Paths Not Taken In August 2009, Paizo Publishing released the first edition of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. This was a refinement of Dungeons & Dragons third edition (it came out after 3.5, but the Open Game License details refer to the System Reference Document, not the Revised System Reference Document …
Uniquely identifying objects is one of the more vexing activities in building the Echelon Reference Series. It is good to have a human-readable ID (it’s a great kindness to the developer to be able to see that yes, a parsed link looks like it does refer to the correct item, …
Any time you build a nontrivial data model, you have to expect the original assumptions will be tested, and found wanting. You’re not going to get it right the first time. In fact, I’ve read design books — data modeling and software design — that advise the reader to be …
… will give you such a crick in the wrist! It’s a milestone, of a sort. I’ve catalogued 10,000 Pathfinder spells. And I’m not done yet. The data is not yet cleansed, so there will be Product Identity (character names, mostly) in the file. I consider this an ‘index’, much …
In Polyhedral Pantheons I described a process where you assign a domain to each face and each point of a polyhedron, then use adjacent sites to define deities based on those domain assignments. For instance, in the Shu-Shi pantheon (worksheet shown below) the ‘1’ face has the Nobility domain assigned, …
Most roleplaying games I’ve played have the PCs at more or less full ability at all times, unless they have exhausted their resources or are otherwise specifically constrained. There are a few exceptions, and I’d like to explore them a bit. In 13th Age, a d6 is placed on the …
There is another element that might be included in domain aspects: visions and portents. One of the elements from Dungeons & Dragons 3e’s Deities and Demigods that I had overlooked, deities have a ‘portfolio sense’. I may want to make it an element of the domain aspects. Demigods have a …
Considering how much time I’ve spent on the Echelon Reference Series, specifically capturing content from the Player Companions and especially from the Faiths of {Purity, Balance, Corruption} books, I really should have looked in them. The sections describing each deity, at least the more major ones, include the following subsections. …
Somehow, I almost forgot to talk about temples, shines, and other holy places. This is particularly ironic because I originally got the idea for Divine Trappings when I read Raging Swan’s Urban Dressing: Temples, which presents temple features based on domains and subdomains. Domain aspects don’t just apply to the …
The other day I discovered I need to change my Entity Template. It turns out that goals — which work very well in adventure design — might not be so great in world building. The reason surprised me when I understood why they didn’t fit. Goals are supposed to be …
