We have to build the wolf!
Aaron King might be the funniest person I have ever interviewed. Assume every conversation is punctuated with (laughter) instead of the more typical dot. We spoke about finding inspiration from the inevitability of death, giant wolves, whales eating your parents, and midnight olives.
This interview was adapted from conversations on June 4 and June 7, 2025. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Alex: Thank you for talking with me today. Starting off, you wear a lot of hats in the TTRPG space. How would you describe your role?
Aaron: I am someone who is trying to leave the TTRPG space, but I can’t.
Alex: Trying to leave?
Aaron: I keep failing. I’m a quitter. I’ve had so many jobs in my life, I just… I’m not trying to leave it. I’m a lifelong dungeon master who, especially during lockdown, got drawn into game design and the RPG community. It’s always felt weird, but not bad.
Alex: A lot of people came in [to the TTRPG scene] around that time.
Aaron: Yeah, I had been running D&D 5e since it came out, and I hate RPG histories in introductions, so I don’t want to go any further back, but I had been running a game of that and then started getting into more indie games and just started playing online with strangers like a lot of us did, I think. And just, you know, all my cool friends were designing games. I thought, I might as well do it too.
Alex: Is that where Patchwork World comes from?
Aaron: You were kind enough to send me your notes [about this interview], and I made my own notes under them. And under Patchwork World, I wrote, “Weird 2021–ass game”. It came out over four years ago now. When I look back, I’m proud of a lot of work that I did, and it was a very stressful time to be doing that work, and I’m glad I finished it. But there’s so much I would change right now. For people unfamiliar, it’s, I guess, a weird fantasy Powered by the Apocalypse RPG. No classes, no playbooks, no stats. You just pick a bunch of weird moves and then roll with the questions a la Pasión de las Pasiones.
Alex: By Brandon Leon-Gambetta.
Aaron: Yes! One of my game design heroes.
Alex: So I have to ask, what kinds of things would you change?
Aaron: Ugh, I don’t know!
Alex: You said you’d change things! I thought you were teeing me up!
Aaron: I find myself cringing at some of the prose, some of the text. I think I could cut it about in half, and it would still be just as good.
Alex: Surely you’d leave the whale move, right?
Aaron: Yes. Whale Ate Your Parents would remain. it’s something that people that I meet who have read it will just say, oh, yeah, I remember you from this. I remember you from Whale Ate Your Parents.
Alex: I sort of feel like that move overshadows the rest of what is a very good game.
Aaron: Yeah, put it on my gravestone. When I die, I hope someone finds this interview and they’re like, well, we gotta write this weird whale shit on a piece of granite now, planted in the ground.
Alex: I was talking with Moss Powers of Hellwhalers a few months back. We are working on a game called Needlestitch, and when brainstorming, we were talking about what we wanted moves to look like, and Whale Ate My Parents — is it roll plus whales killed?
Aaron: Roll plus whales killed, yeah. So the more whales you kill, the more likely you are to find your parents inside it.
Alex: Yeah. That just came up organically because it’s a shared touchpoint. I think a lot of people in the space are familiar with Whale Ate My Parents.
Aaron: I think that’s another part of it is that era, we were all so online that I think people were just retweeting the weirdest stuff as a coping mechanism with reality. And so, you know, there are some strange things I said back then that took off and most of it I stand by.
Alex: And the rest is lost to history.
Aaron: I hope so! Twitter will drown in the ocean and no one will ever know about Whale Ate My Parents.
Alex: Would it be all right if I put a picture of the move in here?
Aaron: Absolutely. The game is free now, so if anyone wants to go see it, feel free. Two, if anyone wants to steal it, use it for anything, please feel free.
Alex: I want to talk about inspirations. I’m not sure if you want to keep talking about Patchwork World, or if you’d rather pivot to something else.
Aaron: Yeah, Patchwork World was… I called it Baroque for a long time, because it was like, what if I put all my weird gargoyles on the side of this church and just hung all of my obsessions on it? So Whale Ate My Parents is that. It’s partially inspired by Sims Medieval —
Alex: Sims Medieval? That’s not one of the better known Sims!
Aaron: No! But characters in Sims [Medieval] could have the trait Whale Ate My Parents. It’s also inspired by my obsession with Moby-Dick, one of my favorite books. But there’s also a move called Duck Soul, which is about being a Dark Souls character, only instead of having a Dark Soul, you have a Duck Soul. You can roll, and water comes off your back. You know, I don’t know! It’s just like what if I took everything in my brain that’s been sitting in the compost heap there, decaying.
