rootring
rooted in blogs, linked in a ringThis Vorpal Coil
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On the ring since 2026-03-20
Latest activity 2mo ago
66 posts
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In 1993, Sandia National Laboratories released a report addressing a problem that wouldn’t matter for thousands of years: once you’ve built a lead-lined nuclear waste disposal...
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A month ago marks the most recent rotation around the day of my birth. This means that today, you receive the knowledge of ten certified Rose Facts: The post The Skye Epoch...
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In spite of the distinction typically drawn between flesh and machine, the human brain is, in fact, an electronic computer: it uses electrical impulses transmitted through...
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So, game development update. So far I’ve got some core functionality implemented: you can move around, swing a pickaxe to break rocks, and rocks drop different kinds of ore...
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So, I’ve described the geologic strata in Deep Time, and the geochemical ores you can mine there, but I haven’t written about how you get to those places and dig up those...
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The ancient alchemist sought many things: chrysopoeia, panacea, and elixir vitae among them. They believed that, through the application of the right sequence of chemical...Linked by the ring
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Deep Time is a story about how physical depth encodes the almost unimaginably distant history that took place before humans emerged to scratch the last few moments of it onto...
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As I type this, a tiny, poorly placed cut on the pressing angle of my left pinkie protests – but I must silence it, as the people need to know the future that awaits them. It...
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All players other than the tyrant are rebels, who collectively form a cell of the revolutionary movement. Each rebel possesses a “reason” and an occupation. Their reason is why...
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Immanent Domain is a tabletop RPG I’ve had on the backburner for a few years now. The premise (elaborated on in this prior post) is that someone figured out how to build...
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As of last month, all seven episodes of Rose Playing Games are available on Youtube, so leave a like if you haven’t already! The playlist for the whole series in order is here:...
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For centuries, the use of magic followed a familiar pattern. A mage concentrated aether from their surroundings into a focus object, then used practiced meditative...
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[This is the second half of the hidden backstory of ‘Til Death. The first half can be found here.] A thousand years ago, the woman who came to be called the Ashen Empress...Linked by the ring
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It will come as no surprise that my game of space necromancer romance, ‘Til Death, came about as a reaction to reading the Locked Tomb novels. I liked the science-fantasy...Linked by the ring
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We agreed ahead of time that the topic was going to be “goals in roleplaying games”, then went off to read different books that approached the subject along very different...
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There are quite a few puns I could make to introduce this topic, so I’ll save us both some time and let you imagine your favorite one. There, feeling better? Now you’re ready...
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The Bloggies, the premiere awards for tabletop roleplaying game blogs, was on a month ago, and This Vorpal Coil was nominated for Best Debut Blog! However, it did not win, with...
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Classic Megaman (AKA Rockman) games maintained a nonlinear structure: they presented the player with a stage select screen showing the set of bosses they could fight, and...Linked by the ring
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Comedy: not a standard topic of TTRPG discussions, but a highly pertinent one all the same: if you haven’t laughed at your table, then you need to find a new group. In this...
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Early in the history of the hobby, a number of factors (including primordial Gygaxian authoritarianism) led to the perception/practice of game masters as petty tyrants who...
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It’s been close to three months since I updated Protoplastic officially, but believe me, I never stopped working on it. In spite of a variety of other projects and things going...
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The Bloggies, the premiere awards for tabletop roleplaying game blogs, is currently on, and This Vorpal Coil has been nominated for Best Debut Blog! If you’ve enjoyed reading,...
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If you can believe it, it’s an episode of Rose Playing Games once again! Watch it here! Today we’re talking about crafting systems in RPGs: gathering materials, assembling...
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Mausritter is a fantastic game – very few get as close as it does to the Platonic ideal of a post-OSR ruleset, covering so much ground yet remaining so brief. While most of it...Linked by the ring
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Welcome back to Rose Playing Games, the Rose-only (count: 2) tabletop RPG show! This episode we’re talking about the history of mechanics like Call of Cthulhu sanity and other...
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Today I was catching up on a recent Dice Exploder episode about the chit-based inventory mechanic in Mausritter – which is a great system, which the hosts come up with some...
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Hello, and welcome to episode two of the only tabletop roleplaying game video podcast featuring two simultaneous Roses! This time our topic is economies in RPGs: gold pieces,...
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So I got the chance to run another playtest session of Protoplastic, this time with an entirely different group of players. I ran essentially the same scenario as the last...Linked by the ring
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At long last, the first episode of the new video podcast I’ve been working on the past few months! A tabletop roleplaying game talk show starring myself (Rose Skye) and an...
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It’s been a month since I last gave an update on Protoplastic, and there’s a reason for that: when I tried to run a playtest one-shot shortly after 0.4 came out, only some of...