Articles by Danny Rupp
Danny works professionally as an architect and serves as managing editor here at CH, which means he shares many of the duties of being an editor but without the fame and recognition. He also writes about RPGs, videogames, movies, and TV. He is married to Sucilaria, and has a personal blog at Incorrect Blitz Input. (Email Danny or follow him on Twitter).
The Architect DM: Worldbuilding Diary
For well over a year now I’ve kept an eye on the material that our friend Dennis has been producing over at his blog The Spirits of Eden for his RPG setting, the World of Adel. I’ve talked to him a few times about his worldbuilding and the setting that he’s created, and every time we talk I marvel more and more at what he is creating. Today he has started a series of posts he is calling a Worldbuilding Diary and I was instantly impressed and inspired by it.
If you haven’t seen his blog or read anything about the World of Adel, I highly recommend it if you’re in the mood for a setting unlike any of the published settings I’ve seen. It has a very personal feel to it and has Dennis’ fingerprints all over it, but the various elements he has combined and the amount of raw passion that goes into his efforts really make it stand out for me. I remember talking to him over a year ago and being very interested in his dislike of the proliferation of humanoids in standard D&D and his desire for more alien and insect-like allies and adversaries. The world has evolved since then, and to start this post out I’d like to share some of the aspects of it that interest me the most.
The World of Adel
Dennis may comment on here that I’ve gotten it all wrong or that I’m focusing on the wrong things, but here’s why I think you should care about his setting. Dennis has started categorizing the World of Adel as “Sci-Fantasy” and managed to get beyond my initial cringing at any kind of cliche combining of concepts by comparing it to some of the earliest Science Fiction stories that most people would barely put into the category. This sentence alone would hook me into a non-standard fantasy setting to start with:
Adel has many accoutrements of science-fantasy: there are robots you can accidentally wake up that will kill you, high-tech artifacts lying around, and a few people can find and carry around laser guns, often to the alarm of everyone around them.
For many of us this most likely conjures images of a setting like Eberron or something very steampunk that meshes fantasy ideas with the low-end of the science fiction spectrum. However, Dennis goes on subvert these ideas by explaining that much of the setting is still very rural and set in a world that can literally speak to the inhabitants through active spirits. This quote is the next part of his diary that really hooks me in: [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: On Character Creation
If someone asked me for a single bit of advice to improve their roleplaying games, whether as a DM or a player, I would tell them to spend as much time as they can reading the great fantasy and sci-fi books that are out there. For the first several years that I was playing RPGs I was not an avid reader and had not even heard of many of the classics, including ones that everyone should have heard of like The Lord of the Rings. At the time I thought many of my friends were insanely creative or stricken by some miraculous form of otherworldly inspiration, but as I’ve read more and more of the books out there I began to realize that most good ideas in our RPGs have been inspired by or even directly ripped from other sources. For example, in one of the first D&D games that I ever DM’d a player showed up with a character named “Muadib” and I remember thinking that it was a very unique and interesting sounding name. A year or two later I started reading Dune and groaned when I realized he’d simply lifted the name straight out of that book.
Let me start by saying that there is absolutely nothing wrong with naming a D&D character after your favorite character in a book or being inspired in any other way by what you’ve read. The reason I groan or roll my eyes when I realize something is from a book is often because I thought it was an original idea and as a result I feel like a chump. I’ll state it again just to be clear, the problem in these situations is with ME, and not with the people who are using books for inspiration. The reaction I have is an expression of feeling less educated and less informed than other people.
Read, Read, Read then Borrow, Borrow, Borrow
From the introduction to this post you might think I’m against borrowing from books in RPGs, but I’m simply telling you how I slowly came to the realization that borrowing can greatly improve your games. Aside from a handful of actual groan worthy concepts, such as showing up to a D&D game with a dual scimitar wielding drow ranger, the people that you game with will most likely appreciate any ideas inspired by other sources. If they’re familiar with the source material then they should be able to enjoy the experience in the same way as you, and if they’re not familiar with the source then they might think it is a very unique and interesting idea. One end result of this process that I never predicted at my own table is that some players, upon finding out certain ideas were inspired by a series of books, have sought out the books and begun reading the series to enjoy the same inspiration that many of the other players and I have had. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Dungeon Interconnectivity
Yesterday I started playing the new game Dark Souls on the PS3 and the level designs in the game are very inspiring when it comes to planning out dungeons. One of the coolest things that Dark Souls and many other video games do with their levels is interconnecting different areas in creative and unexpected ways. This is also an element that I see very rarely in tabletop RPG dungeon design, and that’s a disparity that I’d like to see changed.
