Last night I was involved in a conversation with someone who wanted to run a Pathfinder game on an episodic basis: the PCs as 0-level characters, then third level, sixth, ninth, and so on. Each episode is set a few years after the previous one. There is continuity of character, …
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Rafael Chandler’s work, what with my posts about the Teratic Tome and Lasus Naturae (which I’m really looking forward to getting, Rafael tells me it’s on target for release on schedule). I was recently sent a preliminary copy of No Salvation for Witches, a …
I’ve just added a new entry to the Hall of Fame regarding geomorphs and their design and use. Michael Wenman of Observations of the Fox has been publishing a collection of mapping tutorials, and lately has been exploring and explaining geomorphs. I’ve been inspired by this series to start working on my own, …
Still working on the Echelon Reference Series, and I’m rebuilding my prerequisite parsing and linking system. I didn’t think to capture metrics before I started, but I’m already a little over 90% ‘pretty definitive matches’ — that is, where I can match a prerequisite string to a specific game entity …
I haven’t posted since the A-Z Challenge back in April. It was partly burnout, and largely because completing the challenge severely cut into my work on the Echelon Reference Series. I’m still catching up on that, and shaping up to have my first release in the next few weeks. I had a …
I’ve written quite a bit this month for the 2014 A-Z Challenge. Even discounting Kobold Kommandos because it had been written before I still managed to write (or update, in a couple of cases) 31 articles and more than 35,000 words on a variety of topics. All things considered I’m …
Tomorrow I post my Z-A Challenge 2014 Index, and I’m in a bit of a reflective mood. Early in the autumn of grade six, I found a small group of my classmates sitting in one of the rooms between our classroom and the next. They were rolling funny-shaped dice and …
A few days ago I talked about Unusual Rewards in the Sandbox, and figured I’d respond to some of the comments I’d received. I agree that it is a good idea to assign nominal monetary value to the various rewards. Experience points in many old school games are primarily driven …
Yesterday I demonstrated a bit of how I use Graphviz to visualize game information. I figured today I would describe a bit about how I get certain game data. Capture to MS Word I have created a Word template containing many styles used primarily to mark the start of different …
A conversation on Facebook today prompted this article. And this article ended up rather longer than I expected. I was hoping to get to sleep early tonight. Ah well. Many — perhaps most — roleplaying games involve a lot of information. On the ‘mechanical’ side you might have monsters, spells, …
