In which Nico and Chatty conclude their first session of Castle Death, meeting Pit Trap Mac and dealing with an Ogre noble who’s a stickler for etiquette.
Castle Death! A Dead Simple RPG for Kids and Parents, Part 2
In which Chatty and his son Nico start exploring Castle Death and make up new rules as they go along, creating a unique introductory roleplaying experience.
Castle Death! A Dead Simple RPG for Kids and Parents, Part 1
In which Chatty and Nico get ready to play a a Kid friendly RPG they co-develop as they play it. Beware of Castle Death!
The Architect DM: On Modern and Futuristic Settings
I’ve talked quite a lot about worldbuilding and running roleplaying games in fantasy settings, but I’ve been planning on addressing modern and futuristic RPGs for a long time as well. One of the big hurdles that I have to overcome when thinking and writing about modern/future settings is that they seem inherently more difficult to deal with than their fantasy counterparts. For a modern or even a historic RPG I believe the difficulties come from the game being based in a real world that brings with it a vast amount of expectations from the players. If you’re running a game in these settings and a player at your table knows more about history than you, it can become very intimidating to even try to plan or run the game. Science fiction and futuristic games are a little bit better, but you’re still dealing with a lot of heavy science and realistic elements that can lead to issues where they might not have arisen in your typical elves and magic infused setting.
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 Architect DM: Fantasy Buildings 101
When it comes to designing locations and buildings, the DM/GM has a much more daunting task ahead of them than most players or even the DMs themselves realize. Thankfully in most of the RPGs we play and run it is far from crucial that the design of the world is 100% accurate and entirely believable. Most players are willing to suspend their disbelief to an incredible level and almost all DMs don’t really have the time to make sure every location they put into their game is believable. However, creating an environment that is believable can actually make your players lives easier because they will buy into the game on a more unconscious level. This added level of believability just might turn out to be the whole new layer of depth that your game needs.
Adventure Design Workshop Seminar (GenCon 2008)
Still working through our backlog of GenCon 2008, we stopped in at the Adventure Design Seminar, which Mike Mearls moderated (say that three times fast), and also included Rich Baker, Bruce Cordell, Chris Youngs, and James Wyatt. The seminar was advertised as both talking about adventure design for D&D 4e and actually designing an adventure, […]
Inq of the Week: Wii Wheel Rock You?
Oh, the pun hurts. Last week Dave asked everyone what their primary influences are in the Fantasy genre, and I’d say it’s no surprise at all that Tolkien Middle Earth and Lewis’ Narnia were the most common influence(77%). Next most influential were 70’s-90’s film, including Princess Bride, Labyrinth, Dark Crystal, and Willow with 44%, then […]
D&D 4e: A Whole New World
Within the core books for the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, a base world is being set up which is intended to give new players and especially new Dungeon Masters a much easier time getting into their first game. The setting is called “Points of Light” and is summed up on their site as: […]
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