Imagine an extreme case of dungeon interconnectivity where you run an entire campaign within one big dungeon. I’m sure it’s been done before at least once, but if done correctly I think this could be a very interesting idea for a game and create some unique moments for RPGs. Whether or not you want to think about the extreme case, I think adding some well placed connections at different points through your dungeon can not only make it feel more realistic but also add a whole new level of interest to the dungeon for you and your players.
Classic Use of Thresholds
Perhaps the most common method of accomplishing this that I’ve seen in published RPG dungeons is through the use of doors, often of the locked variety. The locked or otherwise impassable door is the simplest way of redirecting players but then allowing them to gain access back to a previous location quickly and easily. Instead of hand waving the party’s exit from a dungeon, why not include a barred doorway in one of the first rooms that they then get to the other side of at the very end of the dungeon. When the players open what they think is a door further into the dungeon, perhaps into the big bad’s treasure room or to an even greater threat beyond, and find themselves back at the entrance to the dungeon they might feel a little bit more immersed in the world as it suddenly makes sense that their characters don’t have to backtrack all the way through the dungeon just to get back to town. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Winter is Coming
Recently I’ve been reading the Song of Ice and Fire books and really enjoying them, starting with A Game of Thrones and now I’ve just finished the second book A Clash of Kings. One of the major concepts of the series is that summers and winters can last for years at a time, and the books start during a long period of summer and focus on the Stark family whose motto is the very foreboding words, “winter is coming.” Though there are different seasons, the northern portion of the series’ fantasy world is always in a wintery climate and the narrative of the books returns to this area every now and then as a subtle reminder that winter is in definitely coming.
I found it incredibly appropriate that fellow blogger T.W. Wombat (@twwombat) decided to host a “Winter is Coming” blog theme week only a few days into Autumn. Though I’m not one to be melancholy during winter and in fact often love the season and look forward to it, I am a big fan of thematic blogging across as many people as possible and decided that I should participate in this one! It also synced up quite well with some inspiration I received while reading A Clash of Kings just a week or two ago, and I was not about to let the coincidence go by unacknowledged.
The Secrets of Castle Black
If you’re not familiar with the world of a Song of Ice and Fire, then not only should you go read it but I also have to give you a little bit of preface. In the series the northern part of the continent is always snowy and cold, and a giant wall of ice has been built along the edge of the civilized kingdoms to keep the lands safe from whatever threats may linger further to the north. Just beneath this wall is Castle Black, and it wasn’t until midway through A Clash of Kings when it was finally described how the castle was built to survive the decade long winters that are all the more harsh in the north where it was built.
Castle Black functions much like your typical medieval castle, but what really caught my attention was the little detail that the castle also has a series of underground tunnels constructed so that when the snows fall for months on end the inhabitants can still get from building to building within the walls. This detail added a whole new depth of character to the location as well as further defining the idea of long and harsh winters in the north. This is the kind of thing that can really sell a location in your tabletop RPG and D&D games!
Seasonal Design
I’m sure I’ve stressed it before in my posts here, but it bears repeating: the best way to add lasting character to a location is to think about its surroundings and how they impact the design of the place. The cool fact about Castle Black is nothing special or extraordinary, it exists for the simple fact of functionality during impeding snow storms. There is no special formula or recipe for designing a location with these factors in mind, simply pick some feature or aspect of the environment and brainstorm any ideas that might work to make the place more livable or more functional. [Read the rest of this article]
Why I’m Starting to Love Epic 4e D&D
I started playing and running 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons right when it was released. My current ongoing campaign began back then with a party of 1st level characters and now three years later I’ve run over 50 adventures and the party is up to 24th level characters. The campaign has had its share of rough spots and tough times, but overall I’d say it has been an incredibly fun experience and something that I look forward to every other weekend. Dave was also running a campaign that was on the same track as mine only slightly ahead (and in the same game world), but due to a myriad of reasons a few weeks ago we ran a day long, co-DMed finale that closed his game out in style with unrestrained awesomeness.
