​TGI Thursday

Neo Shinobi Vendetta: Forged in the Dark (FitD) (Session 5 of 5)
Lowell Francis runs for Darren Brockes, Fraser Simons, Owen Thompson, and Peter Mazzeo
As more things fall apart within the clan, the cell discovers they must return to the scene of their first op and crosses paths with the forces of a rival ninja family.

Gauntlet Quarterly

Masks: The Suits (Session 4)
Leandro Pondoc runs for Alun R., Rob Ruthven, and Sabine V.
Who are the Suits? Our heroes find the answer and the scope of the conspiracy threatens to swallow them whole. SULIT tries to fiddle with the system to save his friends, L0K1 works to escape from the clutches of Howl Division and Serenade confronts a demon from beyond.

Tales & Things (Things from the Flood) (Session 7)
Lowell Francis runs for Darren Brockes, Patrick Knowles, Rich Rogers, Sarah J., and Sherri
The campaign jumps forward four years to a Wayward devastated by the collapse of the Loop and a world edging towards darkness. And our teens face the return of an old foe.

Tales & Things (Things from the Flood) (Session 8)
Lowell Francis runs for Darren Brockes, Patrick Knowles, Sarah J., and Sherri
With Nicole missing, Darlene tries to get the group back together-- but old hurts and new problems threaten to tear them apart before they can really begin.

Gauntlet Comics

Masks: AEON After-School (Session 3 of 3)
Alexi S. runs for Chris Newton, Jasmin Neitzel, Linda H. Codega, and Misha B
The at-risk supers in AEON's after-school program -- now dubbing their team "Batswarm" -- face the consequences of their actions in Undertaker's Row. Quicksilver falls deeper into her father's criminal enterprises. Brightling flees the divine suitors her grandmother found for her. Mr. Hearse makes a move against the team by kidnapping El Borron's parents. Moxy and Mephista meet with the demon law firm Ozroch, Ozroch, & Ozroch, and Moxy tries to trick the demon but ends up signing a contract with them. It all ends in a hell of a battle (literally) and a PC-to-PC marriage proposal!

Indie Schwarze Auge

[DEUTSCH] World of Aventurien: Schatten im Zwielicht (Session 13 von 13)
Gerrit Reininghaus leitet eine Session für Christopher G., Eike K., Sabine V., und Tina T.
Inferno - Morgon turned into a sun in the devastating events at Andalkan. We mourn for him but, as his will was, without (wet) tears. Rukus shot a dragon with a ballista to confront his nemesis but defied the final battle for the greater good and the life of his love, Boronhilf. Boronhilf stopped the Krakoniers' Priestess dreams with green, cold fire. While the never sleeping Lucaria black holed The Invincible Flesh Spider and then escaped, riding on the back of a sea snake, supposed to be her child. This was the final session of Schatten im Zwielicht. Thanks to the 13 players who joined us in this journey over 13 sessions in the last months.

Mecha Monthly

HILT // BLADE (Session 4 of 4)
Leandro Pondoc runs for Alex, Diana Moon, and Rob Ruthven
After losing half their squad, the remaining Hilts of the Garden immediately chafe with their brash new partner only to be plunged into a fight with a void-faced Outsider tied to their collective history. Veranda is attacked by glimpses of her failure, Rain tries to control the essence of nothing and Carina takes a side.

Gauntlet Hangouts

Good Society: Sense, Sensibility, & Swordsmanship: Raillery, Reason, & a Rapier's Wit (Session 4 of 4)
Sabine V. runs for Agatha, Alun R., Leandro Pondoc, and Scot Ryder
The final and ultimate installment of Good Society: Sense, Sensibility & Swordsmanship ended quite prettily: Lady Justine went to America to be with her true love, Freddy; her mother, the vicious Lady Sibyl was found to be a conspirator and a murderess (the Big Bad revealed!); Hugh Botham was happily married to Lord Cedric; and Annabel Hargreaves was arrested, but ultimately got offered a job with the newly created Ministry of Justice. Lots of desires were fulfilled, albeit not in the sense they had originally been meant to be.

