Expedition RPG News and a bonus

I’m working on a sample adventure for Expedition soon that will hopefully give you something to start with on creating your own adventures with the system. If you’re already familiar with fantasy games of any stripe, you can use adventures from other systems, and things you’ve learned from building adventures for other systems, in Expedition. I intended Expedition to be a game where these kinds of narratives can be ported over without great shock. Things like Skill Challenges from D&D 4e, or the merciless dungeon crawls of AD&D, or even some of the gimmicks from newer Pathfinder Adventure Paths, can be interpreted as Expedition adventures with some time spent converting the monsters, and a little imagination for porting the challenges.

You don’t have things like definitive spells, so if a module requires a spell to be cast for something then that might seem like trouble brewing, but you can turn those into Favors or just have players engage in Events using their Potentials to solve those problems. I think you’ll find the game can be very flexible about these things.

Expedition’s been downloaded 167 times now. A friend of mine is planning a campaign for his players, and Shaun Welch has created a character on his Gnoll’s Den blog. I’m pretty excited about it all! My time for running my own games is limited so right now I’m just planning to play with some friends, but hopefully I can inspire you to try out the game in your own way.

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The Prismatic Art Collection Kickstarter

The Prismatic Art Collection is a Kickstarter aiming to create several pieces of high quality fantasy artwork. These pieces will be released as Creative Commons Share-Alike, so that they can be used by anyone in any product. This, by itself, is a very laudable goal. But the Prismatic Art Collection is more ambitious than this – they’re also aiming to recruit a diverse variety of artists to create this artwork featuring a diverse array of characters, male, female and of varying ethnicity. So you’ll likely see many new faces, both the artists and the characters alike – always a worthy goal to me.

I am a person with diverse interests in people, and most fantasy stuff doesn’t meet them. Hell, I’m a bisexual Puertorican male whose parents are Puertorican devotees of Hinduism – I generally don’t exist in fantasy at all! When I take on projects I try to represent people who are often made invisible in these fantasy stories and fantasy games. In the World of Adel I’ve made all kinds of characters, and in their stories and descriptions in my articles I try to include all kinds of physical characteristics, sexuality, sexes and genders. Because I’m interested and inspired by all kinds of people, and also because I want readers of all kinds to find people with whom they can connect on some level, or to believe that in my world they could exist as characters without barriers. I’ve consumed nothing but “ordinary” works for so long that I wish for more diversity.

I think that the inclusion of more people, ethnicity, sexuality and so on is a very reasonable and achievable goal, especially in fantasy, where there’s such a variety of ways to make that not only justified but interesting and inexorable in the history and culture of the fictional milieu. I feel very excited and happy with what I’ve done with Adel on that order, and I wish more people would try their hand at such projects as well. Thankfully though, I’m far from alone in these endeavors. As usual with Kickstarter, there’s various tiers of involvement. The more funding it gets, the more ambitious the project can become. I’d like to see some alchemists, myself! So head on over to the kickstarter site, look up some of the contributing artists and see what you think.

Maybe at some point someone will draw a couple of fox-eared villagers!


DriveThruRPG GM’s Day Sale

Today is DriveThruRPG’s GM’s day sale, which is typically their biggest sale of the year. This year it lasts a whole week, and has a nice countdown timer for you as well. I got some neat stuff from them on sales like this before, so if you like PDF’s I encourage you to check it out. What’s more, if you’re looking for one of the following products:

Aruneus Bundle [Troll in the Corner]
Part-Time Gods [Third Eye Games]
A Peculiar Pentad – Savaged [Super Genius Games]
Ultimate Dice Tower 2 [Fat Dragon Games]
Exodus Post Apocalyptic RPG Survivor’s Guide [Glutton Creeper Games]

You can get 20% off by using the code: GeekLoveRules2012

So get out there and do some shopping! You might be interested in some products I’ve reviewed on DriveThruRPG in the past. See if perhaps they’re on sale, and maybe you’ll enjoy them too.


Map of the Adelian World

The expanded hex map of the World of Adel is complete. Read on for some idle talk and explanations about it.

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Contest: Read This Blog, Win 10bux

It’s time again for a blog contest. You could win a glorious $10 in RPGNow/DrivethruRPG credit, and buy whatever product you want with that sweet sweet digital lucre, just by reading this blog and commenting.

To enter, simply post a comment to this post with your name and a valid email address that you actually check, and can check within the period this contest will be open for – this is important because otherwise I can’t send you the link.

In the body of the comment you will write below, write me a little helpful bit about an article you read on this blog within the past two or three months (since July) and what you thought about it. The only stipulation is that you not comment on a meta-article, where I talk about the blog’s schedule changes or something. It has to be actual content – in all likelihood it will be tagged “Spirits of Eden” or “Expedition” and you will know it’s actual content.

The contest will be open until next Friday, October 7. I will randomly select one eligible commenter. I won’t actually look at your names when I do – I’ll probably pull them out of a hat without looking. The “eligible” thing is just if you posted a comment with a valid email address and an actual comment in the body.

In addition, anyone can enter the code “DiceInTheFall” to get 20% off the following products:

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Monsters: The Prelude (Monster Vault Part 0)


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