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Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio

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Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio

Lew was Contributing Editor to Dragon, White Dwarf, and Space Gamer magazines and contributed monsters to TSR's original Fiend Folio, including the Elemental Princes of Evil, denzelian, and poltergeist. You can follow Lew on his web site and his Udemy course landing page.

Worlds of Design: Is There a Default Sci-Fi Setting?

Apr 16

The science fiction default setting is less clear than the “Late Medieval plus some Tolkien” fantasy default, but let’s talk about it.

Worlds of Design: Which Came First, the Character or Their Backstory?

Apr 09

Should you create an elaborate backstory for a character or should the character’s adventures tell their own story?

Worlds of Design: Death from Above

Mar 19

Introducing flight to your fantasy battles? There are serious consequences for how it will affect your world.

Worlds of Design: Write it Down!

Mar 05

Hector Berlioz, the 19th century French composer, said “every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.” Just as Abraham Lincoln...

Worlds of Design: Game Design Rules of Thumb - Part 2

Feb 26

In the first article I outlined some rules of thumb I think are important to keep in mind when designing games. Here's a few more.

Worlds of Design: Game Design Rules of Thumb - Part 1

Feb 19

There are plenty of rules for game designers and even more for role-playing games. Listed here are principles, extreme likelihoods, and observations of behavior, including some "laws."

Worlds of Design: The Ways of War

Feb 05

I’m going to briefly describe the two major strategic doctrines of warfare, which can be oversimplified to “fight vs maneuver,” then try to apply them to the mostly-tactical nature of many RPGs.

Worlds of Design: What Defines a RPG?

Jan 22

It’s a daunting task to try to define and characterize a segment as large and diverse as tabletop role-playing games in just a few words. But here goes.

Worlds of Design: What the Future Holds for RPGS - Part 2

Jan 01

Even self-proclaimed “Futurists” and science fiction authors have weak track records in forecasting the future, and I’m neither! In this concluding part, I discuss trends in actual play, and in...

Worlds of Design: What the Future Holds for RPGs - Part 1

Dec 31

This is approximately the 100th “Worlds of Design” column, so a good time to consider the future of role-playing games. In this column I’ll talk about the connection with computers, and in Part 2...

Worlds of Design: Magic vs. Technology

Dec 18

In connection with my discussion about differentiating science fiction and fantasy, here’s a related question: How do we tell what’s magic, and what’s technology, especially in light of A. C...

Worlds of Design: The New Heroes

Dec 11

The way heroes are portrayed has changed. Multimedia previously positioned heroes as muscle-bound monsters or barely-clothed sirens. Things have changed for the better, and it affects how we think...

Worlds of Design: How Long Should Your Rulebook Be?

Dec 04

The nature of tabletop RPGs is that the players can try to do anything, so it's impossible to cover every possibility in the rules. In a way your rules are like the programming of a video game...

Worlds of Design: The Benefit of Experience

Nov 20

This is a discussion of how one decision in game design can make so much difference in how everything works. In this case we’re talking about RPGs, specifically how XP (experience points) are...

Worlds of Design: Baseline Assumptions of Fantasy RPGs

Nov 13

You can write a set of fantasy role-playing game (FRPG) rules without specifying a setting, but there’s a default or baseline setting assumed by virtually everyone when no setting is specified...

World of Design: The Lost Art of Making Things Up

Nov 06

In a previous article I shared differences between entertainment media and how it feels imagination is less often required of people today. What changed?

Worlds of Design: The Chain of Imagination

Oct 16

In this article I try to rank forms of entertainment, including tabletop games, in how much imagination is needed and why they don’t always translate across different types of media.

Worlds of Design: How RPG Tools Have Changed

Oct 09

I was telling my wife about GoDice (which immediately record their results electronically on an app), when she suggested an article about how RPG playing tools have changed since D&D was released...

Worlds of Design: Escaping Tolkien

Sep 18

In my previous article we discussed technological differences; this article focuses on cultural differences. Perhaps the cultural differences aren’t as clear in one’s awareness, but can be very...

Worlds of Design: When Technology Changes the Game

Sep 04

Any change you make from the real world will have consequences, possibly massive consequences. If you want your world to hold together, you have to figure out those consequences, which is hard to...

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