August 14, 2018 Mothership: Prisoners of Hecate Balaam - I’m finally back from Gen Con. Dead Planet is being reprinted and packaged for sale on the website and it’s pdf is up-and-selling, so I finally got...

August 7, 2018 Gen Con 2018 - Just got back home from Gen Con, which is always a little like getting back from summer camp. Historically, my con scheduled used to slow down after...

July 29, 2018 Mothership: DEAD PLANET - At Gen Con we’re going to release the first module for Mothership, Dead Planet. Donn Stroud, Fiona Geist, and I wrote it and it’s got some beautiful...

July 10, 2018 Mothership: Screaming on the Alexis - It’s been a little bit since we got to play, but last night everyone mysteriously showed up ready to game - it just so happens that we’re trying to...

June 22, 2018 Mothership PDF Now On DriveThruRPG - We sold about 50 copies of Mothership at Origins 2018, which was way more than I was expecting, so I am really grateful and humbled by that. The...

June 5, 2018 Mothership: Fire in Hyperspace - Today was one of those no prep needed days, which are always great. Everyone showed up ready to play and the sort of self-made hijinks just kicked...

May 15, 2018 Mothership: Escape from Banquo IV - Last night my home group had their second session of Mothership (my third playtest overall), they’re really starting to get into it, which has been...

May 8, 2018 Build a Dungeon. Level Up. - Let me just start off by saying, this is not going to work for everyone. Top-level fighters (Lords and above) who build castles are considered...

May 1, 2018 Mothership: Second Playtest - Last night I had my second playtest of Mothership, which is far too few for how long I’ve been working on it. This time I played with my regular...

April 23, 2018 Mothership: Laying Out the PHB - I’ve been working more on Mothership in an attempt to get a limited run of the Player’s Handbook done in time for Gen Con this year. I talked to...

April 17, 2018 HEIST: The Connecticut Job, Part 1 - So, I got to run Heist for my friends over at Board With Life for their podcast, you can listen to the first part here, they go over character...

April 8, 2018 Mothership: Ship Creation Sheet - Continuing on my journey to re-work the graphic design in my RPGs, I’ve tried to fit all the rules for designing a ship in Mothership onto one...

March 27, 2018 Mothership: Character Creation Sheet - I’ve been revisiting a lot of my graphic design chops recently, as a result of Zak’s post on information design in RPGs and cool things like Sam...

March 21, 2018 The Golden Barge - Session Report - Note: This is an old session report (I’m posting it two years from its original posting) from an old blog of mine I dug up, I figured I might as...

March 7, 2018 Brendan’s Twenty Rules Questions - From Necropraxis, this makes things semi-easier. This is specifically for my Nilvein campaign. Ability scores generation method? 3d6 in order....

March 5, 2018 The Hall of Sweet Mourning - is a One Page-ish Dungeon. Download it here. Here’s the breakdown: Page One: Map (below) made using Gridmapper (which is...

March 1, 2018 Heartbreaker - I’ve been working on a tactical card game called Heartbreaker, for a little over a year now. In it, players each control a dark champion who fight...

February 26, 2018 Null.hack Urban Geomorphs - Null.hack is a cyberpunk RPG that I’ve been working on. You play as a character in a Robocop, Akira, Blade Runner, Neuromancer type world - and less...

February 25, 2018 Prestige Classes - The base classes in Nilvein are Fighter, Thief, Magic-User, Cleric, and they are meant to prioritize very specific playstyles. From combat to...

February 24, 2018 Nilvein Character Sheet - hmm If you haven’t read Brendan’s post over at Necropraxis about ablative armor then you should do so. I’ve been looking for something like this for...

February 22, 2018 Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain - I got a small lot of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks in from eBay today and I cracked open the first one, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain to play over...

February 21, 2018 Poison - has a rating the same as the HD of the creature that it came from (ie. a Purple Worm has an HD 15, so its Poison is strength 15). If the...

February 20, 2018 Weapons Rules for OD&D - All weapons do d6 damage in OD&D. However, some weapons have special abilities, and all weapons have different effects based on how you wield...

February 14, 2018 Advanced Fighting Fantasy - I’d read a couple of Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was a kid1, but if I’d known about the Fighting Fantasy series of books, man that...

January 23, 2018 I’ve Got Some Art in Megadungeon Issue 2 - When I first started getting into the OSR, there were three blogs that I got into: Playing D&D with Pornstars, Jeff’s Gameblog, and Hack &...

