Grant Howitt

Rolisboa - Portugal’s premier roleplaying game convention - emailed us this year, as they have done for the last few years, asking if we’d be interested in sponsoring their show and giving them some money. I countered elegantly and suggested that actually THEY should give ME their money, or rather p

I’ve had a weird couple of months. Mainly because I’ve been working on [SECRET UNANNOUNCED PROJECTS] that I can’t tell you about. COME AT ME, SONY INTERACTIVE LLC I’m not unused to NDAs, given my career before games design - back in my mid-twenties I was a games journalist for a bit. I’m very glad t

Hello! It's been a busy month for me, what with - well, I've written about everything I've been doing in a full-length blog post, which is coming soon. But one of the things I did was go to Portugal and do several exciting things at Lisbon's Rolisboa convention, and one of those exciting things was

I tried writing my standard long blog post to go alongside this game, but it really wasn't working. I've scrapped it. Here it is boiled down to a brisk set of bullet points: I've always liked it when one thing is big and the other is little (ref: BIG GOAT LITTLE GOAT) on account of both enhancing th

This weekend I wrote a game about different bronze-age philosophies put forward by a theoretical civilisation of superintelligent beehives. It involves making uninterrupted eye contact with a stranger until I tell you to stop. WAIT, A BEE ISN’T A CRAB! You’re damned right. Let me explain - Games For

This month, I have mostly been writing 30-player six-table TTRPG scenarios in advance of GenCon 2026. (Last month, technically. I spent too much time writing the scenarios and now this is late.) Let’s talk about what’s fun, and what’s interesting, and what’s unfortunately dull about that: TO DIE WOU

It's time for beautiful fey lads at the end of the world. A Court of Sparks and Ashes was made as part of the Romantasy TTRPG Jam, organised by Fistful of Crits. Romantasy is very much not my usual genre. In fact, it's pretty much not for me, as evidenced by the way that my first draft of this game

Chris and I have been writing Salt on and off since we stopped writing Heart, as I alluded to in a previous post, so during that time it’s gone through a lot of different shapes - the first serious draft, which was probably the third total, was very piratey. As such, a lot of the class ideas - and u

I wrote a game in 2020 - 2019, maybe? - called PIG AT A WEDDING, in which you must surreptitiously insert a large pig into a wedding before revealing it at the most impactful moment in order to achieve your revenge. It was part of the Simon & Schuster BIG COLLECTION OF LITTLE RPGS (or something alon

You can find part one here, which goes into great detail about how great Wushu is. Part two is another three and a half thousand words about the rise and fall and rise of the Havoc Engine, and why it matters to me, and there's a nice picture of some dumplings towards the end so you've got that to lo

I’ve been working on the Havoc Toolkit for two and a half years. It’s out, and you can download it here, and there’s a game jam that kicks off next week that you can join up to if you’d like. Much thanks to Maz and Chant for repeatedly drop-kicking my ramshackle drafts back at me and carving the res

You can read part one of this blog here. To sum up the first part: we've been writing the sequel to Heart for about five years and we're only now reaching playtest. It's called Salt and it's about a big Atlantis analogue. (But: read it, if you've not!) I'll break down my changes and gambits into one

I’ve been writing Salt, the follow-up to Heart and Spire, for about five years now. We’re just about to hit the first playtest. Let’s talk a bit about how that’s all happened. We’ll do it in two parts: the first is some inside baseball on how we actually make games at RRD, to set the scene. Then I’l

A few months ago I reached my hundredth one-page game, HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOAT GIRL, and to celebrate - to do something about the situation, to lend it some arbitrary significance - I did a game jam on itch.io. 72 people entered! (Or rather: there were 72 games!) Today I’m going to talk about it. And I

Last month it was about Belgium. This month I’ve written a murder mystery party that’s over in half an hour. Let’s go. WEREWOLF Werewolf is a party game. It is sort of the party game, for nerds, in as much as basically everyone’s played it at least once and the rules are easy enough to explain and t

Part one is here. DAY TWO: MAKING SOME MORE TOY SOLDIERS The pressures on my time were minimal. I had to run my own class on Sunday at 11, but aside from that, I had only made it into one of the workshops that I applied for - a mask-making affair, also on Sunday, which sounded like a laugh. Day two

