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RPG Review: Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters

August 20, 2010 in Resources, Reviews by Fitz | No comments

Welcome back!

Have you ever found a sandwich that’s so big, juicy, messy, and full of sandwichy goodness that you can’t figure out where to start eating it? That’s kind of what happened when I grabbed a copy of Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters by the authors of GnomeStew.com. This book should be like crack to not only roleplayers in general and gamemasters (GMs) in specific, but should also provide infinite ideas for novelists and short story writers seeking inspiration for their own works.

For those of you who aren’t gamers or roleplayers, there’s a huge and growing population of people who play tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs) who also write articles throughout the blogosphere. Gnome Stew (GnomeStew.com) is one of the more focused, schizophrenic (i.e. multiple-writer), and excellent gaming resources on the web today. I typically peruse the Gnome Stew RSS feed at least once a week to get an idea for what’s going on in gaming and stealget ideas for my own gaming blog (the Moebius Adventures blog).

The amazing folks at Gnome Stew evidently had their “eureka” moment in June 2009 and it took twelve months from that point to create this huge storehouse of ideas and inspiration for the community. As Martin Ralya, the owner of Gnome Stew, points out in his introduction – “To call Eureka a labor of love would be an understatement.” And the love shows.

Before launching into the plot descriptions themselves, the authors chose to provide a chapter about how to use the book. That takes up less than 20 pages of the 300+ the book fills. But without that information, it would be much more difficult to hunt for ideas on a particular topic. They have provided four different ways to find the perfect plot – by theme, primary genre, sub-genres, and tags.

The themes they use are the 36 Dramatic Situations written by Georges Polti in 1917. The book poses that there are only 36 basic plots used in all the dramatic works ever created or that ever will be created. It’s quite an idea and it’s still in use today by drama students, authors, playwrights, and many more. You can read the book in the public domain here. In terms of RPG plots, this helps by boiling down the initial idea succinctly and then building on it in the text of the plot description.

Genres are broken into four general categories. In this case, a genre is just a set of criteria for a setting that also lends itself to describing the overall tone or assumptions for stories fitting those criteria. In this case, they use three main categories – Fantasy, Sci-fi, and Horror – and add a catch-all “Other” category for any plots that don’t fit in the first three.

And when you get to tags, that’s where the real fun comes in. It’s obvious the editors and authors thought long and hard about how to make this book useful for readers. Like genres, tags in this case are just additional descriptive words to categorize a particular plot. These tags describe things like the type of Challenge involved in the plot, what Creatures and Enemies will be encountered, what kinds of Non-player Characters (NPCs) and Relationships are central to the plot, the Play Style, and the Setting. Beyond that, there’s also a broader “Features” general category for elements that don’t fit anywhere else.

Each of these descriptive methods is used to create a detailed index (four indexes are included – by theme, primary genre, sub-genres, and tag) so that you can simply peruse any of the indices for a particular idea or term. That certainly helps when you’re faced with the sheer volume of work presented in this book. Your other approach is simply to start at the beginning and read until inspiration strikes or you find what you are looking for. My problem with that is that I have hardly dented the Fantasy plots, which come first, so who knows if I’ll ever make it all the way to the Horror section!

There’s no way to do justice to the myriad plots described in the book, so I’ll just talk about one to provide an example of what you can look forward to.

“Vengeance Taken for Kindred upon Kindred” has a long title, but immediately I knew it was describing what I call the “Hatfields vs. the McCoys” problem. It’s a family feud at its heart. And in the fantasy version described in Eureka, it’s a tribe of orcs that’s split down the middle after a chieftan dies and his twin sons want to take the tribe in different directions. Stuck in the middle is a local town. With a war coming between these two factions, the player characters (PCs) must figure out how to save the town.

The plot goes on to describe the problems at hand, including the fact that they can’t face down all the orcs by themselves and what happens when the town mayor tries to make a pact with one camp for protection from the other… There’s just enough information to provide a framework for an enterprising GM to roll an adventure around it.

