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...

This is not just great advice for writers of weird fiction, but could easily translate into great advice for the crafting of weird adventures. Notes On Writing Weird Fiction by H.P. Lovecraft My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best - one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasise the element of...

This magical item appears as if it were a normal blank parchment placed in an elaborately carved scroll casement. If detect magic (or equivalent type spell) is cast, it will register a slight magical residue and after some time glowing runes will appear on the outer casing. The runes give instruction on the ghost scrolls use and dangers. To use this item you simply write a question on the parchment. Any question of any complexity will do. When the question is written in full, the ink will absorb into the parchment. It is is then placed back in its case and left overnight. Be careful what you ask, for there are many things that should remain unknown. In the morning an answer to the question will be written on the scroll. The magic used to create and use this item is a type of necromancy, and like all necromancy it can be unpredictable and dangerous. The scroll summons a spirit that can see and access most mortal, astral and ethereal knowledge and then relay that information to t...

Continuing the idea of sucky character classes from C.D.'s last post , I humbly present the Monk. Monks in D&D suck. They sucked bad in 1st Edition, they sucked bad in 3rd Edition, and even now they suck more than a little. The only edition they didn't suck in was 2nd Edition. But that's because they weren't there. I suppose my beef against the Monk class is not so much in its intended function but in the players who choose to try and play it. Never has a class been more rooted in a heightened form of reality than the Monk. Except maybe the Thief/Rogue, but I can't say anything bad about them or they'll steal my coinpurse. Now see, I've always had this understanding that a monk was a fairly religious fellow who didn't care much for the company of those that didn't share his belief. Or, so I've gleamed from various PBS documentaries. I'm sure things are a little different in real life. But I've yet to encounter a player who understood ...

Just a short post today, posing a question I had never even considered (being the newb I am) until last weekend. Do you use music to set the mood when you game? To me, even the thought of music intruding upon my gaming session would have been distressing just a short time ago. Then I ended up listening to a song out of Apocalyptica's Inquisition Symphony album during a game last weekend and I must say, it actually did add to the atmosphere. Everyone agreed to try adding in a little music some other time, though I want to be very careful with it, seeing as I still think too much background noise could be utterly distracting with my group. But now that the seed has been planted, the ideas roam rampant and unchecked. I'm thinking of using some Blue Öyster Cult for a Mutant Future game I've got planned. Can't argue that Dancing in the Ruins would make for an...interesting mood setter. I suppose it only goes to say that as an icebreaker a bit of music can help set the tone...

What is the most fun part of being a GM? Creating the worlds your players inhabit? Crafting the story they will play out? No! The most fun part, as any good GM knows, is slaying the PCs in the most horrific ways imaginable. Sometimes with maniacal laughter. But when the big moment comes and you are about to enjoy a chortlingly delightful TPK, you chicken out, or maybe one of your players begins to whine and complain that you aren't playing fair. Well, it's true. If you deliberately enjoy slaughtering the PCs that adventure in your world, you probably deserve to be called a bastard and a terrible GM. I know I do. This is actually how most of my campaigns end. But even assuming you aren't a psycho killer out to crush your players' will into a sticky red paste, you will most likely encounter the same problem: A player complaining you are being unfair, even if you play it completely straight and let the dice dictate the terms. I've had a player who was an ot...

I ran a short steampunk campaign a while back and whipped this up. The background is from an earlier hand drawn map to which I added the Campaign Cartographer symbols (Oh Photoshop you make my life so much easier). I usually prefer to draw my maps, but I needed something quickly (even though it still took two weeks to make... I'm a perfectionist). It turned out pretty good, but alas that campaign has come and gone, and now this map needs a new home, so please... Steal this map. Enjoy the map, and let me know if you use it in your game. ......................................... Several people have inquired whether they could my maps in their commercial (for profit) projects. The answer is: No, you cannot use these maps for any commercial project. Read the creative commons copyright below. But, if you are a DIY RPG person, with little to no money, and really want to use one of the maps for something that you're working on, that might earn you a bit of money, le...