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Does Less Rules Mean Stress Free? I've been running my primary group through some Traveller lately. Last night after our game, which due to a few factors ended a little early. A few of us comment on how non-stressful it was playing Traveller. From the GM point of view, things have been really stress free when I compare it to other games that I have run. From the players' point of view there was not a lot of character maintenance. That got to thinking and asking the question why does it seem like it's so easy. I've come up with a few theories. Maybe it's because there are less rules. While I am sure less rules is part of it, I'd submit that perhaps a reason it's less stressful is the system has no classes or levels. Of course, I'd be delinquent if I didn't suggest that it might be the lack of magic. I'm sure I'm missing something. <div class="disqus-noscript"><a href="

Check for Traps: Smash the System! A "smash-up," also known as a mash-up, bootleg, blend, cut-up, crossover, or powermix, is a song or composition created when a producer blends a pair (or more) of previously existing songs, generally by combining the vocal track from one song with the instrumental track of another. Smash-ups have been around a long time but became a renewed cultural phenomenon with 2004's Grey Album , a smash-up by Danger Mouse of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. Mash-ups are not confined to music, of course. Videogames have smash-ups (often called "mods") and so do tabletop RPGs.

Smashing up RPGs has been defined as "replacing major rules components with components from different games " or "taking two games in your collection and mixing them together . " However you define it, it's a lot of fun; indeed, one of my favorite pastimes as a gamemaster is blending systems and settings to create something unique. It's easiest to explain in practice, so let's start smashing.

Crow's Nest. Worlds in a Handful of Dice. Fantasy Demographics Made Hard. Map for my Dungeonslayers campaign. Black Hole Diaries. The Free RPG Blog: Dave Millar's wonderful tool! (Mapping tool, that is) Dave Millar doesn’t roleplay. He doesn’t GM either. He doesn’t tumble D10s. What he does is rock. Dave’s Mapper is a free online mapping tool that takes the community Geomorphs and allows you to generate maps, either by random or by semi-random switch and rotate. He has played a huge part in powering the Geomorph movement by providing a breath-taking online tool. You might be baffled as to why a non-roleplayer might want to expend considerable time and effort in a hobby he doesn’t partake in.

Features Dave's mapper is brimming with features that make it not just useful but fun to use. Main menu Clicking New Map will bring about the end of the world. View The left hand button on view opens up a PNG version of your map, which you can download to your favourite paint application or upload into Obsidian Portal. Map size As the tiles make up a grid, this specifies the width and height of that grid. Mode Modes Map modes deal with tile layout. Grid Mode Map Mode (or type) Map features Stocker Examples. d20monkey - A Webcomic for Gamers by Brian Patterson. Role Playing Public Radio. RPPR Episode 98: I GM Therefore I Am News: Caleb and I will be at Fear the Con this year! We will both be running games and attending events there. I will be at PAX East this year, as part of Pixelscopic, showing off their new game, Delver’s Drop.

(Have I mentioned I’m working on it? I totally am!) Also, check out No Security, Caleb’s new book. Synopsis: After reading the Angry DM’s article on the 8 types of fun, I thought it would be interesting to discuss our philosophies towards running games and what kind of fun we get out of it. Shout Outs Snakehead: A fascinating book about the complexities of human smuggling from China to the United States.True Detective: This. Song: Load Bearing Fungus by Salkovich.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:39:44 — 68.5MB) Game Designer’s Workshop: Posthuman Studios Interview Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:05 — 39.2MB) One Roll to Rule Them All: Arc Dream Publishing and the One Roll Engine at Gencon 2013. Risus. And so the story goes that when cartoonist Pierre' Culliford, who the world would come to know as more recognizably as 'Peyo', could not, for some reason or another, remember how to say “sel” (“salt”) while dining with a friend, he asked his companion to pass the "Schtroumpf".

Colloquially speaking, Culliford had what we in the USA would call a brainfart. He ended up pausing for a moment after saying, in his native French, "Can you please pass the... " and then searched in vain for the right word. Unable to find it he asked "the thingie"* or "le schtroumpf". His dinner mate, Franquin, took the opportunity to mock and tease Culliford and replied (as translated into English), “Here’s the Schtroumpf. When you are done schtroumpfing, schtroumpf it back.” The two, on vacation together, shared a laugh and found a new game; for the rest of the weekend, they continued substituting “schtroumpf” and derivations thereof for various words. The rest, as they say, is history. Where did Nanny come from? Character Compendium | BearMeadows. We are starting a Diaspora campaign, ran by Brennen . I really like the rules so far and am looking forward to playing. So far, we have created the cluster, created our characters and talked about how we are starting out together.

