Category: Challenges

Time for a little project, time to get something done with Echelon that I can point at and give people. The core rulebook is likely to be a while yet, but I don’t need one. Instead, I’ll create a quickstart adventure. Instead of publishing all the rules ahead of time, and …

Buffering made the challenge much easier this year. I had time to prepare three or four posts before April 1, and while I never got that far ahead again, it was enough that I was able to stay on time. I think almost always I had at least one post for …

I had time to think about this some more on my bus ride home. And even take notes, though that’s a bit of a challenge (I hate writing in a moving vehicle). It appears I was only mostly right in what I had planned. I was having difficulty reconciling ‘data type’ and …

One of the hazards of being a data geek, and good at it, is that over time you become better at it. You find better ways to do things. Also, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game has become progressively more complex, both from player perspective (hence the Echelon Reference Series) and particularly from a …

‘X Day’ is always difficult in the A-Z Challenge. So few words actually start with ‘X’. I was going to write about how I was going to add esoteric draconic bloodlines to Draconic Bloodlines, since I deliberately excluded them when I released the book. I even started drafting that post, but when …

A couple years ago, or just slightly more, I wrote about my workflow for extracting game information captured in Word. It’s kind of long: Type (or copy and paste) into Word; Convert Word files to ‘Filtered HTML’; Fix character encoding; Convert to XHTML; Convert to XML closer and closer to the …

A recent question on Facebook reminded me that I was going to review and revise how special materials work with graded items. In short, I expect to look primarily at the effect of the special material and build from there. Sample Materials A few of the common materials from the PRD, …

“Magic item sets” were an artifact (sorry) of the late D&D 3.x era. A small group of items related by their history and power, with a synergy between them that made them more powerful together than apart. The regalia of the phoenix consisted of the raptor’s mask, the crown of flames, the talon scepter, …

Umbral mail, ‘shadow armor’, should probably be a thing. I picture a suit of light mail (chain shirt perhaps?) worn by a rogue who practiced greater and greater acts of stealth. It is a bit like Gyre’s cunning gambeson, so I should look for some ways to differentiate it. Gyre’s Cunning Gambeson …