Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan and joining me is Tanner Simpson.
How you doing this morning Tanner?
I am awaken with you. That's, you know, that's the
best we can hope for, really. So, so for those who might not
know who who Tanner Simpson is, who, who, who the heck is Tanner
Simpson? And what is Simpson Miniatures?
Who is Tanner Simpson? I didn't realize we were going
to get very introspective today. I am.
That quick, right? I mean, it's like a therapist.
I'm a miniature sculptor, miniature painter.
I like to do. Tabletop systems I like to write
other than that. That's about it, I guess, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, obviously that's how I found you, became aware of
you as I kind of started moving in a skirmish.
I found Simpson Miniatures, found this crazy thing called
won a reward. And and then just heard stories
from all around the community of just this, this guy that does
all this crazy stuff everywhere he goes.
And that, that was my introduction.
Nobody was like, hey, we got to play this game.
Yeah. But I guess before we get into
that, because obviously we're going to talk wanted reward, I
guess what got you into the tabletop space and then
eventually into like actually like making miniatures.
How far back are you asking? As far back as you, as far back
as you want to go. I'm here for it.
Well, I I don't know if I've. Told this story.
Before, so I've I've talked on hive scum briefly and forget the
name, there's one other podcast, but I got into the scene because
I read a black library book when I was when I was getting on a
plane for the first time in my life.
I, I was visiting my, my biological father and I was
scared of the plane. So I wanted to read something on
the plane and I went to a bookstore in the airport and
they had a sci-fi section of three books.
I remember that it was the top shelf.
There's three books and one of them was only in death.
I think it was one of the God's Ghost novels and I read it on
the plane part of it and I really liked it and I thought,
wow, War Hammer seems cool and I got really into Miracle Demons.
In the future I was walking in college and a game store manager
sold me I start collecting box and nurble demons for like $40.
So I was pretty stoked and I'm thinking, well, if I don't like
it. It's not that big of an
investment so it doesn't really matter.
And obviously here I am still doing novels.
Realized that Warhammer wasn't my my niche and slowly been
expanding from there. Got the old school DND from a a
mentor kind of figure of mine when I was going to undergrad.
Yeah, it was like a local hobby shop owner who got me into old.
School boats and Dragons. And from there I just kind of
started writing my own systems. And I don't know, you meet
people in the hobby. There's so much more to the
hobby than playing Warhammer. You just kind of realize, like,
why would I didn't even like playing the game itself?
I originally I wanted to just try the game and I realized, you
know, I was doing like late 7th edition, early 8th edition and
just didn't enjoy it. I mean, I don't know, they like
gameplay very much. I like the I like showing off
who I. Was through my models.
More making my own, like armies, like a not like the actual
models, but making your own war for armies.
You know where they come from. Named characters, all bad.
Watch it. Yeah, that's interesting.
No, absolutely. So my, my introduction into
Warhammer was through the novels too.
When I, when I got into D&D back in, I, I started the 5th edition
like, you know, 2014. I also kind of found Warhammer,
but I was like, these are expensive if I get into this
album to go broke really, really fast.
So I can't do that. But much later I, I picked up
some of the Black Library books and started reading those and
then eventually down the road started getting into this
skirmish scene. So yeah, my introduction was,
was the Black library as well. But what, when did you actually
start crafting your own models? And like, how did you get to the
point where you're at now? Cuz like I, I've recently
started trying to play with the green stuff and it's not easy
to, and I have the benefit of a bunch of YouTube tutorials and
stuff now in 2026, like what, when did you actually start
making models? And, and where was the Nergal
stuff? You're were you making Nergal
bits or you again started making your own characters right away?
The first time I think that's a multi faceted question.
The first time I touch green stuff actually I could reach.
I did a soul grinder with a baby head and the green stuff
connecting the neck to the body was the first time I ever.
Used green stuff. Obviously it's a very, I don't
know, low skill application of it, but I just learned, oh, you
know, green stuff is green and you can customize your own
models. I didn't really like the soul
grinders head. I thought it was a little basic
and I wanted to look more unnerable.
Was like life and death, like oh baby heads, that'll be fun.
It was more of just a thing to customize the three models I had
at the time. But regarding making my own
models and sculpting, I've been drawing monsters since I was a
little kid. My grandma kept all my
illustrations. I still have them that's an
adult but underneath me somewhere in an accordion
folder. But I always created monsters
and I I've read monster manuals far before I read anything 40K
related. I've just I've always loved
monster manuals and field guides.
Have a bookshelf like Plants and Insect and.
All kinds of field. Guides.
I just love encyclopedias. So over time I just got deeper
and deeper to how can I, how can I communicate my own creative
expressions? Can I do it through?
I wanted to try sculpting with like a stone, like chiseling.
I tried whittling. I tried all kinds of weird
hobbies to to communicate what my creative expression was.
And eventually I tried green stuff and kind of like that.
And millipot, I learned was my my go to.
I don't use green stuff, especially now that it's like
out of production, impossible to get.
I just I just use millipot when I sculpt.
Recently with my I've been doing a new game called Slumlord and
I've been doing dioramas for it. That's been the models
themselves are made out of. I don't think there's one at
least, but. No.
But they're made out of Super Sculpey because it's what I had
on hand when I was working with clients.
I'm a therapist that I do heart therapy.
Sometimes I find that especially with younger clients, if I'm
just staring at them, it's a little harder to open up.
So I'll have Sculpey in the room for them to use it for me to
use. So we're both kind of busy doing
something during our conversation.
And some of those things I kept, I didn't smush after I was done
with it. I just brought it home and put
in a little oven to bake. So usually I just do millipot
but sometimes super sculpey. I don't really like it honestly
in comparison, but I don't know it has its uses and.
Then what, what was your introduction into like, I guess
the current scene, I guess like where have you gone to a lot of
Adepticons and, and been in, in that team for a long time?
Or are you newer to, to go into those?
Because I, I think I've only been to the last two.
Yeah, post Schaumburg, apparently.
Yeah, I think I went to the last year at Schaumburg maybe, or
maybe it was the second to last. I've been going for a couple
years now. Definitely went to I think 2IN
Schaumburg now I think about it, because 1 was hosted by Steve
and Big Boy Game Time and the other I got a hotel with a bunch
of friends. So yeah, so I went to two in
Schaumburg and then I've been with every Milwaukee one since I
lived in Milwaukee. So it's easy.
I just go down the road. But yeah, I like under the ice
fast. I just went for my first year.
I won the flail, the rusted demon.
It's fun. I like, I like other ice fest a
lot. It's it's everything you like
about under the about Adapticon. But what's the word concentrated
into one convention? Yeah, I'm, I definitely plan to
go to Utd this year for my first time and I'm very excited about
it. I that's what one said like
because the Grimdark Alley kind of feels like its own little
convention within the convention anyway.
And a lot of people said Utd is basically like the Grimdark
Alley is like its own convention to expand that out of it.
And that seems if you. Like hanging out, talking to
people within the scene. That's the whole thing.
It's just a, it's just the grim dark alley blown up.
It's a bigger room. That's that's the best part.
I mean I spent like 90% of my time in the alley anyway.
So like having a multi day con doing that I think will be a
great time. I'll see you there.
You said you also write games, write systems.
And, and I chatted with Goob actually recently, just last
week, and was talking to him about won a reward.
And he basically was like, yeah, I had this idea and then
Tanner's, Tanner's the systems guy.
And he just kind of ran with it. So what the systems guy?
Yeah. What?
So what what got you into, I guess writing systems are like,
what was the first system that you wrote and why?
