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Prismatic Wasteland Profile
Prismatic Wasteland

@PrismaticWastes

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Gold Ennie-winning TTRPG Blogger, working on a Whimsical Post-Post Apocalyptic Science Fantasy TTRPG and Other Adventures

Joined December 2020
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 month
We are getting fewer and fewer usable alternative names for flunkies. “Henchmen” is too gendered and henchpeople just doesn’t have a nice ring to it. You can’t say “minion” without thinking of the little yellow guys. And don’t even get me started on the word “goon”
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
If you ever have to completely improvise a megadungeon (for some reason, may god have mercy), find a map of a large, asymmetric shopping mall, preferably with multiple levels for the layout.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
Another method for improvising a dungeon: imagine the layout of your elementary school and use those hazily recollections for the dungeon. This has a few advantages.
@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
If you ever have to completely improvise a megadungeon (for some reason, may god have mercy), find a map of a large, asymmetric shopping mall, preferably with multiple levels for the layout.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
And it isn’t close
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what is y’all most liked tweet?
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
It’s bullshit that monks in D&D don’t have any abilities relating to the production of liquors or cheeses
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
If I were put in charge of D&D 6th edition, the dungeon master’s guide would be 300 pages of advice about scheduling gaming groups
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
Chris Pratt has been cast as 6th Edition Dungeons & Dragons
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
The Myth of “Consensual” Game Design
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 month
@vastus413two Not yet but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time!
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 month
@Cruxador Oh yeah that one has totally fallen out of the lexicon!
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
7 months
For a small fee, I will read your enemy’s bespoke TTRPG system and say, “have you thought about making it a 5e hack instead”
@jamesholod
james
7 months
for a small fee, i will attend your enemy’s new play reading and ask “but why this story now?”
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
Find the directory and use individual stores as loose prompts off of which to riff. American Eagle? Maybe the nest of imperialistic birdfolk. Hot Topic? A cult popular with the youth in the nearby village. Etc.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
🗺️ Hexcrawl Checklist: Part One The “West Marches” as a type of D&D campaign was born 15 years ago today. I have put together a checklist of everything you need to run your own hexcrawl campaign, inspired by the West Marches style ⤵️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
Too many fantasy ttrpgs have art of epic, heroic heroes. Too few have art of stunted, bulbous, cartoony freaks.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
I don’t necessarily recommend improvising a whole megadungeon. But if you simply must, a mall isn’t a bad place to start.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
Several people are typing…
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
My earliest big house rule I ever implemented in 5e D&D was sort of similar to this but (obviously) much better. It was popular enough within the very large, multiple GMs, West Marches campaign that it was adopted across the board and in other campaigns as well. It’s simple… 🧵
@pangalactic
Chris B 🐻 🏳️‍🌈 loottheroom.bsky
1 year
Today in "things from AD&D that I'd forgotten exist in 5e": weapon speed initiative modifiers.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
🚨New Blogpost: D&D Initiative & The McDonald’s Problem🍔 Does your combat take longer than it should, causing players to zone out when it isn’t their turn? Try this one weird trick (Coastal Wizards HATE him) 🧵
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
Best D&D dungeon design practice is to include multiple entrances and exits, but not enough people know that one of your entrances/exits should have a gift shop
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
Consider history and factions throughout play, jotting down thoughts (especially thoughts from your players). After the first session, you can ossify these loose connections into something solid enough for long term play.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
Watching a group of friends play D&D is boring. I want to watch a group of enemies.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
8 months
A sleight of hand has occurred with respect to the legacy of Jennell Jaquays, one of TTRPG’s most important early figures. Anne at DIY & Dragons definitively lays out the case why you should keep “JaquaySing” your dungeons in Xandering is Slandering
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
4 months
So I need to start a Mothership campaign ASAP huh
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
The first is that your memory is going to be from a better perspective for describing it to people exploring it. You don’t experience real life spaces as a top-down map, it’s all POV. Even better, since your memories are from childhood, the space is going to be larger than life
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
We won, baby!!!
