The Seven-Sided Die

So far WP has caught all the spam comments I’ve gotten, but they’re a pain to individually moderate. I’ve installed a spam-comment blocker that does some tricks with server-side timestamp hashes and javascript, which should be invisible to real commentors while blocking bots.
Which is to say, if you have any trouble commenting, send an email [...]

I’m not really starting a series, just echoing the title of J.D. Wiker’s post Sacrificing Sacred Cows: Random Encounters. I really like random encounters and the events they precipitate, and I have to take issue with the points against that he makes.
“Random” means the GM literally doesn’t have any control over what happens from encounter [...]

Wordle.net creates images out of text. It looks a lot like a tag cloud, but it pulls from the entirety of the text you give it so it’s actually much more representational. The wordle at right is what the Seven-Sided Die looks like as of now to its parser.
I like that it says “probably indie [...]

I love little details in settings that add to verisimilitude. The problem with this predeliction is that when I do my own world building I often let these details bog me down. It’s hard to tell what sort of thing is going to add enough to the setting (and play) that it will be a [...]

I’m reading Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe’s Kinderculture, a book on the need for media literacy in the generations currently growing up in our new media-based information culture. The book focuses mostly on the implications that corporate control of media has on the enculturation of children, but the secondary message is that childhood [...]

I ran a game of D&D 4th edition shortly after the books were released, and I badly mangled that abortive campaign.
I want to say that the books made me do it, and I have good reason to think so, but the blame is mine for letting them. Let me explain.
If you’re a roleplayer today you [...]

I’ve just started reading Tommi Brander’s blog, Cogito, ergo ludo. So far I’ve found Tommi to be a consistently engaging writer and an imaginative roleplayer. His homebrewed persistent fantasy roleplaying system looks intriguing, but I think I’d need a pile of designer’s commentary to successfully digest it. I do like the goals of the system [...]

Recently I was reading the Creative Commons version of Clinton R. Nixon’s The Shadow of Yesterday. That he chose to release it under an open license is awesome, and though I could write about that I’m more interested in an aside he buried in the game.
Note that this is from an older version of TSoY, [...]

My recent return to 1st edition AD&D has been illuminating. Re-reading the books now, I realise that much of what I thought was “wrong” with the game then was a product of my immaturity, both as a person and as a gamer and GM. I’ve been a D&D player of various editions after AD&D, and [...]

OpenCourseWare is a pile of lecture notes, tests, syllabi, and other course materials put together by MIT for anyone’s use. It’s intended as a resource for instructors and students, but the list of course materials for each of the hundreds of courses is complete enough that someone could use it to do casual self-directed study [...]