Appendix N Jam 2026: Submitted!

I'm proud of this cover.

Yes, it's that time of year again, and I've submitted my entry for the Appendix N Jam. This year I pulled the title "The Tomb Tappers", and once again, I went completely literal with two different definitions of the word "tapper". Now I'm downloading other entries and rating them.

Speaking of which, if you're also a part of the Jam, you can rate The Tomb Tappers and leave a comment, both of which I would greatly appreciate. If you're not a part of the Jam, go download a copy and challenge yourself to design a gonzo fantasy/sci fi adventure next year.

I had a brainwave when I started jotting ideas down: What if the tappers were aliens who could fold space? And what if there were a few tombs they wanted something out of? And what if I could use the format of the printed pamphlet to simulate that folding space?

On the Limits of Random Tables

I love random tables. Knowing that I can roll a few dice and get a solid idea to build from gives me confidence when running my games. Sometimes the ideas I get go well beyond what I can come up with on my own in a short time. These are all positive points about tables.

But there's a downside.

Every table has limits. Limits on how many options exist. Limits on the scope of ideas available. Limits on what the table can do for you. Don't get me wrong: A d% or d66 table offers plenty of options. But vanishingly few tables exhaust the limits of options available in reality.

Characters As Hope

Why do we make characters? What compels us to keep rolling up characters we may never play or even look at again? What's the point of spending time breathing life into numbers on a piece of paper if that life only ever sees that glimmer of reality and never a full table?

For me, it's a form of self-soothing.

Lemme 'splain, using Mongoose Traveller. Also look at Hanlon Greyrazor.

Lance Sgt Malachi Dobbs (Human, Age 30, ex-Army Scout)
B46686 - Athletics 0, Carouse 0, Drive 0, Gun Combat (Slug) 2, Heavy Weapons (Vehicle) 1, Investigate 1, Leadership 1, Melee (Blade) 1, Navigation 1, Recon 2, Streetwise 0, Survival 1, Vacc Suit 0
Gear: Cr 8,350. Augments: Enhanced Vision, Subdermal Armor. Cloth Armour, Suppressed ACR (DNA-locked), Cutlass, Mobile Comm, and an assortment of Grenades.
(Created Summer 2021)

Two Weeks In Stone Limbo

Felt this big. It did not rock.

Hi. It's been 2 weeks since I posted. Why? Well...

I posted for my birthday, then went to run my D&D 5e game. About 2.5 hours in, I got dizzy, nauseous, and feverish all of a sudden, and my pants felt far too tight. One trip to the ER later, with two IVs (the first one wouldn't clear so they ran a second one), a CT scan, some morphine, and a couple of scrips, they told me I had a 4mm kidney stone. They also gave me a 10-day course of antibiotics for the UTI they found, though I'm guessing the bacteria they found was my fault, because intense pain and morphine makes peeing in a cup =so= easy.

Apparently the antibiotics made me feel like crap. I've had zero pain since then, but I've just been so tired for two weeks. I'd sit and make myself available to actually write something, and then just nod off at my desk. The antibiotics ended on Wednesday, but yesterday was the first day I felt passably human. I've been doing the minimum required for the past 2 weeks, and there's much to catch up with, gaming and otherwise.

Jammin' and Publishin'

Hey there, Yawning Chasm That Is The Intarwebz. How y'all been? It's been a hot minute since I just talked to you, so I thought I'd do something like that now.

I basically gave this blog over to my current campaign setting Fellport over the past 2.5 years, posting nothing but NPCs, locations, items, groups, and related snippets to use in your game if you want. I shifted focus from my thoughts to stuff I made, thinking nobody would care about this aging white guy's opinions. Maybe that's true. Maybe the void will eat my thoughts and never give anything back. But does that negate the effort or the accomplishment of having strung together words in hopes of clarifying my thoughts and working through what I might think? I don't think so. I'm writing here mainly for me, but if these words reach anyone with similar beliefs and biases, great! So let's get to it.

Just to let you know, things have shifted for me since April, and things have shifted more in the past 6-7 weeks. Lemme 'splain.

(WARNING: Brain Dump Below The Cut! Double-check your safety gear now!)

On Cascading Ideas

I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate the cascading fractal of of ideas that fall out of one decision or moment of improvisation and lead to a broad plain of fertile fiction-land to cultivate.

I tripped across "The Humours of Whiskey" initially as this between-songs a cappella one-verse folk tune sung by Hozier. I followed it down the rabbit hole for a good hour, ending up with the six verses as recorded in 1900. And I thought, "Hey, I've got this Irish/Scottish/Gaelic country that could use more flesh, so why not include a song about whiskey?"

Tempus Fugit

It's been a year to the day since my last post here. That's enough silence, and enough waiting for the rest of life to settle down. High time I started writing again, so buckle up.

