Edited and adapted from a conversation on July 15, 2025
Alex: Now I understand that you are here to tell me the three secrets of RPG design. Is that right?
Ty: That’s news to me, and I think the secrets might be different based on various factors like your time zone and what year you were born in.
Alex: Okay, well, let’s back up and why don’t you tell me who you are?
Ty: I’m Ty Pitre, I run a little blog/hobbyist game design thing called Mindstorm Press, and that’s about the gist of it.
Alex: And what is Mindstrom up to these days?
Ty: Mindstorm is a little bit on the back burner, but I do have a few big blog posts coming down the pipeline. I am working on the Holy Grail game, the big game, the one that takes years to make, so that’s why the blog has taken a bit of a hit, and just general output has been very quiet for Mindstorm as of late.
Alex: What can you tell me about the Holy Grail game? Or are you someone who prefers to toil in silence?
Ty: I’m a little bit of both. I do like talking about it, but at the same time, I also understand the power that sort of, like, dissipates if you say it out loud. I will share the things I’m comfortable with, though.
Alex: Yeah. That does sound like one of the secrets, by the way.
Ty: [Laughter] Oh no! You’re actually quite the interviewer. You’re getting the secrets out of me without even asking outright. All right, so the big game that I’m working on is called Hollovine. It is a science-fantasy system / setting / adventure that I’m working on. It’s set on a jungle world where humanity is at the point of merging with nature in a lot of different ways. So we don’t have the typical fantasy species list, but we do have a lot of just very weird humans and such.
Alex: So it’s a lot like Portland.
Ty: I’ve never been, but from what I’ve heard from friends that have gone is yeah, it is exactly like Portland. There’s a few — I would call them world anchors — going into Hollovine. And by that, I just mean foundational pillars of the setting. One of those is that the world itself is dying, but rather than going out quietly, it’s actually hyper-evolving. The world is basically trying to fix the problems that humanity has caused. And to do that, it has sped up evolution to astronomical levels as it tries to find a solution.
Alex: I’m getting some Wildsea vibes here.
Ty: Interestingly, I’ve been working on Hollovine sort of on and off throughout the years. This is the first year of major dedication, but when Wildsea came out, I said, “wow, that concept looks really cool. I’m never going to read that book.” It’s too close for cross-contamination. I love looking at the pictures, I love hearing about it, I just absolutely refuse to engage with it — through no fault of its own.
Alex: I have some of those. I am working on a game right now that is inspired by my limited understanding of what a Persona game is, for that same reason.
Ty: I also have a limited understanding of Persona, but I’m suddenly very interested to see what that looks like as an RPG.
Alex: I’ll keep you in the loop. So you said this was a system-slash-adventure. If it’s not opening up too big of a can of worms, what is the difference in your mind between a system and an adventure?
Ty: I think that a system is typically a foundation that you can fall back on when you need rules, when you need guidance or mechanics to solve some kind of problem you’re having. I think that inherently, especially these days, most systems do not come with adventures. So you’re basically given a bunch of mechanics and then told, you know, “play the game” with no adventure support. I think that comes in tiers, of course, too, though, because you have some systems that will come out and it’s purely mechanics, but they have, let’s say, guidelines on how to make adventures, or generate adventures. Some systems are so tightly wound that you don’t need pre-written adventures, because the very nature of them drives conflict. And then down that spectrum, you might have a starter adventure, which is used to learn the rules and also provide some setting and vibes. And then you have systems that come out and are supported rigorously with adventures. I think that you see that especially looking at OSR, NSR, and other similar communities. When you think of systems that are big like Mothership, Mausritter, and Cairn, they are big because they are supported with adventures.
Alex: I want to talk about Mindstorm the blog. You had a blog post about about level setting what is common so that people can get on board with the weird stuff.
