Ravenous Role Playing

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.

I’ve been beaten up, rode hard and put away wet this week by a series of illnesses. This lead me to miss Tuesday’s artifact posting. I’d love to post it now, but my energy levels are too low to make up for lost time. I’ll leave that as a missed opportunity of the past and move on. I’ll be posting an adventure hook later in the day.

I apologize to the few readers that I’ve collected so far. Things will be better in the upcoming weeks.

This is a long and rambling post, but it goes to the core of what makes me a gamer…

When I was seven years old, I saw the cover of Sword of Shannara peeking out at me from a pile of books at a garage sale. Being seven years old, I had I beg my grandmother for the quarter it would take to buy the book. Little did she know what road she would set me on when she tossed me that shiny little coin from her purse. Why did I want this book so badly? Two words: glowing sword. I knew that swords were used to kill people and fight mighty battles. I had seen it plenty of times on the television and in a few movies. I knew that Luke Skywalker

Sword of Shannara Cover

wielded a light saber, which is pretty much a sci-fi sword. Swords were cool to me as a seven year old. Okay. I’ll admit. Swords are still pretty cool to me several decades later. Nothing much there has changed. Now, the sword I saw on the cover of Terry Brook’s wonderful book glowed with power. This made it special. This made it unique in my eyes. If a normal sword could be used to battle evil and slay minions, then a glowing sword certainly could be used to save the world and slay powerful evil. This is why I had to have the book in my hands as quickly as I could. How little did I know that my thoughts would come to life between the first page and the last page of Sword of Shannara. This one book changed my life forever, and hooked me on fantasy reading from that day forward. The year was 1980 and a great many journeys began that hot summer day.

Fast forward a brief time in my life, and we arrive at the summer of my tenth birthday. I was in the Cub Scouts and selling Captain-O Greeting Cards out of the back of Boy’s Life magazines. I was doing it more to have something to do during the summer than to earn any prizes or cash. Then things changed. In the “prize catalog” I received with my salesman packet was a small icon indicating the cover of the red Dungeons and Dragons basic box set.

D&D Basic Set - Red Box

On it was a dragon fighting a guy wearing a shield, minimal armor and wielding, you guessed it, a sword. I knew I had to have it. While some of my fellow Cub Scouts were trying to sell enough cards to earn a free bicycle, I knew I had to have that box set with the dragon on it. There was no question in my mind that it was the coolest prize that could be awarded to a ten year old.

I worked for weeks to sell enough cards to get the box set, an RC car and a few other things that I’ve long since forgotten. I sent in my order form and dutifully awaited the day my dragon-laced box set would arrive. Weeks passed with great anticipation, and then the cards for my customers arrived. I knew my order had been received and I would soon be battling dragons, monsters and much more in this strange game called “Dungeons and Dragons.” Excitement filled me to the point that I delivered the cards to my customers in record time.

Then more waiting with held breath.

A week passed.

And another.

Just as I was losing hope and the summer was coming to a close, I received my brown box from Captain-O Greeting Cards. The mail man had scarcely gotten out of the driveway before I attacked the box with a knife and tore it open to reveal the contents. I was dismayed, though. It was time to go through the list of garage sales my grandmother wanted to go to for the day. Oh No! I wanted to delve into a dungeon and slay a dragon or five. Fortunately, my grandfather’s calm demeanor came through, and he suggested that I just take the box and books with me. What a brilliant idea!

I piled into the third-row-seat of my grandmother’s Buick station wagon (You guys remember those seats, right? The ones that face backwards. Yeah, one of those.) While my grandmother trundled around town, I colored in the numbers on the dice. As I marveled at the different shapes, sides and colors of the dice, I realized there were some books to be read. I pulled the pair out of the box and dove into the one that was on top. Fortunately, the PHB copy was on top (or the TSR people were very smart and knew that impatient 10-year-olds would be tearing into their products.) I spent the entire day consuming the books and creating my first character: Kinol. He was an elf, but I pictured him to be more like the warrior elves of Terry Brook’s books rather than the flighty and poetry-laden elves of Tolkien’s works.

In the end, I ran through the sample adventure (I still get scared with the GM pulls out a rust monster and I love magic mouths) more times than I can remember. Each time, I changed up my character a bit to see how things would turn out with a wizard or a warrior or a dwarf (if you remember, halfling, elf and dwarf were more class-like than racial options in the Basic rules.) Even though it was just me playing through solo games, I had a blast. This lasted for about a week, when I decided to introduce my fellow Cub Scouts to gaming. Unfortunately, some ultra-religious folks intervened and put a stop to my “witchcraft” and “devilry.”  Sigh.

I still continued to play on my own and I created tons of new adventures for me to run through, and I would pretend, I didn’t know what was behind the door that lead to the 10×10 room. Two years passed and I landed in Jr. High (7th grade for those of you in a different educational system) where I met J.P., Marc, Van, Joe and Martin. We formed a gaming group and had a blast playing before school, during lunch, during study hall, after school and on the long bus ride home. During this time, I also picked up the different box sets that TSR churned out (and everyone thinks Everquest pioneered the “expansion module” concept into game. Pshah!) In the end we were playing characters of all sorts of different levels and power. We created our own races, classes, monsters, encounters, spells, modules and so much more. More importantly, we were creating memories that would last us a life time.

The first steps of my fantastic journey started in 1980 followed by sprinting into the hobby  in 1983 and I’ve not slowed down one bit since that time.

Many thanks to the dozens of people that I’ve gamed with over the years, and many more thanks to the brilliant game designers that feed our hobby with new material on a monthly basis. Everyone keep rolling those d20s and may you always find a glowing sword in your piles of treasure.

I’ve been hooked on Burn Notice on USA Network since day one. It’s in its third season, and I highly recommend the show for any role player. It’s a great example of how clear thinking can overcome incredible odds. It’s more than just a natural 20 on a bluff or diplomacy check. It goes to show that a great plan of action can pull the PCs butts out of the fires the GM puts them in.

The show has inspired me to dust off my complete collection of Top Secret S/I and see if I can emulate the show to some degree. I’ve always run TSS/I games in the past with the players being active ORION agents, but thinking about the game from a different angle, I can totally see how the game would be just as fun with a burned or retired set of agents. Loads of fun.

Now to see if I can convince my group to do something “a little different,” but first I need to put some thought into a campaign arc.

Sorry for the brief artifact this week. I’m at a conference for work this week, and have very little spare time for a proper post. Please forgive me. I know I could have written this in the past and scheduled it for release on the proper date, but my preparations for the conference ate all my time before leaving. I’ll try to make it up to you with better artifacts in the future.

This reddish-yellow nail clipping is rumored to be taken from Baphomet by a lucky strike with a vorpal weapon. The nail clipping can be placed in the middle of a trap or pit and animals will always fall prey to the snare. The more animals caught with the Nail, the more bloodthirsty and meat-hungry the PC will become until they have taken on the aspect of a raging berserker. If the Nail is held for too long, the PC will slowly begin to transmogrify into a minotaur and become a demon-beast under control of a demon lord, perhaps Baphomet.

If the holder of the Nail merely traps and slaughters animals for the sheer enjoyment of doing so, the Nail will abandon the PC. When the Nail leaves the PC it will merely vanish from whatever pocket, pouch, purse or other container the Nail is kept in.

To destroy the Nail, it must be soaked in holy water blessed by a priest of Bahamut, and then struck with a Hammer of Thunderbolts.