Five years ago, Tyler Crumrine, a professional dramaturge, began to feel the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on his theater work. As the crisis kept him and the rest of the world indoors, he found success with a side project — a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG). From there, he founded Possible Worlds Games, a company dedicated to designing TTRPGs for players of all experience levels, backgrounds, and interests.
He tells Pittsburgh City Paper that The Details of Our Escape, a years-long collaboration between Possible Worlds, writer Renee Gladman, and artist Linnea Sterte, felt reminiscent of his theater work.
“I was trying to get back to what I felt when I worked in the theater, of going into a meeting with creatives and being like, ‘Alright, you’re the lighting designer, you’re the director, you’re the sound designer,’” Crumrine tells City Paper. “We all have our areas of expertise where we know what we do best, and we know how it’s going to interact with other things. Let’s create something that we can all be proud of and that showcases all of our work equally.”
The Details of Our Escape, described as a “domino-based RPG” wherein players “control a caravan of over 2000 people in search of a new home,” recently received a nomination for Best Writing from the ENNIE Awards, which recognizes excellence in tabletop roleplaying gaming through voting by fans and judges.
The nomination marks the second time Possible Worlds caught the attention of the ENNIEs — in 2023, the company won the Silver Award in Best Cartography for Claw Atlas, an expansion pack for the company’s bird-themed TTRPG Beak, Feather, and Bone.
Following a successful February 2024 Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, which raised about $22,000 from more than 1,300 backers, Possible Worlds released The Details of Our Escape to widespread praise. The nomination comes alongside heavy-hitters such as a new Monty Python-themed game. Online voting for the awards recently concluded, and winners will be announced on Fri., Aug. 1.
Gladman, known for her fusion of prose, poetry, and illustration, wrote the story, and Sterte, best known for her acclaimed book A Frog in the Fall, provided illustrations. Crumrine designed the game mechanics. The Details of Our Escape comes in the form of a $20, 40-page, dual-tone book, and a cut-out domino sheet — there’s also a $10 digital version.
“A lot of times, when people hear role-playing game, they self-select out, because they think it’s too complicated or they think, ‘I have to get a bunch of weird dice,’ or ‘is there even a hobby shop in my area where I can get these polyhedrals?’ and things like that,” Crumrine says.
Crumrine says using dominoes instead of the more common dice came from
reflecting upon Gladman’s writing for The Details of Our Escape, which centered careful implementation of numbers in the plot. He adds that the project, which grew out of admiration-filled emails to Glaman and Sterte, allowed him to lean on the talent of others.
“It was an opportunity for me to learn from an expert,” Crumrine says. “It was a very convenient excuse for me to work with people whose work that I admire. I think that part of the reasoning for the collaboration is that it’s the kind of thing that I wanted to do.”
Crumrine originally created tabletop games solo, but found a collaborative creative environment more fulfilling. Crumrine, who has obsessive-compulsive disorder, finds that completing a solo project comes with a kind of perfectionism that trades fulfillment for compulsions. He believes working as a multi-talented maestro need not be the end-all be-all of creativity.
“I think that it’s really impressive that people have so many different kinds of skills, but I think there’s a danger to valorizing that to the point that we forget that sometimes there are people that are better than us at things, and that is not a referendum on ourselves,” Crumrine says.
The success of this team effort, now recognized by the ENNIEs, has already led to increased sales for the game, Crumrine says. To date, Crumrine estimates at least 3,000 copies have been sold, thanks in part to the award nomination.
“I’ve talked to a lot of the folks that stock our games, and the ENNIEs is a list that they go to when they’re looking to see, like, ‘Alright, what came out in the last year that we might have missed? What do we want to stock up on?’” Crumrine says.
Crumrine has found that fans of tabletop games have used The Details of Our Escape as a reason to check out Gladman and Sterte’s other work. It’s a type of cross-media synergy that Crumrine hopes becomes a trend outside of his studio.
“It was a bit of a shot in the dark to see if it would work, and I’m not surprised by the quality, but I am pleasantly surprised that it’s had the impact that it has,” Crumrine says. “It’s a model that I’d like to repeat in the future, and that I’d love to see others do, too.”
This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2025.
