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 ...
Thoughts on tabletop RPGs, and ideas for making play better at the table.