Prismatic Wasteland

Blog Preview: Pedantic Wasteland: Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals

This review is written as part of a Secret Santa type thing for my friend Anne, so if you know Anne, consider this review embargoed until I post it!

Pedantic Wasteland: Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals

Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals (hereinafter “Lighthouse”) is an adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) by Anne Hunter, published by...

Blog Preview: Slush Magic

I can't stop writing blog posts. I divided my magic spells into 5 categories: Black Magic, Blue Magic, Green Magic, Red Magic, and White Magic. Nothing groundbreaking, but as part of the process of sorting magic words into these categories, I had to reject 100 magic words (only 500 magic words made the final cut). But nothing goes to waste here, so I turned them into a 6th category of magic: slush magic.

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My latest draft of the Prismatic Wasteland rules (beta version coming so...

Blogpost Preview: Slush Hour

I write about 8 abandoned blog posts. Some good ideas in here! Also at least 6 bad ideas:

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 ...

Blog Preview: D20 Tabletop Roleplaying Game Gift Ideas that Aren’t Just More TTRPGs (or Dice)

All too often, you want to buy a gift for someone who is deep, deep into this or that hobby but you aren’t yourself super well versed in it. Googling what to get a person based on that hobby is absolutely rational, but the results are typically stuff that a committed hobbyist either already has or is fully aware of and pointedly doesn’t have for a reason. In the specific case of looking for TTRPG-related gifts, all gift guides basically point you to one of two things: very popular (typica...

A New Substack and a Free Adventure for Y'all

My third post in 24 hours here but I promise I am very normal. Just wanted to share two things with you folks:

The first is that I'm opening up a substack in addition to my blog. If you're familiar with the Bastionland blog and the Bastionland Presser, it is going to work a lot like that. You folks probably get enough emails from me, but I'd never dissuade you from opening one more front in my longstanding campaign for people to notice me, so my substack is at 2024-11-11 22:19:23 +0000 UTC View Post

Another Draft Blogpost:

This was is much shorter than the one from last night and mostly just an introduction to me using substack.

They’re Eating the Blogs

First up, I have a substack now. This blog isn’t going anywhere (if I ever stop posting, you must assume I have died), but now there are two places you can read me.

Hopefully you are a fan of blogs, because this is a bit of blogging inside baseball. In the modern era of centralized yet balkanized social media, you must...

Draft Blogpost: It's the Barter Economy, Stupid

Okay, I think I went pretty hard on this post. It describes the economic play loop of Prismatic Wasteland.

It’s the Barter Economy, Stupid

In the post-post-apocalyptic pseudo-fantasy system of Prismatic Wasteland, there is no currency established enough that prices for goods would be pegged to this coin or that doubloon. Even the Caesar Permanente, overlord of the metropolis of Stateon, imposes no coinage standards on the settlements he’s conquered. Particularly...

You Got Democracy in My Medieval Fantasy!

Less than a week out from IRL election day in America, I am writing about fictional elections in games and how they are fun:

All right-thinking role-players know that Dungeons & Dragons (which I use to encompass all pretend-elf games derived from the 1974 original) in no way reflects a medieval fantasy setting, pseudo-European or otherwise. If you haven’t yet come to this conclusion, do yourself a favor and read the seminal “ 2024-10-30 14:34:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Horror Prologue Gameplay

(alternate title: What’s Slashed is Prologue) 

So you want to run a TTRPG adventure that evokes the feeling of a horror movie. The easiest aspect to add are stock characters–the psycho killer (e.g., Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th), the entity (Pennywise from It) or the final girl (e.g., Sidney Prescott from Scream). What is more difficult are the structures that don’t translate well...

