Notes on Every New System I Play this Year #6: A Perfect Rock
Disclaimer: I encounter many of these systems for one-shots at meetups, where I sometimes won't even know what I'll be playing going in. Because of this, I'll often only have taken a deeper look at parts of the book that relate to character creation, and flipped through the rest. But I'll always have played them!
Notes on Every New System I Play this Year #5: Vaesen
Disclaimer: I encounter many of these systems for one-shots at meetups, where I sometimes won't even know what I'll be playing going in. Because of this, I'll often only have taken a deeper look at parts of the book that relate to character creation, and flipped through the rest. But I'll always have played them!
Notes on Every New System I Play this Year #4: Honey Heist
Disclaimer: I encounter many of these systems for one-shots at meetups, where I sometimes won't even know what I'll be playing going in. Because of this, I'll often only have taken a deeper look at parts of the book that relate to character creation, and flipped through the rest. But I'll always have played them!
Notes on Every New System I Play this Year #3: :Otherscape
Disclaimer: I encounter many of these systems for one-shots at meetups, where I sometimes won't even know what I'll be playing going in. Because of this, I'll often only have taken a deeper look at parts of the book that relate to character creation, and flipped through the rest. But I'll always have played them!
Notes on Every New System I Play this Year #2: Brindlewood Bay
Disclaimer: I encounter many of these systems for one-shots at meetups, where I sometimes won't even know what I'll be playing going in. Because of this, I'll often only have taken a deeper look at parts of the book that relate to character creation, and flipped through the rest. But I'll always have played them!
Notes on Every New System I Play this Year #1: Monolith
Disclaimer: I encounter many of these systems for one-shots at meetups, where I sometimes won't even know what I'll be playing going in. Because of this, I'll often have mostly taken a deeper look at the parts of the book that relate to character creation, and flipped through the rest. But I'll always have played them!
"We Need to Talk About Goodman Games" vs. "Eating the Book" - Why not both?
Last week, Questing Beast's Ben Milton released a video in which he talked about Dungeon Crawl Classic (DCC) adventures, and why he generally doesn't like them very much. In it, he compares Goodman Game's DCC module "Sailors on a Starless Sea" to Necrotic Gnome's Dolmenwood module "Winter's Daughter", which he likes quite a bit.
What We Shouldn't Learn From 5e
Over at his blog, Aaron wrote a great post about which elements he thinks we should take from Dungeons & Dragons 5e and port into other roleplaying games. Because while everyone is always trying to do the reverse – steal mechanics from other systems to make their 5e home game bearable – why not look at the most popular roleplaying game in the world and pilfer it for parts? Surely the result can only be positive?
A New Pattern & Pattern Language Garden
Originally for this week for leaflet's "weekly summer pub club", I planned on expanding the pattern language I proposed in last week's post with five more patterns. But I didn't get to write as much as I would've liked.
A Pattern Language for (OSR) Adventure Design
Christopher Alexander’s books The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language are two incredible books. In them, Alexander proposes that there’s a “natural” way of structuring the built environment such that humans enjoy inhabiting it. This way is “from the bottom up,” in dialogue between the builder, the people living in a place, and the place itself.
Towards a Framework for Authoring Adventures
Dice Goblin Games wrote a great blog post about how primitive it can feel to be reading RPGs and Adventures as PDFs on your screen. It's like the old joke of most MacBooks being $2000 Facebook machines. Only sadder, because at least Facebook downloads a lot of JavaScript on first load, which is already an important step towards what I'll be describing below.
A Few First Thoughts About a New Hex Kit (and Some on the One After That)
In my last post, I talked about creating a set of hex tiles from paintings in the Met collection for use with Hex Kit. It ended on an ominous ellipsis hinting that I was thinking about creating an alternative to Hex Kit, which isn't supported anymore. It wasn't meant entirely seriously. Until, of course, it was...
Turning The Met Collection Into a Set of Hex Tiles
The Met Collection is one of my favorite sources of public domain art. They have an amazing collection, and their homepage is a pleasure to use. That's why in the past, I have already built a Bluesky bot that posts random images from the collection every day, as well as printed out some of their photos of objects to hang on my wall.
A few things I got out of forcing myself to write a bad, short blogpost on a deadline and publish it last-minute
The platform you're reading this on right now – leaflet.pub – is running a "weekly pub club" over the summer. Like many, I've been wanting to write more for quite some time now, and so I took that chance and created this publication for the occasion. The idea is to publish something weekly. That's basically it.
Mobile Lair Generator
Sometimes, you need a lair. And sometimes, you'll want that lair to be mobile. Here are two d20 tables to get you moving.
The Taste Gap, or: On the weirdness of learning how to be a better Dungeon Master
I got into TTRPGs only pretty recently, in the grand scheme of things. And when I did, I immediately started to DM. Since being a player doesn't interest me that much for some reason. I'm in my mid 30s, which is to say that I'm at a point in my life where I have at least a very basic understanding of what it means to acquire a new skill in a somewhat structured fashion. And that is what I'm very consciously treating DMing as: a creative skill. My creative outlet of choice.