Sometimes I find solo games which scratch a certain set of very personal itches. My love of pulpy noir-style mysteries runs deep, never to be sated. So it was pretty inevitable I would latch onto No Tell Motel by Ken Lowry and Bannerless Games and love it with my whole being. As luck would have it, Ken has also created a range of amazing games, and found the time to sit down with me for a chat.
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Brent: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me, Ken. For our readers not yet familiar with your work, please tell me a bit about yourself.
Ken: Sure! I live in Dallas, Texas with my wife and our five (five!) pets. I’ve been writing games for about three and a half years, but I’ve been writing all manner of things for decades. I wrote and self-published comics for about 8 years, I co-wrote and produced three seasons of a Web series, and with some friends even published a satirical book (Write More Good: An Absolutely Phony Guide) based on our old Twitter account, @FakeAPStylebook. I’ve also helped run a family restaurant, worked on a radio station promo team, and been a vet tech at an animal shelter. The usual.
B: What drew you into tabletop roleplaying games? What was your “hero (or villain, we don’t judge) origin story” in the hobby?
K: The first game I actually played was AD&D 2nd Edition, because that’s what my friends were doing and you dance with the girl that brought you. This would have been about 1994 or 1995. But the first RPG books I purchased and read a couple years earlier were Heroes Unlimited and a random assortment of Battletech books I picked up from the local tiny bookstore. I couldn’t make heads or tails of them but I loved them anyway.
I finally fell in love with RPGs thanks to a random stack of Vampire: The Masquerade second edition Clanbooks a friend lent me in 1996. I spent the rest of that decade into the next obsessing over the World of Darkness. I still have a lot of those books (including that Clanbook: Nosferatu, now falling apart), and likely always will.
B: How and when did you shift from player/GM to working on your first game content? Was the shift gradual, or did it happen pretty quickly?
K: In early 2019, I’d been goofing around with some friends on Twitter, swapping ideas about pitching our own reality TV ghost hunter shows. I jotted some ideas down into a few tables to help generate random show names and conceits. About this time I was also enamored of Grant Howitt’s games, namely Goblin Quest and the one-pagers like Honey Heist. These two things collided just as I was easing out of self-publishing comics and I thought: OK, I’m not going to be a “game publisher” per se, but I can get this one idea published if I do nothing else. This would eventually become my first original game, Killer Ratings.
Around this time some friends and I started bandying around the idea of a Patreon-supported RPG “magazine” that would offer adventures, advice, cocktail recipes for game night, that kind of thing. We came up with “Bannerless Games” as a title for all of us to work under. Then 2020 hit, three of the four of us got new jobs, and COVID utterly rewrote the year. I got back into things at the start of 2021 on my own, took on the name in case the others ever wanted to jump in, and by year’s end had published a game, some adventures, game jam entries and miscellaneous tables.
So, like a lot of people (I suspect), it was slow for a long time and then picked up rapidly once I got going.
B: You have a number of solo TTRPGs, such as VOID 1680am, Lighthouse at the End of the World, and of course, No Tell Motel. What is it that draws you to solo games?
K: Fellow comics writer Ryan K. Lindsay tipped me to the idea when he published Welcome to Faraday, a one-page solo RPG based on the Second Guess System, back in 2022. I’d heard of solo games but hadn’t really engaged with them up to that point, but I was immediately taken with the designer-side challenge of it. What I liked about it is what I like about cartooning: it’s like a test to see how little you can leave on the page while still conveying a distinct emotional impress that the reader can turn into their own experience. I was so taken with this specific execution that my first two solo games (The Getaway and Axe Wielding Priest) are one-pagers based on Second Guess, and No-Tell Motel also owes a lot to that system.
I first balked at solo games because, like many writers, I don’t need something else telling me to write – it felt like homework. So I’ve had a lot of fun exploring different final outputs for a game: a playlist in the case of VOID 1680 AM, a police report and a stack of conspiratorial speculation in No-Tell Motel.
