TL;DR: The tabletop market is overflowing with interesting games, and most of them will never make it to a table. Not because they are bad, but because getting bought and getting played are two very different things.

The market has never been more crowded

We are living in a golden age of tabletop RPGs. There are countless designs covering every niche and topic you could hope for, and that is genuinely something to celebrate.

But it creates a problem for both designers and players. With so much choice, deciding what to actually play becomes difficult. Players get excited about games, buy the books, and never get them to the table. The effort of learning a new system rarely matches the idealised version of the experience they imagined when they bought it. Something else catches their eye. The backlog grows. The excitement fades and the game sits on the shelf.

A quick look at DriveThruRPG is enough to show how constant the flow of new releases has become. The competition for a player’s attention, money, and time has never been more intense.

This means designers have to think beyond the hype. A finished game still has to cross several thresholds before it becomes something people actually play. It has to generate interest. It has to convert that interest into a sale. It has to be read. It has to reach the table. And then, hardest of all, it has to give people a reason to come back.

Each threshold is a separate problem. A game can succeed at one and still fail at the next. That is how a game becomes something people recommend rather than something they merely meant to try.

The hook has to be repeatable

Before someone buys a game, they have to care that it exists.

That means the premise has to stand out, and it has to be easy to understand and pass on. Whether that happens through your own marketing or through other creators sharing it, the same principle applies. You need to be able to boil the game down into something people can quickly grasp and repeat.

Not every game needs to be reduced to a gimmick, but it does need a hook people can hold onto.

Shadowdark bridges the gap between modern rules and OSR to create an approachable dungeon crawler that uses light sources as a timing device.

Stonetop is a hearth fantasy game, where the people and place you call home are as important to the story as the PCs themselves.

Blades in the Dark lets you play as a crew of scoundrels, running fast-paced narrative-first heists in a city that feels alive with criminal factions.

Whether or not someone likes those games, the premise is easy to pass on. That matters. If people can quickly explain what is interesting about your game, they can carry it further than you can on your own.

Interest doesn’t automatically become a purchase

Plenty of games get noticed without turning into a sale.

This is where you have to make it easy for someone to move from curiosity into commitment. Where are you selling it? How are you presenting it? Are you giving people the format they actually want?

That last point is more important than people sometimes admit. Some players are perfectly happy with a PDF. Others, like me, struggle to properly engage with a game unless they have the physical book in their hands. If you can offer both, you stand a better chance of reaching both audiences, even if it is just a POD service on DriveThru or Lulu.

At this stage the game has to sell more than just the idea. It has to feel worth spending money on, something the buyer wants in their collection, not just something that was interesting for thirty seconds on social media.

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Getting bought isn’t getting read

This is the stage people do not talk about enough.

Every game has to fight its way through a backlog. Through limited attention. Through the pile of other things someone meant to get round to.

This is where layout matters enormously. If the book feels dense, awkward, or tiring to parse, people will switch off. The rules may be excellent, but if the reading experience feels like work, a lot of people will never get far enough to discover that.

Artwork matters here too.

Not just because it looks good, but because it keeps the tone of the game alive while the player is learning it. It gives them something to anchor their inspiration to. A strong illustration also becomes a landmark. Readers remember where rules are by their proximity to certain images, which makes returning to a book feel more natural than hunting through unmarked text.
Quantity matters for the same reason: long stretches of unbroken text give no respite for readers, pushing them out of the experience the artwork is working to maintain.

For PDFs, good hyperlinks are no longer a bonus. Players expect them, and their absence is noticed. So are examples of play. If someone can read a rule and immediately see it in use, they are much more likely to keep going.

Overall, the easier a book is to navigate, the better chance it has of surviving the pressure of the backlog long enough for someone to actually get it to the table.

Getting read isn’t getting played

This is where understanding and usability stop being abstract, especially for the other players at the table.

You can give your players the full PDF and six months, but you still will not get all of them to read it. Some players just want to pick it up on the fly. That might be lack of time, lack of interest, overconfidence, or just the reality of how some people engage with games, but whichever way you describe it, the games design has to account for it.

This is where quality handouts, character sheets, summary cards, and cheat sheets come into their own. Anything that reduces the amount of rules translation a GM has to do, or the homework a player has to do before they sit down, improves the chances of the game actually making it to the table.

Clear procedures of play are worth formalising, particularly when they show players how individual rules connect to the core game loop. If you and your players need to return to the main rulebook for common rules questions, you are disrupting the flow of play too much, which will lead to a dissatisfied feeling at the table.

This stage is not about whether the rules are clever. It is about whether starting even feels possible. Sometimes the effort required in session zero does not feel worth the payoff when you could be playing and enjoying something you already know or that is easier to learn.

Getting played once isn’t enough

This is the stage I think creators most often underestimate. Games with a repeatable loop have the greatest potential for long term play. Serialised sessions with a clear structure in a wider narrative seem to hold together better than the open-ended grand campaign that has no natural rhythm to return to from session to session.

