Idle Cartulary

  • These boundaries are pleasing to me: An Intentional Review of Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants

    I’ve been reading Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants by Eric Bernhardt (available in digital and print). This is a review with an eye for canon-text, mech-text, and anti-text, and I hope to gain insight into how minimise mech-text, and maximise anti-text. I hope it’ll lead me to reassess the principles I’ve previous drawn; or at… Continue reading

  • Everyone’s a dragon

    For real, this is how I prepare places and people, often while play goes on, on scratch paper. I discussed the fractal dungeon in a previous post, and here I’ll quickly talk about the everyone’s a dragon character sketch that I use. Everyone’s a dragon in a fantasy world. I use this as shorthand, because… Continue reading

  • What’s necessary for combat in Oracle

    In previous instalments of Fixing the Fifth Age, I pondered which form the Oracle would take, and conjured a very different Action Resolution system. In this one, I will be disgruntled regarding combat, because for me, combat shouldn’t be special in a story about dramatic fantasy heroes. It’s not tactical, it’s a reflection of the… Continue reading

  • Oath Souls

    So, lots of talk about Dark Souls lately. This is my Dismal Combat Game, unplaytested. Released under CC BY license: Do what you want with it so long as you say “Based on Oath Souls by Idle Cartulary at playfulvoid.game.blog.” I hope you hack it, fix it, enjoy it. You are honorable souls are struggling… Continue reading

  • The fractal dungeon

    For real, this is how I prepare places and people, often while play goes on, on scratch paper. The Fractal Dungeon is my version of the the five-room dungeon (1), but I’ve largely scrapped the granularity of the original version. Instead, I have a [first] Impression and around four Features. The key thing is that… Continue reading

  • Resolving acts in Oracle

    Previously we focused on the Oracle system, what we can use it for, what potential it has, and then we put a pin in it and decided to finish later after we have a better sense for what the rest of the system looks like. Let’s begin with the action resolution system. The system as… Continue reading

  • Any rainboblin

    This is the first Challenge of the Week. The rest will be paid subscriber only, and this one serves as a taster for what will serve as tiny morsels of character, encounter or game design. Challenges (1) are meant to be easy to read and to scale easily. Consider Luke Gearings tweet: For challenges, I… Continue reading

  • Dancing around the rules

    This week, I’m going to read all eight Anti-Sisyphus zines by Jared Sinclair (1). Disclaimers: I like and respect Sinclair and considered him a friend, although our interactions have been limited since he departed Twitter. We engaged around AS and the philosophy of roleplaying a lot in good faith. My discussions with Sinclair informed a… Continue reading

  • Challenges!

    In the current draft of Infinite Hack, a challenge is what any encounter is called, be it social, combat, environmental, or fluid. It has a rough framework to it, and is designed to be very flexible in the way it’s presented. A challenge consists some number of: Threats that oppose the heroes Conditions that prevent,… Continue reading

  • The Oracle

    Recently I tweetstormed through Dragonlance: The Fifth Age, a ‘Dramatic Adventure Game’ from the AD&D 2e era. I found a lot of mistrust in its audience and a lot of legacy pulled across from 2e that weighed down a system with a lot of potential. I thought it might be interesting to redesign it here, with… Continue reading

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