Since then I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to close my campaign out and thinking about exactly how much longer I want to run this game. What I’m discovering more and more as I think about it is that running epic level 4th Edition is some of the most fun I’ve ever had running or playing in any D&D game.
Some Disclaimers
As I’ve discussed a few times before, when I started running this campaign I was without a doubt a “newbie DM” and my attempts at writing, planning, and running my campaign definitely showed it. This is a disclaimer because now that I have 50 adventures under my belt and a lot of hours of DMing experience it should be expected that I’ve gotten better and that the games I’m running have improved as a result. In addition, I realize that many of these points may not be specific to 4th Edition D&D, they may also apply to any edition of D&D when it gets into the epic style of game play (or any RPG for that matter), but my experiences of running epic games are only in 4e so that’s what I’ll be focusing on.
Another part of this disclaimer is that player investment builds over time in a campaign and that adds to the overall enjoyment at the table as well. Last but not least there’s the simple fact that the epic tier is meant to be epic, and therefore awesome in its own right as the players become super powerful and go up against greater and greater threats. I believe all of these are fairly understandable reasons for why I am enjoying running epic level D&D so much, but I’d like to explore some of the other reasons and the finer points of the matter.
Everything AND the +5 Vorpal Kitchen Sink
The aspect that I’m probably enjoying the most about running epic level 4e is that I feel like I can throw practically anything I want at the party. Monsters that are 4 or 5 levels higher than the party will most likely be challenging but unless there’s a solo they stand very little chance of it getting anywhere close to killing the whole party. Even before level 24 when most Epic Destinies grant death defying abilities, many of my players have abilities that allow them to skirt the edge of death. My wife has been playing a cleric for the entire game and even despite her lack of focus on healing her Healing Word ability still gives characters an insanely high number of hit points.
I’ll freely admit that in the heroic and paragon tiers of play I was deeply concerned about the level of difficulty I was throwing at my players and how their characters could handle it mechanically. Being almost entirely free of those concerns is extremely satisfying as a DM and I’m sure it is contributing to the ease of my running the latest adventures of my game and the amount of fun I’m having doing it. There is a certain glee that can be found in the DM’s attempts at creating an all-out massacre and the players/characters abilities to disrupt those efforts. I know that some DMs run with the mindset of “unrestrained opposition” to the characters, and I know that there are some players who really don’t like that style of game, but my feeling is that in the epic tier the players don’t mind it as much and it has been incredibly fun for me as the DM. At least for me, I can’t speak for my players that much, my campaign has recently taken on an enhanced feeling of the DM vs. Players style of game but with an incredibly friendly vibe. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Last Minute Planning
Charrette is a word that most likely means nothing to you, unless of course you studied Architecture or Design in school then it is a word that can mean quite a lot and the emotions it brings up vary widely from person to person. Charrette is a word used among architecture students to describe a design crunch/cramming session that derives from the French word for “cart”. The term became popular because schools in Paris would have carts pushed around to collect student’s drawings and it was not uncommon for students to continue working on their drawings for as long as possible by riding in the cart. For better or worse, the term has stuck through to this day and architecture students are still as bad as ever at finishing their projects before rigid deadlines.
One of the unforeseen outcomes of my experience with things like charrettes in school has been the ability to more efficiently plan for the RPG adventures that I run. The word charrette inspires a mix of emotions in most design students because it represents the insanely stressful periods of a project for many people but also because it invokes a bizarre sense of pride in our shared suffering, and it is not surprising that people are proud to emerge from a charrette with a praise-worthy design and presentation having survived the experience. This kind of experience is also well known to Dungeon Masters and Game Masters around the world.
Planning an Adventure or Studying for an Exam?
