Quarterling’s Corner

  I. The world is not right. Where once there stood proud kingdoms, there is now nothing but ice and snow. Where once the nobility protected us, now they slaughter us in droves. And more and more, our children are born with parts not altogether human… Meltingmoor is my work-in-progress adventure game about mutant treasure hunters exploring a once-frozen, now-thawing gothic frontier in the aftermath of a failed revolution. I am currently playtesting the core rules and working on additional content such as magic items and GM advice. II. I think I’ve managed to design a combat system that is lighter, faster, and clearer than that of  Into the Odd without sacrificing the random chaos of dice rolls, the players’ ability to make interesting decisions, or the resource-management element of dungeoncrawling. The lightbulb went off when I realized that I don’t need to track hit points for every individual PC. One HP or “Morale” value for the entire party does the job just fine. If it hi...

I. We talk about freedom and agency a lot when it comes to games, but what do we really mean by that? Total freedom is boring. If you are the god of this imaginary world, if you can make anything and everything happen, nothing can surprise you. So we impose limits. You exist in this sort of world, you have access these resources, you have these abilities. So far, few would accuse you of impinging upon player freedom. So where is the line? I would posit the line is here: You work for someone else. Or, another character (such as a villain) forces your hand; you have no choice but to respond to their actions. I think when you cross that line, you're playing a different sort of game. Maybe you're more interested in narrative and drama. That's okay! But it's not what  I  love about games. II. Agency and freedom are misnomers, I think. I love games that put the players  in charge ,  in control ,  in command  of a specific character or organization in a specific s...

The map of the planes presented in 5E’s core books. I. I’ve written about how I drifted into the OSR before. To quote a previous post , “I was frustrated with what I saw as a low signal-to-noise ratio in D&D 5E's implied setting. In particular, I never much liked that morality was baked into the physics of the world (what with alignment and the Planescape cosmology), and I hated feeling like I had to have a place on my world map for every godd*mn player-race in the book.” In retrospect, I think these surface-level frustrations were symptoms of a deeper conflict between my aesthetic sensibilities and those of modern D&D. (The thing about aesthetic sensibilities is that they’re subconscious, which makes it difficult for artists to understand the real reasons behind their creative decisions. This post is essentially about me making my subconscious process a little more conscious.) II. Part of this comes out of my more recent attempt to prep a game for Quest . I was really exci...

Read to the end of the post to figure out what this is from. I. I've had a cascade of realizations over the past 48 hours and I feel like if I don't write them all down somewhere they're all going to fly out of my head. I have no idea whether this will be useful to anyone, but at least I'll be able to link it to people if they ask me "hey what ever happened to that G&G thing you were making." This is my second post about the failure of a big project called Goblets & Grues , although the last project under that name was only partially related. (There's a small part of me that's embarassed to write again about my failures, but the rest of me knows that if things are especially hard for me to learn, that just means I'll learn it better. The spark for this new G&G came in July 2021, when I came up with the idea to run some version of D&D for a good friend of mine who lives in another country. I really wanted to run 5th edition D&D ...

Choose your alignment — which quadrant(s) do you care about defining? I. We had yet another debate on labels and definitions today. I’m sick of everything I write in these conversations getting lost, so I’m dumping it all in a blog post. Everything from here on out is directly taken from messages I wrote on the Discord, with some links added here and there. II. I think Retired Adventurer had it right when he called them " cultures of play ." The OSR, the NSR, they aren't movements — people have such a terrible sense these days of what it means for a group of people to be organized. They are cultures , in the sense that designer Greg Costikyan uses the word. In Uncertainty , Costikyan defines culture as "the transmission of knowledge within a group" and explains that, while some animals have simple forms of culture, "humans have culture on steroids, because language allows us to transmit knowledge far more effectively." He writes, "In a sense, ...

I’ve come up with what I think is an interesting and useful way of thinking about RPGs, but the seeds of it were planted in my head by an unlikely source. I was watching this GDC talk by Mick Gordon about how he created the music for Doom (2016). In it, he describes how his main instrument for the game was a simple sine wave — what he describes as the purest form of sound — filtered through four channels of machines that distort the “pure” sound into something industrial, noisy, and full of character. In a previous post , I described all RPGs as the product of different kinds of “creative constraints” upon play-pretend, which you might call the “purest form” of RPG. I listed various kinds of constraints, but this GDC talk made me think — what if I reorganized those constraints into four channels of distortion? Four channels through which you distort and shape the raw energy of play-pretend into something with a particular character? It turns out it maps pretty well to four channels. S...

I wrote this little White Box: FMAG hack over the course of the past few hours. I like how Spwack  posts little hacks straight to their blog, so I figured I'd try something similar. I basically just stripped down how Worlds Without Number does ability checks and simplified attacking to one roll. The non-standard attributes, combat order, and Difficult Movement rules come from my big WIP, Goblets & Grues . I might try using this to run OSE adventures and the like, who knows. Character Creation Roll 3d6 for your six attributes: Strength . Climb, swim, jump, push, pull, lift. Dexterity . Keep your balance, perform simple acrobatic stunts. Charisma . Persuade ambivalent NPCs, put on a charming or convincing performance. Craft . Create, tinker, repair, or operate. Stealth . Sneak, hide, perform sleight-of-hand. Survival . Hunt, track, forage, handle animals. Then, roll on whatever table the GM has handy for starting items. Task Resolution If your success at an action is uncertain a...