For group games, part of this comes down to how sessions end. A session needs to feel like something has been concluded, but also like there is momentum for next time. If a session ends suspended mid-combat, or at a point where the next move is forced rather than chosen, there is no natural pull back into play, just an obligation to finish something.

Blades in the Dark is a good example of how a structured loop supports return play. The setup, score, and downtime cycle gives every session a natural shape. There is a moment that feels like an ending, and a thread that pulls you back. Any game that builds that kind of rhythm into its structure will hold together better than one that leaves sessions to end wherever they happen to stop.

For solo players, the challenge looks different

I am sure most solo players have had the experience of playing a game they were genuinely enjoying, liking their character, digging the setting, feeling fully into the narrative of it, and then somehow not returning to the game for six months. Or perhaps even ever.

I know I am not alone in that.

For solo games especially, the design needs to help people re-enter. Guidance for the core loop, yes, but also for moving time forward, abstracting things when needed, and skipping past the parts that have become difficult to navigate. If someone has hit a creative wall or cannot quite remember what was going on, the game should help them get back into motion.

Ironsworn and Starforged gesture toward this with their Begin a Session, End a Session, and Change Your Fate moves. They acknowledge the difficulties of session re-entry, but do not give enough detailed support for the varieties of motivational challenges that add friction to returning to a dormant solo game. What could be further developed here, and implemented in other games, is more structure and player permission to shift, skip, or otherwise change things in the narrative so you can re-enter at a more interesting point in the story. Ironsworn and Starforged focus more on avoiding uncomfortable topics or outcomes than on reducing friction in re-entering the story itself.

That is part of what makes a game resilient. Not just supporting play once, but supporting continuation.

The full job

Most of the visible craft in game design goes into the early thresholds. The hook gets refined. The marketing makes the game desirable. The book gets laid out and illustrated.

The design may be strong, but a game that doesn’t consider all of the thresholds will quietly lose people at every stage that follows, never quite reaching and sustaining the audience it deserved.

Community spaces and Discord servers can help fill these gaps after release, but they are not a substitute for designing with the full journey in mind from the start.

A game that handles all of that is genuinely rare, because it asks designers to think beyond the core rules and setting, and into the life of the game after release.

A good game is not just one people buy. It is one people are still playing and enjoying six months later.

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A meaningful weakness gives a character something to struggle against. That struggle is where the most interesting stories tend to come from.

Weaknesses give the story something to work with

A character without weaknesses can feel infallible. And an infallible character is hard to build interesting stories around, because nothing is ever genuinely at stake.

When a character has a real flaw, something that shapes their decisions and creates pressure in certain situations, the story has something to push against. That is where interesting things start to happen.

I like building this into a system as a mechanic, but it can also be done purely through player choice.

A real-life Curse of Strahd example

That is an extreme example of self-limitation, and I am not asking you to avoid using your character’s spells for a calendar year. But constraints like this have a way of forcing creativity. When the obvious choice is denied to your character because of an underlying personal flaw, you have to find another one, and that other choice is usually more interesting.

It also gives the other players at the table things to riff off and build inter-character dialogue around.

The limitation changed how the spells felt while playing. They had meaning because they had to make sense within the fiction, so even a lowly cantrip felt satisfying.

Flaws should be part of the system

In my opinion, an effective system makes flaws and weaknesses a built-in part of both character creation and ongoing gameplay.

This is not a new idea. Legend in the Mist does this well. Negative tags are one of my favourite parts of that system. But they will also be central to what I am making.

The game I am building is tag-based, as I mentioned in the last post, and I will be using negative tags to drive this kind of narrative. There will be mechanical bonuses for leaning into your negatives during gameplay rather than avoiding them, but they will also be part of driving character growth to generate new positive tags.

Min-maxing can miss part of the fun

There is nothing wrong with optimising a character build, and I definitely do not want to yuck the yum of anyone who enjoys a spot of min-maxing during character creation. But I do feel that without flaws, those perfect characters are just perfectly boring.

I implore those types of players to take that optimised build and give it a genuine weakness or two. Something that means, in certain situations, the character cannot help but act against their own best interest. A fear, a debt, a point of pride, an old guilt.

Whatever it is, it gives the character something to struggle with. And that struggle is usually where the session stops being a sequence of outcomes and starts becoming an emergent story.

Summing it up

Negative traits and flaws create choices that sometimes work against you as the player. When that happens, your character starts shaping the story rather than just moving through it.

Annnnd with that - lets go!

Saren Durant Studied his charts to set a safe course for Lyra station - something that would let him attempt to fly casual and not draw any more attention to his vessel.

Take +1 Momentum

He sees a way to navigate off of the space lane he is on and route into Lyra space station from a different direction. This at least would allow him to use the quieter landing pads that face away from the planet below. Lyra station moves in an orbit that is perpendicular to the direction of the planet Veil, so the planetside pads, are busier.

Durant manages to approach the station from an angle that makes it unclear what his prior course was and where he had travelled from to anyone casually observing.

He is instructed to land at docking bay 16, his ships transponder automatically completing the authorisation protocols.

“Shit - well if they are looking for me, they will know I’m here. Hopefully anyone who cares will think I’m dead” he muttered to himself.

