The ruminations and game design of Lizzie Magnolia
One of the greatest temptations in any budding GM's life is the idea of building up an entire world out of nothing. We'll get into more of that in a later post, but one of the more immediate challenges is that when you make a place you also need to make up it's name. Now, there are a myriad of fantasy name generators you can use when making a town, but I'd argue that the best thing you could get…
In a discussion about the new Dark Sun on Sly Flourish's Patreon discord about how the setting seems to be shying away from slavery (and other situations where the whole thing is underexamined, I said the following: "It's just funny to see a game where earlier editions had the Enslaved Goblins Digging Pits Chart suddenly get so squeemish about it, even as opponents. I get why not everyone wants a…
This is not an analysis . I'm not even sure if it qualifies as a blog post . It's more of an exorcism. In case you were wondering who the Magnolia Mascot is, this is Vicky, an OC adopt I got from Sakkiye . Isn't she grand? I spent a good chunk of July in wonderful Vancouver, Canada, with my even more wonderful girlfriend, and something I promised myself was no more blogging about Deathbringer.…
I've been spending the past little while visiting my girlfriend, and on the plane ride back I started reading the book Conquistador, by S.M. Stirling. This isn't a book review, mostly because I'm not done with it and my thoughts so far are "I grew up on Stirling's books, this is a Stirling book, so it feels like a lovely homecoming for me." What I initially found interesting was how much it cuts…
Last time , I went through all the actual serious problems with Deathbringer's marketing campaign: the racism, the misogyny, the one weird kinda homophobic potshot Professor DM made in the opening minute of the video. That all stands. This post is going to be the dessert after we've had all our vegetables, looking at the actual pitch and the product, asking "What is this game? What is it designed…
As I write this, Deathbringer , the self-proclaimed most anticipated RPG of 2026, is entering day two of its Backerkit campaign and has raised three-quarters of a million dollars. It is by any count a success story, and I wish I could just celebrate it and go on to my day: it is clearly a project its main creator, Professor DM, is proud of, and I wish the world had more stories of indie creators…
It's no secret I'm into Orcs. Lyme's Why Orcs? was my favorite post in last year's Lizzies , because it dug through the history of The Orc as a metaphor for industrialized warfare instead of the generic Fantasy Tribal stuff they have going on now. To quote myself: Orcs are clone troopers. I love clone troopers. And now I love orcs. So when I realized that Lyme had released a GMless RPG about…
I mentioned in my Sentinel Comics Review that I should probably check out Spectaculars at some point. Well, I did, and let me tell you all, this game has the motherfucking JUICE . So now I'm going to spend the next however many words talking about why this game rocks and you should buy it. The art is what I would call Generic Modern Comic, and it looks really nice and classy. What's in the Box?…
Autogynespolia was a game inspired by Darling Demon Eclipse's post on Faggot games. I was in a really dark place when I started working on it-I was working my shitty security job I hated in the dead of winter, which gave me a lot of time to be alone with my own thoughts, right as my hormones were running out. Originally I envisioned the game as my own fantasies of suicide, of ripping myself apart…
As part of the ongoing Prismatic Wasteland Randomness Blogwagon , I'm writing exactly 2,000 (so long as you don't count) words on random character creation in roleplaying games, why I think it's good, and why I think it's bad, because if nothing else Magnolia Keep is a land of (roll 1d6): Homosexuality Barely restrained, simmering rage Mangoes Autism A deep-seated void of self-loathing Contrast…
I am so fucking tired of discourse. I am so tired of people posting inflammatory things on their blogs and social media, and deciphering through secondhand accounts just what the fuck everyone is talking about. I am tired of watching people argue over what is the most correct way to play pretend. It's why I try to avoid absolutes when I write, why I relentlessly taxonomize and try to break down…
I've spoken before about implied worldbuilding, how fun it can be to tease apart the world that the rules of Dungeons and Dragons build. This has been done before for the setting of OD&D , and it's a fascinating read, but something that's stuck with me is the fact that the example for an alternate setting the players can venture into isn't some other plane, time, or even something like the…
As part of my crawl through the history of Dragon Magazine, something I have noticed is that from an early age the Gaijin Gamer has always been particularly fascinated by the martial culture of Glorious Nippon. I can understand this: Samurai movies are fucking awesome. However, that often bumps up against the fact that you have Very White game designers making some...choice decisions. Even in the…
