http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog Odds and ends of roleplaying Tue, 30 Dec 2008 05:30:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've seen a few hits in my logs from people looking to roleplay in Tamriel using Savage Worlds rules. The Elder Scrolls conversion I'm working on isn't finished, but it's finished-enough that I can use it to run games and I have other projects taking precedence. I figure even unfinished ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/12/29/savage-elder-scrolls/ Edit to add: Welcome, readers from the Paizo boards. Flame-free comments are welcome. Some important points to keep in mind to avoid saying clueless things: I understand that you're protective of your iconics, but they're fair game for social criticism. Please don't confuse "exploitive" with "offensive"—they're different words. Having a ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/12/24/selling-games-by-selling-bodies/ Despite being finished school, I've been busier than ever. My family is taking a lot of my attention, and getting the house into better order than we were tolerating while I was consumed with school is being alotted the remainder. Then, of course, there is the holidays. Failing a thoughtful ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/12/20/gm-advice-industry-musings-and-storming/ The RPG Blog Carnival topic for December is transformations and transitions, hosted by Critical Hits. That's very pertinent to me right now since I'm transitioning from being a working student to being either a plain ol' worker or a stay-at-home dad. (We'll see in January which it will be.) That partly ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/12/12/in-transition/ 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 been discussed, but I haven't turned up anything substantial in my searches. It's the perfect sandbox setting[1. Incidentally, there is a good Gnome ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/12/01/oblivious-sandboxes-and-savage-settings/ The single most useful piece of GM advice I've yet read is Dr Rotwang's Adventure Funnel. The Adventure Funnel is a quick and satisfying technique for creating nuanced and memorable adventures. Start with a goal, throw in some obstacles, season with details (I think I'm getting my metaphors mixed...) and the ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/25/the-adventure-funnel/ Our regular Tuesday game had two cancellations, so I ran a Savage Worlds one-shot instead for the two players who could make it. I decided to run the Tomb of Terrors one-sheet adventure that Pinnacle has available on their website. (Spoiler alert.) Overall the session was fun and I think ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/21/savage-worlds-actual-play/ November's topic for the RPG Blog Carnival is religion. In The B.A.D.D. Files, part1 I posted the first of a set of text files shared in the 80s and 90s among Christians alarmed about the nature of Dungeons & Dragons and roleplaying games in general. Today's text file is about ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/17/the-badd-files-part-2/ This month's RPG Blog Carnival topic is religion. Most fantasy settings have particular domains of interest and influence assigned to each god, but very few actually bother to say what the followers of the gods actually believe. It's a strange omission when designing a faith. I was thinking about this when I ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/15/three-ways-to-give-depth-to-your-games-religions/ We finally kicked off our Planescape game on Tuesday. We're using AD&D 2nd edition rules and, wonderfully, for once I am a player rather than the GM. I'm pleased with the character I came up with. Clearly, being on the other side of the screen is good for my creativity. Marius ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/13/marius-solain-madman/ Round 4 of the RPG Blog Carnival is being hosted by The Dice Bag, and the topic is religion. Most of the contributions to the carnival so far deal with religion within the fiction. The one exception that deals with the elephant in the room is RPG Centric's post, It’s my ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/12/the-badd-files-part-1/ I've been thinking about how to handle pseudo-Vancian magic as it appears in D&D-based settings like Forgotten Realms. I want any magic house rules I come up with to maintain the spirit of Savage Worlds, so easy handling and bookkeeping is important. The important part I want to keep about ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/10/dd-spells-in-savage-worlds-feedback/ Joshua at Tales of the Rambling Bumblers has a lot of great posts about running Savage Worlds that I've been reading this morning. In Savage Bookkeeping Joshua extends the minimalist bookkeeping Savage Worlds uses for allies' ammo reserves to group provisions and torches.[1. Joshua's post is itself a response to ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/10/bookkeeping-free-provisions-and-torches-in-add/ 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 without the usual drags of a huge cast, ungraspably-complicated political networks, or soap-opera plotlines. The level of tech varies from swords and ageing energy weapons ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/09/the-wormhole-nexus-setting-resources/ Advanced Dungeons & Savages (ADS) is a fan-made PDF conversion of 1st edition AD&D for Savage Worlds by Joel Sparks. It's available for download free from Savage Heroes, a Savage Worlds fansite with a huge collection of adventures, setting conversions, and sundry bits of crunch. (Thanks to UncleBear for linking ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/07/advanced-dungeons-savages-review/ I went and bought a copy of Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition from my FLGS today just before tonight's session[1. The session was an extraordinarily great game. I managed to induce in one player, unintentionally, by turns claustrophobia and visceral terror with the atmosphere I gave the dungeon. The other players ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/05/sold-on-savage-worlds/ I've been looking around for a good system to adopt as my default system. It's much like leaving home on a long journey, through wilderness and unfamiliar cultures, looking for something without knowing quite what it is. The high, study walls of D&D 3.x were left behind long ago; I've ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/11/03/savage-worlds-breadcrumbs/ 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 suppose just self-control (and ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/10/26/is-dd-possible-without-session-prep/ 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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/10/22/dollar-woes-and-rpg-spending/ It has been so rare in the past that I've been a player and not the GM that I sometimes have a hard time coming up with characters concepts that I'd enjoy playing for an extended time, rather than the one-off or occasionally-recurring characters that a GM usually needs to ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/10/20/grief-or-the-rag-man/ There has been a bit of chatter about the Tyranny of Fun[1. I picked that post because it excerpts the core bits of Melan's larger post at the RPGsite, which you can read here: The Tyranny of Fun: status report.] that has come to dominate the design of D&D. I ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/10/11/the-fear-of-unfun/ In a recent comment, Jonathan linked to his collection of articles on Gygaxian Naturalism. Reading ravyn's Ecology for World-Builders from that list, I suddenly understood why the first edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide has so many rolls for random encounters in wilderness forest: prey animals. I always thought that the number ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/10/10/edible-wandering-monsters/ I installed WP Captcha Free here the other day, but it appears to be a broken plugin at least with this version of WordPress. The trackback from Tommi's post about using random encounters in his fascinating dungeoncrawl game was never recognised, and Jonathan from The Core Mechanic emailed me to ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/10/05/bad-spam-blocker-no-cookie-for-you/ After my last post about kids and roleplaying games, a dear friend send me a link to an article by GeekDad: Teaching Kids to Roleplay is Only Natural. He points out that kids don't really need to be taught to roleplay since their play naturally involves playing pretend and experimenting ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/10/01/teaching-kids-to-roleplay/ So far WP has caught all the spam comments I've gotten, but they're a pain to individually moderate. I've installed a spam-comment blocker that does some tricks with server-side timestamp hashes and javascript, which should be invisible to real commentors while blocking bots. Which is to say, if you have any ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/28/new-spam-blocker/ I'm not really starting a series, just echoing the title of J.D. Wiker's post Sacrificing Sacred Cows: Random Encounters. I really like random encounters and the events they precipitate, and I have to take issue with the points against that he makes. "Random" means the GM literally doesn't have any control ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/25/care-and-feeding-of-sacred-cows-random-encounters/ Wordle.net creates images out of text. It looks a lot like a tag cloud, but it pulls from the entirety of the text you give it so it's actually much more representational. The wordle at right is what the Seven-Sided Die looks like as of now to its parser. I like ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/22/fall-2008-wordle/ I love little details in settings that add to verisimilitude. The problem with this predeliction is that when I do my own world building I often let these details bog me down. It's hard to tell what sort of thing is going to add enough to the setting (and play) ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/18/move-people-not-things/ 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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/15/kids-roleplaying-games-and-the-information-revolution/ I ran a game of D&D 4th edition shortly after the books were released, and I badly mangled that abortive campaign. I want to say that the books made me do it, and I have good reason to think so, but the blame is mine for letting them. Let me explain. If ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/14/innocence-is-bliss-sorta-kinda/ I've just started reading Tommi Brander's blog, Cogito, ergo ludo. So far I've found Tommi to be a consistently engaging writer and an imaginative roleplayer. His homebrewed persistent fantasy roleplaying system looks intriguing, but I think I'd need a pile of designer's commentary to successfully digest it. I do like ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/08/tommi-branders-cogito-ergo-ludo/ Recently I was reading the Creative Commons version of Clinton R. Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday. That he chose to release it under an open license is awesome, and though I could write about that I'm more interested in an aside he buried in the game. Note that this is from ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/04/why-its-not-insane-to-like-rolemaster/ My recent return to 1st edition AD&D has been illuminating. Re-reading the books now, I realise that much of what I thought was "wrong" with the game then was a product of my immaturity, both as a person and as a gamer and GM. I've been a D&D player of ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/04/whats-wrong-with-alignment/ OpenCourseWare is a pile of lecture notes, tests, syllabi, and other course materials put together by MIT for anyone's use. It's intended as a resource for instructors and students, but the list of course materials for each of the hundreds of courses is complete enough that someone could use it ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/03/opencourseware-for-learning-and-inspiration/ Traditional roleplaying games make the player responsible for the success or failure of one character in the game, and gives responsibility for the challenges, structure, integrity, and enjoyability of the game to the Game Master.[1. Yes, this is a huge simplification. Run with it.] Understandably, many players then decide that ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/09/01/shock-review/ 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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/30/not-the-realms-anymore/ 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, ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/25/not-reviewing-shock-yet/ 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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/18/shock-initial-impressions/ 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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/16/house-rules-for-add-1st-edition/ 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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/16/cantos-the-city-of-bells/ 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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/13/nearly-finished-map/ [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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/08/the-importance-of-the-rules/ 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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/07/map-wip/ 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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/07/old-school-gaming/ 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 ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/05/skill-systems-arent-always-a-good-idea/ Part of what I dislike about 4e is that it's too balanced. Yeah, that sounds loony since poor balance has always been a bugbear for D&D mechanics. But it's true. Still, there is such as thing as so much balance that there's no difference left. There really should be a tonne ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/08/03/i-just-cant-leave-it-alone/ Wizards of the Coast have released, via their organised play body the RPGA, a preview of some material in the forthcoming Forgotten Realms supplement to 4th edition D&D. On that promo page is a link to download the preview document, which contains some expurgated rules for creating drow, genasi, and swordmage ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/07/23/4e-forgotten-realms-preview-released/ Last Sunday I had over for a solo game. Having recently acquired a nearly-complete set of 1st ed AD&D books, and knowing that it's simple (and familiar) to run and create characters for, I proposed running that. It wasn't a long session (three and a half hours, one and ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/07/22/actual-play-add-1st-edition/ Being White, I have the dubious privilege to be able to ignore race in my roleplay gaming and my fantasy fiction. It's a dubious privilege because it's one that is impossible to ever fully decline. That's not to say "poor white me boo hoo"—rather, the only moral response is to ... http://d7.pipemaze.com/blog/2008/07/08/white-privilege-in-fantasy-fiction-and-gaming/