I need your clothes, your boots, and a blood transfusion

Durant exits the Oath and moves across the hangar, hoping to avoid drawing attention. He has changed into new overalls, but the wounds are already starting to weep from his movement. He really should be resting.

He will need new dressings, as well as the blood transfusion, otherwise he could face infection.

+1Momentum.

Durant allowed himself a grim smile. At least this landing bay was not busy. As a small unexpected bonus, the number of refugees travelling through this station made limps and other strange walks less suspicious.

The only downside was that he had never landed on this side of the station before and did not have his bearings. How far was it to the medbay? And when he got there should he ask for treatment or should he try and steal the supplies from the medbay?

Oracle roll - 50/50 Should I request treatment?: no

It was too risky. If he requested treatment, he would have to give his details to the triage nurse at the medbay. His details would be transmitted to the station security immediately. If the Sato company were behind the attempt on his life, they would be on him before he had been hooked up to an IV.

Maybe he couldtry and steal some new ID - that may get him treatment more easily.

No time to stand around thinking, he needed to move so as to not arouse suspicion from anyone in the landing bay.

Oracle - what is behind the door to this landing pad?: Living Quarters.

Beyond this landing bay was a series of large hangar rooms. These large storage areas, stark and cold, had been converted to refugee accommodation. The rooms were lined with camp beds and small tents. Here and there areas were divided by fabric partitions made from the same material as the tents.

The room stank with unwashed humanity, and the walls dripped with the condensation from the accumulated breath of the occupants.

At least in here Durant would be able to get lost in the crowd of misery.

Durant began to look around for someone that resembled him in physique and looks. He needed an ID and ideally a jacket of some sort to hide the expanding blood spots on his overalls.

His Hammadan features would make it a little more difficult.

Oracle roll 50-50. Do I find someone that matches my looks? No.

Fuck - he moved around the two seperate hangars, inspecting the swathes of humanity but he couldn’t find anyone that matches his ethnicity.

He resolved to find someone with clothes that would fit his build and go from there. In the corner of the first hangar he had seen a big man hunkering down on a cot trying to get some sleep. It appeared he was from the far side of the planet and was suffering jet lag from adjusting to the station time zone. Durant would try his luck approaching and taking the jacket and hopefully ID from beside his cot.

Burn momentum. Change to Weak hit.

Durant reached down to take the jacket, just as someone walked into the partition. He managed to jerk himself away out of sight, but the sudden movement pulled open one of his wounds.

Health -1

As he moved away he checks the jacket for ID. Yes, it was there!

He had just robbed someone named Vax Walker. He hoped he would not get Vax into any trouble if he needed to use this ID.

Emboldened by the addition of his new jacket, making him feel less exposed to scrutiny, Durant makes his way to the med bay, now having his bearings on the station.

He bites down as he tries to suppress a limp from his freshly opened wound.

Durant watches the med bay, surveying the movements of the doctors, nurses and staff in relation to the locked cabinet.

He will need to get a key card. Forcing entry will make too much noise and attract attention.

-1 spirit

The medbay has an outer ring corridor - he can’t see anything of whats going on from the main doors to the wing. He will have to gain entry and think on his feet.

Oracle roll - reduce, time,

Durant decides that his best course of action will be to try and evacuate the medbay so that he can enter without being watched.

The medbay would have CO2 emitters to dampen any fires. if he could start a fire, he would have a short time whilst staff follow evacuation procedures before they would come back in.

He was sure that he would still have a gasmask in the engineering kit on the Talons Oath.

-1 resources.

He remembers that the respirator is tethered to a welding kit and will be useless after one use.

He returns to the Oath to fetch the mask and the required supplies to create a fire large enough to set off the evacuation protocols in the Med Bay.

He makes it back to the ship but the delay in navigating through the crowds without being identified and the sheer scale of the task ahead of him depress Durant.

-1 spirit

He steels himself, annoyed that he is letting himself get down. It must be the blood loss he thinks.

+1 Spirit

“Things are about to get pretty hairy” he thinks to himself. “I may need to get out of here sharpish. Probably best if I repair the worst of the damage whilst I can, before I ruin this welding kit”.

Even though he was in a hangar bay, he used his own equipment for the repair so as not to bring any more attention.

Damn - the impacts on the ship are quite bad and the edges of the damage so mangled that he can’t get the welds to take.

“Hey, what are you doing there?! You can’t use unauthorised gas combustion systems in this area, it could cause an explosion” - the approaching engineer indicated to the oxygen tanks that line the hangar walls.

Durant replies, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. How can this little welding torch be a problem but a ship’s engine during take-off are ok!?”

Engineer - “During an authorised take-off or repair process, the gas conduits are shut off and the anti-flashback filters are engaged. The system is made safe. Unlike now!”

The engineer was beginning to look at the ID number on the Oath’s hull and entering it into his data pad. Durant needs to interrupt him before he completes a search in case it alerts someone at Sato.

He leans in conspiratorially. “Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t know the rules. I was just following orders from the hard arse that owns this thing. Treats me like dirt sometimes, so I just do what he says”.

