Review of my 2024

Another year has come and gone. It was an eventful year at that.

2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

How Was 2024?

Plenty of things have happened this year, and some things changed. The blog earned itself 14.4K views, and I made 29 posts on it. Interestingly, I wanted to focus on my New Year Resolutions, and yet I was fairly active on my blog. That was for a simple reason: I engaged a lot with online TTRPG design communities. Oftentimes, someone would come there with an idea they want to do, and I'd go "I would do it this way". Then, they wouldn't use my idea, so I'd post it here. Another frequent source of blog posts for me was "thought dumping": since I was focusing a lot more on my goals, I didn't want to get distracted by random cool ideas too long, so I'd put them here to rediscover and use them later.

Resolutions from 2024

I've set two goals for this year, and I am glad to announce that I have accomplished both of these. First, the shorter one...

The Runehack RPG is out! You can purchase it right now on itch.io, and sometime at the start of 2025 I want to work out how to do community copies on it for those who can't afford it. I knew all throughout the year that I could publish my game, but I didn't know how finished it would be. Since I didn't have a lot of work done halfway in, I was considering cutting content. At some point, I was considering making a game only with the parkour pillar. But in September I got a jolt of inspiration and kept working on the game for several months straight. I have to say that I surprised myself with how much work I got done. Not only does the game feature the Tech pillar (formerly Hacking) as well as the Spy pillar (formerly parkour/freerunning/sprinting). It also features the Job pillar, a way to wrap up the core mechanics into a comprehensive single unit named Social pillar, a Lore section, an example map for the sprinting, several cities, aaand... the GM section. All in one neat 80-page document (though I also offer a player variant without the GM section, just in case they wouldn't wanna be spoiled). Is it perfect? Heck no, I had nearly no time, energy, nor drive to playtest this thing, and I feel bad about that. But then again, I knew what I was going into at the start of this year - I wanted to publish it, not finish it. And I know there's plenty of work still ahead of me regarding this game.

I played 12 good games. Not only that, I actually played 26 of them! I kept a list of them, including their rankings and when I played them. I'll however reveal only the rankings of the top 12 and a little something I learned (or relearned) in each game.

My only regret regarding this is that the only games I was counting were video games and TTRPGs. I played a couple of good board games this year that I didn't record anywhere or rank, and with those included, I could have had over 30 entries here. Who knows what others I could have tried if I didn't restrict myself like that.

12. Hunter: The Reckoning (Aug 9th)

I've kept the World of Darkness games on my radar for a while now. During the summer oneshots event on the D&D server I moderate, one of our members who's very much into Vampire the Masquerade offered to GM us a oneshot. The mechanics of the game were interesting, and the story was quite good, ... but the whole oneshot ended because of what felt to me like one bad die roll that happened because of a misinterpreted thing said by one of the players (specifically me). For quite a while I've been thinking about building trust between the GM and the players. This experience did not feel good, or at the very least the ending did not. I don't know much about WoD in general, since I haven't read its rulebooks front to back, and I'm not really interacting with its community, but if this is the standard there, ... maybe I'm better off just keeping my distance. To be fair though, it's a well-put-together game, and the GM was quite good in all other ways. After the game, we got a debriefing on why the game ended so suddenly, and while it does make sense, sometimes even a thing that makes sense doesn't have to be accepted.

Lesson: I don't want to foster an environment in which the GM works against the players, even going as far as to misinterpret their words. Some will enjoy this sort of thing, personally, I'd rather avoid this.

11. Mothership (Nov 27th)

A friend of mine told me about the Mothership RPG and how much he wants to try it out. We didn't get to try it out together. Fortunately, it was thanks to another member on the same server, this time for the Halloween oneshots event. I have to say, first and foremost, that its character sheet design was interesting. At least the variant that has all the flowchart-like arrows pointing at what you fill out in what order. What struck me as the most interesting about this was seeing the idea of "rolling is not a good thing" in practice. It may not be something I'm all that into, but it's good to be aware of this. In the game design circles, I've heard that a player should have about a 60% chance to succeed at a thing under normal circumstances. I have no idea where this number comes from, maybe some GDC lecture about how the percentages in X-COM are something the players complain about and so they nudge the numbers, or maybe something completely different. Well, the Mothership tosses that aside. In this game, your attributes on their own have roughly a 35% chance of succeeding. You should avoid rolling in this game. And while that feels odd to me, I guess for this game and this kind of genre... it works.

Lesson: The magical 60% chance to succeed at a thing is more of a guideline.

10. 10 Candles (Aug 13th)

The fact that this game made it to the 10th place is either a pure coincidence or a mysterious omen of something far beyond us. This was quite an interesting experience. Everything but the setting was made up on the spot - the characters were generated by us collectively by passing each other the traits, the monsters were made up on the run, and the drama was quite something. We started playing it while the Sun was still shining, and we finished long after it had set, with the candles being the only source of light, other than our phones we had to use to shine on our "character sheets", if they could be called that.

Lesson: The right atmosphere can improve the experience a ton.

9. Baba is You (Feb 2nd)

This game looked pretty interesting, and I've received a recommendation to play it a couple of times. When it was on sale, I got it and waited for a good time to play it. It wasn't easy, several levels were quite tricky, but overall I enjoyed its mind-bending madness.

Lesson: Thinking outside of the box is neat. Take something that people take for granted, like Sokoban, and add an unexpected element to it for lots of fun.

8. Chants of Senaar (Mar 21st)

This is a charming puzzle game, in which your task is to go up a tower, learning the languages of its civilizations along the way to solve problems. I liked its visual design made up of relatively simple character models and elaborate environments, I enjoyed its sound design and minimal music, but what struck me as the most inspiring part were, of course, the languages and cultures. While there isn't all that much information given along the way, it's quite interesting to observe how these cultures perceive each other.

Lesson: Languages can provide plenty of space to play around in. Especially interesting is when two words stand for the same thing, yet they have different meanings.

7. Buckshot Roulette (Nov 23rd)

There's a shotgun between you and the Dealer. Several blank rounds, several live, were inserted randomly. You take turns shooting the shotgun - either at yourself or at the Dealer. If you shoot at yourself and it's a blank, you get another turn immediately. It's a bafflingly simple premise, and on the surface, it sounds like coin flips with extra sound effects and gnarly visuals. But with the addition of the special items, randomness gives rise to order. Strategy. Even if the items are random, you suddenly have options on how to control how the randomness goes. This might not be a game I'd play for hours upon hours, but it sure was fun for the little bit I played it for. Multiplayer is fun too, and we even tried the All Live Rounds mode, as stupid as it may sound. I never expected a game of Russian Roulette with all live rounds to actually be made into a tactical game. Well done!

Lesson: Seemingly random chance can be tilted quite a bit with the right tools.

6. Blades in the Dark (Feb 26th)

When I talked about the kind of game that I'd find appealing, Blades in the Dark was recommended to me a couple of times. It's an award-winning game built specifically for sneaky stealth missions, so when I had the chance to try it out, I went for it. The group was fine, the GM was pretty cool, and the story progression was okay, from what I recall we all had a moment to shine here and there. And yet, despite all that, something felt... off to me. I can't put my finger on what, even months later, and that's bothering me. Maybe if I get a chance to play the game some more I could figure it out. It's well made, don't get me wrong. But the reason why it wasn't just right still eludes me.

Lesson: A game may sound like something you'll certainly enjoy, but then you play it, don't enjoy it as much as you expected, and can't tell why. And that's fine.

5. Inscryption (Jan 2nd)

There are so many things I could say about the Inscryption that have been said already. The Magic Circles, the overall visual aesthetics, the satisfaction of its sound design, and the fact that the game has no real HUD (at least in Acts 1 and 3). The one thing that I look back to the most though would be breaking the game with infinite loops. It's fun when numbers go big. While most TTRPGs don't really have acceptable space for this, ... maybe it would be nice to consider it in the future.

Lesson: Infinite loops that happen due to emergent game mechanics can be quite fun. Consider rewarding it if you want to see this kind of stuff, but be cautious of it breaking your game beyond a point you're okay with.

