In My Campaign

Fantastic Locations: The 6 Weirdest Cities People Actually Live In

kjdavies January 2, 2012, 3:58 am January 2, 2012 2012-01 Fantastic Locations

I have to thank Fustians So Sublimely Bad for this one. The linked Cracked article describes some of the stranger places people actually live.

In descending order:

Neft Dashlari: A Russian oil rig that got out of hand
Manshiyat Naser: Cairo’s garbage town
Miyake-jima: A Japanese volcano town that is frequently covered in deadly sulfurous gas
Yellow Fleet: A small fleet of abandoned ships in the Suez Canal
Dwarf City: A Chinese city full of little people
Kowloon Walled City: An anarchic city of 33,000 in 0.01 square miles that apparently actually worked for thirty years, until the Chinese government tore it down.

If you’re looking for inspiration for a cyberpunk or distopian future setting, I’d start my research here. Wow.

What is a Fantastic Location?

kjdavies January 1, 2012, 6:05 am January 4, 2017 Campaign Setting Design / 2012-01 Fantastic Locations

I have found that generally the most memorable places in my campaigns have had fantastic elements. The more mundane places are useful. They provide framework and context to make the other places stand out — if everywhere were special it would be a funhouse and would not, to me, make …

RPG Blog Carnival: Fantastic Locations

kjdavies January 1, 2012, 12:00 am January 1, 2012 2012-01 Fantastic Locations

The old man watched the small but temporary city rose around his pavilion. He had traveled many lands before coming here, spending a few weeks at each place before moving on. He looked around at the motley assortment of tents and wagons, horses and stranger mounts. He saw many folk …

My Favorite D&D

kjdavies December 29, 2011, 10:52 pm August 17, 2019 Uncategorized

Every time I get drawn into a conversation regarding the relative merits of D&D 4e and D&D 3.x I end up saying much the same thing. While I do like the consistency of my position, I think it’s time I posted something here I can just point at the next time the question comes up.

TL;DR (for those with no patience — and this is long, about 2700 words worth): I don’t play 4e, I don’t have the books, I don’t expect to every do so. But I don’t particularly dislike 4e on a system design level.

Okay, Important Lesson

kjdavies December 29, 2011, 2:34 pm January 1, 2012 Uncategorized

When using the feedwordpress plugin, do not point it back at your site so you ‘download your own posts’. They collide with the original ones and take over the originals… and when you remove the feed it might (and did in my case, because I told it to) stomp on …

Links of the Week: December 26, 2011

kjdavies December 26, 2011, 7:30 am December 29, 2011 Links of the Week

Last one for this year, seventeenth time links post in this series (two meta-posts, one announcing the series, one looking for an RSS aggregator to make my life easier — I expect to have more on this in a week or two). I just realized and remembered, I’m hosting the …

Character Design Requirements

kjdavies December 24, 2011, 12:46 am January 2, 2019 Tips and Tricks

Years ago, a friend online told me of the guidelines she was given in designing her character for a supers campaign. Have a way to get to the fight. Have a way to be useful in the fight. Have a way to survive the fight. It occurs to me that …

I Don’t Always Test My Code

kjdavies December 22, 2011, 9:53 pm January 3, 2012 Uncategorized

Thank you very much to Dennis Santana for bringing this to my attention. I’m adding a new feature (I hope) to KJD-IMC to help me with my weekly reading and round-up and I screwed up my permalinks. Once he clued me in that the primaries were broken, I fixed that and it …

Implications of Changes to the Hit Point Model

kjdavies December 21, 2011, 3:32 pm December 29, 2011 Experimental

A couple of months ago I posted some thoughts about hit points and healing . This is playable model, and the martial artists I discussed it with said that while it’s not exactly realistic, it has the shape of something believable. That is, the relationship between ‘hard to kill’ (or ‘hard to beat down’, more …

RSS Aggregation Tools

kjdavies December 20, 2011, 1:32 pm December 29, 2011 Uncategorized

I am looking for an RSS aggregation tool. I have found in the last few weeks that I read about 250-300 blog posts a week, which then get summarized into my ‘Links of the Week’ posts. This is a lot of reading, and I end up spending either way too …