The Pillars of Our Magic: Story, Collaboration, and Magic
My work on the game is coalescing into stronger supports for play in three areas—story, collaboration, and magic—and these manifest themselves at all levels of the game. In actual play, in the weekly playtest game, our time together is character-focused, with the story of how those characters change each other and the world being told…
The Distillation Process Continues: GameDev as Cooking
Though editing and refinement of ideas takes place throughout game design and development, this condensation is increasingly the emphasis of my work as I lean into playtesting. Now that my players are directly engaging with the rules on the regular, it’s easier to spot the gaps and confusing parts of the Player’s Guide. As I…
Full-table builds without taking up the whole table
Whenever we view a scene our minds are filling in lots of details. As a GM you can use this human skill to your advantage. You don’t have to build the whole place; you just need the center of the action. For this dramatic situation, in which a villain captured by the party and brought…
The Experimental Zoo, a no-plan build that turned out quite handy
Sometimes no plan is the best plan. Last Thanksgiving, my pal Lance and I celebrated the day by making a gigantic miniature terrain build on my dining table. We riffed on various ideas and settled on a multi-biome artificial landscape which would be a kind of a zoo. During the build Lance suggested that we…
Finding the balance between manageable game info and an expansive universe
It’s been quiet here on the site, but that doesn’t mean a huge amount of intense work hasn’t been going on for the game behind the metaphorical spoiler curtain. The development of Our Magic has been very meta in its storyline. Deep underlying themes in the game world are completely intertwined with transitioning this group…
A visit to a secluded shrine
Villagers from Millbake wind their way past the standing stone and through the tangled woods to pay their respects at the shrine of the Eminence Focus. This ancient, sacred place is associated with earth element magic and the shrine is adorned with a large grouping of beautiful crystals. After the picnic, those who feel brave…
Tide Pools, a modified paint scheme to create a new biome in Dwarven Forge terrain
One of the peoples of Kabalor, the Shafori, are coastline dwellers and I’d been really puzzling about how I was going to illustrate their towns with a build. Dwarven Forge, makers of the excellent miniature terrain I use, has dungeons, caverns, cities, castles, hellscapes, forests, mountains, and swamps, but no beachside biomes. I realized, looking…
The first Our Magic playtest story has begun!
Though the world of Kabalor has been in use through multiple campaigns using homebrewed/hybrid D&D rules, the big news this week is that after recent character creation and first sessions tests went well, we’re continuing on with these new characters in an ongoing story. (I’ll be using ‘stories’ instead of ‘campaigns’ for Our Magic because…
Asynchronous tabletop terrain: building a mini layout for remote play using photos
I’ve been running a homebrew-modified Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (D&D 5e) game since April of 2019. We play just about weekly, but have only met in person twice since March 2020. But I love doing tabletop terrain—and I still can! For my other multi-year game, which concluded near the end of 2020, I used…
Location: the large town of Tunnelton
The northernmost town of the Nymion culture is Tunnelton. It is located on the northwest flank of the sacred Twin Mountains and is built around both ends of an amazing natural tunnel below a high, ridged section of the hardest stone. A cave of softer material underneath slowly eroded over centuries and was then respectfully…
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Our Magic 