Writing a Revolution
George Bickers on Gallows Corner
I recently had the opportunity to chat with George from Three Sails Studios about his latest project, Gallows Corner. George is a UK-based game designer who made waves with his (first!) rpg Mappa Mundi (winner of best RPG at Dragonmeet 2025). When I saw his next project was about 14th century England peasant revolts, I couldn’t help but punch the air. I had to talk to him about it.
I’ll let George’s description take the lead here: “Gallows Corner is a new alternate historical TTRPG system that challenges players to do one thing: change England by any means necessary. Players take on the role of the lowest in medieval society — peasants and the working classes — and pit themselves against crown, nobility, and church in a struggle for the soul of post-plague England.”
George kindly sent me a pre-release copy of the book: it is excellent. I encourage you to check out the Kickstarter. I wanted to interview George about some of the game design choices he made in the book, which have a strong overlap with the NSR-style designs we talk about in MurkMail.
We also dig a bit into the politics surrounding the game, and the sociological foundations that George has built it on. Let’s get into it!
Let’s start broad before I go in for the juicy game design questions. What inspired you to write Gallows Corner? It feels thematically linked to world affairs at the moment?
Gallows Corner felt like the game I needed to write when I first started concepting it back in 2024, but the real work began in early 2025. I wanted to write a game that explicitly centred working-class characters, and that’s exactly what Gallows Corner does.
But in terms of its relevance to current events, I’d go one step further and say it is relevant to the way the world has been for a long time. Before I was designing games, I was an academic. I considered, and still do consider, myself a spatial theorist, and my research was focused on the way the state (an inherently oppressive institution) forms itself in physical and social space, particularly urban space.
Gallows Corner has this thinking written right through it. The state (or, in Gallows Corner’s case, the crown, church, and nobility) is at its strongest when controlling space; this is how it constitutes and remakes itself. But it is also at its most vulnerable there, too. When people occupy spaces and start to ‘rewrite’ its rules through different kinds of social interaction, spaces are remade and the state is diminished.
Something that struck me was the whopping 48 trades and jobs, which function a bit like backgrounds in NSR games. They are great for getting GMs and players oriented in 14th century England: worldbuilding through game design instead of pages of lore! Can you talk a bit about that design choice?
Absolutely! The first mechanic I developed for Gallows Corner was the Trades and Jobs system. I knew I wanted something more developed than the dice and test resolution system I used in Mappa Mundi, but also really wanted to keep the idea that progression is not through an abstract sense of ‘levelling up’ and getting more powerful, but by getting ‘more professional’ at the Trade and Jobs that define the characters.
So, Gallows Corner takes the idea from Mappa Mundi that it is the dice that level up, rather than the character, and then takes it a step further by linking some of those dice to Trade and Job (in addition to dice representing your three Traits: Physical, Intellectual, and Emotional).
The idea of worldbuilding through game design rather than pages of lore is not how I thought about it initially but is a really astute observation. I wanted players to see the world through what they do, not just who they are. And so the fact that the available Trades and Jobs are a core part of not only how the players interact with the world, but actually how they understand the setting, is a key part of what the game is trying to do.
A key part of the rules is PCs having Influence Ranks and also Retainers: these represent the party’s general social leverage and allow them to have stables of contacts they can use to help them address challenges. It feels like the game really wants you to engage in socially focused problem solving?
100%, yes. The last fifty years have seen a concerted effort from the state and its supporting institutions to try to atomise the idea of community, of a people, and turn everyone into individuals. The structural causes of problems are ignored and any issue you face is considered an individual problem, a personal failing, something that you, and you alone, are responsible for feeling and suffering from.
We are a collaborative, collective species, and it hasn’t been long that we’ve been pushed into considering ourselves as individuals. Gallows Corner recognises that you alone are vulnerable; an individual is not nothing, of course, they are everything. But they can only experience that everything when they are together with others.
The game clearly sees that freedom only comes when some personal freedoms are deprioritised for the freedom of the community. Change requires sacrifice, but in that sacrifice we discover we are so much more together than we are individually.
I’ll be the first to say that I love pointcrawls. What steered you towards using a pointcrawl format for the scenario-design side of the game?
I love a pointcrawl, too. I knew that, with its focus on physical and social space as the key to liberation, that Gallows Corner needed a more concrete expression and exploration of space than Mappa Mundi (as a note, Mappa Mundi is informed by the same underlying understanding of space, but explored differently), which we abstracted travel and the spaces you travel through far more.
I wanted all of England to be available to the players, and with our Verb system, which determines the kinds of stories you tell during the game, from the local to the regional to the national, a pointcrawl system just made sense.
The ‘real’ spaces of England aren’t as important as the ideas of those spaces. You don’t need to have visited London, or Essex, or Yorkshire, or England at all to really enjoy an immersive pointcrawl experience in Gallows Corner, or indeed to have any historical knowledge of medieval England.
The pointcrawl allowed me that perfect balance of verisimilitude, the feeling of truth, without sacrificing the scope of the setting.
Like Mappa Mundi before it, Gallows is packed with stuff that acts like an adventure cookbook. You’ve got over 60 pages of locations, as well as NPC generators and scenario structure prompts. How do you decide what include to aid GMs in creating content for the game?
We want to provide a rich experience without being prescriptive, so that’s always our first concern. But really, it starts out without a sense of structure or purpose; I sit down and think about what I think the game needs, or what I’d want it to have, or what I find exciting!
After some iteration, a structure starts to emerge and then I’ll start refining and deciding what is needed and what isn’t.
There are a few places in which Gallows Corner is inspired by what I imagined Chris McDowall’s Mythic Bastionland was going to be. I had backed it and become friends with Chris pretty early in my TTRPG design journey, but I made an explicit decision not to read it beyond summaries so that I could respond to it in the way I imagined it worked, rather than how it actually works.
Chris, as anyone who has read any of his games knows, loves a table, and we didn’t have a single one in Mappa Mundi, so I started experimenting with them for NPC generators, and I wanted to do my own take on Chris’s excellent, and always really evocative, story seeds.
The ones in Gallows Corner are a touch longer (I’m an inveterate over-writer, so extra thanks go to Jeremy Blum, one of our co-owners and my very patient editor, among other things), but I hope they’re just as evocative!
A big thanks to George for the interview! Check out the Gallows Corner Kickstarter now.
Thanks for the interview. The setting looks super-interesting, but there aren't any dedicated solo tools, so it's a pass for me. It's a pity, but I don't need another game to pair with Mythic!
Wow. Great thoughtful answers to some really good questions on design. I think the whole concept of controlling space is fascinating, and it’s great to see it applied to this angle and choice in setting. I think Mappa Mundi is a great example of where our hobby can and will go as we continue to innovate. I expect great things from Gallow’s Corner! Brilliant.