Author: brawlerjosh

  • Symbolic Play

    Symbolic Play

    The old text based pc adventure games: They would tell you the basics, what you see in a room, but you’d have to interrogate the game to find out a key was hidden beneath the lamp. There was no ‘roll a perception check.’ That kind of play requires more effort, but it also more evocative…

  • HexBrawlers Making Portals

    HexBrawlers Making Portals

    Work has been especially busy lately, but we’ve been busy outside of our blog designing custom assets for mapping in Dungeondraft. Not an artist, but its been fun pretending to be with a Wacom tablet and Krita, and we are focusing on more of an old-school mapping stye. Tonight I was making portals: i.e. doors.…

  • ChatGPT Lets Me be the Dungeon Master

    ChatGPT Lets Me be the Dungeon Master

    @ There’s been lots of talk about how chatgpt might serve as a dungeon master. However, DMs also tend to be the most obsessed with the game, and can sometimes have trouble finding willing players. Perhaps instead, chatgpt will replace players for DMs who want to play more or play-test an adventure. So I decided…

  • There is no perfect campaign, just the campaign you made. And its perfect.

    There is no perfect campaign, just the campaign you made. And its perfect.

    I love reading posts about TTRPG theory. Its akin to watching an artist straining to draw the perfect curve, seeking perfection, supreme beauty. But all we really have are the moments we share with our friends, the gift of seeing our friends enjoy what we created, even if it is only a tenth of the…

  • World Building from the Well Up.

    World Building from the Well Up.

    It is easy for world builders to overestimate how interesting their lists of wars and rulers and the fantastic get a reader to really care about the world they created. Tolkien’s Silmarillion would have been much less captivating without the smaller, more tactile world depicted in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; stories…

  • Yearning for Dice of Yore

    Yearning for Dice of Yore

    I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with dice. I know I am not alone. For me it came with the confluence of two encounters: 1) My dad buying my brother and me the 1983 edition of the D&D Basic, the “BECMI edition” Red Box Set and encountering the interestingly shaped dice within, and…

  • Odin’s Ravens

    Odin’s Ravens

    Odin’s Ravens most commonly take the form of the common raven, but in their natural form, Odin’s Ravens are marked by an incredibly large and singular green orb, a shard of the Eye of Odin. Devotees to the Allfather believe that seeing Odin’s Ravens in this form is a profound sign of Odin’s attention.  Odin’s…