rootring
rooted in blogs, linked in a ringA shrike for my dreams
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On the ring since 2026-03-19
Latest activity 2mo ago
46 posts
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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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How many things can one do in a round, and how does it change the feel of the game? I am playing OD&D this week, running through Thracia with the amazing d4 hp magic-user, and...
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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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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...
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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,...
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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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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...
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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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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...
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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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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...