A promo image for The Burbs on Peacock, with the faces of Keke Palmer, Jack Whitehall, Julia Duffy, Paula Pell, Mark Proksch and Kapil Talwalkar peering through a white picket fence
Aw rad! Nice to meet you!
done -- it's gorgeous, and intuitive! congrats!
WHAT DOES BEING A GAMESMASTER INVOLVE? As Gamesmaster, you’ll have a lot of different roles to play. Here are some of them in no particular order; you’ll adopt all, some, more, or none of these during every single session. You don’t have to be all of these things all at once, nor do you have to do all of them yourself - when you’re starting out, as long as players are getting the chance to roll dice and mess around they’ll probably still have fun. As you play more, you’ll find which ones you enjoy and which ones you don’t, and you’ll find your style.
FUN ADMINISTRATOR If it wasn’t for you, this game would never happen. You arranged a time and date. You reserved the back room in the pub to play. You helped everyone make their characters. You’re the first person they talk to if they can’t make it to a game, and you’re the final judge as to whether a session goes ahead as planned or must be rescheduled. You’re taking responsibility for all the background details that let the foreground details - the game - work. PETTY GOD This is your world. We just described it in loose terms - it’s coming out of your mouth, and you’re making all the decisions. You can adjust numerical values up and down as you wish. You can wipe cities, countries, concepts off the map entirely if you don’t like them. You alone determine whether things are possible or impossible, and you can dictate how dangerous a given task is with ease. Nothing happens unless you want it to. The player characters are scrubbing about in this world of yours, and you graciously let them do so, because they’re having fun. And so are you; you call the shots, you set the boundaries, you show them the fantastic world you’ve dreamed into being. ORACLE You are the sole focus of interaction that the players have with the game. In one direction, you are the source of all information about the fiction at the table: so if they want to know what colour a non-player character’s eyes are, they have to ask you and you’re beholden to tell them, or tell them how their characters could find out. In the other direction, you are the fuzzy authority that stands between every player and us, the designers of the game, and therefore the interpreter of the rules. All fictional and mechanical action goes through you. A CAST OF THOUSANDS You are everyone else in the world that isn’t a player character. You invent and then adopt their mannerisms, you spin together obvious motivations and secret desires, and you flip between your charges with ease. Sure: many of their voices might sound …
TOUR GUIDE We’ve written a guidebook for a world that doesn’t exist, and you’re the tour guide who’s leading slack-jawed holidaymakers around that world. You know everything there is to know about the game world - and if you don’t know, you can make it up, and that’s just as good. You’re relentlessly enthusiastic, you give evocative descriptions, and you clue the players into what’s interesting or important - and you know all the best places to take them, too, so they’ll experience the world as best they can. WET COMPUTER At the core of every roleplaying game is a set of rules that power the experience, and you are the fallible, non-silicate computer on which these rules run. You know the rules, you enforce them (or ignore them, as you see fit), and you remind players of how best to interact with them. Players might use some bits themselves - rolling to hit, for example, or keeping track of their character’s health - but you’re the ultimate authority on what rule to use when. CON ARTIST Players? Bunch of feckless rubes. Look at them, wide-eyed and open-mouthed: they think this is a living, breathing world. They think that you’ve got this all written down, like some kind of Tolkien; they couldn’t be more wrong. You’re just making it up on the fly. There’s nothing behind the curtain, no master plan, no wheels within wheels: just you, regurgitating some half-remembered details about Bloodborne and talking about bones breaking a lot because that makes them wince. They’ll buy anything you sell ‘em. WORKSHOP LEADER You don’t have all the answers, but you know where to find them: inside the players’ heads. You ask them questions like “Who are we meeting here?” “What’s the most dangerous thing that awaits you on your journey?” “Which one of you does this guy hate the most?” and then you listen to the answers and incorporate them into the story. You love it - it saves work, saves time, and means that the players are more involved and engaged than ever. Involved and enga…
DRUMMER The drummer sets the pace. In a band, they dictate the song’s tempo. In a regiment, they dictate the marching speed. (In a marching band they do both, presumably.) You’re in charge of saying when things begin and end, how long a scene takes to play out, how long a non-player character waffles on about their problems, how descriptive an average description is, and so on. You can cut away from situations and cut back later, you can put the pressure on players to make a decision, or you can leave them to chat to one another unobstructed as the hours roll by. ABSOLUTE BASTARD You’re going to kill them. You’ve trapped them in your lair. They dared to step up and try to defeat your monsters, overthrow your villains, and now they’re on the back foot. Smash them to fucking bits. Throw ‘em through a window, rip off arms and legs, take grim pleasure when their luck turns against them. No-one gets anywhere by being nice all the time - and the players don’t want you to be nice all the time. They want their characters to get beaten up, humiliated, murdered, hung-drawn-and-quartered. You know that this is a masochistic endeavour and you are happy to indulge them. TORTURED ARTIST You always wanted to be creative, and this is your outlet. You’ve spun a world of torment and tragedy (or light-hearted slapstick, depending on the game) for your players to explore - or crafted a complex story within someone else’s, full of betrayals and comeuppances and juicy details. You’ve taken the time to make something clever and you can’t wait for your friends to admire it; what matters most is getting the artistic intent of your world across to the players so they can react appropriately. OBSESSIVE FAN Oh my god. You love the player characters so much. Like your favourite character in your favourite TV show, you’re fascinated to see what they’ll do next - and you can probably take a good guess at what it’ll be, because you know them so well. You get a bit sad when bad things happen to…
Writing a GM section is hard.
