Articles and discussion on Roleplaying including Shadow World, Forgotten Realms.
For a variety of reasons, many RPG GM’s have less time to design, develop and write original gaming material. Marathon gaming sessions with the same group in high school or college have given way to infrequent gatherings of old friends. The result: time-strapped GM’s have to rely even more on prepared materials and modules. Part …
Continue reading “Shadow World Deux ex machina: Gods or Loremasters?”
I like my game rules light. The less rules the better in my view and the less time spent trawling back and forth through the rules trying to find the exact paragraph you need should mean more time spent adventuring. I accept that it doesn’t always work out that way and without ‘enough’ rules you …
Continue reading “Encumbered by a lack of Encumbrance Rules”
A week on Friday and I will be off for one of our long weekends of gaming. Interestingly the way things were left at the end of the last session the characters had not actually finished they job they were hired for but events had moved on and because of their actions the powers that …
There are times when what you want is a world saving adventure and there are times when you just want to kill something. This little adventure is of the just kill something variety. This is really intended to be used with a beginning party of 1st to 3rd level characters. In many of the games I …
This week Nicholas Caldwell published the October Director’s Briefing. I seriously recommend reading it if you are interested in any form of Rolemaster. I think you should never be afraid of people who challenge your ideas or disagree with you. In business we say you will learn more from a single customer complaint than from …
There have been three mentions of this recently on the Ironcrown forums. How do you handle the time when the player characters are not adventuring? This is also part of the problem I have with sea voyages as I was writing about recently. The discussions I mentioned involved playing an alchemist who by necessity requires …
When I build anything from towns to taverns I always start with the people. Once I have created the people who provide the essential services to make the location work and then add their families I have a rough working population. That then tells me how large a place it is. In a tavern you …
Continue reading “How Many Adventures Can You Have In A Tavern?”
In a recent game I was in the party was walking around with something like 70,000gp in Diamond Notes (the Shadow World solution to mass currency transport). Depending on how you value a Gold Piece* that is the modern equivelant of between £8.3M and £350M ($13M – $539M) in cash. That was the cash surplus …
I don’t normally see death as a player failure. When you start waving swords around then people are going to get hurt. One lucky strike can take someones’ head off and occaisionally it wll be yours. That is just the nature of combat and random dice rolls. I am also not a fan of skewing …
As you know I just finished rereading The Crystal Shard which is the fourth book in the legend of Drizzt. There are twenty eight books in the entire legend series so you can be fairly certain that if you are reading book four that the main character is not going to die despite how dire …
Continue reading “For those about to die (Player Character Death)”