A rant about tactical mechanics in roleplaying games and how they are incompatible with a Play Worlds mindset.

3 pricing models for freelance graphic designers and artists in rpgs.

Great covers from across the tabletop rpg industry.

YouTube video by Murkdice

<p><strong>Mothership Month is coming November 1 - November 30,</strong> back to our regularly scheduled timeslot. With one big caveat: <strong>No crowdfunding this year.</strong></p> <p>I don’t know ...

Rules by their inherent nature are restrictive. If you’re playing a game, everyone agrees to play by those rules, and break them only via consensus. We accept these restrictions because that’s what…

An essay on the allure of cleverness for game designers.

Convert any Pokémon into stats for Into the Oddish and any other Oddlike like Carin or Into the Odd. Also 22 enemy Pokémon for your games or Into the Oddish adventures.

User-friendly definitions, rules, and hacks for your next rpg pdf.

A fantastical, ornate TTRPG from Possum Creek about the might and folly of powerful wizards bound by a venerable Pact.

An installment of my hexmap for Middle-earth project.  Follow the "Middle-earth Hexmap" tag for all entries in this series. Art by Goran Gli...

Cover inspiration from across the tabletop rpg industry.

This post is part of my series on developing the sandbox. You can read other posts in the series here . The series will, when necessary, go ...

My goblin post was fun, and it gave me a hankering to do something similar with halflings. Why halflings? Well, mostly because I like that ...

How does life and death work in this game without hit points?

Why are guns a problem for systems designed to accommodate melee combat? Whenever we take a game that facilitates heroic action fantasy, with strong PCs tear...

Decagone, with Daniel Hallinan by Ansible Uplink on Patreon. Join Ansible Uplink's community for exclusive content and updates.

A game jam from 2026-06-01 to 2026-09-30 hosted by graculusdroog. Vaults of Vaarn is a science-fantasy tabletop RPG. It draws inspiration from novels like Dune , Hyperion , The Book of the New Sun, an...

This post is part of my series on developing the sandbox. You can read other posts in the series here . The series will, when necessary, go ...

This fluorescent labyrinth is fun for the whole family.

AD&D is a game in which the player characters are expected to overcome challenges themselves. This is made most explicit in the section on N...

The author of "What do we mean when we say a game supports play?"

This post is part of my series on developing the sandbox. You can read other posts in the series  here . The series will, when necessary, go...

A report and postmortem for the first session of my D&D 4th edition Hunters of Northmarch campaign.

A chess-based RPG about Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet

A roundup of 50 blogs from the past few months that all focus on maps (including a few adventures that key off the same map).

A decade of knowledge applied to the most common questions in tabletop.

Idle thoughts while reading through a roleplaying game. This issue I flip through Tuesday Knight Games's new Fatherfog zine.

Sneak Preview - Inkvein Faction

The coalface of minimalistic design

Get more from Snow on Patreon

A new method for procedurally generating the terrain of a hex map that adds some level of “memory” to the otherwise disconnected random tosses of the oracle dice.

A framework for thinking about refereeing as Backend, Frontend, and Runtime, so you can diagnose play problems instead of solving the wrong ones.

Urban design is the art and science of shaping urban spaces. Let's steal from it.

Fleurons, Mother of all Bullets