Yesterday I described the components of Planar Trappings: ‘manifestation building blocks’, ‘trait manifestations’, and ‘sample planes’. Since planes are described using traits, and traits have manifestations built from common blocks, I’m starting there. Existing Art First, let’s look at the references I’m working from. Manual of the Planes from Wizards …
One of the most exciting books from the AD&D era, for me, was Manual of the Planes. It expanded wonderfully on the two pages of information in the… Player’s Handbook? Okay, that part never made sense to me. Anyway! Manual of the Planes gave us information about other places that …
While developing Divine Trappings, I’ve created way more random tables that I imagined I would. I expected to have random tables in the domain descriptions. I didn’t expect to come up with so many generic random tables… but they all look useful. Domain Field Tables Still working on it, but …
I thought about trying to work up a sleestak joke, but it’s been a long day. I’ve started many series on this blog. Many have been left stagnant as my attention was drawn elsewhere (either on the blog, or in my life outside elf games). This year, I’m going to …
Truly, I can’t imagine this would be even a mild surprise to anyone that I’m a nerd at times. But this goes a little beyond the norm, even for me. I just spent that last few hours drafting — rough cut, first draft — documentation of my XML Workflow. Don’t …
This morning I was thinking about monster design, and how different choices affect play. Specifically, I was thinking about how to balance attacks. Is it better to have two attacks each doing 2d6 damage, or a single attack doing 4d6? Or, making the situation a bit bigger for examination, one …
… sure, I’ll call it ‘two days’. I was going to say it was actually last night, but since the ‘October 2’ on the previous post was very early in the morning (AKA ‘quite late October 1’) I’ll call it two days. Makefile refactoring is complete. 500 lines of Perl …
Sometimes, “what it is” can be much more complicated that “how to work with it”. My publishing workflow has seven different systems (including a ‘nosys’) with thirteen different domains (collections of content with that system). The pf1 set is the only one I’ve published, the rest have been captured for …
No real change to the workflow, but in rebuilding my Makefile construction I found I’d missed a step, and misrepresented a couple of relationships.
Some years ago, while working on the Echelon Reference Series, I reached a point where individual titles would take months to put together (the diagrams were horribly time-intensive). I shifted direction and decided to release the ‘Rough and Fast’ (RAF) versions of the titles, without the diagrams and all the …