Why you say that? I'm going to go grab a bunch of
your systems so I forgot. That's funny.
I'm not really, I mean, I don't have like a background to game
design or anything. I just play a lot of indie video
games and I don't know, I like writing rules.
I've always liked writing rules and mechanics and thinking.
I'm a very creative person. I guess I just like creating
things. But as far as my first system
probably be, I started a system based around the Final Fantasy
Tactics a long time ago called Fantasy Tactics that was never
completed. I ended up because Steven Big
Boy Game Time is a big fan of Final Fantasy Tactics.
So I gave him the leftovers and said feel free to make something
of this if you want. And I think he still has the
files, but it never was officially released or anything.
I don't know. It was an interesting little
skirmish game thing you could use any model for.
It was very basic. There was a whole combat flow
chart that was a nightmare to to navigate.
It was really funny. But my first like actual system
was probably my cat game, TSPN Teaspoon.
I wrote that as a just an experiment to see what it'd be
like writing a game. I was kind of edged on by the
high scum guys to do so. Well, why not?
So I just wrote it on my couch with colored pencils and crayons
while I was watching TV and stuff.
And I don't know, it became a much bigger thing than I
anticipated. And I went, all right, and it's
kind of fun. Maybe I should put more thought
and time into it than I am now. And I wrote a bunch of scenes,
like the fishing game, DDFF 2000, Deep Dark Fishing Fantasy.
Yeah, there we go. That one isn't really playable.
It is playable, but I think that when I write games, I don't pay
attention to how much they work, like how much they function as a
playable thing. It's more of like an art piece
that might work. It's a theoretical system.
It theoretically works, but it might not.
It might not really play well. There's a few mechanics that
game that just don't work at all.
They're completely broken, but it looks cool and there's an
idea behind it. That game was written in the
same of a month and like a fever dream, I was in a haze.
I wrote it. I just typed and typed and typed
and type, type. Eventually it was done and I
went, all right, I'm done. I'm quite tested at once with a
friend and I give it out of convention sometimes.
But writing games is fun because nobody's there to tell you what
to do. You're going to make all the
rules and if other people care enough or think it's cool like
you do, they give it a try. And then you hear stories about
their games and that makes me really happy, hearing other
people's experiences and like how the game helped them in some
way or they enjoyed their experience.
I like them to be tool boxes the players use to to create their
own things. So one reward, for example, is
pretty much a huge toolbox for players to make their own Galaxy
or solar systems of different planets and alien races.
I don't know, I think people just want to make their own
things. I think at the core, everybody
wants to make their own guys. They want to put their own two
cents, but it was too complex. That makes it a little more
difficult for the way the average person to, like, figure
out how to do that seems intimidating, but anybody could
do it. Just a matter of.
Trying I guess. Yeah, you know what you said,
you said teaspoon tea, the Gardens of Hecatee playthrough
of like how they played teaspoon was actually I think maybe my
first introduction to you and and and your work and then and
then. Yeah.
It's great. It's, it's one of those ones.
So like I, I'm, I'm just getting into like doing terrain and
stuff. And teaspoon was the one that
I've had set up to be like I'm, I can make a mini board and
practice making like a little mini board with like flocking
and stuff. So I can have a little like
teaspoon pin to put my little, my little, my little guy in for,
for those that haven't read teaspoon and, and the links are,
you know, where, where they are on the Internet so people can
find it. So what is, Yeah.
Well, so. So what is teaspoon for those
that don't know what it is? It's a Tamagotchi game.
It's a tabletop Tamagotchi where you randomly generate a pet and
you have to play it every day until the pet runs away, it
dies, or you get bored and just stop.
I want this. I want to simulate getting a
real pet. You can't see it, but on my left
and right I have multiple aquariums with catfish and
shrimp and whatnot. And I love keeping aquariums,
terrariums. I think it's a lot of fun.
I'm Madagascar hissing cockroach and a jar on my left.
But with every pet there's kind of this cycle of you get
excited, you create the enclosure, the the terrarium,
the aquarium, but a lot of time and energy to doing so, you get
the pet, you get excited, you watch it for a day or two, you
pay a lot of attention to it and make sure all the parameters are
right. And at least for me, not being a
cat or a dog, but being like an aquarium or something smaller,
it's going to get bored of it and it becomes this like hassle
you have to put up with and keep making sure it doesn't die.
Make sure like the. You know you're maintaining it,
caring for it, cleaning it. And I thought that was a really
funny concept. So what if there was a tabletop
game that you put a lot of energy and excitement into and
then it becomes a chore of you do your dailies Otherwise it
gets. Sick and dies so for many.
People they get like that same hassle of like they care about
it and they go, oh, should I have to do that?
You know, you can like you can let your pet, like you can put
up for adoption. There's easy ways out of the
game. You don't have to let it die.
It's not a feel bad game, but generally speaking, people end
up the pet dies or runs away or, you know, it's, it's a
simulation in real life. Yeah.
And this. Is why I don't have a cat or a
dog or literally anything. I didn't even want the plant
that I have and now I care about it, but I have to take care of
it. But for that exact reason, like
I just don't have like the time or energy to to take care of
something else. And that's why I want to do I
want to do teaspoon really bad because that is exactly what it
feels like. It feels like I'm going to build
a board. I'm going to get past a cool
little pet guy and then I got to do yeah, do the dailies every
day where I'm like, fuck, it's like 2 AMI, you know, fed the
thing yet or not So, but no, it's it's it's great.
And it's it's mostly legible too.
You can read most of the the rules in it.
It's very difficult as far as a lot of my the people that
originally were played best in the game and they came around
like a running joke in the community that you had to
manually handwrite the entire system and your own handwriting.
And people are making notebooks and colleges.
They were really making the game their own, which I think is
important. As I said before, all my games
require the the person playing it to put their own two cents
and use their own. It's a toolbox.
For their own creativity. So, and to play Teaspoon, which
is a very personal game. I mean, the the name is my name,
Tanner Simpson TSB and it's my signature.
So Teaspoon inside of it, it's all note like I don't know, it's
written for me, by me. So it's very personal.
And I don't expect anybody else to really understand a lot of
the little references or nudges, Easter eggs for me.
But when other people play it, read the game and rewrite it to
themselves, they'll even fix some of the rules they don't
like or they'll leave parts out. And that's, you know, it's like
old school D&D. Nobody plays every rule of AD
and D, They just use what they want to.
I think that's that's how water reward plays.
Nobody plays the fishing game, but that's how that plays.
People just use the rules that they feel are necessary at that
given time. I have put a little bit of time
into the fishing game, but I specifically, I don't know if
you remember, I messaged in the discord and I asked if there's a
PDF of it and people were like, no, you know, there's not.
But then someone in the discord actually made me a PDF of it.
Yeah, and. But when they sent it to me, it
was upside down, the PDF was upside down and I was.
Like, yeah. But, and that's exactly what it
was like because I was like, they were like, oh, you know, I
can try to fix that. Just give me more time.
And I was like, no, please don't.
Like that's the most like I think Tanner Simpson discord
thing I could get is to actually get a PDF of it and it's upside
down. So please just leave it because
because I want to do it at work. I think that don't even bother
point that one, that one doesn't work.
It doesn't work. It's it's a theoretical game,
it's an art piece, right? But that's, that's, that's
what's fun about interacting with.
And that's honestly one of the things that I enjoy most about
your work, especially coming from, you know, we've done the
TRBG scene, you know, for a really long time.
And I've bitched on the podcast for a really long time about how
I feel about the the current scene and how it feels very like
product focused, not like art and game focused.
