Idle Cartulary

  • Treasure smithing by Magic

    Continuing to muse about oracles and campaign building. Nick started these thoughts, and I’ve done dungeon rooms, hexes and NPCs. What about treasure? I think the best take on creating interesting treasure recently was Ty’s Treasure Squares. I’m going to iterate on that here. I want to see if I can get that system to… Continue reading

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  • Character sketching by Magic

    Continuing to muse about oracles and campaign building. Nick did work on adventures, I’ve done dungeon rooms and hexes. What about NPCs? I think of NPCs progressively detailed sketches. Begin with name, description, and catchphrase. Then asset, trait, need or agenda. Then approach, false visage, obsession and weakness. Things at the end are only important… Continue reading

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  • Making hexes with Magic

    I’ve even pondering my and Nick LS Whelan’s thoughts on using Magic the Gathering as an oracle. Nick was saying on twitter that he doesn’t use it anymore because MTG cards skew towards violence. m I’m thinking: What if we didn’t use it to generate adventures, but rather locations. I considered generating a county, but… Continue reading

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  • Wierd oracles and punnett rooms

    I’ve been going through my games shelf (honestly, I’m not playing most of what’s on there). and I found a few oracles I haven’t really looked at before. One is Rory’s Story Cubes, which are dice with symbols on them that are freely available in toy stores. I also found these Intuiti Cards, which are… Continue reading

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  • Combining fast travel and pathcrawling

    Honestly, if you thought I wasn’t going to come back to Advanced Fantasy Dungeons, you were being optimistic. Marcia’s Mosaic Worlds neatly matches with AFD’s counties, and then she wrote about Fast Travel using these counties, which provided me with impetus to trial an option where the words “watch” and “hex” are excised, when they… Continue reading

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  • Pathcrawl revised!

    I invented the pathcrawl yesterday, ten years after Daniel D. invented it, although I didn’t know that until this morning. Daniel’s is more complicated, which I don’t like, but captures some nuance which mine didn’t, which I do like. I’m gonna smush them together. Our basic tension is informed decision making versus freedom of movement.… Continue reading

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  • Wilderness walls and halls: Streamlining hexcrawls

    Joel wrote this, about why he doesn’t prefer hexcrawls. Joel’s got some sense, and it made me think about what I don’t like about hexcrawls. Namely: As anyone who has travelled in the wilderness will tell you, the wilderness has walls and hallways. The wilderness is a dungeon. You can’t just climb a mountain. Certainly… Continue reading

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  • Mentzer’s Dungeon

    Sean McCoy recently posted an old perhaps reddit post by Frank Mentzer, talking about how he always improvises the same dungeon. Along with it, Sly Flourish wrote about the concept here. I think Sly Flourish missed the most interesting part though: Mentzer has sketched themes out roughly for the entire dungeon: So it looked like… Continue reading

  • Broader Proceduralisms

    There’s been a lot of talk lately about proceduralism as it relates to various D&D-likes. I’ve written about procedure as it relates to Advanced Fantasy Dungeons here, but informing my views on the topic are these posts by a bunch of luminaries: Doctrine of Proceduralism Proceduralism Proceduralism Theoretical and Practical Proceduralism What Even Is a… Continue reading

  • Advanced Fantasy Dungeons: Pre-alpha reflection

    If you’re walking in on the end of the Advanced Fantasy Dungeons series, there’s an index here. That’s a wrap! Kind of, anyway, we have our rules sketched out. Advanced Fantasy Dungeons is the broadest, largest game I’ve written. Next, I’ll start laying it out into an alpha document so I can start limited playtesting… Continue reading

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