The World Brewery

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

As it was becoming clear the US was headed into trade war territory, I got really interested in farming and the logistics of keeping people fed. I turned that interest into "your cool city needs a food supply," available now!

it's a hack of "i'm sorry did you say street magic" and "Microscope," two gold-standard worldbuilding games. It was polished by Nico MacDougall, who gave me some great advice on how to make this game really align with the themes and ideas I had in the draft.

"A DC 15 Perception roll is required to see..." "A DC 20 Investigation roll will reveal..." no. Shut up. If the thing is in plain sight or can be perceived with the senses by simply existing in this space and taking a look around then the PCs are perceiving it and describing it to the players is part of your role because you are their source of sensory information about the in-game world.

How I Broadcast VOID 1680 AM

One of the key aspects of my solo playlist building game is that the radio station is real, and if you submit a playlist and DJ breaks I will broadcast your show on the air and stream it on YouTube. The game is, after all, about expressing yourself and finding fleeting connections while you do, so it only felt right to help facilitate that in real life.

This is how I do that. You can check out some broadcasts from me and VOID 1680 AM players here, and check out the game yourself here.

I re-designed the map order worksheets during my time at WOTC as manager of cartography. Mainly it was just to make the worksheets completely digital and accessible for anyone who was to design maps for our game worlds. These are the final versions which were being used up till 2003 at WOTC.  The list of map symbols goes back to the dawn of role playing game maps and TSR.  Dave Sutherland and Dennis Kauth were the two people who really started all of the organized nature of making map orders easier to produce for the TSR RPG R&D design department.  

Dennis Kauth was originally from an engineering background, so he even made sure that all of the symbols had a corresponding number in case of the situation where someone was not able to draw things out in a competent manner, they could just simply write a number on the map reference and circle it, thus making “it” the object or feature from the master key.  The mapping standards is one of the first things Dave & Dennis showed me when I started work in the mapping department at TSR in the early 90s.  

Not in the “plunged into the fires of Mt. Doom” sense. 

Artifact repatriation.  The heroes work for an international commission aimed at reversing centuries of plunder.  Oh, sure, the adventurers of yesteryear may have had solid reasons for looting the Ancient Tomb of the Noonday King, but those justifications have passed, and the Noonday King’s regalia really should be returned home, not sitting in a foreign adventurer’s ancestral manor.

Possible adventures include:

Archaeologically respectful dungeon crawls, aimed at returning items to original context if possible

Consulting and cooperation with host museums in native cultures to provide security and academic collaboration

Liberating artifacts from foreign collections, if imperial governments or plutocrats or nobles initially refuse to return them

Realizing that an ancient conspiracy is modifying paperwork and falsifying academic reports to turn the repatriation committee into a MacGuffin delivery service for an ancient lich-king

About Your Dungeon Room…

Dungeon Room Name: What’s this Dungeon Room called? Instead of calling it “Room #3 on Floor 2″, try making each room unique by calling it something like “The Corridor of Knives” or “The Sinking Square”. 

Naming your Dungeon Room peaks the interest of any DM reading it, as well as keeping the Name stuck in your head so you don’t have to flip through all those DM Notes mid-game…

Dungeon Room History: What’s the History of this Room? Is it the bedroom of a mad alchemist? Or is it the bathroom of a powerful necromancer?

Threat Level: This is how deadly this Dungeon Room is. Is it no threat at all, a simple setback, a moderate threat, or straight up deadly to anyone who enters?

Dungeon Motif: Is the Dungeon Underground, Abandoned, or does it lead to another Plane? 

Selecting a Motif for the Dungeon Room based on the Dungeon can be pretty crucial. A mega-dungeon buried in the desert is very different from a ruined mega-dungeon that’s underwater…

Layout

Dungeon Walls: Are they stone or wood? Are they bare or decorated with elaborate tapestries and faded paintings?

Dungeon Floor: Is it stone, glass, wood, or something else? Will it make a noise if an oblivious Adventurer walks in?

Temperature: Is it unnaturally cold or unusually hot in this room? Maybe as the Party ventures deeper to the core of the earth everything gets supernaturally hot, or maybe as they venture deeper into a creatures lair, the air becomes supernaturally cold and the Adventurers can see their own breath!

Illumination: Is the room pitch black or lit by torches, or does the Room have small magical flames that burn forever?

Room Features: This is what’s in the Room. Statues, chests, pools of water, broken bottles. Room Features can be whatever the Adventurers see when they first enter the room, and what they could find if they explore the Room further.

Encounters

NPCs: This is usually a social encounter, such is meeting and talking to a friendly denizen of the dungeon, or maybe the ghost of a long-dead tomb-robber…

Traps: From corridors that flood with lava to false stairs that lead to a pit of boiling oil, these are the dangers a Dungeon Room (or corridor, or even stairs leading to the next Room or Dungeon Level) can have to stop any unwanted treasure-hunters.

Wandering Monsters: These are the Monsters that could possibly be found in this particular Dungeon Room, just in case the DM wants to spark some combat after a long session of busting down Dungeon Doors.

Puzzles: This is for the DM that likes to test their Players smarts. Maybe your Dungeon Room isn’t filled with Monsters, but instead a carefully composed riddle that only the Denizens of the Dungeon would know, and failure to solve such a puzzle could lead to a painful death at the hands of the Dungeon Room itself!

so im disabled, and i have a disabled d&d character. i didnt like not having an in-game mechanic to express my character’s disability in more than words, so i decided to make some and then ended up making others.

a lot of these were made while consulting someone who has the disability or from my own firsthand experience, but some aren’t. if you want to critique some of my choices, message me! i’ll be able to either edit the ruleset or explain my reasoning, and i want it to be the best it can be.

note: a lot of the save DCs are left vague in this so you and your DM can determine how difficult they are to meet.

this is under a cut because it’s really long and so i can update it. if you want to see something added, message me!

(#dungeons and dragons, #long post, #death cw, #limb trauma)

Beyond this, consider how these professions might vary depending on who the customers are - nobles, or lower class. Are they good at their job or just scraping by? Do they work with lots of other people or on their own? City or village?

For younger characters:

Apprentice to any of the above

Messenger/runner

Page/squire

Pickpocket

Shop assistant

Student

Looks after younger siblings

((long list, so it’s below the cut))