Improving Bastions in D&D 2024 11

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 […]


LARP Design: Second Puzzle Box 3

We ran a one-day event for Citadel LARP this past weekend (19 July), and we put our second puzzle box design into play this time. Serella Savenko helped me with every step of planning and building this one. I want to thank Elena Simon for providing the box itself, and […]


UA 2025: The Psion Breakdown 3

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 […]