The Adventure Gaming Periodical - Issue #17 - Process, Process, Process, Pt. 1

Creating an academia inspired publishing process for large projects

Oct 14, 2025

Wow! 2025 has been crazy personally and just in the world. I started working on this essay months ago, and now The AGP is finally returning after a bit of a hiatus. A divorce will do that to a girl.

It’s been a year of big growth for RV Games, and I had largely resisted formalizing the RV Games ttrpg development process. Not because I’m opposed to process, but because I want to be sure to develop the right publishing process.

This is part 1 of a two part newsletter, part 2 will be published in two weeks. In this one, I get pretentious and talk about the conceptual underpinnings of the RV Games development process, and in part two, I will lay out what this looks like in reality, using Orgy of the Blood Leeches as an example.

Development Processes

I’ve talked here about how my day job involves teaching people to write. However, I am also a coordinator and consultant and my area of teaching and research is in design processes and structures. I apply this work towards educational systems in my academic and professional work, so I wide array of experience of designing human systems, structures, and processes at all sorts of scale. I’ve notice two problems whenever organizations tackle adding process to a previously unmanaged task, and they both stem from wanting to approach process in a top-down fashion:

They try to to wholesale import a process from someone or somewhere else
They over-design their processes before implementing anything, and then implementation is brittle and clunky.

However, if you aren’t importing a process or conducting a bunch of design ahead of time, you have to be willing to exist in a messy, unorganized realm until the areas that need process emerge and reveal themselves. The processes developed are grounded in the task at hand and developed in a bottom-up fashion.

As you work on projects with teams, you see where you have miscommunications or delays or things that led to poor outcomes, and you develop process around this pain points while allowing as much as possible to stay free and organic and unconstrained by development processes. You want the lightest touch for the results you want, otherwise, your processes end up turning into needless bureaucracy, especially in the case of RV Games which has one full-time owner and their partner who work with small ad-hoc product development teams.

Once you’ve made some mistakes, which include hurt feelings and miscommunications, you can then start to do some research into processes that may be adaptable to your situation. Determining what is adaptable is a process in and of itself that requires focus. After working on Advanced Rules and Hecate Cassette Archive as larger scale projects, I built a theory of action for RV Games, a guiding principle for larger ttrpg projects.

RV Games strives to build a rigorous process for developing tabletop RPG adventures and games.

After a lot of sleeping and shower thinking, this theory of action led me to three questions that I would need to answer to develop a rigorous process for ttrpg development:

What does it mean to rigorously develop a ttrpg product?
Why is it important to bring rigor to ttrpg development?
What processes are necessary to generate rigor and ship ttrpg products?

What does it mean to rigorously develop a ttrpg product?

A rigorously developed ttrpg product is hardened and defensible. There is a design sensibility that is conceptually entwined in all aspects of the text. There is an idiosyncratic view of the world that is logically coherent within itself that is apparent through the text. A rigorously developed ttrpg has something to say, but does it in a way that is woven through the text, it is not heavy-handed or didactic, but it is defiantly obvious.

Current films by David Cronenberg, Coralie Fargeat, and Robert Eggers are examples of the type of rigor that RV Games would like to bring to ttrpgs: The Substance, Nosferatu, and Crimes of the Future expertly wielded rigorous craft to make the exact movies the directors wanted to make. They are all heightened realities with extremely obvious subtext. They are High Camp, taking Body Horror and the vampire film very seriously, escalating to something sublime and ridiculous and meaningful.

Camp is thought of as shoddy art by many people, but High Camp is the most rigorous genre to work in. It takes such an understanding of a medium to use high levels of craft within genres that have often been degraded. They are not deconstructions or satires of genres, but they understand their roots and play with them.

Within ttrpgs, this means understanding the tropes and history of the genre and of a particular system to play with and break expectations while still acting as a superb example of work in that genre or for that system. Orgy of the Blood Leeches definitely hopes to play with expectations while at the same time being the most Mothership-y module possible.

