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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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Pre-made Art for Independent Publishers

August 16, 2010 in Resources by Fitz | 1 comment

Let me start out by saying that I am definitely not an artist. My artistic skills peaked when I was 12 or 13 and have had plenty of time to regress since then. But I understand the importance of artwork in roleplaying materials. Text by itself, even when you play with layouts, fonts, and lines – simply isn’t sexy enough. You have to add a few splashes of art to break up the monotony of line after line of rolling text.

Now, when I published the Moebius Adventures Core Rules book a couple of years ago, I used a combination of pieces. I contracted out the cover, redo my logo, and a few black and white pieces from Jason Adams (Rogue-Artist.com). Jason did an awesome job and if I ever get the oomph to put out another book, I’ll have him do more art and another cover. His prices were extremely reasonable and he worked with me to get things just right. I couldn’t have asked for more.

The other place I used may surprise you. I have a subscription to Clipart.com. They literally have millions of pieces of art available, including some great black and white shots of castles, knights, priests, and so on. My subscription also comes in handy when I design the occasional t-shirt to sell at my CafePress store or whatnot.

But beyond that, many artists have come forward and started producing commercial-use collections available at places like RPGNow.com.

Sade is one of the independent artists providing collections for use and has nearly 200 in RPGNow.com as of today. And she provides a ton of options – everything from computer-generated art to black-and white and inked pieces – from dragons to steampunk, weapons to templates, even cards for treasure and paper minis. Prices are great too – everything from $0.50 to bundles going for as little as $9 or as much as $65.50. Her Templates collection provides a ton of amazing stuff that an enterprising publisher could use out of the box to make an outstanding book. And her many collections of weapons are simply amazing.

Other companies – from Action RPG Counters to Ye Olde School Stock Art provide an amazing array of bits and pieces that could be used. Everything from fillers to amazingly detailed pieces and even cover art is available.

So if you’re thinking of publishing a book and you (like me) are not an artist, don’t fret. There are lots of available options that are available now. There are some amazing artists out there who will work with you to get you exactly what you want, but there are also some collections of stock art that might be right up your alley. Make sure you look around, check out the licenses for these beasties, and look for something that will work for you.

–Fitz

Where do you find art for your games?

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More thoughts about Typography, or the tools used to create it…

August 13, 2010 in Inspiration by Fitz | No comments

Hittite Cuneiform Tablet
Image by voyageAnatolia.blogspot.com via Flickr

Long title, I know…

But basically I am wondering how we might take the small things, such as the method of writing, and use that in a game. And by “method” in this case, I’m thinking of the tools used to create the work. For example, were the letters painted onto wood or stone? If so, how old are they? What remains?

Let’s think about a few different tools… brush, stylus, chisel, and pen – just for a representative sample.

If you look at the cave paintings in Lascaux, they’re estimated to be around 17,000 years old. That’s a lot of years. That could come into play in numerous different genres of games. The paint used, colors chosen, or even the brush strokes can tell a lot about the artist and how fast a particular piece was finished. The prehistoric artists at Lascaux took their time and it shows. Some gang banger simply marking gang signs on an underpass probably won’t use a brush and will instead opt for a can of spray paint…

Another example would be the good old cuneiform tablet. Clay tablets and a sharpened stylus worked pretty well to document lists of payments or property somewhere around 3500 BC. It may not be the most expressive language in the world, but it works. Consider for a moment some priest documenting the steps for interment of a royal family member and warning anyone not to disturb the dead or face the consequences. Scratches on the wall are probably going to be ignored by most game parties I’ve been in – so who knows what might be behind that cuneiform-labeled door?

Why not use a simple chisel? It beats having to find some wet clay and where you put your stylus down… Some chiseled petroglyphs may be 800,000 years old. More recent ones, for example from Pompeii or Rome, are probably a bit easier to understand if your Latin is up to snuff. (Mine isn’t.) Chiseled stone is kind of like the permanent record for many civilizations we still don’t know much about.

Pen and paper don’t last nearly as long as paint, clay, or stone, but they can be much more expressive and perhaps in a more modern language a PC might understand without too much research. Paper and papyrus have been around for nearly 6000 years. But unless your paper and pen is stored somewhere the paper won’t mold, mildew, or wear away with sun and sand, it’s not going to last very long. Crayons don’t last nearly as long, but can leave a brief reminder on a sanitarium wall that someone did in fact live there for a time.

