Newsletter – Loot The Room

Ritual & Release

LtR_Chris1 — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 12:20:25 +0000

I was in a decent routine of writing these emails roughly once a month. Then I wrote Wheneverly back in May and immediately stopped writing emails. Part of that has been a lack of desire to continue writing on Substack, which I’ve now solved by moving away from that platform, but part of that has also just been feeling like I haven’t had anything to say. But here we are, on a brand new platform, and suddenly I have to find something to talk about to justify having put in the effort of finding a new platform to write on.

Back in June I was asked to speak at Multiplatform 2025: Rituals of Play about my work. I wrote a presentation, practised it, and then immediately threw it all out on the day after listening to a few other speakers. Instead I ended up talking a little about my approach to my work and to writing, and how ritual and oracle imbue my work both in the things that I actually write and the way that I write them. The past few months have been a bit of a creative struggle, and sticking to my rituals and routines has helped me to get work done where it’s felt really hard. So I figure rather than writing a whole new email for the sake of writing a new email, I’ll instead share my talk from that day. This is a transcript from my talk rather than the notes that I spoke from, so please excuse any clumsy phrasing or strange sentence constructions – I’m a much better writer than I am a public speaker.

if you’re not interested in that, then I have some new releases out and some stuff coming up that you might be interested in, which I’ll list first so that you don’t have to scroll to find it. If you are interested in my talk from Multiplatform, keep reading to see me talk about me for a little bit. And, as always, there’s a picture of Lucky at the end as a reward for spending some of your time with me.

The Haunting of The Wretched

What’s New?

Earlier this week I announced The Haunting Of The Wretched, the follow-up/sequel to The Wretched. I’m calling this “ASMR horror” and I’ll have more details about it very soon, but in the meantime you can follow the pre-launch page here.
My new Mörk Borg adventure CANDLE is now available in print and digital formats. This is a chaotic reverse dungeon crawl that grabs your PCs, transports them into the bottom of a temple alongside a very pissed off devil, and says “now what?” It’s a ton of fun and I hope you’ll pick it up.
My short story ‘A Black Mile To The Surface‘ appeared in Swords & Sorcery Magazine back in June. You should read it.

Light A Candle

Multiplatform 2025

My name is Chris Bissette. I’m a writer and game designer based here in Manchester. My work is primarily in tabletop role-playing games. I write for games like Pathfinder, Discworld, Hunter, the Reckoning. Most recently I’ve been working on designing the new edition of Tunnels & Trolls. But I think that what’s most relevant to what we’re talking about today and over this weekend is my work in solo journalling games and in indie role-playing games that draw on the traditions of lyric games.

I had some notes about how I was going to talk about my work but in listening to Dr. Howard’s keynote speech this morning, I realised that maybe I should take a different approach. That may prove to have been a terrible decision because I’m sort of going off the cuff but we’ll see.

My background before I got into tabletop was in creative writing. I did my masters at Salford in 2016, and I’ve been deeply interested in ergodic literature and non-traditional and non-linear narrative structures for a long time. This is all something that I’ve drawn on as I’ve moved into tabletop. But something that I hadn’t really considered or connected to my work in tabletop until I listened to the keynote this morning was the idea of occult practise as playful, and the idea of the overlap between occult practise and play and ritual and play.

Ritual has been a part of my creative practise for as long as I can remember. I have a very set writing ritual. I do the same things before I sit down to write and when I’m finished writing, and I think about them as opening and closing a ritual space. Part of the development of this has simply been in the pursuit of forming good writing habits, and part of it has been in the pursuit of treating my writing as a job, not just something that I do as and when I feel like it. But I’ve also found that the formality of beginning a writing session helps me slip more easily into a state that is conducive to creativity.

To get back to my work specifically, in 2020, like many people, I found myself without a gaming group anymore and I began to get into solo role-playing games. I was still going into the office but had very little to do once I was there, and I wanted to keep playing games. This was when I discovered journalling games, but what I found with journalling games was that many of them were little more than creative writing prompts. Many of the oracles were very vague, and I was struggling to see a difference between playing a game and just writing fiction, because it was the feeling of play rather than the feeling of creation that I was craving.

