1849 California Gold Slush
In the sacred texts (decade-old Goblin Punch posts), the prophet, Arnold Kemp, thus spake his first commandment:
“Keep a slush pile. This is where you put all of your incomplete ideas, or ideas that don't quite meet your criteria for quality control. Odds are good that you have tons of ideas that are aaaaalmost good enough. Sometimes you can frankenstein two sorta-good ideas into a brilliant mongrel. Sometimes you can read over an old idea and think of a way to improve it.”
I have always followed this commandment. I keep so many slush piles, often divided for each project I work on, or even for potential blog posts. These are typically in my notes app, but when I was just getting started blogging I would put stuff directly in my blog back-end with hopes that I would “get to it later.” Foolish young blogger (especially because it is easier to lose stuff that way. Don’t play with fire when it comes to something as easily meltable as a slushie). As I am going back through my old catalog to begin plugging the most elderly posts into the occasional old folks home that is my weekly substack newsletter (when it isn’t publishing my newer posts), I have decided to undertake the Herculean task (specifically the 5th one where he cleans out the stables) of cleaning out the slush from my blog drafts.
But this is no lazy recycling of slush! What you see splayed forth in front of you are both aborted posts, cut down in the subprime of their unlives, but also a bit of commentary on where I was going with the post. Maybe one day I’ll revisit some of these ideas.
December 11, 2020: Start (with) the Party: What RPGs Can Learn From Scooby Doo
This post was going to be about how to create characters collectively at the onset of a campaign, as opposed to the more popular (particularly among 5e and 5e-adjacent play groups) of character creation as a solitary act. This is still how I like to start off campaigns, as it both creates party cohesion and makes sure the players know not only who they are playing but who their friends are playing right from the onset. A less solipsistic TTRPG experience:
“‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’
-scooby doo
Building a character for a campaign should not be a solitary endeavor. That’s how you end up with two Mysterious Loners, two members of ideologically opposed factions and a veritable ball of chaotic evil who for some reason are sitting together in a tavern planning some act of altruism. Even in the best case scenario, you end up with a party with strong, conflicting personalities like the Guardians of the Galaxy, who are fun to watch in a scripted movie but potentially combustible in the collaborative story-telling medium.”
A link I was apparently planning on referencing in this post: How Scooby-Doo’s Origins Are Related to the RFK Assassination
December 17, 2020: A Universal Cooking Minigame for TTRPGs
This post was not only basically entirely finished, but it even for some reason teased a future post that I never even started, but the subject of which (the Food Pyramid) would eventually be included as a small part of Big Rock Candy Hexcrawl and will be included as the central mega-dungeon in an upcoming adventure I am writing, titled Candy County.
I think I never ended up posting this one because I just wasn’t happy with the way the mechanics worked. Too fiddly and not enough player choice. Instead, this was an egg I cracked nearly 4 years later with my post from 2024: The TTRPG Cooking Minigame. This is a testament to what Mr. Kemp said: “Sometimes you can read over an old idea and think of a way to improve it.” Don’t give up on your dreams, kids.
“Every game without fail can be improved by a fishing minigame. This tweet [BLOGGER’S NOTE: This tweet has been deleted, but I think it said musically the same thing as the prior sentence] inspired me to make a minigame for my RPGs. Its confidence is reminiscent of the Gygaxian adage “You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept.” However, I am not much of a fisherman and fishing has never came up in one of my games, despite ample opportunities. So I looked a bit downstream of fishing: cooking. Every time my players reach a kitchen when exploring a dungeon, they want to cook. Every time, without fail, I develop an ad hoc cooking minigame (the best way to do minigames, but you might as well keep reading).
A minigame should eschew the core mechanic used everywhere else in the game. That is what makes it feel like a minigame. Calling for a Dexterity test for chopping potatoes lacks the same allure; it just blends into the rest of the game, forgettable. For a cooking minigame, specifically, I thought what makes for a fun cooking game and my mind immediately went to Overcooked. While I can’t recreate Overcooked in the tabletop medium, I can draw inspiration from it. Overcooked faithfully captures the chaos and collaboration of cooking as a team. To capture that collaboration, my minigame will embrace asymmetry, already quite unlike Overcooked itself. For chaos, plenty of dice will do, maybe even exploding dice.