Cuneiform sign
Image via Wikipedia

So how might you use these different tools?

Take for example a Cthulhu campaign or any other setting that relies on the “previous civilization” model. Can you imagine a scientist from our era stumbling upon the ruins of a temple to the Old Ones and finding 10,000-, 20,000, 100,000-year old markings that get translated (correctly or not) to form the basis of a summoning spell? Or perhaps the previous arrival of aliens or monsters from other worlds or dimensions? Lastly, consider how much you could play with your players heads if it turned out to be graffiti from some punk with a paintbrush in the last 10 years who wanted to spark a hoax…

And then keep in mind the effects of time on a particular piece of art. Has some of the paint disappeared, leaving a message that may be misinterpreted? Or were large portions of a chiseled stone destroyed, leaving only a partial text that may not include the stringent warning about letting whatever was locked deep inside the tomb free?

Endless possibilities.

From fantasy to modern and beyond (computers anyone?), the tools of the trade have a lot to offer as far as inspiration. So don’t forget the little things…

I’ll leave you with some of the sacred text of Monty Python and the Holy Grail…

Chapman as King Arthur in Holy Grail

Image via Wikipedia

  KNIGHT:  There!  Look!
  LAUNCELOT:  What does it say?
  GALAHAD:  What language is that?
  ARTHUR:  Brother Maynard, you're our scholar!
  MAYNARD:  It's Aramaic!
  GALAHAD:  Of course!  Joseph of Aramathea!
  LAUNCELOT:  Course!
  KNIGHT:  What does it say?
  MAYNARD:  It reads, 'Here may be found the last words of Joseph of
      Aramathea.  He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail
      in the Castle of uuggggggh'.
  ARTHUR:  What?
  MAYNARD: '... the Castle of uuggggggh'.
  BEDEMIR:  What is that?
  MAYNARD:  He must have died while carving it.
  LAUNCELOT:  Oh, come on!
  MAYNARD:  Well, that's what it says.
  ARTHUR:  Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'aaggggh'.
      He'd just say it!
  MAYNARD:  Well, that's what's carved in the rock!
  GALAHAD:  Perhaps he was dictating.
(quoted from Sacred-Texts.com)

(Funny enough, this article was inspired by something programmer-related at Design for Hackers and not Monty Python – but hey. You take inspiration where you can get it!)

–Fitz

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RPG Blog Carnival: Teaching the Game…

August 9, 2010 in Articles by Fitz | 2 comments

In 1982, when I was just starting the 7th grade, I met up with a group of people who were playing Dungeons and Dragons. We played a lot over the next few years. And there were few boundaries.

We took on Tiamat, the Queen of Dragons, and killed her just to take her loot. Yes, so we might have been a bit bloodthirsty and the mighty haul was enough to keep us entertained. Perhaps it’s the bifocals I wear now as an adult, but I look back fondly on those days.

But here’s the thing. Nobody taught us how to play. We just kind of… figured it out as we went along. We were all bright, curious pre-teen and teenagers. Our parents allowed us (in a time when such a thing as D&D was linked to devil worship and suicide) the freedom to explore the boundaries of our imaginations. I don’t think we ever found them, but damn if we didn’t try.

Now I’m much older and have two little girls. They’re cute and bright and love playing games. The night that I dug out my old Dungeon! board game to play with them and my wife, I think I opened up a door to a new world. My style of parenting is a bit more open than many other parents I know. I will sit and watch movies like Shaun of the Dead, Wanted, and Legend with them even though it’s a few years off that they’ll even come close to PG-13. So when we go through and gather treasure and kill monsters in Dungeon!, we’re still pushing barriers and expanding their imaginations…

I have no idea how I’m going to get them playing roleplaying games. But you know what? I’m dying to try. My youngest is starting kindergarten this year and will be reading soon… My eldest is entering 4th grade and reading at a 6th or 7th grade level already – so they’re both going to be quick learners I think.

The thing is… Should I introduce them to roleplaying? Or do I let them learn on their own? Will I pass along my own prejudices for particular rules systems and settings? Will they get stuck in certain ruts as I do in particular roles sometimes? What’s the downside?

