I shared a laughter-filled half hour with Quinn Murphy of Thoughtcrime games, where we discussed the blogging–freelancer pipeline, Pathfinder 2e, and the many forms inspiration can take.
Transcript adapted from an interview with Quinn Murphy on May 22nd 2025.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length
Alex: Thank you so much for meeting with me! First off, how would you describe your role in the tabletop RPG space?
Quinn: Thanks for having me! My role? I’d say my role is a ranter, currently on Bluesky, formerly on Twitter. Yeah, I’m a ranter.
Alex: (laughter) That’s where I first encountered you!
Quinn: But actually I have a decent body of work as a freelancer. I’ve done freelance work for [Wizards of the Coast], for Paizo, for lots of other indie places. I’ve done blogging for 4e D&D, and also just sort of my own general stuff.
Alex: Prolific!
Quinn: I also run Thoughtcrime Games, we do Community Radio, I’ve also done Five Fires. I’m clearly not a household name, but I feel like I’ve been around long enough for people who know that to get my schtick. I’m kind of firmly entrenched on the outside, but I’ve got my comfortable little pocket.
Alex: Firmly entrenched on the outside, I like how you phrased that. I first encountered you as one of the earliest enthusiasts (at least on my radar) for Pathfinder 2e. If I remember correctly, you had a Twitter thread where you described it as [D&D] 4e with jazz. I’m a big fan of 4e, so I think that line is why I first started following both you, and pathfinder 2e.
Quinn: (laughter) That would do it! A weird thing I have is that I often forget things I say, and then someone will be like, “Oh you said this thing”, and I’ll think, “Oh that’s right, I did say that.” I do remember saying that now that you brought it up.
Alex: That phrasing really stuck with me, I was like, “You know, maybe I‘ll give Pathfinder second edition a look here!” I played a lot of the first edition back in the day, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect from the second edition, it just wasn’t on my radar. And then to hear you say — if it’s taking 4e inspiration, that caught my attention.
Quinn: How was it, when you tried it?
Alex: I only got to play it once, as a demo game. I played a Paladin, I think. I liked how I could choose how many actions to spend to boost my spells, but it was such a constrained experience, I think it was a 2-hour one shot, all for new players. So I got a glimpse of it, and I walked away thinking, “I would play that again.” I certainly don’t feel like I’ve seen everything it has to offer.
Quinn: I don’t want to go too deep into the well, but I’ve been running it a lot, and one of the best things Pathfinder 2e ends up doing is that it lets you make your characters interesting and unique without sacrificing their effectiveness. Compare that to Pathfinder 1, or [D&D] 3.5 or even 4e to some degree, where you’re like, “Look, I know you want to take Gardening Lore at this level because it fits your character concept, but you’re going to hose your character if you take that.” In certain games, I’ve had to convince my players, look, you’re not going to have fun, because you’re not going to be able to do the things you want in these other areas if you take the fun thing. But in Pathfinder 2, you’re just like, yeah, take the fun thing! There’s these off-levels where all you can get is fun stuff, you get your class features, and you can do your functional stuff right in line.
Alex: So there’s less of the feat tax, or feeling like you need to put points into Tumble at every level up.
Quinn: Exactly.
Alex: You’ve actually written for Paizo, and you mentioned writing for Wizards [of the Coast] as well. How did you get started there?
Quinn: I got started with freelance, actually, through blogging, like a zillion years ago. Back in the days of 4e, I had been on hiatus with roleplaying for a little bit, and I randomly saw 4e in a store, and I thought, “Oh, this seems neat!” I totally burned out on 3.5, it was just too much for me, all of the stuff that it was doing. It was at maximum bloat, and I said I just can’t do this anymore. And then 4e was a change of pace. And shortly after, I decided to start blogging about it.
Alex: What were you blogging about?
Quinn: Oh you know, my different sort of house rules and stuff. I had always done a lot of house rules and amateur game design back in the day, so I just made it into my blog. And then I — it was interesting, because that ended up being one of the things that made my blog kind of unique, is the fact that I had a lot of house rules and interesting new mechanics on there. A lot of other blogs were just reviews or small tweaks on existing stuff. I would just make new systems.
Quinn: One of the things that was really popular was I did a [World of Warcraft] raid boss style called Worldbreakers for 4e. I did different stuff with skill challenges, and that eventually ended up as my first game. The first thing I had published professionally was through Kobold Press, I did the Lost City, and then I was also published a few times in Kobold Quarterly, RIP. I love that mag. And from there it sort of, you know… I don’t know if anybody still thinks of me this way, but for a while people would just see me as a 4e guy. But I like all RPGs. But that really kicked off and turned into lots of different work here and there. And eventually after a lot of ups and downs and life getting int he way, I was sort of taking a break. But then I got a chance to work on some stuff for Pathfinder too, and I just started. And that helped me get back into freelancing and then doing my own work on top of that.
