Glass Bird Games

In Crimea, Ivan Shishkin When I was very young there was a stretch when I was absolutely obsessed with Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf . For those unfamiliar, the piece is a narrated children's story accompanied by an orchestra, with each character represented with a specific instrument and theme. I loved  it, and would listen to it over and over again until I had every bit memorized. Not so much every word, or even the specifics of the story, but every turn of the music was etched into my imagination. The characters spoke to me not through their literal actions, but through the way they were portrayed by the orchestra. Soon I was imagining entirely new stories, new configurations of characters and their interactions based on the way their themes were woven together as the narration rattled on, entirely ignored. Music has such a deep-seated emotive effect, even for kids (or adults!) with no formal musical literacy to speak of. We should be leveraging this inborn sonic empathy be...

Like a lot of GMs who enjoy a playstyle divergent from that prescribed by the RPG industrial complex, I often find myself in games with people whose prior game experiences don't exactly mesh with what I'm putting in front of them. They need a little onboarding. They need permission to free themselves of the constraints those past experiences have ingrained in their brains. Specifically, they often need to be reminded that they can do (well, try) anything. This is an aspect of tabletop play that people often reference as unique to the form, but it's not something the reality of play always bears out. This is part of my aversion to meatier systems with special abilities and skill lists and grappling rules and so on: they promote a video-game mindset. Encounters have been placed in the world for you to overcome in the specific way the designer intended, in the manner in which your character is built to overcome them. Pay no attention to the walls of the hallway/railroad - they...

The Reluctant Dragon -  Justin Gerard I've been thinking about dragons and such. Creatures. Beasties. Monsters.* Monsters are kinda hard to get just right, especially when it comes to classic fantasy. I always have these two opposing urges. There's a common vernacular, a vocabulary that everyone who's been exposed to fantasy shares. Everyone knows what a dragon is, and frankly most people are bored of the vanilla pantheon of D&D MONSTERS . I don't want to bore anybody! At the same time, if I'm running a relatively straightforward fantasy campaign, I don't want to get too weird or gonzo. I still want the creatures I run to be relatively parseable, even if they're not adhering strictly to the most vanilla version of themselves. I want to play the hits, without things getting stale. I'm not going to run an encounter with 1d6 Beholders with all the dryness that that suggests, but I also don't want to overwhelm my people with neon mecha-eyelords that ...

I'm an aspiring wanderer of wildernesses that have never been. I'm a dreamer who doesn't get very much done, at the end of the day. I'm a nervous wreck of a carelord. I'm an unbelievable, insufferable, absolute fucking  nerd . Don't believe me? Check out this essay I wrote about my history with RPGs, due to appear in Knock Issue #2 ( still mid-KS until the 24th ) - the Knock version has the bonus of fantastic art by the talented  Evlyn Moreau  and the incredible layout madness that the Mushmen are known for. ------------------- Istus is the goddess of fate and destiny in good old Gary’s Greyhawk campaign setting. She spins the tapestry of the universe from strands of potentiality. She bears the weight of penning the future, down to the most minute detail. She is all-seeing and all-knowing. And I used to think I was her. From the beginning of my RPG obsession, my experience GMing (as a preteen roping my too-young brothers and my tolerant mom into a stumbling, fum...