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 … Continue reading Design Insights: Playtesting
Category: Articles
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 … Continue reading The Third Layer of Storytelling Appendix
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 … Continue reading The Living World – Appendix
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 … Continue reading The Five Types of Sessions
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. … Continue reading Running the Sandbox: The Living World
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 … Continue reading Getting Paid
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 … Continue reading Make Better Creatures
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 … Continue reading Steal This Worldbuilding: The Waning Pantheon
When Campaigns Fail
Intro I haven't posted here for a while and there's a good reason for that. My last few games haven't gone well. There's nothing existential about that. It doesn't send me spiralling and calling into question my skills as a GM. It doesn't have me throwing my toys and vowing to never touch the game … Continue reading When Campaigns Fail
So You Want To Run A Postal Service Part 2 – Why
Intro At last the follow up to This piece on some of the structures postal services can take in medival-esque settings. In the piece we covered everything from the Early Middle Ages through to the Industrial Era in terms of analysing real-world analogues.This piece is going to focus on why we may want to actually … Continue reading So You Want To Run A Postal Service Part 2 – Why
So You Want To Run A Postal Service Part 1 – How
Intro This one’s been a long time coming. Back in March I posted this piece about how medieval banking actually worked and how we can integrate banking into our games to make them more immersive. I mentioned off-handedly that I would write a piece on medieval postal services at some point. Here is that piece, … Continue reading So You Want To Run A Postal Service Part 1 – How
Yes And Is (Probably) Not Helping You
Intro This has been on my mind for a good long while and I’ve struggled to articulate exactly what my position is. In fact, I’m still not sure that I’ll do this topic justice. Still it’s worth a try, because quite frankly I think the touting of ‘Yes And’ as the key to good DMing … Continue reading Yes And Is (Probably) Not Helping You
Running the Sandbox: Finding the Quest
Intro So here I am now writing the 3rd piece in what was supposed to be a one-off explanation of a useful game concept. I guess I have more to say about this than I originally thought.Once again we must go back to the first piece in this series wherein I discuss the shift from … Continue reading Running the Sandbox: Finding the Quest
Revisiting the Clockwork Setpiece: Roguelikes
Intro So a little under a year ago I posted This Piece that discussed something called the ‘Clockwork Setpiece’. This is a convenient catch-all terms used to describe things like time loops and other resetting challenges. I’m incredibly proud of that piece. I would say it’s one of my best.I’ve recently re-explored the concept in … Continue reading Revisiting the Clockwork Setpiece: Roguelikes
So You Want To Run A Bank
Intro Alright, it’s time for the last piece in this series. Or at least the last piece for the time being. As always I might revisit this if I find there’s more to say.So far we’ve broken down how currency was actually used in medieval societies and used that as a framework to more realistically … Continue reading So You Want To Run A Bank
Managing Multiple Currencies
Intro It’s time to tackle this tricky topic I first talked about over in This Piece. If you haven’t read that one then it’s not the end of the world, but it is highly related. If you’re reading this piece because you want a better understanding of medieval economics then you’ll find that piece helpful … Continue reading Managing Multiple Currencies
You’re (Probably) Using Currency Wrong
Intro So this has been loosely on my mind for a while. In the endless strive to have my games feel more immersive I’ve started running up against a few problems when it comes to money. You may well have come up against these problems yourself. The PHB’s price lists relative to villager wages are … Continue reading You’re (Probably) Using Currency Wrong
Design Insights: Defining Success
Intro We’re continuing the Design Insights series with a bit of a different topic. It’s one that’s probably more fundamental than the ones we’ve covered off so far, but I wanted to get the other ones out first to set the tone of the series.Anyway, the whole point of this series is to help you … Continue reading Design Insights: Defining Success
Design Insights: Power Budget
Intro We’re continuing to unpack various design concepts to make ourselves better at homebrewing and creating 3rd-party content for D&D 5e. In the last piece I mentioned Power Budgets, so this piece is going to focus on that concept. Before I dive in, this is going to be almost exclusively relevant for designing classes and … Continue reading Design Insights: Power Budget
Running the Sandbox: Overarching Narratives
IntroWell I wasn’t necessarily intending on following up my piece on Reactive vs. Proactive questing in the context of a sandbox campaign, but there was something contained in that piece that I think could stand to be elaborated on.I discuss in that piece how in a sandbox things will tend to start off as Reactive … Continue reading Running the Sandbox: Overarching Narratives
Apothecary Press 