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I’m Alex Wiltshire. I’m a writer and editor in the world of games. I work at Mojang Studios on storytelling for Minecraft, am the author of books including Britsoft: An Oral History, Making Videogames, Home Computers and Minecraft Blockopedia, and am a former editor of Edge magazine.


I released a new version of Board of Mammon, my one-page GM-less RPG in which players are demonic corporate executives competing for Mammon’s favour. Along with a suite of tweaks (Biz Climate is now an Event, and you get to roll more dice), V2’s hot new feature is a second Events table which gives each Board Meeting a bit more infernal colour. Now your supply chain issues might come as a result of church interference, an annoying bloom of demonspawn, or even a newly discovered sin. Thanks for the feedback and idea, Kieron!

Download it here, or on Itch.io, for free.

August 8, 2025 ・ #
August 2, 2025

A logo for Board of Mammon in which a stern god wearing gold with a crown points stares and points out of the picture, with a cityscape in the foreground.

I wrote another RPG. I set myself the challenge of creating it for a single sheet of paper and came up with Board of Mammon, a GM-less PVP one-shot RPG about greed:

You are demonic executives competing for Mammon’s favour in corporate board meetings. At the end of the coming financial year, Mammon will judge you. Who will stab backs and grift hard enough to be its champion?

Download it here, or on Itch.io, for free.

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I’ve updated Fortune Dark, a light TTRPG system I put out a couple of weeks ago. The notable change is to player death. In the original version, player characters would be smited (smote?) by their god and removed from the game once they got their fourth debility. Now they can have as many debilities as they can bear, but there’s also the addition of a new move, Sacrifice:

When the party decides that one of its members has fallen too far from their god’s grace and offers them as sacrifice, collectively describe how you perform this rite, then remove all cursed dice from the party’s fortune and claim 1 tribute. The sacrificed character’s adventure is over.

The idea is that now death is a choice with a dark benefit. Once a player has a lot of debilities, they’ll likely only be able to act by spending fortune and thus be a major drain on the party. So perhaps it’s time to put them out of their misery, a gift which cleanses the party’s stock of luck. Feels like a grim but enticing decision, and therefore very fitting for Fortune Dark. Thanks, Caleb, for the idea, which I’ve basically lifted wholesale!

Download the PDF here.

July 26, 2025 ・ #

For a few weeks I’ve been fiddling with creating a very light ruleset for running dark and desperate TTRPG adventures. It’s called Fortune Dark, and it’s about cultists striving to gain treasure and glory for a capricious god against ever lengthening odds. Their god has granted them a shared pool of fortune, which will dwindle and become cursed as they play. Can they claim enough tribute before their fortune runs out?

Download it here (26 July update), or on Itch.io, for free.

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June 17, 2025

I spent the weekend walking in the Cotswolds with an old friend.

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I enjoyed Godland, a film in which a Danish priest is told to go to Iceland to build a church and loses his mind. It’s sort of a Scandi Heart of Darkness with starkly bleak-beautiful cinematography, a truly excellent performance from an Icelandic sheepdog, and a sense of material grit and grind that films rarely capture. Every crunching step on exposed scarp; cloying mud and spongy moss; the incessant blowing of the wind; the reassuring mass of hardy horses — the actors appear to be truly living in this place. Iceland here is profoundly harsh and inconstant, not at all where fragile priests should be. Currently available on the BBC’s iPlayer.

May 17, 2025 ・ #
May 10, 2025

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Wells lately, but only just got around to going inside Wells Cathedral. It’s a good ‘un.

Looking up the nave; the classy quadripartite vaulted ceiling was decorated in the 19th Century

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Photos taken at Snape Maltings in Suffolk

May 4, 2025 ・ #
March 16, 2025

In the pursuit of working on something that I’m not quite ready to share yet, I found myself needing to create a map of a town without any labels. No road names, no area names, just the roads and paths. Turns out that, due to the wealth of geographic data that’s freely available to all, this is both entirely possible to create and difficult to do without a lot of blind fiddling, so I put together a quick guide to the solution I discovered.

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February 5, 2025

I GMed a session of the sci-fi horror TTRPG Mothership, using the scenario There is a Goblin on the Loose in Icarus Station. In it, a goblin is on the loose in Icarus Station. My son made some art for the titular character:

And I made some atmospheric audio for a radio transmission that the players receive…

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