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Symbolic Play
The old text based pc adventure games: They would tell you the basics, what you see in a room, but you’d have to interrogate the game to find out a key was hidden beneath the lamp. There was no ‘roll a perception check.’ That kind of play requires more effort, but it also more evocative…
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HexBrawlers Making Portals
Work has been especially busy lately, but we’ve been busy outside of our blog designing custom assets for mapping in Dungeondraft. Not an artist, but its been fun pretending to be with a Wacom tablet and Krita, and we are focusing on more of an old-school mapping stye. Tonight I was making portals: i.e. doors.…
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ChatGPT Lets Me be the Dungeon Master
@ There’s been lots of talk about how chatgpt might serve as a dungeon master. However, DMs also tend to be the most obsessed with the game, and can sometimes have trouble finding willing players. Perhaps instead, chatgpt will replace players for DMs who want to play more or play-test an adventure. So I decided…
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Tools in the Toolbox Part 2: An Illustration from The Mandalorian
In my last blog post, I introduced Mary Douglas’s culture theory of grid and group as a potential world-building tool, but I never really gave an example of how you might use it to not only create more convincing, coherent cultural worlds, but to clarify the sorts of conflicts and tensions that might naturally arise…
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Tools in the Toolbox
One very useful framework for studying society is in terms of grid and group, an approach created by anthropologist Mary Douglas more than fifty years ago in her book Natural Symbols, and then elaborated upon by her and others in the years since. Without bogging ourselves down in the minutiae of the theory, Douglas contends…
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World Building from the Well Up.
It is easy for world builders to overestimate how interesting their lists of wars and rulers and the fantastic get a reader to really care about the world they created. Tolkien’s Silmarillion would have been much less captivating without the smaller, more tactile world depicted in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; stories…
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There is no perfect campaign, just the campaign you made. And its perfect.
I love reading posts about TTRPG theory. Its akin to watching an artist straining to draw the perfect curve, seeking perfection, supreme beauty. But all we really have are the moments we share with our friends, the gift of seeing our friends enjoy what we created, even if it is only a tenth of the…
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Feuds, Divisions, and Stability in Viking Society
Creating a new dungeon campaign can involve–and often does–a lot of world-building. World building is not, and probably should not be, constrained to the sorts of fidelity expected of the sciences, but it must achieve sufficient plausibility and internal coherence that those participating in the experience are not distracted by it; if there are blank…
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Yearning for Dice of Yore
I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with dice. I know I am not alone. For me it came with the confluence of two encounters: 1) My dad buying my brother and me the 1983 edition of the D&D Basic, the “BECMI edition” Red Box Set and encountering the interestingly shaped dice within, and…
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Odin’s Ravens
Odin’s Ravens most commonly take the form of the common raven, but in their natural form, Odin’s Ravens are marked by an incredibly large and singular green orb, a shard of the Eye of Odin. Devotees to the Allfather believe that seeing Odin’s Ravens in this form is a profound sign of Odin’s attention. Odin’s…
Got any book recommendations?