Tag: Tips | Page 5 | Scaldcrow Games

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.

Tactical Tuesdays: Heroes in the Living City

Because in a city—especially a noir, pulp, or street‑level heroic city—visibility is friction. Heroes who act, act in public, and public action creates attention. Attention creates pressure. Pressure creates story.

Mazes & Mondays: Relics in a Fallen World

Today, we’re going to explore a topic that often gets overlooked in the thrill of dungeon delving: the ethical dilemmas of treasure hunting in a world shaped by survival and corruption.

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.

Tactical Tuesdays: Beyond the Swan Song

If you are running a game where danger, decisions, and consequences matter, then failure must be treated as a functional state, not a narrative embarrassment and not a cue to quietly reset the board.

Mazes & Mondays: The Broken World

Power vacuums don’t wait for heroes. They get filled—by mercenaries, cultists, guilds, warlords, desperate healers, and people who never wanted power but found it lying unclaimed in the rubble.

Frights & Fables: Doors versus Monsters

We insist it is born from the monster—the fang, the claw, the shriek in the dark. We place our faith in spectacle and persuade ourselves that fear arrives fully formed, snarling and complete.

But it does not.

Fear is far more patient than that.

Words & Wonders: Genre to Extremes

Today, we’re exploring how you can push your chosen genre to its limits in your tabletop games for greater impact and engagement. Let’s discuss why fully embracing the spirit of your game’s genre—sometimes even to the point of caricature—can lead to memorable adventures and a more unified experience for everyone at the table.

Mazes & Mondays: High-Tension Villages

Whether you’re bandaging wounds in a swamp, hauling relics from a crumbling ruin, or holding the line against screaming goblin hordes, sooner or later you’ll need a few extra hands—preferably ones not attached to undead things.

Frights & Fables: Perception v. Pragmatism

Step into the shadows, my friends. We gather to discuss the most exquisite of horrors—the terror that blossoms entirely from within the mind. The monsters scratching at the door are frightening, surely. But the monsters hiding behind the eyes of your storyteller are truly terrifying.