Megan R. Miller's Blog

Last night I dreamed about the house again. The one I've been to hundreds of times in my sleep and is as comfortable as an old winter coat, but that couldn't possibly exist because the rooms don't stay the same. I think it's a part of my mind, or a representation of it.  There are a lot of bedrooms and secret passages and mirrored architecture.

If the stairs go up one way, they go up the other way. If there's a room on one side there's a room on the other. They aren't always decorated the...

Salutations, my curious congregation. Today we will be continuing down the road we've already been on re: fastdrafting a novel. I'll be honest, I had no idea what to actually talk about today because it's mostly about taking what you already wrote down and expounding on it, but let's run with that and see what happens.

Content Warnings: My usual dose of irreverence, probably some swearing. Contents may be mildly carcinogenic. Also, don't pick the left door. Only nightmares lay beyond it.



Guys,...

Salutations, my curious congregation. Last Thursday I started a kind of experimental project trying to write a book in 15 days. I'm going to be talking about my personal experience with this process, but mostly it's going to be about what to do on Day 2.

In this case, refining your outline.

Content Warnings: A healthy dose of irreverence, probably some swearing, and mild risk of dramatic music playing in the background while you make operatic eye contact with one of your enemies in a melodramat...

Salutations, my curious congregation. I'm going to sit down and talk about something crazy that is totally possible and I only recommend if you really need to get some words down and get something finished. You're going to have to edit the hell out of it but hey! Editing the hell out of it is kind of an inevitability.

On another note I want to thank you guys for chilling and dealing with my weird rambles while I was having medical issues. You're the best <3

That said. Yes, you read that titl...

Salutations, my curious congregation. As some of you might already be aware, I live in the butt crack of Ohio. And Ohio is kind of being a turd right now. Now, the river's like spitting distance from my house. I could feasibly walk to Kentucky if I had to, so going out of state for an abortion isn't off the table from me and in fact the doctor that I go to when I need one is already in Kentucky and was before this kerfuffle started. But I still live here.

And it's had this topic on my brain fo...

Salutations, my curious congregation. I'm late to this party. As in, I never played Knights of the Old Republic back when it was new, but swung around to give it a go recently and I have some feelings about the NPCs and romantic interest(s). Or lack thereof.

Anyway I know it's Thursday and this is supposed to be my writing blog. I know this is technically about gaming. But I mean it's about the writing in a game so we're halfway there, right?

Content Warnings: Regular dose of irreverence, some...

Salutations, my curious congregation. Today, we're going to talk about a cool bit of encounter design a dear friend of mine put us through last night and why it worked so well. So Faith and Mimi, brace yourselves, I'm gonna be singing your praises for the next while, and everybody else break out your notebooks.

Note that this was a play-by-post game and there were 9 PCs involved, so it was not an easy encounter to DM by any stretch. Which only increases how impressive this was.

Content Warnings...

Salutations my curious congregation, and let me open with an apology for my recent absence this week. I needed to take some space for my mental health, and things are getting steady again, and I would like to thank you for your patience.

So anyway, today I want to talk about expies. There's a link there to the TVTropes article, but if you don't want to be on a wiki walk for the next four hours I'll give you the tl;dr here: It's short for exported character. Basically, if you see a character in...

Salutations, my curious congregation~ I've decided to try something a little different for a while. I know some of you are here for the tabletop and some of you are here for the writing, and a lot of what I write about on this blog applies to both, but enough of it doesn't that I'm thinking I'm going to try to get into a schedule and write about tabletop on Tuesdays and writing on Thursdays.

Most character-based things apply to both, of course, and that's what I've got for you today. So this o...

Salutations, my curious congregation! I have been doing a lot of plot study recently in the vein of writing things. I've always held to the idea that you can't really DM like you're writing a novel because you can never be sure what your players are going to do, but I've been thinking about that. You can have some pretty decent guesses.

Structure isn't bad. I think we're all agreed that railroading is. Can you have structure without it being railroading? Well, you bet your sweet bippy you can....