Ty: Yup, I titled that blog post Baseline Worldbuilding. It’s the theory I’ve come away with from decades of roleplaying and exploring settings and adventures. Some are easy to grasp, some fall flat. And a setting that is very easy to grasp doesn’t mean that it’s going to land. Every group as a personal baseline that forms as they play together, based on just about a million different factors. But the more you deviate from that baseline, the more mental fatigue and mental energy you need to put in just to imagine the world. So if we take something really simple, like, let’s say this setting is a Game of Thrones medieval-esque world, with a little bit of magic. A lot of people who live in Canada, in the States, probably Europe too, are probably going to be familiar with Game of Thrones. They understand it. It’s also not that far from a lot of tropey medieval stuff. So there’s just this inherent foundation that you can draw on. You can say, yeah, there’s a tavern or an inn over there. And everyone is kind of picturing the same thing if you have that same baseline. The second you deviant from that — let’s say you tell everyone that this world doesn’t have taverns or inns — it might take a group that’s very familiar with fantasy tropes a little while to make that mental leap of understanding. I’ve seen this called out directly in Stonetop, under a part called “handling misconceptions.”
Alex: Right. If I say it’s like Jurassic Park but with pigeons, if you know Jurassic Park—
Ty: —And if you know pigeons…yeah, that’s a great example too. I’m sure most people have seen at least one Jurassic Park.
Alex: Even if they haven’t, it’s breached the cultural osmosis. And even if you haven’t: it’s a park with dinosaurs. They get out all the time. It’s a straightforward pitch.
Ty: I think when you cross that, and go far out of your baseline is where you need to either be putting work in, to build the setting, or you just kind of pitch it and hope for the best. And once it hits someone’s table, it doesn’t really matter what you said as a designer. You can write a setting with every piece of detail possible and then publish it. And someone picks it up and says, “I’m going to run this for my group”, reads it, and tries their best. Their group is going to find a common understanding of that setting together. You don’t really have control when you’re publishing a setting or adventure on what someone else’s baseline is, so you can only use your own baseline as a compass.
Alex: There’s a game that one of my tables plays… I shouldn’t call it a game. There’s a ritual that happens at the table, during the pitch, where someone describes a game as poorly as possible. And it usually starts with Shrek. So they’d say like, “It’s like Shrek, but without most of the fantasy creatures, except one. And the CIA is there, along with the other intelligence agencies. And it’s modern day. And there’s no magic.” And it’s like, okay what part of this is Shrek? You’re describing Night’s Black Agents, which is like CIA agents hunting Dracula.. None of that is Shrek! There aren’t vampires in Shrek.
Ty: I love that.
Alex: That’s the opposite of what you’re describing, the bad way of doing it.
Ty: Maybe, but it is the fun way, which can arguably be the better way.
Alex: You released an adventure a couple years ago called Swineheart Motel. It caught my eye because I have a policy of reading any supplement that rhymes with my name.
Ty: I’m going to change all of mine now. Hollovine is going to be called Vinehart.
Alex: That is a worse name!
Ty: It takes a lot of work to make an adventure. Swineheart Motel is not made for a specific system. I did put a list of systems that I think would work well with it, but I didn’t make it for anything in particular. So mechanics-wise, it’s completely divorced. Setting-wise, it’s sort of like 90s modern day horror movie vibes, which is easily placeable in a lot of the bigger games. But the thing I really learned is how much work it takes to make an adventure. How much you need to include, how much you need to not include, or cut, and how many times you need to iterate to get to a point where you are being truly creative instead of regurgitating things that you’ve already consumed.
Alex: That’s a really important theme that I’ve been writing about myself recently.
Ty: I did write about it on the blog a little bit. Basically the way I made Swineheart Motel was I started asking myself questions. So I knew I wanted to make a horror adventure. So my first question was “Where is this set?” And then after that I [listed] everything that was even sort of exciting, or even just popped into my head. And I had this big spreadsheet. The columns were the questions, and every row under that column was an answer. And for the first part of Swineheart as it was coming together, I wasn’t even writing things in a Word doc or anything, it was only the spreadsheet. It was just iterating, coming up with new ideas, and refusing to use the first five that I came up with.
Alex: The Onion approach.
Ty: Lots of crying?
Alex: The newspaper! They throw out their first six ideas every day.1.
