Articles & Devlog

I've been revisiting some of the character sheets and other tools for Bug & Claw, noticing with fresh eyes some areas for improvement. There were multiple spots where I had left things quite vague, depending on explanations in the eventual reference book. In other areas, I used iconography as a shor...

The first main lands explored in Bug & Claw are known as Entomara. More specifically, Western Entomara. Many bug-kin in Western Entomara will be originally from, aware of, or have visited these places. A dominant organization in the area doesn’t mean members from other organizations cannot be foun...

As I work through some of the lore of the lands of Bug & Claw, I gave myself a bit of a task around settlements. Understanding how large a settlement was, as well as what type of special features it may have has helped greatly in pondering what story opportunities might exist there. Sometimes I go t...

Crystal Growth Crystals grow on their own, scattered across the landscape. What they might turn into or how they’ll effect their surroundings is sometimes anyone’s guess. For the most part, they are seen as protective, lucky, and good omens. Data storage It didn’t take bug-kin society long to...

If you're running Bug & Claw you may want to generate your own adventures and play more organically. The game will include various ways of helping make that happen, with this adventure generator being just the start. You can roll three d20s on this table to quickly spin up an idea for a new adventur...

The Doll's Eye short story introduced a couple of characters with unique abilities, but where the fiction and the game differ is players will need to know what these things are! Introducing relic-kin The oldest bug-kin (literally) have been shaped by infection, old-world gene-modification that...

What follows is 100 pocket filler items for Bug & Claw. Pocket filler refers to small items or trinkets that characters can acquire and carry in their pockets, backpacks, or other storage areas. These items serve several purposes within the game, like world immersion, role-playing opportunities, fla...

Just hearing about Bug & Claw? Start here. You reach down and pull the crystal from the raider’s head. It will bring a decent bounty. Gazing out into the forest, you see eyes shining back at you. In one direction, the lack of a protective crystal tower means contending with mutant wildlife and...

Problem/s: XP in many TTRPGs gears the players toward certain types of actions. Eg: XP for killing drives you to kill more instead of exploring other options Eg: XP for gold recovered back to town in OSR games encourages reward-seeking behaviour The way some systems, like many OSR games...

I've been having fun with Rory's Story Cubes as a means of helping prompt or generate small bits of narrative. What follows is an example, originally posted to Twitter but edited for quality here, of a short story using this method. Phil and Fred are two of the main characters of Bug & Claw's worl...

In the last post, you may have noticed two curious blocks on the character sheet capturing "grit" and "flesh" and wondered what those are for. Let's talk about that. The problem with HP There's long been a problem many of us have had with HP in games. Your character is often supposed to be thi...

The first iterations for player character sheets started almost a year ago. Any time I was thinking about a problem players might encounter I thought about how they might resolve it. I asked myself a lot of questions during this process: What kind of interesting choices should they be able to ma...