rootring
rooted in blogs, linked in a ringLatest
Recent posts from across the ring.
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Earlier
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Look what the cat dragged in. Monthly project updates, plus curated blog posts and oddments worth your time.
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Urban design is the art and science of shaping urban spaces. Let's steal from it.
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The dreaded snake: scourge of man, terror of archaeologists, sworn foe of silver screen Cimmerians. The slithery, venomous beasts have been staples of our milieu since its...
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Hit points and damage, it is often observed, don't "make sense." They're wonderful game abstractions that persist because they are fun and work well, even if you sort of have...
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tl;dr: a draft system with a setting soaked into its bones; PC's as "meddlers". Light-weight and stuffed with gorgeous art. I saw Centaur Games launched their webstore so I...
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Band-Aids & Bullet Holes is my upcoming deckbuilder tabletop roleplaying game built for bloody revenge operas inside a tight-knit clique of professional assassins. Here’s a...
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UPDATED April 8th 2026: In retrospect I decided I didn't care for how I was handling armour for the Automatons. My design goal was to encourage players to seek situational...
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Meta Image from Michael Q Powell's Photography Blog I've spent the last few days going back through the notes and feedback from last week's playtests. In The Wax Marches I...
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I mentioned earlier I was using Gus L. and I’s dungeon from Fantastic Medieval Campaigns so I could be lazy and not have to prep much for my home campaign’s alien arc—isn’t...
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Suikoden is one of my favorite video games of all time. This quaint, rustic JRPG is based on the oldest Chinese fiction novel, Water Margin, and tells the story of the young...
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Owlch. Or: No pants, no service.
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Unicorn Blood Simple, Or: Is a night a day?
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Discussions around the bullet typographical device have been making its rounds in the Blogosphere and inciting much debate and discourse, which I’m partially adding to with...
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Hi all! As you might know, Pine Shallows is now on Kickstarter: Good news, we reached the first stretch goal. This means a new adventure will be added: Salvaged Memories, a...
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The Black-Blood God promised Senator Johnson that, in exchange for extracting more fossils fuels from the Tennessee hills, it would save Senator Johnson's wife from lung...
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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...
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The first in a series of posts with resources to help support player skills. First up - better equipment lists (with verbs!).
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In Firebrands, The GM Is Dead.
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Listen to this episode here. The Awards are back! The rpg awards show with a bent towards indie games and the guaranteed worst SEO of all time is back for...
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These are my initial observations after running the first half of my Super Adventure. I will be writing more concrete advice on how to structure one after that one finishes up...
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Writing adventures for Cairn is very similar to writing for other OSR systems, with a few additional tweaks. Before reading further, see my previous post for a decent...
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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...
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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...
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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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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...
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Shiny links for this Easter Monday - a free day I forgot I had off! Still need more? See last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the RPG Blog Carnival....
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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...
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Si las reglas del juego no te convencen, tendrás que cambiarlas. ¿Cómo puede hacerse bien eso?
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Back in the late 14th or early 15th century, poet, nobleman, and (one assumes) at least occasional drinker Oswald von Wolkenstein prepared a list of twelve types of drunk, as...