Me in 10 seconds
My name is Samuel Doebler James. I make games, play games, perform music. INTJ. 1w9.
What do I write about?
Role-playing games and story games! I’ve had quite a bit of experience running them for youngsters. Oddly, my top posts are about death, deathlessness, and violence in games for kids. I’m known for talking about stopwatch duels, open table games, diegetic advancement, helmets, trait drafts, scene-based adventures, and open strategy games. I think there’s a better way to do advantage and that perception and knowledge rolls smell bad.
I consider myself part of the Matrix Game, NSR, OSR, and FKR spaces. Whatever focuses on the world the most.
The Cauldron is the best forum for long-form discussion that sticks around more than Discord. It’s posts go directly to my RPG feed, so I’m reading what comes through often.
Check out the Index for a large categorized list of popular posts.
There are RPG bloggers that I read as well. The blogroll on the bottom-right is randomized, so just click one and see how deep that particular rabbit hole goes.
Email!
I read everything you send me. Here’s where you can reach me in long-form. Then also follow the blog via email, the last free frontier of the internet.
Check the tags on the right side of this page for whatever grabs your interest by topic. Or scroll down more to view posts by month and year. And here are my 10 most recent articles:
Smiling Friends Story Game – RELEASE
HERE”S GAME, CLICK ME Hey you, I never paid to watch Smiling Friends, except for the few months where I was gifted HBO Max while I was on paternity leave. Zach is on record saying to watch the show however, just go watch the show. But anyway, this is my gift back to the creators and a little something for fellow fans of Smiling Friends, now laid to rest in its third season. RIP. I created this game for the love of the game. And the love of the show. I like the absurd humor that never comes off as jaded or…
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forget and lose yourself in another
The groom takes the microphone at the center of the reception hall and reads from his phone: Being the son of a preacher-man, I feel obligated to do my bit of sermonizing. But I did promise to Lucero to keep this short and not burst into song. I know y’all are very disappointed in that latter promise. On this hot summer day, everyone drove or rode in a car. Some of you had to catch a plane to get here. Some had to take multiple planes. Some of you would’ve been attending this wedding if we had it five months…
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An everyday glimpse of what happens after
I. The Game Master exhales. The final session is over and with it, the campaign. The four players around the table high five and laugh: the dark lord has been defeated, good has triumphed. They survey the world map and the scattered minis and dice and recall the time spent rolling and pushing around the table. Well spent. “Well,” the GM says. “What did you think?” The players deliver their enthusiasm for how the game went, but soon want answers to their hypotheticals and peel back the curtain. “What if we hadn’t gotten the elves on our side, do you…
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World of Quests
<First non-Mythic Bastionland post all year lol> This is for those who got the Dungeon World itch after Quinn’s review of Stonetop, but don’t have the funds for a big pdf or print copy or also observe regular “no spend months”, I give you: Poor Man’s Stonetop Take a small Powered-by-the-Apocalypse dungeon crawler: Recommend combining with: Loads of credit to John Harper for World of Dungeons, the basis of the text, layout, and concept for the whole game. Side note: I love Gearing’s monster manual so much. Read it over and over all Memorial Day Weekend. However, I noticed he…
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How do we start in the Realm? (A Mythic Bastionland luck roll to unlock the open table)
I’ve been running Mythic Bastionland as an open table game. Each session, I put out a call for players from a pool of eight to see who has availability to jump on Discord for two hours and roleplay as knights of the Realm. If I have even one player, we play. The stable of knights has grown with new players and shrunk with unfortunate endings. But the range of ages, glory, possessions, and connections is vast among the player characters. You have young ones starting out alongside old knights, some successful, some not so much. All together for an adventure…
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What sets Mythic Bastionland apart..
This is a collection of thoughts around Mythic Bastionland. I like talking about this game. I like addressing players by their knight title instead of the name they made up. Titles have weight. Titles are slick. It’s cool too when an NPC has an evocative title that becomes their name. “That guy” or “old woman” it becomes “the woodsman” or “shawled crone”. You’re already doing this: the Seers don’t have names, do they? Part of the referee’s job is to obfuscate what comes from which myth and what is “normal set dressing.” I had something happen in nearly every hex,…
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Mythic Vagabonds: A Campaign Framework for 4+ Players
There was a poll a few months back on the Mythic Bastionland asking how many player characters is optimal for a long-running game. And of the 27 responses, the results were pretty stark: As stated by one user: “That’s a strong consensus.” There’s a few reasons for this: But what if they weren’t heroes, but little better than squires? And what if they weren’t powerful enough to trounce every combat even if there are six of them? And what if you’re running in-person or don’t have qualms about being online with 4-6 players? Glad you asked. But here’s a solution.…
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The Troubled Downs in Woland – A Collaborative Realm
This post is part of an ongoing collaborative Realm for Mythic Bastionland. If the Luck Roll blog is going to pull from the FKR’s “every book is a source book”, then I shall follow suit… I guess we’re getting a hexflower based on A. A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh.” I told William I wanted a sanctum and so chose the farthest hexflower from the action, but still connected to an already developed hexflower to build on established ideas. This project is VERY sparse on setting/tone/content guardrails, so having to at least connect my ideas to another’s gets me started. That meant hexflower…
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Eliminating Session Zero with Nine Words and Swearing
Structural PC group cohesion problems BEGONE! I really like the Oath from Mythic Bastionland: These are the statements the PC knights live and die by. It’s how they move through the world. The group has instant pursuits. Do any one of these things next and something interesting is basically guaranteed to happen. It’s the equivalent of all that session-zero-nonsense (“Are we a team? What’s our goal? What do we DO?”) boiled down in three statements (of three words each, the artistry here makes me cry tears of joy). What’s your alignment? THE OATH. Why are we together? THE OATH. What…
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Mythic Bastionland – Wait, am I illiterate?
High scripts = domain documents, ritual instructions, holy scripturesUsers of high scripts: heralds, sages, priests Low scripts = trade orders, posted signs, most writingsUsers of low scripts: merchants, guides, rulers When attempting to read for the first time, roll d6: When asking a seer for help reading, roll d6: Because what’re Medieval Times without a little illiteracy? These tables also harken back to Electric Bastionland where Luck Tables were also tiered as Rare/Uncommon/Common. Just another way to write them. Find more Mythic Bastionland greatness on the Syllabus! Looking to add recurring NPC plot threads? Check out Mythic Denizens!
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DREAMING DRAGONSLAYER 