The upside of course is… I know what they’re playing. I can answer questions as they come up. And I get to play along with them. Ultimately I’m just a big kid. I know this. My wife knows this. We’ve all accepted it.

So I guess to heck with it… Soon we’ll be having family game nights that won’t involve Chutes & Ladders or Candyland… Maybe the girls will see it in their hearts to dare attack Tiamat’s lair!?

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GMing and Playing Styles… What’s yours?

July 23, 2010 in GMing, PCs by Fitz | 10 comments

Hi there…

Recently I watched the new documentary Dungeon Masters that featured a GM who managed to kill his whole party simply because they were dumb enough to charge into a Sphere of Annihilation… And it got me thinking.

Over my nearly 30 years of playing RPGs, I’ve encountered a variety of GMing styles. Everything from being adversarial to strictly hands-off “see what happens”, from lockstep “don’t go off the path” to “wow did we just roleplay a NPC-NPC conversation for the last 45 minutes?” They all have a place, but I have to wonder if it’s a progression through which most GMs work through in their gaming careers.

At the beginning of the cycle is the newbie GM and at the end is the battle-hardened GM…

When I was young and just starting out in RPGs in junior high, the GMs I played with were mostly focused on the critical path. Whether it was a pre-written module we were going through or something they had thrown together, we focused on getting the job done. It was less about roleplaying and more about roll-playing at that point. Combat was everything on both sides of the table.

In high school and college, we started getting more into playing the characters. Combat was still important, but less so. We became enamored with the collaborative effort within the party. But our GMs started to diverge a bit. Some were interested in the all-important story, pushing combat to something that only happened rarely. Some were focused on trying to kill players, which made the players more apt to simply trying to defeat the GM’s nefarious schemes.

After college, wow there have been even more extremes. In one Vampire game we played, I swear the GMs (it was a boyfriend/girlfriend pair where one typically played and the other GMed) simply wanted to hear their own voices. However, we were really able to focus on character development to the max. And in one game I GMed I lost control of a game simply because two players became more dominant than I was.

Now I haven’t GMed for a while – at least nothing more than the occasional playtest or one-off adventure. But my goal would be to offer a focused sandbox that gave enough wiggle room, but could accommodate combat and roleplaying in equal amounts. I’d probably sway more towards the roleplaying than roll-playing these days, but there are plusses and minuses to both approaches.

The odd thing to me is the advent of RPGs on the computer in the last 25 years. Everything from Bard’s Tale and the Gold Box games from SSI/TSR to World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights… none of them have managed (beyond Planescape: Torment maybe) to capture the roleplaying/storytelling aspects of the tabletop roleplaying experience. As such, when new folks want to try playing tabletop after playing CRPGs, they tend to focus on the roll-playing combat aspects more than anything else and have to work through all the things the rest of us who started with tabletop years ago went through…

Anyway… Where are your GMs in the continuum? Where are your players on that same continuum?

Where is your GM at on the Continuum?

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–Fitz

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DVD Review: The Dungeon Masters

July 19, 2010 in Reviews by Fitz | 1 comment

Hey there…

People who play roleplaying games sometimes get a bad wrap. We get accused of practicing witchcraft or blamed for the suicides of individuals with mental illness, when all we’re doing is getting together to pretend we’re someone else for a while and hang out. “It’s a game, people” seems to be our regular response to this controversy, but that doesn’t stop some folks from trying to stop creativity and free thinking by banning books.

The Dungeon Masters is a new documentary from director Kevin McAllester (You’re Gonna Miss Me) that shines a light on the lives of three gamers – Richard, Scott, and Elizabeth. Though not typical of those people I’ve met in my nearly 30 years gaming, these three present a unique cross section of roleplayers from across the country.

Each of the three subjects of the documentary is involved in roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons. D&D was introduced in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Now on its 4th edition, it has spawned two feature films and hundreds of books. Games such as D&D provide a creative outlet for thousands of imaginative and creative people around the world to escape the realm of the mundane and experience the fantastic for a time.

D&D is traditionally a table-top roleplaying game, meaning that a Dungeon Master (DM) or Game Master (GM) leads a group of players, each with their own Player Characters (PCs) on an adventure in a make-believe world. Games like D&D provide a structured, yet open-ended, set of rules so that everyone plays fair and doesn’t just start changing the rules as they go. PCs have characteristics to define their strengths, weaknesses, and abilities. And the players, in a way similar to actors on stage or screen, describe their characters’ actions and speak for them.

