rootring
rooted in blogs, linked in a ringNick Hendriks
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On the ring since 2026-04-02
Latest activity 16mo ago
46 posts
Brick
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You are so small and the world is so big! Lucky for you a mighty steed awaits, its chitin glossy and vibrant. Choose or roll for three traits (re-roll incompatible results):...
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Just a brief thought. It occurred to me recently that I've probably been looking at factions through the wrong end of the microscope. I find the concept of factions to be an...
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The West Marches gameplay style gives us a structural conceit: Start in Town, End in Town. It exists to satisfy the format's real-world need for players to be available for...
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I've posted on this blog about my piratey West Marches game before. In typical OSR fashion I've hacked together my own custom set of rules to suit this game, and it's ever a...
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Smudge Industries performed some kind of chemistry in the Before Times. Today it is surrounded by pools of multicolour slime. Reaching the building on foot requires navigating...
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Have you ever wanted to run a secret agent spy thriller game but you couldn't come up with a cool story concept? Move over Clive Cussler! We're going to make up our own...
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Last time: Three androids were waking up. Fly was set up to start shooting as soon as the androids caused trouble. Altivo was trying to steal shotguns. Baby was trying to...
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It's been ages since I ran session 1 of this game, so I'm going to do my best to pick up where I left off. I may forget a few things. To begin with I cannot remember how many...
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In session 0 we established a party and a quest: Fly, Altivo, and Baby must find chlorine or something similar within the bowels of the Blood-Bird infested West Edmonton Mall....
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Inspired by Lone Horizons, I've decided to do some solo roleplaying using my Fallout knockoff rules-light system and record what happens as I go. I'm not confident enough to...
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Goblins come out of rocks. They've been there since nearly the beginning of time, when the world was fire and Chaos, before Order got to grips with things. The world cooled,...
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DISCLAIMER: This is not a fully developed idea, just musing. I advise skipping it if you're looking for something actionable. This is going to seem like I'm doing it out of...
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Idea: A hidden network of social influence which players must navigate in order to gain the trust or attention of someone influential. Imagine this: your party is visiting The...
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That's right, I pre-roll them, and I won't apologize for it. It gives me more time to think about how to make the results cool. I'm running a West Marches game (I've talked...
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I love to categorize stuff to make my life easier when running exploration tabletop games. Today I'm thinking about pointcrawl paths and their characteristics. Three key...
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This was a direct continuation of my previous playtest with some new rules adjustments. PlayersMy brother, playing Fast-Hands Finn My daughter, playing Brute Melee Character...
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PlayersMy brother, playing two characters at once, Harry and Harriet Character CreationCharacter Creation went as smoothly as could be expected. My brother did not have time to...Linked by the ring
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Start with the fiction of the game. Find or design a fun encounter map. Include some great NPCs. These standard pieces of advice apply, but are not specific to this design...
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I read this fantastic post over at elmc.at about managing factions in a sandbox game today and just love it. It's not wildly dissimilar to the simple faction system I've been...
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A short one, and obvious to most I'm sure. It can be difficult, I think, to know when to break the rules when you're playing a new system. What rolls are important and which...
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Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is - as you may learn from the linked Wikipedia article - a flawed concept. It may model the way some people operate, but people and their...
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I posted before about my attempts to liven up my piratey West Marches game by encouraging PC-to-PC interactions. My players are very story-focused, and I want to find ways to...Linked by the ring
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I posted before about how flavourless the opening of my piratey, 17th Century West Marches games have been. In that post I theorized ways to fix this. In this post: more...Linked by the ring
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This is another post migrated from my old Tumblr blog. A marble bust of a large-nosed woman A richly woven carpet with nautical patterns Soft, clean bedsheets sewn with golden...
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I used to maintain a D&D themed Tumblr blog. It had a variety of content, but far and away the most popular posts were just... lists of things. Here is one of those lists,...
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At the start of a few sessions in my longest-running campaign I tried out a few experimental storytelling techniques. Each one was about 20 minutes long, so not a huge...
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EDIT: I want to be clear about something from the outset: This blog post is about a couple of things: it's about me learning about myself and my friends. It's about setting...
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As a grown-ass adult with a job and a family I consider myself wealthy by many measures. Unfortunately spare time is not counted among those metrics. I'm currently playing in a...Linked by the ring
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I prepared a West Marches style game for my game group and invited some other folks along. It didn't go well. I'll admit I'm a bit sore over it. I think it's fair to feel...Linked by the ring
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EDIT: I've learned that the Angry DM has apparently already come up with this idea and has even called it the exact same name. I'm gonna leave this up because it's not like I...