Alex: You mentioned the raid bosses. You mentioned the skill challenge tweaks. Are there any other new rules or mechanics that you introduced that you remember being really proud of? I know it’s been like 15 years since 4E’s heyday.
Quinn: I had done a really good system for gridless 4e.
Alex: Oh, like theater of the mind.
Quinn: Yeah, like theater of the mind 4e. It borrowed some from 13th Age, but you couldn’t do a straight port. Even some of the very simple things were hard because 4e power required, like this was 3 squares or 4 squares, you needed input. And it was a challenge, but I found a strong way to basically turn those range bands into abstract concepts so you could sort of map it. I thought that was really cool.
Alex: It’s very cool!
Quinn: Most people, if they think about the stuff I did on 4e, I did a series of different skill challenges that people really liked, so I was the skill challenge guy for a while. And then I did Worldbreakers. I think those are the two main things people associate me with.
Alex: And are you still blogging today?
Quinn: (laughter). I have a newsletter, Imagination is For Everyone. And it’s been… you know, 2025 has been a lot. (laughter) So I haven’t done as much writing on that as I’d like to, but I’ll probably fire off… I always find something to say, and even when I’m on a Bluesky kind of tear, I always get to a apart and think, “This could have been a newsletter, right?”
Quinn: So I stop it halfway through, like this is getting to be a really long thread. And I’m looking to turn a few of those rants into something more coherent. Not too much longer! My inbox is currently full of email newsletters that are, like, a bit too long. They all think that they’re the only newsletter I read.
Alex: Yes!
Quinn: So I try to make my points very concisely in the newsletter, but that also makes the writing a little bit harder.
Alex: We all appreciate it!
Quinn: I could write a longer one easier, to get that same information concisely is a lot more editing and thinking through it.
Alex: What’s the phrase, “I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”
Quinn: (laughter) It’s true, it’s true! But I’m working on that. So right now, my main blogging platform is regrettably Bluesky right now.
Alex: If it works, it works. And actually, I want to talk to you about something you did post on Blue Sky recently. A few weeks back, you posted about finding inspiration for games everywhere you looked and just always adding them to the pile. What’s been inspiring you lately?
Quinn: Oh, okay, we’re going right down the well, huh?
Quinn: Just the other day, I was tweeting, you know, like, never let me play games because I will often… if I play a really good video game, I’ll find a game in it. A thing that I like about myself is that I appreciate all sorts of games. Like I have my preferences on games I will go for, but if you put a game in front of me that is good, I will appreciate it as a good game, even if it’s not my normal fare. Like I don’t usually play puzzle games very much, but I sat down with Blue Prince—
Alex: Yes, that’s been making big waves lately.
Quinn: I literally have a journal, just full of stuff. Full of notes and everything. And I love that thing! I treasure it. Like I was playing with my son, he was watching me as I was playing, and we discovered this whole new area. I want to meet the developers of Blue Prince and just hug them. It’s just, oh it’s so great! And when a game inspires me, inspires me to that level, I immediately start thinking about how I can use this stuff in an RPG? And then I’m off to the races. So Blue Prince has been inspiring me. I have been thinking specifically on that in a tabletop role-playing context: What does drafting look like in there?
Alex: Where did you land?
Quinn: One idea I had was kind of for a format was like for the Queen meets Magic the Gathering cube style drafts. Instead of everyone just drawing from the top of a shared deck, everyone’s got different prompts or interjections that they can sort of make their own deck of, and then you intersplice them. So you’re still telling some story with the prompts, but someone’s going to play a plot card and then it’s going to be a general prompt to sort of bring people in. And then someone can play, like a twist card that they drafted, or things like that. And that’s just one of them! There are a few other things that Blue Prince has inspired on me, including a haunting semi-competitive ghost game.
Alex: A semi-competitive ghost game?
Quinn: All right, I’ll go into it. It’s essentially taking the draft idea where it’s using a deck of playing cards. While you’re drafting, you’re telling this intro where you’re telling the story about your person. All of you are haunting this mansion, and telling the story of your life before, what happened, why you’re stuck here, and what you’re hoping to get out of it. Are you just looking for simple revenge on the living? Do you want to find rest? Do you want to escape the house and go on a rampage as a revengeful spirit? All those things. And you’ve drafted different haunting types, like violence, or emotions, or you know, special rules of the house, and different ways you can haunt victims who enter the house.
