Creator of Yoon-Suin and other materials. Propounding my half-baked ideas on role playing games. Jotting down and elaborating on ideas for campaigns, missions and adventures. Talking about general industry-related matters. Putting a new twist on gaming.
Once summer holidays are out of the way, I will be launching the Kickstarter for The Great North , described long ago as 'Yoon-Suin but in Northumberland'. All the text and art is finished, and layout is commencing. Here are some little fragments from the prototype of one of the chapters, mostly close-ups (i.e., not full pages or spreads) so you can see it in some of its final glory and get a feel…
An important and useful way to tease out weird new fantasy cultures or civilisations is what I am going to christen here the -Rider Gambit. The way this works is you imagine a race of people (or orcs, or elves, or whatever) and then find an unusual animal species for them to ride. And you then build a culture around that. We are familiar with human horse riders, goblin wolf riders, orc boar boyz,…
One of the most perillous moments in any D&D campaign is the Interdimensional Space Time Continuum Bait-and-Switch. If you do not know what that is, let me explain: It is when the players move into a different dimension and/or break in space-time such that things become Different to How They Were. Two examples from my own life: a - PCs are in a dungeon where they encounter a place where, due to a…
Sometimes, I like to post on this blog in a fashion that is more along the lines of thinking-out-loud than having a coherent message or purpose. This is one of those occasions. You may recall that long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, The Simpsons was funny, and nobody had yet heard of Baby Shark, there was a thing called d20 Modern . It was not, I think, a great success - I played in a few…
An important aspect of tabletop RPGs that is insufficiently discussed is the theatre of the mind. When playing a game, we - players and DM alike - picture a great variety of things in our minds' eyes. We visualise what ths room looks like, what this monster looks like, what this NPC looks like, and so on. No doubt we also do it when reading splatbooks and modules: we picture in our heads what is…
It is easy to be a doom-monger - to literally go out into the world and mong doom. Monging hope is less easy, and tends to have to be done practically rather than theoretically. Doom is monged through words - dire prophecies and warnings, or elegies for times past. Hope is monged through doing, rather than telling. A hope-monger shows the way. There is a lot of doom (ok, ok, I will stop with the…
One of the most important things for a DM to do if he wants to innovate is to switch things up with monsters. You know the problem: orcs, elves, goblins, ogres, dragons - we've seen it all; we know them; they are hackneyed and trite. This is not to say that interesting things cannot be done in the arena of Bog Standard High Fantasy Furniture (TM), but these are tropes which have become more than…
Work continues on the Paladin Project , my ongoing effort to come up with an OSR 'good guys' campaign toolbox. Regular readers may recall my last post on this subject , in which I described the phenomenology of the anti-rogue campaign . The nuts and bolts of this remain, but I am now positively steering clear of the 'anti-rogue' motif and am accentuating the positive: this is not anti- anything.…
I believe it is important in life to recognise when one is in the wrong, and apologise. To that end, I have two apologies to make. I owe the first to the creator of Tale of the Manticore . In my post yesterday , I posted the following review: This self-describes as a 'hybrid between a dark fantasy audio drama and a solo D&D RPG'. In this respect it is actually quite close to what I was trying to…
Readers of this blog are people of rarefied tastes and great education and learning, and we should not be surprised to discover there is a high degree of consensus between them about matters of Truth, Justice, and the Best OSR-adjacent Actual Play podcats and YouTube videos. In my last post I asked for recommendations and, lo and behold, they are almost all exactly the same . Here I review and…
What is the state-of-the-art when it comes to Actual Plays on YouTube? If you are reading this blog you are likely familiar with my tastes, and your own will be aligned, but for the avoidance of doubt I am looking for OSR-adjacent, or OSR-sympathetic, content with the emphasis on sandbox play. I am by no means limited in my interests to D&D. (I will merrily watch MERP, Cyberpunk 2020, RuneQuest,…
Like any right thinking person, I hate and fear Microsoft Bing. But on my office computer at work, each day a free Bing wallpaper is downloaded and automatically set as my desktop wallpaper image. They are surprisingly inspiring for campaign or adventure site ideas. Viz: This is quite literally a ruined mountain temple complex of a lost civilisation. It therefore serves as a wonderful template…
