Failure Tolerated

Mothership Month is coming November 1 - November 30, back to our regularly scheduled time slot.

Here’s a structure for planning out your treasure.

Prepping dungeons is hard and while I’ve read a lot of great modules, I never seem to remember what I loved about them other than the vibe.

When you’re working on a key for a dungeon or other location, it can be difficult to come up with all the concepts you need to round the place out.

Boy, what a month.

One of the biggest complaints new creators have is that they hate dealing with stretch goals. it’s a common customer complaint too, because if you do stretch goals wrong (you are), you’ll overburden your project and put yourself behind schedule, over budg…

Last week my church hosted a reading by the poet Kaveh Akbar at TCU.

Here’s how you want to set your margins on your game to make sure it’s profitable.

I Cast Light!

When it comes to encounter design in horror games I think about this image a lot.

I’m obsessed with two things in dnd: giant campaign spanning megadungeons and vast wildernesses to journey through.

There are lots of similarities between the note taking/productivity communities and the rpg hobby.

This is a 400+ room mega-dungeon with multiple levels and sub-levels, built around a direct goal: retrieve the SKOROS ORB, the mysterious artifact used by the evil wizard ILLITH VARN to wage war upon the KINGDOM OF OROSTRANTHY.

Thinking more about The Underclock and how it fits sort of my ideal dnd game as more of a countdown.

Maybe there’s something to having a base encounter HD for certain hex areas. 1/3/5/7 seems about right.

Read this interesting post on the author’s “12 favorite problems,” which is a callback to something physicist Richard Feynman talked about.

Listening to the interview with Luke Gearing on Into the Megadungeon and a couple things jumped out at me that I hadn’t really considered before.

I wrote up a thread recently about safety tools in ttRPGs/mothership, but I wanted to archive it here for future reference and expand on it a little bit.

I wrote about this a little on twitter the other day, but we’re changing the way we do ship combat in Mothership.

“These rules are as complete as possible within the limitations imposed by the space of three booklets.” – Dungeons & Dragons (1974), “Introduction” “Players, players, and more players — that’s what comprises the D&D phenomenon.

For awhile now, I’ve wanted to talk to James Maliszewski of Grognardia fame of his experience playing and running a seven year campaign of Empire of the Petal Throne.

A lots going on in the Motherverse.

One the easiest traps to fall into as a new referee in tabletop rpgs is to treat violence the same as video games do.

I don’t think Mothership needs levels anymore.

Last night Gen Con Online held the 2020 Annual ENnie awards.

We had session 07 of our Gradient Descent Playtest a couple weeks ago and it didn’t go so great.

So you might have heard that last week we released Dissident Whispers, an anthology of 58 original rpg adventures in support of Black Lives Matter, and more specifically to raise money for Bail Funds.

We had a two player game tonight for our sixth session of Gradient Descent.

Five sessions into our Gradient Descent playtest as of yesterday, and the team is recovering from a near TPK last session with some fresh blood.

Had our fourth session of our Gradient Descent playtest last week, and this one nearly ended everything.

Back in the Deep with my players for session 2 of our Gradient Descent playthrough.