Previous: Chapter 2: The Drowned Fish As I approached my room, I could see Ralph waiting next to the door. When I was about an arms-length away, he finally noticed me and opened his mouth to talk.
Recently, I was fleshing out a nation in my fantasy setting that I wanted to be mostly inspired by ancient Mesoamerican cultures. I also had a few ideas from gold rush California, Argentinian
Previous: Chapter 1: A Damsel in Distress Going back to the school covered in blood and dirt and saliva was out of the question, but the Fish was close by and Manny would let me clean up enough to
One of my priorities in how I GM is that I want the players to be active and engaged, not just act as my audience. So when I started planning out a new adventure with a heavy investigation
As a player, I like writing backstories as vignettes rather than surveys or lists. Mostly they're a page or two to communicate personality and motivation. But one time a backstory kind of got
There are a bazillion different takes on the fantasy genre (yes, I counted), but Amy Raby's Coalition of Mages series is the only one I know of based on the Indus River Valley civilization, circa
In the last post, Power Sources I: Polishing a Half-baked Idea, I described my general approach to creating a power system as part of making a D&D 4e homebrew. So, let's walk through the
In D&D 4e, the developers categorized classes in terms of combat role (controller, defender, leader, and striker) and power source (arcane, divine, martial, primal, and psionic). The compulsive
I was reading through a set of ten-year-old Dungeon magazines trying to find just the right module to play, when I noticed something. No women. Every one of the modules I had sticky noted was
T. Kingfisher is the pen name for Ursula Vernon. She's won a bunch of awards for her stories and comics and novels, and I highly recommend reading some of her short stories to get at least get a