Introduction

I'm Misha, a (usually) NYC-based game designer and educator. Most of my professional background is in digital game design and programming, but this is my tabletop RPG blog. I always have a few RPG ideas rattling around in my notes, but until now I've been pretty bad about sharing them with the larger RPG community.

There's a ton of great stuff going on in the various RPG spaces out there, and I love playing pretty much all styles of games, but my favorites (and, by extension, what I tend to design) are fiction-first games focused around creative problem solving. I'm a big fan of RPGs that are incredibly rules-light on the player-facing side, but also have a ton of non-binding mechanical structures that the GM can use to keep things interesting while acting as a fairly impartial referee.

I'm super interested in the unwritten rules people use to run RPGs--all of those habits and processes a good GM juggles behind the scenes to keep a game fun. One of the big weaknesses of this hobby is in how hard it is to learn to run games without basically just mentoring under an experienced GM (or just following a ton of RPG blogs), and a good portion of this blog is probably going to be me trying to figure out ways to make the barrier to play lower for novice players.

My big published digital game is Sumer, a local multiplayer digital boardgame where you play as one of four Sumerian nobles trying to sacrifice the most stuff to the goddess Inanna. It was our attempt to take all the cool design innovations of the Eurogame board game scene and bring them to the digital game realm. Check it out on Steam and the Nintendo Switch, it's really good stuff.

I'm currently working on a team tactics roguelike game tentatively called Megadungeon. At the time I'm posting this, the combat mechanics are pretty locked down, but the larger game structure and visual presentation are still in flux. It's a melding of 4e D&D's tactical combat systems with the dungeon crawl structure of B/X. You can find it on itch.io