January 8, 2018 HEIST: A Smash & Grab RPG - So here’s something that I’ve been working on for awhile now, Heist the roleplaying game. What is Heist? Here’s a quote from the introduction:...

December 21, 2017 Isaac’s Basement - is a one page dungeon that’s meant to be dropped into your campaign near a mountain, or forest, or any area where the PCs will be...

December 19, 2017 Battletech: HPS-222 HOPSCOTCH - Continuing to take the Battletech 2e mech design rules out for a spin, this time I opted to make the tiniest little tse-tse fly of a mech I could....

December 18, 2017 Battletech: FAL-5A FALSTAFF - I just grabbed a copy of Battletech 2nd Edition off of eBay. It’s a game that I’ve wanted to try out for a long time, and since from what I’ve read...

December 14, 2017 What Do The Monsters Want? - One of my favorite tools in D&D is the Reaction table. It’s incredibly simple (three sentences of description) and if you want, it can...

December 13, 2017 d20 Cleric Religions - New clerics in my games roll on the following table and develop the religion as they see fit. Notes on their religion are passed down to future...

December 11, 2017 Ophanim’s Plague - Session 1 - Defeat at Denngarde - Started a new campaign yesterday for my regular group, with some new scheduling restrictions. Everyone is too busy for a weekly sandbox campaign, so...

December 5, 2017 d20 Magical Components - When it comes to casting spells in my D&D games, I like the tactics of oldschool Vancian magic (preperation, one time use, powerful spells, wide...

December 4, 2017 Introducing: The Sewers of Sarakesh - Inspired by Jeff Rient’s Vaults of Vyzor and Natalie Bennett’s Sewers of San Draso, I’ve been working on a new megadungeon campaign for my B/Xers...

December 1, 2017 What Are the Guards Doing? - In preparation for my new campaign, I’ve had to scrounge together a lot of random tables from old notes. Here’s a list of 20 things that the city...

November 28, 2017 Interesting Treasure - I’ve been preparing for a new campaign recently and so broke out a bunch of my old notebooks to harvest ideas that went unused in old campaigns....

September 11, 2017 B/X/R/X: Ape, White - The B/X/R/X series is a remix of the monsters from the Basic & Expert D&D sets by Moldvay and Cook, inspired by similar work by Zak S. and...

September 7, 2017 B/X/R/X: Acolyte - The B/X/R/X series is a remix of the monsters from the Basic & Expert D&D sets by Moldvay and Cook, inspired by similar work by Zak S. and...

September 4, 2017 B/X/R/X: Monster Manual - There’s something really magical to me about Moldvay & Cook’s Basic/Expert boxed sets of D&D. From a product design standpoint they hold up...

August 22, 2017 Mothership: First Playtest - At Gen Con this year, I finally got to run a one-shot session1 of my sci-fi horror RPG, Mothership. We had a good spread of players: two were really...

August 21, 2017 Mistakes We Made at Gen Con 50 - This was our fourth Gen Con as a company, I think my seventh overall. While we’ve done a lot of things right over the years, we’ve also made a lot...

July 7, 2017 My ENnies 2018 Judge Application - EDIT: Thanks to everyone who voted for me, I can now say that I am a judge for the 2018 ENnies - I’m super excited and feel incredibly honored to...

June 26, 2017 20 Useful Twitter Bots for D&D - About a year ago I decided to see how hard it would be to make a twitter bot. Apparently it’s not that hard depending on what you want to do. I...

June 6, 2017 Survive, Solve, or Save: Pick Two - Last night, I was reviewing Mothership with some close friends while complaining about Alien:Covenant and my friend Nick said something that’s stuck...

May 19, 2017 Mothership: A Sci-Fi Horror RPG (Beta) - Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about Saving Throws in RPGs. Essentially, they are the opposite mechanic from a lot of things we’re used to as...

April 17, 2017 Pixel & Pieces: Production and Logistics - I had the pleasure of giving a short talk on Production and Logistics with UNT’s Pixels and Pieces class. This is the third time I’ve done this,...

March 10, 2017 Buc-ee’s Bathrooms - I’d never stopped at Buc-ee’s before, which my girlfriend thought was insane. We were heading to east Texas to see her family around Thanksgiving...

February 24, 2017 Failure Tolerated - I’ve been reading a book called The E-Myth Revisited recently. It’s thesis is largely that there’s a myth in America about what makes a good...