I'M GONNA TELL MY KIDS THIS WAS D&D

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 complete with the correct back page.

I don't have kids. It's the meme. You know the meme?

BREAKFAST

I've been busy this month. We did UKGE, which necessitates cramming most but not all of Rowan, Rook and Decard's staff into a single house so we can run the stall properly.

The responsibilities within my role as a small business owner have, thankfully, been relaxed over time as Maz has surrounded themselves with other sensible geniuses so I've been able to do more of the bits of the job I like and I'm good at (writing games, asking insightful questions, knocking off at 4 for a spliff) and less of the bits I don't and I'm not (anything involving spreadsheets, Business to Business stuff, responding to emails). I had a total of zero business meetings at UKGE, which was great, so I could focus on what was really important: cooking breakfast for everyone every morning.

I didn't take any pictures of us at UKGE, so here's some stuff I picked up instead.

I'm serious. Cons are hard. We live sedentary lifestyles crammed behind our computers; our bodies aren't used to standing up all day, capering like clowns for the approval of people we've never met, and carrying boxes of anything anywhere. You can't sneak by on a cup of coffee and a biscuit like you normally do. You gotta eat.

So every morning I make eggs and bacon and sausages and, I dunno, some halloumi or mushrooms for the vegetarian. My mother, bless her heart, used to do a similar thing for me and my friends; the morning after a party, which I was permitted to hold at our house presumably because my dad was desperate for me to make friends and stop playing around with toy soldiers like a nerd (sorry Dad), she would arrive like a guardian angel with a tray of foil-wrapped bacon sandwiches for everyone.

Can you imagine. What a sweetheart. I like to think I'm channelling her when I shift into Dad Mode and insist that everyone Eat Up because they've got a Big Day Ahead of them and I don't want them getting pissy at about 2pm cause they've not eaten.

It was joyous, UKGE. We work as a remote office so we don't really get to see each other in person outside of cons; we were able to stay up late and smoke cigarettes in the back garden and drink whiskey and be humans at one another.

POLAND

Then! A scant two weeks of blundering around my house, T-posing in corridors and glitching into furniture, before I was whisked away to Poland along with three other members of RRD staff for Pyrkon, Poland's yearly premier nerd corral and dork pit. It turns out that if you say "who do you want out of these three people to attend as guests" sometimes a con will just say "yes" and ship the lot of you out.

Pyrkon, as I wrote last year, is a thoroughly magical experience and I'll go as long as they keep inviting me. It began 20-odd years ago as a local general nerd interest convention running at a school; this year, they had something like 50,000 people turn up. It's never been set up to make money. It can't make money. It's not supposed to. So instead of having a massive trade hall and some tertiary games, the bit where you can buy things is tiny - about a quarter of the size of UKGE's trade hall - and instead people are just fuckin doing the thing all over the shop. There's three concert stages. Everyone's dancing and singing. Young crowd, too. Most of the crowd were under twenty, I'd say, all frantic teens in cosplay determined to get all of their weird done in a single weekend.

Now: I was very happy to have an air-conditioned room to walk back to. I don't relish the prospect of, as those kids do, sort of falling asleep in a corridor and propelling themselves through the weekend on Red Bull and hormones. But more power to 'em.

I ran a workshop where, in about an hour and a half, we strongarmed the participants into writing the skeleton of a Havoc Engine game - the one that runs Eat the Reich, Goat Crashers and Havoc Brigade. I've run a few design workshops but never really found my feet with it - I always veer on the side of caution, give people free reign to do whatever they like, and then watch them struggle because my teaching method amounted to Draw The Rest of the Fucking Owl.

Thankfully, by tying them into the Havoc Engine, the constraints allowed people to do some clever stuff without worrying about being too clever and not getting anything done. The session boiled down to about twelve questions and some brief explanations of dice mechanics, supported by me and my assistants wandering through the crowd and offering support and encouragement while the teams worked.

One team had stats that were the five stages of grief. One team wrote a game where you played orcish wrestlers who were contractually obliged to fight a dragon tonight so the game is about discrediting the dragon, learning its weaknesses, cuckolding it to demoralise it, etc.

I'm made up about it. And it showed me that Havoc Engine isn't just for big dumb run-and-gun fun; you can make it do other things too. Exciting stuff. Keep an eye out for the revised SRD releasing at some point in the next two months probably.

ALL THE DICE

Last year I was struck by inspiration at Pyrkon upon hearing the tale of the St Martin and the Geese; this year, no such luck. Plus the other legend Posnan has is about goats, and I've already done too many games about them. Instead, I was walking home from the shops, and thought: what if there was a game where you rolled all the dice?

I remember buying my first set of polyhedrals. I was eighteen. I'd been at uni for maybe a week, and a man called James Moran gave me a lift into town to buy a set because I was to be in his SLA Industries game. I wrote about James at length a decade ago. I remember the peculiar see-through box that slotted together, the dice stacked atop one another inside, the curiousness of their shapes and meanings.

Magic items, basically. Things with which to commune with another world. In an unusual break from gamer tradition I would go on to care about no dice ever - I can't even remember what colour the first ones were; I assume it was red because that's what I would have picked - but, before I grew tired of everyone's bullshit around dice superstitions and the continual grind to buy another set of dice because you had to buy something and you'd bought all the D&D books already, I enjoyed their strangeness.

Anyway. I'M GONNA TELL MY KIDS THIS IS D&D is an experiment, much like Everything is Tables or RP6, into dice mechanics. I wanted to come up with a system where every single one of the dice mattered every time you did something - or as near as damnit - because otherwise that poor D12 never got used. (Barbarians notwithstanding.)

I reckon it'll work real nice. In fact, I reckon it'll play fuckin D&D. PLUS I put in a one in a hundred chance of something being your LUCKY BIRTHDAY ROLL, so if that isn't worth the price of admission, I don't know what is.

This month: all the dice. Next month: no dice. Month after that: dominoes. After that: those spinny things you used to cut out the back of cereal boxes. Then: Hopscotch. Dog racing. Gurning contests. Slapfights. Duelling harmonicas. Sleep deprivation. Spiders.

Fuck it. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Yours aye,

• Grant "Hot Dog" Howitt