Who are you / what am I?
You find yourself in front of a large wooden door. All manner of beasts are carved into its surface, grinning and snarling at you, but its actual guardian seems to be missing for the moment. Still, the door is locked, and incredibly heavy besides. You hear a soft noise and look down to see a folded piece of paper at your feet. It must have been slipped under the door.
A note from the labyrinth.
Hi! The name's Nicholas. Generally I go by omophagic_beast online.
I'm a game designer, publishing under the imprint of The Horned Sphinx. My day job is at Indie Press Revolution, selling games. Generally speaking I'm either running or playing a game most nights of the week. In other words, I kinda eat, sleep, and breathe indie TTRPGs at this point.
But I'm not sure what I think about them.
I do have thoughts! Quite a lot of them, actually. But earlier this year Jay Dragon put out her Expressionist Games Manifesto and while reading through it I realized I don't have concrete thoughts. I have built a sense of when a game is good, when it'll sell, I don't know what my personal favorite kind of game is and I couldn't tell you why some games really click for me while others don't. These opinions must certainly exist in my head but I would be hard pressed to explain them to you.
That is the first purpose of this blog. A place for me to crystalize / distill my thoughts about TTRPGs into something I can point at and understand and critique.
The second purpose is for me to have an archive of stuff. My memory is very bad. This probably contributes to the not knowing much of my own opinions — I can barely remember what games I played this year, let alone what I thought about them at the time. I want to change that. Games are important to me: the time I spend playing them, the experiences I have, the stories we tell, they're important to me. I want to remember them.
With that all laid out, lets talk goals.
In 2026, my goal is to make one post on here a month. I might make more! I do love to talk about games. But one a month feels imminently reasonable.
My secondary goal is to make this a place for slow, deliberate thought. If I want to post something quick and dirty, I've got social media. If y'all have thoughts about how to achieve this, I'd love to hear them. I'm thinking to let my posts sit for a day or two after I've written them before I post them, and to maybe try and not post more than two or three times a month. To start at least!
We'll see how this all actually ends up working out. But at least now I've got all this written down — partially for accountability type reasons, but also so I remember them (see purpose two)!
If you're interested in seeing me explore the annals of my mind (and indie TTRPG collection) you can subscribe to this blog via RSS feed or email (or just by bookmarking it and remembering to come back).
I'm not sure what my first post is going to be yet, but I've running / playing a lot of Realis so probably something about that!
See you then :3!
- N.A.