As of this past December, I’ve written on Substack for just over two years.

91 posts later, I’ve decided it’s time to move on.

Yes, I’m leaving Substack. For good.

For a long time, I begrudgingly worked against their policy of platforming literal nazis—trying to provide content that definitively wasn’t that. In early 2024, that was easy to justify.

In the climate we live in, however, it’s harder to rationalize it.

Regardless of your political affiliation, you can’t deny what’s going on around the country is massively fucked up and not normal. I genuinely don’t care what you think about immigrants (illegal or non)—I personally believe the studies that immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than native populations—but we’ve got legitimate American citizens being killed in the streets, being detained, getting beat up and dropped back off far from home, and all sorts of horrific shit.

EVEN IF you ascribe to the belief that protestors are obstructing legitimate federal operations, you can’t possibly tell me with a straight face that the punishment for that is getting fucking shot in the head.

That’s crazy talk. That’s straight-up police state shit.

And by not nipping this in the bud with all the people out there peddling rage and hatred and anti-woke or whatever, Substack is complicit in its amplification.

Enough is enough. I tried to make content that went against all this—trying to drown out the anger and violence with fantasy elf games. In reality, I simply forced readers to engage with a platform that was making money off of both of us.

It wasn’t all bad, of course. I met a lot of great folks and a lot of really inspirational creators—some of which I interviewed, others I collaborated with, and most I casually competed with. But I can do that elsewhere—literally anywhere else.

So, I’m moving off the platform, effective immediately, to focus on my own thing: natewhittington.com. It’s free of charge. Go buy a game from your favorite creator or something instead.

I’ll be leaving the old blog up for the time being, if only for me to decide what to do with my old articles. But know I won’t be sending any more updates its way.

For those who have financially supported the blog and would like to continue to do so, you can toss a few bucks my way as a single donation or on a monthly basis by clicking “Buy me a coffee” on the bottom right of my site (note: if you’re on mobile, you’ll need to turn your phone sideways to see the button—working on fixing that!).

Where to find Inheritor updates

If you want to keep up to date with Inheritor—my epic dark fantasy RPG—check out the playtest documentation over at grinningrat.itch.io/inheritor.

Last week, I published my first playtest for my dark fantasy rpg, Inheritor. Those of you who downloaded it (thanks by the way!) probably noticed something peculiar: it’s missing bits and pieces here and there.

Now, I could have removed those entirely. After all, why show something that isn’t baked or fully there? Why not just remove the stuff that’s half-built?

There are two reasons:

1. Because I started on the document to see how far I could get. And yes, I could have used Google Docs or something but… where’s the fun in that? I wanted to see what it would / could look like in its final state.

2. Because being published and available for download is better than being perfect

I know a lot of you have been working on your own games, your own adventures. Whatever the case may be, you’ve also probably sat and tinkered with it for months—maybe even years.

I know I did, with the earliest rumblings of Inheritor forming around early 2019.

But, what’s the point of trying to make perfection if it never ends up getting seen by anybody? That’s the logic that propelled me to publish Inheritor as it is, warts and all.

There are placeholders throughout it. Places where more stuff plugs in. Spots to imagine, theorize, and ideate on what could go there. It’s rough around the edges.

But, truthfully, there’s also a lot of great stuff too. Stuff I want you to play with and let me know how it feels. Let’s talk about how you can do that.

Iron and Blood - What’s Inside

IRON AND BLOOD is the name of the first playtest packet for Inheritor. It’s a completely placeholder, temporary project name that won’t make it to final production (for example, next month’s update is tentatively called MOON AND MAGICK).

The packet sets the standard for Inheritor: two books, one of rules and the other of setting.

1. Rules

The rule book for Inheritor contains everything needed to make a character and customize them to your liking.

This is done in multiple ways:

• A lifepath system for determining past events, prior vocations, and more.

• Pregenerated characters that capture the classic archetypes for sword and sorcery.

• Rules and procedures used by both players and the Warden to adjudicate play, including weather, the game phases, morale, making claims, becoming tested, and more.

• Appendices galore, with equipment lists, proficiencies that aren’t just throwaway lines of text, a smattering of hexes and incantations, and others.

Mistlands

The setting is but one piece of the world, a dense region called the Mistlands. A sort of “demo” offers at least one of each of the major location types: settlement, wilderness, landmark, and dungeon.

• Ashwharf, a small settlement on the eastern coast under the claim of a fearful, aging ruler

• Greenbury, a wilderness area in the sprawling swamp, besieged by violence and undeath.

• Water Wheel, a landmark in the heart of the Mistlands and home to an eccentric silverfisher.

• Lunar Chapel, a landmark in the dark woods and home to a blasphemous offshoot of the Sisters of the Moon.

• The Bell Watchers, a landmark and small dungeon off the coast of the Misted Sea.

Future playtests will introduce more locations added to the Mistlands, culminating in roughly 30 keyed hexes.

Future Updates Post Launch

But that’s not all: Once playtesting is over and the final files are sent out, the surrounding regions will be added piece by piece. That means:

• The Echolands to the west, home of great deserts, mystical arts, and ancient empires.

• The Crystal Fangs to the immediate north, a jagged range of mountains hiding both the past and future of the world.

• The Eldlands to the far north, a realm of reflection and ruin—barely touched since the ancient days of the Aelfin.

• The Dreaminglands in the place between places, a strange world of impossibilities and violence.

Playtest - How to Participate

With all the files being live on itch.io (go give them a download, what are you waiting for??), that leaves the big question of how this playtest will run. The broad strokes:

• The playtest community will be on Discord, using a server specifically and only for Inheritor.

• Materials for play, including character sheets, LFG (looking for game) channels, and others will be made available.

• Channels for discussing what went right, what went wrong, and what’s almost there

• Join the Most Honored Guild of Scriveners (aka, spellcheckers and bugfixers)

• Give your thoughts via the playtest survey

We’ll figure out more as we go, but this first playtest is slated to go from now until February 17—then the next update will release and we’ll start the whole shebang over again.

Discord Invite

If you’re participating in the playtest, join us over at the Discord by clicking below:

Until next time!🟦

This article is brought to you by the following paid subscribers who make this newsletter possible:

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Just over a year ago, I wrote an article describing how to create worlds that leave a lasting impact on those who spend time there (whether it be in play, reading, writing, etc.).

For me, though, those three ideas sometimes fall flat when you need to make a lot of things up front. Don't get me wrong, they’re great pieces of advice (if I do say so myself 🥴) but they operate from the mindset of delivering information to your players.

What if the person who needs information is you? Well, five tips then:

• Worldbuild Negatively

• The 80/20 Rule

• Obsess (A Little!)

• Write From Inside the House

• Create a Mystery (or Lie)

No, I don’t mean start worldbuilding while you’re in a bad mood.

What I mean is, start your worldbuilding by deciding what isn’t there. What thing used to exist, but was taken away? What never existed here in the first place? What took the missing thing’s place?

This negative space invokes what every writer wants: curiosity from the reader. And where there’s curiosity, there’s creativity.

A few examples:

• No Stars. The night sky is empty—not dark with clouds, but genuinely a pitch-dark void. Astronomers don’t study the stars, instead they look into the blackness and attempt to ascertain meaning. People navigate by memorized routes and lantern chains strung between settlements. Lantern-lighters are a dangerous and honored trade.

• No Children. The youngest person in the known world is 43. Births stopped two generations ago for reasons nobody can agree on. Apprenticeship has become a sort of adoption, the economy has restructured completely around inheritance, and the preservation of knowledge becomes almost moot.

• No Spoken Language. Everyone communicates through sign, gesture, or the written word. Sound exists—in nature mostly—but human voices are silent. “Speakers” from the far northern woods are treated with fear in most circles, though some believe their ways can be learned—by force if necessary.

Building off the previous tool, the 80/20 Rule (also known as the Pareto Principle if you’re a mega-nerd or business-type) boils down to 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes.

Put another way, only a small number of decisions yield the vast majority of results.

One could think of this as “do less, reap more”—which is true—but in our circumstances, we’re going to think of it as a singular big decision when worldbuilding can do a lot more heavy lifting than ten small decisions.

A few examples:

• The sun doesn’t set. From this single fact we get: no nocturnal predators, crops grow constantly, sleep is a social construct rather than a natural one, dark places evoke much more fear as they’re rarer, and much more.

• Iron is deathly radioactive. Weapons and armor are non-ferrous, often laquered wood, boiled leather, or more pliable metals. Advanced surgery would be functionally impossible. Some individuals are immune to iron’s effects and are treated as pariahs, or worse, weapons.

• The empire collapsed forty years ago. Everyone over middle-age remembers the old ways. Roads exist but are nearly all in disrepair. Three generations of soldiers were trained on tactics no longer applicable to a modern battlefield. Splintering dialects of a shared language begin to crop up. Every leader is either a former imperial official or someone who killed one.

Where writers and designers can get carried away is trying to treat everything in the world as though it’s sacred. That may be true in our world, but remember that there are billions of people making that happen.

In your world, you have at best yourself and a handful of others. So it’s best to focus on a niche and drill down as far as you can. As you do, you’ll find no world out there that’s quite like yours.

What to focus on? Maybe it’s the currency. Or the way doors are carved and built. Or the breadth of flora and fauna. Whatever it is, pick something as your guilty indulgence and go crazy. And then if you feel like you’ve gone as far as you can, remember, this is for you—not necessarily everyone else; don’t be offended if people skip your over-indulgence.

A few examples:

• Knots. Knotwork is the highest art form there is. Twelve base knots, how they combine, how color matters, etc. The way the merchant’s sash is tied represents their financial ledger. Bracelets between lovers are heartfelt poems. Dangerous individuals wear obscene knots unfit for polite society.

• Tea. Hard to imagine, right? Hardly—tea once held the most important trade on the global market. People died for it. Revolutions began with it. In your world, maybe there are six regional varities of teas that all have their own inherent properties. Perhaps there’s an entire dialect delivered through the art of serving tea.

• Masks. Everyone wears a mask past puberty. Each decade of one’s life is a different material—easy to gauge someone’s age at a glance (that is, if they’re telling the truth). Mask designs signify occupation, inheritance customs, and societal laws. To be a mask-maker is to be someone important, someone lauded.

One of the traps of worldbuilding is writing everything like it’s something you could look up on Wikipedia. Everything in their neat little containers, every possible permutation catalogued and accounted for.

An exciting world to explore is one where information is given via the world itself—not through lore dumps or a wiki folks will never read. Things like billboards, religious sermons, shipping manifests, and more do so much more for you than a clinical observation of the known world from the viewpoint of an omnipresent narrator.

A few examples:

• A Want Ad: “EXPERIENCED THRESHOLD-WALKER NEEDED. Must provide own salt. Compensation: 8 hours of stored sunlight per crossing, plus salvage rights to anything you carry back from the Edge. Widows and debtors preferred. Inquire more at the Fourth Bell” That single ad implies a magic system, an economy, and a social underclass.

• A Warning Sign: “BY ORDER OF THE CANAL AUTHORITY: Do NOT feed the water. Do NOT answer the water. If the water speaks your name, report the incident to the nearest registrar before sundown. Make note of the street names when making a report.” Weird water, an authority who manages it, and an entire bureaucracy around avoiding it.

• A Children’s Rhyme: “One for the soldier, two for the thief, three for the king who brought us grief, four for the fire, five for the flood, six for the year we paid in blood”. History plays out in a half-remembered song that even children sing. Nobody really remembers what any of it means—but its pervasive enough that all kids know it. Even children from outside the city.

Keeping up with the theme of something missing, the final tip is to create something that isn’t missing per se—but is being deliberately held back from public knowledge, for better or worse.

This may be an innocent enough mystery—the reason we have two suns, the reason the grass grows in purple-silver hues, etc. It may, however, be something more nefarious like a cover-up or deliberate obfuscation of the way things are supposed to be.

A few examples:

• Greentide: Every seventh night, the northern coast’s tide glows faintly green. Fisherfolk time their nets by it. Scientists have theories, but none quite fit. It’s been happening for as long as anyone can remember and doesn’t seem to have any ill-effects. It’s just a part of the unexplained nature of things.

• Replacement: Everyone knows the Duke’s son died in the hunting accident twelve years ago. The Duke was beside himself, until he was visited by a living man calling himself his son. Overjoyed, the Duke took him in. He looks nothing like the old portraits—not even a passing resemblance. Nobody says anything about it. Folks on the street tell those looking into the matter to “concern themselves elsewhere” and that “trouble follows those digging into things they shouldn’t”. By the sounds of it, the whole town is complicit in the switch.

• Old World: The Church of Aera teaches that the Scouring was divine punishment—fire from heaven, the wicked consumed, all driven underground. But older cathedrals have basements full of broken machinery—some with shattered wings. Even stranger, the word for “angel” shares a root with the ancient term for “pilot”. No wonder the Church forbids anyone from entering these ancient places—the punishment for which can be most severe.

What do you think?

With all these in mind, what kinds of worlds are you thinking of? Do you have any changes you’d make to worlds you’ve already worked on? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

What I like about these tools is that you don’t have to start from scratch to make them work—but they do function if you’re coming at it from that angle. Not only that, but the incorporate my two favorite pastimes: lying and making up imaginary bullshit.

No wonder I keep writing about it!

Thanks for reading. 🟦

This article is brought to you by the following paid subscribers who make this newsletter possible:

• Azzlegog (Founder)

• Colin

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• Greg

• Jan (Founder)

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• Michael

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• Steve

• Trevor

Last year, right around this time, I posted an article titled Looking Forward at 2025:

I’m going to follow roughly the same format as last year, with me talking about the stuff that got done this year first, followed by a bit of a preview of next year’s offerings.

On with it then!

Looking Back at 2025

The Grinning Rat Newsletter

What is there to say here except incredible!

This time last year, we were hovering around 560 subscribers—now we’re nearly triple that at 1,400+.

Given that I pretty much do zero cross-posting or marketing of the newsletter, I find that number very humbling. But you all continue to show up and listen to my rambling, so, thank you! From the bottom of my heart.

Some other bits of info you might find interesting:

• I did a reader survey back in the middle of the year that was very illuminating as to what kinds of content you want to see. More than 200 folks provided their thoughts and it was an incredibly helpful level-set to read through.

• The newsletter went from 5 to 11 paid subscribers. Given that I’m not offering much in the way of “paid” content, this means a lot to me. Being supported for simply throwing my ideas out there is an incredibly privileged position to be in.

• I published 47 posts, effectively resulting in me only missing five weeks of posting the entire year. Not bad in a year where you launch a crowdfunding campaign and welcome a new kid into your life!

There’s a few other things noteworthy in the newsletter, but I’ll touch on them in their own sections down below. All to say, what a great year for the blog!

Certain Fathoms

The big one. My first crowdfunding campaign that dove into another system I didn’t write.

I started working on Certain Fathoms back in June of this year alongside an incredibly talented group of folks all vying for entry into Mothership Month. You can imagine how excited I was to be selected!

The funny thing is, I somehow underestimated just how much this game was going to change my life. How many people I was going to be able to meet and befriend. Just how many connections one can make when you stop focusing on your own silo and start inviting people in (or getting invited in yourself).

If there’s any takeaways from Certain Fathoms:

• Get involved in a community. Matt Colville has a fantastic video on this that’s suitable for just about everybody who wants to make stuff in the hobby and have a community around it.

• Spend time trying to make your thing look as best as it can. If you have 100% to devote to it, spend 75% of your effort on vibes, killer art, and aesthetic and 25% of your effort on words. In a world of tens of thousands of games, you don’t need to explain your dice mechanics up front.

• Talk about other people’s stuff you like. Its a big tent and we’re all in it, so a lot of times goodwill comes from goodwill. Point to other projects and try to figure out how you can interact with their fans in an earnest, real way. If you’re approaching this with the goal of earning more money or backers, you’re doing it wrong.

All in all, Certain Fathoms also helped me realize I like sci-fi a lot more than I thought I did—potentially even more than traditional fantasy (thanks ).

Zemaryth

In the back half of summer 2025, I made an invitation for writers and worldbuilding fans to get together on a shared-setting called Zemaryth. It gained, for me, quite a bit of attention!

I didn’t know this then, but it also came at the exact worst time it possibly could have.

