There were no words, just… one of them approached you, pulled you close to its mask…and your mind started flooding with shame, with anxiety, with fear, and guilt…before you knew it you were revealing everything you know about anything. I could hear myself babbling and bawling like a baby, but I couldn’t stop. I just couldn’t stop. Once they got the person they had come for, they dragged him out of town and left us survivors here, weak, exhausted, and empty.
So You Want to Write RPGs?
How does one get into the freelance RPG business? I cannot tell for sure, but I can make some observations.
Chatty’s PaxEast Highlights: 3 days of Fun Among Friends
In which Chatty miraculously fits his highlights of a spectacular convention in only one 1500 words post. A record some will say!
By The Seat Of My Omnipotent Pants
This past week’s D&D session was something of an experiment for me. As I mentioned last week, I procrastinated a bit too much. By that, I mean that by about 2 hours to game time, I had managed to be indecisive enough to know several major plot points – just not the specifics or the order in which they would appear. Not having any combat encounters worked out turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I had also invited a new player to the group over lunch that day. At this point, I was more than slightly worried the session was going to be a disaster and that we would wind up playing Snorta! for half the evening. Did I crash? Did I burn? Both? Hit the jump to discover the unthinkable truth.
RPGs and Fiction: An Interview with Alana Abbott
D&D and other RPGs owe much of their development to fiction, and they in return have spawned an entire industry of game-related novels and stories. Can you write good fiction that is still true to the game? I talk to someone who has done so to learn the tricks of the trade.
Agents of the Un-Kingdom: Alpha Dogs
Imagine a dog that’s ALL bite. I mean seriously, look at the jaws on that thing. Funny looking, right? But if that weird little super-pug bites you it bites it doesn’t just break the skin…it breaks down your reality, your potential.
The Architect DM: How to Improvise Fantasy Buildings
In an ongoing effort to help new and experienced tabletop RPG storytellers improvise and design locations, I started by talking about urban open spaces and provided what I called a design toolbox for that purpose. In this post (and most likely several future posts) I will attempt to provide an extensive and easy to use design toolbox for “Fantasy Buildings”. What types of buildings fall into that category is not set in stone, so I invite you to comment on this post or suggest on twitter (tag me with @Bartoneus) any types of fantasy buildings that I don’t cover int his post that you think should be included in future posts on the subject.
The Combat “Out”
Combat speed in D&D is an oft-debated topic, and while much of the conversation is useful, I have one method that I trumpet above all others to make your combats take less time and work better as a scene in your game, and that’s the combat “out.”
The Architect DM: Negative Space in Dungeons
A very important design concept used in Architecture that I would like to discuss today is the concept of negative space. This topic flows naturally from the discussion in last week’s post about the open spaces in an urban setting being defined by the buildings that are placed around it. In addition I have been thinking quite a lot about the topic since seeing the post on Boing Boing about classic style D&D hand-drawn dungeon maps. If you haven’t seen those maps yet, they are indeed very classic but they are also, unfortunately not examples of good dungeon design.
Mouseburning It: Hacking a Skill System, Small Press Style
In which Chatty finally shares part of what his small press pilgrimage taught him and describes his new method for dealing with skill checks in classic RPGs like D&D (easily adaptable to most other classic games too)
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