Playing role-playing games with my kids has taught me, more than anything else, how to be a better GM. It is incredibly fun when it goes well.  But it can be hard when it does...

In role-playing games, how to deal with the ultimate failure, death?  There are plenty of ways to punish players for lesser failures, and as the Knight at the Opera points out,...

Tempting, dangerous choices, clear rewards with unpleasant surprises–that is the key to helping PCs to simultaneously feel fear and agency, I think.  This is the ‘mess around...

If you forgot or don’t have d12 dice, you can play a game of Daggerheart that uses playing cards in place of d12s.  This post details a few alternative ways to roll Duality...

Today, foreshadowing danger.  The next few posts in this series are my take on the path of fear for adventure games: how GMs can threaten and surprise players, maintaining...

Let me tell you a story about the old Reeve.  He was a hard bastard, taking all we could give every season and shoving our faces into the muck whenever we didn't hop to the...

Let’s talk about fear of failure and player investment, in both traditional and OSR games.  This was originally intended to be one post on building landscapes of fear around...

This is part 2 of a series on landscapes of fear (Part 1, Part 3): today I am going to talk about why it’s important to build a landscape that evokes fear. But before I get to...

Inspired by two excellent posts on using ecology to make encounters more realistic and exciting (Writing Encounters in Networks and Trophic Encounters), I started reflecting on...

I was going to bed last night when my friend Dadstep sent me the coolest idea, why not do opposed overloaded reaction rolls with cards, instead?  He calls it the...

Reaction rolls are my favorite part of OSR/NSR play.  But they have been around forever, in largely unchanged form, since the early days of DnD.  That got me thinking: can we...

Due to new medication, I'm battling insomnia this week.  So today I want to talk about health, and to share how I sustain my creativity.  This post is inspired in part by this...

Joel over at the Silverarm wrote a funny, yet serious, post advocating for greater use of Her Dodecajesty, the d12. In the spirit of having more d12s around our lives (and Joel...

This is a continuation of a review.  In part 1, I described what I like about Nimble 2e.  In this Part 2, I outline some things this homebrewer would fix, and give my overall...

I received Nimble 2e for my birthday in October, about time I reviewed it here.  Nimble started out as a 5e rules hack to make it faster, but Nimble 2e is its own game--a...

For my Shadowdark homebrew, I created feats for fighters, thieves, priests, wizards, and all classes.  Feats are meant to be even-level customization options, and also may be...

Well, I had intended that last post to be my farewell to 2025, but my kids are munching on dinner and I need a break.  Plus, the idea of writing a Year in Review post for a...

Inspired by the number of potential feats across DnD- and OSR-dom, I came up with "badass normal", OSR-compatible feats for Shadowdark.  Part 1 of this series banged out 30...

Inspired by the number of potential feats across DnD- and OSR-dom, I came up with "badass normal", OSR-compatible feats for Shadowdark.  Part 1 of this series had Fighter...

Inspired by the number of potential feats across DnD- and OSR-dom, I came up with "badass normal", OSR-compatible feats for Shadowdark.  Part 1 of this series had Fighter...

I love Shadowdark--it's lean, it's elegant, it's evocative.  Everything you need from a fungeon crawl, nothing you don't.  But coming to the OSR from a perspective of loving...

Domain of Many Things (DoMT) had an interesting blog post about how 5e is fundamentally a good game, but that quality is obscured by 'layers of interdependent ill-considered...

Initiative (who gets to go first in combat) is one of those things that is endlessly discussed in RPG circles.  If you haven't read an excellent roundup of initiative systems,...

Now that we are past the beginning, I will begin at the DAWN OF TIME and tell you about all the adventure games I have ever loved.  This will be a blog about tabletop role...

Beginnings are delicate things. Honestly I don’t like them so let’s skip to the part where I am blogging about table-top role playing games, okay?  But maybe one more thing...