4. Slay the Princess (Dec 2nd)

I was aware of this game before its release thanks to the demo. I didn't play it, because I figured it's a visual novel and I could just watch that online. And I could. But then I decided to buy the game spontaneously when it was on sale after the Pristine Cut and played through it myself just so I could include it on this list. I was in for quite a surprise when I discovered one of the new endings added in the Pristine Cut. The Happily Ever After ending was an experience that hit me harder than I thought this game could. Due to my own personal experiences, it felt too real, too relatable. The game easily earned a rightful spot among my top five just because of that, and then it got even greater when I found the Dragon ending. Those who have gone through the game would surely be able to tell what I mean.

Lesson: Sometimes, a thing that you think you know rather well can throw you an unexpected curveball that changes your mind completely.

3. Outer Wilds (Aug 3rd)

I was one of those people who kept mistaking Outer Wilds and Outer Worlds before I looked at them closer. I took my time getting to this game, and I have to give a shoutout to my friend Jay who gifted me a copy when he heard of my resolution for 2024. I played the game, and I was pleasantly surprised. It looks nice, its controls take some time to get used to but it was worth getting used to, and I was surprised many more times over the course of playing this game. Missing the forest for the trees, learning about the Moon, visiting the Sun Station, and the grand finale of the game, all of it made for a stellar experience. There were some things I didn't learn on my own but I found online, and the game thoroughly impressed me. I had no idea that the planet positions were simulated in real time! What I appreciated was that the solar system felt both huge and tiny at the same time and that I could hardly ever get lost somewhere boring. Not because every place had something interesting, but because the interesting places were obviously more interesting than the rest. I can't remember the last time I played a game where I just wandered around to see things and learn about them instead of pursuing some kind of objective. I need to learn more mindfulness... one day.

Lesson: Learn how to reward the player's curiosity. Also, time limits are important.

2. Hades II (May 19th)

I don't care if it's an Early Access game, it's my list so I'm including it. The last thing I'd expect Supergiant Games to do would have been a sequel, but this one was very much worth it. Switching up the main character, new areas, new enemies, the combat system overhauled to include spells, and so many other changes and additions... I did not expect they could improve what was in my eyes a perfect game, but they did it somehow.

Lesson: People who like stuff will generally welcome more of the stuff. I had no idea what to expect of the studio that was about to make its first-ever sequel, but they certainly did not disappoint.

Honorable Mentions

Before I talk about the top of my list, I'd like to list the other games, which are sorted into three separate categories. To keep these short, I'll list only their lessons.

Beyond the Top 12 (Alphabetical order)

• ABZÛ (Mar 3rd). Underwater environments can be both calming and dreadful.
• City of Mist (July 8th). Powered by the Apocalypse isn't for me. The dice rolls took too long because of the time the players needed to add the tags together, and the tags were easy to abuse for high rolls.
• D&D 4th Edition (Aug 1st). Sometimes a system doesn't need that many mechanics to feel like it has too many mechanics.
• Indigo Park, chapter 1 (Oct 13th). I might enjoy this sort of thing in a Let's Play that runs in the background while I do other stuff, ... but I felt too old to be playing it personally. Mascot horror just isn't for me.
• Maid the Roleplaying Game (Nov 11th). Silly fun can occasionally be a good thing. Go ham! And screw the realism, I don't care if it would burn on its way down, a giant wooden stake tossed down from the outer space rod-from-god style piloted by Rasputin to kill a vampire is a fantastic way to finish a silly session.
• Mörk Börg (May 12th). Fantastic players and an awesome GM can run a great game even with the blandest rules. Yes, Mörk Börg has style, but mechanically it was nothing extraordinary to me. This is the game that made me coin the term soup stone game because it's hard for me to call it a good game or a bad game. It's as good as the players playing it are.
• Never Stop Blowing Up (Nov 26th). A premise can sometimes sound way better than how it actually is. Your roll could in theory end up a staggeringly huge number, but the chance of two explosions happening in a row without the player spending a token is 1 in 24 at best.
• Spec Ops: The Line (Mar 3rd). Sometimes, you can be too late for a good thing. By the time I got to experience this for the first time (nearly 12 years after its release), things that made this game special became the industry standard.

Demos

These four games are previews of what is to come, but they still left an impression on me. A good enough impression to make me include them in the list ranked on halved spots to minimize the mess with the ranking of the other games.

• 12.5 Esoteric Ebb (Jan 15th). Everything hasn't been discovered just yet. New genres are out there, waiting to be unveiled by those who create amazing things. Imitating them is the sincerest form of flattery.
• 10.5 Pip My Dice (Oct 8th). Even a game with a NUMBERS GO BIG game loops can be a valid source of fun. I know Balatro exists, I avoided that game on purpose because I had resolutions for this year.
• 5.5 Rose and Locket (Oct 12th). Art direction can certainly sell a game.
• 4.5 Rue Valley (Dec 30th). Seeing how spots 2 through 5 involved some kind of time loop or an excuse to go through the same story again and again, ... maybe I really like time loops as a storytelling device.

My Own Works

I did not want to include them on the ranked list, so they were in their own separate category.

• Everyone Slays the Princess (Aug 16th). Sometimes, very little is good enough.
• Runehack: Express Deliveries (Jul 30th). An awesome idea can be proven crappy on the first playtest of it.

Now for the top of my list...

1. Disco Elysium (Mar 17th)

An amnesiac detective wakes up in a rented cafeteria room. Behind the cafeteria, a dead body has been hanging on a tree for a week. It's his job to solve this case. I tried to play this game multiple times in the past, but couldn't bring myself to finish it. I started over at least three times before the playthrough and I finally played all the way to the end. To say that this game is a lot of reading would be an understatement, and that's talking about it after it was updated with voice lines on pretty much everything. And that's not even mentioning the flowery language the game enjoys using. It's well written, but I'm not a native English speaker, so sometimes it takes me a moment to fully grasp what's actually being said. That being said, this is truly a genre-defining game and a start of something new. Remember how I mentioned the Esoteric Ebb and Rue Valley above? Those two could be described as 'disco-like', and they are not the only ones. There's already another game in the works called XXX Nightshift that appears to also fall into this genre. And more might be on the way.

The most important aspect of Disco Elysium to me has to be the strangeness of its world compared to ours, and how those who live in it take these things for granted, more or less. The bizarro nature (or lack thereof) of the Pale that surrounds the various parts of the world. The future of Revachol. The encounter that the protagonist of the game has towards the end of the game, those who played the game know which one I'm talking about. The Doomed Commercial Area, where all the companies somehow fail. Literally everything about the Shivers, and Inland Empire. How they don't track their centuries with numbers and don't really question it. The glowing lungs as a divine sign. The detective having entire dialogues with things that shouldn't be able to talk. So many times we make a fantasy world, and yet we stick to the sensibilities of the medieval times, or Industrial Revolution, or ancient civilizations, or the modern era. There's so much untapped potential for new things. The next time you work on something in your fictional world and you're about to put into it something we take for granted, pause. Take a step back, and consider what could it be like if things were different. It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't have to be a huge thing. But it could be something tiny that could one day bring awe to a person who experiences your world.

Lesson: Don't be afraid to be weird in the worldbuilding, and treat the weird things as real.

Hopes and Goals for 2025

Wow, that took me a long time to write! Now then, what grand goals do I have for the next year, you may ask? I accomplished everything I wanted to do this year, and arguably to an extent greater than I even dared to imagine at the start of the year. Surely I want to aim higher this time.

For this year, I have one resolution only. I want to Make 12-25 Things. It's partly inspired by Jonathan Coulton's "Thing a Week" project, where he composed a song every week for a year. What is a Thing in my case? Honestly, anything that's at least a bit beyond my comfort zone. For example:

• A TTRPG that's more than a page long and has nice formatting, or one page with optional stuff on the other page.
• A YouTube video that's either more than a minute long or a decent Short.
• A song that I'd compose and post on YouTube. Those both would count as one Thing.

Things that are month-long challenges, such as NaNoWriMo or Inktober will count as two Things since I expect myself to make one Thing roughly every two weeks. I know I don't want to count the blog posts as Things since those are already firmly in my comfort zone, so I can't even guess how many blog posts I'll make this year. Honestly, I don't want to list what specifically Things are, because I don't want to repeat the same mistake I made with the 12 Good Games resolution. Who knows, I might find new Things over the course of the year that I didn't consider today. Maybe cooking? Maybe cosplay? Who knows what the future holds!

Thank you for reading! Have a lovely Happy New Year 2025, and may you too achieve your goals!

Review of my 2023

Another year has come and gone. It was an eventful year at that.

2020 | 2021 | 2022

How was 2023?

