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.

Related posts:

1. Stargazer’s RPG Stuff
2. Google Friend Connect
3. Surfing on the Wave

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?

Related posts:

1. Learning to say no…
2. Fighting the good fight…
3. It’s a good time to be a supers fan!

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.

Related posts:

1. Rock’n'Roll
2. iPhone app “Mach Dice”
3. Review: Printed Dice

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!

Related posts:

1. Ask The Readers: Can I use the Kindle as a GM tool?
2. Open Game Table Vol. 2 is coming!
3. Preview: “Open Game Table, The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs”

Of course there are a few rules (it wouldn’t be fun without those!):

• Create the game in November
• Finish the game in November
• Play the game in November
• 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.

Related posts:

1. My Plans for NaGa DeMon
2. NaGa DeMon: I surrender!
3. My NaGa DeMon diary #1

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.

It’s much easier to get a two to three hour game over Hangout going. Nobody has to drive long distances to get to the place where you want to play. And when the game is done you can go to bed directly without having another long drive ahead of you. Especially when you want to play during the week this really opens up opportunities.

So, do I think that playing via some kind of videoconferencing tool can replace regular gaming altogether? No, I don’t think so. But it can help you to game more often, especially when scheduling in addition to long distances are an issue. And it can help you to play with people you would probably never even meet in “real life” because they live thousands of miles away.

Of course some games are easier to run over Hangout than others. In my opinion it’s perfect for rules-light games. I guess you could even use the sketchpad to realize a battlemap if you like to play with miniatures. The only thing missing so far is a dice rolling feature, but there’s hope third party developers will add something like that with the newly released API. But if your GM trusts you, you can just use your own dice. That’s the method we used in our games and it worked fine.

By the way, I already convinced one other GM to run a game over Hangout for me and I am currently thinking about running games this way myself. I think great times are ahead of us!

Related posts:

1. Almost as good as the real deal: playing RPGs over Google+ Hangout
2. “Roleplaying games as a teaching tool” @ Musings of a ChattyDM
3. Random musings

“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”.

I don’t want to spoil things here, because you might want to join Chris one day or eventually your local GM will pick the game up when it’s done and run it for you. But rest assured there was a lot of exploration to be done and it was very exciting and weird. I loved it. I can’t wait to join the guys for the next session sometime next week.

What I also enjoyed very much is that the “Into the Odd” rules usually only call for dice rolls when you are in trouble. You can do pretty much everything without rolling, but when the GM asks you to roll it’s usually because you need to evade damage or during combat. “Into the Odd” feels quite deadly and we were extremely cautious. In the end the whole party safely escaped from the Iron Coral but one player was down to just 1 hp. Ouch!

If you want to learn more about “Into the Odd” check out Chris’ blog and his playtest document.

Now let’s focus on Google+ Hangout. Google+ is the new social network by Google. Think of Facebook with a better UI, better privacy options, and a freakingly awesome video conferencing feature called Hangout. Recently Google added a few extras to Hangout that are almost perfectly suited for online gaming. Basic Hangout allows you to see each other (if everyone has a webcam) and to use voice chat. In addition to that there’s a text chat and you can watch YouTube videos together.

If you decide to use “Hangout with Extras” you don’t get the YouTube feature BUT you can share your desktop, Google Docs documents or a Sketchpad with each other. The latter is great for drawing maps and we always had a document open with our character stats. Very handy indeed!

We had some minor audio issues, but overall the experience was great. After a few minutes you almost forgot that you were sitting in front of your PC with the other players scattered across the globe. For me it felt almost like sitting with friends around the table.

By the way, one of the other players, David Reichgeld posted about his experience on Google+. His post is public, so you should be able to check it out here.

Related posts:

1. More Google+ Hangout musings
2. Google Friend Connect
3. Google Friend Connect integration

The web-based generator allows you to generate up to 15 randomly generated male or female names suited for a game set into the Victorian Age (or a Steampunk equivalent). You can choose between the various social classes. I am sure this random name generator will be invaluable for me in the future!

Related posts:

1. Ask The Readers: What’s your favorite Steampunk RPG?
2. Review: Kingdom Builder Generator Pack II
3. Review: City Builder Generator Pack

The City Builder contains the following random generators: a Complete City Generator, a Tavern Generator, the Feature Namer, a Crowd Generator, a Rumor Generator, the Merchant Generator and the totally awesome Market Map Generator.

The City and Tavern Generator each create a pretty detailed description of a complete city and a tavern respectively. You just press a button and a new randomly generated description is generated, there are no setting to be made. But the software allows you to edit your results and save it to a RTF file. Following are examples of the output generated by the City and Tavern Generators:

Miyl is a city with loud streets.

There are seven major districts: Guild, Temple, Military, Merchants’, West Quarter, Nobles’ and Fortress

Areas of interest include: The Pine Statue, Radarus Forum, Troll Museum, Messcrown Storehouse, The Smiling Dog Inn, The Barkshark Spire, The Limping Blade Inn, and The Daring Duchess Inn

Its people take pride in their beautiful ancient architecture, patriotism, superstitions, monks, enchanters and local fighting schools. Their patron deity is the God of Names.

