Wild Hunt Studios

A blog post about the skill system in Traveler recently helped me better concretely conceptualize the “only roll dice when people are going to die or things are going to explode” method I’d originally attempted to detail in the rules for my abandoned dark military sci-fi RPG, eXpendable.

I’ve always been really fond of that bit of design work, and am happy I was finally able to expound on it in a clearer fashion. Since eXpendable is highly unlikely to see the light of publication–it just never came together as a whole–this is the clarified method, minus rule-specific bits, for those who may find it or the reasoning underlying it useful to their own approach to play.

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At the end of 2014, Wild Hunt Studios embarked on a new project, the creation of an illuminated manuscript titled Rose, Thorn, and Mist: Elves of the Bloodwood developed by way of patronage through the Patreon website. Patreon is based on the historical concept of patronage (very fitting, given the nature of this project!), allowing individuals to support artists and creators by pledging small donations in return for content — some artists are using Patreon for music, others for webcomics, maps, paintings, or even whole magazines.

At its heart, this project is a pseudo-travelogue about a grim enclave of elves, their forest homeland, and its history, based more on classic legends about the fey folk than on Tolkien’s own take on the same, done in an illuminated style of my own design. It is not specifically a game-related product and is not tied to any RPG system, but presents ideas that can be used for such, as well as enjoyed simply for pleasure and its aesthetics.

You can learn more about the project, and see the pages that have already been completed, by heading over to my Patreon page.

Over on Nerdwerds, a point was raised about letting players with wild character concepts play those characters, and play them as conceived rather than hosed versions of them. And it reminded me of a few times this has come up in my own gaming history as a GM.

Around a decade ago, for an on-line game I was DMing, our group had put out a call for new players. One of the applicants had a character concept he insisted I should give a chance, that it was “a great character”: a high level multi-class (rogue-cleric-mage) half-troll. The character could regenerate and the Ability scores were insane. I think there were some other bits that resulted in quirked eyebrows, but those things are what I recall.

I turned the character down for being much too powergame-y and didn’t think much about it.

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I’ve been playing Tony Dowler’s How to Host a Dungeon the last few nights, and realized it would be interesting to record my results for each Age in terms of a potential campaign setting, beginning with the Primordial.

I rolled a river with multiple waterfalls, some mithril deposits, ancient beasts near to the surface, and a demon civilization deep under the earth–which lasted only one season before erupting upwards without interacting with anything else. At the end of the Age, earthquakes caused multiple rifts intersecting the river.

Then I spent some time thinking about what all that meant for the developing dungeon, eventually moving away from the idea I was just developing a single dungeon here. At least in this portion. This felt more like a chance for world creation.

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