Category: TTRPG
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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…
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Moss Woods Campaign Review, Part 2
Once more with feeling! This is the second half of my retrospective on my 15-player Moss Woods campaign (Part 1). I ended the campaign a few months ago after a big event which got all the players together in a voice call, a hiatus, and a few more sessions to end things out. What failed?…
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Misc Campaign Ideas
A few undeveloped campaign ideas from previous years, updated with commentary. I like the “In [world] the players are [X] who do [Y]” format for campaign descriptions. I think I stole it from somewhere but I’ve lost the post. Imperial Patrol On the frontier of a vast empire, the players are rangers whose responsibilities are…
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Moss Woods Campaign Review, Part 1
What do you call a retrospective for something you’re currently doing? I’m currently running the largest and most successful OSR-style campaign I’ve done so far, with fourteen players across three different parties in the same world, using a system of my own creation (read: cobbled together from other people’s blog posts). I’ve yet to find a way…
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A Shadow World
The World. A great irregular mass of matter and light and life suspended in space. It contains within it the Sun in a colossal spherical chamber constructed for the purpose. At great distance lies the moon, bathing the moonward world in silver light as it progresses through its phases. Yet further orbit the handful of…
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Against the Universal Skill Check
I have a love-hate relationship with skill systems in RPGs. On the one hand they provide several systemic benefits and allow for more character customization than class-based games. On the other they can often feel underwhelming and don’t always work well as typically implemented. I would like to examine the downsides of skill systems, and…
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Multiparty Processing
Let’s suppose that a GM wants to run multiple parties in the same world. They have two parties A and B which play on different days weekly. Let’s say Tuesday and Thursday for the sake of example. Everything goes well until the following scenario happens: Party A goes to dungeon X and ends the session…
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Anti-Canon Worldbuilding
Anti-canon is a response to the Tolkien style of worldbuilding typically emphasized in fantasy fiction. It is a rejection of the creation of a world with a complete history, rigid geography, and rigid boundaries. Anti-canon instead sets out to create a world which changes as stories are told in it. While the world is consistent…
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Character Components
Over the last few months on break from running campaigns, while tinkering with homebrew and pawing through games I have come up with a theory that a TTRPG character can be broken down into four-ish essential components: fiction, statistics, perks, and items. Fiction is the part of a character which has no connection to the…
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Die Trying on the Graveflower Fields
A Campaign Post-Mortem Three months ago I put my Die Trying campaign to bed; this is a reflection on that campaign. The campaign was created over winter break of my final year at university in 2021, and was run until August 2022 with intermittent hiatuses. I ran the game both in person and online on…