I recently had a scenario for Zaibatsu, Bring me the Head of Izumi Takahiro, published in issue #10 of the Cepheus Journal. I thought I'd post some design notes and inspirations. You can download the issue for free. The name of the scenario comes from the curious Sam Peckinpah movie Bring Me the Head of … Continue reading Design Notes for a Zaibatsu scenario: Frozen Heads & Fanboys
I recently posted a submission for the 2021 On-Page Game Jam over on itch.io. The theme of this jam was to make a one page RPG about the concept of borders. I ended up making a game called Fiction is What We Flee. The basic concept is that players can travel into fictional worlds and … Continue reading Design Notes for a one-page RPG: Fiction is What We Flee
I recently put up a post about making custom character sheet PDFs. In it, I had mentioned adding JavaScript code to a fillable PDF to add special features. One of them is the feature to give a user, using an ordinary PDF reader, the ability to import their own image into a form. Usually this … Continue reading Adding a custom image field to a fillable RPG character sheet
OK - It's not either of those things. But I make a lot of character sheets, and have occasionally been asked about my process. This isn't in any sense a complete guide, just some notes and ideas I've had while designing sheets that some might find useful. This is generally intended to create print PDFs, … Continue reading The universally complete and infallibly correct guide to creating your own custom RPG character sheet.
I've finished my entry for the #TroikaFestJam over on Itch.io. It's set on the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs, during the Cold War. Barsoom: 1960 - A Cold War on a Red Planet 36 PC Backgrounds15 EnemiesPlot Seeds & Locations If you're interested in other games set on Burrough's Mars, I keep an updated list … Continue reading Barsoom: 1960 – A setting for Troika! – some design notes
I'm still continuing work on my Dark Sun conversion and by Shabby Land zine, but I like to take the occasional break to quickly create something small and simple. I recently picked up Chaosium's Cthulhu Dark Ages, the medieval sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu. It's great book, but when I run Lovecraftian games, I prefer … Continue reading Notes on an upcoming new character sheet for the Cthulhu Hack
Here are some great free Unicode fonts that might be useful for GMs or game designers who needed some ancient-looking symbols. They are based on actual ancient scripts including Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, Mayan and many others. Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts I used the Egyptian font for my Valley of the Pharoahs character sheet.
Polyhedral Nonsense 