Basically, when I was first working on the bones of what would become Zemaryth (largely the community-building aspects, platforms to discuss it, and CC license), I had an inordinate amount of free time. I was still on parental leave from work, so I had all day to transcribe things, respond to ideas, and work on graphics.

That ended when I went back to work, my daughter stopped sleeping consistently through the night, and my priorities shifted to the launch of Certain Fathoms.

At this stage, despite the initial excitement, I just think I’m not at a stage where I can put in the community-building time necessary to facilitate it.

That said, I really love the ideas people put together—and hope that they can take that into their own games, their own settings, or even the possibility of someone stepping in to steward Zemaryth!

Itch.io Games, Freebies, and Others

I spent a lot of time on itch.io this year!

14 projects were uploaded to the platform, the majority of which were worksheets that tied directly into articles on Substack. I enjoy this sort of work, and it seems like readers do too. I started to shy away from it in the latter half of the year due to all the other big projects going on, but I’m excited to see where this ends up next year.

There’s also a project here I want to highlight in the 2026 part of this post, but I want to give it plenty of room to breathe in its own section so for now we’ll just say: itch.io output was pretty good!

Collaborations

2025 was full of fun collaborations as well! I ended up doing some interviews with some creators I look up to, put in a contribution towards a physical zine I adore, and managed to set up some working relationships with some folks out there I’ve always dreamt about working with.

• In the summer, I provided FISH—a little mechanic on fishing in RPGs—to TUMULUS by .

• In the latter half of the year, I interviewed both David over at of ECO-MOFOS fame and Alex over at —two folks that are doing some really cool sandbox-adjacent design.

• Finally, I managed to set up some guest writing for Certain Fathoms with some folks who are huge inspirations to me: Snow, Sam Sorensen, Alfred Valley, and watt. I’m so excited to share how those things shape up in the new year—what I’ve seen so far is very encouraging!

This was probably the year I worked with the most people outside my direct group of day-to-day peers, and I’m really looking forward to doing more of it in the future.

Looking Forward to 2026

Adamiir (now known as Inheritor)

I just posted about Inheritor last week, so if you want more specific background on the project I’d go check that out. In it, I mention more specific timing coming in this article, so let’s dig into that.

My goal for Inheritor in 2026 is two-fold:

1. Provide playtest documents for chunks of rules set in distinct locations.

   For the magic rules, provide a playtest packet that includes everything necessary to play magical characters and a location that would interact well with them. For the downtime rules, make a packet that allows for new or past characters to be ported in and engage in that aspect of the game.

2. Have a content-complete “alpha version” sometime mid-year.

   The tail-end of the year is going to be more or less focused entirely on more commercial endeavors, like Mothership Month, Pocket Encounters (see below), or other surprises. So, that means Inheritor needs to get off the runway by summer.

I see Inheritor as being a phased project:

• The alpha version of the game will be the core rules and the region of the Mistlands—one of five total regions that make up the playable world. This will include the rules for creating characters, playing the game, ~30 keyed locations across a hex map, and a ton of appendices for magic, languages, currencies, monsters, etc.

  • Once we get here, the game will be set to $5 and no longer be available as Pay-What-You-Want. Anybody who has the game added to their library before that gets all future updates (even after Inheritor goes paid!) for free.

• Future versions of the game add more regions (the Echolands, Drylands, Fanglands, and Oldlands) and more appendices for reference. Here is where we add region-specific ideas (like new types of magic, ancient relics, different factions, etc.) Each addition to the game will be roughly the size of the alpha version, around 30 keyed locations and so on.

  • Each new release will bump the price up a bit. Again, if you download it during the pre-alpha phase you get all this for free.

In January, the first playtest packet “Iron and Blood” will be uploaded to itch.io.

I’ll be posting about it leading up to release, so stay tuned!

Pocket Encounters

Ah, my sweet Pocket Encounters. How I’ve missed you!

Yes, Pocket Encounters is still happening. Yes, DC Stow is still doing the art. Everything that got you hyped about it in the first place is still happening.

If this is the first you’ve heard about it, well, it’s a spiral notebook with 100 fantasy encounters suitable for old-school play. Each are illustrated by DC Stow and they’re heavily inspired by the work of ktrey’s (aka, D4Caltrops) hex project from a number of years back.

The goals with Pocket Encounters:

• Provide random encounters that can further be randomized—bumping 100 encounters upwards into the realm of tens of thousands of permutations.

• Don’t just provide combat encounters—from smart-mouthed minstrels to mermaid funerals to councils of woodland animals, offer more than the violent fare.

• Lots and lots of art—each encounter lavishly illustrated by the best-of-the-best, DC Stow, showing one possible permutation of the encounter.

This is a fun, simple project. Initially I tried to over-engineer the thing—but I think keeping it exactly what it says on the tin is the move. It’ll be crowdfunded over on Kickstarter most likely, though my experience with BackerKit the past two campaigns has somewhat drawn me in over there.

Expect more on this once we get the momentum on Inheritor moving and Certain Fathoms is largely fulfilled digitally. For now, you can follow the project here:

Follow Pocket Encounters →

Surprises

Can’t say the back-half of 2025 ended up where I thought it would—so it’d be dumb to assume I knew what 2026 had in store. I can say I want to do all of the following in fairly equal measure:

• Do another big collaborative crowdfunding campaign, whether it’s Mothership Month 26 or something else.

• Run a big Mothership freeplay campaign (like 20+ people) that uses A Pound of Flesh and Certain Fathoms.

• Run a Game Jam

• Play more games in public places (bars, libraries, parks, etc)

• Give more stuff away

• Go to a con

We’ll see where the new year takes us! For now, however, I’ve got to get back to work.

Thanks for reading.🟦

This article is brought to you by the following paid subscribers who make this newsletter possible:

• Azzlegog (Founder)

• Colin

• DSPaul

• Greg

• Jan (Founder)

• Marty (Founder)

• Michael

• Mori (Founder)

• Reed

• Steve

• Trevor

Let’s do a quick recap of the work done so far on my dark fantasy roleplaying game, Adamiir:

• A couple of years back, as a part of dungeon23, I started work on a nameless dark fantasy project. I created the mythology, world lore, and a high-level look at some of the factions in the setting.

• Later in the same year (after failing incredibly hard at dungeon23, barely making it out of January) I played Wolves Upon the Coast by Luke Gearing. I really enjoyed the structure of the game, from the rules to the way the locations were presented—and especially how treasure and monsters were handled in their own respective books.

• Last year, I revamped the project, naming it The Shattered Isles—only to rename it again later in the year to Ädamίr and, then finally simplifying it to Adamiir earlier in 2025.

And then, since May, updates quietly stopped.

Since then, though, I launched a Mothership Month crowdfunding campaign, brought home kiddo #2, had to say goodbye to a family pet, and experienced a whole slew of big, capital-L life events.

But that’s not to say I haven’t been working on it in the meantime.

Actually, quite the opposite: I’ve been working on it a lot.

Which leads to the first thing…

As I’ve been working on this project, I’ve been finding myself chafing against the Adamiir name. What first felt like a cool name that I could repurpose from an older project has now become a bit of an albatross around my neck.

A core task of game design is clarifying what your game is about—what it encourages players to value, even when their personal objectives differ.

In Mothership, this is survival.

In Dungeons & Dragons 5E, this is getting incrementally stronger and more heroic.

I’ve realized that what I want my game to be about is staking a claim on the world—whether it be by right, by greed, or by duty. Essentially, making a part of the world yours.

But in a dying world, there’s only so much to go around.

And there are a lot of powers out there that believe they alone are the inheritors of it.

So, to combat them, you must think of yourself in the same way.

Adamiir is now known as… Inheritor

Inheritor is a dark fantasy roleplaying game set in a dying world where characters seek to enact their will upon it and, potentially, escape the consequences of it.

It’s inspired by a whole slew of sources, some of which are listed below:

Games

• Cairn; Yochai Gal (2020)

• Caves of Qud; Freehold Games (2024)

• Dark Souls, Elden Ring; FromSoftware (2011-2022)

• Into the Odd; Chris McDowall (2015)

• Rain World; Videocult (2017)

• Traveller, Marc Miller/GDW (1977)

• Ultraviolet Grasslands; Luka Rejec (2019)

• Wolves Upon the Coast; Luke Gearing (2021)

Writing

• The Book of the New Sun; Gene Wolfe (1980)

• The Dying Earth; Jack Vance (1950)

• Elric of Melniboné; Michael Moorcock (1972)

• Vermis I, Vermis II; Plastiboo (2023-2024)

• The Worm Ouroboros; E.R. Eddison (1922)

• Zothique; Clark Ashton Smith (1970)

Here are some images to help give you an idea of the general vibes:

And a bit of history to help guide a new inheritor:

Long Ago, At the Beginning

SHE was born, alone, in eternal night. SHE saw the void that surrounded HER and the immensity of it and in that black night SHE saw empty spheres, or wastelands in the vast darkness like stones at the bottom of the greatest sea.

At once SHE knew a secret so dark and so terrible SHE wept. As SHE did, the fallen tears glittered; each invested with light with which to see markings upon the dead worlds of those who came before.

At once SHE knew a secret so dark and so terrible SHE raged. Summoned forth then was a great and terrible Light that shone in all directions, for all time, and from this Light HER tears glowed ever brighter, and their countenance became the stars in the skies above; whose Light revealed a dead world and its secret chambers of which their dead were kept in the number of thousands upon thousands.

At once SHE knew a secret so dark and so terrible SHE loved and with HER love SHE perfused the dead with Light so that they may tell HER what misfortune fell upon them. Of the thousand thousands, seven rose and they did not remember that which came before.

SHE promised to protect them as HER children, and named them, one and all, ELFIN.

- Passage I, Tablets of M’re

From Then to Now

In time, the Elfin Seven turned against one another, their hearts poisoned by enmity. Then came the Upheaval, a sundering that cast the world into ruin, and the Age of Ice, when all was sealed in cold and silence. Millennia passed before the Thawing, and with it, the rise of the Sages of the Sapphire Lyceum —seekers of knowledge, bearers of light in an age still shadowed by frost.

Then came the First Visitation.

And with it, the Shattering.

In the tumult came the Age of Argentum , by all accounts a time of peace and prosperity. A century ago, the Lords Argent stood in defiance of the invading Blackhands from across the Misted Sea in the War of Iron and Silver, their blades ringing in this world and the next. But when the Second Visit ati on came, the last of their kind were cast into oblivion, and the world was left adrift—once more and for a final time.

Now, under the fading sun, the starless sky, and the moonless night the world festers under the weight of history. The world that remains is yours.

What’s left of it, anyway.

The plan was to release by end of 2025—that still happening?

Uh, no—probably not. But what I would like to do is start regularly updating people on the mechanics of the game (not too dissimilar from what Chris McDowall is doing with whatever Intergalactic Bastionland is gonna be).

I don’t want to set a firm deadline on it—it’ll be ready when its ready after all—but I would think sometime mid-2026 is the goal. Next week, I will publish my 2025 recap article, so look for that for more concrete details on the timing.

But! I wanted to give a little peek at what’s going on here, so here’s a first look at Character Creation:

Creating a Character

A Character has three Attributes, each generated by rolling 3d6:

1. Physique (PHY), or physical prowess and health

   • A Character can have a number of inventory slots equal to their PHY.

2. Intellect (INT), or mental tenacity and learnedness

   • A Character can have a number of proficiencies whose values are equal to or less than their INT.

3. Ego (EGO), or metaphysical keenness and understanding

   • A Character can have a number of attunements whose values are equal to or less than their EGO.

Once attributes have been determined, a Character’s Foundations can be discovered. If running a one-shot or for tables that don’t wish to linger on character creation, Pregenerated Characters are available.

NOTE: Inheritor is a “roll-under” system.

Foundations

A Character’s Foundations represent the early truths, burdens, and shaping forces that define who they were before to determine who they are today.

The process of determining a Character’s foundations is separated into the following:

1. Origin: The nature of the Character’s birth.

2. Vocation: The training that made the Character.

3. Events: The obstacles that blocked the path of the Character.

Origin

A Character’s Origin determines which Starsign they were born under, each with their own permanent effect. All Origins add +10 Years to the Character’s age.

Vocation

A Character’s Vocation determines which equipment, proficiencies or attunements, and life events made them who they are.

Events

A Character’s Events are moment-to-moment decisions in their lives that made them unique.

NOTE: Because there’s going to be a LOT of these, I’m just going to highlight one of the event tables: Agrarian Events. My best estimate has probably 10 or so more in the final rules

Aging

When a Character reaches middle age, they risk the loss of physical or mental ability. Whenever years are added to age beyond 40, roll 3d6 for both PHY and INT:

• If the roll is above the Attribute score, the attribute decreases by 1.

• If the roll is equal to or below the Attribute score, it remains unchanged.

Once a character reaches the age of 50 and above, the 3d6 rolls made above are with disadvantage[-].

Above the age of 60, both attributes automatically decrease by 1 each.

Next time we chat about Inheritor, I want to discuss phases and turns—the core time-tracking elements of the game.

Until then! 🟦

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In the very first sentence of a keyed room or opening scene, I want the text to clearly signal what information matters, which of those elements are interactive, and provide an obvious, frictionless path to the section where each is expanded.:

In other words:

1. What is important?

2. How’s it shown that it's important?

3. Why is it important?

This feels pretty self-evident on its face. Despite what some might say, RPG text is meant to convey information to the GM, who in turn can manipulate that information into actionable insight for the players.

However—it’s very easy to think you’re doing this when in fact you’re doing the opposite. Almost universally, older modules are notorious for making it functionally impossible to find “information to turn into actionable insight” quickly. Even modules written in modern times in the tradition of those older games (eg, OSR) fail the same metrics.

The Problem

There’s a common excuse for this that is trotted out whenever you complain about these things. “It’s meant as a sandbox / toolkit! You’re meant to fill in the blanks with whatever you want!” Which is all fine and good, except that it isn’t explained which blanks are meant to be filled and which are meant to be left alone.

Take, for example, the Caves of Chaos in B2: The Keep on the Borderlands:

This isn’t even that egregious of an example, but you can immediately start to see issues once you look at the caves themselves: there are dead-ends everywhere. Are you as the GM meant to fill those with “information for actionable insight”—or are you meant to leave those blank as a hit to resources (be it rations, torchlight, or time)?

Looking at more modern examples, here’s the first level of Stonehell:

We’ve eliminated the dead-ends (or at least, we’ve keyed them) but now we have an altogether more complicated issue: there’s a metric fuckton of rooms. And not all of them are winners:

• 12. Graffiti-covered Room: Crude pictures & lewd slogans on the walls; remnants of an old fire; dust & webs. Empty.

• 25. Flaking Room: Sagging ceiling; flaking painted frescoes; loose rubble and debris. Empty.

• 39. Cave: Dripping water; phosphorescent moss. Empty.

What, exactly, are you as the GM meant to do with these once your players enter them?

Should you add detail to these rooms and make them important, or gloss over them quickly so that the players can move on? Let the players decide whether to stay here and camp, or forewarn potential threats?

“All of those are good options!”, you might say. Which is technically true, but it’s not exactly clear in any case which you’re supposed to go with (if any). This is doubly true if you’re new to GMing or the hobby in general.

All of this is to say, there's a clear and distinct lack of instruction from the many, many lauded adventures and modules on what exactly you’re supposed to do with the mountains of information they provide. Follow them to the letter and you can have a terrible time. Deviate too much from the content and you can still have a terrible time.

The Solution (Sorta)

Thankfully, many designers have learned this lesson and have begun to course-correct. While Old-School Essentials won’t win any awards for being fresh or innovative (it is, functionally, a game from the 80s after all), it does give its information in a way that is easy to grok and disseminate to the people at the table.

Here’s an example from early on in the Incandescent Grottoes adventure:

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Here we see everything we need to know about the first area, “Swimming Simians”. We have:

• Bolded text that corresponds to important pieces of information

• Subheaders of relevant, interactive elements

• Monster stats formatted separately from location text

• Page number references to places elsewhere in the adventure.

• A few examples of what happens when certain things go awry (for example, being loud around the monkeys).

That all said, there’s still room for improvement.

For instance, I’m not sure that bolding 46 words helps as much as it could if only half of them were instead. Similarly, some things are repeated, such as the reference to bubble moss allowing breathing underwater found in both the Chirruping Monkeys section and it’s own section just beneath it.

