Short role-playing adventures, musings on the hobby, illustration, and further afield.
Somewhere in your dice collection is a die like this one, the humblest of dice. Although you don't know it, this small white die carries with it a secret symbolism, the tarot of pips . If you hold the die under the light of the last full moon before you die, the black dots change and you can see the symbols yourself. But, since you have a full life ahead of you, I will now explain. Six of Pips -…
Asking about The Awful Lights, a commenter asks: I'd love to hear about how this is run - with the Handler determining mission location and objectives during the session, is the GM left improvising? Are you meant to pre-build all the possible Sites, and then hammer a Handler-chosen objective into them? Yes, I just improvised; in that sense it works very much like Blades in the Dark when the GM…
Here's an updated version of The Awful Lights , now with a set of playbooks for the mission team members. There are five: A Survivor - this playbook is meant to represent all survivors without a specialty. They're starting characters for some players in larger groups, and this playbook is a replacement character option if any of the specialists gets killed in the field. The survivor's advancement…
This past weekend I was at Breakout Con, running The Awful Lights . This is an alpha edition of a wilderness/zombie survival paramilitary RPG, heavily inspired by Band of Blades by John LeBouef-Little and Stras Acimovic. In the Awful Lights, it's eight or ten years after a zombie infection wiped the world away. Now, only scattered wilderness bands remain, living off the land as best they can. Life…
Unbenownst to the bards, their music and tales are no mere diversion, but the carrier signal of a great mind that spans all of humanity. Deep thoughts live in the delicate web of syllables and poems that join us. I've heard it said that we never learned to sing. We sang from the beginning, maybe before. It was speech we found later. In this first song, we were all one. Not people carrying out the…
Here's a simple principle: (1) The player who needs to use a quantity should be the one tracking it. If you're the one who updates your rogue's hit points, the hit point score should be on a piece of paper in your hands, not somebody else's (e.g. the GMs). Pretty obvious. I can only ever remember this principle being broken once: in an early version of Blades in the Dark, it was actually the GM…
One of the defining aspects of this campaign is my choice to run this on the real , actual Isle of Wight. I had thought about filing off the serial numbers, but the more time I spent poring over Google Maps, the more tempted I was to use the real place. Approaching the Needles Tourist Attraction The sheer amount of information here is truly overwhelming, but also like catnip to my brain. For one…
A few weeks ago, I kicked off a zombie survival game set in the real-world Isle of Wight. It's been really delightful! The campaign pitch goes like this: On November 4, 1988, a unexpected nuclear exchange takes place across western Europe. The cargo ship BF Fortaleza is travelling unloaded from Lisbon, Portugal to Bournemouth UK when the night horizon lights up with flashes. In the confusion, the…
When the servants of the gods fight, they use more than earthly wood and steel. Taking a blow from them can have strange consequences. d12 Legendary Critical Hit Target knocked unconscious for d6 minutes, slammed into 3d6 years of an alternate life of quiet contemplation and service to the being they were just fighting. A mighty blow breaks the target's forearm. d6 musical instruments within a…
Here's a mini-game for a wizard player, designed to encourage tinkering between sessions in a way that emulates downtime magical research. Imagine a sudoku board with astrological symbols, which corresponds to the pattern of the wizard's preparations and meditations. Certain tetris-like shapes of specific symbols are how wizards memorize spells. e.g. Fire over Earth with a Sun on both sides of the…
One way to bring a setting's calendar to life is through downtime. When you spend a month cooling your heels and recovering from the road, each month has distinctive, meaty benefits. Set the list out where the players can get it, and let them make their own choices. It doesn't even matter if players are actually able to make use of the benefits they want. If all that happens is the party…
A dense and dusty city toils under a flickering yellow sky. None may enter, but everyone does. All may leave, but none do. Prickly selks stand at the gates. Their halberds gleam like razors, but their eyes are dull from the heat. The crowd inches forward toward the city's mouth. Sickly smoke rises from the burners along the high walls: a thousand fires of caylum wood, oracle grass, the narcotic…
