Brent

Nearly a year ago, I decided to celebrate the release of D&D 4E’s Dark Sun campaign setting by writing and publishing a Dark Sun adventure. I got the writing part done okay, but not so much the publishing. I created a conspiracy, a set of characters, and some tough monsters. I got about 80% done, then stopped. I let other things get in the way. It’s embarrassing. So now it’s time for me to rectify that mistake. […]

Been listening to Merlyn Bragg’s audiobook The Adventures of English, which traces the history of the English language starting from its earliest days in England. Which sparked some ideas about languages in role-playing games. D&D-style worlds usually have half a dozen languages: a Common or Basic tongue that’s known by 99% of civilized people, a few species-specific languages, and maybe a few religious or otherwise esoteric languages (equivalent to Latin and Ancient Greek in our […]

There are a lot of interesting theories out there about what a “story” means within a role-playing game. The simple view sees the GM as the controlling narrator, with the players reacting to the GM’s story. In this view, the players are fundamentally passive, struggling to overcome the GM’s challenges. The PCs are trying to survive or otherwise get past the current obstacle. This is an outdated paradigm, though a lot of games default to it. The other extreme […]

There’s a great post over at RPG Musings about buying third-party products. I have a similar problem: I rarely buy third-party RPG products. In my experience, those products are too-specific slices of other peoples’ campaign worlds, which don’t fit into my own. I’ve only bought generic tools, like Gygax’s Book of Names, or completely self-contained adventures that don’t connect with my world, like a jungle temple adventure I bought. […]