It’s one thing to experience anxiety and stress when going through design school, after all so much rests on your shoulders and counts on your performance in school, but I was extremely surprised when I found myself experiencing some of the same problems when I found myself approaching the day of an adventure and found myself needing to plan for my game. Today I’m not only going to talk about some of the best advice I received about getting through charrettes and lessons I learned in school, but I’m also going to share some specifics about how I’m applying all of this to the hobby of running for tabletop RPGs. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: On Magic Items – Part 2
Last week I looked at some issues I’ve been experiencing with magic items in 4th Edition D&D and some possible solutions. This week I’d like to talk about some other possible solutions as well as just some general concepts related to magic items that hopefully generate some interesting ideas for how to handle magic items in your D&D campaigns. There were some fantastic comments on last week’s post and I’m going to incorporate some of the topics or ideas brought up there into this post as well.
The biggest thing that I meant to mention last week but didn’t get to was the Inherent Bonus rules for 4th Edition that allow you to run a game without any magic items at all and the math will still work for the players. There are a few different ways to use these rules, but my preference is to give player’s the inherent bonuses and then allow them access to all common magic items, a few uncommon magic items, and then hand out one or two more powerful magic items per player. I prefer thinking about these more powerful magic items as simple +1 items, even though they will mechanically be one plus higher than the inherent bonus the player’s currently have. In this way the magic items are still incredibly good and give the character’s an advantage, but at any given level they will still only be +1 or at most +2 magic items.
Breaking the Rules in All the Right Ways
The first thing that I changed about magic items in my own campaign was leveling up player’s primary weapon and armor instead of handing out new parcels as they leveled up. This isn’t so much of a change as a different way of handling the parcel system. The second thing I did was allow the players to break the rules and combine two separate items in specific cases. For example, my players very quickly found themselves wanting to have +3 Dragonclaw armor that was also Summonable.
I’m a big fan of the “say yes” style of DMing, but I also happened to agree with my players on this point. Since Summonable armor is the same level and cost as basic magic armor, I decided it was no problem at all for my players to make any piece of armor also Summonable for a small additional cost for the special enchanting. We’ve been doing this for well over a year now and through an entire tier of play and so far, not surprisingly, it hasn’t broken the game in any way. The only thing it’s done is given my players armor they’re happier with and possibly given them access to one additional ability. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: On Magic Items – Part 1
I’m sure that magic items in D&D have been talked about for countless hours, but with Wizards of the Coast finally releasing Mordenkainen’s Magical Emporium for 4th Edition in September and my home campaign nearing the middle of the epic tier I’ve been wanting to talk about them here. The handful of times that I ran 3rd Edition D&D I was guilty of handing out items of a much higher level than the party, but I would try to balance it out with concepts like staves only having a small number of charges. The players/characters always loved it, but I would hear from other D&D players outside of the game that they didn’t like what I was doing and that they had the impression it was “contrary to the rules of the game” or something like that. I didn’t mind them much, but was very intrigued by what they were saying.
Now in 4th Edition the magic items are in the Player’s Handbook (instead of the DMG), we have item rarity levels, and the way that magic items function in the game has changed quite a bit from when I started playing with 2nd Edition. In the heroic tier of my campaign I was pretty happy with how the magic items worked out, and I even have a character in my game that is STILL wearing the Acrobat Boots he found in the very first adventure. My players really seemed to enjoy finding and wearing new magic items; many of the item types such as gloves, boots, and helmets stood out as extremely useful during adventures.
The Walking Armory Dilemma
Things started to change roughly coinciding with paragon tier when the players became much less excited about new items, possibly because they’d been playing the game for a year, began to have too many items to manage, or they were hesitant to replace items they were already using. The one thing that I did change to counteract some of these feelings was allowing the players to keep the same armor and primary weapon and simply level up the items with the characters. At present my campaign is up to level 23 and I haven’t given out a single magic item since before they hit level 20. I’ve heard one or two of my players mildly complain about it but only in the capacity that they know the rules suggest giving out a certain number of items (and that number is more than zero). [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Campaign Building
It’s good to be back! The first week of August saw us at GenCon and very happily winning a Gold ENnie award, and then in the weeks after I’ve been catching up on things post-convention and getting back into the swing of things. Lately I’ve been discussing and toying with the concept that the best world building happens through playing a campaign, and so I suggest the world building DMs out there spend less time before play and just jump into things with a published or a bare bones adventure and then let the world build from there. This also opens your game up to the possibilities for players to contribute to the world building which for me has always turned out better than I could imagine.
