There are things I assume at the table that I rarely state out loud or consciously think about. They aren’t rules, and I do not think of them as expectations so much as background conditions. They shape how I run games, but I only really notice them when they are missing.

When I talk about taking a genre seriously in an RPG, I do not mean treating it as sacred or insisting everyone gets it “right”, or that everybody has to be earnest and serious. I mean trusting the genre to do its own work.

I often joke about mashing genres together. Sword and sorcery at boarding school. Totalitarian surveillance states with midnight feasts. It is an easy laugh, and a fun idea. But I rarely want to run those games for long.

I’m currently running on a weekly or bi-weekly basis: a 10 year old Fantasy Homebrew, a Star Wars Homebrew, Liminal urban fantasy, and Blades in the Dark (In a homebrew setting). It’s a lot of plates to keep spinning, so I’ve put a lot of thought into how I do it.

I quite like the word “ruminations” and I was hoping to find some pun on “roomy nations” but so far no luck. I will just let it stand. Anywhere, here’s a post where I mull over why I designed Blaydon Grange the way I did.