+1 momentum, but agreement comes with a price

Engineer “look I get it, the seniors here ride my ass all day as well. But I’ve started an entry in the data centre now, it will create questions if I stop and it make more work for me. If you make it worth my while, perhaps I will see fit to take on that extra admin...”

Durant hands him some credits “ look man, I don’t have much, but hopefully this isenough. I appreciate what you are doing for me”.

-1 supply

With that, the engineer walks away.

Durant stands there for a moment, drained.

This piece of proactive work to make his future actions easier has brutally backfired. The ship is no more repaired than when he started and now he was even lower on resources. If he can get away from this station, would he even have enough supply to make a journey?

The only positive outcome of this is that there clearly isn’t an alert out for this craft yet. The fact that it’s docked at Lyra might have gone unnoticed to anyone that’s looking, or they may not be looking at all.

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TL;DR

Tag-based systems are, in my opinion, ideal for solo and GM-less play because they keep the story, character background, and narrative logic close to the surface of the action at all times.

They help answer not just whether a character can do something, but how they approach it, why they are capable, and what that tells us about who they are.

This matters because you are already doing double duty, both playing the character and running the world around them. So anything that keeps you from having to reference other materials mid-session is a win.

Tags keep the story in focus

For me, the real strength of a tag-based game is that the character’s history remains active during play at all times.

It helps make sense of what a character would do in a moment, how they would go about it, and why they would be good at it, grounding your character in the world you are playing in.

In a traditional stat-based system, you might look at a number and say:

I have 18 Strength, so I am strong enough to lift this, break this, or carry this.

That works mechanically. It tells you the character is strong and that they have a good chance of success.

But it does not tell you much about how that strength shows up in the fiction. The player has to do more work to reconnect the number to the character’s backstory. They have to remember, or pre-write, why that number exists and what else it might imply. Without that context close to hand, approaches to problems can become repetitive. Strength becomes a repeated mechanical answer, rather than something shaped by the character’s life and experience.

In a tag-based system, your character’s backstory is in plain sight on the character sheet. The tags replace the numbers of a traditional character sheet, but they do more than tell you what the character is good at. They tell you something about why.

So let’s take that same strength-based situation, but instead of a number, we see that the character is strong because they were a farmhand.

That immediately gives you more to work with in the moment. Their strength is tied to a life they have lived.

And strength is only one thing that tag carries. A farmhand who can force open a swollen door is the same character who may know how to grow crops, read weather coming in, or keep livestock calm in a dangerous situation. None of that shows up in an 18 Strength. The tag also opens up who they are in moments that have nothing to do with strength at all. It shapes the texture of the action itself, not just whether they succeed, but how the attempt looks and feels.

So when that character has to move a fallen beam to rescue a comrade, or carry them to safety across difficult ground, the tag does more than justify the roll. It gives shape to the action.

They will not approach the problem like a trained soldier, an athlete, or a bodybuilder. They might test the weight first, look for tools they can use for leverage, or understand how to carry something heavy and ungainly without wasting effort.

The tag does not just say:

I am strong.

It says:

I am strong in this particular way, because of this particular life.

In that sense, a tag-based character sheet can feel like having a tailored spark table in front of you at all times. It gives you prompts that are already specific to the character without needing to roll on another table or dig through separate backstory notes for inspiration.

Tag-based systems are misunderstood by a lot of people

To be fair, a lot of these criticisms come from group play, because that is where the majority of people’s experiences lie. But those views bleed into the wider perception of tag-based systems.

Tags do not necessarily equal rules-light

Tag systems are often mistakenly associated with rules-light gaming, or somehow being less serious than traditional stat-based systems.

A game not being built around numbered stats does not automatically make it rules-light. A tag-based game can have depth, structure, consequence, and plenty of mechanical weight. It just approaches those things differently.

“Tags are too easy to apply to every situation”

Another criticism levelled at tag-based games, especially games like Fate, is that they can become systems where players try to justify any tag for any challenge.

I think there is a real issue there, but it is worth being precise about what the issue actually is.

Creative use of tags is not the problem. In fact, I think that is part of the point of a good tag-based game. The system should encourage you to look at your character in interesting ways and find approaches that emerge from who they are.

The problem occurs when systems do not give a mechanical reason or benefit to a player for not throwing every possible tag at a challenge. That leads to a situation where the player is no longer asking:

Does this tag genuinely shape how my character approaches this problem?

And is instead asking:

How can I make my best tags apply to everything?

At that point, the tag stops being a piece of character and becomes a lever to pull for mechanical advantage. The fiction starts bending around the bonus, rather than the rules helping the fiction come alive.

Part of the answer to that is playing in the spirit of the game. But I also think the system itself can help encourage that spirit.

Where I am going with this

This is one of the things I have been trying to address in my own tag-based system for solo and GM-less play.

My system does allow players to use any tag. I actually think that flexibility is important, especially in solo play, where you do not always want the game to stop while you argue with yourself about whether something technically counts.

But using any tag should not always be the obvious best choice.

