Category Archives: RPGs

The following map and location template are for you to use to develop your own cavern-exploration adventures. They’re derived from William Crowther’s descriptions of the Bedquilt section of Mammoth Cave.

Three random tables for instincts: for use with NPCs, monsters, or either.

For my TTRPG Planet of the Week, I’ve created adventures on 11 different planets so far. Which has required me to create at least one miniature constructed language (conlang) for each planet. For unlike Star Trek, with its magical, invisible, instantaneous translator, in Planet of the Week the Universal Translator (UT) is a device that has to be trained over time. So characters always hear a bit of the new language before translation kicks in.

When you embrace co-creation or shared narration with your players it can sometimes lead to a pastiche, less like Middle Earth and more like Narnia. For instance, my hexcrawl setting was initially conceived of as Iron Age, but my players kept bringing Medieval elements into it.

We surveyed 204 past and current players of D&D to determine what they recalled about the game’s rules, in a survey designed to be representative of the typical player.

Our library ran a one-shot of Shadowdark, the $1.37 million Kickstarter from 2023 that has developed a loyal following. The GM used the “Pipes on Droomen Knoll” adventure starter from the Dolmenwood Campaign Book, while I would have liked a Shadowdark-specific adventure, as Kelsey Dionne, creator of Shadowdark, built a reputation for her 5e adventures.

You as GM can certainly handle factions solely through the fiction and the regular rules, but it is great when the game supports factions mechanically. Your characters help this faction, but in doing so run afoul of that faction, and the GM tracks this in some way.

Skills aren’t commonly used in Powered by the Apocalypse games, and take different forms when they are used.