games
Ninefox Gambit RPG
Now a Nebula finalist, with coauthor Marie Brennan, for Game Writing!
NINEFOX GAMBIT RPG is a tabletop roleplaying game of heresy and hard choices set in the tyrannical interstellar empire known as the Hexarchate.
The Abominable Font
Your characters are investigators specializing in occult texts. Unfortunately, the texts fight back.
Cracktastic tiny 2-player epistolary TTRPG for anyone who delights in terribad fonts. :)
Available for pay-what-you-want, including FREE, here.
The Amiable Planet
It’s been a long journey beyond stars and things stranger than stars, when at last you alight on an amiable planet.
Entropy Soldiers
Play the roles of interstellar soldiers relying on each other to survive after they’ve escaped from the war. Entropy Soldiers is a GM-less narrative RPG that uses found texts like magazine pages to prompt your creativity. (Some sample texts drawn from public domain books have been provided for your convenience.)
Paper Souls
A quirky GM-less narrative mini-TTRPG for 2-5 players in which you travel to a mysterious city and become entangled with each other. The game’s key mechanic involves folding each other’s character sheets and telling stories about the words that the folds pass through. Available for free/pay-what-you-want at itch.io.
Six Slots
A GM-less narrative tabletop roleplaying game in which players create a dungeon, explore it, and uncover each other’s secrets.
Thanks to Sam Kabo Ashwell and Yune Kyung Lee for the comments.
Ready Aim
A GM-less narrative TTRPG in which you play the roles of both the survivors of an attack by alien drones, represented by a paper airplane, and the survivors’ descendants in the aftermath.
Heretical Geese
A two-page tabletop roleplaying game for a cunning Fox (or GM) and wary Geese (or players). Can the Geese achieve moral insights before being assimilated?
The game may be of particular interest to fans of Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire novels, but does not require familiarity with them.
No animals were harmed in the creation of this mini-RPG. Some cattens might have been petted, though.
The Compass Rose
A work of interactive fiction (with some graphics elements): There’s more than one north by which to guide a world. Story/text by me; coding by my collaborator Peter Berman. Published in sub-Q Magazine on August 18, 2015.