The question should not only be:

Can I justify this?

It should also be:

Is using this tag actually to my benefit right now?

That is the space I am interested in. I want tags to remain flexible and creative, but I also want the player to think about what they are bringing into the fiction, what risks come with that, and whether leaning on that part of the character is wise in this particular moment.

Because a tag is a statement about the character. It tells the game what matters, what is being tested, and what might be put under pressure.

This is just the starting point

There is too much here to cover everything in one go, so I will end this article here before it gets too long.

In the next two articles, I will go into the details of my own system, and why I think self-imposed limitations, or negative tags, can make tag-based play more interesting.

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Char Gen:

Session 1. The Betrayal.

Saren Durant comes to, laying in a pool of his own blood. He is covered in the slick, sticky mess and fear shoots into his heart when he realises that it is his, and how much he has lost.

He is drowsy and could do with a nap....

No - he must stay awake and get to the med bay. He must survive, if only to make the Sato family pay the price for their betrayal.

The med bay is down the companionway from the cockpit. It is a long way to crawl with blood loss, especially in this weakened state.

Suffer move: -1 health.

Durant drags himself through the corridor, discovering new wounds on his body as the metal grids on the flooring catch upon him as he passes.

It is clear that he has multiple stab wounds. His adrenaline must have been keeping the pain at bay - or it could have been the blood loss....

He makes it to the med bay.
One final painful movement to cross the threshold and he is onto the smooth clean floor of the clinical space.

The autodoc is on a table above him. How on earth is he going to drag himself up onto there? With one blood curdling scream, he hauls himself onto the table, his bloodied hands slipping as he fights his way up.

He stares back in horror at the trail of blood that leaves the room. The sheer quantity and thickness of the streak scares him, showing that he had been losing more blood as he exerted himself.

Once on the table, he pulls the autodoc control screen around, and leaving bloody marks on the touch screen, begins an injury diagnostic program.

In a moment of clarity, he has the wherewithal to set a triage and surgery program in the instruction queue, in case he is not conscious to give the instruction later.

As his bloodied thumb falls away from the biometric authorisation panel, the autodoc’s robotic arm begins to whir into action.

On the screen Durant sees a readout for the injuries he has sustained:

Puncture wound - left lung

Puncture wound - abdomen

Puncture wound - liver

Laceration - forearms

Laceration - shoulder blades

Well - at least it was clear he had fought back he supposed. But those wounds sounded serious.

Clear Wounded Status.

+2 Health

The arms of the autodoc return to their home position as the machine starts its next task - surgery protocol. The tools change from the diagnostic package to those suited for surgical action.

The arm whirs across his peripheral vision as things start to go dark - the anaesthesia kicking in.

Durant wakes to the faint smell of burning flesh - a cauterising attachment still glowing gently on the autodocs retracted arm.

His abdomen has been cleanly stitched back up. On the screen a warning message reads -

Critical injuries: stable.

Blood loss: severe**
**Insufficient plasma inventory to replace.

!Continued care urgent and advised!

Do you wish to print your notes? Yes/No.

He taps yes on the screen and a moment later a memory chip is ejected with his name lasered into the surface. He pockets it and tries to sit up tentatively.

He grimaces, still in pain. But he is glad he can now breathe without wheezing like a wet bag.

He needs urgent care still, but should he continue on to his current course to Lyra or plot an alternative course to Rust? If those that attempted to murder him found him in Lyra, they would surely have something to say about that? But Rust was a long way - what if he didn’t survive that journey?

Does Durant know who attacked him on his own ship?

+2 Momentum
Oracle roll - How many passengers were on the ship? D12: 1
Oracle roll - Do i know this passenger, odds, likely: Yes.
Oracle Roll - Character Role - Lawkeeper
Name Generator - Yael Tracer

Since we rolled that a story focus for this game was about Cargo - Yael is going to steal something.

Back in the cockpit, stepping past the puddle of congealing blood on the floor Durant finds that the security monitor system is operational. It displays an array of images covering the main shared spaces of the ship.
The cockpit itself is not recorded, but the monitors show a female security officer entering the cockpit hatch. The woman reappears a few minutes later, looking winded. She is carrying a small case.

Durant recognises her instantly - she was the only passenger onboard. Its Yael Tracer, the security officer he was transporting back to Lyra station on his return journey from Hypatia station.

Oracle roll - Is Yael still onboard the ship? 50:50. :No

As the recordings continue, we see Yael move through the ship to the cargo bay, don an emergency EVA suit and exit through the airlock.

”That bitch” Durant says out loud. “I did her a favour by giving her a lift to Lyra and this is how she repays me! She will be in for a shock when she finds me knocking at her door…”

That settled it - he knew Yael was stationed on Lyra. If he didnt follow her there, the trail for his stolen cargo could go cold.

He would carry on to Lyra, keep a low profile and hopefully get the blood supplies that he needed without setting off suspicion.

Durant looks at his astrogation charts to set a safer course for Lyra station - something that will let him attempt to fly casual and not draw any more attention to his vessel. He doesn’t know who else may be involved with this. He needs time to plan what to do when he gets there.

