Amorphia is the beginning and the end of everything. An unstoppable power of creation, transformation, and destruction, it cannot be stopped. There are some who, while they cannot stop it, can at least give it pause. These are the gods. The elder gods are immune to it. They came into …
I’ve recently been reading the Fantasy AGE system (Fantasy AGE Basic Rulebook, Fantasy AGE Companion, and Fantasy AGE Bestiary), and while I don’t know it well enough to say I love it, I definitely like what I see so far. Character Creation Character creation, once you get past the organization of the …
ANYWAY, over time my document workflow has changed a few times. Here’s the latest iteration, for those who wish a look into the mind of someone not quite right (and so I have a copy to remind myself how I’m doing this). Not three weeks after I wrote that, I …
It astonishes me sometimes how long I’ve been working on Echelon, and even just on the Echelon Reference Series (I spent a year working toward the first release in September 2014). The Echelon Reference Series has been a five-year project just gathering information for the game I’m actually working toward. …
As usual, here is my ‘Z-A Index’ roundup of my blog challenge. I feel like I’ve done better in previous years. This time around I was late many of the days, and I did not actually reach the target (by subject completion, not word count) I was aiming for. The …
[It appears the ‘related content’ plugin works pretty well… the post linked below about adversarial DMs is the same story… but it still makes me laugh, so I’m keeping both posts — kjd] Long, long ago we ran into some trolls and cut them in half, and the DM ruled …
Echelon’s Advantage Dice System started as a straight roll-with-advantage system and has grown dice pool elements (mostly for measuring critical success). You get a ‘tier die’ (based on your level) for any check you can try, then various talents can add more dice based on the tier of the talent. …
I probably usually cheat on ‘X day’; outside of writing about xorn and Xavier (Professor X) and xylophones, fitting this ‘X day’ is a challenge on its own. Sometimes an NPC grows beyond the intended use. An NPC intended for a single encounter can end up being used in multiple …
Several years ago I bought Rafael Chandler’s Teratic Tome. Today I realized — prompted by a post at Against the Wicked City — that I should keep teratic design considerations in mind when I create monsters for Echelon. Possibly not for the quickstart adventure, since I want the focus to …
I like maps. I like automated tools. I find automated tools for creating maps fascinating. One of my favorite engines for creating random maps uses Voronoi diagram methods as a starting point, then expands on them. The engine first creates a Voronoi diagram, then runs a smoothing filter of sorts …