So I decided to write a game that would act as a more ‘formal’ journalling game, one with very defined procedures of play. Or, you could say, rituals of play. I wrote a game called The Wretched, which is a space horror journalling game that’s basically Alien with the serial numbers filed off.

What was novel about The Wretched at the time was the very structured mode of play. You play with a deck of cards, dice, a microphone, and a Jenga tower, and there’s a very formalised structure to the procedures that you go through as you play the game. The game is split into days – effectively rounds – and on each day you roll a die which tells you how many oracle cards to draw. You draw the oracle cards, which direct you to specific prompts to respond to about the fictional situation that you are in, and many of those prompts will also instruct you to pull a block from the tower. The Jenga tower acts as a clock that tells you when the game is over. It provides a rising tension and it provides an external stimulus that, when combined with the inciting nature of the prompts, creates an experience that is very intense, emotionally and mentally. Playtesting this game was the first time I experienced bleed – although it’s a game about being alone, stressed, isolated, and living under the threat of impending death that was written during the first COVID lockdown, so it’s probably fair to say that “bleed” has been a facet of the game since its inception.

Crucially, I found the Jenga tower also gives you a very clear indicator of when to close the circle and step away from the game. And it’s only now, having listened to Jeff speak earlier this morning, that I’ve realised how much the structure of The Wretched and the many games that have made use of the game engine that I wrote in the 5 years since I released that game mirrors my own creative practise.

I’m very interested in games with explicit defined beginning and end points – games like Jason Morningstar’s The Skeletons, or Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year. My work outside of solo games is in writing adventures for more traditional tabletop role-playing games, and I’m specifically drawn to the megadungeon as a mode of play. I’m interested particularly in dungeons as a mythic underworld, a liminal space where the rules of reality are changed and different, as a space of transformation, both physical and mental. For me, I think these spaces tap into some of our oldest modes of storytelling.

This is a mode of play with a defined set of boundaries. You go into the dungeon, you experience whatever it is that you experience in the dungeon, and then you emerge changed – but you do emerge, and your delve into the mythical underworld comes to an end, and generally the session of play comes to an end when you leave the dungeon, safe in the knowledge that you survived and that you can choose to go back at a time that suits you.

The other thing that I think is interesting about this mode of play is its reliance on oracle and procedure, and on being driven by a force that’s external to the players and the GM. Much of what happens in the megadungeon is driven by rolls on wandering monster tables and on reaction tables to determine how wandering monsters respond when they are met, and this leads play in the direction that nobody – not the GM, not the players, not the writer of the dungeon – is able to predict.

My current big project is a huge sandbox campaign setting for a fantasy role-playing game that I’ve written, imaginatively titled a dungeon game, and this setting reimagines the ‘dark ages’ of sub-Roman Britain into a mythic past where the Old North still stands, and where Wales has separated itself from their neighbours to the east by building a massive ditch and flooding it. It invites players to place themselves into this fictionalised version of a past that could have been and to discover it through play, and the setting is filled with these sorts of random tables and oracles that I’ve talked about. Something that I think is interesting is that I’ve also been using oracles to write the setting, which is also something I do when I write dungeons as well.

The first thing I did before anything else was to write procedures for deciding what each section of the map is, and to use those procedures to generate the world to give me a framework to write in – and so, just as this mythic past reveals itself to players, it’s been revealing itself to me during the writing process in a way that feels very much like accessing something outside myself. I’m constantly surprised while working on it – the oracles guide not just play, but creation itself.

What I’m realizing, partly through this conference, is that there’s something fundamentally ritualistic about the way I approach both playing and making games. Whether it’s the formal procedures of The Wretched, the liminal space of the megadungeon, or my own writing practice, there’s always this sense of opening a sacred space, engaging with forces beyond our control, and then closing that space when the work is done. And maybe that’s what draws me to games in the first place; they offer a safe way to ritualize our engagement with uncertainty, creativity, and transformation.

Thank you.

