Wednesday, September 11, 2024

The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 Prep and Actual Play Video


I love Alien. Along with The Thing, The Matrix, Cloud Atlas, and Mad Max: Fury Road, Alien is one of my top favorite movies.

That's why I was overjoyed when I first saw the adventure The Haunting of Ypsilon 14! It’s a short, sweet, not-too-predictable Alien-esque adventure that fits in a little yellow pamphlet!

Friday, September 6, 2024

UVG Session 4 Play Report | Glitch Spire Part 2

Another day, another dollar, another deadly session full of swashbuckling combat with gonzo mutants! It's our final (for now) session in Glitch Spire! If you're interested in the dungeon, you can check it out here:

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

UVG Session 3 Play Report | Glitch Spire Part 1

The third session of my ongoing Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign has come and gone! In this post, I present a link to the video, as well as a written session synopsis, for the readers' edification. Also, here is a link to get yourself a copy of the dungeon I ran for this session: Glitch Spire! It's PWYW on itch.io :)

Sunday, June 9, 2024

UVG Session 2 Play Report | Porcelain Shenanigans and A Giant Camel Worm

Last time, on UV(ball)G!

In line with UVG's design intentions, the session started with a bit of teambrewing in which the players and I determined that:
1) A Porcelain Prince comes into being when a group of people subsume their individualities under a common personality, forsaking originality for power. Kind of like working for a big corporation, but more magitechinical.
2) Everyone thinks that Redland vampires can shapeshift. In fact, they are just excellent at cosplaying. Also, they may live in the Redlands because it has the ideal amount of infrared light, which gives them their power; if they went any further east, the infrared light would be so great as to turn them into overpowered hulks.

Thursday, May 16, 2024

UVG Session 1 Play Report | Potsherds, Cake Cars, and Prophecies of Doom


Sequel to the session 0 play report.

While Alroy, the red-brick necromancer folk historian, spent three weeks pondering his orb from the ballpit of the Satrap’s faultless crystal clock, the rest of the party struggled against starvation, danger, and disease as they made their way from the High Road and the Low to deliver Miela’s letter of inheritance to a dangerously laissez-faire trust fund baby in the Potsherd Crater, then set out to resupply amid the brutal enamelware caste-hierarchy of the Porcelain Citadel.

Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Stormlock: Campaign Retrospective and Final Session Play Report




In 2018, my friend Matt and I drew several fantasy kingdom maps, taking turns making marks, exquisite corpse style. To one he added a bottomless canyon with earth motes floating in it, and I made up that this kingdom had been torn asunder from the wider world and now floated off on its own. Matt also mentioned "the Goddess of Thread" being an important figure in one world. 

Throughout the coming months I developed the idea of a Planescapish demi-plane setting whose edges bleed into various planes of the D&D cosmology. It was created when an ancient spellcaster (seduced by the voices of Demogorgon) simultaneously opened all his magocratic lands' trilothonic plane gates to the various worlds of the World, triggering a multiverse-threatening Plane Storm. This was foreseen by the storm giant Surmos, who worked with the goddess of thread Teyaru to halt the storm and lock it in place with silver cables made from the goddess's body. Thus was born: Stormlock!

Thursday, April 18, 2024

UVG Session 0 Play Report | "1,000 Camels" and Outfitting a UVG Caravan

A couple of days ago, I kicked off a much anticipated campaign of Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG) with a session 0. I laid out the 5-foot-long Grand Long Map and postcards from UVG locations, and printed out sheets and packets from the UVG book so multiple players could review the glossary, languages, and gear. I also introduced players to Hakaba, my homebrew Adventure Hour! hack for UVG (rules one-pager here).

Here's a quick play report: