Blog Buddies: Mint!
01 December 2025
This post is a reply to Mint from There’s A TTRPG For That, as part of their Blog Buddies series. Read Mint’s letter first here!
Hey Mint!
Thanks so much for inviting me into this series! I’ve really enjoyed reading them from the sidelines so far and it was such a nice surprise when you reached out to invite me on!
The Things I Like series on Jackalope Mail was only meant to be a small part of the blog, but as I’ve been focusing more on university work this last year it pretty much makes up half of what I post. It was definitely born out of a want for more authentic recommendations in the world. Other people have said this far better than me, but in a world of so much algorithmic recommendation, getting a recc from someone who’s taste you trust is far more valuable and probably more likely to make you actually check out the things you’re being shown. This is exactly why I’m such a big fan of your blog! It’s especially cool when I see designers coming in asking you for recommendations, because they know you have that expansive knowledge of games and great taste to boot! I really really need to watch Interview with a Vampire and read This is How You Lose the Time War, so I might move them up the queue just to prove my point!
I’d love to know more about time.war! Would it be focusing on the epistolary element of the book? I’ve had my eye on a game of Dead Letter Society for a bit now because I think epistolary RPGs are such a cool concept. I’ve just found your Itch collection of epistolary games, I’d love to know if you have any particular recommendations from it!
I actually think this culture of citing your inspirations is ingrained in TTRPGs more than any other creative medium. You can trace it all the way back to the Appendix N of AD&D, but I’m most impressed by the Ludography of Apocalypse World, which I’ve been reading bits of for the first time while researching my uni dissertation (more on that in the new year!). AW goes into incredible detail citing how specific mechanics were inspired by mechanics in other games, and I really admire that level of citational detail. I think my interest in games academia also fuels this appreciation of citations, but I think it’s a very healthy culture for creatives in all disciplines.
To get a bit meta for a second, this discussion made me reflect on the inspirations behind my Things I Like series, and I can draw it back to two different newsletters I still love nearly 2 years since I started mine. Thomas Manuel’s Indie RPG Newsletter was one of the first RPG newsletters I ever subscribed to. Every week, Thomas writes a small blog post musing on some aspect of the TTRPG scene, then links to a bunch of other blog posts, videos and occasional game releases from the week. It’s a super thorough newsletter that keeps me up to date with so much of the scene, I can't recommend it enough!
The other newsletter belongs to YouTuber Tom Scott (two Toms! Isn’t that fun?), who has been in my inbox weekly since he launched the newsletter in 2021. Tom’s newsletter is half YouTube video recommendations and half links from elsewhere online. I find there’s always something interesting there to check out, whether it’s about science, history or culture.
Much like you with Crush Curriculum, I’ve got something on the back burner about taking mystery mechanics and giving them a new context. Specifically turning it into a game about journalism. I’ve got this idea for a game about urban fantasy journalists partially inspired by the newspaper sidequest in Tears of the Kingdom, and partially inspired by the newspaper clippings found in the D&D 5e Eberron book. I’ve been building up this moodboard of super colourful editorial art because I think it would make for a super neat and unique look for a game. No idea when I’m actually gonna commit to making this, but it seems like it might be a far larger game than what I make right now, so it might be on the back burner for a while!
It’s funny that you’ve paired Goodbye, World </3 with Ech0, because Asa Donald has just done the exact same thing on the Monthly Mecha Newsletter. I didn’t really know anything about Ech0 before you both spoke about it (the Sad Mech Jam was before my time in the scene), but it seems super up my alley with it's themes of dead robots, ghosts, and ancient history.
That sense of ancient history is central to Breath of the Wild and is a large part of why I find it's world so captivating, and thus why I wrote about it. It's a theme that appears more explicitly in my game ABODE, but I really love the concept of pairing multiple TTRPG systems to tell a longer-running story. I need to check out your CAMPAIGN.FRAME for exactly that!
I actually think the game of mine with the most explicit inspiration was my One-Page RPG jam entry Borrowers Dungeon Crawl, which I had the idea for not even 20 minutes into watching The Secret World of Arrietty. There's a scene super early in that movie where Arrietty’s father takes her into the human house for the first time, and the clever ways they use common household objects as dungeoneering equipment immediately put me onto the idea of making a game about the same thing.
Now, I’m so glad you mentioned Uncertainty in Legacy Games because it tees me up to talk about my strongest TTRPG opinions: that the RPG scene as a whole relies way too much on randomness. The book that I cite in that blog post, Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan, massively changed how I think about tabletop game design. It’s part of MIT Press’ Playful Thinking series, which are all written to be super accessible texts that you don’t have to be deep in the weeds of games academia to enjoy, there’s a couple others in there I really wanna read. In Uncertainty in Games, Costikyan lays out how uncertainty is key to making games interesting, and the many different ways you can have uncertainty in a game. Mathematical randomness is one way to do it, but there are plenty of others, from physical challenges (like Dread!) to hidden information (like you mentioned about There’s Something About the Deep!). I think it’s easy to make things random when you could make them something else, and the design space gets far bigger when we look beyond dice and playing cards when making our games. I also talked a bit about this when I wrote about The Power of “Might” ages ago.
There’s Something About the Deep was inspired by Immortal Gambit, which was in turn inspired by Goodbye World (see what I mean about citations being cool?). The secret goals came from Immortal Gambit, but I think I built on it in some interesting ways, expanding the goals beyond just getting a particular number on the dice. I actually think the clearest example of Uncertainty in Games’ effect on my work is with ABODE. The first edition involved randomly generating your relationship to the other player characters, but the second edition made it the player’s choice. I think with 1E I was making that mechanic random just for the sake of it. But as I’ve gained more experience as a designer, I’ve gotten a better understanding of when to implement randomness and when to leave things to another source of uncertainty.
In terms of board games bleeding into TTRPGs, I definitely think it’s a healthy thing to think about. Exeunt Press’s blog Skeleton Code Machine is full of interesting posts about applying board game concepts to TTRPGs, and lots of EP’s solo games (such as Eleventh Beast) sit snugly between board games and RPGs. I’ve flirted with this briefly when making Trivia Heroes, but I’m definitely interested in doing it more!
I think that’s answered all your questions! Thanks so much for having me on! This was the first time (afaik) that someone has really picked apart and analysed my work like this, and it made me feel seen in a way that was really unexpected but so lovely! You’re absolutely killing it, Mint, thanks again for inviting me to do this.
Best,
CJ