Things I’ve worked on, or that I’m working on, intended for publication.
It astonishes me sometimes how long I’ve been working on Echelon, and even just on the Echelon Reference Series (I spent a year working toward the first release in September 2014). The Echelon Reference Series has been a five-year project just gathering information for the game I’m actually working toward. …
I’ve always liked special items that are distinct, sometimes even unrealistic, in description. Not Final Fantasy-style “really freaking big sword”, but with various ornamentation and other features. This is part of what I was planning to write I explored ornamentation some time ago, but have never finished the research for. …
In my last Race and Class post I discussed other ways race-class associations have been implemented in D&D and D&D-like games. I have come to prefer to the later-edition methods of handling it: some races are just better at certain classes, at least a bit, or exhibit traits similar to …
Or perhaps ‘historical alternates’. In my last post I described how race and class were linked in various editions of Dungeons & Dragons (and family). In this post I’ll expand a little on these connections, and a couple of alternatives to them. Later-era D&D 3.x presented ‘alternate class features’, where …
Four months since my last blog post?! Apparently the new job — which is going wonderfully — has been taking more out of me than I anticipated. However, now that I’m getting my feet under me it’s time to get back to some game design. Races and Classes in Dungeons …
The 2017 GM’s Day Sale is almost over, but you still have a couple of days if you want to pick up any Echelon Game Design products at a 30% discount. (They’re also available at Paizo and the Open Gaming Store, both of which give me a better cut, but …
Finally, time for the article whose idea prompted this entire series. This is much more detailed than the core “plus 1,200 gp worth of jewelry” entries in the treasure tables… but not particularly different. Wearable jewelry is typically fairly light, all things considered. ‘Heavy earrings’, according to a bit of research, …
I just realized something about my last two posts. If I take the ‘jewelry system’ from the previous post and I modify the exponential values table I see something interesting happen. What if gems scale by one rate and jewelry by another? Specifically, gem value is multiplied by five every six …
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about gems, including how to increase their value (or not) and alternate means of determining their value. Now it’s time to look at jewelry and other items made of precious metal. This will necessarily be greatly simplified; in the real world this is horribly complex. …
Back in June I wrote some ideas of new rules for gems. I started with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game rules for gems, which provide standard values and some variation. I wanted a little more detail, though, so I drafted a table that separated ‘size’ and ‘quality’ so they could each be rolled with …