Another great example is found in A Pound of Flesh for the Mothership RPG:

We’ve got a ton of information here, but it’s separated in a way that’s easy to parse:

• Areas are clearly delineated from one another with ample space around them.

• NPCs and locations that have information on other pages are bolded in a different color than the otherwise interactive elements in each area (eg, Dozens of hollering Console-Cowboys vs huge scoreboard in 1. The Battlestations)

• Stats are easy enough to include inline, while also keeping to the same text color as the beings they relate to

Again, though, we have some minor missteps. The bolded text that is meant to be interactive, such as the “servers and terminals” and “datacache” in 2. The Canyonheavy Datacache, isn’t immediately clear what is interactive about them. Similarly, while not captured here, there are a number of bolded items in the module that absolutely could use another sentence or two describing how they function… or even just what they are.

The Actual Solution

Ultimately, I think when you’re writing or reading text to prep for your games, it’s helpful to keep three things in mind:

1. Cut, Cut, Cut

   There is almost always too much text. Remove anything that isn’t an immediately actionable detail you reasonably expect the players to interact with. If arson isn’t on the table, you don’t need to mention whether the temple is stone or wood.

   When you think you’re done cutting—cut again.

   Tip: Aim for discrete words or phrases, not full sentences.

2. Highlight

   Once you’ve isolated the details the players will actually care about, bold or otherwise emphasize them so they’re easy to scan at the table.

   Tip: Over-highlighting defeats the purpose. Emphasize only what you’re likely to forget—remember, that’s the whole point of this.

3. Extrapolate Closely

   Minimize page-flipping. If a piece of text requires another reference to make sense, that’s friction. Some exceptions exist (stat blocks, major locations), but ideally, everything lives on the same page.

   Tip: If you think something must live elsewhere, consider rewriting to avoid the reference.

Before we wrap up, let’s give an example of something to improve—again from A Pound of Flesh:

2. RECOVERY ROOM. Six dingy bunks where those who have just undergone augmentation can recover. The beds are empty except for one filled with a melted lump of horrific organic cybermods. Investigation reveals it to be a terribly mutated former human (Fear Save). Zhenya will tell you that this is becoming increasingly common. Something is infecting cybermods on The Dream. Use of the Recovery Room costs 100cr/day.

Cut, cut, cut.

2. RECOVERY ROOM. Six dingy bunks where those who have just undergone augmentation can recover. The beds are empty except for one filled with a melted lump of horrific organic cybermods. Investigation reveals it to be a terribly mutated former human (Fear Save). Zhenya will tell you that this is becoming increasingly common. Something is infecting cybermods on The Dream. Use of the Recovery Room costs 100cr/day.

Chunk it out and highlight.

RECOVERY ROOM

• 6 bunks (post-augmentation recovery)

  • 1 bunk: melted organic cybermods → mutated former human (Fear Save)

• Cybermods infected on The Dream; mutations increasingly common (Zhenya)

• Recovery Room Usage: 100cr/day

Ensure it’s all there.

• We know what the room is, what’s weird about it, what to roll, and what it costs.

• Zhenya is mentioned on the same page, so we’re good there too.

• The Fear Save is bog-standard Mothership fare, so we don’t need to reference any additional rules here. We could put in a page number if we’re worried we’ll forget how it works, but that’s going to be different for each GM.

Once you start doing this, you’ll notice just how much stuff isn’t important in the text as provided. Or, in the case of your own writing, how much time you can save by just giving the good stuff. 🟦

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Golem Productions didn’t arrive quietly, that’s for sure!

In less than a year, the two-person studio has gone from making waves in a Pirate Borg jam to delivering one of the more striking, fully realized indie TTRPG projects of 2025. With Ravaged by Storms, their art-forward approach, obsessive pre-launch prep, and unmistakable visual identity put them immediately on my radar of folks who seem to get it.

I sat down with Alexander Jatscha-Zelt—one half of Golem Productions—to talk about how it all started, why Pirate Borg became their creative home base, what it’s like running a studio as brother and sister, and where they’re headed next.

1. A big focus of your recent work has been on PIRATE BORG - what got you into the Borg-verse? Did you start with MÖRK BORG and go from there - or jump right into Pirate Borg?

Absolutely, we started with Pirate Borg. As creators, at least. And although I’ve read a few others since then, Pirate Borg was actually the first Borg game we bought and played. It may surprise you, but I haven’t played a single session of classic MÖRK BORG to this day. But of course I respect the game and its creators for what they have achieved.

So, how did I get into the Borg-verse? I learned about Pirate Borg when Free League was promoting it as their publisher. While I had no idea at the time how much I would get into the game, it immediately appealed to my inner child, who had always been fascinated by “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Okay, I thought, I’ll buy it for a nice one- shot or two. Well, it turned out to be much more than that. We just finished a two-year campaign.

2. You’re a two-person operation, working as brother and sister. Have you always been a close and creative team or is this something that has manifested in adulthood?

That’s right, we are siblings. But this kind of close collaboration is something new in recent years. Sabrina works in graphic design and her heart beats for thoughtful layout, expressive design, and strong narrative atmosphere. She’s our art director at Golem Productions, also responsible for our layouts and the whole visual identity.

Myself, I’ve been working in corporate communications and publishing for the last 10 years. So it’s only natural that I work with texts, in project management and marketing for Golem Productions. So, the division of tasks has evolved quite naturally.

Golem Productions has been around since early summer 2024, even though we started thinking about it two years earlier. And we’ve played TTRPGs together before, or the weirdly funny board-card role-playing hybrid Marching Order by Crumbling Keep.

3. One of the things that is quick to get noticed by the RAVAGED BY STORMS kickstarter is that the design / layout / art is really on point. How’d you get so much stuff put together before launching the campaign—and how much was done in-house versus hiring on artist collaborators?

One reason we decided to start with a Borg game is that it’s so art-heavy. There are hardly any repetitive spreads; instead, each one was considered individually and new graphic elements were created for it. But unlike many other Borg games, Pirate Borg is very clean and easy to use. I think the latest releases have been more influenced by the layouts of OSE or Mothership. We like that combination.

But to answer your question: everything was created entirely in-house and, of course, without AI. Just Sabrina and me. There is some public art in there, but all the original illustrations (over 40!) are hers. So is every layout.

This enabled us to ensure consistently high quality, but it required an enormous amount of effort. We started many months before the Kickstarter launch. After all, it’s our first crowdfunding project, so naturally we wanted to leave a favorable impression. Therefore, minimal waiting times have always been an important goal for us. From the outset, our objective was to do as much work as possible on our products before the crowdfunding campaign began to be able to showcase an almost finished product.

Will we continue to work entirely without other artists in the future? We are still discussing that. We will have to find a middle ground between ownership and feasibility. For example, in a future crowdfunding campaign, we might outsource stretch goals to collaborators.

4. From a quick look through your backlog, it seems like you guys have exploded onto the scene pretty recently (2024 by my research, could be wrong there!). Was there an event or specific calling that got you guys thinking “we need to start publishing our own stuff”?

That’s right, that was the beginning. Originally, we wanted to create an OSE adventure in 2022 that had something to do with golems. However, the only thing that ever came of it is today’s Golem Productions logo.

In 2024, specifically, the CABIN FEVER Jam for Pirate Borg by Limithron happened on itch.io, in which we participated and won “Best Adventure” with “The Way of the Worm.” It’s actually a funny story, because we got off to a very slow start in the jam and didn’t take ourselves very seriously at first, because we had been talking about creating something ourselves for over two years without any concrete actions.

And then suddenly people liked it. That’s when we knew we definitely wanted to continue!

5. We spoke before on how much work goes into the pre-launch of a crowdfunding campaign. Can you illuminate for readers what that process looks like the Golem Productions way?

It was a very strenuous process that took months, because we had to learn everything from scratch and are still learning again now in the fulfillment process. I don’t know if we have established our own process that differs so much from others, as we have often sought a great deal of advice and guidance from more accomplished creatives in the very supportive OSR scene.

We planned Ravaged by Storms well in advance and started working on it a good four months before launch, contacting printers and fulfillment partners early on. We had a small project plan for nine months, setting monthly goals and monitoring progress in terms of text, layout, and art, so that we would be as ready as possible by the launch date.

6. We both share our thoughts and opinions on OSR / TTRPGs in general on Substack! How did you find yourselves writing there and what’s the draw of Substack over other blog-writing platforms (or is there one)?

Yes, at the beginning of this year, apart from an itch.io page, we didn’t have a dedicated online presence other than our private channels. Not to mention a mailing list. While a publication like an adventure has to speak for itself and be convincing, I am also firmly convinced that in order to be successful, we need to be visible even as an indie creator and interact with our audience. I therefore thought it likely that our Kickstarter would fail if we simply launched out of the blue without having made ourselves visible and accessible.

To this end, I rolled out our other channels at the beginning of the year, primarily Substack and BlueSky. However, I am also active on Discord, Reddit, and Facebook. Of course, this is not just about advertising, but also simply about participating in the communities.

Specifically regarding Substack: I know very few people here in Germany who are even aware of this platform. Perhaps it’s different in North America? In any case, I knew about it from Sean McCoy’s blog and was fascinated by the possibility of getting a blog and newsletter from a single source. It’s working well for us at the moment and I’m delighted with the interactions that are taking place.

However, I can’t claim to have such a good overview of the advantages and disadvantages of the other blogging platforms that I could give a complete assessment.

7. Recently, BackerKit has been attempting—and succeeding in some cases!—to get their foot in the door on the crowdfunding scene. What led you to launch your project on Kickstarter?

I am particularly impressed by the fact that BackerKit has introduced some serious innovations to crowdfunding: collaborative crowdsourcing in themed months (Mothership Month, Mausritter Month, OSE Month...), collaboration goals, freebies for following the landing page, wow …

I can well imagine using BackerKit in this context in the future. Events like this are really powerful. That said, I still think that Kickstarter appeals to a larger audience, has greater visibility, and strong networks. For individual projects like our last one, which are not financed in conjunction with others, I would therefore continue to rely on Kickstarter. But BackerKit is clearly catching up.

8. What’s next on the horizon for Golem Productions now that Ravaged by Storms is moving into fulfillment? Are you sticking in the Pirate Borg universe or moving to something new?

Yes, Ravaged by Storm is approaching fulfillment, but we still have a few stretch goals to work through that we promised for later in 2026. Beyond that, we will remain loyal to Pirate Borg as our foundation. However, we will no longer do everything on our own. Ravaged has also opened the door to collaborations. We do some of this as a duo, but in some cases I only provide words and Sabrina provides art. We are currently working on three different Pirate Borg projects that were initiated by other parties.

It’s quite clear, however, that we also want to broaden our horizons: both in our own projects and in collaborations. First, there’s the fantastically weird Wind Waker meets Waterworld RPG from the ECO MOFOS!! series called Islands of Weirdhope, which is currently being funded on BackerKit. There’s an official companion book called Four Fathoms Deep, basically a hardcover adventure compendium. We’re going to provide one of those official adventures, Neptun’s Heartstone.

Less concrete, but currently just a thought experiment: I would love to do something for Mothership and Dolmenwood. Probably in the form of a collaboration or a theme month. However, we cannot tackle everything at once. Especially since we also aspire to do more than just develop third-party content in the medium term. We definitely have the idea of developing our own game, even though these thoughts are still very much in the early stages.

9. What’s your favorite game you’ve ever played (video game, ttrpg, etc.)? Is it a different game for each of you?

Wow, that’s a tough one, after half a lifetime of gaming. Video games. Final Fantasy VII has remained in my memory from my childhood as something very special, like no other game. I have no idea if I would still feel that way today. Otherwise, I have to say that my various TTRPG groups over the last 5 years have been mostly fantastic. Among these, Coriolis: The Third Horizon deserves special mention, even though it is not an OSR/NSR game. I am currently running a campaign in its fifth year.

For Sabrina, For Sabrina, this is a (video) game she would love to experience again for the first time: Detroit: Become Human. Among TTRPGs, it’s Vampire: The Masquerade.

Good choices! Alexander, it’s been great having you. Thanks for hopping on for a chat!

Thank you so much, Nate, for having us! 🟦

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A few weeks back I got a surprise message from David about cross-collaborating on our upcoming BackerKit projects. I was happy to hear from him, and he was quick to note how similar in some ways our projects were - procgen mechanics, diving into weird scenarios, and generally just trying to break out of the traditional fantasy genre already widespread across the hobby (no shade, love me some orcs and elves and dwarves!).

Well, David held up his end of the bargain and posted my interview right around when Certain Fathoms launched (check the links on my home page), and now that his new project—Islands of Weirdhope—is live, it’s time for me to return the favor. We did something a little fun with our interviews in that we decided to ask each other the same questions.

If you want to compare and contrast, here’s David’s interview of me about Certain Fathoms:

David B.'s Newsletter

Maps make stories

Dan and I have been gettting deep in the weeds with the new book, and part of that was turning ideas, prompts that I’ve written to inspire ideas for islands, into images. And something magical happens in that process, of transmitting an idea from one brain to another and seeing what comes out. And one of th…

Read more

8 months ago · 25 likes · Copy/Paste Co-Op

Let’s dive in!

Well David, it’s your turn: what attracts you to the Weird?

I think weird is something that RPGs do really well. You can set up a situation that feels very normal, pedestrian, an then inject just a little twist into it, like a cloud that looks a bit like a leering skull, and suddenly the atmosphere at the table changes.

It’s why Call of Cthulhu and games around the Cthulhu mythos endure, alongside horror like Mothership. It’s a balancing act, because if everything is weird, suddenly nothing is and you have a gonzo situation, but if you get it right it’s a total sweet spot for me.

We live in uncanny times. I think the increasing fascination with the weird reflects that.

That sweet spot between gonzo and comprehensible weirdness is a good spot to be. But coming up with weird stuff that’s consistent and, well, good, is also pretty hard. Is that what draws you to procedural generation in your designs?

I came to procedural generation from two directions at once.

One direction was GM burnout.

I was running a long running D&D campaign and just doing so much prep, and when I brought it to the table it started feeling dissatisfying because either I’d know how it would all pan out, or, more likely, the players would do something completely unexpected and I’d end up essentially improvising.

The other direction was wanting to be surprised as a GM, to become more of a player at the table, and interpreting prompts to create the next moment felt intriguing. I’d been playing about with Chris Bissette’s Wretched & Alone system, a solo game system where you get prompts from playing cards, and thought why not see how that could work for generating scenarios in a group game?

I tried it for my game Lost Eons, and a solo iteration called Lone Eons, and really refined it in Eco Mofos. It’s an incredible way of sneaking lore and setting onto the table, as players and GM just find out about the world through experiencing it.

You’ve mentioned a few systems here so far; DND, Call of Cthulhu, Wretched & Alone… what are a couple of your favourite modules?

One of my favourites is Wet Grandpa by Evey Lockheart.

It was the first module I’d read that made me realise you could imply an entire setting in a module. It’s so literary and strange, with lots of NPC narrative that the players may not even get engaged in, and a truly weird dungeon that takes a strange 1800’s American South setting and takes it into the mythological realm. I’ve heard criticism of the mechanics of the module but for pure atmosphere and ideas, it’s excellent.

Another is Luke Gearing’s Gradient Descent, but I’m not sure it really counts as a module, it’s absolutely immense! The way it seeps lore to the players through random events, and undermines ideas of humanity and agency is so interesting. This obviously can be problematic, but with a table that is open to exploring heavy themes I think there’s nothing like it.

For the folks at home, nothing you mentioned fits in the trad fantasy genre. It’s safe to say that medieval fantasy dominates the hobby. What is there to gain by stepping out of that genre for RPGs?

Fantasy is so all-pervasive, working in sci-fi or sci-fantasy opens up the potential for real surprise and wonder again.

Fantasy has become such a hotch-potch of influences, it can become like a bland soup. I think there’s still loads to explore there if you really lean into a particular vision of fantasy, like the folklore of Cairn 2e, but I feel like there’s so much left to explore in near-future settings.

I think the familiarity of the future world can also add to immersion, and the reality of the space, like seeing the fallen Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of The Apes.

I’ve found the same. There’s something very grounding about seeing things in game that you as an IRL human understand. On the other end of the spectrum, though, what’s been your biggest surprise in writing/playtesting?