So instead I wrote down every role I could imagine that a GM might play and instructed the reader to kind of figure it out themselves as they go
My most powerful takeaway from reading the Daggerheart core book—beyond wanting to run it—is to amplify the narrative weight of my 5e skill checks that fall in that fuzzy middle of the DC spread. Give a few seemingly low-consequence rolls the power to viscerally twist the whole narrative. ⚔️
Dimension 20 at the Hollywood Bowl photo of stage
Last night was fun
Creating some YouTube videos about Witchlight and my primary anxiety is do I have enough footage of me making coffee
60/ In the last moments of the series, Joe finally turns on you—but that’s Joe, not the show. I love our fans and am so grateful to everybody who watched over the years, talked about the show, and rode the rollercoaster with us. 🧢
A tabletop display of Guinevere Beck's books highlighting a fake review, which reads, "Problematic, and all the richer for it." The quote is fictionally attributed to Roxane Gay.
59/ I wrote the review I hoped the show would get (with apologies to Roxane Gay, who truly has nothing to do with this):
58/ I’ll close this walk down memory lane with an anecdote from season one. While producing ep 110, at the height of my own hopes and insecurities for the show, the props department asked me to write a fake blurb for the table tents around The Dark Face of Love, Beck’s posthumous bestseller...
57/ In the end, the version that makes it to screen is the most fun (we are all the deer), but the heart and nuance have a way of filtering into the rest of the season.
56/ Of all the things I’m proud of in our final season, the writers’ long, complex, respectful and heartfelt discussions of how to end this series were the highlight. Every option was weighed.
55/ As a staff and as a product, we’ve been together since the birth of the #MeToo movement… and we’ve witnessed the pendulum of patriarchy swing back toward our present moment. There are no wrong answers to what Joe deserves... as long as it’s a true comeuppance.
54/ Implicitly and explicitly, we were concerned with our own legacy, because we have nobody to blame but ourselves for making the audience fall for a misogynistic serial killer season after season.
53/ Is death a karmic make-good, or an easy escape from culpability? How do we condemn Joe without condemning the fans who love him?
52/ “What does Joe deserve?” The question that drove more discussion and debate than any other creative choice we made across five seasons of the show. Never once entertained giving him a happy ending. So what form does justice take? In the real world? In the heightened satire of our tone?
51/ SEASON 5: This season’s writing was interrupted by the strike—we actually started work on s5 over two years ago, in March 2023. I am so relieved it’s finally out.
50/ It is possible to have empathy for Joe while condemning him, and by now, we were veterans in milking that empathy to balance the horror he inflicted on his victims. But, still—karma has to have its day, which is why season 5 was always intended to be the last.
49/ As far as the love story of the season, my favorite scene is the last conversation on the bridge between Joe, and the dark part of himself that just wants Joe’s love. We were inspired by parts-work therapy to ground the psychology behind all these shenanigans.
48/ I muse on this sometimes, the power of platforms, and how much more fluid we could be than the model we inherited from broadcast (premiere, midseason finale, finale).
47/ Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like to hold just the final three episodes for the month, cliffhanging on the real “gotcha” rather than the fake reveal of Rhys-as-killer. Woulda coulda, and totally moot now...
46/ ... from our usual pattern. More of our “love story” energy was between Joe and… himself. But we didn’t really tip that that was the heart of the thing until ep 410.
45/ The show was designed to be a ten-episode binge and even with a mid-season cliffhanger, the whole picture of what we were doing (the “Fight Club” reveal) didn’t emerge until the final act of episode 407. As an enemies-to-lovers pairing, Joe and Kate’s relationship consciously leaned away...
44/ For me, this season was defined by the “split”—Netflix was experimenting with dropping 5 episodes, waiting a month, then releasing the other 5. Based on my small sample size, people who waited and watched the whole thing as a 10-episode binge enjoyed it more. No slight; just a learning.
43/ The creative lift of this season was reverse-engineering Joe’s psychotic break and hiding it from the audience, seducing us once again into thinking Joe is the victim.
42/ SEASON 4: So instead of romance, a new genre. The answer to “whodunnit” on our show is always, always going to be Joe, so the work was to hide the ball in a new way.
41/ Saying goodbye to Love was another painful milestone—inevitable, planned from the beginning, but, a loss nonetheless. She was created to be Joe’s soulmate, and she was so perfect for him it was impossible to imagine building another season around romance.
40/ I also could not have predicted getting review-bombed by anti-vaxxers so fragile they couldn’t bear to see Love throw Gil in the cage for giving her kid measles. Accusations of the show “becoming woke”—like, you’re really choosing measles as your line in the sand?
39/ The stress of this moment was so relentless, I’m not convinced any of us actually processed it, and some of the darkness bled right into season four.
38/ And, credit where it’s due, our studio and producers figured out working conditions that allowed us to make a living when it seemed impossible. This season’s existence is miraculous.
