Announcing the release of my third-party content for Atlas Games and David Somerville's Planegea, Extravagant Sehlkwen's Rumours of Treasure ...

I'm pleased to be host of the June 2026 RPG Blog Carnival. This month I'm inviting you to consider the following subject: Cyclopes, Ettins, Hill Giants, and Ogres. I've chosen...

If you're a player in my Fortunes of Ewistar game, please don't read this post. This month, Vulcan Stev at Vulcan Stev's Database hosts the RPG Blog Carnival with the post,...

In my excitement about the "What My Games Look Like" post trend, I told the other GMs in a Discord server I'm on that I'd host their posts on this topic if they cared to write one up...

More enemies for Nick Hendriks's AllOut Apocalypse system, including raiders called Apothelyptics, assorted cultists, gene-edited mutants, various beasts, snallygasters, and mantygers.

Back in February a handful of ttrpg bloggers, starting with Grace at 200 independent bathrooms, wrote posts describing what their games look like. This is mine.

I don't think I can imagine post-apocalyptic fiction without the scavenger. Of course the scavenger isn't the *only* archetypal post-apocalyptic character: the raider also...

A companion post to John Machnee's episode about autism and tabletop games on his podcast Christianity on the Spectrum, on which I was a guest.

When it comes to tabletop games, I generally handcraft settlements, encounters, and so on rather than roll on tables. So far my approach to the Lakelands has been in line with...

I don't generally care for the idea, seen in some fantasy stories, that the gods need worship. I've been meaning for a while to write something about this, but as it happens...

In the broadest strokes, there are four approaches to understanding, avoiding, confronting, and harnessing the Weird: scientific experiment, exoteric tradition, esoteric...

I've decided that in 2026, as something of a new year's resolution, I will work to have better locations in my tabletop games. For the month of January 2026, Duncan S. Rhodes...

The Lakelands are not a safe place. They're safer than the Unbound’s petty empires to the south, or the tracts of wasteland beyond them, but this does not make them safe: death...

A Lakelands post "Ant-sheep" is the common English name for one of the domesticated extraterrestrial insectoid animals, about as big as ewes, that the amazons and drakemantids...

A Lakelands post Religious service was a function never neglected in pioneer days. Whatever the pioneer's circumstances or environment, this, at least, was always vouchsafed to...

For the month of December 2025, I hosted the RPG Blog Carnival, having chosen the theme "The End Times and After." As a reminder, I asked for blog posts on any of the following...

When it comes to pictures for my blog posts, I'm committed to only using images in the public domain or ones with Creative Commons or similar licenses, such as Unsplash's...

     "The only way to learn is by playing. The only way to win is by learning. And the only way to begin is by beginning."      — Sam Reich, Dropout's Game Changer As I write...

One way the world changed with the Arrival is that ghosts have become an indisputable reality: sapient minds sometimes leave echoes when they die, of various complexities. More...

     "Of what is he singing?" said a queen to a queen.      "He is singing of everlasting Zaccarath."      — Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, "In...

The CarnivalesqueRussian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) is perhaps best known for his work on "carnival," often now called "the carnivalesque."1...

      "The time is out of joint."       — William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene 5 The White Pages Society is a network of local historians, archivists, and librarians who...

When I first started working on the Lakelands, I planned to make my own system for it, until I eventually realized how much time that would take and how little I then knew...

Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, The Fairy Dance, 1895 For better or worse, my main 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign tends to shy away from overly fantastic setting details. Of...

Somewhere in the Black Hills National Forest of former South Dakota, an Unbound named the Howling Rustic was dissatisfied with the human population of Earth. Perhaps the humans...

Horror games are not what I run most often, but from time to time I run Chronicles of Darkness games, or Fate Core adaptations of Chronicles of Darkness setting lore. In fact,...

A Lakelands setting post In a previous Lakelands post, I discuss a central tension that animates the setting, one which rejects both hope and cynicism. To a significant extent...

For September's RPG Blog Carnival, host WobbleRocket at his eponymous blog chose the topic Magic Stones. Among possible examples, WobbleRocket gives the following: "In Dungeons...

A Lakelands setting post Imagine a band of hunters ranges through the Lakelands, tracking a herd of deer. A heavy fog creeps up. By the time they begin to worry about losing...

A Lakelands setting post Not many years after the Arrival, an Unbound named the Hallowed Instar gathered a small team of scientists in an Illinois university laboratory and...