My colleague Warren of ICastLight was kind enough to send me a copy of the MERP module The Haunted Ruins of the Dunlendings . MERP modules can be a little hit or miss, but I thought two of the three adventures were pretty good! Of course, being persnickity, I wanted to inject some modern OSR theory into the dungeons. So I took the opportunity to go ahead and stat these out for Lore , my Lord of…
Part 4 of my investigation into "Hobbits have a Roadside Picnic." Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Dragon gold We must away ere break of day To seek the pale enchanted gold. One of the primary reasons burglars brave the aberrations of the dungeon zone is the gold that the dragon amassed. No one has yet seen the center of Smaug's golden hoard and lived to tell the tale, but caches of…
Part 3 of my investigation into "Hobbits have a Roadside Picnic." Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Traps "I don’t exactly understand your terminology. What traps?” Noonan laughed. "That’s folklore," he explained. "Stalkers’ jargon. Bug traps—those are the areas of increased gravity." A dungeon zone is filled with hazardous environments that arise spontaneously due to proximity with a dragon. Some…
Part 2 of my investigation into "What if the Desolation of Smaug was a Zone from Roadsic Picnic ?" Part 1 is here. Maybe I should have called this series "Hobbits have a Roadside Picnic." Hmmm. Dungeon Zones Inns are the haunts of burglars--notorious drunks, all. All of a burglar's tall tales are told there. "I saw the Old Wyrm making new passageways. He was digging like an earthworm, chomping at…
When people give me a recommendation for a book, a show, whatever, I always say "I'll add it to the list!" And I'm not kidding: I have a list. It sits at the bottom of my To Do Google Doc, where I track my daily tasks. The list is organized by medium (book, show, whatever), but is just a comma separated list in the order the text was recommended to me. Some of the lists are hundreds of entries…
Alas, to be an indie RPG designer is to be both the author, the project manager, the social media, and the marketer (among other things). You may have heard me mention this week (on this blog and through social media) that voting for the 2026 ENNIES is currently going on and the Designing Dungeons Course is up for Best Online Content . I make no apologies for shilling! But, if I must advertise, I…
An installment of my hexmap for Middle-earth project. Follow the "Middle-earth Hexmap" tag for all entries in this series. Art by Goran Gligovic The Angle is a wedge of land between the rivers of Hoarwell and Loudwater, south of the Great East Road. When Bilbo - and later Frodo & company - traveled towards Elrond's House, the Angle is what lay south of the road. It's a delta of arable lands where…
The Designing Dungeons Course: Or, How to Kill a Party in 30 Rooms or Less has been nominated for 🏆Best Online Content in the 2026 ENNIES🏆. I mean it when I say that it's an honor just to be nominated. Thank you very much! Vote here! Who What Why of the Designing Dungeons Course If you are a regular reader on my blog, I hope you already know all about the Designing Dungeons Course. But just to…
I bet you've seen notes in dungeon keys that say something like: The murals depict an ibis-headed god handing out the tools of writings to grateful humans. (Clerics know that this is represents Thoth, god of knowledge.) What if your wrote a whole dungeon with an eye towards giving out this class-specific information? It might look something like this: A round atrium; the domed ceiling is cracked,…
When Sean McCoy proposed the Dungeon23 project , I couldn't help but join in. I wrote two dungeons--one for His Majesty the Worm and one for Under Hill, By Water . This effort eventually went on to become the 100+ room, Metroidvania-inspired dungeon... The Castle Automatic The premise of The Castle Automatic is that there is a mechanical castle with a self-contained sun, moon, and seasons. It was…
Working on the Middle-earth Hexcrawl Project has made me want to articulate some brief thoughts I've had on writing material for canon settings. This is a microblog, unedited, stream of consciousness, and written while drunk. If you just faithfully reproduce the things that Tolkien directly talked about, Middle-earth would seem very empty indeed. You can see in Idraluna Archive's map that much of…
Sufficiently advanced technology blah blah blah. But I do think it's helpful thinking of wizards as people with access to out-of-place technology as a way to conceptualize what they can do vs what they cannot. Yes, I can receive real-time updates about the collapse of my country. No, I cannot change the outcome. If we define spells as modern technology given the appearance of classic spells, what…