Mutants in the Night: Unity (Session 4 of 4)
Ludovico Alves runs for Michael G. Barford, Tom F., and Walter German
We follow Grey, Thorn and Jack for the conclusion of this campaign. The Mutant Safe Zone of Unity Heights is under martial law, but that does little to quench the burning spirit of its inhabitants. With resources they been denied for almost a decade, they come together and establish between each others. Through cunning and cutthroat maneuvering, the turn the tables: at the end of this campaign there is a New Unity. It is time now for the rich and their lapdogs to hide behind walls in fear.

Cthulhu Dark Green: M-Cell Operations (Session 2 of 2)
Horst Wurst runs for Jasmin Neitzel, Kevin Lovecraft, and Puckett
Night Floors - The investigators are brought in to catalogue the articles of a missing painter. The bizarre tapestry of items in her apartment hints at something more than the everyday; for those few who can solve the mystery the rewards are reaped...elsewhere.

Mutants in the Night (Session 3 of 4)
Leandro Pondoc runs for Ludovico Alves, Pawel S., and William
Headed by an implacable newcomer, the Mutant Task Force sweeps through the Safe Zone to demonstrate its power. As the city seemingly girds itself for conflict, our gang is forced into a desperate gauntlet to help those that want out. Mist tries to curb the possibility of open warfare, Hypereel exposes the twisted ambitions of the new MTF leader and Thinner slips down a bloody path to protect his kind.

The Veil: Echoes (Session 3 of 3)
Darren Brockes runs for Alex, Fraser Simons, Leandro Pondoc, and Walter German
Hector and Joy arrive just in time to get Z and Rhye out of hot water. Joy disappears into the Veil. Rhye sells the memory of his grandmother. Z gives Joy a simple solution.

The Veil: Reflections (Session 2 of 2)
Darren Brockes runs for Agatha, Joshua Gilbreath, Matt Caulder, Puckett, and Ryan Perry
Kohi, V, and Aleph get to their collection job, leading them a strange, abandoned district. 2-Bit is probed and unmoved until they run into a friend. That friend, Kristoph, is caught up in something far more insidious than he could have ever realized.

Once Again, We Return (Monsterhearts): Wannabe, Adored (Session 3 of 3)
Barry runs for Alexi S., Chris Thompson, Peter Mazzeo, and Ryan M.
Tiamat and Fenris display their monstrous appetites as Fenris warms up for Ragnarok with Mercury while Tiamat calls forth the monstrousness of a fan. Through a great fall, then through Eos, Anansi discovers the end of all stories before Eos skips to the next chapter and we're all left wanting more. Cut the strings.

Achtung! Cthulhu Dark: The Angel of Krupna (Session 4 of 4)
Alun R. runs for Eduardo L., Sabine V., Walter German, and William
The series climaxes with the stealthy infiltration of the Castle Karlstein and a confrontation with the final, bestial, horror that cost one character his life (the self-sacrificing Brit), and another his sanity (the over-curious Czech professor with a new taste for human flesh...). Meanwhile our clever young Czech hero earned his spurs and, inevitably, the incredibly handsome American diplomat got away with most of the essential intelligence. Great to GM this series (my first 4 session series for the Gauntlet), and the hack is a lot more solid now than it was. Thanks, all.

Trophy: Shifting Sands
Jason Cordova runs for Tyler Lominack and Walter German
We are playing an incursion by Luiz Ferraz.

Dark Streets & Darker Secrets: Beneath the Canals (Session 4 of 4)
Richard Ruane runs for Jason, Jesse A., Maria Rivera, and Stentor Danielson
While Asmus pursues a family vendetta and Sibel tries to find the key to her strange memories, the others seek out the alchemist Paprika in Pentola's undercity.

