Last night, the Paper Cult crew wrapped up our Fabula Ultima game. Out of every game I’ve played with them, this is the game I regretted saying farewell the most. I’ve decided it’s my favorite fantasy game and it probably competes with Lancer for being my all-time favorite some days. It’s been a weird 48 … fabula ultima was made for me
For the past month through the end of October, Binary is hosting the fourth annual Minimalist TTRPG Jam. As part of my efforts to publish a beta for The Serket Hack by the end of the year, I’ve decided to participate. In a feat of monumental laziness, I’m writing this post to kill three birds … 270,336 spells
In a game where every character can participate in commerce, what is a merchant? Every character can pick up a sword or steal, but fighters and thieves are established archetypes. We could conclude, then, that a merchant is someone particularly skilled at business. This perspective is both reductive and conceptually boring: stories of business are … the merchant class
As with many of my ideas, this one sparked because I’ve been playing a videogame. Borderlands 4 came out on September 12th and I’ve been having a really good time with it, and in particular the boss fights have been a massive improvement over past installments. I am not the type of gamer to relish … boss relative: telegraphs & radial positioning
In 1979, the Dungeon Master’s Guide for D&D was published featuring “Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading”. Prismatic Wasteland has called for a Blog Bandwagon of Appendix [initial] based on your own sources of inspiration. These can be books, movies, comics, video games, or anything that informs your creativity. Some of the things in this … ==> [s] appendix
In the absence of position-based tactics, singleplayer turn-based RPGs have converged upon some similar mechanics. I want to look at how this works through a few case studies and talk about what it would look like for ttrpgs to adopt this design pattern. Rather than try to talk around this in the abstract, it’s easier … weakness break mechanics: a case study
I published a Lancer adventure called War In The Toybox based on the 2006 LEGO theme Exo-Force! This project has been in development for a few months as part of the 2025 Summer LEGO RPG Jam by diyanddragons. The jam ran from June 2nd to August 29th and the goal was to write a ttrpg … war in the toybox
I can hear it now. “Serket! You literally reviewed a game last week. Why do you have another review for an entirely different game this week?” Timelines are funny. The PaperCult crew wrapped up our game of Break!! on the 28th and it took me two weeks to find time to write about it. Directly … salvage union retrospective
Earlier this year I joined forces with some folks over at PaperCult to play new rpgs together, working through our backlogs to “Meet the RPG”. The first game we played together was Break!!, a lighthearted adventure fantasy game by Reynaldo Madriñan and Carlo Tartaglia. Though the full and correct title of this game is “Break!!”, … break!! post-mortem
I’ve been reading Fabula Ultima and playing Octopath Traveller 2. Somehow, these two ingredients have mixed in my head to develop a dungeon crawl procedure based on their chemistry. Neither of them are really about dungeon crawling, and I am, perhaps infamously, not an OSR nerd. This is why I find it so weird that … hacking the dungeon procedure
