What is “true” about the fiction of your world? I present a tier list (no S tier, sorry) of sources of truth and argue that the paramount source is what actually happens in...

If someone told you they were going to play sports at a professional level by the end of the year but they don't even practice regularly, would you believe them? This is how...

A small wiry man in a black bodysuit, red shorts, brown loafers, white gloves with torn fingers exposing dirty, gnarly long nails, and wearing a cheap costume mask of a rat...

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...

 CONTEXT & GOALSI have a slight fascination with understanding how much creative mileage one can get out of the Basic D&D and a couple of sheets of graph paper. I hold this...

Artist credit: Jeffrey HummelGamers suck at talking about difficulty. It's one of those topics that somehow never produces a good conversation. It's mired in bizarre value...

The Straight DopeI'm trying to make this a habit, so here's the gist. In ttrpgs, play will usually follow this basic procedure: Describe React Resolve Repeat This particular...

There was a poll a few months back on the Mythic Bastionland asking how many player characters is optimal for a long-running game. And of the 27 responses, the results were...

Roll a D6, D10, D12 and D20 at once, and consult the tables for inspiration:Arthur RackhamWhat message is imparted? (D6)A warningA rebukeA requestAn instructionA...

Writing dungeon locations is hard. I'm not referring to the creating a dungeon (that presents its own sort of challenge) but rather the actual act of writing it down. You have...

  This, mostly.Howdy, Farmhands!    This January, I posted a year-in-review to cover what I'd accomplished (or neglected) in 2025, as well as posited what I'd learned. The big...

note to self

A reading informed review of Orbital Blues.

Book recommendation for your Mythic Bastionland campaign

When you level up, you gain a random benefit based on your race or class. Here's what goblins get. You can also use this table for folks like half-orcs or maybe even tieflings,...

 Hey I decided to make a Webring for specifically bay area ttrpg people! I made it via onion ring so shout out to those wonderful people.If you wanna join the webring shoot me...

I just read Cats Have No Lords's post Tyranny of the Crawl (as well as the accompanying topic on The Cauldron), and it got me thinking about the relationship between hexcrawls...

Been tinkering with some advice for pacing a game of Intergalactic. I suspect I'll go a bit further than this, but it's a start.The speed at which the group moves through...

My marble visage wrinkles with an Ozymandian sneer when I read the countless posts advocating the disposal of this rule or that procedure because they are, and I'm trying my...

New to the ongoing blog series called STQK "Would you like to know more?" Hello there, We continue with the last episode in the Gamma World 1e system. Scene 1 After it seemed...

 Of all the factions and polities in Barony, the White City has always been the hardest for me to draw and think about visually. Part of this is scale - the images for these...

What if I told you that you could map every single element in your adventure to one of two states? You heard it here first friends and enemies: I’m back in the writing mines,...

Indonesian Tabletop RPG scene has a Gen AI problem!

We started preparing for our GURPS mini campaign about two months ago. Myself and several other intrepid explorers from the Paper Cult forums have been running a variety of our...

While running Libra and, now, prepping for Not My Destination, I'm still trying to keep up at least a once-a-month cadence for posts about my 2nd edition domain rules, to prove...

Here are some of my fresh thoughts after wrapping up a mini-campaign running Crown of Salt in Mörk Borg. This took a total of 5 2hr-ish sessions with a group consisting of 3-6...

Some of the most useful tools for a GM are tables and oracles. In it's most basic form random tables can aid a GM to make decisions or perhaps throw the adventure in a...

Last weekend I (officially) attended my third Gary Con. My first was in 2020, which was unfortunately moved online for obvious reasons, and I also attended in 2024. In 2022 and...

Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn...