Happy Birthday, Jim
I’ve seen Tom Smith’s shows. High-energy and a lot of fun. Now watch him reduce a room to silence and sniffles. Jim Henson would have been 76 today. Happy Birthday, Jim.
Death vs. It Gets Worse
In The Confession: I Am Not An Old-School DM, Erik talks about how certain old school expectations aren’t being met, in his mind. Key among them regards PC death. Old school play seems to imply that death is waiting at any moment, and keeping the PCs alive is the responsibility …
The Power of Random
I may have mentioned that my son and his friends are interested in playing Pathfinder RPG. I offered to run a few sessions, and realized this is a good opportunity to get my West Marches-style sandbox off the ground. I broke out some old tools, including a random-table-roller I built… …
Kickass Kickstarter Projects
When I wrote Kickass Kickstarter Projects, Introduction the other day, I was thinking that I would have enough content for a series of articles. After outlining the material I realized that unless this one gets big enough to warrant splitting up, it could be entirely handled with a single post. Let’s see …
Kickass Kickstarter Projects, Introduction
Since November 2011, it has become apparent to me that I really like Kickstarter. My wallet doesn’t, but spreads for Kickstarter anyway. My wallet can be that way. Some projects have been really well handled, some stand room for improvement. I’ll be posting a few articles over the weekend that …
Rethinking Pathfinder Cleric Subdomains, Part 2
Yesterday I described some things I don’t like about Pathfinder cleric subdomains. Now it’s time to think about what to do about these things. I think I’ll do this in several passes, since so far I’ve found the solutions I come up with tend to interact with more than one …
Rethinking Pathfinder Cleric Subdomains, Part 1
I’ll start by saying that I like Pathfinder’s domains and subdomains. Domains provide a structured means to collect divine spells and granted powers so they can be assigned and associated with gods in a structured way. Pathfinder expanded on the D&D 3.x model by adding an intermediate power available to …
Vote Blood & Treasure!
I try to stay away from political conversations, though the US presidential race is making that difficult at times. Not only am I being inundated with political stuff from another country, but some of it is so blatantly unfair and untrue that it riles me something fierce. So, in lighter …
Building Pantheons
I am considering a series of blog posts building pantheons — or rather, a pantheon identifying the gods for each culture, since by definition the ‘pantheon’ covers everything. I’m drafting some sets of god-domain assignments using my Polyhedral Pantheons methods, and some of the combinations are telling me very, very …
Dividing the Population
I’ve been thinking for a long time about how to split up populations. There are many possibilities: race, class, faction, alignment, level, profession (distinctly different from faction), and so on. In D&D 3.x these appear to be handled pretty inconsistently. Analysis Before delving too deeply into solutions, let’s think a …