Techniques

  • Minimalist Lore

    I can’t speak for the Dark Souls games, but in Sekiro, which I’m told is similar, story is told obliquely, through torn off pages, off hand mentions, and item descriptions. We were talking about this on a discord this morning, and I was thinking about how it worked, so I’ll use an example from the… Continue reading

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  • 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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  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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Threshold of Evil – Dungeon Regular

Dungeon Regular is a show about modules, adventures and dungeons. I’m Nova, also known as Idle Cartulary and I’m reading through Dungeon magazine, one module at a time, picking a few favourite things in that adventure module, and talking about them. On this episode I talk about Threshold of Evil, in Issue #10, March 1988! You can find my famous Bathtub Reviews at my blog, https://playfulvoid.game.blog/, you can buy my supplements for elfgames and Mothership at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/, check out my game Advanced Fantasy Dungeons at https://idlecartulary.itch.io/advanced-fantasy-dungeons and you can support Dungeon Regular on Ko-fi at https://ko-fi.com/idlecartulary.
  1. Threshold of Evil
  2. Secrets of the Towers
  3. Monsterquest
  4. They Also Serve
  5. The Artisan’s Tomb

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