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Greetings Murder Hobos From Sunny Purotu!
Baston Kale There’s plenty of things to do in the City for the up and coming Murder Hobo. Giant face-eating naked mole rats fill the sewers. Crime syndicates riddle the dark alleyways on the seedier...
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Murder Hobos and the Economics of Piracy
The Local Smugglers The local magistrate requests the Murder Hobos visit his office. In Medieval societies, while armies grow to great sizes, civic law enforcement is thin on the ground. Paying and...
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Murder Hobos and Empire
The Empire The Empire lasted 5000 years. Like all fantasy empires, the beginning was hazy and undefined. It had a founder. He was a great mythical General who slew a the head of an older, more...
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Preview: “Out of the Abyss” Adventure for D&D
The Underdark is a popular setting for your D&D sessions to take place. It’s a perfect place for exploration and battles, delving deeper and deeper into the forgotten depths. Any number of classic...
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What the Orks Want
Orks. The mainstay of every early fantasy campaign levels 1-3. Orks have a Challenge Rating of a measly 1/2. Thematically, they lurk outside peaceful peasant villages waiting patiently for young Murder...
View ArticleCargo Cults in the Murder Hobo Dark Ages
The End When the Dwarves attacked the Empire, the Empire pulled all its military from its far-flung edges to buttress its own survival. The troops defending the security and stability of the Island...
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Dungeon Hazards and Wage Differentials
The Underdark Hellmouth This is a story about Murder Hobos and wages. It starts with an improbable village perched on the edge of an Underdark Hellmouth. The village hadn’t always perched on the edge...
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Dragons and the Free Rider Problem
The Dragon The village acquired a dragon. The village didn’t intend to acquire a dragon. It’s more like the dragon happened to them. One day, the villagers were dragon-free and going about their usual...
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Tragedy of the Murder Hobos
The Village The village perched at the edge of the vicious hellmouth. The Murder Hobos were fabulous for the village’s economy. The villagers stopped catering to the needs of sheep and catered to the...
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The Decade of Blogging Nerdily: Critical Hits is 10
In early October of 2005, Critical Hits launched using the WordPress platform (version 1.5!), both to bring the nerd conversations I was missing with friends as we all had moved to different areas and...
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The Tontine
A Bard Tells a Story The bard at the bar in the Adventurer’s Guild picks up his drink (his unfortunate third) and finishes his story: “… the seven Tiefling Warlocks chase the Demon Lord to some...
View ArticleFinancial One-Shots and Short Campaign Seeds
No fiction this week! Instead, I present the early Christmas gift of gaming tools. Last week, I took a look at using a tontine in a gaming context. A tontine is an investment pyramid scheme....
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Let Your Ambitions Drive You to “House of Bards” for Fate Core
House of Bards, part of the Fate Worlds of Adventure Patreon, is now available to one and all, for the price of whatever you want to pay for it. (Suggested $4. But it could also be $0. Or $0 first,...
View ArticleA Busy Year, Part 1: NPC Importance
Working as a part-time RPG freelancer is a proverbial rollercoaster ride. Sometimes it is thrilling, and other times the reward at the end of the ride is that you get to stop. If you asked me to stop...
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The Emperor, the Orks and the Murder Hobos
Ork Massacres The Orkish Hordes invaded the settled frontier land from the East. The Orks came to occupy. The Orks came to settle and make this land theirs. Their homelands were hard and bitter....
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The Empire Elves and the Tourism Travel Guide
The Elvish Empire The grand, mighty, world-spanning Elvish Empire no longer spanned the world and war arguably no longer an Empire. To qualify as an actual Empire, a nation-state must contain one or...
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The Unspoken God of Knowledge
Small Gods In the early days, Gods were unformed blobs of stuff. They bounced around the Planes. When they felt the vibrations of a believer, they latched on to the nearest small tribe and transformed...
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Lloth, Goddess of the Underdark Wide Web
Monsters and Steam Little grows in the pitch darkness. Not wheat, nor fruit trees, nor rice, nor soybeans. No one tends row after row of rippling, wind-blown heads of cabbage. No one ties up the...
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The Second Live Gnomish Caucus
Gnomes Gnomes aren’t interested in empires, kingdoms, peasants, conquest, or land-based taxation systems. They prefer tinkering and over-engineered systems with tiny, complex, fiddly bits to far-flung...
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From Thieves to Seas to Apocalypses: On Kickstarter Right Now
Some weeks, you just have to say to yourself, “wow, there’s a lot of good games out there.” Nowhere has that hit me so strongly by seeing all the games being funded on Kickstarter this week. And so I...
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