Recently, I learned about the Brindlewood Bay's approach to mysteries via the Darknened Threshold podcast . It struck me that it's does something that Blades in the Dark also does, but in a completely different way: It avoids inapt discussion about information the players don't have. Brindlewood Bay has a Theorize move where players chew over the assembled clues and propose answers to the…
For a generation, the tides at Vincha stopped completely. What was once an enormous tidal flat was lost under bitter waters. Now they have returned, and the brave and curious are gathering to see what was hidden under the terrible salt . This adventure features an enormous tidal flat, miles and miles wide. Adventurers who set out from Vincha have a strange and dangerous land to explore, and will…
On Monday, July 20, the Mentor™ learning service suffered an outage that lasted from 4:53AM until service was fully restored on Wednesday, July 22 at 6:11PM. At Mentor, we don't consider this an acceptable level of service. We sincerely apologize our valued users, institutional customers, and the family and friends of Kyle H. We commit to doing better in the future. This incident report explains…
Taking a covid test in a car speeding through the rain at night feels very cyberpunk. International travel, backseat chemistry.. all I need is a red dot sight on me from a blacked out Mercedes. That makes up for it all.. right? I guess you can have column A, but not without a little column B. d10 The future is here but with.. Implanted augmentation captchas Smartgun roaming charges Mirrorshades…
Now that the core of Dungeons & Dragons has been effectively open sourced, a lot of retro-clone designers are breathing a sigh of relief. You can't copyright mechanics, but that hasn't stopped numerous lawsuits in the past. Those days seem to be over! I thought it might be nice to look at some of those now-free core mechanics that have been with the game since its very early, dungeon-centric…
For the third post in my 'transcript analysis' series, I'm looking at a very different play style than I'm familiar with: Critical Role. For this analysis, I picked a random Critical Role episode, "Between the Lines". Episodes are long, so I chose to do Part I of this episode, which is about 110 minutes and just over 16,000 words. Unlike most RPG sessions, Critical Role is played for an audience.…
Recently, I wrote about a taxonomy for classifying the statements made while playing a role-playing game. I've been looking at an 'old school' style transcript that I was given by Ara Winter. With the whole transcript annotated, including breaking up longer statements into separate ones so they can be tagged distinctly, it looks like this in my google sheet: This lets me do a couple of fun but…
There are lots of ways that gamers characterize play styles, many of which focus on the intentions of the play group. I won't recap those here—this post is about a different lens for looking at play style, namely, what are people talking about ? I Describe Fireball At Them A few years ago I watched a YouTube video where the players spent an incredible amount of time describing how the actions of…
In a galaxy far, far away, safety research is a thankless job. Final year Academy projects don't write themselves, however, and so it fell to Partho Borc to dig deep into the question that had been bugging him ever since the Battle of Yavin. How on earth did firing a proton torpedo into an exhaust port lead to the destruction of a moon-sized battle station? The conventional wisdom was pretty…
Recently, Wizards of the Coast announced that they would be releasing version 1.1 of their famous Open Gaming License, the OGL . What does this mean, and how does the deeply weird Section 9 affect their plans? The OGL is a legal agreement that WOTC developed in 2000 to encourage third parties to develop content for Dungeons & Dragons. When a gaming text includes it, the open gaming content…
The lost tomb of Sierk the Carver may have passed from memory, but it's nearer than anyone suspected. But be warned, wizards don't die peacefully. Great danger awaits anyone who arrives at the hour of death. At the Hour of Death is Trilemma Adventure #55. It's a pocket dungeon that you can locate almost anywhere underground. If an ogre misses a player and bashes a wall, a secret door in a castle…
Memorize this, but for god's sake don't act like you know it. Play dumb and ask for directions like everyone else or you'll get flagged and dumped out an airlock. In the post-planet setting of Coming Apart , the few remaining human communities survive through secrecy. When any nickel-hulled pirate can fold in with a world-ending asteroid, the only defences are to be too small to extort, or to…
Fans of Trilemma Adventures: one of our own needs our help. Evey Lockhart is the writer and designer of weird, sad, queer old-school stuff that you’re probably familiar with. She was celebrated in 2015 as winner of the One Page Dungeon Contest, then took ENnie silver for her contributions to Trilemma Adventures. She’s gone on to make books like Very Pretty Paleozoic Pals and the disturbing “Wet…