Just wanted to give an update that progress continues on Into the Oddish with all of the art for the "Vile Plume Mountain" starter adventure complete, and layout for the test version of the "Red Version" complete. Have I given enough previous updates on this project for all of that to make sense? Probably not, but this has always been an amateurish Patreon feed, and you find it charming. Anyway...
2025-11-09 12:35:12 +0000 UTC
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This one will be going up on the blog soon but you get an ever-so-slight (and seasonally inappropriate) head start:
Blogwagon Announcement: Merry Hexmas
It is blog bandwagon time once again, but this time with a bit of a twist. We (that includes you, yes you) are each going to write up the contents of a single hex. Simple enough! But then in your ...
2025-10-31 16:03:52 +0000 UTC
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Sometimes when it rains it pours when it comes to writing blog posts. Here is one for you good folks. If you're interested in being a part of these playtests, I run them from time to time on the discord server (you should all have access, but let me know if you have trouble getting there and I can hand you the keys):
Playtest Early, Playtest Often
I am spinning a fe...
2025-10-23 21:30:14 +0000 UTC
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Most of my writing time has been devoted to playtest or upcoming games as of late, but I, of course, needed to write at least one post for spooky season. This year I wrote about the monster that decorates every suburban lawn: skeletons.
Bare Bones Survey of Skeletons
Beneath each of us, under skin and sinew, is a temple of marble-white columns and archways that spea...
2025-10-20 20:37:28 +0000 UTC
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To call these "beta" rules would be overly generous, but it is at least something minimally viable that I am going to begin playtesting in the discord server this week. If you are free on Thursday, feel free to join us! But either way, I welcome comments on these very rough rules.
Cheers!
WF Smith
2025-10-07 19:13:21 +0000 UTC
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Howdy pard,
I hope you've had a good month! Not a ton of new blogs from me (day job plus toddler aren't productivity boons), however Into the Oddish will go into playtesting soon once I finish the first adventure for it, and I may do some playtests of a different project next month. But because Oddish will require a very strange marketing schedule, I wanted to have a "looks final enough" ...
2025-09-28 15:36:13 +0000 UTC
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This will be posted as the upcoming blog bandwagon on Sept 8. If you're a blogger, you should come up with something of your own!
Pick Two Inspirations and Combine Them
Marcia of Traverse Fantasy (I merely served as her herald) declared a Blo...
2025-08-17 15:20:25 +0000 UTC
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This is a fully playable game. I plan on starting the playtests soon, as well as writing the starting adventure. Open to feedback (and ESPECIALLY if you note any typos, wonky bits, bugs [other than the bug-types], etc).
I'll round up a list of the Beleaguered Bouncer and Aspiring Tycoon tier backers closer to printing so your names can be listed in the credits.
Cheers!
2025-08-10 02:38:01 +0000 UTC
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I won two Ennies last night! Thanks to all who voted for me. Nothing else changes though, we still out here blogging.
Track Encumbrance and Only Encumbrance
One of, if not the, most appealing aspects of games like Knave, Into the Odd, or newer-comers like
2025-08-02 14:25:10 +0000 UTC
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I am committing double avian homicide by means of a rock (monster) with this post. For those in the know, I called for the silliest yet blog bandwagon, on the nebulous topic of “holes”. Meanwhile, Anne of DIY & Dragons invited everyone to participate in her 2nd annual
2025-07-13 23:42:37 +0000 UTC
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Ennies Good?? Also, By Total Coincidence, I am Nominated for Some
The Prismatic Wasteland blog and my book with Games Omnivorous are nominated, respectively, for Best Online Content and Best RPG Related Product. Voting is open NOW, and I sure would appreciate your vote. Here is a link to vote: [ADD LINK]
Yes, the Ennies are good even when not a single game I...
2025-07-05 18:30:14 +0000 UTC
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Dumpster Deep Dive: You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge Prep Example
So you probably celebrate this or that nation’s independence from this or that other nation (trivial), but do you celebrate the day the entire world was freed from the tyranny of the to-hit roll? On May 17, 2010, the blog 2025-06-30 22:23:09 +0000 UTC
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Have I already posted this one? I hope not.
AI and Empty Art
Humans create art because at some level we need to and always have. We spend all of our lives trapped in the solitary confinement that is our skulls, a solipsistic nightmare if you let it become one. But art, experiencing art to a smaller degree, but really creating art (which requires exp...
2025-06-14 14:03:02 +0000 UTC
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I wrote this for the Knock Kickstarter, which ends soon, so this one will be a "preview" for much less time than other postlings.
There has never been a better time to stock up on Knock, the favorite “magazine” (magazine being either a lie or mistranslation from the original français, as the issues of Knock are clearly books). 2025-05-17 21:21:30 +0000 UTC
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Howdy! I have a new book out, published by Games Omnivorous (if you've never heard of them, they put out extremely high quality physical products) called Prismatic Wisdom. I'll save you the hard sell since you're my patrons and instead, as way of thanks, offer you a PDF free of charge. Keep it under your hats, as I'm not sure if I can just give this out willy nilly. I also updated the 2025-05-13 00:24:30 +0000 UTC
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This one will likely be posted to the blog sooner than the many others that are currently in the queue because some bloggers and I are thinking of doing a bunch of posts during the upcoming conclave:
Divine Magic Works in Mysterious Ways
I don’t like clerics and never really have. Primarily, I have never liked the strange brand of polytheistic assumed setting that...
