F A Q

Why not charge money? People living in economic precarity need the togetherness and good times of our hobby the most. Having all grown up at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder we can tell you discovering the hobby was completely life-changing, not just for all the friends we made but for the escape hatch to other worlds.

Why prisoners? We’ve seen conversational games ease the misery of incarceration in three ways:

First is the pro-social. Conversational games are one of the few things in prison that bring people from all races to the same table. It’s a social simulator whose very nature forces you to take others’ perspective, building empathy and social intelligence. Its central feature is cooperating to achieve common goals, which effortlessly forms bonds and a sense of community.

Second is creative fulfillment. Having a crew you regularly meet up with, who you know are looking forward to anything you write or draw, makes the creative process intoxicating. A person on their own might fill up a notebook once a year, but a crew of hobbyists will go on creating entire universes together. 

Third is the least talked about, but anybody who has been in the hobby long enough, or just has played with people who have been through real shit, has seen them externalize that into the game for healthy processing. Being able to unwind that pain at an emotional distance, displaced into the fiction and surrounded by friends, is a powerful catharsis that we’ve seen first hand. Also, the plausible deniability of it all being fiction is probably the only way a lot of guys are ever going to open up in an environment where talking about your feelings is considered weakness. 

For academic papers on the therapeutic power of the hobby, check out this archive put together by the good people at Roll2Heal. 

I don’t want to support somebody “who did something horrible”, do you work with people like that ? No, we don’t work with anybody convicted of sex offenses, child abuse, or similar crimes. 

Cash is tight right now – any other way I can support? Word of mouth is a massive help. If you tried one of our games and liked it, it would mean a lot if you passed it along in your scene or shouted us out. 

Can I donate? Thanks for asking. We have a tidy little donation page here.

Where’s that Hounds of Order painting from? It’s a landscape of Azuchi Castle, destroyed in 1582. The artist’s name is lost to history.

Is St. Disma a real saint? It’s the old-fashioned French form of Saint Dismas, the good thief.

Why don’t your games have maps? Maps, even fictional ones, are banned in many US prisons and jails.

Did you bite that one 2019 show when you were making Illadelph? No, Illadelph goes back way before that (proof). It was based off a game one of us ran about a genre-mashing version of their own city as a kid in 2008.

How come we haven’t seen you around the usual spaces? Mostly because we’re trying to introduce new people to the hobby, so you’re more likely to find us slinging literature at a basement show than tabling a convention.