Welcome, new readers!
An overview of our labyrinthine archives
Since Stonetop was officially released last week, we’ve had a few dozen new subscribers join the table. So, to you all: Welcome! After five years of publishing, the archives have gotten a bit labyrinthine, so here’s a quick guide to what’s worth a look, for new arrivals and dormant subscribers alike.
The Stonetop Campaign
The main event. If you want to catch up on the fiction quickly, the story-so-far post covers sessions 1-15 and gets you ready for the current arc, which will resume on June 8th. If you’d rather read straight through, here’s the full table of contents — the early sessions are rougher than the recent ones, but the world and the characters are there from the beginning.
On GMing
Alongside the actual play, I’ve written a handful of essays on GMing and TTRPG craft, mostly drawing on lessons from running Stonetop. My favorite is The Sweet Sting of Defeat, on why letting your PCs lose is one of the best gifts a storygame can give them. Dice & Divinity takes on religion at the table — how to make gods and faiths feel numinous, rather than just a source for Cure Light Wounds. And Acquiring Arcana is about keeping magic items feeling magical, instead of letting them slide into loot-list inventory management.
Other campaigns
The Stonetop archive is the main attraction, but a few other games have wandered through PTFO over the years. The most extensive is Proper Villains, a four-session Blades in the Dark campaign about a family of Crow’s Foot orphans trying to survive the bloody, ghost-haunted streets of Duskwall. It’s a rougher campaign than Stonetop — Blades doesn’t lend itself to solo play as well as PbtA does — but the worldbuilding has teeth, and if you love that game it’s worth a look.
As part of that campaign, I also ran a session of Microscope as a worldbuilding tool, building out a few centuries of history for Dalmore House, an arcane institution in Duskwall. Microscope is an incredible little game — worth a look for any GM, or any writer who’s ever had to brainstorm a millennium of backstory in an afternoon.
Two other campaign pilots are also worth a glance, even though neither got picked up: That Devil, Sam Crow, a Weird West monster hunt with a gunslinger, a priest, and a frontier-wife-turned-witch hunting things that shouldn’t exist, and Heartsworn, a martial-hero drama drawing on Indian epic traditions — think Mahabharata by way of wuxia. Both are session-zero pitches with no follow-through, but they’re solid showcases of their game systems (Monster of the Week and Hearts of Wulin), and the worldbuilding stands on its own.
Other stories
The Beast of Rome is a Roman Empire-era supernatural noir, seven chapters deep, with reader polls driving a few of the key story decisions along the way. It’s been on pause while I focus on Stonetop, but I’ll be returning to it before too long.
Ephemera
During a recent hiatus, I wrote two essays, close readings of old poems I love — Horatius at the Bridge and the opening of Beowulf — looking at how each one builds, layers, and retells the myths beneath them. If you enjoy tales of the elder days, you’ll probably enjoy these.
Happy Reading!
If you’re not sure where to start: the story-so-far post is the fastest way into Stonetop, and The Sweet Sting of Defeat is the essay I’d hand someone first. Glad to have you here.
Gave me a lot to read :) waiting eagerly for my physical edition of Stonetop and already talked to my D&D GM that I want to run Stonetop after our campaign ends