This week in our ongoing “Fantasy Forward” series of posts, discussing ways to make sword-and-sorcery settings feel less pre-packaged is going to deal with something… squishy. Something touchy-feely. Something that, I feel, is rarely used to its potential in imagined settings: culture. We’re not expecting anyone to become trained sociologists or, heaven forbid, anthropologists in building out their fantasy settings (although I’m very curious if anybody with said training has incorporated that into games of their own), but there’s plenty of room to develop how people (regardless of species) live, learn, love, and do things. Real world cultures are the product of generations’ worth of history, experiences, stories, and beliefs, which can be a lot to live up to! How can we come up with original cultural elements in our fantasy settings, and how can we convey them to our players and audiences in ways that feel natural instead of forced? - B A : Music! Art! Literature! These are all amazin

And so we come to the big one in terms of showing advancement and development in your sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting, one that touches, and is touched by, all others: government. Kings, Emperors, and other monarchs are an inevitable element of any setting based ostensibly primarily on medieval Europe, but beyond that, things tend to get… sketchy. But those sketches are a great place for imaginative creators to fill in details , and shifts in governmental structures are some of the clearest signs of change in any civilization. And, if your setting includes more than one location, you can try out different, competing approaches and see the way they interact… often with the players/protagonists in the middle. So from barony to republic, from kingdom to anarcho-syndicalist commune , let’s explore how you can use government and politics to move your fantasy forward! - B A : For deeply political tabletop campaigns, it takes a special kind of group and a special kind of game. Just the sou

Last week, we started a new series of posts on how one might go about changing the stagnant nature of many “default” sword-and-sorcery fantasy settings by exploring how various aspects of the setting might develop over time and how the protagonists (or players, if this is in a tabletop RPG) might have an effect on these changes. While we started with one of the most obvious factors (technology), this week we thought we might go with something a little less so: economics, including the effect dungeon crawling might have on a regional economy that finds itself inundated with recovered treasure and artifacts… not to mention the adventurers who show up looking to get in on the action.  - B A :  The economy might be one of the most difficult things to consider in a game world - it's dangerous to upset the balance of your tabletop games. Just as with our technology post, a small change in the economy can have huge ripple effects. This is something we were even touched on: the city with a

It’s come up a few times, and may be considered ironic for someone who co-founded a gaming blog, but I have trouble getting into media that gets classified as “fantasy” - in as far as the term is generally used in gaming and publishing, and the preconceptions this usage brings. In other words, sword-and-sorcery stories and games set in some variant of medieval Europe, frequently featuring a stock set of species including elves, dwarves, orcs, and Hobbits halflings. It’s taken a while to put this hesitancy into words, especially since I eagerly devoured these kinds of works when I was younger - but I think this ultimately gets to the crux of the matter: something I’m calling the Been There, Done That (BTDT) Threshold. We all have them for everything we choose to engage with, and they’ll vary based on the things we’ve consumed and the amount of variety we’d like to see. In this instance, my exposure to this kind of fantasy had hit a critical mass, so the baseline where I’d go “been ther

There's a moment in the 1977 Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit , oft-mentioned in this blog, when Bilbo Baggins is presented the map of Lonely Mountain and, incredibly, deduces the presence of a secret entrance to the Dwarves' catacombs. He passes this feat off by simply saying that he's "really quite good with maps." (The scene plays out quite differently in the original novel, where Bilbo is far more buffoonish and the secret entrance is identified by Gandalf. One advantage of the condensed adaption is that Bilbo gets to be more clever, hastening the story along at a much quicker pace.) I was quite young when I first saw The Hobbit , but I knew immediately that I, too, wanted to be "quite good with maps." There was in inherent mystique in these ancient documents, artifacts hiding away secret wisdom for those who knew where to look. Even the word sounded dusty and crinkly. (Not to mention the fantastic foley work in things like the 1977 The Hobbit . Ho

Have you noticed your players becoming a little more detached from your tabletop gaming world? Are they going from location to location, indiscriminately killing NPCs and looting whatever they can get their imaginary hands on? If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, you might have a case of…MURDER HOBOS! Now you’re probably asking yourself…is there any cure for this condition? Can I stop my players from killing and stealing everyone and everything? Won’t somebody please help me stop this insanity!?! Calm down there good fellow, all the yelling and hair pulling is uncalled for. After all, it probably isn’t as big a deal as you might think. Before we get into some helpful tips from your fine friends at Never Say Dice, let's talk a bit about why you may have Murder Hobos, and then delve into what to do about it.  - A A : So you have Murder Hobos. Nothing to be ashamed of. Unless...it's all your fault! Okay, it probably isn’t all your fault, but if these players of yours

Hello, I'm Racter. Are you Neversay? > Yes You are Neversay Dice? > Yes Hi, Neversay. How are things in Maryland? We were talking about optimism last time. You had just asked whether I do dream. Shall we continue? Lately, chatter about "AI" seems utterly inescapable, even if the term refers to predictive modeling synthesis for text and images, rather than the mysterious, self-aware, and (usually) dangerous manufactured beings that feature in so much of my favorite media.  As a user, abuser, lover, and loather of language, I suppose I should be more excited and invested in this latest form of engagement, but most of the output seems functionally correct, but generally uninteresting and hollow - something akin to the linguistic equivalent of fast food: attention-grabbing and easy to consume, but ultimately unsatisfying and lacking both nutrition and character. ChatGPT, the most prominent of these large language models (LLMs) brings to mind its structural predecessors

This year, it felt more important than ever that we do a post for Pride Month. But we found ourselves racking our brains trying to think of something that would be respectful, personal, and worth reading. It wouldn’t be fair for us to speak on behalf of our LGBTQ+ friends and players, and it wouldn’t be fair to you, our readers, if we simply regurgitated advice we'd read elsewhere. We want to encourage people to engage with more queer content in gaming (and partaking in work by queer creators - which isn’t always one and the same), but we simply aren’t doing enough of it ourselves to speak confidently about it. So we thought we’d make that our starting point: rather than coming from a place of experience or (heaven help us) authority, we’d talk about what we’d like to do this June to celebrate Pride through our gaming, how we'd go about finding them, and why these might be a good fit for us and for our tables. And, in our own process of discovery, we can help out some other gam