Night Witches: Engles Airdrome (Session 3 of 3)
Jim Likes Games runs for Barry, Bethany H., Sara, and Sarah J.
The pilots of the 588th complete their training and drop bombs on actual Nazis.

Uncanny Echo (Session 4 of 10)
Jim Likes Games runs for Alexi S., Pearl Zare, and Steven desJardins
Restless - The residents of the Silver Lake Assisted Living Facility uncover their connection to the Uncanny! A charming and heart-tugging adventure.

Infinite Galaxies: Empire of the Dying Sun (Session 5)
Rory runs for Ash, Michael Mendoza, and Simon Landreville
Our first season concludes with the PCs traveling to the home system of the Ancients and confronting them about the impending supernovas within the Empire.

Veil'd Fantasy (Session 5 of 5)
Lowell Francis runs for Chris Newton, John Campbell, Sherri, and Tyler Lominack
The group attempts to steal a relic lightning rod from the neck of a dragon and deliver it to their employer. This does not go according to plan. Repeatedly.

You can see all these videos (plus all the ones that have come before) on The Gauntlet YouTube channel playlists, and be sure to subscribe to catch all our great podcasts! If you'd like to play in games like these, check out the calendar of events and the Gauntlet Forums where games are announced. To support The Gauntlet, please visit the Gauntlet Patreon. Everyone is welcome to sign up for Gauntlet Hangouts games, but Patreon supporters get extra options like priority RSVP for Gauntlet Hangouts games and joining the Gauntlet Slack team where special events and pickup games are announced. Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

by Jason Cordova

I spend a lot of my time thinking about the future of The Gauntlet. 

As a leader of this organization, if I’m not always looking around the corner for what’s next, for what ways this organization can innovate, then I’m not doing my job. 

We’re getting ready to turn around one of those corners. In one week, we launch the Kickstarter campaign for our very first standalone game, Hearts of Wulin. I’m going to use this space to talk a little bit about The Gauntlet as publisher. I’m going to talk about why The Gauntlet is getting into publishing in the first place, what we hope to accomplish in the publishing space, and how Hearts of Wulin fits into that vision. 

UPDATE: Hearts of Wulin is now on Kickstarter! You can find the campaign by clicking here. 

Why publishing? 

I have a close friend who is writing a major, standalone game for a big TTRPG publisher. I asked if they would share details of their compensation with me so I could get a better sense of what the market was like. What they told me was, frankly, disturbing—so disturbing, in fact, I decided right then and there I would try to create something better.

My friend explained that, in exchange for writing the text of a full game for this major publisher, they were being paid 3 cents USD per word. Folks, that is breathtakingly low (at the time, our zine, Codex, which has a budget that isn’t even a scintilla of this publisher’s budget, was paying 5 cents per word). And that 3 cents per word does not account for any playtesting and revisions my friend is responsible for, which they have to do for free. To make matters worse (and, to be clear, I’m not sure if this applies to my friend’s deal) many publishers don’t pay for the entirety of the words their freelancers write, only what they decide to actually publish. 

I remember asking my friend: “Why are you doing this? You know this is predatory.” Their answer: they wanted to work with the publisher in question. It was worth it for my friend to take this shitty deal because they wanted the prestige and professional development that came with working with this big publisher. And there is definitely a part of me that gets that: my friend is involved with the TTRPG industry in a myriad of capacities besides publishing, and I could see how something like this would help them in other parts of their career. I know there are people who work for Codex at a rate lower than what they normally charge, and they do so for similar reasons: because there are rewards for doing so outside of the purely financial. 

But I still think there is a better way. In fact, this conversation with my friend solidified in my mind that The Gauntlet needed to get into publishing so we could develop a better model. 