Scott is a gamer seeking a way to provide for his wife and son through his hobby as opposed to his job as an apartment complex manager. But as most of us with the same dream have learned one way or another, that’s tough to do. As a result, he spins the imagination he uses for gaming into a fantasy novel and tries to get it published through an agent.

Richard’s life is a little different. A reservist, he spends most of his time thinking about GMing his weekly roleplaying game sessions. GMs basically control everything that the player characters see in the game – from the rest of the population of a town or city to the monsters and even the weather. And Richard seemed to take a very adversarial approach to his games – going so far as to kill all the PCs in the game when they went into a Sphere of Annihilation and obliterated themselves, which put a strain on his group that bled even into the next group Richard GMed.

And Elizabeth is a different case all together. She, even more than the others, likes to inhabit her characters fully to the point where she dresses up as a Drow (Dark) Elf with face paint, a wig, and a costume. Elizabeth also plays World of Warcraft on the computer and enjoys Live Action Role Playing or LARPing with other individuals who like to wear costumes and wield fake weapons to get further into their own characters.

Where all of these people fall down a bit is with personal relationships outside the game. Scott’s wife seems to be the main breadwinner of the family while he chases his dreams of being a famous author and having a successful cable television series. Richard’s dedication to running his game meant less time to spend with his wife and within his church. And Elizabeth went from relationship to relationship seeking someone who would accept her as she is as a person and not just as a character.

Though I understand that overall there’s a positive message to the documentary that shows that change is possible for these people and they can mend fences to gain stronger relationships, I’m concerned that it portrays all gamers as socially dysfunctional, damaged individuals disconnected from the real world.

In my own personal experience as a gamer, I have spent time with many different types of people. And yes, there have been some odd folks like the guy who was occasionally on acid or the self-professed Wiccan. But for the most part, they’re just normal people. Most of the gamers I’ve met since college have had jobs, relationships, and are as ordinary as anyone you’d meet on the street. Some, like myself, even have families and still find time to game.

So the documentary seems skewed to me towards the more extreme ends of “normal” gaming behavior. Are there gamers who behave the way the people in the documentary do? Yes. But I can without hesitation say that I’ve never met anyone who tried to run their own cable television show.

Quality-wise, the documentary is very well shot. Most is in widescreen, with older video clips worked in here and there. In addition to the film itself are many outtakes that didn’t make their way into the final cut. I can honestly say that 99% of them would have made the subjects of the documentary seem even more unusual or crazy than they already do.

If you’re a gamer, I would strongly suggest you check out The Dungeon Masters to see how our hobby is being viewed in this case. The documentary provides an unflinching glimpse into the realities of these three lives and how they try to balance their hobbies and real life.

If you’re not a gamer, but know someone who is – I would encourage you to watch this documentary with them so they may provide a different perspective on gaming in their own lives. Use The Dungeon Masters as a starting point for a conversation about roleplaying – not the end.

But either way, I’d encourage you to check out The Dungeon Masters when it’s released on DVD August 3, 2010. For more details, check out the info page at Antidote Films here.

This article first appeared at BlogCritics.org here.

–Fitz

p.s. If you want to pick up this DVD when it’s released, check it out below:

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RPG Review: The Kobold Guide to Game Design – Volume III: Tools & Techniques by Wolfgang Baur, Monte Cook, Ed Greenwood, Rob Heinsoo, and Colin McComb

July 5, 2010 in Resources, Reviews by Fitz | 1 comment

kobold_guide_3_cover

Hi there!

The kobolds are back with another amazing collection of twelve thought-provoking and informative essays from some of the best designers and writers creating roleplaying game material today. The essays cover everything from the simple question of “What is Design?” and work through contentious topics of creativity, craft, and how to recover when things don’t go well. Anyone who’s tried to write professionally understands the power of the blank page, rejection, and the unforgiving and untapped potential of any great idea you can’t quite find the words to express, but it’s a rare treat to get advice from some of the stars of the roleplaying game industry to address those problems. It’s nice to know the kobolds care.

