rootring
rooted in blogs, linked in a ringRise Up Comus
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On the ring since 2026-03-17
Latest activity 11mo ago
288 posts
Earlier
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At my day job, I’m a technical writer. In the evenings, I blog about RPG stuff. I am combining these professional interests into this series: I am using my career of...
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In games I write, I tend to be pretty uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Reddit neckbeardy about religion (despite being a somewhat religious person). There are powerful religious institutions...
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Weird Writer's prep post has started a bandwagon. I have enjoyed reading people's various modes of prep.As I am preparing a campaign right now (running the Yellow Book of...
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User castella on the Worm discord did a great write up of the different ways a monster can inflict harm and setbacks to adventurers in His Majesty the Worm. Because this essay...
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The cockroachatrice is, like all animals with a stupid name, the result of a wizard's bad sense of humor. Goddamn, those idiots ruin everything.These 1' cockroaches have a...Linked by the ring
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I had this "aha" moment a few weeks ago, sketched it out, and shared it. Unfortunately, that drained all the endorphins out of it, and I never got around to really exploring...
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I don't think I'm the first person to make this observation (as an OSR blogger, I almost never am), but it occurred to me today how useful the saving throw names are for...
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I have gone on record as saying that making a megadungeon is fun and easy. I wrote a book about it. But I have good news. It's even easier than I made it out to be. I want to...Linked by the ring
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I assume the Venn diagram of "people who read my blog" and "people who have already backed the Knock! Kickstarter" is a perfect circle, but if not, I wanted to say (shout!...
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A while back, I wrote about the tensions between wanting no homework and settings with rich lore (and some potential solutions). Today, I'll write about another solution:...
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I really do believe that indie games live and die by their third-party support. Mothership is probably the best in the business with this right now (although lots of cool games...
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My colleague, Warren at ICastLight, posited that we can embed short-term memory into tables like your encounter table to create a more dynamic or interesting engine for...Linked by the ring
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As Dan pointed out in his post, the cleric's Turn Undead ability says something about the default setting of D&D: there are undead here. Indeed, for this to be a core class...Linked by the ring
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1. Weirwood StaffMade of white weirwood, carved with a mournful face. On nights of the new moon, you can ask the GM about a past event. On nights of the full moon, you can ask...
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"How much treasure should I be giving out in His Majesty the Worm?" I get this question sometimes, and wanted to address it in a blog post I could link to for...
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What is deconstruction?In 1967, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida published the book Of Grammatology. In it, he reevaluated traditional Western ideas, claiming there is no...Linked by the ring
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In many RPG books, character creation is right in the front of the book to give the new reader a sense of what the game is about, help them picture who they'll be playing and...Linked by the ring
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I had an idea for a narrative game while watching Nosferatu. Not my usual deal. Jotting down the idea as a microblog for posterity.The game is called...Cargo: Boxes of...
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Every time I go to a museum, I think "Wow, these artifacts are so interesting. The real world is so much weirder and more fantastic than the loot described in the pages of...
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Hello, happy New Year! As we start 2025, I have noticed that many people are spinning up dungeon-creation projects (Dungeon23 continues into its third year, and the Zungeon...Linked by the ring
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Marcia at Traverse Fantasy had the idea of bite-sized dungeons--six room layouts that contain a normalized array of the types of rooms you can get in procedural generation in...Linked by the ring
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Here are some equipment packages you can use when generating new characters. The goal is to make it quick and easy to pick some gear based on your motifs/failed careers without...Linked by the ring
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The Lord of the Rings Adventure Game is one of my favorite licensed Tolkien games. It was released in 1991, and was largely the work of long-time ICE designer Jessica Ney...Linked by the ring
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With the dissolution of so many things I once enjoyed (Twitter, America, etc.), I'm going to try and start doing more microblogging. Too many of my previous thoughts were...Linked by the ring
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I expect the Venn diagram of "people who have already seen the notification that Questing Beast has a new video" and "people who read my blog" is a perfect circle, but was very...
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At the Cluny museum, there's a gallery that displays a sequence of six tapestries called The Lady and the Unicorn.You can see them all here.To quote Wikipedia: "Five of the...
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The Lord of the Rings Adventure Game is one of my favorite licensed Tolkien games. Pipedream is one of my favorite unlicensed Tolkien games.In Pipedream, there is a very...
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Here is a puzzle for your next dungeon. I have used it before. It is fun.There is a maze in the dungeon. It has many twists and turns, to say nothing about the zombies. Those...Linked by the ring
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Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?Me. I do. His Majesty the Worm has a vampire in its Bestiary. Here are some variations on that theme to give you some variety based on...Linked by the ring
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Throughout the month of September, I hosted a game jam for His Majesty the Worm on Itch. The goal of this jam was to support folks who had just got the game and were making...