I enjoyed both the cluster and character creation process and the results are always fun to read. We had a lot of laughs while creating both, and I am looking forward to playing next week. I do find the character creation process a lot more difficult than most other games though, simply because there is so much more we have to think of and write. I also believe that when the options are so wide open, I have a much harder time narrowing down what I want and coming up with something that isn’t straight out of a movie or book.

I don’t know if anyone else has this problem, but once I powered through it, I was really happy with the results. I decided that I did not what to play a humanoid. Here is my character in our upcoming game. Phase 2: Starting Out. “The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope” No, that’s not a mistake. I want to talk about the Society of Torch, Pole and Rope, but not THIS Society of Torch, Pole and Rope, if you get my meaning. Instead I want to talk about the idea of an Adventurers Guild. As a quick bit of background, since I haven’t ever mentioned it before, the name “The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope” originally sprang from a list of possible “group names” that I quickly jotted down once when my party was trying to come up with what to call ourselves.

That list included several which were serious, several which were humorous – I remember “Big Brother and the Holding Company” was one of the possible choices, as well as a few random non sequiturs. For whatever reason, “The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope” didn’t make the cut, but I’ve always thought that it summed up old-school dungeon crawling pretty well. And not being one to throw out a good idea, when the blog started to coalesce, it seemed like a natural choice. . .lapsus calumni. . SURPRISE ROUND 不意打ち! | Get a jump on Role Playing Games!

Sarah Darkmagic. Greyhawk Grognard. Lapsus Calumni #6 – The Goblyn Grotto « . .lapsus calumni. . Wednesday, 13 October 2010 by m.s. jackson Fellion peered around the bend in the narrow canyon created by the stream; ahead of his was total darkness. The sides of the canyon wall had been worn smooth by the rushing water ages ago and now the barely trickling stream gurgled slowly past him leading into the dark. “I can’t see anything Snik.” “That old guy in town swore bandits were using this canyon as a base camp for their raids. I am pretty sure he was right,” Snikle’s purse was bare and he needed this job to fill it back up. “I ain’t goin’ back empty handed. “Ye did loosen his lips with an ale or two,” Fellion pointed out. Snikle threw his friend a devilish grin. “Aye, but at what cost?” “Let me take a look,” The hobbin sighed and pushed past his friend. Calling them ‘little’ made Fellion chuckle, most of the goblyns would be an inch or two taller than Snikle.

“What? Click here to download Lapsus Calumni issue 6 (pdf). How to make a Fantasy Sandbox. Unlike a Traveller Sandbox making a Fantasy Sandbox is less straightforward. This is because Traveller at the stellar level has a uniform geography while a fantasy setting can have any type of geography imaginable including the fantastic like lands floating on shards of a shattered world. If talking a fantasy setting I would do the following Using one page sketch a world or continent mapLabel important regionsWrite one page of background giving no more than a handful of sentences to each region.Pick an area roughly 200 miles by 150 milesGrab a 8.5 by 11 sheet of hex paper. This is being expanded in the following posts. How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox by Robert Conley with layout by Patrick Walsh. (Bugbears for Breakfast) collects the previous steps into a single PDF.

Prep-Lite Wireframe How To - Gnome Stew, the Game Mastering Blog. In my last installment of Prep-Lite, I talked about the concept of Wireframes & Skins; using and re-using condensed NPC stat blocks, as a way to reduce prep time. In this article I am going to discuss, in more detail, some of the assumptions I was working under, how I condensed the stats I needed, and how I populated different tiers of NPC’s. The Assumptions So lets start with a few assumptions that guide this whole process. You may or may not agree with all of these, and they may or not work for the specific game you are playing, but you need to understand them in order to understand the process I took.

Some NPC’s are Stars…Most Are Not The first assumption is that most NPC’s are not that important, and do not need to be fully fleshed. Not All Stats are Important Tiers of NPC’s Even ordinary NPC’s are not all the same, and there are going to be some tiers or power levels of them. GM Does Not Need To Play By The Same Rules Yes that is true…to a point. The Technique Important vs. Simplifying. Caverns of Lakoma: A Dungeon Diagram... Good Morning, All: To conclude my series of posts on Caverns of Lakoma dungeon design, I needed to produce a map for Level One. As I may have mentioned, I suck at dungeon maps, and so I found myself in a quandary.

