Religion in Fantasy and Fantasy Gaming 5

Reading a post in a blog far more popular than mine, my imagination wandered far off from the writer’s points. He says we’re all doing it wrong with polytheism in D&D, but… I don’t know, I’ve never really cared about recreating Roman polytheism in detail, because among the many things […]


Mage: Combined Spells, Part Two 5

In my last post, I talked a bit about spells that combined Arcana to do interesting things. This time around, I’m looking directly at the character sheets of the mages in my game so that I’m creating things they might want to buy their way into – attainable within 1-2 […]


Mage: the Awakening Combined Spells 10

First off, I am returning from just about abandoning this blog for the entire month of May. I hope that I’ll be able to post here more regularly in June. May saw an end to six months of unemployment, as well as the writing frenzy of the second Dust to […]


LARP design: Storyboarding and Downtime 3

For people who don’t play Eclipse, this post may not hold a lot of interest, except in the area of theoretical design for boffer LARPs. For people who do play Eclipse, and especially for those who run it, this post may be controversial, but I will studiously obey the second […]


3.5 Kitbash: Planetary Spell Lists 1

Way back in this post, I proposed a rework of 3.5e spell lists to create a new and different cosmology in a setting, one based on planets and constellations rather than the eight schools of magic. At the time, I was not at all sure that I would do anything […]


New 4e Terrain Powers from the DMG 2

As suggested in my last post, I think there’s a huge amount of potential for additional terrain powers. In this post, I’m mining the terrain section of Chapter 4 of the 4e DMG (pp 64-69) for types of terrain that might have associated powers, which brings me to the realization […]


4e Terrain Powers 7

This post came to mind while thinking about responses to Stands-in-Fire’s post about melee and ranged balance issues in 3.x and 4e. I’ve also been thinking about the most important things that 4e does right and other games should lift from it, thanks in no small part to Sarah Darkmagic’s posts […]


LARP-writing Thought Experiment 5

Kainenchen’s brief mention of LARP politics and scale of game in this post got me thinking about that topic, and I wandered off into “what if” territory that has nothing to do with actual use. To give a bit more background on the point, I think many games – particularly LARPs […]


Doing Sequels Right

Strangely, this post is not about Portal 2, which Kainenchen bought just last night. No, this post is about Overlord and Overlord 2. If you follow those links, you’ll discover that GameSpot gave the first game a middling grade, and gave the sequel a slightly worse grade. In brief, I have […]


4e Skills and Class Balance 8

While on a long drive with Kainenchen and Stands-in-Fire recently, we started talking about skills and skill challenges in 4e. At its most macro level, the skill challenge is one of the best ideas that 4e has added to D&D as a whole. I have seen skill challenges be an […]