Jews in TTRPGs - Designers (Part 1)

Welcome to the first article in the “Jews in TTRPGs” series. We are starting with some of my favorite people: indie tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) designers. Like many others, my only idea of a TTRPG was Dungeons and Dragons. In 2019, my amazing friend Theo Rusmore introduced my friend group to Sleepaway by Jay Dragon.

I was absolutely blown away by the richness of our gameplay. We created a deeply intricate web of characters and lore, without any d20 rolls or ability checks. Sleepaway wasn’t like anything I had ever played because I was only used to the rigidity and specificty of D&D. Sleepaway sparked my love of indie TTRPGs which is now three years running.

Anyways, enough about me! We are here to talk about my fellow Jewish game designers.

Caveats

Like any published work, writers can’t capture 100% of the nuance on a given topic. I’ve collected a few caveats that I want to disclose before proceeding. Please approach with kindness and consider that I’m writing this series out of love for my fellow Jews.

1. This collection contains Jewish people I personally know, people identified as Jewish in Twitter replies, DMs I received from Jewish people about themselves, and other Jewish designers that I know of who have zero knowledge about this series!
2. Some of the designers asked to be on this list, many did not!
3. Some listed are personal friends and I may exhibit some bias because I think they’re awesome human beings.
4. Throughout the Jews in TTRPGs series, you’ll notice that many of the featured people fit into multiple categories (designer, content creator, artist, publisher, etc.). For example, there are a ton of content creators who are also designers and designers who are also artists! I’ve done my best to collect people into interesting articles and will list the variety of their talents as best as I can.
5. See something that needs to be corrected? I’m happy to consider them and fix where appropriate. DM me on Twitter or email me.
6. I probably missed something on this list, and that’s ok. I’m not perfect and we are all just trying our best in this complicated world.

Philosophy

There are a TON of Jewish TTRPG designers! I’ve currently got around 30 in my spreadsheet and I’m sure that number will grow in the coming days. So here’s my philosophy for sorting into digestable articles:

I’m going to highlight no more than eight folks per article, with a mix of “well-known” designers and less well-known designers that you should know. Whether a designer is included in Part 1 or Part 3 has no bearing on how cool they are. I just needed to create organization among the chaos :).

Alright folks…it’s time…time for the highly specific Jewish listicle you’ve been waiting for!

1) Adira Slattery

Oh my freaking gosh…I admire Adira so so much. Every list should have Adira at the top. I could stop there…but I need to tell you that Adira is in an tier of game designers I call the “thought provokers”.

Adira is a Trans Jewish game writer, zinester, and poet. What strikes me the most about Adira’s games is they are incredibly unique and unafraid. Adira’s topics range from queer love, futility, joy, hope, and intmacy.

Adira is most well-known for The Machine, a serial journaling game inspired by complicated clockworks, and Tension, a Tarot based roleplaying game for telling stories like Killing Eve and Hannibal, letting you explore queer experiences in the cat and mouse genre.

Many of Adira’s games can be desribed as “lyric games”. There is no agreed upon defintion, but lyric games are experimental and often defy game conventions such . Lyric games challenge players to approach the act of “play” in a new way and challenge your assumptions. Dicebreaker magazine wrote a nice article on what lyric games are, so read up!

Adira has collaborated on several large projects such as Wanderhome by Jay Dragon, a multi-award winning pastoral fantasy tabletop RPG about traveling animal-folk and the way they change with the seasons, and Doikayt, an anthology of short tabletop roleplaying games about Judaism or Jewish themes (more about this later, I promise!).

Note: Adira is a friend and someone I have hired as a sensitivity consultant for my Hanukkah Goblins and Esther and the Queens projects.

Adira’s Twitter
Adira’s Games on Itch.io
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Go right now and look at her games!
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I’ll wait…go look!
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Adira’s Website

2) Riley Rethal

Riley Rethal is a Jewish pharmacy student with a passion for tabletop rpgs and critical theory. Riley writes games that encourage collaborative play and explore relationships between people, ideals, and society.