And then when I encountered a year, yeah.
But then I. Encountered your work and and
honestly, like that's one of the things I enjoy most about it and
specifically what you said earlier in the show where it's
just like this is an art piece. This is it kind of works.
I did it because it was in my brain.
I got it out and and I really appreciate that about all the
things that you do where it feels like, you know, it's free,
it's personal, it's there if people want to use it, it's
theoretical. It was just fun to do and people
going to interact with it the way they want.
And that's, that's great. I love that about games and and
that, so that's the thing I would, if I had to say one thing
that I appreciate most about your work is just how it's just
out there for people to enjoy with them, people to interact
with the way that they want and people to, to make it as
personal as the way that they want.
And it's great to see. Well, at the end of the day, the
community for me, the tabletop community, the 28 community, the
hive scum, all our Instagram community, right?
I think that it's so much more than just painting Games
Workshop models, so much more than the.
Corporate part of it, I think that's how everybody gets into
the game is they have to get sucked in from somewhere so
you're. Most likely going to get pulled
in from some big they pulled off the street right?
Like in my case I literally was walking with my girlfriend and
they pulled me off the street. As this games Workshop manager
say hey have you ever heard of 40K?
He's just. Standing from LDS but once you
actually get. Into the scene, it's more about
the people that you play with It's about the for me, I mean,
fuck the game, it's not about the games, it's about the
people, right? It's by the friendships it's
about the interaction half the more than half the year, the
entire year, other than one week or two weeks and not interacting
physically with hobby folk, I'm just painting or sculpting or
writing and you know, I really want to create things for my
friends to talk about or to see about that communication.
I don't know. It serves as a.
Kind of a. Springboard for actually
developing friendships and talking and sharing something.
But I think that's why my games are so intimate and personal.
It's because they're, again, they're written for a specific
person and most of the time it's me.
Water Ward, I think is The only exception.
That was the game for Eric, because he asked me to write a
game and he said, here's my idea.
And I said that game that sounds like a game I love to play and
it doesn't exist. So let's create it.
And you know, it's, I think that I put so much time and thought
and energy into that game. Again, it might not work fully
parts of it work, but parts that probably don't.
And that's part of the fun, right?
But I kind of realized like, I don't want to be writing games
with shooting. I don't want to be writing 28
games anymore. I want to just make my own shit.
So now I'm doing my landlord game.
I feel much more like, all right, this is kind of like
Teaspoon too. It's like my game but with a lot
more energy and thought and time.
And I don't know, I'm really excited about putting my own
personality into a game again versus maybe something for my
friends. Right.
No, no, absolutely. Well, I, I want to talk about
the landlord game, but while we're talking about wanted, I
want to bring that up a little bit and, and I guess, well, let
me hide that right there. I guess talk to me.
So this is goo Eric, you know, had this idea and, and started
it off. How did it actually come to be,
though? And like, how did you meet Eric
in the 1st place and actually get, you know, up and running
with this and then get to a point where you literally have
like the game and the game in a DVD box and on like DVD and on
floppy disk and on zip disk and, and everything.
Like how did you get from this idea to this stack in my hands
here? Well, you know, I I met.
Eric because I saw a person on Instagram making goblin sculpts.
And you know, I do major sculpture myself, so I think I
really enjoy indie sculpting. I just enjoy indie sculpture.
So I saw this guy out of nowhere, like he had no place in
the scene. Nobody knew who he was, just
showed up and started posting these goblin sculpts.
I went, oh, who is this person? You know?
I DM them. So as as with any friendship I
make any person, if I respect the person enough and I look up
to them in some way artistically, I'll reach out,
send a message, start talking and most of the time networks
they respond to, we chat. But.
Yeah, we just talked a lot and he was looking to go to
antibiotic con and a bunch of random hobby folk that I vaguely
knew didn't have a hotel. So I said let's all just get a
hotel together. And we were all strangers at the
time. Basically.
We made a group chat. And ever since that we've been
like inseparable. So all those guys and I, we we
formed a tight bond. But yeah, to become the actual
like zip disk, floppy disk. You have an idea for gaming
pitch that me just when I say pitched he just went OK dude.
Hear me out. Yeah, one of those.
Hear me out. Here's the basic idea.
They gave me an idea of two teams of bounty hunters
competing to capture some middle party.
And when I heard bounty hunters sci-fi, I just got this really
like kind of schlocky pulp satirical sci-fi bounty hunters.
Like that's so fun and it's so open to interpretation.
Anybody can make anything you could do with sci-fi.
It's fun because you could even go into like fantasy realm of
like, well, I want my guys to be Cavemen with Spears and you can
do that, right? You can make your people as low
tech as possible. I think that it was a very slow
process of creating the game. I think for like a year and a
half, two years. I have a discord where a bunch
of hot people talk about everything but water reward, but
it's supposed to be a water reward play.
That's a discord. And I guess sometimes.
People play test to give me feedback and whatnot.
Generally it exists just so I can see if something's overtly
broken, it just doesn't function in the game and I can fix that.
But no, again, it's just kind of a.
It's a joke. The system itself is a joke.
It doesn't try to be funny. It doesn't tell you jokes.
But water reward is a joke, the entire system is a joke, but
people seem to like it a lot and it brings a lot of people
together, so that makes me happy.
Yeah, no, it's if it's a joke, it's one of the best jokes out
there. I've said repeatedly, I've said
repeatedly on this show and to most people that won a reward is
one of the best TTRP, GS and skirmish games out there right
now for so many reasons. One, because like you just said,
like it is a joke. Like when you go into the
system, you're just like, yeah, this works.
Anyone that tries to play the entire game though will go crazy
like it's. Impossible.
It's impossible, yeah. That's intentional, right?
I mean, there's mechanics for MPC relationships between each
MPC and the game tells you, you have to have, you know, I think
it's between zero to 100 MPCS, like just civilians wandering
around. So if you were trying to
simulate, a computer could do it, you know, But a person?
You can't you. Can't do a relationship
triangles between 100 different NPCS while also running the game
while also gambling while. Yeah, there's just too much
shit. Too much shit.
But. It's the, the toolbox aspect of
it is, you know, one of my favorite parts of it is whatever
game you decide to run for that session, you can just pick the
parts that you want to use for it.
So if you do want to have some type of like NPC love triangle,
you can do that. You're going to like cut off a
bunch of other stuff. But if that's a focus you want
for the game, you absolutely could do that.
And that's what's great is almost anything you want to do
is in here. You just need to dig deep to try
to find that part of it and then get to play with it.
And and like I said, as a teach RPG, as much of the skirmish
game, because just about every session I've been in quickly
devolves into like way more RP than like actually engaging with
like the skirmish rules. And and so much of it is the
civilians too, and and their reactions to everything, you
know, everything just goes to shit as soon as one of them sees
a gun is just I don't know, it gets me every time.
Yeah, well, I wanted. It to feel like real life, like
if you're Seville. I was out of laundry because I
had to. I had to put a rug in a
laundromat. I don't have a washer.
She could put a whole rug in it. Or carpet.
What is it called? Rug.
Yeah. And I was looking around and
thinking about this, like, everybody's calm and just
wandering around, not really doing anything.
People are. Chatting if a.
Armored man with a laser gun kick the door down.
People fucking freak out. They'd run around and shoot at
the fan pretty quick. People start blasting.
That's what the game really is. It's like the first couple turns
are kind of quiet. People could sneak around or
kind of plan and then when when they get they realize, oh hey,
you know, something's happening. Then chaos breaks loose.
