Notes from the workshop
Dev logs, design notes, world-building, and the occasional postmortem for something I was certain about that turned out to be wrong in an instructive way. These get written at odd hours, because that is when the thinking arrives and it has never once consulted the calendar.
Some of it is architecture. Some of it is a rules problem I chewed on for three weeks and then solved in a single sentence, which is its own particular humiliation. Most of it is me working out what I think by writing it down somewhere a person can see it and tell me I have it backwards.
Build a thing too tight and nobody else can get their hands into it. Build it too loose and it comes apart the first time somebody leans their weight on it. The whole job is the middle, and I get the middle wrong in public, here, about once a month.
I am still looking for someone who knows how to build a community — the one part of this I genuinely cannot do by myself.
Why a Tag-Based GM Protocol
The AI GM speaks in 24 typed directives, and that number is small for a reason that has nothing to do with the AI. It's what a self-similar ruleset does to the software built on top of it.
Beyond the Dark Continent
Designing the Southern Realms meant confronting a century of fantasy Africa done badly, and writing down real rules for not doing that.
Same Law, Different Grammar
The card-based scene generator isn't a random-encounter table with better art. The same structure changes genre at every border — and the setting has noticed.
The People's Die, or: What a Joke Variant Taught Me About My Own Dice
I lost an argument about dice accessibility on principle while winning it on facts, wrote a d6 conversion as a bit, and then ran the numbers and found something that changed how I think about converting any system.
The Ninth Taboo
Why every region in the Amaranthine Core counts to eight and fears a ninth — and why the fear only gets deeper the closer you look, never clearer.
The Same World, Six Different Stories
How Fate's Edge lets a campaign cross a border and change genre entirely, without ever changing games.
Failure Is Fuel, Not a Dead End
Why a Miss in Fate's Edge isn't a wasted roll — and why Story Beats exist to make the GM escalate instead of punish.
Two More Seats at the Table
The AI GM can now sit down as a player, or as a rules reference that knows nothing about the adventure. The interesting problem wasn't teaching it to play — it was deciding what each half of it is allowed to see.
The Real Game
Strip away the VTT, the AI GM, and the app, and what's left is dice, a deck of cards, and some friends. That's not a compromise — that's the point.
Choose Your Modality
Fate's Edge is a game, not an app. The rules, campaign state, and adventure data are the foundation — the interface is your choice.
The Guides Are Books Now, and You Can Sell What You Build on Top
The GM Guide and Player's Guide read as single books instead of scattered pages, and there's now an explicit commercial license for community creators.
No Money, Just Fun
Why Fate's Edge is self-hosted, simple to learn, and built to outlive its own website — and its author.
A Gift, Not a Gate
Why Fate's Edge is open source, self-hostable, and free — and what that actually means, license by license.