Why is it important to bring rigor to ttrpg development?

There has been much ink spilled to talk about coherence between gameplay and fiction within ttrpgs, but when I discuss coherence I mean more than that. I’m thinking about how ttrpgs are a unique product because you are giving people the pieces for a game, but they will play it out however they see fit. This means that coherence between social theory, message, gameplay theory, writing, and art needs to be strong and obvious. I’m including social theory here because I am an auteurist, and every auteur is sharing their idiosyncratic view of how the world and society and psychology all fit together, which is different from the broad picture message you would like to send.

This is what I meant by defiantly obvious earlier, you want to develop something that is on the nose and blatant because that’s what it takes to get something across within the genre of ttrpgs, you need to work in broad strokes in a heightened reality. It can become really easy to moralize or to lose subtlety when taking this approach, especially when coming from a particular social stance, so it takes a rigorous process to strike the balance. People will always misinterpret your work, but much like a screenwriter, there are ways you can build your manuscript to be sure that the Warden will approach it in a certain way without eliminating their creativity and moment to moment decisions at the table.

Orgy of the Blood Leeches is a very Queer piece of work, so it takes a lot of thought and care to develop something that makes an impact for Queer and straight people alike. You can get torn apart by either audience, and you probably will when making any Queer art, you have to have thick skin, but you can make sure that you do your homework before putting something out in the world. As a publicly Queer individual, I know that my work can be interpreted as something larger than just my own views, and that is in the back of my mind as I write even if it isn’t necessarily the best way to stay creative.

What processes are necessary to generate rigor and ship ttrpg products?

Rigor comes from the editorial process, I do not believe that there is such a thing as over edited text. Rigor especially comes from doing multiple rounds of developmental editing until a manuscript is ready to go. There also needs to be a process for getting outside eyes and input on a manuscript before entering into copy and line editing and production. This where the academic process of working with a committee with a chair guiding the writer seems perfectly suited for generating rigor within ttrpg products. By the time the manuscript is through the process, it is rather painless for layout to happen since text adjustments should be minimal by that point. This committee type process also gives an opportunity for everyone to look at the fully laid out work before moving into printing and distribution. In part 2 of this essay, I’ll discuss what this looks like in a lot more detail for RV Games specifically.

Mothership Month

Mothership Month 25 launches tomorrow! I’m sitting this one out as a writer because I am still working to complete Orgy of the Blood Leeches. However, there are four different projects that I’d like to highlight.

We’re providing development and production support for The Conduit and Flatline on the Blocks, All on Red is a writing project for A. Jordan Dewitt, the writer of A Secret Chord for RV Games, Burnt Flesh & Borrowed Gloves is from Hammer City Games for whom we distribute, and Sunlit Path is from Joshua Justice who wrote Hecate Cassette archive with RV Games.

These are all fabulous pieces of work that I am excited to see fund!

The Conduit

Pressed into service by LinneTech, your Crew hunts the source of defective black-market clones. The trail drags you through The Dream’s underbelly: Doptown, the Sink, and beyond. It pulls you into a web tying a rising clinic, a “charity” that feeds the machine, and a clandestine lab. At the center is The Conduit, clones intent on founding a new civilization. Choose your allies, crack the prison, and decide who gets free and who gets burned before the AI wakes and someone arms the bomb.

Flatline on the Blocks

Flatline on the Blocks is a new setting module of crammed city blocks, scheming factions, and ticking doom set aboard the megacity X-class space station Prospero’s Dream, for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. This zine contains cascading criminal conspiracies building up from small events to massive, district-wide catastrophes that affect the entire playground of the Spinal Crux District. Inspired by squalid city life in Final Fantasy VII’sMidgar and Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One with the colorful madness of Joel Schumacher’s Gotham City and a dystopian F-Zero, this district has the heart and hooks to keep pulling your crew back in.