rootring
rooted in blogs, linked in a ringAdvantage on Arcana
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On the ring since 2026-05-29
Latest activity 6w ago
76 posts
Earlier
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In my excitement about the "What My Games Look Like" post trend (see the first here and mine here), I told the other GMs in a Discord server I'm on that I'd host their posts on...
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I'm struggling to write the next post for my post-apocalyptic/cosmic horror setting, so I'm looking at what I've already got written that I could post. The next installment of...
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Back in February a handful of ttrpg bloggers, starting with Grace at 400 independent bathrooms, wrote posts describing what their games look like. (See, for instance,...Linked by the ring
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A Lakelands post 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...
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A few weeks ago I recorded an episode with John Machnee for his podcast Christianity on the Spectrum, which reports on his ethnographic study of autistic Christians and...Linked by the ring
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A Lakelands post 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...
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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...
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A Lakelands post In the broadest strokes, there are four approaches to understanding, avoiding, confronting, and harnessing the Weird: scientific experiment, exoteric...
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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...Linked by the ring
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A Lakelands post 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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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"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...
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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...
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"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...
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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...
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"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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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A few months ago in one of my anthology sessions I had an opportunity to use the flickers, a magical disease I homebrewed to fill the gap of compelling fantasy ailments. Based...
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A Lakelands setting post cw: climate crisis David Somerville identifies three key phrases that define how his Planegea setting ought to feel: kinetic action, primordial horror,...
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At of Dice and Dragons, Scot Newbury chose the use of AI in TTRPGs as the topic of August 2025's RPG Blog Carnival, immediately after Prismatic Wasteland announced the Appendix...