My RPG work

My name is Gerrit and I'm a TTRPG and LAOG designer. Are you interested in the games I have designed? Have a look into this post. If you are interested in an exchange with me about your or my design? Join the Open Hearth community, engage with me on Instagram or join the Facebook group on Remote, Digital Larps and Live-Action Online Games. 

My RPG statistics for 2020 and 2021

 This is how my RPG and LAOG / larp life looked like in the last years - in numbers. Follow me on a statistical ride, based on the form I'm using to track information about the sessions I played. Since I missed posting about the stats for 2020, this is looking back at two years. More so, since I'm now doing stats since 2015, I have now 7 years I can compare with each other. Sounds like a decent time series, doesn't it? 

Surprise, surprise, my gaming moved online over the pandemic. Also, I played a lot less. From the all-time-high in 2017 with 370 hours of gaming, I'm down to 130 hours in 2021. That still sounds like enough to me. The stats nicely show that pandemic times weren't a drastic shift in gaming. Quite the opposite, my gaming has been mainly online since 2017 - when we had moved to Guatemala.  I'm a fan of playing online: the variety of people I can play with, the setup, the commitment to logistics. 

All the following figures are percentages in gaming hours - not counted in sessions. Which means that longer sessions have a higher weight. That seems to me to be the more useful stat as more time usually also means higher importance and hopefully more joy.  

Three Forms of LAOGs

In this article, I present a categorisation of LAOGs - depending on how they make use of the communication channels in place. I identify three different forms: The Diegetic Call, The Invisible Call and The Metaphorical Call. Let me take you on this journey of design exploration. Then make up your own mind how your experience fits or does not fit into this picture. 

My RPG year 2019 part 1: Looking back

It's 2020 and time to look back to my RPG life 2019. Again, I have done statistics and will publish them here in three successive articles. This first one will be about what generally has happened in my RPG life.

My RPG year 2018 Part 3: Characters of the Year Awards

Picture by Tina Cassati

This is about the characters I played. In Part 1 of my review of 2018 I talked about my RPG activities, in Part 2 about my gaming - but now we come to the core of it: the roles - as in role playing. This third and celebratory post is giving all the attention to our protagonists: the characters we played.  Let's give them all a big applause for the good time they gave us.

My RPG year 2018 Part 2: Statistics and insights

Statistics sound boring. But they don't need to be. I track my roleplaying activities to learn, to reflect and to make visible. I think there are some interesting points in here for others, too, hence the publication of the data and my accompanying thoughts.

This is the second part of me looking back into 2018 and what has happened in terms of roleplaying for me personally. Part 1 focused on my activities beside playing. This part is about playing. Part 3 will be the award ceremony for the characters I played.

My RPG year 2018 Part 1: Looking back

I'm carefully tracking my roleplaying activities for a couple of years now. 2018 was no exception. For the next three blog posts, I talk about what I have done and played with some deeper insights behind my personal statistics.

Sharing the cognitive load

This is a re-post of a blog article I wrote for The Gauntlet Blog.


It's an article for online game facilitators and how they can structure the social aspects of a game session: how to discuss the game, bring in safety tools and eventually how to share the roles which usually all seem to automatically fall into the facilitator's lap with other players. I provide a template I created for your convenience. The final paragraphs are dedicated to how to end a sessions, namely how to do a debrief - and finally why debriefing and feedback are so hard to separate from each but should be separate.

Ghost Drums - a game about pain and ignorance

Ghost Drums is a a short story game by Daniel Sojuel and me with art by Ismael Sosof. You can find it in the latest Gauntlet Codex issue, Dark 2. 

With Codex Dark 2 you'll get the game twice: once in English and once in Spanish. 

Here is the free, unedited version of the game.

The game is based on an old Tz'utujil Mayan legend. The legend is also included in Tz'utujil. 

Ghosts who drown in lake Atitlan (Guatemala) return to the town of Santiago Atitlan (where I currently live) to haunt the living. But they are forced to carry drums, so the living can escape them. One day a visitor from the North comes and steals the drums as they make nice souvenirs. 

Designing and playing live action online games – laogs

This year I started a new project on the Gauntlet Hangouts calendar under the name: live action online games. It’s my attempt to bring some of my favourite moments I had in Nordic larps and American freeform into an online world. In a laog, you stay for the actual play time 100% in-character, often the nature of the video call is part of the game. There can be mechanics or meta-techniques but we don’t describe what our characters are doing, but what we do, we do.

Atitlan Riders, a Central American Indigenous Tuk Fast & Tuk Furious Social Drama RPG

Atitlan Riders is my Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) roleplaying game (RGP) about coming-of-age in a modern Mayan town in Central America - and about secretly being fast and furious tuk tuk racing drivers.

The time has come to present the PbtA story game I’m currently developing to the public. In this article I would like to give you an idea of what the game is about, share with you some design elements, where I currently stand in terms of development and what I have in mind for the future of the game.

My RPG year 2017 - Statistics and looking back

Al my characters - part 3 in 2017

It’s time for another look at my RPG session statistics. Something I’m doing now for three years. As my fellow RPG statistican Timberwere was already saying: the more material from past years you have to compare the current year to, the more interesting observations you can make. So I will compare and analyse between the years. But beside all statistics this article is also a lot about all the great things which happened to my gaming in 2017 and I write to celebrate that.

Solo RPG: Last Ride / First Ride

Last Ride / First Ride (LRFR)  is a solo RPG by Jason Morningstar. I played it a month ago, had a lot of fun and would like to share some thoughts I had around it. Below you can find my Actual Play report. 

Planning a healthy RPG weekend

 One of roleplaying groups I run play over extended weekends with a total play time of more than 30 hours. For this group I do a detailed planning and post-play analysis in an Excel workbook which I have made ready for download and use for others here. The tool also allows to plan chapters and single scenes beforehand and a bit of analysis on how you spend your gaming time.

In the following, I will outline why I came up with such a tool and for what purposes it can be useful. It has a lot to do with how keeping a sustainable enjoyable atmosphere around for a long time, considering health, group dynamics and dramaturgy. I will then describe the tool in a little more detail. I close with some observations I have made while using the tool.

Download time scheduling and campaign planning tool here

Download the German version of the tool

Humanity in Action at the CSD Berlin

This Saturday, the CSD parade marches through Kreuzberg and Mitte  and Humanity in Action (HiA) will be part of the parade in a joint block with Aktion Sühnezeichen. LGBT-rights are a very important part of human rights and minority rights and therefore it makes perfectly sense to march on the CSD as a human rights organisation. 

Though I won't be in Berlin myself, I invite everybody to show up. Most of the current fellows of Humanity in Action's summer program in which I participated in 2006 will also be coming and I am sure that we will take part in an impressive political demonstration while we also join a great party. Which other minority manages to combine those two things? Well, the Fuckparade does. 

The HiA block will meet Saturday the 23rd at 11:15 at Prinzenstrasse and Moritzstrasse. The parade itself starts at 12:00, so there is plenty of time to find each other and distribute cool T-Shirts, watch out for the HiA banner and take some Flyers to do some HiA PR. 

Aktion Sühnezeichen has been a regular participant on the CSD with their own block and march alongside other NGOs for equal rights of the LGBT community. As most of you know the Christopher Street Day or Gay Pride Parade is an anual event all over the world commemorating the Stone Wall Riots  in New York in 1969 and helps raise awareness to the civil rights of sexual minorities.