Dungeon Merlin

Hey! I'm Jonas-Merlin, and these are my thoughts on being a dungeon master, game master, keeper, storyteller, MC, referee, etc.

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 #6: A Perfect Rock
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
March 14, 2026

Running List of Gameable Ideas I Get Watching Twilight Zone

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
February 21, 2026

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!

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
February 15, 2026

Writing Things in Networks is Unreasonably Effective

That's because RPGs are network building games.

Writing Things in Networks is Unreasonably Effective
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
February 13, 2026

Exploding a Blog Post

Or: Growing a digital garden out of a Zettelkasten about RPGs

Exploding a Blog Post
Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
February 08, 2026

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!

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
January 27, 2026

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!

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
January 26, 2026

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!

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
January 20, 2026

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!

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
January 19, 2026

"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.

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
January 12, 2026

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?

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
October 04, 2025

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.

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
August 17, 2025

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.

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
August 10, 2025
3

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.

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
July 30, 2025
1

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...

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
July 27, 2025

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.

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
July 19, 2025

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.

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
July 13, 2025

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.

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
July 04, 2025

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.

Jonas-Merlin Schumacher
June 25, 2025