And at the end of the plot description, there’s a section describing what other genres it can easily be adapted to, including Action Horror, Cyberpunk, Grim and Gritty Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic, Sci-fi, Traditional Fantasy, and Western. The section also describes all the various tags associated with the plot idea – alliance, deadline, innocent, isolated area, mass combat, sandbox, tactical planning, and villain.

As a GM, I think I could take this idea and spin it at least three ways right off the bat, which is awesome. It’s this kind of inspiration with crunchy details that really sets my brain on fire.

So if you’re a GM, a player, a writer of any sort, or just like noodling about story ideas, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters by the authors of GnomeStew.com should provide you literally hours and hours of gaming fun. One review I saw mentioned that with 501 plots at your disposal, that’s more than a year’s worth of adventuring time for even the most aggressive gaming group!

This article first appeared at BlogCritics.org here.

–Fitz

p.s. Be sure to pick up your copy today!

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The Edge of Sanity…

June 7, 2010 in Inspiration by Fitz | 2 comments

Hey all…

In my career as a gamer, at least since college, I’ve had a thing for playing insane characters. I thought I’d share some of those characters and how I dealt with their crazy behaviors.

The first time it happened, my character in a Call of Cthulhu game went crazy with a Tommy Gun and managed to murder all but one member of his team because he thought they were monsters. And it felt good. Not the killing part – just cutting loose of all rational thought for a brief moment. He just snapped and went insane based on the rules of the game (aka “missed his save”) and I went with it.

That moment led to my playing of a Malkavian in a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign who was more than a little loopy. He liked having rules for everything. So if, in the course of an adventure, he encountered a situation that lent itself to a new rule, he’d add it to the list. Suffice it to say that living by those rules was a bit of a challenge at times, but a welcome one. The simplicity of the insanity was the key.

And more recently I played a rogue in a campaign that shifted rules a couple of times (from the freeform Hero to a thief in D&D 3.5e). The game was set in a world much like our own during the time of the Roman Empire. Didius (or “DC” as he came to be known – short for Didius Cato) was an escaped slave. And he had a bit of a thing about slavery.

If DC encountered a situation where a slave was being treated unfairly… For instance, on the auction block in a crowded marketplace… There was a chance he’d go a bit nuts and do what he could to change the situation. I’d roll a die and basically decide if he would (even number) or wouldn’t (odd) flip out based on the result. During one session, he basically slaughtered a number of guards as he worked to free a line of slaves being sold.

Somehow he managed to survive. But again, the simplicity of the insanity is what made it fun. He had a trigger (seeing slavery) and no willpower to speak of (thus rolling to determine his action). Sometimes he managed to contain himself. Then there was the rest of the time…

So if you haven’t played a crazy character, I’d encourage you to try it at least once in a campaign. As a GM, it’s easy to slip in a NPC teetering on the edge of rational thought. As a player, sometimes it’s less easy – but talk to your GM and give it a go.

If you have played crazy characters, I’d love to hear about them. What were they like? How did they come about? What guidelines did you use for bounding their nutty behavior? Leave me a comment below or drop me an e-mail at fitz(at)moebiusadventures(dot)com.

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Who has the power in a game?

May 31, 2010 in GMing by Fitz | 3 comments

Odd topic, but power is a funny thing. In real life, those who have it typically want more. Those without want some. And it’s not always what you think.

In a roleplaying game, you’d think the GM held most of the power. And to a point, you’re right. But without players, what good is a GM? Players hold the other half of the power in a campaign or one-shot adventure. It’s a give and take between both sides. Don’t kid yourself that there aren’t two sides to the game table though. However, they’re not always in direct opposition.

For me, it’s not (always) a competition between GM and player. Sure, sometimes it’s literally a competition such as a jousting tournament or a game of chance played in the game. But for the most part, the GM is there to keep the world in motion to give the players opportunities for action.

But I digress…

So obviously the GM has some power… but it’s spread thinly between NPCs, monsters, and plots afoot in the realm of his or her control. A fair GM doesn’t let the power of the dice corrupt him or her unfairly. A fudge here or there on behalf of the players is a choice GMs always have, but in the vast majority of cases I have to believe it’s not used against the players or player characters to hasten their demise. So in my view, no GM has absolute power over their domain if they’re playing fairly.

