Author: John Scott Tynes

My Kickstarter for Puppetland: A Storytelling Game With Strings is in its final hours and I’m thrilled with how it’s going. We are able to fund a beautiful hardcover edition twice as big as the previous one, with a slew of new adventures by some of my favorite game designers, and a new illustrated storybook telling the grim tale of how Punch the Maker-Killer came to be.

We’ve also been selected as a Kickstarter staff pick today, which is a real honor. I’ve backed more than eighty projects on Kickstarter over the years and it’s a treat to contribute my own project to that community.

Last night around 3am I awoke and could not sleep. All I could think of was work, my day job, whirling and whirling and keeping me awake. I had to break out of that spiral so I tried to think about Puppetland, and about the storybook I want to write. It was hard — work kept reasserting itself. But I kept lying there, pushing through the distraction.

The fundamental problem with the storybook was that I’ve already told the story of how Punch killed the Maker in the introduction of Puppetland. I needed a new approach, a new way to make the story breathe in storybook form.

Then suddenly I had it. It just burst into being, all of a sudden:

“The world is a mirror maze, and in every reflection there is a Mr. Punch. But the most terrible Mr. Punch of all, the one locked away for all the crimes of all his reflections across history, was a prisoner of Bedlam. And there he wondered day and night at the injustice that he was locked up in here while his Maker, who made him this way, was out there free and he was locked up trapped. And so he sought to escape, and to kill the Maker, that he could finally be free.”

This headline is total clickbait. I mean, for me.

A 1,300-Year-Old Egyptian Book Of Spells Has Been Deciphered

Do you want to cast love spells? Exorcise demons? Subjugate your enemies? These and other arcane invocations can be found in the Handbook of Ritual Power, an 8th-century, 20-page codex that has been translated and published by two scholars of religion and ancient history.

More Puppetland sculpted hardcovers, and a visit Down Below to one of Punch’s greatest adversaries.

Update 5: The Maker's Face and the Devil's Place · Puppetland: The Storytelling RPG of Grim…

Greetings from Respite. Our fundraiser for Puppetland has only a few short days to go and we are already working hard on the book. And we have some news!Watch Out! More Nutcrackers!First, Ann Koi has offered to make more custom book wraps for the NUTCRACKER pledge level. That level sold out fast. No…

I’ve been reading the prerelease PDFs of Designers & Dragons by Shannon Appelcline, which tells the story of the roleplaying game industry from the 1970s through today. It consists of four books and it’s really great. Shannon is a talented writer and he’s pulled together an immense amount of history, anecdote, personalities, and data. He’s done brilliant work here, invaluable work, and I recommend these books to anyone interested in the history of this hobby.

Designers & Dragons

If there's one thing that the "old school" revolution has taught us, it's that history is important to us as gamers. Our roots matter. But how much do we actually know — or remember — of the orig…

It’s a good night to write more Puppetland.

My wife and I were discussing whether or not an axe murderer might be hiding inside our house because we left the door unlocked all night.

“If so, he must be very patient.”

“Well that’s what you want most in an axe murderer. You want them to be patient. You don’t want them just charging in and doing it right away.”

“You’re right, patience is the most desireable quality in an axe murderer. And the second quality is quadrepalegy.”

My six-year-old daughter designed our Jack O’Lantern this year. I think she already understands how creepy asymmetry is.

Some Unknown Armies fans in Israel made a short film inspired by my game. It’s pretty cool! This five-minute tale of two enforcers from the New Inquisition is moody and has a nice supernatural element. I love seeing passion projects like this.

Our Kickstarter to bring back my 1995 story game Puppetland: A Storytelling Game With Strings is live! Ann Synesthesia Koi’s custom-sculpted hardcovers are already going quickly so check it out soon. Many thanks to Shane Ivey, Dennis Detwiller, Raven Mimura, James Wallis, and Samuel Araya for pulling all the right strings over the years.