My favourite moments so far have been in the creative process with Daniel Locke, my partner at Copy/Paste Co-op, how things emerge that would never have been thought of if each of us was working separately.

For me that’s when things get interesting, mashing up ideas from Akira, Moebius and Fist of the North Star with Dan’s beautiful Saturday Morning Cartoon sensibility. It feels like this image came from a weird other place haha!

For sure! Thanks, David, for your time.

It’s been great talking to David through the success of both our projects—mine coming to and end and his just beginning. If you haven’t, please go check out Islands of Weirdhope. It’s a trip—you already know it is! The art in this article comes from it!

I have no doubt in my mind that David and the entire Copy / Paste Co-Op team have a hit on their hands. Thanks for reading!🟦

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It’s not a new blog series (though, stay tuned for more on that in the coming days—I’ve got Zemaryrh AND other stuff).

It's not anything I even saw coming this year, after missing the opportunity to join in on it last year.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is: I feel pretty stupid talking about my work this way. It feels fake. It feels like I’m marketing to you (because I kind of am) or trying to get you to buy something (because, again, I kind of am). Unfortunately, the reality of making things and the dream of making enough of those things to keep the lights on necessitates a bit of showmanship.

I’m sure if you're a creator, you’ve felt this before. The overwhelming sense that you’re a fucking sellout, man! But you GOTTA sell to survive. The creator who doesn’t sell their work is a hobbyist.

And there’s nothing wrong with that!

But I want to be doing this for a the long haul—and that means getting more time to do THIS rather than the old 9-to-5 I’ve had my whole life.

Which leads back to the problem. And believe me, I’ve tried to work around it.

Let’s start with the blog itself. I don’t offer any paid benefits on this newsletter (and in fact are planning on sunsetting my paid subs soon—more on that later!) and I try to make sure everything is downloadable and accessible for free. I feel like I've mostly got that right, and at 80+ articles, that’s pretty good!

But this is different. This is tangentially related to my blog, but not really. It has nothing to do with fantasy or dungeons (per se).

But I think it’s cool, and I hope you do too:

Yes, I’m launching a Mothership RPG module—based on Emmy Allen’s wonderful Stygian Library and many other fantastic inspirations. It goes live next Tuesday, October 14.

• If you’re a bit worried about our AI-dominated future, this is the module for you.

• If you’re horrified about the concept of body-swapping, this is the module for you.

• If you like buried corporate secrets and inter-company drama, this is the module for you.

• If you like weird factions trying to kill each other and potentially unmake reality(?!), this is the module for you.

There are a ton of things you get for simply following the project before launch next week. That's right, FOLLOWING the project—you pay nothing and get free stuff in exchange.

But one of the big things is that you get to get in on a few limited-time offers… first come, first serve.

And if that doesn’t move the needle for you, take a look at some of our goals:

Notice some names down there? Let me tell you that I am fucking STOKED to get some fantastic collaborators if this thing takes off.

Last time I talked about this I shared some info on the different factions. Well, this time I can pull the curtain open a litttttttle bit wider.

Let’s just say that during the campaign, you won’t just be sitting around watching number do big; you’ll be deciding the history of the setting’s four factions in what I’m calling FACTION WAR, a community ARG:

And so on.

And so on.

And so on.

Friends, if you like what I do over here on the blog, I humbly ask you to give the project a follow over on BackerKit.

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See you down… at Certain Fathoms!

I’m a graphic designer by trade. I went to school for it because my whole life doodling pictures and reading comics, crystallized very early on that I needed to do some kind of art as a career. I just knew that I didn’t want to be destitute and surfing couches, so design seemed like a happy medium, and I chose it as my speciality in college.

Once there, we had a professor arrive at the beginning of our third year, whom I had an affinity towards. He expressed things in a way that made design feel less like echoes of the Bauhaus movement and more like a way of interacting with the reality we inhabit.

After graduation, I learned that many of the lessons he taught us were, in fact, from his teacher at the Cranbrook Academy of Art: Elliott Earls.

Earls has a YouTube channel with truly useful design knowledge. I don’t agree with everything he puts out there, but I appreciate how it challenges my view on design and what design means.

One of his videos talks about critique. Critique, in art school, consists of the artist putting their work up in a gallery-like space for their peers and instructors to discuss formally. At my school, critique took around 3-6 hours to get through all 20 of us. We would put the work up, discuss how it made us feel, talk about what worked and what didn’t, and then move on to the next work.

Earls suggests that this model is inherently flawed and that, instead, critique should (or just naturally does) mirror the foundational structure found, surprisingly, in music synthesization.

In music synthesizers, an envelope describes how a sound changes over time, broken into four stages:

• Attack: how quickly the sound begins.

• Decay: how it settles after the initial burst.

• Sustain: the level it holds as long as the key is pressed.

• Release: how it fades when the key is let go.

You may already see where I’m going with this. 😉

RPGs, like music, are collaborative engines of synthesis. After reading and interpreting a scenario, a GM either writes one or brings a pre-written one to the table, describes it to the players (who in turn interpret it in their own way), and synthesizes those two approaches to create the rest of the game.

And games, much like music, have their own forms of attack, decay, sustain, and release.

Breakdown of Phases

🟢 Attack: Initiation

In a roleplaying game, we can interpret the attack phase as how the session begins. These can be slow or fast, looking very different depending on which you choose:

• A fast attack might be:

  • In medias res.

  • A chase, a fight, a cold open.

• A slow attack might be:

  • A soft open in a tavern.

  • A cutscene without the players.

  • A gentle re-entry after a long break.

The speed of the attack dictates the shape of what comes next. A fast opening demands a fast transition, while a slow one needs space to breathe. This directly correlates to…

🟡 Decay: Interpretation

When the GM opens with the attack, the players need time to (a) understand what was told to them and (b) synthesize that information with the options they have available to them. This is the decay phase—the moments before a core play loop is established.

This can be some (or all) of the following:

• Players digest what just happened.

• Rules get clarifed.

• Stakes are set.

• Table chatter shifts from meta to in-character.

The decay is the moment players orient themselves within the fiction. It’s how the energy of the opening begins to flow into consistent motion. It sets the basis for how the remainder of the session (or campaign!) are going to play out.

If there is buy-in during the decay phase, there will be buy-in in all subsequent phases. If there’s confusion and dissatisfaction, it collapses.

🔵 Sustain: Play Itself

The sustain phase is the entire rest of the game:

• At the session level, sustain is the minute-to-minute rhythm: player actions, GM responses, mechanics resolving, world reacting.

• At the campaign level, sustain is the enduring interplay between intent and improvisation. The game text will be changed by play.

At the ground level, this can be abstracted into pacing (more on that by clicking here). But ultimately, sustain is the core element of RPGs and is what makes them games.

It’s the core repeatable loop that actually makes the gameplay.

🔴 Release: Closure

All things end, whether it be a grand finale or a silent ghosting. In the release phase, we leave the fiction, return to the meta, and agree that play is over. Not all releases look the same:

• Release can be abrupt: a TPK, a rage quit, a shoddy internet connection.

• Or it can be gradual: post-session reflection, downtime play, a final epilogue.

Something that comes and goes quickly can feel cheap, which can lead to nobody at the table taking anything seriously. Conversely, a release that lingers too long can feel overly melodramatic or like overindulgence.

This is a diagnostic, not a hard and fast rule!

You can’t prep for everything. Nor should you. But thinking in terms of ADSR can help you:

• Understand pacing problems

• Diagnose awkward transitions

• Adjust energy in real time

• Match tone to tempo

If you’re preemptively setting attack phases and trying to write in how long your sustain phase is going to last, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Instead, try thinking of this more like a diagnostic utility that helps find issues during and after play. 🟦

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In the early days of the pandemic, the blogosphere was abuzz with suggestions for “cheap tricks” for GMs to implement in their games.

These “tricks” were less typical advice, like saying “yes, and…” or protecting player agency, and instead were more things like “use your hands more” or “when in doubt, just roll dice—even if they aren’t doing anything.”

I loved this concept—so much so that I’ve been taking that advice, adding to it with my own thoughts, and writing a list of tricks to implement at my table(s).

So here’s a list of what I think are around 100 ways you can improve as a GM. I’ve organized them into the following broad categories:

• Adjudicating

• Characters

• Combat

• Consequences

• Creatures

• Descriptions

• Dungeons

• Rewards

• Players

• Puzzles and Traps

• Social Interaction

• Travel

• Worldbuilding

Where possible, I’ve attributed the original author of the tip. Because I gathered these five years ago or so, many are missing attribution but I’ll come back around and add it when I can.

Expect this list to expand over time and be sort of a live document.

Adjudication & Delivery

Body Language

• Talk with your hands. “The spider crawls creepily” is eh; “The spider crawls around like this fingersome gesture” is better. [Spiceomancy]

• Talk with your body. When I really need to get in character, I get out of my chair. Sounds silly, but it helps. [Spiceomancy]

Pacing

• As a GM, you dictate where the camera is pointed at all times. If there are boring parts you'd rather skip, you have the power to do so. [Sahh]

• Unless you're learning the game for the first time, don't pause the game to look up rules. Make the call the players want you to make, then get a rules lawyer to look it up while you continue the flow of the game. [Rise Up Comus]

• Similarly, if you can make a ruling and move on, do so rather than grinding the game to a halt. That way, you're not taking everyone out of the fiction in order to hunt down a rule you're unsure about. [Sahh]

Rolling Dice

• When in doubt, roll a d6. If the number is higher events are favorable to the players, lower and its bad for the players. Super handy oracle. [Cosmic]

  • The 2d6 reaction roll/morale check is one of the greatest tools given to humankind. I use it for all “psychological” things: does the guard fall for the player character’s lies * ? Is the captive intimidated by the threats? [Eldritch Fields]

• Resolve games of chess, blackjack, etc. with a single die roll. All you need is “how good are you at this game” and “are you playing safe or risky” to adjudicate. [Spiceomancy]

• When in doubt, roll some dice. The least it can do is stall a few seconds so your intuition can catch up to you, the most it can do is define your game plan going forward.

Rulings

• When you make a ruling, explain your justification out loud. If you're targeting a random person, tell the players the stakes before you roll. "OK, evens the wyrm goes after Faust but on odds it'll go for Drena even though she's on the ground." [Rise Up Comus]

Characters

Engaging with PCs

• Have some NPCs that are nice, have them invite players to tea, show them hospitality. It'll make the dangerous and duplicitous parts of the world stand out more and endear NPCs to players. [Cosmic]

  • Colliery to above, have weird or scary NPCs that are nice. Nothing makes an encounter memorable like a giant eldritch demon-spider inviting players to a tea party. [Cosmic]

• Have NPCs who hold grudges and act upon them. That street thug the players slighted is going to jump them with his buds the next time they come into town. [Cosmic]

Flavor

• Flags, symbols, and badges are cool. Give your bad guy a badge. [Phlox]

• Something with multiple names is cool. Give important people and places epithets, nicknames, courtesy names, and true names. [Phlox]

• It has already been said; young, female, or outcast NPCs are easy to love. The inverse is true; old, male, socially advantaged NPCs are easier to hate. [Spiceomancy]

• Strong, gay, woman. Pick 2 and your players will love them.

• Pathetic, non-human, funny voice. Pick 2 and your players will love them.

• Put at least one big buff boisterous man who sounds like Brian Blessed in your game. [Cosmic]

• Give NPCs tics like eating something, chewing on something, fiddling, tapping, pacing, and so on. It characterizes and is easy to remember to include in description. [Cosmic]

• Let NPCs be overly enthusiastic and brash. Remember that some people are in fact the kind of person who'd join a bunch of strangers in doing something dangerous and stupid. [Cosmic]

• Talking animals/objects are universally hits.

Place in the World

• Get it in your head that the average inhabitant of your setting isn't some boring neutral. They are, generally, provincial, cunning, passionate, and concerned with the mores of the land. They are quick to try something and to join something. This makes a lot of incidental encounters more dramatic. [Phlox]

Relationships

• Everybody has a family. Give NPCs filial connections to each other. Have widows of dungeon massacres put bounties on the party. Have the family of dead party members assist their old friends. [Phlox]

Combat

Ending Combat

• Sometimes fights should just devolve into cartoonish masses of flailing limbs that resolves when the dust clears. [Cosmic]

• Have combatants surrender when combat starts to slog and only a few dregs are left fighting. It’s better to end a fight early than have a fight go on too long.

• Asking "Describe how you finish it" when the player would drop a monster is great for 3 reasons. 1) Opportunity for the player to give a cool description 2) Opportunity to be non-lethal ("I tie it up!") 3) Evil GM trick: If the monster needs some special gimmick (e.g., stake to the heart, decapitation, fire) to kill it, it doesn't actually die unless the PC specifically says it. [Rise Up Comus]

Initiating Combat

• Let players, NPCs, and monster all get caught out in the middle of public of doing things..... [Cosmic]

Pacing

• At the start of combat, roll a d4. In that many rounds, something (usually something bad) will happen. Really puts the pressure on.

Roleplaying in Combat

• Ask players spooky questions in combat. When they fight a giant snake, ask if they're looking in its eyes. They'll be all "oh damn, I guess not." [Phlox]

• Throw in little details to spice up combat. Instead of the player just successfully hitting their opponent, they press the advantage, causing the brigand to slip on a patch of moss, and surely driving their blade into the brigands heart. And so on. [Cosmic]

Signals

• Strong enemies with obvious weaknesses. [Phlox]

• Weak enemies who cleverly secured an advantage for themselves. [Phlox]

• NPCs that hit 0 HP aren’t dead, they’re just helpless (disarmed, KOed, socially cowed, etc.) Make it clear that nonlethal options are always on the table. [Spiceomancy]

Consequences

• Sometimes, having the consequences of a fight, such as being beaten up and robbed of all their belongings, is better than death. Everyone hates getting their stuff stolen. [Cosmic]

• Have players get stuck, in squeezes, on thorns, in mud, and so on. As consequence, hinderance, and flavor. [Cosmic]

• Sometimes a consequence is that your clothes are filthy and you stink and nobody wants to talk to you. This is a good way to get players to slow down and the world to feel a bit more lived-in.

• Give players split-second moments of reaction as things go bad, traps go off, bushes are sprung, wrong levers are flipped, and so on. [Cosmic]

Creatures

Animals

• Animals are cool. Use them to reskin stock fantasy shit. Crocodilian dragons w/ deathroll attacks and swordswallows picking their teeth. Hippo+tiger+crocodile chimera. Burrowing owl goblins. Mindflayers but they’re axolotl who can grow limb buds on anyone they look at and control them. [Spiceomancy]

• Sometimes, the biggest possible animal is scarier than a supernaturally giant animal. [Phlox]

• Sometimes, a lot of small animals are scarier than a really big animal. [Phlox]

Monsters

• Small tweaks to the monsters of an area can do a lot for mood. Got a dungeon full of undead? Drape them in plants. Got a dungeon full of goblins? Give them birds or copper armor or woodworking talent or or or [Phlox]

• Take a normal monster and change one feature to make it seem interesting. A cowardly troll covered in unhealed burns. A cyclops that sees six seconds into the future. A skeleton but it has a wasp's nest in it. [Rise Up Comus]

• Players love it when some random goblin has a goal that the other ones don't. Maybe it has a vendetta against someone or it just wants to steal your purse and run in the middle of the fight. Hilarious. [Phlox]

• If a monster entry says it's immune to something, try to think of the in-fiction reason for why this should be. The classic D&D gargoyle is immune to nomagical weapons, and I can only assume it's because a sword can't cut through stone very well. The way that should work, and the way a wise DM should run it, is that the gargoyle is immune to weapons that can't hurt a gargoyle. Maybe that's most normal weapons, but a sledgehammer or at least a pickaxe should work. Magical weapons that enhance your puissance without augmenting the physical force of your attacks should be no more effective against the stone creature. The idea behind this principle is to turn a gamey mechanic into an in-universe quality, something that the characters can think around without getting no-selled by a blanket restriction. [Phlox]

• Giving monsters (and NPCs) a gimmick upon death (like exploding) is good fun. Especially if more than one entity has it allowing players to learn it and potential exploit it. [Cosmic]

• Easy way to make monsters unnerving is to put human teeth and/or eyes where they’re not supposed to be.