Alex: There’s a phrase I first picked up in The Mythical Man-Month, “Beware the second design” because you make your first successful game and you’re like, “This is great!” and then all the ideas that you had to cut just come over, you know you want to shove them into the second one and say oh why not? Everything goes in here.
Aaron: That was my first game.
Alex: Oh.
[I should mention that I thought Aaron was saying that Patchwork World was his first game, and not that his first game was full of all the ideas. This confusion was my fault alone, and lasted past the end of the interview].
Aaron: It was a year after COVID-19 hit the mainstream I was living alone, was still very socially isolated (on purpose), and suffering from a terrible ear infection. And I remember there were days where I was laying there, and I was like, what if I die? What if this is worse than an ear infection? I better finish this game so that if I die, everything I know will be in this game. Which is so overblown. I was fine!
Alex: I mean what a game to come out swinging with!
Aaron: I guess. Again, of its era, for sure.
Alex: Today you’re no longer on lockdown, you no longer have an ear infection. What is driving you forward? It’s not I have to get this out before I die. What’s motivating you today?
Aaron: I mean, I think that’s still it. It’s just a different death I fear.
Alex: Just zoomed out a little bit.
Aaron: Right. I mean, I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Which obviously has had a lot of its own stuff going on.
Alex: And also during 2020!
Aaron: Exactly. And that is still a wound in this city. ICE was here just the other day surrounding a taco joint 10 blocks from my house. So it still feels like that year is happening. I’m sure everyone feels doomy and gloomy, and I’m not trying to say I’ve got a special brand of that stuff. But it’s been very strange to often be able to literally walk down to the main street near me and feel some of that same stuff.
Alex: Historically Minneapolis, and Minnesota in general, has not been at the forefront of the country’s consciousness. And in 2020 it very much was thrust directly into the limelight.
Aaron: Everything I’ve loved about this city for so long is still here. Some things have not changed one bit, and other things have changed so much. But nothing will keep you aware of politics more than tear gas blowing in your window on a summer night, and armed National Guard people being posted on the street as I walk to the liquor store.
Alex: That’s got to color your world, and your designs.
Aaron: Again, I’m not trying to say, “Woe is me”. I’m a somewhat privileged white person. But even if I’m not directly affected, my friends are, and my neighbors are. My best friend bought a house two blocks from George Floyd Square three months before he was killed there. So she is in it much heavier than I ever was. But the cool thing coming out of that is that she knows all her neighbors now, and they’re texting all the time, and they’re looking out for each other. So as hard as some of this has been, to see neighbors banding together is really cool, and I hope that informs my life as much as the hard stuff.
Alex: It sounds flippant, but I mean this sincerely: that is a very Mr. Rogers outlook.
Aaron: People look out for each other. My friend has a lot of chronic illness stuff, so a lot of times she is inside for a long time. If [her neighbors] don’t see her for a few days, they’ll send her a text, or someone will stop by. I just wish that was what we all took from all of this horrible stuff going on, or that that had more power into the national scale.
Alex: I love that sentiment. And even with all that’s going on, you’re still motivated to create, rather than being bogged down by it all.
Aaron: All of my life, I feel the urge to set stuff down in text or whatever format has been just like very natural to me. Sometimes it feels like something I have to do. And I don’t know if that’s a sign of mental illness, which again is not a flippant thing, it’s something I have worked on my whole life, but I don’t know that I could stop if I tried. Like I’ve said, “I’m taking a break”, and then I wake up at 5 a.m. and I’m like, I gotta write a 10 page game real quick.
Alex: I totally get that. I have tried to walk away a couple times, and where I’m at is I have waterproof paper and pens in my shower.
Aaron: That’s some advanced tactics. That’s really good.
Alex: My wife got them for me for Christmas. It remains one of the best gifts I have ever received. She was tired of me going full Archimedes through the house.
Aaron: Lock yourself in the bathroom, turn the fan on and write it down like a normal person out of all of our earshot.
Alex: The two things you’re most known for is Patchwork World and RTFM. Is that correct?
Aaron: Probably. I hope I never know.
Alex: That was my attempt to elegantly pivot to RTFM without… now I’m wondering am I forgetting something?
Aaron: I don’t know, name one more game I wrote! I’m kidding. Please don’t.
Alex: (laughing) I can make this interview sound very antagonistic in the edit.
Aaron: EVERYTHING I’M SAYING WILL BE IN CAPS AND ITALICS.
