Draw Maps, Leave Blanks (Dungeon World) with Tim Denee

Transcripts available at diceexploder.com

If the thesis of last week’s episode was “hey the fiction of your game matters a lot and can even have mechanical effects,” how do you know how deeply to define that fiction? Maybe no one in indie games has recently faced that question on quite the scale of Tim Denee with Blades ‘68, an expansion to Blades in the Dark. I wanted to have him on to talk about when you completely reinvent the setting, how do you think about what parts of the fiction are important and need to be kept vs what parts should evolve and change?

And to do that, we picked an old mechanic from Dungeon World that cuts to the heart of it: draw maps, leave blanks. But how detailed of maps, and how big of blanks?

Further Reading

Blades 68 on Backerkit

Blades in the Dark by John Harper

Dungeon World

Tim’s maps of Doskvol

Socials

Tim on Bluesky and olddog.games

Sam on Bluesky and itch

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Credits

Our logo was designed by sporgory, our ad music is Lilypads by Travis Tessmer, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.

This episode was edited by Em Acosta.