• 01 Nov, 2025 *

This post is heavily inspired by Matt Colville’s latest video essay, Community.

I.

For the past five years, I’ve wanted to be the designer of the next big table-top role-playing game. That would mean...

1. Designing a game.
2. Building a community around the game.
3. Developing content to support the game and keep the community going.

That’s a pretty familiar pattern at this point, right? That’s what my last post, “Four paths to a successful OSR game,” was all about. At the bottom, all four paths are just different ways to build a community excited about your game.

But here’s the thing... I’m nominally a member of the Discord servers for Cairn, Bastionland Press, FIST, and MCDM. I used to be in the Arcane Library / Shadowdark server too. I keep them open, I check them from time to time if I’m bored. I think what they’re doing is cool.

But I don’t hang out in those servers. I hang out in the NSR Cauldron, the server I moderate. Why is that?

Recently, someone on our server asked a simple question: “What are some of your favorite systems?” I thought for a moment and answered:

I don’t think I have any favorite systems, I just have ideas for different sorts of games I want to run and I begrudgingly select or create systems that let me run them. Games are of heaven and systems are of earth, so clever rules and such don’t really get me excited anymore.

And I guess that got me thinking. If I don’t get excited about systems — if I don’t join other games’ communities and get excited to make things for those games — then why should I expect anyone to get excited to make things for any game I would make? When I finished Ruins & Rogues, I wasn’t even excited to make content for it myself.

The “Four paths” post helped me to brainstorm ideas for different OSR-style games I might make. I had one idea about monster hunters in a Bloodborne-esque setting and one idea about wizards trying to pay off their Wizard Student Loans.

Maybe I’ll figure out how to use these ideas some day, but right now, I just can’t imagine myself getting excited about them in the long term. And if I can’t get excited about them, how can I get other people excited about them? How can I build a community?

II.

What is my end goal here? I want to make a career doing what I love. It might take a long time to get there, but as long as I’m working toward it, I’m happy.

For a long time it seemed like making “the next big game” would be the path to that career. But what if we deconstruct that a little bit? What if what I’m really after isn’t “the next big game,” but “the next big community?” What would I want that community to be like?

I think it would be most helpful to think about why I was attracted to the NSR Cauldron in the first place and why I helped shape it to be what it is today.

Let’s look back at the three points I wrote under “NSR Spirit” in my (highly dubious) “What is the NSR?” post:

1. The best game is the game you like to play, the way you like to play it. There is no One True Way to play an RPG, and there’s something to learn from every style of play.
2. Don’t make myths about history. Look backward, think forward. There was no One True Way back in the ’70s or ’80s either, and there’s still a lot to learn from studying the past.
3. Hack a game together. Steal from everything. Never be satisfied with someone else’s rules. Embrace the attitude of Romantic poet William Blake: “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. / I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

...Reading these again for the first time in a while, I’m sort of surprised by them. It’s striking to me how well these points capture what I love about the space we’ve built.

It isn’t a space devoted to any particular game. It’s not trying to capture creative energy behind any particular product. It’s about pushing the medium forward. It’s a space that encourages us all to be different and lets us learn from those differences rather than smooth them over with common wisdom. That’s the kind of creativity I value more than any community of people all making content for the same game.

III.

Alright, so then if I’m already a part of a creative community I love, and building a creative career is closely tied to building a creative community, then I should be all set, right? All I have to do is keep moderating the NSR Cauldron and taking whatever opportunities come my way.

Maybe... but I think I could do better. I think maybe I could carve out a space that carries forward these values and takes them to a higher level.

I’ve recently been working on Lull Astir, a social matrix game about the fate of a revolutionary who finds refuge on a small island in the Late Middle Ages. Here’s the introduction to the scenario:

For generations, an idyllic monastery on the Isle of Lull has given refuge to anyone and everyone without question in honor of St. Enid, the Patron Saint of Sanctuary.

But now, King Felix has ordered the monks to surrender radical preacher John Quill, who fled the mainland after he inspired a failed uprising against the nobility.

To turn Quill over would be to betray St. Enid and everything the monks stand for; to defy the king would bring war to Lull.

I ran the game for the first time at our NSR Camp event last weekend and I had a great time. In a pitch for players, I wrote:

It’s the culmination of six or seven months of intense creative introspection via hundreds of pages of handwritten notes. It’s very personal to me in a way that nothing else I’ve run has ever been, but at the same time I hope it speaks to something universal about the times we’re living in.

Of course I owe my interest in Social Matrix Games to all the work Samuel James has been doing to explain what makes them better than RPGs. But I think there’s something novel in my approach to Lull Astir.

Instead of designing a scenario based on a familiar genre with familiar characters, I wrote up original characters with short descriptions. And I designed the scenario not primarily to be a fun creative exercise, but to express something artistically, to convey something complicated that I wanted to say.

I don’t know yet if I want to build a new community around “Dramatic Matrix Games” or whatever you want to call this. I don’t know if I want to create a new movement with a new three-letter-initialism.

But I think, whatever I do, I want to inspire people to express themselves artistically through conversation games. And I want to build a community that isn’t centered around my own work in that field so much as it is about inspiring everyone to strive for more with what they make.