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

2024-12-13 02:17:45 +0000 UTC View Post

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 ...

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-o...

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 ...

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 Bastionla...

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...

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, ther...

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 ga...

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 th...

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)? ...

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. 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, an...

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 & Drag...

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 sho...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 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 ...

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...

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 t...

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 p...

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): 2024-06-19 20:26:09 +0000 UTC View Post

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! A...

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/...

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 ...

Previewing a Metapost

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

https://docs.google.com/...

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...

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 ...