TL;DR - Not many oracles give you prompts on how to roleplay your NPC’s so that they feel distinct. This VAK approach will give them extra texture with only a one word prompt.

Have you ever sat there after running a bunch of NPCs and realised that, if you stripped away the accent and maybe level of anger / suspicion, all of them sound the same? They all speak in roughly the same way?

That’s to be expected, because if you are the GM, especially if you’re playing solo, all of those characters are you.

There are plenty of oracles and spark tables out there for quickly rolling up an NPC. They can help you with appearance, demeanour, motivation, lots of things that help you create a visually distinct character and a reason for them to interact with you.
But few of those oracles or spark tables really give you any guidance on how to make the way that character speaks to your players unique or different.

Tools like the Enneagram and Myers-Briggs are often suggested by well meaning contributors on forums to create characters, but holy crap they take a lot of time - and really are more focussed at the psychology of your characters.

I wouldn’t want to run an Enneagram or a Myers-Briggs for my main character, let alone an NPC that you’re only going to meet once. The Enneagram is far too much work to get benefit from, and Myers-Briggs always feels like a job interview. It’s not really set up for creating something usable for fantasy escapism, in my opinion.

So what can we use instead to give these supporting characters texture and make them feel distinct during dialogue?

Use VAK as a prompt

My solution, and something I’ve been using for a while, is VAK.

I think the technical term is modalities, but VAK is the name I’ve always known it under. It is an acronym for the Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic pathways. Each of these modality types affects the way people engage with the world around them, and the way they talk about things.

Visual characters, as the name implies, relies on their sight.
When you’re talking to them, they’ll respond with things like, “I see what you mean”. They can “see the problem”. If they’re unsure about something and trying to work it out, they “can’t picture it yet”. They want to “look at the evidence”. Visual language dominates the way they interact with things.

Auditory charactera rely on hearing.
Their dialogue will include things like, “I hear what you’re saying”. “That doesn’t sound right.”. When presented with an obstacle they want to “talk through a problem”.

Kinesthetic characters rely on touch and physicality.
If you’re talking about a problem with them, they “grasp the idea”. They want to “get a handle on things”. If they are foing to do something they “will handle it”.

Why this works for NPCs

This prompt gives you a consistent anchor to use when your path crosses with this NPC again. If you’ve got the modality for the NPC written down, you know how that character spoke, and you can keep that up when you return to them. Your players will feel like there’s real consistency there.

A quick example

Let’s imagine you’re talking to an NPC that you’re trying to persuade to come along with you on a quest.

Without any modality, that character might say:

“I don’t know. This plan seems risky. What do I get out of it?”

If you were going to run that same scenario with VAK

A visual character, they might say:

“This plan is full of holes - Put it on paper and show me exactly what I’m walking away with”

An auditory character might say:

“That plan doesn’t sound right to me. Talk me through it again, slowly. And tell me exactly what I’m getting out of this

A kinesthetic character might say:

“This plan doesn’t feel right. I’m going to need you to put some of that money in my hands before I do anything.”

These are rough and ready examples, but you can see how, even with that fairly minor change, they’re already speaking differently.

I’ve tried to keep them similar so it’s a direct comparison, but thats not really how this works in practice. Trust me, if you really lean into the VAK language, you can make these characters feel very different with almost no effort.

It is not just about dialogue

The way a character acts under pressure, the things they pay attention to and how they can be persuaded can all stem from that single VAK Prompt.

Ive put these into a table for easier reference:

Why I like it

Modalities are not going to be for everyone. For some people, talking this way is going to feel too forced.

For me, though, it adds a really nice layer of texture without much effort. It is basically a one-word prompt.

Give It A Try

I’d love it if some of you tried running modalities in your next game and reported back on how you got on.

Maybe try one visual character and one auditory character. Keep it simple. Just focus their dialogue around those keyword patterns and see how it feels. See whether those characters feel more separate from one another.

My feeling is that they will. I think they come out more textured, and easier to identify as separate characters.

Drop me a comment if you try it. I’d be curious to see which modality comes up most often for you.

What the Dead Cannot Say is not a game about glory.

It is a game about war, but not about winning one. It is about witnessing it, recording it, surviving it, and deciding what truth is allowed to survive the journey home with you.

Most tabletop roleplaying games are power fantasies. That is no surprise, because they are a rich and satisfying creative outlet. You are usually playing as the adventurer, the warrior, the soldier, the person at the centre of the action.

What I wanted to do instead was step away from that pattern.

In What the Dead Cannot Say (WTDCS), you are not the hero. You are not the soldier. You are the witness.
You are the observer standing between the front line and the people back home, trying to make sense of what has happened and then deciding what version of it will be allowed to travel home with you.

Your words and images matter. They can sway opinion, bring about change, reinforce the status quo, or be bent towards your own ends. For some characters, that may mean pursuing truth and decency. For others, it may mean pursuing access, reputation, influence, or even celebrity.

That is the premise of the game.