I’m experimenting with something as we crest this new, post-100 games horizon. This is going to be a (very) extended version of the blog parts of my design notes, with an eye to (hopefully) saying something interesting about design. I'm releasing this in two parts because, honestly, it's massive. So

Hello! Thank you all for your feedback on what you'd like this Patreon to become if it's not a big machine that pumps out one-page games every month. The most common response I got was "write whatever you want, as long as you write something," which was very flattering to hear but left me stranded b

This Patreon has formed the backbone of Rowan, Rook and Decard, and it's allowed me to earn money - actual honest-to-god money - in exchange for doing whatever the hell I like as long as a) it's one page long and b) I show it to you. I'd like to thank you all for being so supportive over the last, s

I have written one hundred one page games. This all began a decade ago. Maz and I were in Norwich, and we were taking stock of our lives. We'd recently moved back to London from New York, and before that we were in Sydney for a year and a half: both with Maz' job. It was all tremendously exciting, b

I've not seen Air Bud, the 1997 Disney film that this game is very obviously a sequel to. (Or: not that obviously, if you don't know what Air Bud is. It's a feel-good film about a dog that can play basketball.) I believe that overfamiliarity with the source material can sour one's creativity, so I j

I went to Games Transformed earlier this month. Reader: it was the hottest day of the year, and I ventured forth from my idyllic valley in the north of England to brave the wretched pit that is London. I lived in our capital for about a decade, when you add everything up, and I do not enjoy going ba

Physical backers! Thank you for your patience. We'll begin the mailout process for the next package of games - You Wouldn't Download a Boat, RECOVER, and Big Goat Little Goat - tomorrow, complete with their back pages. We're also throwing in an updated version of It's A Very Honey Heist Christmas co

Hello! Grant here. Friend and co-worker Chant Evans, who runs Ex Stasis games in his spare time when he's not marshalling spreadsheets and making books appear at Rowan Rook and Decard, told me he's not busy enough at work. And seeing as I'm responsible for making sure he's busy enough at work, I sug

This all started seven years ago. But we'll skip ahead from there to, oh, two years back, when I started thinking about mecha again. I dig giant robots. Everyone does. There's more mech RPGs out there than you can shake a hardpoint-mounted fully-automatic stick at, and they generally fall into one o

Hell of time getting this one out, folks. I went to Italy earlier in the month - lovely time, Bologna is a gorgeous city, I ate far too much pizza and several Italian game designers gave me free hashish, which is really all I could have asked for. (Strange business, hashish. Haven't smoked it since

Note for physical backers: I've done all the back pages for the last three months, and they're with Producer Chant (who I believe you've met) so they're on the way towards being printed out and shipped to you. Here's a preview: Anyway. On with the show. I, like all of you I imagine, grew up watching

Hello there, esteemed patrons. In a departure from – nay, an absolute upheaval of – normal service, this is Chant, one of Grant’s producers at RRD. I’m the one who does things like make sure physical copies of games get mailed out to Grant’s most valued, and indeed most valuable, supporters. Grant’s

I've been fascinated by horses for a while. I loathe them. They're just too big - and famously skittish - and that combination unnerves me. There's something primeval in it: this is a beast. Quite how people manage to ride the fucking things around is beyond me. A few years ago, I wrote a game calle

What if, right, every part of a TTRPG was a random-roll table? EVERYTHING IS TABLES answers that question. Whole thing's a set of tables, even the illustration. (If you feel the game isn't visually rich enough, roll 3D6 on the Illustration table and use your damned imagination.) I've enjoyed random-

PHYSICAL PATRONS: Thank you for your kind ongoing contributions. I'll be sending out the next batch of paper copies in January. It's Christmas! Chiz chiz, jolly et cetera. Can I share a secret with you? I'm not very good at Christmas. I don't like it much. I'm fine with the feasting part, and I'm al

I wanted to write the simplest roleplaying game possible, and have it use only a single D6 for everything. (Okay: I WANTED to write a sawed-off version Ocean Bastards, my wet tactical combat cyberpunk game, but as ever I couldn't make it fit and still seem like fun. So I had some Ideas in the shower

