Bath Imaginable
Adventure Design, Storytelling, Reflections
Category: Reflections
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You know what’s cringe? Falling in love. Telling your friends that you value them. Getting earnestly excited about your hobbies. Being vulnerable with others. You know what else is cringe? Asking acquaintances in your life to play ttrpgs with you, and getting over the fear of mixing different groups of people in your life over…
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I have a lot of opinions but that doesn’t mean I’m a good critic. I think if you want to know whether you might like Public Access, you need to watch this video by Quinns Quest. You probably already have. I agree with many of Quinns’s takes on the game, and the Brindlewood Bay mystery…
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One of my favourite things about Ravenloft is its wacky worldbuilding: each Domain of Dread is a mind-prison tailored by mysterious Dark Powers to eternally torture its Darklord. Made of shadowstuff and the Darklord’s own memories, these domains are unreal yet populated by very real, trapped souls. The most famous Darklord is Count Strahd, imprisoned…
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This year I’m participating in the Appendix N Jam. My prompt was Warriors of the Bleached Basin. I spent the first hour of this game jam wondering if I should design a gladiator arena for Mausritter about a sink in an old garage filled with dangerous human junk. You know, mice fighting in a dusty…
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I always listen to music when I play RPGs. There are many good reasons to use music in your games and I’m sure you’ve already heard them all so I’ll just tell you my reason: it’s fun to build playlists and imagine what kind of scenes could unfold in your setting. I made this playlist…
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This month, I’m reading Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer. It’s the sequel to Borne—a novel I absolutely adore for its refusal to hold the reader’s hand. VanderMeer respects the reader; he drops a disturbing piece of worldbuilding, moves on, and trusts you to sit with the implications. But Dead Astronauts feels less like a traditional…
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Last year, a friend introduced our group to Brindlewood Bay. I was immediately struck by its near-perfect mystery system. Over six sessions, we told a largely player-driven, truly resonant story about facing loss. Now, I’m running Public Access for some of the same group. Three sessions into a planned year of play, having seen the…
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While the Forgotten Coast won’t be continuing, there’s no such thing as wasted creativity. The joy of making things is its own reward. THE MAPThe first version of the Forgotten Coast map was thrown together hastily to serve my home game, but wasn’t my exact aesthetic preference. RUMOURS d61. “Something is killing folk in the…
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Like many projects in the plane of Development Hell, the Forgotten Coast won’t be moving forward. I titled the first session of my Electric Bastionland Deep Country campaign Pilot as an explicit nod to the way I view my TTRPG campaigns through the lens of a TV Showrunner. I’ve written about this framework before (see…
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This weekend I visited Montreal for the first time and spent most of it wandering around aimlessly looking at the sites. Overall I was very charmed. At times I was overwhelmed. I thought a lot about Electric Bastionland. I thought about the different routes we took, the strange and wonderful encounters we had, and when…
Bath Imaginable 