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castle dragonscar castle dragonscar a blog about rpgs and other weirdness tuesday june 3 2014 support my friend s patreon page cause he s awesome hey guys if you like supporting independent artists musicians and creative types then please check out my friend mike tv of the band get set go s patreon page give his video a watch and if you are so inclined then throw a few quatloos in his direction he s a good guy super creative and a fellow d d player to boot find the page here www patreon com getsetgo thanks nick posted by nick at 6 12 pm 56 comments thursday may 16 2013 rpg musings setting and mechanics there is an interesting aspect of rpg design which i ve only recently begun to contemplate the connection between setting and mechanics you ll notice that many games keep the mechanics and the setting separate these games sell themselves on their generic qualities gurps is the most extreme version of these sorts of games sure in these types of games if it is a fantasy game there might be rules for magic or whatever but the magic rules are often rather vanilla giving no particular flavor or uniqueness to the setting it could be any standard fantasy world there are advantages to this approach as many players and gms do not want the setting that the game has supplied to them they d prefer to make up their own setting i must confess this has almost always been my feeling about games i was much more interested in what i had in my head than what the game s author was trying to get across to me this feeling so predominates in the rpg field that it is a real consideration whether to include a default setting in your game or not many of my favorite games do not include a baked in setting there are exceptions pendragon empire of the petal throne talislanta warhammer fantasy roleplay all contain very definite settings that i d be more than reluctant to lose removing the setting from these games would lead me to ask the question what is the point now the setting in those games for me anyway is the whole point this isn t to say you shouldn t imaginatively own the setting and make it yours that is in my opinion absolutely essential for satisfying play to happen my arthurian britain is not going not look like yours my tekumel is not going to be prof barker s tekumel that s as it should be with a good rpg setting the designer has hopefully left plenty of white space for you to fill in when companies tried to more tightly control their campaign worlds we saw the late eighties and nineties explosion of books with the setting metaplot to get the real setting required that you also purchase the latest product both the indie gaming scene and the osr have eschewed this approach as they rightly saw that these sorts of practices were both an unsustainable business model and actually toxic to the health of the rpg hobby itself i think many different approaches can work when you re dealing with setting the question is really what is your ultimate design goal here the setting might be deep and exceedingly detailed or it might have just a light touch where the game approaches being generic but it doesn t really go all the way do you like when games provide setting or do you like to make it up yourself or are you somewhere between or does it depend on the game you re playing posted by nick at 3 53 pm 10 comments wednesday may 8 2013 fantasy rpg design draft update a grim world of perilous game design okay so i ve got around twelve pages of a design draft for this thing i ve been tinkering with right now it is a bit of a frankengame see here but i keep drifting things so that hopefully i end up with something that isn t totally derivative that said i m also not trying to reinvent the wheel with this game it is both mechanically and content wise a homage to those games of the past that i have loved it just brews them into a slightly different package i ve no illusions that the world wants or needs another fantasy roleplaying game but i ve always wanted to do this for my own satisfaction so far it has been fun the pain will come later i suspect so what s next once i do another pass or two on the design draft my next goal would be to play the game to see how it runs i ll post about that after it happens but it may be a while as my group is finishing up this fifteen month amber campaign that we ve been playing after i play the game i have to do some serious thinking about where i d like to go next do i try to develop this into a coherent game text doing so would mean some serious writing as i could see the design draft expanding to eighty or a hundred pages once everything is explained so that other people could play and run the game one of the other things i do want to include is some kind of beastiary but i haven t even turned my mind to that yet there will be a setting in the game but it is my intention that as with chaosium s runequest the game could easily be adapted to your own dark fantasy campaign world the world right now is a mix of old school warhammer ravenloft a song of ice and fir e and real world gritty medieval however the imagined playstyle the game supports is a semi sandbox that the players can wander around in and there will be concrete advice on how to set up this up when i say semi sandbox i mean that the map space the characters wander around in will have opportunities for the characters to use their skills attain a bit of gold and even achieve personal goals it isn t exactly the pure sandbox of old school d d but it is a close relative i m not interested in a missions or railroads as that s not usually a playstyle i particularly enjoy uther period pendragon being a notable exception posted by nick at 8 27 am 6 comments friday april 5 2013 franco v colbert tolkien smackdown ii steven colbert is awesome posted by nick at 1 45 pm 6 comments thursday april 4 2013 awesome comic books artists drawing stuff on a french tv show from the 70s here are some of the best comic book artists ever on a french tv show where they collaborate on a drawing in this one druillet amazes me as always with what pours out of his pen hogarth is wonderful and who can resist john buscema drawing norrin radd i ve always loved moebius and neil adams but it was joe kubert who blew me away here posted by nick at 9 58 pm 3 comments wednesday april 3 2013 in the weeds of game design i ve been working on my previously mentioned and untitled fantasy roleplaying game i m well into the weed in a few areas but i also