Tag / Me Stuff

by Moreau Vazh

Kittuck Meads Sheepfold: Access and Use

Strange Ground is an occasional series about particular places and the ways they resist easy explanation. Some pieces approach landscapes through history and reputation; others are closer to field reports, written from within the site itself. Rather than smoothing these perspectives into a single account, the series lets their contradictions stand. You can find the rest of the pieces collected here.

I arrived in search of a bronze-age barrow and found a barely perceptible uniformity in an expanse of otherwise uneven land. The monument is so hard to spot that a corner of it was carved off when the council built the road. The only unambiguous sign of human improvement is a roadside marker in the shape of a Star of David.

I pass through a gate and set off across open moorland. There are posts indicating the existence of bridleways but the closest thing to laid paths are conspicuous gaps in expanses of wild grass; reeds on the way back, something finer and golden on the way there. This land was once part of the 10,000 acre Knight estate, bought from the King for a song and the first step on Exmoor’s journey from Royal Forest to whatever it is to become tomorrow. Knight took over Exmoor on the understanding that it would be brought to heel by advances in modern farming but few of these innovations remain and those that do are easily confused with either abandoned modern buildings or ancient ruins. To my left, shin-high earthworks that once marked the edges of a field. To my right, a trench dug for training exercises in the run-up to the Second World War. Improvements may come and improvements may go but the moor remains.

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by Moreau Vazh

On the Radical Instability of the Ligottian Canon

Long time readers of this blog will be aware that I have been working my way through the stories of Thomas Ligotti as part of a series I refer to as Canon Fodder.

The original model for Canon Fodder was inspired by the podcast Just King Things, which has spent a number of years working its way through the novels of Stephen King in publication order. While I am not that interested in Stephen King’s work, I admire the way that approaching his works in chronological order has allowed the podcasters to get a sense of how King’s sensibility has evolved over the course of his career.

Canon Fodder began as an excuse for me to work my way through the complete works of H. P. Lovecraft and I was able to do this work because generations of Lovecraft nerds had combed through Lovecraft’s correspondence and determined the dates when particular stories were written and what those stories might have looked like before the editors at Arkham House began revising the canon in order to fit with August Derleth’s interpretation of Lovecraft’s work.

The problem with the Ligotti strand of the Canon Fodder project is that the Ligotti canon is radically unstable in that Ligotti continues to re-work not only individual stories but also the contents of entire collections. Ligotti scholars have tried their best to discover when stories were written and to note changes in both stories and book contents but each re-issue seems to bring fresh changes meaning that there has never been a fixed and settled canonical progression of stories for people like me to work their way through.

This poses a methodological problem for the series going forward.

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by Moreau Vazh

Posting My Ls – Sandbox Drift and Narrative Collapse in Call of Cthulhu

I have been running RPG sessions for the best part of thirty-five years and I still make mistakes.

Not little mistakes either. I mean huge, campaign-derailing, momentum-killing, structurally catastrophic mistakes that later turn out to have been blindingly obvious. Not long after returning to the hobby, I introduced a house-rule that allowed players to log income from investments as XP. While I thought that this would encourage long-term engagement with the campaign world, it actually wound up transforming the party into a cabal of rent-seeking slumlords who outsourced much of the adventuring to less wealthy NPCs while they sat around smoking cigars, collecting passive income, and getting their labia majora stimulated by highly-trained courtesans.

People do not talk enough about these kinds of failures. RPG culture tends to reward performances of confidence and expertise. People happily post elaborate campaign settings, home-brewed mechanics, and tales of triumphant sessions, but they often become markedly quieter when it comes to the moments when things fall apart.

This is unfortunate because I suspect we learn far more from our failures than our successes. Running RPGs is not simply a matter of correctly applying procedures in pursuit of specific outcomes, it is an activity that is social, improvisational, and personally expressive. When running games, experimentation is unavoidable and mistakes are inevitable. The challenge is not to avoid getting things wrong, but to learn from our mistakes. People who write about their own gaming should spend at least as much time discussing their failures as they do celebrating their successes.

A few months ago, I ran a short Call of Cthulhu campaign and made a couple of fairly serious mistakes. This is a post about what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what I think I learned from those mistakes.

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by Moreau Vazh

Advancement and the Twisted Saints of West Somerset

I have of late been trying to navigate a path between three somewhat incompatible pressures in my gaming life: my group’s desire to play a fantasy sandbox, the knowledge that while the broader TTRPG hobby offers a number of easily accessible styles compatible with that mode of play I don’t get on with most of them, and the fact that I have been playing RPGs for a long time and have my own habits when it comes to building worlds, preparing sessions, and running games.

