Rule of the Dice

Today, I will briefly continue my ruminations on Megadungeons, specifically three of the distinct advantages I've found they have. #1: A smaller, more localized area. A Megadungeon rarely, if ever, requires that the heroes travel far afield, and this makes it more easy to GM, as you won't need to consider every single faction, nation, and locale when you build your game. Even when using a purchased campaign setting, you'll find it can be a lot of work to enjoyably maintain all the various towns, cities, and NPCs you'll need, if you want to create a deep and compelling game. With a Megadungeon campaign, you can focus on one or two principalities, developing greater detail for the NPCs, and even having an easier time of managing a more living world. Even when using the dungeon itself as a living world, with numerous factions and groups, it is a contained world, subject to easier laws than the round (or flat, your choice) world your characters inhabit. It's hard to rem...

The Megadungeon. A dungeon so vast and epic, players were expected to spend their entire lives plumbing its murky depths. A dungeon that might easily top 20 or 30 levels of sheer madness. Feared by some, adored by others, and quickly becoming a relic of an older age of gaming. Now, sprawling epics that take the players from land to land, environment to environment, are more popular with both players and publishers. And who can blame them? Did the Fellowship of the Ring spend their lives exploring one damp, lonely old dungeon? No. Did Conan drop into the same fetid pit time after time, seeking to delve ever deeper? No. Heck, even Lara Croft, the world's most famous tomb raider, sought new locales after a hard day's plundering! So why would gamers want to spend their entire campaign in some Kafka-esque hell that never really ends? And yet, when done well, a Megadungeon (yes, I like to capitalize it to show off its awesomeness) can be extremely entertaining. Of course, I am...

Bear with me. I don't normally try to do a whole post of links, but today I'm already running a little late. For the past four days all of my off time has been spent shoveling out snow amid wind, occasional rain, and general discomfort. No, don't worry, I'm not going to turn this into a whining rant against Mother Nature and her sick sense of humor. No, this is going to be a short topic on some of the tools one can use to help speed up your RPG planning when life starts getting hectic. I've got to run this weekend's game for my group and, thanks to my schedule, haven't had much time to plan out any kind of plot advancement after they completed the last major plotline. I can, of course, just wing it, but that could be trouble if I don't mentally prepare myself. I could also just run a one-shot, but that's not my usual purview. So what do I do? I take to the Internet and use some (or all) of these handy free tools to make my job just a little eas...

Mutant Future review. Mutant Future is a post-apocolyptic game by the makers of the D&D retro-clone Labyrinth Lord . Unlike Labyrinth Lord , Mutant Future is not a direct clone of an existing game, though it shares more than a little DNA with the sci-fi classic Gamma World . It creates a world where technology is gone, civilization turned into a violent, desolate wasteland of swords and mutants. The game lacks a detailed setting, but the implications are clear and easy to adapt to your own, more detailed setting. The character classes are the first thing I noticed. They are a melding of the old and the new. The standard D&D statistics apply, though slightly altered in their purpose to fit the new setting (no more Dragon Breath save), and the creation is random roll. From there, you select a class, including Mutated Human, three different kinds of Androids, Mutated Plant, and Pure Human. Each has unique abilities and, honestly, you can play a mutated plant! A deadly daf...