Episode 148 Michael Low and Luna Uni: A New World of RPG Writing Instruction
Michael Low and Luna Uni: A New World of RPG Writing Instruction
Episode Summary
In this episode of Experience Points, host Dave Eng welcomes Michael Low—educator, game designer, and creator of Stories RPG. Michael shares the powerful story behind Luna Uni, a tabletop role-playing curriculum that transforms writing instruction through collaborative storytelling. From 100% student writing gains to building emotionally resonant classrooms, Michael explains how play, character-driven narratives, and East Asian story structures can supercharge literacy and connection. Whether you're an educator, gamer, or curious learner, this episode unpacks the magic of fusing RPGs with pedagogy to build a joyful, self-sustaining learning culture.
Michael Low
he/him/his
ELA Master Teacher, Game Designer, and Curriculum Developer
Luck of Legends
Michael started designing tabletop games when he was thirteen and hasn’t stopped since. After undergrad, he started teaching in Japan, then after-school programs and summer camps until he finally got his MA in Education and began teaching public school. Along the way, he was always playing games with his students, where he began working on what became Stories RPG: a classroom role-playing game designed to teach writing, enhance reading, and build lasting socio-emotional skills and community. Now, he splits his time between LuckOfLegends.com, where he teaches kids to write with online RPGs, and StoriesRPG.com, where he runs the largest AP role-playing podcast for kids with story arcs ranging from epic fantasy like Starsworn to utopian scifi like Luna Uni. In his “spare time” he coaches teachers on using his approach, which has led to 100% writing gains (median and mean!) in under three months.
(LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-low-luckoflegends/
(Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/LuckOfLegends
(Instagram): https://www.instagram.com/luckoflegends/
(YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@luckoflegends
(Website): www.luckoflegends.com | www.storiesrpg.com | www.infinibrix.com
(Other): https://www.threads.net/@luckoflegends
(Other): https://bsky.app/profile/luckoflegends.bsky.social
Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host, Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP. Find out more by going to www.universityxp.com.
On today's episode, we'll learn from Michael Low. Michael is an educator, game designer and the creator of Stories RPG. A classroom role-playing game that helps kids write, read, and connect in powerful ways. With an MA in education and years of teaching experience from Japan to public schools, Michael's work blends Learning with adventure.
He now splits his time between www.luckoflegends.com, where he teaches writing through RPGs and storiesrpg.com, home to the largest actual play podcast for kids featuring stories like Starsworn and Luna Uni. And yes, his method has led to 100% writing games in under three months. Wild, right? Let's welcome Michael Low to the show.
Michael Low:
I thought there would be cheers. Thank you. That was illustrious. I felt very fancy.
Dave Eng:
Illustrious. But we wanted you to feel welcome, Michael.
Michael Low:
Appreciate.
Dave Eng:
And everyone should know about all the good work that you're doing.
Michael Low:
That's very good.
Dave Eng:
Yeah. No, right? But people are not familiar with your work, I've seen your presentation before along with your colleagues. But I want to know a little bit more about your origin story. So let's go back to the origin story. What was the spark that got you into designing games at age 13? And how did that early passion grow into your teaching career?
Michael Low:
Yeah. So weirdly, I think it's one of those organic processes. It's a little bit when somebody asks me if they find out I speak Japanese, they'll say, "Well, how did that happen?" I'm like, "Well, a lot of things sort of weird accidents accumulated and then there was momentum and then it kept going." Right? But game design is a little bit like that.
Game design is very much curriculum design, and I think the wild part for me is I didn't realize how close the two things I had a passion for were until later in my career. I'd been teaching for 20 years and I'd been running games for kids and also in my spare time and making games for my friends. And when I brought the two together, I really felt like it was a face palm moment.
I thought, "What have I been doing? I could have been doing this years ago." So it definitely felt like something that was there already that I sort of foolishly had overlooked.
Dave Eng:
And now that you've discovered it, do you think it's something that if you could go back in time to 13-year-old, you say you jumped in the time machine, you're going back to 13-year-old you, what piece of advice would you tell yourself now that you have all of this experience in game design and just apply games in general?
