Mythos and Madness: Becoming a Cultist for Fun and Prophet

I had originally considered a few other topics for ‘M’. ‘Magic’ is way too big. ‘Making Mountains out of Molehills (well, using GIMP)’ was a possibility but it would be a beast of a post (and never mind that it’s Sunday, that one is going to take days to write …

Lexicon and Microscope: A Study of an Imaginary World

Rambly rambly time. I am just starting to explore the idea of combining Ben Robbin’s game Microscope with Neel Krishnaswami. I am not aiming for a particular target or result beyond seeing if they can work together, so I will be (was, actually; I wrote this sentence after everything below …

Just Guess: Demographics in Seekers of Lore

Over the last few days I’ve been doing a lot of calculations regarding population and demographics in medieval times, in part because I’m working on rules for Demesne-Level Play. These calculations are mostly to lay groundwork for the rules I’m working on, to ensure they produce credible results. I’m certainly …

Imperial Scale to Manorial Scale in Mapping and Rulership

A few days ago I talked about Fractal Game Design and mentioned how it relates to Demesne-Level play. Yesterday I dug into Hex Population Density. Today I’m going to try to bring these things together. Definitions I am using a very simple model for the relationships between demesnes. Real feudalism is …

Generating Random Gaming Content

Part of developing skills involves constantly assessing your abilities. Among my strengths are abstract though and pattern discovery, and other analytical skills. Not so much among my strengths is quickly inventing detail… without tools to prompt me. My brain insists on making things make sense and be sensible, and I …

Exploration, Seeing What There Is To See

I’ve written this post two or three times now in my head, each time with a different emphasis. Hopefully I’ve chosen a good one. And I’ve just decided to bail on everything I’d written to start over, because I was digging into the differences between sandbox flavors (hex crawl versus …

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