Exploring a better model

Codex’s 5 cents per word (soon to be 6 cents per word) isn’t amazing. We know that. But it’s what we can afford, and furthermore, the Codex publishing model is structured to be extremely friendly to authors. For starters, Codex pieces are shorter than what you might find in a bigger TTRPG book; these are projects the authors don’t have to spend huge amounts of time on. Second, the author 100% owns their text. They can turn right around after we publish their work in Codex and publish the text on their own Patreon or itch.io account or whatever. Finally, if playtesting or revisions need to happen before publishing, we will take care of that (although many authors choose to do their own playtesting). That last point should be especially salient considering the author still owns the text and can continue to benefit from our playtesting and revision. 

I bring all this up to say: we have taken into consideration basic fairness in the publishing process when it comes to Codex. 

But Codex is a periodical, and one that does not have to get X sales per month or hit Y dollars on Kickstarter in order to be viable. Basically, we can afford to take a lot of risks with it. 

A traditional, standalone game is a more complicated proposition. When devising a publishing model for a standalone game that is both fair to the author and respectful of their time—but also makes it worthwhile for the publisher to do—you have to be much more careful. 

After a great deal of thought, and conversations with some of our mentors in the industry, we have settled on a 50/50 profit split. The Gauntlet, as publisher of the standalone game, will pay authors a royalty equal to half the profits earned on the project. That includes profits from crowdfunding, physical book sales, PDF sales, and any licensing agreements we enter into. We will even pay an advance on those royalties, dependent on crowdfunding performance and other factors. 

We think our publishing model is a generous one, and, to be honest, it may not even work. But we’re going to try. If we can pull it off, we will have created a system by which authors get paid real money for their work and The Gauntlet community has a source of income that exists outside the vicissitudes of Patreon. And that last part is really important: in order to continue being viable into the future, The Gauntlet must find new ways of raising money. We simply can’t do everything we want or are expected to do on 4K a month, and there are a lot of signs Patreon may not even be a going concern in a few years. Remember when I said I'm always thinking about the future of The Gauntlet? This is one of the things that weighs heavily on my mind. 

Hearts of Wulin

​So, how does Hearts of Wulin fit into this? Well, to be blunt, it’s our test project. Hearts of Wulin is going to prove whether or not our model works.

Now, before I go any further, I want to note that discussing Hearts of Wulin as a game is beyond the scope of this blog post. If you want to know more about it, check out our Kickstarter preview page right here.

What I'm interested in doing here is discussing the specifics of our arrangement with the authors of the game, Agatha Cheng and Lowell Francis, so you can see how our model will work. 

In exchange for delivering a draft of the game text by XXX date, Agatha and Lowell are entitled to royalties equal to 50% of the game’s profits (split evenly between them). They will receive an advance on those royalties equal to 10% of the crowdfunding so long as the project hits $40,000 during the crowdfunding campaign. They will be expected to a do a reasonable amount of promotion, such as appearing on podcasts and similar, but the only hard requirement is to deliver their draft by our agreed-upon date. 

The Gauntlet gets a grant of rights that makes it the exclusive publisher of Hearts of Wulin. We also have the right to publish supplements and add-ons for the game, and to enter into licensing agreements. If Lowell and Agatha are ever unhappy with our marketing of the game, they can terminate the contract so long as we have been given a chance to address their concerns. 

There are, obviously, many more details, but the above represents our basic agreement. 

A note about self-publishing

Why would an author want to enter into an agreement with a publisher at all, especially given that self-publishing is easier than ever? That’s a great question, and, in fact, we strongly recommend it. For many people, self-publishing is a completely viable, financially rewarding path to take. Our model was not developed to suggest otherwise. 

But I do think there are a lot of advantages to working with a publisher. I can only speak for The Gauntlet, but here is what we bring to the table for our 50% cut: we handle editing, layout, artwork, and the logistics of printing and shipping; we offer a platform for promotion; we offer a platform for playtesting; we set up and manage the crowdfunding; we offer project management; and, importantly, we take most of the risk. The author is likely going to write the text no matter what, but we’re the ones putting extra resources on the line to get the project going. 

