Below is a small lightweight procedure to use when your players have found themselves in a complex and tense situation. Multiple threats and vectors threaten the group, and...

What if I told you that you could map every single element in your adventure to one of two states? You heard it here first friends and enemies: I’m back in the writing mines,...

The crew arrives in Fort Deauvilly. They meet a half-giant seer and take on jobs. Ratboy communes with a mysterious entity. Play Report The crew of the Last Chance arrived in...

Among the OSR blogosphere, there’s a lot of advice about how to make a sandbox. A whole lot of them involve breaking out a hexmap and populating it, creating a world for...

The scoundrels board their new ship. Introductions to their crew go over well. A group of glublins attack the ship, demanding their cannons and a fight ensues. Play Report The...

I’m going to be blogging about the current game I’m running, called The Shimmernight Sea. It is a nautical / pirate open-ended seabox. When I started planning this game, I knew...

Location-based adventures have a lot going for them. They’re naturally quite atomic in scale, in that each “room” exists mostly on its own, and the GM running the game can zero...

The weekend Return of the King came out, the sun was just peaking above the horizon when my friend Mike and I piled into my dad’s truck and made the forty minute pilgrimage...

I tend to oscillate rapidly between projects I’m interested in, like some kind of misfiring neuron in an RPG-soaked braincell. Right now, I’m working on a science-fantasy...

Forgive me, but I must post theory. I want to talk about worldbuilding, cognitive load, and the narrative baseline. Let’s first work to define what the narrative baseline is,...

Deep in the darkest parts of the Prismatic Wasteland discord server a bunch of us bloggers and designers decided to do a little Secret Santa. Instead of socks and cheap...

There’s a special place in the depths of my heart for those freaky little merchants you find in odd places. The concept of “dungeon merchants” has been around forever,...

There exists, within the world, a single somata engraving kit. It is not something one stumbles upon by luck or chance, and it cannot be found through research, coin, or word...

Hypothetical time: you’re starting a new game and want to have all the player characters connected in a way that creates just the right amount of drama, tension, and connective...

When I’m running a game, one of the highlights for me is inviting players to collaboratively build the world with me. In the past, this has resulted in a few hiccups. Enter...

I’m reading Berserk. There’s a part—almost 200 chapters in—where Guts is teaching Isidro how to fight. Here’s the panels: The core of these panels seem to be drawing on Kentaro...