I could make empty promises that I'll post something at least monthly, and then summer will happen and I'll drop off the face of the earth for a few months. So I won't. I'll just say I'll post when I feel moved to post and go from there.

For those of you still out there and reading along: Thanks for sticking with it. Or for the laziness in not cleaning up your dead blog links. Whichever, the end result is the same.

I've got a few irons in the fire currently...

Goals for 2017

It's my second day home after PAX East. Post-con letdown aches in my bones, and this snowstorm doesn't help. Shoveling clears the head and raises the heart rate, but doesn't help with the fatigue.

Again I ask myself how to create lasting community outside of an expensive con that forces us to reserve hundreds of dollars and a weekend of time to hang with friends that live locally but we don't see as often as you want to. It should be easy to reach out and schedule something, but the mundane reality of parenthood and being a responsible adult with a job and a mortgage means that friendships slip down on the priority list far more often than they should. And that sucks.

Sometimes introversion sucks. Self-induced anxiety tends to suck all the time.

Personal Note: Sudden Proliferation

I'm not used to having 4 posts in the hopper waiting for publication. (OK, 2 and two that are almost done. Curse my inevitable exaggeration.) But there they are. And this one makes 5. So I'll shoot to publish a post a day this week.

Over the winter I was lucky if I had inspiration for an article a month. Spring showed up and brought a bounty of ideas with it. So here I sit, swimming in ideas and actually carving out the time to develop and record them.

It feels glorious.

The Idea Workbook

Since I wrote Honor Your Ideas last week, I've put my money where my mouth is and started doing exactly that. I started with a notebook...

[Toolbox] GMing Links

In the continuing effort to close browser tabs and outsource cranial retention services, I've compiled another set of links. These mostly focus on GMing and Worldbuilding. So without further ado...

On Economics
Building Your World: Economics Overview for Fantasy Writers (non-technical) explores world economics in terms of World of Warcraft's quest rewards, monster loot, crafting, and auction house mechanics. It's a great way to simplify thinking about the economies in your tabletop game.

Intro to Binding

I've been making my own (small) notebooks lately, as I mentioned previously in My First Attempt at Binding. I've been posting several pictures on G+, and then people started requesting a video. I had some time, so I recorded and edited 2 videos yesterday.

The first one covers the tools I use in binding, all of which have Amazon links in the video description if you're interested in picking them up. About $100 will get you started with all the tools you need to get a zine assembled and out the door.

This video is 2 minutes long. What can I say? I enjoy working in a limited space.

My First Attempt at Binding

I picked up all the tools for zine production, so this morning I did a quickie binding project. I found an old pad of graph paper, and my daughter had some green card stock that I swiped. A few rotary cuts, four green-colored staples, and four corner rounding chomps later I ended up with these:

Gone Mapping. Don't Wait Up.

Last week, I solicited recommendations on pens for mapping. I scored a set of Sakura Micron pens at Blick (a short walk from work, and for $6 - yay, member discount!) and scribbled a map in a graph composition book in about 10 minutes at work. Since then I've been playing with hashing and fill, and I'm still experimenting.

All the hashing looks muddy to me.
Then again it's all freehand, and I'm still tinkering.

Demons, Practice, and Keeping the Creative Faith

I feel like I'm plagued with demons. Most of them wear tutus, or rather "TooToo"s (hat tip to Ze Frank's Invocation for Beginnings on YouTube - go watch it again). Too Old. Too Disconnected. Too Unfinished. Too Difficult. Too Simple. Too Complex. Too Esoteric. Too Cumbersome To Use. Too Specific. Too General. Too Convoluted. Too Useless.

These demons serve me well when wearing my Editor Hat. Focusing the little bastards on something to knock off the rough corners and make a book better makes me think they're useful. And they are. But with great usefulness comes great possibility of abuse. They can poison an embryonic project in seconds.

Or Devils, as the case may be.

Demons have sharp edges, the backstabbing, lying little tools.

On Judging

Judging has its place in any project. Judging whether a project is worthy of even starting should happen as a single question near the beginning of the project, not as an ongoing process of second-guessing myself which stifles the project in a haze of "Why Bother?".

The demons have allies, insidious in their logic. Perceived lack of time delays a project, sometimes past the point of never getting started. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but discovering a game that does almost everything I was planning on designing really takes the wind out of my sails. Lack of experience can cause stillborn ideas, but how else do we gain experience and actually learn?

And yet, against all these negatives, we're driven to create.

Past the Wall

How do you get past the wall of "My work has no redeeming qualities", through the "Nobody will ever read this" quagmire, and into the land of "One negative comment can spiral my whole day into the crapper"? How do you keep donning that godlike cloak of creativity with the demons shouting in your ear? How do you harness the twin horses Inspiration and Perspiration and ride your chariot into uncharted territory?

