My First GM: A Very Special Interview
Posted: May 3, 2011 Filed under: Adventures, Campaigns, D&D 3.5, D&D 4e, Legacy D&D, Online Gaming, Other Systems, RPG 2 Comments »Charles, known online as Master Epyon or Shalazah, was basically the dude who corrupted me, bringing me into the dark cult of RPG games one fateful day over MSN Messenger. He basically told me that an RPG was like playing out a story but with rules, kinda like if I could write my own RPG video game. I signed up pretty much immediately as the Half Elf Wizard Wyatt Salazar and the rest was history. He helped me roll up (actually roll up, 4d6 drop lowest) my first character for D&D 3.5. I’ve been wanting to write something about him on the blog for a while, and so I hit him up over an online chat to get an interview going.
BOLD text indicates my questions and normal text indicates his answers.
The Races of Eden
Posted: February 4, 2011 Filed under: Adventures, Campaigns, Fluff/Inspiration, RPG, Spirits Of Eden Leave a comment »A variety off human-like races inhabit the world of the Spirits of Eden. Past the cataclysm, many species once dominant over the landscape have vanished entirely – and humans are dangerously close to doing so as well. Many new species of human-like beings have risen to claim the new world, each in their own way adapted to Eden. Though they all resemble humans, the mark of the new world is upon each of them in a unique way that sets them apart. Despite physical differences, strong national ties keep them together – it is more often one will see two Iomadi bickering over their homelands than over their features.
Brother Ptolemy Is Out
Posted: November 4, 2010 Filed under: Adventures, D&D 4e, News, Products, RPG 3 Comments »Well, it’s finally here! I had no real control over the long wait, but hopefully you haven’t forgotten about the previews I tried doing some time ago, for a module I designed for inclusion in this book. Jonathan’s got a promo going whereby you can get a free PDF, so buy before November 30th, y’all. I actually get a cut of the sales of this thing, a pretty decent one I think, since I wrote the original draft of the module in the book, so save for some interpolations and necessary editing by Jonathan and others, I wrote the module. The book is more than just the module though, there’s the big bad Ptolemy, organizations, all sorts of stuff for you to use, from the mind of Paul King and others. So if you buy, you will be directly supporting my “money to put towards that bunker to prepare for the end times” fund, into which I hope to dip in the future to maybe pay an artist to do a map of Adel, among some other plans (buying food – more likely to happen than the former).
Hopefully you’ll enjoy it, some early playtest feedback has been good. It was a learning experience for me, the first module I ever seriously sat down and wrote for an audience, with a specific purpose for each encounter and each section. I’m still unsure of exactly how I feel about the whole process, but I am proud that I’ve got some publishing credit under my belt now and happy to have the product finally going out to your hands.
Guns In Fantasy
Posted: October 6, 2010 Filed under: Adventures, Campaigns, Copper Coins!, D&D, D&D 4e, Fluff/Inspiration, Legacy D&D, RPG, Spirits Of Eden 1 Comment »When I first started gaming I used to be very against the idea of firearms in Fantasy settings. This was before I really understood the game mechanics well enough to ascertain that a wizard who can basically shoot fire all day will always just be better than the guy with the pistol, and also before I was imaginative enough to figure out how the aesthetics might coexist. To me, guns were a modern or sci-fi deal, and there was no real heroism to having a gun, nothing really cool about it. Having a sword or a bow and arrow was always fantasy to me instead. As with many things, nowadays I feel much differently.
Of Copper And Prices
Posted: September 29, 2010 Filed under: Adventures, Copper Coins!, Fluff/Inspiration, Homebrew, Legacy D&D, Other Systems, RPG 2 Comments »I once was under the impression that the single most painful, slow and least rewarding part of game design was crunching the combat math until it is workable. I was wrong. Designing equipment and price lists that go beyond the 4e “fuck it they’ll never buy anything non-magical” bare minimum and just a bit farther than the old D&D “here’s everything an adventurer will ever need to buy” is pretty painful. Trying to do so when your units of currency don’t match up to anyone else’s (not even my favorite price guide book, Grain Into Gold, which uses silver coins for everything) makes it doubly painful.
In a way I decided to pick just one thing to agonize over, and I decided to agonize over the actual prices of things. There’s a fair level of abstraction involved regardless, because it’s possible for anyone to buy things at nebulously lower or higher quality. So if a certain price for a certain item seems outrageous to the living conditions of a fantasy game people under these rules, it can still be bought at 1/2 price as a “low quality” unit. So I guess that counts.
Loot And Encumbrance
Posted: August 31, 2010 Filed under: Adventures, Campaigns, Copper Coins!, D&D, Fluff/Inspiration, Homebrew, Houserules, Legacy D&D, Other Systems, RPG 3 Comments »In the process of writing an RPG that at its core wants to support dungeon-looting play more than is usual, the idea of encumbrance plays an important part. In older editions of D&D, the particulars of how you are going to get loads of loot out of a dungeon are important. Encumbrance systems are there to essentially limit the amount of crap you can make off with in one go. As a party, if you were expecting to collect a lot of junk then you needed to prepare for the eventuality by hiring minions or buying pack animals, or you had to settle for not being able to make off with a thousand pounds of gold.
A lot of modern gamers, myself included, don’t really have the patience to deal with this completely. I like the idea of encumbrance – it forces a meaningful decision. If you are in a large enough dungeon, then at a certain point you either stop collecting loot, or you toss some and grab stuff preferentially for its value or utility, or you have to leave with the stuff you have, and return later for the rest of the stuff. Each of these decisions can provide a wealth of roleplaying and challenge opportunities depending on the locale.
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Spiritual Talk