Bloggies 2022

The first part in a comprehensive guide for designing and running your own hexcrawl campaign.

A little subsystem for tracking the state of the masquerade in your vampire games. I wanted a minigame that tracked masquerade breaches and...

See Also: d100 - This Secret Door Opens... S o often in Modules and Published Adventures, Traps are tragically under-telegraphed. Often...

With Twitter in its apparent death throes, a lot of people are thinking about alternatives. My favorite alternative is the humble blog. If T...

Players see god in one of two ways: Vague source of magic, or high-level XP piñata. I propose a third: gameplay feature. Profane, no?

TL;DR: here's a link to a rough draft procedure I've made for hacking gameplay [INTRUSION DETECTED: EPIC HAX0R AVA WAS HERE] Today I will o...

I wrote about this a little on twitter the other day, but we’re changing the way we do ship combat in Mothership. In Mothership, ship encounters are social encounters, not dog fights. The game assumes that the minutiae and logistics of conducting space warfare can largely be handled by the ship’s computer. What can’t be handled is the decision making: should we risk death to fight with this other ship. This means we’re placing a heavy emphasis on a ship’s innate capabilities over the talents of the individuals aboard the ship.1 This feels very on point for a horror game to me. You’re stuck inside the ship that might be your tomb, whether you decide to fight or flee may be one of your last decisions. Also, any aspect of the game that means players are going to talk more about the risks of a given scenario is a good one in my book.

This is something I wanted to isolate from my post about mosaic worlds [1] because I thought it was worth drawing out and expanding upon. I...

1d10 MINOR ORBS 1. Cursed Orb of Evil Snowmen A heavy white orb, like a small felted bowling ball.  Once you hold it in your hand, it begins...

A few options for making healing from 0 hp feel more realistic and offer more tactical depth.

GOBLINS! Here are some rules for an all-Goblin game build on the "BX Commons" chassis. Arthur Rackham CHARACTER GENERATION all goblins are ...

AEdwardBaker   Deep in the great asteroid hive-cities, folk capitalists chant polyphonic stock prices to the thrum of their crypto rigs and ...

Swine Chopper from Darkest Dungeons Once again I am surprised by what catches fire on Twitter and what doesn't. The most recent example is a...

An independent, coreless, spirit-magic system for free-form RPGs... that's right, I've gone MOSAIC Strict.

The Construct Itself Of all the artefacts the ancients left littered across the cerulean sands of Vaarn, few are more imposing than the canted bulwark of pale ferrosteel that is known variously as …

There's a lot of excellent dungeons out there, but in my opinion there's a bit of a shortage of towns to go along with them. So here's my ta...

Split up hit dice in order to make every fight follow the "information, choice, impact" doctrine.

A blog about table-top role-playing games after a break of two decades.

SLOUCHING TOWARD PROCEDURALISM “Here we come across another, very positive feature of play : it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect...

At the time of this writing, my cozy game Under Hill, By Water is part of DriveThruRPG's "Cozy Game Indie Gallery." I'm extremely flattered...

Creators often live in the shadow of their own previous work, the big thing they're known for. Danial Radcliffe isn’t called the guy from Guns Akimbo or Swiss Army Man- he’s Harry Potter to the average person on the street. Steamtunnel at the Hydra’s Grotto can be counted among these shaded creators by their well known 2009 blog post “In Praise of the Six Mile Hex”. In it they laud the 6 mile hex scale as the most convenient for computing distances at the table.

I recently reviewed John Battle's My Body is a Cage for Bones of Contention . Battle’s game combines slice of life real world downtime wi...

This is a post I had hoped to write back at the start of July, and so by now the little conversation I hoped to contribute to is far from au...

A guide on how to create procedures to structure your RPG campaign

I want to talk about a long-standing tendency that's been bothering me in OSR-inflected design spaces. I'll start this off with a working d...

Late anaphase of mitosis (sciencephototlibrary) I hate when I write a thoughtful response on Reddit and not this blog. So here it is repeate...

So a game has “procedures” but what does that mean? This post presents a basic definition for an aspect of TTRPGs that is garnering more and more critical attention.

Who's ready for another stupidly long post? That's the spirit! The "Skill Challenge" is an interesting type of generalist gameplay procedure...