One of those habits is a preference for setting games where I live. Writing what you know may be a cliché, but basing things in your local area is a good excuse to immerse yourself in local history, a reliable source of the small details that make fictional worlds feel lived-in, and a generally enjoyable process in its own right. You get to twist your immediate environment, and your players get to see familiar places filtered through that distortion.

My current campaign is set in West Somerset. It began in an Elizabethan frame as a rejoinder to a game I ran last year, but in-world events led the group back into an alternate history in which I placed my take on Keep on the Borderlands. I had intended to finish that adventure and return to the earlier period, but the group have settled into this version of the setting and so I have decided to let it run, pushing them out from Taunton towards the Exmoor littoral.

Given that the campaign now seems likely to linger in this space, I have found myself wanting a little more mechanical infrastructure and, in particular, a clearer sense of how characters change over time. For reasons I will unpack below, this has led me towards a series of “advancement paths” inspired by Celtic and Anglo-Saxon saints associated with this part of the country.

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by Moreau Vazh

A Year that Ends in 25

We reach the end of the year with both this blog and its author at something of a crossroads.

I started this blog after spending over a decade away from the TTRPG hobby. The idea was that it would do two specific jobs in support of my regular game.

First, it would serve as an idea funnel. I would read widely, watch films, strip-mine them for ideas, and feed those ideas back into play. The blog was intended to function as a kind of creative stomach, using criticism to digest new material.

Second, it would act as a venue for re-appraisal. Returning to the hobby as a grown adult with decades behind the GM’s screen, I knew I was not a blank slate. Absorbing new ideas meant making space by re-examining old assumptions, old methods, and familiar narratives about the hobby’s past. It took time to find the right balance, but I am pleased with how much ground I cleared by engaging with memory, modern writing about RPG history, and a series-based approach to breaking down old tropes and habits.

The problem with this method was that, while it helped me dismantle old assumptions, it assumed a degree of exchange with the wider hobby that never really materialised. I kept breaking things down, clearing space, and looking outward, only to find that the dominant ideas circulating online offered little in the way of challenge or inspiration. That stalled exchange eventually led me to stop listening, stop looking, stop buying, and finally stop reviewing.

Meanwhile, the tools that were meant to be instrumental to my engagement with games have become joys in their own right. What began as the industrialised strip-mining of Lovecraft’s fiction has turned into one of my proudest critical achievements, while writing about Thomas Ligotti and cinematic folk horror has become something I actively look forward to.

This leaves me in an odd position. The question facing this blog is not whether I still care about games, but what role, if any, they should play in a space that now feels more at home with criticism than with hobbyist engagement.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Stag and the Hound: How Exmoor Became Sporting Country and Dartmoor Became Haunted

Strange Ground is an occasional series about particular places and the ways they resist easy explanation. Some pieces approach landscapes through history and reputation; others are closer to field reports, written from within the site itself. Rather than smoothing these perspectives into a single account, the series lets their contradictions stand. You can find the rest of the pieces collected here.

As someone who lives on Exmoor, I know the hills sometimes feel older than they should. You walk out past the last hedged fields and the bracken hisses underfoot, as if something is trying to warn you off. Out here the sheep do not so much bleat as scream, as if they’ve seen something behind your shoulder that you can’t. There is a chapel the bishop is trying to sell to the National Trust. The mist that clings to its crudely repaired door doesn’t just look uncomfortably like a crowd of faces, it waits like one too. Pass by at the wrong time of day and it can feel like they’re watching to see if you’ll come in. Contrary to the magazine covers and advertising campaigns, I see no deer and hear no hunter’s horn. All I know is that when the wind comes in from the south, it feels thick with things unsaid.

The English uplands are not just pieces of high ground. They are stories we tell about wildness, class, guilt and improvement. Nowhere is that clearer than in the way Dartmoor and Exmoor have become separated in the imagination despite being only a short drive apart: Dartmoor is the haunted one, thick with legends and literary fog, watched over by a prison and patrolled by a spectral hound. Exmoor is about the natural beauty of stag country, a romantic frontier that cries out for proper farming and grown-up land management.