Riley has many games on Itch.io, including galactic 2e, a Belonging Outside Belonging game (more on that later) inspired by the Star Wars franchise that focuses on character-driven, relationship-focused space opera stories. One game that continually captures my eye on Riley’s Itch page is sing it again, a not-quite-game that is a Powered by the Apocalypse poem inspired by the musical Hadestown. I loveeeee the lyric/not-quite-a-game genre.

So you remember I mentioned Doikayt in Adira’s section…Riley was Doikayt’s editor and one of the coordinators of Doikayt with JR Goldberg. Doikayt is a collection of Jewish games by Jewish writers. Read the excerpt from the Kickstarter page below since I couldn’t describe it better myself:

For huge numbers of Jews throughout the world, childhood memories are tied to games. Be it board games played as a family on Shabbas, a local Purim carnival, or simply being taught the rules of the dreidel game, Jews have long relied on games to help pass down tradition, culture, story and song to the next generation. It is with this same earnest joy that we present Doikayt: A Jewish TTRPG Anthology.

In Yiddish, the word doikayt translates to “hereness”. While hereness can be interpreted in many ways, we take it to mean that a Jewish person’s ideology, practices and traditions are a product of their environment, and it is these differences in background and knowledge from sources around the world that make the Jewish people so stalwart.

These differences are what informs our anthology. Featuring games from Jews of completely dissimilar backgrounds, it is our goal to not only show how Judaism can be highlighted through play in a multitude of ways, but also to show that despite our inherent differences, despite our upbringings, we al share this same idea of doikayt. No matter where we are, we are all here.”

I also want to highlight the Table of Contents so you all can see the aboslute RANGE of topics.

• On Playing These Games If You’re Not Jewish by JR Goldberg
• On the Diversity of the Jewish Experience by Gila Green
• Ayekah by riley rethal
• If You Can’t Take The Heat Get Out Of The Ring by a. fell
• Dybbuk Cup by Marn S.
• Emet by Evan Saft
• Jewish Inspirations for Worldbuilding by Randy Lubin
• The Wise Men of Chelm by Adira Slattery
• Talmud by Zev Prahl
• The Accounts of Getzel Shlomo by JR Goldberg
• The Cantor’s Son Is An Orphan Now by JR Goldberg
• Grandma’s Drinking Song by Lucian Kahn
• Lunch Rush by Nora Katz
• Christmas Day by Eli Seitz

I’ve played a few games from Doikayt and they are very thought provoking. Even if you don’t play every game, each game leaves a different perspective on the Jewish diaspora experience. When reading throughout the anthology, you feel the wide range of experience of 21st century Jews, from religious rituals to folllowing the Cohen family in a Chinese restaurant on Christmas Day. Every Jew in the TTRPG space should pick up a copy of Doikayt and enjoy who these writers share their Judaism with us.

Now if there’s a Doikayt 2nd edition…I want in! LOL

Riley’s Twitter
Riley’s Games on Itch.io

3) Benjamin Rosenbaum

Now onto Benjamin! Ben is also an award-winning writer and independent game designer, most notable for their Ennie-nominated game Dream Apart, published by Buried without Ceremony.

Dream Apart is a tabletop roleplaying game where you play a Jew of the shtetl, a little mostly-Jewish market town in the Eastern European countryside. In the cities, the industrial revolution has begun. Dream Apart is also attributed alongside Dream Askew by Avery Alder as the founders of the Belonging Outside Belonging (BOB) game engine. Dream Askew and Dream Apart are important games to the TTRPG community because they gave us the BOB system. Many indie TTRPGs implement the BOB system, most notably Wanderhome and Sleepaway by Jay Dragon.

I haven’t had the pleasure of playing Dream Apart, but some day I will! Do you want to play with me? :). I’ll bring the rugelach.

Benjamin’s Twitter
Benjamin’s Website

4) Ilya Lytvyn

Ilya is a new designer to me that popped up in the Twitter replies. And by gosh, I’m very glad they did! Ilya is a Ukrainian, non-binary, queer, neurodivergent Jew living in Germany. From Ilya’s Itch page: “While I’m not a Gamemaker in the classical sense I am a Media Designer and Illustrator who likes to entertain with the outcomes of wherever my visual art experiments take me. I want to dabble in potentially collecting my artwork in zines and maybe creating some odd, fun stuff with the skills at my disposal!”

