A Wild Ride - The Last 5 months
In the 5 months since MurkMail began, our readership has multiplied by 10+. We’re over the moon. We were thinking that our newer readers ~or even some of our veteran ones~ might have missed some of the articles we’ve released so far!
This is a quick summary for each article we’ve released. Maybe something you missed will catch your eye, or perhaps you have forgotten some of these ideas.
Stick around to the end for a look at what we’ve been cooking up for MÖRKTOBER.
When should we make a check in TTRPGs? is a short rundown of three ways to decide when players (or even GMs) should roll dice at the gaming table.
Shut up (no really) is about GMs (and players) taking their time to talk and the power silence has to generate tension in games.
How did I miss this game? was my first impression of Trophy Dark, a fantastic dark fantasy game geared for melancholy one-shots.
Your backstories are boring provides a leaner approach to background character narratives without the dead weight. You Again. You’re not following me are ya? lets you connect a party together with less work, following the same approach.
You liked that map huh?, Ready to Pointcrawl?, and Time to Crawl are a 3-part series that discuss building and running an isometric pointcrawl like this:
Shrink your sandbox is a quick chat about how smaller, denser sandboxes can lead to fantastic games with less GM work.
Make a Mork Borg sandbox FOR FREE is concise recipe for putting Stockholm Kartell’s free releases together into a sandbox.
Does your initiative suck? presents a handful of simple approaches to initiative for hacking into games with more complex initiative systems.
I hated solo games until… 11th Beast discusses the first solo rpg experience that captivated me.
Pull the trigger, coward is a rundown on getting comfortable with executing threats at your game table.
Make factions fast outlines the idea of ‘faction blocks’, compact descriptions of factions containing their key info. Make factions fight presents a diagram approach for managing faction conflicts. Sizing factions is a method for determining numbers of faction members.
Reaction Table Overhaul is a rework of old-school style reaction tables, using wants and emotions instead, including deploying an emotion wheel:
We explored an approach to mapping caves and how to running a flooding scenario in them.
We launched our line of Hexbooks, notebooks designed for preparing hexcrawls!
We put elevation on hexmaps and talked rules for climbing open terrain.
We launched our free hack for running the setting of Blades in the Dark with Into the Odd, Blades into the Odd! We’ll be back with part 3 of this series next week.
And we released our sci-fi game Void Above globally.
It has been a crazy few months and we want to say a big thank you to all our readers. We have much more yet to come, but it’s nice to take a moment to look back on all this cool stuff.
Halloween & Morktober
Samhain is fast approaching. Last year, we released a free RPG party game, perfect to play with friends, Rotten Hags. The short of it: play as Hags who fight to claim mortal souls by figuring out their secrets, which happen to be your own real life secrets.
Now for some of our Morktober efforts this week!
Congratulations. With such great articles its no wonder your reader number have been increasing.