The Seven-Sided Die

I’ve seen a few hits in my logs from people looking to roleplay in Tamriel using Savage Worlds. The Elder Scrolls conversion I’m working on is finished enough that I can use it to run games, and I figure even unfinished rules might be useful.

In the spirit of December’s Carnival I’m transitioning from student to… something else. My Elder Scrolls for Savage Worlds conversion is also coming along well. Those explain why it’s been quiet here lately.

There is a tonne of setting conversions for Savage Worlds, but one in particular stands out for its absence: Bethesda Softwork’s venerable world of The Elder Scrolls. It’s the perfect sandbox setting, with deep background material, plot threads galore for players to chance upon, and a wide world to explore. Savage Worlds is simple and flexible enough to make such a large project feasible instead of an exercise in back-breaking labour.

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.

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.

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 looking around for a good system to adopt as my default system. I’m currently looking at the setting-agnostic Savage Worlds from Pinnacle. Getting here I wandered through a few interesting pages about the game and [...]

Doctor Checkmate makes an astute point: “Buying product after product has always been the methadone to treat the addiction to play.” I need to take this to heart, considering the state of my wishlist.

However, playing more often isn’t an available solution, so what’s left? …

I like that roleplaying has one of the best cost to value ratios of any media hobby. It’s such a good return on investment that my hobby’s value is more often bottlenecked by the lack of time I have to read all the material I do get. At the top of my to-buy list is a one-book game (InSpectres, entirely due to the InSpectres in Spaaaace! play reports at lame mage) and a five-copy set of a generic rules system (Solar System); each are a mere US$20. That’s an incredible price for how much play I hope to get out of them.

Alas, even such a low-cost hobby can give me pains in the wallet these days…

I’m reading Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe’s Kinderculture, a book on the need for media literacy in the generations currently growing up in our new media-based information culture. The book focuses mostly on the implications that corporate control of media has on the enculturation of children, but the secondary message is that childhood [...]