The Future of Grappling & The Iron Grip Monk

“I try to grapple.” For those of us who started playing Tabletop RPGs with Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, 3.5, or Pathfinder this is a phrase that causes hearts to sink. It has been lampshaded in webcomics, blog/forum posts, and live plays. It’s so prevalent that even today the same jokes about the complexity of…

Immortality is Stagnation – The Rider

It’s a common temptation for writers to select an “appropriate” level of technology for the story they want to write, only to make characters who exceed it. At some subconscious level, writers bring a setting closer in line to the familiar, and over the past few decades, I think it’s safe to say that the…

GMing on the Go for a GM Who.. Doesn’t Like To

I’m definitely a homebody, and when I am out and about, I prefer not to take anything with me – I don’t enjoy packing with its millions of decisions of what to leave behind, what needs to come with me, and the worry of leaving something vital behind or worse, something of mine getting damaged…

Christmas Bingo

A long-standing holiday tradition in my family has been a variant of the White Elephant gift exchange, which we call Christmas Bingo. The game requires two decks of standard playing cards – one is dealt evenly to all players, and the other is shuffled. An announcer draws a card from the shuffled deck, and, well,…

Role-playing as Myself

Hi, everyone, I originally posted this on Substack, intending to unify the content with Patreon, but, well, that didn’t quite pan out due to both issues on the platform and a level of executive dysfunction which kinda stems from this story. I’m putting it here and making today a twofer, along with something new. Pre-2020,…