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@ENnies
ENNIE Awards
1 year
Gold award for Best Supplement goes to Barkeep on the Borderlands.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
The “can only maintain concentration on one spell at a time” rule in D&D 5e was a big quality of life improvement BUT HOWEVER casting like 5 different buff spells before a big fight did have this vibe, which felt cool
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@DevTheGuy
The Dev Team
1 year
Powergaming in D&D 3.5e compared to powergaming in D&D 5e is so funny. In 3.5, making a broken build is like, “Take this race, these feats from these 8 different source books, these classes and prestige classes, cast these spells before combat even begins.” 5e: “Take Fireball.”
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
Apparently today’s discourse is whether you can use D&D 5e to run a romance/dating sim? Without opining on whether you *should*, here is a quick and dirty hack to instantly make 5e character creation lead to more interesting characters in that sense: 🧵
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
4 months
The cover of Traveller is obviously iconic, but unfortunately I can now no longer see this many ellipses without reading it like it’s a baby boomer posting on Facebook This is Nana , calling anyone … Happy, Birthday …
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@ClayNotestine
Clayton Notestine
4 months
Love it. “A Knight at the Opera: The Best RPG Cover of all Time”
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
In pseudo-medieval fantasy games, characters often understand the world much better than actual medieval peoples. Europeans from Aristotle until the 17th century thought mice just spontaneously generated from moldy grain. We know better, but would the people in your setting?
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
Some previews of Barkeep on the Borderlands. Only a few days remaining to pre-order!
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
It also likely won’t be perfectly remembered, which gives you some flexibility. Maybe you remember that there was a little fake pond in the front—that can be a jumping off point for embellishing it into a flooded room with koi swimming between your legs as you wade through
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
5 months
🚨 New Blogpost: Rehabilitating the To-Hit Roll 🗡️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
8 months
I love the idea of converting office buildings into apartments for two reasons: 1. Office bad, housing good 2. It is good dungeon design. The best dungeons have an original use and are then hastily converted to another purpose, sometimes multiple times
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 months
🚨New blog post: The TTRPG Cooking Minigame 👨🏻‍🍳 I love minigames in TTRPGs, and cooking is the ur-example for a good minigame in your mostly fighting and exploring focused game like D&D and its cousins. A simple system for your game 🔗⤵️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
Your memories are also likely to involve more senses than just sight. Which areas smell musty, which ones are always cold, which ones have lights that flicker unnervingly?
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
🚨You can now check out Barkeep on the Borderlands, a pubcrawl pointcrawl adventure, for yourself on itch dot io! Link, and a bit of explanation, below ⤵️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
🚨 New Blogpost: Shopping in D&D is Garbage, and How to Fix It 🛍️🛒 Two minigames for making shopping in TTRPGs between dungeon delves more exciting, even addicting 🧵
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
Hot take: there is no hard distinction between board games and tabletop roleplaying games.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
🗺️ Hexcrawl Checklist: Part Two In the follow up to my first part of a checklist for everything you need to run your own hexcrawl campaign, I focus on the most important elements that don’t appear on the map ⤵️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
A friend told me that buying dog toys is often more exciting for the dog owner than playing with said toys are for the dog. This dynamic is obviously analogous to gamemasters buying TTRPG supplements ostensibly for the players in their game but really for themselves.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
If you want your DnD game to be realistic, and the characters encounter orcs, instead of fighting each other they should realize they have more in common than they differ and will unite to topple the monarchy.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
13 days
OSR blog posts about encumbrance rules be like
@ArannReichhardt
Arann Reichhardt Swordsmith
14 days
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
9 months
There are so many cool fantasy creatures in roleplaying games yet not once have I seen stats for people with preposterously large fruits for heads—a real opportunity for your campaign
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
🚨 New Blogpost: Social Monsters 👯‍♀️ One reason that combat is the bulk of what D&D is about is because the ability of the enemies to do physical harm is graphically detailed, but focus is rarely given to how monsters can be social antagonists as well 🧵
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
4 months
AI has started scrapping even RPG blog posts for content. Was looking for an old post of mine and google now hides it under a mangled summary of my post. Artificial intelligence is a fucking menace. If you want to license my words, pay me first
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
🚨 New Blogpost: Shopping, Listing, Picking and Gambling for Equipment 🛒
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 months
🚨 New TTRPG Adventure: Trouble in Paradisa 🏝️ A system-agnostic murder mystery adventure based on a Lego theme from the 1990s, Paradisa, which focuses on tropical leisure.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
LEAK: in the new D&D movie, all the actors will constantly move diagonally because it is a somewhat more efficient use of movement
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
5 months
Lmao, the former head of DnD is like yeah I only play this stupid game one hour a week and would be wiser if I played even less
@roguecaliber
Ben
5 months
So you want realism in D&D?