Ty: Oh interesting. Yeah, pretty much that. There’s a bit of a weird thing where you come up with an idea and you almost don’t want to write it down because you know that you’re going to have to cut it. At the same time, you really just have to get the low hanging fruit out of your system. The only way to make them go away is to physically write them down. You can’t just pretend that you won’t use it, you actually have to physically take it out of your head and put it on paper. I think that’s true for almost everything. This is not mind-blowing stuff I’m saying.
Alex: That’s not the second secret?
Ty: Well, if it’s the first time you’re hearing this, it is the second secret. Do not ask for the third secret.
Alex: What helps me with that is I work in Trello and I always have a done slash ignoring column so I can never tell whether I used an idea or whether I threw it out it feels the same to me.
Ty: Ooh, I like that!
Alex: Moving on, when I first met you, you had gathered a reputation for being skilled at naming things.
Ty: That’s true. I’m not sure how that happened. It goes back to the iterating, where I just start thinking of something, and combining words, pulling words that I know and endlessly chewing on something in my brain.
Alex: You named LUMEN, right?
Ty: LUMEN was mine, Anamnesis was a name I gave to Sam [Leigh], Carved from Brindlewood—
Alex: Carved from Brindlewood was yours? You also named the Cyberrats expansion!
Ty: I forgot about that! I haven’t given a name to something in a long time.
Alex: You said you’re not looking at Wildsea, where are you looking for inspiration these days?
Ty: Where I look for inspiration is seperated into two different tracks, setting-wise and mechanics-wise. I just love reading role-playing games. So I just explore what’s out there, what’s new, see what people are doing. And usually I’ll read something and think, “Oh, hey that’s a cool piece of tech! I wonder if it would work in this other context”, and then just kind of iterate on that a little bit. I really like looking at systems, I am definitely a systems enjoyer.
Ty: But for actual adventures and dungeons and settings and all that sort of stuff, I think that not enough people look outside of role-playing games and that’s where the juicy stuff is. Just reading anything about history, there’s an adventure in there. I randomly read about this revolution of the artisans in Italy. [The artisans] didn’t have any power in government, so all of the artisans revolted, took over the government, ran it for a bit, and then obviously it collapsed. But I remember reading that and thinking to myself, “Wow, there’s a full campaign there!” You know, give the artisans magic, give it a little spice of fantasy. Make the bad guys even worse, and you’ve got some variant of a Blades in the Dark [game] where you’re overtaking a city for the good of the painters and sculptors.
Ty: History and the real world is a great source of inspiration and if you’re really into fantasy, I think you owe it to yourself to be looking at folklore and the old myths and all that sort of stuff, and maybe not going so deeply into the pop culture fantasy of now, especially novels, and instead look at the stories that were told back in the day. Look at history, ask yourself, “Where did this trope come from? What inspired this?” and follow these threads as deep as you can until you hit the gold mine.
Alex: That sounds an awful lot like the third secret.
Ty: Oh no.
Alex: I think you accidentally revealed all three of them.
Ty: Well, dang it. Your interviews are just out of this world. I came into this saying to myself, “Whatever I do, I’m not going to reveal any secrets, especially not three game design secrets.” And then here we are.
Alex: Final question, what should people expect when they pick up a Ty Pitre adventure or game?
Ty: With my game design and my adventure design, I’m really looking for a cohesive whole. For example with Swineheart, I wanted it to be an adventure that you could pick up and run right out of the book and never have a spot where you’d need to to make something signficant up, or come up with an answer on the fly. That’s what the person sittting in a dark room, writing endlessly, is responsible for. That’s what I’m looking for in adventures: is the stuff there when I need it, is it coherent, and is it satisfyingly connected together? With systems it’s the same way, I like when procedures, which are sort of mini chunks of game design, are built to support the game in a cohesive and connected way. So here is your travel procedure, here is your downtime procedure, here is your combat procedure. Are the mechanics fun to play with and serve their purpose? Those are the kinds of things I’m looking for. I enjoy the roleplaying aspect of TTRPGs, but I also really like the game part too.
Alex: I love a strong cycle of play.
Ty: It feels like a natural way to support play.
Find Ty’s games on Itch, and follow his blog.
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