As someone who aspires to be a game designer and writer, I find that rules are hard for me and settings are relatively easy. So as I perused the pages of the guide, I found myself trolling for tips and tricks to simplify my rules process and make finishing projects more of a reality than a wish. With that in mind, I will avoid talking about each essay in depth and instead focus on a couple that I found particularly helpful.

Wolfgang Baur has worked on some of my favorite gaming projects over the years, from the original Planescape line at TSR to adventures for Alternity, Call of Cthulhu, Pathfinder, and a whole lot of D&D. He’s edited the Kobold Quarterly, Dragon, and Dungeon magazines and is the publisher and founder of Open Design – a collaborative game design company. Oh, and in his spare time he publishes the Kobold Guide to Game Design series.

Baur’s essay “What is Design?” tries to define a term that doesn’t lend itself well to a definition unless you have context on your side. In this context, he defines it as “its own discipline, but it always borrows and builds on other modes of creative work.” What does that mean in terms of roleplaying games (RPGs)? It means there has to be a balance between rules and setting. When they are out of balance, you can end up with a less than fun experience for your gamemaster (GM) and his or her players, which may cost you fans or customers. Rules must be focused on the setting and the setting must keep the rules in mind at all times. It’s a balance I know I’ve not yet achieved in my own games.

The other essays build on Baur’s beginning, covering the similarities between designing RPGs for the computer and for the tabletop; the basics of combat systems; the power of a good design, hook and dastardly plot; and the fun and heartbreak inherent in collaboration and any creative enterprise. Each essay is lovingly crafted by a master in RPGs today who knows what they’re talking about.

The other essay that really got my attention was “Basic Combat Systems for Tabletop Games” by Colin McComb. As I said earlier, system design is my Achilles’ heel. McComb manages to explain, in a Q&A-type of format, what you need to know about attack systems, who attacks and when, how things like area of effect attacks affect a group of targets, how to measure the consequences of combat through permanent or temporary damage, and so on. He then lays out a sample system using his own rules (minus stringent playtesting) to show how the questions can help you come up with a working system. The practical aspect of the article provides a ton of hints and help to avoid the common problems that plague beginning system designers (like myself).

Colin McComb was involved in 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, but helped create one of my favorite settings for that edition – Planescape – and even helped with two of my favorite computer games of all time – Planescape: Torment and Fallout 2.

Rob Heinsoo has been involved with the 4th Edition of D&D and seems to have written half the sourcebooks that have been published so far. He’s the force behind the D&D Miniatures game and its first nine expansion sets. And if that’s not enough, he’s worked at Daedalus Entertainment, Chaosium, and A-Sharp in the 1990s.

Ed Greenwood is simply a legend in the gaming industry. Not only is he the author behind the Elminster Series, including Elminster: The Making of a Mage and Elminster’s Daughter, but he’s written hundreds of articles about gaming and continues to GM his own campaign. Where does he find the time when he’s typically writing three novels at a time?

And Monte Cook… What can I say about Monte? When 3rd Edition D&D and the d20 system came out, he was one of the three principle designers behind the efforts. And since then, with his own design studio Malhavoc Press, he’s managed to create several award-winning products such as Monte Cook’s Arcana Evolved, Ptolus, and the Books of Eldrich Might. In my opinion, he has one of the most unique voices among the game designers of today.

If you’re a GM, a game designer, or a RPG player interested in getting into the design side of how to create your own games – you can’t find a better introduction than The Kobold Guide to Game Design – Volume III: Tools & Techniques. These 96 pages will provide infinite food for thought and hopefully save you some pain and suffering along the way. I certainly have a lot to think about now…

As a final note, I think that kobold on the inside cover is up to something… don’t you?

Article first published as here on Blogcritics.org.

–Fitz

p.s. Be sure to pick up all the Kobold Guides at RPGNow:

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Typography or “How a font can redefine an idea…”

July 1, 2010 in Inspiration, Resources by Fitz | 5 comments

The elder Futhark, oldest Germanic writing system.
Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever noticed that advertising people are totally in love with fonts to express their messages? Have you ever wondered why? Ok, me either. I typically tune out commercials and skim past ads in magazines and on web pages… But I recently saw a couple of posts about typography that made me do some thinking…

Where do fonts come in handy in gaming? It’s a simple thing in most modern word processors or drawing packages to select one of the typically hundreds of installed fonts on a system. And if you’re like me, you’ve probably collected even more over the years. Then again, maybe not – I’m kind of weird.