I think many solo games are excellent vehicles for self-expression and self-exploration in a way group games are not. In my experience, group games tend to return to a mean that’s mostly centered around goofing off and inside jokes. With solo games, you can set any tone you want. You get what you bring to the table.
B: You’ve also written a number of group games, like Killer Ratings and Hell Grinders. How does your approach to design differ when writing a group game over a solo TTRPG? Do you see some crossover in your approach to each?
K: In some ways, the challenge is the same: how little can I give you while still transmitting a clear tone and feeling that you turn around and make your own? You can guess from my previous answer that my experience with group games often ends up in a jokey space, so (at least to date) I’ve written group games that encourage harmless rambunctiousness. Both of those titles are pretty silly, but I hope they’re silly in a way that invites everyone in, rather than relying on the default Dude Humor I spent so much time around in my formative RPG years.
B: Are there themes or ideas shared between your games? Are there elements you purposely explore when you create?
K: I try to follow what interests me and let the themes sort themselves out. Over time you develop an instinct for ideas that are like itches persisting no matter how much you scratch them. I just try to spot those when they happen, see how they interact with other things I can’t let go, and move on the ones that catch. Every game I’ve published is an index of at least two obsessions.
Themes do emerge, though, especially in the solo games. Lighthouse and VOID both ask questions about where you find meaning in the processes of living and expressing yourself, and No-Tell Motel has at its core a hypothesis that you can’t ever really know anyone else. These are things I’ve contended with my whole life, and I think every one of my games has one of these unanswerable questions at the heart of it.
B: Along with a number of other creators you use Itch as a platform to sell your game. For someone maybe looking to produce their first game, what are some of the things you like about the site? What are some of the challenges?
K: Itch checks a lot of boxes for me. They handle ecommerce, you can set when you receive payouts, their cut is much less than DTRPG’s, the analytics are decent, it’s got sales widgets you can plug into other websites, it’s easy to find and join game jams (which are fun to do and a good way to build up some design discipline), and assuming you can chart in one of their categories there’s some organic discoverability. Basically, people can find you without you having to drag them to your page by the nose. It’s also very easy to build a nice-looking page, which is important because I’ve been online for 30 years and have exactly zero capacity for web design. I simply haven’t found anything else that does all those things for that small a percentage and no upfront cost.
My only real challenge is that while the analytics are decent, they’re hardly comprehensive. Sometimes I’ll get a noticeable traffic spike and there’s no easy way to determine where it’s coming from. But, really, if you write comics, prose, or games, I think Itch is quite possibly your best overall option for a PDF marketplace.
B: The fragmenting of social media seems to have made finding an audience for creators increasingly difficult. Do you have any thoughts on what designers can do to compensate? Do you see a change coming around how you find an audience for your work?
K: Man, I have no idea anymore, and I say that as someone with 13 years of experience in social media marketing. I have a Twitter account just for Bannerless, and then personal Bluesky, Tumblr and Instagram accounts where I also talk about my games. I think it’s important to note that on those latter three accounts, I’m mostly just me being myself – I’m not there to sell you something. I also boost the hell out of other people’s work I’m excited about. I think that earns you a lot of credibility when you flog your own stuff, and it’s good for building community and just being a decent human engaged in the world.
Similarly, I have a newsletter which I publish at most once a month. I talk about my games but I mostly blog about other things. The same rule applies here: be yourself, be transparent with your thinking, and your people will find you.
On the nuts-and-bolts front, it’s pretty inexpensive to boost posts on a few of these platforms, so it might be worth testing. $10 can go pretty far on Tumblr or Instagram (or, God help you, TikTok). If you’re feeling frisky, set up a URL redirect service like Rebrandly and create custom URLs per game per channel just to see how many clicks are coming through from each space and update your tactics accordingly. I find people on Instagram are looking to buy and people on Tumblr are mostly looking to window-shop, but your mileage may vary.