In one word, this year could be summed up as eventful. With 11.6K views of the blog, it surpassed the last year, but not 2021. I feel like that's partially because of the fact that I stopped making D&D homebrews 3 months in, for good. Part of the reason for that is the distance that grew between me and D&D since then (see my review of 2022), but another part of this is an elephant in the room. Starting in early January, Wizards of the Coast have seen controversy after controversy. OGL, Pinkertons, AI art, misprinted cards, and so much more. The two things they have succeeded at are the D&D movie, which was good, but came to the cinemas with bad timing, … and Baldur's Gate 3. At the same time, One D&D has been renamed to D&D 5e 2024, and it's... not looking all that much different from what's currently 5e.

All this in combination with my dislike of D&D in general is why my publishing has slowed down this year. On April 1st, I released Null, my only serious published full class for Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. This was also meant to be my final 5e homebrew, so I made sure it was an interesting one, breaking the conventions of the game to open up the readers' perspectives. I haven't stopped following D&D for some reason, though I did redirect my attention elsewhere.

Here's some good news, though! I managed to surpass my personal record of articles written in a year once again. My former record was in 2021 at 27 articles. When I found out that I was very close to this number in December, I figured I'd go just a bit further, pushing it up to 28. Maybe that's why there were more blog views than last year. The biggest contributing factor to this would have to be the fact that I gave myself a new monthly challenge of making a 200-word game every month. What I find funny, looking back at it, is the fact that my busiest months were April, October, and December. I can somewhat understand April - April Fools is something I always try to do, and the monthly 200-word game added another article there. October was around the time when I finished The Asterist, published a design article for another horror game of mine, and made a 200-word game, then I had some extra ideas. As for December, well... like I already said, I went a bit further than expected to break my personal record. I wonder if I will be active in these months next year too.

That being said, let's address my resolutions from the last year.

Resolutions from 2023

I find it funny that I said I wanted fewer technical successes, that's pretty much most of the stuff I accomplished this year.

• Runehack: The Asterist is finally released! While I can't say I'm 100% satisfied with it, at least it's out for people to see and play.
• As for more Runehack Cities, I wrote... one. It's not much, but hey at least it's a technical success, right?
• Streaming was hardly present during the year, I think the Twitch recap told me I've streamed five times? Well, that changed a bit in December when I started to stream Lethal Company more. I'm not sure if I should count that though. I also started a Youtube channel like I hoped I would! But... it also has just one video for now, and even that's just an introduction.
• Dungeon23 was a big failure, with most of the wind being taken out of my sails due to the OGL controversy. Over time, I didn't feel like returning to it because I realized... I don't enjoy dungeons. I don't enjoy combat as much as I used to. My tastes have changed. However, during January I felt like releasing a 200-word game, and I also made one in February. This made me reconsider this goal, and instead of making a daily room for a megadungeon I'd never use anyway, I made a 200-word game every single month, most of which I will probably never play.

Some of my successes were not resolutions for me last year (or at least they should have been mentioned in my last yearly review). I managed to republish the Slasher Oneshot System with a new name Final: Sole Survivor. I started gathering information regarding my worldbuilding and even personal notes into an Obsidian vault, which I find to be highly useful now. I also traveled ten thousand kilometers to meet Arell, which was a fantastic experience, even if it was rather scary since I had to do it on my own.

Hopes and Goals for 2024

I'll still keep it light because I don't know how much I can afford to aim for. I only have two resolutions this year, the first of which is finishing and publishing the Runehack RPG, with regular updates on this blog, YouTube, or Twitch (based on whatever I'll go with this year). It will be a mixture of many things I wish to get out of playing TTRPGs, including most of the design from Runehack: Fairy Heist and Runehack: The Asterist. Both of these projects served as testing grounds for the concepts that would go into the Runehack RPG, and I can make it work within the next year. My goal is to cover at least the hacking and freerunning pillars of experience along with the core rules. I already started writing the first blog post regarding the system, though I wonder if I should be more active on YouTube. Not many people read my blog, it might be more interesting as a video. Besides, you can listen to a video while you do other things, such as chores.

My other resolution was actually something I came up with after New Year's Eve. I consume a rather small amount of media. There are recommendations I received for good things, and I was never too concerned with not spoiling myself on them, so I already know a fair bit about them. As some dude once said, the secret to creativity is in well-hidden sources. It needs food for thought, so my idea is to play 12 good games this year. If they are video games, I need to play them until I believe I've finished them to a sufficient degree. If they are tabletop RPGs, I need to play just one session. Those of you who have read my previous New Year resolutions might be wondering why I worded it the way I did - why not make it another "once a month" deal? Why not play one good game every month? Well, to put it bluntly, Witcher 3 is the primary reason. This game supposedly has 100+ hours of playtime. If I were to play it every single day in a month, I'd need to play for over 3 hours daily. There's no way I could afford to do that. But at the same time... I want to finish it finally. I don't know if I'll ever have enough time to finish it otherwise.

I can't guarantee I'll keep making more 200-word games, seeing how each one is more of a proof of concept rather than an actual game, but I can't say I'll completely stop either. The rest of my goals are either too personal to list here, or something I can't 100% guarantee I can do. Game jams, NaNoWriMo, and other kinds of challenges might have to go to the side since I want to focus on Runehack and gaming a lot more.

Thank you for reading my blog. I would like to wish you a Happy New Year 2024. Have a great one, I'll see you soon!

Play It by Cheer! (100th Blog Post)

Ahoy, everyone! After nearly 7 years, the blog has finally reached its 100th post. This means that on average, there were 1.2 blog posts every month for you to read. On such a special occasion, I would like to make an announcement. I could talk about how I'm working on a Runehack: Fairy Heist update, or on an expansion and update for the D6 Feet Under, but there isn't much to be said on those topics until I'm done with them. So I'll keep the main announcement relatively short to get to the May's 200-word TTRPG quickly!

Youtube Channel

I'm starting a youtube channel that covers pretty much the same topics that I do on the blog: my personal musings on worldbuilding and game design. There are two major reasons why I want to do this. The first one is that audio content is easier to binge while doing other stuff, such as chores. The second reason is that I'd like more people to discover my content naturally. Unless I were to jam this blog with various Search Engine Optimizing keywords, it'd be hard to stumble upon it without being linked to it. And while I don't expect Youtube to be too kind to me by recommending my videos to thousands of people for no reason instantly, maybe the algorithm will someday give me a chance.

Now, I don't know how difficult this will be and whether I can keep it up. I find writing to be a lot easier than video-making. My main sources of inspiration are Worldbuilding Notes and Nakari Speardane, and there are likely plenty more sources of inspiration that I'm unaware of at the time of writing this. While my first reason is to make content that's audible, I'd still like to put some effort into it by providing at least some visuals. I'm not that good at drawing just yet, but hopefully, I'll work something out in time. And I'm afraid working out these visuals is going to take up the most time, along with editing.

The channel's name is Proph, the Prophecy Breaker. Those who are long-time readers might recognize the name. Those who know me on Discord know me by that name, so I figured I'll go with that. The PNGtuber avatar I'm using for it was drawn by my lovely girlfriend Arell.

So far it's just this video, but I'm happy because it's more than nothing. Now then, with the announcement out of the way, let's get to the game!

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Play It by Cheer!

The music band is made up of each player's character. Their qualities start at 10's. Players can increase or decrease their musician's quality by one 12 times.

Low	Quality	High
Slow (Careful)	Tempo	Fast (Quick)
Calm (Subtle)	Intensity	Strong (Forceful)
Bright (Uplifting)	Authenticity	Dark (Empathetic)
Stock (Simple)	Creativity	Fresh (Unconventional)

The concert crowd has preferences for high or low qualities that the GM can generate randomly, or pick based on a musical genre. Players must discover the crowd's preferences while performing based on their reactions. The crowd doesn't need a preference for each quality.

Players take turns clockwise. Turn steps:

1. Announce a quality and if you're trying to roll higher or lower than your quality.
2. Roll d6+d12 and d8+d10, keeping the sum further from 10.
3. Three successful predictions across the group achieve the quality. Three failed predictions disallow achieving the quality.

The amount of crowd's preferred qualities achieved determines the concert's success. After sufficient success (determined by GM), the band members choose one upgrade (pedals, microtonality, etc.) that lets them add or subtract 1 to rolls on one specific quality.

The qualities can also be used when roleplaying outside of concerts. Use common sense.

