Posts Tagged ‘Cultures-&-Societies’

How to Design a Cool Holiday for Your Game – 3 Templates

With a big holiday imminent, today’s post is themed on how to create adventure-filled holidays for your campaigns. It’s one thing to have a date picked in your game world calendar, and another to have a holiday become a living, interactive game element that helps you do some of the legwork for session planning and [...]

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An Unneccessary Evil? – Focussing On Alignment, Part 3 of 5

This entry is part 3 in the series Focussing On Alignment

In part one of this 5-part examination, we presented a guest article by Garry Stahl, “The Conundrum Of Alignment”. In Part two, “A Neccessary Evil?”, I discussed the justification for alignment being part of the rules, looked at the historical precedent for oversimplified moral arguements, and concluded that the real problem with alignment was misuse [...]

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Ask The GMs: Going Beyond The Rules

How do you extrapolate from existing rules to cover new situations?

Recently, Campaign Mastery was asked,
If a giant has rapid shot can he throw 2 rocks in a full round action? (d&d 3.5)
This sparked some debate over whether Campaign Mastery should answer rules questions of this sort; we aim to deal with big-picture and comprehensive situations [...]

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How Much Is That Warhorse In The Window? – Pricing Of Goods in D&D

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 [...]

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The Gold Standard: Mike’s Top Twenty 3.x Supplements (part 1)

This entry is part 1 in the series The Gold Standard

In the comments to a recent blogpost (”The More Things Change: An essay on the future of RPGs”) that I wrote, Johnn suggested that he’d like to see a list of my top twenty D&D supplements. It wasn’t easy, but I finally narrowed the choice down to a mere 20 choices – with an additional [...]

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Lore Enforcement: The Legal System in an RPG

Let’s talk for a minute about the law. Most legal systems are based on two things: the protection of certain general principles that are considered fundamental truths by the society in question, and a long history of precedents matching punishments with violations.
Criminal law, for the most part, is fairly straightforward. Not much has changed in [...]

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The Flói Af Loft & Ryk Bolti (conclusion)

This entry is part 3 in the series The Flói Af Loft & The Ryk Bolti

Within The Flói Af Loft
Finally, the characters have reached the floor of the great chasm, and started looking around. It is even colder than expected, no more than 10°C, and there is perpetual dust and ash in the air. The sand dunes underfoot are treacherous; seemingly-solid surfaces offer no more support than smoke. As [...]

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The Flói Af Loft & Ryk Bolti (continued)

This entry is part 2 in the series The Flói Af Loft & The Ryk Bolti

Fólk Afsteinn (The People Of Stone)
These are a race of people capable of living in this environment not through physical adaption so much as through intelligent manipulation of their environment. I chose a blending of Dwarf and Halfling and called them Dwarvlings, because I wanted them to make a reasonable basis for PCs, but always [...]

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The Flói Af Loft & The Ryk Bolti

This entry is part 1 in the series The Flói Af Loft & The Ryk Bolti

The following is based on material prepared for My ‘Seeds Of Empire’ campaign in mid-2006. It has been rewritten to form a standalone setting for an encounter with an original creature to be found there (amongst others), as part of the February blog carnival. A day or so late, but better late than never…
It also [...]

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Distilled Cultural Essence – Part 4 of 4: Expressing a different society, Section 3

This entry is part 4 in the series Distilled Cultural Essence

This is the final part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second and third parts identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined these [...]

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