Welcome to the Archive
The Archive of Blades is a repository of musing, analysis, and rants directed at and around tabletop roleplaying games. The most recent additions are presented here for you to peruse at your leisure. Older documents are available through the Collections, detailed below.
Updates from the Archive are delivered by raven on Twitter, and through an RSS quest board.
- A Whole Load of Nothing in a Sack
The Pouch is a meaningless store of meaningless items that do nothing. In order for that to be possible, we need to write some rules! - Backpack Economy
What does 5e’s Action Economy have to do with how much your PC can carry? EVERYTHING! It’s time to build a high-level system framework. - Lay Down Your Burdens
Good encumbrance mechanics. They said it couldn’t be done, but I’ll show them! Either that, or you can watch me very carefully fail. - Death
Why do TTRPGs have death mechanics? Do they offer anything of value, or are they merely a relic of a bygone age?
The Collections
Pried from the fingers of long-dead adventurers, Delver’s Journals are a collection of notes, diaries, and warning from those who have quested into dangerous dungeons and never returned. While their contents hold particular value for Players, those intending to follow in such reckless footsteps, it may also provide useful insights for Dungeon Masters.
From the hand of the masters of such dungeons come the Keeper’s Logbook. Detailing how to run and maintain such elaborate deathtraps, the Logbook is a tool to equip Dungeon Masters.
The Archive’s more analytical collections include the Rules Repository. Here is displayed a curated selection of discussions, critiques, and proposals for mechanics for roleplaying games. While the Keeper’s Logbook focuses on how DMs should wield the tools at their disposal, the Archivist has used the Rules Repository to focus on what those tools should be and how they work.
The Archive of Blades exists in the space between multiverses. After eternities watching the birth and death of realities, the Archivist has begun to pen the Tomes of Creation. These books describe how to create a universe, from basic metaphysics to adventure design, with the goal not only of creating a pleasing work of fiction, but facilitating the chaotic, free-willed madness players inevitably bring when they enter such worlds.
All other odds and ends are somewhere in that pile of Assorted Notebooks. The Archivist has accepted that they are never going to find a way to neatly sort everything, so the miscellaneous pile shall remain the solution. Housed here are updates on the state of the Archive and administrative information.