Michael Low:
Oh gosh. I wouldn't have told myself anything. I mean, I think that's one of those wonderful mistakes that we make fictionally is that we assume that somehow we have some knowledge we can impart to our younger self. That knowledge all came from all those things that the younger self did. So I think I was learning at 13 things about the difference between the experience I wanted to have playing and the structure of the rules that I created.
It was really the business of, I mean, this is the thing about game design. It's great training for curriculum design because both of them are experience design. What you're really doing is you're designing, "Okay, how do I create a system that moves people into having a particular kind of experience?"
In a curriculum, you want it to be an emotionally moving, super engaging, and also deeply academic practice that builds towards mastery. So that your students begin to both feel ownership of the skills they're practicing, but also see how those skills benefit them and get excited about the possible applications of those skills.
And you also want them to build community and culture around those skills so that you get a learning environment that is ultimately self-sufficient, right? A good game shouldn't require someone to play Ref forever. If it's a really good game, and I'm going to offend everybody who loves games that have Refs. But I'm a Ref-free kind of guy.
I think a really great game brings everyone to the kind of play culture where they're playing because they're playing for the joy and for the transformative power of the experience that they're having together. And I always thought as a classroom teacher, my best benchmark for my success was if I got sick or something happened and I couldn't be in the room.
I always told my students, you know what to do. You can tell your substitute exactly how the classroom runs. You know what needs to happen, you know how to learn, you know how to work together. You can explain your assignments and you can explain your papers. And ultimately, when kids went solo and were able to effectively learn without me, that was the best measure of my success.
In the same way that the best measure of a good game is without anyone to explain the game in the room, folks, pick the game up, figure out how the game works, and then get deeply immersed in a collaborative, creative, emotionally, hopefully joyous form of play.
Dave Eng:
Wow. Thanks Michael. I really love your, it's like an infectious optimism about curriculum because when I think about curriculum, at least because I design a lot of learning content for corporate training environments. Curriculum for me is like there's learning outcomes and then there's the content that leads to those learning outcomes. If you have a positive experience, that's just icing. But like... to do?
Michael Low:
No. Because you know what? Okay. I'm going to share with you one of my favorite words to hate on in educational spaces. It's engagement. The street name of engagement is fun.
Dave Eng:
Right.
Michael Low:
And I think anybody who, it's really funny, because I'll have these moments. I'll be talking to a bunch of game designers. Game designers don't need to be told that what they're creating should be fun. Nobody needs to explain that to them. Right? But when you talk to a bunch of teachers, eventually a querulous hand will go up in the back and somebody will say, "Yeah. I get that they're having fun, but how do we prove that they're learning?"
And I say, "Well, okay, take a second everyone. If your kids aren't having fun, do you think they're going to learn?" I'm like, "You guys all know, you know your classroom, you know your students. What do you think?" And they all have this moment. There's a beat where they all think about it. And then they all kind of go, "Yeah."
The best teachers already are game designers. That's what they do. They create a culture and a community. They help facilitate the creation of that community. Ultimately, they are bringing kids together to create a classroom in which they own the learning and they create community together, and they're excited to be there every day. If they're not, I guarantee you, whatever they're learning will be temporary and it will not be transformative.
So my learning outcomes are always a set of skills, but also an inspiration. If you are not inspired to keep learning, then what are you doing in the classroom? Nobody should feel like going to school is akin to mopping a floor. I always used to tell my students, if you feel about the work you do for school the same way someone does in a poorly paid menial job, then I'm preparing you for the wrong things.
Dave Eng:
Right.
Michael Low:
I don't want that for you.
Dave Eng:
Wow. Powerful, Michael. Great takeaway. And I think that understanding your philosophy behind this is very important. But now I want to talk more about Luna Uni, which is the presentation that we connected on originally.
