Articles and discussion on Roleplaying including Shadow World, Forgotten Realms.
I saw a discussion on the Tenkar’s Tavern* discord server today. One participant pitched a suggestion for a game setting to get feedback from the community. I will call him the Pitcher as it is nicer than participant. The Pitcher was actually looking to do an entire world building job. I had already read a …
I saw this exchange on Reddit today… Adventure Writing Hey guys, I am writing an adventure for a campaign set on Skull Island and I was wondering what advice you guys can offer to make the campaign and adventure great. 🙂 Reply… Don’t “write adventures”; doing that creates a tendency to railroad players. Instead, create …
All long term readers will know that I am a fan of ‘fixed’ #hits. It gets rid of a DP sink, removes the concept of people being able to be hit several times with a sword and survive just because they are high level and it makes low levels slightly more survivable. My version is …
Recently I read Elizabeth Moon’s Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, one of the most interesting Dungeons & Dragons novels I ever have absorbed. I call it a Dungeons & Dragons novel not because it contains oversized, fire breathing serpents, nor because it portrays sprawling, underground inhabitations of wealthy monsters—indeed, it contains neither of these—but because of its metaphysical …
Continue reading “Gamist Elements in Elizabeth Moon’s Sheepfarmer’s Daughter”
In my advancing years, I have ceased being a fan of Skills-based RPGs, and Rolemaster, I am told, quite ironically is Skills. I much prefer the idea of working out resolutions at the table as situations arise, and this lends itself well to the style of play in “first generation” games. Here is an example: …
Continue reading “Professions and Skills for the Navigator RPG”
I’m of two minds while reading about Peter R’s development of Navigator RPG. As far as I can tell, it purposes to be an open content retroclone of Spacemaster but using the convenient OGL of White Star, which is based on the “White Box” version of the Original Game. I fully support the mechanics of …
The other day I was looking up something in Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP), and I came across a passage I don’t recall reading before—ever before, even when I aspired to run MERP just last year! Elves have certain advantages over the “mortal” races … , and in terms of a fantasy role playing game this …
In the scene above can you see a face in the rockface? It probably isn’t there at all but it when I first saw the imagine it sort of jumped out at me. The point is of this is threefold… The first was the forum post by Jengada on rendering campaign worlds. The second was …
I am bringing together two threads here. The first is Gabe’s Lazy DMing and the second is a conversation I had with Marc about how he has house ruled the Patronage/Renown rules from One Ring in to RMu. When Marc first mentioned Patronage he described it as a single figure, 0-6, that is used to …
A recent article in The Atlantic, which is worth reading for it’s implications on bio-enchancement also mentioned a concept I hadn’t thought about in a while: the Umwelt. While the concept of umwelt is much more nuanced, in general it’s how the world is perceived by a specific organism. I wanted to comment on this …
Continue reading “Saturday Whiskey Thoughts: Umwelt and fantasy roleplaying.”