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The Three Shadows (Escalating Inventions)
Fantastic genres usually work via escalating inventions: they show you a star destroyer at the beginning and the Death Star in the middle and a multi-starship fight on the Death Star at the end.Sci-fi...
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Demon City Character Generation
This is stuff for the new game I'm writing and painting, Demon City, donate to the Patreon here.CHARACTER GENERATIONThis'll all be laid out in a fancier, easier-to-follow way in the final book, and Im...
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Liking, Sharing, Zealotry, Games
So I was listening to the Longform podcast and somebody who runs a web magazine was talking about the kinds of nonfiction that were popular on the site.Those kinds of true crime stories, he was saying,...
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Distracted From Distraction By Distraction
...that's a line from TS Eliot. He was a well-educated creative genius and a grotesque anti-Semite, back in the days when that combination was still possible. It no longer is--so we'll have to listen...
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This Robot Makes Accountants
So the indefatigableRamanan Sivaranjan made an automated character builder for Demon City.It's fun to make characters and try to figure out who they are, some people on G+ made some...FriendAccounting...
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Jesse, Lester, Wendy
I tested the Demon City character gen rules (mostly the 5 skills plus miscellaneous bonuses system) by trying to see if they reliably produced the kinds of fictional characters I could see running...
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Mmmmm...Rich Creamy Vanilla
God damn there's a lot of talky NPCs and things to keep straight in the Maze of the Blue Medusa.My players are in the Reptile Archive, but they still don't have their Chameleon Woman paladin with them...
View ArticleSnacks
After my last D&D game I vomited explosively for several hours. The snacks were poorly managed.So, on this Retropost Saturday, I give you an old but necessary overview:Let us not ignore the white...
View ArticleSqueee!
More weekend retroposting.This is an earrrrly actual play from this blog: Mandy's sister wanted to learn to play, and she wanted to be a witch. I said alright, roll some dice.Like most 1st level...
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The Fudging Talk
This is basically how I'd write it in any core RPG book:Have you been fudging?I don't know whether you've been fudging AND you don't have to tell me. If you really don't know what it is, I'll tell you:...
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Our Barbarian is Pet of the Month
Charlotte Stokely was a wizard......but then The Black Metal Amazons of the Devoured Land cut her arms off.Then she was a Sea Elf wizard......and Chameleon Women mutilated her with their...
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Acupressure Mountains of Yoon-Suin
Found an old acupressure diagram while cleaning up Fort D&D With Porn Stars--the names sound exactly like things on a hex map. If you can't do anything with "Crooked Marsh", "Sea of Blood" or "Ear...
View ArticleOh The Early Days...
Broadly, two popular views attach to "The Early Days" of collective movements--games, musical fashions, art movements, stock-car racing, whatever: technological and cultural.The popular technological...
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So This Art Collector Comes Over...
...to Casa D&D With Porn Stars. He owns some of my stuff, he's been following my work for years.He says he's bringing his kid, who's 10.I'm like Do you want me to hide the pictures of naked...
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The Medical Suite
This is the first new painting for Demon City. Click to enlargeFor Demon City:A thick unreality hangs over the Medical Suite, making it always feel bland. You remember: Nothing much happens or happened...
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Adventure-Building and The Ecology of Murder
This is a new painting I made for Demon City, click to enlarge itThe silver ant of the Sahara can survive about ten minutes in the mid-day sun. Platoons of them crawl up from their ant hills, skitter...
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Demon City Appendix N (Part 1: Books)
New painting for Demon City, click to enlargeWhile lists of other media to check out are extremely helpful in RPGs, you're often given so much to read that you end up no better than where you started....
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Demon City Appendix N (Part 2: Movies)
Recommended watching for Demon City:Film is the deepest well in terms of horror ideas and images, and if I started talking about great horror movies we'd be here all day, but a few stand out as being...
View ArticleThe Invisible Dungeon & Wallet, Keys, Pants
The Invisible Dungeon and Wallet, Keys, Pants are, like the hexcrawl, dungeoncrawl, heist or Hunter/Hunted, basic formats for open-ended adventures that avoid railroading....mostly. The trick is they...
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TSR List of Things to Definitely Do
Nobody reads blogs on Sunday, so here's a retropost about gaming aesthetics under fascism:As blogland well knows, every sneezerag and post-it Tactical Studies Rules ever produced is secretly useful so...
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