Riding Into Battle by Destrier Studios

  THE BELLMAKER'S TOMB A dungeon for 3-6 characters of levels 2-4. System-agnostic, OSR-compatible. Oskar Vane made bells. He made the carillon in the Cathedral of St. Emmund. He made the harbor bell at Portmaw, the one sailors still use to time the tides. He made seventeen other bells across the Reach, and when he was dying he asked to be buried inside the largest bell he ever cast: a bronze monster, nine feet across at the mouth, never hung, never rung. His guild obliged. They dug a hole in the hill behind his workshop, lowered the bell in mouth-up, sealed him inside with his tools, and filled in the earth. That was sixty years ago. The hill has settled. The seal has cracked. And three expeditions have gone down into the bell in the last decade, drawn by rumors of Vane's tools (which could supposedly repair anything, even flesh) and the bronze fortune he was buried with. None of the three parties came back whole. The last one, four years ago, sent one survivor to the surf...

Nothing Here: On Empty Rooms, Rat Brains, and the Dread of an Unlocked Door Your dungeon has twenty rooms. Six have monsters. Four hold treasure. Two are traps. What goes in the other eight? Nothing. Or close to nothing. A smell, a stain, a chair with three legs. The room is there and the room is empty and the room is doing more work than anything with hit dice. I used to fill every room. I was twenty-two, running Keep on the Borderlands for people who had never played D&D, and I thought an empty room was a failure of preparation. So I crammed something into every ten-foot square. A goblin. A chest. A puzzle. The players moved through the Caves of Chaos like they were clearing a to-do list. Nobody was scared. Nobody hesitated at a door. Why would they? They knew what was behind it. Another thing to kill, another thing to take. The dungeon that finally taught me otherwise was Tomb of the Serpent Kings, which has rooms that are just rooms. Stone walls. A puddle. Maybe an old boot. Th...

Heading Into 2025, A Year in Review         Happy New Year! I wanted to thank everyone for the support I’ve had since founding Destrier Studios just over a year ago. I’ve interacted with many wonderful people, learned more than I ever have about all sorts of beautiful things, and have made great strides in my personal life. I’m heading into my last semester of college, the future isn’t too clear after that but I remain optimistic and look forward to stepping into a new part of my life. I’m only 22 and yet I feel that I started this business later than I should’ve. Had I done so earlier, I wouldn’t be behind in so many skills I still need in order to make my dreams come true. Nevertheless, there’s no time like the present, and so I’ve recently been making a concerted effort to study graphic design (excuse the poor format of this blog, I plan to remedy that in time), art, coding, game design, and...

Arkham Horror: The Card Game Revised Edition Review Disclaimer: Haven’t really experienced the story or expansions, stuck to introductory and higher level difficulty plays just in two-player and solo. TLDR: If you love the aesthetic or need a co-op experience to spend an afternoon on, this should be a go-to. It’s great fun figuring out what’s next and seeing what’s thrown at you, just make sure you and the people you play with are actual team players and dig the aesthetic.          Arkham Horror: The Card Game   is a 1-4 player living card game, a term penned by Fantasy Flight Games to mean that each product sold for the game which contains cards is equal in content instead of milking you via RNG (if only so much of it weren’t out of print). Set in the world of Chaosium’s much loved Call of Cthulhu TTRPG , it’s also the 28th highest ranked game on BGG at time of writing (technically the 2016 version i...

Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance Review Disclaimer: My only experience with the Gundam anime is IBO. I still know stuff about the UC timeline and whatnot, but IBO is all that I’ve watched entirely before this. My reviews are spoiler free, or at least I try to keep it that way. TLDR: I don’t really think this is worth your time unless you’re pretty big on Gundam. They do a lot of stuff wrong here, but there are some cool parts about it. Tough not to considering  you’ve got big robots fighting each other, but you know what I mean.          Requiem for Vengeance  was not really my cup of tea. I want to say that as I was watching this, until about the fifth episode there were multiple points where I wanted to drop it. Then the last episode further irked me because, quite frankly, it was awful. Does that mean the show itself is bad? To be honest I would say so, but to my knowledge Gundam isn’t portrayed in 3D media ...