Telenovela star Mateo Carbonvilla wants to talk to you about Dos Equis.

My most diligent attempt at guidelines for creating fantasy hex maps yet. zarban.com/2026/05/17/m...

D&D-type campaigns start off probably too generous, yet never get to, like, a hoard worth millions. What would your PC spend millions on? IRL, it was exotic furs & spices, elaborate tapestries & armor; multiple castles, & collections of horses, not to mention an army and/or ships to seize more land.

If your random generator works, and you tested it a couple dozen times to be sure, why not just publish those? No one needs a thousand random hex maps/dungeons/cities/adventure ideas; they need two dozen good ones.

I would be a whiny scribe who would keep saying things like, "Why not copy the books as quickly as possible? Forget the illumination. Just get the information down in as many copies as possible & distribute them far & wide!"

If your adventure includes 2 tricky problems to solve, 2 interesting locations to explore, 2 unusual combats (location, circumstances, creature abilities, goal, etc), & 2 two fun NPCs to talk to, you probably have a GREAT adventure. Focus your prep on those things.

9-mile hex map of England. I calculated the farmland needed to feed towns & cities of the 1300s & placed manorial farm hexes near them. Remaining hexes became forest, hills, moors, or marsh, as (roughly) appropriate for the region. #fantasymap

I like the little tableaus in Hogwarts Legacy. Good alternative to combat/negotiation creature encounters. But they don't always need to be crime scenes. They can be exploration, tangent to the main adventure.

If your game tries to turn boring stuff into puzzles--encumbrance, armor damage, rations--instead of just skipping them and presenting characters with actual puzzles the way real adventure stories do, you're probably doing it wrong.

sci fi idea: Aliens shoot us with seed balls, so our corpses become the fertilizer for their crops.

Shout "For Minoros!" as you slay a creature in the Temple of the Bull God, & you've made a blood sacrifice & get a permanent boon from Minoros, as the inscription on the idol says. Roll 1d4, but with each sacrifice by any PC, rolls gain a cumulative +1…

How do you know the suit of armor is a mimic? 1d6 1=gauntlets have extra fingers 2=feet are gauntlets 3=engraved tracery resembles a face 4=breastplate has nipples 5=for a second, the visor looked like it had eyes inside it 6=instead of a wooden rack, it's supported by a third leg

Yes, & we can have games with pirates & raiders that leave out the rape, too. And monster-hunting games that don't confront you with hatchlings you have to kill or leave to starve to death. And games with religion that leave out holy wars & torture. Yes, we can have these things.

"In trad-land, established companies and studios churn out books full of extraneous systems and new character-building options instead of adventures. All of these, one way or another, allow writers to skip doing the legwork." samsorensen.blot.im/in-praise-of...

For me, one reads well and one runs well at the table. Both are great, at different things, in different contexts and situations. You should always write good, of course. And you should always format your text to best fulfill the design goal. That is not always making it pleasant to read as prose.

This survey of various fantasy RPG hex crawl systems is right up my alley. A real treasure. rancourt.substack.com/p/a-survey-o...

A good challenge is open-ended. There's a door high up; the old staircase rotted away. They could stack crates from another room, use levitation, have a thief scale the wall, etc. But a proper puzzle has a solution. A lock has a key, combination, or password… but it can also be picked or broken.

idea: Potions spoil between adventures. If you find one somewhere it might still be good, roll to see if it stinks. If it doesn't, the whiff tells you what it will do. If it does, then it's become a bomb; throw it for explosive damage. But if you fall while carrying it, roll to see if it goes off.

I need a T-shirt showing the characters from ALIEN sitting around the table, right before the chest burster scene, playing D&D, with Yaphet Kotto saying “We need to talk about the bonus situation.” Does that exist? I don’t want to create it with AI.

One thing I don’t like about YouTube is how, if I post on a video review of The Tome of Adventure Design that it’s 500 pages long & doesn’t include any maps, it just keeps showing me more video reviews of the Tome of Adventure Design.

It's tempting to make a world that's a utopia except for orcs. There need to be evil nobles, scheming merchants, lasting grudges, family feuds, lost treasures, troubling mysteries, & percolating menaces. Make one of each & you’re golden.

Information is treasure. If you let players pick any spell from the PHB, you're cheating them out of finding them in hoards & on slain enemies. If you use standard monster abilities, you're cheating players out of finding that info in tomes & from sages. Useful lore is fun!

Why can Millennials play a Teenage Mutant Ninja Tortle but I can't play Hong Kong Phooey?? #UnfairToGenX

The more options a PC has when leveling, the more difficult & less balanced the system is going to be. Always. The more options a PC has each round, the slower & more difficult combat is going to be. Always. But NO options (like fighters in old-school D&D) is worse.

What's the ideal first adventure? It's not the Caves of Chaos, which is nearly all combat & very repetitive. It's probably a ruins with creepy crawlies (so no ganging up) & traps, puzzles, & secrets—low lethality. Maybe others have been there first, so some traps have been sprung & treasure looted.

