Magic Circle Announcements
FOLK and Travelers Print Zines!
Order print copies of FOLK and Travelers of the Inky Void from our friends at Heart of the Deernicorn!
About Magic Circle and Pony Press
Magic Circle is Kate Barbaria and Brendan Albano, artists, game designers, and architects based in Portland, OR. Our practice is rooted in performance, storytelling and space-making. We invite our audiences to join us in ritual and play, to be transported to other worlds, and to discover delight in the everyday magic of this one.
Pony Press is also Kate Barbaria and Brendan Albano! We love names. And we love ponies. So we have named out game and zine publishing efforts Pony Press.
To stay up-to-date with Magic Circle and Pony Press, subscribe to our mailing list on the KB+BA home page!
PDFs of our game projects can be found at www.pony-press.com.
Projects
Travelers of the Inky Void, 2025
Travelers of the Inky Void is a picture book. It is an exercise in worldbuilding for the for the joy of building a world and exploring it.
Take your imagination on a stroll. Let it fill in the blanks.
Travelers of the Inky Void is also a roleplaying game setting.
The folk of Void City are people you meet or characters you play. Their roles are factions. Their desires are adventure hooks. The tables of dangerous, forgotten, and broken things are random encounters or sparks for session prep.
The Night Market is a reason to come to Void City in the first place.
FOLK Volume I, 2024
FOLK is a love letter to character generation, fan fiction, and storytelling prompts. It began because I love to start telling stories, and I detest finishing them.
In this zine, you’ll find 20 characters that can be used as seeds for RPG character creation, NPC inspiration, or for the pleasure of taking your imagination for a stroll.
Each character has a portrait and an appellation. Most have a series of descriptive words in italics that might be considered character attributes, as well as a very short story.
Clown Furniture, 2025
A forthcoming series of performances and furniture.
Word Wizards, 2024
Word Wizards is a role-playing game (RPG) about a group of wizards who have just discovered wizarding and are rapidly and chaotically expanding their understanding of true words of magic. These stories can play out in a variety of settings and genres. Think stories about children going to wizard school, ill-advised deals with devils and faeries, government experiments with psychedelics, or anything else that sparks your imagination!
Download Word Wizards on itch.io
Being Present Is Hard To Do, 2023, 2012
Performers prepare extensively for their performances, yet audience members rarely do. Being Present Is Hard To Do explores how an audience might prepare for a show with the same intensity that a performer does. The piece is reimagined for each audience. Performed at Something Weird in Portland in 2023 and the New Blood VI Performance Festival in Chicago in 2012.
Tell Me Something You’ve Been Thinking About, 2023
Tell Me Something You’ve Been Thinking About is an interactive performance where we collect conversations with participants about things they have been thinking about. The potentially wide-ranging topics form a portrait of a group of people at a particular time and place. We’ve performed Tell Me Something You’ve Been Thinking About at Form.a at Oregon Contemporary on July 1st, 2023 and at the 2023 Oregon Country Fair.
Mr. Boat-head’s Electrical Dreamship / Casual Stories Project, 2011
“In this groovy, unpretentious little show, Brendan Albano and Kate Barbaria invite tiny audiences—the max is eight people—to sit around a warmly glowing lamp underneath a tarp and drink tea or cocoa. They also give audience members 30 seconds to think of four kinds of material to share: a story, a dream, a lie, and a poem. Our lives and subconscious minds are all treasure troves… Intimate and elemental. I totally dug it.” - Collin Thomas, The Georgia Straight