On Restless Tides

LtR_Chris1 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 09:45:06 +0000

It’s funny how creativity never moves in a straight line. For me it seems to come in phases, shifting constantly not just between individual projects but across entire mediums. One month I’m deep into writing fiction, the next all I can think about is music, and then without warning I’m back into game design. It’s like my brain refuses to follow a single path, darting between different creative expressions depending on some internal tide that I’ve never quite managed to predict.

That restlessness is present even within a single medium. In games specifically, I’ve spent the last few years immersed in traditional fantasy adventures and dungeon design. But this year I’ve suddenly found myself returning to a form I stepped away from years ago and once again becoming interested in solo journaling games.

There’s something uniquely intimate about creating a game meant for one person and their thoughts. When I wrote my first journalling games I was fascinated by the quiet conversation between player, page, and prompts. It’s like leaving notes for strangers to find, never knowing what stories they might tell in response. Working on ‘Blood In The Margins’ has been a process of both familiarity and discovery, like revisiting your childhood home to find that everything seems smaller, but the rooms somehow contain new corners you’ve never noticed before. (Incidentally my partner and I did visit my childhood home a few weeks ago. That was a very surreal experience.)

Creative evolution isn’t always about moving forward into uncharted territory. Sometimes – often, in fact – it’s about returning to old haunts with new eyes, about looking at what you’ve done in the past and bringing the experience of the new, present you to bear on it. The Wretched, like many solo games, contains prompts that are relatively lose. Blood In The Margins is a creature of specificity and focus. You can still tell the story you want to tell, but the sandbox is smaller, the toys within it crafted with more care. This is what I’ve learned from writing dungeon games; that the specific and the concrete are the tools the imagination needs to create something truly surprising of its own. We never truly abandon our past creative selves. We just fold them into who we’re becoming.

Projects & Updates

Blood In The Margins is in its final 24 hours, and closing in on £8,000. I released a big preview of the game to backers a couple of days ago that will let you play through the opening Act. You should go and play it.
The final PDF of Down In Yongardy is now available. All that remains now is for the physical book to be produced, which Space Penguin Ink are kindly handling for me.
Weird Hope Engines was a rousing success. The team behind the show did an amazing job of bringing Directive 92A to life in the physical space, and it was an incredible experience getting to see people actually play it and to read what they were creating. The show runs until the 10th of May and I hope you’ll get a chance to see it. I’m working on a website to archive all of the writing people are doing when it’s over, and I’ll say more about that when it’s ready.
Speaking of Directive 92A, I wrote nearly 2 hours of weird ambient soundscapes and glitched-out beats to go with it. It’s on Bandcamp for a fiver.
I’ve been enjoying writing fiction again, and I have two stories published on my itch page. ‘The Knight of Rot‘ is a short, sad grimdark tale set in the world of Mörk Borg. ‘The Interview‘ is a slice of dark academic murder fiction. They’re both free to read, and you can get a limited edition physical chapbook of The Interview as an add-on with Blood In The Margins.

Things I’ve Been Enjoying

Listening: I’ve been in an ambient and electronic mood of late, and in particular I’ve been really enoying Throwing Snow’s 2016 album ‘Axioms’. Here’s my March playlist.
Watching: I’ve been going through a Hitchcock phase and finally convinced Steph to watch Rope (1948). It’s still incredible.
Reading: I’m about halfway through I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan and I adore it. It’s funny, it’s well-written, it resonates on a very personal level, and there’s this slow creeping horror that’s starting to mount. I can’t wait to see where it goes.

As always, here’s a photo of Lucky. He’s enjoying the fact that the sun is out again, though my asthma isn’t enjoying my house being covered in his fur.#

Weird Attention Engines

LtR_Chris1 — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 10:03:13 +0000

I’ve been using social media in one form or another for about 25 years at this point, give or take, whether that was Faceparty or LiveJournal or Bebo or… well, you don’t need me to list all the different social media sites that have come and gone over the years, do you? And I’ve had a presence on the internet for even longer. The first site I ever built was a space where I wrote short fiction that I based on the 16-bit animated GIFs of monsters a complete stranger was making. I often wish I could find that site again, just to see what sort of stories I was writing. And I often wonder if that complete stranger knew that the person she/he/they were talking to was 14 year old kid who just wanted people to read his writing.

