Rust & Ruin is a tabletop roleplaying game. I started it in December 2023, having stolen the name from a previous game I designed a year before. Though the game is far from finished, it’s taken the place of Dungeons & Dragons 5E in my weekly games with no complaints from my players or myself---though I’m biased, and they’re all very nice.

The game is also being designed by my friend Dana, who stepped up from being “merely” a play-tester to become a co-designer last summer, and my other friend and play-tester Hunter is responsible for the logo below. It’s radical and I love it.

The game is our attempt at what might be called minimal simulationism. There’s more bookkeeping here than you’ll see in truly minimal games—like the excellent Maze Rats by Ben Milton—but there’s less than in your standard game of modern Dungeons & Dragons, and with generally richer systems.

We’re spending a lot of time trying to make mechanics that are simple, but that still “feel right.” This comes down to three steps. Choosing what things we want to abstract with mechanics and what things we want to leave to intuition and interaction. Figuring out what parts of the experiences we’re abstracting feel essential to us. And then figuring out how to recreate the feeling of those essential elements with mechanics that are as simple as possible.

None of these things is easy. But they are fun.

Written on: December 8, 2024