I wasn't sure if I want to include the Pentakill or True Damage pic, so I figured I'll post both to highlight something about the game. It is setting agnostic, and it can work well for any world with music and audiences willing to listen to them, no matter if it's modern hip-hop, or fantasy heavy metal.
Both of these are skin lines in League of Legends, owned by Riot. The top one is Pentakill II, made by suqling (Kat C.K.Y).

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Believe it or not, I've gone through at least two other ideas for music bands performing before getting to this one. The first one was more akin to D&D 5e combat, except the "damage" dealt was good quality notes and the goal was to add them up to some high number. The second idea was of just rolling a lot of dice, and finding "chords" (groups of identical numbers) and "riffs" (sequences of numbers that go in a row), and adding them up to get the quality of the music played. While those were okay, something felt off about them. It was just about gathering big numbers, and that was it.

The latest iteration started when an acquaintance of mine on a discord server I frequent wanted to make a crafting system. For a long while, I've theorized about making a crafting system that could also work for providing services. The premise was that to craft an item, one needs the materials, the tools, and the goal. The goal would be composed of several qualities that could be developed independently of each other. I created some ideas, kept working on them, and eventually made an entire crafting game. My plan originally was to make this crafting game my 200-word TTRPG for May, but it was delayed due to my Youtube channel preparation. I kept postponing the recording of the first two videos more and more, due to being busy and procrastinating on it. In the meantime, I started wondering how I could adapt the crafting game into a music one. My third attempt at a music-focused game however failed when I realized that I can't come up with any more than four pairs of qualities. I needed to pivot this.

On May 23rd, I woke up, thinking about how to do a dice graph with two bumps. I tried looking for one on the internet, but I couldn't find it. I was sure there has to be a way to do it, and yet my searches yielded none. Then, I remembered Brennan Lee Mulligan's houserule that I was told about recently, "Rolling with Emphasis". This method of his is meant to give the player an extreme result more often than the average one, being essentially an inverse of 2d10. I could feel it, I almost have the two-bump graph in my hands. And that's when... it clicked. "What if I roll 2d10 twice with emphasis?" That was it!

"Look at this braph!"
Look, why bother just pasting here just the straight results if I can have a little fun with it? So what if the meme is dead, I loved wasting 10 minutes of my time on this.

In fact, the secret to a two-bump graph is rolling multiple dice twice and taking the result further from their average. For Play It by Cheer!, I went experimental and decided that the rolls will be d6+d12 and d8+d10. Why? Because this way, the player can roll all four dice at the same time without getting confused about which d10 was paired with which. Another important reason is that both of these averaged 10, which is an easy-to-remember number (and hopefully easy to compare to).

If I had more than 200 words to spare, I would've added more stuff. Maybe how much money the players make, how many fans they have, maybe some way to classify instruments, definitely something about the kind of audience you attract when you get famous, and maybe more stuff. Maybe I'll include this in the big project I'm working on. Only time will tell.

Play It by Cheer could, in theory, be played without a GM or other players, you just need to determine randomly what are the crowd's preferences, perhaps after the first roll. Of course, without friends who are there to support you in your weak points, you'll have a harder time.
Art by Guweiz

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

Review of my 2022

I'm back at it again!

2020 | 2021

How was 2022?

The number of views my blog has earned itself is a little more than 10K. Not too bad, but it's not as great as I did last year. I would guess that is because of my relative lack of activity on it, at least in comparison to the last year. That in combination with the discomfort I feel about self-advertising my blog (unless it has something new, or it's relevant to a discussion I'm having with someone) is definitely a factor.

There are a couple of reasons for my relative lack of activity on the blog, which I'd boil down to my personal life and my thoughts about D&D. My life got rather busy this year, and while I recognize it can get busier, I didn't have enough time to think about things I could write here. Honesty can hurt, and facing my idealistic new year resolutions, I can tell it's going to be a tough one. I'll go out of order for reasons you'll see eventually.

D&D Goals

Vestigia and Cursed Sovereigns Compendium were two of my resolution I can admit I couldn't get myself to finish, and the reason is simple: D&D burn out. I know, it's been way too long, I thought I got through it, ... but I've given it a lot of thought, and it's fair to say that Dungeons and Dragons simply isn't for me. Sure, not a cheerful way to start the article, but I should be more open about it, and couldn't find a better opportunity to write about it last year, so here we go. Here are six reasons why I personally don't really feel like DMing a long-term campaign of D&D 5e much anymore:

• Unbalanced pillars of experience. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Ever wondered why there's a stereotype of barbarians being bored of social interactions in D&D memes? It's because they have basically no features for it. I'm not talking just about a high Charisma score, or a skill proficiency. This isn't an issue that can be resolved by letting the barbarian use Strength for their Intimidation (mini-hot take: Intimidation and Performance should be usable with any Ability Score). Anyone in 5e can roll the dice and try to get a success. But Barbarians and Fighters lack a support in things they can do in a social interaction that aren't doable by literally everyone. Look at the wizard spell list and tell me what things in it could be useful for social interaction. Comprehend languages, detect thoughts, message, disguise self, alter self, invisibility even, and so many more. It's a flaw I can't unsee ever since I started looking into the Tavern Tales RPG - some classes get pretty much no support for one or two pillars of experience, and it... saddens me.
• Adventuring day. DMG recommends 6-8 combat encounters between two long rests, with one or two short rests inbetween. On paper it sounds like a good goal, but in practice... it's a goal that a group will rarely be able to achieve. If it's not achieved, the group will get an impression that classes relying primarily on long rest resources are way too powerful, and classes that rely either on short rest resources or no resources are too weak. I've actually tried DMing a three sessions long mini-adventure this year, in which my sole goal was to attempt achieving this, and... honestly, it felt kind of tiring to me. I can't imagine doing this every time. And while suggested solutions exist, like longer rests, ... I don't know if that would be enough for me.
• Magic system. It's too high magic. It's a matter of preference, but that's this whole list. Way too many things are possible in the system for me to reliably create a believable world, unless I invest way too much time and focus into it. And while going "for this campaign, I permit only cantrips" or "this campaign will be restricted to using only spells of illusion and enchantment schools of magic", ... I doubt too many players would enjoy it, and it would be cutting off way too many rules.
• Rogue. Yes, one whole class is an issue for me. This will likely be the most unrelatable point to the majority of readers. Believe me - I have a love-hate relationship with the concept of a rogue. Being excellent at a couple of skills sounds good in theory. It feels bad when a rogue chooses to drop one of their expertises into a skill that another player wanted to be "their thing", making them feel useless in comparison thanks to a much bigger numerical bonus. Honestly, expertise overall just feels like a very strong feature, way too good since skills can influence any pillar of experience. My strong stance on the issue is: either everyone should get at least one Expertise, or nobody should. Maybe as part of the backgrounds?
• Mismatch of ideals and design. A fancy name for a simple thing - these days, it's popular to have media that advocate for pacifism, avoiding violence, and relatable villains. D&D is focused on combat. Thus, if you make the players feel too guilty over some combat encounters, they'll start avoiding them, or trying to talk it out with the enemies, or even trying to understand the enemies and reason with them. That wouldn't be bad, but the bulk of game's rules is about combat. Avoiding combat in a game in which two thirds of the rules relate in some way to combat is like entering a candy store, only to avoid looking at or tasting anything sweet.
• Combat burnout. It's in so many places. So many TTRPGs, video games, movies, shows, etc. chooses combat as a focus, and I can see why - it's exciting, it's high stakes, and it's something pretty much everyone can understand when done right. Sometime in the spring or summer of this year, I realized that when browsing TTRPGs, I get a little more tired when I stumble upon the "combat" section of the rules, skipping it to see if there's anything else that could excite me. I don't care as much about what kinds of armor there are, how a player character can reduce damage, or how many dice do they roll to damage their foe.

Then the announcement of One D&D came, and... frankly, I wasn't surprised that this is what Wizards of the Coast want for D&D. None of my issues with the system will be fixed by it, unless they surprise me by doing something about point one. What's more, ever since its announcement I don't really feel like making homebrew for it. While 5e will be around still, and WotC promised that the systems will be compatible, ... why bother brewing right now for either? I may as well wait two years and see how the playtests and release go down. I'll also find out in the meantime if I even want to make more D&D 5e homebrew materials.