Some current rumors:
Kakil the butcher is being unusually quiet.
Chaemn the servant believes that Troumner the bandit is involved in business dealings with Isairakri the shepherd.
Criv the assassin claims to have proof that Elath the moneylender’s father is planning something.
Tramnax the gambler’s father is waiting in the tavern.
Jatimo the moneylender is going to run off with Nykur the guide’s daughter.

Golden Duke Tavern

Overall quality: Shady    Cleanliness: Somewhat grubby, but decent    Size: Large

Drinks: Fairly priced, poor quality, far above average variety
Food: Overpriced, poor quality, somewhat limited variety
Rooms: Overpriced, small and medium sizes, most vacant

Popularity: Very crowded, a few shady characters
Noise level: Loud        Sobriety: Most patrons sober
Dark corners occupied: 25%        Patrons openly armed: Most

Attractions: major brawl
Menu: slightly torn around the edges

Bartender: female, green eyes, very busy, glares at party immediately, speaks with a heavy accent

Noteable patrons: the amourous drunken druid wearing a religious symbol and the drunkenly ranting bard who clearly has a bodyguard

House special: Semi-transparent blue with blue flecks and a stick of cinnamon in the mug. The drink smells heavenly and tastes like ginger. It can be smelled on a drinker’s breath for several hours.

The Feature Namer, Crowd, Rumor and Merchant Generators let you choose the number of results you want to have generated. In addition to that you can choose what type of Feature or Merchant you want to be generated. The Merchant Generator also allows you to exclude sellers of magical items by checking the “Historical” check box. I especially like the Rumor generator which can also be used to generate adventure hooks if you have trouble coming up with ideas of your own.

In my opinion the Market Map Generator is the highlight of the pack. It generates a beautiful map of a market place including descriptions of all the market stalls and buildings. The generator gives the user a plethora of options. You can change the scale of the map, choose which types of merchants and other structures you want to include. You can also choose between four different background decorations (blank, parchment, cobbles and grass). The map can be saved as PNG file.

The software has been written in .NET and should run fine on Windows XP or newer. The City Builder sets you back mere $3.95 and comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. But I doubt this guarantee is actually needed. It’s a great piece of software for a very reasonable price. If you like random generators you should definitely get a copy of the City Builder Generator Pack!

Related posts:

1. Review: Kingdom Builder Generator Pack II
2. Roleplaying City Map Generator
3. Preview: Kingdom Builder by Chaotic Shiny Productions

The World’s Greatest Screen actually solves these issues. Like the SW Customizable GM Screen it’s created from cardboard and vinyl. It has a total of 8 sleeves sized 8.5” x 11” so even A4 paper fits if slightly trimmed. Please not that I picked the portrait variant, but if you prefer landscape, you can get it, too. There’s also a mini version with 4” x 6” sleeves.

Quality-wise the World’s Greatest Screen is on par with the Savage Worlds Customizable GM Screen. It looks sturdy enough to survive years of adventuring. With a price of $29.95 it should be affordable for every gamemaster.

According to the product description you can write on the screen itself using wet erase markers. I haven’t tried that yet, but I think this could come in quite handy. If you are looking for a sturdy, affordable and customizable GM screen, you should consider getting “The World’s Greatest Screen” by Hammerdog Games.

Related posts:

1. One GM screen to rule them all
2. Does the GM Screen deserve to go the way of the Dodo?
3. Starblazer Adventures Storyteller’s Screen

So little by little I have balanced my use of Twitter and Facebook. These days most updates I do on Twitter and they appear on Facebook. Oftentimes I will post in English in Twitter, where the majority of my followers are English speakers, and do my occasional update in Spanish in Facebook, where I have a LOT of Spanish speaking friends.

One thing I had NEVER done was participate in a large scale real time discussion with lots of other people. I get hashtags; I had just never tried it. Some time ago I had seen the #RPGchat discussions and lurked, fascinated by all the ideas floating about. So last week I saw they were discussing Gen Con this week and decided to join in. I used my iPhone with the Twitter app and was able to follow and participate so easily.

The people participating in the discussion where friendly, helpful and so much fun and I won a prize they were giving away! It was the most fun I’ve had in Twitter. Shout out to all the fine folk there, it was a pleasure to meet you. I will definitely be joining them again.

I did embrace Google+ early one so worry not I’m keeping up to day.

Just in case, if you are interested, in Facebook you can find me as sunglar@hotmail.com, in Google+ as sunglar@gmail.com (you can see a pattern emerging here) and in Twitter as @Sunglar. I’d love to get to know you all better!

Related posts:

1. Twitter
2. Twitter Trouble!
3. 10 RPG geeks you should follow on Twitter

Masks is a 338-paged book which contains thousand unique NPCs for your game. There are 334 fantasy characters, 333 sci-fi characters and 333 characters meant for a modern setting. These genre divisions are of course only meant as guidelines, so you might actually use a fantasy character in your sci-fi game with just a few minor tweaks. Aside from being divided into genres the NPCs also fall in three general roles: villain, neutral and allies. Since the most people in any given campaign world are more or less neutral to the players this group makes up 50%, while villains and allies are 25% each.

