The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

  For those not familiar with the practice of a slush pile in TTRPG blogging, it's basically 'throw all the stuff you've lost motivation to write/found wasn't worth writing about out there so people can pick through the ruins.' For various reasons - possibly I'm not naturally as productive as I was in 2024 over long periods, possibly just a tough few months - I have a fair old bit of slush this season. I hope you find something worthwhile in it! NOT SLUSH The following projects are still ongoing. Slowly.  What Interesting Terrain Looks Like, where I argue for a change in the way people approach exploration play in games towards the mundane difficulties and small scales rather than the weird and grandiose Folkloresque-Ritterian North West Mageckrawl, Part 1, in which I'll go through the placement of sites of power, nodes, ley lines etc. over which our mages and other supernaturals will  compete . This is the thing I've done most writing on this season, i...

See previous post ! The game was goodish. The PCs didn't interact much with each other, doing their own things, which is fine by me contra many others, but never sparkles. Two questions about any bit of prep to assess it postfacto: • Did I use it in some way? • Was it/would it have been better than I could improvise? 1. Ideas from the daydreaming walk • While cool, the view down the stairs at an angle wasn't used. It did inspire a little 3rd person intro snippet I did with a view of *somebody* (the doctor) getting arrested • The octopus was referenced, in a big tank in Durret's study when etric went to visit. The image got appreciative comments & bond villain comparisons; without prepping it I'd never have done it, I'm awful at improvising set dressings like that • Didn't use the little oil lamp. Eh. Obviously these are all unimportant descriptive fluff. But does matter in a description based medium. 2. Notes on Notes The player's account of last time I ...

Dear Players of the Pillar of Velkith campaign, I know some of you read this. This post will both spoil the plot and expose my GMing methods' sticky guts in a way you may not actually want to know. I can't stop you, but I recommend: Owwww T his post is being written almost entirely through the medium of  speech to text , w/ minimal post-facto editing for sense.  The reason this happening is because I am to my significant regret developing a repetitive strain injury from work in addition to trying to write for this and for games. I don't want to have RSI; that sounds unpleasant to the long term. So instead I am going to do my writing in the immediate through this medium and I'm going to do something a bit experimental where I try to adapt my normal game prep processes from having my hands available to minimally  having my hands available . This is going to make things somewhat difficult/interesting but I think offers a unique opportunity: because my usual prep method is ...