Quarterling’s Corner

Big hexes are 18 miles, little hexes are 6 miles. I. The Gyldir Vale is a temperate river valley enclosed by the sharp and rocky Red Range to the west; the ancient, forested Green Range to the east; and the magnificent, snow-capped White Range to the north. The valley's name is derived from the Golden Flame, the mysterious source of power with which Rotangur barbarians conquered this land from the high elves 1,000 years ago. The Common Church denounces the Golden Flame as the work of the Devil, but some whisper that the Flame was a gift of divine grace, granted to the Rotangur by the pagan gods of their northern lands. II. 500 years ago, when the kingdom of Gyldria was at the peak of its prosperity, the king's oracle pronounced a vision that the Golden Flame would soon be lost and that the rule of his family would come to an end. Desperate to preserve his rule, the king invited a covetous sorcerer into his court, who promised to study the Flame and uncover the secrets behind it...

I. Before RPG design became my main hobby, I used to write poetry. My favorite book on my shelf from that time is  The New Book of Forms  by Lewis Turco. It explains the fundamental building blocks of poetry (such as what “iambic pentameter” means) and lists, in encyclopedic fashion, all the notable forms within English poetry. Most modern poetry is free verse, including all the poetry I ever wrote. You put the words together however you think they sound good. There are certain principles to absorb that’ll help you with that, but it’s ultimately up to your intuition of what feels right. It wasn’t always that way. For various historical reasons — because poetry used to be primarily for performance, because it used to be set to music, etc. — poems almost were almost always composed within a particular form, such as the sonnet or the villanelle. To gloss over a lot of history: at a certain point, there was a shift. Poets like Walt Whitman popularized a transition to free verse as...

  I. I came up with the chart above some time ago. Originally, I tried to rate individual games' focus on each quadrant on a scale of 1 to 5, but that method arbitrarily relies on comparisons to pre-existing games. Who is to say which game represents a "5 out of 5" focus on Player Agency? Anyway, I still think it's a worthwhile way of thinking about different games in the TTRPG space and what their priorities are. I tend to view Player Agency in terms of  Information-Choice-Impact . How much information are the players given, how free are they to make choices based on that information, and how impactful are those choices in the moment-to-moment gameplay or in the overall scenario? If the answer is "lots of information, very free, and very impactful," the game in question has high Player Agency. Into the Odd  and similar games focus on Player Agency and Adventure Design, but eschew Character Customization and GM Improvisation. By "GM Improvisation" ...

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 ...