This week’s newsletter took me a bit by surprise because I was so busy chilling out. But I still have narrative thoughts I want to talk about. Let’s dive briefly into what makes a story human and conversely, non-human.

It’s a short one today. Just like me, a lot of creative folk struggle with burnout. In today’s piece, I want to briefly touch upon how I experience burnout. We’ll get into crossing the line between hobby projects and work.

I’ve been playing tabletop roleplaying games for a little over a decade now. They’ve phased in and out of my life, but for the past two years, I’ve been pretty consistently playing and running campaigns. Naturally, this affects the way I think about games.

This week we’ll be exploring some narrative design issues I’ve found and solved for Clysmoids. We’ll be touching on how to decenter violence from games, the dissonance between tone and gameplay, and how to make things click.