2025-04-29 02:16:52 +0000 UTC
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Thought of this one while pushing the stroller around the neighborhood.
All Along the Clocktower
When E.G. Gygax commanded that all must keep strict time records lest their play not be meaningful, there wasn’t much guidance for exactly how strict time records should be kept, which was great. A gauntlet was thrown but with no prescribed method whereby said g...
2025-04-20 01:57:19 +0000 UTC
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Another little blog post, this time inspired a bit by a recent Between Two Cairns episode.
Killable Peoples
In some of the first adventures for D&D, there were certain people who were fair game to kill. If you come across a goblin or an orc, you simply murder them first and ask questions never. Nowadays, we moderns find this a bit grotesque. You’re kill...
2025-03-29 18:14:14 +0000 UTC
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Closer to fiction that any blogpost I've written to date, but just had a stray idea I wanted to get out of my head. I bet Goblin Punch could've really taken an idea like this to the next level, but I can't measure myself agains the standards of a Goblin Punch.
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Moonlight Glitters upon Weregild
In some corners of the known world, people barter with lives ...
2025-03-22 20:29:44 +0000 UTC
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My parental leave has ended, and I am back to my real-world job. The domestic economy teeters on the brink of collapse, and my various bosses want to wring as much value out of me, a wet dishrag of labor, as they can before the bottom falls out. It is thus with a heavy soul that I report I haven't written...anything?! this entire past month.
However, the whee...
2025-03-09 20:24:41 +0000 UTC
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Another one! Sometimes I watch a movie and wanna write a few hundred words about it.
I’d Rather Be a Mouse Than an Elf
[Hodag RPG, you can stop reading now]
I recently watched Studio Ghibli’s Arrietty, which is based on The Borrowers, a series of children’s books about tiny people who live beneath your floorboards and pilfer your excess sugarcubes and ti...
2025-02-02 20:40:37 +0000 UTC
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Some explanations about how to make heavy armor feel different than just being good at dodging attacks.
Playing Dodgeball in Plate Armor
What even is armor class in D&D? Imagine two characters: one is the most dexterous rogue who ever picked a pocket wearing studded leather armor, the other is a brawny paladin with muscle for brains wearing 55 pounds of chain ma...
2025-01-31 23:47:50 +0000 UTC
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An argument about a spell I find underwhelming and a whole-ass character class. The level progression table didn't format correctly in Patreon, so you can check the google doc if you need that.
Control Weather Should Not Be a Spell
Control Weather should be a whole field of magic. Before I convince you, the jury of my peers, beyond any reasonable doubt that t...
2025-01-25 15:04:48 +0000 UTC
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So I ran a "Calvinball" style campaign recently and it is high time I talk about it and all the wacky rules the group came up with.
You Don’t Need a Game System Before You Play: The Calvinball Experiment
In the final three months of 2024, I ran something of a thought experiment disguised as a game among a handful of player in my Discord server. It was inspir...
2025-01-25 01:10:24 +0000 UTC
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Been a while since I've shown off WIP of Prismatic Wasteland. I am still chugging along to releasing the full Beta sometime this year (hopefully July), so this document is still VERY messy and not at all fully playable. But there are some ideas in here. About 23k words, still a lot of ideas to move over from the v0.4 version and a lot of extra stuff to write for the beta to be ready to go.
2025-01-22 16:36:19 +0000 UTC
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Really quick post for next week probably about a simple GM technique:
I don’t often write advice for running games not because I don’t consider myself especially adroit at the practice but because when I am a referee I enter a flow state that feels most similar to how a spirit would take me over when I would perform theatre or extemporaneous debate. It’s almost out-of-body but it’...
2025-01-21 15:34:33 +0000 UTC
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As a forward, voting has begun for the Gameable category in this year's Bloggies! One of my posts (Overloading the Random Encounter Table) is nominated and I would appreciate your vote today and each of the following 4 (phew) days! This year's Bloggies are being hosted here: https://sachagoat.blot.im/
But also, here is ano...
2025-01-10 22:36:48 +0000 UTC
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2024 Prismatic Retrospective
Year-end retrospectives are a rare blogging mismatch in that they are important for the blogger to write but typically of little interest to readers. However, the real blogging sickos (I count myself in that grouping) do gobble these types of things up with interest. So here I basically lay bare my analytics on everything from the past year ju...
2024-12-31 20:15:10 +0000 UTC
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My first post of the new year is ready:
2025 Is the Year of the Beta
Did you know that every baby you’ve met recently is an alpha? Unfortunately for zoomers, that is the official name of the generation slightly younger than them who will mock them mercilessly for affections we won’t know are uncool for at least another decade. But that changes this year because whatever secret c...
2024-12-30 16:10:05 +0000 UTC
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Was discussing social interaction rules in the discord server and came up with my take that will go in Prismatic Wasteland's beta rules. Might as well share it separately now, although you'll see it in the next update for PW.
2024-12-15 12:06:35 +0000 UTC
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