Just off the top of my head, I came up with a few ideas for where to use fonts:

  • Though developing entire languages is often impractical, sometimes a font can be a cheap substitute… and if you’re consistent, you can use the same font for any pages/notes/letters your PCs find in a particular language so they KNOW – “oh! this is in Draconic and I don’t read it, so I’ll have to give it to Bob, our scholar…”
  • Wingdings is a simple enough way to encode a message so it takes some enterprising player a while to decrypt a particular encryption, but not so difficult that it becomes tedious. A little homework for your players is sometimes a good thing.
  • I’ve seen runes (Viking, Gothic, Celtic, hieroglyphs, cuneiform, etc.) that can make VERY cool ancient scripts if you’re in a hurry.
  • And if you combine the font/language idea with the runic idea, you can end up with a Rosetta Stone of your own that allows a scribe among the party to know how to translate from a particular long dead language of runes to one of the languages they know and then translate from that to common…

Really the ideas are endless. And of course fonts make printed documents look better too. [grin]

So back to those web articles that prompted this… they’re on the Smashing Magazine website in a couple of parts – “The Beauty of Typography: Writing Systems and Calligraphy of the World” and “The Beauty of Typography: Writing Systems and Calligraphy, Part 2“. Though Smashing Magazine deals with the art and technique of website design, these two articles provide amazing insight into the art behind a particular typography system that transcends the web.

If you’re interested in fonts, typography, or want to tackle the daunting task of creating your own writing system for a game – I’d encourage you to take a look at those two articles for inspiration. They have amazing details on Asian, European, Hebrew, and other forms of writing. Definitely worth taking a look anyway.

How do YOU use fonts or typography in your games? Leave a comment and share your ideas!

–Fitz

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Is it time to ask your character some questions?

June 29, 2010 in Inspiration by Fitz | No comments

Yes, I’m probably going out on a limb here by asking you to talk to a fictional character – which can be further construed as asking you to talk to yourself. (Though recent articles say that talking to yourself isn’t necessarily a bad thing – see here.)

Characters are rarely just numbers and words on a page. There’s more to them than that more often than not.

So why not ask your character, on paper or out loud, a bit about themselves? Consider it an interview. I’ve done it for characters in my pale attempts at writing fiction (had a long talk with a serial killer once that unnerved me a bit). But what do you ask?

There’s the usual stuff psychobabble stuff like:

  • What was your mother like?
  • Where did you grow up?
  • Who were your friends? Your enemies?
  • How was your relationship with your father?
  • When did you realize you wanted more for yourself than an average life? (Most characters lead extraordinary lives.)
  • Why are you here?

But how about some not so obvious questions… A recent article by Alicia Rasley at WritersDigest.com brought up 9 interesting questions to ask… Here’s a few from that article…

  • When you walk into a party, what do you notice first? The mood? The people? The decorations? The things that need to be fixed? The background music? The food on the buffet table? Whether or not you fit in?
  • Do you usually notice problems around you? What is your response? Do you write an angry letter to the editor? Shrug and move on? Analyze what’s wrong and how to fix it? Take it as evidence that the world is falling apart? What about problems within yourself?
  • Are you more interested in the past, the future or living in the now?Are you one to keep holiday traditions? If you had to move tomorrow, how long would it take you to make new friends?
  • How do you decide if you can trust someone? By experience with this person? First impressions? Intuition? Do you test the person somehow? Or are you just generally disposed to trust or not to trust?
  • Are you a deliberate, careful speaker, or do you talk without thinking first? Do you use slang, or do you use diction your old English teacher would approve?

I think these are interesting questions to ponder on a quiet evening or afternoon. Any extra tidbits you learn about your character makes it more interesting to play in my book. It’s those little things that sometimes make a huge difference.

Where does all this lead? Hard to say. You might write up a small biography for your character that you can pass along to your GM. You might simply compile a list of adjectives to remind yourself about your character’s personality and quirks. This could even be useful for a GM trying to further define the party’s arch nemesis or discover the motivations behind a local lord who thinks the PCs should be tossed out of town on their rumps…

What do you think? Have you spoken with your characters recently?

–Fitz

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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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