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COLLABORATIVE WORLDBUILDING: GLIMPSES

May 21, 2024 RPGs gming adventures worldbuilding mechanics

When I’m running a game, one of the highlights for me is inviting players to
collaboratively build the world with me. In the past, this has resulted in a few
hiccups. Enter this post, where I will attempt to solve them all. Rather than
the players having carte blanche on worldbuilding, I want to add some structure
to keep the ideas on topic and the game moving. I’ve written about this before
and I still believe world anchors are foundational to my games, but I want to
try and tackle this from a different angle

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KENTARO MIURA ON SKILL

March 11, 2024 creativity learning art

I’m reading Berserk.

There’s a part—almost 200 chapters in—where Guts is teaching Isidro how to
fight. Here’s the panels:







The core of these panels seem to be drawing on Kentaro Miura’s musings on the
creation of art more than they’re drawing on his knowledge of warfare and
sword-fighting. When I first came across them, they struck me immediately as
Kentaro’s thoughts in regards to others asking him “how do I become you?” And I
think with just these six panels, we get the answer:

You cannot practice your way into becoming a master.

You are not, and never will be, Kentaro Miura.

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NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION SYSTEMS

January 4, 2024 RPGs mechanics

Prismatic Wasteland has issued a challenge and who am I to resist such a thing?

> My challenge is thus: In January 2024, come up with a new resolution mechanic
> for a TTRPG and give it a name. It doesn’t need to be good (in fact, most the
> good ones have probably already been taken). It just needs to be new! You
> don’t need to plan to use it in your games; it can be absolute detritus for
> you. But one blogger’s trash is another designer’s treasure. You never know
> how great an impact one throwaway idea on a blog might have.

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2023 MINDSTORM RETROSPECTIVE

January 1, 2024 meta learning retrospective

Alright, another year in the books means that we’re going to go through files,
notes, and memories and try to recap this thing. This is a mostly self-indulgent
post, rough around the edges, and posted for posterity’s sake.

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A DEMON OF THREE NOTES

December 27, 2023 RPGs adventures worldbuilding monsters

The children run through the village, laughing and singing in harmony. The
organist in the temple plays music that would rival even the great masters of
the world. The dour fisherman, who smiles for nothing and no-one, hums a
cheerful tune. Those who never had the ear for music wake up with perfect pitch,
the harmonies sinking into them, resonating with the songs in their souls.
Instruments are taken up and mastered, flutes and lutes and little harps. The
town gathers at night and sings the deep songs, the true songs, the night songs,
smiling and laughing as they dance and embrace.

Beneath it all, deep within the earth, the demon slumbers, growing stronger with
each note that passes through joyful lips.

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GULCH

November 21, 2023 gulch rpgs gming adventures worldbuilding

Welcome, traveler, to Gulch. This town ain’t much, but it’s ours, and we’d
appreciate it if you’d not muck about in our business, thank you very much. You
might be tempted to dive under the surface, get to know the people here, and try
helping them out. Don’t. That’s just going to piss someone else off, you see?
Best to fill up your car and keep on moving on

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UNDER THE HOOD OF THE GARDEN WALL

October 24, 2023 rpgs gming adventures worldbuilding

What can Over the Garden Wall teach us about adventure design? The 10 episodes
are tight, full of surprises, and effortlessly entertaining. For the most part,
they seem to share a foundational structure that we can pull out of the show and
apply to roleplaying games. You can’t plan a “story” in an RPG, but that doesn’t
mean you can’t set something up to be fun and engaging for everyone at the
table.

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RINGING THE BELL, A SIMPLE REPUTATION SYSTEM

August 14, 2023 rpgs mechanics gming

Imagine a character that has been through it all: hard fought victories against
deadly foes, slaying monsters of legend, delving into depths unknown, and
wielding the old magics of the world in the form of their weapons, gear, or
arcane trickery. One of the coolest experiences to have at the table with a
character like that is when their reputation proceeds them. When their titles
are shouted out in backwater towns, when the lord of the land calls upon them to
solve a problem, when their past catches up to them because it’s been hard-won
in the crucible of action.

There is nothing quite as striking and commanding as a name on the lips of many.

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RANSACKING THE ROOM

July 17, 2023 rpgs mechanics gming

Usually, the way I handle players exploring a location is pretty standard: I
describe the location, point out the interesting bits, and let the players
inform me how their characters are checking things out. If there are secret
things in the location, I’ll hint at them (either in the main description, or in
further descriptions as they search). Basically, nothing revolutionary—I’m using
Justin Alexander’s Matryoshka Search Technique.

This works really well in ruins, dungeons, haunted forests, and the other milieu
you typically find in an OSR-ish game. I, however, am merely a POSR, and my
games don’t contain all that many ruined dungeons for the players to explore.
Instead, they often find themselves dealing with dangerous locations in
populated areas—and that involves a lot of B&E into the lairs of the bad guys.