So I know that, and I talked a little bit about this in your intro. I know it's a supercharger for writing instruction, but what inspired you to create it and how does it produce, how do you use it to work it to produce the kind of huge writing gains in under three months? Let's keep in mind that not everyone listening may be familiar with Luna Uni, so give us a background and more about what it does.
Michael Low:
Oh, sure. Yeah. Luna Uni is a setting for Stories RPG, but it's also a series of add-on rules and a curriculum that I designed for other folks who want to do what I've done. And I love hearing it called a supercharger.
I will say this. There is a significant sampling bias. My test teachers are all really good at their jobs, so I always joke, I'm like, "You guys are the worst because you're able to get these 100% writing games out of kids, and it's because you're all great at your job."
And of course, the sampling bias is anybody who's willing to try this kind of approach tends to be someone who's very excited to be in the classroom, who's really excited to learn with kids and play with kids who's very open to a new approach.
So with that caveat, yes, we did have in both 2023 and 2024, 100% median and mean gains for sample the test classrooms, which were being run by Tyler Pelletier and Thomas Charltray. And I've got two more folks working with it just this year, so we're going to see how it goes.
And yeah, the key to the design of Luna Uni and anybody who's interested, you can see me give me my full presentation on YouTube, Luck of Legends. It has the South by Southwest presentation I just gave last month in Austin. But the key is it is a game, a role-playing tabletop game that is designed around helping students learn how stories are told.
So there are a number of design elements that make the process of learning to play the game, help students also learn to write. And this starts with character creation. Characters are not a list of numbers, rather they are lines, descriptive lines that help you as a player think about your character like an author would, what's their drive? What motivates them?
And this is emotional. This should not be an external goal. This is the internal need. So kids will say, "Well, I want to be the best chef in the galaxy." I'm like, "Wait. Wait. Wait. That's a goal. Why do you want to be the best chef in the galaxy? Who are you trying to prove yourself to? Are you trying to prove yourself because you don't trust yourself, you don't think you're good enough? Are you trying to prove yourself to a parent who never believed in you? Are you trying to live up to the standard set by your brother or your sister?"
There's all these different questions, and that leads the kid to first of all, understanding who their character is, and second of all, understanding why drive matters in a character.
Then there's downfall. What do they struggle with? Perfect characters are boring, right? And a downfall makes a character human, and it also gives a nice positive qualitative boost to the kids. A downfall actually helps you in the game as long as you leverage it correctly.
So these lines ultimately are the basis of the rolling mechanic for what are called live sessions. Live sessions are like a classic D&D storytelling game only, instead of focusing like they do in D&D on sort of colonialist combat and murdering people in stealing stuff. They focus on how do we tell a dramatic and interesting story? What would make the story better?
So a lot of kids, I always know they got it when they roll and they get a triumph with a trouble. And instead of saying, "Yeah. I want to reroll so I can get just the triumph." They're like, "No. No. No. Let's talk about what would be a cool trouble here." That's when you know they've got it. They're like, "Okay. I got this."
So the structure of the character sheet then becomes a template for literary analysis and they're reading. So as they're reading, you'll invite kids to say things like, "Okay, so can you tell me who this character, what's this character's bond with this other character?" Because bond is another kind of line you can develop.
And you can say, "All right. Tell me how they feel about them?" One kid will say, "Oh, they they're best frenemies." And I'll say, "Okay. So where's the evidence for that? Give me a quote." And the kid has to go and find a quote and they'll read out what the character said, and say, "Okay, so is that a best frenemy relationship?" Why? Explain it.
If they can do that very quickly, what they've got is the claim, and so, and so, and so are best frenemies. They've got evidence, here's the quote, and they've got analysis. Here's the explanation of why this quote justifies the claim. That's one paragraph for a character analysis essay.
Now the live sessions as well emphasize story structure. So each live session is organized according to the four act East Asian cinema structure, which in the West, we often use the Japanese term, Kishōtenketsu.
So ki is the hook. This is a read aloud. So the instructor gets to read. The read aloud, set the scene for everyone's characters. Then there's the sho, which is development. This is a series of questions that the kids get to ask and answer together. So it's collaborative storytelling. They get to think about who are the characters I want to involve in this scene? What are the things I want to set up? What do I see around me?
