Tag: setting element

February 2, 2007

Culture-making checklist

I’m in the middle of a project that involves sketching out various cultures for use in D&D campaigns. I’ll provide more details on this as the project progresses, but I thought it might be worthwhile to go through a bit of the process here. The following list was drafted as a set of guidelines. It is not complete, but it...

January 25, 2007

Brainwriting a Campaign

Today I was in a training all morning. One of the things we covered were some team-based brainstorming techniques. I’d been familiar with the idea of brainwriting before, but this morning I thought of using it for group campaign design. Here’s the basic (slightly edited for my purpose) idea. You begin with a grid/table (a spreadsheet works). Across the top...

January 9, 2007

Goblin Eugenics

Last night I was helping Angela brainstorm about cultural variations for her D&D campaign world. She largely wants to get away from cliches. Here are some highlights: Centaurs: Her criteria: They should be vegetarians, somewhat nomadic, and not particularly nice. My input: Base them loosely on the Mongols. They mostly graze on grasses, but need a certain percentage of more...

January 4, 2007

Putting things down on paper… or in words…

Some time ago, I wrote about the possible use of inconstant geography in gaming. I don’t want to rehash that here, but it has been rumbling around in my head since then, and I recently added a new twist that I think solves some of the issues in the right sort of setting. Imagine a world where the path between...

June 12, 2006

Inspiration and ramblings

Over the weekend, I read The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams. As a good changeling story, it is immediately going on the Neitherworld inspiration list. I’ve read a good chunk of the stull Williams has written at this point, and I’d generally recommend it as inspirational reading for gaming. Much of the action in The War of the...

February 21, 2006

Use the cool

No, I am not talking about Fonzie again. I’ve been thinking about some of the things that I find frustrating in RPGs, and I’ve noticed some patterns. In D&D, there are a lot of cool options – feats, prestige classes, races, spells, and things like that – but in any given game, you are likely to only use a small...

January 24, 2006

The Neitherworld (a wuxia urban fantasy?)

In case you wanted more details concerning the premise of Neitherworld: Ages ago, magic was torn from the Earth. Those responsible shaped their own world, a world whose very bedrock was created from the stuff of dreams, a paradise in which they could live out their every fantasy for eternity. All that it cost them was Earth’s dreams, hopes, and...

January 13, 2006

The beginnings of a campaign setting idea

I was brainstorming the other day about twists on D&D-style fantasy, and the following is what resulted. I will almost certainly never use it, so it becomes a gift unto the world… In the stories you heard as a child (the ones that began with the words, “A long time ago…”), there were other lands. That was an Age ago....