A blog post brave enough to answer the question on everyone's lips: "what if the classic D&D ceiling monster (that's not the cloaker, lurker, or piercer) was actually a psychedelic nightmare squid that imprints its eggs in your subconscious?" traipse.hexarcana.com/2026/07/dark...

Darkmantles

Chthonic squid monsters floating soundlessly through the Inverted Palace . Conical indigo bodies ringed with crimson eyes; dense membrane we...

traipse.hexarcana.com

I haven’t checked but has anyone done a comparative study of the Gamma World dice flowcharts & the CCRU Numogram

Transfixed by Frederic Coché's Hortus Sanitatis

Angine de Poitrine makes me suspect I’m going normie, because historically I’d be all over a trendy math rock duo in kooky costumes but something about them... like I’m sure I can find enjoyment in their music if I really try but I put it on and immediately feel this visceral nausea-like repulsion

A series of illustrations based on the prompts I got here.

Jason Song Quinn (Comms Open)@hulkhoquinn.bsky.social · last mo.

Feel like drawing a knight, anyone got a theme I can use as inspiration?

Blogged about getting your players to make imaginary friends traipse.hexarcana.com/2026/06/frie...

Friendship Simulator: a Procedure for Friends and Contacts

The same way equipment and gear help you get things done in the dungeon, friends and contacts help you get things done in the city. What thi...

traipse.hexarcana.com

Here's how you make a pun-based magic item cool: after you get an idea and give it mechanics, change the name. The Petard of Hoisting (everything in the blast radius is thrown 30' into the air) is hard to care about. But call it an Earth Reviler and suddenly it's awesome

Underrated dungeon inhabitant: big guy that follows you around

Evlyn Moreau@evlynmoreau.bsky.social · last mo.

Solo session of Orbital Megastructure. This big guy followed me from a long distance, was unerving, luckily I was able to use my masking hack again to avoid being tracked.

Session number whatever of the party testing a key on every single lock they find, not realizing it opens a door the thief picked months ago

People who talk about Todd Hayne's SAFE (1995) are correct about the chilling plot and oppressive atmosphere, but no one mentions how it has one of the most unsettling minor characters ever put to film

A friend runs an Index Card RPG campaign at the game shop he works at. Asked me what he should do about a player who came in one day wanting to use a 30-page homebrew class. My advice: "if he can get it to fit on an index card, he can use it."

A miserable #dungeon of savage pulp fair and oozing body-horror. 28 keyed areas over 5 pages, including the map, magic items and monsters. It's also #free. foreignplanets.blogspot.com/2026/05/pity...

PITY THE CAVEMEN - an OD&D Horror Dungeon

A miserable dungeon of pulp savagery and slimesome body-horror.

foreignplanets.blogspot.com

Setting lore post 🏰📜🕯️ traipse.hexarcana.com/2026/05/the-...

The Inverted Palace

This is what I sent my players as a little backstory for the big dungeon at the center of our campaign: The Inverted Palace  On clear days, ...

traipse.hexarcana.com

As a kid I always waited until the bathtub completely drained before I got out so I could pretend, as the water lowered around me, that I was emerging as a synthetic organism from some sort of birthing vat

When PCs get a bounty on their heads, you need cool+colorful characters to hunt them down. Here are six: traipse.hexarcana.com/2026/04/1d6-...

1d6 Bounty Hunters

Six villains who hunt wanted PCs or whoever the PCs are hunting. Dead or alive, always.  1. Lolelia Rakva  Her skin is a beautiful pastel bl...

traipse.hexarcana.com

Yamantaka // Sonic Titan deserved the kind of career King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has

Melville once wrote of Moby-Dick: “it is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.” I hope one day something I write can be described the same way

I actually really like alignment (L-N-C of course, I don't care for G and E) but every OSR game plays like it doesn't exist. I endeavor to find a way to make it more relevant in my games and yet every attempt has left me wanting. This is my curse.

The conversation about what is lost when shortcuts and conveniences are used in TTRPG writing can be extended to OSR mechanics mechanics meant to sand off "rote" aspects of old games. Overloaded encounter dice are the bullet points of game mechanics. traipse.hexarcana.com/2026/03/work...

Illustrations like these are important for kids because they feed the part of the mind that craves the grotesque. You learned the pages you never turn to, save for when compelled by morbid curiosity... better to be occasionally distressed by a picture in a kids book than anesthetized by cocomelon

Keeping it Geekly@keepingitgeekly.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Picture this: Carcosa but the visual inspiration is old school Tokusatsu

The only remotely good Harry Potter-adjacent thing is Wizard People Dear Reader and that's only because of the amount of times Brad Neely gets to say "lo." Period end of story.

Forget it, Fafhrd. It's Lankhmar.

Does the world have room for yet another OSR fighter fix? Yes. Specifically this one: traipse.hexarcana.com/2026/03/migh...

MIGHT DICE: New House Rule for Fighters

Everyone has a fix for the Fighter. Every OSR game. Every blogger. I have . You have. It's a veritable right of passage. I have tried quite ...

traipse.hexarcana.com

Working on a doc for my players about unlockable classes. One of the classes is unlocked by discovering it exists.

A common thing in JRPGs and other video games you don't see so much in fantasy TTRPGs is when monsters are a relatively recent phenomenon in the setting. It's either implied or outright stated that everything was fine and placid until the BBEG appeared, and now there are monsters everywhere

I heard 1d6 flies buzz when I died

Reading @idraluna-archives.bsky.social's Zurth hexcrawl and I'm thrilled. There's like a minimum of 10 good ideas per page. I'm Zurthpilled. I'm a Zurthhead. I'm standing on the street asking strangers if they heard of Zurth