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
5 months
Weapon and armor restrictions in D&D are more interesting if they are only social restrictions or taboos. Like, sure, a wizard *could* wear armor and a cleric *could* wield an edged weapon, but they will be pariahs in the wizard or cleric community and shunned by polite society
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
🏆 Inaugural Bloggies! There were a lot of great TTRPG blog posts in 2022, and this is a chance to highlight some of them and award a few as the TOP BLOG POSTS OF 2022. But first, you need to help pick them🧵
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
A ttrpg “system” is basically a collection of rulings for various situations, useful only to the extent they help the GM make their own rulings.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
🚨 I just released my first game: BIG ROCK CANDY HEXCRAWL! It’s PWYW on itch dot eye oh, link below! 🍬🏔
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 month
GM Tip: during the entire session sit backward in your chair so your players will think you’re cool
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
9 months
Luke Crane is about to have a wild new Kickstarter campaign
@MonkipiQuinn
Little Hercules, DDS
9 months
Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
Yes, your dungeon should be Jaquaysed but it should also feature a grooving area. Where do the dungeon’s monsters get down? It’s important for the ecology of the entire subterranean labyrinth
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
I think they’re running out of ideas for D&D 5e adventures…
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
🚨 Pre-launch Page for my ZineMonth project, Barkeep on the Borderlands, a system-neutral pubcrawl pointcrawl adventure is LIVE 🍻 Go follow, retweet, etc! Like, comment, subscribe, etc
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
🚨New Blogpost: Humpty Dumpty Should Die: Fixing Falling Damage in D&D 🍃 D&D’s “1d6 per 10 feet” rule has survived for decades and many editions. And Gary Gygax is probably mad about it. Here’s why!
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
I love logging onto ttrpg twitter after a long day of work and everyone is like “so here is my take on romance and hotdogs in D&D” with zero context of why that’s today’s hot topic
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
9 months
🚨 New Blogpost: My Weird Wizard Show! 🪄 I talk through my new magic system, how it works and why it works! 🔗⤵️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
Errant, your new favorite D&D, is finally available to purchase! It’s one of my favorite games and I’ve had many near death experiences (mostly just my character’s death) playing it. Go grab it!
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
7 months
Roses are red Clean floors are swept YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
“OSR” is mostly a marketing term at this point, but I consider my games to be Post-OSR, i.e. POSR (pronounced “Poser”)
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 months
A hotel hosting an industry conference would make for a great grimdark dungeon crawl. Random encounters of stuffed suits with glazed, empty expressions shuffling along drab-blue, labyrinthine corridors, ravenous for blood and networking
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
If Tomb of Horrors is a purposely unfair module to “test” the skill of the players, what is a hard to run module that would similarly serve as a test of skill, but this time of the GM running it?
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 months
I won’t release a 2nd edition of a TTRPG unless I need to specifically screw Dave Arneson out of royalties
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
7 months
The rumors are true. Prismatic Wasteland Incorporated is in talks with Wizards of the Coast to purchase all intellectual property rights for “Dungeons & Dragons”
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
9 months
Devastated to learn that the O in OSR stands for Ohio
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
9 months
When Gandalf calls Shadowfax “the lord of all horses”, is that a literally true fact or just how he greets an old friend? I’d absolutely greet a friend by being like “Hark, it’s John! The lord of all horses!”
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
5 months
Free NPC names for your D&D campaign
@astrayhound
sᴋʏe
5 months
I'm absolutely losing my shit at this ĀÎ gen yearbook
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
Is it possible to teach someone a new game you are designing without giving off this exact energy?
