A Role Playing Games Blog
RPG tools
mashupforge
3Have you ever dreamed about creating a Google Maps style map of your campaign world? My friend and fellow RPG blogger Zakharov Sawyer recently told me about mashupforge, a new service that allows you to do just that. You can even add markers with descriptions about the various places on the map. This can be a very handy tool, especially when you use a laptop or tablet PC at the game table. Below you see a map created by Zak:
If you want to check out the map in all its interactive glory, follow this link. Mashupforge is currently in beta, and they’ll probably add more features in the future but if you look for an easy and free way to turn your campaign map into an interactive map in the style of Google Maps, mashupforge is definitely worth a look.
Learning is good for you! And gaming too…
1December 14, 2011
To say that role-playing games have been good for me is an understatement. Besides the countless hours of fun they’ve provided, the lasting friendships that have been forged and the way it has opened my eyes to a global community I am thankful to belong to, gaming has had other benefits in my life.
Let’s look at the most obvious ones. I read a whole lot more because of gaming. I was already an avid reader before discovering rpgs, but the games introduced me to all sorts of different authors and influences I might not have discovered where it not for the game. I became a better storyteller and developed both my oral and written communication skills due to the game, during face to face interactions as part of the game or when I sat down to write a handout or other game related document.
I can’t say I learned English because of games, I already had a pretty decent grasp of the language, but I know many friends who improved their language skills thanks to gaming. On a recent discussion in the Puerto Rico Role Players group we were talking about how being a good Game Master had much in common with being a good teacher and how that has helped me in my line of work. I really believe that my interpersonal skills, something I rely on daily in my line of work, are better because of the game.
Then there is the ongoing learning… I find myself researching ideas and concepts for my writing (game related and otherwise) all the time. My creative endeavors (and role-playing games is a big chunk of that) mean I am constantly searching for ways to learn more, and more effectively. Readying articles on Wikipedia still seems odd to some people (probably the same ones who thought it was odd to read the encyclopedia for fun!), but recently I have been using the Kahn Academy more and more.
The Kahn Academy is a non-for profit that has existed for a while now (and you can read all about it on this Wikipedia page), and while I knew about it, I had not really used it that much. Then I ended up going to it to look at the Brain Teasers videos thinking I could use some of them for my games, but ended up watching many more videos, and it the process learning about many new things, some I had little interest before.
There are a lot of math and science videos, but even those can be useful for a gamer, specially if you are working on a sci-fi game, I particularly like their History section, great for giving context for historical games for your history-challenged player who might know the timeline of Krynn but might not know if the Wall Street Crash of 1929 happened before or after the Vietnam War. And that anecdotes my friends really happened!
So that’s a recent tool I’ve used to brush up my knowledge, much being applied to my current and future campaigns, such as the Cosmology and Astronomy area for my upcoming sci-fi game. What tools do you use for research when you game?
WordPress Dice Roller
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Recently I was made aware of some pretty cool dice roller widgets created by Awesome Dice for WordPress. There’s a D&D Dice Roller Widget created with D&D or Pathfinder in mind. As you can see to the right, you can customize the title of the widget and also choose if you want to allow the use of modifiers. When included in the widget area of your site, it shows a Roll button and a list of results. When a natural 20 is rolled you get alerted by a big red CRIT notice. Nice.
The second available dice roller widget was created for White Wolf’s World of Darkness. Again you can choose the title of the widget. But in addition to that the widget lets you set the needed target number, if 10s are allowed to explode, you can toggle whether 1s cancel successes or not, and you can even colorize results. Very nice indeed.
My blog’s widget area is already a bit overcrowded, so I doubt I will include these dice rollers on my own blog, but they could come in handy for anyone interested in running or playing games online.
And if you need an all-encompassing solution, Awesome Dice has something for you, too. The Gaming Dice Roller let’s you roll any number of dice from d4s to d%. It doesn’t have the added functionality of the WoD Dice Roller, but is probably your best choice if you play neither D&D nor WoD.
All three widgets are available as plugins from WordPress.org (I included the links in the text above).
If you want to see the widgets in action, check out the Awesome Dice blog.
Using the Kindle at the game table
12November 9, 2011
Yesterday I finally got my Kindle. For quite a while I have been pondering whether I should buy one or not. Last August I bought an iPad and actually thought it might double as my ebook reader as well. But although I use it a lot to view PDFs I actually never used it to read whole novels using iBooks or a similar tool. A couple of months ago my girlfriend – much to my surprise – bought a Kindle. So I actually had the chance to have a closer look at the device and I especially liked the electronic paper display. It looks pretty close to real paper and you can actually read comfortably in direct sunlight. So after long consideration I ordered the Kindle Keyboard a couple of days ago.