Or one god. Blood and
Souls! Check out Jeff
Dee's D&D art remakes.

I tend to focus on tiny things, on doing the work one instant at a time. One word. One page. One idea. String the words, ideas, and pages into one seemingly smooth effort, even if it's pockmarked with constant questions of self-doubt. Focus on the immediate work and not the questions that derail - you can ask those when you're done with the first draft.

Get the project in the can; let Editing and Marketing worry about whether or not it's any good, even if the Editing and Marketing departments contain only me. Those are hats for later. Push off questions until after. Outright denying the questions gets me in trouble, and the demons throw monkey wrenches into the factory.

Respect the Demons

I don't have to like them, but I need to accept them as part of myself or I'll never get anything done. I work with them so we both get what we want. Sometimes that means bribery. Sometimes that means letting them shut down the process for a while. But I will come back to the process and finish.

I'm struggling with unfinished projects. I think many of us are. I'm struggling with an internal voice that tells me I have no business even trying to do anything creative. I think many of us are. I also think most of us know how wrong that voice is even if its honeyed words make sense to a part of us.

Seen at world-building.com.

We have sparks and demons within us all the time. Sometimes mine fight each other so hard I'm exhausted before getting out of bed. Sometimes they don't even talk. Sometimes, a precious few times, both sides get excited by the same idea. In those heady, sunbeams-breaking-through-the-clouds moments they harmonize and produce the most wonderful creations. Those instants color the world in gold and rose, and they make the process instantly worth any effort.

I'm not sure I can control it. Heck, I'm not even sure anything I consciously try has any meaningful effect, but I still try. But maybe the willingness to try and to keep trying has more impact that actually accomplishing anything by trying.

Maybe that's the Heart of Faith and the Soul of Practice. Meditate on that and let me know what comes to you.

And now we continue the Creative Practice...

GM Drunk. Design Sober.

So I just watched this talk by John Cleese on the nature of creativity. It's a half hour, but good stuff.

There's probably a cleaner version of that somewhere, but the subtitles add a certain je ne sais quoi. Some of the ideas in the video are expanded upon in this article at LockerGnome.

Mr. Cleese talks about research into the nature of creativity that tells us creativity is not an innate talent. It's not tied to how educated you are. It's a state of mind where you're not blindly rushing directly toward the completion of a task, but a state of mind where you're open to exploring ideas that you stumble across. It doesn't focus on a specific goal, it looks around and sees everything in the area.

You can develop creativity by inviting it in, by creating an oasis of time and space to block out the day-to-day task completion (Closed Mode) and settling yourself into an almost meditative state where you can grab ideas and run with them.

He talks about Open Mode and Closed Mode and my mind flips into other modes of duality. About being open to the ideas around you and about discarding ideas as irrelevant to your current task. About moving in circles around a topic and about moving in lines to implement a plan. About the darkness of chaos and potential and the beam of light focused on a single goal. About Zero and One. Gathering and Hunting. Female and Male. Yang and Yin. Circles and Lines.

And that made me think of this TED talk about brain scans done on improvisational jazz and freestyle rap artists to see how your brain handles improv. It's sixteen had a half minutes, but fascinating.

With music, you work within a massive linear structure through the musical constructs of meter, scale, harmomy, and rhyme. Improv musicians can fit something spontaneously creative within the confines of that structure. When improvising music, the self-expression, language, and communication areas of the brain engage in addition to all the structural areas that engage when performing memorized music.

Freestylin' RPG
How does this tie to role playing games? Like music, you have a massive linear structure of rules, stats, character classes, combat maneuvers, the nature of magic, and all the optional and home rules that make the game system. And like music, players and GMs need to be creative and fit their ideas within this structure for a really great game. The pace is somewhat slower than rushing to figure out something to do in the next four bars, but I think the concept holds.

Getting back to the John Cleese talk, to be a great improvisational GM you need to be able to speedshift between Open and Closed Modes. To take the ideas that come up at the table and flesh them out within the rules to present the next thing that happens in the story. To be quick enough to paint the next scene for the players when they take that sudden left and dive off the edge of the map. To brainstorm ideas and implement them in the same breath. It takes effort that engages more of the brain than just running a pre-written adventure, and that explains why I'm usually both tired and buzzed after GMing a good session.

Getting to Open Mode
This begs the question, "How can I switch into the Open Mode quickly?", and there's no simple answer to that. How do you prepare yourself to run a game? I don't just mean prepping the pieces of the game; I mean how do you get yourself in the right frame of mind to take curve balls from the players and react intelligently?

