Coactus Illustration © Heather Gwinn. A gift she gave me in 2013 for an edition of Miscreated Creatures which I hope exists someday. Coloring by me. I am abysmal at keeping you folk in the loop. Here’s some stuff you might want to know: The Sanctimonious Slimes Versus Expired Epicures kickstarter was a success! I am immensely grateful to my Kill Jester compatriots: Ava Islam and Ty Pitre, and to everyone who contributed. I spent most of December and early January making final revisions, refining the layout, and sneaking in a bit of extra content at my own expense. Our printer has accepted the ..read more

Sanctimonious Slimes Versus Expired Epicures is the first adventure module written for Errant. It will also be my first properly printed book. The kind with an inventory that needs to go in a warehouse somewhere! We’re running a short campaign for this one, and there are only 6 days left until it’s over, so get over to Kickstarter and back it! Not only can you get a copy of my book through this campaign, this will also be your only opportunity—ever—to purchase a print edition of Gus L.’s adventure Ganshoggr. The PDF edition is available for free, but we’re only producing 100 print copies of t ..read more

I’ve been inspired by my time working with Gus on Tombrobbers of the Crystal Frontier, and want to play at making something similar: a big intro adventure for Dungeon Moon. Something that sells the vibe of the setting, and will allow me an opportunity to think with modes of play that aren’t accommodated by my current campaigns. Returning to Dungeon Moon will mean returning to Flux Space. It’s an idea that has had a lot of time to percolate in the 6 years since I last discussed it, so let’s begin at the beginning. What is Flux Space? The Problem Classic exploration play is great. The referee d ..read more

The Original Dungeons & Dragons published in the Three Little Brown Books is a delightful and frustrating game. It’s good simple fun, with some real virtues that had already been diluted or lost by the time of Holmes, Moldvay, and the Advanced edition of the game. OD&D was my introduction to the OSR, through Brendan’s Pahvelorn campaign, and I’ve retained an abiding love for it. But it’s clunky, inconsistently written, requires the players to reference entirely different games for combat and wilderness travel rules. It has desperately needed an update since the day it was published, a ..read more

It’s happening right now! 26 episodes! 8 hours of RPG thoughts, theories, and flavor for your listening enjoyment! Back up, what is this about? Blogs on Tape is a podcast with a very simple purpose: we find good blog posts from the OSR and adjacent RPG scenes, and we perform readings of them. Each episode is just one post. Our aim is to make the scene easier for people to dip their toe into. Listen to D&D blogs on your commute, or while you do the dishes, or while you exercise. When do new episodes come out? Every weekday (Monday-Friday) a new episode will drop at 8AM (PST). This will con ..read more

When your character drops to 0 hit points1 in On A Red World Alone, two things happen: You must roll on the permanent injury table. I remind you that the next hit will kill you dead. That’s it. The character’s ability to take actions is not inhibited in any way beyond their specific injury, and their own desire to avoid character death. This always surprises and slightly confuses new players, who expect having no hit points to restrict their options more severely. It even surprises and confuses old players who haven’t been at 0 hit points in awhile. (Which, as an inattentive player myself ..read more

This post is an update to my 2017 essay “Structuring Encounter Tables.” It’s intended to replace that earlier version, and thus includes a bit of self-plagiarism. In order for an environment to feel dangerously alive it must intrude on the player’s desired activities. For any activity in my game, there are increments of fictional time which require the players to roll the Event Die. Each face of the Event Die corresponds to something, but the most complex and important result is an Encounter, which then calls for a roll on my Encounter Table. All my encounter tables are 2d6 tables1. The bell ..read more

Organizing campaign notes is frustrating. My preference would be to keep all my hobby material in an analog format, but it’s not practical. A campaign is a constantly evolving mesh of interconnected ideas. A referee can never know which parts of their notes will need to be removed, or expanded wildly beyond their original scope. I’ve tried a bunch of methods: binders, notebooks, recipe boxes full of index cards, stacks of paper with bespoke organizational symbols in the upper corner. In the end, all of them required too much paper shuffling in order to find anything. Digital tools are too use ..read more

I’ve run a lot of D&D over the years, and in that time I’ve cycled through various approaches for how I get ready for a session. Like most folk, I started out with unrealistic ideas about how much and how quickly I could produce good material. Because of this, my early campaigns were basically burnout generators. They quickly morphed into Zombie Campaigns: I continued running them out of a desire to spend time with my friends and to be a good referee, but I’d lost any creative energy for improving them. A lot of promising campaigns wound up ending before they should have because of that ..read more

In the coming weeks 5 Years Left will be ending. Its been a fun and creatively rejuvenating game, but after nearly two years I’m ready to shift focus. I want to delve back into On a Red World Alone. Play a game with more substantial factions, where players have more opportunity to make world-altering plans. Before I can get things started back on mars, though, I’ve got to develop some tools for myself. Part of the reason I took a break from this game was my fatigue with trying to support a style of play I’d never experienced before. I didn’t know how to referee a satisfying domain game. Worse ..read more