This month’s RPG Carnival is about RPG conventions. GMing at cons is a fine art. It’s high pressure chaos that includes a lot more table and environment management than your typical home game. Add in a group of total strangers as players with unknown skills and game knowledge, and you have a recipe for an [...]
In a previous blog, I discussed converting prices from “…and a 10-Foot Pole” from I.C.E. and mentioned a number of campaign-related issues and background elements from “Fumanor: The Last Deity” that complicated the discussion, which I promised to tell everyone about at another time. Since it’s a good example of how to take a rules [...]
The first type of hazard we talked about was Terrain. Another variety of combat hazard is environmental. What are the physical surroundings like? Are there any interesting global effects in place?
My definition of environmental hazard is one that affects everyone. If a hazard is limited to just certain areas of the battlemap, then it is [...]
I recently had the need to design a Drow Outpost for my Shards Of Divinity campaign, and in the process, I made a few mental notes concerning how I go about designing cities, and population centres in general, that I thought I would share with our readers.
Design First, Draw Later
I don’t put pencil to paper [...]
There are many kinds of combat hazards, such as giant bubbles that trap combatants who bump into them, or a narrow band of strong wind that pushes combatants around. GMs often do not have enough variety in their hazard selections. Use these categories to inspire and keep combats fresh.
Terrain hazards
A classic combat hazard that hearkens [...]
The first helping hand you can offer your poor, underrated and under-appreciated combat hazards is to give them a great name. A name with gusto, panache, or spirit gives hazards a surge of vitality and interest. A great name inspires.
Instead of calling the mud in the middle “difficult terrain”, call it Grom’s Brown Demise. Rename [...]
Throw hazards into your combats to make fights more interesting, regardless of game systm or genre. Dungeons and Dragons, for example, has always promoted dungeon masters using traps and difficult terrain, though in the latest edition there seems to be more urgency for doing this.
To start this series off, I’d like to provide a working [...]
It doesn’t take much more than a quick flip through the pages of “…And A 10-foot Pole” to realise that it’s an extensively-researched volume. Aside from breaking history into twelve periods covering everything from the stone age (prior to 9000 BC) to the information age (1980+), it divides commodities into standardised categories and gives prices [...]
Many monsters come with treasure in D&D. Taken at face value, these can quickly overwhelm a campaign. I thought I would run through a few measures that the GM can use to control how much hard currency the party gets their hands on.
First they have to find it
Most treasure will be found in a creature’s [...]
Part 1 of this blog post listed nine general supplements. Parts 2, 3, and 4 added three planar supplements, four supplements about magic, and four supplements about game settings and gaming environments.
That makes a full twenty-count by my tally. This fifth part is all about honourable mentions: supplements that didn’t make the final list, but [...]
