Design Insights: Playtesting
Intro Alright, this is a big one for me. I have a real axe to grind when it comes to this topic. Just to preface this, a lot of this piece will be geared toward those who create custom content for general release to the public (especially for money). This should not be a surprising…
A Short Adventure: The Cursed Couple
Intro The party rolls into a small town to find the village green is abuzz with life. Wooden trusses support wreaths of ribbons, benches are laid out in rows, and at the head of it all is a wooden arch dressed in a tangle of fresh spring blooms. There’s a wedding on! The mood is…
The Third Layer of Storytelling Appendix
Intro Alright, I’m finally pulling this one down from the shelf and blowing off the dust. I had the full outline for the piece completed and just… never wrote it. This is a direct appendix to The Three Layers of Storytelling, which will be required reading for this piece to make sense. What I’ll be…
Design Insights: Designing For Fun
Intro I left this series on the shelf for quite some time, which is a shame because I had quite a few topics planned. As much as this series was focused mostly on D&D 5e, there’s some more general advice I wanted to impart. Many of us GMs are homebrewing bits and bobs all the…
State of the Press: An Announcement
Whew, been a while since I did one of these! I know posts here are very irregular these days. To be candid, a career transition has meant the time I have available to work on content here has swung about wildly while I get solid, consistent work. I’m also going to announce this here in…
The Living World – Appendix
Intro This is a direct companion piece to the ‘Running the Sandbox: The Living World’ piece that can be found Here. I mention toward the end of that piece that there’s a few extra details I didn’t have the chance to dive into. It’s taken me a while but I’ve finally got them laid out…
The Five Types of Sessions
Intro In some sessions nothing happens, in some sessions everything happens, and every other session is somewhere in between. Yeah I know, what earth-shattering wisdom. What I’m interested in, though, is what actually happens in those in-between sessions. As I’ve grown more experienced as a GM I find myself thinking more and more in terms…
Running the Sandbox: The Living World
Intro How do you make a campaign world feel ‘alive’? I’ve had this one on the slate to get written for a while now. Just today I was re-reading my piece on ‘Why Campaigns Fail’ and there was something I mentioned in it that made fleshing out the concept of this piece fall into place.…
Getting Paid
Intro Maybe this is just a me problem but I’ve always struggled with the whole ‘you get to the final room of the dungeon, beat the boss, and find a bunch of coins and items just sitting there’ thing. In short, I find loot weird. Obviously by default D&D has to have heavily ‘game-ified’ elements…
Five Folk Heroes
Intro Your players aren’t the only heroes out there, and not all heroes are adventurers. Here’s five folk heroes to drop into your campaigns and bring life into your world. What I have here are some basic narrative bones. Remix, flesh out, and adjust as needed. The Mountain Man A small, fairly isolated village nestled…
Make Better Creatures
Intro I’ve had this one on the backburner for a while and finally have a way of expressing the concept. I have in my time DMing created a very useful mental model that helps me easily increase the quality of my encounters built entirely around how I use monsters. Full disclaimer, this advice is geared…
Steal This Worldbuilding: The Waning Pantheon
Whenever I create new settings I always look to lay out some fundamental principles that inform the worldbuilding and, by extension, create unique story possibilities. For my most recent campaign I wanted to take on the idea of a very minimalist pantheon with religion being viewed as something dangerous and even volatile. Below is a…
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Apothecary Press 