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 …
We recently had a season finale in our Low Fantasy Gaming campaign, and I mentioned the Dark & Dangerous checks. Certain creatures (undead for sure, and probably demons) trigger Dark & Dangerous checks under certain circumstances. So to most spell casters (every time they cast a spell). The Dark & …
Most of my gaming is centered on roleplaying games. I play them, I run them, I design them, I even publish for them. I picked up a copy of Terra Mystica a few years ago (I’d wanted it for a while and it came on sale) but hadn’t played it for …
For the last few months in David B’s Low Fantasy Gaming (Steve Grodzicki’s OSR game) campaign, set in Cerilia, we’ve been making our way through the lost dwarven outpost of Khundrukar. Lost to the orogs and an unknown horror in the lake below the outpost about a century ago, Khundrakar has …
This little valley has really started to grow on me, and I’ve considered making a campaign setting out of it. Also, something about ‘Church of the Underworld’ just seems weak to me. Between the two, perhaps it’s time to devise a pantheon, so I can speak with some knowledge about …
So far, I’ve spent a fair bit of time on the setting for the adventure, mostly so I can provide some context for things the PCs might encounter. Now it’s time for the character lineup. I’m going with pregenerated characters because I don’t have quite enough information prepared about talents …
Yesterday I showed how adding ‘nodes within nodes‘ gives a layer of increased detail that can be used to find adventure hooks. These new nodes give specific points of contact, and following the connections between them reveals many situations to explore. Can a GM use this to plot an adventure? Well… …
Along with nodes within each of the major nodes, we have edges joining them. This is where we really get the payoff for this work. These are where many of the adventure hooks come from. Certainly, you can simple walk from the town to the mines, but you’re not getting …