Alex: What is RTFM?
Aaron: It’s a RPG book club podcast, which we always said at the start of it. And now there’s another cool podcast called the TTRPGbook club podcast. And so I worry that now when I call it that, it sounds like I’m trying to say we were the first, but we were not the first.
Aaron: There’s lots of other podcasts that cover RPGs. And you should go listen to the TTRPG book club podcast. You should also listen to RTFM, which is a podcast I started with Max Lander again, during lockdown because we met in a game design discord and thought we should be friends. But you live in Canada and I live in America and we’ll never meet in real life. So what do you do? You start a podcast. Each episode we cover one book, one RPG book that we read and talk through. Often we have a guest. Our guests are usually very smart. And then, you know, we do six to 12 episodes of that. And then we do a little roundup of what we’ve covered. We call those our seasons. And then a lot of times there’s a season theme. Like we’ve done sexy games, we’ve done monster games, and we’ve covered most mainline D&D editions as well. So it was really just a way to keep hanging out with each other and structure that hangout time.
Alex: Oh, I love that.
Aaron: We are the ENNIE award–losing RPG book podcast. Max, my co-host is a game design professor in Toronto. He’s the smart one. And then I’m like there for the yucks and you know, the jokes. I do the research as well. It’s been really cool to have our friends on, but it’s also been really cool to approach people. Dia Lacina, this very smart video game person, these super cool people that we just have reached out to and been like, “Hey, we just do this weird thing. If you want to come hang out.” And now like, I’m just ride or die for Dia. Quinn’s from Shut Up and Sit Down and Quinns Quest has been on an episode, which is wild, covering Pasión de las Pasiones. It’s just been really cool to find out that people like to sort of hang out with us, as parasocial as that sounds.
Alex: Is there a place that you would recommend, either a season or an episode, that people should start with?
Aaron: They’re all really, I hope, pretty standalone. We don’t have a lot of lore developments. The one lore development, we did a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay episode with John Geary, who is a game designer who I met in that early lockdown era, who does not really do a lot of game design stuff anymore. And I hope they’re just like living a good and pleasant life outside of it. But John wrote a game called Sledgehammer, which was a rules-light, gritty zine-based, fantasy game like Warhammer, but what if Warhammer fit on a single sheet. And I’m obsessed with it. And Max is obsessed with it. And so the only lore you need to know going into RTFM is that often we’ll say, I like this, but I wish we could Sledgehammer it, which just means I wish I could smash off all the boring, too big parts and release a tiny gritty zine like sledgehammer.
Aaron: My personal favorites: Dia’s episodes for Wet Grandpa, which is an awesome OSR adventure by Evey Lockhart. And then Dia came back to cover Keep on the Borderlands, the classic D&D adventure. I think those are great. I think I just mean, I had a great time, which is my only real metric. And then we’ve started doing interviews as well. We just had an episode where we interviewed Kali from Gem Room Games, who co-wrote DUKK BÖRG, Letters to Sandra, lots of other cool games. And she has a history in library science and museum curation and is super knowledgeable about fiber arts and textiles. We ended up talking about that. She’s super brilliant, and she carries the show. Don’t listen to the show because of me, go listen to the show because we did that cool interview with Kali.
Alex: When it comes to game design what should someone expect if they pick up something with your name on it?
Aaron: Lately I have become known as someone who is like, “Make your shitty thing.”
Alex: Say more about that.
Aaron: Please send me your eight page stapled zine. Go through the process of having an idea, writing it down, smashing it through layout and sending it through a printer, finding a stapler and having a finished thing. And to me, that’s so much more important than getting cool art or doing a Kickstarter or having [a spine, or an ISBN].
Alex: I’m always saying that the worst thing you have on paper is better than the best thing that lives in someone else’s head.
Aaron: See, that’s way cooler. I should have said that. Make it so I said that as well.
Aaron: We are obviously seeing such an onslaught of AI and corporate media and, you know, the way that a show is made for streaming to just kind of remove all friction. And that’s really sad and depressing to me. And as someone that grew up reading punk zines and going to punk shows, like I don’t care about that. Or I only care about the movie Thunderbolts* If you write a little zine about your own mental health and how the Thunderbolts helped you deal with that struggle or whatever, like those prisms of, again, I guess getting back to like community and neighbors, I want to know what they are doing and thinking.
