Putting Punk In Tabletop Games
The ethos of the street
Punk is an ethos and an aesthetic which has remained cool since its origin in the 1970s. Punk is an ac of rebellion against establishment mainstream culture, which punks perceive as being monolithic, sanitised, and commercialised.
Punk has been able to find its way into religion, politics, media. The media, in particular, still react to punk as much as they once did back in punk’s first heyday. It’s about not giving the Establishment anything they can latch onto, because they’ll always try to unravel what they catch, spin out the tangled motivations behind punk - rebellion, non-conformity, countermeasures against every tool used by the mainstream to shape people into a form that fits with the expectations of a handful of people at the top, typically rich, white old men.
Punk exists to write its own path; follow and narrate its own story. Nobody can tell you any different when you choose the drum you march to.
Which brings us to tabletop roleplaying games.
Welcome to Yellow Bricks.
Yellow Bricks, Book 1: Emerald Revolution
Here’s where Berin Kinsman of Lightspress Principia first drew his line in the sand. He’d promised us an adventure based on L Frank Baum’s Oz books, laced with punk, sweat, blood and spit. In November 2025, we got the first book.
And we got the second, of fourteen, just two days ago.
Yellow Bricks, Book 2: The Puppet State
Each book in this series will be following one of L Frank Baum’s books. Note: not the 1939 Judy Garland movie, because that was just Book 1.
Here’s the list of all fourteen of Berin’s Oz tribute titles.
Yellow Bricks: Emerald Revolution
Yellow Bricks: The Puppet State
Yellow Bricks: The Clockwork Crown
Yellow Bricks: The Fault Line
Yellow Bricks: The Invisible Parade
Yellow Bricks: The Glass City
Yellow Bricks: Fractured Thread
Yellow Bricks: The Wound That Winds Down
Yellow Bricks: Broken Harvest
Yellow Bricks: The Weight of Laughter
Yellow Bricks: Search Protocol
Yellow Bricks: Hollow Heart
Yellow Bricks: Coded Tongue
Yellow Bricks: The Last Spell
Each book follows the plot of one of Baum’s Oz books. And each is as punk as hell.
This blog will be following this long Magnum Opus of an ageing punk. More to follow as the news develops.
Long story short: Punk is not dead. In fact, it is thriving, entering its second heyday, and sticking up two fingers to The Man as ferociously as ever.