So. You went out and you bought into this cool new gaming system. You bought the first release and it played so well you bought every expansion that was printed. You built decks, you tweaked them, you traded for just the right cards - and when you couldn't find those, you even bought singles online. You played in league, you competed in tournaments, and you even collected all the promos.
Sometimes when designing a campaign world, after I've setup the regions that inspired the new world to begin with, I find myself out of ideas for peripheral kingdoms. I don't have ideas for them so I steer the party away or I make them so generic that they're replicas of one another rather than truly unique places. When I find myself in this situation, I employ what I call the Principle of Extrapolation, which is exactly what its name implies: if A, then B. In this way you can build something special without even trying. It won't replace the lands you were inspired to create, but if your players decide to wander into that Big Empire to the South, they will find something worth seeing.
Lately, I've gotten back into gaming. After my drought of playing video games, I decided why not give it another try? So of course I throw myself in headfirst, without thinking of the consequences. My first game was Starcraft, which is an extremely enjoyable battle-sim. . . when played properly. I began to go to a few games, and things work out fine. About my fifth game, I got a short, albeit quick, reminder of why I quit in the first place. Just as I'm wiping out a colony of the enemy, they (for reasons still unknown to me) reveal they were hacking. Enraged, I decided to just give up that day.
Aaaaggghhh!! The sun!That's what many of us think when I bring up the out-of-doors. I realize, gentle readers, there are yeti out there, but the places outside of your hermitage hold rich and thrilling opportunities for role-playing, just right to spice up a tabletop game that may be suffering a little between the Elvis on black velvet and shag carpet.
Around a year ago, I did an article on Dominic Heutelbeck's Visions in Color show, or ViC, wherein participants all select the same miniature and convert and paint it as desired. The success of this show inspired Harry Colquhoun to start a similar show on the 1listsculpting Yahoo group.
I once had a good friend who used to tease me about my role-playing habit. It was in the late eighties, and many people were still convinced the devil himself created D&D. My friend and I had many things in common; we were both into football, AC/DC, and blondes, but he simply refused to enter my world of magic. Finally he had enough of me and told me, quite frankly, that there was no need for fantasy when the world was weird enough. He had a good point.
LARP encounters needn't be combative in nature. They needn't even have any overt conflict. You can have a very satisfying encounter with just a merchant selling his wares. Of course, the interesting part will happen long after the encounter is over.
With one successful Changeling campaign already under our belts, it was a given that my all-female gaming group would reunite to follow it up. I had some great ideas for a game of Mage: The Ascension with player characters drawn from the ranks of the Technocracy, and I was looking forward to trying out what I perceived as more "serious" gaming with a group as talented as the one I'd found. But before I get too deep into an explanation of how our second year of gaming together went, I'd like to take a few paragraphs to address some of the questions brought up by readers in the intelligent discussion my previous article sparked.
Most people seem to agree a good Gamemaster's job is to run a memorable campaign the players enjoy. This entails a good mix of suspense, humor, intrigue, preparation, improvisation, and a little acting. What many GMs mistakenly leave out is Trauma. Not blunt force trauma like hitting someone in the head with a lead pipe. No, Trauma with a capital T. Trauma is, in a nutshell, doing something so horrible to someone's character that they start laughing. Until they realize you are serious.
You're a filthy thief, d20 system. You've robbed me of fun! How dare you pilfer my precious rule systems, those which I have massaged to yield the fruits of less frustrating game play, and molded in my image of Game-Master, Game-God. Your beastly watering down of complex rules assaults my delicate sensibilities and forces me to launch into this well-thought out rant for the pleasure of Gamegrene's readership. Damn you!
