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Some Thoughts on Caves
Since the 2024 solar eclipse is nearly upon us, the Boss and I felt it was high time to visit family in Texas. While here, we also took the kids (and, let’s be honest, ourselves) to the conveniently located Inner Space Cavern in Georgetown, TX. The 1-hour “Adventure” walking tour was both fun and educational,…
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Serious Fun: Disaster Prep and RPGs
Today, I got the opportunity to apply my role-playing skills at work. By day, I’m a newly-minted member of my employer’s Emergency Operations Committee (EOC). As part of my orientation to the committee, other committee members and I “played” a tabletop disaster simulation, practicing the skills that we’ll need in case a real emergency occurs.…
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Game on!
Yep, since I last wrote on this blog, I playtested a bunch of puzzles, did a bunch of improv, asked a bunch of gamers about their frustrations, and ultimately… designed my own prototype RPG at Dundracon 2024! I’m very excited about it, since I think it combines the narrative freedom of D&D with the mechanical…
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Cipher Puzzles, Part 2
“These hieroglyphics have evidently a meaning. If it is a purely arbitrary one it may be impossible for us to solve it. If, on the other hand, it is systematic, I have no doubt that we shall get to the bottom of it.” Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Dancing Men, written by Sir…
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Cipher Puzzles Part 1
“If he had anything confidential to say, he wrote it in cipher, that is, by so changing the order of the letters of the alphabet, that not a word could be made out. If anyone wishes to decipher these, and get at their meaning, he must substitute the fourth letter of the alphabet, namely D,…
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What are puzzles, anyway?
I had originally planned to have my first few posts be about ciphers. Ciphers, after all, are a great puzzle mechanic that can be easily incorporated into a TTRPG. But as I tried to wrangle my ideas into words, I kept coming back to a basic question: Why is a cipher a puzzle? Or, more…
