Design Diary: Resolution Mechanic
This is another post about my work in progress, Quintessence of Dust, where I lay out the game’s resolution mechanic and how I’ve gotten there. The first post and starting point on this topic is here.
Tales of Maj’Eyal: A Newbie’s Review
So I don’t have a long history with roguelike video games. Not to twist the knife for any geezers in the audience, but I was not yet born when Rogue was first released. I’ve played plenty of games that take place in dungeons – Diablo, Diablo II, Path of Exile, just to […]
Design Diary: Grappling Rules
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve put 15k words into a playtest document for Quintessence, and today I got to a span of rules I’ve seriously dreaded writing. The 4e brawler build of the fighter class is about the only version of grappling rules I think I’ve ever seen in […]
Quarriors! iOS Release
One of the last projects I worked on for MFV.com has just been released on the App Store. The Quarriors! app is a transliteration of the Quarriors! dice-building game. I strongly recommend both games, but especially the one that I worked on. Ahem.Quarriors! WebsiteQuarriors! on the App StoreI hope you’ll […]
Birthright: the Regent of Style and Substance
I’ve mentioned Birthright a dozen or more times over the past few years of writing this blog, especially while playing around with SIFRP hacks, but I’ve never written a detailed post of why it deserves its place in the canon of D&D’s settings. If it weren’t wedded pretty heavily to its […]
Oceanhorn Review
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing a new iOS game called Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas. I play a lot of things I don’t care about, and this isn’t a dedicated review blog, so if I’m bothering to post a review, then spoiler: I liked it. It’s not a […]
Design Diary: Quintessence of Dust
Dear Design Diary, While I was away for Thanksgiving, thanks to the unflagging support of Kainenchen, I started working with some ideas for a new fantasy roleplaying system for tabletop. I particularly want something that borrows a bit more from the style and substance of LARPing, without sacrificing usability. When […]
LARP Design: Magic Items
There are a lot of lessons of good game-running that carry over between tabletop and live-action gaming. This post, though, concerns itself with an area in which the two are quite different. As usual, I’m talking about a certain band of LARPing, not all LARPing. (There are almost no statements that […]
A Third Year of Blogging
This is my third Anniversary Post for Harbinger of Doom. Its predecessors are here and here. In these posts it is my custom to talk about the games I’m running and playing, since I otherwise largely abjure blogging about matters of normal life. Much like when I started this blog […]
Skyrealms of Jorune Review: Part Two 2
It’s been a long time now since I first cracked the cover of Skyrealms of Jorune and began my detailed examination of this famously strange game. It’s been a pretty slow news week on the D&D Next front, what can I say? So here we are, in Chapter Two (Creating Your […]