Steve Johnson

Steve Johnson is the co-founder of Hex Games and co-creator of QAGS (the Quick Ass Game System). He has written, co-written, or otherwise contributed to numerous RPG supplements, including Spooky: The Definitive Guide to Horror Gaming, Sharktoberfest, and the ENnie Award-winning Hobomancer. He also writes non-gaming books, makes maps, and does digital art using Daz 3D Studio, AI, and other tools for people who can't draw. You can find links at lnk.bio.kingyak.

Hard vs Soft Game Systems

Over the last year or so, I’ve seen several references to and discussions about “hard” and “soft” magic systems. Author Brandon Sanderson coined these terms to describe world builders approach magic. Basically, soft magic is vague and open to a lot of hand-waving and interpretation by the author. Soft magic works best when magic is…

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Rebuilding the Archives

Welcome to the Death Cookie! You might notice that there’s not much content here. That’s because I’ve just updated the software. Also, I haven’t posted anything new for almost a year. All the articles from the old site are here, but they’re not published because I need to tweak them a bit before they go…

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2019 Reading List

I’ve gotten bad at reading actual books (regardless of format), so in 2018 I re-started an old livejournal tradition of keeping a running list of the books that I’d read that year. My thinking was that knowing the actual number of books I’d read might convince me to read a real book instead of clicking…

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