rootring
rooted in blogs, linked in a ringBrackish Draught
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On the ring since 2026-05-28
Latest activity 2mo ago
23 posts
Earlier
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This blog post is inspired by a panel I was on at Sabrecon in 2025. Unlike most panels, we ended up with two and a half hours to talk about making RPGs with a small group of...
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Here’s a neat little dice idea I’m thinking about. If you roll 2d6, the odds of rolling exactly 7 are around 16%. The odds of rolling an odd number other than 7 are around 30%....Linked by the ring
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I was involved in organizing Designed in the DMV, a local group of mostly-but-not-exclusively-RPG designers in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area. I’ve had to leave the area for...
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The rules of Estoc are as such: Each character has four Qualities. A Quality can be anything – a title, a piece of equipment, a skill, a career, a conviction, a supernatural...Linked by the ring
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For much of the early 2000s and 2010s, whenever a TV show wanted to signify that a character was supposed to be a geeky type, they would have them express a strong opinion on...
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I’ve been asked a couple times by people looking to make RPGs about what kind of math goes into designing an RPG, and if they need to study any particular mathematics in order...Linked by the ring
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I had this idea during the TTRPG manifesto jam, but never got around to writing it down before the jam ended. The OSR famously has its Principia Apocrypha, and Irving Benitez...
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I'm reposting the "Cost" section from the end of my first blog post here, to make it easier to link to. It's come up a lot in conversations I've had recently. Cost Cost creates...
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Here are two concepts, one from the world of biology and one from the world of landscaping, that I think are useful when thinking about games. A conserved sequence is a...
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It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mines. -“Dark As A Dungeon”, Merle Travis The dungeon holds no special nostalgia for me – I started gaming with the libraries and...Linked by the ring
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If you’ve read some earlier blog posts, you might know I’m very interested in producing the physical copies of my RPGs as sustainably as possible. I recently met Ben through...
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UPDATE: I was extremely wrong about how the Ennies work. Anyone can vote, not just Gencon attendees. I think I had them confused with the Hugos. Now I could really use some...
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Here's something a little different than my normal blog posts. I promise it's at least tangentially RPG-related. “All I dream of is breaking free/ from all the spells chained...
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In Development Log 2: From a Game To A Book I chronicled how Dawn of the Orcs went from a set of playable rules to an actual printable book. Now I’m going to get into the...
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In Development Log 1: The Recap I explained how I came up with the rules for the game Dawn of the Orcs. In this blog entry I’ll get into how I made the book. The typical...
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It's no secret that I like Orcs. I just released a GMless game about their origins, I’m working on a trad game where everyone plays Orcs, and as a player I often enjoy making...Linked by the ring
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If I was a smarter, more energetic person, I would chronicle the development of my games stage by stage on social media, building up a following along the way. But I am not. I...
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This blog post is going to be a short one - I just launched Dawn of the Orcs on Kickstarter! Go check it out! Dawn of the Orcs is a GMless dark fantasy worldbuilding and...
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Some pieces of the following text will appear in the upcoming Lurking Fear GM’s Guide, but have been heavily modified for this post. There are broadly three kinds of horror...
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I’ve learned a lot of useful things by paying attention to the personal stories of my favorite RPG creators as they try to make games, so I’m going to start an irregular...
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The following is an except from The Lurking Fear GM's Guide, an upcoming companion to my game The Lurking Fear. The final text may change before the guide is published, but I...Linked by the ring
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The following is an except from The Lurking Fear GM's Guide, an upcoming companion to my game The Lurking Fear. The final text may change before the guide is published, but I...
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The following is an except from The Lurking Fear GM's Guide, an upcoming companion to my game The Lurking Fear. The final text may change before the guide is published, but I...Linked by the ring