4e Terrain Powers 7

This post came to mind while thinking about responses to Stands-in-Fire’s post about melee and ranged balance issues in 3.x and 4e. I’ve also been thinking about the most important things that 4e does right and other games should lift from it, thanks in no small part to Sarah Darkmagic’s posts […]


LARP-writing Thought Experiment 5

Kainenchen’s brief mention of LARP politics and scale of game in this post got me thinking about that topic, and I wandered off into “what if” territory that has nothing to do with actual use. To give a bit more background on the point, I think many games – particularly LARPs […]


Doing Sequels Right

Strangely, this post is not about Portal 2, which Kainenchen bought just last night. No, this post is about Overlord and Overlord 2. If you follow those links, you’ll discover that GameSpot gave the first game a middling grade, and gave the sequel a slightly worse grade. In brief, I have […]


4e Skills and Class Balance 8

While on a long drive with Kainenchen and Stands-in-Fire recently, we started talking about skills and skill challenges in 4e. At its most macro level, the skill challenge is one of the best ideas that 4e has added to D&D as a whole. I have seen skill challenges be an […]


The Dungeon of Three Deceits: Sector 2 2

Room 3In this room, one of the largest in the whole dungeon, a three-foot-high wrought-iron railing partitions off a twenty-foot by twenty-foot area in the center of the room. The south wall of the room holds a door that appears to be made of smoked glass; through the glass one […]


The Strength of His Convictions 4

In this post, Kainenchen talks about what she would want out of her ideal psionics system. I started thinking about how I would make that happen, wrote my initial thoughts in comments to that post, and let my brain percolate on it for awhile. I think there’s a chance, by […]


Armchair Design: Dungeons 3

To take breaks from the writing I’ve been doing lately, I’ve played through the core campaign of Dungeons. It begs for comparison to the classic and excellent Dungeon Keeper games, of which I played Dungeon Keeper 2. I’ll go ahead and get that out of the way: where Dungeon Keeper […]


Mace West Cudgelcon 1

Hoping to bring news of Dust to Dust to the tribes of North Carolina, Kainenchen and I went with three other friends to Mace West Cudgelcon in Hickory, NC. We had not exactly realized the small size of this convention ahead of time, nor its general character, which was not […]


Dungeon Philosophy 2

Item 7 of this dungeon-building project specifies a discussion of dungeon-building philosophy. My first post of actual content was running a bit long just as my spare time was running a bit short, delaying said philosophy until now. MMO design and LARP design have both informed my ideas on dungeons, […]


For my next 4e game 4

From January of 2009 to January of 2011, I ran a D&D 4th edition game set in a reinterpreted version of the Dust to Dust setting (as Dust to Dust does not natively have dwarves, eladrin, half-elves, or tieflings, this was necessary). We had a lot of good times with this […]