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SPELL FRIEND AND ENTER

May 31, 2023 rpgs mechanics worldbuilding video games

In the following post I’m going to lay out a foundational structure for using
scrabble tiles in two different, but connected, ways. The first is using the
tiles as a key to unlock the ancient dungeons in the world, where the more tiles
you have the more dungeons you can unlock (and gain more tiles from). The second
application comes in a Tears of the Kingdom-esque application of creativity,
where your characters can use the tiles to magically modify objects in the world
to solve the problems they encounter.

This requires two things to be true about the setting.

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QUESTION-BASED ADVENTURE DESIGN (Q-BAD)

May 16, 2023 rpgs adventures swineheart motel creativity

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love spreadsheets, and that’s why—like an
absolute freak—I write the first draft of my adventures in a spreadsheet. Hold
on. Don’t leave. You don’t have to use a spreadsheet. It’s just easiest for me.

There’s really only one step to that first draft—and I’m using first draft
pretty loosely here—instead of something hammered down, ready for editing, my
initial pass on an adventure mostly lives inside of my head, with about 10% of
it on the spreadsheet, like some kind of RPG iceberg.

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TENSION CHEATSHEET

February 7, 2023 rpgs gming adventures

In the latest POSR game I’ve been running we’ve played eleven sessions and the
players have only explored two dungeons—and those dungeons only took five
sessions between both to clear to their satisfaction. That means that for this
game, we’ve spent six sessions not dungeon crawling.

Lots of stuff has happened. They rooted out the cause of a missing village. They
met with the leader of a powerful clan in the last city. He introduced them to
his “burn everything, ask questions never” special forces team dedicated to
taking out cosmic-monster worshipping clans hidden about. They’ve made friends
with a group of travelling merchants called the Nine Thumbs. They’ve went to a
dark and spooky theatre and watched a performance about themselves. They’ve made
a lot of messes, too. Right now, they’re attending the “wedding of the year”
between two clan scions.

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THE PIRATE CREW

November 2, 2022 mechanics rpgs

I think something that almost every GM seems to go through is the elusive “ship
game”, where the characters are all members of a crew of some kind of ship
(sailing or space) and they go around doing various odd jobs. My group has tried
to run this game numerous times with many systems and we’ve just wrapped up the
latest attempt: a mini Scum & Villainy campaign.

Dwiz over at Knight at the Opera has talked about running a pirate game in a
great manner of detail and I think it’s a great post. One of the three pillars
he talks about are “social challenges” between the crew. I’m going to spend this
post trying to flesh this out a bit using ladder tables. You’ll need to be
familiar with that post.

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STEALTH TURNS

September 6, 2022 rpgs mechanics gming

As I gear up to run another game for my friends, I’ve been fiddling with my own
system. I’m trying to mesh together multiple things that I love—characters with
cool abilities, an easy resolution system, procedural play, and a
science-fantasy mileau.

As such, I’ve been thinking about how best to employ the hazard die and
turn-based structure to the game. Ava has mentioned before that she believes the
Event Die in Errant is the engine that drives the game, and I wholeheartedly
agree. As such, I’ve been thinking about how to leverage the Event Die in a
structure that will be less about crawling through dungeons, and more about
adventure, exploration, and character-based scenes.

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NESTED MONSTER HIT DICE

August 22, 2022 rpgs mechanics gming

Like almost everyone, I’ve spent some time thinking about Witcher style monster
hunting in RPGs, racking my brain over and over again as I try to “solve the
case” as it were. Often the advice suggests vibe and a certain procedure of
play:

 * Run the monster as a “puzzle” instead of a straight up fight. Do this with
   resistances, immunities, and weaknesses.
 * Make discovering information about the monster the main purpose of the
   adventure. A successful investigation leads to a fight that is significantly
   easier as a result.

This is solid advice in terms of trying to evoke Witcher vibes, but it doesn’t
really scratch the itch in the right way for me. The other inspiration I’m
drawing from is Horizon: Zero Dawn, which has you targeting the components of
the beasts you’re hunting as opposed to just smashing the side of them with your
spear.

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MATRIX CAMPAIGN STRUCTURES, PART 2B

August 2, 2022 rpgs mechanics gming

This should be a quicker post than Part 1 and Part 2B, thankfully. I think we’re
hitting the stride now and can pick up some speed—I’ve discussed why I’m making
these procedures, how I’m making them, and breaking down the concepts that go
into them.

To recap, the four “major” procedures that make up the Matrix loop are:

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MATRIX CAMPAIGN STRUCTURES, PART 2A

July 28, 2022 rpgs mechanics gming

Apologies for the bit of the delay in getting part two out the door. I’ve been
swamped lately with editing Barkeep on the Borderlands and the blog is the first
thing to suffer. This adventure is going to be amazing, though.

