This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 20, November 2025

I designed the original Princess with a Cursed Sword in 2020 to solve a critical problem: I have too many tarot decks.

I’d been playing solo roleplaying games (tabletop roleplaying games) and while many of them used playing cards to generate story prompts, few used tarot cards, and fewer still cared about the image on the card, just the number. Tabletop role-playing games have always had a problem with numbers.

So Princess Sword was designed with these three tenets:

1. Like a tarot reading, it should care about the card itself, not just a value that it generates.
2. Because it’s for just one player, that player should have a lot of control over the story, where it goes, and how and why it ends. The game rules shouldn’t be too prescriptive.
3. It should fit on a single page. That helped me keep it manageable and concise and avoid the scope creep that would have been at odds with the other two tenets.

The game released on itch in February 2020 and became a central text in my first-ever History and Design of RPGs class at DePaul that March. That class was hastily reimagined from in-person to online when a global pandemic swept the globe; solo RPGs ended up being a good fit.

Over the next five years, Princess with a Cursed Sword expanded to encompass four self-contained games using the same system and a System Resource Document that walks creators through making their own games.

The second of these has been on my mind lately, Tavern at the End of the World (Anthropy, 2021) is about a provider of some illicit service in a city under military occupation. The primary tension of the game is serving the local community while avoiding attention from the occupying forces.

It was created in the summer of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter uprisings. One of the possibilities for why the occupation is there is “to secure law and order.” I wanted to allow for the possibility that the occupying forces were not some other nation’s invading military, but the city’s own. Police are an occupying force.

It’s no wonder state police and CPD are so eager to help the federal agents currently occupying our city.

In 2024, Tim Hutchings, author of seminal solo RPG The Thousand Year Old Vampire and my friend and mentor, approached me about participating in a new series he was doing with Central Michigan University Press.

The first “Art & System” BackerKit campaign would include a new edition of Liam Liwanag’s Dog Eat Dog (a devastating game about colonialism in the Pacific Islands and one of the games that got me interested in tabletop design in the first place), Tim Kleinert’s The Mountain Witch, and a new hardcover edition of Princess with a Cursed Sword.

The new Princess Sword book collects all four of my original games, plus a new one, plus the SRD. It features writing by a number of designers, including Nell Raban (Sid Meier’s Civilization VII), Jack de Quidt (Friends at the Table), and Sharang Biswas, who gave Tavern at the End of the World its name. The whole thing is held together by gorgeous art from Evlyn Moreau, my favorite up-and-coming tabletop artist.

After a delay due to federal funding cuts (CMU is a university press), the BackerKit campaign launched October 1, 2025. It was fully funded within 48 hours; by the end of the month, we had smashed through our one and only stretch goal (which turns the Princess Sword book into an actual journal the game can be played in).

I think I was more prepared for the campaign to fail than for it to succeed.

It’s late 2025. No one has a job anymore, including me – I was laid off from my University appointment during those budget cuts. The games industry has been through several years of mass layoffs, and things are especially dire for games writers – already an undervalued skill, now further eroded by generative AI. Any day, that bubble threatens to burst and take what’s left of the American economy with it.

Every morning, I look out the window of my apartment at the gently swaying tree outside and I try to square that sense of peace with the knowledge that somewhere in my city, maybe not even far, federal agents are beating, gassing, kidnapping people who could be my neighbors. Like many Chicagoans, I carry a whistle with me to alert neighbors if I see ICE try to grab someone. Schools are on lockdown during the day.

What do you make with success at the end of the world? What do you do with a book when the world is burning? Why make art when tech companies are destroying the very definition of art?

There is some comfort in thinking of it as a form of resistance.

The BackerKit campaign is finished, but Princess with a Cursed Sword is available for purchase on itch.io: https://w.itch.io/cursed-sword