Yesterday I Revisited Polyhedral Pantheon Design, a method of choose domains (and indirectly portfolios) for gods in D&D 3.x. It is an update to Polyhedral Pantheon Design, something I wrote several years ago. I overlooked an important part — how clerics work. Overall they are pretty similar to the core rules. The biggest change I [...]
Category Archives: Campaign Setting Design
Apr 14, 2012
Polyhedral Pantheon Clerics
Apr 13, 2012
Polyhedral Pantheons Revisited
A few years ago I wrote an article on Polyhedral Pantheon Design. I decided it was finally time to follow up on that post (especially since it predates this blog — it’s here on its original publication date to another location). I was recently looking through Pathfinder’s Advanced Player’s Guide and realized that it lends [...]
Mar 22, 2012
Top-Down Campaign Design
Morrisonmp at The Rhetorical Gamer talks about campaign-down design. Briefly, I think it’s a great idea. My Campaign and Scenario Design series talks about how to do exactly what he’s talking about.
Finally, I am in a position to describe Rime Tower in (hopefully succinct) detail. I started more than two weeks ago looking for Inspiration, applied some Perspiration, and now move to Implementation. Potential (because I’m not describing them now) other entities are highlighted in bold. Text in <angle brackets> indicates a placeholder — I am [...]
A couple of days ago I came up with the idea of Rime Tower. I started basically from a blank sheet of paper, some dice, and a small (mmm… about six-inch) stack of RPG books and went looking for ideas. I ended up with a rough idea of what I was going to build– Rime [...]
Jan 11, 2012
Fantastic Location: Rime Tower, Part 1 – Inspiration
For the last week or so I have been talking about fantastic locations. I have described one, I have discussed even more the resources I use when devising them. I thought it time to describe another one, and I realized that I didn’t feel like going back to revise an older one I’ve posted here, [...]
Jan 1, 2012
What is a Fantastic Location?
I have found that generally the most memorable places in my campaigns have had fantastic elements. The more mundane places are useful. They provide framework and context to make the other places stand out — if everywhere were special it would be a funhouse and would not, to me, make a very credible setting. To [...]
Nov 30, 2011
Factions
In a recent conversation on google+, Jason Pitre asked how many non-player factions we thought should be present in an RPG campaign. There were several different suggestions that included small numbers (say, 4) and larger numbers (0-4 to start, then at least one per dungeon or adventure after that). My first suggestion was “perhaps 1-3 [...]
Sep 25, 2011
West Marches-style Sandbox Campaign
Ben Robbins had what looks like a very good sandbox campaign, and a remarkable way of managing PCs available at any given time. This post describes how I think I’ll go about giving it a try, because it sounds like it’ll work very well for me, given the difficulties I’ve had in maintaining a steady group of players online… and the design requirements for any particular session are relatively small compared to my normal campaign design mechanisms. I’m looking for players and possibly co-GMs.
Aug 28, 2011
Learning From Experience
I recently posted a description in a comment to a blog post of how I handle experience and level gains that I thought I should include on my own site. In considering how to write it, I realized it might be worth exploring a few other models of character development and learning as well. Some [...]
