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I'm guessing most of us don't roleplay with pre-modern phrases, but that's okay, because if you watch this video, you can take away that plenty of modern phrases were also used back in the day. They just were part of a suite of options, including many which are no longer popular. You could have...

I'm writing a bronze age fantasy novel, and in a bid to stay with the aesthetic of the era, I keep running into fun challenges of world-building. My latest: tea. Tea is a beverage made from steeping leaves of the tea plant in hot water. There are numerous other types of plant you can steep in...

I recently got bit by the nostalgia bug for Battletech. Big robots, no magic or psychic mumbo jumbo. Fun times. But thinking back on the novels I read in the 90s and the video games over the past couple decades, and comparing them to the understanding I have today about how war works, and my...

I work at a library, and a coworker and I had a conversation about me possibly running a 1 hour game for some staff who've never played RPGs before, as part of a series of staff members sharing their hobbies. I've run simple systems before, but how simple do you think I could go and still have...

I'm working on a Bronze Age setting for a novel. A driving conceit of the setting is that a civilization is built on holy dictates, graven in stone, made by a series of high priests over the course of centuries. Imagine a cross of Hammurabi's Code and the Ten Commandments, only if a tablet...

I have mentioned elsewhere that my group needed me to fill in for a few weeks while our main campaign went on hiatus for the GM to plan his wedding. I filled that hiatus with a campaign I knew I could run with no prep: War of the Burning Sky. I knew my group was in the mood for something...

Lunar seems obvious. Quasar? Stellar just seems like another version of solar. Cometar? Nebular? Novar? Supernovar? Metear? Meteorar? And what sort of space object is an Aasim?

I don't have a kid yet, but well, my wife and I were checking out an exhibit at Atlanta's High Museum of Art on Beatrix Potter: (Really great exhibit, by the way. That woman was a virtuoso.) In one little corner of the exhibit was a photo someone had sent her of a doll house they had made for...

(Very mild spoilers for BG3.) I just finished BG3 last night, and (aside from the very ending which needs a fuller epilogue), the game has some really stand-out character arcs for the various companion NPCs. If you go the route most players do, you'll design your own character, and along the...

I have a player who wants to be a suave hero, seen as honorable and brave, but who is actually really deft at poisons -- both on blades and in goblets. What are some good ways to let him lean into this fantasy? Yes, there's basic poison that just gives people disadvantage if they fail saves...

I have been playing BG3 for the past month, and I very much enjoy the way they do magic items. You find a ton, they mostly all just give you some once per short rest ability, and you end up selling a whole bunch because you can't use them all. But they're fun little toys that give you new...

Ideally this should be shared somewhere on our website, but since I am not able to update the website, I'm putting it here for now. The first image is the map from 2022's Adventures in ZEITGEIST setting guide. If you are playing in the Gears of Revolution adventure path, don't use that map. It's...

Does anyone know if there's a dictionary of terms that might crop up in fantasy stories (and games), stuff that is often defunct in the modern day? Did anyone here have those books when you were a kid that explained how cathedrals and castles were built, and they explained what's a rostrum, a...

He is a Sith Giff.

I was writing up another thread to get ideas for power players and political schemes that might be afoot in a Bronze Age setting, when I stumbled upon the fact that the first diamond mine we know about was from the 8th century BCE, and the Bronze Age lasted until the 12th century BCE, so the...

I'm working on a setting that's heavily inspired by Bronze Age Mesopotamia. I have plenty of ideas for action and adventure out in the wilds, but I want to have some interesting political dynamics going on in the two main cities that the heroes can get involved in. Honestly, I expect this...

Update August 2nd, 2023. Scroll down to today's post to see a working version of the rules. Inspired by this dumb pun - - I'm tinkering with a tabletop game that uses dice pools for quick combat resolution to better capture the visceral fun of classic Beat Em Up video games. This is not an...

I was listening to the soundtrack to Streets of Rage last night and started wondering if there's a way to capture the feeling of walloping baddies, and importantly the viscerality of winning a fight with reflexes and "being skilled" rather than relying on random dice and a competent "character...

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00262-3 A study in the journal Cell has discovered ways in which plants emit sounds when they are stressed. If you have druid PC, you might work this in somehow.

It can be hard to have a memorable villain in a TTRPG, because for the players to appreciate the villain, they need to see them, and if they see them . . . well, they'll probably try to kill them. If Leia, 3P0, and R2 had either been TPK'd in the first scene of Star Wars, or if they'd gotten...