Blog moved I’ve moved this blog to https://floodedrealms.substack.com/ for the time being. Recent life circumstances have made it difficult for me to continue self hosting here. I will be reposting all my old posts there but for now this site will be dead. Sail on!

Playing the Game to Win In a previous post I discussed why people buy a given set of rules. While I agree with my original premise, I still felt as though there was something missing. It wasn’t until I saw this tweet from Krafty Matt that the missing bit clicked in my brain. What is the win condition of B/X, of ACKS, or anything else? Some even go as far as to say there is NO WINNING.

“Save vs Poison or Die.” says the bearded face from behind it’s screen. The clatter of dice follows, then a groan. The beard tilts downward slightly “Roll a new character, you’ll be in the next room. Everyone else, what are you doing?” A classic scenario in old school gaming, and a contentious one at that. Save or Die poisons are a staple in many old school adventures. They make dungeons seem deadly and dangerous, regardless of level; and they fit well into certain styles of play.

A Pirate’s Booty In my home games, often like to have my hordes consist primarily of gems and jewellery. In my opinion, this adds to the feeling of piracy. Instead of mounds and mounds of Doubloons, players get crowns and necklaces and rings, which they must sell to a fence of otherwise utilize to gain that sweet sweet experience. Plus, in any good schlock pirate media, the chests they open wont be primarily gold pieces, there’s going to be a large amount of gems and jewellery in there.

Dungeon23 Day Four: Wanted to add something a little mechanical to mess with today, and try my hand at drawing something more interesting than just a box or star. So I recycled something I used in No Artpunk II, natural gas pipe works. In this case it’s simply moving it outside instead of somewhere more interesting. This will likely be the entrance from outside, a water gushing out of a cave sounds like a neat set piece.

Day Three.

Day Two of Dungeon 23, just the digital version today!

Day One of Dungeon 23, so here is my room. First, the hand drawn and written versions, then the digital ones. If your eyes have not bled out after seeing that, here is a typed description and digital rendering(NOTE: I won’t always make a digital rendering, it will just be as time allows). You can see it does not have doors, this is on purpose, you can read why here.

So I have decided to partake in the Dungeon 23 project (learn more here). However, I do have some preemptive thoughts about the project as a whole and what I plan to get out of it. The project states that by the end of this year, any participant who finishes it will have created a twelve level mega-dungeon with 365 rooms. This is a noble goal and well worth attempting, however, I feel that the challenge as written will not produce gameable content very consistently.

Comments are live! I finally found a commenting software that strikes a balance between ease of use and privacy to my users. The software is commento. I am using a self-hosted instance, which means your comments will only ever been seen by me on the backend.

The original map I created for Wavestone Keep certainly isn’t great. The main issue is that it had absolutely no distinction between levels, which lead to it feeling more like a single level of natural caves, as opposed to a crudely carved hideout below and open air areas above. Secondly, the layout is sort of ludicrous. Both of these things I chalk up to inexperience. There is a large difference in designing adventures for my usual players and making dungeons that are fit for wider consumption.

The last few weeks have been interesting, I’ve been involved in the excellent No Artpunk II contest, ran by Prince of Nothing (more here). While I don’t expect to actually win the contest, I’m happy for the feedback. There are some extremely good entries this year, and I honored to even be able to compete against them. However, as an unintended consequence of this I learned that the excellent Bryce of TenFootPole actually reviewed my first ever adventure, Wavestone Keep, and eviscerated it completely.