Credits and Acknowledgements

This guide was created by Chamomile, who has a blog and a Patreon, with editing and other assistance from Stubbazubba, who has a blog, but not a Patreon.

The Alexandrian provided the basis for both the name and much of the content of the Art of Rulings. The sections on hexcrawls and dungeons are also more elaborations on his writing on those subjects than anything else.

The Angry GM has written a few posts that also helped form the foundation of the Art of Rulings. I think he also wrote something that made its way into the Art of Encounters, but I can't find it now.

Matt Colville's advice on skill challenges was a significant influence on the general encounter advice in the Art of Encounters. Our prioritization of immersive fantasy and advice on complex politics and intrigue was developed mostly independent from his, but I'd still like to thank him for bending his good nature and charisma on camera towards showing people how much fun these things can be. Before Matt Colville, when I told people "I specialize in believable worldbuilding" a lot of them assumed I meant "I do a lot of boring info dumps."

The Extra Credits episode on the aesthetics of play (which we refer to as "the elements of fun" for reasons I can't remember and am now too lazy to change) is a crash course in what is almost certainly the best way to communicate a specific style of GMing as rapidly as possible. Anyone who plays or especially runs/designs any kind of game regularly should watch it (I'm sure there's a .webm version you can find on the internet somewhere if you're so vitriolically opposed to them morally that you don't even want to give them a single YouTube view). These terms should absolutely be part of our common vocabulary as gamers, whether that's tabletop gamers or video gamers or whatever.

Shamus "What Do They Eat?" Young hasn't talked about tabletop games on his blog for a long time, but he did back when I was in high school. That advice has now been iterated upon to the point of being barely recognizable in my current work, but it's still the foundation that my style - and by extension, this guide - is built upon. Similarly, without his depiction of his campaign making D&D sound so fun, I might never have gone to the trouble of subverting my parents' opposition to the game (a result of BADD's undead influence and media's unwillingness to ever run a "that thing we told you was true was in fact completely false" story). This post-campaign write-up seems like a paltry offering in the face of things like Critical Role, but it was a pioneer of the concept a decade ahead of the more famous artists who perfected the craft.

My players don't really have any online presence to link to, but without guinea pigs to experiment on, none of these techniques would've ever gotten any field testing.