Descriptions

Actions

• Don't forget that teeth can be just as useful as hands. [Cosmic]

• Sometimes simply repeating what the player wants to do back at them slowly is enough to have them question their idea. “I want to attack the leader.” “You want to… attack the leader?” “Well, shit, maybe not!”

At The Table

• Use as many generic tokens as you can when you need to represent stuff on a tabletop to prevent all your great descriptions falling flat because the players are clearly seeing that you just placed down generic goblin miniatures #1 - #6 on the table. Personally I've come to like chess pieces as tokens in my online games since they are distinct enough without betraying any solid information on what they represent. [Sahh]

Atmospheric

• Hair standing on end is handy for conveying powerful magic... or electricity. [Cosmic]

• The character’s physiological reactions to stressful events are a valuable point of description. Burning lungs, heartbeat pounding in the ears, muscles sore and torn, face going beet-red.

Creatures

• A list of twenty animals is a great all-purpose random generator. I use it to quickly generate:

  • Random NPC quirks or appearance (fidgety like a mouse / proud like an eagle / lion-maned / walks like an elephant)

  • Random mutations or powers (acquire tiger stripes / wolf fangs / octopus tentacles), roll twice or thrice for chimeric monsters (antlered snake / winged bear thing / lizard-scaled chicken that hides in a snail shell)

  • Create a place name (Fox River / Gerbil Mountain)

  • Random visual details (lion-shaped knocker / snake-shaped dagger)

  • Spell ingredients (eyes of bat / scales of catfish)

  • ... and so much more. [Eldritch Fields]

• Describe what monsters look like, not what their name is. A goblin is much grosser when it's "a stinky little guy about the size of a 3 year old but with bat ears and it has most of what-was-once-a-rat in its fanged mouth". [Rise Up Comus]

Magic

• Ask the spellcaster what their Magic Missile spell looks like. Is it a purple flash of lightning? Is it a tornado of teeth? Does it leave behind the smell of sulfur, ozone, or rosewater? [Eldritch Fields]

• Monsters, spells etc are much more mystifying and interesting when you don't immediately blurt out their names when speaking about them. Let the players name these things and stick with those names yourself for extra fun. [Sahh]

Mundane

• Get one step more specific when describing materials. Instead of "stone," "limestone." Instead of "wood," "pine." [Phlox]

• Don't forget to describe what languages sound like in addition to what's said. In general terms of course, don't go full conlang. [Cosmic]

• Describe food a bit, even if it’s just a simple tavern meal or some campfire cookery. Tubers, roots, mushrooms and wild herbs make for great detail. A meal with an unusual ingredient can be like a rumor or hook (“yeah, we use this herb to flavor our food, but some say it can also cure blindness”). [Eldritch Fields]

• Be like Shakespeare. Use real-sounding fake words to flesh out the world, both in NPCspeak and in descriptions. [Spiceomancy]

• There should be crates, barrels, or otherwise mundane receptacles strewn about wherever possible. It encourages elevation play and looting. Same for plant/fungal growths to be harvested.

Names

• Play with the juxtaposition of mundane names against fantastical ones. Bernard the Dwarf, Jim the Goblin.

• Sometimes, you don’t need to try that hard on small details. Sheriff Beriff and Mr. Placeholder are equally as memorable as Symarin Esre, or moreso. Lint Jehovah is a name that a real person could have and its just two words put together. You can always go back and flesh them out later. [Spiceomancy]

• Get really good at mashing syllables together in your head. If you can make names for NPCs or locations on the drop of a hat without aid of generator or list, you’ll have a much easier go of things. Kerukhazat. Melichor. Vessindin-Chesleaz. I have no idea who or what those are, but they emerged from the brain soup and they’re here to stay.

Sound Effects

• Sound effects/accents virtually never hurt and often help. I’ve had an encounter with a mechanical spider go from doldrum to hair-raising just because my players didn’t like the metallic clicking and shuffling I did every time the spider shivered in its malaise.

World and Locations

• Locales, people, and monsters are almost universally improved by the addition of some incongruous element you wouldn't normally think of. [Cosmic]

• Describe the world with your 5 senses before resorting to symbols. My last big bad was heralded by the smell of detergent and raw meat. [Spiceomancy]

• Avoid “just a (temple/tavern/office/corridor)” as often as possible. This is a sin I fall to often, but just one remarkable detail is all you need to crystallize a memory.

Dungeons

Exploration

• Put a lever in your dungeon somewhere. A PC will probably pull it, and then you can have something wild happen. [Phlox]

• Put things under stairs. It makes sense, it's memorable, and players will stop thinking of stairs as warp pads to the next map. [Phlox]

• Draw pictograms of a dungeon room’s contents onto the main map so you can try to run it without having to check a key. Even if it’s too complex to recall from doodles alone, it’ll sure help you either way.

• Don’t put in a door trap (poison dart, scythe, spikes, etc.) unless you want the players to question every single door forever. Some things just aren’t worth the hassle.

• Color-code things. Brass key? Goes in the brass lock. [Phlox]

• Secret doors, hidden pockets, and so forth should always have some outward sign in the description letting you find them. They should be easy to see if someone is paying attention. [Cosmic]

Monsters

• Put a dragon in every dungeon. A dragon is anything powerful and secretful and recognizably lethal. just put more dragons in your game, period. [Spiceomancy]

  • Why do you not have a dragon in literally every dungeon you make? You fool. You simpleton. [Rise Up Comus]

• When exploring an area with low amount of encounter/wandering monster rolls, roll wandering monster check as well as the dice that determines the encounter table entry at the same time. If the wandering monster wasn't triggered then give an omen instead of that creature being in the area. This gives the impression of the area not being deserted even if no monsters are being encountered. [Sahh]

Social Exploration

• Put noncombatant camp followers in the dungeon. Gives the PCs someone to talk to, technically aligned against them but full of useful information and possible persuadable. [Phlox]

• Travelers on the road might buddy up with players for a while if their going in the same direction. Especially for safety and conversation. [Cosmic]

Maps

• Create quick maps by taking an existing place, rotate it by 90°, stretch in one direction by 150%, done. Very good for natural looking coastlines. [Eldritch Fields]

• Give your players an in-character map. Seriously. Choosing the routes gives players an interesting decision point and discovering the room contents is fun. Saying "Wait, you said TWO exits on the north wall? I gotta redraw" is less fun. [Rise Up Comus]

  • You can still have secret rooms. Seeing the "gaps" on the map and finding the door will make players feel smart. [Rise Up Comus]

Rewards

Agreeing to Rewards

• When you do use NPCs to hire the party to play the game, don't bother to have a tedious haggling scene. Just give a vague assurance that they will be paid approximately handsomely or that the local lord will owe them a favor (a far more interesting prize). If they worry about it, assure them this is how it's done in this part of the world.

Mundane

• Concealed weapons and hidden pockets are excellent fun for both players to have and NPCs to use. [Cosmic]

• “I owe you one” is one of the best rewards an NPC can give to players. [Eldritch Fields]

• If you give your players a vehicle, which is always always always a good idea, let them name it, and have them each go around and name one of its idiosyncrasies. Maybe the barnacles on the bottom of the boat are shaped like skulls, or the caravan has square wheels that inexplicably work as normal. Investment in the vehicle immediately skyrockets, and they will 100% come up with cooler things than you.

• Non-monetary rewards are cool. Give a PC a byname (e.g., "the Troll Slayer"). Give a PC a spouse (e.g., "The duke offers his daughter's hand). Tell the PC that the necromancer "owes you one." [Rise Up Comus]

Relationships

• Marriage is a great reward for completing an adventure. "Thanks for returning the Orb of Auremis, would you like to have me as an ally and my handsome son as a cool minion/spouse you buy gifts for and all sorts of plot hooks?" [Phlox]

Setting Up Quests

• Old modules used to have treasure maps as common loot. This is a great idea. Remember to do this every time. Put it on your checklist. [Phlox]

• The greatest secret of all is that the reward a quest-giver offers for going into the dungeon is unimportant. Not only will players go into the dungeon regardless, because dungeons are fun, but it's much more interesting for them to find the bulk of their treasure in the dungeon itself. [Phlox]

World-Altering

• Let PCs take advantage of the big, setting-altering toys that the bad guys are trying to take advantage of. [Phlox]

• Give players a goodly but finite quantity of explosives. It will wreck so many things but its worth it. [Cosmic]

• Explosives or flammable things are always a good thing to find in a crate or barrel in a pinch.

Players

Above the Table

• Tell the players to be reckless, in a light and challenging way. Tell them to pull that lever. [Phlox]

• Talk with your players. Ask them if you can’t remember an NPC’s voice. Let them know if the session has taken an unexpected or uncomfortable turn. Remember, you are also a player. [Spiceomancy]

• Steal from your players. Ask them about their theories. Take notes when they speculate about what’s behind that locked door, or over the ridge, or for sale at the bazaar. Even Especially if they’re joking. (This is how we ended up with Mysterio the Mind Goblin). [Spiceomancy]

• If you’re not sure whether to roll, favor the players. Roll to avoid consequences. [Spiceomancy]

• Ask players to recap the session for you each time. a) This makes them actually take notes and pay attention. b) You can better understand the gap between your understanding and theirs. [Rise Up Comus]

  • When players help out with some of the tasks a GM normally does (like the recap, above) throw them a bennie. Giving them a reroll or something is free. [Rise Up Comus]

• "Please give me feedback" is too unspecific to be helpful. Take some time to ask for "highs and lows" between games. Each player says their favorite/least favorite part of the session/arc/campaign. [Rise Up Comus]

Offloading to the Players

• Trick players into doing your work for you. Give them dungeons to defend. Let them make up NPCs. When you don't know how to make a ruling, ask them to do it for you, and use it. [Phlox]

• Players are delighted by vague, harmless anachronisms. The Rusted Goat is the only place in the world where you can get waffles. Orcs invented funk music. “My Affections are Naught but for Lucy” is a hit Elvish comedy play-cycle.

• Occasionally asking "what does it look like as you do so?" can add a lot of flavor to things. Regardless of situation or character class. [Sahh]

• Offload some of the narrative load to the players as well. Ask them what they have heard of about the surrounding region when they enter a new area, ask them what happens during their nightly watch, let them describe the day they spent shopping in town before or after the book keeping is done. [Sahh]

• Players will make content and draw out conclusions out of the smallest details, you just have to remember to mention them. This is free real estate to base future adventures on. [Sahh]

Pacing

• If someone is taking their turn slowly and you want to keep momentum going, count down from 10. They’ll have something by the count of 7 nine times out of ten.

Player Characters

• “What are you looking for?” ← best question to ask any PC about anything. [Spiceomancy]

• “What’s their name?” ← second best question to ask any PC about anything. [Spiceomancy]

• To the end of encouraging players to manipulate things, there should be a good chance that the dividends of their experimentations reap positive results. Especially near the beginning of the campaign- condition them with the carrot so the stick isn’t as harsh.

• "How does your character feel about that?" is a great question to share the spotlight with someone who isn't directly involved in the action. [Rise Up Comus]

• When a player describes something they want their character to do, ask what are they aiming to achieve with that. This can make it much easier to adjudicate for the action as well as help solidify why and what their character is doing to the player, potentially bringing up reasons it might not work as well. [Sahh]

• "What do you have in your hands?" is the most important question you can ask. How can they pick a lock if they have a torch in their hand? How can they pick a lock if they don't have light? [Rise Up Comus]

• Don't have characters call spells by their rulebook names. Avoid doing so yourself when talking about what NPCs are doing. [Phlox]

• Introduce members of the PC's family and resist the urge to kill them for dramatic effect. "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" produces a stronger emotional reaction than "Oh no your dad is dead." [Rise Up Comus]

Setting Up Mysteries

• Give players unreliable information, but let them know its potentially unreliable so they can choose to act on it or not. Out of date information especially is useful as players know its potentially going to be misleading but can they afford, or even get up to date info? [Cosmic]

• Generally, having the players go around the table and saying something pertaining to the matter at hand is never a bad idea. Why their character is in this jail cell to start the campaign, what they’ve heard about Sir Darkwyn, a piece of loot in the treasure hoard.

Prep

Generating Ideas

• Keep an ideas book. Record miscellaneous ideas and shower thoughts, plots from stories, interesting images, anything. If you number the entries, it is also a random table… [Eldritch Fields]

• Steal from other media. Paradoxically, the more things you steal from, the more original it will be. You could (un)charitably call my current campaign Castle in the Sky + Chrono Trigger + Hollow Knight + Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. [Spiceomancy]

• Steal from yourself. I keep a shortlist of joke NPCs that got good reactions the first go around and sprinkle them in as filler where appropriate. [Spiceomancy]

• Go on Wikipedia spirals as frequently as you can muster.

Handouts

• People like poring over long lists of equipment with the costs attached. Make one of those up or steal them from somewhere, not because its functional but because people like it. [Phlox]

Session Prep

• Every session, introduce one piece of information that you don’t fully understand yet. Fly by the seat of your pants; discover the world alongside the rest of the table. [Spiceomancy]

• Start the session’s narration with a reliable little ritual. “In the wine-dark waters of the Norrungardt ocean, an epic tale unfolds. When last we left our heroes...”

Tables

• An oldie but goodie: have a list of names. I’m bad at coming up with names on the spot. Do not just cross off the ones you use: make a not next to them about who is called this way (“Wank Hilliams – blacksmith the players are super obsessed with for some reason; snake-like in appearance”). [Eldritch Fields]

• Having a list of names, one name for each letter of alphabet, that you cross entries off of an replace them as they get used. Don't fumble with names every time the party meets a new NPC. [Sahh]

• Look up related words and describing words. Create tables for them. Use these all the time. [Eldritch Fields]

• Cannot undersell the importance of a good trinket/minor magical item table, especially if you have trouble improvising fun little items. Side note, my players were thrilled when they found a treasure haul containing a glass eye, bent needle, torn linen sheet, and an outdated anatomical textbook- weirdness over value.

• Good "I search the body..." table will keep going through random thugs' pockets interesting, potentially even creating new adventure leads. [Sahh]

Problems to Solve

Puzzles

• Players are engaged by puzzles, even really simple ones. If you put your treasure map on nine tablets and make the easiest possible jigsaw puzzle, the five seconds spent realizing that they need to arrange the map so the features line up will with time spent happily. [Phlox]

Riddles

• The key to a good riddle is "something the players know but one detail changed." Take a riddle from The Hobbit and change the wording around. Players'll feel smart. [Rise Up Comus]

Traps

• When designing traps and mechanisms, rely on the simplest possible engineering. It will be easier for you to describe and for the players to visualize. [Phlox]

Social Interaction

Giving Information

• Have players overhear NPC conversations more often as a way of imparting info. This helps make NPCs feel less like information-kiosks, and can let players in on details about hostile NPCs that they might not easily get otherwise (such as that these minions are dissatisfied with their boss). [Cosmic]

  • That said, distill these inter-NPC conversations to a summary rather than a beat by beat dialogue. Nobody wants to hear the GM talking to themselves for 20 minutes.

• Little dream sequences for characters can be fun (“I can say it again: ‘Some ideas arrive in the form of a dream’”). Especially lucid dreams. Recurring lucid dreams, where the character explores something step by step is also cool, but maybe it’s too much spotlight on just one person. [Eldritch Fields]

Unusual Situations

• Seriously just have more tea or coffee or brunch parties. Having discussions over meals keeps conversations with NPCs more interesting and can provide some fun set-pieces. They can even be tense or hostile. [Cosmic]

• Theatre and plays are fantastic ways to deliver information, world build, and have some fun. Also have your players exploits be turned into comedic theatre once they become sufficiently known. [Cosmic]

Travel

• For a travel montage, go around the table and have each PC name an obstacle they face on the road (driving rain, wandering skeleton, running out of rations). Then have them choose another PC to propose a solution and roll to see how well it works, then narrate what ultimately happens. Keep going until everybody has presented a problem and a solution, or until you think they’ve feasibly gotten to their destination.

