My Blog mostly following my Wolves Upon the Coast campaign. I also do some game system design and just like to make ttrpg stuff. I also have a zine for this game.
There are adventures that when played really impact specific GMs in ways that make them think about them every time they design their own or compare future modules to. What adventures those are often change based on GM because frankly some people will play the Delian Tomb and they will decide the 5 Room Dungeon is the peak way to run their TTRPGs for the rest of their lives. For me personally this…
A sculptor lives high in the mountains. Each spring he comes down to the village to sell his wares. Fine stone figures of woodland and mountain creatures. From mice fine to the whiskers to deer grazing in a field their mouth open as if midbite. Many wish he would craft a man but he always refuses. Merchants travel far from the cities for his figures are well sought to bring the essence of…
A ruined menagerie. Blood, fur, and viscera. No bones remain. They have been taken into the whole. No witness to the massacre tells the same story.
Fences are smashed, hedgerows are aflame, nobody saw who did it, no animals were taken, the flocks wander the countryside, the farmers are scared to gather their herds incase the vandals return. They rode in the night fast and silent. Nobody saw them.
The new bridge has collapsed. It had been built by royal engineers using iron and wood and had been funded by a levee across the whole region. Now the peasants are near revolt. They had missed meals to fund this bridge and it is gone in under a year. They accuse the royal engineers of using cheap lumber and pocketing the differences. Why else would it rot away in 6 months and kill 2 as they tried…
As you make your way along you see a woman in the distance sobbing stumbling through the landscape half dehydrated and starved. She was born blind. Her husband and her had been journeying to see family in the next city over when he went to fill waterskins at the start of a day. He never came back. After waiting 2 days for him to return for her she has been wandering the countryside ever since…
Monsters should have real impacts on the world around them. The presence of a giant lair should never be a surprise to the party if they arrive there. Before you arrive at a human town you know it is coming if you pay attention. There is often literal signs and markers but beyond that you go from sparse farm buildings and large stretches of tree lines to having some residential style buildings.…
A second article from Dragon Magazine #1 this delves into possible rulings and thoughts on how to do rulings for language from how much can a 3 intelligence Fighter speak even their own language (they can with limited vocabulary) and alignment language and how much language does a 18 intelligence Elf speak (6 native + 8 acquired). This is a pretty brief bit as it is hard rulings but the…
Written by Wesley D Ives in the June 1976 copy of Dragon Magazine this article lays out an early attempt at making a skill system for D&D a year before AD&D laid out their more concise skill system. This system didn't have specific skills but rather used a series of 3 rolls as detailed below. In this detail you roll d100 to determine a die to use. You then roll the associated die and multiply that…
Dungeons and Dragons and TTRPGs as a whole have gone through a great amount of changes over the years. I would like to understand how the game developed more and what odd little tidbits have existed from time to time. Rejecting the "Whig History" of ttrpgs where the belief of newer = better and that progress is linear. My next few posts will likely be a collection of these reviews of old dragon…