Jason Pitre‘s RPG design worksheet is a nifty tool. It’s available as a free, form-fillable PDF. Each section gives you a number of points to assign to elements of your design, forcing you to 1) prioritize, 2) acknowledge design goals that are present/absent, and 3) think about game design more broadly. Here’s Jason on the […]
Jason Pitre’s RPG design worksheet Read More »
I was poking through Dave Arneson‘s The First Fantasy Campaign[1] the other day and happened across a section I’d never looked at before: Gypsy Sayings & Chance Cards. The sayings don’t mesh well with my GMing style (they remind me of Ravenloft’s Tarrokka Deck (paid link), a 2e product revived for 5e), but the Chance Cards
Chance Cards in Blackmoor Read More »
I needed wilderness encounter tables for the DCC RPG (paid link) hexcrawl I’m running, but there aren’t any in the book. Jeff Rients created some excellent tables for wandering monsters by dungeon level (which also appear in Crawl! #5), but after searching high and low I couldn’t find any wilderness encounter tables online. So I
DCC RPG wilderness encounter tables Read More »
It’s 1977. D&D is wild and wonderful and everyone’s doing their own thing. So much so, in fact, that in that same year two people published alternate versions of one of the core mechanics of old-school D&D: earning XP for treasure. In 1977, Dave Arneson, co-creator of D&D, and Jon Pickens, who later became an
Debauchery & Dragons: Carousing for XP, 1977 to 2015 Read More »
Crawl! (also available on DriveThruRPG; paid link) is a DCC RPG fanzine designed and published by Dak Ultimak, with a rotating cast of writers (which often includes Dak). I recently snagged the full run, and this zine is really, really well conceived and executed. It’s rawlished — both raw and polished at the same time,
Zine roundup: Crawl!, issues 1-11 Read More »
I’ve discovered that if I’m careful I can de-ink — de-crayon, really — old precision-edge dice, then ink them anew with a Sharpie. My first real test of this was tonight, using the dice from my Cook Expert set. They’d been nicely crayoned years ago (by someone else), but crayon isn’t really my jam.[1] Here
Removing crayon from old-school precision-edge dice Read More »
