She started with us shortly before the beginning of the year but we are proud to officially announce that Cris Viana has joined our team as Lead Graphic Designer! Based in São Paulo, Brazil, Cris is experienced in many areas of graphic design but currently focuses on book design. She’s been in love with TTRPGs […]
Our News
Deathmatch Island – Playtesting now!
We’re very excited to announce that Evil Hat is publishing Deathmatch Island by Tim Denee! What is DMI? Deathmatch Island is a fast-paced game about a deadly gameshow on a mysterious island chain. The competitors don’t know how they got here. They have been selected and recruited, forced to risk their lives in a deadly […]
The Cost of Doing (RPG) Business
The start of a new year is always a time to look over our books and review where our expenses and revenues are heading. The good news is that our financial performance is solid. However, there are some supply-side challenges we need to address.
Our Next Crowdfunding Campaign
Hello friends, We are gearing up for the crowdfunding campaign for Apocalypse Keys by Rae Nedjadi and wanted to take a brief moment to share the thinking behind our decision to launch it on Kickstarter. First, we want to be clear about our company values: We at Evil Hat believe cryptocurrencies and NFTs are too […]
System, Hold the Math
Just to illustrate something, here are a pair of systems that you can use as a basis for resolution. They share two key characteristics – neither is math dependent but both are heavily expectations dependent. Math is, I hope, self explanatory, but expectations are another matter. What that means is that they depend on the […]
More Skills
So many good comments on the last post that I really can’t process them, except to note that they resulted in my digesting them, and lead to this. Ok, let’s start from a premise: If you roll the dice, you’ll succeed. The idea behind this is pretty simple – if your character is one who […]
The Fragile Foundation of Skills
This is a rant. I’m circling an idea, and if you read this, you get to watch. There’s a truism that gets rolled out from time to time when talking about old school D&D vs newer iterations (and more generally, old vs new games) and that is this: “No one fell off a horse before […]
Moving Pieces
This started out as another 13th Age post, but I ended up tabling it as a bigger issue came up in discussion which, I think, crystallized a few thoughts about games, how they’re run and how they’re played. Now, here’s the caveat up front: I’m speaking in broad generalizations here, not making assertions about anyone’s […]
Iconic Examples
So, here are a few specific tricks you might want to consider to build an interesting Icon set: The Icon DeckOne interesting thing about the existing 13 Icons is that they’re not hard to map to half of the greater arcana of the Tarot deck. Some of that is probably intentional, but it’s also almost […]
Icons and Anchors
So, one fun thing to do with the Icons system from 13th Age is to start mapping it onto fiction and game settings you like. I’ve done it several times, and I encounter an interesting pattern – the first few Icons of any setting tend to be very easy to come up with, but somewhere […]