Tag: Pulp | Scaldcrow Games

Mazes & Mondays: 10 Epic Swords of Myth

Some weapons are just tools. Others become legends. Across centuries of myth, epic, and storytelling, a handful of swords have earned names, personalities, and reputations that outlive the heroes who wielded them. These blades cut through more than flesh — they cut through history, shaping how we imagine courage, kingship, and destiny.

Mazes & Mondays: Speak the Law of Magic

Think on it. If a wizard may do anything, then nothing he does matters. There is no tension in a spell that never fails, no awe in a power that costs nothing, no dread in a curse that carries no price. The moment magic can solve every problem for free, the story goes limp in your hands like a snuffed wick.

Mazes & Mondays: Under the Bone Totem

Years ago, one of my players proudly informed me that he’d learned everything there was to know about wilderness survival from fantasy roleplaying games.

Mazes & Mondays: Heroes are a Fool’s Debt

The tavern owner nailed their unpaid bill to the wall as a memorial. Years later, that yellowed scrap of parchment was still hanging there, gathering smoke. My players thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

The tavern owner did not.

Words & Wonders: Craft at the Table

Today we roll up our sleeves and dig into the hands-on craft of running a great tabletop RPG session. Rolling dice and tracking hit points is only the skeleton of the thing. The real magic lives in how you dress that skeleton up.

Mazes & Mondays: Most Terrifying Monster

Then they spent the next six months trying to catch a jewelry merchant, name Clyde. He was not possessed by a Rune God, nor a jeweler secretly summoning horrors from beyond the Doomgate. He was just a jeweler, an unpleasant little man who a hand cart with a bell. After that figured out that if he paid them something, they wouldn’t question the value of the rest.

Words & Wonders: Edge of the Impossible

I grew up in the 70s and 80s. The heroes I was shown, the ones I feared for and cheered for, were action heroes. They faced impossible odds and walked away. Sometimes limping. Sometimes bleeding. But they walked away. That image never left me. It bled straight into the games I run and the settings I build.

Mazes & Mondays: Economy of Apocalypse

The Rune Gods want civilization in ashes. The dead refuse the courtesy of staying buried. Cockatrices leave gardens full of screaming statuary. Whole provinces sit one bad cult meeting away from becoming a demon’s playground.

Frights & Fables: Dread with Trust

Here is the thing to understand first. Horror is not something you do to your table. It is something you build with them. The tension, the dread, the sweet cold shiver down the spine, all of it only works when everyone at the table has agreed to feel it together.

Words & Wonders: Beyond the Screen

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Words & Wonders is that it occasionally gives me the freedom to wander off the well-traveled road