One of my offspring is quite attached to a podcast in which a woman very nicely reads (pleasingly unvarnished and unbowdlerised) fairy tales and classic children's stories. One of them is Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen . If you don't know The Snow Queen , it's framed by a sort of story-within-a-story in which an evil spirit has created a looking glass which causes everything to be…
To cut a long story short, I was recently on a long-haul flight and ended up watching The Empire Strike Back and part of Return of the Jedi on the in-flight entertainment screen. I haven't watched a Star Wars film since The Force Awakens came out at the cinema and I don't believe I had seen any for some time before that either. But there was nothing else on that I wanted to watch (apart from the…
I recently recorded a podcast episode for higher-level backers of the Yoon-Suin 2nd edition kickstarter, in which I was subjected to some tough questions about certain aspects of the book. I liked the line of questioning, as I think it made the conversation much more interesting than a series of underarm throws ('Tell us exactly what else is brilliant about Chapter Four?'). But I wanted to expand…
Apropos of nothing, here are eight ideas for megadungeons, each inspired by the title and lyrical themes of the Iron Maiden album Powerslave (1984): Aces High - A storm giant's tower, seated on a cloud; it is reached by climbing to a high mountain peak and then casting off by glider, which limits how much treasure can be taken back or forth (and from which some loot may simply fall off). The…
It's funny how you go down rabbit holes. Last week I happened to be in Lund, in southern Sweden, where there is a very grand and beautiful cathedral which is rightly famous. It contains a famous astronomical clock, first constructed some time around 1425, and which calls to mind CS Lewis's observation that the defining characteristic of the medieval mind was 'intricacy': This is the clock's…
Hear and attend and listen, O best beloved. Once there was a man who had two daughters. Each Saturday, the elder of the two daughters attended a dance school, O best beloved, around the corner from which was an emporium which sold coffee, and this was what befell and was befallen: the man would visit the emporium each Saturday to drink said coffee in the morning sun and entertain his daughters…
I am of the view that there is no pursuit that is more noble and no task that is more worth doing than writing novels. Call me romantic; call me deluded; call me a fuddy-duddy; call me a pseud. I will stand by this statement and only nuance it by adding that the most noble type of novel-writing is fantasy fiction. The real world will look after itself. Factories will be built, medicines will be…
The other day I took a walk with the kids to a plot of land, near my in-laws’ place in rural Japan, which is devoted to community use. There are some allotments, a little river walk area, a slide, and so forth. And, it being close to Children’s Day, there was a big display of koi nobori - the fish streamers that are hung up everywhere in Japan as part of the celebrations of spring. On a weekday in…
I'm sure you'll agree with me that there can be few pleasures greater in life than purchasing a new notepad. You hand over the money and there it is: a hundred or more blank pages, waiting to be filled. With what? An infinity of options extends to the far horizon of your mind. Will it be the beginning of a novel-writing career that culminates in a Nobel prize? Will it be a book of poems that will…
Not really. But I did just spend an hour drafting a post only for it to disappear into the ether. All the way through, I noticed that the autosave function in Blogger was not working - presumably due to some sort of connection error. But I blithely carried on regardless, and these are the consequences. I hit 'post' and the carefully crafted post I had written simply disappeared. It is not in…
I was recently discussing with two friends, as one does, the important matter of whether a human being could communicate with a red dragon. Could a human learn a dragon's language? And could a red dragon learn a human's? More broadly, is cross-species communication in a fantasy world possible at all? This is both a more simple and a more complicated question than it appears. First, clearly…
I have been writing this blog, and reading other RPG-related blogs and forums, for almost twenty years (!). One thing I have noticed during this time is that there is a species of gamer who sees it as an important part of his (always his ) identity that he only uses RPG materials for play and has no other earthly use for them. This type of individual always belittles and pooh-poohs any desire to…
I read an interesting blog post today in which the author makes an eloquent and compelling case for describing dungeon locations (and, by inference, hex map locations) using only normal prose sentences and paragraphs, and without boldings, italicizations, underlinings, smallcaps, parentheticals, bracketed asides, sidebars, lists, tables, bullets, nested sub-bullets, color-coding, font alternates,…