And the players have power to exercise on behalf of their in-game characters… Choices that may benefit the player or the group at large exist in great quantities usually. And it’s easy to see when players step out of bounds through metagaming or by doing something to harm another player, for the GM or other players may rise to the occasion and combat such inequities.

But in the best cases of gaming, it’s a symbiotic relationship between players and their GM. When the relationship becomes one-sided, it ceases to be fun for the other side and bad things may occur. Hard feelings, bad decisions, and things said in anger may result in the downfall of a group and the temporary or permanent harm to friendships between members.

Has anyone seen the demise of a gaming group like this? It’s not pretty.

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How do you make module-driven games seem less railroaded?

May 24, 2010 in Advice, GMing, Seeking Feedback by Fitz | No comments

Hi all…

Yes, it seems that nearly every time I post anything these days, it’s asking a question. But before I ask, let me provide some context…

We have a very small group (currently 2 or 3 players depending on the week and a GM) playing a D&D 3.5e adventure set in one of the Paizo Pathfinder adventures (Second Darkness). The GM (Mike) and I have been discussing the fact that, like every other module-driven adventure either of us has played or run, it seems very linear. And, dare I say it, a bit boring for those of us playing who prefer story and emotional depth over combat.

Sure there are a few mysteries left. We only play once a month or so and sometimes not even that, so getting through significant parts of the adventure is iffy at best. And it probably doesn’t help that the two PCs in our group that are supposed to know and like each other are drifting apart (but that’s a tale for another day), so that’s not helping us move forward much either.

But here’s the issue… if the GM lacks the time to spin off his own ideas to make the setting more lively and engaging for the PCs and the PCs can’t stay together, how do we make the game more enjoyable across the board?

I suspect that if Mike as GM can find some nuggets of creativity in the module to build on, that’s one way to do it. And as a player, I can try and invest myself more in the world as well – perhaps going so far as to define NPC “friends” he may have met during spelunking beneath the city, in the wilds, or while avoiding the less natural parts of town (he’s a druid who’s probably swinging from neutral good to true neutral soon after some experiences he’s had in the campaign).

What do you do, as a player or GM, to make campaigns based around pre-written modules seem more lively? Or what do you do to revive fading campaigns when the enthusiasm starts to die?

Mike and I are both curious what others who have faced similar issues have done to help the situation… And not just what worked, but what didn’t… So we don’t unwittingly step in land mines trying something that probably was a bad idea from the get-go.

Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated. I’ll try and sum it up in a separate post so others can benefit from the combined wisdom.

Thanks!
–Fitz

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RPG Blog Carnival: NPC Show and Tell…

April 28, 2010 in NPCs by Fitz | 1 comment

I’m coming late to the RPG Blog Carnival this month, but better late than never, right?

Superman II
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NPCs are an area where I either go very deep or very shallow. For example, a common theme I have in running a game is putting an Inn/Tavern in every town and there always happens to be an old man or woman at the desk or available when someone rings the bell.

This old person inevitably was a) cranky, b) hard of hearing, and c) difficult to deal with. So whenever the PCs would try and find a room for the night, they’d have to verbally spar with the desk jockey.

Desk clerk (DC): “Eh?”
PC: “We’d like a room for the night.”
DC: “A broom for flight?”
PC: [speaking up] “A ROOM FOR THE NIGHT.”
DC: “You don’t have to yell… I’m not deaf you know… I have a couple of rooms with one bed in them, but all 5 of you might have to draw straws… or there’s the [mumbles] common room…”

Yes, I like to torment my players. It’s part of the fun of being a GM.

On the flip side of the coin are characters like Lady Dagor, the female knight in charge of the Order of St. Greggor – a group of knights seeking the destruction of all demons in the world of Immortals’ Wake.

In her case, I always had a mental image of Sarah Douglas as Ursa (Zod’s second in command) in Superman II, but a bit shorter and wearing a combination of chain and plate mail. She buries her contempt for civilians well, but holds them somewhere above pond scum in the order of things.