All in all, that's kind of why I didn't finish all hundred islands of Vestigia (I got the first 10, though!), or the Cursed Sovereigns Compendium. Funnily enough, at least one of the island ideas from Vestigia I want to reuse for a future article, and the Cursed Sovereigns Compendium... might be getting its own rules light TTRPG system.

Runehack

In 2022, I wrote a total of two articles about Runehack cities, the latter of them being published on April Fools with a twist of it actually being an in-world piece of fiction. Most of my year after that point I've spent mulling over ideas regarding Everling, a completely digital yet real city of Runehack, because that felt like a very strange city that I want to describe next to show how much of a contrast can be found in the world. So as you may have guessed, that's hardly the full list of cities I wanted to finish this year. In fact, my full list of ideas hardly grew this year. On my to-do list are the following cities (in no particular order):

Bedenblume, Moorwell, Everling, New Fractalis, Amberwatch, Grand Republic, Silvercove, Caldfort, Ashington, Wondermire, town, Hollow End, and two cities that have no name as of today.

Of course this is not the exhaustive list of all the cities in the world. There's more of them, but I don't feel like listing that many things about the ones that are more generic. I'd rather just summarize those in one fell swoop of an article at the end, once my to-do list is finished. While I didn't manage to fulfill that goal, though, I did write a couple of miscellaneous articles about Runehack, so that's neat!

In regards to my novel-writing, this year was rather bad. I didn't manage to make any progress with publishing my last year's novel, I didn't manage to finish this year's NaNoWriMo due to real life stresses, and I've only barely done research regarding how I could publish the first novel. I still hope to publish it, but I don't know when or how yet.

Here's a curious way to finish this section of the article: while I didn't manage to make progress on my Sprinters tabletop roleplaying game, I did make something that was inspired by it. Runehack: Fairy Heist is a game, in which players play as a group of fairies who break into big folks' houses to steal their stuff without getting caught. It started as my project for One Page RPG Jam 2022, but over time I grew fond of the system and expanded it. A couple days ago, I released a new version of the game, including several more pages of rules, expanding the game's long-term potential greatly. I even started running a campaign in it in August that's still going strong now. So even if it's a stretch, I'll consider this resolution a success.

Personal Goals

Wrapping the last two goals briefly: I didn't manage to run 10 kilometers, but at least I walked 10 kilometers a couple days ago, so that's a partial win. As for the streams, ... I've hardly managed to stream at all this year.

Hopes and Goals for 2023

Looking at my personal track record from last year, I feel rather hesitant about this section. Even if technically I fulfilled one more goal than I hoped for last year, I saw a lot of change in the way I think and feel about some of the items on the list. Hopefully, this year my list will see fewer "technical successes". I'm not sure if I'll be able to prevent those. I don't care about how many of these I'll manage to accomplish, but I'll certainly try to fulfill at least some of these goals.

Runehack: The Asterists. This is something I've been working on ever since July or August of 2022. What originally started as just another TTRPG, and another piece to a bigger system I hope to complete one day, has sort of become a video game. During my winter vacation, I took the idea and figured maybe I could do a tutorial for the game playable right in the browser to sell people on its premise. I want to finish both the TTRPG and the video game that goes along with it and publish them at the same time. The video game is in a playable state, by now it just needs polish, such as UI, possibly sound effects, and more. I plan to give the TTRPG another rewrite, hoping to both minimize the page count, but also to flesh out the setting of the game a little more, and then also give it some visuals.

I've listed the cities of Runehack above, I'd love to finish a couple more of those. Other articles about Runehack would be nice as well. Finding a platform, where I could publish my novel, would also be nice. Wattpad is an option I want to look into.

Streams will hardly be possible within the next six months. And even after that, the future is uncertain. I feel like I'd much rather start a Youtube channel, but I'm afraid of it eating up too much of my time, and having no time to actually make videos for it. I guess only time can tell.

I've considered and decided to try out the #Dungeon23 challenge. It's about creating a megadungeon, one room a day, over the course of the year 2023. I'm not sure if I'll publish the rooms monthly on the blog, or at the end of the year. I don't have plans as of yet to actually map the dungeon, just to make the rooms. Knowing myself, I'll stop caring about it sometime in February, but hey it's worth a try, I've never designed a megadungeon before.

There are also other projects I've got my mind on, most of them unnamed as of yet, or too vaguely defined. Honestly, this year is hard to predict already, and I don't feel like taking my chances with hard goals. I'll take it a little slower this year, and do things at whatever pace I'll feel like.

Anyway, I hope you'll have a wonderful year, and a nice day!

Review of my 2021

I did it last year, so I'll do it again.

How was 2021

With 14.9K views, it's fair to say that the blog has improved quite a lot. I'd say that the primary cause of this is my presence in a greater variety of groups, writing on it more often. These result in it being shared with more people, and more often. Compared to last year, I'll change up the structure and talk about each of the resolutions I made one year ago.

Homebrew

This year was a little more difficult on homebrews for me. I have made some, but I haven't made as many as I did some of my previous years, mostly because I focused on writing more stuff for the blog. Here are some of the brews I've published last year:

• The Roamer, an artificer specialization for lovers of bikes,
• Flatbread Specialization, an April Fools' post for an artificer who invited pizza and pizza delivery services,
• Minimus Magus, a rework of my fighter subclass that focuses on making the most out of their cantrips,
• Soulweaver and College of the Nameless, two undead-themed subclasses for the Playing Dead, a product I'll mention in a bit,
• 10 Guidelines to Moderating Magic, which is not a player material and more of a set of suggestions for DMs to consider when figuring out their worldbuilding,
• Inchlings, a race of cute tiny people inspired by the Borrowers,
• and several Devotees of the Kings and Queens, which I'll talk about in a bit.

There were fewer homebrews and further apart, but going back through them, most of them have been more popular than any previously released products of mine. It's not something I've intended, but I suppose I focused more on the quality rather than quantity of my products.

What's more, I've published two products, one of which can be bought, and the other can only be bought. Runehack: University's Pillars is a solo journalling tabletop RPG, in which the player must maintain balance in their personal, scholarly, and social life by balancing three towers of stacked dice. It was made as part of the One Page RPG Jam, and I am happy about how it turned out. The other project came to be when the small community behind the Mooncell subreddit, which I am a part of, has decided to put their heads together and make a compendium for players who want to play undead characters. Playing Dead is a fairly successful product, and I still find it hard to believe I became part of the team writing it just like that.

My goal of revisiting at least three subclasses or one compendium of mine was successfully fulfilled. The Trial of the Seven Queen is going to get reworked into a project I've hoped to make for a long time but got stuck on for a time. The Cursed Sovereigns Compendium will be... coming soon™, whenever the artworks for the rest of Kings and Queens get completed. Most of my brews do bear my brand, but I also forgot to post most of them to my blog. I'll consider this a success though!

Blog Posts

The only month, for which I haven't written an article this year, was November. The total number of articles I've published is 27, which is a lot more than the 18 articles I aimed for. I'll forgive myself for the November, NaNoWriMo was exhausting enough, even if I could have prepared myself an article to publish in November during October. Success!

Villainous Cookbook

I'm happy to say that the Villainous Cookbook is, for now, finished. The finale was a lengthy article about an infinite elven army, which I definitely want to have present in my future settings instead of the default "human is default" feel. Compiling them into a compendium will be a bit harder because some of them will require a rewrite - things I assumed would get from UA into a book didn't. We'll see what comes for this in the future, in the meantime, I will gladly announce this was a success!

Novel

Sadly, I didn't get to rewrite it through the year, until November came around. When I participated in NaNoWriMo again, I overhauled the novel, changing almost everything in it. I'd say the rewrite made it a lot better, as well as...

Runehack

Writing articles about my world was a difficult endeavor, but it was worth all the effort. After writing about the various cities in the world, I had a much easier time writing my novel. There are plenty of other details too that I discussed privately with my closest friends, which eventually made their way into the novel. This resolution and the previous one are both a resounding united success.

Feedback

While others had only small mistakes here and there, things are going to go downhill from here. Writing comments on every blog post I've read is a difficult thing to remember to do. I will say that when it came to smaller blogs like those of my friends who I got into writing these, I always left a comment whenever I finished an article of theirs. But as the year went on, I forgot more and more often to do it on blogs I don't have a personal connection with. I'll chalk this one up as a failure, but I think I'll keep leaving comments on the small blogs my friends have, and maybe on some others too every now and then.