But of course Masks contains more than just descriptions of thousand NPCs. The first chapter not only gives a few guidelines about how to use the book you also get some great tips on how to make your characters really memorable. The book provides the GM with several examples on how qualities like attitude, style, depth, etc. can help to turn a random NPC into someone the players will talk about for years to come. But the advice doesn’t stop there.

The book gives a lot of tips on how to fill your NPCs with live. My favorite advice is that even if you think you might look like an idiot when you act out a NPC you should do it anyway. Too many GMs fail to breathe life into their NPCs because they play them as if they were reading a random section from the newspaper. Booooring! Another great advice that you should avoid falling in love with your NPCs. NPCs are the support cast of the game, but they should never steal the limelight from your players. All in all the advice given is sound and in some cases even an old GM may learn a few new tricks.

But of course the bulk of the book is taken up by the thousand character descriptions. Each NPC has a unique name, a capsule description like “Possessed Cleric”, “Unlucky Captain” or “Post-Apocalyptic Preacher”, a quote, a number for easy reference, a decryption of their Appearance, Roleplaying tips, an overview of their Personality, a Motivation, Background, Traits (like humorous, political and pilot).

Of course I haven’t read all the character descriptions yet, but the ones I’ve checked out were original, well-designed and definitely memorable. In some cases the description is accompanied by a skeptch of that character. Speaking of the artwork. While the interior of the artwork is black & white its of a high quality. I also like the layout and fonts used. The book has a very strong style without overdoing it.

One of the highlights of the book are definitely the indexes. Especially for a book like Masks which is not only during preparation but also at a reference tool at the table a good organized index is vital. Luckily the book comes with multiple indexes. The Indexes list the NPCs by Trait, Name, Author and Groups (like Academic Organization, Holy Warriors, or Tavern Staff for example)! The book concludes with the short bios of the contributing authors.

One question remains: is this book useful? Hell yeah, it is! Coming up with a good NPC can sometimes be very hard, especially when you are constantly as bad prepared as I am. In a lot of cases my character have silly names and you have the nagging feeling, you met that guy already in a bar somewhere. In the future, when my improvisation skills fail me, I can just open Masks and pick one of the NPCs there that loosely fits what I just needed.

A lot of the NPCs can also be used as inspiration for a whole adventure. Especially some of the villains are extremely cool. I can’t wait to put some of those to good use. Masks is definitely a book that should not be missing from any GM’s bookshelf!

Please note that this review was based on the PDF version of Masks that has been provided by Engine Publishing for the purpose of this review. By the time this post goes live the preorder for Masks should already be open at the official Engine Publishing site. So what are you waiting for? Head there and reserve your copy of the book now! It’s well worth its price of $39.95!

Related posts:

1. Preview: “Open Game Table, The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs”
2. Review: Open Game Table
3. Making NPCs come alive!

I am not one of these people. To me, a blank space is a challenge. I rely on seeds to kickstart me. (This is probably why I am a fan of what has been called “remix culture”, taking existing things and making new things out of them, often by combination with other existing things.) My creativity works more from adaptation to constraint than from limitless possibility. My gaming projects are often alterations of or expansions of existing products, such as Arcane Secrets for Michael Wolf’s Arcane Heroes, or Resolute, Adventurer & Genius. I have multiple projects on my hard drive that arose from a Game Chef-like creation contest on the RPG.net forums; these projects were detailed on my old blog, Polyhedral Dreams. I also have a retro-clone that has been creeping toward completion for a few years now.

Blanks spaces do not inspire me; they intimidate me. So it is that when confronted with the popular trope of an ever-changing landscape, a world that shifts constantly around the characters, I instantly lock up. I have a hard enough time describing landscapes as it is. Coming up with new features on a regular (or even irregular, but continual) basis is right out. The Dreaming from oWoD’s Changeling, its Exalted counterpart known as the Wyld, and the shifting lands of the Maelstrom from Maelstrom Storytelling are three example implementations of this trope. I’ve never had any success with them.

When confronted with the game ingredient “seasons occupy distinct locations” from one of the Game Fu challenges, the key was inserted into the lock and my creativity ran rampant… and for some reason immediately went right for a trope I had no personal luck with. For what became my Seasonalis world, the all-encompassing Winter was realized as an ever-changing winterscape, always cold and snow-bound but shifting from hills to forests to mountains around anyone wandering through it. This was how it was supposed to be, I realized, even though I would never be able to properly describe the continual changes. I hoped that someone else might find the setting entertaining and do what I felt I could not.

Seasonalis languished. Perhaps I would get around to writing up a full setting document, I thought. Some day. But then, a few weeks ago, as I was going through old posts looking for what I felt were my best articles, I reread what I had posted about the setting and realized I still wanted to do something with it. I have felt for a long time that Seasonalis would make a wonderful Everway campaign, but on #StargazersWorld, we had been talking about Warrior, Rogue & Mage, and I got the notion that WR&M might be a great compromise between Everway and a heavier game like D&D. I even got the idea that I would like to run the game, something I rarely do.