Dagor focuses on two things. Firstly, she studies all the battles between the knights of her order and the Changed demons who control raw elemental energies. She feels she has a better understanding of how her enemy operates than they do in many cases and far more knowledge than many of the organizations also studying the demons (including other church members, the House of the Magus (mages), and the Chasers). This feeling of superior knowledge is both a good and a bad thing.

Secondly, she focuses on strategies for capturing, testing, and killing demons. Using her knowledge of how they operate and many of their tactics, she finds weaknesses to exploit and is constantly instructing those under her command to test such weaknesses vigorously in the field.

Lady Dagor is a stern task master and a good soldier, but also knows how to play the political game. As the first woman in charge of the militant order of the Church of the Mother, she knows she is empowered to do just about anything in the name of the Church. But even with this knowledge, she obeys the letter of the law and will rarely break with church doctrine.

It was her laugh that I settled on first. A haughty, full-bodied laugh that has been practiced and perfected over the years to throw off allies and enemies alike. She has few friends, and only “befriends” people if it is politically or strategically necessary.

But at the bottom of this superiority complex and the haughtiness, she devoutly believes in the teachings of the Mother. What she is doing is right on every level and that gives her the strength to do what she must. Is she evil? Not from her perspective.  But from other people’s perspectives? Yeah, probably.

Some NPCs, like Athena from Zeus’s head, come fully formed in my mind when they appear. Others sneak up on me. And others just pop up like that damn innkeeper. “Eh?”

–Fitz

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Starting Over…

March 17, 2010 in Design, Playtesting, Rules, Seeking Feedback by Fitz | 6 comments

Just like the rest of life, sometimes it’s time for a do-over. Thus begins a new chapter in the life of Moebius Adventures (MARPG) games.

Dice for various games, especially for rolepla...
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Here’s the scoop. We have a streamlined system. It needs to be tested seriously. So who better to take a look at some of the mechanics than… you! That’s right, it’s time YOU got into the act here.

First, I want to welcome you (back) into the fold. The next series of articles will focus on some core mechanics, character creation, and then how to apply those bits to various genres. After all, MARPG is a cross-genre, universal roleplaying game. Tough to tell that when all we’ve seen so far are examples for fantasy settings.

I WANT your feedback. If you think this sucks and is too difficult, let me know. I’m looking for frank opinions with suggestions on how to make things better. The goal here is to create a solid base mechanic for a variety of settings so gaming groups can pick up the system and play just as easily in a cyberpunk setting as they can in a low-magic fantasy setting. Or if they want to do epic space battles such as in Star Wars or Star Trek or make more intimate “cowboys in space” games like with Firefly, it moves quickly with them.

Like in all roleplaying games, your MARPG character is a set of properties – characteristic values (Mind, Body, Soul), derived characteristic values (Hit Points, Luck Points, Reality Check, and so on), and skills with ranks. All these values do is provide a framework for behaviors, abilities, and experience. They’re just numbers on a page. It’s up to the player and GM to bring the player (PC) and non-player characters (NPCs) represented by those numbers to life.

As a player or GM, in addition to a PC or NPC, you’ll need two d10s. We’re not talking huge sets of dice here.

The basic mechanic is the same for all skill checks, characteristic checks, and combat rolls. You have a target number you have to roll below with 2d10 and modifiers.

The target number comes from the character himself for most actions, with modifiers from the GM for things like weather, fatigue, item quality, etc. In the case of opposed actions, it becomes a battle between the quality of success or failure between opponents.

Bird tracks on a frozen lake
Image by Paul Williams (Iron Ammonite) via Flickr

For example, if a tracker is looking for animal signs and tracks in the woods, it’s a simple skill check. The GM may make the attempt more difficult or easier based on conditions such as how recent the tracks were made, if there was fresh snow, if snow or leaves covered the tracks, and so on.

Let’s say the Tracker has a Tracking skill of 3 ranks. Tracking relies on knowing what to look for and how perceptive the character is, so it’s a Mind-based skill. Let’s say the Tracker has a Mind of 7. By default, without any modifiers from the GM, the target number is 10.

