The feed of updates to mindstorm
Prismatic Wasteland has once again put out the call for a blogwagon, this time about maps , and I’ve got to land this hot air balloon before the deadline hits. This is a small appreciation post for what I consider the gold standard of a detailed fantasy world map. Let’s dig right in. Here it is. The map of Echesea by Worldspring . It’s a big file, so I recommend right clicking on it, opening the…
Below is a small lightweight procedure to use when your players have found themselves in a complex and tense situation. Multiple threats and vectors threaten the group, and they need to handle them or try and weather the story. Using this mini-system, we remove handling the minutiae of the action, instead focusing on the risks and how everything shakes out. If you’d rather play out every single…
What if I told you that you could map every single element in your adventure to one of two states? You heard it here first friends and enemies: I’m back in the writing mines, testing the brain-feel of a new tool for adventure design. This, of course, supplements pocket-sized powder kegs and question-based adventure design . The energy coin is a mental model for mapping out dynamic and static…
The crew arrives in Fort Deauvilly. They meet a half-giant seer and take on jobs. Ratboy communes with a mysterious entity. Play Report The crew of the Last Chance arrived in Fort Deauvilly, ready to get to work and make some gold. Valnés has staked her claim upon the city—an old Kouroi settlement built along multiple elevations up the coast. The Alloyed Church is most prominent here, vowing…
Among the OSR blogosphere, there’s a lot of advice about how to make a sandbox. A whole lot of them involve breaking out a hexmap and populating it, creating a world for players to explore. Even advice that doesn’t focus on a hexmap will usually direct would-be sandboxing GMs to create a lot of points of interest in the wilderness for the characters to trek out to. This way is different. I’m…
The scoundrels board their new ship. Introductions to their crew go over well. A group of glublins attack the ship, demanding their cannons and a fight ensues. Play Report The crew arrived with Denerus to the docks of Port Darling, eager to be away. There, they found The Last Chance , which was… not quite what they were expecting. The ship was seaworthy, but that was essentially the highlight.…
I’m going to be blogging about the current game I’m running, called The Shimmernight Sea. It is a nautical / pirate open-ended seabox. When I started planning this game, I knew that I wanted to try and avoid the pitfalls and dangers of the elusive “ship” game, where the characters start with a vessel that can sail them to far and distant lands. Dwiz has done the work of highlighting the typical…
Location-based adventures have a lot going for them. They’re naturally quite atomic in scale, in that each “room” exists mostly on its own, and the GM running the game can zero in on the location. A good adventure will have what the GM needs at hand easily enough to run the room. Some elements are less atomic, like random encounters and wandering monsters, but those are the exception. For the most…
The weekend Return of the King came out, the sun was just peaking above the horizon when my friend Mike and I piled into my dad’s truck and made the forty minute pilgrimage into the city. Dad didn’t even park the truck, pulling up to one of the twenty entrances that led into The Mall and letting us out. I’m not even sure he fully stopped, eager to get back home and enjoy a day without any kids…
I tend to oscillate rapidly between projects I’m interested in, like some kind of misfiring neuron in an RPG-soaked braincell. Right now, I’m working on a science-fantasy megadungeon / ruined city for my home group, but swinging in the other direction means shifting to my modern day setting. I’ve got a lot of plans to run a hodgepodge of games in that setting, except something has been tripping me…
Forgive me, but I must post theory. I want to talk about worldbuilding, cognitive load, and the narrative baseline. Let’s first work to define what the narrative baseline is, and go from there. Every person has a baseline that they are comfortable with, and this baseline comes from a wide variety of sources. Mostly, it comes from your cultural background, your life experience, and the stories…
Deep in the darkest parts of the Prismatic Wasteland discord server a bunch of us bloggers and designers decided to do a little Secret Santa. Instead of socks and cheap household appliances, we followed the gift guide over at Explorers Design (find games and rate them, play them, write about them, or design for them). For my pick, I got Franco Alvarado, who designs under Root Devil . Gatorbarge…
There’s a special place in the depths of my heart for those freaky little merchants you find in odd places. The concept of “dungeon merchants” has been around forever, especially in mega-dungeons, and I’m not breaking new ground here. In fact, you can go and check out a major piece of inspiration for this post by heading to Joshy McCroo’s itch page and grabbing At the Shrine of Fortitude . It’s…
There exists, within the world, a single somata engraving kit. It is not something one stumbles upon by luck or chance, and it cannot be found through research, coin, or word of mouth. When the kit chooses to be found, it is found. The small box is carved from cherry wood and bleached bone, with silver clasps and ornate hinges. Inside, stiffened felt cradles each engraving tool snuggly in their…
Hypothetical time: you’re starting a new game and want to have all the player characters connected in a way that creates just the right amount of drama, tension, and connective tissue. There needs to be an iron-clad bond between them, but you’re having trouble coming up with the solution. Have no fear, theoretical game-starter I just created! I’m going to share what I consider one of the…
When I’m running a game, one of the highlights for me is inviting players to collaboratively build the world with me. In the past, this has resulted in a few hiccups. Enter this post, where I will attempt to solve them all. Rather than the players having carte blanche on worldbuilding, I want to add some structure to keep the ideas on topic and the game moving. I’ve written about this before and I…