Quarterling’s Corner

welcome to my mountaintop The NSR Discord server is really something unique, I think. For one thing, it's the only server that's got me hanging out regularly! But, more importantly, it has a wide range of people who hail from a wide variety of play cultures. ( This is essential reading if you don't know what I mean by that.) We have a lot of days where those partial to a Culture A and those partial to a Culture B have a conversation along the lines of: CULTURE A PEOPLE : "I just don't get Culture B for reasons X, Y, and Z." CULTURE B PEOPLE : detailed explanation and/or theoretical refutation of X, Y, and Z SOMEONE, EVENTUALLY : "Well, at the end of the day we all have different preferences and that's okay!" Don't get me wrong for a moment: These are often  fantastic conversations , people learn a lot, and some people end up discovering a new style of play that they enjoy. And, yes, we all do have different preferences, and that is okay! Jus...

The following post is about lore I'm thinking of using for my next campaign world. If you think you'd like to play in a game of mine some day, perhaps you'd rather discover it in-game alongside your character, if it even comes up at all. (Personally, I don't think it's much of a spoiler, and a little out-of-character knowledge might give you context for how your character would understand the world.) I. Sapient species produce souls. This phenomenon is poorly understood, but what is known is that, unless the soul's host experienced some serious trauma , the soul sinks to the center of the planet and joins a mass of soul-stuff called the World Will. A select few, called "prophets," are born with the ability to encounter aspects of the World Will through their dreams. Through such encounters, the prophets come to categorize, personify, and interact with such aspects, which they conceive of as "gods" or "spirits." (In truth, the manifo...

I. Five or six years ago, my friends and I were in high school, it was lunch period, and we expressed interest in playing D&D. So my good friend Max said, "Sure, we can play D&D," and he pulled out some dice and we made up some characters and he improvised a dungeon on the spot. I must have had some familiarity with D&D tropes back then, because I made up on the spot that I wanted to be a quarterling (half-halfling, half-gnome) and that my name would be Borris Bilburrow. I had just read The Hobbit for the first time, and I think I was trying to poke fun at the concept of fantasy races, which I thought seemed especially dumb. We didn't get very far that day, but we played a few more times and I always used the same character. Max got us to fill out full fifth-edition character sheets sometimes, but I don't think we were ever using the actual rules of 5E, and my impression is that he never had much at all prepared. It was a free-wheeling kind of thing with ...