About Autumnal Games

Autumnal Games has been a labor of love for more than a decade. Fortunes, the Tarot Card Storytelling Game, was the culmination of years of work, of countless playtests and late game nights. But the soul of this studio started with writing duels.

Jim started running writing duels at New Wave Coffee in Logan Square, more than ten years ago, with two friends. The rules were simple. Ten minutes on the clock and a one-word prompt. When the time runs out, you read what you made out loud to each other. It was fun. We wanted to put it in front of an audience.

It was a secret society from the start, and that aesthetic is still all over Autumnal Games today. The three of us tested the duels in the back room of a nearby bar, on the TVs bolted to the wall behind the pool table. Then we found a home at G-Mart Comics, a local shop that hosted the event for years. From there it toured: PAX East, PAX South, PAX Unplugged.

That's where this comes from. The games came later. The impulse, three people daring each other to make something in ten minutes, has been the same the whole way.

What we've made

Fortunes: The Tarot Card Storytelling Game is a game for storytellers, played with a tarot deck or an ordinary deck of playing cards. No game master, no prep. Art by Charles Huth. We still run it in public: most recently at Storygames Chicago's TTRPG Con in March 2026, and next at Secret World Books in Highland Park, IL, in August 2026.

The Ink & Blood Dueling Society Doesn't Exist is a short, illustrated manual to the secret world of writing duels. Autumnal Games runs these events live as Writing Duels, where writers compete to craft stories in a short window of time, usually in front of an audience, including appearances at PAX East, PAX South, and PAX Unplugged.

Crypt Kickers, a free committee LARP about negotiating where to throw a party, won the Golden Cobra Max Gladstone Special Judge's Choice Award in 2021.

Alongside the back catalog, we publish printable murder mystery party kits and parlor larps under the Autumnal Games name, and write hosting guides from the table.