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All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.
— Sir Ken Robinson,
TED Talk: Do schools kill creativity?

Archive for August, 2008

Not the Realms anymore

Wizards of the Coast has released the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. There’s a review at RPG.net that is less than glowing. Judging from the material mentioned in that review, I think my opinion would be even worse.
The 4e staples have been introduced: Dragonborn, Tieflings, the Shadowfell, Elemental Chaos, and so forth. To accomplish that they [...]

Not reviewing Shock yet

Out in the wilds of Suburban Onterrible, life-giving internet connections are hard to come by. Nonetheless, I managed to discover, under a scrap of driftwood, a review of Shock not written by me. I have managed to stuff it into the narrow straw through which I am accessing the webbernets, just for you: Jono DiCarlo’s [...]

Shock: initial impressions

I just received my copy of Shock: social science fiction in the mail this morning. I’d forgotten that I’d bought it some time ago, so I can’t praise the shipping time. However, at US$24 shipping included, it’s relatively cheap for a complete game. (For someone used to paying nearly twice that after tax for a [...]

House rules for AD&D 1st edition

For the Edge of Empire campaign I’m using 1st edition AD&D rules, but with some tweaks.
First, we’re using stone weight encumbrance from Delta’s AD&D house rules. This reduces the amount of calculation immensely, and results in numbers that are easy to visualise. A knight wearing 3 stone of armour, carrying 1-½ stone of weaponry, and [...]

Cantos, the City of Bells

Since I got so much interest in and suggestions for the area I’m working on with the last WIP map, I thought y’all might like this: Cities and towns of the Iron Valley.
I’ve only written anything for Cantos yet, but I’ll be adding more as inspiration strikes. There is some undercity to Cantos that I [...]

Nearly finished map

I’m almost finished the map I was working on using this tutorial. It still needs a compass rose, title banner, nice border, and other finishing touches like that, but the natural and societal geography is done. For some reason, when I export to PNG it gets a shade darker than what I see in the [...]

The importance of the rules

[Rules] help ‘inspire’ things you might not create on your own. — Fang Langford
I always intuitively felt that D&D, as a game of creative imagination, was intensely flavoured by its rules. I didn’t really understand what this intuition meant when I was a high school–aged DM and I was trying to figure out why I did and [...]

Map WIP

I’m no artist, but I’ve always wanted to make nice-looking maps on the computer. That’s why this mapping tutorial for the GIMP is awesome. Using it I’ve managed to take this:

And turn it into this:

Rheall should recognise it, since it’s the land I used for the solo game I ran for her recently. (Actual play [...]

Old school gaming

Old school gaming gets defined differently depending on who you ask.
The two most common definitions—that an old game is “old school”, or that the earliest edition of a ruleset is “old school”—aren’t what do it for me. I don’t think that Everway is old school, nor do I think that 1st edition Vampire: The Masquerade [...]

Skill systems aren’t always a good idea

Just last week Microlite74 was released. It’s a d20 variant designed to have modern rules (based on Microlite20) that enable an old-school play experience. It manages to get character creation, task resolution, spells, and more than 80 monsters into a mere 4 pages!
But my purpose in posting is to quote this paragraph on skills in [...]