The Athasian Cartographers’ Guild relaunch
Friday, August 16th, 2024
After a long time serving a solely archival purpose, the Athasian Cartographers’ Guild website has been extensively redesigned and relaunched in conjunction with the Pristine Tower Development Group’s efforts to expand the setting on a global scale using canon (both public and never-released sources) and popular fanon sources. New, lore-corrected maps of the core regions and surroundings are available, and more are in the process of finalization. Many other maps are being discussed and outlined.
I spent a good two months on the redesign and coding this summer, with many more man-hours going into actually painting the site graphics, and am very happy with the results. If you’re into the Dark Sun setting, or just like maps of fantasy worlds, come check it out!
Goblin Babies and Wasp Nests: Too Close to Home?
Friday, September 25th, 2020
Dungeons & Dragons is getting rid of inherently evil humanoids, maybe even race-based ability scores, and so on. I’ve personally always disliked alignment for various reasons, the old “slaughtering goblin babies” problem being one of those, and I also don’t put humanoid women-and-children in the path of adventurers, so the problem hasn’t come up in my games.
But I do want a way to have “these are probably not things you want around” to be a thing with monster-types because…well…such things do exist in the real world, even if they aren’t rampaging barbaric hordes wielding steel and magic. I like monsters for heroes to overcome.
For example, in the real world, we Raid-bomb wasp hives that are built on our houses, and you would probably stomp a nest of black widow spider eggs into goo if you found one, and cockroaches that have set up shop in our walls are going to a roach motel. And we feel–and probably are–justified in doing so. But there’s a lot to explore and unpack here.
Cut it Like a Pie
Friday, August 21st, 2020
Forged in the Dark games tend to have a multi-part meta-structure to play that I am finding very enjoyable. The types of actions and play that take place in each phase of that structure are differentiated from one another and simply utilize variations on the core mechanic.
This started me thinking about how OSR-type games could benefit from this meta-structure, and how I already use a pseudo-structure like this in play: for example, how downtime and travel are separated into mechanically-discrete phases of play when I run a game. I started wondering what this BitD meta-structure would look like for an OSR game, and a quick sketch emerged with around eight phases of varying complexity and length…but that’s a lot of phases, so I went back to ruminating on the issue.
Make Mine a Challenge
Monday, August 10th, 2020
Your players announce the following ideas during play, maybe during Downtime, maybe in the middle of an adventure:
- “I want to convince the head of the depository to give me a loan!”
- “The queen is pretty lonely…let’s say I seduce her…I know! Maybe convince her to marry me?”
- “The texts I need to complete this research are in the grand library in the capital? I want to go there to access them.”
- “I’m going to punch this guy in the face for lying to me about his qualifications!”
How would you handle each of these ideas from a player?
Temple of the Night Serpent
Monday, August 3rd, 2020
My first map for public consumption drawn by hand using my own map assets. This was meant to be the centerpiece of a battle against yuan-ti cultists, but COVID has delayed my group’s ability to meet. Rather than allow it to languish unused, I’m sharing it.