Ravenous Role Playing

In the past few weeks, I’ve received or bought:

• The Dresden Files RPG that I pre-ordered months ago.
• Mutants and Masterminds and a supplement with a bunch of pregenerated characters.
• Runequest from Mongoose Games
• A variety of items from Free RPG Day.

Now to find the time to go through all of this and start writing some reviews. I’m still not sure what order I’ll be hitting them or when I’ll have a chance to get through all of this new material. I can’t wait to do it, though!

I just heard that Mike Cook pulled up a chair to the great D&D table in the sky on June 7th. He was an executive and a driving force at TSR during the 80s. He will be sorely missed.

More information can be found here, here and here.

Be at peace, Mike. You’ll be missed here on the prime material plane.

I’m going to be out of touch and away from the Interwebs for a few days. I’ll do the Friday Five on Sunday, and since I’m making you wait for it (yes, all three of you reading this) I’ll post at least seven links on Sunday… maybe more.

The Friday Five for this week is a day late. I had a large mid-term paper come due, and all of my writing time went into that. Enough with the excuses…. It’s time for the Friday Five!

Learning To Play New Games

I love learning new system. They expand my horizons and help me play the games that I always seem to fall back to. However, picking up a new game with a foreign system is always a daunting task. The folks over at The Spirits of Eden have some great advice on how to learn a new system. I’m definitely going to apply their techniques on the next new system I pick up.

Retcon Rightly

Going back and changing past events is usually the arena of authors rewriting and revising their novels and short stories. However, it can be done in a game, but it has to be done the right way. Go see what Johnn has to say on the matter.

How To Be An Effective Dungeon Master

Ahh… The wonderful words of the late, great Gygax. NewbieDM stumbled across some of his writings, and did us all the favor of sharing them. I would highly recommend seeing what Gygax thought of GMing back in the day. Much of what he has to say still holds true today.

You Don’t Have The Industry Without The Hobby

The industry of RPGs started out as a hobby and bloomed from there. The hobby of gaming is still the solid foundation of the industry. RPG Blog II has some great insight and wonderful words on the topic. I wholeheartedly agree with everything said there, and instead of repeating it all in my own words, I’ll just let you click the link and follow things up.

World Building 101: This One’s For the Players

It is true that a vast majority of the world building that has to be done is done by the GM. This is an immutable fact. However, the players outnumber the GMs (most of the time) and they have some level of responsibility in helping build the world. This can come in the form of well written character backgrounds, assisting the GM in building the world and making things up on the fly (with the GMs permission.) Some of the best games I have run in the past had a high level of player involvement.

I just came across this blog post at Gnome Stew, and it contained this link to DriveThruRPG. If you donate $20 to Doctors Without Borders (a great charity!) through DriveThruRPG, they’ll give you $1,400 worth of PDFs!!!

I don’t think I have to tell you how great a deal this is for everyone involved. Many thanks to DriveThruRPG for their kind donations of PDFs and for arranging something that I can get behind.

I found this idea at Keep on the Gaming Lands and he got the idea from Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Like the Flame Princess says, let’s make this viral.

Come up with an evil GM idea that will be sure to cause your players to revolt!

This is not my idea, but the evilest thing I’ve seen done is to make all of the magical items in a dragon’s treasure horde cursed. The players will get a few cursed items and think the worst is over only to find out that more pain is to come. They’ve earned tons of gold and/or magic only to find out that they’ve grown weaker in their conquest, not stronger.

This has been a great week for RPG posts in general. I usually struggle to get five candidates for the Friday Five each week. However, this week I have ten to choose from that I bookmarked throughout the week. I’m running short on time today, so my summaries will be brief. As always, follow the links for more details.

NewbieDM Tutorial: The Battlemap Part III

As you know, I love maps, and this is the third part of NewbieDM’s ongoing tutorial about making some awesome looking maps. I have my own Fractal Terrains/Campaign Cartographer tutorial in the works. I have tons of screen shots, but have yet to put together the text that goes with them. While you’re waiting for me to get my act together, check out the third part.

The great escape: designing scenarios for imprisoned characters

This post inspired this week’s Adventure Hook, so go see what go in the crook of my mind and gave me some inspiration.

World Building 101: Effective Campaign Briefs

I love home-brewed worlds. I like playing in them, and I especially love running them. I’ve added this post to my permanent list of bookmarks for the next time I have to run someone through my own world setting.

Something silly

Chgowiz calls this silly, but I think it’s a great idea. His post is brief and links to the Diablo item name generator. I love these kinds of things because they can inspire so much creative thought just based off the name of the item.

The Five Maxims of the Dungeon Master

Follow these five rules of game mastering and you’ll be the better for it. So will your gaming group. Good stuff here.

We were playing AD&D (1st edition) about two years ago and Bill was running the game. We had progressed to somewhere around 4th or 5th level and were getting along quite well. We had built a great party rapport and we all liked our characters. Things were finally starting to move along quickly and we were getting into the swing of things…. until….

Bill drew out a long, straight, five-foot-wide passage on the battle board and asked for a marching order. We did our best to put the biggest fighter in the front, followed by the cleric, followed by the other spell casters with our thief in the rear to guard that direction. Bill then pulled out a few miniatures and placed them about 50 feet down the hallway in front of us. We knew something was up. Bill always uses chits for monsters unless they are special, and then he pulls out the miniatures. In this case, there were no chits on the board. We knew we had run into another adventuring group.

That either means parley and trading, or bloody war. We were prepared for either eventuality, and then we heard the chanting. Our wizard recognized the spell as lightning bolt, and we were trapped in a straight line! Bill called for an initiative roll, and we ended up losing poorly. The other group got to go first. Their wizard unleashed his lightning bolt and Bill required all of us to make our saves… We collectively rolled: 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2.

Yep. Nothing higher than a 2. No saves for us! With the rattle of his dice, Bill rambled off the damage and asked who was still standing. The math was easy for us. No one had anywhere near the maximum HP of the damage done by the spell. We were toast. Literally. The brief campaign ended with a TPK (total party kill.)

Now, you may be thinking that Bill is a hard-ass for killing us off that way. I’ll always defend Bill because he showed us the stats on the group after we were all dead. We should have been able to take them had the dice rolls not gone the way they did, and Bill does not fudge dice rolls. In the end, we rolled about as poorly as we possibly could have, and he rolled about as well as his dice had ever allowed. The combination of the two strokes of luck brought doom to our party.

We still laugh and cut it up when someone mentions the numbers “1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2″ because we all know what they are talking about.

Good times, indeed….

Creating a new and inventive artifact each week takes me too much time, and I feel like the items are below my normal creative standards. I had not done any D&D 4e artifacts when I came up with the idea, and I didn’t realize how formulaic they were. It’s just not exciting for me to do them. I remember my days of playing AD&D 2e in which artifacts were much more dynamic and exciting… or maybe I just remember it that way. Since my heart is not into doing artifacts, I’ll find something a little different to do to fill the dead air.

However, I will continue to do the adventure hooks on Thursdays as those are quite fun to do and I feel the gaming populace at large can get something out of them.

I missed the Artiface Tuesday post for this week. Again! I’m sorry to have done this, but life has caught up to me now that school has started up. I was up until almost midnight last night doing homework instead of creating artifacts or prepping for the upcoming Tacticon, which is just two days away. I’ve done precious little prep work for the con and I’m running four sessions while there! Oi! I might even miss the Adventure Hook Thursday tomorrow because I’ll be so busy with the prep work. Ugh. I’ll see what I can pull out of the hat for tomorrow, though.

Best wishes, and I hope to be back on a regular posting schedule again next week.