As someone whose interests lean towards folk horror and away from blood-sports, I am interested in how that division came to be made. It is not simply a matter of tors versus combes. It has to do with where prisons and railways were built, which novels caught on, which antiquarians had a train to catch, and what kinds of damage were visible from the nearest city. In what follows I want to trace how Dartmoor became spooky through over-extraction and control, how Exmoor became sporting through under-investment and indulgence, and what is lost when one moor is allowed to carry all the ghosts.

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by Moreau Vazh

On Criticism and TTRPGs

After some amount of reflection, I have decided to stop reviewing RPGs.

At least for the foreseeable future.

There are a number of motivators behind this decision but the first and foremost is that I am burned out to the point where the sense of fatigue has begun to filter over into other areas. Having finished the first section of my Call of Cthulhu campaign, my recent series of reviews, and a smaller game that I was running alongside these two things, I have reached the point where I am struggling to find the motivation to come up with another game to run. I sit down to write and nothing comes. I sit down to read a rulebook and I find myself either looking at my phone or drifting back to a novel. It’s a strange kind of exhaustion—like the light’s still on but the room’s empty.

Clearly, I need a break and I am to blame for this… I took on too much, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, and I allowed my priorities to become inverted: I returned to writing in public as an excuse to engage with stuff that would then filter back down to my game and I allowed myself to get into a position where I was running stuff in order to write about it and no good was ever going to come of that as the tail should never wag the dog.

While I am obviously fatigued and in need of a break, this fatigue has given me reason to pause and re-examine what it is that I am doing with this blog and, in truth, I am no longer sure that reviewing RPG stuff is a good use of my time. For want of a more emotionally nuanced phrase, it is too difficult.

This is a post about those difficulties, how they impacted me and why I suspect they may be impacting other people too.

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by Moreau Vazh

Strahd on the Moors

This blog is meant to track my creative process, though it mostly records what distracts me from it. Recently, returning to my Tudor Cairn campaign, I found myself thinking about how that game only swam into focus when I began to take inspiration from the landscape that surrounds me.

The OSR loves its forests. Cairn inherits its literary metaphysics from Dolmenwood, where the deeper you go into the woods, the stranger things become. It is a lovely idea, but it never sat right with me. When I picture deep dark forests, I do not see mystery. I see fairy tales by way of garden-centre statuary: porcelain pixies squatting between the recycling bin and a gently rusting barbecue.

In England, forests are not intimidating places… They are small, well managed, and full of signage. You pass through them on your way to a pub lunch. They belong to the realm of car parks and bird hides, not the uncanny. Vaesen: Britain and Ireland made a fascinating mistake when they grafted Scandinavian unease onto terrain that hums with different frequencies. The world outside my window is not a land of deep woods and trolls but of fog, peat, and ruins. Its fears seep sideways rather than looming overhead.

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by Moreau Vazh

A Ritual of Dismissal

Last week, a prominent YouTuber named Quinns released a video about the ENNIE award-winning RPG Triangle Agency. As someone who a) doesn’t regularly watch Quinns’ videos and b) has not read Triangle Agency, I am in no position to speculate on the soundness of Quinns’ remarks but I was dismayed by the reaction to the video.

In an excellent post attempting to make sense of what happened, Thomas Manuel suggests that substantial discussion of Quinns’ post may have taken place behind closed doors but the most common online reaction appears to have been existential bafflement at the idea that one might proffer an opinion that does not end in an invitation to spend money.

Obviously, there is a (much) longer post to be written about how consumerism and para-sociality have hollowed out online discourse but I was more unsettled by the well-worn objection that always seems to surface when someone tries to start a conversation about reviewing RPGs:

“You Can’t Review a Game without Playing It”

This claim may or may not be true, but it’s rarely made in good faith—and almost never when the review ends in praise. It surfaces whether the critic played the game or not, and the reasons why such reviews might be unacceptable are seldom explained. It isn’t a position. It’s a ritual of dismissal: re-invoked to ward off criticism that serves a purpose beyond purchase or praise. In form and function, it closely resembles the No True Scotsman fallacy.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Hollow Valley Method

There are already too many RPG books.

Shelves groan with unused settings, unplayed supplements, and dice that have never been rolled. Never known mercy. Never tasted fear.

We buy them for inspiration. For hope. For the sense of possibility that comes with a new world in shrinkwrap. And then we leave them unread. Waiting to be forgotten.

This is not unusual. The hobby rewards acquisition over use. Hype over engagement. It is easier to buy a world than to run one. Easier to read a setting than to let it unravel at the table. What we accumulate is not just product, but a backlog of potential.

