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About this blog

Discussion about writing game supplements and setting sourcebooks, hypnosis, immersion, ocarina music, and why I write material for Mythras.
About The Author
Occultist, practitioner of chaos magic, Klingon teacher, Welsh language poet, ocarina player, Games Master. Mutant. I'm not into science fiction. I am science fiction.

Entries in this blog

Happy New Year, Everybody!

Just wishing everybody here a Happy New Year in 2024. I've been looking back at 2023, and the single biggest gaming-related event was the OGL fiasco, and the new ORC License. Let's hope that 2024 will be better for us, with loads more Mythras content coming down the line.

Alex Greene

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Mythras Adventures in Time and Space

Tonight's blog is about writing adventures, as compared to reviewing existing ones. Tonight, I'll take my cue from the late Ursula K LeGuin for inspiration. I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. - Ursula K LeGuin A tabletop adventure has got to capture the imagination. But it's also got to draw in the players. It's their time and energy, and the GM has got to give them something to challenge the

Alex Greene

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Back To Meeros - Xamoxis' Cleansing

So, this being the last Saturday of the month of October 2023, I felt it was time to go back to Meeros and environs for another adventure. Last time, it was Sariniya's Curse; this time, it's Xamoxis' Cleansing. Behold, a map. For    For some of us, this is the first time we've seen where Meeros sits, as well as the lands and seas surrounding the city. What's this adventure about? First of all, Xamoxis' Cleansing is some sort of MacGuffin. A desideratum. A Maltese Fa

Alex Greene

Alex Greene in writing

Looking At Parts Per Million's BSRP

Parts Per Million is a small publisher with a speciality. Solo roleplaying. From their DTRPG page:- Parts Per Million is a specialist creator of Solo Roleplaying tools. I believe that moving between your chosen Oracle and your favorite game should be seamless, the entire experience should feel like one game. The solo supplements you will find here are intended to be an entry point into solo play. Every soloist builds their own set of preferred tools. These supplements will ge

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A Look At ... Life's Long Consequences

And so it's time for another review of a Mythras adventure. This one is the first adventure to be attached to a Mythic title. In this case, it's Mythic Constantinople, a title I aim to review at some point in the future. For right now, let's take a look at this adventure by Mark Shirley. By the way, just in case, if you're planning on running this adventure, best to have a copy of Mythras and Mythic Constantinople handy. The opening paragraph of the blurb lays the story on the sho

Alex Greene

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A Look At ... Mythras Adventures

Tonight, and for the next couple of months, this blog will be looking into the adventures created for Mythras and satellite games. This includes the Meeros adventures, the Luther Arkwright adventures, and the adventures for Mythic Constantinople and Lyonesse. We're going to start with Sariniya's Curse, the introductory adventure designed to allow the readers to test out the combat system in a dungeon crawl. Behold, the Mark of Sariniya. Actually, the glyph comes out with a bi

Alex Greene

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Mythras Factions

This month, I will be looking at Mythras Factions, The Design Mechanism's most recent title for Mythras. This will be a short review, as it is a short book. I'm also declaring personal interest, since I both proofed it and supplied material for the book, hence the multiple credits on the inside cover. Mythras Factions Only this week, I received my complimentary author's copy of this book. It's a slim volume, like a magazine with glossy, colourful pages. The illustrations by A

Alex Greene

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Long Break

I'm taking a step back from blogging on most of my social media. It'll be my birthday on June 30th, and in the runup to my birthday I'm planning on doing nothing but reading, maybe ocarina playing, anything but hunching over a laptop, sweating the reluctant words out onto the screen. There will be a sea change to the scheduling of this blog. From July 2023, it now goes out once a month, on the last Saturday of each month. In the case of the next blog, that will be July 29, 2023 at arou

Alex Greene

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Modern Mythras Finale - Summary

This post is going to wrap up what we have covered over the past few months. There are a number of TDM titles I have yet to dig through and review ... I do hope nobody minds if I give Mythic Polynesia a wide berth - and I'll be moving on with the next blog post. I also have news about the blog going forward. Modern Mythras We began with an introduction to the concept. It began here. We moved on to embrace modern Mythras' characters, and the cultures they came from. We th

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Modern Mythras: Challenging The Players

This is the penultimate Modern Mythras post, and I intend to wrap up the subject with one last look at Gamesmastering before I summarise everything in the next post - then take a one week hiatus. In a recent post, I posed four sources of drama and conflict: Person versus Person, Person versus Self, Person Versus Nature, and Person Versus Society. This blog just expands on those four sources of drama, and presents ideas which are intended to draw the players in to the conflict. Make It

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Modern Mythras: Gamesmastering the Modern Setting

Drama is the key to Games Mastering in any Mythras setting. In most fantasies, the goals are pretty simple: there's some healing herb to cure the King who's fallen to some poison, or it's a McGuffin with the magical power to stop some weird storm, or the characters have to drop by some bloody wizard's Black and Evil Tower In The East and kill a guy. And that's it. It's a Thing, or a Task. Do that, and you get your Experience Rolls. Modern Mythras is a bit different. There are any numbe

