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What ho, Blog Demons?

Spencer 2020-08-24 4238 Comments Off on What ho, Blog Demons?
Incessant Rambling

How to break the ice after nearly a year and half? It’s been about that long since my last post. Sure, I’ve started plenty of posts in that interim period — Black Blade #5 (the conclusion), posts on SHOctober, Solo-a-Module Month, and SGAM, among others — but they were never finished. Will they be? I don’t know! You see, I spend a great deal of time and effort in trying to figure out what to do with my very limited free time — which usually results in a lot of not doing anything, or at best, a doing lot of research…

Cards and Role-playing Games

Bicycle Black Tiger Playing Cards
Spencer 2018-07-03 13472 Comments Off on Cards and Role-playing Games
Resources

  A few days months ago on the Lone Wolf Roleplaying G+ Community I inquired as to whom might be using cards in their RPG sessions. I’d started out shying away from cards, preferring to soak up the nostalgia of rolling polyhedral dice, but have recently become more intrigued by cards thanks to playing the Dungeon Solitaire games. I started snatching up cards left and right and now have several decks piled about, including the complete GameMaster’s Apprentice decks from the recent Fantasy Deck Kickstarter. Cards in Solo RPG The results were somewhat surprising, to me at least. A good 60%…

Thoughts on Soloing a Published Adventure Module

Spencer 2018-03-09 7976 2 Comments
Resources

My first solo play session was attempted using a published adventure module (the Hero Kids “Basement o’ Rats” introductory adventure). I had fun — I was able to use a simple d6 yes/no mechanic to pose questions and emulate GM responses — but I also had enough foreknowledge (and inexperience) that it was too confining compared to more free-form, generated-on-the-fly sort of play. And that’s the problem, right? Modules are published for GMs, so they’re chock full of great stuff that absolutely spoils things for the players if they come into such knowledge before the proper time. As a solo…

Hero Kids Compatible Encounter Generator 0.1.19 Released

Spencer 2018-02-23 3327 Comments Off on Hero Kids Compatible Encounter Generator 0.1.19 Released
Family Gaming

I’m not sure if anyone actually uses it, but I’ve updated the Hero Kids Compatible Encounter Generator web app (henceforth known as HKGen because that’s too much to type out every time…). It’s set up as an offline, responsive javascript web app using an appcache manifest. You don’t necessarily need to know that, but you should see a popup asking if it should reload any time you visit the page after the code gets updated. I actually had issue with this on my Android phone and had to go in and clear the cached data in the mobile Chrome browser…

Four Against Darkness Compatible Game Board

Spencer 2017-11-23 37985 Comments Off on Four Against Darkness Compatible Game Board
Resources

Lately I’ve been playing a nifty little dungeon-crawling game called Four Against Darkness. Some might call it a board game instead of an RPG, but whatever it is, it’s a solo game designed for one player to delve into a randomly-generated, old-school style dungeon — using only a pencil, paper, and a few d6 dice. I’ve been enjoying it, but I won’t get into the details here (stay tuned for an actual play / review post). Instead, I just wanted to share the 4AD Game Board I’ve created for use with Four Against Darkness — in both 20×28 and 30×42 sized grid-flavors!…

Rolling Solo – Appendix A: What Now?

Appendix A: What Now?
Spencer 2017-11-23 11324 2 Comments
Resources

So you read through the Rolling Solo series and learned how to engage in solitaire role-playing — great job! I hope you enjoyed it. But, if you were left asking yourself questions like “That’s it???” or “Now what???” or “Help!!!!?“, I don’t want you to think I’ve left you hanging. Wisps of Time got your back. But, what should I do now?? If I haven’t said it enough already: whatever you want! It’s up to you! But, if you’re like me and often want or need a little more direction when faced with such an open-ended response, I  have some suggestions for you. First,…

How I Format Actual Plays (and How You Can, Too)

Spencer 2017-10-10 3509 Comments Off on How I Format Actual Plays (and How You Can, Too)
Community

Not much to see here, I just wanted to point you to my latest community contribution: ap_shortcodes.js. It is a drop-in JavaScript solution for easily formatting your actual play reports with custom BBCode/WordPress-style “shortcodes”, such as [story] to wrap your narrative elements, that get replaced out with HTML+CSS to consistently style them across your site. Check it out at the link, and also check out the GitHub project, where you can contribute code or to the Wiki (or, dare I say, report bugs). I don’t actually use it to format my posts here, but I do basically the same thing with…

The Wheel of Fate: a Mythic Fate Chart Alternative

Spencer 2017-09-28 8691 Comments Off on The Wheel of Fate: a Mythic Fate Chart Alternative
Resources

The Wheel of Fate is a volvelle representation of the Mythic: Game Master Emulator’s “Fate Chart”. A volvelle is also known by other names: wheel chart, “dial-o-matic”, info chart, dial chart, calculator, and more. While the term originally referred to such tools created for astronomy (and became rather popular in the Middle Ages up through the twentieth century), volvelle seems to be the universal term for them now. You’ll find them employed for everything from baseball stats to oil filter selectors. To use the Wheel of Fate, one simply turns the “dial” to indicate the current Chaos Rank, and then…

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