Herein I read the monster manual entries from OD&D in order and try to parse them into groupings and categories that let me use them at the table. Every attempt to read OD&D is some sort of bizarre self mortification ritual. It's not the text itself, it's the grappling with it that's important. This post is a quasi-continuation of my quickly-abandoned Domesday Book project. It is heavily inspired…
Spells are never spoken aloud. That's just superstition . Spells are always written on scrolls. The spell is the scroll. The wizard writes "chain." The scroll functions as chain. Wrap it around the prisoner's arms. The wizard writes a letter on the scroll, then pens the magical name of its intended recipient, and the letter sails through the air. A spellbook is a collection of these scrolls…
A while back, when juggling all the materials I needed to run a game, I had the idea for and mocked up a proof of concept of a hexcrawl dashboard --something that had everything I needed to run a game in a single view. Last week, Mick of Advanced Mystery & Manners did the yeoman's work of making a hexcrawl dashboard for the Middle-earth Hexcrawl - at least as much as has been released so far. I'm…
I've long been a big fan of kung fu movies, but only recently started dabbling in the core texts by reading a translation of The Legend of the Condor Heroes. This has prompted me to think about how these stories might be captured in a long-term RPG campaign. (I've written previously about the structure of kung fu movies and made observations about translating the structure into RPGs. This post…
"I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." - J.R.R. Tolkien My favorite licensed Tolkien game was published by Iron Crown Enterprises in 1991. It was called The Lord of the Rings Adventure Game…
When you level up, you gain a random benefit based on your race or class. Here's what goblins get. You can also use this table for folks like half-orcs or maybe even tieflings, if that's your style of game. If you prefer your goblins more whimsical and fairy tale oriented, may I suggest Papers and Pencils's d100 Gobbobilities . Art by Goran Gligović Goblins Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and…
There's nothing revolutionary in this post, but I think it contains generally good advice and feels worthwhile articulating. When an RPG gives you something generic, a player skill that enlivens your roleplaying is describing it in a non-generic way. Items are a great place to have fun with this idea. Instead of a dagger, it's a "wavy dagger with a hilt shaped like a mushroom." You can "show, not…
Another year and the Bloggies have come and gone! I'm very pleased to have taken home some medals in the Best Series category! Gold : The Designing Dungeons Course, or, How to Kill a Party in 30 Rooms or Less Silver : The Middle-earth Hexcrawl Project My colleague and co-author of Designing Dungeons, Warren of ICastLight, has a nice post on the Bloggies that says more than I will. > Blogs are like…
When you level up, you gain a random benefit based on your race or class. Here's what hobbits get. You can either roll a d10 for your culture to get a result from a tightly-bound part of the table or roll a d50 to get anything from the entire table. This is ostensibly for the Middle-earth Hexcrawl project but I think it can be broadly applicable to any fantasy adventure game with halflings in it.…
Sometimes when you're writing a dungeon room, it can feel like pulling teeth. The empty space and the stocking result of "Trap with Treasure" mocks you. Here's a technique to unblock yourself. Look around you. Put cogent details that you can see into your dungeon. Things I can see from my computer desk chair: The Mordant Arcana tarot deck A pipe The Fantasy Prompt Generator zine from Norn A helmet…
When you level up, you gain a random benefit based on your race or class. Here's what elf-friends get. What are elf-friends? Well: The master of the house was an elf-friend—one of those people whose fathers came into the strange stories before the beginning of History, the wars of the evil goblins and the elves and the first men in the North. In those days of our tale there were still some people…
When you level up, you gain a random benefit based on your race or class. Here's what elves get. This is ostensibly for the Middle-earth Hexcrawl project but I think it can be broadly applicable to any fantasy adventure game with elves in it. Elves When you advance, you may either: Roll a d10 to an advancement based on your culture. Roll a d30. On a result of 1-10, read the corresponding entry in…
It's February. I posted my finished Shire Hexcrawl back in December and stopped making regular updates about the Middle-earth project. But I haven't been idle, dear reader. I have been continuing to write a hex a day for Idraluna Archive's big Middle-earth map as a daily writing project. I want to share a glimpse into this work with you. Here are two dungeons in the Trollshaws. Art by Goran…