🎤 Emily Allen on The Yellow Curtain and Metagames

This is the third interview in my series about metagames in tabletop RPGs. This essay is about framing devices and performances-within-performances in The Yellow Curtain by Emily Allen. I conducted it in preparation for publishing Mousetrap: A cursed game-within-a-game that won't go back into its box.Emily Allen is the designer behind an impressive range of games from OSR and wargame-style adventures to PbtA-inspired or lyric games. Most notably, she is the designer of Black Death Rising, Dungeon Bitches, Gardens of Ynn, and ENNIE award-winning Stygian Library.I asked to interview Emily about one of her other works, The Yellow Curtain, an experimental PbtA-inspired storytelling game. In it, a group of theatre students put on a performance of “The Yellow Play.” As they study and rehearse, the line between fiction and reality grows blurry. Just as our students find their experiences of the play bleeding into their lives, so might you, the players. The Yellow Curtain plays with…

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