Game

... yeah, about that. I did not start a new campaign at all. While I've participated in some as a player, I've run very few TTRPG sessions this year. I think... two of them? Yeah, this one is overall a failure.

I think I overcame my burnout, but then went into the phase of overthinking my next campaign. The 10 Guidelines to Moderating Magic were a good helping step for me to figure out what I want out of D&D, and my article on minimalistic worldbuilding is another great idea that I plan to use, but now the hard part is solidifying the rest of the world, getting a group together, and actually dedicating several hours of my time to them every week or two.

Unrelated to any of the above resolutions, there's one other dream of mine that I've had as a new year resolution for several years, but to no avail until this year. Some of you may have noticed that my Runehack articles have been brought to life by original artworks created by my dear friend Arell. Well, about two months ago, we have talked about something very important together, and I can gladly announce that our friendship has blossomed into an actual relationship. While I'm not going to edit the past articles, in which I've used artworks she has drawn just for me, I think it's only fair to credit her from now on as I should - as my girlfriend. I usually don't talk about my personal life on this blog, but this was fairly important to me and her.

Goals and Hopes for 2022

I think I'll write them in a bullet point list, otherwise, this article will get even longer. I wouldn't say that these things are all my new year resolution, the resolution is to fulfill at least one of these, but hopefully more than one.

• Vestigia. Write articles that would describe a total of 100 islands floating in my minimalistic D&D world.
• Runehack. Finish writing articles for all of the cities I have figured out at the moment for my Runehack.
• Novel. I'd love to get my novel published, but I have no clue if it'll be possible within one year. The second draft is done, now I just need to go through it, fix all of it, and then figure out how to do publishing. Sounds easy enough... for now.
• Cursed Sovereigns Compendium. It's not too high on my priorities list, since I'd rather let Arell work on potential commissions rather than ask her for more artworks of the remaining kings, queens, and other potential things in the book. But finishing and publishing this even just in PDF form would be cool.
• 10 kilometers. It might not be a D&D goal, but I would love to run 10 kilometers someday again. I did succeed at it a couple years ago, but relative to back then I got out of shape due to various forms of stress.
• Stream. I've started to do some more livestreams on Twitch last year, and I would like to do some more.
• Sprinters. I want to finish my TTRPG that takes place in the world of Runehack. More details on that in the future, possibly soon.

Of course, this is not everything, but it's everything I'd like to state on the blog. I will continue to leave comments on the blogs of my friends to help them out, 

Edit: I almost forgot about one of the resolutions.

Review of my 2020

Howdy! I was inspired by a similar post of a fellow blogger of mine to look back at how I did last year, so today it's time to do a more laid back relaxed post rather than something directly related to RPGs.

How was 2020

First up, some boring statistics. Last year, I've had 8,38K views on this blog, which is a surprise even to me. I remember how back in the days when I started writing here, I was happy that my total number of views was four thousand, so to see this number makes me pretty happy. The average number of views per post is 183,85, which I consider a whole lot, even if some of the posts skew this number. I think the number of views has increased thanks to three main reasons.

1. I have shared my blog more often on discord.
2. I have linked my blog with every recent homebrew I've done.
3. One of my posts has been pinned on Pinterest, since the source of that particular photoshopped image is on my blog.

One of the cooler things that I've done this year was the beginning of my Villainous Cookbook series on this blog. It feels like I've found something I could really dig into and write about more than once. There seem to be people out there who have been inspired by these, so I think I'll try to come up with a few more.

When it comes to sharing homebrews here, I... still don't do on this blog as well as I hoped I would, and I feel like I should apologize for that. I've made 16 homebrew posts on the /r/UnearthedArcana, and out of those only one has shown up on the blog at roughly the same time as I've published it there. Then again, my blog features multiple homebrew ideas that are not featured on the subreddit just yet, some of which might never really appear there.

I have entered the year with a D&D campaign that was ongoing. Unfortunately, over the Christmas year ago, we've got all burned out on it, so we figured we should start anew. The new campaign has started shortly before the quarantines, and once those have started, ... the campaign has slowly begun to die out. None of us was really used to playing D&D online, it just didn't feel right. What's more, I have come to learn that it's a lot harder for the DM to prepare it. Over time, doubts in my own capabilities combined with prep crunch and some very underwhelming games caused me to announce to my players a hiatus. A hiatus that will probably never really end. I've been on this hiatus for a couple months now, I've already lost count of how many.

Due to that same burnout, I've also grown more curious about other RPGs. I've looked a bit into Fate, Amber Diceless RPG, a micro hack of Blades in the Dark, and most importantly since I have actually played a game in it as opposed to the other two, Tavern Tales RPG. There are more systems out there, and while I still feel that I'd enjoy more making my own than reading a new one, I've learned some new things by reading already existing systems others have made. I've tried to make some RPG systems of my own this year too, but I can tell at least one of them will get a complete overhaul in the near future written up.

To finish this part on an upside, I participated in the NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. The goal for anyone participating in this challenge is to write a novel with more than 50K words over the month of November. Besides writing a couple of short stories and posts on this blog, as well as homebrews, I don't actually have experience writing long stories like that, but I figured after years of preparation, it's my time to attempt it. I can say with confidence, that I have succeeded, finishing the last of the words on November 23rd, one week ahead of the deadline. It was an exciting experience that I originally wanted to talk about more in-depth, but came to realize over time that there isn't all that much to talk about. Instead, I'd surely like to develop the world this novel takes place in, and maybe write more articles about it here.

Goals and Hopes for 2021

I want to improve, so let's see what New Year Resolutions I can make!

Homebrew. While I wouldn't consider it reasonable to put numerical goals on my own homebrews that are completely new, seeing how it's difficult to get new ideas on command, I would like to at least update either more than 3 subclasses or at least 1 compendium of mine. I'm kind of bad at returning to my old homebrews in a timely manner in order to update them, so we'll see how this goes. At the same time, the brews I make I would like to brand with my logo and repost on the blog if I remember to.

Blog. I want to make at least one post every month without counting the posts describing homebrews I publish. Hopefully, the total number of posts (including homebrew ones) is going to be higher than ever before.

Villainous Cookbook. I've got at least 4 ideas for the next entries in this series, so ideally I'd love to publish each of them, and then find some way of compiling all of these in a big compendium so that they're easier to read through and refer to in the future.

Novel. I would like to go through the first draft of my NaNoWriMo novel and fix up some of the errors, plus finish one of the chapters so that I could pass it to the proofreaders.

Runehack. I want to write some articles here about the setting my novel takes place in, as I've said before, in order to develop it further. Any potential spoilers will either be hidden or completely omitted. Another potential article I've considered is a preview of the novel itself, but I can't make any promises of that being ready this year.

Feedback. I know my blog has no comments, so I figured I should lead by example. When I read a blog post, I'll try my best to leave a comment on it. Unless I just have to make a completely new account to do so. I don't expect this to change anything about my blog, but it's a change that could hopefully make me personally better in giving feedback to others.

Game. I want to get back into playing a campaign. I could perhaps start writing a couple of articles on the D&D setting I've worked out, to describe the steps I've taken, and maybe even my sources of inspiration. One big thing I'll have to make up my mind on is whether I want to keep on playing with my current party or find a new one. Another is, what kind of system do I play this game in? My current party has told me they prefer D&D, at least over a system like Tavern Tales. But maybe a new party could be more open to something new.

I think that could do it, at least for my goals related to tabletop RPGs, homebrews, and this blog. I'm happy about how much work I've got done last year, and I feel like I could do at least some of these this year. I have several homebrews in my workshop almost ready for publishing, several villains to write up recipes for as I mentioned before, and a world that's almost ready for a campaign, with a very very basic concept of a game to take place in it (that could definitely use more details).

As a final note, I hope you'll accept my small gift to you all. Someone asked me the other week about why I'm bothering with writing a blog, and one of the reasons I gave was that I like to revisit my old ideas at times. One such article, the one that talked about the souls, has reminded me of a very old idea I had. Hearts, sources of magic for each plane of existence, as an alternative to the Weave. Since I wanted these to be extremely powerful, I figured I should make them so. Two days ago, I have posted one as a way of wishing the community Happy New Year, so it's time to present it to you all too. Please welcome the Heart of the Material, the source of the Material Plane's magic that grows more powerful the older it gets!

I hope you all had good Christmas as well as holidays in general, and I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year 2021!