The Winter, however, still stood in my way. I could come up with a wonderful “island” of Spring, Summer and Autumn for the characters to live in and explore, but the true adventure in Seasonalis is in the Winter, and I would be forced to confront my weakness. I waffled. I considered using art, in the manner of Everway’s Vision Cards. But eventually, I came upon the self-referential idea of using seeds to kickstart my creativity: simple charts I could use with dice rolls.

Since WR&M only uses the d6, I wanted to keep to that. I originally considered using a “d66″ (two six-sided dice read individually, rather than added, for a total of 36 equally-likely results) chart, but in the spirit of the Wyrm system I eventually settled on a set of simple d6 charts that would give me ideas for how the Winter landscape would lie at any given moment. I’m still planning a d66 chart of “special” features, one-shot events or unique discoveries to add spice to things. The idea is to be able to rely on the charts when I need ideas, rather than trying to cover every single conceivable possibility.

The charts include a starter indicating how many different features to check for (with indications on the extreme ends that the local Winter is either relatively stable, and will change less on the next check, or unstable, and will change more) as well as charts for each of six basic “landscape” feature types (hills, forests, mountains, caves, water and ruins). The d66 “special” chart will include all manner of random little images that can be blended with the landscape features and used as inspiration for important events or little side jaunts on adventures.

The use of charts to help make decisions on the layout of the environment isn’t new, of course. The first edition AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide included charts for designing dungeons (a feature that really should have been carried over into every edition since). These could be consulted at any time, if the DM wanted to add something new on the fly, and could easily have been used for a game in which the environment kept changing. Mongoose’s version of Traveller includes charts for creating worlds which are also simple enough to be checked at-need. But the idea, for some reason, had never occurred to me before. The fact that the Winter in Seasonalis is constant in at least some respects makes the task a bit easier. Something like the Dreaming would involve a broader base of seed ideas, since anything is possible there, but if you’re not afraid of charts, or really want them to help out like I do, a small folio to consult would be brilliant.

Now that I’ve got the charts to help me overcome the difficulty of the Winter, I’m ready to move on with detailing a small section of that universe to play in. I’m eager to see how well they work in play.

Related posts:

1. Mouse Guard RPG Boxed Set
2. Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition Gamemaster’s Kit Unboxing
3. Ask The Readers: What are your thoughts on the GUMSHOE system?

Wait! What did I say? I should not say “just”, man there is an online CHARACTER GENERATOR for Pathfinder in the webpage. Great!

I’ve become a great fan of online tools that can speed up my game in any way, from the SRD to spell cards and generators! I own Hero Lab and love it but realize not everybody wants to (or can) invest in software for their games. The Venture Captain Standard Character Generator includes all the basic races and classes from the core rulebook, it’s easy and intuitive to use and you can save the result to a PDF. This is obviously a labor of love and the creator is still working on it (here is his stated roadmap for the development) but so far so good.

I love the generator and look forward to the any features added in the future. So be sure to drop by, give it a whirl and thank the creator for this awesome tool! Enjoy…

Related posts:

1. The Pathfinder Role Playing Game Reference Document UPDATE!
2. Pathfinder RPG Spellcards, for free!
3. Oldies but goodies! Some great digital game supplements for the New Year…

M&M’s Gamemaster’s Kit came with two items. A black and white paperback QuickStart Character Generator and a full color Gamemaster’s Screen.

The description of this kit reads:

HEROS IN A FLASH!

The Mutants & Masterminds Gamemaster’s Kit is a key accessory for your superhero campaign. It features a sturdy and practical three-panel, Hardback screen with all the charts and tables you need to play Mutants & Masterminds, Third Edition. Also included is a 48-page booklet featuring the Quickstart Character Generator, Which allows players to speedily create balanced starting Heroes. A 2-page Character sheet suitable for photocopying completes the package. The Mutants & Masterminds Gamemaster’s Kit is the perfect complement to the Hero’s Handbook. Kick off your super-hero game with style!

Lets talk about the QuickStart Character Generator first.

The QuickStart Character Generator is just that. A quick character generator. It’s designed to give you three quick ways for your party to build their characters and get the game started as quickly as possible. You have the d20 method, the Menus option and the Combination method. With the d20 method you roll a d20 and whatever number comes up is your archetype. You then role it a couple of more times to determine your Abilities, Advantages, Skills or powers you get. The number of roles you need to make to generator your character varies just depending on the results you get. With the Menus option you get to pick the Archetype you want, go to that page and start picking different packages of Abilities, Skills, Advantages, and Powers you want. Lastly with the Combination method is a combination of the d20 and the Menu method.

The very last page of QuickStart Character Generator is a double-sided character sheet that you could easily put in a copy machine and make copies.

I have a lot of good things to say about the M&M Gamemaster’s Kit. The Gamemaster’s Screen uses wonderful art and all the content is in beautiful color. Everything is easy to find and read. The Quickstart Character generator is just that. A solid character generator with no frills or gimmicks.

Pros

• Gamemaster’s Screen is solid and full color
• Everything is easy to read and understand
• If you pre-order you get PDF versions of everything for just $5 more.