To determine success or failure, you roll 2d10, add modifiers, and compare the total to the target.

In the case of the Tracker, let’s say he rolls a 13. He failed the attempt, so he’s unable to find his quarry.

Roll two 1′s and you have a critical success. Roll two 10′s and you have a critical failure. Compare the total to the target number to determine the Quality of Success (QoS) or Failure (QoF). If your total was above or below the target, your QoS (if below) or QoF (if above) is the difference between the target and the total. If your total is equal to the target, the GM can decide whether the act was directly opposed and it was a draw or if the act was unopposed and it was a success.

QoS = Target Number – Total Die Roll
QoF = Total Die Roll – Target Number

For the Tracker, his QoF was 3. He missed the target by 3 (Total Die Roll 12 – Target Number 10 = QoF 3).

Let’s say he rolled a 3 on 2d10. That would mean he succeeded in finding tracks. In that case, his QoS was 7. He made it by 7 (Target Number 10 – Total Die Roll 3 = QoS 7).

Now let’s say the Tracker is looking for someone deliberately trying to obscure signs of their passing. The Tracker’s opponent uses her Tracking skill at rank 4 and her Mind characteristic value of 5 for an unmodified Target Number of 9. The GM rolls 2d10 and gets a 5, for a QoS of 4. This makes the Tracker’s job harder.

The Tracker’s unmodified Target Number is 10. But since it’s opposed, the QoS becomes a modifier on the skill check making it more difficult. Now the Tracker’s Target Number is 6 (Target Number 10 – opponent QoS = 6). The Tracker would have to make a great roll to get a six or less.

* on the left: German Reitschwert, circa 1530,...
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Let’s add another wrinkle. The Tracker finds the woman he’s been searching for in the woods and a battle begins. Each opponent has a sword and some ranks in the Swordsmanship skill.

The Tracker surprised his quarry and gets to attack first. His quarry can only Parry with her sword or Dodge to get out of the way. The Tracker’s Swords is at 4 ranks and his Body is a 5, for an unmodified Target of 9. His quarry has Swords at 6 ranks and a Body of 5 for an unmodified Target of 11. Both opponents roll 2d10.

The Tracker rolls a 5, for a QoS of 4 (Target Number 9 – Total Die Roll 5 = QoS 4). His quarry has a -4 modifier to her Target to make it a 7. The GM rolls a 9 for a QoF of 2 and the woman takes 2 points of damage…

This pattern of comparing QoS and QoF is repeated throughout the system now for skill checks, characteristic checks, and combat. One mechanic simplifies the rules greatly, while still providing the flexibility and uniqueness of character strengths and weaknesses to appear in sometimes unexpected ways.

In the next article, we’ll talk about character creation and the flexibility available for quickly creating PCs and NPCs for any campaign.

What do you think? Leave me comments here on the blog entry or send me e-mail directly at fitz (at) moebiusadventures (dot) com. I’m looking for negative and positive feedback here – so let ‘er rip!

–Fitz

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Religion in Fantasy Worlds

December 13, 2009 in Design, GMing, Inspiration, Resources, Rules, World by Fitz | 8 comments

This post was inspired by a post at the KORE rpg blog about the topic. And it got me thinking, which is sometimes not a good thing…

monk_bwReligion is definitely one of those hot buttons in the real world, like sex, money, politics, and many other hot buttons. As soon as you breach the subject however, some people want to either convert you or condemn you – and neither option really appeals to me.

I’m an atheistic-leaning agnostic… or an agnostic-leaning atheist. Just depends on the day. From my point of view, religion is a good thing for a lot of people, so I don’t make a fuss about it. If you want to talk to me about religion, that’s fine – but I don’t like being preached to. Just a personal thing. The door-to-door folks concerned with saving my soul should just move along. (I’m nice about it, but don’t want to waste their time or mine.)

What’s funny is that it’s also not one of the things I typically think about in my roleplaying. I’m more likely to play a cleric or priest as an NPC than a PC, which goes along with my leaning towards creating worlds with conflict these days.