Delicious in Dungeon is a big inspiration for this post, and anytime I incorporate food in fantasy gaming. I highly recommend checking it out. Here is a great article about it.
When the party cooks together, they pick one player to be the Chef de Cuisine. All other players are Sous-Chefs. An example of this method is included below, to help clarify how it works. The players should tell the GM what meal they hope to create and the DM, on a notecard, will write a number of required tasks for the meal equal to the number of participating Sous-Chefs (a staple task is cleaning up/doing the dishes). The GM will assign a random number for each task by rolling 2d6, writing the result next to each task. Then, the GM will hand the notecard to the Chef de Cuisine, who will keep the information secret. While the GM is doing all this, the Sous-Chefs each pick a different sized die, in the following order: d10, d8, d6, d4 and d12. If there are fewer than 5 Sous-Chefs, the remaining die are not used. If there are more than 5 Sous-Chefs, the remaining chefs take turn picking die in the same order (such that there are 2 Sous-Chefs with d10s if there are 6 total Sous-Chefs). The Chef de Cuisine is privy to all this information. (Optional Rule: instead of rolling 2d6, the GM may assign numbers to each task: 3 if it is easy, 6 if it is moderate, 9 if it is extreme).
The Chef de Cuisine assigns each Sous-Chef to one of the required tasks for the meal. The selected Sous-Chef rolls their die and tells the Chef de Cuisine the result. Each of the dice are exploding dice, meaning that if the Sous-Chef rolls the highest result, they roll it again and add that to the total, ad infinitum. If the result is higher than the number the GM assigned to the task, the Chef de Cuisine adds a checkmark next to that task. The Sous-Chefs should take inspiration from their role to describe how their kitchen performance helps or hinders the other chefs. After each Sous-Chef has performed their task, the Chef de Cuisine counts up the checkmarks. If there are at least a number of checkmarks equal to the number of Sous-Chefs (rounded up), it is a tasty meal. If fewer, it is a disappointing meal. If each task has a checkmark, it is an exquisite meal. Here is where you may tailor the effects to fit the system, but I suggest that a tasty meal heals 1d6 hit points and an exquisite meal heals 2d6 hit points or 1d6 points of any stat damage. For a disappointing meal, the Chef de Cuisine rolls a d6:
(1-2) the meal lack any nutrition, causes 1 level of fatigue/exhaustion;
(3-4) the meal tastes funny, causes food poisoning for 1d6 hours;
(5) a creature is attracted by the smell of the meal;
(6) nothing happens.
Here is an example of this minigame in action, using the players from my ongoing UVG game. Giorro and Rian were indisposed so there were only 4 players. Grillgamesh was easily elected Chef de Cuisine and the remaining 3 (Hakon, Sulmar and Vera) served as Sous-Chefs.
Pick the Meal. The party decides they will make Squidburgers & Fries.
Write the Tasks. The GM writes down the required tasks and rolls 2d6 for each task, as shown below, and hands the notes to Grillgamesh.
Grill squid patties - 9
Chop sea lettuce - 9
Clean up - 4
With two 9s, the recipe looks very daunting! Grillgamesh notes to his Sous-Chefs that squidburger is a delicacy enjoyed only by the most prominent chief executive officers of the costal confederacy of tax havens.
Select the Dice. Concurrently with step 2, Hakon (like Grillgamesh, an experienced restauranteur) takes a d10, Sulmar takes a d8 and Vera takes a d6. Because there isn’t a 4th or 5th Sous-Chef, no one takes a d6 or a d4.