This piece offers a way to use that backlog. Not as it was intended, but as something to be misread. Rather than struggle to approach settings by the paths their designers intended, what if we explored them from the outside? What if we played characters who do not belong—who wield no power, decode no lore, fulfil no canonical arcs… and yet pass through the world anyway?

The Hollow Valley Method is a way of playing where the protagonists are not chosen ones, trained operatives, or destined heroes. They are small people from a small place. People with their own rituals, their own gods, and no real understanding of the wider world.

The twist is that the world isn’t theirs. It’s someone else’s. One you already have on your shelf: Ravenloft, Planescape, Glorantha. You take that dense, dust-covered lore and treat it not as canon to master, but as a world to misread. The characters enter it as outsiders. They interpret it through their own logic. They survive not through strength, but through stubbornness, kindness, mistrust… and the occasional lucky pie.

It’s a style of play that resists consumerism, power creep, and lore worship. It says: you don’t have to know everything to walk through a world. You just have to keep walking… and hope that the world doesn’t notice you.

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by Moreau Vazh

Between the Map and the Marsh

When I returned to gaming, I wanted to start fresh. The habits and preferences I had built over decades came with me, roots thick and gnarled, carrying the scent of rooms and landscapes I thought I’d left behind.

I needed new methods… I wanted to engage with modern writing and let its forms reshape me at the table, but it felt like walking in someone else’s shoes. Every experiment pulled at those old roots, exposing something I hadn’t expected: To find one’s voice as a GM isn’t about applying techniques you can absorb by aping the dialect of DriveThruRPG’s gold-selling modules. It’s about discovering a language you didn’t know you had been speaking… a language I needed to learn before I could understand what I’d been trying to say all along.

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by Moreau Vazh

The Gardens at Taskerland – A Change of Format

I’ve been thinking about time…

About how much of it disappears into the making of good things. And how much more disappears trying to keep up. This blog has always been a place for thinking-in-public, a rhythm of attention and care… but lately I’ve noticed that rhythm becoming a kind of siphon. What was meant to nourish the deeper work has begun to crowd it out.

So… a change of format.

From now on, I’ll be posting at least once a week. Sometimes more, if the mood or a particular project takes hold. I want to leave room for seasonal arcs and for small rituals that gather shape over time. I want to protect the quiet where the deeper work happens.

You’ll still hear from me. Just with a different cadence. Less out of obligation. More out of necessity.

Canon Fodder and Things Resurface will continue as regular series. Other strands (reviews, reflections, reading notes) will surface when the mood takes me. My coverage of RPGs is likely to drift a little further from recognisable products as I find myself creating more and purchasing less. But there will be seasonal arcs, too… focused runs of attention, moments when the light hits a certain shelf just so.

I’m also beginning to revise the early Canon Fodder essays into downloadable collections… something more deliberate, something that gathers its own weight.

Maybe you won’t notice the difference.

Maybe that’s not the point.

Maybe it’s just a reminder… to myself more than anyone… that the good work takes time. And that trust, not output, is the better metric.

Thank you for reading and for your companionship.

by Moreau Vazh

I am Embarrassed

I have spent the last year or so in a weird state of RPG-related cognitive dissonance and while I can feel it starting to lift, I think I need to write a bit about it in order to fully exorcise the demon.

The root of the problem is that I allowed myself to get sucked into a corner of the internet that was a remarkably poor fit both for what I want out of games and for my values in general. This has left me feeling embarrassed and more than a little ashamed.

My embarrassment is due to the fact that, for ages, I would encounter people saying that the OSR is full of nostalgia-addled, backward-looking reactionaries and my response would be to feel both a degree of hurt and some anger: I play games that are mostly OSR adjacent and I know what is in my heart. I also know what is in the hearts of my players and have a pretty good idea as to what is in the hearts of the people with whom I discuss these games on a regular basis. I know that these generalisations do not apply to me and so I was both hurt and angered by the people who seemed content to spray them across the internet with neither care nor caveat.

I had been feeling that combination of hurt and anger for a while but those feelings have now been replaced by a profound sense of embarrassment because I no longer think that those people were wrong: I was wrong… they were right… and the thing preventing me from seeing that was hubris. I should have listened. I should have known better.

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by Moreau Vazh

ORIGINS: On Lost Cultures of Play


Origins is a series of posts in which I reflect upon my relationship with RPGs as well as the events that have shaped my tastes and understanding of games. The rest of the series can be found here.

