I didn't think I would become the old man yelling at clouds when it came to my gaming habits (although many of my friends will tell you I'm a grumpy old man in a 32 year old body). But while I find myself endlessly fascinated with
If you or anyone you know struggles with the joys of ADHD, you know that sometimes it means you are going to hyperfixate on something for no particular reason. That thing will have you captive in its clutches until you have given it the proper attention it deserves, and fuck
Joining the long list of things declared dead that are not actually dead (including, but not limited to; punk, the OSR, shitty chain sit-down restaurants, and media literacy) I figured it was time for another evocative headline. I haven't blogged in a while, mostly as a consequence of
Towards the end of March, I saw a post in the NSR Cauldron discord from PermanentBacklog's Substack detailing a world building challenge for April called The April Foundry. The TL;DR of that is it was a series of prompts, one each day, designed to help flesh out
I thought about a million rom com/dating tropes to start this blog with. I even thought about opening up with a "It's not you, it's me" joke. But sometimes simple is just better (a philosophy that the developers at Paizo have never once
Okay so there's an orange elephant in the room, particularly if you live in the US these days. Everything is on fire, everything is crazy, people are losing jobs left and right, eggs cost eleventy million dollars, and it turns out every RPG product ever made is printed
Being a DM is kinda hard actually. Your job is to be part storyteller, part NPC voice actor, part game designer, and part rules expert, along with 5 other roles that I'm probably forgetting at the time of writing this blog. It's made harder by the
If you have spent any time reading or watching advice on how to be a great Dungeon Master, especially for 5th Edition D&D, you have probably seen some variant of advice telling you to use "Yes-And" principles in your games. A lot of advice from the
Alright time to get this off my chest; I participate in a lot of hobbies that are populated by people I personally find incredibly distasteful. Such is the curse of having nerdy hobbies where there are incels, sexists, racists, transphobes, and other varieties of bigots that would be too numerous
Musings on OSR and NSR RPGs
A little more than 2 years ago, the D&D community was rocked by scandal when the draft text of WotC's proposed updates to the Open Gaming License (dubbed OGL 1.1) was leaked. Thanks to the excellent reporting of Lin Codega, we had serious insight into
As the tabletop space has evolved from its wargaming routes, one of the more commonly discussed and designed around challenges has been using dice to resolve situations. While D&D immortalized the now iconic D20, still other resolution mechanics continued to pop up; RuneQuest with its D100 based system,
Hey all, apologies for the delay in posting here! Between a medication change and a horrible bout of food poisoning, myself and the blogging thing have been passing like ships in the night. A recent post on the NSR Cauldron discord reminded me, regrettably, that Pokemon Tabletop United is a
I've been interested in diving into review content for a few weeks now, and I figured there would be no better game to start with than one of my favorite purchases of 2024; *Sinless*. For those unaware, Sinless is brainchild of Courtney C. Campbell, creator of On Downtime
AKA Why Sci-Fi RPGs aren't more popular
And why modern fantasy worldbuilding isn't doing much for me these days
A different take on the classic and controversial system
And how to actually run a good one
Examining one of the myths of crunchier rules systems
A response to the recent Pathfinder 2nd Edition drama
And why it's so hard to nail down
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