The Dragon’s Tower

The players are sailing on the open ocean when they spy the sea covered in gray. Do they persist, sailing into the expanse of volcanic rock and ash? Of course, from the photos, you can see that if they keep sailing, they shortly arrive at volcanic island in the making. But what Continue Reading »

It can be frustrating to have an excellent game idea but no setting to put it in. Take Korric’s Hall for example. Great idea but if we want to fill it out further, we’re going to need to do some research. To start, the original hotel on which the adventure hook is based is located in Farmington, New Mexico and some quick googling will get us some information about the area but alot of it is modern advertising. Not useful for our purposes and it can be time consuming to wade through all the links Google can provide. What we need are Continue Reading »

Here’s a website that’s been out there awhile - Hero Machine. It has some serious limitations (the only sex selectable for human fantasy is female) but if you’re having some trouble coming up with a character portrait, consider it.

One fun thing to try is using the die button near the bottom of the options section, setting everything to “all random”. This is especially cool if you’re stumped for new character ideas. And who hasn’t been?

This can be a cute trick but use it carefully. It’s one thing to mislead players and challenge them and something else altogether to just frustrate them and piss everyone off.

The BBC has a small, quick quiz about the senses. Take it. Be surprised at the things you find out, it’s harder than it looks. Some of the questions, like missing the word “the” typed twice in a sentence, are ideas that have been around for quite awhile but the things on perceptions (man, I really screwed up on that circle) could be used to create interesting and challenging puzzles.

I’m traipsing cheerfully along the internet when I trip over a Thing in a Jar. You’ve probly seen other version of them out there. It’s a pretty common idea but what caught me was this:

“The glass jar acts as a physical barrier, preventing the viewer from directly accessing its contents. The murky fluid acts as a visual barrier, making the exact details of the form indistinct. The viewer is forced to fill in the gaps with their own imagination.”

You can do this to your players. It’s fun! First, you have to be running a system you know inside and out. Can you make up monsters on the fly? Without ruining the game? That’s harder than it sounds and I never did get to know d20 well enough for it. It won’t always work, alot depends on the party and their imagination but it’s excellent when it does.

We were playing a modern game and it was at night. I had gunmen on the roofs of nearby buildings waiting to ambush the party. The players got rolls to see the ambushers vs the ambushers hide. One player succeeded and immediately began fretting as it was a smaller party than usual and she’s a nervous type to begin with. “Oh god, I hope they don’t have crossbows!” This weapon recently got an upgrade and had been made particularly nasty in the game so she feared its effects.

So of course, all the NPC rifles suddenly morphed into crossbows….

Use it carefully but when it works, the players face their worst nightmare without ever even realizing they created it!