Now that I’ve been running my current 4th Edition D&D game for 3 years and the players are progressing through the Epic Tier, I am starting to plan ahead for what we will play and run after the campaign is over. In addition playing a wider variety of games and RPGs, I am also hoping to run a series of mini-campaigns inspired by Phil’s ideas about running a campaign like a British TV Series and his Gears of Ruin campaign posts.
The early stages of planning for these future mini-campaigns is what has inspired all of my raving about world building through play. Now that I have spent more than 3 years playing in my campaign world, it has become incredibly easier for me (and more importantly my players) to envision playing a sandbox game in the world because we already have an intimate understanding of the world. All of this brainstorming has led me to another style of running a campaign that I think could be quite fun and I’d like to explore here.
The Core + Expansion Campaign
Players often cringe at the idea of restricted choices when starting a campaign, but this concept thrives on it. Start your “Core Campaign” with a limited number of races, classes, types of items, locations and pretty much anything else you can limit. Decide what kind of story you want to tell, what kind of character your friends want to play, and then work out what kind of restrictions you should put on the Core game. Run the game with a limited plot for 4-6 or 6-10 adventures and then wrap it up. Characters can die, subplots can remain unresolved, but give a good sense of closure to the game. [Read the rest of this article]
Game Previews from GenCon 2011
While at GenCon this year I was floored by the amount of new games that were being previewed and available to purchase at the convention. Checking out these new games is one of the big reasons that I go to GenCon, so today I’d like to talk about some of the games that I got to demo while I was there. This post is titled “previews” because I haven’t had a chance to play any of these games in their entirety, but they all stood out to me either from before I went to the con or while I was walking the exhibit hall.
These are just a few of the games that I saw and was excited about at GenCon. The first two previews here are games that I got to play demos of and talk to some of the people from the companies about the games. The rest of the games in this post are ones that I was hoping to get a chance to play but just didn’t have the time to play or wait for a spot to open up at the tables.
Ninja: Legend of the Scorpion Clan (Alderac Entertainment Group)
This is one of the games that I was excited for even before going to GenCon because I’m a big fan of what AEG has been doing with their Legend of the 5 Rings products, plus I love ninjas so that pretty much sealed the deal for me checking this out. Ninja is a board game that takes place in the L5R universe, and I have a copy of it here at home so there will definitely be a full review of it up in the next few weeks. The game plays with 2-4 players and allows 1 or 2 players to control the ninja and traitor as they secretly move about the board and try to avoid the samurai guards controlled by the other players. The samurai players place traps, objectives, and sleeping guards in hidden locations around the board to surprise the ninja, and every player has a small hand of action cards to add even more surprise into the equation.
Above and beyond the “I love ninjas” caveat, many of our friends (including myself) have been playing the game Letters From Whitechapel a lot recently and I was even more excited to see that Ninja appears to share many similarities with that game. I’m happy to see that Ninja is supposed to play quicker than Whitechapel, and the game also doesn’t end if the ninja or traitor are found but instead they get to kill and/or flee from the guards and still attempt to sneak away.
Food Fight! (Cryptozoic Entertainment)
The stand up displays for this game were immediately eye-catching. By eye-catching, I mean it featured badass looking food wearing combat gear and wielding guns! I jumped into the demo of the game knowing nothing more than that it is a card game, and I was pleasantly surprised once we got into playing the demo. Our first play through involved a dealt out hand, choosing which cards to play for either Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner, and then flipping up cards and battling against other players that chose the same meal that you did.
Food Fight’s cards are all extremely stylistic and, if you’re a fan of the game’s particular kind of humor, incredibly funny. If you think things like Private Pancake, Corporal Taco, and Sergeant Sushi all decked out in army outfits are funny, then this game is perfect for you. However, as we played that first hand I couldn’t help but find it to be a mediocre game at best. That’s when the demo changed completely. Once we’d played one hand to learn how the basic game played, we were each dealt a hand of cards from which we drafted one card and proceeded to pass hands around the table in the familiar card drafting fashion. I can understand why they were demoing the game without the drafting at first, but at least one of our friends ONLY got to play the game with a non-drafted hand and that confuses me. Once I started to draft the cards the game immediately improved for me and I understood the card designs and enjoyed it a hell of a lot more. [Read the rest of this article]
