Not that long ago in G+, Rob Donoghue proposed the idea of distributing secrets to players at the start of play by means of a card draft. Shortly before Cam Banks posted the same idea, it occurred to me that starting character stats could be distributed with a card draft […]
About six months ago, I wrote about my conflicted relationship with the Forgotten Realms setting, and mentioned that I might like to rebuild Menzoberranzan and the conception of the drow as a whole. My problem with them is that the Menzoberranzan boxed set is written to support an urban, all-drow campaign, […]
In working on Quintessence of Dust, I decided that I liked some parts of D&D Next’s skill list, and didn’t like others. Of course, I’ve talked about D&D Next’s skill model extensively. I particularly liked the skill-die model of earlier playtest packets, with skills rated +0 to +1d12, and with each […]
Quite some time back, I talked about the problems of high-level gameplay in D&D and made an assertion that the concepts weren’t the problem, and that it was easy to scale up to higher fantasy and power on the story front. This assertion was not supported in the comments. It comes […]
Not very long ago, I posted a lengthy praise of Below, and in that post I talked about how much I liked the way it lets adventurers alter parts of the dungeon to their own convenience. I may have even waxed a touch loquacious about it. I can’t remember the […]
In response to this post, +Matt Lichtenwalner asked: LARPing’s not my bag, but I am curious about the module building and how it relates to ‘traditional’ module building.
With constructive and much-appreciated feedback from friends, I’ve created another boardgame for Dust to Dust. As with its predecessor, and the Duel Arcane, the goal is to create uniquely setting-appropriate ways to pass the time with your friends, mostly using pieces that characters already have a reason to carry on […]
The Bellringer’s Tomb For the past few weeks, I’ve gotten back into Below and Fallen London (formerly known as Echo Bazaar), two browser-based choose-your-own-adventure games. I’ve mentioned Echo Bazaar reasonably often in this blog, though it’s been awhile; I think my hiatus from the game ran nearly two years. I had […]
In response to a question from a reader, I’m tackling what is, in my limited knowledge, one of the great unaddressed issues of LARP-running: the long arm of the law and imprisonment, both by PCs and against PCs. Now, I bet you’re thinking of that one time there was a […]
In working on Quintessence, I’ve been trying to think of situations, either realistic or cinematic, that other tabletop games don’t model well, if at all. So when Kainenchen and I watched Stardust the other day, I was struck by the many times that a character sets a blade at another character’s […]