Draft Blogpost: Being a Vampire Doesn't Suck

Some people want to kill a vampire, some people want to fuck a vampire, but some want to be the vampire. But what do you do when a player wants to be a vampire (or contracts vampirism from a night spent carousing in the wrong pubs)? For some, the answer is that you don’t let them. For instance, D&D’s first true vampire, Sir Fang, the Baron of Blackmoor, was turned into a vampire because his player, 2024-10-25 02:51:44 +0000 UTC View Post

Prismatic Wasteland Beta Rules - October 24, 2024

I am in the process of compiling all my notes into a single beta rules document for Prismatic Wasteland. The goal is to hopefully have a full beta game that will be ready for playtesting in 2025. I'll share updates here every 10,000 words or so.

This update includes:

• Basics of character creation (including 12 morphotypes)

• The core procedure

• Character advancement rules

• The full combat rules

• Some brief rules for wa...

  2024-10-24 12:56:43 +0000 UTC View Post

Draft Blogpost: Playing as a Ghost

Another post for spooky season:

Playing as a Ghost

Oops, you died. Don’t worry about it too much, pal, these dungeons can be real death traps. Happens to the best of us! But because this is a game, and not one of those games where if you die in the game you die in real life, you have the problem of everyone else’s characters still trekking through the dungeon while yours is decomposing on the dungeon floor, likely stripped of your best gear whi...

Draft Blogpost: The languages of D&D implies a specific setting

I tweeted a tweet, 5e folks found it and yelled at me, and it inspired a short blogpost. Another one for my backlog (going to try to only post spooky posts for the rest of the month):

Like many with an abiding interest in Dungeons & Dragons (the generic concept, not any particular iteration published by a corporation), I also have a passing interest in medievalism. Recently, I was reading about the medieval kingdom of Northumbria recently, as one does, and came across the following ...

Draft Blogpost: A Witch's Best Friend

Trying to get a few SpoOoOoky themed posts out during the Halloween season, and this is the first in that vein, probably will post next week.

A Witch’s Best Friend

A familiar must be more than a mere housecat. Magic should be weird, and there is nothing weird about owning a pet. A witch is more than a cat lady. Here is how I would rule a player character obtaining a familiar. 

First, I would remove the “Find Familiar” spell entirely. No need t...

Barkeep Jam Retrospective

This took me a while to write but I have finally written a little blurb for all of the entries in the Barkeep jam! This will go on the blog this week. Then I hope to write some spooky posts in the Halloween mood.

If you are already in the spooky season and looking for blog posts to match, here are two hidden Halloweeny gems from the early days of my blog: https://www.prismaticwastela...

Draft Blogpost: Babies in Dungeons

Perhaps my strangest blogpost yet?

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If you’re hardscrabble enough that you need to delve caverns full of monsters that want to kill you just for the chance to bring back a rotted chest of coins or magical but slightly cursed sword, you probably don’t have the scratch for a babysitter. By the way, if you’re one of those who balks at the “combat wheelchair” or is fine with elves and dwarves but having adventurers who aren’t all able-bodied men in the prime of youth is...

Early Blogpost: Playing Card Initiative

Playing Card Initiative

I have been playing a lot of Arcs recently (including with my colleague, Anne of the DIY & Dragons blog) but have the disease where everything I do or see makes me think about how I can repurpose it to TTRPGs. For those unfamiliar with Arcs (it’s not important for my overall idea here), my colleague at the Ennie-nominated Skeleton Code Machine has a 2024-09-08 16:29:32 +0000 UTC View Post

I think I just wrote a board game?

I must be procrastinating because I keep getting hit by waves of creativity that are unrelated to anything else I'm currently working on.

This is a board game you can probably already play if you own both Risk (any version) and Monopoly (any version). Basically it is a hack of Risk where you play out millennia of conflict and, at the end of the game, have a world map with dungeons, settlements, roads and history for a campaign of your fantasy tabletop RPG of your choice.

Thoughts...

Advance Blogpost: Advantage by Default

I need to finish my Barkeep Jam retrospective, so this won't go up on the blog until that does, but I wanted to get down my thoughts before they escaped.

Advantage by Default

Fuck it, I’m D&D Oprah now. You get Advantage, and you get Advantage, and you get Advantage! In my ever-under-construction system, Prismatic Wasteland, I am currently leaning toward baking in an automatic way for players to gain Advantage on all their attribute tests. You are probably a...

