Roundup: On Dragons & Riding Them
The blogosphere is talking about an obscure monster you've probably never heard of, also inspirational media and what game design lessons they can teach us
The Prismatic Wasteland blog and my book with Games Omnivorous (Prismatic Wisdom) are nominated, respectively, for Best Online Content and Best RPG Related Product. Voting is open NOW, and I sure would appreciate your vote. Here is a link to vote: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/
I think the occasional planned blog bandwagon (speaking of which: post your holes posts on July 16!) are great, but they are but pale imitations of the uncoordinated instances where lots of bloggers end up approaching the same topic from different directions. That just seemingly happened in connection of that most iconic of creatures: dragons. Legend has it that it all started at the Blog of Forlorn Encystment where it was argued that Your High-Level NPCs Should Ride Dragons, but it certainly didn’t end there (although it did continue with there with their One Hundred Thousand Dragon Encounters AND Gang of Teenage Dragons Roam the Wilderness: The Implied Lifecycle of Dragons in AD&D—the last of which prompted me to ask, in the comments, “Are dragons monogamous?”). Dice in the North provided their own Note on Dragons while Whence Came the Lightbringer continued with the dragonriding theme with To Approach a Dragon. The aptly named Dragon Peak Publishing wrote about the difficulties of Creating Draconic Adventures. To round it out, in a very neat use of literal interpretation of The Hobbit’s text and faithful translation thereof to Old School Essentials stats, The End of All Things gave us The Smaug Dragon.
Also riffing off the works of Tolkien, Weird Wonder wrote about the Lord of the Rings character whom I most resemble: Tom Bombadil. More particularly, they use Tommy Bahambadil to illustrate how they approach lore in their games and adventure design. One concluding thought in the piece was how with lore, less is more and to allow players to pull on threads to learn more about the world rather than dumping it all on them at once. This brings to mind the recent advice from David B.’s Newsletter to Not Write Lore, Write Tables. All this good advice that keeps bubbling up just goes to show I apparently did not present the definitive hot-take on the subject when I wrote Lore! What Is It Good For? a few years back. And that’s good.
Tolkien wasn’t the only piece of non-TTRPG media that bloggers have been drawing inspiration from recently. From the Sorcerer’s Skull made The Case for Planetary Romance like Flash Gordon, John Carter of Mars, or (more recently) Scavengers Reign. Dreaming Dragonslayer told us how to get back, back to the past and play a TTRPG inspired by Samurai Jack. Rise Up Comus even listed all the badass lines from MacBeth that you can use as headers in the combat section of your rulebook. That’s the kind of rulebook advice you would expect for someone who is at this very moment nominated for “Best Rules”! (And will hopefully win, with your assistance).
My incredibly humble blog, Prismatic Wasteland, is nominated for an Ennie Award for Best Online Content, and my book, Prismatic Wisdom, is nominated for an Ennie for Best RPG Related Product. Voting is currently open to the public (e.g., you) through July 20 at this link: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/
If you haven’t heard of the Ennies, they are the Oscars for TTRPGs, if the Oscars were a bit more like Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards with marginally less slime. Voting takes only a single combat round of your time but would mean a great deal to yours truly.
How to Vote: Voting is easy and I bet you’d figure it out without my help, but here is a procedure just in case:
Follow this link to the voting page: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/
Scroll to the “Online Content" Category
Select the drop-down menu beneath “Prismatic Wasteland Blog”
Vote “1” from the options to rank my blog as your top choice
Once you’re done ranking your votes (you don’t have to rank them all, but I encourage you to rank the others you like), just hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to submit your vote for this category
Scroll to the “RPG Related Product" Category
Select the drop-down menu beneath “Prismatic Wisdom”
Vote “1” from the options to rank Prismatic Wisdom as your top choice
Same as above, rank your other choices if you want, then hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to submit your vote for this category
Simple as! I really appreciate your support, whether that takes the form of reading my blog, reading my book, and/or voting for both.