Character Development: Quick and Dirty Backgrounds
Ever needed to sketch out a replacement player character or a major NPC when time is short? Want to add a little depth to that cult leader or the deputy mayor? Sometimes you just don’t have the time to dedicate to preparing a full, in-depth background — or you want to leave some room for a character’s background to grow and change as the game requires. Maybe you’re starting a new campaign, and you want something that will break the ice without tying the characters down with too many specifics before they all know each other.
By asking a handful of questions, you can generate a usable character, with a skeletal background, within 15 minutes.
Categories: Advice, Player Advice | Comments (3)
Ritual of Rejuvenation
This is mostly a plot-device ritual, but I wrote it up since it came to feature pretty prominently in my game. Its purpose is to extend the life of its caster… perhaps by sinister means. This is the ritual used by evil magicians to bargain with the Raven Queen, trading others’ lives for their own — but it can also be used by a good magician, albeit less effectively.
Categories: Original Game Content | Comments (2)
Musical Inspiration
I’ve written a little about my brainstorming methods before, but lately I’ve been using another method I hadn’t touched on there: plucking phrases out of existing works and building something around them. A good phrase can be inspiration for an NPC, an object, a location, or an adventure. They can come from novels, poetry, movies, television.
And song lyrics.
A couple of ideas generated by my playlist recently:
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Categories: Advice | Comments (3)
4E from One Year In
4e PHB alternate cover image I had sitting around... from the German version, maybe?
Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons is a little over a year old now, and I’ve been playing or running it for almost exactly a year today. On the whole, I’m finding it a pretty robust system. It’s not my favorite system, or even my favorite D&D (that would be Cyclopedia D&D), but it’s become my favorite version of AD&D. A few of my favorite parts:
Philosophy
I’ve said before that I’ve been playing the same game since I first picked up basic D&D. That game is a cinematic game about daring heroic exploits with the fates of villages, nations, worlds hanging in the balance. Not every campaign has had the same elements, to be sure; many were high fantasy, but some were low fantasy, or even bizarre science fantasy. Some were set in mythic Asian locations, some in the Bronze Age, one memorable one in the prehistoric during an ice age. There were flirtations with dark fantasy and steampunk. But the game remained the same. With few exceptions, the characters were heroes and did heroic things (or died trying).
Categories: My Campaigns, Philosophy and Rants | Comments (7)
Foxbat for President: Sacred Cows and Hamburger
Sacred cows make the best hamburger, or so the saying goes. When it comes to RPGs, they tend to provide grist for the mill.
There are sacred cows aplenty in rules systems, of course. That’s one of the reasons why we have edition wars: change anything, no matter how inconsequential you think it might be, or how much better you think the new version is, and there’s sure to be someone loudly decrying the change and lamenting that the new version just isn’t the same game any more. No more assassins or cavaliers in 2e? Sacrilege. No more THAC0 in 3e? A travesty. No more Vancian casting in 4e? Well, that’s fine, but not for any game whose title includes the words dungeon and dragon.
That’s not the sort I’m thinking about today, though. I’m interested in the sacred cows within the settings. The characters, locations, and other elements that are always present, if only lurking somewhere in the background. The ones that define that setting, that — in a sense — make it what it is. The ones that are iconic — not Tordek and Mialee, but the real icons. The ones with names like Bigby, Mordenkainen, Raistlin, Elminster, Vecna. (There tends to be a good share of wizards among them. I don’t believe this is a coincidence.) The guys you know and love. Or hate. Sometimes both.
A campaign set in one of these published settings must acknowledge its sacred cows at one point. Either it kowtows to them, making use of the pre-existing body of lore that surrounds them (however nebulous it might be in some cases — how much do most D&D players really know about Bigby, other than that he’s the guy with the hand spells?), or it slaughters them, creating some explanation for why they’re no longer present or have no impact. The former option limits the GM somewhat; the latter often infuriates players who have a fondness for that setting. Witness the reaction of Greyhawk fans to Greyhawk Wars, or the more recent reaction of Forgotten Realms fans to the 4e redesign of that world.
Which brings us to Foxbat.
Categories: Philosophy and Rants, Reviews | Comments (6)
