Watery graves, inspiration from an iconic indie videogame *and* an accurate representation of water pumps? Read on to find out what I thought of| pointlessmonument.blot.im
Back in February, a call went out via Prismatic Wasteland for hole blogs: blogs about holes. This post is one that I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while, and it felt like a natural fit. Has this ever happened to you? Ahem, let me make sure the intonation is correct: [Infomercial Voiceover] Has *this* ever happened to *you*? GM: You are deep within the bowels of The Dark Keep, loaded with stolen treasures. The blood of the kobolds is soaking into your clothing and the very structure sh...| Pointless Monument
I have many pamphlets but I must campaign: A Mothership table story Mothership one-shots are a lot of fun! (enough to make me write a blog post| pointlessmonument.blot.im
The latest entries posted on Pointless Monument| pointlessmonument.blot.im
Generating playtest material for an existing game can often simply involve deriving the designer’s framework and then iterating on it. After a first| pointlessmonument.blot.im
Only one of these is an actual acting tip, and even that is about making it less work for you. Around 10-15 years ago I did improv once or twice a| pointlessmonument.blot.im
Or, testing your character’s skill as an ambassador only when there is something at stake. As my Mothership boxset goes into cyrosleep for a few| pointlessmonument.blot.im
Or, giving your players a key to the TOMBS I’m going to get the second half of the title (and the subheading) out of the way first. The Mothership| pointlessmonument.blot.im
Or, making your player characters more Ripley and less Jonesy. I’ve had a Mothership-heavy few months; finishing up my campaign (which started with| pointlessmonument.blot.im
What do you do if you want to run Arnold Kemp’s Lair of the Lamb, but you have a Mothership campaign planned for when the physical boxset arrives?| pointlessmonument.blot.im
A call has gone out asking for resolution mechanics this January and it feels like a fun exercise. However, the main system projects (as opposed to adventures and other content) I have lined up for this year are a slight tweak on 24XX and using a d20 for FitD-style resolution (similar to Realms of Peril’s approach to PbtA). Clearly, neither of these are sufficiently new and novel. So instead, here’s: 1, 2, MAXIMISE (where possible I aim to make my mechanics sound like rejected Venture Bro...| Pointless Monument
Mothership, for all the attention it (rightfully) gets for its layout, strong sense of theme, atmosphere and mass appeal etc, doesn’t seem to elicit much mechanical discussion or hacking. In particular, the Panic Die/Table rules, and the associated trauma responses for each player class. Pondering this has meant I’ve had a draft post entitled “Mothership panic die, but for supply?” sat on my Google drive for a few months. I’m trying to blog more this year, so I decided to actually f...| Pointless Monument
As someone who is a lore curious, deductive type of player, the phrase “roll investigation on the room” weighs heavily upon me from years playing and running 5e. The following suggestions (especially the rules concept at the end) are not intended to be universal, rather justified for a particular combination of players, setting and campaign premise. So, there’s been murder. Or a kidnapping. Or a theft. You get the idea. Most player dice rolls in TTRPGs are either to: Avoid failure (savi...| Pointless Monument
I had intended for a while to write a fairly dry, mechnical post about the gameplay implications of travel distance and hence on map building, but then a couple of things happened: I read Prismatic Wasteland’s excellent hexcrawl checklist (Part 1 and Part 2) I watched Map Crow’s video, which packs a lot of good map design (including some valuable points from open world videogames) into just 15 minutes. And I thought “well, there’s probably enough theory out there… but perhaps I can ...| Pointless Monument
This is a technique for a ‘history-forward’ method of worldbuilding. One where you first construct the history of a location and use that to inform| pointlessmonument.blot.im
“You can tell you have reached civilization because you are standing on a street, and there is a beggar on it” — Archmage Hann, writing to a pupil| pointlessmonument.blot.im