Hey! I'm Jonas-Merlin, and these are my thoughts on being a dungeon master, game master, keeper, storyteller, MC, referee, etc.
by Jonas-Merlin Schumacher @jonasmerlin.bsky.social
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!
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|March 14, 2026
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|February 21, 2026
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|February 15, 2026
That's because RPGs are network building games.
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|February 13, 2026
Or: Growing a digital garden out of a Zettelkasten about RPGs
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|February 08, 2026
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|January 27, 2026
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|January 26, 2026
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|January 20, 2026
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!
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|January 19, 2026
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.
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|January 12, 2026
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?
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|October 04, 2025
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.
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|August 17, 2025
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.
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|August 10, 2025
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.
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|July 30, 2025
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...
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|July 27, 2025
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.
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|July 19, 2025
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.
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|July 13, 2025
Sometimes, you need a lair. And sometimes, you'll want that lair to be mobile. Here are two d20 tables to get you moving.
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|July 04, 2025
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.
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher|June 25, 2025