Game Design TTRPG Blog
The blogger MadGod created a great Rabbi class . I liked it, but it left me wanting . In that void of wanting I created my own take on the ttrpg Rabbi class suitable for the Goblin Laws. The real question: what's kinder to "gaming", the Goblin Laws or halakha? To the wise, a hint is sufficient. Rabbi Akiva in a classic GigaChad philosopher pose Rebbe " the honor of your student should be as dear…
The Road A vaguely Middle East + Central Asia inspired setting, evoking the historical Silk Road in themes and setup for adventure. When a traveler speaks of the entire region, they call it The Road of Dead Buddhas . Upon its breadth not a soul can forget the wisdom of the sages: " If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him ." As people travel these lands for gold and glory, certainty and…
Creating fictional languages for my GLoG hack and its setting (The Road of Dead Buddhas) and trying to tackle the following: Include the diversity and variety of real linguistics Interesting (flavorful) dialect choices Giving players meaningful choices… …while also trying not to overwhelm them (or the GM) with complexity All of this is also in the context of creating a setting that encourages…
These testaments are player options for the Zealot class for KillJester's ttrpg Errant . They come from the playtest of my Jewish mythology megadungeon MYR REGATH , now cancelled for logistics reasons and has entered a hiatus. Now that it's on pause I can look at things more critically, and am even more excited to run it again at my FLGS. Agrat bat Mahlat אגרת בת מחלת Acid-etched carving of Agrat…
I’m going to be trying Yora’s challenge Lore24 , a kind of spiritual successor to Dungeon23 . It’s focused on writing rather than strictly designing, pretty laid back, and open enough that if you were to sufficiently finish a project (a world, a fantasy system, etc) you could start a new one while maintaining the creative momentum and pressure. Check out the full post at Spriggan's Den ! I like…
"Who is this king of glory? Shogach, strong and mighty, Shogach, mighty in battle!" Psalms of The Storm WADI SHOGACH A dry river-valley forgotten in the outskirts of a fallen desert kingdom. Scholars and mystics find mention of it in obscure scriptures, the supposed site of a shrine to The God of that land. Shogach was his name - he was their Elohim, called The Rider Upon the Clouds - the locals…
In the play of my urban megacity game, I think my players may have accidentally played God. They took a tribe of feral, zombie-esque rat people and have been nurturing them. It's a city game. There are rat people - naturally - but I made them weirder. I like non-standard, weird alien means of reproduction for non-humans. (My dwarves are made/born as stone statues, for example). The ratlings are…
Shalom and salutations ! Bringing you an update on MYR REGATH, my dungeon23 megadungeon inspired by my love of ruined-cities-as-dungeons and inspired by Jewish mythology. Last month I did an esoteric experiment with the Sefirot, but for the season of scares, I decided the opposite level would be THE JEWISH UNDERWORLD ! Don't Jewish people not believe in Hell? Or an underworld? What's going on?…
Vast and trunkless legs of stone found here (GLOGtober 23') CHALLENGE #1 [ PRIMEUMATON ] 5. Cool things to replace your eyes, teeth, and fingernails with. The sheydim will never forgive mankind the transgression of working metal. In the days before The Great Flood , the sheydim were supreme upon the face of the Earth. They need not fear that their desires and will would be rebuffed, they had no…
Vast and trunkless legs of stone found here (GLOGtober 23') CHALLENGE #3 [Semiurge] Come up with a grimoire with some unique spells, a story behind it, perhaps some trap or riddle to figuring it out, etc The Road of Dead Buddhas A vaguely Middle East + Central Asia inspired setting, evoking the historical Silk Road in themes and setup for adventure. Few walk it in its entirety; yet spices, silk…
Here's a further update on my Dungeon23 megadungeon, called MYR REGATH , the City of Sortilege! Last post I talked about coming back around to my cultural roots, transitioning my project into taking heavy inspo from Jewish Mythology, and now I get to share how I've been putting that into practice. In Concept So, looking into Jewish mythology / mysticism, I came across this map. These are the…
Vast and trunk-less legs of stone found here (GLOGtober 23') In the beginning, there was nothing but The Deep . Before there was The Deep, there were MONSTERS . As the infinite created Itself - God the Most High creating Himself and making Himself Known - the anti-spark of the first Creation rang out. With the first Light came the first Shadows. The beginning warranted its own antithesis. With no…