Alex Greene

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Modern Mythras: Writing Tabletop Adventures I Want To Play

Adventure is adventure, so - according to custom - every adventure should be the same, right? There’s a dungeon, and an evil wizard’s tower, and an army rising up from the East, and only this bunch of idiots stands in their way, and … So how come adventures like these utterly fail to whip my cream? Because they’re not really adventures. They’re computer programs. Your characters are the code; the mooks, monsters and the final BBEG are just input; and treasures are just output

Alex Greene

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Modern Mythras - Gamesmastering

This blog will be wrapping up the whole Modern Mythras thing with a look at Games Mastery. The GM's Role You, as the Games Master, have an enviable task ahead of you. Your job is to come up with a world for the characters to inhabit, enemies to oppose, and a story to keep the players engaged. You are also, as the responsible host for the game, tasked with keeping the players occupied and working together to maximise the shared sense of enjoyment and engagement around the table. To

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Modern Mythras - What Else Do We Need?

The end of this series of Modern Mythras is upon us. I can feel it. It's just today, May 27th, and the four Saturdays in June. I'm taking a one week hiatus on July 1, the day after my birthday. Incidentally, I'll be taking a one week break from all of my blogs from that day, including The Spiral Room on Wordpress. Just asking for some feedback from you tonight. What would you like to see included in, among other things, the Mythras Encounter Generator? More cops - uniformed, Detective,

Alex Greene

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Modern Mythras, Modern Encounters Part 2 (MEG Template) Feat. Hannu Kokko!

Tonight's post is another modern NPC encounter, this time from guest contributor Hannu Kokko himself, designer and developer of the Mythras Encounter Generator! Say hello to the Typical Modern Period Goon, your basic thug that you can drop in on your characters in any modern game: Luther Arkwright, After The Vampire Wars, Destined and even Worlds United. Thanks, hkokko! https://mythras.skoll.xyz/enemy_template/11341/

Alex Greene

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Modern Mythras - Heroes of The Spiral Room

I maintain a fiction blog called The Spiral Room on Wordpress. Two of my blog's modern setting stories are Den & Lauren and The Chaotician. Here are the main protagonists of these stories, statted up for Modern Mythras. Den & Lauren A long-running story of a weird, doomed, but passionate romance between Dennis Thompson, a former student, and Lauren Tanaka, a slightly more mature woman who is married to a Japanese businessman, Isao Tanaka. Theirs is a passionate, open relat

Alex Greene

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Modern Mythras - Modern Encounters Part 1 (Mythras Encounter Generator)

Very brief blog post here. I've started creating templates for average people encounters in Modern Mythras. The tool I'm using is the Mythras Encounter Generator. This can be used to generate a bunch of average people all at once. This is the first template - New Recruit. https://mythras.skoll.xyz/enemy_template/11321/ The above is for a new recruit / average commuter / bystander. Your everyday business people rushing around peering at their mobile phone in one hand, a latte

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Modern Mythras - Non-Player Characters

Following on from last week's post, here are three interesting non-player characters to throw into your Modern Mythras game. They can be supporting characters, antagonists, or significant others to the Adventurers. Skilled Mercenary Your basic gun for hire, this thug can be brought in to make things blow up, or to make people meet their maker. STR 14 CON 11 SIZ 11 DEX 15 INT 17 POW 14 CHA 18 Action Points 3 Damage Modifier +0 Movement 6 Initiative Bonus 11

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Modern Mythras - Example Antagonist

Today, I'm going to give you an antagonist to throw into your Modern Mythras game. Inspired by a creation of Robert Bloch, it is an ancient hunger that never dies. The Hunger It has gone by many names, each more infamous than the last. It has fed for centuries. Possibly millennia. There are stories about it in the Bible: beings possessed of terrifying violence, carving their way through the increasingly-civilised world. It has bathed in the blood of Minoans, taught haruspicy to th

Alex Greene

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Psionics in Modern Mythras

This week, I thought I'd bring in psychics and psionics to a modern Mythras game. Psionics in modern games tend to be more or less cloned from Traveller. Your character must find a psychic (or "Psionics Institute"), get tested, roll their PSI rating, then get trained, and randomly pick from a small range of Talents - Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Telekinesis, Awareness (basically Mysticism from the Mythras Core Rulebook) and Teleportation. And that's it. M-Space has its Psionics section. Wo

Alex Greene

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Many Roads

This is the 100th post for this blog, and we are at a crossroads. Many paths are open ahead of us now. I can list some roads down which to travel, and I can think of others. But these are the ones off the top of my head. 1. I can wrap up my take on Modern Mythras with a look at how to integrate psionics, a look at GM'ing, and some scenarios and vignettes. Between all of these, I can get us to my birthday at the end of June. 2. I can review selected titles which have already been p

Alex Greene

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Hiatus

Taking a hiatus tonight. I've got a double length season finale for The Chronicles of Shirae to write up this weekend.

Alex Greene

Alex Greene in writing

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