The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

This is a short sequel to the post  on trees and eldritch horror , fulfilling my promise to make some gameable material just in time for Samhain! You should read that post first, or this is going to make no sense. If you're short on time, just read part 3 where the Lumberjeses are explained, but be warned that it’s going to seem quite left-field without the earlier bits. The strategy I've adopted for making these lists is to write as many ideas as I can and then cut 25-50%, keeping and developing the best, keeping to 75 words max unless essential . (Fairly sure I learned that method on a blog somewhere, but not sure where.) This means they aren't really very useful as random tables IMO - I think a good table needs lots of little bits that slot together into a whole, producing a massive range of options - but if you’re going to do lists why not make them conveniently rollable? d6 Lumberjes-related encounters that could be inserted into an otherwise-normal plot or used in ...

Short post today, because A) I'm working on a couple of bigger things and B) this is mostly setup for something else reasonably big I'm going to do in future. I'm going to assume you know about the game Mage: the Ascension if you're reading this. (If you don't, have a look here  to learn a bit about the constructivist chaotes fighting for control of your destiny.) This post started off as a thought experiment where I tried to describe how inter-mage competition would look in the setting if they adopted modestly optimal strategies, and turned into a discussion of how the resultant world lends itself to the sort of modelling proposed by the proceduralist movement of the OSR and Post-OSR (POSR).  (Yeah, I know that a lot of Mage players just instinctively cringed. I've seen/listened to how you guys talk about the OSR extensively on various discords, subreddits and at least one noteworthy and otherwise-excellent podcast: as a dumb hack-and-slash dungeon fantasy abou...

 Hi!  This is a TTRPG rules idea, a modification of Desks and Dorks' idea for a bridge set-piece encounter built around an incrementing 'momentum' tracked on a d6 . I asked their permission to iterate on the idea, and was granted it, so here goes! Notably, their idea uses the D6 only as a counter - they don't roll it. I suggest you do! I also broaden the scope of the system to cover any situation where A) the PCs are in a contest with an intelligent antagonistic force and B) the PCs and the antagonist are both vulnerable to some non-intelligent force which is made more likely by actions they take such that C) they all die or, at minimum, risk death if they don't manage their actions resulting in D) a degree of co-operation between the antagonistic forces being if not necessary then at least  very useful to avoid mutual harm. Idea is as follows, illustrated first using the original example of a bridge to contrast the differences between this approach and the origina...

Let's Get This Show... Further On The Road, I Guess? This was going to be the first post for this blog. After too long staring into the terrifying maw of Tumblr willing myself to write something about my thoughts on game design  as the gods intended , I decided to retreat to the gloaming wood and carve my thoughts into mysterious arcane tablets instead [ 1] . From the fact that it's the sixth to go up, with another 14 things in drafts, you can probably guess that getting it finished has been a struggle. It should be about an hour's reading, counting the footnotes (less if you skim the miscast table and specifics of the spells). That said, if you aren't interested in the design process and just want to get your hands on the ideas you can skip to the section titled 'the current solution, written out for use in play,' and that'll save you a good twenty minutes. This is a post about Warhammer: the Old World (ToW). If you aren't aware, very briefly, it's ...