My Immortals’ Wake setting has a church – the Church of the Mother – that has been twisted in the last thousand years to preach a message of no tolerance. History in the real world shows that many faiths have had issues with tolerating views other than their own. And I wanted to bring that aspect into my setting.

And, as with all things, there are those people within the Church who are more liberal in their views of brotherhood than others. A militant arm has sworn to destroy a group of so-called “demons” simply because they are an affront to what they believe. Other groups within the Church are more tolerant of the “demons” and even helps them from time to time.

However, priests in my games tend to be focused on the personal aspects of the mortal condition – helping the sick and poor, aiding those seeking sanctuary, providing spiritual guidance, and so on – not just the traditional D&D cleric point of view as far as mobile MASH and holy smash unit. As mentioned, there are militants in the Church of the Mother who certainly focus on what they think of as fighting the good fight. But most priests would rather tend to their flocks than fight I think.

As such, my priest NPCs tend to be more philosophers and scholars than weapon-wielding crusaders of faith. They’re more likely to talk you to death than beat you with a blessed club. These folks are also just as likely to be warped by greed or lust as any other mortal, so they may not be the paragons of virtue they’re made out to be. They’re simply men and women doing a job they believe in (or want you to believe in).

This is not to say that they don’t apply their healing abilities to those who need them. Nor do they stray away from praying regularly to the focus of their devotion. And miracles do happen. But these are mortal representatives of their faith who only rarely become vessels to the divine power of their gods.

When you bring in the whole wizard vs. cleric debate and wonder whether a priest might directly oppose a wizard and try to have them lynched. Many priests would decry that wizardry is evil and therefore should be destroyed. But many others would state that if their divine hosts could work miracles through the faithful, why would they allow magicians of other types not to exist? What’s to say that the wizard isn’t working divine miracles of his or her own and simply doesn’t appreciate the divine side of the equation?

A priest whose power base is threatened might turn his flock against a rival wizard, but that would erode his power base. The wizard would most likely fall to greater numbers eventually, but how many members of the priest’s flock would die first? Wouldn’t that give them pause?

So there is definitely room for religion in my games. I’ve only had one player ever convincingly play a priest in a campaign I ran. But I’m always hoping for another!

How do you use religion in your fantasy games? Is it a force to be reckoned with?

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Friday Links, December 4, 2009

December 4, 2009 in Advice, Articles, Friday Links, Resources by Fitz | No comments

Another week of awesome posts in the gaming blog community means I’m back with a new list of links for Friday!

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving (if they celebrated) and is looking forward to some happy holidays. Winter has finally arrived in Colorado (with most of this week spent near zero degrees fahrenheit), so even I’m starting to think about Christmas.

Friday Links Banner 150x150But I digress. :)

Here are a few posts to contemplate when winter weather hits in your neck of the woods:

