Whenever I have a short pause in in what I’m doing at my desk, I reach out for the little pile of index cards called “The Horizon Consipracy” and add new cards to it.
13th Age Musings: Of Templates, Uniqueness and Adventure Hooks
On one hand, I’m excited about creating stories, plots, and themes needed to establish the best possible campaign. I know the game provides me with some solid tools to do just that. On the other hand, I want to fiddle with the very same tools to make them even more useful.
Redesigning the Epic Tier
Both Sly Flourish and I have talked a lot lately about the issues we’ve run into at epic levels in D&D. While there are certainly rules issues, I believe fixing them all would take up a lot more than single column. However, I do have some ideas on alternate ways to restructure how the campaign […]
Crafting Your Adventure
How about that for a title? It’s pretty audacious, acting like I’m about to deliver some sort of authoritative how-to guide. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that a better title would be, “Crafting MY Adventure,” and still better, “Crafting This One Adventure Once.”
Critical Hits Podcast #18: Planning Your Campaign Using the 5×5 Method Seminar
I gave a talk at synDCon 2010 on how to use the 5×5 Method to plan a campaign arc. I took suggestions from the audience and walked through the process, and by the end, we had the structure to start planning.
Making Your 5×5 Campaign Plan Into A Grid
Maybe it’s the gamer in me but when I first read the post title “The 5×5 Method” I immediately visualized a grid. When I read Dave’s post, I got that feeling but it seemed more like a tree than a grid with branches flowing from one another and even sometimes intersecting.
The 5×5 Method
When working on chapter 2 of my D&D 4e campaign (in the paragon tier, chapter 1 having encompassed the heroic tier), I kept running into roadblocks when trying to map out the next major arc. I had left a number of dangling plot threads that didn’t feel right to abandon (that the players were just getting into, as well) so changing gears majorly didn’t seem like the right thing to do. At the same time, I wanted to give the arc a bigger scope than the specific mission-based adventures that I had been sending them on, as well as giving them more freedom to roam about the world I had spent 9 levels introducing them to. I also wanted to let them take more direct control of where they wanted to go next, but still script things out enough to let me plan ahead (i.e. not go full-on sandbox quite yet).
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