People run off the board. People are taking cover.
Depending on the profiles, the MPCS, they might fight back,
they might just run away or hide.
It really depends. It's all random base rules and
whatnot. No, it's I, I love it.
I think it's fucking incredible. Like I said, just the fact that
again, you have this giant, it's not even giant.
You have a a, but it's still decently big system of pretty
much like you said, just tools to use to make whatever game you
want. I mean one of my favorites is
the like the Droid coding you have to do to actually use one.
Because I want I. Want the right rules for the and
initially droids? It's like you write contingency
commands so you write the coding for how they function in game.
And I just. Apparently there's other systems
like old school. Warhammer I think like how this
Rogue Trader or 40K but there's rules for robots.
It's like a flow chart. So there's similar rules that
exist out there, but. For my own sake, I feel like if
I read too many other systems, I get I just copy their rules.
So I want to write my own, right?
But I wrote those for me because I wanted there to be robots that
felt very robotic and would fall into those trappings of being a
stupid Roomba, bumping into walls and that kind of thing.
That's what it becomes, right? I think it was Steve's story.
High scum Steve. He wrote all these rules for a
Droid he forgot to write. Like walking around, like the
very beginning, like just looking, there's all these
contingencies if it were to find somebody and when the game
started. He realized it couldn't move.
It would just stand completely still.
Unless a bad guy walked right up in his cultivation, it wouldn't
do anything. So just completely sit still and
either that's the. Best but that's the most perfect
encapsulation of the game too. Is just like how ridiculous it
can get and just how I don't. There's not a better way to
describe, like, playing the game than literally that.
Yeah. You put all this time into
making this thing work the way it should work, and then then
it's just busted and doesn't work.
But like, I'm sure crazy stuff came from it, Yeah.
It should work, but it doesn't. No.
But. But.
But trying to make it work is what's fun.
It's like, it's like finding like a busted down engine and
trying to figure out why the spark plug is in sparking or
something. Like it's enjoyable to to try to
figure it out and to interact with it the way that it can.
Because I have some of your other stuff here too, like rules
is class dual as well. Other stuff that you you've
done. What do you think is your most
playable game if you're saying that most of your stuff is
broken? I mean, one reward is.
Most acceptable. It's just that people like
shooting guns, so you know, you bring a model, you can use
anything you want. I think it's the most easily
digestible game. Most of my games require kind of
tongue in cheek. It requires you to have a ton of
patience. It requires you to, when you
pick up a game and you want to play it, it asks the player to
pay for the system. Generally, right?
Not my games, but generally speaking, you have to pay for
the system. It's a paid time and reading the
system, you have to find other people that want to play the
game with you. Assuming it's not solo play,
normally it requires a lot. So I think when you see more
corporate games or more, I don't know, even games that are indie
that want to be a new thing and want people to play it, I feel
like they're overly simplified because if you ask too much,
nobody's going to play it right. But I find that obnoxious and I
think it's annoying that games, I mean, I picked up something
out of that, the kind I don't matter what it was.
It's like a Zine and like, oh, this looks great.
The cover was awesome. Super India's up by alley.
I opened it up and I just saw how basic the rules were and I
went and I just set it back down.
I even take it. I should have took it anyway
regardless, but I was like add no, no, they aren't school.
But like they didn't, they want us to be accessible.
It was like very easy to read. It was very accessible.
You know, I think if you make something too accessible or too.
Broad You're writing something for everybody, but nobody wants
it. That's why I write something for
nobody, and everybody wants it. That's the opposite.
Yeah, no, that's such a, it's a hard line, I guess to to
straddle if you're especially if you're making stuff to sell
stuff, right. Because obviously like if you're
making something and it's, it's going to be sold, there has to
be a level of accessibility or you know, you're going to get
100 printed and and none of them are going to sell.
But I was talking to someone recently about Traveler, for
example, and how I love 1977 Traveler.
And part of the reason I love it is because it's not easy to
parse. It's a, it's a, it's a game
almost in itself to figure out what the game is trying to say.
And that's really enjoyable. It for a game that's from like
1977. It's, you know, it is kind of
harder in 2026 to find games like that or partially again,
because so many people are writing games to sell games.
So that's not really going to fly that far.
But you know, when you're writing your games as art pieces
and as As for you, you can do that, you can make one reward do
that. And people can engage with that
in a way that they like from like, you know, third edition
Warhammer Fantasy where you had to freaking have 2-3 different
books just to be able to find all the rules and stuff.
Yeah, yeah. I you know, I think that the
less successful something is, the more.
The more you. Want to just look at it, the
easier it is to sell. But again, like with all my
stuff, I make it free to download because I want people
to be able to look at it. I won't be able to be able to
have it and play it at no cost. I think that's very important
because if people want it, they're going to illegally
download it one way or another. I'm the same way.
If I want something, I'm going to read it and if I can't pay
for it and I think it's worth it, I'll pay the person,
especially if it's indie. I want to pay indie creators,
obviously. But you know, like I think at
the end of the day, if somebody wants something, they're going
to get it. So may as well put it out there
for free. Let them check it out.
They don't like it, they don't like it. 99% people that look at
my stuff will probably be filtered because it's weird or
me and that's fine. You know, I don't, I'm not sure
when I was selling water ward at Adepticom, you know, I had all
my books and I floppy Dr., my floppy disks and my CDs and
everything and I forget who it was.
If somebody came up to me and said sell me on the game and I
went, huh, like, well. What's your pitch?
You know, sell me on it. Like I'm not going to do that.
You can pick it up and look at it and if you think it's like
you want to check out, you can. I told the person right off the
bat, like get games free online, you don't have to buy it.
Like go check it out. If you want a physical copy you
can buy one. But the books are, you know,
they look nice. Pretty the CDs are fun to have,
the floppies are fun to display to show it off, but you don't
have to buy it. And you guys sat there and
nodded them hemmed and hawed and looked at it and went, all
right, I'll buy 1 and I took it 20.
Bucks so you play tested with me the next day so you know at the
end of the day if people. Want something they'll?
Check it out and you had a great time.
So I was really happy to see like, oh, thanks for coming and
thanks for trying game out. It's important to be it's the
community aspect, right? If it's buying the paywall,
people aren't going to even get through the front door.
So. You're preaching on the choir.
I I say every other fucking episode on the show that like
anyone like you should make your games free to download because
getting people to play the game and build a good community
Ranger game is going to take you a lot farther than making 10
bucks off of like 1 digital sale.
Like it's not even, it's not even close.
It's not even a question. The number of people that have
probably interacted with wanna reward because it was free
online as opposed to having it be 1520 bucks or something like
that is is exponential. I was looking at water reward, I
saw even a $1.99 virtual download.
I'd say fuck that, I'm not doing it.
Don't find an illegal download of the game or ask a friend that
has it send me the PDF but. Again, like you also have to see
like especially in the Andes scene, games of style, right?
I think that I don't mean just being the aesthetic of the game,
but if your game is really hip and cool, but you have to buy
it, you have to buy my official models, play the game.
It just comes off as like annoying.
That's a common This wasn't an indie person.
This was a couple years ago, some booth next to the old grim
dark alley in Chicago. And they were like.
Hey man, come over here and look at my game, check it out and he
was trying to sell me on his game and that's a get the fuck
away from me. I don't I.
Don't want to look at this. I don't even know what it is.
I don't want anything to do with it.
But if I see something like a scene that's like on the floor
of a game, I'm going to pick it up and read through the entire
thing because what is this thing?
