rootring
rooted in blogs, linked in a ringA shrike for my dreams · linked by the ring
Posts by A shrike for my dreams that other blogs in the ring have linked.
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Picked up recently
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The idea was that I am running an elfgame forest campaign for my young son and his friends, teaching them how to GM. They find a portal in the city, a la Ultan's Door, that...Linked by the ring
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"No man is an island,Entire of itself;Every man is a piece of the continent,A part of the main."--John Donne"Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth."--Archimedes...
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"When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than...Linked by the ring
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"When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness." --Tecumseh (apocryphal)If the world is a tree, its roots are legends. We cannot see them, but the sap...
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"I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes."--Psalm 82Folk here talk to things, and...Linked by the ring
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Right now my brain is jetlagged between thinking it's 8 am and 2 pm, I haven't played RPGs in a month, and writing words is honey on a cold day, drip drip drip. But the more I...Linked by the ring
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In many old school games and AD&D, you hire retainers to help you in the dungeon, which can give a player lots of actions (see my last post). Does that mean tactics and...Linked by the ring
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I just spent a lovely, hectic summer week chasing fulltime after my kids. They have grown so much, and I wanted to share a small part of their arc, the one where my partner...Linked by the ring
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They did it. Out of curiosity or boredom or misplaced trust, they pushed the big red button. The party gave the MacGuffin to the evil priestess, she summoned her evil god,...Linked by the ring
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Is talking to your players like playing a game of verbal ping-pong? Is the table quiet unless you are speaking with one of them? Do you fill the silence? Then you may have...Linked by the ring
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Is AD&D still alive and well, or an older part of the OSR that is fading in popularity? This week’s post is an apology: after I wrote “AD&D is too complicated for the OSR” in...
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I have been running a weekly 5e campaign through the fun pirate isles sandbox Secrets of the Black Crag (SoBC), by Chance Dudinack. We are 23 sessions in, and I plan to write...Linked by the ring
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When my kids were about 2 and 4 years old, a squirrel jumped onto the power transformer by our house. It did not go well: the squirrel was blown off onto the road, power went...
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Here’s a pair of questions I have been pondering: why don’t I make keyed hexcrawls for wilderness travel in my home game, and which published hexcrawls have I liked and why...Linked by the ring
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As promised, a follow-up post on my house-rules for playing Mausritter with my elementary-age children, derived from negotiating with my kids over four sessions of our ongoing...Linked by the ring
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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...
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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...
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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...Linked by the ring
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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...Linked by the ring
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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...Linked by the ring
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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...Linked by the ring
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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...
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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...Linked by the ring
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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...Linked by the ring
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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,...Linked by the ring