One idea comes from the brain scan video. When improvising, the self-monitoring part of the brain disengages to let the new ideas to come out without inhibition. With this in mind, Hemingway gives us one way to think about avoiding the inner editor and letting the ideas flow: "Write drunk. Edit sober." He was talking about getting past writer's block, so GMs can think of it as, "GM drunk. Design sober."

I'm not advocating that you run your games drunk, but if it works for you I'm not going to tell you to stop it either.

Do I have a point? Yes.
Give up some control and you'll improvise better.

You don't need to be right, especially not the first time. You don't need to fear being wrong because you learn from things that aren't perfect. Remember it's not your game alone, it belongs to everyone at the table. So let the ideas come out without stopping them. Communicate your ideas and let your players change them. Tap into the Open Mode circular way of playing with new things, and don't discard ideas before you give them voice just because the Closed Mode tells you they don't fit with the current line in the game.

Challenge yourself to use one idea as soon as it comes up at the table, preferably one that you didn't come up with. Before long, it'll become a habit and you'll be able to roll with anything that comes up at your table.

Good luck out there.

The Creative Struggle

I popped in a yoga DVD this morning and let Rodney Yee kick my ass. I lay on the mat a while after the routine finished and I felt like I just had a 4-hour crash course in mixed martial arts fighting. To be fair, it's been weeks since I've done any yoga or even any serious stretching, so today I struggled against the poses and paid for it.

Found at Caterpickles

Which, of course, runs completely counter to the philosophy behind yoga.

Yoga doesn't tell you to beat the crap out of yourself. Yoga doesn't have an achievement system with ranks or belts. For me, yoga is intensely personal. It's an invitation to explore yourself by fully inhabiting poses which stretch and bend your body in ways you don't normally move. For me, yoga acts as moving meditation, where the mind empties and I invite myself to relax into new experiences.

Except for days like today, when it feels like I need to defeat each pose.

So I thought about all of this, and I reflected back to the RPG projects on my plate. That same attitude of conflict and challenge reared its ugly head and smiled at me. And I tightened up, my fight-or-flight reflexes tensing for a struggle.

But it was the wrong struggle. I had already lost the more relevant battle.

Challenging Writing
I wrote an article for a forthcoming RPG supplement, and I'm in the process of rewriting and editing now. Getting that first draft onto paper took the life out of me. It felt more and more difficult to get the words out as I wrote. I knew what I wanted to write, but the approaching deadline and the fear that I wouldn't be able to communicate what was in my head kept popping up and derailing my writing process. I keep falling into the trap which is best expressed through the words of a fortune cookie:

Writer's Block is when the crap
in your head gets in the way.

"The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing, because you think you can only do a little."

It hurt to turn in for editing. It felt half-assed and unfocused. It felt unfinished. I feared outright rejection, and I asked for help. Luckily, I got the help and perspective I needed from that first round of feedback, and the process continues.

This is what editors do. They provide an outside perspective and ask the tough questions to get writers thinking in a different way. With everything I do, I try to learn how to become a better editor, a better ally on whatever project I'm involved with. This article, though painful to work through, has shown me new ways to approach the editing process which I'm totally stealing and adding to my tool kit.

Which Struggle?
The struggle to get words on paper or to edit another few pages of a project in't the important struggle. If you're struggling to write or fighting with yourself to keep working even though you feel like you're killing yourself, resolve that first. Some people call this process Sharpening Your Axe, and there's merit in that metaphor.

I draw from yoga and mindfulness. Don't force yourself to do anything. Take a breath, and invite yourself to work. If you lash out, explore where that reaction came from and why it presented itself that way. Steer clear of blame and finger-pointing; this is about you and your attitude toward your work. If a block or an issue comes up, ask yourself to put it aside for a while and bring it up later. Invite yourself back to your desk and the work that waits there.

Found at Yoga Dork

No whips, no sticks, no angry nun who will rap you on the knuckles with a metal ruler if you don't get this done. You don't need that. You just need to get all the crap in your head out of the way. You need a clear path between you and your work. Get out of your own way and your work will do itself. The crap in your head won't go away, so just tell yourself you'll put it aside for a few and come back to it later. Once you finish your work, the crap may not matter any more and it'll melt away like morning dew.

Focus is a struggle. If you bring weapons to the fight for focus you've already lost. It's not a titanic battle, it's a thousand instances of tiny choices every hour. It's every bit as hard as yelling at yourself, but less draining. Let go of the blame and internal dialogue. Let go of the crap. Stop thinking about the project and let yourself actually do the project.

Let go. Write. Edit.
Do.

I wrote this mostly to focus my own thoughts. I've got a couple of days mostly free to work on RPG projects and get them out the door. If you find something useful here, then I'm glad I shared it.

Thanks for reading!