Assign and Perform the Tasks. Hakon is chosen as squid-grillmaster but rolls a 6. He explains that he has never cooked squid and it isn’t as similar to grilling eel as he expected, so it’s a tad overcooked. Vera is selected to chop the sea lettuce, though with a goal of 9 and a d6 die, Grillgamesh doesn’t have much faith. But for either Vera or Sulmar to succeed at this task would require the exploding die to come into play, so Grillgamesh is swinging for the fences. Vera rolls a 6 and, because all die are exploding, gets to roll again. He rolls a 4! A total of 10, and the party takes its first checkmark as Vera saves so much time chopping sea lettuce that he is able to also chop mutant tomatoes to add to the burger. It now comes down to Sulmar and his d8. He rolls a 3 and describes how he feels slighted by his task and only halfheartedly cleans the plates and other utensils.
Count Checkmarks and Determine Results. Because there were 3 Sous-Chefs, they needed 2 checkmarks to succeed (half of 3 is 1.5, rounded up to 2). Because they fell short with only one, it was a disappoointing meal. Grillgamesh rolls a d6 to see what results. He rolls a 5. It seems Sulmar’s failure to clean up after the meal attracted a squid-loving jellybear to the party’s campsite!
As a follow-up to this blogpost in the same theme, my next (give-or-take) blogpost will be a spark table for cooking-based magic items and a one-page dungeon, the Food Pyramid! Bon appétit!”
December 30, 2020: Session Negative One
Dear reader, there is simply nothing but a title in this draft. I don’t know if I wrote it and it got eaten my the machine or if an overzealous blogger simply put the title, called it a day’s work, and determined to turn back to it at some other time. This was probably going to be about prep? It may have simply been ideas that would eventually go into my Worldbuilding as a Team Sport blog post 2 years later.
November 24, 2021: Hausritter: House Rules for Mausritter
Honestly this one still has real potential, and I may come back to it if and when I run another Mausritter campaign (always a distinct possibility because I love Mausritter). The bones are all right there, I just needed to finish the drill! This does show you a bit of what a post looks like in the drafting stage for me. I will outline it first and then start writing the chunks from each part of the outline.
“I love Mausritter. I have been running a game of it (intermittently) for the first few months and it has been a blast. Something about being a mouse in a world filled with all manner of dangerous predators like cats or hawks feels grittier, more hardscrabble than being a human in a world of dragons and giants. Accordingly, my players are extremely cautious. Fighting is always a last resort. Most of the time, they scurry from crisis to crisis, using their wiles more than their might. I previously did an unboxing post of the Mausritter box set and a review of its starting adventure, Honey in the Rafters, on the Bones of Contention rpg review collective.
I am never content to leave well enough alone. I am a tinkerer. That is probably true for many of you, especially if you are a regular reader of ttrpg blogs. As Jay Dragon recently wrote, “Most people, when confronted with something they don’t understand and lack the motivation to dig deeper into, stop engaging with that thing. If you’re reading this article, you’re probably part of the small community of weirdos who have the opposite response.” So even though Mausritter is one of my favorite games, it was inevitable that I was going to muck around in its engine and tune it just as I like.
Here are some of the house rules I have for Mausritter, listed roughly in the order of the rules in the core rulebook. Some of these I have been using since I began running the current campaign. Some I am only just now articulating (and for my players reading this; you are now forewarned that I will be using these). I will also provide some commentary for each house rule because I am an insufferable bloviator.
[Advancement]
[Hireling Advancement]
[Weather]
[Language]
[Hex Type]”
March 7, 2022: Quick and Dirty Hex Map Generation
There wasn’t much here other than a couple introductory sentences. You can see I must have gone back to that Mausritter post and decided to break out the hex type portion for a standalone post. The basic gist was going to be (and I don’t fully stand by this method but it is indeed quick and dirty) that you assign a terrain type to each number on 1d6 and each side of a hex (e.g., “1” indicates both north and woodlands). Roll 1d6 for each hex and first look in the direction it indicates. If there is already a terrain type for that hex, then this hex has the same terrain type. If it doesn’t then give it the hex type based on the die roll. For instance, with “1” indicating both north and woodlands, imagine we want to know what terrain type is in a hex that is south to a mountainous hex. If you roll a 1, it will also be mountains. But if it is south of another as of yet unfilled hex, then it would be a forest. Simple as that.