have some really daunting work ahead of me game design is a bizarre and sometimes painful process as was indicated in my last post the game is definitely heading in an old school simulationist direction right now it feels to me like an unholy combination of runequest top secret si ad d 1e rolemaster stormbringer and palladium fantasy i ve also stolen a few new school ideas from games like burning wheel which i feel like a spiritual successor to some of the games above right now there are sixteen professions and working through those is taking longer than i thought and the magic system is a bit of a mess right now and so it goes posted by nick at 2 06 pm 5 comments monday april 1 2013 simulations dragons or how i learned to stop worrying and do my own fantasy heartbreaker there is an ancient tradition of people trying to do the their own fantasy roleplaying games for much of the early years of our hobby this consisted of people trying to do d d right or more even realistically examples of this particular design path include games like runequest chivalry sorcery harnmaster palladium fantasy 1st edition rolemaster warhammer fantasy roleplay and many others even my beloved ad d 1st edition can be seen as an outgrowth of this impulse in response to the original 1974 d d boxed set i ve always been attracted to these more complex games and the idea of simulating in great detail my own fantasy characters and the kingdom they live in has always been a powerful draw for me to that end i ve started tinkering with my own game system that definitely draws inspiration from these types of games right now it consistes of a mass of notes in a notebook but it s edging up on eight or nine pages of rough notes right now i ve no intention of publishing this for sale but maybe i ll make it available as a free pdf eventually and i don t really know where this is going though conceivable i could wake up tomorrow and decide this is a terrible idea right now i m excited about though i ll post more about it if i continue to make progress old school simulationists unite posted by nick at 2 54 pm 9 comments older posts home subscribe to posts atom popular posts support my friend s patreon page cause he s awesome hey guys if you like supporting independent artists musicians and creative types then please check out my friend mike tv of the band get 1970s fantasy art rodney matthews roger dean right now i m feelin particularly inspired by these rodney matthews pieces and their odd feeling a matthews inspired campaign might be 1970s fantasy art philippe druillet philippe druillet is along with moebius and caza one of the founding visionaries of the movement that took french comics by storm in the 1 1980s fantasy art robert gould s moorcock art here s a selection of images by robert gould who remains one of my favorite fantasy artists back in the 1980s his work graced the cov fantasy boardgame fun a rama so we ve been playing talisman the edition by fantasy flight games and its been lots of fun when we picked it up a few months ago t the room of a hundred dwarves and other highlights of third grade unlike a lot of other rpgs d d has for a variety of reasons always been linked to boardgames in my head this likely has to do with my doctor who 1970 i grew up watching doctor who on pbs on sunday mornings and while i m a big fan of the new series the old show still has something spec 1970s fantasy art more rodney matthews awesome folks seem to have really liked my previous rodney matthews gallery and so here is another helping of his particular brand of fantasy weird ad d dungeon master s guide finding the gems despite my earlier posting about my youthful frustrations with ad d i ve recently grown to appreciate and understand the massive ba rpg musings setting and mechanics there is an interesting aspect of rpg design which i ve only recently begun to contemplate the connection between setting and mechanics about me nick i m a writer english teacher and tabletop rpg gamer i m interested in all sorts of things including but not limited to american and english literature of the 19th century pulp fiction swashbuckling romances of the early 20th century comics 70s 80s punk rock old school dungeons dragons indie rpgs science fiction and fantasy literature horror films of the 1930s 40s i live in a very pleasant condo in an undisclosed location with my wife and daughter view my complete profile my blog list from the sorcerer s skull faceless howl 1 day ago grognardia the eternal city 3 days ago sorcerer under mountain wield the wyrd sword 5 days ago bat in the attic into the majestic fantasy realms the northern marches has been released 1 week ago zenopus archives moldvay basic finally available in print on demand 2 weeks ago the mule abides addendum to the official policy of the mule 3 months ago jeff s gameblog jimbo update 4 months ago back to the dungeon 1d100 church temple whispers 5 months ago hill cantons ten friggin hill cantons wizards 6 months ago lotfp rpg new website blog space 7 months ago dreams in the lich house b5 horror on the hill finished 7 months ago the realm of zhu the mygnskerö unleashed 1 year ago delta s d d hotspot why did natural 20 s become automatic hits 1 year ago cyclopeatron when did the osr begin 2008 2 years ago telecanter s receding rules abiørn s satchel 4 years ago original edition fantasy dungeoneering blog 6 years ago dungeons and digressions human infravision 7 years ago greyhawk grognard please update your link 7 years ago beyond the black gate adventure lookup 8 years ago space1970 news close encounters returns to theaters in september 8 years ago swords of minaria review otherworld fantasy skirmish 10 years ago the society of torch pole and rope stonehell dungeon into the heart of hell on sale now 10 years ago how to start a revolution in 21 days or less twenty questions for the sewers of san draso 11 years ago fightingfantasist 11 years ago sandbox empire deep carbon observatory the flooded land 11 years ago runequest fun zombie survivor sheet update 12 years ago blog archive 2014 1 june 1 support my friend s patreon page cause he s awesome 2013 8 may 2 april 4 march 2 2012 9 september 1 august 6 january 2 2011 13 december 3 november 1 october 4 may 2 april 3 2010 28 november 1 october 4 september 3 august 3 july 3 june 3 may 7 april 1 march 3 2009 37 september 3 august 1 july 4 june 4 may 5 april 9 march 10 february 1 what i m thinking about what i m reading followers 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