Category: Scaldcrow Stories

Worlds & Wednesday:The Hardest Thing

People still ask me, every so often, whatever happened to The Dark Fantasy of Sundrah. It’s a fair question, and I’ve decided it deserves a fair answer. So pour yourself something warm, pull up a chair, and let me share a story about lessons learned, failure, and the simple, stubborn act of standing back up.

Worlds & Wednesday: Pulp. Getting it Right.

To boil pulp down to a look is to mistake the ash for the fire. You can paint a cover in faded sepia, scuff the edges, and ape every visual trick of the old masters — and still produce something utterly dead. Why…

Worlds & Wednesday: Yes and No in Editing

Over time I have learned that designing a setting is as much about saying no as it is about saying yes.
A good idea is not automatically the right idea.

Words & Wonders: Greater than More

What if the mechanics, meant to guide the game, instead slow its momentum, drowning the narrative in a sea of modifiers and charts? This is where the philosophy of “Smaller Rules Equals Bigger Gaming” shines like a beacon, cutting through the fog and illuminating the path to faster, more immersive gameplay.

Words & Wonders: SLICs, Mobs, Momentum

If Soul Gaming is about the heart of play, then Boxcars and Recall are about the hands-on craft—how players engage with the moment, how they take risks, and how mastery emerges after play instead of before it.

Words & Wonders: Table Mastery and Recall

If Soul Gaming is about the heart of play, then Boxcars and Recall are about the hands-on craft—how players engage with the moment, how they take risks, and how mastery emerges after play instead of before it.

Words & Wonders: Soul Gaming

I want to talk to you for a minute—not as a designer, not as a publisher, but as the kid who grew up rolling dice at a kitchen table and learned something important there.

Soul Gaming is not a mechanic.
It’s not a feature bullet.
It’s not a brand term, even if I’ve used the phrase enough that it’s become associated with my work.

Soul Gaming is a choice.

St. Patrick’s Day: Corny Cop Shocker

once more we lift our lanterns toward the macabre as we examine Maniac Cop, a film that stalks the razor’s edge between slasher grit and urban nightmare.

31 Days of Halloween: Three-Witches Glee

Let us descend into the cobwebbed corridors of memory, where celluloid ghosts flicker and dance upon the silver screen.

31 Days of Halloween: Twin Lenses of Poe

Welcome, my dear fellow travelers upon the eerie planes of cinema, to a labyrinthine tale where the haunting whispers of Edgar Allan Poe serve not as the foundation, but as the muse. Two Evil Eyes offers not a devout tribute to its literary progenitor but rather a platform for the darkly distinctive imaginations of two cinematic titans, George A. Romero and Dario Argento.