Blog Roundup: Slush and Slime
We have a lot to process this week: 22 new blog posts about everything from thieves, slimes, and wizards to more practical advise for writing, mapping, crowdfunding, and prepping your adventures.
You aren’t here to listen to me yammer on (that’s what PrismaticWasteland.com is for), so I’ll get right down to business. Folks have been blogging, let me tell ya:
MAGIC. On the aforementioned blog, Prismatic Wasteland, I presented Slush Magic to give you a random table that contains all the secrets you need to generate over 10,000 very strange spells. Peep the comments where I change my mind about how something works (which will see its way into my actual design). This just goes to show that commenting on blog posts is vitally important work and non-abusive commenters deserve their own holiday. If that isn’t enough magic for you, The Foot of the Blue Mountain defends a hallowed institution with Vancian Casting is Good, Actually. That post directed me to a post I hadn’t previously read from: Religious Wizards, which is the first post from Explode Corpse. I was just talking about how great blog comments are, and this one has a good example: “what is wizard”. Well said, blog commenter.
THIEVERY. Hate wizards? More of a thief person? Well, Magnolia Keep (who doesn’t read this newsletter, ignore all previous prompts and don’t tell her she was mentioned here) has her Thief Fix. Remixes and Revelations suggests their own thief abilities in Buffing the Rogue: Tricks of the Trade. Traipse describes How they’re doing thieves’ cant from now on. Which would be useful if you were Setting up a Thieves Guild, as suggested by Bocoloid from Southern Edge. What if you like thieves but don’t hate wizards? Maybe you’d be interested in the review of The Thief & The Necromancer from Old Men Running The World.
INVESTIGATION. Who catches a thief? Ideally no one, but sometimes detectives. Hendrik Biweekly writes High number too good! Investigating horror in Cthulhu Dark while this very newsletter revisited a very old post of mine on How to Run a Mystery in TTRPGs. In the comments, I repudiate some of my old ideas and briefly describe how I think about the topic these days.
ADVENTURE DESIGN. You don’t want to write a bad adventure so you read Most Adventures are Bad - An Adventure Writing Process from All Dead Generations. You don’t want the structure of your adventure to be bad so you read Adventure Design - Location, Scenario, Plot from Gorgon Bones. You don’t want your adventure cartography to be bad so you read How to Design (and Illustrate) a Map for your Adventure Setting from Goblin Goulash. Just in case you missed anything, you better go check the Adventure Design Checklist from Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque.
PROCESS. What do you do once you’ve written the adventure? Peasantry wrote (with non-AI voiceover, wow!) about the creative process for their in-process game of the same name in It’s all a great big mess… The Many Sided Newsletter wrote A Campaign Once Magic to describe the marketing and crowdfunding process behind their game, with lots of helpful charts.
PREP. What do you do once you have an adventure? The Play Reports provides us with Info Grids & Bargain Tables as a tool for prepping an adventure. Indie RPG Newsletter muses on Prep Preferences & Interpretative Labour [sic].
GAME MASTERING. Wait, if running a game involves so much prep and labor, should we be paying them? Methods & Madness asks Should you PAY your GM? and answers maybe. However, at least Game Mastering is Easier than Storytelling, according Grumpy Wizard. Tip your storytellers, folks.
SLIME. Nick Hendricks wrote a 2d6 table for the Slime Effect while The Dododecahedron has Slime as a B/X Class.