Cons

• None

Related posts:

1. Mutants & Masterminds 3rd edition Unboxing
2. Free Stuff Friday: Mutants & Masterminds Character Sheets
3. A Non-Review of Mutants & Masterminds/DC Adventures

In his series, specifically Part 8 he talks about this and touches upon the elevator speech, or elevator pitch, call it what you may. And I think this is particularly appropriate, the idea is to communicate the “value proposition”, in layman’s terms, why this campaign is right for you! Having worked in sales I can understand the value of this type of communication. Precise, succinct, to the point, and there is something to be said for getting your point across in a distilled form. It forces you to take a hard look at the campaign and reduce it to its salient features.

Of course, being creative types who have (probably) worked on this campaign for hours upon hours, you want to share every exciting detail with the players. My advice, be patient, there will be time for this. If you indulge my digression here for a moment, patience is also a valuable skill for a Game Master. In our modern “instant gratification” culture we want all the excitement and we want it right now, but if you pace yourself, set up plots and introduce information little by little not only will you have the satisfaction when it all comes together down the line, but you will keep your players engrossed and interested, coming back to your game for more.

But back to the task at hand, how do we apply this to the campaign primer. Ok let me recapitulate from the last post and give some structure to this:

1. Be concise! – Don’t drown players in information. If you must prepare hand-outs try the one page idea. Limit yourself to one single page handout per session. I normally try to prepare a slightly larger introduction to a campaign, a mix of history, rumors and set up for the first couple of sessions, and try to pace myself handing out information in small manageable chunks. This is a relatively new technique for me, and I have not used it all the time, but I believe it works. Normally the one page handouts have no illustration or fancy fonts, the idea is to share the most important information and get it out of the way.

2. A picture is worth a thousand words – I have said it in other posts and I think it bears repeating. We are visual creatures and when you can show an image of a place or an NPC the players grasp the idea quicker. My biggest problem is when I write and create and then spend hours scourging books and the internet looking for the image to represent just what I have in mind. You know an easy solution for this? Find the image first! We may not have the budget for art departments or to hire big name artists, but we can burrow their art and use it. I am not advocating piracy, or using any art for profit without paying the artist. All I am saying is to use it privately for your game to show exactly what you have in mind.

I remember a friend who, in the olden days before the internet was everywhere (well almost) would cut images from magazines, newspapers, textbooks and glue them on a composition notebook. He then would write the names of his campaign’s NPCs under each picture. No information, no stats write up, just the name and the picture. He would pass it around and we would spend hours looking at the NPCs. Likewise I would use the collectible cards sets of famous artists printed in the early 90’s, and the old AD&D trading cards, to represent NPCs, places or events. I would put them in trading card pages and then label each according to what it was. At a point the collection became quiet large. I still have the scanned images of all those cards.

3. It’s all in the presentation – I am well aware that the mere mention of Power Point may send shivers down the spines of some of our readers. If you have been victim to endless presentations with slides filled with text that the presenter, professor, salesman, whoever it may be, just reads in monotone, I understand your trepidation. But Power Point can be a powerful tool. It has become so prevalent that almost everybody will know what Power Point is. Don’t want to spend money on the program? There are options like Open Office you may explore.

My advice, use Power Point to illustrate what you are talking about. Select an appropriate and evocative background, set up a format and use lots of images. Remember point 2 on this list. I usually write a title, place various images and write small captions under them. I have used them to present NPCs, pahtheons, even illustrate adventures like I said in the previous post.  We live in a multimedia world; engage all your player’s senses!

4. “The dungeons are alive with the sound of slaying!” (with respect to Miss Andrews) – One of our readers, symatt, wrote a comment on the previous Campaign Primer post about using audio files to tell some of the stories of your game, having others speak different voices. I like the idea, but don’t have the equipment to produce the audio drama playing my in head. I simply may not have done proper research, but I like the idea. Another use of audio can be the campaign soundtrack. Michael has written some excellent posts about music for games before, and while for many years I was reluctant to use music in my games, now I am a convert and play music on my games to set the mood.

But on this instance I am not talking about music FOR the game, but music BEFORE the game, the Campaign Soundtrack idea! In our day and age it’s easy to burn a CD with a playlist; share existing playlists from your music devices, or create online collections. I have NOT done this yet but I plan to prepare one for when we retake our Pathfinder swashbuckling campaign. Simply put its collection of music appropriate for the setting, taken from movie and game soundtracks, some ambient sounds, classical music and music of specific cultures. Using the music of certain real world cultures to illustrate the music of a region or a culture in your game gives your players another mental short cut to associate with specific details from your campaign.

Let’s say that in the campaign soundtrack you identify, for example, a track of Russian folk music (like this one) as the typical music of a region in your campaign. When your players visit that place during the game, you can play that track and the players will associate what they heard in the soundtrack with what’s happening in the game and you’ll have reinforced another detail that makes your game come alive. Avoid music that is commonly known to your players unless you want to create a sense of familiarity.

