Comments on: Revealing the Exotic

By: campaign creation

campaign creation — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:36:35 +0000

[...] return your investment but is perfectly rounded and can be scaled is a hard thing to do. We provideRevealing the Exotic | Campaign MasteryCharacters in my Riddleport campaign will be constructed just from the Pathfinder Core Rules and two [...]

By: Ravenous Role Playing » Blog Archive » Friday Five: 2009-12-18

Ravenous Role Playing » Blog Archive » Friday Five: 2009-12-18 — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:24:32 +0000

[...] Revealing the Exotic What strange and exciting items in your game? Then make them rare and hard to get. It will make the players want them that much more. Go see what Johnn has to say on the matter. [...]

By: Johnn

Johnn — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:30:12 +0000

Good stuff Mike. Love the reincarnation story.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Just how “standard” is “standard equipment”? Most groups (gangs, whatever) like some means of ready identification and personal decoration (look at all the unit insignia in the military, for example). With the same basic equipment available to all, I can see it becoming popular to customise it in some fashion, from the simple (adding ribbons and insignia and such) to the extreme (custom-designed filligree, frilly hats, tassells, and so forth). So you could play up the uniformity of the equipment by emphasising the points of distinctiveness.

The resulting impression could be reinforced by using different descriptive terminology with referance to the combat manouvers of those who are differently armed, depending on your knowledge of such things and available time (hah!) for research – more swings than stabs, perhaps a wider, more expressive swinging style, perhaps different weapons balances to accommodate the slightly different ways in which each group uses the same basic equipment. None of which make any difference at all in terms of game mechanics, but all the difference in the world in visual terms.

The PCs in one of my past campaigns once visited a village where everyone wore the skull of some creature they had slain as a headpiece. In an attempt to blend in, the PCs went out and killed some handy “giant” rats – all except the mage, who was stuck wearing the skull of a vulture because there weren’t enough rats going around. They never did figure out exactly why everyone in the village could immediatly pick them out of a crowd – or kept laughing at them behind their backs. You see, it was a village of shamanistic buddhist types, and the skulls were supposed to represent the creature they wanted to be reincarnated as…

Minor differences become big differences when they are the only differences!

By: Johnn

Johnn — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 02:45:55 +0000

Robert, that’s a super idea. Golarion has numerous cultures, now with even better longswords. :)

By: Tweets that mention Revealing the Exotic | Campaign Mastery -- Topsy.com

Tweets that mention Revealing the Exotic | Campaign Mastery -- Topsy.com — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:27:14 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by JohnnFour, David Emmons. David Emmons said: RT @JohnnFour: Campaign Mastery – Revealing the Exotic http://bit.ly/5YQvbi #rpg @myEn [...]

By: Robert

Robert — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:38:47 +0000

Love this article, and I must say the few games I have played in where the DM enforced something like this were definitely much more memorable than the rest.

You could take it further like one of my previous DM’s did, and enforce the differences (design and such) between common equipment found in Riddleport and common equipment found elsewhere in the world. Under that DM we soon learned that “going incognito” in a hostile nation does NOT include wearing/wielding the equipment from our home nation. Yeah it was low level and we had no magic items, but country A’s longswords will be different from country B’s, and it is even more obvious when it comes to armor, so if countries A and B are at war and a party is in country A with a full set of equipment obviously from country B, they will likely receive a warm welcome in the form of a fireball to the face.

So if one of your players decides to be from a place that most/all of Riddleport has a hostile attitude towards, even their basic equipment can give them away and lead to interesting encounters.