Then there's the ten, which is the twist, and I like this structure for plot a lot better than the classic rising action climax resolution Western approach, partly because twist is a much more open word. It says something's going to happen, things are going to change, right? In a live session, it's the roll. You roll and you roll to find out. You roll for drama. You don't roll to win. You roll to see what happens, to surprise yourself.
And then there's the ketsu, which is the resolution where you say, "Okay, so what happens as a result of that twist? How does it turn out?" And that structure becomes one that they get to repeat in their stories. And that's the final piece is most of this approach involves basically what is a writer's room. The kids work together writing stories on their own and in collaboration fiction stories about their characters and about other characters they're interested in and about plot.
And those stories generate story points, which are a resource that exists completely separate from grades or any kind of loaded measurement.
Dave Eng:
Yeah.
Michael Low:
And those story points allow them to both expand their character. So if they meet a character in a live session and they go, "Oh, I really like that character. Can I have that character be my sidekick?"
Pay three story points, get a bond. And then they have that bond, and in the next live scene they can say, "Oh, yeah. Okay. So can I get so-and-so to help me with this because they have that cool weird black hole generator? Can they use that to open up a black hole so that we can suck out some of the spores that are in the place? And then I'll fill it with air from my..." Sure. That's one die towards your role.
So it is a game that is not just being used to teach. It is a game where every single piece of the game, every mechanic, every resource, every interaction is designed to emphasize and expand and teach principles of authorship and help kids practice that authorship and also really be excited to share it with each other.
They're not writing for you, they're writing for their peers. It's nothing more fun than writing a huge story scene that adds an element, adds a villain, adds some strange thing. And then doing the share-alouds, having everybody go, "Ooh." When something happens, the kid just visibly swells two times. There's a huge spine straightening.
Dave Eng:
Yeah. Wow. Great. Thanks, Michael. I appreciate everything here. I'm not an expert on literary analysis, but I kind of wanted to know, because this is the part of literary analysis that I'm familiar with. Do you ever reference or use the hero's journey, Joseph Campbell? You're probably more familiar with it than I am in your work.
Michael Low:
I don't.
Dave Eng:
Okay. I guess there's a reason why?
Michael Low:
And I say that so brutally of-
Dave Eng:
Okay.
Michael Low:
Well, it's a little bit like why I use Kishōtenketsu as opposed to rising action, climax resolution. I think the hero's journey is one template, and there are a lot of very educated and highly academic critiques of how the hero's journey has been this highly standardized template that's been sort of forced onto multicultural models where it is actually kind of a limited and Western approach.
It's not very broad. And this is a lot like, for me, talking about personal essays, which I can make an argument about, but they often think that they're a form of emotional abuse. And I'm happy to expand on that if you like. But if someone's out there and they're using the hero's journey and they're getting a lot out of it and it's working well as an approach for helping kids learn.
Great. Please use it. Keep doing what you do. That's wonderful. I find it reductive, and I find it also problematic for teaching kids. A little bit in the same way that I find stats and D&D problematic for teaching kids.
So in D&D, you have these numbers that represent your characters' different strengths, right? From their literal muscular strength, their strength statistic to their intelligence, to their charisma, which is a vague measurement of their social prowess and attractiveness.
I find those hugely problematic because the minute a kid starts playing a game where those values are assigned, they start thinking about, well, how strong am I? How smart am I compared to other people? That's like a limiter. How attractive am I compared to other people?
They are being asked to literally give themselves numerical values that are better than worse than other people's. It's almost a capitalistic or market driven approach to understanding what makes someone important, which I find deeply problematic.
I don't want to know how strong your character is. I want to know why are they interesting to you? Why do you want to talk about them? Why do you want to fall in love with them? What story do you want to tell with them?
And a good author understands that what makes a character compelling is not whether they're extra strong or whether they're extra smart. It is who they are and why their story matters to you and what it is you want to tell about them? Every person has a story that's worth listening to. No one is uniquely more interesting or better, or there's something to say about everyone.