Use specific pieces from existing soundtracks for NPCs or events, referring to them as the King’s March or the Dirge for the Battle of the Haunted Pass in the campaign soundtrack. Then when PCs visit the King’s court or travel to Haunted Pass you can play the music for added effect. I avoid well known soundtracks, like Conan or Lord of the Rings, they may be fine to set the mood during the game, but if they are too well known they will never be YOUR campaign’s music. Explore distant cultures and languages that sound foreign and exotic. For example, in my campaign the elven language sounds like Quechua. To illustrate what is sounds like I played Yma Sumac to my players. You can hear some of her music here. It may not sound like your idea of what elven sounds like and that is exactly the point! And of course there is this video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ker24VSMImo

And this brings me to my last point…

5. “Video killed the GM star!” – I remember a client back when I worked at my FLGS who used to tell me stories about the games he would run (people telling gaming stories in stores, ludicrous I know!) and how he would show clips of movies for events and NPCs. The BBEG of his campaign was the “Lord of Darkness” from the movie Legend (Tim Curry as the BBEG, there is an idea). While I’m reluctant to just lift random clips from famous movies, as some are just too well know to gamers, I have used animations for alien landscapes, or clips from games to illustrate locations. This is perhaps the idea I have used the least, but it can be ideal for certain genres, like sci-fi, or if you play games based on movies or TV series this can be a powerful tool.

When we began playing our Pathfinder swashbuckling campaign I got together with my players to watch Treasure Island. Sadly I could not get the original Disney movie, so we watched Simbad movies instead. It might not have been exactly about the campaign, but it set the tone, they served as a primer to the type of game we would play.

Those are just five points you can take into account when you create your campaign primer. And I haven’t talked about tools such as Wikis, Blogs, I feel like there is a lot more ground to cover. I may just need to revisit this topic again.

Remember it doesn’t have to be all in paper, we can so do much more! I hope some of this may be of use to you. Please share your ideas of what you do for your game’s campaign primer, how you introduce your campaigns to your players. I’d sure like to know…

Related posts:

1. Campaign Primer Ideas! Part 1
2. Instant soundtrack for your Cthulhu campaign
3. World Building Part 8 – Kicking Off Your Homebrew Setting Campaign

A way to introduce your setting to you players, giving them an idea of what the game they are about to embark upon is about. Shinobicow lists the ideas of handing out print copies, what he calls the drive-in method (jumping right in) and the elevator speech. Good stuff, go and read it. I have been pondering about this topic since reading the original post.

First about how to go about it… I used to create my campaigns by myself. Come up with concepts and ideas and then share that with players. Over the years I’ve become convinced that the more you involve your players in the process the more they are invested in the game. Not every player wants to create a campaign, that’s why YOU are the GM, but they may want to contribute depending on their interests. Some may want to create a city, a planet or an NPC; others may want to contribute some rules. Even something as simple as a campaign questionnaire can help you in this process.

Find your comfort level on how much you are willing to let go and invite them in. Parcel out the work and then as a god chef it’s up to you to use all the ingredients into a succulent campaign. But regardless of how much or how little the players contribute eventually you must put it all together. You must make sense of all the work and present it in a coherent way to your players…

I have tried different ways to introduce campaigns to my players through the years. From simply telling them about it, to introducing it piecemeal as we play; my first real attempt at creating a proper primer was during the AD&D 2^nd edition phase of my homebrewed campaign. I sat down and collected all the data on history, races, kingdoms, and printed out an illustrated Players Guide to my campaign. My players back then appreciate it, and I know one who keeps it to this day (Pierre thanks for all the years playing), but looking it over now it seemed like a rather large and unwieldy hodge podge of information. Let’s see 50 pages, with cartography, a one page introduction to each kingdom, a random piece on coins.  Too much, too soon!

Then when we switched over to D&D 3^rd edition I wrote a lengthy piece on the history of the world. Again too much detail too early on; since then I have tried to distill data, to find a way to share the most important information that conveys the basics of the campaign, captures the player’s interest and gets their creativity going. There is one lesson I learned from my very first Players Guide, the one page idea. Off all the parts of that document I think the part the players referred to the most was the one page descriptions of kingdoms and regions. In one page I described, through words and pictures, the very basics of the region.

For my current campaign I’ve tried to work within the one page limit. The goal is to distill the description of the campaign to one page. And the any additional information you need to hand out to players I try to keep to one page. Have I been successful? Not completely, some topics like religion have gone for two pages, and the full blown history of the campaign is much longer that 50 pages, but that additional information is optional, there for the player who is interested and wants to read it. All they need to play SHOULD be on the one page format.

And let’s break with the idea that all hands out need to be printed out. On this day and age we have so many new ways to engage our players. I have been using Power Point to great effect as introduction to campaigns, actual play aides and for adventure design. I first began using it to introduce a D20 Modern game and then prepared Power Point presentations for each session outlining adventures, including NPC images and even maps a la Indiana Jones with the plane traversing the map. I also used this strategy to introduce my Star Wars Saga System prequel Infinities campaign, opening scroll and all. When I used it as a game aide some slides would not get used, but they helped me visualize the game.

So consider Power Point as a tool for creating that campaign primer. Another new powerful tool is social media, not just to share information but actually to create content. Pages and groups can be created to share information, integrating images, music and video. Even creating profiles for groups or NPCs in your campaign can make them seem real to your players in ways a description on a handout cannot. Explore the possibilities they are exciting!

I have some other ideas on this matter, but I think this is enough for now. I’ll be back for part two soon.