Quinn: And each of you is trying to meet your goal, and how you get that, you need to get your perfect haunt set up. But to do that, you have to manipulate, you have to play your thing, and get the victims to react to it properly, they will move, or have the condition that you want. And you’re telling the story of these ghosts trying to haunt these people, and getting them where they want, like for one ghost, maybe it’s like you need to murder a male victim on the balcony, and that sets you free.
Alex: (laughter) And this idea came from Blue Prince?
Quinn: Yes.
Alex: It doesn’t seem like a linear adaptation of “How can I make a game out of this”, but more of “What parts of this can I adapt to tabletop?” Is that right?
Quinn: (Thoughtful pause) Yeah. Sometimes it’s just the nature and the theme of it. And then sometimes it’s like, there’s this mechanical thread that I would just want to pull. And then I pull it. But, going back to that original thing of seeing the inspiration everywhere, one where I actually got on the theme of something that’s on my hopper. I’ve already done about half the writing for it is one based on the show, “Kevin Can Fuck Himself”, have you ever seen that one?
Alex: That’s the one with the multiple camera setup, right? Half of it is filmed multi cam and half is single cam, like a drama?
Quinn: Well, half of it is a sitcom, and half of it is prestige—
Alex: I haven’t seen it, but I’m familiar.
Quinn: And they start to flip, and merge, and people start getting pulled in and out. I love the theme of it so much, that one actually inspired a game I have on the hopper called Jimmy Can Go To Hell, which is basically taking the concept of that story, but with a lot more variability in the outcome, right?
Quinn: This was the interesting thing of taking that inspiration from different media and stuff you’re exposed to. It ends up being a really cool method of analysis and media appreciation. Because if I just made a game where you can replay the plot of Kevin Can Go Fuck Himself, that really wouldn’t be very interesting, right? Because you could just go watch the show, right? And, you know, they’re probably much better actors than I could try to roleplay for you as a GM. So as a game designer, what I have to do is find the white space in that story.
Alex: Say more about that.
Quinn: In any story, there are paths not taken, boundaries, sort of unexplored, kind of things not mentioned, right, that are nonetheless there and true and possible, right? And so to make a game out of a story setting is to take a look at all of the interesting, true, unsaid things in that space, and then build a system for exploring that while also engaging in some of the sort of tropes and interesting things that we have seen.
Alex: One of the games you mentioned earlier is Community Radio, which is inspired by [the podcast] Welcome To Nightvale. Where’s the whitespace there? Can you talk about how that translated?
Quinn: Yeah, the whitespace in that is — what I love about Welcome to Nightvale, is that there is this portion where we’re doing a radio show, right? And we’re talking about these things that — we’re talking around something that must have happened, right? When we’re saying, like, do not go into the dog park, well, somebody must have, you know… like, you ever see those labels or warnings in a thing where it’s just, like, you know,
no one can touch this lever because, you know, because of X, Y, Z, and it’s so specific, you’re like, oh, somebody must have done this—
Alex: Yeah, this is the Jonathan Rule.
Quinn: Right, exactly! So you know we can’t go into the dog park because somebody has found this out with disastrous results. And so, community radio is like, what if we made half of the game playing out those things that must have happened? And then the other half is making a radio broadcast that describes a thing that we just saw happen. And so, we take that white space of the show and we make it actually a part of the game. And then, and then we build the sort of radio show from it.
Alex: I like that a lot.
Quinn: Yeah, one of the things I love about community radio is that when people play it, they’re like, oh, this fits,the tone and the beats of Welcome to Night Vale perfectly. By the time you get to make the broadcast of it, you’re just like, oh, it feels like you’re making your own episode about something crazy.
Alex: That’s an incredible thing, really. With my last minute here, I want to ask my final question, which is: what is a Quinn Murphy game? What makes one of your games yours?
Quinn: Oh, woah, damn. (thoughtful pause). A thing that makes a Quinn Murphy design is that… We’re gonna take something familiar, and we’re going to find its edges, right? And we’re not going to feel constrained by tradition. In Community Radio, there’s no character sheets, you just need some index cards to write some sort of secret, you know, council notes. But it’s mostly like an improv game, it’s, like, right on the legs of an improv game and a role playing game. A Quinn Murphy game will use role playing to explore things that you might not expect, like how Five Fires is an RPG about hip hop.
Alex: I really like that answer. Thank you so much for chatting with me today!
You can find Quinn Murphy on Bluesky, or find his games and newsletters at Thoughtcrimegames.net