Dice Deliberations

  My Favorite Flavor: Exploration I love exploration games, where there is a safe place you can start from, but where the interesting, valuable, dangerous and different are available for the experiencing, if you go just a little farther.  In video games, I'm a huge fan of No Man's Sky, Subnautica, Astroneer, Don't Starve and now Valheim. Some of these involve looking for resources; some involve looking for secrets. The common thread with these and others like them is that the more you explore, the more interesting the game becomes. In thinking about the flavor of my own tabletop role playing games, today, I realized that exploration is one of my favorite themes to run, as well. I love running sandbox style games, where the players choose what they do, but I also love the idea of mysteries in a world. This is what draws me to sandbox gaming in D&D, Numenera, The Strange and Invisible Sun, just to name a few. In each of these, the only way to really start getting somethin...

  About the Eleven Over a thousand years ago, in the north-central areas of Trinity, there were the Eleven. They were liches born from an alliance of despair, in the certain knowledge that the ultimate power they were owed was lost to them forever. The First of these, known today only as "One" is said to have been the inventor of modern magic while he still lived as a person. In those early days, he flipped the arcane paradigm from one where magic spells began by defining constraints and characteristics and only then allowed magic to flow into those constraints, to one where the magic flowed freely, limited and defined as it flowed. Less controlled, this new method was much faster, and was equally or more effective in most circumstances than the older model. Over time, as others learned and copied his techniques, it became the favored approach of casters everywhere. Harnessing the power of this new magic, One was able to see his fate and those of the nine others who forme...

  Despite today's header art, I will not be writing about swords. Instead, I'm going to be talking about a very special hammer, and how it evolved through 17 levels over 7 real years of play. About the Wielder In my first Trinity campaign, one of the characters was a dwarf and also a cleric of the Fire God, Dal, in the Red House. That character, Froin, was just a basic cleric at the time and as far as I know, he chose Dal on a whim. Still, we made a few early assumptions about the character.  The first is that earlier in his life, he had seen or worked at the Great Forge, which is a significant event for dwarves. The Great Forges are literally world-defining, so having an association with one not only grounds the dwarf as being part of something greater in the world, but also gives them a strong sense of personal identity. The specific locations of these Forges (of which there are six) is a closely guarded secret, so one of his early characteristics is that he had zero toleran...

Image by Dmitry Burmak from  Frostgrave: Thaw of the Lich Lord  by Joseph A.  McCullough © 2015 Osprey Games  www.ospreypublishing.com My Favorite Character - a Tactician My favorite character of all time was definitely Tal, my D&D 3.5 Beguiler. For those who don't know, a beguiler is a magic using character who really only casts spells from the Illusion and Enchantment schools. By the time we ended the campaign, at 14th level, he was a polyglot with absurd levels of social skills, and magical abilities that were truly terrifying. All those things were fun, certainly. But the reason I truly loved him was that I learned what it meant to be a "Controller" in a D&D game. One of the things D&D 4e introduced was the idea of character roles, with each class or subclass mapping to a given role: Leaders, Defenders, Strikers and Controllers. And I had played a controller in EverQuest for a while, and really enjoyed the concept of not doing damage, but rather contr...

Real Maps I love maps: real, historical and fantasy maps of all kinds and scales. Maps are a graphical language that describe a space, and not only tells the viewer what's there, but also can't help but impart the perspective of the person who created it. Many nautical maps were coastline images, with only the most important coastal landmarks displayed: cities, critical resources, ports and such. In fact, such maps were often much more interested in water depths, current directions, reef boundaries and common shipping paths than what was located as little as one mile past the shoreline. Similarly, there is an excellent 1800's map of Africa that we have, which shows what the Nile River, must do. Explorers know it's here, and they know there are things that would affect it...so it must come from *there*. (It doesn't come from there, but they didn't know that, because finding the source was too difficult at the time.) In additions, as a world builder and gamemaster...

Scenarios As the gamemaster, it's my job to come up with "scenarios" for the party: encounters, events, or even brief storylines that last one or a few game sessions. For most of my time running games, I have tended to go into detail in my notes about the planned adventure of the day. I fully support player's having choices of what to do, but I liked to have things planned out, so that I had the information necessary to keep things moving. And truly, while full player agency means that the characters  could ignore what I set out, the "collaborative storytelling" model of gaming says that they normally got around to following the planned hooks, eventually. But over the last few years, as my time for prep has shrunk, and my interest in more sandbox-oriented gaming has grown, I've changed that model significantly. Now when I know that characters are likely to end up somewhere, I create several opportunities at that site, for the evening's scenario--wit...

  This is a longer format review of an innovative RPG adventure product, Help Wanted , from I Write Adventures .  First off, the understated description on the cover really says it all: Unobtrusive Adventure Template Creative GM's Taking those one at at time:  "Unobtrusive" means that the scenario does not attempt to tie you to a specific setting or even RPG system, nor does it attempt to impose anything on your world other than what you choose to include. To me, this makes it an incredibly innovative product. I've seen a lot of "can use it anywhere" and "system independent" products, but they usually require work to make them fit. That brings me to the second word "Adventure Template" which is exactly what it is. It presents a basic scenario and a couple of maps, but leaves it to you, as the GM, to provide the details for what's going on, what the encounter means in the greater scope of things, how difficult it is, etc. But it does s...