B: While it’s quite common to see Actual Plays for group TTRPGs, there seem to be relatively few solo APs being produced. Do you think that’s something AP producers are missing out on? Could AP have as big an impact for solo TTRPGs as it sometimes does for other games?
K: You might know better than me! I have attention span issues that put me at odds with following most APs. That said, I have seen a few focused on solo play, and wider networks starting to incorporate more solo game content. I’ve watched a few of my games played, and I’m always delighted to see how people interpret things completely differently from how I imagined them, and usually end up playing a more interesting game as a result.
Broadly, I think it’s a big positive to incorporate solo games into AP shows. They help expand the idea of what games are to wider audiences, and that’s nothing but good for everyone.
B: For someone who might be thinking of taking the plunge and writing their first game, solo or group, so you have any hardwon advice to pass along?
K: Do not wait for permission. There will never be a moment when the cosmos whispers in your ear that you’re ready. If you’re wondering if it’s time, it is.
I think from the outside looking in, game publishing (or really any kind of creative work) can feel like sorcery. The professionals seem to simply know and understand One Standard Unit of Game, and produce those at a standard clip. But I can tell you from the inside looking out that what we’re doing is Frankensteining stuff together and hoping for the best. The only things we know that you don’t are the stuff you learn by doing it. So, truly: just get going.
On the practical front, find a game jam you like and give it a go; all the better if the jam is just asking you to riff on an existing system. I found it helpful to start with challenges where much of the establishing design work had already been done so I could focus on what I bring to the table rather than deciding if I want to use d10s or d6s or whatever. Use game jams to find your voice, then go deeper with your own stuff.
B: What other games out there right now excite you? What are you drawn to as a designer and as a player/GM?
K: I think Slugblaster: Kickflip Over A Quantum Centipede is one of the sneaky-best games released in the last five years. It’s confidently written and disarmingly approachable, and it has some of the best and most concise player and GM advice I’ve ever seen. It’s also hilarious and has a mastery of voice I will go to my grave envying.
I’m also excited to give Teeth a go, and like everyone else I’m currently reading through Triangle Agency. Thin black gulf is a really exciting (if that’s the word) idea for a two-player epistolary game, and I need someone to play that with me tout suite. On the solo front, the last one to really wow me was Letters to Sandra from Gem Room Games. I’ve played a lot of solo games, and I’m not sure any have hit me as hard as that one.
What most excites me in games are simple ideas with lots of lateral potential, games that play differently every single time they hit the table. I also like some ambiguity; the more didactic group games and solo games with heavy authorial voice are cool, but I tend to resonate with games where I can sense the designer(s) is down in the dark with me, unable to come up with easy answers for the questions they’re asking.
B: Are there other projects on the horizon you can discuss?
K: In no particular order, I’m working on a short solo game tentatively called Handful of Dust, which helps you turn any paperback novel into evidence of a conspiracy. I have an untitled two-player epistolary game loosely about Voyager I and fraying relationships. Everyone gets their sad space game, and that one is mine.
Then there’s the big one, the one I wrote my last two games avoiding: Saint of Blades, a nightmare noir loosely based on the Forged in the Dark ruleset. If my previous games are two or three of my obsessions tied together, Saint of Blades is a dozen or more. I plan to start that one off with a prologue adventure called “Boss of All Bosses,” to ease myself and the world into the setting and its rules. More on that soon.
B: Thank you again for talking with me, Ken! Where can folks find you if they want to follow what you’re up to?
K: It was a pleasure! My main hub is Itch, and I also have sell physical copies and merch at my website. The rest – my social media accounts, my newsletter, the VOID 1680 AM player-submitted broadcasts – are all linked at linktr.ee/bannerlessgames.
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Thanks again for agreeing to talk with me, Ken! And if you want to see No Tell Motel in action, tune in to my Twitch channel this Friday at 6:30pm MST/8:30pm EST.
