The Seven-Sided Die

The single most useful piece of GM advice I’ve yet read is Dr Rotwang’s Adventure Funnel, a quick and satisfying technique for creating nuanced and memorable adventures.

On Tuesday I ran a Savage Worlds one-shot. Overall the session was fun and I think a good demo of Savage Worlds’ strengths and weaknesses. In four hours we managed to make characters and play through that short adventure, which is impressive considering none of us had ever played SW before.

Here are some of the highlights and “low”-lights.

Today’s text file from the B.A.D.D. Files is the sad story of Darren Molitor in B.A.D.D.’s words and his own.

Few fantasy settings detail what the religious faithful actually believe. Here are three ways you can add depth to gods and their followers’ faiths in your game world.

My new Planescape character Marius is a dispossessed noble who threw himself off a cliff, fell through a gate, and now believes that the Multiverse he’s experiencing is just an elaborate hallucination in the moments before he dies. It doesn’t help that he has untapped mental powers that can alter reality.

Religion is the topic of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival. Let’s tackle the elephant in the room and take a morbid look at Christian anti-D&D propaganda from the 80s.

I’ve been thinking about how to handle magic as it appears in D&D settings. I want to maintain the spirit of Savage Worlds, but I don’t want to entirely re-write settings shaped by Vancian magic.

In Savage Bookkeeping Joshua extends the minimalist bookkeeping Savage Worlds uses for allies’ ammo reserves to group provisions and torches. Here’s my adaptation of that system to 1e AD&D.

Ever since reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s series revolving around Miles Vorkosigan I’ve wanted to play or run an RPG in that setting. It’s brilliant space opera with a wide range of tech, political situations, and scales of travel.

Advanced Dungeons & Savages is a good add-on for playing the implied setting of classic AD&D, but it would be better off putting more trust in Savage Worlds’ mechanics.