You know, it's the style. Or if it's just a friend of mine
that wrote it and I like that person, I want to know what they
wrote. So I think I have a backwards
approach to try to sell my own stuff.
If you know Tanner. You have the correct approach
and a lot of people have a backwards approach.
Like we are of the same mind when it comes to this.
Like we literally have reviewed like triple digits of of games
on this show. And every time we can we say
like it's, it's about people actually getting a chance to
play the game. Like that's why you know, you're
you're going to have a lot more approachability with a free
digital download than you are with anything else.
And again, building community. And if you look at, you know,
you know, we're, we've done RPG is a lot more than skirmish.
It's something we've more moving into now.
But if you look at the biggest teach RPGs in like the quote UN
quote indie or small market space right now, all of them
have free PDFs for their core download.
Like, you know, if you know, so it's not.
And then the communities that have been built around them.
When you look at things like Mothership, when you look at
things like Merkborg, when you look at things like Mouse
Shredder, they have these massive communities and it's a
free PDF to download the core rules and get it playing in the
game. So the number of indie people in
the scene that do that too is great as far as skirmish and
stuff goes. But that's why I can't imagine
everyone that walks in a Warhammer store is like, sure,
yeah, I'll pay whatever the fuck 11th edition starter set cost to
to build my fucking army. Like it's not going to happen.
I'll pick up Cauldron or I'll pick up anything else.
You know before before I'll pick up something like that.
So you you have the correct approach you.
Know if you to the scene. You don't know better.
You know you'll buy the index for TRN EDS and I'll be obsolete
in a month when the codex comes out.
Whatever, right? People are going to do that when
they first get into the game. But once you meet people on the
scene and you become cool punk that can hang out the grub dark
alley and you're tattooing 28 on your wrists and all that.
And you know, once you're at that point, you can buy the
indie stuff and be cool. But I think again, and that's
not to put down anybody that tattoos the hobby.
I don't care to. Do your life right, But I think
it's, I don't know, I think that this hobby, it's fascinating,
but I wouldn't want my games to blow up to the.
Point where it's a morgue Borg where everybody knows that.
I think that it's important to gatekeep and filter out 99% of
the hobby because too many people water something down that
it makes it less. Personal, I think there's a
sweet spot of a couple people to give a shit and actually try.
You don't want nobody playing a game, but you don't want too
many people either. You want you want people that
you can vibe with and you can talk to.
But I don't know, maybe if it was making a trillion dollars I
would shut up and just take the money.
I don't know. Hey, if, if the line is no money
or a trillion dollars, I think a lot of people would take the
trillion dollars. But is that what you feel like
wanted reward is right now 'cause like, I know that I was
like waiting in line to, to, to get wanted reward.
I was like down there every day and going so where's Tanner?
When, when's the book coming 'cause I love it.
But when like do you feel like that's where you are right now
with, with your stuff, with your miniatures, with wanted?
Are you in a place that you enjoy with like the the space
that you want around you? Yeah, I mean, I it's funny.
I don't think I'm an influencer, a popular person.
I think I'm popular. In the scene now.
But I don't. I don't fancy myself an
influencer or a person that I don't know.
I think I influenced people without trying to be that.
Face, I guess I think it's important to make friends in the
scene. And I don't know, none of them
just friends. But there's there's some like
young artists, like 1819, they're just getting into the
scene and they're figuring things out and they're trying
and sometimes failing and making their stuff right.
But part of the joy for me is being a kind of a mentoring
figure of like. Now write your own system, do
your own thing, and you got this right.
As a therapist, you learn there's many different types of
relationships and I think that that.
You know, you can be positive and friendly, but they're not
your friends. They're just people in the scene
that you you mutually respect as an artist.
And I think that I think that's surrounding myself with peers,
people that I respect through their art and through their
contributions to the hobby, as well as people who are younger
artists are excited to become a bigger and the scene it become,
you know, niche freaks, peers. So yeah, I I think I'm I'm
happy. I'm happy.
He whispered about. I think that's what I want to
say, whispered about. Yeah, no, you, you, you were
like, especially until I met you, you were, you were kind of
like this mythological like person in the scene of just
like, I had no idea what you looked like.
I know that you sounded like, I just saw your crazy miniatures.
I just saw one reward. I just heard these like stories
about you about like, like you're selling a bunch of stuff,
but we'll take anything but money kind of thing.
You know what I mean? Like.
Just this. Yeah, that was what?
Was that? Midnight market I was it wasn't
even selling, it was trading, just trading it in metal models.
So I brought suitcases full of things I've like, hobby related
things that I've picked up over the years.
And I found a room that wasn't being used at Schaumburg Center.
I don't remember the name but the one in Chicago.
And I just said anybody that trades me enough metal models,
you could take what you want. Like this one's worth 2 Miami, 2
metal models and I just had a big cardboard box.
You'll drop them an antique something.
And it was a bunch of crap. Nobody wanted obscure systems
and games that I found at Noble Knights Clearance Cave or at
thrift stores or bookstores. I still haven't.
Got them out of it somewhere behind me I need to get rid of.
Yeah, I. Don't know, I think that's the
soul of the scene, right? Is the indie?
Is the the? The conversations, the
friendships, it's about the friends you made along the way,
right? I think that's important.
People get stuck in me, the corporate selling, making a
product, being a named person. Or being an influencer I want to
make a YouTube. And don't get me wrong, I have a
YouTube I just it's all shit posts and jokes and satire.
People don't actually watch it but it does exist and you can't
find it because YouTube my name. So give that a look sometime
you'll you'll get a laugh. Yeah, no, I'll definitely check
it out. No, you, I mean, I, I, I very
much enjoy that you are very aware of who you are and your
place in the scene. And you're like curating the
space around you to, to maintain that space.
Because having Someone Like You in, in a hobby, someone that
people couldn't like look towards kind of as, like, you
know, like you said about the midnight market.
I think that is like a story that everyone that interact with
that will tell forever because of just how interesting and
different and cool it is and is like inspirational to just
remember to do like weird cool shit.
So I, I, I will definitely say you're like a huge inspiration
to me in the scene to just remember to, to just do weird
cool shit to, to do, to do it as art because you want to do it,
not because you're trying to sell something.
So I mean, that's how I saw you before I met you ended up, I
mean, still do. But then I actually met you as a
person and you became like an actual figure.
It's not just like an abstract idea, you know?
That's I would. I think I'd prefer to stay an
abstract idea. There's an idea of a Tanner, I
mean again I think on the on the thought of tabletop.
Systems as art pieces, I think that's much more important to
look at games as something that we look at because I, I have,
you're not going. To see it behind you as a
bookshelf. I don't know, I.
Might. Go see in the corner.
But there's like right over there, there's a bookshelf
system. Little little bookshelf full
full of games, and I've read maybe two of them completely.
Like, I'll flip through them, I'll look at the art, I'll read.
Specific mechanics. Oh.
That's unique. Oh, that's cool.
But at the end of the day, I don't give a shit about the
entire. Book I'm not going.
To play the game, I'm not going to run it for people.
I just I want to support a specific thing and I want to add
it to my collection. I want to.
I collect models and huge nowadays item it is friends
models. It's not even like, you know,
official things from some way. I just like collecting things.
My friends have sculpted and I'm woefully behind in my backlog.
I've got a bunch of stuff from Merlin or Kai who's sculpted
stuff from War Award and he's wonderful young man.
He's a sculptor from Germany that's, you know, like 20 or 19
or something and he's incredibly talented young man.
I've got so many of his models are based on my models.
I haven't painted yet and they're right next to my webcam.