Again thanks for Shinobicow for the inspiration for this post.

Related posts:

1. Campaign Primer Ideas! Part 2
2. World Building Part 8 – Kicking Off Your Homebrew Setting Campaign
3. World Building Part 4 – Campaign Setting Genre

Jon Leitheusser

Anyone who is a fan of Mutants & Masterminds or DC ADVENTURES has probably seen the Threat Reports that Green Ronin has been putting out lately. Threat Reports are 99 cent downloadable PDFs for Mutants & Masterminds 3rd edition. They contain a quick little story about a bad guy and their stats allowing GMs to use them in their M&M games. I recently got the chance to interview one of the creative minds behind the Threat Reports, Jon Leitheusser and ask him where the idea behind Threat Reports came from. I also got to ask question about what it’s like to work with Green Ronin and what future projects he is working on.

Youseph Tanha: I want to thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview with me. It seems like there are never enough interviews like this in my opinion and I really appreciate you making the time.

Jon Leitheusser: You bet!

Youseph: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? Where you grew up?

Jon: Well, I grew up in Burlington Wisconsin. Which is sort of on the South Eastern corner of the state not far from the Illinois border. Actually its ten miles away from lake Geneva which is where D&D was created. I went to school there (Burlington) and high school there. I went to college in Madison and the UW. I ended up spending 14 years there. Not in school, in Madison.

Youseph: What role playing game did you cut your teeth on?

Jon: Oh, Advanced Dungeon & Dragons. I think it was 1982 when I started playing that.

Youseph: How did you come to work for Green Ronin?

Jon: In 2001 I got recruited to come and work for WizKids out in Bellevue Washington. While I was working their I did a little bit of freelance work for Green Ronin. Doing some editing. Specifically doing editing for stat blocks because I enjoyed it. They had a hard time finding people to do that. So I did a little bit of that for them. I did a little bit of freelance writing for them. I wrote part of the Iron Age book with my buddy Seth Jonson who was the HeroClix Game Designer after me. Then I ended up leaving WizKids and the guys from Green Ronin said ”hey you want to come work for us a Line Developer”? And I said “Sure that sounds like a lot of fun to do in my free time”. So that’s how all that went down.

Youspeh: So are they your full time employer right now?

Jon: They are.

Youseph: What did you do for WizKids?

Jon: For WizKids I was hired to be the advertising and public relations guy. I was probably there a couple of months when I walked into the head of the game design department and said “I want your job.” And he said, “All right, I’ll start sending you rules and you start giving me feedback on them. Let me know what you think.” So I… It wasn’t editing. It was slightly editing and slightly like, you know, the logic on this is wrong. The wording on that needs to be cleaned up. That sort of stuff. I don’t know what these rules are trying to say. Here is how I would fix them. He was impressed by this so he hired me out of the marketing department and into the game design department. I moved up from there and I think in two years I had his job and he had been moved up to be vice president.

Youseph: So did having something like that on your resumé open up doors to places like Green Ronin?

Jon: I imagine that is probably true, but I think that has more to do with making contacts with people. I have known Chris Pramas actually now for a good 16 years one way or another. I worked with him when I was a product manager for ‘Capital City Distribution’ which was similar to Diamond Comic Distributors. Then Diamond eventually ended up purchasing Capital City. So I had a lot of contacts in the gaming industry through that job. Chris knew me from that. We would talk at conventions.

Youseph: So how many employees does Green Ronin have currently?

Jon: Full time?

Youseph: Yeah.

Jon: 8 plus some part timers.

Youseph: So the thing that came up that made me want to do this interview was that Green Ronin has been putting out these ninety-nine cent PDFs called Threat Reports for Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition. Looking at the whole thing, the whole idea of it just seems genius to me. I mean you got something that costs less than a buck and it adds a layer of depth to the game. It’s just awesome and it’s set at a good price. Who’s idea was that?

Jon: The short answer is that it started with me, but the long answer is we have been talking about doing more PDF products for a while now. I was sitting around thinking about this and I though “People like PDFs. They like the immediacy of them right? So, if it costs ninety-nine cents, it’s an easy thing to download and have right then.” Then the other thing people really like are bad guy books. Those sell very well for us. So I thought “Why don’t we just do a villain of the week thing.” That’s originally what the ‘Threat Reports’ where called. ‘Villain of the Week.’ Then as we got closer to the launch date we thought “You know we should come up with a more interesting name than this.”
We figured that at the very least the PDFs would at least pay for themselves and they have. Which is great. Eventually we will collect these villains into a book in order to sell in stores.

Youspeh: I imagine there will be several more books to go with M&M 3rd.

Jon: Yeah, yeah, there definitely will be more in the future. Just for M&M this year we have a hand full of books already planned or are in the works. Then for next year we have probably already talked about another half dozen.

Youseph: Which I think is great.

Jon: Yeah it is. It’s a lot of work, but it’s good to keep new products coming out and people seem to be really enjoying the new edition of the game which is great.

Youseph: So, as an outsider looking in I love the fact that the PDFs Green Ronin offers are not watermarked. I love the fact that when you guys do an update, like the errata for DC ADVENTURE I was able to download the entire PDF updated with all the errata and it did not cost me a dime. I mean to me that is HUGE! How come Green Ronin is more accepting of selling PDFs than a big boy like Wizards of the Coast.