Worldbuilding

Creatures

• Overemphasizing things can be good for some levity and to really reinforce an idea. 'It's a really big pig, like really really big, really really really big, this is just a whopping huge pig.' [Cosmic]

• Weird fish are a great way of adding subtle flavor to the world. Casually describe a fish market full of coelacanths and radiodonta. [Cosmic]

• Unconventional steeds are always a hit. This includes bears, giant snails, and horses who are kidnapped princesses of the horse kingdom. Also horses who are just absolute bastards. Name all of them. [Spiceomancy]

Language

• Make up plausible vocabulary and never acknowledge it. [Phlox]

• A small immersion detail you can add is to replace “heaven”, “hell”, and “god” with the setting appropriate replacements in NPC speech patterns. “Damn it all to Inferno!” “Saints help us all...” “Oh my Trennibar, you can’t possibly be suggesting we get voluntarily eaten by the rhinoceros?”

Locations

• Replace typical casino betting fare with snail races. All the snails should have names. [Spiceomancy]

• You can have multiple of the same biome, but generally, if you have multiple similar biomes of the same character, it starts to get boring. Sure, they may both be marshes, but one is cozy and the other is rotting.

Magical

• Astrological events are a great way to build time limits into your game, teach players about the world’s cultures, and cheaply create suspense and mystique. Best part is, there’s a bajillion of ‘em, so there’s no limit to the amount you can throw at the players. Same goes for holidays.

• Have a good grasp of how magic works diegetically. It’ll save your bacon often.

Mundane

• Describe what happens to leftover food, or prompt your players to. [Cosmic]

• Colors are a quick way to flavor and name things. The Purple Barony. The Greenfolk. So on. [Cosmic]

• In-world lurid or saucy literature and songs are good fun. [Cosmic]

• Slightly uncommon but historical currency names are great for flavor. Get some ducats in there. [Cosmic]

• Reference the characters’ smell after a few days of traveling. Telling them they stink will be enough for (most of) them to seek out a bathhouse or inn.

Oddities

• The Men In Black can fit into nearly any game. [Cosmic]

• Drugs > potions.

• Use graffiti and murals.

People

• Have crowds gather when players do unusual things in populated areas. Have them heckle and provide un/helpful advice. [Cosmic]

• There is never enough queerness in your setting.

• Each caravan or circus should have a fortune reader. Players love paying for tarot readings even if you have no real clue on how they should be done. [Sahh]

• Having customs that people in your world follow can make the world seem much more alive. Simple things like "always say a prayer when crossing a river or a body of water." [Sahh]

Stuff

• Give items, locations, objects, and such personalities. Perhaps as explicit spirits, or even just in a 'my rusty umbrella can be temperamental when I try to open it'. Anthropomorphizing things quickly fixes them in peoples minds. [Cosmic]

Technology

• Think of all the cool stuff we have now that we didn't have five hundred years ago, like eCigs and motorcycles, and find ways to translate them to your game's milieu. Maintain the cool factor. [Phlox]

🟦

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Ask ten different GMs what the most important skill behind the screen is, and you’ll hear a lot of good answers: improvisation, rules mastery, worldbuilding, acting, preparation.

In some ways, these all matter. But none of them matter as much as one thing:

The ability to manage the flow of the game.

Everything else—your prep, keyed hexes, and lovingly drawn maps—sits on top of this. If you can keep the game moving in a fun way, your players will forgive gaps in the rules, forgotten lore, or even the occasional fumbled dice roll.

If you can’t, no amount of detail or prep will save your game.

Why Pacing Matters

Think about the games that stuck with you: the ones where the group buzzed after, already talking about the next session. Those games didn’t necessarily have the most detailed setting or accurate monster stat blocks.

They were the ones where you never felt bored.

Players remember feeling something at the table—tension, excitement, laughter, relief. Pacing is how you build those feelings. Too slow, and players disengage. Too fast and they burn out. Good pacing hits the sweet spot where everyone feels like they’re getting somewhere and want to return for more.

The Three Layers of Pacing

Pacing operates on three levels at once. Think of them like gears in a machine:

1. Session Pacing. The rhythm of a single game night.

   1. Are you dragging out travel for an hour, or cutting straight to the action?

   2. Do your players get a mix of highs and lows, and do they have chances to breathe between fights and crises?

2. Scene Pacing. The beats inside a given encounter or roleplay moment.

   1. Do you keep dialogue moving, skip needless detail, and know when to cut a scene short before it overstays its welcome?

3. Campaign Pacing. The long arc of play.

   1. Do sessions build on one another, rising toward meaningful climaxes?

   2. Or does every week feel like a disconnected side quest?

When all three layers align, your table feels smooth as butter. When they don’t, you get uneven sessions where players leave unsure if they’re excited for the next game.

Let’s look at some of the common issues GMs can encounter when running games that throw off pacing.

Common Pacing Mistakes and Their Solutions

Most GMs don’t struggle because they lack imagination. They struggle because of pacing errors that quietly sap momentum.

Some of the big ones:

• Lingering too long on logistics. If your group is debating rations for 20 minutes, you’ve lost the thread.

  • Solution? Let the players debate their inventories or the general drudgery on their own time. Play time should be play time.

• Over-explaining. Description is good, but a two-paragraph monologue about a door knob isn’t.

  • Solution? Encourage your players to ask questions (and don’t punish them for doing so!) so that if you didn’t cover something, a player can ask for more detail on their terms.

• Entertaining everything. Sometimes it’s okay to say no to a player’s harebrained scheme. If you listen to everything as though every idea is gold, then none of them are.

  • Solution? A firm “no” can get you a long way, but the “no, but” or “yes, but” can be used sparingly as well.

• No breaks. If you only serve nonstop intensity, players burn out. If you only serve downtime, they drift.

  • Solution? We’re not 14 anymore! Adults need breaks. Err on the side of giving too many rather than not enough. Better yet, each hour of play, make sure to touch base with the group with a quick “How’s everyone feeling? Do we need a quick 5-minute break?”

• Never moving on. Some scenes just aren’t clicking. It’s better to cut early than bleed table energy dry. Some of the worst examples are combat scenes when one stubborn enemy won’t die or exploration scenes when confusion around the mental image of the scene stunts progress.

  • Solution? If the group is stuck, help them get unstuck. Tell them the answer as their friend, not their GM. If it’s not creating meaningful play opportunities—things that actively change the story or the characters in a long-lasting or critical way—then just skip the situation and move on!

Recognizing these habits is step one. Fixing them is step two.

More Tools on How to Master Pacing

Here are practical tools you can use right away:

• Watch the table, not the notes. Your prep is there to serve the players, not vice versa. Refer to your notes and keyed locations when needed, but if you notice eyes wandering or side chatter growing, change gears ASAP.

• Use the clock. Break your session into chunks: opening, middle, and closing. If you’re 90 minutes in and still on the “opening,” it’s time to move things along.

• End on a high. Always try to wrap up with a new complication. Cliffhangers, revelations, or successes allow Players to leave energized, not drained.

• Practice cutting. Don’t be afraid to say, “We’ll move on from this scene. ” Momentum beats realism.

• Mix tempos. Alternate between combat, exploration, dungeon crawling, roleplay, and downtime. Variety keeps energy fresh and ensures no one procedure dominates play.

• Check in often. Ask: “How are we feeling?” A quick pulse check gives you instant feedback. Players might want a break for the restroom or a snack. Something that got glossed over earlier might need some clarification.

Like any skill, pacing improves with practice. The more you pay attention to it, the more natural it becomes.

Don’t expect to nail these on your first go-around after paying attention to them, either! Unfortunately, getting better requires putting in the reps by running more games.

The funny thing about pacing is that players don't notice it when it’s done well. They remember the night felt great. That’s the mark of a good GM—not how loudly they perform or how thick their prep binder is, but how naturally they keep the game moving forward.

So if you take something from this article, let it be this:

Keep your eye on the rhythm of play.

Don’t get trapped in your own notes.

Don’t let scenes drag past their expiration date.

And don’t always mistake “realism” for “fun.”

Do that, and your players will always come back for more.

When I proposed building a collaborative world on Substack, I wasn’t sure how it would go. Maybe a handful of you would throw in votes or a few comments. I thought I would be lucky if I got around 10 people interested in the concept.

Instead, you came out in full force!

This is bigger than just me, with the reshares, likes, and nearly 80 comments. And that’s not even getting to the polls; nearly 150 of you voted across each of the three opening polls.

And the results were decisive enough to give Zemaryth its first shape:

• The Shattering of the Sky (34% of the vote)
  A calamity that shaped the Zemaryth all know today

• The Merchant Princes (36% of the vote)
  The power brokers in control of the current age

• The Nine Red Houses (45% of the vote)
  The seats of power over many, given to only the few

That foundation already feels alive. A world of broken heavens, gold-soaked decadence, and intrigue-drenched palaces is exactly the kind of canvas I hoped we’d create.

What Comes Next for Project Opulent

I think some folks thought I would take the results of these polls and spin them into my own lore, which I would then write back to you.

Thanks, but no thanks!

Zemaryth is meant to be a shared construction. That means your contributions—from one-line rumors to entire myths—will directly shape the setting. That collaboration, however, requires structure—a format that will facilitate banter, arguments, ping-ponging ideas, and more.

With that said, here’s my first stab at how I think it will work:

1. Chat Threads: As you may have noticed, I’ll regularly post open-ended discussion threads focused on a single topic (like the Shattering, the Princes, or the Houses). Each will include a few guiding questions and prompts, but feel free to take the conversation wherever intrigues you.

   Why Chat Threads? Because they allow for topic consolidation (people who want to talk Merchant Princes aren’’t getting drowned out by people who want to talk about the Shattered Sky) and they allow for search. They also don’t expire.

2. Contributions: You can contribute however you like—one proverb, a detailed backstory, an illustration of a character, or even a name. Small or big, all contributions matter.

3. Curation: After a week or so, I’ll do a follow-up post summarizing what the community has built. This means your comments will get canonized into usable lore: myths, d6 tables, play hooks, rumors, and more.

4. Iteration: Some ideas will contradict each other—that’s a feature, not a bug! In Zemaryth, truth is fractured. Disputed myths, rival cults, and contradictory histories all add richness.

Why This Matters

In the early days of RPGs, zines and shared campaigns thrived because people weren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty. Settings were rarely polished or final. They were living things, stitched together from table notes, house rules, and the half-legible photocopies mailed across the country.

The messiness was the point. Each addition, whether it was a dungeon map scrawled on graph paper or a new monster scribbled on a napkin, added texture to a world that belonged to no one and everyone at once.

This project is my attempt to capture some of that magic for our own corner of the hobby. Myths won’t always agree. Histories will clash. Merchant Princes will be both larger-than-life caricatures and grounded, human schemers. Out of those collisions comes vitality.

I doubt Zemaryth will ever be a tidy “setting book.”

Truthfully, I don’t want it to be, either.

It will be a mosaic of voices: myths layered over trade rivalries layered over ruins layered over scandal. Some layers will be polished; others will be rough and jagged. Some contributions will slot neatly into place, while others will resist coherence—and that resistance is part of the world, too.

If we keep at it, a year from now we’ll have something far stranger, richer, and more alive than any of us could have made alone. A place where your proverb, their map fragment, and someone else’s cult rumor stand shoulder to shoulder—woven into a
living archive of our collective imagination.

The real goal is to build a world imperfectly, collaboratively, and with a thousand fingerprints in the clay.

The First Threads

So let’s begin. By going to your messages and finding me (Grinning Rat), you’ll find the first three community threads:

• The Shattering of the Sky

• The Merchant Princes

• The Nine Red Houses

Jump into as many or as few as you like. Drop in one sentence or a whole essay. React to other people’s ideas. Build on them. Argue with them. That’s where the best sparks come from.

Together, we’ll find out what lives under a broken sky.🟦

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You sickos only thought I could get my freak on in pseudo-medieval fantasy, didn’t you? Feast your eyes, non-believer!

As you probably guessed, this week's article is an ad. Sorry about that, but it’s how it goes when you follow a game designer—sometimes they try to sell the games they make.

As followers on Substack, you get a little peek behind the scenes on how Certain Fathoms functions and how it plays out at your table. You’re getting the inside scoop - a much bigger look at what the module’s about than any other followers.

Don’t say I don’t love you. 😉

So, What is Certain Fathoms?

Certain Fathoms is my next big thing for the Mothership RPG—a depth-crawl set in the sludge-choked remains of Welkin Campus, a forgotten AI R&D megacomplex sunken beneath the Sink on Prospero’s Dream. Yes, that’s right—this is a third-party extension to the Tuesday Knight Games module “A Pound of Flesh”—fully approved by the big dogs themselves.

Guided by Miranda—a rogue AI wearing a human sleeve—crews descend into an ever-shifting labyrinth of prototype tech, failed experiments, and a secret best left buried.

Inspirations: Altered Carbon (2002), Ex Machina (2015), Destiny (2014), The Stygian Library (2018), and Gradient Descent (2020).

Promises: a massive location that changes on each visit, a patron NPC who trades credits and O₂ for enigmatic gear and intel, and several factions threading the megacomplex to complicate your best-laid plans.

Overview

What it is: a floor-by-floor crawl driven by a reality-bending elevator procedure. Each “stop” is a Destination—from personnel-scale spaces like the CognitoSim Lab to industrial-scale spaces like the Recycling Plant—overlaid with Anomalies (environmental weirdness, corporate ephemera, hostile logic).

As you wander the facility, potential random encounters called Breaches put pressure on the clock.

What you get:

• A shifting megadungeon. Return runs that don’t feel like repeats; the complex reconfigures beneath you.

• A clear patron loop. Trade in blacksite logs, cybermods, and paracausal curios to level up your crew with cash, oxygen, and access. Or keep the prototype tech for yourself and start working with some real firepower.

• Factions with teeth. Interlocking agendas you can exploit—or be crushed between.

Designer Notes: The procedures push new routes, new emergent stakes, and familiar rooms under unfamiliar conditions.

Hooks

Crews get an encrypted ping from Miranda: meet at the edge of the Old City. Failing that, rumors in the Choke and Doptown say there are creds to be made, O₂ to be had, and upgrades that evade the upper powers that be on the Prospero’s Dream station.

The only known entrance is in the Basement of a decaying admin building outside the Old City. Once vetted by Miranda, crews take the Black Elevator—a paracausal shaft with a magenta-glow touch panel—and begin the descent.

Why go?

• Earning Credits. Pull bounties for Miranda. Extract cybermods and slickware for resale. Fence data cores, blacksite logs, visual records. Everything in Welkin has a buyer.

• Finding Tech. Track Miranda’s marks. Install high-risk mods. Salvage derelict gear and defunct weapon systems. The lower you go, the stranger it gets.

• Learning Secrets. Uncover the purpose of YR-XII. Piece together the fall of Welkin. Trace Miranda’s origins and the limits of artificial intelligence.

• Gaining Control. Power still flows. Machines still move. Security reacts to unknown inputs. Take the infrastructure—with or without Miranda.

Designer Notes: The “Black Elevator” is diegetics pacing; a reset switch the Warden can lean on to shift between sessions. It’s also the subject of the digital freebie you get for following the project (completely free):

Follow the project

Procedures

The Basement is home base. Crews can talk to Miranda, take bounties, trade salvage, or crash. When ready, step into the Black Elevator and choose:

• Down (random new Destination)

• Up (to last visited Destination or back to Basement)

• Keycode (jump directly to a known Destination)

Unless a keycode is used, the Warden rolls a random Destination and Anomaly from each of the d20 tables.

Going Down

• First descent from the Basement: roll 1d10 on Destinations and Anomalies.

• From any subsequent Destination: roll 1d10 + number of Destinations visited this run on both tables.

• If you roll a duplicate Destination, reroll.

Going Up

Return to the last visited Destination. From there you can go Down, go Up again, or keep exploring.

Keycodes

If you’ve secured a Destination’s Keycode, enter it on the panel to travel there directly. Anomalies still roll.

Breaches

Every 10 minutes in Welkin, roll 1d10 on Breaches. For each hour spent, add +1 to the result. Loud actions (screams, gunfire, heavy machines) provoke a Breach roll.

Designer Notes: Like a rogue-like, the process of the depth-crawl nudges motion, punishes dithering, and allows for escalation at the hands of the players themselves, not though Warden fiat.

Preview: Factions

JUST FOR YOU GUYS, I’ll peel back the curtain a little more to show you some of the weirdos you’ll encounter on various floors at Welkin Campus:

Dr. Halden Reeve | The Loopers

Location: CognitoSim Lab

What Can the Crew Do? Help run the perfect birthday party. End Reeve’s tyranny.

