I have talked in the past of how I dislike linear scenarios and adventure paths. A friend has described strongly-linear games as “walking in a painted tube” because you can see what you are presented, and your only real choices are to go forward or maybe to go back. As …
About ten years ago I played in a campaign based on the Warhammer setting. We were operating out of Mordenheim, nominally working for a “Mr. Graf”, a businessman with broad contacts within the community and an almost-explicable amount of wealth because of it. My first character, Jerris the Toolsmith… well, …
I have a very structured mind. I have been told that I am remarkably adept at organizing information and making sense of things. I never been told I have a great imagination, and honestly, I don’t think I do. It’s a bit of an inconvenience when designing things — I …
Emphasis on the wrong word there. Lusus Naturae — Freaks of Nature — is a book of horrific monsters. However, being ‘H’ day, something had to give. I’ve been a fan of Rafael Chandler’s RPG work for a while now. I’ve reviewed his Teratic Tome, I’ve posted about what I learned from it, …
Until now, most of the work done has been pretty random. The hex map was randomly generated and the graph of interesting locations was mostly randomly generated. Even combining them had only minor intervention on my part, and that was simply shifting the node locations a bit so they landed …
A couple of years ago I wrote a post On Hit Points and Healing, and a couple months after that a post exploring the Implications of Changes to the Hit Point Model. According to my logs, it seems both have been fairly well-received. It occurred to me recently that the …
Last night I generated a campaign map and a graph showing how major sites of interest link to each other. I have 26 nodes at my highest level, and I usually stick to a total of 10-12 nodes in any given graph for a particular level of detail and locality …
I think it’s time for me to start working on another sandbox campaign. My last one stalled on me when I got busy with another project. I’d like to build this one using a slightly different approach, so rather than trying to update the previous one I’ll simply start over. …
This article expands on a sometimes troublesome piece of the Entity Template I posted earlier. ‘Scope’ measures how broad an influence or impact an entity has on a game. This is not necessarily a measure of how much power an entity has, but power and scope often are related. Scope …
The Entity Template is one of the more frequently used tools in my campaign and scenario design toolbox. Whether I actually present it or not, the template guides my thoughts to ensure I don’t miss any standard design elements. There was a time, long ago, when much of my scenario …