WIP Microblogpost: Which Sacred Cow Doth I Kill?

[I realized maybe it is better to just natively post the text of a WIP blog into Patreon directly instead of sharing a google doc, but let me know if you prefer the old ways]

So many design ideas start with “Is this anything?” In the case at hand, I think there is something to this idea but also it feels distasteful to me. It just needs something more to make it click. 

This idea was inspired by a conversation with my friend Dwiz of the Knight ...

Is GenCon Worth It? (Plus Patreon-Exclusive Reporting)

I wrote about the first day of GenCon immediately after the fact on my blog (https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/blog/gencon-this-is-my-first-rodeo), but for my write up of the remaining days, it was pretty long (although I hope still an entertaining read, and I thought would distract from the meat of this post about whether GenCon is worth it. So the post I will upload to ...

Free Physical Adventure for Y'all

Howdy Folks,

So I have been up to my eyeballs in work, travel, and planning for a new addition to my household, which has left precious little time for writing. This past month, I have mostly been working on a project for Kobold Press that they commissioned me and my pal from Knight at the Opera blog to write, but don't have much to show for it (or rather, it isn't mine to show). I've also gone on a number of podcasts to promote the still ongoing Barkeep Jam! Weekly Scroll; Weird People...

Post Preview: A LEGO Jam Retrospective

I wrote about my process for creating an adventure (more specifically, a Lego adventure) in a weekend. I think the juiciest tidbit is a process I used for mapping NPC relationships and how that was able to drive the rest of the adventure-writing process.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qF1plpJRbtkRNeoeou8jr92SrCsCwJXtRhP8ZbWfslU/edit?usp=sharing 2024-06-30 22:02:39 +0000 UTC View Post

Trouble in Paradisa

Hey folks,

I released a new, very short, adventure for the Summer Lego RPG Setting Jame: Trouble in Paradisa:

You can get it on itch (there are plenty of community copies): https://prismatic-wasteland.itch.io/trouble-in-paradisa

Or on DriveThruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en...

Endangered in Dungeon

I realized I forgot to post a monthly update last month. Oops. Basically the update is that I've been traveling (to Savannah to officiate some friends' wedding, to Ireland for fun, to New Yawk for my day job) and have been running fairly ragged! Anyway, I wrote most of this post while driving (riding) through the Dingle peninsula in Ireland and just finished it for, for your previewing pleasure: 2024-06-14 00:41:12 +0000 UTC View Post

The Cooking Minigame Post

Free samples of the new blog post I'm cooking up. You'll never guess what it's about

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nBS5ox4bXDn1r5B9B-1HXBIC7kgcNX48YRHC8_GEdqQ/edit 

Wonky Willie Adventure

An adventure I wrote with some friends a while back that mocked the artificial intelligence generated "Wonka" experience in Glasgow from a few months ago is finally ready for a quiet release. You get to look at it whole minutes before the rest of the world! It's free but I also think it is pretty dang funny.

Previewing a Metapost

In which I promote the lego jam, Barkeep jam and this here patreon. Someone has to!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lmd7RG2u3jZaklgAwRZLBS5igVatKQuurvTHfzrL6-8/edit?usp=sharing 

Blogpost Preview: Wizard Diss Tracks and Wizard Beefs

This one is going to get posted soon, likely tomorrow morning, for obvious timeliness reasons: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14JO08ePBi00DvvUV9MyLdL0loobB0fiTgD75FmaXsB0/edit?usp=sharing 

May ‘24 Update

First off, welcome to new patrons! For those of the Beleaguered Bouncer and Aspiring Tycoon tiers, I have put a posting containing various PDFs (literally hundreds of pages) of work-in-progress, backburnered, or old versions of adventures and rules, including the full version of the Prismatic Wasteland rules from 2020 among a lot more. Most of these have been shared previously, but I figured it would be helpful to have them all in one place. I'll try to do a similar roun...