September 2009
23 posts
Part III - Panic! They Went off the Map!
In general, most people who play Living Realms understand that the adventures (like their predeccesors in Lving Greyhawk and Xendrik Expeditions) are of limited duration and scope.
“Going off the map” doesn’t even occur to most players, most of the time— and most of the adventures are set up with clear goals and a very obvious path.
That said, sometimes the players opt...
Part II - Improvisation in LFR
I’m going to use two “real world” examples of adventures I have altered a bit. I haven’t made any fundamental changes to the structure, outline, or plot, but I have used improvisation and roleplaying to make the adventure a lot cooler.
Example 1: is BALD1-2 (“The Night I Called the Undead Out”).
In this adventure, the players are tricked into causing an...
Part I. Break Out of the Formula- The Fearless DM...
One of the less-favorable aspects of Living Realms is that the format is very tightly constrained; over the years (and I really suspect this goes back at least as far as the AD&D2e days), The RPGA has gotten the process of adventure presentation and DMing down to a formula.
It pains me to say this: It’s probably more than a bit detrimental to rely so heavily on this formula.
...
My hilariously broken kenku warlock...
Broken not in an abusive “I found a loophole in the rules” kind of way, but actually the opposite.Whoops! But I found something fun about him anyhow!
I got the chance to actually play last night instead of DM (my usual!) and I had planned on running my own Majestrix character, my obsequieous “winter-themed” gnoll swordmage, Frostbite.
BUT— it just so happened that...
The 4E Assassin is posted - introducing the Shadow... →
I have about 8 more videos (I didn’t get everyone at the gamenight) but I will post the rest later.
These are my favorite D&D players in the world. They are all great people!
No Books At The Table... Try It!
This post might either be shocking and radical or utterly non-controversial depending on what edition of D&D you started playing.
One of the coolest things about D&D lately is now I can run the game with no books at the table. I also don’t reference books when I am playing. I try to keep other players from opening any books, too.Have that stuff on your character sheet!
Two...
Snap Decision Tactics for a Fearless DM!
Snap Decisions are quite common in DMing. Sometimes it’s a matter of making the smartest possible tactical move when 5 or 6 options present themselves (for the 7 or 8 figures you have control of). Sometimes you don’t know a specific rule off the top of your head. Sometimes a situation pops up that really is an edge case that could be interpreted any number of different ways.
You can...
“Mystara does have an overall world hook which applies to every inch of it, from...”
– John Biles, via Enworld
Mystara 4E Conversion Project →
This is really exciting!
Victory Conditions (for real this time..)
The adventure is Baldurs Gate 1-2 “The Night I called the Undead Out”. It has several combat encounters. It runs notoriously long.
Let me break the combat encounters down:
1. One encounter in the “haunted house” where players receive a cursed artifact.The artifact holds several undead at bay, but it is itself *guarded* by undead. The players unwittingly kill the...
Time, Tactics, Victory Conditions!
One issue I see a lot with RPGA games is getting the game to play in the alloted time (and this has been true since I started playing them with Living Greyhawk and Xendrik, and remains true for LFR). I see this especially in convention circles, because time is one of the few things a DM has absolutely no flexibility to change. Either there’s another slot coming up, players need to get to...
Skill Scenes - an improvisational alternative to...
I tend to think of adventurers in my campaigns as being in either “mission mode” or in between missions, and one of the thrusts of Majestrix* is to focus some time on the “in between” period. LFR** is (by default) 100% mission mode. As the game begins usually the PCs have already assembled with full gear at or near the place where the first encounters are going to take...
Majestrix Island: The union of context + content
One of my current experiment/projects is the Majestrix Island Adventuring Company for Living Forgotten Realms. It’s really not a standard adventuring company- it’s kinda related to what were called “Meta-orgs” in Living Greyhawk.. or almost like a faction in Xendrik Expeditions. Another DM and I (Mark Bradley) worked out a bunch of little details for it while we were at...