For the first entry in this series I thought I would read Stars Without Number. It's a game I've somehow heard a lot about and even purchased despite remaining almost utterly ignorant of it. The book's been sitting on my shelf for over a month, now. It's about time I actually read the thing.…
At least half of my bookshelf is comprised of RPG books I've yet to read, let alone play. So, I thought I might leverage the my to-read list guilt together with my remorse over neglecting this blog and start a regular feature on here where I read and summarize role-playing game books.…
I've tired recently of the level of maintenance involved in running this blog. I don't mean regularly producing content—lord knows I never did that; I'm not about to start losing sleep over it now—but in actually running the software on my server. I think my deployment setup is…
Git's been ubiquitous among coder-types for so long now it's almost old hat. This isn't going to be another post detailing its virtues relative to other version control systems (VCS) so much as a report on my experience using it to store my personal configuration—itself hardly a novel idea.…
Matthew Colville put up a video a while ago on verbs and role-playing games. Or really verbs and fiction and narratives in general. Matthew Colville does a lot of videos on role-playing games (and Dungeons & Dragons in particular) and I greatly appreciate a lot of his work. But this…
At bottom, Ghost is a full-fledged application, and in 2017, in my view, deploying an app responsibly generally means involving Docker in some capacity.…
This post is part of a series detailing how this site runs. You can view the previous entry here. The Domain The first thing I did after getting the DigitalOcean droplet this site now runs on was to go about getting dwgill.com (which I already owned through Hover) to…
This post is part of a series detailing how this site runs. You can view the previous entry here. This site is hosted on a $10/month DigitalOcean droplet running Ubuntu 17.04, giving it 1GB of RAM, 30GB of disk, and 2TB of transfer. The principal reason I'm not…
So I recently went ahead and started running my blog on Ghost, a blogging platform that seems like a Node powered up-and-coming competitor to Wordpress, with a bit more emphasis on being tinker-friendly to coders like me. I hear enough horror stories about Wordpress that the idea of something a…
Recently I've since been reading all the advice on D&D I can get. I'm particularly fond of the UA on traps that WotC released a while back, and appreciated the structure recommended in there for designing traps. I thought something similar might be useful in creating secret doors and passages.…