Link Roundup
One issue with reading RPG blogs like the morning newspaper is that I often lose good posts. As a response I’ve been accumulating links in a document since January. Of last year. I figure this is a good softball return-to-blogging. Posts are presented in no particular order within their categories.
Grappling with D&D’s Colonialism
Quick Comments on D&D as Western at Roll to Doubt. The most succinct distillation of the idea I’ve seen, though it doesn’t argue for it so much as casually reveal.
Use Your Words; OR Against the Tribals at Lonely Star. An argument against using “tribe” to refer to groups of people.
Beautiful Settings
The Tauroctony Club at the Nothic’s Eye. Part of a series of posts detailing Victorian urban fantasy locations. Locheil’s work often features a web of characters whose preferences and personalities shape the location, an incredibly compelling format which begs to be replicated. I intend to study these posts to improve my NPCs.
The World of Serina - A speculative evolution worldbuilding project based around the idea of setting up a biosphere with a small number of seed species and letting evolution run its course. A thing of beauty.
The Nomad Kingdoms at Garamondia. The first post I’d seen of a project titled Barony which strikes me as at once surreal and grounded and which is what I really want to share. The bulk of this particular post is a system for generating strange weapons and armor expressed in a way which is both mechanically meaty and evocative of the setting. There’s a wholeness to it which is representative of the best of what I expect from the GLOG community.
A Psi-Wars Primer at Mailanka’s Musings. I unfortunately haven’t read through this in depth but wanted to share it anyway. The entire process of building a Star-Wars inspired setting in GURPS is lined out here in glorious maximalism.
Worldbuilding
Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’ at ACOUP. A description of how coinage worked in pre-modern or partially monetized societies. Useful for more realistic medieval worldbuilding.
Baseline Worldbuilding at Mindstorm. A thorough dive into the additional effort it takes to run games in settings that diverge from player’s expectations. I’ve experienced the difference in effort myself and appreciated being given the words to describe it.
Medieval Demographics Done Right at Apotheosis of the Invisible City. A post which digs into how deeply, deeply flawed the popular RPG worldbuilding document Medieval Demographics Done Quick is. I had run into that document early in my gaming career and dismissed it out of hand due to the numbers simply not making sense, so this post was extremely vindicating. The second part has the information required for a more sensible replacement.
You’re Using Mounts All Wrong at Gracklecourt. Points out that mounts should be handled as hirelings and provides rules to encourage that. I’ve wanted to handle party animals as animals for a while but haven’t been able to put together a framework. I really like the idea of rolling random stats for horses. Related but heavier than I probably want: Horses and Donkeys and Mules, Oh My! at About Bruce Heard and New Stories.
The Emerging Post-OSR
2025 was the year the OSR finally died, at least for me. The constraints and conventions of the playstyle became more restrictive than useful, so I moved on. At first this meant poking around the remnants of what was the FKR scene, but as the year went on I began to find people pushing more in the direction I wanted. These are just the posts I’d saved as the year went on but this category will be well represented in my top posts.
Principles of Conflict at Dododecahedron. One of the things I had gotten tired of in my games was the constant focus on violence. This is something I still don’t have a solid answer to but this post points to the start of moving towards games with a different relationship to conflict.
I Don’t Know How I Feel About TBD-like Domain Games - a Panic Attack in Writing at Archon’s Court. Despite the author’s feeling on the subject the style of game described is something I want to build towards. In particular having the player characters be individuals with goals that don’t always align is compelling to me. It also provides links to several projects in the same style. I’m surprised to see this playstyle emerging from the GLOG community, but welcome it. Since then Archon’s Court has also written further on the topic in the context of their Lanthanide Horizons setting, which itself is well worth delving into.
Play Worlds Manifesto at The Dolent Chronicle. There were a lot of gaming manifestos written last year, and I think that’s a good thing. Being able to describe and communicate your style of play is something the hobby has historically struggled with. I like this one as it’s in the direction of what I want to be doing even if I’m not super into concealed mechanics, and because it came along with its own self-critique. Sam Sorenson’s New Simulationism is also a recommended read.
Aspect: The best TTRPG system I ever designed by Tangent Joy. Effectively “play worlds not rules” taken to its logical conclusion. 2025 was the year of Over/Under for a portion of the community. I barely participated, but I’m glad I was at least nominally there as it drew several artists to the fold which I am now paying close attention to. Something is being born here and it deserves your attention.
Systems and Tools
How to Set Up and Use Faction Turns at Among Cats and Books. What it says on the tin - a framework for running NPC factions during prep. I really like the idea of faction turns to make the game world feel more alive, and I think it could mesh well with patron play.