So what's up with the blog?

Hope you didn't fall for my April Fools.

I'll keep the news brief. These days I'm working hard on some school stuff. I've got several projects that I am working on, most significant ones being a tabletop RPG system of my own, and a series of short stories that would take place in the world of Runehack. These stories will get their own tag so that it's easy to tell them apart from my regular posts.

I've got several ideas for the articles that I could post on this blog, but all of them lacked that spark I felt when writing most of my other articles, so I didn't get back to finishing them.

I do also have plans for 5e homebrews, but I don't know when will I manage to publish those. I did manage to publish another version of Sealed Horror, but judging by the feedback I received, it's still not complete.

Here's an overview of my homebrews up until now ever since Golden King Monk, excluding older versions of already updated brews. The list is organized in the order of newest to oldest.

Sealed Horror, a sorcerous origin
Minimus Magus, a fighter archetype
Monstrous Lord, a ranger archetype
The Backstabbing Friend, a magical item
Circle of the Blood Alchemy, a druidic circle
Rod of Fifth Glyph Chastising, a magical rod
Jánošík's Infamous Treasures, a set of magical items
Way of the Rubber, a monastic way
Path of the Organist, a barbaric path
Warp Sniper, a fighter archetype
Appliancebjörn, a sorcerous origin

Apologies for the inactivity on the blog. Have a nice day!

How to do low magic?

Happy late New Year, everyone! Sorry for no posts, real life has a way of keeping me busy, but I should be slowly getting back on my tracks now.

During the last few months, I've been pondering how to do low magic settings properly in D&D 5th Edition. I've seen several attempts, but I was not satisfied, because they were not done in the way I wanted. And then it hit me - there is no single low magic. Thus, we got a problem with definitions. So I decided to team up with the Grisly Eye Games to set some terms, accidentally finding out how to do low magic 5th edition D&D settings in the process of doing that.

There are four main types of low magic in the fantasy worlds:

• low power magic
• low frequency magic
• low possibility magic
• low reliability magic

Low Power Magic

Low power magic is the type of magic that can't do things that are too powerful. It's one of my preferred types of magic, where grand things such as conjuring a fortress or summoning demons (depending on how low the author wants to keep the magic) are simply not possible.

There is a relatively simple way to do a low power magic setting, and that would be to limit, how many caster levels can the players get. Of course, divide half-caster levels by two and third-caster levels by three while counting. The rest of the levels have to be gained in non-caster class, such as monk, fighter, rogue, or barbarian.

When limiting the number of levels, consider what's the maximum caster level you want your players to gain. Depending on this level, different spell slots will be available to the players. If I were to limit the level of magic but still grant my players spell slots, I would most probably allow 10 caster levels. The 9th level is the moment at which the player gains some interesting spells, such as actual resurrections (that are not too strong and come with drawbacks), geas and modify memory, limited long-range teleportation, and several wall spells. I feel like these are still strong enough to be considered master-level magics by some standards. As for why 10th level and not 9th, some of the caster classes like warlock and wizard gain a subclass feature at 10th level, meaning that it could make for an interesting "caster capstone" of sorts.

Low Frequency Magic

The most common of the low magic setting types I've seen, the low frequency magic aims to limit how regularly does one meet with magic. This could be like the Shire in Lord of the Rings, where it's an event when Gandalf comes around, or like the muggle world in Harry Potter (think the beginning of the first movie, before Harry gets to the Diagonal Alley or Hogwarts). There is a charm to this type of low magic - it makes the magic rare, and mysterious. You either don't know when you're talking to a mage, or everyone knows.

How would this be possible is rather easy - set conditions for when a player gets to play someone magical. One good example would be Grisly Eye Games' method of Unique Backgrounds, which are backgrounds that lack a Feature, have an additional Unique Flaw, and let the player play as a race or class normally not allowed in a game. Another example could be gaining the magical powers through a quest, or the magical powers coming at a cost, such as being pursued publicly in a world where magic is forbidden.

Low Possibility Magic

Low Possibility Magic setting is a world, where magic can only be used for a few things. Some examples of this in the popular media would be the Death Note, where the Death Note can essentially only be used to kill people, determine how they die, and control the circumstances of their death (and see the gods of death, but that's not too important now is it), or Avatar the Last Airbender, where magic can be used to control one of the four elements - air, water, fire, earth - and do some other things that I don't think I should mention here.

One good thing about Low Possibility Magic is the potential to improve worldbuilding using this magic. Imagine magical elevators that are possible thanks to the telekinesis, or cancellation of lotteries/raffles due to divination magic. The fewer magic there is, the more manageable it is, and the easier it is to include in the worldbuilding. Which is rather difficult with over 400 spells that the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons has right now.

The solution to this is to limit which spells the players can and can't pick. Possibly even limit which classes players can pick. Or races. Mainly because this type of magic is all about limitations and how one can use a few things for many situations.

Low Reliability Magic

Last but not least, we have the low reliability magic world. Whether it's just magic that can just fizzle out and not work, or magic that has a chance to open a dimensional rift to the xeno hellscapes, this magic is simply not as well documented as the standard 5e's magic, where when you do a thing, it happens for sure.

There are several ways to do this type, but before I go on with that, a fair warning. Players may not like it when their magic doesn't work - whether it's just them expending a spell slot for nothing, or them getting hurt in the process, or their teammates getting hurt in the process and getting angry at the player. This type of low magic should be used with caution, for - just like the magic itself - it can have unpredictable results and may be risky.

So what does one do to make this work? Well, the answer is simple. Roll tables! If I had to call them anything better, I would call them "meta-spells". You can fill these tables with anything - you cast your spell, nothing happens, you conjure an evil monster, you cast maybe a wrong but similar spell or a portal to another dimension opens, ... anything you wish. They can also be of any size you are comfortable with - from d4 to d100, possibly even more or less. Not every cell needs to be different, and if you want your world to work that way, include in some way a possibility to affect the results depending on the caster's level. The easiest way to do that would be to add the caster level to the result and have the table organized from the worst results to the best.

Combined Low Magics

To finish off this article, I'll present the ways in which I'd implement combinations of these low magic types.

• Low Power Magic + Low Frequency Magic. The players have to fulfill special conditions to be able to gain caster levels or play as magical races, but they can only gain a certain amount of caster levels, having to multiclass into a nonmagical class for the rest. This is especially good for worlds, where the magic is significant because it's scarce (think Lord of the Rings).
• Low Power Magic + Low Possibility Magic. The players can only gain a certain amount of caster levels, and they have a limited selection of spells. This is especially good for the worlds, where the magic is supposed to be rather obscure and not too useful.
• Low Power Magic + Low Reliability Magic. The players can only gain a certain amount of caster levels, and the magic they use is not even deterministic anyway.
• Low Frequency Magic + Low Possibility Magic. The players must fulfill special conditions for the magic and they have a limited selection of magical options.
• Low Frequency Magic + Low Reliability Magic. The players must fulfill special conditions for the magic options, and the magic they use can have random outcomes.
• Low Possibility Magic + Low Reliability Magic. Only a few spells are known to the people, and even those can have unpredictable outcomes. If combined with high power magic, this could make for an interesting setting where the magic is forbidden because of the risks connected to it.

Thank you all for reading, and I hope you have a nice day and a good year 2019!

CoFS:A Hardcover Release Celebration!

Good day everyone!

As some of you might have heard, Compendium of Forgotten Secrets: Awakening has been released and is getting printed, as well as sent out, as I write this. Not to Europe yet, sadly, but soon I'll have my own hardcover. Until then, I figured that I could celebrate by making an archetype of my own inspired partially by the book, and by some Greek mythology.

What's there to like about CoFS:A?

Alright, let me start the answer to this question with another question - who here played Skyrim? I know I did. How about Oblivion, its sequel? Morrowind? Any other Elder Scrolls game? Well anyway, these games share several things in common, mainly the setting. Within the setting, you have lots of various beings - some are mere mortals, some are gods, some are chicken protected by the law apparently, judging by how many times the guards have chased me because of them. But... my favorite beings would have to be the Daedric Princes. I always liked the idea of beings that are on the power level of gods, but not really divine... and how close could they get with the mortals. Bestowing them with artifacts, having them do quests for them, telling them things, but also fighting each other and making alliances. The Compendium I'm talking about is all about a bunch of these beings, except they're called Alrisen instead of Daedric Princes. But I can see through their guises. Sheogorath, you won't fool me again!