And I don't want a student in my room to be worried that they're not important enough, that they're not a hero on a hero's journey. Not everyone is. Some of us are muddling along and being human in various different ways, and I want to open those doors and give kids agency to have the voice that they would like to have.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you, Michael. I appreciate it. Again, not a literary scholar in any way, but a hero's journey is something...
Michael Low:
Oh, no. No. I get excited about it.
Dave Eng:
Yeah. I know we're tight on time, so I wanted to jump into our third and last question.
Michael Low:
And please.
Dave Eng:
You brought this up a little bit before, but I want to talk about challenges in schools because hopefully people that are listening want to use Luna Uni or some of the other frameworks that we talked about so far. So I want to know, what challenges did you hit when trying to bring RPGs into schools and how did you overcome the... Like someone says, "You want to do what with class time?" Their skeptical incredulous view of your work in using applied games.
Michael Low:
So it's interesting. I think you find a lot of different types of folks in education. I think if you're in a school where people say you want to do what with class time? You already have sort of probably a hill to climb no matter what it is you're trying to do.
There's a lot of problems in education, and you don't get exciting, innovative options to recreate the classroom and create a classroom that really serves students and has them succeeding and excelling without experimentation and without trying new approaches. I guess the short answer is I've been lucky in that the folks who've been interested in using this have had the to do so, and supportive administrations.
I will mention. So Tyler and Tom were my first earliest adopters in 2023. And what was very interesting to me was they started working with this. They had huge gains in writing, they were working with second language learners who were new to the United States. They were working with kids on the spectrum, and they had a spectrum kiddo who went from crying every time they had English class to staying during lunch to write more because he was so excited to be in the class and so excited about the next elements in the plot and had huge writing gains across the board.
And their school had a need for a writing innovation. And Tyler said, "Guys, I got one. I've been running it. You guys all know that it works." They did something else.
And part of it was, and this is what I always think of, the biggest difficulty for teachers is. Teachers are in the US, at least, are underpaid, overworked, and very often not supported in their practice. They also are, I think teaching is both an art and a craft. It is something that requires inspiration and innovation, but it also requires the basic understanding and know-how of how to deal with the day-to-day.
And I think like a lot of artists who are also craftspeople, teachers who survive in the career have very carefully crafted their own game. They've spent a lot of time and effort building something that works for them and for their students, and that means that introducing something new can often be very difficult.
It means that you have to be willing to take risks, and you have to be willing to try and understand that it won't be perfect the first time out. And so that's a huge leap for a lot of teachers.
So I'm looking for the teachers who are excited to make those kinds of leap because they know that that's part of learning. You never improve at anything unless you fail a lot, which is why games are such a great way to learn. They make failure low-cost and high-reward so that you enjoy doing it. You get to make those mistakes, and that allows you to build understanding.
For admin, there's a lot of articles out there. The literature is growing. There's a lot of evidence for play as a foundational way that human beings learn. Play and stories are both foundational ways that humans have learned throughout all human history. Understanding how to build those for the classroom seems like a logical next step.
Dave Eng:
Wow. Great. Thanks, Michael. I know that there's going to be a lot of educators that are going to be listening to this that want to use a system like this, but I also feel like there's a challenge there, at least in the educational system and trying to adapt something new. But you make a good point, and this is something I take to heart on a regular basis that we don't really learn, we don't really grow and develop unless we take risks, unless we take chances.
And like you said, games are a form of experiential learning in a way that we can improve ourselves, but also better take agency over our own experiences. So I appreciate your insights, Michael.
Michael Low:
Thank you. I just wanted to say one quick thing about that because I like the way you framed it. I do think that's one of the reasons games are so great is that they create a, especially story games like role-playing games. They create a situation in which you can afford to be vulnerable and make mistakes, and play allows you to make those mistakes freely and learn from them without fearing consequences for failure, where failure can be celebrated, where you blow a role in Luna Uni and everybody gets really excited thinking about how everything goes wrong, because a good story thrives on drama and what goes wrong.
