Does That Make it Scolfish?
March 23rd, 2019
I’ve been messing around with predictive text and Markov chains for my campaign, to come up with a quick name list reference to use with one-off NPCs. The players decided, in a fit of whimsy, that the king of the elves was named Scott. Scott Eddington. Fine, I says to myself, the elves are Scottish. Ach. We have Scottish elves.
However, we’d already thrown around a bunch of elf-ish sounding names for other elves and locations in their kingdom, so I couldn’t just borrow straight from a Scottish name list. Hence my playing with language dissection tools — I needed to make the choices work with each other.
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Patreon Project Down!
March 10th, 2019
After quite some time of attempting to encourage and grow interest in the Patreon project, including altering the Patreon towards producing battlemaps and paper minis for tabletop and electronic gaming and such in order to broaden the project’s appeal, and yet still gaining no foothold in terms of interest or financial benefit, I have decided to end the experiment as having less value than the time being put into it.
The various items produced for my patrons are now unavailable to the general public and will remain so. For those of you who provided patronage, I thank you for your interest and support!
Adventures in Downtiming
March 7th, 2019
Downtime. It’s what adventurers do between mighty quests of derring-do and limb-endangerment. Anything from working at their profession, to carousing, to adventuring. It also lets the characters spend all the gold and riches they’ve acquired.
The activities available to characters in my game during downtime are based on 5E’s Downtime rules, but I added other options of significance to make it potentially just as fun and interesting as any other kind of activity at the gaming table. Based on our prior session, it appears to have worked well!
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Magic is Irresistible
January 8th, 2019
For a couple sessions now, I’ve been wondering exactly how to handle spells in my OSR project. I feel like Magic-user spells in particular should be “overpowered” in the sense that they just work. No saves against the effects. Magic-user casts Charm Person? They are now your best friend. Until the effect wears off, at least. Sleep? Goodnight, sweetheart, have a great nap.
Because Magic-users are dangerous. Scary. What they command, just happens. That’s the whole schtick of the Magic-user. It’s why peasants and kings alike fear and distrust them.
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Of Arcane and Occult Magics
December 21st, 2018
Balancing encounters with and the character use of magic with the idea magic is rare, supernatural, and occult–even dangerous to the practitioner–can be difficult in D&D. On the one hand, any solution that seeks to make magic mysterious should not cripple player character spell-casters through randomness, misfortune, and difficulty–the effectiveness and utility of an entire class should not be undercut by making their main class ability a liability that will consistently cause them injury or misfortune–yet it still must draw out the odd and arcane, even worrisome, nature of magic.
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