Skip to main content
In this blog, I hope to share ideas and prompt discussions on how to make playing role-playing games better, as a player, as a DM, and as a scenario designer.  I don't do this for a living (yet?), although even if I did, I suspect often there would be better ideas than I scrounge on my own out there.

Please lend me your eye, your wit, and your insight.

Regards,
Empedocles

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Names

  Note : There are a lot of external links in this post. None of them should be affiliate links If they are, please let me know . Note2 : This has been bouncing around in my brain informally for a while, but putting it to pixel was prompted by Rook’s post on names on Beneath Foreign Planets as part of the RPG Blog Carnival .  There’s a lot of great material that comes from these prompts. I encourage you, dear reader, to check that out. Note3 : Link to the GDoc version this post was originally composed in. On Names One of the holes new Game Masters fall into while playing D&D-esque games is names. I’ll start with random NPC names first, to get the subject out of the way:  Make a d20 or d100 list of names for each gender, and for families.  Either stick it on the fourth panel of your DM screen, or pre-roll five of each, and stick those lists on your fourth panel. If you need a list of real world names, use an onomastikon .   Onomastikon “What is an on...
2 comments
Read more

RPG Blog Carnival: Beyond Vancian Magic

  Hello Friends! I'm thrilled to be hosting December's RPG Blog Carnival topic, Beyond Vancian Magic ! I'm not a hater, but I'll admit I prefer different systems being different, and clerical and magic user magic systems are basically the same.   I'm looking forward to seeing your interesting takes and contributions on evolving past that kind of magic system.  While I chose this topic about half a year ago, it's come up recently on r/osr, in the post Vancian Magic - What It Is How It Works and Where Did It Come From? Here are some ideas to get you started if you don't already have something in mind: Creating entirely new magic systems, or emulating those of other works, such as those by Brandon Sanderson or Jim Butcher. Spellcasting based on the undead turning table, as illustrated by ktrey of d4 Caltrops suggested using in Alternative Spell Casting . Expand on existing the existing "Vancian" system: Make spells truly Vancian, so that they a...
5 comments
Read more

How I Generate Home Brew Fantasy Towns Quickly

I was prompted to write this by an article about world building  ( https://ofdiceanddragons.com/rpg-carnival-world-building/ ). One of the challenges of a  gamemaster (GM) is spending time building things that are useful in play.  From that  point of view, after sketching out the world in thirty words, it seems more productive to me to focus on the places the player characters are most likely to go.   Generally, for a sandbox style exploration game in the West Marches style, I want it to be some sort of town or small city.  A village is too small to do more than provide food and fodder, and maybe shelter in a farmer’s barn.  A large city can be an interesting setting, but is probably a little too large for a new GM to start with, even though it basically extrapolates on what’s outlined here. Why? In our elf games, we typically focus on going to wild or hostile places to bring something back or handle a threat.  We don’t really spend much time in ...
Post a Comment
Read more