Cryptic Keyway

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.

If you need a random encounter that doesn't (necessarily) lead to a fight, consider using two unrelated animals. Neither a giant tortoise nor a hive of bees "do" much on own. A giant tortoise with a massive beehive attached to its shell, wandering into town to munch on a garden... is an encounter.

Piglet from Winnie the Pooh’s striped torso makes him look like a grub or other insect. The original drawings clearly indicate that it is clothing, but the tight, even, pink-on-pink bands of the modern depiction imply a pig-insect hybrid creature.

But then I thought about it some more, and the players’ anticipation of the value/likelihood of finding something in that particular space would mean that they wouldn’t/couldn’t boil it down to simple math the way one can at the blackjack table. 🤔

This is a cool idea. My main concern with implementing would be the same one I have when playing Kompromat – that there’s a mathematically correct play pattern in blackjack, and my awareness of that would inhibit the fun of making sub-optimal choices.

Bjork: “It’s oh, so, quiet… a little TOO quiet.” *reloads her shotgun*

No Game Needs to End Without an Ending We’ve all been there. The game is going great. The players are excellent, the GM is doing a great job, everyone is excited to see what happe...

Have your opinionated, bloviating scholar get things wrong that the other players would find really annoying, then share it with them. If they don’t like it, they can always come back and finish the game to write their own ending.
cryptickeyway.blogspot.com/2025/06/no-g...

No Game Needs to End Without an Ending We’ve all been there. The game is going great. The players are excellent, the GM is doing a great job, everyone is excited to see what happe...

If your RPG campaign peters out and doesn’t have a satisfying ending, treat it as a writing project. Imagine you are a scholar writing hundreds or thousands of years later, based on fragmented sources. Include lots of speculation about the later parts of the story that the game never reached.

Illustration of grain engulfment hazard

Dungeon concept: OSHA safety hazards

Fire beetle glands and bioluminescent mushrooms are great, but there are stranger dungeon light sources. For example, a glowing stone stairwell at the entrance to the dungeon. PCs can chip pieces off of it, but the further they get from the entrance, the more the light fades.

“Carrion crawlers strongly resemble a mix of a giant green cutworm & a huge cephalopod. A carrion crawler moves rapidly on its multiple legs despite its bulk, & each of its feet are equipped with sharp claws. The head is equipped with 8 tentacles which flail at prey;”

Gary Gygax, Monster Manual

“Kill summoner, destroy any records” is plan A (and why so many demonic incursions involve murder and arson). “Escape summoner, obfuscate origins” is plan B, and the reason so many demons are found hiding in dungeons or moving randomly through the wilderness.

A demon can only be summoned to the material world when someone speaks its true name. But a true name also grants the speaker power over the demon. So a demon’s motivation is to let at least one person learn its true name, but to thereafter restrict that knowledge as much as possible.

A map from Wikipedia showing (among other things) distribution of settled/agricultural peoples vis-a-vis nomadic peoples in 2000 BC. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_in_2000_BC.svg

Imagine an RPG world with a population distribution like this. The adventuring sites are scattered all over... but if you want to buy the best armor or get a disease cured or hire a sage, you have to go to Ur or Mohenjo-daro or Thebes. Managing long-distance travel becomes a big deal.

i saw this guy eat five 7-11 roller hot dogs and a jumbo sour apple slurpee without taking the cig out of his mouth once

Just as humans dig into the earth to create graves, skeletons are digging up through the earth to rejoin the surface world. The older the fossil, the more likely it has forgotten its original internment. Become an archaeoexorcist today to help protect the world from their tenebrous grasp.

Carcassonne cities look like weird little bacteria

Quentin Tarantino insisted on donning the wizard's circlet and cape before directing each scene in Pulp Fiction

Creepy art by https://millennium-hand.tumblr.com/ depicting a ghost-like figure with the bottom of the mouth stretching downward out of the picture.

I’m not going to tell you how to live your unlife but if you are a ghost do not just be a blue translucent version of your living self. Be a ghost like this Millennium Hand art. This is a ghost that gets results.

64.media.tumblr.com/9c67771b7f61...

Exploits of a Mom

See #21 here: medium.com/magnetic/52-...

And there’s an XKCD for that: xkcd.com/327/

Wizards assume ostentatious, multi-syllabic names because those names incorporate arcane “code” that can cause all sorts of malfunctions and errors if someone attempts to curse, scry, or otherwise magically meddle with them by that name. As in Earthsea, only give your real name to someone you trust.

Such quests occasionally serves some actual purpose for the community in question, but more often are just busywork to ensure adventurers don’t excessively carouse, steal, or otherwise "adventure" within the community itself.

In fantasy RPGs, “the mayor” of a small community is not a public official in any modern sense, but instead a ceremonial role predominantly concerned with giving quests to adventurers.

Was It Likely? ... anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss trehizond napkins shame stones distance fever antipodes mush glaciers incoherence label...

Your blog is useful -- I've added some of the artists you've featured to my comics-to-read list.

Great recommendations already in response to this post but I will add a few more.

wasitlikely.blogspot.com
millennium-hand.tumblr.com
cubeofannihilation.tumblr.com
vintagegeekculture.tumblr.com

kretch egg

after boiling in dirty water for 4 hours, smashing the egg summons a kretch, a pathetic six-legged toad-hound that will begrudgingly complete three tasks, complaining the whole time, before violently choking to death on another kretch egg

#osr #magicitem

Frieren is the only pure fantasy example I could think of immediately as well (and it's a good interpretation). Maybe it is rare because it's hard to imagine without sliding from fantasy toward steampunk?

Ten Years (Part 3) You've heard the good, the messy, and the annoying. But here in our grand finale? These are the  real  reasons I haven't run a 5E game in ye...

Finishing out my 5E retrospective. I have no doubt that it will be the final word on the game, with no further discourse necessary. Probably.

knightattheopera.blogspot.com/2024/12/ten-...

Broom Frog!