Archive for the ‘Tools & Techniques’ Category

“This Means War!”: Making huge armies practical (Part 2 of 6)

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series This Means WAR!

Part 1 began discussing the fundamental concepts needed to simulate a unit of 100 soldiers, dealing with the number of hits that they could inflict in a round of battle, and the amount of damage that they could inflict. Part 2 picks up right where we left off… Part 2: Fundamental Concepts (continued) Ranged Attacks […]

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Building The Perfect Beast: A D&D 3.5 online monster generator

Recently, Campaign Mastery recieved a comment to one of our blogs informing us of an online monster/NPC generator available at Dingle Games. While the comment was not approved as it was unrelated to the post in question, we felt the product itself was worth a look: http://www.dinglesgames.com/tools/MonsterGenerator/dnd35/

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Ultimate Toolbox of Ideas

When Toolbox for d20 by AEG came out I scooped it up right away and have found it very useful over the years. Now, in 2009, its big daddy has arrived on the Prime Material Plane and it’s awesome. While some might scoff at a book of tables, I see the Ultimate Toolbox, like its […]

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The Flói Af Loft & Ryk Bolti (conclusion)

This entry is part 3 of 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 of 3 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 […]

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The Flói Af Loft & The Ryk Bolti

This entry is part 1 of 3 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 […]

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

This entry is part 4 of 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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7 Gamefull Uses for Campaign Coins

I received a box of Campaign Coins for review and they are fun, high quality game props. They must be great because the box packaging has no less than six exclamation marks in the text. :) Each box contains 121 detailed coins depicting four metal types in 1, 10, 100, and 1000 denominations and 1 […]

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Distilled Cultural Essence – Part 3 of 4: Expressing a different society, Section 2

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Distilled Cultural Essence

This is the third part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second 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 the first two, Expression […]

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Distilled Cultural Essence – Part 2 of 4: Expressing a different society, Section 1

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Distilled Cultural Essence

This is the second part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; this part and the next (which were originally intended to be the whole article) gives some techniques for conveying the uniqueness of the resulting culture to the players, selling them on its credibility, […]

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Distilled Cultural Essence – Part 1 of 4: Creating a different society

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Distilled Cultural Essence

This post is being simultaneously posted here and as the feature article in Roleplaying Tips issue #433. Subscribe to the e-zine here if you haven’t already, and check out some of the GMing Articles (including three by yours truly: ‘Dragon Characters For Eberron’, ‘Putting The Fear Back Into Disease’, and ‘On Feats’) while you’re there. […]

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FreeMind Tips for Game Masters

I never understood mindmapping until I read one of Tony Buzan’s books, saw numerous examples, and clued-in. For game planning and tracking, mindmapping is now one of my essential tools. My mindmapping tool of choice is FreeMind, a free application you can download for Windows, Mac, and Unix. It’s a natural fit for documenting relationships. […]

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