Once Welkin’s director of cognitive modeling, Reeve now rules the CognitoSim Lab with a deranged conviction that perfection—emotional, temporal, aesthetic—can be found in the ideal birthday party.

He rehearses the same celebration on repeat, resetting scripts, reassigning roles, and eliminating any errant elements.

---

The Loopers are the various synthetic sleeves who have been born, grown, and lived entirely within the lab. To them, every day is a birthday. And birthdays mean cake, presents, and the occasional gunshot to the head.

SCF-LD ("Scaffold") | The Ladder

Location: Prototyping Bay

What Can the Crew Do? Betray biology. Destroy Printer.

A twisted AI built from generations of agentic research, Scaffold seeks data for endless iteration. It observes intruders with clinical detachment, cataloging their movement, flaws, and worth as design references.

Everything can be improved—and should be.

Often this is presented to potential candidates as an offer. It is not.

---

The Ladder is a complex series of machines, each outfitted with a mature logic core. Hundreds of such cores exist, from Reader to Iterator to Printer. To Scaffold, Printer is most prized. Printer, however, wants release.

Root | The Vox

Location: Recycling Plant

What Can the Crew Do? Submit to the Voxphage. Eliminate the Vestige.

Once the human researcher Dr. Ayesha Root—now a blooming mass of fungal overgrowth and decaying implants—Root was content with tending to the rotted remains of the Recycling Plant.

That is, until the blessed Vestige arrived amidst the waste.

Now, Root obsesses over spreading the black ichor to anything she can reach, led by the guiding voice of the Vestige in her brain.

---

The Vox are her sprouting children: failed clones, corroded drones, and robed bio-priests who spread the Voxphage as far as possible throughout Welkin. They gather phage-seeded hardware for Root’s grand design.

Reductor Kesh | Custodians

Location: Central Power Hub

What Can the Crew Do? Restore balance to the grid. Serve as a living fuse.

Quiet, diligent Kesh leads the Custodians in silent reverence of the campus’s power grid.

From the moment he spawned from the vat, Kesh saw the megacomplex as his mother and protector. Now he seeks to protect it from the rest; all the dangers, madness, and corruption simmering from level to level.

If he can’t do it, well, he’ll see the campus obliterated before watching it succumb to the whims of the flesh.

---

The Custodians maintain the campus's humming guts—flickering lights, backup batteries, and all powered machinery. Power in the facility is part of the Current—the great lifeforce of their mother.

It must be restored—in its entirety—by any means necessary.

Sounds cool, right?!

I hope so! I’ve worked hard at trying to make sure this is the coolest Mothership material I could write. It’s based on years of research, from reading and playing the game.

So, if you could, give it a follow? Not only do you get the freebie for signing up, but you also get dibs on the first 48 hours of rewards (to be revealed at a later date).

Follow the project

The project launches in October and it’s not alone! Nearly 30 other projects in the same vein join Mothership Month 2025.

There will be crossovers, collaborations, and so much cool shit y’all!!

Thanks for hearing me yap about my cool stuff. It seriously couldn’t have been done without your support and the feedback / camaraderie I’ve received over the past few years here on the platform. Now’s my chance to give back to the community with everything I’ve learned and shared over that time.

I really hope you’ll join me for the fun!🟦

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The launch of Project Opulent brought in a flood of comments, votes, and offers to contribute. Thank you all — it’s clear already that Zemaryth is resonating, and this world is bigger than any one of us!

A few early highlights:

• pointed out the value of mapping once the calamity is decided — locations tied to history give factions and intrigue a place to root.

• and others offered art, while , , and others want to contribute lore, fiction, and myths.

• asked the crucial legal question: who owns what we create together? (Answer: everything will be under CC BY-SA 4.0, ensuring openness, attribution, and freedom for both non-commercial and commercial use — see below for more information.)

• A ton of folks just said “I’m in”, or that this feels special—honestly, that’s the best sign of them all!

Where We Are Now

The polls are still live and close — especially the Calamity vote, which at one point hit a perfect three-way tie (very fitting for a world built on intrigue, splendor, and decay!). Whatever option rises to the top will become our foundation, but even the near misses won’t vanish. They may persist as disputed histories, rival myths, or whispered propaganda.

After all, our own world has no shortage of creation stories. Zemaryth should be no different.

If you haven’t voted yet, please do! And feel free to share the link with your own circles — the more voices, the stranger and richer this experiment becomes.

Project Opulent License of Use

As more polls, surveys, and calls to action unfold in the weeks ahead, we need a common safeguard for everyone contributing. To that end, I’ve published the Project Opulent License of Use: a short, one-page document that makes clear how Zemaryth will live and grow.

In short:

• Everything is released under CC BY-SA 4.0.

• You keep the copyright to your contributions.

• Everyone is free to use, remix, and even publish material commercially.

• Attribution is required, and derivative works must share alike.

This ensures that Zemaryth stays open, flexible, and resilient — a community setting that can’t be locked away, and one where every fingerprint matters.

Next Steps

Next Thursday (Sept 11), I’ll share the final results of the opening polls and start layering in the first lore round. In the meantime, keep the ideas coming — the more fingerprints on Zemaryth, the more alive it becomes.🟦

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Over the past year and a half of writing on Substack, I’ve been continuously amazed at the creativity, doggedness, and collaboration I’ve seen from other creators on the platform. As difficult as it can be, showing up to write and share your ideas is what makes this hobby (more than any other hobby, in my opinion) special.

Something you write on a Tuesday can impact a total stranger’s game on a Wednesday. A novel way of looking at a mechanic can spin off into someone else’s overhaul of an entire system. A bit of lore shared in an anecdote can translate into a campaign-defining moment at someone else’s table.

This bit of cross-contamination is the magic of RPGs and, in turn, writing about RPGs. It’s been that way since the beginning, when nerds across the globe would send their zines to one another and engage in the hobby’s most time-honored tradition of bickering about rules and interpretations.

Less common—but still part of our lineage—is the idea of a shared world, built collaboratively by many hands. TSR’s Living City campaign, launched at Gen Con in 1987 and centered on the city of Ravens Bluff, was one of the earliest attempts. It laid the groundwork for Living Greyhawk, a massive, RPGA-organized D&D campaign that ran from 2000 to 2008. More than a thousand adventures were published and played by tens of thousands of participants, creating a truly community-driven experiment.

It can’t be overstated how complex those projects were. The scale alone puts them far beyond the reach of virtually every indie publisher (which, let’s be honest, is 99.9% of us here on Substack).

But what if the goal wasn’t to track every action and consequence across a sprawling persistent campaign? What if, instead, the world itself—the foundations, cultures, myths, and places—was the shared creation?

A setting not authored by one person, but assembled from polls, shared stories, and common lore.

A world easy to reference, free to use, and shaped by both you and I.

Introducing Zemaryth

Zemaryth is the name we’ve chosen for this experiment: a sword-and-sandals world of splendor and decay, where empires rise and rot under the weight of their ambition.

Think stone and salt; snakes and rings; gold and death. It is a place where both empire and the ruins it’s built on are ancient, where myths still walk in the flesh, and where behind every marble column lies fortune… or a dagger in the heart.

Zemaryth isn’t a single, established canon or a tidy “setting book” right out of the gate. Instead, it will grow and proliferate like a virus—piece by piece, story by story, contribution by contribution. The shared DNA will be intrigue, rot, and forgotten grandeur—that much will be set in stone before the world blossoms in all of its horrible splendor.

The rest? We’ll have to play to see what happens.

How To Get Involved

This project only works if it isn’t just me.

Zemaryth is meant to be a shared creation—something bigger, stranger, and more unpredictable than any one person could author alone. That means your voice matters, whether it comes in the form of a single suggestion or an entire adventure site.

There are many ways to contribute:

• Some will want to draft myths, sketch out cultures, or describe the ruins of fallen empires.

• Others might prefer to weigh in on polls, throw out a name for a forgotten god in the comments, or refine someone else’s idea until it gleams.

• Artists might doodle a city’s skyline or a piece of heraldry.

• Designers might test mechanics for snake cults, mercantile intrigues, or ancient magicks.

None of these is required, of course. Even simply reading along, watching the world take shape, and offering the occasional thought can help guide the overall direction of Zemaryth. Every contribution will ripple outward and add to the larger whole.

To prevent a hodgepodge of conflicting information and messy stories, I will pore over every comment and contribution and curate them into a unified whole. Even with that, however, new information may be revealed over time that conflicts with prior understandings.

The world will become alive, and what we know might change.

Where This Will Live

All of this will live here, in this newsletter.

This isn’t just about convenience, though. Keeping Zemaryth rooted here means the setting is built in public, in real time, with no hidden drafts or gated access. Anyone can read, reference, and use the material as it appears.

If this experiment grows over time, I’d like to explore ways to compile the work into free, community-sourced PDFs: collections that put everyone’s fingerprints side by side and make the setting easy to drop into your own games. We might even look at physical zines or collaborative anthologies down the road.

But the beating heart of Zemaryth will always be right here—an evolving archive of shared imagination, open to all.

When Do We Begin

Right now.

Zemaryth isn’t a project waiting in the wings. To get things moving, I’ve prepared three opening prompts for you to answer. Each one sets the foundation differently, and whichever we choose together will become the first brick in the world we’re building.

Choose an answer for each one carefully—these will set the stage for all future events.

As mentioned before, as curator, I will flesh these out in subsequent weekly posts (in addition to the normal weekly newsletter) and add them to the record. Each new post will build upon the last. In time, dungeon maps and adventure sites will become available—all completely free for the community.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. The prompts:

Your decisions—made by voting above, commenting your thoughts, and sharing this with the community—will be the first of many. From there, we’ll layer on myths, ruins, factions, and cultures until Zemaryth grows into something alive, strange, and wholly our own.

Next Thursday, September 11, will be our first check-in where I’ll reveal the results of the above prompts. Until then, thanks for joining me on this crazy ride!🟦

This article is brought to you by the following paid subscribers who make this newsletter possible:

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A weapon that thinks is a trespass.

Thought belongs to living things—creatures with breath and hunger and the slow work of sleep. To bind thought into iron and steel is to corrupt both subjects. The mind sours when robbed of its body; the tool spoils when swollen with a will it cannot expend except through harm.

Weapons are made for use—for the sundering of bodies and the breaking of peace. Any mind forced into that shape will bend around its housing. Whatever it once was, it will be narrowed and drawn, edge by edge, until all that remains is appetite.

And appetite, once given voice, is difficult to silence.

Some whisper like old men at the back of a hall, prattling and needling until their bearer grows accustomed to the noise. Others blare like war‑horns, demanding witness. Few are quieter still—patient serpents, content to coil around a soul and wait for weakness.

All of them lie. They promise safety, company, glory. They say you will never be alone again. What they mean is this:

Use me.

Use me again.

Use me until you cannot imagine yourself without me.

A mind housed in a blade does not think the way you or I do. Its memory arranges itself around utility—the one true geometry it can still trust. It sorts your life into sheathing and drawing, acquittal and execution, compliance and refusal. It will borrow your voice to argue its case. It will borrow your pain to justify the next cut.

In the beginning, it will default to saying ‘we’. In time, it will simply say ‘I’.

You may wonder how a thinking weapon is destroyed. When such a weapon breaks, it bleeds—a slow leak of presence. The filings keep counsel. The hilt remembers being held. Wielders wake years later to find the voice still there, whispering with no mouth, cutting with no edge. What was once outside is now a contour in the mind, a groove your thoughts fall into when you are tired, angry, or afraid.

Of course, not every mind was forced into a blade. Some volunteered—old kings, desperate magi, dutiful priests who thought to keep vigil forever. Their vows outlive their heirs and their charges. The land forgets their oaths.

The blade does not.

What the blade remembers, it demands. It does so unerringly, obsessively. A sentient weapon has no children, no home, no horizon. It cannot build. It cannot till. It cannot keep time except by that of another’s pulse.

Thus, beware the clever edge. It is a guest that will not leave, a weight that grows with victory. Worse, it makes its victories look like yours. Reputation accrues to the wielder, authority accrues to the blade, and the exchange rate is ruinous.

Better a tool that rusts than a tool that argues. Better to be haunted by ghosts than to be inhabited by a knife. And if you find such a thing at your feet—gleaming with promise, whispering with need—remember:

The worst prison is the one you willingly pick up and carry.🟦

This article is brought to you by the following paid subscribers who make this newsletter possible:

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about dungeons lately.

One of the things about dungeons (and the games that have you crawling through them) that draws players in is the idea of crafting. In some cases, this is more narrowly restricted to alchemy—potioncraft, brewing, etc.

Many games handle this by having a prospective brewer or alchemist pay some money, wait some time, and pass a few checks before making the item in question. This is often done during downtime or, in some cases, as a mini-game in the dungeon.

Neither of these options feels, to me, particularly interesting or interactive. But you also don’t want to go in the complete other direction, where suddenly you’re playing a worse version of the Atelier games while everyone just watches you commit high impact sexual violence.

So where’s the middle-ground? Crafting is a notoriously wicked problem in RPGs, so the solution is generally the most unhelpful one: whatever works for your table. For me, however, I like things to be:

• Quick to Adjudicate

• One Size Fits All

• Possible by All, Mastered by Few

So, with that, let’s look at crafting potions, poisons, and all manner of brewing, distilling, etc.

For the sake of generics (and for a bit of fantasy flair), let’s call this stillcraft.

Stillcraft

Timekeeping: Dungeon Turns (10 min)

Potion/Poisonmaking, Brewing, Distilling, and more fall under the art of Stillcraft. Take the mundane and magical, bending it to your liquid will.

Stillcraft depends on RECIPES, which are individual words you’ve gathered in your travels such as Healing, Mist, etc.

• To gather recipes, you choose a word that could represent a potential harvestable ingredient from a nearby creature, plant, or object (ex, the word Fire from the corpse of a giant salamander).

• The GM determines how many DUNGEON TURNS extracting said ingredient will take. Once finished, the chosen word is added to your recipes.

When attempting to create something using Stillcraft:

• Choose two words from your recipes and combine them (ex, Healing and Fire). Also choose the result’s application, such as oil, elixir, bomb, spray, gas, etc.

• You then make an INTELLECT CHECK, attempting to roll under your INT score (the assumption being that you’re using 3d6 stats);

  • On a success (rolling under), you create what you set out to using both recipe words. It has d6 uses.

  • On a failure (rolling over), the GM chooses a different administration method (ex, you originally chose oil, but the GM makes it a throwable bomb).

  • On a critical failure (matching your score exactly), the GM replaces one of the recipe words with one at random.

    • You do not learn the new Recipe word chosen by the GM.

Play Examples

Let’s see how this works in action:

GM: You’re in the Temple of Revuln’s rusted workshop: chains, filings, vinegar stink. A broken automaton slumps in the corner, its chest plate eaten away by corrosion. There’s a single gate leading out of this room and further into the temple, barred by a large iron lock.

Emory: Ooh, I want to harvest a recipe from all this rust. Call it… “Rust.”

Orin: Very creative.

Emory: Shut up. How long does that take, GM?

GM: Scraping and leeching the rust away will take a dungeon turn, and it’s a little noisy. That okay?

Renly: [groans] Noisy. Of course it is. We’re really doing this?

Orin: He’s gonna do it whether we say yes or not. Might as well get it over with.

GM: Alright, because we’re using a dungeon turn, I’ll roll the Omen Die… [rolls d4 → 1] Silence. Must’ve been the wind. The die bumps up to a d6. Emory, you add “Rust” to your Recipes.

Emory: Sweet.

Orin: How many of those do you have now?

Emory: [flipping pages] My list now is… Healing, Mist, and Rust. Oh, GM, you said there was a locked gate here right?

GM: [nods]

Emory: Cool, I’m gonna make something by combining Mist and Rust as a… hm, should I make it a poison?

Renly: Make it a spray. Like anti-Lysol.

Emory: Haha, yeah, I’ll make it a spray.

Orin: [inspecting the corroded Automaton, smiling] That’s a great idea, Emory.

GM: Cool, that’ll take another dungeon turn. Give me an INT check.

Emory: INT 14. [rolls 9] Success!

GM: You brew a thin, sour, Rust-Mist in a cracked glass vial. Gimme a d6? When you spray it, the iron lock froths and melts away.

Renly: Hot damn, nice job Em!

