Design
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River Dice (Make Dice Work For You #1)
Make Dice Work For You is a series where I’ll regularly talk through a new way to use dice in your game. It came out of conversation surrounding What to randomise when you’re randomising, and what advanced techniques you can use for specific needs. I’ll where I know, but please help me out if you Continue reading
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What to randomise when you’re randomising
You may have noticed that a common theme in my reviews is that I criticise people’s random tables: Their wilderness generators, their wandering monsters, their weather tables, their treasure tables. Why? Because often I see randomisation misused, particularly when taking the form of a random table. So, I’m going to break down a few of Continue reading
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Preparing for City 26 (Week 0)
I’m a sucker for these challenges. But, every day feels like an overcommitment. So I’m toning down the expectations, and I’m going to post something every week, here.My two favourite cities are Fever Dreaming Marlinko and of course, Duskvol. I want to try to meet Marlinko’s scale with Duskvol’s detail, which hopefully will be a Continue reading
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Idle Cartulary Awards for Excellence in Elfgames
Everyone loves an informal end-of-year awards ceremony. This year, everyone’s doing it! I’ll join the bandwagon! Best Single-location Module Gold: Cyro-Siq (review here) is a tiny module, that hits so far above its’ weight you couldn’t believe. You’re trapped in a space-ship, and one of you is an assassin hired to murder the others. Will Continue reading
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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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Recent Posts
- Bathtub Review: In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe
- Bathtub Review: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
- Bathtub Review: Mana Meltdown
- River Dice (Make Dice Work For You #1)
- What to randomise when you’re randomising
Threshold of Evil – Dungeon Regular
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