Design

  • New Release: Hiss!

    Today I hit “publish” on the small module I’ve been playtesting the last few weeks, Hiss! Hiss is a horror module featuring a doomed village for your diy elfgame. It’s short, dense and flexible, and features simmering tensions that could explode over a short two or three sessions, or could become a mysterious feature of… Continue reading

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  • The You’re Not An Idiot Principle

    One of my guiding principles in Bridewell is “The reader is not an idiot”. What do I mean by this? I’m assuming that someone reading my (independently published, single-creator, idiosyncratic horror sandbox influenced by haiku, 17th century literature, and queer rage) setting sandbox has come to it with the wherewithal to figure out how to… Continue reading

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  • Combat in Trophy Gold

    Combat in Trophy Gold is a mess, as written in the book. I suspect it’s just badly written, not badly designed. I’m going to decipher it, hack it if necessary. Say how you expose yourself to injury, then roll your weak point. If, during combat, any dark die is equal to your weak point, take… Continue reading

  • Bridewell’s Annotated Appendix N

    Influences for Bridewell and my work in general are often distant, vague and sparse. My brain works in impressions, absorbs the shape of a concept which is then brought to bear without reference to the concept itself. So the concept of an Appendix N for it feels odd, but may have value anyway. Books Thematically,… Continue reading

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  • Trophy Freed

    So, I’ve finished writing the main text of Bridewell, with only the maps to go. I’ll do another editing pass to my satisfaction, and then I’ll want to playtest it with myself as GM. I’ve been playing mainly Trophy Gold lately, and I’m really enjoying it as a system. Trophy Dark has a free SRD… Continue reading

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  • Bridewell Gothic: State of Play

    Forgive me for this pointless stream of consciousness, but I’m spending so much time on this project right now and I want to talk about it. My all-consuming project right now is Bridewell Gothic (or perhaps just Bridewell, that’s just not a great name for a project). It’s intended to be a system agnostic gothic… Continue reading

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  • Module Design and Scaffolding

    I read Throne of Avarice this morning on its release, which brands itself a “setting book and procedural generation toolbox.”. I considered writing a review of it, but I’ve been avoiding reviewing new releases as my Bathtub Reviews can be quite critical. But I found myself encountering a very specific problem. This book is jam… Continue reading

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  • Time bubbling

    Timekeeping is important when you’re running multiple groups simultaneously in the same world. Doing this means you get to do half the preparation, and might get to re-use preparation on a second group. It’s pretty good GMing practice for people like me, who want to play a lot, but can’t find easy ways to play… Continue reading

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  • What’s your apocalypse?

    I was writing a post about a timekeeping technique called Time Bubbling (coming soon!), and I realised that there was a worldbuilding technique that I think is essential to most fantasy worlds that we play treasure-hunting in: Apocalypsing. Don’t worry, this one will be a quick one. Most D&D-likes are post-apocalyptic. When you’re world-building, the… 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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