In my last post I talked about the basics of city construction. Settlements have In this post I’m going to talk more about qualities. Settlement Qualities The Pathfinder GameMastery Guide defines a dozen qualities that influence the nature of a settlement. Each quality is basically binary (present or not) and has …
Deviating from plan (I’d said my next post would be about building a ‘local pantheon’ of small gods), I decided to write instead about alternate rules for developing a city or other settlement. It expands somewhat on the Polyhedral Pantheons Adaptations I wrote about a while ago. Settlement Basics Before diving …
James Spahn (Barrel Rider Games, publisher of White Star and of Labyrinth Lord supplements) had an unfortunate interaction with a kamikaze bambi. He and his family are fine, nobody in the car was injured, but they’re looking at a big repair bill. I was already planning to run a sale …
Many campaigns have world-spanning deities whose power reaches everywhere (more or less). They can provide the ‘full range of services’ (i.e. spells all the way up to ninth level, or seventh in some editions of D&D). Very useful from a game play perspective. However, the idea of being able to …
A brief diversion on the Words of Power exploration, I thought it worth providing a bit of an overview of how powers are constructed in HERO System. This looks like it will become important soon. Effects Powers in HERO are based on effect, with descriptors added to give flavor and something to …
Alex Abel — the Flaming Crab himself — is Kickstarting the 2017 Letters from the Flaming Crab series. These are small (15-20 page), flavorful supplements that explore topics often overlooked in many roleplaying games, topics that help round out a setting and make it more than a murderhobo arena. Topics from 2016 include: In …
In my last post I outlined some things I’d like to see in the Words of Power system. The unified power framework might seem to be the most ambitious… but I noticed something that might make it a lot less work than I expected. I’ll come back to that a little …
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 …