gamesfromthewildwood

Hey, I'm Luke (my pronouns are they/them). 

I'm a queer non-binary game designer, performer, and professional GM.

My games are sincere, spooky, sad, and specific in both their themes and their setting. My work is emotional and honest; informed by a poetic sensibility; grounded in a sense of place and genre; interested in people, their pasts, and internal landscapes; and focused on "soft" narrative mechanics rather than complex procedures.

HARVEST gives us laden orchards and barren fields; desperate fervor and doubts grown thick as weeds; calves born and pigs slaughtered; proud traditions, failing wealth, and hostile stares; juice-smeared lips and dirt under nails; and always the questions echoing down through the generations: whose blood must be spilled to feed the land, and whose hand will hold the knife?

A folk horror game of Belonging Outside Belonging, inspired by The Wicker Man, Midsommar, and Apostle.

THROUGH THE SMOOT is a Forged in the Dark roleplaying game about bold and curious villagers borrowing the shapes of animals to escape their mundane lives and travel into Faerie. There are contests, brawls, chases and escapes, riddles, desperate deceptions, promises—heartfelt, false, or unwise, and wonder and peril in equal parts.

You play to find out if the villagers can make it there and back again (maybe even with something to show for it) amidst the dangers of gluttonous giants, haughty nobles, tricksy goblins, strange beasts, watchful dragons, ill-tempered sorcerers, and their own foolishness.

There is something rotten in the Low Cantrefs. No-one knows quite when it started but all agree that the land is living under a shadow. Has been living under a shadow, for long decades now. Folks have had good reason, in recent years, to remember and repeat the old superstitions that ward off creatures born of Sorcery, and the Dead.

But nonetheless, in the midst of this, life goes on. Fields are planted. Cottages are built, and roofs thatched. Namedays and baptisms are celebrated, and the harvest welcomed in. Babies are born. People fall in love,make new friends, cling to grudges, and forgive old wrongs.

And as faded traces of past glories crumble around them, children grow up

TALES FROM THE LOW CANTREFS is a hearth fantasy coming-of-age roleplaying game Powered by the Apocalypse and inspired by the Old Kingdom trilogy and the Chronicles of Prydain. It tells stories about adolescence and self-acceptance, about grief and sacrifice, about duty and responsibility, and a slowly gathering apocalypse.

In TO TREAD THE SPIRAL PATH you play exiled Irish warriors questing through the feverish dreamscape of the Otherworld, home of spirits and gods. You are sent by the High King as disposable assassins to do his blasphemous work, and for the blood you spill he will see your honor restored and your place in society returned. 


Will you follow the Spiral Path all the way to its end, or will you stumble and falter? Can you trust each other? Can you trust the High King? And what price will you pay for your trespass onto sacred ground, and into the affairs of druids and gods?

Podcast with Luke talking about Dream Anew, utopian storytelling, and belonging outside belonging: insertquesthere with Ray Cox.

Podcast with Luke talking about Heaven Has No Taste and queer games: Game Closet episode 65 with Taylor LaBresh.