The feed of updates to 's blog.
Here’s a structure for planning out your treasure. See if you can create a good variety of treasure that is easy to sell vs hard to sell and easy to carry vs hard to carry. The hope is that this will create interesting choices for the players other than “ hoover up everything that’s in sight.” Too much treasure that’s hard to sell makes the whole endeavor disheartening. Too much treasure that’s…
Prepping dungeons is hard and while I’ve read a lot of great modules, I never seem to remember what I loved about them other than the vibe. So now, whenever I read a module and notice a cool monster or room or trap I copy and paste it into my dungeon book. Here are hundreds (211) of corpses propped up as if cheering, facing the tower ruins. These are long dead worshippers of St. Garamond propped…
When you’re working on a key for a dungeon or other location, it can be difficult to come up with all the concepts you need to round the place out. One trick I’ve learned to cut this in half is to write rooms in pairs. So the idea is that you maybe have a shitty or boring list of rooms like so: 1d6 goblins. Treasure chest with some gold. Empty room. Orc. Pit trap. Right? It’s not far from basic…
Boy, what a month. If you haven’t heard, for the past thirty days we’ve been experimenting with a new event. We call it Mothership Month , and we hope this is the first of many. TL;DR Mothership Month ends Tuesday, December 10 at 12 PM CST (or whenever the backer train ends), so if you haven’t checked it out, do it now! What is Mothership Month? It’s essentially a month long pep rally for…
One of the biggest complaints new creators have is that they hate dealing with stretch goals. it’s a common customer complaint too, because if you do stretch goals wrong (you are), you’ll overburden your project and put yourself behind schedule, over budget, and cut your profits to nothing. So why have stretch goals? What’s the point? You’re Doing Stretch Goals Wrong Stretch goals are not “ cool…
Last week my church hosted a reading by the poet Kaveh Akbar at TCU . Kaveh’s debut novel Martyr! is a NYT bestseller and his poetry appears in the New Yorker, New York Times, The Paris Review, and on and on. He gave a beautiful reading and the Q&A afterwards was generous and insightful. One of the things Kaveh said that struck me as a game designer, was this idea that he is “ obsessed with the…
Here’s how you want to set your margins on your game to make sure it’s profitable. You’ll want to use a spreadsheet to keep track of some of this stuff. Spreadsheet maintenance is a big part about figuring out your business. It’s like a sketchbook for numbers, so learn to have fun with it. So let’s start with this: your ideal profit margin is 10x. That means you set your price as 10x higher than…
I Cast Light! has become one of my favorite blogs this past year, and Warren’s latest post, Straight Up Villain , is a good example why. Warren outlines a kind of prep which is what you’d call “ selling your sawdust” in the business world. Basically if you’re already making lumber and sawdust is spraying everywhere, why not just bag that up and sell it too? In prep it’s the same thing. Warren…
When it comes to encounter design in horror games I think about this image a lot. Silent Hill 3 Horror games require really intentional environmental encounters in order to build tension. If this was moldvay I’d replace tricks on the stockings table with “ environmental horror.” It’s huge and it’s easy to forget. But if you put all your horror in encounters with monsters or other people then…
I’m obsessed with two things in dnd: giant campaign spanning megadungeons and vast wildernesses to journey through. These often seem at odds with each other. One thing I’ve been considering is to have dungeons with big “ locks” between levels. As everything else in ttrpgs, these are soft locks. Obstacles essentially, that can be beaten a number of ways, rather than hard locks like in video games…
There are lots of similarities between the note taking/productivity communities and the rpg hobby. Namely that an obsession with tools and methods of prep can overwhelm and overtake the actual doing of the thing. In the case of notebooks and organization there are all sorts of sub hobbies. Fountain pens, notebooks, journaling, calligraphy, personal knowledge management, productivity, etc. but all…
This is a 400+ room mega-dungeon with multiple levels and sub-levels, built around a direct goal: retrieve the SKOROS ORB , the mysterious artifact used by the evil wizard ILLITH VARN to wage war upon the KINGDOM OF OROSTRANTHY . It is meant for mid- to high-level play: my players started around level 13 or 14, and are now between levels 20 and 22. Each main level has 60-70 rooms and each…
Thinking more about The Underclock and how it fits sort of my ideal dnd game as more of a countdown. It makes me think there’s a whole game in the idea that after the countdown the ONLY encounter is a dragon showing up. For campaigns this isn’t great but for a night of fun it sounds like running away from a dragon that is hunting for you constantly really hits the nail on the head of what I’m…
Maybe there’s something to having a base encounter HD for certain hex areas. 1/3/5/7 seems about right. And we can use this similar level chain to say: minion/elite/boss/megaboss. So in hex 1 areas an elite would be 3 HD and. Boss would be 5. In hex area 5 a a minion would be 5 Hd and an elite would be 7 and a boss would be higher, a 9. I should look at the spread of HD in odnd and BX and maybe…
Read this interesting post on the author’s “ 12 favorite problems,” which is a callback to something physicist Richard Feynman talked about. Most people look for solutions. But few seek out problems. There are exceptions. Physicist Richard Feynman, for example, liked to keep a list of his dozen favorite problems. These were big open-ended questions that could guide his life’s work. “ Every time…