What caught my attention was Ilya’s game Self Care or Dare, a 1-person ritual game highlighting executive disfunction, challenging the player in the great ways of self-care, introspection and home keeping.

Ilya’s Twitter
Ilya’s Games on Itch.io

5) Jess Levine

Jess is a cool cat who is an author, game designer, editor, programmer, and musician. Jess’s work spans a variety of mediums, but it’s mostly all about sci-fi and lesbians.

Jess’s most notable works include:

• Going Rogue, a GM-less anti-fascist rpg about war, rebellion, and making the ultimate sacrifice. Originally developed as an expansion for riley rethal’s Star Wars-inspired galactic 2e, this second edition of going rogue expands it to a 32-page game that can be played as a one-shot or over the course of a limited-run campaign.
• I Have the High Ground, a collaborative 2-player game using game mechanics inspired by competitive fencing. Players choose moves in secret and after their choices are revealed, the winner takes the opportunity to flaunt their bravado or to perform subtle acts that leave an imposing quiet in their wake.

Jess is also currently open for commissions for Zinequest/Zine Month 2023 projects! Go check them out.

Jess’s Website
Jess’s Games on Itch.io Jess’s Twitter

6) Gabrielle Rabinowitz

I can’t believe I’m already at #6 and I haven’t mentioned Gabrielle yet! This is another reminder that the order of this list is not indicative of anything besides the need to create some organization out of the chaotic universe.

Gabrielle Rabinowitz is a Jewish game designer and science educator living in Brooklyn, New York with too many books and one grumpy cat. Gabrielle’s design philosophy embodies gsimple mechanics and powerful emotional themes. My personal design style shares a lot of similarity with Gabrielle’s approach and I LOVE IT. Gabrielle has made several Jewish games, including A Necessary Miracle, a Hanukkah-themed solo journaling game inspired by Tim Hutchings’s Thousand Year Old Vampire. Gabrielle also succesfully ran a Kickstarter in May 2022 for Ma Nishtana, a game co-designed with her cousin Ben Bisogno that is modeled on their family’s Passover seder. Glitzy Demon Adventures did an in-depth interview with Gabrielle if you want to learn more about Ma Nishtana.

Gabrielle is also pretty involved Jewish game design community. Gabrielled organized a panel on Jewish games at the 2021 Metatopia convention and hosted a Passover-themed game jam called MatzoJam.

Gabrielle’s Games on Itch.io
Gabrielle’s Twitter

7) S. Quinn Morris (aka Authenticity Trip on Twitter!)

Authenticity Trip is another friend from the Brain Trust Discord (shoutouttttt). He publishes games as 200-Proof Games and is the designer of TRAVEL NOT ADVISED, a TTRPG that allows you and your friends to create your own stories within and interpretations of the excellent isolation-horror genre. With 2-6 players and one Documentarian or DM, together you will trespass into unknown and mysterious places and draw the ire of the supernatural MONSTER that dwells there.

2000-Proof Games on Itch.io
Authenticity Trip’s Twitter

8) Eli Seitz

Last but certainly not least: Eli Seitz is an Indie Groundbreaker Award-nominated game designer on this esteemed list of Jewish TTRPG designers. In addition to being a writer on Doikayt, Eli published Thursday RPG, a tabletop role playing game for 2-4 players of time loops, drama, and learning from your mistakes inspired by Russian Doll.

It is a game about finding out what is important in life as you fall off the fire escape for the fifth time. It’s about finally making that deep connection, but knowing it’ll all be lost with the next reset. Discover your character’s hidden backstory and unmet desires, and help them reach the personal epiphany they need to escape the fatal time loop and move on - Thursday’s Kickstarter page”

Fun fact: I actually did a shoutout for Thursday during Zine Quest 3 on the Brain Trust podcast. It was one of my ZineQuest 3 purchases and is a game I haven’t played yet…unless I have?

…Huh…deja vu…

Alright folks, that’s it for Designers - Part 1. Thank you for reading! Be sure to check back for the next entry in the series: Content Creators.