Aaron: And I think our access to computers and printers, as much as people try to stop us from using them in fun ways now, makes it really easy to get your own thoughts out there. And I want to see that. I will read anyone’s zine, especially if I find it in a cafe or a little free library. Whereas I’m very hesitant to read a published 300 page book or whatever. So I think I also try to live that dream to get back to your question. Like I am very happy to, like I said, smash out a 12 page thing based on a weird archival document that my sister found at her job in the Minnesota historical society.
Alex: Is this a true story?
Aaron: Yeah! My sister works the historical society here and one of her coworkers was scanning old documents. Her coworker Perry, who I have now met in person, which again, part of the reason to do this is because you get to meet weird archivists in person because Perry scans a document, an ad for Nyal’s worm syrup. Nyal is like a Norwegian Neil, the name Neil. And so they scanned this weird worm syrup document that was an ad to like get the worms out of your child. And my sister sent it to me and was just like, this just has your vibes.
Aaron: Nyal’s worm syrup. When a child grinds its teeth during sleep, complains of itching about the nose, has colicky pains, impaired appetite, and offensive breath, the child is suffering from worms. Nyal’s worm syrup brings relief, permits the little one to sleep in comfort, restores healthful appetite. It is sure to kill and remove the worm, which is an awesome sentence. No one today would write that sentence. It’s also — this document ensures — pleasant to take. My sister sent me that and I was like, I need to make an encounter based on this. I need to make an RPG module. And I did and it was fun. And then my sister printed them out and handed them out to her coworkers, including the person that scanned this document, who seemed happy to have had this happen.
Alex: Going full circle.
Aaron: Yeah. It’s a black and white eight page thing with a bunch of old fashioned advertisements. And I guess I don’t care if anyone ever plays it because I just got to talk to my sister about worm syrup and meet this archivist. So just make a weird shitty thing.
Alex:I haven’t been to your city in over 10 years, but the last time I was there, I saw the greatest piece of public art I’ve ever encountered. It’s a giant fiberglass moose and wolf… does this ring a bell?
Aaron. No, but now I want to know more about it.
Alex: There is a bicycle in each, they’re 20 feet tall, and when you ride the bike, it lights up and plays drums and someone reads poetry about hunting and being hunted, depending on which one you’re in. They were in opposite sides of a field near the convention center.
Aaron: See here’s the problem. I avoid downtown like the plague. I hope it’s still there!
Alex: The reason I brought it up is I wanted to know if Minneapolis has a culture of public art that has inspired you.
Photo by Jayme Halbritter
Aaron: We do have a lot of public art. There are little things where you push a button and someone will like read a poem and you get to see a little machine do some weird steampunk spins while that happens. Weirdly, I also grew up near Black River Falls, Wisconsin, which has a giant fiberglass orange moose and a big mouse on a piece of cheese. And then nearby, there is the graveyard of these fiberglass statues. There’s a place nearby that would manufacture them and fenced in. And you would like sneak in as a child, as an evil teen, all these like not quite right fiberglass statues of like the Bob’s Burgers guy or whatever. So yes, I love weird public art. And again, it’s the old white man version of [making] a shitty zine, except I’m going to spend 20 years pouring weird cement and making like a broken mirror Virgin Mary… I live by a place called Powderhorn Park. Every day they have a May Day parade, and the parade includes the South Minneapolis Battle Trains.
Alex: BATTLE TRAINS?!
Aaron: They’re, they’re like giant welded trucks that are pulled by humans sometimes. And there might be like a half pipe in one or a flamethrower that’s powered by drummers. Those people all live in my neighborhood. And then there are also like weird giant puppet theaters that do performances in this park as well. So yeah, again, just like some real freak shit that I would never see anywhere else. That is so limited by budgetary constraints that they produce something that no one else would make. And I love it.
Alex: That is incredible.
Aaron: Yeah, I don’t know anything about your moose and wolf, but I’ve got a battle train in my back pocket! When I see stuff like this, or the Art Shanty Fair, where people make weird art shanties on a frozen lake every year, I think, “This is what we do because we’re stuck inside six months out of the year.” And we’re just like, when we have a chance to go outside, you will see our strange thoughts become unshackled. And we will build a giant light up wolf. We will build a battle train that has a flamethrower and someone cooking a oat on it. It’s weird!
Alex: And COVID did the same thing.
Aaron: I think COVID escalated it, and now we have — again, we might die soon! We have to get the giant wolf built!
I realized I forgot to ask Aaron about Sword School, and he was gracious enough to talk with me a second time a few days later.
Alex: Thank you for coming back when I realized I forgot to ask you something about something you made, because I love it. You made a Tumblr post years ago called First Day At Sword School. From the title, it looks like it was from a move a day creative exercise.
