Design
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How to Write a Module: An Incoherent Play-by-Play
A few months ago I decided to write a module live on Bluesky, from woe to go, to show my process and why I keep insisting it’s not hard. A few people asked me to immortalise it here, so I’m reproducing the thread with a few small edits so it makes more sense outside of Continue reading
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Got no game: Should your module be system agnostic?
A lot of people ask questions like “should I write a module as system-agnostic, or for a popular system?” or “if I write a module for an unpopular system like X, will nobody read my module?”. I’m about as deep in the module game as you can be, so I thought I’d talk about what Continue reading
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Don’t wait to create, don’t wait to learn
A prominent game designer recently said in a Dice Exploder thread, that breaking down design paradigms before you design games is self-limiting and unproductive. This was interpreted by many as “you don’t need to read or play a lot of games before you start designing games”, which is both true and not true. I thought Continue reading
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Multitudes, not mechanics
TTRPG design consists of a bunch of different things, and the relationships and interactions between them lead to something hopefully greater than the sum of its parts. What are the things we’re concerned with when we design a TTRPG? Well, a lot of people would say “mechanics”. You might define mechanics as the rules and Continue reading
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When is the cake baked?
Lately I’ve read a bunch of modules that feel like they weren’t fully baked. The scope story they were trying to tell was greater than their page count. I was left wishing there was more, despite and often because what was there was already pretty cool. I get the sense that the authors didn’t realise Continue reading
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Releasing Guilders
For the last few years, I have been really intrigued by Trophy and particularly Trophy Gold, which are absolute messes of games, which don’t suit my play style at all, but that I find deeply compelling, to the point where I wrote a very long review for Wyrd Science about them. Anyway, in the intervening Continue reading
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The Zungeon Manifesto: Demystifying Dungeon Creation
I have a really large earring collection; I have perhaps as many earrings as I have TTRPGs, and I mainly buy them from local craft markets, not jewellers. They’re all made from resin or clay, or cut from wood or acrylic, by hand or with homestyle equipment, in peoples’ basements or garages, not outsourced to Continue reading
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The Ugg-Tecture of Language
Many years ago a game called Ugg-tect went out of print. It is my favourite game I never played, and has entered mythical status in my personal canon. In it, you are cavemen who can only provide directions for building a building by making “ugh” sounds and hitting your friends with an inflatable club. The Continue reading
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Forsaken Easter Eggs
You know how sometimes, in a module, there’s a guard who’ll let you through if you know he likes pizza from that one place? But there’s no way to know? Or there’s a door that opens if you walk around it three times clockwise, but there’s no way to find that out? I call them Continue reading
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Videogame! Villain! Vampire!
It’s Vampire Weekend! So I’m going to talk about what I want out of a classic vampire villain. For the purposes of this, I’m interested in the vampire that is a fun antagonist to my players. There are other types of vampires worth exploring — I’ve written one myself in Bridewell — but I’m starting Continue reading
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