The other day, I happened upon a post over at Ward against Evil about how, when people get drawn into the RPG hobby, they wind up looking to mentors to orient themselves and interpret rules that are often unclear on the page. The post is a little odd in places and while I disagree with most of what is said (I’m not going out and recruiting people to the hobby like some kind of Mormon) the post did get me thinking about my own path into the hobby and how the style of play that nurtured me during my formative years appears to have completely disappeared.

Now… there have not been many attempts to engage with the history of role-playing games. Being neither a form of computer game, nor a conventional artistic text, RPGs have historically fallen into the crack somewhere between Game Studies and the work done by traditional humanities departments and so, for most of the hobby’s history, the single and solitary book-length study of RPGs came from a sociologist who observed a bunch of graduate students playing in an early 1980s Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. Fast forward the entire history of the hobby and now we are starting to see the emergence of books that are primarily about the early commercial history of Dungeons & Dragons. However, because academia has historically not been that interested in studying RPGs, a lot of this historical work has been done by fans whose focus of study has been on either famous historical figures such as Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson or on the discourse of how people within the hobby talk about themselves. While I value a number of these works, I think that people and discourse reflect material realities rather than the other way around. To shuffle matters closer to what I want to write about, I think that how we think about and engage with RPGs is determined by the material conditions of the hobby. The culture of play that nurtured me is like one of those weird counties or states that emerge from the chaos of socio-political change only for its existence to be erased by the transition to a more durable status quo: I am the Kingdom of Wessex or the Helvetic Republic. I play games of atmosphere.

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by Moreau Vazh

On the Ambiguities of Harold Bloom, Dickless Lemmy, and the Hanson Brothers

So I know a guy who is a guitarist and whenever he encounters another guitarist, he asks them to play a lick before returning the favour. Sometimes it’s a well-rehearsed melody, or a fragment of a guitar solo, or maybe it’s just a slick chord progression that they’ve been playing around with. The idea is to give someone an opportunity to show off while promoting the circulation of ideas. Nothing as involved as a song or even a melody… Just a lick.

As an experiment, I thought I might try something similar and share a technique that I use regularly in my games: I’ll start by explaining some of the thinking behind this technique and then demonstrate how it works in practice by showing how a couple of NPCs came together in my most recent campaign.

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by Moreau Vazh

Home and Away – On RPGs and Community

One of this blog’s recurring themes has been the sense of culture clash I have experienced a) upon returning to the hobby after some time away, and b) engaging primarily with the Anglo-phonic RPG scene when a lot of my formative memories stem from a time when I was primarily engaged with the Franco-phonic RPG scene.

I could say that this left me feeling like a fish out of water but that feeling never seems to go away regardless of what I do and so I suspect that this is one of those cases in which ‘the call is coming from inside the house’. Obviously, my experiences are not yours and it is quite possible that you find the online RPG community to be ceaselessly inspirational and supportive, in which case all I can say is that I envy you.

I started this blog with no great desire for communion with other gamers… I wanted to get back into writing for fun, I wanted the sense of structure that comes with publishing stuff at regular intervals, and I wanted the space to think through various sources of inspiration and creative decisions as I worked on my own campaigns.

For the first few years of its existence, I told nobody of this blog’s existence and it was only when I tagged a couple of other people and got noticed by a couple of people on Reddit that the numbers started to go up. Nowadays I am back to forgetting to mention this blog’s existence to other people. I do the work because I enjoy the work and that’s that…

Back in January, I wrote a piece about my growing sense of frustration with the OSR and how the gradual ossification and social capture of the scene’s process of discovery-and-recommendation meant that I was struggling to find any OSR adventures that I actually wanted to bring to the table. Since then, my sense of frustration has only deepened and I want to think a bit about how I visualise the broader hobby and what (if anything) I actually want from it.

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by Moreau Vazh

Purovoku #7

An infrequent series that shares personal news, interesting links, and any videos that I have been watching.

Christmas and New Year have come and yet I feel as though I am still in holiday mode and that the year has yet to start properly. I suspect that this is partly a product of weather (we were snowed in for a week and then had road down to the village blocked not once but twice by fallen trees) and partly a product of work having been extraordinarily slow for both me and my partner resulting in a lot of floating about the house with nothing particularly important to do.

One of the advantages of this much free time is that I have had quite a lot of time in which to write and have produced some pretty interesting pieces:

Below the fold, you’ll find news from my current campaign as well as a load of links to some of the videos and articles that have captured my attention over the last couple of months.