Listening to the interview with Luke Gearing on Into the Megadungeon and a couple things jumped out at me that I hadn’t really considered before. Schroedinger’s languages. Where your players have language slots that they can spend to talk to things. I’m a big fan of language irl and making it more important in dnd. So I think either saying “ choose languages of things you want me the Dm to…
I wrote up a thread recently about safety tools in ttRPGs/mothership, but I wanted to archive it here for future reference and expand on it a little bit. Let’s get into it: I’m working on the section on Safety in the Warden’s Guide. It’s something we’ve worked on for about a year. This is the 12th draft. It’s not quite there (and after this follows a page with specific safety tools), but it…
I wrote about this a little on twitter the other day, but we’re changing the way we do ship combat in Mothership. In Mothership, ship encounters are social encounters, not dog fights. The game assumes that the minutiae and logistics of conducting space warfare can largely be handled by the ship’s computer. What can’t be handled is the decision making: should we risk death to fight with this other…
“ These rules are as complete as possible within the limitations imposed by the space of three booklets.” – Dungeons & Dragons (1974), “ Introduction” “ Players, players, and more players — that’s what comprises the D&D phenomenon. And phenomenal is what it is, as the audience for this, the granddaddy of all role–playing games, continues to expand.” – Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition…
For awhile now, I’ve wanted to talk to James Maliszewski of Grognardia fame of his experience playing and running a seven year campaign of Empire of the Petal Throne. EPT has long been a fascinating game for many RPG fans due to how early on in the scene it was created and because of the depth of the lore designed by its creator MAR Barker. More recently it has come into the news since it turns…
A lots going on in the Motherverse. We went from producing a zine a year roughly to now having something like six plus books due this year and a hundred or so third party products. I don’t have an MBA or really extensive knowledge on how to run a company other than that Sunday marked TKG ’ s 9th year in business. That’s pretty cool! But I’m always trying to learn how to do this better and the past…
One the easiest traps to fall into as a new referee in tabletop rpgs is to treat violence the same as video games do. Video games are particularly well suited for testing your reflexes and hand eye coordination, as well as your ability to make optimal decisions from menu-like option trees. However, in order to excel at testing these things, they must limit your choices down to what can be…
I don’t think Mothership needs levels anymore. I don’t think they serve the game in any meaningful purpose. Here’s a few things that I think could easily stand to replace levels but still give a sense of progression and advancement to players. Note: This post was heavily inspired by two articles by Dreaming Dragonslayer about running games for young kids. But I’m starting to think rpgs designed…
Last night Gen Con Online held the 2020 Annual ENnie awards. A Pound of Flesh walked away with a Silver ENnie for Best Layout/Design and a Gold ENnie for Best Adventure. We’re deeply honored, to say the least, and I’m incredibly proud of our team and the amazing work they put into A Pound of Flesh. It’s been about a year since we released A Pound of Flesh , though it’s felt like much, much longer,…
We had session 07 of our Gradient Descent Playtest a couple weeks ago and it didn’t go so great. Let’s get into it. Joining us tonight: Ian playing: Lula Shrike, Level 0 Scientist Explosives tech. Slantio playing: Uriel Sigma, Level 0 Android Engineer Nick Reed playing: Ambrose Rex, Level 0 Marine Gunner (Absent) Alan Gerding playing: Jimmy Cobb, Level 0 Teamster (Absent) SinisterGrin playing:…
So you might have heard that last week we released Dissident Whispers , an anthology of 58 original rpg adventures in support of Black Lives Matter, and more specifically to raise money for Bail Funds . Dissident Whispers by the Whisper Collective in partnership with TKG This project was in direct response to the Black Lives Matter protests currently underway across America and the rest of the…
We had a two player game tonight for our sixth session of Gradient Descent. A lot of our players had to bow out from travel, work, and illness. But I love small games! In smaller games players really can argue over choices and make their case. In bigger groups you have a lot more social dynamics in play. Bigger groups are more fun because of mob mentality and hi-jinx. In small groups I see a lot…
Five sessions into our Gradient Descent playtest as of yesterday, and the team is recovering from a near TPK last session with some fresh blood. Joining us we had: Slantio playing: Roja, Level 0 Scientist (who believes she’s an Android) SinisterGrin playing: Everett-7, Level 2 Android Nick Tofani playing: Dr. William “ Billy” Whalen, Level 1 Scientist Reece Carter playing: Rex Sharp, Level 2…
Had our fourth session of our Gradient Descent playtest last week, and this one nearly ended everything. Joining us we had: Slantio playing: Gunner Markus Lilith, Level 2 Marine SinisterGrin playing: Everett-7, Level 2 Android Ian Lee Von Richter, Level 2 Teamster (Absent) Nick Tofani, playing: Dr. William Whalen, Level 1 Scientist. Before I start, one of our players, Ian Yusem, has an amazing new…
Back in the Deep with my players for session 2 of our Gradient Descent playthrough. Joining us this time: Slantio playing: Gunner Markus Lilith, Level 1 Marine SinisterGrin playing: Everett-7, Level 1 Android (Absent) Ian Lee Von Richter, Level 1 Teamster Our illustrator, Nick Tofani, playing: Dr. William Whalen, Level 0 Scientist. DECEASED NPC : Roskam, a Diver DECEASED NPC : Tamm, a mercenary…
Back in the Deep with my players for session 2 of our Gradient Descent playthrough. Joining us this time: Slantio playing: Gunner Markus Lilith, Level 1 Marine SinisterGrin playing: Everett-7, Level 1 Android Ian Lee Von Richter, Level 1 Teamster Our illustrator, Nick Tofani, planing: Dr. William Whalen, Level 0 Scientist. NPC : Roskam, a Diver NPC : Tamm, a mercenary grunt I use a big printout of…