www.mindstormpress.com Open in urlscan Pro
54.191.179.131  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

archives | mailing list | twitter | search | greatest hits | rss


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

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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:

read more


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.

read more


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:

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


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.

read more


2021 RETROSPECTIVE

January 1, 2022 publishing learning meta business

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.

read more


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.

read more


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?



read more


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.

read more


HOW TO SET A DC IN A D20 DUNGEON GAME

December 6, 2021 rpgs mechanics

“Alright,” your friend the fighter says. “I’m going to smash down the door.”

Great. You’ve got options. In fact, you might have too many options.

If you’re using a module, there might be a piece of information somewhere that
says “the doors are iron, and need a DC 20 check to smash down.” Tell your
friend to hold on a sec while you check the book. No problem, not really.

If you’ve made up your own doors—fancy you—you might already know what your
friend needs to roll against to get ’em down. Great.

If (and this is the most likely scenario here) your group has gone off on a deep
tangent, ended up lost in the woods and trying to kick down an innocent witch’s
cabin door, you’re making a ruling on the spot. Perfect, because you’re playing
a game where rulings > rules, or some such non-sense, so yay, you’re doing it.
You’re making rulings.

“Uhm, okay, go ahead and roll.”

“I got a 17.” You didn’t say the DC out loud before your friend rolled, but in
your head, it was 16, so that’s good enough. You tell your friend. Your other
friend, the one who likes verisimilitude and understanding the game world,
points out that a 17 wasn’t good enough last time, and they’re confused, because
these doors you’ve just described are harder than the previous doors described.

You get out your notebook, and you find a new page, and you take 10 minutes to
write down DCs for every possible door the players might encounter, so you’ll
always know what DC you should set when they see a door and decide that a door
shouldn’t be closed any longer. It took 10 minutes, but now there’s
verisimilitude, and you won’t have to make up an excuse like “oh these doors are
different doors than the doors three doors back.”

Let’s say you did say the DC before your friend rolled, so everything is
above-board, and your verisimilitude loving friend pointed out how much you
suck, therefore letting you course correct the door DC up to a healthy 18, which
your fighter friend then doesn’t pass, and now she feels cheated, because she
would have made it if nothing was said. Tension brews.

Exaggerated? You’d think so, but this is happening everyday to GMs everywhere. I
assume. I don’t actually know.

What if there was a better way? What if there was… a procedure? A way to set the
DC of a door and so much more? In a way that made sense, and felt fair, and
everyone could even get a hand in on? Maybe with a little bit of that player
agency that gets tossed around in the “GM Advice” slushpiles?



read more


THE DUNGEON PROJECT, PART 6 (MAIN LANDMARKS, CONTINUED)

September 28, 2021 rpgs adventures the dungeon project

This week, we’re continuing to brainstorm spaces in which players might
adventure.



read more


THE DUNGEON PROJECT, PART 5 (MAIN LANDMARKS)

September 21, 2021 rpgs adventures the dungeon project

This week, we’re combing through the previous factions created to dig out the
landmarks and potential spaces that need development.



read more


THE DUNGEON PROJECT, PART 4 (SETTLEMENT FACTIONS)

September 7, 2021 rpgs adventures the dungeon project

This week, I’m going to be focusing more on the immediate “safe” settlement that
the players start the game in. But, before I get into that, I wanted to bring up
some other great ideas.



read more


THE DUNGEON PROJECT, PART 3 (FACTIONS)

August 31, 2021 rpgs adventures the dungeon project

So, I’ve sort of nailed down the mileau of this fantasy space. To recap, we
have:

 * A large open space, filled with sculptures across its entirety.
 * A small town, run by convicted political prisoners who have been lowered down
   (by force) into this space.
 * Other factions, out in the space, operating with their own goals.
 * The PCs are recently convicted prisoners, with the game starting by having
   them lowered into the space.
 * Character “class” is chosen by who each individual PC aligns with in the
   town. Without signing up with someone, they cannot survive.

I think the starting town, the safe haven, should have a number of factions
operating inside of it. Sub-factions. These can be mission givers, rumor
generators, item shops, and also the in-game way that PCs can level up. By
taking on “debt” to these sub-factions, PCs can train and get better abilities
and level up. I think something like Down We Go works well with this sort of
set-up, since in the base game there you can choose a different class to level
up in each time you do. You’re not beholden to a single career.

Outside of the town, I’m starting with 3 main factions. These are the biggest
players. Any other factions that might occur in the sculptures will either be
sub-factions, or small enough that they probably don’t own much territory. These
small groups would be good to recruit by more powerful players to help out on
their missions.

read more


LADDER TABLES

August 26, 2021 rpgs mechanics


OR, A RANDOM TABLE WITH A MEMORY

If you’re reading this post, you’re probably at least vaguely familiar with Hex
Flowers from Goblin’s Henchman. These have been billed over the years as “random
tables with a memory” due to how they work. If you’re not familiar, the quick
run down is:

 * A hex map of outcomes is created. Usually, the center hex is the starting
   location.
 * When you need to roll on the table, you roll 2d6 and move in a specified
   direction. The probabilities and results can be fiddled with here, by
   changing which directions the results go in.
 * Typically, a trend is established to move towards a certain direction.
 * When you hit the edge of the hex flower, you wrap around and come back in on
   the opposite side.

A lot of people find hex flowers very handy, and a lot of people also get pretty
confused! I know it took me awhile to get them, and while I like them now, a new
person seeing a hex flower still needs to pass the grok threshold in order to
use them. As well, since it’s a hex, you typically either need to use symbols or
large hexes to fit text into them.

