About
Welcome to the Socratic Dungeon!⌗
To put it simply, this is a personal blog, one which I am currently employing as both a collection of thoughts regarding tabletop roleplaying game design, and a documentation of my projects and the process and development of them.
If you had to draw a vin diagram as to the sort of mindset I’m approaching with this, you could draw it with three circles. OSR gaming, Linux FOSS, and pulp literature.
Another desire in respect to the creation of this blog was to become the internet equivalent of landed gentry! which is to say untethered and removed from the typical social media setup of sharing opinions and thoughts, only to be churned down and shadowed by algorithms at every turn.
No, I invoke and harken the spirit of the old internet, the wild one where everyone owned a cheesy profile website with that generic crazy technocolor laser background! and where web pages loaded in a timely manner!
Game design tenets⌗
There is a small but important number of game design tenets which I follow to one degree or another. while not an expert in the OSR, I generally base my tenets from that school of thought.
- Rulings not rules
- Character creation is quick and easy
- Combat is lethal and has stakes
- Depth over complexity
- Emergent story over explicit story
- Player skill over character power
- Procedures, DM tools, and useful tables
I think seven is a good number of core tenets, though this is always bound to change and I could imagine probably a lot more I follow explicitly or subconsciously, but these represent a solid core foundation.