Cities, fixed at last at Billhook Blog. I’m really not a fan of codified procedures for cities. In my experience they’re dense enough that the complexity can be hand-waved until it’s needed, and small enough that moving from place to place isn’t a meaningful decision. So I saved this post for the prep procedures rather than the play procedures. They provide enough information to give the city character but still leave gaps which can be filled in with play.
Lions, Foxes, Wolves - A Set of Procedures for Political Play by Newt Young. A more or less full campaign structure. The post has been almost fully re-written since I last read it, but what remains is very much still worth a look. Synthesizing this with the faction turns above could lead to interesting results.
Ambition by the pressbetwixt. I suspect this game isn’t going to need any extra help getting eyes on it but I’m not immune to marketing, alas. Even though the game clearly isn’t for me, I can respect the craft evidenced here. The closest thing I can compare it to is unfortunately 5th edition, but I think that’s because the game is aiming to service the 5e’s playstyle with an intentionality and skill not found there. The way the mechanics ooze flavor in the witch playtest got me excited to play the game despite the class essentially just being a normal spellcaster. Though it’s clearly taking from Disco Elysium in a way I’m increasingly side-eyeing in media1 I’m still really interested in the Voices mechanic despite myself. And you know. The art is gorgeous.
Just Neat Blogs
At a certain point in the year I stopped saving posts and just started saving blogs to pull out and dig into later.
Stepnix - Saved for their TTRPG and freeware lists, and for their discussion of games I probably wouldn’t play myself. And the site being really cute helped too.
Bocoloid from Southern Edge - They’re pursuing a playstyle similar to what I want to aim for, and the more I can learn from the mistakes of others the better.
The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm - Probably my top find of 2025. They’re pursuing trad play while also bringing in a decidedly literary bent. It is not a coincidence that the best TTRPG blogs are those which are willing to engage with ideas from outside the hobby. Particular highlights include their socratic dialogue on the value of TTRPGs and other art in the middle of all that’s going on in the world, their outline of a Mage: The Ascension hexcrawl campaign, and an argument for procedural game prep.
The Bottomless Sarcophagus - An inspiration in my early days in the hobby. I saved it to avoid forgetting it as it slips further and further down the RSS feeds, as the blog is no longer updated. I would recommend their posts on the Thawing Kingdom and on Aphid Elves.
Valeria Loves - Originally saved because of her post on Fabula Ultima but her reviews are excellent generally. And she’s just genuinely funny.
subjunctive moods - Excellent worldbuilding posts on fantastic genders and thoughts on simulationism. I was also quite inspired by their approach to social mechanics.
My Top Posts of 2025
Neither of these were on the original document, and indeed one of them was not published in 2025, but I feel like it would be remiss of me not to share them.
The OSR Onion at Dodocahedron. I had seen someone saying that this post provided a clear direction for where the OSR can go from where it is now, and I wholeheartedly agree. The questions to be explored in the conclusion were especially compelling.
Depicting Violence at The Garden Below. I checked this blog before bed not long after it was published, initially hoping for another design diary from her game. Instead I found myself viscerally pulled through to the end. Anything else I have to say about it feels trivial.
Post Script
I’m immensely grateful to those who write for these games and who share their thoughts freely, whether they’re on this list or not. Roleplaying games are a strange medium when you get down to it, and the fact that so much theory and practice - so much care and intentionality - can go into them never ceases to amaze me. It makes me want to build on these ideas, take them down from the shelf and play with them, and maybe add something of my own and hope it’s worth building on in turn.
Footnotes
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One of the greatest games I’ve played, but its ideas have been plastered everywhere recently in a way I’m starting to find tiring. ↩
2025-01-15
GM Toolkit - Central Place Theory
Sometimes something hits your brain like a pile of bricks. I lurk on mastodon far more often than I ought to, but this post actually paid dividends.
Now, thanks to ACOUP I was already familiar with the idea of cities needing hinterlands (and those being often omitted in modern media), but I was struggling to understand how to arrange those cities on, say, a hex map.
Enter central place theory, a theory on the distribution of cities. After watching some YouTube videos to get my head around the idea, here’s how I was able to use it.
My starting point was already having geography in place, as well as the location of the largest city I wanted. I already had some loose modifiers for travel time in mind. These are 3-mile hexes so entering a flat hex takes one hour at walking speed. So I made hills take 2 and rivers take 0.5. These probably aren’t the travel time I’ll use in play for players but they’re simple enough demonstration purposes, and it isn’t yet clear to me whether they need to match up exactly or not.
Now, we start by finding the travel time to each hex from the main city. We start by finding the distance to each hex adjacent to the city, then find the distance to each hex with the lowest distance, and continue until we’ve filled the area. This is a simple pathfinding algorithm and isn’t too tedious to do by hand (though this example quickly got bigger than I expected). For this example I’m not tracking the distance more than four hours for reasons I’ll explain shortly.