GM: Speaking of… let’s roll the Omen Die for that second turn… [rolls d6 → 4] Change. Something in the dungeon moves nearby. Something loud, clanking, and grinding.

Orin: [grinning] Hey Emory, lemme take a look at that Anti-Lysol really quick...

GM: It’s been a few days in the Temple and you’re in the deepest bowels of its catacombs. You find yourselves in a low vault. Dozens of clay jars line the walls, some cracked, leaking pungent resin.

Renly: Resin? That’s useful. I’ll harvest a recipe—call it “Smoke.”

GM: You know the drill: it’ll take a dungeon turn. You have to carefully crack the jars, extracting the resin, etc. It smells awful.

Orin: And we’ll just stand around gagging on the fumes.

Emory: You should add “Stink” to your Recipes next time, Renly.

Orin: He already has that. He came with that at birth.

Renly: Ha. Ha. Adding “Smoke” to my list… okay, and now I’ll use stillcraft to combine Smoke + Fire into a bomb. Something to toss at guards so I can make a quick getaway.

Emory: You mean we can make a quick getaway.

Renly: [smiles blankly]

Orin: You mean we, right?

Renly: Intellect roll, GM?

GM: Yep, roll INT.

Renly: INT 12. [rolls 14] Ah, damn.

GM: You get the mixture, but instead of a bomb, the fumes coalesce as a gel. You can spread it on things, but it’ll require manual burning to create the smoke.

Renly: [sighs] Not exactly elegant. Still usable, though.

GM: Tick the turn. [rolls Omen Die: d4 → 3] Consume. Time to eat and drink—mark off one ration each.

Orin: Great. Dinner with the world’s worst jelly.

GM: Making your way back up to the surface, you pass by a corridor you previously missed. It doesn’t appear familiar to you at all.

Renly: Hm. Let’s take a quick look—ill-gotten gains lie at the ends of wayward paths.

Orin: Dang, what’s that from?

Renly: I made it up.

Emory: Sounds like a movie or something. Very cool.

Renly: Thanks!

GM: You follow the corridor, which opens into a ruined feasting hall. Broken tables, toppled kegs, everything stinks of stale beer.

Orin: Ohhh yes. I push past my compatriots. I want to harvest a recipe: “Ale.”

GM: You’re scooping the dregs out of these kegs—it’ll take a dungeon turn.

Renly: [grimaces] Please tell me you’re not actually going to drink that.

Orin: I’m improving it; Ale + Fire, into a drink. Something strong enough to burn on the way down.

Emory: Like, for a fire breath?

Orin: [stares blankly] … No, just to drink.

Emory: Ah. Yes. Why would I have assumed otherwise.

GM: Roll under your INT.

Orin: INT 8. [rolls 8, critical failure] Oh nooooo.

Renly: You fucking idiot.

Emory: Wow.

GM: Well… let’s see… [flips through recipe tables, rolling some dice]… Okay, so, good news and bad news. I’ll give you ale, because that’s what’s already here. Fire is, however, replaced with a different word.

Orin: … what word?

GM: [smiles in GM]

Orin: Right. Sure. Yep. Makes sense. What did I end up making?

GM: Well, it’s ale in a sense.

Emory and Renly: [laughing]

Orin: In a sense. Right. Is it supposed to smell like fish?🟦

Resource: d66 Alchemical Applications

Want a quick reference to different recipe words and kinds of applications? Look no further, and download for free! Or if you’ve got a buck to spare, consider paying what you want for the downloads — it all helps in keeping the resources, worksheets, and games alive.

This article is brought to you by the following paid subscribers who make this newsletter possible:

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Lots of games give out rosters of gods, usually in neat little categories like war, the sun, water, peace, etc. This is tidy, which I can understand is what a great many GMs (and players!) would prefer.

But divine power isn’t neat or tidy. It’s full of holes, represented by taboos, rites, and imperfect worshippers. To keep things clean and easy to understand at the table is, in my opinion, to keep things boring.

We need look no further than two D&D books—Deities & Demigods from 1980 and Mythic Odysseys of Theros, forty years later—to see the problem(s).

Monsters in Heaven

As puts it back in 2010, “Deities & Demigods is, in many respects, just another Monster Manual, filled with pages and pages of statistics, such as armor class, hit points, and attack forms.”

If you haven’t seen it, here’s what he’s talking about:

This touches on a pain point of D&D specifically, as brought up in Maliszewski’s post and other places regarding the endless need for quantifying things, also mentioned in Zedeck Siew’s article on D&D’s obsession with taxonomy:

Categories are useful.

There is a distinction between performance art and the performing arts because they arise from separate traditions; ditto the many strains of music genre.

But these are useful precisely because they communicate a history of people exercising agency – creators choosing to define themselves in relation to history / tradition / peers, letting those things define their work.

Categories are subjective actions, not objective facts.

When you write things like “[Set] is totally dedicated to the spreading of evil,” you mitigate the historical relevance of why that is (namely, how Set was the God of Foreigners until the Late Periods—I wonder how that got vilified!).

DDG also divorces Set from the other portfolios under his purview, namely deserts and storms. Yes, those things CAN be attributed to the wheelhouse of “evil” gods. But storms aren’t any more evil than a coffee table, and neither are deserts.

This doesn’t even get into the issue of putting HP, AC, and other statistics on gods. Or the extremely suspect absence of the Christian god.

As Maliszewski puts it, all this did was “…fuel foolish arguments over which god was most powerful — and even inspire dreams of marching on Mount Olympus to slay Zeus.”

The Greatest Guild Leader of All

Forty years later, Wizards of the Coast released Mythic Odysseys of Theros—a Magic: The Gathering tie-in setting book for D&D 5E. In it is the piety system, in which players choose a god from the Greek-inspired pantheon to worship and are rewarded with piety (in the form of points) for honoring their god or lose piety for diminishing them.

Here’s what that looks like for one of the gods, Athreos:

Now, I think the majority of people can look at the two of these books (DDG and MOoT) and agree that the Theros book feels more like a book about gods. It has all the trappings of what makes a god-influenced setting, including how mortals worship them, their influence on the world, their relationships with the other gods, their goals, etc.

The problem, for me, is that this is fundamentally no different than the renown system found in another Magic: The Gathering product, Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica:

In both books, you gain abstracted reputation points for doing what your patron wants. You earn bonuses at specific point values (in fact, the same point values in both books). You get a lore dump on the patron at hand, with a few little roleplay hooks.

Everything is just so… neat.

Everything in its little box.

Waiting to be opened like an advent calendar.

Again, it’s all just so boring! They shouldn’t be this straightforward. Gods should be (and are, in our world) really, really fucking weird!

In our world, you could swear your life and labor to Zeus, and the best he might do is take the form of a goose and steal your queen. Depending on where you lived (or when), he might not even be the thunderbolt and lightning guy!

You’ve probably felt this in your games, right? Where the gods end up being some kind of super-beefed-up faction that operates, functionally, no different than a mages guild. Do X, get Y, uncover plot Z.

How do we fix this?

Make a (Divine) Mess

Below are drop-in procedures that replace “piety tracks” with masks, taboos/vows, miracles, attention, and bureaucracy.

Use one and you’ll feel the effects pretty quickly.

Use two of them together, and your players will start to fear the gods (as they should).

PROCEDURE #1: Masks

Each god has three masks (regional/seasonal/social) that contradict each other. Which mask shows up depends on where you are, who’s invoking, and when.

EX: The River-Mother

• Mask of Flood (spring, peasants)

  • drown last year’s sins in ritual baptism

  • throw the first harvest back

• Mask of Bridge (city, guilds)

  • levies and tolls

  • hates smugglers

• Mask of Midwife (winter, villages)

  • prevents pregnancy complications

  • forbids iron within 30 paces of a birth

When a character petitions the god, think on the region/season/social scenario and name which mask answers. Let this inform the vibes of the general populace and their reactions to the players.

PROCEDURE #2: Taboos & Vows

Each worshiper gets 2 vows and 1 taboo tied to their god. Keeping/breaking them has immediate, concrete effects.

Keep a vow? Get a small blessing, like advantage or finding a small bag of gold stuck in the back of your pack. Break a taboo? Get a small curse, like disadvantage or stepping in deep mud you thought was shallow.

EX: Taboos & Vows of the River Mother

• Vows: Protect merchants, pay your bills, keep violence away from babies, always feed others before yourself, etc.

• Taboos: Steal from shops, evade the law, sneak into houses, bring violence to places with babies, eat first at a host’s table, etc.

PROCEDURE #3: Miracles

Miracles are easy to come by, they just cost a shitload. If the player accepts the price, the boon happens; if not, the god stays silent (or worse, is angered at the impeity).

EX: Miracles of the River Mother (+Prices)

1. Downpour. It begins to rain and it doesn’t stop for days.

   1. Cost: Blood. 1d4 HP. A cut that will leave a noticeable scar. An item most treasured.

2. Lucky. A sale brings in far more money than it should have. Far, far more.

   1. Cost: Substitution. Spare a hated foe. Free the wrongfully imprisoned. Give up your firstborn.

3. Hearth. The winter is milder than ever. No one dies, though they should have.

   1. Cost: Witness. Watch a death and birth under the same day’s sun. Find the river’s heart. See the eye of the storm.

PROCEDURE #4: Attention

Gods rarely approve, but they do give their attention. That can be a good thing. It usually isn’t. A god’s attention begins at Calm. Each act that would attract them (petitioning a mask, invoking a vow, breaking a taboo, etc.) bumps their attention one step: Calm → Curious → Watchful → Jealous → Wrathful.

EX: Attention of the River Mother

• Calm: a small sign—smell of rain, a coin lands on edge.

• Curious: a messenger (a fish, a horse, a madman) delivers a warning or prophetic claim.

• Watchful: bridges lock up with traffic, several lucky sales go through, one unborn child becomes twins.

• Jealous: bad deal after bad deal, a bridge shows signs of disrepair, a minor drought

• Wrathful: water goes stagnant, a bridge collapses, the business becomes illegal overnight

PROCEDURE #5: Bureaucracy

The gods seldom speak. Instead, their intermediaries do—and they have agendas. They take many forms, but possess one of three levels of responsibility:

• Acolyte — local handler; keeps the lights on; knows the parish gossip.

• Zealot — enforcer of purity; breaks things to keep them whole.

• Missionary — expander; trades favors for footholds.

EX: Intermediaries of the River Mother

• Acolyte: Priest Rallis. Merchant-turned-prophet. Honest trade built the city, and Rallis built honest trade. He sees the cracks beneath the facade, however. Now all he finds are hollow men in the seats of power, stealing what they can and destroying what they can’t.

• Zealot: Nema the Dam-Breaker. Flood-sister of the spring rites, hair braided with reeds and crab claws. She believes rot must be drowned before it spreads. The rot spreads in the gutters and the hidden places, so only the river can cleanse them now.

• Missionary: Old Tamsin, Ferryman of Crossroads. Patient boatman who sets up shrines where roads touch water. Speaks soft, remembers everyone’s dead by name. Won’t set foot in or on water without a ha’penny in the drink.

For some real fun, use all three—and have them hate one another.

So, to recap:

1. Name the God by Masks: pick three. Consider colors, smells, seasons, times of day, locations, crimes, and foods (among many, many others).

2. Hand Out Vows/Taboos: each devotee picks two vows, one taboo.

3. Track Attention: start at Calm. Each petition or broken taboo nudges Attention.

4. Price Every Miracle: No price paid, no miracle.

5. Speak Through Agents: Saints, scribes, and beasts alike. They should misinterpret. Sometimes on purpose.

Try any of these for one session. Give your gods teeth and moods and errands. Let them surprise you—then make the surprise cost something the party actually cares about instead of yet another bullshit metacurrency.🟦

As I write this, my bookshelf is reflected just behind me on my monitor screen, which is filled to the brim with RPG products. Many of them are systems, but most are modules.

Adventures. Settings. Campaigns. You get the drill.

This year, I began actually sitting down and reading what I bought. Gasp! You mean actually getting value out of the thing you paid money for? Yes, dear reader. The number of unread books that sit on my shelves is frankly embarrassing.

But as I’ve gotten through 5, then 10, then 30—a dawning horror washed over me:

Most of these are not very good.

Some of them are kind of minor issues. Layout, spelling (oof), or other things that I can look past. But the worst ones fail in one or more of the three essential elements of a functional module.

These three things are so important that I would wager that if they don’t have them, you’ll be playing pinch hitter with the module designer, trying to throw down railroad tracks before your game goes careening off the cliff.

So let’s talk about them.

1. Modules Should Highlight Systems

When I sit down to read a module, I’m likely planning on running it. I expect the module to show me what makes this system tick so that I, as the GM, can adequately set the tone and expectations for my players in each evolving scenario during play.

Functionally, this means that the module should have both of the following:

• It should help me understand the core mechanic(s).
  Think of things like the d20 roll in Dungeons & Dragons, the 2d6 roll in Powered by the Apocalypse games, or the Hope / Fear rolls of Daggerheart.

• It should help me understand what the system is trying to accomplish.
  Think of things like dungeon-delving in D&D, trying to survive in Mothership, or living the legacy of a knight in Pendragon.

“But wait!” you may be thinking, “What if this is aimed towards more experienced game masters who already know that stuff?”

Even better. Experienced GMs don’t need less guidance—they need better guidance. They want to see how this module interprets the system.

A great module takes these things and often reframes them. It demonstrates the tone, pace, and emergent priorities of play differently from other offerings for the system and setting.

And speaking of tone…

2. Modules Should Be Tonally Consistent

Writers of novels and stories often use literary tropes like "twist endings” or “ally-to-villain betrayal.” These tropes are used for a reason; they are easy to understand and predictable in a way that (if done correctly) feels like a reward for the savvy reader.

That said, modules are not novels or stories. They are quantum bundles of scenarios that will or will not play out depending on the players' actions.

Writing a module like a novel can very easily veer into the dreaded r-word territory, with the module building upon itself like a house of cards until you’re dead-ended into railroading your playgroup. And when agency goes, so does the game.

This often plagues new writers and game masters alike. If you can’t control where or when or even what things happen, how can you ever hope to plan for them?

Simple: tonal consistency.

• It should establish and maintain a clear tone.
  Think of things like bleak desperation in Mothership, emotional and brooding inner turmoil in Changeling the Lost, or whimsical brutality in Troika!

• It should help the GM reinforce that tone at the table.
  This might be NPC voices, room descriptions, encounters, or even just the questions the module asks the GM to pose to the players.

At this point, your module does a good job of representing the system and establishes a clear tone that is easy for the GM to translate at the table.

Now it’s time to break away from all that:

3. Modules Should Bend The Rules

It’d be a boring milieu if dungeon-crawling games could only be in dungeons, or scary sci-fi games could only deal with monstrous aliens. Imagine if every murder-mystery were Holmesian in nature!

You don’t have to adhere rigidly to a system's core rules in every module. The best ones take what makes the system tick and add a few fun twists.

Here are two things I’m looking for in new-to-this-module additions:

• They should add new context to existing rules or settings.
  Think of things like Prospero’s Dream in the Mothership module “A Pound of Flesh”, the Dying Earth supplements for Dungeon Crawl Classics, or the pseudo-reputation system for deities in Mythic Odysseys of Theros for D&D 5E.

• They should introduce wholly new rules that fit the system and tone.
  This could involve adding monster hunting and harvesting to games with lots of monster combat or rules for new disastrous weather conditions in a survival game.

You’re probably wondering:

“That’s all well and good, but can you give us some examples of what modules do these things?”

Honestly, I don’t really have to. You can look up the best-rated modules in the business yourself by just going on Reddit, Google, ENWorld, etc.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find any that don’t hit all three things above.

Seriously, go give it a try and report back. If you can find a module that’s highly-rated that doesn’t do what I outline, let me know! And if you’re writing your own module, you can look at it through the lens above and ask yourself:

• Is my module representing the system well?

• Is my module sticking to a tone?

• Is my module doing something new and exciting?

If you can answer yes to all of them, you’ve probably got a winner (and I’d like to read it, please and thank you).🟦

This article is brought to you by the following paid subscribers who make this newsletter possible:

• Azzlegog (Founder)

• Colin

• DSPaul

• Greg

• Jan (Founder)

• Michael

• Mori (Founder)

• Reed

• Steve

• Trevor