A shrike for my dreams

The idea was that I am running an elfgame forest campaign for my young son and his friends, teaching them how to GM.

I want to talk about my flair tonight1: I had a bad session.

"No man is an island, Entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main."

"When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use."

"When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness."

"I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.

Right now my brain is jetlagged between thinking it's 8 am and 2 pm, I haven't played RPGs in a month, and writing words is honey on a cold day, drip drip drip.

In many old school games and AD&D, you hire retainers to help you in the dungeon, which can give a player lots of actions (see my last post).

How many things can one do in a round, and how does it change the feel of the game?

I just spent a lovely, hectic summer week chasing fulltime after my kids.

They did it.

Is talking to your players like playing a game of verbal ping-pong?

Is AD&D still alive and well, or an older part of the OSR that is fading in popularity?

I have been running a weekly 5e campaign through the fun pirate isles sandbox Secrets of the Black Crag (SoBC), by Chance Dudinack.

When my kids were about 2 and 4 years old, a squirrel jumped onto the power transformer by our house.

Here’s a pair of questions I have been pondering: why don’t I make keyed hexcrawls for wilderness travel in my home game, and which published hexcrawls have I liked and why (hint: they rhyme with “Black Burn of Blandonsford” and “Irate Worg seecrawls”)?

As promised, a follow-up post on my house-rules for playing Mausritter with my elementary-age children, derived from negotiating with my kids over four sessions of our ongoing Mouse Knights campaign.

Playing role-playing games with my kids has taught me, more than anything else, how to be a better GM.

In role-playing games, how to deal with the ultimate failure, death?

Tempting, dangerous choices, clear rewards with unpleasant surprises–that is the key to helping PCs to simultaneously feel fear and agency, I think.

If you forgot or don’t have d12 dice, you can play a game of Daggerheart that uses playing cards in place of d12s.

Today, foreshadowing danger.

Let me tell you a story about the old Reeve.

Let’s talk about fear of failure and player investment, in both traditional and OSR games.

This is part 2 of a series on landscapes of fear (Part 1, Part 3): today I am going to talk about why it’s important to build a landscape that evokes fear.

Inspired by two excellent posts on using ecology to make encounters more realistic and exciting (Writing Encounters in Networks and Trophic Encounters), I started reflecting on how I use ecology in my weekly game.

I was going to bed last night when my friend Dadstep sent me the coolest idea, why not do opposed overloaded reaction rolls with cards, instead?