“Missing isn’t fun. Characters shouldn’t miss. Sometimes it takes 15 minutes just to get back around to your turn!” Jamie Hyneman hands you option bloat.

Core mechanic idea: Roll 1d20 plus 2d3. Penalty takes away a d3 or two. Bonus adds more.

Easy travel: "Go to Hexley Manor & ask for the old abbey trail—or go thru the woods & risk getting lost. Take the trail to the river ford & on to the abbey—or find a hermit up a lane who can tell of a shortcut." Shortcuts are fast but rough (cost more hp) or dangerous (higher chance of monster).

Every time I think I've got the perfect game system worked out, I'm reminded of Professor DM's principle of "everything is just easy, medium, or hard vs unskilled, skilled, or highly skilled", and I feel like you could run a whole rules-light system off that.

5e players talk all the time about total party kills. We never had that back in the day. Is it that they've been conditioned to think they can win every fight so they try to fight everything?

YouTubers who like to "really examine the implications of a world with magic" are bad for the game. They push designers to write rules like legal contracts. "Cantrips are unlimited? Then nobles would teach everyone to cast cantrips & employ them to cast fire spells all day to heat their homes!"

Wizards of the Coast has just released its new version of craps. Instead of bothering to roll the dice, you can just take the average result, a 7. Everybody wins, which is, after all, the object of the game.

TIL Wordpress not only automatically changes double hyphens to N-dash, which was annoying, but also changes TRIPLE hyphens to M-DASH, & joy has reentered by life.

Forget tracking supplies. Say the heroes can get an XP bonus (or inspiration) if they make up a plausible problem they have to deal with (supplies low; torch goes out; damaged armor reduces AC). Offer it at key points, including in a city; it's worth much more at the climax of the adventure, tho.

why do they say "tactical grid-based cinematic small-team skirmish action with deep customization" instead of "crunchy-punchy"

Writing sketches again....

Good morning! I’m drawing a Neolithic pig cauldron

If your PCs aren't traveling like Indiana Jones, you're running a low-budget campaign.

Loot that drops after defeating me: 🛠several tiny tools 🍪four Oreo Double-Stufs ⭕a roll of Gaffer tape 📝an unfinished comedy sketch script 📜an unfinished RPG 🤡a glitter bomb of bouncing emojis

Stop making a big deal out of taverns. The Princess Bride didn't have a tavern scene. Die Hard wasn't set in a McDonald's.

Did you know that, for a few dollars, you could have a giant print of your dungeon map on fabric? Pin it to your game mat or use spray adhesive to tack it to a piece of cardboard. Just make sure the number of squares horizontally & vertically roughly match the size.

Thinking of a Draw-Steel-style victory system for OSR. You gain 1 victory after every challenge (combat, trap, puzzle, etc.). At the start of a challenge, you get a bonus equal to your victories on one d20 test or damage roll (3 victories = +3). Overnight rest resets victories.

I don't think all beasts are neutrally aligned. I think hippopotamuses are chaotic-neutral at BEST. Rhinoceroses, I believe, are lawful-neutral. Elephants, neutral-good. Sheep are definitely chaotic-good. Deer: neutral-good but skittish. Dogs... what can I say? Lawful-good unless ruined by a human.

A good way to set up a fantasy world religion is to have many gods--current, old, & ancient. Good ones give their followers more protection; evil ones give theirs more power. The heroes respect many gods (or saints). Makes it easy to whip up an evil cult of the serpent god & not break your world.

Bronze/iron golem special ability: When brought to zero hp, the construct becomes enraged & self-destructive. It still fights, but it bulges, reddens, steams, & fires off limbs for damage, giving the clear impression that it's going to explode. Then it does, doing heavy damage to all within 20 ft.

Pro tip: a tower doesn’t have to be just one room per floor. Any building is a tower if it’s taller than its footprint. A vertical dungeon can have windows & balconies & such that subterranean chambers don’t.

For stealth checks, offer the PC 2 routes with different DCs. On a failure: guard rolls vs the same DC to confirm. Crossing open ground is quick, but if you're spotted, you're obvious. The indirect route is slow—so more likely to be seen—but you're always in shadow & hard to confirm.

Give your heroes… 🧙‍♂️a reliable mentor 🧖‍♂️a shady merchant who fences shady loot 🥷a rival who can be helpful but can't be trusted 🧚‍♀️a pain in the ass they can't kill 🧌a monster they like too much to kill 🦦a pet that causes trouble 🤴a hero to admire 🦹a distant, powerful foe 🐉a distant, powerful menace

Watched a super-nerd video on Hyrule's river system (Legend of Zelda game) & decided to see what the start of the Mississippi looks like. It comes out of Lake Itasca in Minnesota.

In a sandbox campaign, the heroes should choose from three rumors of fortune & glory, meaning they have an idea of the treasure & monsters. BUT one of the others is taken by rival adventurers they might one day fight. Now their choice has bite. Do we go after the gold, ring of flying, or +2 sword?