Okay, look, quoting T.S. Eliot back and forth at each other was a significant part of how I got to know Kainenchen. All the more so when we reworked “The Naming of Cats” and “The Waste Land” to be about Fallen Earth, the MMO we both worked on. My point is, […]
This post comes out of watching a lot of The Magicians (haven’t read the books) and listening to a lot of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. Together, these have me thinking a lot about the narrative loop of stakes, agency, and consequences. I want to talk about these, and how we […]
Today is the fifth anniversary of my wedding with the wonderful Kainenchen. In celebration, here’s a collection of magic items corresponding to the traditional anniversary gifts of the first five years. And how should I begin?
I don’t have any great gift for rendering a visual description in my GMing narration – I can get the idea across, but really making players feel, smell, or taste the fetid stench of this week’s dungeon is just not something I do well. Among other things, this is because […]
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a game designer in possession of even a modest audience must be in want of a clever new way to talk about fundamental design.” — Jane Austen, on The Forge, circa 2003, probably. This is one of those abstract-theory posts that might be […]
This blog was nominated for a Liebster Award today by +Dan Head, one-half of Dan & Sally’s Digital Domain. The Liebsters are a pay-it-forward kind of blogging award designed to help others find new and interesting small-readership blogs in the vast, unexplored reaches of the Internet. The good thing about […]
Video gaming, as a medium, lives now in a constant state of public debate over when it might bridge the gap into being an art form. A conversation sprang up the other day in G+ over this article, and I had enough that I wanted to say that, well, here […]
In LARPing, there is a playstyle (not exactly a character archetype) defined by deep engagement with the setting lore and ardent pursuit of its mysteries. This area of gameplay is of particular interest to me; my first long-term character, in Shattered Isles, was a dedicated scholar, and the enjoyment I […]
In order to give the players in my Aurikesh campaign a range of options suitable to the setting, I have created two new “deities” for clerics to choose at character creation, and one new spell (as I was dissatisfied with the extant options in the playtest packet). I place deities […]
A conversation about magic in the Marvel universe over in Google Plus today has me thinking about the greater role of magic in storytelling and games. A ton of different sources factor into my thinking here, starting with Merlin and the wizard-heroes of the Kalevala, continuing through the Wizard of […]
