Updated Bastion Special Facilities, Part Three 2

February has been very demanding so far, but we just finished the first Citadel event of Season Two, so I’m taking time to remember that this blog exists and its readers are delightful people who deserve content. Thanks for reading, y’all. I’m about halfway through the list of Special Facilities […]

Two horses in a stable. One seems to be reaching out to touch its nose to the other.

Fantasy Names for Your Delectation 1

I like naming characters things. I like constructing a set of phonemes into something remotely plausible as a fantasy name and using the sense of it to say something about the region. At the same time, I am given to understand that for some people this is a source of […]


Updated Bastion Special Facilities, Part Two 7

I am so grateful for the positive responses to the last two posts in this series that I’m continuing without delay, before the deadline doom of the next few months eats my head again. Let’s see how many of these I can get through. Improving Bastions | Updated Special Facilities pt 1 […]

Name of the Rose - William and Adso

Updated Bastion Special Facilities, Part One 4

I had fun revising the first few Bastion Special Facilities in my previous post, so today I’m doing a few more. I’m still not sure what I want to do with the Barrack, beyond adding an -s to the end as most English speakers would, so I’m starting with the […]


Improving Bastions in D&D 2024 9

I’ve talked before about what a mess I think the 2024 DMG’s Bastion rules are. With all respect to the designers, I think there are good LEGOs in the pile, but this arrangement of them doesn’t serve the needs of the game or the story. The Issues First, I’ll recapitulate […]

It's a castle shot in a way that it looks tiny.

A Fifteenth Year of Blogging 4

It’s another year of blogging done, even if the last few months have been very thin around here. Some of my big clients have had steady work for me, and Citadel has taken whatever was left over from that. We’ll see how that develops over the next year. Games I’m […]


Coven of the Written Word

For Halloween, Kainenchen put together an awesome good-witch costume. Not in, you know, the Oz sense, though she’s also just finished rereading The Wizard of Oz and picked up the next book. Anyway, this subclass hasn’t seen any review from the Worlds Beyond Number team, but it was commissioned by […]


LARP Design: Castle Puzzle Box

This past weekend (19-21 September 2025), we ran the third three-day event for Citadel LARP, at Booker T State Park in Tennessee. Serella Savenko and I created another puzzle box, our most elaborate design so far by a very wide margin. We were initially building it to go into play […]


Twenty Hirelings Awaiting Certain Doom 3

The use of hirelings isn’t nearly as common in D&D as it once was, but I think we should bring that back a bit. In addition to shoring up a party’s weakness and draining some cash out of their coffers, hirelings also provide someone who can die horribly to showcase […]


The Merciless Snare of Sorcery

What follows is a microgame that I wrote for Dancing Stickman’s LAARG project on Bluesky (which is why the text refers to posting your playthrough on Bluesky). I don’t work in the microgame space, um, ever, but I enjoyed writing this, and I hope you’ll enjoy it too. You can […]