🎤 Kienna Shaw on Your Magic Circle

This is the second interview in my series about metagames in tabletop RPGs. This interview is about Your Magic Circle by Kienna Shaw and her perspective on how "the magic circle" works in games. I conducted it in preparation for publishing Mousetrap: A cursed game-within-a-game that won't go back into its box.Kienna Shaw (she/they) is a well-established writer for tabletop RPGs with credits for projects with Paizo, Wizards of the Coast, Free League, Exalted Press, and Larian Studios. They are also co-curator of the gold ENnie winning TTRPG Safety Toolkit and have consulted on DIE RPG and Ironsword: Starforged. They have also independently published their own wickedly good games, including Blood on My Name and The Devil They Buried.Among their titles is Your Magic Circle (2019), which Shaw labels as a “game(?)” about magic circles and how we create magical spaces of play. Your Magic Circle walks players through eight steps that engage with this magic circle, essentially guiding the…