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Jeeyon Shim and the Personal Resonance 0/ Tabletop RPGs
"THE BEAUTIFUL THING about mushrooms is that many of them have lots of great names," game maker Jeeyon Shim tells me. Mushrooms constituted the first topic of conversation our breezy semi-decade-long friendship, obviating the need for stiff introductions.
In 2021, Jeeyon posted a series of threads on Twitter about mushroom foraging. Candy Caps, true to their name, carry the aroma of maple syrup. "I'm torn between making candy cap sable cookies to keep in my ice box or candy cap lace cookies to eat all at once," Jeeyon tweeted. On the other hand, consider Witch's Butter. Its name does a lot for it: the simple act of naming it "Witch's Butter" transfigures it from a streak of urine-lurid forest slime to a gorgeously thick, cheese-like layer the colour of fairytale sunshine. Unfortunately the name is deceptive. The fungus is apparently quite flavourless, Jeeyon once informed me.
I don't think Jeeyon intended it, but our discussion about mushroom nomenclature carries a curious resonance with her style of RPG design. In her work, Jeeyon tends to eschew the complicated stat tables, long lists of character abilities, and involved dice-mathematics that typify "crunchy" tabletop roleplaying games. After all, Jeeyon's first TTRPG experience was through Dread, Epidiah Ravachol's celebrated Jenga tower-based horror game. "This really influenced how I thought about any kind of game that essentially consists of make-believe for adults," she tells me. To new-gamer Jeeyon, there was no Dungeons & Dragon, no Shadoiurun: there were only rules-lite story games.
Today, Jeeyon's most celebrated contributions to the field come in the form of contemplative journaling games. In them, players might spend long, loving hours over seemingly small details like character names in order to craft powerful symbolic resonances. In Jeeyon's work, things like names, often trivial in games, might matter a great deal.
What's going on with TTRPGs?
Once there was Dungeons & Dragons -
Scratch that. Once there was Charlotte and Emily Bronte writing letters to each other, pretending to be insurrectionists and heroines -
No, that isn't quite the beginning of the story either, is it?
Once there was a person - of an age, nationality, and historical epoch of your choice - who decided to play...