Puzzle Dungeon Jam A game jam from 2025-11-03 to 2025-12-15 hosted by Directsun Games. A puzzle dungeon is more than rooms filled with puzzles—it is the puzzle. Each space teaches something new, reuses old ideas in clev...

If puzzle dungeons are fair play, there's a whole jam going on right now with a ton of resources
itch.io/jam/puzzle-d...

The Endie Awards #Endies2025

You're into RPGs.

You've maybe played one this year, or ten, or... sixty-two?

What if you told us about them?

Like, in a blog post, or on here. Tell us what you played, maybe for how long. You could say if you liked them and why. You could even hand out awards.

Welcome to The #Endies2025.

Finishing this thought, I think my biggest takeaway was how through in-fiction, self-enforced rules, o/u was able to make so much game, without a facilitator needed to adjudicate. That opens a lot of room for larger scale games without prohibitive upkeep.

Totally fair, I think it's cool seeing these two diverging schools of thought from the same game

Meanwhile, I've been going the other direction, thinking what games can I run that emphasize the in-fiction rules. Do we need the wargame, as long as there is some fictional mechanical backbone and character incentives driving players into conflict? Really, it's just becoming LARP tho

#over/under

I love how utterly incomprehensible this will be to all but a thousand people

Converted garage for “Code Breakers Club”

Stairwell with vending machines

Stairs that lead to a wet room.

Bookshop at the end of an alley

The #over/under fever has been possessing me, it will only break once I’ve mapped the entire station I think, or I explode…anyways heres my latest batch of pieces. 🫡

I'm restarting my old A Pound of Flesh mothership campaign this week! My players will not be ready for what #over/under has taught me. It's gonna be like recounting a war story to my grandkids—but interactive

Congrats on the print release! Just ordered it. I've been so impressed with this month-long release and all the thoughtful blogs to come with it

i know you're all sick of hearing about #over/under but I find I'm having a strange emotional response. For every high (and there are a lot!), there are lows like fomo, feeling disoriented by the tech (I'm almost 50 irl), feeling inadequate at the game, etc. It's stirring up a lot of old feelings.

But it *does* feel like a reworking of cyberpunk for the 2020s: a vision of the future not as a unified aesthetic but as this crazed sensory overload, a hundred different stories and worlds fired at you at once, leaping between crassness and warmth, insincerity and sincerity.

Same, honestly nice to hear I'm not alone in that

I've been feeling this too! For me another reason has been how much is going on in the Dream that I don't know about. It's pretty scary stepping into a character who has such a narrow perspective on such a big world

CHACHACA

Trying to cut it as an info broker in #OVER/UNDER is getting to me. I see some irl news, I think "oh, I could sell this for a few creds." This game is genuinely changing how I see the world (I think that's a good thing??)

This has been a year of committing to TTRPGs as my artform of choice. It's helped me to better understand how I look at the world and engage with it. It's taught me that I can be a creative person. Thanks to everyone in the community that I've met so far! (11/11)

50% chance to stay lost. Otherwise, you end up in a random location, or is you are lucky and kept your bearings you end up where you wanted. The Grove can only be accessed via wandering aimless.

My favorite part in this module is my off-trail procedure. If you go off the trail, you stay stuck there encountering random events, until you get lucky and find your way out. There are certain locations and factions that can only be found off the trail. (10/)

A table of random events. Low entries are playful. Higher entries are more dire. More dice are added to the roll whenever certain events occur, so higher number entries eventually become more common.

The only constant is the accumulation of pollution, represented by an overloaded event table. This world is aimless, but trending towards loss. (9/)

Compared to most modules, this one is intentionally designed to be aimless. There is no map, certain paths dead-end, and sometimes you can only progress by getting lost. This feels right in a module about grief and memories. (8/)

Wetlands fill me with a sense of nostalgia. I grew up fishing and clamming there with my father and grandfather. My great-uncle and sister have both worked in wetland conservation. Thinking of wetlands makes me think of childhood memories now out of reach. I tried to bring that feeling here. (7/)

I tried embracing the moody, narrative tone of Cloud Empress for this module, to create something hopefully as fun to read as it is to play. My goal was a small world charged with grief and coping in different ways. (6/)

Beneath These Grasses Grieving by wade A muddy and moody adventure for Cloud Empress

I followed that up with Beneath these Grasses Grieving, my attempt at an adventure module for Cloud Empress during the #CloudEmpressWinterJam. I ended up spending somewhere between 40-60 hours working on this one, and it feels nearly like a finished product. (5/)
wadekbennett.itch.io/beneath-thes...

Who are they when no one is there to see? Sit in the dark until you feel alone. Sit a little bit longer.

This game is designed so that a player may leave at any time. If for any reason you no longer want to participate, you may immediately skip to the end of your comms track then stop playing (see Ending Play). By design, this will not affect the other player's experience.

This game has a pretty cool safety tool too—a natural open table, enabled by remote play with natural breaks. I'm also pretty happy with my prose, especially this paragraph at the end. (4/)

It's a game about silence and boredom. About how the fear of being alone brings people together. I still think this is ripe ground, as seen by the subsequent #JamInSilence amassing 50 submissions. Consider how else you can wield loneliness as a tool. (3/)

Resonant Static by wade An RPG about loneliness, boredom, and radios.

My first game, Resonant Static, was written for the Dice Exploder Pregens Jam. It's not polished, but I think there's some good ideas in there. More importantly, it felt freeing to get a project done. (2/)
wadekbennett.itch.io/resonant-sta...

One year ago, I published my first game. Since then, I've published a second, and am approaching 500 downloads all together. So if you'll allow me, I'll be a bit self-indulgent and reminisce. (1/)

The era of trick-taking is out, the era of cribbage is coming

Commercially, it's not optimal. But building a network effect is how communities thrive and grow long term.

What I'd love to see more is game listings that include links to related games by *other* creators that might not be seen otherwise. "Hey, if you liked this game, check out these other three games that do something similar, but you probably missed."