Now I’m going to draw an outline containing all the hexes which are four or less from the center city. What this represents, according to the central place theory, is all the hexes containing settlements which will go to the main city for whatever things they cannot get in a more local market. I’m also using it to define a border between settled and “wild” lands – a dubious concept but one which the fantasy of the OSR is usually built on.
According to our theory, the main city also contains all the services of a smaller level town as well. If we assume that the reach of a smaller settlement is two hexes, we can draw a second outline inside the first to represent all those settlements which will also go to the main city to get less rare goods.
So far this is pretty uninspiring. But the real magic happens when we consider the following. All the settlements between these two outlines also need a market for local goods. Or another way to look at it is for each given service it takes a certain amount of settlements within a certain range to be able to exist, so if a region can support these services they will crop up. Some, usually more specialized, services require more people to be profitable, so they are scattered sparsely, whereas more common services require less people so they’re scattered more densely.
We can prevent overlap by placing these towns twice their reach from one another. We’ve already calculated distances from our city, so we can start putting towns on hexes that are four hours from the city.
So I’ve placed a town up north and calculated the borders of its reach.
Now, central place theory says that regions of the same level shouldn’t overlap, which is something I failed to do for this map. Four hours was actually a miscalculation not accounting for the quantized nature of the hexes. It should have been five hours, and in general twice the distance plus one hour should produce results with no overlap. There’s also going to be artefacts due to the way I’m calculating distance not being the same in both directions (I’m only counting the cost for “entering” a hex and ignoring the type of hex I’m leaving. This is what I do during games) and the fact that unlike the central place theory I’m not putting smaller settlements on smaller grids.
In any case the next step is to repeat this process until all the settlements inside the outer outline of the main city are served by towns.
In case it isn’t clear, I want to point out that I’m assuming every “empty” hex inside these boundaries contains a village. I just didn’t want to draw them in.
Again you’ll see more overlap than the theory predicts in the ideal case. That’s; it’s close enough for our purposes. But you’ll also notice that I’ve extended the outline of these towns outside the red outline for the city’s market. This stems from central place theory assuming all land evenly contains settlements and not allowing for borderlands. This is an example of what settlements might look like in a “points of light” setting – hand-placed cities with smaller towns and villages scattered a short distance around them.
This leaves the question of what to do with these “empty” hexes still within the. I’ve elected to put settlements in them, deciding that they’re smaller due to their more limited access to the city’s markets, creating a new level on the settlement hierarchy below our basic settlement. We can call these hamlets as opposed to the baseline settlement of villages. I’m tempted to speculate as to what a more realistic solution might be, but it would be fairly baseless. These artifacts can be left in to create a bigger variety of region sizes, as I could see things getting a little too simple on a flat plain.
So it might be fair to say that this technique is really more inspired by central place theory than truly based on it. It’s close enough for my purposes of having a process deciding the placement of settlements smaller than cities.
But the main takeaways of central place theory are directly useful:
- Settlements contain the goods and services of all the settlements further down the hierarchy
- Settlements of the same size are roughly evenly spaced by travel time, which gets smaller as you go down the settlement hierarchy.
Wait, why bother randomizing where the settlements are?
I have a lot to say on how procedural generation can be used in ttrpgs, but for now the reason I’m using proc gen is because this system works as an oracle. It’s no different than a random encounter table or, for that matter, a game system. It’s a way for a GM to generate outcomes via some internal logic that is independent of them, which allows them to encode ideas they wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves when simply improvising off the cuff. It’s just in the prep phase rather than the running phase of the game for the GM.
Additional Ideas
Instead of assigning two levels of services – town and city, we could assign three and see where things end up. Services with a range of 4, 3, and 2, for example. I’m not sure how this will affect our ability for settlements to contain the services of all settlements below them, but that ought to hold for the reason that having to go to two different places for two different services is a pain in the ass and that would cause the services to move.
This system could be used for distributions of things other than cities, such as magical sites in the world.
These market area borders could also be used as somewhat natural political borders, because they are based on travel times. With geography and artifacts distorting the regular grid shown in central place theory they’re irregular enough I don’t think players would notice unless it was pointed out or your campaign is taking place on an infinite plain. And there’s nothing stopping you from adjusting political borders after the fact as you see fit. The overlaps could be used as conflict regions where feudal lords are butting heads.
Even if not used for political borders you could have a go at using these areas as markets for item prices, though that would require computer aid very quickly. I’m still looking for better ways to handle simulating markets.
Speaking of computers, there’s also the temptation to set this up as a computer algorithm, either on a hex grid or operating on the pixels in an arbitrary image using shaders.
Bonus
My example map, cleaned up and colored to indicate market borders (I like to use yellow to represent fields), with a road system added.
