Mega Dungeon Design, Week 2

 Hey Game Fam, we’re back with week 2 of our development cycle on the Mega Dungeon Generator. If you want to see where we are after last week, check back here or here, and get yourself refreshed. If you’re completely new, I suggest you check back at the links above to get an idea of what’s going on. This is a look at the design and development of your very own Mega Dungeon using my Mega Dungeon Generator. Let’s dive in.

Product Feature: We Are All Children

 Hey friends, we’re back today featuring something a little outside or normal coverage. Today we’re going to talk about a new game that’s dear to our hearts because it’s a game we wrote. We Are All Children is a game of young people struggling against existential crises. Set in a surreal world where physics is a suggestion, We Are All Children is a new entry to the fantasy RPG market. Let’s dig a little deeper into the system and show how you things run. 

On the Creation of Murder Hobos: A treatise on balancing backstory elements with forward moving content in Role Playing Games

 

Today we’re going to discuss the ideation of Murder Hobos (and their creation). These are a bizarre phenomenon in the role playing game hobby but they come from an easily understandable place. We’ll look at the root causes of their existence and how to manage them during the game (and between sessions). Let’s start with the first question that comes to mind. What precisely is a Murder Hobo?

Culture and Gaming

Well, today kicked off a hell of a firestorm on Twitter (you know who you are and what you said that you shouldn’t have thought), and it kicked up an internal question/debate around the office. The first part of this discussion is one that crops up again and again in the tabletop community and it can be reduced down to “Our game is perfect and represents wide and varied cultures vs. No, it really doesn’t.”

Basic Heroes Handbook (Mutants and Masterminds 3rd Edition)

Hey Game fans, Zardoz here with a quick look at one of the coolest books I’ve picked up in recent memory.  Now this was supposed to go out shortly after Gen Con, but my diabetes and immune system had a pow wow and decided I was going to spend some time in the hospital so I couldn’t get around to it until now.  Today I’m going to give you my quick look at the Basic Hero’s Handbook for Mutants and Masterminds, Third Edition.  I’ll give you a quick explanation of the system and then we’ll get into what I think this book does for the game as a whole. 

Mutants and Masterminds Characters

Hey Game Fans, just a quick update for two characters i built for a Mutants and Masterminds.  Hopefully we can see more of the adventures of Cat and Mouse coming soon.  Up first, we have Mouse.

Character Creation Example: Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition (Part 2)

Part 2

Hey Game Fans we’re back for another look at building a Vampire: the Masquerade character for the new 5^th edition rules set.  If you read last week’s article, then you know we’ve built a science focused Ventrue with a penchant for hopeful idealism and a strong belief that science is a universal cure-all.  We still haven’t named our precious vampire child yet, but we’re about to.  If you want to check back on the character so far, check out the example sheet here.  Also you can go read the article from last week here.  So picking up where we left off, we need to fill in some details and move forward in character creation. 

Character Creation Example Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition (Part 1)

Hey Game Fans, we’re back with another look at building a character for the Storyteller system that forms the basis of the World of Darkness setting.  Today we’re going to build a vampire character for the  new 5^th edition of Vampire the Masquerade.   Now there are a few different versions of the Vampire Rules set (namely V20, Chronicles of Darkness, and Vampire the Requiem to name a few) but for today’s article, we are going to take a look specifically at V5.  Buckle in and prepare to get yourself embroiled in some pathos and tragedy.  This is Vampire: The Masquerade, 5^th Edition.

Why do we play games?

Oh, my friends there are as many answers to this question as there are people to answer it.  Some of us just want to win, and that’s okay.  Some of us want an activity to spend time with our friends and that’s okay.  Some of us want to build worlds to share with people and that’s okay.  Some of have our very own, very personal reasons for playing games, and that’s okay too.

Plot Traps (Diseases)

It’s been a while since I put together one of these articles but I’m back and reasonably healthy enough to put one of these together.  We’re going to be putting some more of these together going into the new year and exploring some new options for ideas to make your gaming experience fun an exciting.  Today’s excursion covers another plot point that can shape an adventure, a story arc, or even an entire campaign. 

Today’s topic is disease and illness.  Ranging from simple childhood ailments to divinely mandated and supernaturally powered plagues, diseases and illnesses can radically redefine the plot you are building.  Now we’re discussing this in terms of an rpg environment and not a real world setting, so you can discard some real world practicalities and details when you put one of these together.  Let’s dive into this.

Fun in Gaming? We still do fun, right?

The internet gaming community is a lot of fun to experience. There are creators constantly rolling out new ideas and thoughts and gaming. You also have a host of Actual Play Podcasts to experience, if you have the free time. You can also find a host of players on both sides of the screen who are sharing their ideas and stories from past experiences. Some of these are good stories that make you happy about the hobby, where others are more cautionary tales about things that could happen. 

