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Palimpsest RPG Design

I was recently leafing through the Basic Fantasy RPG Adventure Anthologies looking for small dungeons to drop into my OD&D campaign. I'm fond of BFRPG, but it is aggressively vanilla, and most of the adventures would need re-skinning to fit with my inane milieu. But it dawned on me: all three paperback Anthologies combined cost me less than a burrito at Chipotle. They're just basic text on cheap paper with a few illustrations scattered around. There is literally no reason not to cross out the bits I don't like and scribble margin notes all over.

Similarly, I have two copies of Worlds Without Number: one POD from DriveThruRPG, another a glossy offset print. I use the former way more often because I don't feel bad about highlighting passages & marking it up with sticky-notes.

And this got me thinking: what if more TTRPGs were like BFRPG? What if we optimized our games to be edited on-the-fly by the people playing them?

There's an understandable tendency to want to make beautiful gamebooks with detailed art & impeccable typography. Artfully-designed books lend the hobby legitimacy & prestige, and they sell well. Writers & designers pour tons of effort into their work, and it's reasonable to want to see it reflected in presentation. But I think we shouldn't conflate 'beautiful' with 'pristine' or 'immutable'. RPGs as a medium are especially prone to eluding authorial intent -- every game assumes a life of its own at the table; house rules are ubiquitous. I find myself wishing that more books (especially smaller, 'indie' offerings) made themselves more available to emendation.

Palimpsest Principles

I'm calling this pitch "Palimpsest RPG design", after manuscript pages where text was effaced to facilitate reuse. (Despite unnecessarily coining a term, most of these ideas aren't new; I discuss similar threads below). I would propose three core tenets of the approach:

The following list covers some more specific design practices that I think comport well with Palimpsest Design, grouped under the tenets above:

Expecting players to alter a text to their liking and writing accordingly:

Designing texts to be easily modified via analog or digital means:

Publishing materials that are inexpensive & easy to distribute:

Notes & Afterthoughts

First, I don't expect anyone else to adopt this term, nor do I see it as a one-size-fits-all prescription for the broader hobby. But, it clarifies some of my thoughts about how I want to direct my own creative endeavors. I haven't followed all of these guidelines in the past, but moving forward I intend to adhere to them pretty closely.

Second, most of this obviously isn't original. On my mind when writing it were Traverse Fantasy on de-commodifying the hobby, and Sam Sorensen on Art Pressure & What a Work Doesn't Need. There's also some affinity with zine culture, though I envision Palimpsest Principles as having weaker associations with punk aesthetics and the materiality of photocopiers. On modular design, see Trilemma Adventures on Mosaic Strict Principles (a bit more restrictive than I'm envisioning here, but it's a cool idea).

Accordingly, there are many, many examples of works that fit this approach, too many to list here, but I'll mention a few personal favorites:

#musings