UA 2025: The Psion Breakdown 2

Not even the Ranger has had as many UA releases thrown at it as the Psion (née Mystic). Searching through the dusty, moldering archives of this very website, I see that I last wrote a UA breakdown about psionics in 2020, but it was already in good company. I was […]


UA 2025: Horror Subclasses Breakdown 2

I haven’t written an UA breakdown in a hot minute—the last one was before the three core books of 2024-25 dropped!—but this drop sucked me back in. Part of this is to find out where the reading audience is these days. I’m sad to see that they’ve dropped bylines for […]


Citadel LARP Design: Puzzle Box

So I’m a huge fan of games like The Room and Boxes, and I really wanted to bring some of that experience to Citadel LARP. Let’s set aside for a second the fact that the boxes in those games aren’t constrained by the cruel realities of Euclidean space the way […]


Taken from the Blue Prince website

Dungeon Design Lessons from Blue Prince

If you’re like Kainenchen and me, you’ve been utterly obsessed with Blue Prince for the last month or more. Now, a roguelike puzzle game isn’t necessarily for everyone, but the lessons the game has to offer are for everyone with even a passing interest in dungeon design. This list is […]


Dominoes and Dice Resolution Mechanic

Okay, I’ve gone away and had a long think about a core resolution mechanic for a Dust to Dust-based tabletop game. For aesthetic reasons, a core resolution mechanic for this game should involve dominoes, but what if it’s a combination dice-and-dominoes system? (The fact that both “dice-and-dominoes” and “Dust to […]


Ruby Talon Deeps: Locations 4

It doesn’t seem possible that it has been almost two years since the last time I posted something about Ruby Talon Deeps, or that I first drew it almost three and a half years ago. Time is weird and I don’t think I like it. For some reason this feels […]


Twenty Magic Item Flaws

One of my professional projects and working on Citadel LARP have converged on exploring magic item flaws of varying severity. The space between a flaw and a curse is largely semantic, but if you’re compelled to keep using the item that doesn’t work quite as advertised, that’s definitely a curse. […]


Grathe-Dzerin, the Sanctuary in the Abyss

The location described below is an idea that I’ve been pondering for awhile now: a relatively safe settlement in the Abyss that PCs can use as a base of operations for adventures in tiers 3 and 4. One of the things about the Abyss is that it can be so […]


Twenty Strange but Useful People to Meet in the Dungeon 2

If you need some weirdos for your PCs to meet while exploring the dungeon, if you need a change of pace between two fights or just think a minor social encounter sounds like the thing, this table is for you! (The three other tables linked below could also serve, depending […]


Improving Backgrounds in D&D 2024, Part Two 5

I liked the direction things were going in my last post, so today I’m continuing that with as many more Backgrounds as I can get through. Last time I covered Acolytes, Charlatans, and Criminals, so today I’m starting with Criminal (Spy). I always thought it was cool to have a […]