The Grey Ledger Society

Sign in Subscribe

Topic

Folktales

A collection of 84 issues

Catspaw, Terrier, Squirrel, Spy: The Machine Towers Over All

A Designer's Essay on Espionage, Subversion, and Play Espionage games usually begin with a lie: you are the protagonist of your story. Players expect agency, meaningful choices, and the power to shape outcomes through clever thinking and decisive action. But the history of intelligence work has always been

In the Belly of the Beast: Subverting Space Horror from the Inside

This essay draws from and speaks to roleplaying traditions across systems, but it holds allegiance to none. The horror described here—of recursive memory, unreliable narration, and collaborative dread—doesn’t require stats to manifest. Whether you're using stress dice, pull towers, or improvised table rituals, the genre

The Spooky Signal

Never mind your typical "house of horrors in space" sci-fi, here's a one-shot with clown shoes, four-fingered balloon-hands, and a countdown timer before everyone becomes an extra in the Chuck E. Cheese juggalo revue. Genre: Carnival Haunted House Sci-Fi Scene: The USS Cotton Candy, a derelict

From Cyberdecks to Stagecoaches

Widescreen Dramas of Morality and Compromise, Set Two Centuries Apart An essay on the unexpected kinship between cyberpunk futures and post-Civil War Westerns At first glance, the neon-soaked streets of 2080 and the dust-choked trails of 1880 seem to share nothing but their aesthetic of decay. One crawls with chrome-limbed

From Chuck Jones in Space to Hank Hill's Propane Zen

A Conversation's Folk Process or How theoretical game criticism became practical creative refusal The Starting Point: Literary Analysis as Game Design We began with a synthesized essay about horror RPGs - the kind of piece that treats tabletop games as serious cultural objects worthy of academic analysis. Recursive

There Is No Outside

A Space Horror Folktale Overview No Outside is a space horror TTRPG module for 3–6 players and a Game Master (GM). The players are crew members of the Anamnesis, a salvage ship that has intercepted a looping distress signal from an unknown source. The ship is not merely a

The Revolution Will Be Hand-Knitted: Meet the Trolley Magi

Tabletop RPGs often cast resistance fighters as young heroes—chosen ones with swords and spells. We don't imagine Maureen from Flat 3B, who remembers when the miners had power, The Clash fought the law (and the law won), and uses her shopping trolley to disrupt surveillance grids. But

Derelict of the Day: The Communal Dream

A Sci-Fi Horror One-Shot Adventure Background The players are part of a salvage crew or rescue operation that has detected a derelict courier ship, "The Communal Dream," drifting in orbit around a mysterious dead planet. What they discover aboard will test their sanity and survival instincts as they

Sky Town: Where Dreams Fall to Earth

The Eternal Divide In the fractured territories of what was once a proud and united country, the sky belongs to the reckless and the ground belongs to the wise. Above the clouds, daredevil pilots chase glory and bullet-riddled horizons in patched aircraft held together by prayer and aviation fuel. Below,

Out of the Loop

"Once, you chased shadows on the edge of science. Now you debug error messages from machines you once thought were gods." You remember when the impossible was Tuesday. When robots walked through your backyard and you followed them home. When the power plant hummed lullabies that bent reality.