Anyway, if I had to say what my least favorite of these patrons are, I always like to answer with "the ones I've read the least about". Seriously, they're well written and flexible enough to fit into any world I've ever ran with minimal changes, including Ethernet of Keys. Some of my personal most liked patrons would have to be:
- The Keeper of the Depths, a lovecraftian sea horror that invades the dreams and grants its followers forbidden knowledge;
- The Fallen Exile, a literal star that fell in love, and I guess one could say it fell from sky because of love too;
- The Shadowcat, the first ever nightmare that feeds on other nightmares, and can manipulate the powers of luck;

And the one who inspired my monk archetype...

Currency Conspiracy and Way of the Golden King

Who wants to get rich? Everyone who does raise your hand. Good, the conspiracy has taken note of you, you can lower your hands now. Actually, the currency conspiracy cabal is responsible for you wanting to get rich. They're responsible for money being as widespread as it is. But I shouldn't tell you much more, or else they'll notice me.

There is something I can tell you though. How many of you have heard of the king Midas? You know, the Greek legend, the king who turned things into gold with nothing but a touch? Alright. I figured that it would be cool if the king owned up to his curse, and made good use of it. You know, like certain other cursed royalties, hint hint. If his powers work only through touch though, he may as well throw away weapons. Hell, the armor will be made of gold, so he doesn't need that either. The best way to make use of his power is through martial arts.

This is roughly how I came up with the concept behind the Way of the Golden King. He was greedy, he got cursed, the unseen forces (that may or may not be Currency Conspiracy) gave him an offer, and now he's got his own monastery where he teaches his monks how to turn things into gold. Okay, maybe not real gold since this is players we're talking about, just false gold.

Way of the Golden King PDF

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Thank you for reading! Make sure to check out the Compendium, even the abridged version could give you an impression of what's inside. Alternatively, you can find GenuineBeliever on Reddit, Twitter, Discord and Facebook! But since I don't want to leave you with a barrage of links, I'll have to do with just one.

Webpage of Genuine Fantasy Press

This promotion was not paid in any way, I just wanted to make sure my readers see this. Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

I am back

Hi! It's me, and I'm back. Hopefully.

I got burned out and did not feel well, but that's changed now. I did do some stuff in the meantime, so let's go through it.

Sivobog

I abandoned Sivobog setting. I got unhappy with it for a couple of reasons. Here's a short list of them:

• Lack of diversity. One of the players literally visited all three continents, and there were virtually no differences. Another detail is that most of the cultures felt same, not only compared to other cultures but on the inside too.
• Unfairness. One of the sides has got gods on their side. The other one should have been dead already.
• History didn't make enough sense. Yeah, sure, because elves were made sooner than fey. I suppose those are the risks of collaborative worldbuilding.
• World felt small. Because sure, you can travel between two continents in about two weeks time.
• World felt empty. My world map had about twenty cities on it, and I didn't figure anything more before the game began.

I know there could be more reasons, but I don't remember them all at this point. With that being said...

Staromoc

I made a new world. Yup, because I didn't really think any other world was that good. Here I will try to fight all these points that made Sivobog a bad setting by careful planning. Diversity should be present everywhere, there should be exceptions at all times, world should not be divided into clearly distinct factions (Warcraft is nice influence, but world doesn't have to be constantly at war) and I'll work out the history by myself. To make the world feel not empty or small, I will be focusing on just one continent, where my players are going to do stuff in one kingdom, possibly even a single county of the kingdom. What I need to do is make a hex map of the kingdom and some local history, and I should be good to go. Even if... I already started the game.

Alright, irresponsible life choices aside, I need to make update on other worlds.

Rest of the Settings

Lasklo was just my dumping ground for experiments of mine, it never really was a fully-fledged setting.

Earth-2020 has too many problems to solve, like D&D 5e being built for high fantasy settings and Earth-2020 being low magic modern setting, I suppose. That's why Earth 2020 is gonna be dropped too.

Charodey Academy is something I really do want to develop actually, to this day. Magic schools make for some classic settings, and I would really want to make something out of it one day. This one will get updates. Eventually.

Finally, Grimwick. My bastard lovechild of Ravenloft with lots of fairy tales flavor. I would like to make more stuff for it, but the problem is that premises of some of the demiplanes are too flawed. How would a demiplane where nothing ever dies work? Or one where it's constantly night? If it was dark at all times, what would the people and animals eat? Why would the demiplane that is on a time-loop not have players in the same time-loop? Too many questions. I would love to figure out solutions for them, but right now I am not capable of that so the Grimwick is gonna be on a hiatus.

My Homebrews

While I was gone, I made some homebrews. Some turned out pretty good and had positive feedback, others not that much. I don't really feel like all of my homebrews are fully complete yet, so I'll just post those that I find acceptable here. Not all of them are as I wish they could be, so I do plan to edit them sooner or later. One I am pretty proud of is the changeling race, so I do recommend you to check it out.

My articles

Let's see... the Fey one is technically finished, but it still feels kinda off to me. Like it's missing something. That is why I did not publish it yet. There is an article about Far Realms that I had planned for a long time and is technically finished, but it feels off to me too. Most of the articles felt off to me. I couldn't figure out what it is for the longest time, and then I gave up, starting the hiatus.

Well, now I'm ready to tackle with these issues. Maybe even releasing them in a state I am not perfectly fine with, seeing how the school begins once again.

I suppose that's it. Main setting for now is going to be Staromoc, Charodey next one, I'll be working on a lot of homebrew and writing articles.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

Sylvan Loner, style of game

I feel like I have made my own style of DMing, one that appears to have inspired people to DM this way too. I'm not sure if it isn't already a thing in D&D, but I felt like this could use a name, like West Marshes since that too is a playstyle with some characteristic rules to it. I'll name my playstyle "Sylvan Loner", keeping that name until someone shows up to tell me there's another name for this, possibly a couple years old.

The rules necessary for this playstyle:

- players all play in the same world
- each player plays a solo game
- NPC companions are vital, when in combat the PC gets to control them unless said otherwise
- time in the world is inconsistent
- sandbox
- when players meet, they aren't really supposed to merge parties. Maybe just stay for a bit and talk, or at best they could do one quest together, like helping with killing a dragon or in a heist. Afterall, all players have some goal of their own.

That would be everything for today. Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

Settings to work on

To make contents of this blog easier to understand, I should include explanations for what each setting is about, a short description that can be read by newcomers.

Sivobog

Gods rule the world of Sivobog, they ruled it ever since they made its creations. Never able to let go of it, they got angry when more beings started to sprout out, beings they did not make. This is why all the races and monsters of this world are split into two groups - Favoured, ones that gods love, and Unfavoured, ones gods hate. Each group's races used to cooperate within groups for the majority of world's history.
However, something strange happened relatively recently. The avatars of gods stopped receiving commands on a daily basis. As a result of that, a war broke out between the Favoured races, that stopped to care about Unfavoured ones, who finally got chance to develop. And then, another Moon appeared out of nowhere.
This is my current setting I'm planning to play my games in, and thus will contain most of the spoiler warnings for my players. Let's see how much it changes over time.

Charodey Academy

A magical school located in a demiplane of its own, inbetween multiple worlds. It's a place where not only wizards, but also sorcerers, warlocks, and possibly other classes can study magic and even more. This demiplane is big enough to house the school, but also a forest and a city that has things necessary for surviving like way to produce food and other things of the same sort.

Grimwick

Grimwick is heavily inspired by Ravenloft, basically me trying to reinvent it for my own purposes. It's composed out of a set of demiplanes, each being ruled by a person who made an unfortunate wish, that turned into a whole story revolving around them. So, a Ravenloft, but with Fey instead of Undead, and about fairy tales instead of horrors.

Earth-2020 (E2020)

Year is 2020. Earth is just as you would expect it to be, just as you know it. Well, except for the fact that apparently, magic and fantastic creatures are real, they were just hidden here and there. Sometimes, magic interacts with modern technology, and that creates interesting combinations.
(Note: It's made up in 2016/2017, so please - if during that time something in the society or technological progress changes in a major way, which I'm almost sure it will, bear in mind that I can't see into the future.)

I know there may be more settings, some of which will be just a one-shot equivalent of my worldbuilding, while other may actually join this list. There is also a chance that some of these will get less attention than the others, so I can't promise anything.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!