I’ve been a huge fan of Robin Pierson’s History of Byzantium podcast since… whenever I finished listening to Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome (I also talked about Byzantine history here), and the part where Robin explains court titles and the importance of honors to the power dynamics of Eastern […]
I’ve done a few posts now that are collections of NPCs you can drop into your campaign. I usually do sets of twenty at a time, but since these are going to have more description for each item, and both Patreon and WordPress do awful violence to tables, I’m doing […]
For another project, I’m working on research mechanics, and I thought it might be interesting and fun to create a stable of researchers and scholars that you can drop into the narrative on short notice. Maybe the PCs need someone to interact with while they’re hitting the books at an […]
It’s been one week under a year since my last post in this series, and a big freelance project means I’ve been awfully quietly lately. It’s almost done, though, and I promise a return to form in February and March. This time, I’m talking about how a Mayhem villain scheme […]
It’s been over a year since my last post in the Villain’s Schemes series, but since it’s gotten a lot harder in the last week to write D&D content with confidence, I’m just writing about stories and antagonists now – even if it’s using the 5e DMG for its backbone. […]
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 […]
The Eclipse campaign has successfully concluded its first story arc. Their six-year mission: to boldly go where no LARP of its lineage has gone before. This is far from the end for the campaign, however, as they have announced that the second story arc begins in September. Arc structure, especially in the […]
I’ve been playing a lot of Avadon: The Black Fortress lately. I’ll be saving my full review for another time, as I haven’t yet finished the game, but it’s gotten me thinking about the kinds of plotlines and stories that drive scenes within games, and games as a whole. Before […]
