Diegetic Advancement Blog

The Original Game Part 1

24 Dec 20243 min read

So in my initial Intro post, I mentioned wanting to take a deep dive into Original Dungeons and Dragons, so lets explore what that is going to look like.

Over on the Audio Dungeon discord they've been running a Hobbit Slow Read, following on from doing the same with the Lord of the Rings. I've fallen off the wagon reading and probably won't join back in but the Lord of the Rings slow read was very fun and a very different experience from simply reading the work. If this sounds interesting, then you should listen to Mirke's excellent podcast episodes where he and his daughter share their thoughts on the current chapter: here

I'd been toying with doing a similar thing with RPG products (game systems and modules) but then I stumbled across this reddit post titled 'Complete Reading Order Question' and that gave me the inspiration for this series. I'm going to work my way through reading each entry of this list, slowly section by section, sharing any insights that I gain from the activity. Its a very long list, so for now I'm going to put an arbitrary stopping point of 1975 (with the release of the Blackmoor supplement).

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Adventure Design for Game Completeness

4 Dec 202411 min read

In the last post I mentioned some frustration with prepping Shadowdark, so I wanted to dive into that a little bit more: Is adventure design guidance required to make a game complete? And what does good guidance look like?

But first a comment on feedback.

Feedback

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Bolt Action Showcase - Early War Japan

4 Dec 20245 min read
Bolt Action Miniatures - Imperial Japanese Army

So I wanted to put up a post on the blog just showing off some pictures of the units I built and painted for the event I mentioned in my update post. Just a showcase is probably not terribly interesting though, so I'm going to talk about the methods and products I used as well.

I'm pretty proud of these, not because they are particularly good - but because I finished them. Before playing Bolt Action I had been playing Warhammer 40k sporadically, I had a lot of models most of them built and I even did some conversions, though nothing terribly elaborate, just using different weapon kits or merging two different units together. Here is a pic of my most fun one:

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Updates from DA

26 Nov 202410 min read

Okay lets jump back into that old format. I'll mostly be talking about wargaming in this post as thats what has been consuming my time. We'll cover Bolt Action, Frostgrave and a newish game called Hobgoblin. But don't fret, there will be some RPG talk, first up...

RPG Theory

So I've recently moved my group from a Shadowdark game to Dolmenwood; I had been waiting for physical products for Dolemnwood before diving in, but I got the exciting news that we're expecting our second child in April so that timeline doesn't work out. I also found that Shadowdark lacked enough meat on the bone which added to the burden of actually running it.

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Intro

18 Nov 20244 min read

Hello, and welcome to the Diegetic Advancement blog. I'm Riley.

The Plan

Just over a year ago, on the 12th of September 2023, I released the first episode of the Diegetic Advancement podcast, and over that year, I published 40 more episodes (and some short daily episodes during RPGaDAY). So why are you now reading a blog post?

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