An analogue war

The setting is not a historical recreation, but it is shaped by the same kind of media environment as the Vietnam War. That was the conflict that brought the realities of war directly into people’s homes and living rooms in a way that had never happened before, and it had enormous consequences for public sentiment. It was also a war of propaganda, of managed access, and of information controlled by governments and a select number of major media channels.

I do not want to make a direct historical representation of Vietnam itself. Even though i am a military history enthusiast, I do not know enough to do that with the confidence or care it would deserve. But I do want to work with the touchstones of that kind of conflict.

So this is an analogue world. No internet. No social media. No instant circulation of information and evidence.
It is a world of cellulose film, television cameras, photographs, cassette tapes, notebooks, field interviews, rubber stamps, paper documents; with all radio traffic, and transmissions watched closely by the state. Information does not move freely here. It can be delayed, confiscated, redacted, tampered with, or simply lost to the elements before it ever reaches home.

Getting the truth out is not automatic. It requires planning, nerve, and sometimes subterfuge to slip past the grasping reach of the censors.

What you do in the game

You can move through this world in different ways. You may freelance and work more independently, or you may attach yourself to a military unit and gain access through them. Each path comes with trade-offs.

Independence may give you more freedom in what you pursue, but less protection and less mobility. Embedding with a unit may give you greater access, easier movement through checkpoints, and official legitimacy, but at the cost of control. How you travel, where you are allowed to go, and what you are able to send back all become part of play.

You will witness the war from multiple angles. Allied action. Enemy action. Efforts to defend civilian life. Attempts to rebuild. Destruction, fear, exhaustion, and the slow grinding damage of conflict.

The role of the witness

This is where the game differs from a traditional ttrpg.

You are not trying to defeat the enemy yourself. You are not a powerful hero wading through combat encounters. You are trying to follow events, survive in proximity to them, capture the moments and ultimately, communicate them back home. The power you have is not martial. It is narrative, moral, and political.

That does not mean every character has to be driven by principle. You may play someone trying to tell the truth at great personal cost, but you could just as easily play someone using the war as a stage: chasing prestige, building a name, cultivating access, and turning proximity to history into status. That does not make the game less serious. If anything, it is part of the seriousness, because those instincts exist wherever suffering becomes a story.

You can support the government line. You can undermine it. You can try to raise public sympathy, harden public resolve, protect the war effort, or simply protect yourself. Your character’s moral compass matters because every act of reporting is also an act of interpretation.

What you choose to show, what you choose to suppress, and what you choose to reshape all carry consequences.

In that sense, What the Dead Cannot Say is about shaping a war without firing a single bullet.

The cost of seeing

This is also a game about what witnessing does to a person.

Seeing violence, suffering, hypocrisy, and compromise over and over again takes a toll. Recording it takes a toll. Deciding how much of yourself to sacrifice in order to tell the truth, or bury it, takes a toll.

The game tracks that impact on your character. It is interested not just in events, but in what prolonged exposure to those events does to someone’s judgement, convictions, and sense of self.
Some characters will fall apart under the pressure, others will thrive and rise to their full potential.

So that is What the Dead Cannot Say in a nutshell.

It is a game about war, but not about winning one. It is about witnessing, recording, and deciding what truth is allowed to survive. After all, the dead cannot speak for themselves. Someone else always does it for them.

In later posts, I’ll be going through the tag-based system I’ve developed to power the game, as well as the visual language I’ve landed on for the artwork for it.

Drawing a line in the sand

I wanted to make a quick post clarifying how AI does, and does not, appear in my workflow here.

Cantium Signalworks is resolutely a human-made publication, but I think it is worth clarifying a few things.
As has been discussed at length on the Man Alone Discord, there are now some aspects of modern creative work where it is almost impossible to completely get away from AI. So I wanted to set out where those things sit in my workflow, and how they are not something I actively use in any substantive way.

For creating these posts, I do use a transcription tool that runs through ChatGPT. However, I have given it very strict instructions not to edit or change my spoken words beyond removing filler sounds, dead space, and things like that. I will actually post an example of the instructions I give it below, so people can see exactly what I mean.

The rules for my transcript tool:

Keep my voice, intent, wording, and structure as close to the original as possible. Only make light edits needed to remove filler sounds, verbal clutter, obvious repetition, and transcript messiness. Do not substantially rewrite, embellish, sharpen, or reframe my points without permission. If you notice words that could have been misunderstood during transcript, do not change them automatically. Instead, highlight these at the end and ask whether I want any of them applied. Preserve first, suggest second.

Beyond that, when I rewrite posts and check them over, I use ProWritingAid as a spellcheck tool. I have had a lifetime licence for it for many years, from long before it started including AI features. I use it purely for spelling and minor grammatical correction. It works much like old-school Word did, where it underlines a word and says it is spelt incorrectly. I do not use it for rewriting, expansion, or as any kind of additive tool.

I do not use AI in any way for the art. As you will see in some of the posts to come, I have gone out of my way to make the artwork for my games analogue. These are real, physical artworks that are then used in my publications, assuming I ever get far enough to actually publish them. I will create digital art using my iPad and procreate for some posts, so it wont all be analog, but NONE of it will be generative.

