Yarnspinner [#Itchmas Day 8]
Few games dwelt in my head rent free as much as Yarnspinner, by Edda Mendes.
Spare and sparse, undemanding and unobtrusive, this handful of frameworks and collaborative techniques provides support that is otherwise be an unfilled lacuna. What it provides is unidentified in ttrpgs writ large but for the lingering sense that something is missing. The nearest comparison that comes to mind is Dream Askew's idle dreaming, that asks players to engage in free and open conversation, riffing to find an engaging ingress to instantiated play.
Consider Yarnspinner a schematic for structuring a Session Zero, and you're not far off, but it builds also to connect sessions thenceforth. It is a wall socket to plug other games into; Eaves beneath which to shelter from elements we took for granted.
Yarnspinner lives and breathes most vibrantly as connective tissue to knit a number of games together, but even as a stand-alone one off, it provides every player at the table a shared space to buy in. It asks you to collaboratively sketch tonal Colors; sharpen those into conceptual Fibers; then counts down with a handful of worldbuilding Textures.
This is one of the finest tools in the quiver of gaming tables to undermine the expectation that a GM will provide a fully formed world from the jump, and damn the interests of everyone else: it asks you to feel out each others' sensibilities, establish shared interests, and from there build a place we can all care about and be invested in.
You can go into Yarnspinner looking to set the stage for a campaign in a pre-determined game system, but to me, the much more appealing notion is to feel it out together, and from there consult the table's pool of possible games that suit.
Give it a spin, and open yourself to the shared dream of what we might build together.
#12DaysOfItchmas