“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles."
Paul Atreides Much like Firearms, psionics in D&D have this stigma around them, a very vocal group of people who think they don’t belong. My typical retort to those people is to tell them to browse Appendix N of any old D&D edition, and you’ll find psionics was quite a big part of the pulp fantasy that would inspire D&D.
Of all the classes, Thief receives probably the brunt of criticism regarding D&D’s early class design. I’ve even met some OD&D grognards who view the class as borderline heretical and excise the class entirely from their games, viewing it as a “forced niche.”
The point of this article is not to debate the merits of the thief class, which I believe it has - even if not mechanically, certainly archetypically - but that is a bit beyond the scope of this article.
Token Magic The name is a bit of a work in progress, as is the concept, but its place in a mechanical and cosmological context is pretty solid at this point. One of the design goals of this “magic system,” if you could call it that, was to backport some of the more classic OSR spells into my game system, Be Not Afraid.
Because the setting takes place in a modern-day world imposed upon by the supernatural and occult—and because traditional D&D magic doesn’t really fit into any modern practice or real belief structure, nor does it even much resemble its Vancian roots—I designed this system to lend the spells a degree of plausibility.
Most of my conceptual brewing is like panning for gold: rolling the idea over in my head again and again to refine it before putting pen to paper (or keyboard to screen) and shaping it into something hopefully understandable to my fellow man
Other times, a concept strikes out of the blue, arriving almost fully formed and ready to be developed. This was one such occasion. As I was having breakfast and saw a meme comparing American to Japanese isekai, it hit me…
Mythic Underworld vs. Gygaxian Naturalism is a Stupid Debate To put it as gently as I can, both sides of this debate are quite misguided—at least at the extremes. Now, I’m not on Twitter/X (or whatever the kids call it these days) because I prefer to retain my attention span and avoid being a dopamine addict fueled by outrage. But even I hear news through the grapevine from my RSS feeds and podcasts.