Failing better: a GMing retrospective
Ever tried.Ever failed.No matter.Try again.Fail again.Fail better.- Samuel BeckettLearning to run an RPG, like most things, is mostly about practise. You can read all the theory and advice you like,...
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Image archaeology: Paladin Girl
Who knoweth not of Paladin Girl?M:tG card art for Knight Exemplar, by Jason Chan (2011). Exemplary in more ways than one!Paladin Girl has become a cliche of modern fantasy art. She always looks the...
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Meet the new boss: some thoughts on domain-level play
I've long since lost count of the exact number, but I'm pretty sure that my current 'City of Spires' campaign has now run for almost as many sessions as the 'Team Tsathogga' campaign that preceded it....
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Condensation in Action 10: Wrath of the Righteous
Part 10 in an irregular series where I take bloated Pathfinder adventure paths and try to prune them into something more useful. Previous Condensation in Action posts can be found here:KingmakerRise of...
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Escape from the Ghoul Queen!
This post is about a situation that arose in a recent session. One of my players suggested that I post it, and I thought it might be of interest as a case study of in-game problem-solving.The situation...
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Publish or Perish: d100 reasons your wizard had to drop out of academia and...
My department has been interviewing for new academic posts this week - and as I contemplated the mountain of incoming job applications, the vast majority of them inevitably doomed to failure, I found...
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Elements of incongruity
I've written before about the dangers of simply doubling down on the same ideas ad infinitum, leading to extremely one-note characters, settings, and situations: barbarians primarily characterised by...
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Local gods and the spiritual technology of rulership
There's a legend about the Battle of Brunanburh, at which King Aethelstan confronted the allied kings of Scotland, Dublin, and Strathclyde in 937 AD. Before the battle, one of Aethelstan's soldiers was...
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Magic bags and the things inside them
I've always thought that Aeolus's bag of wind from The Odyssey would be a great item for a D&D campaign. It's a bag with a wind inside it: point it in the right direction and open it to blow your...
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Game-enhancing powers, game-ruining powers, and yet more magic items
I've been running OSR D&D more-or-less weekly for over five years, now, with a heavy focus on exploration, problem-solving, and diplomacy. Combat happens, but I learned early on that the kind of...
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Desert Monsters from the City of Spires
A few monsters who have turned up in my current campaign. I think my PCs have figured all these guys out well enough for me to safely list them here.Image by Akihiro TsujiSmoke Giant: AC chain, 4 HD, 2...
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Upstairs, Downstairs: d20 Power Relations
You know what makes for good drama? Unequal power relations!You know what makes for even better drama? Power relations that are not what they appear to be!Gerard ter Borch, Young Woman with a Maid (c....
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That's what Shi said: race, gender, and 1990s comic books
Who here remembers Shi?I certainly didn't until recently. As my dalliance with Mutant Chronicles demonstrates, however, there are few limits to my tendency to become fascinated by whatever 1990s pop...
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Remnants of the Nameless Empire: more monsters from City of Spires
More monsters that my players have run into during my current City of Spires campaign. These ones lean further into science fantasy, as one of the key conceits of the campaign is that it's a fantasy...
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Major injuries: what doesn't kill you makes you stranger
In yesterday's game, one PC was rescued from captivity by the party, but not before undergoing some pretty severe torture. This presented me with a bit of a quandary: having him simply bounce back from...
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Race, gender, and 1990s comic books 2: Warrior Nun Areala
[Advance warning: this post will probably be of interest to no-one but myself and a handful of pop culture historians.]Researching my post on Shi involved a bit of reading around it, into the weird,...
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Drunken incompetent regional magnates: the purpose of aristocracies
First up, a brief announcement: the kickstarter for Knock! issue three has now gone live, packed with material from the old-school blogosphere's finest. It will also have a couple of my articles in it,...
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Race, gender, and 1990s comic books 3: Ghost
Malcolm Svensson asked for more of these, so blame him for this. Previous posts on Shi and Warrior Nun Areala here and here.Ghost was part of the same wave of comic book action heroines that gave rise...
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More encounters from the City of Spires: the desert
A year ago I posted tables of 72 encounters from the City of Spires, as a convenient means of recycling material from my ongoing campaign into something that other people might find gameable. As the...
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Gender and 1990s comic books 4: Witchblade
Fourth and possibly last in this series, depending on whether I can muster the energy to do posts on any of Kabuki, Dawn, Aphrodite IX, or Fallen Angel. This one's just on gender, as Witchblade had...
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More encounters from the City of Spires: the uplands
Second in a series of three 1d10 encounter tables, one for each of the three biomes that my PCs have been most active in recently. This post covers the uplands. Feel free to roll on them next time you...
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Team Tsathogga / City of Spires setting primer, for Severed Fane
Severed Fane asked for a 'small campaign bible' for my current campaign, City of Spires, which shares a setting with my previous Team Tsathogga campaign. This campaign world started as a kitchen-sink-y...
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City of Spires character art, by Autumnal Bloomer
One of the players in my City of Spires campaign recently commissioned a collection of character art for the party from Autumal Bloomer, of Tabletop Character Art. I thought they were absolutely...
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Early modern corpse medicine
I recently read a book called Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires, by Richard Sugg. Despite its title, it's not about monsters. Instead, it's a history of what Sugg calls 'corpse medicine' - the early...
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Notes on a semi-successful skill system
When I finished my Team Tsathogga campaign back in 2019, one of the things that I noted afterwards was the extent to which fighters had struggled to keep up with magic users as the game progressed into...
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