Social media has taught us to be loud, to always have something to say even if it’s something completely empty. To be quiet on the internet is to cease to exist. Algorithms reward us for constantly making noise. If you take some time away, if your all-important Engagement drops off, then when you return with something to say the platforms say no, sorry, you were quiet for too long. You may have found your voice again, but we won’t allow anyone to hear it.

Every month when I sit down to write this newsletter I wonder if I have anything to say. Am I writing this to communicate something thoughtgul with the people who’ve asked to hear from me, or am I writing this because I know that if I miss a month fewer people will read it when the next one rolls around? It’s impossible to be mentally On all the time, but this is the life I’ve chosen for myself.

On the 21st of March I’ll be attending the preview/opening of Weird Hope Engines, a show put together by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards, and Jamie Sutcliffe. The first exhibition of its kind, the show aims to “explore play as a site of projection, simulation, communal myth-making, distorted temporality, and alternate possibility”. I’ve been writing a game for it that I’ve titled ‘Directive 92A’, a dystopian group journalling game that I’m pitching as Papers Please meets Fahrenheit 451. Here’s the pitch:

In the near future the government has outlawed artistic expression and that collective memory is failing because we remember history through stories. You are a government agent who’s been tasked with correcting the historical record in the form of stories people tell about the world and what happened to get to this point. You can choose to do your job, or you can choose to add new stories to the record to preserve the past that’s being taken from you.

The game explores the power in the things that we say and the way we choose to say them, and asks you to imagine a world were the freedom to speak the truth has been stripped from you. The show will run from March 22nd to May 10th at Bonningon Gallery in Nottingham and also features new games by Laurie O’Connel, Zedeck Siew, and Angela Washko, as well as original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K Kemp with Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang. I’m very excited to be a part of it.

The week prior to that, on March 13th, Blood In The Margins launches on Backerkit. To mark the occasion of the 5th anniversary of Wretched & Alone I’m blogging my way through a lot of W&A games on Loot The Room. The second post will go live today, with regular play-throughs appearing throughout the month. I think Blood In The Margins is going to be really good, and I hope you’ll pick it up.

Oh yeah, Rebellion Unplugged finally announced that I’ve been working on the new edition of Tunnels & Trolls for the past 18 months. Which is exciting.

Here are some things I’ve been enjoying recently:

The new Banks album is just really, really good.
As is the new Stray From The Path single.
Here’s my February playlist.
Sam Richard’s The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God has a cover that makes me want to play DCC and is packed full of great, weird, heartfelt horror.
I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that I enjoyed Quinn B. Rodriguez’s malaise. but I felt very seen by it.

There’s probably more I should say and include, but I’m still recovering from surgery and my brain is a fog of codeine and discomfort. As always, here is a picture of my cat.

Black Cats & Funerals

LtR_Chris1 — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 13:42:16 +0000

tw: talking about death, and some brief politics

We’re technically in the heart of winter right now, but we’ve moved out of the gloom of December and January and into weather that could trick you into believing it’s spring. As I write this it’s sunny outside. I can see crisp blue skies, frost on the ground, the puff of breath clouding around the heads of people walking past my window. This is very much my favourite type of weather.

There’s a cat who lives on my road. We see him all the time, and sometimes he sunbathes in our back garden. We’ve actually found Lucky lying next to him, both of them on opposite sides of our patio doors, chilling out together without being able to physically touch each other. It’s adorable. He’s black but has white feet, and so we’ve called him “Socks” for years. This morning I saw my neighbours, who he lives with, and so I went out to ask them what his actual name is. It turns out that Socks is his name. There’s no point to this anecdote other than that it’s fun.

February is set to be a month of funerals. This week we’re burying an old friend of my partner’s family, a woman who I’ve never had the chance to meet but who we were planning to invite to our wedding next year. That invitation will, obvuiously, not get posted now. At some point I’ll also be attending the funeral of my uncle, who died last week.

