Travis Miller's Blog About Sword & Sorcery Fiction and Classic Fantasy Adventure Gaming
Ray Bradbury was the sort of writer and storyteller I appreciate the most. Many great storytellers are not particularly great writers. Many great writers are not particularly great storytellers. Writing is the skill of communication through the written word. One can be good at writing and lousy at storytelling. Most of what gets printed in …
Continue reading Book Recommendation: Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
I don't like elves, dwarves, and halflings in Dungeons & Dragons. We all know the way they look and feel in D&D was lifted out of Lord of the Rings. The inclusion of elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, ents, and balrogs (don't get me started on balrogs) into Dungeons & Dragons was a design mistake in …
Continue reading Tolkien’s Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits Don’t Belong in Dungeons & Dragons
I'm not a fan of the non-human character races in Dungeons & Dragons. I rarely play non-human characters and often exclude them as playable classes in my campaigns. It's not because I have a problem with non-human characters per se. I just don't like the way they were implemented in the original game. My preferences …
Continue reading How Do I Play A 1st Level Demi-Human In An OSR Game?
How much backstory and history do I make for my sandbox campaigns?
There are some basic elements of story that are helpful for a game master to know. This post is about those elements and why games and stories share them.
Humans use storytelling for practically everything we do. It is a tool we use to tell other humans what's happening, to convince, to entertain, to delight, to manipulate. Yet, most of us don't actually understand how it works on a conscious level. When we try to tell stories our efforts are mostly intuitive. For some …
In last week's post I wrote about how random generation tables have some uses but they also have some drawbacks. The biggest drawback I find is that the tables created by other GMs or designers often have assumptions and contexts that don't fit whatever campaign setting I'm running. The major drawback of random generation tables. …
Continue reading How Do I Create Random Generation Tables for a Sandbox Campaign?
Grumpy Wizard 
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