I wondered if there was a way to make a more regular table that provided the
main draw of the hex flower, which for me is the random table with a memory bit

read more


THE DUNGEON PROJECT, PART 2 (PROCEDURAL SPACES)

August 24, 2021 rpgs adventures the dungeon project

It occurs to me that I should probably title these posts better. Depending on
the length of this series, we could get up pretty high and if I’m looking
through old posts and see “Part 19” I’m not going to know what that is at all.
So, I’ll probably add a subtitle or something the Monday before the post goes
up, trying to tie everything together that I work on that week.

read more


THE DUNGEON PROJECT, PART 1 (INTRODUCTION)

August 17, 2021 rpgs adventures the dungeon project

This is Part 1 of a series where I attempt to build an expansive dungeon through
blogposts. None of the other posts are currently written yet, so I can’t link
you to them, but when they are this is where you’ll find them.

I’ve decided to undertake the rather ambitious task of designing a large dungeon
on this blog. This is, of course, no small or easy thing. It’s actually a
monumental task, and anyone who has written an adventure knows that a well put
together dungeon takes a lot of time, let alone something like this. Still, it’s
more of an exercise for me than anything else, but I thought I’d try to document
the process in a unique way.

How’s this going to work? I’m going to do all of my work in these blog posts.
Each post will serve as the work space for what I’m doing with the project that
week, and then it’ll publish every Tuesday. This means that the length of these
posts are always going to be in flux, since they are dependent entirely on how
much I put in during the week. This might be a bad process for a creative
endeavour, but I do think it’s a bit more stress free than trying to write
laser-focused blogposts while I always try to build this thing.

So, that’s it. Every Tuesday, a post publishes, no matter what amount of words
I’ve put into it. (This rule will almost certainly be broken. Do not hold me to
it, I beg you.)

read more


O.A.R. COMBAT OBJECTIVES

August 7, 2021 rpgs mechanics


INTRODUCTION

This is a bolt-on system for other systems with combat. I think it can work well
with more traditional turn based systems but also with a looser, more
storygame-applied approach.

It comes in three steps. Each step can be fiddled with and dialed back or
forward based on how it slots in with the main mechanics.

This idea is free to take and fiddle with in any way you want. If you want to
think of this as a document, you can consider it CC0, which puts it in the
public domain. You can use it without crediting me, but I’d love to hear about
it if you do!

 * Objective Declaration
 * Achieving The Objective
 * Resolution

read more


AFFINITY PUBLISHER WORKBOOK COMMENTARY

March 15, 2021 layout learning

A live reading the affinity publisher workbook follows, currently uncomplete.

read more


ARCKNIGHT: A NEW CLASS FOR SLAYERS

March 2, 2021 rpgs slayers

More stuff for Slayers by Spencer Campbell!

The Slayers tinkering continues and now I’m feeling a bit of a rush to get this
class worked on, as I’m joining in a game of Slayers this weekend and I want to
try out something new! So, presented here is the WIP of my second class.

read more


PANGOLIN PIANIST

February 20, 2021 rpgs fiction

This is a blog entry in which I write journal entries for the game Pangolin
Pianist created by Samantha Leigh.

read more


COTERIE FACTION SYSTEM

February 11, 2021 rpgs mechanics

A SIMPLE FACTION SYSTEM FOR RPGS

I love factions in RPGs and I think there’s a lot of good games out there that
support faction play! However, there’s been a few issues that I’ve had when
trying to implement them:

 1. They are very mechanically-heavy and time consuming to set up and run.
 2. They were rigid in their possibilities in what the factions could do.

Goal: I wanted to set out to see what I could come up with that was more open,
freeform, and in line with “rulings not rules.” I don’t think anything I’m
creating here is terribly original or ground-breaking, instead I want to
facilitate a level of faction play where you can put everything you need for a
faction on an index card and pick up a stack of them for a group of factions and
immediately begin taking faction turns.

read more


ON PUBLISHING MY FIRST THING

February 6, 2021 rpgs publishing business

So, I recently published the Wraithshroud, a small class expansion for the
Slayers RPG. I wanted to jot down my thoughts about the whole process, since
it’s the first time I’ve actually gone from concept to completion on anything
RPG related. Completion here being signified by the project being on itch.io for
public consumption

read more


WRAITHSHROUD: A NEW CLASS FOR SLAYERS

February 3, 2021 rpgs slayers

edit: 2020-02-06 — The class is out in the wild now. Check out the itch page!

I am pretty obsessed with Slayers by Spencer Campbell lately! I have some loose
setting ideas for a place called PRIMORDIA, and was creating a ruleset to go
along with them. At the time, I was using a very classic OSR engine, but it was
quickly evolving. One thing I was doing was finding ways for each class to feel
both thematically appropriate to the setting (no fighters here) but also
implanting each class with a unique mechanic.

read more


A RATHER AMBITIOUS GOAL

January 27, 2021 meta

I have been, at best, a lurker on the RPG scene ever since the scene has
existed. I have been playing games for a long time, but never sharing the things
that I’ve created for personal games. To put it lightly, I don’t see most of the
stuff that I create up to the standards that I want to hold myself to.

read more
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
Doomed Campaign Sheets
Save vs. Total Party Kill
ITO Bound Stat Generation
Traverse Fantasy
FAQ U: What is a Blorbo?
Traverse Fantasy
40,000 Sectors: A Generator
The Retired Adventurer
Magpie Cube
Save vs. Total Party Kill
Powered by Feed Informer
"Mindstorm Blogroll"