Category: Skull’s Insight

A Wizard's hat in a rough sharpie style.

So, that happened

I have been silent for some time, as I was trying to navigate the perilous waters of our new hobby scene. I don’t really want to reiterate on the events, it was a wild ride. We collectively remembered that the Wizard that has bought the skin of our hobby is actually more kin to the Hoarding Dragon that gives it its name. The community was louder than normal, and many were able to look beyond their overpriced books and realize that our hobby has never been this diverse and widespread. 

Others rallied under the flag of new giants, companies that were born out of the Main Game, and that finally had an occasion to say something about the game that fed them. I am particularly interested in MCDM’s Tactical RPG and Kobold Press’s Black Flag. I also fell in love with the presentation of Shadowdark. I think this day was long overdue, the Wizard, like the villains of our stories, created the very weapon that will bring its downfall by acting upon its worst instincts. At the end of this whole debacle I think we grew stronger as a community. It was a cataclysmic event that revealed a whole new world of uncharted lands to be explored.

And then there’s me: a shy creator that had to have a life crisis to start publishing silly fantasy weapons on the web. I stopped posting, as I have often done in the past, but most importantly I stopped believing my ideas in the ttrpg space mattered. Well, that sucks and was pretty over dramatic of me, but the good news is that I am here to ramble a bit and process all of this. I hope my words will find another lost creator one day and inspire them.

But, Did we ever Need the Wizard?
…

Discover Tips, Hooks and Variations!

Why Magic Items

Now that the Trove is starting to grow, it’s time I ramble a bit about why I choose to focus on Magic Items for these articles. Afterall, there are many parts of the game we can tweak, adapt and play with. Monsters, NPCs, Adventures, Classes, Sub-Classes or even Ancestries are all very common supplements to the game that people in the hobby seem to seek. While I don’t want to shine from them (apart from Ancentries maybe, not my thing), all of these tools are mostly read by DMs and rarely used at the table. Why items? I want to inject cool design ideas into your games.
Are you a Player? Wouldn’t you like something to make your character cooler? Don’t you feel the tight grip of what the manuals tell you you can and can’t do?

Are you a DM? Here’s some cool, wild things you can throw in your game and watch them take a new, amazing direction, it simply being the smile on your player’s face when they use a new cool ability, or the amazing story YOU came up with to fit this idea into your unique world.

Magic Items are small pebbles that you can throw on top of your gaming table, easily ignoring them if awful, or placing them near your character’s sheet if you fall in love with them. They can carry a small or titanic weight, give you a simple idea or altering your entire campaign. They are the most versatile tools we have, let’s make more.

Discover Tips, Hooks and Variations!

Hey friends, this is the first post in my ‘Opinion Corner’. I know you usually open the door to this dark dungeon and hope to find some magic items, but sometimes you just stumble upon a rambling npc. Now, let’s get to the matter!

We Just Want Our Friends

We DMs and Players just want to get the party together. This usually means grabbing all of your nerdy friends by the ears and strapping them to chairs for three or four hours each week, hoping they’ll like our weird nonsense. Does it make sense then to talk about player party sizes at all? Are you really gonna alienate one of your buddies because you want the nice feeling of a well balanced group? Of course not!

I find myself very much in luck to have in the past defeated the BBEG of Any Game: Schedule (More about this nefarious creature in another post). That meant I had at times too many players and had to say no to some of my friends. Having a big party paradoxically also means that not everyone is gonna show up everytime. Some players also wanted extra content, others were up for more one-shots. This truly blessed state resulted in me having played with any number of players at my table and noticed key differences in the kinds of stories we are able to tell when the number of main characters drastically changes.

Recognizing these core differences, between a table of 6 and one of 3 for example, could help us to better fit our game to our players’ needs and also have matching expectations when running the game. This is my attempt to sum up those differences.

Discover Tips, Hooks and Variations!