Cryptic Keyway

Locate item; Treasure (Calligraphy). An alchemist seeks the Philoxist’s Stone, said to convert any liquid into acid. As a reward, he will use its acidic magic to write a sentence in acidic script; the same words will appear in material of the same type at other locations specified by the PCs.

Pursue NPC; Magical ally. A swamp thief has been raiding local ponds and grabbing frogs with latent magical potential, hoping to corner the market on wizards’ familiars. Put an end to these herpetological heists and gain the friendship of the swamp seer, an intelligent toad wielding marshy magic.

Adventure Hooks The Great Table Experiment, Part 5

Great use of Knave 2E tables: substack.com/@johnctompki.... Did a few of my own.

Deface building; Key. The cold war between the Doorwright’s Fellowship and the Clavinger’s Guild intensifies. Boldly paint “doors suck” or similar invective on the former’s premises to join the latter organization.

I'm such a fool, out here galumphing, when I should be skirring 😔

Maybe the origin of Pluribus is that Vince Gilligan was watching Sense8 and just thought “what if this, but in reverse?”

why is no one talking about this

Frieren and What It Means to Play a Truly Ancient PC Frieren, the manga and anime about the titular elf, is in many ways classic fantasy, using a lot of common fantasy vernacular to tell its st...

Frieren S2 is another good opportunity to think about how to portray long-lived PCs in fantasy TTRPGs.

cryptickeyway.blogspot.com/2025/11/frie...

If you advance to level 8, begin radiating good or evil, then are level-drained by undead below level 8... can you then do a lot of morally opposite deeds and flip your alignment when you eventually return to level 8?

Wrapping or embalming suggests the desiccated husks of the zombies the mummy controls, stumbling out of the darkness, using bandages to restrain PCs or attempting to drown them in jars of embalming fluids. This is already more compelling than the last mummy encounter I ran.

Choose a few verbs, and keep an open mind about how they apply in the corridors connecting those rooms. Seal could indicate the mummy will try to seal the entrance to its tomb, trapping the PCs inside. Imbue could represent the mummy drawing power from the ritual chamber.

You can make a lair or small dungeon area really quickly with this method. For rooms, combine a few words to get locations like ritual chamber, mummy’s tomb, organ jars. If you're not using the optional adjective rule, you can pull adjectives into the room names.

A screenshot of the mummy section of the monster manual, describing the mythology of mummies as they appear in D&D.

OK, so nouns are dungeon rooms and verbs are dungeon corridors. cryptickeyway.blogspot.com/2025/12/dung...

Take a random page from a monster manual, like this:
Nouns: Ritual, tomb, curse, organs, jars, markings
Verbs: Punish, embalm, wrap, preserve, imbue, seal

The World's Largest Rewrite: Grey Horse, Devil Swine, and Normal Humans Last time:   The World's Largest Rewrite: Floating Heads, Mother Fungus, Cellipedes #60: Horse. OK, yes, I jumped into this exercise withou...

The harder it has to run, the more scrambled it is when it catches up. Incentivizes running without putting the PCs out of danger. I love that they are Batesian mimics too. D&D should have weirder monster insects.

cryptickeyway.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

"Tiger beetles have an unusual form of pursuit in which they alternately sprint toward their prey, then stop and visually reorient. This may be because the beetle runs too fast for its visual system to accurately process images." Great feature for a D&D monster.

...but the constant violence orbiting the party draws unwelcome attention everywhere they go.

Complication: Some nameless enemy the PCs killed was an incompetent minor member of a major crime family but nonetheless the offense must be avenged. The family sends multiple assassins after the party, who actually get in each others' way more than they directly threaten the PCs.

Practical precautions to protect your garden:

-Oni must cross bridges in straight lines. Curve those bridges.
-Purple worms won’t digest rock with irritating toxic oxides. Bury a perimeter of alkaline volcanic rocks to keep them away.
-Vampires can’t cross running water. Keep that garden hydrated!

bsky.app/profile/ceej...

This is the correct NPC naming approach imo. Names should be:
-About 2-4 syllables
-Often rhyming or alliterative (but not always)
-Often one or two letters off from a real name
-Wordlike, but not real words
-Sounds meaningful, but no literal meaning
-Easy to remember

Dorothy Parker picks up a perfectly ripe nectarine. "What fresh smell is this?”
Dorothy is caught by surprise by an ocean wave when the water is cold. “What fresh swell is this!”
Dorothy filming a deodorant commercial. “What fresh gel is this?”

Random encounter: An ogre threatening to eat a terrified farmer. Neither realizes they are both named Eustace (no proper introduction, they went straight to threats and terror, respectively). They will be amused by the coincidence if the PCs ask their names, potentially defusing the tense situation.

A diagram labeled "The Humanoid-Anthro-Alien Sex Triangle." It features many fictional aliens, robots, and monsters, largely from science fiction and fantasy, which various online communities have reputedly sexualized. The diagram attempts to group them into categories, using a humorous taxonomy.

Imagine a player asks which species/ancestries players are allowed to pick in a new RPG campaign you're going to run and you just hand them this diagram.

Frogs require less caloric sustenance than humans during peacetime, so they’re resource-efficient. Weaker nations without sufficient swampland suffer from what is known as a “frog gap.”

Famously, the kiss of a princess can turn a frog into a prince. It follows that the most powerful princess-led states (princess-ipalities) contain the most marshes and swampland. A princess can rapidly convert frogs to a standing army as needed.

Falx - Wikipedia

What kind of weapons do adversaries in a fantasy game use? They use weapons that are effective against the things they expect to fight (which may or may not be PCs). Even a fraction of the history behind something like the falx makes for good worldbuilding. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falx

Funnel idea: The PCs are teens who planned to “froghop” for fun on a Friday night, but the dose was stronger than intended. While hopped up on the frog juice, they read and followed a guild post, and by the time they sobered up, they were up to their necks in frogs and thieves, deep in the dungeon.

Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness Contest: Psychedelic Cryptography (Innovate)

The thieves' guild posts messages in plain sight all around town, but only those experiencing the mild hallucinatory effects of a local drug derived from froghemoth bile can read them. The teetotalers in the town militia and the local temple are none the wiser. qri.org/blog/psycryp...

A "half bath" does not have half of a bathtub, so it cannot be credibly be called a "half bath." The toilet is the dominant feature of what is typically called a half bath. A half bath should instead be called a toil room.

Material girl living in a material world = Madonna
Immaterial girl in a material world = Sue Storm
Material girl in an immaterial world = Motoko Kusanagi
Immaterial girl in an immaterial world = Existence strongly implied by above data, but scientists have yet to find a way to observe and confirm

Shirtless Stephen Dorff as Deacon Frost in the 1998 movie Blade gazes broodingly at a very chunky 1990s laptop. It is not even plugged in, which shows that he doesn't play by the rules, because those laptops did not have a long battery life back then.

Blade was so weirdly prophetic about using computers to translate ancient text. basically 25 years ahead of its time, predicting how computers could brute force translations that were beyond humans (or vampires). And of course the 90s techno-goth aesthetic doesn't get much better than this.

Dungeon energy can come from one weird thing that leads to a chain of PC questions. Suppose that near the entrance, there’s a vertical shaft coated in melted wax, with more slowly dripping from above. Too dangerous to climb, and no explicit reason to try. But 9/10 players will want to find out why.

The bees are agitated by the noise and smells of the town. The townsfolk just see the swarm of bees, and probably don't even know the turtle is there. The thick-skinned turtle is unbothered by the bees. The turtle is easy to lure with food, but it is challenging to get its attention amidst the bees.