I mainly intend to use the Kindle for what it was designed which is reading normal ebooks. But as a gamer I also look for ways how I can use this new device at the game table. I’ve done some research and found out that a few roleplaying publishers have started to release their books in ePub or Mobi formats. There are also free ebook versions of the Anima RPG and the German translation of FreeFATE. If you have a long trip on the plane or train ahead of you, you might want to put some RPG book on your Kindle to give it a readthrough from cover to cover. And that might actually work pretty fine when you have a version of said rules optimized for an ebook reader.
I even tried reading a PDF on my Kindle and was surprised that it worked better than I expected. But that doesn’t mean I would recommend it. If the PDF was created in a digest-sized format it might actually work, but usually the font size is just too small to read anything comfortably. Zooming is possible but not that user-friendly. The Kindle is no iPad, folks. In addition to that I am pretty sure that very artwork-intensive PDFs might be too much for the device.
Since you can copy your own documents easily to the Kindle, you could for example copy all the notes you need for the game you’re running to the Kindle. And searching for something in actual ebooks (not PDFs) is pretty reliable, so you might actually use the Kindle as an alternative to flipping through a physical rulebook when you want to look up some obscure rule. I am sure some Kindle owners and D&D 3.x/Pathfinder players have a copy of the SRD on the device.
So what are your thoughts on that subject? Do you own a Kindle or a similar ebook reader and have you used it successfully at the game table? Please share your experiences in the comments below!
NaGa DeMon, NaNoWriMo and Scrivener
4October 26, 2011
No, we’re not talking about demonic snake-like people from Indian mythology here. Nathan Russel, the guy who created the awesome FU RPG among other things, had a great idea. Why not take the idea from the National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) an bring it to the game table? So this year he challenges all of us to design a game in one month. This November will not just be NaNoWriMo but also Naga DeMon! And of course, the latter sounds much cooler! 
Of course there are a few rules (it wouldn’t be fun without those!):
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Create the game in November
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Finish the game in November
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Play the game in November
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Talk about your experience
By the way, the NaGa DeMon is not just about pen & paper RPGs. If you want to create a boardgame, wargame, cardgame or even a computer game, you can do so and it’s still part of the official NaGa DeMon! I am basically working on some game design project all the time, but perhaps I will use this event to see a project through next month!
And there’s one more thing. For a while I have followed the development of the Windows version of Scrivener. Scrivener is software that was initially developed for Mac only that was meant as a tool for writers. I think explaining all the features of this software would definitely be beyond the scope of this post, so it’s perhaps best you check out the official website for more details. What I have been wondering for a while now was if you could use Scrivener to help you in game design, too. And November may actually be my chance to do so!
You can get a special NaNoWriMo Trial Edition of Scrivener for free that you can use until December 7th. And if you are among the NaNoWriMo winners you’ll get a 50% discount on the full version of Scrivener. And even if you don’t manage to churn out a novel of 50,000 words next month, you still get a 20% discount by entering “NANOWRIMO” as coupon code at the purchase! 
But there’s more. I actually found a very interesting blog post on “Population: One” today, that shows how you can use Scrivener for RPG Writing. If you are interested in using Scrivener for NaGa DeMon, you definitely should check the article out.
More Google+ Hangout musings
4September 28, 2011
Yesterday I had my second game over Google+ Hangout (check out my post about my first game there) and again, everyone had a blast. Of course we had to fight some technical issues first and even though we tried we couldn’t eliminate a nasty echo entirely. But as one of the players mused, we were exploring a cave after all, perhaps it’s supposed to sound like this. 
Like the last time Chris ran “Into the Odd” for us. After the game I realized that because of Google+ I have actually played more during the last two weeks than in a long time before.
Scheduling a game has always been a major issue, and since most of my local players live up to an hour’s drive away from me, the time they need to get home after the game has always been another problem. So most of the time we tried to play on the – much too short – weekends. And if then one or more players can’t make it you have to reschedule to the next weekend or the weekend after that. The end result is that you don’t get to play that often.
Almost as good as the real deal: playing RPGs over Google+ Hangout
6September 23, 2011
Yesterday I joined Chris McDowall and a group of three players I didn’t know before that in a game of “Into the Odd” over Google+ Hangout. In this post I want to talk a little bit about both. Let’s start with “Into the Odd”.
“Into the Odd” is basically a highly streamlined and simplified version of D&D that did away with classes, three of the attributes and includes a totally new magic system. In this game magic is not fully understood and based on artifacts left behind by some race that supposedly came from the stars. While it’s a fantasy games it brings a lot of horror and SF themes to the table. The focus of the game is exploration and in our game we explored the “Iron Coral”.
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