Random Idea

With the Kickstarter for Kids on Bikes combined with talk of the Dark Places & Demogorgons RPG, I thought I’d write a post about using The Whispering Road to run a Stranger Things game. The Whispering Road is actually ideal for this. You’ll want to decide whether you’re just playing the kids or whether you’re … Continue reading »

As I’ve been thinking about how to use the Inverse Barker Mechanic (roll d100 in any difficult situation; higher is better), I think there are (at least!) 2 immediate problems to solve: How do you create characters that are “balanced?” That is, how do you keep one player from just having maximum stats in everything? … Continue reading »

I’ve probably written about this on Google+ a few times, but I wanted to document it in full. Apparently, M.A.R. Barker, creator of the early RPG Empire of the Petal Throne, after decades of role-playing settled on a very simple system: The GM takes the PCs’ character description into account when describing NPC reactions, so if … Continue reading »

Imagine a D&D fantasy world where you don’t screw with animals. If you enter a cave and you run across a growling wolf, you back down and find another way in (or tempt the creature away, or make peace with it, or whatever). Now, you could make exceptions for some vermin, like sewer rats and … Continue reading »

This is part of a series of RPG characters, creatures, items, adventure ideas, and locations inspired by random entries from Wikipedia. The material I create may grow distant from its roots. Today we have The Man of Mode, a comedic play about a libertine trying to win over one young woman while disentangling himself from another. … Continue reading »

This page links to 3D miniature designs that you can download and print on any desktop 3D printer. You can use 3D Hubs to find someone local who owns a 3D printer, or send your files to Shapeways and they’ll print it and ship it to you. I’ve focused on files that are provided with … Continue reading »

This is part of a series of RPG characters, creatures, items, adventure ideas, and locations inspired by random entries from Wikipedia. The material I create may grow distant from its roots. Today we have Adil Giray, the khan of the Crimean Khanate in the 1600’s and a big supporter of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an early … Continue reading »

This is part of a series of RPG characters, creatures, items, adventure ideas, and locations inspired by random entries from Wikipedia. The material I create may grow distant from its roots. Today we have Bloom County, the 1980’s comic strip by Berkeley Breathed. Bloom County gained fame by lampooning politics, elections, and controversial celebrities like … Continue reading »

This is part of a series of RPG characters, creatures, items, adventure ideas, and locations inspired by random entries from Wikipedia. The material I create may grow distant from its roots. Today we have the News & Record, a North Carolina newspaper. It consolidated several papers during the 20th century, and has since followed the … Continue reading »

This is part of a series of RPG characters, creatures, items, adventure ideas, and locations inspired by random entries from Wikipedia. The material I create may grow distant from its roots. Today we have double escrow, a real estate transaction. The wikipedia article is so thin we need to do a little more investigation. According … Continue reading »