CHAINMAIL: 06.24.2023

cjsomedays -
Chainmail is a weekly newsletter dedicated to sharing the abundance of excellent content available in the TTRPG space. You'll find YouTube videos, blog posts, quotes from books, and many other forms of media related to improving your skills as game masters and world builders. Enjoy!

Build Your World with Immersive Daydreaming - Sly Flourish

Part poetic part practical, this post by Sly Flourish discusses how we as worldbuilders can get into a head space that cultivates creative output. I am a big fan of not just sharing advice directly related to DMing but also advice that can relate to other aspects of our lives as well, and Sly Flourish has secretly snuck that in here. While the advice will absolutely help you clear your mind and envision new worlds for your players to explore, it will also help you clear your mind and focus on other aspects of your life that may need brainstorming. A clear and focused mind can achieve so much. Try and get into that space as much as you can.

Side Quests - How To Make a Good Detour - Design Doc

Side quests come up in campaigns all the time. Whether they are player-directed or DM-instigated, it's worth figuring out what makes the different from normal story-focused quests and how we can best utilize them to improve the experience. Design Doc outlines what a side quest is and how they are used in video games and I think the information is also usable for us in the TTRPG space. Give it a watch and see if you learn anything new.

Christopher Perkins - Between The Sheets

Chris Perkins is one of my favorite DMs. While his time DMing Acquisitions Incorporated lead to some really awesome moments, I am more in love with a series of articles he used to write called "The Dungeon Master Experience". These have since been lost to time and require some serious internet digging to uncover (I have them all saved as PDFs luckily) but are worth every last piece of advice. Chris has been working with D&D for a long time, writing for Dungeon Magazine as a kid (even if his writing wasn't accepted). This podcast is old, but Chris gets to talk about how he started and his story. I really appreciated it and I hope you do too!

I hope these resources inspire you! If you haven't already, the best way to stay up to date with everything hothead related is to join the discord. See you next week!