This may mean some of my posts will go out without imagery - just because i don’t need another reason to hold myself back beyond my natural procrastination.

Conclusion

So that is the extent of AI in my publishing workflow. As we have noted, it is almost impossible to get entirely away from these things now. I have opted to use transcription because I can talk far faster than I can type, and I tend to lose my train of thought when trying to write everything out directly.

That is less of a problem when I am writing systems for a game, because then I am focused on one very specific thing. But when I am trying to create public-facing posts like these, I need to get the ideas out of my head quickly, because otherwise the flow disappears.

So yes, in conclusion, Cantium Signalworks is a human-made publication, as much as that is still possible in 2026.

Why Cantium Signalworks, and why a redacted chess piece?

Cantium is the ancient Roman name for Kent. Thats the name of the county where I live, here in England. The emblem of Kent is the white horse. There is history, folklore, and local identity tied up in that symbol, and I like that the name reaches back into the place I’m from and have spent most of my life.

The horse emblem is also why I chose the knight chess piece as the logo. It felt like a natural bridge between that white horse symbol and the gaming side of what I want to make. It connects place and play in a way that makes sense to me. The horse becomes the knight, and the knight becomes a game piece.

Signalworks, for me, suggests making things and sending them out into the world. That is what I hope to do with these games. I want to create things, work on them, and then release them, even if they never feel fully finished to me.

That is where the redaction in the logo comes from. The horse, or the knight, is there, but it is obscured. The signal is being sent, but it is incomplete.

That matters to me because it connects to the themes of the games im making, but also because it says something about the way I view creative endeavours more generally. I do not think anything I put out into the world will ever feel complete. I will always be aware of the parts that could be refined, expanded, or expressed more clearly. There will always be something in my head that never quite makes it onto the page.

At some point, though, you have to stop. You have to say this is done, this is enough, and let it go.

So the redaction means a few things to me at once. It points to censorship, to interrupted messages, and to things that do not arrive intact. But it also points to the fact that creative work is never fully complete, at least not in the mind of the person making it. There is always some unfinished thought, some version of it that remains internal and never quite reaches the end user.

That is the origin of the name i will publish under, and why it matters to me.

The TL;DR

• I needed to publicly state what im working on to stay accountable to myself to keep working on my projects.

• I will use this as a way to share my projects but also keep track of things for myself

• i have two projects in the pipeline

Two long-brewing projects, one public commitment.

I’ve been playing and reading TTRPGs, both around the table with friends and more recently solo, for over 20 years. Reading has always been part of it, because we can’t possibly play all the games, can we? In that time, I’ve found a lot of things that I really like. I’ve also been fortunate enough to work out the things I don’t like, which I think some people never quite manage to pin down.

That’s led me to want to create and share things in this space that match my own preferences, but also, importantly, explore what I see as potential gaps. I know these won’t be wholly new things. Nothing is new under the sun. But the projects I’ve been working on do feel, to me at least, like they offer something a little different.

Why I’m starting this now

I have two projects that I’ve been working on for far too long. Honestly, my level of procrastination is pretty epic.

These ideas have been knocking around in my head for years. I’ve written notes, I’ve written parts of the rules over time, but I’ve never really been able to get a grip on my energy enough to actually move things forwards.

This year, though, I’ve started getting more on top of habit tracking. A friend from the Man Alone Discord recommended I try Habitica, which is a habit-tracking RPG app, and that’s actually been working really well for me. In the last 23 days, I’ve written down and properly sorted more than I have in the last four years.

So I’m starting this Substack to build on that.

This first post is basically me putting myself out there, exposing myself a bit, so that I have some pressure on me now, some accountability, to actually keep moving forward and get this done.

I also think it’s good to work on things in discrete parts, to share ideas as they take shape, and to let other people see what’s being made. Hopefully more than one person reads this. Maybe no one will. Maybe I’ll just be an old man screaming into the void. But even if that’s the case, writing it down will still help me organise things.

The two projects

The two projects I’ve been working on both have working titles.

1. What the Dead Cannot Say

The first is called What the Dead Cannot Say.

This is a project that has been in my head for many years now, but the thought itself has never gone away.

I think that’s one sign of a good idea: it keeps coming back, it keeps gnawing at the edges of your mind.

I had another title for it, Bear Witness to Woe, and that may still end up being the title. Or maybe I’ll combine them somehow. I don’t know yet.

What is the game about? It’s about war journalism and censorship. It uses a tag based system that i have developed myself.

I will make a separate post about it to go into more detail.

2. Knots

The other project, at the moment, has the working title of Knots.

This one isn’t a game. It’s more of a system-agnostic supplement for character creation, focused on adding flaws to a character, but also building the traumas that created those flaws.

That one will get its own posts as well.

What comes next?

This substack is my way of staying accountable and actually moving these things forwards. I will be sharing posts on the projects in more details, discussions on mechanics im building, showcasing artwork, explaining why i chose this name to publish under etc.

Hopefully some of you will find this interesting and stay on the journey with me.

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