The first Off the Path series will take the Words of Power system from Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Magic and make it more to my taste. The general approach is good, and I see room to add a lot more to it. Words of Power Overview Words of Power in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game …
I’m starting a new series, “Off the Path”. Off the Path takes an idea currently implemented in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and changes it — much like the old ‘KJD-ALT‘ posts I used to make to rec.games.frp.dnd. Much of my design is influenced by my work on Echelon. I mostly talk …
Today GreyKnight tagged me in a G+ post regarding some machine-assisted mapping software by Martin O’Leary (Uncharted Atlas on Twitter). Well, I say ‘machine-assisted’, but it looks like the software does most of the work. It’s also frighteningly close to some ideas I explored about fifteen years ago, but Martin made it work much better than …
In the last couple of posts it’s pretty clear I was wearing my geek hat. Time to lower the flaps and tie the strings under my chin, because this is going to get busy. Taxonomy Straight from dictionary.com: Moving to a more abstract representation of the game data means I need …
In my previous post I wrote about the evolution of the Echelon Reference Series. So far there have been four stages: Raw copy and paste aggregation. Ultimately not useful to me because it threw away so much information without gaining me much. Aggregating by source document, marking up in Word …
After I finish releasing the RAF versions of the Echelon Reference Series, I’ll be rebuilding my workflow for data capture. It will be simpler and more abstract, and more powerful. I thought it might be interesting to show how this has evolved. Origin of the ERS The ERS started as a …
My last post refined the generation of random gems, introducing variance to the size and quality of the stones. One of the first comments I got regarding the post suggested ‘uncut’ as one of the low-quality entries. I hadn’t previously considered gem cutting because I was focusing on the end result, …
Creighton Broadhurst of Raging Swan Press (I like Raging Swan products) wrote a post last week about Gygax On… Treasure, speaking mostly of how most treasures are likely to consist of a collection of varied but valuable items, rather than a simple chest full of coin or pouch of gems. Coins and gems …
I had an epiphany of sorts last night. Also, insomnia; the epiphany might be nothing of the sort. In my previous post about the card crawl I described PCs as starting at ‘second level’, and that each level made them better in one area of endeavor (martial, arcane, divine, skill), …
… or not. I’m working around the edges of a card-based crawl game. I don’t know all the resolution mechanics yet, but I’m starting to see the shape of it. Probably co-op (adventuring party) Possibly competitive co-op: party has a shared goal, but each PC might have individual goals that …