October arrives, and with it many a game design prompt! The prompts are here courtesy of Glass Candles. I am going to use this as an opportunity to expand my silk-road-inspired setting, unless I decide otherwise idk Will update these as links once they're written and released. GLOGtober 2023 CHALLENGE #1 Minor Demons Cast in Copper , gain power at the cost of giving up a body part to a Jewish…
Here's another #dungeon23 update for y'all, courtesy of some real "how the sausage is made" historiography on my part. This is for my megadungeon called MYR REGATH, the City of Sortilege. This update honestly has more to do with me as a person and a creative, even more so than the dungeon itself. It has to do with the evolution of doing a project like this over such a long time, going back to my…
Running my dungeon23 project using ERRANT continues to be a smash hit! The roster of PCs so far: Carné Halfling Deviant | Proficiencies Anatomy + Stealth pronouns Yes/Chef Carmen from The Bear, ready to cook monsters and chain smoke Bog the Toad Frog-folk Violent Topsis Jellyfish-folk Zealot of a Sea God As to the custom nature of the Zealot, we came to an agreement that her Blessings were a) she…
Errant includes an XP-for-Gold mechanic, but inverts it. Rather than gaining 1 XP per Coin, you instead gain XP after you've a) taken it home and b) have "wasted" it. Spending the gold in randomized sums on the likes of pretentious eatery, erecting statues in your name or declaring your piety (things those in the real world who hit a kind of lottery would do), that's how you get XP from your gold.…
My recent blogosphere obsession has been reading the backlogs of setting-specific classes for Vain the Sword: 2nd Edition and GLoG, OSR games with a wealth of options that exist largely on blogs like Whose Measure God Could Not Take. I was drawn in first by the blog The Nothic's Eye, with a series of articles on a Mesopotamian-esque setting called Qal Ashen . In a world cursed with "too much life"…
This post is part Dungeon23 update, part play-report for the first (albeit brief) test-runs of said mega-dungeon project. The month of August was the time for a sewer level! Dungeon23 as a yearlong project has seen lots of internal changes, at least in my experience. I've changed notebooks, changed design philosophy, and I think the dungeon itself has undergone as many conceptual changes in my…
I've been thinking a lot about sewers this month. I continue to plug-away at Dungeon 23, and August's level is a section of sewers from Myr Regath, the city that is now a megadungeon. My long-running story game, set in an Urban Fantasy metropolis, also features a lot of sewer exploration and adventuring. Archetypal of the human struggle to maintain public health amidst growing crowds and…
Earlier this year, when I used my substack like a blog (which I've now separated into blog & newsletter) I wrote up a love-letter to Ava Islam's ERRANT . Over the course of this year - working on Dungeon23, looking for my next long-term TTRPG system - I've fallen more firmly in love with the Old School Renaissance and the kind of play it encourages. You can read that article here . It's a good…
Welcome Hearthside to The Dripping Tap, traveler. Here's a list of some of my favorite books, ttrpgs and historical sources that inspire me to run and make TTRPGs. In no particular order: BOOKS: The Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark City of Brass (and the Daevabad Cycle) by S.A. Chakraborty The Black Company by Glen Cooke Terry Pratchett's Discworld Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. by Mike Mignola Dune by…
This blog post is about a magic system for my work-in-progress ttrpg called YOU ARE A DEATH (K)NIGHT , or YADN for short. [This post was originally on Substack. Now it's here!] This ttrpg is weird, specific, and it’s my love letter to a game of villainy and horror. Players play as archetypal “death knights”, reanimated servitors of a Big Bad Evil Guy. The game diverges in that, spontaneously, the…
Nazgul from Bakshi's LotR adaptation Back in April I teased the very beginnings of my TTRPG pet project YADN - You are a Death (K)night. A game for roleplaying powerful, undead wraiths like the Nazgul or The Ten Who Were Taken …if they had killed their master(s) and regained their free will at the 11th hour. I’ve been iterating on the basic resource management that I think I can share a sneak…
Hello all! This issue of Hearthside talks about the TTRPG I started noodling with in my spare time, talking about specific fantasy influences, as well as the mechanics that I’ve got - a dice pool and what I hope is a fun twist on Lifepaths. [This post was originally over on Substack. Now it's here.] I want to openly share this development process, where I’m at and what inspires me. I could wax…