  • In the “Not Necessarily from This Week” category, we have “Fistfull of Lead: All the Monsters on a Budget” from Jonathan Drain over at Kobold Quarterly. The article tells us where to procure a solid collection of miniatures for your gaming pleasure. Everything from humanoids and skeletons to demons and insects is included in this mix and match collection for a bit over $100 US. Not bad!
    http://www.koboldquarterly.com/k/article3132.php
  • Is Chivalry dead? The RPG Athenaeum offers some suggestions on how to bring knightly orders into your game in “Chivalry doesn’t have to be dead…” The tips on designing a knightly order are very cool – including what to do if a knight fails to live up to the code. As someone who’s designed a few knightly orders, I wish I’d had these tips when I was writing them. :)
    http://rpgathenaeum.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/chivalry-doesnt-have-to-be-dead-use-knightly-orders-in-your-game/
  • Also from the RPG Athenaeum, we have “Flesh out your hero with an anecdote or two,” which offers some awesome suggestions on quirks for characters that might not have occurred to you. The article covers things like quirky appearance bits, emotional bits such as memories that surface during certain conditions, or unique phrases from their adventures or where they grew up. Cool stuff to consider for NPCs as well as PCs I think!
    http://rpgathenaeum.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/flesh-out-your-hero-with-an-anecdote-or-two/
  • From Abstract XP, we have an article on “Writing effective setting in adventures (part three)”. Weather is one of those things I never get right in campaigns, from what it should be from a seasonal perspective or what it should be from a geographic perspective… So tips and hints for using weather in an adventure is quite welcome. And when you add in tips for avoiding cliche’s and bringing in culture, the article starts overflowing with ideas!
    http://abstractxp.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/writing-effective-setting-in-adventures-part-three/
  • Rob Lang over at The Free RPG Blog brings up some intriguing ideas about making fantasy RPG rules into something that doesn’t fall flat in “How to turn your stock fantasy RPG into a unique delight.” As someone who’s trying to make a generic RPG and start with the fantasy aspects, this was particularly well timed. By not only going back to the source of fantasy ideas – fiction, myth, and folklore – but researching games and other mechanics to borrow ideas here and there to add crunch to otherwise not crunchy bits, I may have enough ideas to finish something soon. :) Thanks Rob!
    http://www.thefreerpgblog.com/2009/12/how-to-turn-your-stock-fantasy-rpg-into.html
  • Ravyn at Exchange of Realities proposes three ways to think about solving problems in “Three Problem-Solving Question Sequences.” And though this was meant for gamers, I might actually suggest it to my daughters as ways to approach many different things in life. It’s hard to argue with “What do I have and how can I use it?”, “What do I want and what do I have that can help me get it?”, and “What could solve this problem and how could I get it?” Although they all pose similar questions, it’s HOW they’re asked that’s the key… Very though provoking!!
    http://exchangeofrealities.today.com/2009/12/01/three-problem-solving-question-sequences/
  • And lastly, we have a throwback to an earlier time for me… This picture of Orcus from the Lord of the Green Dragons just made me smile as I thought back to my youth and the early days of playing D&D. Good times. Does it reflect poorly on me when I think back on a big demon prince as a symbol of my youth? Maybe. :)
    http://lordofthegreendragons.blogspot.com/2009/12/old-school-orcus.html

Thanks to everyone who wrote the articles above and to the many more I have yet to read on the various RPG blogs I follow.

Have a great weekend!

–Fitz

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Need Feedback – Where do we go from here?

November 22, 2009 in Design, News, Rules, Seeking Feedback by Fitz | 1 comment

Sorry I’ve been a bit lacking in the posts arena lately. I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking about how to move forward.

Question MarksWith the great, constructive feedback from the October 2009 playtest session of the Moebius Adventures system, it became painfully clear it was time to rethink things. Each player at that session had constructive criticisms of various aspects of the rules, from character generation and presentation to skill resolution and combat. Though we had a good time despite the rules, I was left wondering about the future of the game.

Moebius Adventures was born in the mid-1990s when a friend (Sean Bindel) and I took a hard look at the games we’d been playing.

Like many gamers, we’d played with a number of systems in college and before. We had a great time with a campaign set based loosely on the Temple of Elemental Evil from TSR, but we used the Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game as our system. Add in some serious time playing the d6 Star Wars RPG, Call of Cthulhu, Mechwarrior, and even a little Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, and that about summed it up. And after college, we were playing in a Vampire: The Masquerade game and decided we wanted to get back to the fantasy roots we both started with.

The Moebius Adventures system started out as an exercise in discovering what qualities we wanted to see in a RPG rules system. We modeled it a bit after the Palladium FRPG (1st edition) and Dungeons & Dragons and set to work adding our own spin. The result was first published in 1997 and then in revised form in 2007. And it was the edition from 2007 that we playtested in October of this year.

Though painful, I would say it was incredibly valuable to have seen the game through fresh eyes with this recent playtest session. Almost immediately after, I started working on a slimmed down set of rules that would provide (1) quick character creation, (2) quicker skill and combat resolution, and (3) enough freedom to do all that I was looking at for a cross-genre universal system.

I believe I’ve met that goal and hope to do some playtesting in the next few months as I get more details written up and considered.