“For a small-ish game about even smaller characters, Mausritter serves a fully-loaded set of tools for worldbuilding. Among these is a process for generating a hex map, hex-by-hex.”
May 24, 2022: Bad Ideas
I don’t have any fucking clue what I was thinking with this one. But just so this isn’t a complete wash, I am going to set a timer at the end of this sentence and see how many bad TTRPG mechanics I can come up with in 5 minutes:
Instead of rolling “to hit” or “damage” rolls at all, you always hit and you always kill when you hit. Even thinking about hitting has a chance (5-in-6) of killing the target. If you don’t get yourself to a monastery to cloister yourself from the world immediately, you may cause the end of the world
When you move in combat, roll 1d6. The result indicates how many further d6s you should roll, and the result of those d6s is how many feet you can move that turn, unless it rolls above your Dexterity score, in which case you lose your turn and do nothing that turn except to stand with your mouth agape
Instead of 6 ability scores, you only have 1 and it is “talent”. You roll it for everything. Generate talent by rolling 1d20
Armor class is the friends you make along the way. Armor is ascending with higher being better. Keep track of how many friends you have made so far in the campaign and the more friends, the harder you are to hit. You cannot make more than 20 friends, no one can, that’s impossible
There are only 3 ancestries that players can play as: elf, not-elf, and third-thing. Not-elves are dwarves, humans, hobbits, and orcs. Third-things are human-sized mice with rabbit ears
If you roll a natural 20 on a 1d20 roll, you become the game master and the current game master must play the weakest creature in the room at the time you roll the d20
And time (3 seconds to spare). I think I fucked up because #1 isn’t even a bad idea. I am pretty good at this challenge because (1) I have lots of bad ideas all the time, that’s why I am able to also have some good ideas, and (2) I was bred in a lab to be good at school exams, so I am a speedy typist and also a real shark when it comes to multiple choice questions. All of the above, mother fucker.
“A friend recently claimed that innovation is impossible. More specifically,”
July 15, 2022: When Are Limits Fun?
Honestly, this one would’ve been fun, but it never moved past bracketed idea format. Should I still write this out? Let me know in the comments if I need to wax poetic on when limits are fun, if I have anything further to say beyond what Jay Dragon laid out in Rules Are A Cage (and I’m a Puppygirl).
“[Compare the two limitations in the original pokemon games (# of pokemon vs # of items), why one works and why the other doesn’t and how we can apply that to TTRPG design. This is a theory post]”
November 4, 2022: A Brief History of Tabletop Roleplaying Games
So I remember that this one came from a thought experiment in a discord server about if one were to teach a class on the history of TTRPGs using only games as primary texts, which you would choose and why. I came to the below list as part of that discussion. The post would have laid out not only why each selection was important, but also what it was reacting to and what reactions it caused that shaped the trajectory of the medium. These are the kinds of posts I wish I would see more of, and I guess I am partially to blame for abandoning this post, since it takes the medium seriously, as it deserves to be treated.
“[introduction]
Little Wars (1913)
Original Dungeons & Dragons (1974)
Traveler (1977)
Caverns of Thracia (1979)
The Keep on the Borderlands (1979)
Call of Cthulhu (1981)
Ravenloft (1983)
Vampire the Masquerade (1991)
Dogs in the Vineyard (2004)
Red Hand of Doom (2006)
Dungeons & Dragons, 4th edition (2008)
Dream Askew (2013)
Into the Odd (2015)
Pathfinder, 2nd edition (2019)
[thanks to John Bell, Jay Dragon, Pollux, Ian, Dwiz, Gus, Josh, Ben L and others]”
Post-Script
In 2023 and beyond, I stopped the practice of plugging blog ideas directly into my blog’s backend. The above aborted drafts have now been cleansed, and with them my soul. I have been washed in the glory and the power of blogging. Amen.
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