The previous post in this series laid out the groundwork of what we’re trying to
do here: build a set of procedures, unconnected to ‘system’, that let us play an
RPG campaign that has the vibes and structure of The Matrix movies.

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MATRIX CAMPAIGN STRUCTURES, PART 1

June 27, 2022 rpgs mechanics gming

If you’re anything like me, you’re a thirty-something year old living in Canada
that like fries (my fav food), bouldering (indoors only), reading overhyped
fantasy novels (without shame), and listening to your friends talk RPG theory
(procedures lately).

If you’re not like me, but you’re reading this blog, you may have seen a few
posts going around lately discussing the nature of procedures, structures, and
gameplay loops. Here’s a few good links:

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TREASURE SQUARES

April 14, 2022 rpgs gming

This post is my own musings and an extension on WD’s excellent post on monster
design. Seriously, it’s good stuff. Go read it.

It occurred to me that you could extrapolate the idea into more than just
monster design. Really, you could use this sort of thing as a through-line for
everything in your world, but that’s an entirely different post. Instead, let’s
take a look at a way you can use it to create unique and exciting treasure.

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MINDSTORM PRESS FIRST QUARTER

April 2, 2022 meta neon shine swineheart motel rpgs business

The title of this post is nothing more than a fancy way of me saying that I’m
going to talk about the last three months. I had originally planned to do
monthly check-ins, but I skipped the first two months, so now I’m compiling a
first quarter instead.

Let’s start with the thing that really matters: how many games I’ve managed to
play in so far this year. The total? 18 sessions worth of gaming, clocking in at
61.5 hours. Nice. One of those was 9 Lives to Valhalla on stream with PlusOneExp
and the rest are split between personal groups. Only one of those is a game that
I GMed—kind of disappointing here, since I want to run more games, but that’s
just how it shakes out sometimes.

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CREATING A GAME HOPPING SECRET SOCIETY

February 22, 2022 rpgs worldbuilding

When my friends are having fun, I’m having fun. When I’m running an RPG, one of
the main questions sitting at the forefront of my mind is are they having fun?
Most of the decisions I make in terms of games (what to run, what to focus on,
what to prep) filter their ways through that lens. What’s the most fun my
friends can have, and how the heck do I make that happen? That’s a big part of
my fun. There’s probably some kind of term for this type of personality. It
might not be healthy. I refuse to think too hard about it.

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THE MINDSTORM WEEKLY, JAN 17–24, 2021

January 24, 2022 mindstorm weekly movies learning gming

A roundup of the things I was checking out this week.

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THE MINDSTORM WEEKLY, JAN 10–16, 2021

January 17, 2022 mindstorm weekly feedback writing

A roundup of the things I was checking out this week.

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THE MINDSTORM WEEKLY, JAN 3–9, 2021

January 16, 2022 mindstorm weekly gming creativity

A roundup of the things I was checking out this week.

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THE MINDSTORM WEEKLY, JAN 3–9, 2021

January 10, 2022 mindstorm weekly gming creativity

A roundup of the things I was checking out this week.

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2021 RETROSPECTIVE

January 1, 2022 publishing learning meta business retrospective

2021 has been a difficult year. I’ve been “lucky” in that I work a day job that
I still need to physically be at and it’s been relatively busy. That means that
I haven’t been working from home, and for the most part, my “daily” routine
hasn’t actually changed that much.

But the lack of physical activity over the pandemic has certainly affected me.

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THE MINDSTORM WEEKLY, DEC 20–27, 2021

December 27, 2021 mindstorm weekly rpgs mechanics television

A roundup of the things I was checking out this week.

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ADDING CONGRUENCY TO ANTI CANON WORLDBUILDING

December 23, 2021 rpgs worldbuilding

Can a world spontaneously erupt from the minds at the table and follow a ley
line of verisimilitude at the same time?



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THE MINDSTORM WEEKLY, DEC 13–19, 2021

December 20, 2021 mindstorm weekly rpgs blogs factions mechanics video games

A roundup of the things I was checking out this week.

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Greatest Hits
Spell FRIEND and Enter
Using scrabble tiles to answer riddles, enter dungeons, and build magic
contraptions.
Nested Monster Hit Dice
Split up hit dice in order to make every fight follow the "information, choice,
impact" doctrine.
Adding Congruency to Anti Canon Worldbuilding
Communal world creation done on-the-fly at the table.
How To Set A DC in a D20 Dungeon Game
An interactive procedure for setting DCs.
Ladder Tables
A procedure for a "random table with a memory" that doesn't use hexflowers.
Blogroll
Helpful Links for the LEGO RPG Jam
DIY & dragons
FMC Booklets / End of an Era
Traverse Fantasy
Resourciv: Weeks 1-2
Traverse Fantasy
Recovered: The City of Emination, a Newer Crobuzon
Benign Brown Beast
Shadowdark: An Informal Review
Traverse Fantasy
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