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by Moreau Vazh

ITO: I Struggle to Find OSR adventures that I Want to Run

Into the OSR is an occasional series in which I write up some of the creative decisions I have made in the preparation of my old school sandbox RPG campaign. The rest of the series can be found here

I am currently six sessions deep in a hacked Cairn 2e campaign set in Elizabethan East-Anglia. In an effort to crash-test both my own creativity and some theories I had about appropriate amounts of prep, I decided to write everything myself from scratch.

Then the Christmas break happened and the thought occurred to me that there might be some interesting OSR modules out there from which I could steal. The timing of this turned out to be somewhat opportune as it coincided with a particular blog post gaining a lot of traction. I must admit that said post made me rather sad as every single one of the adventures recommended by that post was one of the adventures that tend to get auto-recommended whenever someone turns up at r/OSR knowing absolutely nothing about the scene.

I do not think it is healthy that the same adventures are getting recommended over and over again in every situation and regardless of context. I say this as someone who plays OSR games almost exclusively while also really struggling to find any adventures that I actually want to run.

I apologise in advance for a somewhat messy post but I want to make it clear where I am coming from before I launch into the problem of social capture and why I think the same dozen-or-so adventures keep getting recommended over and over again. If you’re not interested in where I am coming from then please feel free to skip the opening section.

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by Moreau Vazh

2024 in Review

As we reach the end of another orbit around the Sun and I bask in the font of inactivity that is the period between Christmas and New Year, it seems like as reasonable time as any to take stock of how things are going in terms of blogging, gaming, and life more generally. I would also like to thank the people who have stuck around to read the increasingly weird output of this site… I appreciate your attention and your comments. I hope you all have a lovely Christmas and that everyone has the best of all possible years to come.

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by Moreau Vazh

ORIGINS: The Cock Cage of Ogre Strength

Origins is a series of posts in which I reflect upon my relationship with RPGs as well as the events that have shaped my tastes and understanding of games. The rest of the series can be found here.

Every few years (because RPG culture has no institutional memory whatsoever), someone decides to re-invent the wheel and comes up with either a rediscovery or a refinement of Blacow’s fourfold model; Sometimes the number of categories expands and you get the typology contained in Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering, and sometimes the conceptual sophistication of the sorting hat increases and you get the Forge’s Threefold model. These typologies rarely sit that well with me as they never seem to capture what I enjoy about the RPG experience: I’m not really interested in rules, I’m not really interested in producing well-crafted stories, I’m not all that interested immersing myself in a dramatic role, and I’m definitely not interested in nurturing a supremely-powerful character. In am running or playing an RPG then I am in it primarily for the chaos…

It’s those moments where something unexpected happens and a player does something completely out of pocket that forces you to improvise something weird in response thereby prompting another reaction from the group triggering you to improvise something even weirder. We have all experienced such moments… moments where things escalate so quickly that the entire session seems to fly off the rails and enters a phase of pure creativity and unbridled chaos. Those moments are absolutely unique to this hobby and they are why I keep coming back. There’s a lovely moment in Francois Truffaut’s film Day for Night where he talks about moments in film-making when personal problems disappear, financial worries recede into the background, and everyone starts working together. ‘Le cinema reigne’ he exclaims and that is how I feel when a game flies off the rails and suddenly one of the characters is beating a cop to death with an oversized novelty dildo while the building burns and someone in the group is having a meltdown because that’s not how smoke grenades are supposed to work. In those beautiful moments, ‘le jeu de role reigne’.

I realised quite early on that what I really enjoyed in roleplaying games was the chaos and so I tried to find ways of encouraging their emergence: Sometimes it was a bit of strategic descriptive ambiguity, other times I’d plant an element in an adventure because I’d knew I’d get a response out of one particular player, and other times I just ensured that stupid, impetuous actions were met with realistic and proportionate consequences. My next step was to start introducing elements that functioned like boobie traps in that they’d sit undetected in the body of the campaign until the right moment at which point they’d wake up and turn a tense moment into outright chaos.

One of the first ideas I hit upon was an object that granted the characters power but only at the expense of a drop in status. At the time, our group was entirely composed of 15 year-old boys and while we were not what you might call ‘power gamers’, we were very sensitive to humiliation and mockery by NPCs. This inspired me to create the Cock-Cage of Ogre Strength, a dumb joke that soon became the most toxically-lethal magical item in our entire campaign setting.

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