My webcam is over them right now and I feel like shit.
I I need to catch up because I have so many things from friends
that I just I'd rather. Keep creating my own.
Thing There's always so much time.
Yeah, no, very. And that's very true.
It's just the amount of time that you have in a day to
actually to outside of work and life and everything to do what
you want to do and then to also get hobby in there as well is
something that I've been trying to struggle with a little bit.
But again, speaking, what's that?
You say get happy or get hoppy. What did you say?
Oh, no, to to hobby, to to hobby, to try to hobby.
Yeah. I mean, I would love to try to
get happy too, but that one's a little bit harder than hobby.
But we'll get there. Yeah, no, listen, both hobby and
happy. Yeah, no.
But again, Speaking of systems, you did mention you're, you're
working currently on one right now.
So what? What?
So what are you, what are you working on?
You said you're talking about doing a landlord game, a
slumlord. Game.
It's called Slumlord. It's a it's a tabletop game,
kind of like Teaspoon. So it's very loose.
It's general. It's more of a, it's a
residential simulator where you you can model it like the whole
house style and model rooms and whatnot.
The general idea is you know this omnipresent figure, you're
a landlord, and you monitor a complex like a a building a
property. And the property is constantly
decaying and falling apart. Because that's real life, right?
Everything slowly. Decays and pipes leak and you
get a pest. Everybody's living.
It should be an apartment. Everybody knows what it's like.
So it's a game about simulating slice of life, day-to-day stuff.
Kind of like my the pet game Teaspoon.
So that's how you'd come to every day.
But instead of having that obligation of caring for them,
I'm trying to write the rules in such a way.
Again, it's very work in progress currently where you
don't have to really do anything.
You only have to check in at the end of the month to get paid and
then use that to try to fix the properties if you keep swelling
apart. But your tenants might not pay
you. They may not have the money
themselves. They may just leave overnight.
You know, you don't really know. So it's really a simulator for
for emergent narratives. It's a lot of journaling and
writing and it's kind of an excuse to hobby.
It's a vehicle to make you hobby.
But you don't have to physically do any of it's scale agnostic.
So you don't have to do a specific scale.
You can do it in, I don't know, 12mm if you want to, you can
write it on paper and just do paper crafts.
You can do cardboard. It doesn't really matter.
So that's, you know, I think that's important components of
the game. But I've been doing dollhouse
backgrounds and more characters for the photos in the system
itself. And I've been typing rules for
the game for the past like month and a half, two months.
Got a lot out. There.
I don't know if any of that works yet, so we'll make sure
the foundation works. Yeah.
Are those the last couple posts that you've been posting on
Instagram? I just brought one up on stream
right now of what looks like this apartment building with
these like fleshy guy in it next, like paint cans and stuff.
So this is this is for for that game.
Yep, Yep. It's just that those are just
photos for the game. The tenants for me, they're like
these kind of I. Don't know how much this is like
stuff but when kids. Start drawing.
They draw what's called head footers or tadpole people, and
they're like heads with arms and legs sticking out of them.
They're a ball with wimps and after a while they could develop
a little more and children start to draw like stick figures or
like more human proportions. But I really like that component
of just. Thing with the.
Arms and legs sticking out of it.
So though I my overarching kind of aesthetics when I sculpt
models, so it's just like a thing with arms and legs
sticking out of it. So I wanted to, in my game and
my vision for my system, all the people that live in this
property are just kind of like human heads with arms and legs
sticking out of them. But no, I think again, for
anybody that plays the game, the system can be anything you could
be. I already have a few people play
testing the general rules somebody's doing just humans.
So they just look like people. They look very standard.
I heard somebody was doing them with like kind of furry
characters. So they're furries, right?
There's people that are doing them with all kinds.
It's, it's up to you, right? It's what you want your game to
be. It's it's a system I wrote for
me, but I want everybody to be able.
To to customize it to their own, tailor it to themselves, I
guess. I think that's important.
Yeah, no. And it's, it's, it's interesting
that you went from teaspoon to slumlord because like you said,
it really is just kind of the same thing.
You're like going from taking care of like a pet to like, I
guess kind of taking care of people.
If you really feel like it, you don't.
You don't feed them. Right.
And the game. Kind of like from day-to-day
there was rules initially that would require each player to
like check in on their same meters like hunger, food, The
Sims, right? And I kind of was thinking about
like, well, what if you don't really, it's going to be
impossible to navigate that many meters for that many tenants as
human, not as a computer. So I thought, what if every time
you peek in on a specific tenant to see what they're doing, it
shuffles around their their their hunger, their sleep,
because it's assuming they're eating and they're sleeping and
whatnot. There are subsystems that keep
track of how much food is in the house and that kind of thing,
but they'll replenish it at their own, They'll work on their
own, they'll do everything on their own.
It's again, it's super loose. And it's not going to make you
feel like, Oh yeah. I didn't feed them today.
So they're starving. It's it's not, they're not wait
on you. It's not really a pet game.
It's more of a property management social narrative
simulator. It's about writing.
It's about seeing different people.
There's a really complex system for generating tenants where you
generate like their their coping skills, their, you know, their
likes, dislikes, their look, their age, their relationship to
other tenants. It's a super in depth, really,
really long system. But the few people that play
test said it's their favorite component is just generating
people seeing who comes up a plumber that likes carpet
beetles or you know, he's getting very strange residents
that live in your property. And that's the fun of it, is
seeing who's here and what happens to them.
Now that's the most Tanner Simpson shit I've ever heard.
Is like a property management game that has like super in
depth rules about like character creation and like who people are
and stuff. Like that's incredible.
But we went from pets to like property management.
Are we going to get like local government game like in four to
five years where you're like in charge of like?
I wanted to write a a. It's not off the table yet, but
there's a sister supplement system.
Sister system supplement. Game.
To our award where it's a legal system where you'd have to like.
Like model A courthouse of essentially civilians forget
like hit by you at crossfire. They can sue you and you'd be
required to be like to show. So there would be a very complex
system of jurors and lawyers and like how the actual there'd be
evidence from the game where photos were taken at the time of
the game to show like the blood and you know what I mean, all
that shit. I thought, oh, that'd be so much
fun of like having crooked lawyers.
You could pay like Better Call Saul show up and like try to
twist things around. You might just get jury of
idiots that are really hard to convince even if you did nothing
wrong. But as I sat down and started
writing it, I got really stuck immediately.
I was like, why am I this stuck with writing this thing?
It should be easy. Why is it that hard?
I realized I know nothing about legal systems.
I know nothing. And it's not going to be like an
American legal. I want to be a very.
Broad like sci-fi amalgamation. Once, but I don't know enough
about it, so I don't want to sit down and write a game about
something I don't know if you're going to write a system you
should know about. His system about things.
So the pet game, I know a lot about keeping pets, right?
One reward. It's easy because everybody's
played sci-fi shooting games. It's easy.
It's easy to write rules for it. Living in a shitty apartment.
Every hobbyist has lived in a shitty apartment, right?
Every hobbyist sad people have things that are falling apart
and whatnot. It's part of it, right?
So it's easy to write rules about black mold because you've
been there, right? So I think that yeah, any game I
write, I think at its core it's going to be very customizable
and curtailed to that person that's picking up and reading
the book. The game's going to be a toolbox
to customize and make your own thing out of it.
I think overall in the future specifically, I'd like my
systems to be more pretty. I want people to be able to look
at it and have an artistic, like all the stuff.
Like you can see the fishing game, it's very just black and
white. It's literally black and white
and scanned and crusty. It's very, I don't like putting
too much art and things because if I do, it gives you an idea of
what it's supposed to be. So yeah, in this game the only
illustrations are like art of my face, my friend's faces on fish
overlaid. But again, I think like with one
reward, I just got plastic blue art and it was of the models I
made for my game, right? But other people that played the
game made it grim dark. And it's not a grim dark game.
It's very much not. But I've seen people use models
from their 40K shit or Neckerboud or whatever, and it
gives entire aesthetic that feel.
Other people have used very bright colors, reviews, Legos or
whatever. They use whatever.
They want and it. Becomes their version of the
game. Same with teaspoons somebody
used well, somebody who like like felt it all their their
pets and the closure. So it was all felt it.
Somebody did it with paper crafts where it was all 2D and
it was like you can see it a piece of paper that ripped out
and cut out and they could move it.
It's all every game within my game is going to be customized
to the person playing it. And that's what makes it
personal. That's what makes people invest
it when it's not the same shit to every person.
It has to be unique, it has to be distinct, and it has to push
the player into being more creative and showing what they
have. I hope that my systems teach
people that they could create their own systems and they could
do their own thing. That's the most important part
for me because that's what the future of the hobby is.
And I want to read those systems.
I want to see what you make. I push people on my Discord
every day to make their own stuff and to write their own
games. The curse of the Try, even
though they haven't. Because anybody can do it.
Anybody can do it. Do you think that you the way
that you have written some of your systems in the past, like
for example, like, you know, deep dark fishing fantasy, you
like it's a theoretical game that like kind of works.
Do you do you? It's funny because I, I, when I
message you on Instagram, that's literally the first thing you
said. You're just like, hey, cool,
thanks for buying it. It kind of works.
So like, don't get frustrated. It kind of works.
Do you put that into your games on purpose, like to kind of
force that? Because in TGRPGSA lot of people
will would put something in the beginning of the game that says
like the rules are what you make of them.
If it doesn't work, do whatever. It's just like tacit permission
that they like give to it. But do you find with when you're
making systems, do you make them like want a reward where it's
something that you have to put a lot of work in to kind of like
force that kind of realization that people can make it their
own? Or is that just something that
comes from your rules writing? I think this comes from the
question of rulings over rules as an old school mindset of
playing, right in modern day tabletop game design.
It's very much play the game to the letter and there's rules
lawyers right there. It's not exactly.
And there's many reasons for that.
And you look at competitive Warhammer, right?
There are judges, there are people that are that are making
sure something is functioning as it's supposed to, right?
You're not supposed to be able to, to tweak the rules of bandit
because that would be unfair. Somebody would lose and they
should have won. And I don't think games are
about losing and winning. I think, well, games are, but I
don't think table five games I want to engage with should be
about winning or losing. It should be about telling a
narrative. Part of why I do in therapy is
narrative therapy because I really like stories.
I really like learning about lives of people.
I like helping people. Reframe and look at worlds,
their life and the world from another perspective, especially
when they were risen in such a way that, you know, leads to
problems. We'll see.
And I think that when you're able to look at tabletop games
from the perspective level, it's not about winning and losing.
So why am I holding this book again?
For me, it's because I want to learn about it, because it's
from a friend, because I care about the person.
Or I like the art. I think the art is beautiful.
In this most recent game, I'm writing some more and I'm going
to be commissioning artists I really look up to to do the art
in a very specific way that I envisioned the game to be and
how I. Would want to open the book and
look through it. I want to be proud of what I put
out there as a more. When I say polished, I don't
mean mechanically. I mean like as a book.
I want to be proud of a physical thing in my hand.
So Wonder was the first time I've had a book that looks nice,
that actually feels nice in my hands.
And I'm not selling the book too, because you can't even buy
it if you wanted to, but you know what I mean.
Like it's, I think that's important.
I think it's very important to have a distinct aesthetic that
make people want to open it up when they open it up.
One award too. It's pretty blank.
All the pages are very white and there's a few illustrations that
give you an idea of. My version of the game, but
again, that's intentional, at least for one reward, because I
want you to fill in with your own characters.
I want you to make your own game out of my gear.
And if I put too much art in it, then it's going to say this is
what the game is and that's not so as far as the rules go.
And to answer your question first, I'm not a.
Talented rules writer. I don't do balancing.
I don't care about that. It doesn't matter.
For me, it's a concept, for me it's.
It's not a. Competitive game, you're not
going to, you can't try and that would be hysterical to see a
tournament and won award. I would love to watch people try
to optimize the meta game again that fights you to not do that,
but I would I would love to see. I think it'd be really funny.
That's an ironic thing, right? But no, I think, I think that
when you write rules that fall apart and don't work, you can
let them know in the beginning and say, hey, I don't want you
to buy this game looking for a competitive, looking for
something that it really isn't, because I don't want you to pay
for something you don't want. In fact, the fishing game
ironically on the back says this is a free system.
Scan the barcode to give me Milla pipe or something because
the barcode would lead to my PayPal if you scanned it.
Apparently I used a website to generate the barcode that would
lead you to a link. You've scanned it.
I don't know if it works. I haven't scanned it yet, but
supposedly barcode readers can do that.
I don't know. Again, I might have compressed
with the barcode itself too, so it might just not work because I
I squished it in Ms. Paint, but I don't know.
Supposed to lead to my PayPal. Yeah, I think if people know
what they're getting into, you know, and they know they
understand who I am, that's important.
If you buy my game, you don't know who I am and you just pick
it up. As you want to play Necromunda
more time, you can probably a little bump.
It's not what you want. It's they're all jokes.
Like we said before, they're all jokes.
Yeah, I mean, listen, you but you can tell good jokes like
comedians are a thing, you know what I mean?
Like that's that's that's important too.
You know, like there there is a very big difference, I think,
between like a joke and between making the focus of the game on
the the vibes and the experience as opposed to not necessarily
the rules is written. And so it's not, you know, I
definitely wouldn't say anything that you that you have made is a
joke. Every bit of it is enjoyable and
it as a whole tells a story of a lot of the way that you feel
about games just by being able to read it.
And I enjoy them immensely. Like that's the the reason I
fell in love with one reward was just how out there it is and
like how it forces you to engage with it.
And, and I just, I again, I hope that more people see the, what
you do and the reason why you do the things that you do as like a
beacon for like what could be and should be, you know, at
least part of everyone's hobby experience.
I've been saying it forever, but Grim Dark and 28 is that I it's
creative dead end. It's a black hole that sucks you
into it and it leads to people just creating the same shit,
regurgitating it right. I'm done with the mod blood gore
no more. I'm done with it.
I think you know the 28th scale is fine.
Nothing against it personally, but people especially with the
the naming convention to .28 at the end of the system.
Fuck that, don't do it. If you're listening to this
podcast, you listen me talk. I've said this a million times.
Do not put 28 out of your system.
Name it something unique. Name it something that gives you
an idea of what the game is. You don't need to say it's a 28.
Say oh I can have my 28mm models will work perfect it could be 28
scale without saying 28 damn it anyway I.
Will say hey no, I will say I'm an edgelord piece of shit.
I love modern blood and guts forever but you just can't.
You can't. Make.
That your whole, you can't make that your whole thing.
You're allowed to engage with it as long as it's not the only
thing you engage with. Because, you know, I like dark
shit. But if, if, if everything is
dark, there is no tone, there is no variation, there is no like
nothing is dark if everything is dark and nothing's light if
everything is light. So I will happily stack one
reward right next to all my other my grim dark bullshit so I
can see the brightness next to it and know that there is there
is something else out there. I'm going to make sure this is
next to the most grim dark 28 thing on my shelf, just so just
so you know. There needs to be.
