Posting challenges, usually time bound or on a particular topic or theme.
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 …
So far, I’ve got about 10 nodes. This is a good start, but only a start. I’m not going to make the arena bigger, though. Now I make it deeper, and add a layer of detail that gives me more to work with. Every one of the nodes present in …
You may have noticed that so far, I have used only labels for nodes. There are no proper names. There are some good reasons this is so. First, they simply don’t matter yet. I’m mostly focusing on what the entities are and the relationships between them. A name can certainly …
I was originally going to write something about nodes tonight, but since I’m still thinking about ‘M’ and I think my Midpoint Check-In is a bit of a cheap post, I’m going to write about something else. Microscope is a wonderful cooperative tool for world building. The primary focus is …
As usual during the A-Z Blog Challenge, here is my midpoint check-in. I’ve been late a couple of times, usually as the weekend approaches. I kind of expect that, partly because I get tired toward the end of the work week and partly because I have to be up at …
Almost all my attention so far has been on the adventure nodes themselves. I have completely neglected the links between them. This ignores one of the critical elements of this design practice. As with my entity template, nodes without links are merely curiosities: they might have some interesting elements, but …
A brief follow-on to yesterday’s diversion. In discussing the idea of jade daggers, it was pointed out that jade is not a particularly good material for weapons. Historically it was used for axes and the like because it was relatively easily ground into shape and was pretty durable, but as …