rootring
rooted in blogs, linked in a ringAdvantage on Arcana
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On the ring since 2026-05-29
Latest activity 10mo ago
82 posts
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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...
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A Lakelands setting post Much of the wildlife in the Lakelands has not changed since the Arrival: beavers still industriously dam rivers, ducks migrate seasonally, and...
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Prismatic Wasteland, perhaps on behalf of Marcia B. of Traverse Fantasy, has announced an Appendix N (or other letter) blog bandwagon. An Appendix N, I only recently learned,...
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A Lakelands setting post What is it, to be human? From a biological standpoint, humans were among the most widespread and intelligent species on pre-Arrival Earth, bipedal...
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While working on my "Local Magic" post, part of the "Magia en la Ciudad" RPG blog carnival at Codex Anathema, I had an idea for a random table to generate magic trades that...
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Life tends to be local in the Lakelands, as few people travel farther than the next village or two. Those who do, however, often travel far, bringing news from places...
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I. I want to take another run at what I was trying to figure out in "The Mysterious Appeal of Emergent Narrative." I'm going to use Matthew A Olson's "July 2025’s RPG Blog...Linked by the ring
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What is the Weird? Theories abound: it is miracle, or witchcraft, or emergent phenomena as the physics of one world collides with the physics of another. In practice, the Weird...Linked by the ring
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At the start of the month I introduced the 2025 RPG Blog Carnival topic for June, Magic Shops and Their Alternatives. As a brief reminder, I asked participants to consider the...Linked by the ring
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Many different peoples now inhabit the post-apocalyptic Lakelands, and player characters are not limited to regular humans. For now, I have seven Lakelands "peoples" from which...
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For a few years now I've been picking away at a ttrpg setting in private, between other things and as the mood strikes - but no longer. It's time to share my work, very much in...
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There is no such thing as a magic shop. A few brewers or alchemists may sell signature potions here and there, and it's not impossible to find a crafter to enchant a sword or a...Linked by the ring
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Magic shops, that staple of high fantasy campaigns, can be controversial in the hobby. On the one hand, in all but the most magi-tech of settings, magic shops do not seem...
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In Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy games, paladins are empowered by their oaths. It's tempting to say that the very force of that promise is what magically shapes the...
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A few weeks ago, I ran a game for my brother Nick Hendriks and his daughter, using his rules-light All-Out Apocalypse system. For that game I wanted to make a creature...
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In "Magia en la Ciudad" ("Magic in the City"), his post for the 2025 RPG Blog Carnival, Gonz Campoverde of Codex Anathema asks about the magic that animates your game's...
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Here are four more magical diseases for your use in a high magic setting. As before, the first paragraph describes each disease generically and afterwards the mechanics are...
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Magical settings should have magical diseases. In a world with basilisks and ghouls, sicknesses with weird effects should be at least as common as those monsters are. To that...
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In "Toward Better Rewards," Matt Colville says (among many other things) that characters advanced in early editions of Dungeons & Dragons more by acquiring magic items than by...
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There are two kinds of people, perhaps: those who enjoy taxonomies and those who don't. As a member of the first category, I like that 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons divides...
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Late last year I suggested a way of making a ttrpg setting with your players: Days of Wonder's board game Small World already has a number of standard high fantasy staples:...
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A few weeks ago I played in a session of Falling Tide, my brother Nick Hendriks's OSR game.1 My PC Makepeace Barebones and the rest of the party were in a pirate town called...
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Colin Woodard's 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, published by Penguin, has turned out to be helpful for me as a...
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In my bio, which you can find under "My Character Sheet," I wrote, "One of the convictions motivating this blog [...] is that what we bring to the gaming table also has a lot...
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Last week I provided an exercise for sketching out the literary scenes of multiple cultures. In this post I'll do the exercise myself as an example, in case it's helpful to...
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Last time in this series I gave you an exercise for making a literary scene for a particular culture, and then went through it myself as an example. This exercise is especially...
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Over the years I have had a few campaign or one-shot ideas I may never use, and I thought I'd give them to you as an early Christmas gift. Some are serious enough and some are...
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In my last post I offered an exercise for making a literary scene for a single culture; in this post, I'll go through the exercise myself as an example. Now, I don't have a...