Wolves Upon the Coast - Solo #1: The Flesh and the Fruit

The men and women take Thorn as their leader. It is, after all, only due to him that they are free - as short-lived as it may be. The isles of Abhaus and Argadnel sit to the north and south, respectively. The crew looks to Thorn to decide their course.

Read More

Wolves Upon the Coast - Solo #0: The Tale of the Free Thirteen

Luke Gearing’s Wolves Upon the Coast recently got a massive discount as part of the Bundle of Holding. I picked it up and have been diving into this grand campaign setting and its accompanying ruleset over the last few days. I seen so many great player stories, sketches, and more come out of this game, and I’ve been looking for another game-as-writing exercise (similar to the The Isle play-by-blog I ran on Tumblr a while back) so Wolves was the perfect reason to get back into a bit of regular solo play and writing up the play reports here.

Read More

BLUESTAR: Bluesky as Galactic Setting

Earlier this week, Theo Sanderson released a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualized by follower patterns. Because I have some sort of cursed brain, my first thought was “I wonder if I could use this as inspiration for an on-the-fly galactic sci-fi setting.” After thinking about it more, you definitely can, and I’ll show you how. Welcome to BLUESTAR!

Read More

Cairn 2e: Trad Fantasy Ancestries

I’m spinning up a monthly TTRPG night at my day job. For several players, it’s going to be their first roleplaying experience, but most of them are coming into it with DnD pop culture familiarity and desires. I’m hoping to lean into some of those traditional fantasy aspects while playing an easier game for them to learn and a much more fun game for me to run: Cairn 2e.

Here are some classic fantasy ancestry bonuses I’ve cooked up for Cairn that are taken at character creation, each granting a stat/HP bonus and a unique ability.

Read More

Stranger Stars #03: Building Factions & Creating Planets

A key part of any setting-focused roleplaying game is… well… actually building that setting. For Stranger Stars, I’m hoping to strike my preferred balance of in-text worldbuilding which is enough to understand and envision a majority of the universe while leaving plenty of voids to be filled in at each table during play (or by the GM during their prep, if desired). Ideally, that will be something a bit more expansive than MÖRK BORG’s world information (12 or so pages in the BAREBONES EDITION) but far more streamlined/focused than a trad game’s setting section (which can easily be hundreds of pages long, if not being entire books unto themselves).

Read More