As I introduced in my last post about improvisation, I believe that the key to being able to design a location (whether beforehand or on the fly) is grounded in what I’m calling your toolbox for design. The key is that once you have a well developed toolbox to pull ideas from, you can more readily and quickly design a location for your tabletop Roleplaying Games on the spot or adapt your planned locations to fit the developing needs of the game table. An underlying goal of this series of posts is to help you develop the toolbox required so that you will be able to accomplish this task with relative ease and a good amount of confidence.
The Architect DM: On Improvisation
I could not be happier for February to be here because it means winter is getting closer to ending and with it hopefully the seemingly annual lull in gaming activities. There was an unintentional break from my regular D&D campaign from late November until the very end of January due to weather and horrible holiday scheduling conflicts. Last year I somehow managed to go from thinking about canceling my campaign in early December to running three full adventures within January alone. Thankfully my game got back into the swing of things two weeks ago and now I am gearing up for another adventure this weekend. As I’m getting back into planning my adventures, I’ve been thinking more and more about improvisation in tabletop RPGs.
Take Refuge . . . IN AUDACITY!!!!!!!!!
The moment that everybody has been waiting for is here, and it is now time to see the preview of the most exciting RPG that is coming up! This is Refuge in Audacity! It is time for EXTREME ROLEPLAYING!!!
Unboxing: Wrath of Ashardalon D&D Board Game
For those of us who have been playing and enjoying the game Castle Ravenloft, anticipation has been building for the quick release of the second D&D Adventure System board game Wrath of Ashardalon! We were fortunate enough to get an early preview copy and so what I’d like to provide for you today is a brief post about the box and its contents as well as a preview of what to expect from the game based on a preliminary look through the rules and components.
4e Success or Failure: Magic Items
Were 4e’s changes to magic items a success or a failure? Are they streamlined and lean, or boring and plain? Logan Bonner delineates where they went right and where they went wrong in revamping the classic treasures of D&D.
The Architect DM: Questions & Answers
While I’m gearing up and preparing to continue the Architect DM series into 2011, I decided to first put out a call for more questions on my twitter account and see what kinds of questions you guys have when it comes to DMing and world building in your RPGs. This has worked incredibly well for me in the past, at least half of the posts in this series so far have come directly from reader questions or suggestions and I’m always looking for more topics to cover.
Personal Encounter Design Workshop
In mid-December I received a great e-mail from a reader named Brian that I talk to regularly on my twitter account, he was planning for an upcoming D&D adventure and wanted some specific help with designing an encounter. I’m not sure what exactly prompted him to send it my way, but I was more than happy to read through and share some of my ideas to help spice up his encounter. Just today I received a follow up e-mail that he is planning to run the encounter tomorrow and that he wanted to run his updated encounter by me again. I was all to happy to oblige, and I also realized that the exchange of e-mails might be something some of you would be interested in seeing. So here it is, with his permission of course.
The Architect DM: Open Spaces, Plazas, and Holidays
It’s the end of the year and what most of us would call the “Holiday Season”, and I have instead decided to bring up a relevant topic that is quite fitting for this time of year. I’m sure there are several published pieces and posts online about incorporating holidays into your RPG game, but I’d like to discuss them with a specific focus on the location designs you use in your game. I’d also like to focus on one specific holiday trope that you’ve probably considered for your own game – if there’s a holiday/special event, the party is most likely there to experience it.
The Architect DM: Fantasy Technology & Development
In my last post I talked about how the abandonment of locations and their resettlement can be used to influence the way we design our RPG worlds. The discussion led into the idea of technologies that could be developed and subsequently lost along with a civilization, only to be rediscovered at a later date by different cultures. I know for a fact that many people have a mental disconnect when it comes to thinking of “technology” and their typical Dungeons & Dragons game world. I often think of technology in an RPG along the same lines as psionics, there seem to be a lot of people who love to use them and a lot of people who avoid using them altogether.
The Architect DM: Abandonment & Re-population
As a DM that runs a tabletop RPG, it is your right and privilege to strike towns, lands, and whole continents with whatever form of catastrophe or disaster that strikes your fancy. Whether it is a terrible plague, massive tidal wave, or vicious invading army that sweeps through the area and all but wipes out the native inhabitants it is up to you to determine what happens with that location once the initial catastrophe has passed. These events could have happened hundreds of years before the characters were born or they could be the climatic event that finishes off a chapter of your game and opens up a new one. No matter when it happens, it is up to you as the DM to figure out how these events will effect your game world and how the players will experience the event and the aftermath.
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