And I think that that kind of trust, being able to experience with other people, that vulnerability to fail publicly, and to trust the people you're with. I mean, this is another huge piece of this approach. It helps kids build socio-emotional skills and they connect and collaborate to build a really trusting and optimistic and positive classroom culture, which ultimately sustains the learning.
So yeah, if anybody's out there and listening, I do give all of this away and also coach teachers on how to use this approach with the only condition being, you have to tell me how it's going so I can help, and you have to give me some numbers so that I can talk about it. Although you don't have to tell me any details about your kids, because I want to make sure their privacy is respected.
Dave Eng:
Right. Well, thank you, Michael.
Michael Low:
Yeah.
Dave Eng:
So again, thanks for joining us today. Where can people go to find out more about you online?
Michael Low:
www.Luckoflegends.com, L-U-C-K-O-F-L-E-G-E-N-D-S.com. You can find me at wwwstoriesrpg.com. I'm on YouTube as Luck of Legends. I'm on threads as Luck of Legends. I'm on Instagram as Luck of Legends. I think if you write Luck of Legends in your search bar, you'll find me. And please feel free, write, call, message me however you like. I love to hear from educators and anybody out there who's interested in using games to teach.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thanks, Michael. We'll include your email address and all of those links in the show notes. So thanks again for joining us.
Michael Low:
Thank you so much.
Dave Eng:
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more then a great place to start is in my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links or references in the description or show notes.
Thanks for joining us. Again, I'm your host Dave Eng from games-based learning by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. So if you like this episode, please consider commenting, sharing and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you.
Also, love it if you took some time to rate the show. We live to lift others with learning, so if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could also benefit. Also make sure to visit University XP online at www.universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter and Blue Sky as University XP and on Facebook and LinkedIn as University XP. Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on!
Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2025, October 5). Michael Low and Luna Uni: A New World of RPG Writing Instruction. (No. 148) [Audio podcast episode]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/148
Internal Ref: UXPQSNLFOXFT
References
Luck of Legends. (n.d.). Luna Uni. Luck of Legends. https://www.luckoflegends.com/lunauni
Low, M. (n.d.). Games. StoriesRPG. https://www.storiesrpg.com/
Low, M. (2024). Teaching writing through RPGs – Luck Of Legends [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9mqVhmYasA&ab_channel=LuckOfLegends
Low, M. (2025). School is a badly designed game: RPGs for the classroom. SXSW EDU PanelPicker. https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/153506
Pelletier, T. [@TPelletierG5]. (n.d.). Home [X profile]. X. https://x.com/TPelletierG5
Charltray, T. [@G5SopoSharks]. (n.d.). Home [X profile]. X. https://x.com/G5SopoSharks
Eng, D. (2019, September 17). Player Interaction. Retrieved June 3, 2025, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/9/17/player-interaction
Eng, D. (2019, October 15). Make More Mistakes. Retrieved June 3, 2025, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/10/15/make-more-mistakes
Eng, D. (2020, August 20). What is Player Agency? Retrieved June 3, 2025, from http://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/8/20/what-is-player-agency
Eng, D. (2020, December 3). Game Mechanics for Learning. Retrieved June 3, 2025, from http://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/12/3/game-mechanics-for-learning
Eng, D. (2021, October 26). Applied Games-Based Learning. Retrieved June 3, 2025, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2021/10/26/applied-games-based-learning
Akouri, A. (2025, April 10). Trying the low-risk, high-reward mentality. The Michigan Daily. https://www.michigandaily.com/opinion/trying-the-low-risk-high-reward-mentality/
Eng, D. (2016, March 04). Game Systems. Retrieved June 3, 2025, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2016/3/4/whats-your-system
Eng, D. (2019, August 20). Play is Work. Retrieved June 3, 2025, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/8/20/play-is-work
Eng, D. (2021, April 6). What is Grokking? Retrieved June 3, 2025, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2021/4/6/what-is-grokking