I've done it. I've written a Dungeons & Dragons hack. They said it'd never happen. (I said it would never happen.) But here, in the twilight of my years at the ripe old age of 38 (it was my birthday this month, I'm older now) I'm experimenting around with the format of the one-page RPG and what it c

So: what if goblins built dragons? When enough goblins hang out together, they invariably construct a dragon statue out of any magically-resonant junk they can lay their hands on. If the statue gets big enough and cool enough, it will come to life as a real dragon (albeit one made from empty healing

Physical backers! This is the last of the current batch of three games, the others being There But For The Geese Of God and Pub Crusade. I'll write the back pages for them in September and get 'em sent out once they're good and funny. I've been playing around with the idea of dice placement as a mec

This, like LEXICUTIONERS, is a game set entirely within Spire. Spire is a much larger game I wrote with Chris Taylor about six years ago, but you don't need it to play Pub Crusade, but don't let that stop you from buying it just in case. It was a tricky one this month - I experimented with a few nov

PHYSICAL BACKERS UPDATE: I've sent off the files for this last batch of games to Maz, who's handling the printing. Hopefully you'll be receiving your copies in a couple of weeks. I went to Poland recently! More accurately - I went to Poznan to attend Pyrkon, which was lovely, and I'd go back in a sh

I've been thinking about Business a lot recently. This is probably because, as Rowan Rook and Decard grows as a company, the ideas of Professionalism and Management and all those fascinating concepts we wrap ourselves in to blunder through capitalism are coming to the forefront. What does it mean to

Physical backer update: all the back pages are written, and we're currently in the process of extracting your names and addresses from Patreon's database and sending that data over to our printer so they can distribute 'em. This should happen before the week is over. Also one of the back pages is a

I try not to write games about current events. It's a cheap trick, you have to rush it, and it doesn't work - once current events move on your game passes its sell-by date and starts smelling funny. THAT SAID. I caught the news about XL Bullies last month - to those not in the know, this is a specia

This game is a sequel to 2016's THE RAPID AND THE RIGHTEOUS, and I think it's an indication of how far I've come as a designer. Because back in 2016 I was trying to write a proper RPG in cut-down form with GM advice and everything, and in 2024 I've written a dumb fucking shitpost which uses little w

The Order of Lexicutioners are a player faction we put into Strata, our first full-length Spire sourcebook. (They were commissioned as part of a Kickstarter reward by Tim Rudloff, who deserves full credit for the name.) The Lexicutioners are a cult of linguist-assassins who hunt down and kill danger

I've been trying to write a game about Christmas movies for bloody years - I find them fascinating. (Not enough to sit down and watch the damned things, mind you - I have my pride - but the concept alone is enthralling. I've watched The Christmas Prince, and the associated sequels, a couple of times

Full disclosure: the Summer of Hollows wasn't all it promised. Thanks to a cocktail of business and mental health challenges, we have not made the dramatic - indeed, total - progress on the book that we'd hoped to make. I'm going to restart one-page games soon, so this is the last Hollows update I'l

I haven’t gone Hollow, don’t worry. I took a couple weeks off as we were at GenCon, and then we launched the EAT THE REICH Kickstarter, and since then I’ve just been sort of pinballing about the place and reacting to whatever’s happened to me most recently. It’s not the sort of behaviour that makes

(Eagle-eyed readers will notice that we have skipped a week from four to six. Turns out I had two WEEK THREES, which shows you just how on top of my project management I am. Anyway.) Chris and I played Hollows this week. We haven’t played it in a long time - we’ve been using other people’s feedback,

You know those old-timey diarists and letter writers? I can’t think of any of them in particular right now but they’re always saying things like “March 7th. Wrote nothing. Incalculably sad. I have purchased myself a horse” or “September 22nd. Wrote nothing. S visits and tells me of the new exhibitio

[Content warning: I talk about suicide in this one a bit, towards the end. So skip the FLUFF section if you don't want to read about that] More preview pictures from Sam this week. He's doing beautiful work. You know, it’s hard to properly cocoon yourself in an impenetrable bubble of limitless creat