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On the ring since 2026-03-18
Latest activity 5w ago
60 posts
Earlier
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Prismatic Wasteland has once again put out the call for a blogwagon, this time about maps, and I’ve got to land this hot air balloon before the deadline hits. This is a small...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...Linked by the ring
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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...
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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...
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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...Linked by the ring
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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...
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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...
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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,...Linked by the ring
- A Sicko’s Guide to Prepping D&D Valeria Loves
- A Sicko’s Guide to Prepping D&D Valeria Loves
- The Map Speaks: Communicating Via Maps Personable Thoughts
Show 9 more
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- The Bloggies' 2026 Nominees Explorers Design
- Play Style Preferences: Widdershins Worldbuilding Widdershins Wanderings
- I’d Rather Be a Mouse Than an Elf Prismatic Wasteland
- Treasure Thoughts Microblog Rise Up Comus
- Example: Making Literary Scenes for Multiple Cultures Advantage on Arcana
- EYE OF NEWT AND A DASH OF STARDUST: Ingredients for Fairy Tale Adventures I CAST LIGHT!
- Shiny TTRPG links #206 Seed of Worlds
- The Demon of Dogwater Gulch Pre-Postmortem Gordian Blade
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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...Linked by the ring
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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,...Linked by the ring
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Prismatic Wasteland has issued a challenge and who am I to resist such a thing? My challenge is thus: In January 2024, come up with a new resolution mechanic for a TTRPG and...
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Alright, another year in the books means that we’re going to go through files, notes, and memories and try to recap this thing. This is a mostly self-indulgent post, rough...Linked by the ring
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The children run through the village, laughing and singing in harmony. The organist in the temple plays music that would rival even the great masters of the world. The dour...
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Welcome, traveler, to Gulch. This town ain’t much, but it’s ours, and we’d appreciate it if you’d not muck about in our business, thank you very much. You might be tempted to...
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What can Over the Garden Wall teach us about adventure design? The 10 episodes are tight, full of surprises, and effortlessly entertaining. For the most part, they seem to...
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Imagine a character that has been through it all: hard fought victories against deadly foes, slaying monsters of legend, delving into depths unknown, and wielding the old...
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Usually, the way I handle players exploring a location is pretty standard: I describe the location, point out the interesting bits, and let the players inform me how their...
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In the following post I’m going to lay out a foundational structure for using scrabble tiles in two different, but connected, ways. The first is using the tiles as a key to...Linked by the ring
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Anyone who knows me knows how much I love spreadsheets, and that’s why—like an absolute freak—I write the first draft of my adventures in a spreadsheet. Hold on. Don’t leave....
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In the latest POSR game I’ve been running we’ve played eleven sessions and the players have only explored two dungeons—and those dungeons only took five sessions between both...
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I think something that almost every GM seems to go through is the elusive “ship game” , where the characters are all members of a crew of some kind of ship (sailing or space)...
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As I gear up to run another game for my friends, I’ve been fiddling with my own system. I’m trying to mesh together multiple things that I love—characters with cool abilities,...
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Like almost everyone, I’ve spent some time thinking about Witcher style monster hunting in RPGs, racking my brain over and over again as I try to “solve the case” as it were....Linked by the ring