Tag: Setting | Scaldcrow Games

Worlds & Wednesday: Forged in the Crucible

As designers, we often get excited about the details: cool factions, unique locations, interesting characters, or clever mechanics. Those things matter, but before a Pocket World is ready for play, it must answer three essential questions.

Mazes & Mondays: City-States on the Brink

In Blades and Bone, power does not flow from crowns blessed by gods or bloodlines etched into prophecy. It flows through coin, contracts, favors, and fear. The city-states of Essembria are not monuments to stability; they are pressure cookers, held together by trade agreements, criminal syndicates, mercenary loyalty, and the desperate belief that tomorrow’s deal will be better than today’s.

Mazes & Mondays: Steel over Sorcery

There was a time—long before spell lists grew longer than swords—when magic was something to be feared, whispered about, and paid for in blood. It wasn’t a convenience. It wasn’t a toolkit. It was a wound in the world, and those who touched it rarely walked away unchanged.