Corridors have been doing your party favors nobody asked for. Take them away and retreat becomes a gamble, noise carries three rooms over, and your torches last forever. Here's when that trade pays.
How room spacing shapes dungeon pacing, exploration, and player decisions—and why layout should be a deliberate part of adventure design.
Why AI handles the first 80 percent of game development and stalls on engines, concurrency, and the feel of a game that only a human can verify.
How the BECMI Thief turned shared player ingenuity into one class's dice roll, and quietly traded D&D's player agency for character permissions.
How IBO's Progressive Resolution System turns every skill check into a multi-stage risk decision, from sword fights to lockpicking to crafting legendary gear.
A deep dive into IBO's character system: nine characteristics, d100 skill rolls, backgrounds, apprenticeships, and the Rule of 5.
Lockpicking, ranged combat simplification, grapple redesign, and a dev environment rebuild in the latest Iron, Blood & Omens devlog.
I've always wanted to build a MUD. After 30 years as a software engineer, AI coding tools finally closed the gap between skillset and available time. This is the first dev log for Iron, Blood & Omens, a gritty text-based RPG built on a custom engine and a game system of my own design.
Solo TTRPG play has been part of the hobby since the 1970s, serving as practice space, a creative engine with oracles, and now evolving with AI.
I built an interactive KCD2 alchemy tool to manage recipes and reflect on how modern TTRPG design has diminished meaningful crafting and earned progression.