I will probably repeat this list for every project I work on going forward, with slight variations. All of the simple “approach values”, whether they’re expressed as the Black Box Manifesto or framed as lo-fi or punk DIY, remain intact. It comes down to this:

Form Follows Function

I do things because the project needs them, not because it’s what everyone else does. This book is going to be as many pages as it has to be, to say everything I want to say. It will have the information I feel it needs to have, not what someone else dictates a roleplaying game must have.

You Create Canon

What I put in the book are ideas, even if it’s written as if it’s a canonical setting. The only canon is what happens at your table, in your game, with your players. Add, delete, and change things as you see if. That’s why there’s no art, that’s why I won’t lock down an obsessive amount of detail, because I’m not going to mess with your creativity and imagination.

It Makes Sense to Me

This one might be Ghostlight-specific, and I’ll talk more about it when we get to the post on the playlist. If you ask five people to define dark academia, you will get at least eight answers. When you throw it into a blender with Dark Shadows, Provincetown, Murder She Wrote, and a touch of Stephen King, you need to make a choice as to which elements of dark academia you’re going to use. I know what I said in the last paragraph about creating your own canon, but I also can’t make things so generic as to try to be all things to all people. There are borders around these things, I went with interpretations that fit well with the other elements, and you can build your own canon within those parameters.