Aaron: Yeah, it was Dungeon 23, one of those daily exercise things. I was like, well, I’m not going to do a dungeon room a day, but I will write a PBTA move a day. And that lasted for two months, which means I wrote 60 moves. And one of the months was February. You can find this on my Itch page in a January PBTA digest.
Alex: I found this on Tumblr, isolated. Are these all from the same game, or are they isolated?
Aaron: They are all independent. The one after Sword School is about Camel Cash. Are you old enough to remember Camel Cash?
Alex: I have never heard of Camel Cash. Are you — wait, are you older than me?
Aaron: I’m 41.
Alex: I’m 30, I assumed we were approximately the same age.
Aaron: Oh, I’m unfortunately much closer to death.
Alex: We don’t know that!
Aaron: Camel Cash was, when you smoked Camel cigarettes, they came with a little piece of Camel Cash, and if you smoked enough cigarettes, you’d get enough Camel Cash that you could send it to them, and they would send you, like, a T-shirt with Joe Camel.
Alex: (laughing) What? This is insane.
Aaron: The Sword School move is, like, two pages long. It’s really long. The move after, from January 11th, is called Camel Cash. And it says, when you smoke one branded cigarette, mark one harm, then mark one branded coin that you can spend to mark one branded cool. And that’s it. Some of them were very small. Some were almost full games unto themselves.
Alex: This is incredible. I’m going to look more into this. But what you’re telling me is that there is no more sword school.
Aaron: Well, I will tell you a secret. There is more Sword School, but it’s different. I have, like, 80 things on my Itch.io page, and I’ve hidden most of them, because I’ve made them and put them up for a month and then disappeared them. But, for a long time, I was trying to… hack, I guess you would call it? the classic Arthurian RPG Pendragon. And I wanted it to be Sword School, like Revolutionary Girl Utena. So, I rewrote the whole character creation life path system from Pendragon to be set at this same Sword School. And I don’t remember which of these came first. But you can roll your whole history of your ancestors and which ones fell in love with vampires in France and all this kind of stuff. So, there’s another half of a game.
Alex: I was active on Tumblr for about two months between leaving Twitter and becoming fully active on Bluesky, and in those two months I think I reblogged the Sword School post at least two or three times. Every time I would see it I would say, “This is great!” I finally started working on a game about being aliens trying to fit in at a human high school. I’m not going to pretend that it started as anything other than an Animorphs ripoff, and that move stayed in my mood board the whole time. Even without the vampire stuff, or sprouting wings, that move is such an evocative thing — do something that earns you an in with a powerful clique, it’s such an essential piece of that high school experience. It’s toothy!
Aaron: Right, and it is, you know, I mean, if you watch any school-based TV show or read any books like that, like, you know, even with Buffy [The Vampire Slayer] or the cartoon Doug, again, I’m showing my age, I guess. And I think that’s, like, the joy for me of that Move a Day project, and that’s the joy I find in well-crafted PBTA games as well, like Monsterhearts is a high school-based weird one as well. It is the game design equivalent of poetry, where you read a good poem that’s half a page long, and you’re like, oh, shit, and then you think, maybe I would read a whole novel like this, and then you realize, like, the sustained emotional density and the sustained, like, linguistic density is probably less enjoyable and may be much harder to write across 10, 20, 100 pages. So I guess I’m just saying that it’s sort of cheating to just write — I can always write one tiny bit of a good game. I can very rarely write an entire good game.
Alex: Hire Aaron King to write one tiny bit of your game.
Aaron: Yes, please. I will write such a good half page.
Alex: So much for leaving the TTRPG space! Thanks for chatting with me again. I will find some way to fit this in, even if it’s just shoehorned in at the end.
Aaron: You can use that Yoda meme, you know?
Alex: Which… no?
Aaron: (laughing incoherently) There’s a picture of Yoda, he’s laying down, and the text says, after eating 37 olives straight out of a jar while standing in front of the refrigerator at 1:34 a.m., there’s that picture of him dying. And then there’s a picture of him, like, a lively puppet from the later shows, and it says, 2:12 a.m., going back for more olive. So this could be, you know.
Alex: When I type in “Yoda meme”, none of that shows up until I add the word “olive”. Olive was a load-bearing piece of this.
Aaron: You don’t actually have to use this. I will not be mad if Yoda does not appear.
Alex: He won’t!
Find Aaron’s games at itch.io, and RTFM at your favorite podcast place.