This post is part of a series: Stranger Than Fiction In the second area of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, the city of Kutna Hora has a fountain in it that most first-time visitors will see going in. The main character, Henry, will never fail to exclaim how strange this fountain is, to the point that it's become a meme even Henry's voice actor has acknowledged . It's funny, but it's also a bit of a…
I'm a big fan of taking notes when playing video games, I'm the kind of pervert The Painscreek Killings was made for. Writing stuff down on a piece of paper helps make things feel so much more real , and leaves you with a memento that probably makes sense to you and only you (also, my memory is shit. It's fucking dogshit). With that in mind, I'm going to highlight a pair of shorter indie games…
I recently joined Meet the RPG , a round-robin thing organized on the Paper Cult Club forums , and we just went through three-ish sessions (plus a Session Zero) of Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game , an rpg based on the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game, which I have functionally no experience in and thus can't comment on at all. You can read the GM's take here , and I'd highly recommend…
I've started work on an RPG named Elfkisser , and while I was discussing it Elizabeth of Patchwork Paladin jokingly asked when I was working on Orcstabber. I now present, comepletely unplaytested, Orcstabber: The Roleplaying Game Orcs. The misbegotten legacy of the great war against the Dark Lord. Still they fester and churn, daring to exist in the catacombs and sewers beneath our great city. Once…
One of my longer-running side projects has been going through the ENWorld Gary Gygax Q&A . It ran for several years, up to Gygax's passing, and is the source for a lot of good and interesting information about the early days of Dungeons and Dragons buried under a not-insignificant amount of forum dross. Most of it's already been picked clean, but between yours truly being bored at work and it…
One of the central maxims of the OSR is that the answer is not on your character sheet. "Builds" as such aren't really a thing, between games offering random stat generation, extremely frontloaded classes with fairly minor abilities in the grand scheme of things, and so on. Early editions of Dungeons and Dragons were much the same, though by the 80s we're beginning to see options for things like…
I did not grow up in the Call of Duty lobbies. As a child, I wasn't really allowed to play shooters, and the closest thing I ever got to a proper multiplayer match was hotseat games of Sid Meier's Civilization with my dad, Unreal Tournament with my uncle, or the occasional match of Halo on the school computers (or the PvPvP mode of Batman: Arkham Origins when my parents weren't home, but they…
"You may be a group of unsightly men sitting around a card table on a Friday night, but your players will still be looking for chances to meet girls" -Shamus Young, DM of the Rings XII: NPC Non Grata I've been reading through old Dragon Magazines, and one of the things I've noticed is that, despite largely being by sweaty wargamers for sweaty wargamers, about Advanced Dungeons and Dragons with an…
This blog post is part of a series! Part One , Part Two, Part Three, Part Four So, you've finally gotten yourself a group of players and are preparing your first session. So, what kind of stuff should you be preparing? In this case, I'll be pulling from my home game, as shown below: A rough diagram for the first (planned) session of my game, diagrammed using the Anal Bead structure. It's probably…
Fellow RPG creator Snow posted BULLET POINTS LIKE DUST IN THE EYE OF GOD , a discussion of whether or not editing and layout in standards in tabletop roleplaying are strangling possible expressions of the medium. I'd recommend reading that piece before continuing with this one. It certainly gets a feeling across, even if I personally find the point to be lost a bit under a few too many layers of…
This post is part of a series: Stranger Than Fiction Hello all, and welcome to the first installment of an ongoing series I've decided to call Stranger than Fiction! As I've mentioned before, looking back to the past can provide a wealth of inspiration for the modern elfgamer, because modern fantasy has become so calcified that it allows the old to seem new again. Now there are still cases where…
Last night I saw Dracula: A Love Tale (the French one, not to be confused with the American one), and I realized partway through the screening that I've now seen three Dracula movies that run across the spectrum of quality. Now, I've never read Dracula (I bounced off it when I tried to read it on my Nintendo DS) or seen the more famous Francis Ford Coppola movie (though I've heard Dracula: A Love…