A better landing page for this series, including links to related materials on other blogs, can be found at KJD-IMC: Node-Based Megadungeon. — kjd I’ve spoken before about scenario design that focuses on the relationships between various elements of the scenario before the physical layout. These techniques can be used to manage …
When developing something new, it is often worthwhile to look around and compare to similar things that already exist to make sure you’re not going too far off the rails — or if you are, that it is in a direction you want. In this post I do a rough comparison of my intermediate results with the Greyhawk pantheon to make sure I’m not too far out of line. I’m mildly surprised at what i find.
The Revisited Polyhedral Pantheon Design technique still has a couple difficulties, though. First, if you use only the Revised System Reference Document (RSRD) you don’t have enough domains. The RSRD includes 22 domains — slightly more than needed if you don’t want the gods to have personal domains, but not …
Yesterday I Revisited Polyhedral Pantheon Design, a method of choosing 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 …
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 …
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
