Me in 10 seconds
My name is Samuel Doebler James. I make games, play games, perform music. INTJ. 1w9.
What do I write about?
Role-playing games and story games! I’ve had quite a bit of experience running them for youngsters. Oddly, my top posts are about death, deathlessness, and violence in games for kids. I’m known for talking about stopwatch duels, open table games, diegetic advancement, helmets, trait drafts, scene-based adventures, and open strategy games. I think there’s a better way to do advantage and that perception and knowledge rolls smell bad.
I consider myself part of the Matrix Game, NSR, OSR, and FKR spaces. Whatever focuses on the world the most.
The Cauldron is the best forum for long-form discussion that sticks around more than Discord. It’s posts go directly to my RPG feed, so I’m reading what comes through often.
Check out the Index for a large categorized list of popular posts.
There are RPG bloggers that I read as well. The blogroll on the bottom-right is randomized, so just click one and see how deep that particular rabbit hole goes.
Email!
I read everything you send me. Here’s where you can reach me in long-form. Then also follow the blog via email, the last free frontier of the internet.
Check the tags on the right side of this page for whatever grabs your interest by topic. Or scroll down more to view posts by month and year. And here are my 10 most recent articles:
The Troubled Downs in Woland – A Collaborative Realm
This post is part of an ongoing collaborative Realm for Mythic Bastionland. If the Luck Roll blog is going to pull from the FKR’s “every book is a source book”, then I shall follow suit… I guess we’re getting a hexflower based on A. A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh.” I told William I wanted a sanctum and so chose the farthest hexflower from the action, but still connected to an already developed hexflower to build on established ideas. This project is VERY sparse on setting/tone/content guardrails, so having to at least connect my ideas to another’s gets me started. That meant hexflower…
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Eliminating Session Zero with Nine Words and Swearing
Structural PC group cohesion problems BEGONE! I really like the Oath from Mythic Bastionland: These are the statements the PC knights live and die by. It’s how they move through the world. The group has instant pursuits. Do any one of these things next and something interesting is basically guaranteed to happen. It’s the equivalent of all that session-zero-nonsense (“Are we a team? What’s our goal? What do we DO?”) boiled down in three statements (of three words each, the artistry here makes me cry tears of joy). What’s your alignment? THE OATH. Why are we together? THE OATH. What…
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Mythic Bastionland – Wait, am I illiterate?
High scripts = domain documents, ritual instructions, holy scripturesUsers of high scripts: heralds, sages, priests Low scripts = trade orders, posted signs, most writingsUsers of low scripts: merchants, guides, rulers When attempting to read for the first time, roll d6: When asking a seer for help reading, roll d6: Because what’re Medieval Times without a little illiteracy? These tables also harken back to Electric Bastionland where Luck Tables were also tiered as Rare/Uncommon/Common. Just another way to write them. Find more Mythic Bastionland greatness on the Syllabus! Looking to add recurring NPC plot threads? Check out Mythic Denizens!
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Mythic Bastionland: Overloading the Wilderness Roll
If you should apply anything from this article, you must, like me, apologize for adding cruft to Chris’s elegant design. Shame, shame! Apologies also if you read this and find that the best idea or resource was buried somewhere in the body of the blogpost. I kept it long so as to not deliver several small sandwiches but one OVERSIZED SCOOBY-SANDWICH that’s obviously inspired by Necropraxis’s Hazard System and the Overloaded Encounter Die. Also also, I’m not your mom, but you should run Mythic Bastionland as-written before this foundational level of tinkering. And with that, let’s tinker. As it stands,…
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Mythic Bastionland – Harvesting
When extracting goods from a corpse, plant, or quarry with sufficient tools, roll d6 to see how it goes: GOODS Find more Mythic Bastionland greatness on the Syllabus! Looking to add recurring NPC plot threads? Check out Mythic Denizens!
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Mythic Bastionland: Knighting Ceremony
This is a simple procedure for a squire to swear the Oath and become a knight. It requires a seer to lead the ceremony and at least one witness must be present. The squire kneels as the seer gravely states each line of the oath with a small ritual to accompany it. “SEEK THE MYTHS” 1 – The oil jar falls to the ground. A bad omen. 2-3 – Some oil spills to the ground. Ambiguous. 4-6 – Oil falls into the eyes of squire. A good omen. “HONOR THE SEERS” “PROTECT THE REALM” The squire responds: “BY THESE I…
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Everything you wanted to know about story games in 17k words, 8 actual plays, and one history video
…If you’ve heard them called social matrix games from this blog and other places, that’s fine too. Basically, I’m over bifurcating my brain to make posts for two separate audiences: the OSR/NSR/adventure game types (here) and the storygame/theater kid/writers/storyteller types (on substack). I’m both of those camps, and that “split” is something I’ve done TO MYSELF. So the quick announcement is that I’ve collapsed the substack from Story Games Sojourn to just Dreaming Dragonslayer, changing the URL and names to do so. Apologies for links that are now dead as a result. The podcast name also changed to just Dreaming…
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Mythic Bastionland Syllabus
I’ve always appreciated one (of many things) Yochai Gal did for Dungeon World, Into the Odd, and Electric Bastionland: collecting resources. He put together a syllabus for these games containing basic information and introductions to the game in hopes of onboarding people in the best way possible. Now I have done that same exercise for Mythic Bastionland. Here it is: The Mythic Bastionland Syllabus Goals: I’ve already collected the Mythic Bastionland Jam entries and a lot of Chris’s stuff, my stuff, and a handful of headliner tools, but I’m always on the lookout for more! Hope you find it useful…
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Disheveled December
With baby in month three and the holidays here and family in town and work ramping up, time is short. Here are a bunch of topic ideas and short thoughts, bones only. If you like anything I’ve written, you’ll find something for you in here. Onward I got the False Machine Christmas Discount and picked up the blogpost-collection “Speak, False Machine” for ~3 bucks. I adore it and flip through it on my iPad near-nightly. Pick it up. I was barely “blog conscious” during the time of most of the writings, so it was an informative and illuminating read. I…
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Design Thoughts for Mythic Denizens for Mythic Bastionland
(Somehow I missed posting this here, whoops.) Talking about the execution and intent of my new Mythic Bastionland supplement, designed to thicken the delightful and captivating tapestry of the Realm! Each of the dozen Denizens offer a unique plot-thread to be woven into the greater story of the Knights’ quest! Come with me inside my brain for my PROCESS, which mostly involves ironing over the material until I can stand it. Get Mythic Denizens for Mythic Bastionland on itch.io! If you haven’t, watch the Quinns Quest review of Mythic Bastionland for more thoughts and hilarity about this game.
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DREAMING DRAGONSLAYER 