I don’t really know how to feel about his death, or even if I’m meant to feel anything at all. We certainly weren’t close. The last time I saw him was at my dad’s funeral last year, but before that we’re probably going back 20 years. And yet it’s undeniable to say that he had an impact on my life. He was the first person I ever met with tattoos, his arms full of old faded ink from his time in the navy. It’s directly because of him that I’m so heavily tattooed myself. As kid I thought they were the coolest things I’d ever seen, and I started getting my own as soon as I was able to. I have very fond memories of being at his house as a kid. Now that he’s dead I find myself wishing I’d known him better.

And yet, as always happens when someone dies, life has to go on for the rest of us. We take some time to grieve – or to figure out whether we need to grieve, at any rate – and then we sit down and clock in again. Such is life. There’s no time to take a break, especially not in the modern world where life seems to accelerate to greater speeds with every passing day.

We’re all aware, at this point, that America is fully in the grip of fascism. Elon Musk’s salutes were exactly what they looked like, and Donald Trump is exactly the man those of us paying attention since 2016 said he is. Here in the UK Nigel Farage’s Reform party continues to gather popular support. There seems to be no fucking escape from them, their rise feels inevitable, and it seems that every internet service will happily roll over and give them everything they want. I’ve previously written in this newsletter that I’m tired of being chased around the internet by Nazis and having to find new spaces that don’t contain them, and that continues to be true. But I’m also not at all entertained by Substack’s “Elon Musk is a defender of free speech” bullshit, and I know that there are increasing numbers of you who simply don’t want to read anything published here. And I sympathise, and understand. I’m going to continue to keep posting on Substack, because I can’t afford to pay for an actual newsletter service, but I’m also cross-posting these newsletters to Patreon, Loot The Room, and my blog from now on. So if you want to keep reading what I have to say and don’t want to have to do that on Substack, please choose one of those alternatives.

Thankfully we’ll always have art to fall back on, whether that’s to help us make sense of the world or simply to entertain and distract us, at least for a little bit. This month I’ve been reading a lot (a more detailed wrap-up of all of that is over on my reading blog). Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night is an old favourite that continues to be fantastic, and is increasingly relevant today. It deserves a place in the canon of dystopian fiction alongside 1984 and We. I’m also currently really enjoying Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey, which I’ll likely write a review of on the reading blog when it’s done.

I finally got Down In Yongardy finished. Yes, it’s very late. I don’t feel good about that. But I do feel good about managing to finish it. It’s been the hardest project I’ve ever written. I can’t wait for the print edition to be ready, though that’s now out of my hands.

Yongardy being done does mean I can finally focus on some bigger projects again, though. I just did my taxes for 2023/24 and discovered that I only earned £18k that year, which is less than the current minimum wage in the UK. After all the expenses of running a business my actual profit was only a couple of grand, which goes some way to explaining why I’ve felt the constant existential threat of poverty again for so long. This is a problem of my own making, of course, but not being able to run a crowdfunder for so long has made life very difficult. Now that I can do that again, I’m hoping that Blood In The Margins will do well on BackerKit in March and make life a little easier for me. I’m partnering with Hatchlings Games, who are going to be crowdfunding the first season of *GAST at the same time. If you back both projects you’ll get a fun exclusive, which I’ll be able to say more about once we’re finalised the details of it.

Since it’s February and that’s as good an excuse as anything, I’m running a sale on the majority of my games, adventures, and soundtracks on itch. Everything is 50% off. I made a fun banner for it. It looks like this.

There are also two A Dungeon Game-based campaigns running at the moment, which is a weird thing to be able to say but one I’m very happy about. Fistful of Crits have successfully funded CALPINI, a horror module for A Dungeon Game that’s also compatible with Mörk Borg. And Nick Spence is going to be launching his hack of A Dungeon Game, Heist Game. I’ll be doing book covers and layout for this thing, which I’m very excited about.

I also need to point you in the direction of Disposable Bags of Meat by Ex Stasis Games. This is a super rules-light game designed to play out horror movies, and it looks great. I’ve been a fan of the work that Chant and Lore do for a long time (and have worked with them a few times in the past), and I hope this does really well for them.

This is getting long now, so I’m going to leave you with the music I’ve been listening to in January.