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
7 months
🚨 New Blogpost: Wizards Playing Telephone ☎️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
5 months
This happened to me and I found out there is a medieval peasant stan twitter. They didn’t like me citing Aristotle (to be fair, I didn’t like it either)
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
One difference between video games and TTRPGs is that (with some exceptions) You *play* video games, but you *play with* TTRPGs. (🧵)
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
Let all old medieval superstitions of the past be true, but the people believe what we believe about how the world works. And just as often as in the past, they’re wrong. I think this actually lines up pretty well with a fantasy setting. After all, witches and ghosts are all real
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
🚨 See Early Drafts of my RPGs Alert 🚨 I have been working on Prismatic Wasteland, a whimsical dying earth TTRPG, my take on both D&D and Gamma World, for 3+ years. For the first time, I’m letting people who aren’t me gawk at it 🧵
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
8 months
As everyone who reads her blog (especially the post in question) knows, Anne is tremendously thoughtful and the insinuation that she wrote this for “clicks” and not because she was morally outraged at the shameful attempted erasure of another trans woman is insult to injury
@hexcrawl
Justin Alexander
8 months
I would like to believe that Anne is sincere in what she posted, but, regardless, I'm unsurprised to see someone trying to get cheap clicks by appealing to outrage culture over this. Such is life on the modern internet.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
🚨 Barkeep on the Borderlands Reviewed! 🍻
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
Let the players and their characters assume they know how the world works, but let it be wrong. Perhaps in your world everyone from peasants to philosophers “know” that mice reproduce similarly to humans. But in truth, mice spontaneously generate from moldy wheat
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 months
Spitting image, but not quite spitting distance
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
9 months
Seeing much chatter about plagiarism as of late, and this is an egregious example from the TTRPG sphere. I encourage you to read this whole piece!
@traversefantasy
Marcia B. 🍹
9 months
🚨 blog post! 🚨 unconquered (2022) plagiarized swaths of ideas and passages from ultraviolet grass lands & the black city (2020) and vaults of vaarn (2021) more below 1/2
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
🚨 New Blogpost: Spell Lists Are Not Magical 🧙🏻
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Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
Imagine this as a monster in Mausritter
@gunsnrosesgirl3
Science girl
1 year
Stygian Owl have reflective discs that give their eyes a vivid red appearance when exposed to daylight. 📸Claudio Eigi Iwasaki
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Prismatic Wasteland
5 months
On reaction rolls, someone asked how to differentiate between aggressive and hostile encounters Aggressive is someone who just plain doesn’t like you—the aggressively unhelpful TSA agent or the other bar patron that says “I don’t like you. He doesn’t like you either.” 🧵
@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
6 months
🚨 New Blogpost: Overloading the Random Encounter Table 👾
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Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
🚨 New blog post from A Knight at the Opera: Picture Book Gameplay. Link below ⤵️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
10 months
🚨New Blogpost: In Defense of Ability Scores 🎼 Pathfinder 2e is getting rid of ability scores, which is absolutely the right call for that game. But for games not based on 3e D&D, ability scores are having a bit of a mechanical renaissance. Full post below!
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
🚨 Missed your chance to back Barkeep on the Borderlands? Pre-orders are now available as we get ready to send these out 🔗⤵️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
🚨 New Blog Post: Apolitical RPGs Do Not Exist 🏛
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Prismatic Wasteland
1 month
A Knight at the Opera wrote a spicy review of Mothership 1E. Trust me: it doesn't say the same thing as all the other reviews of Mothership you've seen or read
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
7 months
🚨 New Blogpost: Potion Clues 🧪 Don’t just give your players a potion and tell them what it does. Information should be earned! But it also must be earnable. Here are 3 ways for D&D characters to identify the bubbling beaker they found in the dungeon ⤵️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
🚨 Calendars, Not Just Maps: a blog post disguised as a tweet thread (1/10) 🗓
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
2 years
The “OSR” is similar to CRT in that it’s an empty signifier, but—unlike CRT—we MUST stop schools from teaching OSR
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
A new adventure from Gus L just dropped and damn is it good.
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
🚨 BARKEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS is now LIVE on Kickstarter! 🍻 Go back it!
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
3 years
📍 I’m W.F. Smith, author of the Prismatic Wasteland blog and other TTRPG detritus. Here is some stuff I’ve done/am working on ⤵️
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@PrismaticWastes
Prismatic Wasteland
1 year
The initiative die were: Spellcasting? D12 Weapon? Damage die Moving? D6 Anything else? D8 Roll both and take the higher result. That’s your initiative. Higher is faster. Dexterity score breaks ties. Initiative is rolled each turn
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