Monsters and Manuals

Once summer holidays are out of the way, I will be launching the Kickstarter for The Great North, described long ago as 'Yoon-Suin but in Northumberland'. All the text and art is finished, and layout is commencing. 

Here are some little...

An important and useful way to tease out weird new fantasy cultures or civilisations is what I am going to christen here the -Rider Gambit. The way this works is you imagine a race of people (or orcs, or elves, or whatever) and then find an unusual animal species for them to ride. And you then build a culture around that. 

We are familiar with human horse riders, goblin...

One of the most perillous moments in any D&D campaign is the Interdimensional Space Time Continuum Bait-and-Switch. If you do not know what that is, let me explain:

Two examples from my own life:

a - PCs are in a du...

Sometimes, I like to post on this blog in a fashion that is more along the lines of thinking-out-loud than having a coherent message or purpose. This is one of those occasions. 

You may recall that long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, The Simpsons was funny, and nobody had yet heard of Baby Shark, there was a thing called

An important aspect of tabletop RPGs that is insufficiently discussed is the theatre of the mind. When playing a game, we - players and DM alike - picture a great variety of things in our minds' eyes. We visualise what ths room looks like, what this monster looks like, what this NPC looks like, and so on. No doubt we also do it when reading splatbooks and modules: we picture ...