 

Dressing for Success (The Details make the encounter area)

Hey Game Fans, we’re being a little too clever for our own good today, and we’re going to talk a little about how you describe your adventure locations and what you can do with some clever words and descriptive details. This is also a bit of advice for reskinning adventure locations and how to turn things on their head to modify an existing dungeon/encounter location/region to meet your needs. Buckle in, we’re going for a ride in the Rambler.

Good Vibrations

This is a little different from our normal fare, but i see things on twitter, or in facebook groups that look like “OMG, i suck at this, why did i ever think i could do this, wtf is wrong with me?” and it cuts through our (the gaming community) population with a regularity that i find concerning. So, here are two truths that i think will help us all out.

Intelligence and Behavior (Monsters)

Hey game fans, we’re going to briefly discuss something that cropped up on the twitters today (again, i blame TerminallyNerdy.com) We’ve got a DM Tip that Intelligent monsters should be played intelligently, and if they are, then they are way more dangerous than the sum of their stats and abilities. This is very true, but Intelligence is a spectrum, and creatures at the other end of the spectrum are equally interesting tactical challenges for players and DMs alike. Let’s take a look at one of the key things to remember when deciding how a less than intelligent monster is going to potentially behave.

Experiments in Cartographic Doom

Hey Game Fans, we’re back with an idea article about a part of the world building process. This article is the intellectual descendant of my good friend Clay, over at Terminally Nerdy (Here). The genesis of this idea starts with a simple DM Tip on Twitter that basically says “When you are building your own world, don’t forget to leave blank spaces so you can fill in with new things or ideas as they come up.” And this is absolutely perfect advice. It does lead into a deeper thought of mine that comes up every once in a while.

Pathfinder Playtest

So the big news this week is that we’re going to be getting a new edition of the Pathfinder RPG from the wonder workers at Paizo. This is exciting news in our hobby for a couple of different reasons which i’ll get into in just a minute. With an expected playtest to start in August of this year, and if i read the announcement correctly a full launch to hit in Summer of 2019, this is a fairly tight release window for the playtest period. This means a couple of things to me, and i’ll get into those a little further down. Let’s dig into what this means to our hobby, and then i’ll toss out some speculative flights of fancy, and maybe we’ll ask a couple of questions to go along with it.

Monday Morning Thoughts (Game Mastering stuff)

Good Morning Game Fans, it’s a bright, shiny morning around the office and we’re settling in for a nice long week of winter (We just had our first patch of ice). Today’s thoughts from the Interweb revolve around something near and dear to my heart, Game Mastering. There are a TON of articles, videos, streams and other consumable forms of media that go into great detail about the nuts and bolts of Game Mastering and we’re not going to necessarily dive into any of those specifically, we’re going to talk about the underlying framework of what a Game Master does for the game, and the role they play in the group dynamic. Buckle in Game Fans, it’s going to be mild ride.

Savage Metaverse (Thoughts and ideas)

If you were keeping up with last week, you know how much of a fan we are of Masters of the Metaverse (a fine RPG show on Hyper RPG’s Twitch and Youtube Channels), and the underlying concept that it runs with.  For those that aren’t familiar, the idea is that the player characters have the ability to hop into the bodies of people from parallel worlds and can take control of them to interact with their world for a variety of different reasons.  The tagline for the show is that it’s sort of like Quantum Leap and Sliders had a baby.  

Plot Traps: Bad Guy Example (The Unbroken Circle)

Hey Game Fans, we’ve shown you the theoretically steps for how to put together an Antagonist/bad guy for your RPG fun, but that’s a theoretical.  Today i’d like to take to an opportunity to show you how this works in actual practice.  I haven’t exactly decided what kind of a Big Bad Monster that’s Going to Break Your Tiny Face ™ to use in this, but let’s dig into the idea and see what we can come up with.  As always, we start with the Antagonist and work our way down from there.  

Plot Traps: Bad Guys Part 5 (Antagonists)

Hey Game Fans, we’re going to keep on keeping on with our discussion of Antagonists and how to get the most use of them in your adventure writing.  Every Antagonist has a specific role to play in the narrative you’re putting together. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of them gives you a leg up in finding the spot to put them and how to utilize them to maximum effect.  We’ve talked about Minions, Specialists, and Lieutenants in previous articles, so today we’re going to finish up with a discussion about Antagonists.  These are the end bosses, masters of disaster,  or world breaking tyrants.  In some cases they are background elements, like an evil overlord whose minions constantly threaten the neighboring kingdoms.  In other cases they are personal enemies that have to be dealt with in some way.  We’ve written these articles technically backwards, because we really do think you ought to start with your primary antagonist.  Once you’ve decided who or what it is, you can design the overarching scheme and figure out what lieutenants, minions and specialists you can use to build their encounter, adventure, story arc, or complete campaign.