In the end, I decided to utilize a principle described in a recent Gnome Stew article: Prep-Lite Maps. This is also similar to the diagram dungeon as presented in Sine Nomine Publishing's Red Tide. In essence, I built a flowchart of important rooms, and will simply make up any unimportant rooms as I have need. This is the result: For those that would like to have all of the information on the Egyptian Great Plains gathered in one place, have no fear.

Thank you all for hanging in through this discussion, and I look forward to any additional input you might have on my quest for improving my minimalist campaign preparation process. With Regards, Flynn. June 2011. Toral Powerless DP Mollie Powerless DP Athydas MU Gail MU Yestlick MU G F Janis hireling le bouche hireling Z F Pita hireling Mika hireling Fabrino hireling Derick F Jimbo hireling Zigfried trained baboon Luke F Sarai Rogue The party is in Mont St Brise, the City of Pilgrims, their ship has been quarantined the crew and pilot incarcerated, their cargo confiscated. They find that the prisoners are being held in the shrine of St Letholdus, the pilgrimage destination in the city. They run into Luke and Sarai, brother and sister, whose mother is also being held for witchery. The prisoners will be burned in a week.

The party follows the throng of pilgrims up the main processional and into the shrine to get a sense of the place. The shrine is a three story, damaged keep with two entrances, pilgrims enter by one and exit by the other. After being prevented from scouting the castle courtyard, Luke reveals he has an inborn ability to become invisible and proceeds to explore the shrine itself.

Monster of the Week: Aboleth | Dice of Doom. Aboleths are large and intelligent marine creatures not to be confused with an Axolotl, another strange fishy creature also starting with ‘A’. However, rather than having legs, an Aboleth has psionic powers and another nasty stuff. They look something like this: That took a while. Anyway, Aboleths are one of the more obscure D&D monsters, despite having been around for a while. Well, who can blame everyone: they’re giant psionic fish! So what can they do? Highly intelligentVery evilCan dominate creaturesSlimy! They also have another cool ability, which for some stupid reason isn’t even in the 4E MM, but existed beforehand: They get the memories of everyone they eat. Despite the MMs saying they live in the Underdark, it does actually make sense for them to come to the surface. For example: People have been disappearing, strange things happening, and the PCs have to investigate. 3.5 Edition I’m going to just discuss regular Aboleth, because I really don’t know anything about psionics.

Sly Flourish. The Underdark Gazette. Making an Adventure with "Mythmere's Adventure Design Deskbook Volume One" 4E. I posted briefly about this before, when it was first announced that the new version would be coming. Now that I've actually read the rules and also the first released adventure, I have further thoughts on the subject. I should state up front that I have yet to actually play the game. I considered waiting until then to opine about the new rules, but then figured that to really do that justice, I'd have to play it more than just for one adventure, up through to the higher levels, and that could take a very long time indeed. I'm sure I will have an opinion at that point (and I'll post it) but I think I've played enough RPGs in my time, particularly enough D&D, that I can get at least a reasonably good feel for the game just from reading the rules.

I want to briefly address one issue that some have with the new edition - the notion that it is just a money sop. At this point, the initial shock has long since worn off. Perhaps some of the things that feel wrong will feel better with play. Eleven Foot Pole. 4eBlogs.com: Top Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Blogs. DnD Corner. D20 Source: Dungeons & Dragons Blog. The News: A Bit of a Change of Focus and a Request for Input. Alex Schroeder: 2009-12-02 Hexcrawl. Zak thinks about hexcrawling and asks: do you just sort of write a few bits about each place and wing the details when the players get there, or what? Brian adds that most of his hexes are empty (about one in ten has interesting stuff). That density certainly looks similar to the Wilderlands of High Fantasy maps such as the Lenap map that I started with. For my own Alder King game, I decided to take the advice found in one of the books saying that there was much more to be found in each hex.

I started out with the original hex and the six surrounding hexes à la M20 – a true Microlite Campaign: As time passed and my players started to explore, the map started to grow. The current player map is even bigger, now. The things I do between sessions: Also, How to make a Fantasy Sandbox by Rob Conley is the best advice on the topic I’ve seen. More reading: Update: Hex Based Campaign Design by Erin D. Tags: RPG hex Maps Sandbox. The Welsh Piper » Random Social Hooks. Year of the Dungeon: January 2010. Troll and Flame. My One Page Dungeon Entry « Adventure Materials. One Sheet Adventures | Apathy Games. The Adventure Funnel. Pocket Full of Peril #2. The Dice of Life. Key Our Cars. Jeffs Gameblog.