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 […]

Taken from the Blue Prince website

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 4

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 […]


Improving Backgrounds in D&D 2024 11

I’ve got a number of issues with the way the 2024 rules change Backgrounds from their 2014 form. In this post I want to dig into those issues and see if we can improve upon them. If I stumble upon something worth having, this could become a DM’s Guild release, […]


LARP Design: Traversal Challenges

We’re in the run-up to the first full weekend event of Citadel LARP. The Citadel in the name is a dungeon for as much of that old-school dungeon-crawling feel as we can manage in a LARP, and one of the ways we do that is to lean into something that […]


A Fourteenth Year of Blogging 3

The actual anniversary of my blog was a few days ago, and I was just so buried in other tasks that I’m only now getting around to writing this. Every year I like to talk about what I’m playing, what I’m running, and otherwise what I’m enjoying. Games I’m Running […]