Also: many game designers simply may not want to do all the things needed to self-publish. A great many self-published game designers only have time for working on their game, and get separated from the pleasures of the TTRPG hobby. Our model creates space for designers to write their game and exercise their creativity, but otherwise continue enjoying TTRPGs as they wish. 

Closing thoughts

As mentioned above, this may not work! At all. It is as equally likely to be a total misfire as it is to be a reasonable success. Is Hearts of Wulin going to get published? Yes. Will we meet our obligations to our crowdfunding backers? Yes, absolutely. Will the project be so successful that The Gauntlet can push forward with this publishing model? Unknown. If the crowdfunding fails, then no—that future as a publisher of standalone games is foreclosed to us. That could be the case even if the crowdfunding is a moderate success. If crowdfunding is a great success, then yeah, we think our model will work. 

We shall see!  

Coauthored by Barry Cook, Sarah Jacobson, and Ryan McNeil

Lots of role-playing games with a traditional GM role can be scaled down to a GM and just one player. In most cases, these maintain the asymmetry of a solo player character in a world conducted by the GM. But a handful are outright designed for just two people, and most of these games make each participant both soloist and conductor, each accompanying and directing the other.

“Duet” RPGs are creative, frequently collaborative affairs that thrive in the emotionally crowded spaces of worry, regret, love, and understanding—and sometimes even aggression and violence. To support the players taking on these creative and emotional challenges, duet games will often take a very structured approach, the rules themselves almost functioning as a GM. But within this structure is a surprising amount of freedom. Many duet games provide scene prompts—ranging from abstract and suggestive to highly prescriptive—and then pretty much step back until an end timer or narrative trigger kicks in. Lucian Kahn’s Dead Friend: A Game of Necromancy uses tarot card–connected prompts to direct the narrative. The setting of your game can be anywhere and the variety and intentional open-endedness of the prompts mean you’ll end up telling a wildly different story each time.

Even when the game takes on a GM-like role, however, you’re still “on” all the time. You don’t have the kind of breathing room you would in 3+ player games. If you aren't actively participating, then you're participating reactively: listening, making suggestions, and asking questions. All this means you're more invested, you care more, and you feel it more, too. That can get rough, emotionally, and rather bleedy. A specific game that comes to mind is Caroline Hobbs’s One Missed Call, a game about a long-distance relationship played out over a series of phone calls between the two characters. Players secretly decide whether they hope for the characters to come together or to drift apart, but don’t reveal their choice until after the game has ended, leaving one player to guess why their partner has stopped taking their calls. Pre-game conversations about tone and subject matter can help get you on the same page, but it’s also important to use your chosen safety tools to bend, break, or throw out some of the rules, or shift the narrative away from something you don't like. It often feels easier to speak up, too, when your opinion is half the table’s opinion.

Because a duet really is just you and one other person for a couple (or six) hours, they’re more intimate than standard RPGs. Although playing a duet doesn’t require you know your playing partner well, it means by the end of the game, you’re probably going to. In most duets getting to know the other player is a fairly organic process, and happens pretty much the way it does in any other game. But some explore this more intentionally. The character creation process of Emily Care Boss’s Breaking the Ice (part of The Romance Trilogy), for example, includes a “getting to know you” discussion, where you discover a way in which you and the other player differ, and then swap it for your characters. Since the game explicitly asks this of you, it requires some vulnerability, but in return lets you play a character different from yourself while also providing an accountability buddy for that role.

Even with a trusted partner, however, duets are intense, intimate, high-creativity games by design. It’s important to build in breaks, check in with one another and yourself, and take the time to de-role and debrief afterward—because the people playing are more important than the game, the story, or the characters. Duets may require more intentionality than 3+ player RPGs, but you’ll pick up some valuable skills along the way—creating side characters, connecting action to theme, and asking sharp, interesting questions. And you’ll grow as a player, too.

Now go get a partner, find a game that works for you, and duet!​