There needs to be it. There can't be the void of, you
know, there needs to be grim dark, there needs to be
Necromuda. So it filters out the people I
don't want to play with. You know what I mean?
Joking aside, I think again I I talked to a lot of mad shits the
the grim dark and. 20 and everything but.
You know, if you enjoy something then why not?
I'm not going to. Pooh, Pooh, your, you know, your
aesthetic. I just think that it's
especially an hour in DC and I think that it's so overplayed.
And so assumed with shit like Tragic Crusade turn up 28.
Nothing against the games themselves, but it's it's mud,
it's it's blood. At least turn up 28 as humor,
right? I mean, it's a little more
light, but still it falls in the same trappings.
I think encourage. I mean, I won't go to tangent
with this, but if you look at turn up 28 right, I got Max
props to you. I've talked to them many times.
He's a he's a nice guy, but the game started as a make your own
war band super distinct and when they're.
First coming out you'd see these Instagram posts of the most
beautiful conversions or lovingly made and like.
It took a very long time and a lot of patience.
And I don't remember who it was, there was a 3D printed SCL pack
of the helmets of the pointed noses.
And after that I released every model was like Perry historical
miniatures Napoleonics with the same 3D printed head on.
And while yes, that is the fastest way to go about it and
to get it looking like the system in the book again, it
kind of removed that soul, I hate to say soul versus
soulless, but it removed that initial.
Every model is unique and it takes a lot of time and thought,
which you can still do again, it's not like you can anymore,
but it removed that from it, right?
I think when I saw trench Crusade stuff people are talking
about, oh, it's a new thing, it's hot, it's.
Cool. And I don't know, I just look at
it, it's just more of Warhammer, more grim dark, and I just don't
care. I don't give a shit.
It's on. It's not appealing to me.
But again, I'm not the I'm not the average hobbyist.
I'm writing games about being a landlord.
So if if that's the kind of thing you're into, you know,
write your own games, you know, do your own listen talking about
that. No, I, I hear what you're
saying. I, you know, and I don't
disagree about Trent. You're saying, listen, I love
dark, you know, bullshit and and mud and blood and guts and stuff
like that. But I've, you know, I've read
enough like dark Christian, like fantasy forever.
I don't need more World War One. I I appreciate the game.
I back to the Kickstarter, but as soon as I got it, I was like,
okay, like that. Like, well, maybe I'll get to it
eventually. I, I do, I, I've never actually
played 40K. I do enjoy the books.
I like all the different factions and I do think that
some of the authors still can be a little bit tongue in cheek.
I wish they were more so like the older books.
But you know, I hear what you're saying.
Like I said, I, I think that everything has to be in
moderation and I understand why so many people in the scene
enjoy Grim dark. I very much do.
But I can also appreciate 1A reward.
I can also appreciate and be looking forward to the slumlord
game because again, you can't have everything be one note or
or nothing. Nothing matters and nothing,
nothing is different or interesting.
So, you know, it is what it is. Yeah, that's, you know, and
what's funny is I love all the grim dark bullshit and stuff.
And then my first game was a Western.
So, you know, it's, it's at least, you know, just something
a little different. So we'll take it from there.
But Speaking of slumlord games, Speaking of one of awards,
Speaking of like, all of your things, where can people find
what they're allowed to get from you on the Internet?
Well. I don't know just mess with you
on Instagram and I'll link you to it.
I guess I don't really have like a a spot.
I think I do have like an itch dot IO with a few of the PDFs on
it. I need to update it.
Wanna reward the PDF is free. It's hosted on there's a website
that you can go to Kudong POODON g.boards.net.
We'll link you to there's a forum for it that nobody uses,
but it's there. God bless Gabe.
He pays like a dollar a year or something.
I don't know how much he pays, but he pays for it to be hosted
and it's there. Maybe someday when it really
takes off, it'll boom and people will use it.
But there's also generators for like random weapons and random
things. You just click a button to
randomly generates targets and you know little tools that are
on the websites for fun, but the rules are free to download
there. There's a link to the discord.
I have a a channel that's just one reward.
It's all my hobby friends talking.
It's not a huge thing but there are rules for the game and
people sometimes post playing the game.
So I'm more just DM me if you want to play that.
So there's a tiny discord with like 10 people on it, people
trying it. But again, it's so far in the
process of being built that it really doesn't exist yet.
It's just an idea that I'm still flushing out and I'll be working
on it for probably a year or two, depending on how fast I get
through it and how much motivation and energy it is.
But that's what anything I do in this hobby, I get a surge of
energy. I get really excited to work on
it and I, I keep at it for a long time until I go, fuck this.
I move on to something else. I actually almost wrote a entire
game about hunting like, just like a satirical hunting game.
And I started the process and I got a good bit into it.
Kind of like the. Cabela's hunting games but kind
of water award with deep dark fishing fantasy where you would
generate the woods and monsters that come out of it would be
randomly generated and you'd have to hunt bizarre foreign.
Things to see how big they are cooperative and I was really
excited inspired because I thought a satire on hunting
would be funny but then I got it got into this idea of like
what's still shooting shit, I don't want to write another game
with shooting and then I was kind of in a weird slump and.
I got fired for slum ward when? I'm going to do that.
I'm out. Until I'm bored, I guess I'll
just keep doing this and I think it's going to be a minute until
I get bored with us. I'm very excited about play
testing, at seeing where it goes.
So if you're watching, yeah. I'll be shooting you Adm to to
to try to play test. It sounds incredible and the.
It's all in notepad files and I didn't realize the formatting
gets messed up when you move it to somebody's computer.
My computer. Is fine, but when you put it on
somebody else's the tabbing is messed up for every table.
So they all like jumbled up and it's really hard to.
It's hard to play as as a current.
State. Anyone that knows your stuff
would be completely unsurprised to get a notepad file that is
then completely misformatted and stuff.
So but hey, listen, I really appreciate you coming on the
show again. I you, you know, you are an
inspiration to me because of the way that you think about and now
actually getting a chance to sit down and, and talk to you like
even more. So like I, I really, really
enjoy the way that you interact with games and the way that you
or even positioning yourself as like a mentor in the space to,
to, to try to encourage people to think about games.
And it's, it's wonderful. I wish more people thought about
that and thought that way, not even just in table top scene,
but in TTRBGS as well. So I just want to say like, I
really appreciate what you do And I and I, I'm very much
looking forward to Slumlord. You know, David Lynch says
movies are moving paintings. And I think that tabletop games
are so much more than just shooting.
I think there's so much more than grim dark.
And I think beyond, even if it is grim dark, it's the
community. It's the friends we made along
the way. It's the people on the scene
that really make the community what it is.
If it wasn't for each other and our our shared excuse to
socialize and have something in common, you know, what's the
point of any of this stuff coping?
I mean, I can get a whole conversation about that and I
won't, right? Distraction, focus.
But I mean, yeah, I don't know, man.
I'm glad to be on the podcast. Make your own games if you're
listening to me. Write your own stuff, get
inspired, watch a movie, you know, don't do something that
makes you want to do your own thing.
And DM me it so I could play or at least look at it.
Put in my bookshelf. There you go.
So once again, thank you so much for being on the show.
I'll make sure all the links to the Internet are where they are.
You know, people, you know, this isn't your first podcast, but
thank you so much. And that's going to be us for
today. So appreciate you all listening
and we will see you all later. Bye.