My problem now is deciding what to do about this predicament. I have a ton of ideas for free-form magic, super-hero abilities, as well as ways to integrate technology for modern and futuristic settings. And I have three entire settings from which to pull potential setting or adventure products from. But without a simple, consistent, and open system to use, I’m at a bit of an impasse. In my mind, I can’t create system-less modules or settings without having some way of modeling a consistent way to describe NPCs, monsters, items, and so on.

Am I simply over-thinking this? Obviously there are many companies and writers coming up with great RPG materials and I’m not the only one who’s run into this.

Can anyone point out some companies that are doing this already and how they’ve overcome this hurdle (that’s most likely entirely in my head)? Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

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Magazine Review: Kobold Quarterly Fall 2009 Issue 11

November 12, 2009 in Uncategorized by Fitz | 2 comments

Hi all!

Along with many other folks, I had an opportunity to check out the Fall 2009 issue of Kobold Quarterly in October… And I’m just now getting back to writing up the review. But here I am!

I have to admit that I’d only seen one other issue of the magazine a couple of years ago and though I was impressed, I wasn’t blown away. This time it hit me more like the old Dungeon or Dragon magazines of yore and from the cover on I was hooked. Not only does it have great art to capture your attention, but the content covers everything from vampires to the myth of the Philosopher’s Stone and far beyond.

Kobold Quarterly, Fall 2009, Issue 11As with many magazines, there are quite a few ads – but I’m guessing KQ (like many other magazines) uses ad- and subscription-revenues to keep providing us great content every quarter. On the plus side, most of the ads are well designed, colorful, and definitely meant for the target audience (of which I’m definitely a member).

The issue starts off with “A Broken Mind – Sanity and Mental Disorders” by Scott Gable – and I love the idea of merging in sanity rules with D&D. Ever since I played Call of Cthulhu in college, I’ve been fascinated by usually slow (sometimes quick) slide to madness that can occasionally overcome a character. Gable’s mechanic of adding “Mind” as a 7th ability score and a pool of sanity works great to bring in the dark overtones of a world where mortals are not meant to experience everything the world might throw at them… And I just love describing a character’s sanity points as “the currency of madness”… [insert evil laughter here]

Gable’s article presents not only the base mechanic for sanity, but how to use it (and lose it) as the character reacts to the bizarre things an evil GM might throw at his or her players. Having lost my sanity in CoC long ago, I remember going Berserk and killing the rest of my party, so I was pleased to see that slip into the list of “Temporary Insanities”. And among the “Indefinite Insanities” you have things like Fear, Obsession, and Paranoia – a trifecta of mental illness sure to cause a player to stretch some roleplaying skills!

Another great article is “Howling Werebeasts – How to Play Lycanthropes as PCs” by John E. Ling, Jr., which covers a bit of the history of Lycanthropy and how to integrate it into a game. Unless you’re playing White Wolf‘s Werewolf, I think the templates covered presents both sides of the were-beast picture. As a player, you must take the bad with the good. It hurts to change. People will react to you differently. And it requires a it of work on your part. As a GM, it offers logical responses to how to work it into a game without throwing the balance off.

What I really liked about the article was how it broke the Wererat, Werewolf, and Werebear into actual, playable characters. I don’t think I want to play one soon, but it might be something to consider as a NPC should I need to throw some PCs a curve ball. And once you’ve introduced it as an NPC it’s not too much of a stretch to see your PCs get infected… [insert more evil laughter here]

The other articles in the magazine are just as good, covering the “Ecology of the Vampire,” “Uvandir: The Pride of Craftsmen” (great details about dwarven life), “Running Across the Screen (A GM Roundtable)” (great roundtable interview with 16 GMs!), and more. The book reviews were also welcome, presenting a few fantasy and science-fiction titles that might inspire GMs and Players alike.

In 82 pages you get a bit of everything, which is awesome. Be sure to check it out at KoboldQuarterly.com today!

Looks like I’m going to have to break out my wallet and purchase a subscription just in time for the holidays. :)

–Fitz

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