I am so grateful for the positive responses to the last two posts in this series that I’m continuing without delay, before the deadline doom of the next few months eats my head again. Let’s see...
2026-01-04 20:27:38 +0000 UTC View PostI had fun revising the first few Bastion Special Facilities in my previous post, so to...
2025-12-12 17:27:50 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve talked before about what a mess I think the 2024 DMG’s Bastion rules are. With all respect to the designers, I think there are good LEGOs in the pile, but this arrangement of them doesn’...
2025-12-01 18:02:47 +0000 UTC View PostIt’s another year of blogging done, even if the last few months have been very thin around here. Some of my big clients have had steady work for me, and Citadel has taken whatever was le...
2025-11-21 03:29:22 +0000 UTC View PostFor Halloween, Kainenchen put together an awesome good-witch costume. Not in, you know, the Oz sense, though she’s also just finished rereading The Wizard of Oz and picked up the next bo...
2025-10-30 00:55:08 +0000 UTC View PostThis past weekend (19-21 September 2025), we ran the third three-day event for Citadel LARP, at Booker T State Park in Tennessee. 2025-09-22 17:07:10 +0000 UTC View Post
The use of hirelings isn’t nearly as common in D&D as it once was, but I think we should bring that back a bit. In addition to shoring up a party’s weakness and draining some cash out of th...
2025-08-06 00:02:19 +0000 UTC View PostWhat follows is a microgame that I wrote for Dancing Stickman's LAARG project on Bluesky (which is why the text refers to posting your playthrough on Bluesky). I don't work in the microgame space, ...
2025-07-26 18:30:26 +0000 UTC View PostWe ran a one-day event for Citadel LARP this past weekend (19 July), and we put our second puzzle box design into play this time. 2025-07-22 03:43:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Not even the Ranger has had as many UA releases thrown at it as the Psion (née Mystic). Searching through the dusty, moldering archives of this very website, I see that I 2025-06-06 19:44:51 +0000 UTC View Post
I haven’t written an UA breakdown in a hot minute—the last one was before the three core books of 2024-25 dropped!—but this drop sucked me back in. Part of this is to find out where the readi...
2025-05-19 03:23:09 +0000 UTC View PostSo I’m a huge fan of games like The Room and 2025-05-14 04:09:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey friends! I am excited to share with you today this sample of "Avenging Heart," an adventure I wrote for Wildmage Press's Horizons magazine. It's just a taste of the awesome stuff found...
2025-05-09 21:40:35 +0000 UTC View PostIf you’re like Kainenchen and me, you’ve been utterly obsessed with Blue Prince for the last month or more. Now, a roguel...
2025-05-05 15:46:26 +0000 UTC View PostOkay, I’ve gone away and had a long think about a core resolution mechanic for a Dust to Dust-based tabletop game. For aesthetic reasons, a core resolution mechanic for this game should involve d...
2025-04-16 13:34:26 +0000 UTC View PostIt doesn’t seem possible that it has been almost two years since the last time I posted something about Ruby Talon Deeps, or that I first drew it almost three and a half years ago. Time is weird ...
2025-04-10 15:12:15 +0000 UTC View PostOne of my professional projects and working on Citadel LARP have converged on exploring magic item flaws of varying severity. The space between a flaw and a curse is largely semantic, but if you’...
2025-03-23 02:42:22 +0000 UTC View PostThe location described below is an idea that I’ve been pondering for awhile now: a relatively safe settlement in the Abyss that PCs can use as a base of operations for adventures in tiers 3 and 4...
2025-02-19 01:41:39 +0000 UTC View PostIf you need some weirdos for your PCs to meet while exploring the dungeon, if you need a change of pace between two fights or just think a minor social encounter sounds like the thing, this table i...
2025-01-30 01:56:57 +0000 UTC View PostI liked the direction things were going in my last post, so today I’m continuing ...
2024-12-31 23:41:18 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve got a number of issues with the way the 2024 rules change Backgrounds from their 2014 form. In this post I want to dig into those issues and see if we can improve upon them. If I stumble upo...
2024-12-16 17:48:27 +0000 UTC View PostWe’re in the run-up to the first full weekend event of Citadel LARP. The Citadel in the name is a dungeon for as much of that old-school dungeon-crawling feel as we can manage in a LARP, and one ...
2024-12-06 18:39:44 +0000 UTC View PostThe actual anniversary of my blog was a few days ago, and I was just so buried in other tasks that I’m only now getting around to writing this. Every year I like to talk about what I’m playing,...
2024-11-22 22:12:16 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve been a huge fan of Robin Pierson’s History of Byzantium podcast since… whenever I finished listening to Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome (I also talked abo...
2024-10-24 13:27:20 +0000 UTC View PostIf you’re the kind of person who reads my LARP design posts, you probably already know about Citadel LARP (but I’ll link i...
2024-10-06 03:59:41 +0000 UTC View PostIt’s been an incredibly busy month, and next month won’t be easing up, so I’m sneaking in under the wire to get a second post up in September. On the plus side, I think it’s all work that i...
2024-10-01 01:51:55 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve done a few posts now that are collections of NPCs you can drop into your campaign. I usually do sets of twenty at a time, but since these are going to have more description for each item, an...
2024-09-05 04:12:59 +0000 UTC View PostOver in Tribality, I’ve posted some initial thoughts on the 2024 Player...
2024-08-20 02:13:07 +0000 UTC View PostYou'll probably be getting this message from a lot of your Patreon backers, but if you subscribed to my Patreon through the Apple Store, please consider switching to subscribing through desktop or ...
2024-08-12 19:26:16 +0000 UTC View PostIn my Aurikesh campaign, my PCs are in rebellion against the prince of the domain they live in. I've given them the names and brief descriptions of a bunch of the Prince's inner circle of advisors ...
2024-08-01 13:06:41 +0000 UTC View Post