History Rethinking Alignment: the Great Chain of Being One of the most ignored parts of D&D's core rules is the idea of alignment. I get it, I ignore it too! For those who aren't familiar with it, D&D gives every creature--PC, NPC, monster, beast--an alignment on two axes. One axis
History Varying Religious Culture in TTRPGs and Worldbuilding The focus on bone magic that has dominated the blog for the past three weeks has made me start to think more about how we treat religion in D&D and other TTRPGs. Because of the "real" nature of the gods, who go around and directly intervene
History The Power of Bones: History & Myth Part of the Magical Practices Project Part of the Osteomancy series This article is going to kick off a big project and a short series that will be part of that project. Let's start with the big one: exploring real-world 'magical' practices (click here for the
History Jesters & Fools: History & Myth Happy April Fool's Day! To celebrate this holiday, I wanted to write about the history of court jesters, a staple trope in popular imagination about the medieval European royal court, as well as share some resources for this classic image for use in your Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
History Rethinking Fantasy Feudalism: History & Myth Something that came up while I was writing last week's post on the Luddites is how hard it is to imagine a world that is based on any system other than capitalism. The motive of individual profit, the majority of individuals living in cities and towns, the ability
History Captain Ludd: History & Myth This post is all about a pretty major social movement in the early 1800s. While that is certainly a bit later than the medieval-ish historical epoch that a lot of fantasy draws from, the larger social point of the Luddites is one that can pretty easily be adapted for a
History Worldbuilding Elements of a Western Readers of the blog may have noticed that both of my newly published homebrew work is centered very much on the Wild West. This is because my current home game is set in a fantasy version of the American West, so it has been dominating my personal homebrewing for the