Design Theory: Secret Rules 3

In working on Dust to Dust, one of the significant areas of design theory discussion has been which rules to reveal and which to keep secret from the publicly-posted rules. That secret rules exist should be no surprise to most gamers; in one form or another, it’s a practice as old […]

4e Terrain Powers, Part Three

I thought I’d go back to terrain powers today, since I always meant to go back and add more ways to interact with the fantastic terrains of the DMG and DMG 2. Several of them go away when used anyway – if you look at that as a “per encounter” […]

LARP Design: Culture Packets 9

So, for non-LARPers in the crowd, I want to explain culture packets in a few words, so that the rest of this post will make a damn bit of sense. A culture packet is a document describing one of a game’s cultures, organizations, or races, with details on a variety […]

Five Kinds of Plot 5

I’ve been playing a lot of Avadon: The Black Fortress lately. I’ll be saving my full review for another time, as I haven’t yet finished the game, but it’s gotten me thinking about the kinds of plotlines and stories that drive scenes within games, and games as a whole. Before […]

Mansions of Madness: Informal Review, and some Armchair Design

Yesterday, I played my first-ever game of Mansions of Madness with Kainenchen, Stands-in-Fire, and Mrs. Stands-in-Fire. None of us had played before or read the rules exhaustively, though Stands-in-Fire had gone over them a bit – so he played the Keeper. This review, then, is based entirely on player-side experience; I […]

Mage: Hidden Weapons 7

For reasons having everything to do with Dust to Dust, I started thinking about how a character in Mage would conceal a weapon from various levels of searching. While I don’t have specific plans along these lines in my own Mage game, characters might very well want to sneak a […]

4e Rules Variant: Healing Surges 3

As I’ve established pretty thoroughly in this blog, I’m interested in 4e rules hacks, tweaks, and general brainstorming. This is because I believe the most essential part of 4e is the way information is presented in the form of powers; everything else is worth examining for other applications. The 3e […]

Achievement-based Advancement 6

So, a blog much more widely-read than this one recently posted about doing away with XP tables and transitioning to achievement-based advancement. This reminded me, naturally, of Samhaine’s series “To End an Era of Exp,” particularly the concluding post. Notably, Samhaine was really talking about video games, but the ideas […]

Hacking 4e: Martial Schools, Part 1 3

I wanted to do something kind of big and special for my 50th post in this blog, but I’ve had some trouble deciding between the various post topics bouncing around in my head. I chose this topic firstly because it was the one that Kainenchen was the most enthusiastic about, […]

New Race: The Parthic Rite 3

Back in January and February, I posted the veytikka, the beruch, and the kagandi. A fourth new race was always intended to go along with them, though I’ve struggled with the name (originally “rindari”) and concept of this race for quite some time. My goal is that this race is […]