Jon: I don’t really know the reason behind Wizard’s strategy there. I don’t understand. As for Green Ronin, none of us are particularly concerned about piracy. It’s just not something we spend a lot of time thinking about. I can’t even say we have a strategy for it. Right? We release the products the way we do because that’s the way we release them. That’s the easiest answer. I think all of us kind of look at piracy and think, ”that sucks,” and it would be great to get all that money from all the people that are “Stealing this from us”, but you know I think a lot of piracy happens because people are interested, but not actually interested enough to spend the money… and if they download something that interests them then it’s entirely plausible and possible–and very likely in fact–that some number of those people in the future will by product from us. So, it’s another way to do marketing I guess. It’s hard to track and it’s not like you would be able to crack down on it anyway unless you pulled all of your PDFs from being on sale… and that still doesn’t even end the problems. We are just not going to bury our head in the sand over it. We know it’s out there, but we hope some of those people eventually spend some money with us.

Youseph: I want to share a link with you. Do you know the author Neil Gaiman?

Jon: Oh yeah. I have been following him and his giving the book away for free. I haven’t been able to convince Green Ronini to do that yet. -laughs-

Youseph: Well what I am trying to say is that I like what you guys are doing with the PDFs and the price point and what not. It works for me.

Jon: Well I think one of the things that helps us is that we have a really good fan base. They are really responsive and interested in what is going on. So when we announce a new project or a new product goes up for sale we do the pre-order which has the hard copy book and the pdf for an additional five dollars, or you can just get the PDF for, I think, full price or something like that. I think when you order the book, and the PDF is only an extra five dollars or so, you don’t have to worry about overpaying. The price makes it reasonable to pay for and download the pdf right away.

Youseph: Right. With the DC ADVENTURES game, was it hard to convince DC or Warner Brothers that you were going to create a PDF and put it out there and not be able to track it?

Jon: No, not at all. Not in the least. We explained to them that we would not only have the hard copy, but we would also be offering the PDF. I think there was a couple of minutes where they weren’t sure. Then they realized we were going to charge money for it and they would be getting their percentage of the sales they were fine with it. The issue of piracy never came up.

Youseph: Well that was kind of cool of them.

Jon: Yeah they have been really great to work with.

Youseph: So the ‘Threat Reports’ are selling well then?

Jon: Yeah. They are doing just fine. I mean they aren’t blowing the doors off. They are not selling thousands and thousands of copies, but you know, hundreds of copies is great. As long as we can make back what it costs to produce them we are going to keep going with them.

Youseph: Can you talk about any future projects you are working on?

Jon: Nothing that you haven’t already heard about. Heroes Journey is coming out right now. Emerald City Nights. The prologue is up and chapter one will be going up hopefully very soon. The M&M Heroes Handbook just came out. The Gamemaster’s Guide is in good shape actually. It’s written, it’s edited, it’s developed. We are just waiting on art. It’s all laid out, we just need to put the art in. Then we should have the DC ADVENTURES Heroes and Villains books coming out soon. We have the DC ADVENTURES: Universe book coming out later in the year. Hopefully in the summer. Then we have the GM Screen and the Character generator that just came out in PDF and will be out in hard copy in the next couple of months. It’s probably no surprise to anybody that there will be an Emerald City book in the summer which I am working on now. And that’s it until later in the year.

Youseph: Do you have a favorite role playing game right now?

Jon: I know I am supposed to say Mutants & Masterminds. Which might actually be true, but I’ll discount that one. See I really like mechanics, game mechanics, and I like elegant mechanics that facilitate fast, fun game play. They don’t have to necessarily have to be super deep. They just have to work well and be consistent. There are just so many games I like. Like I said I am going to discount M&M because that would probably be my favorite since I’m a superhero fan. So outside of that, I would probably have to say Savage Worlds.

Youseph: Really?

Jon: Yeah, because of what I said. Its fast and light and its internally consistent. It has a lot of flexibility because it allows you to play it as a role playing game, or a miniatures game, or a skirmish game. I mean there is all sorts of stuff you can do with that system.

Youseph: I received my copy of Mutants & Masterminds the other day.

Jon: Oh, that’s great news!

Youseph: Yeah it was nice to get it. One thing I was disappointed about was that it was a softcover.

Jon: Yeah. We’ve heard that a few times.

Youseph: Any particular reason you guys went that route?

Jon: Part of it was we assumed that people would have just purchased the DC book and we didn’t want to “make” people purchase another hardcover book since it would have cost at least ten dollars more. So instead we went with softcover. I’m sure at some point will do a hard cover version of the book.

Youseph: Oh don’t say that.

Jon: I am sure it will be a ways down the road, though.

Youseph: Well it is what it is, I guess. So I am ready to do my Inside the Actors Studio ten question ending here.

Jon: -laughs- Ok.

Youseph: What is your favorite word?

Jon: Yes.

Youseph: What is your least favorite word?

Jon: It’s a dirty word.

Youseph: That’s ok.

Jon: Ok, its cunt. I hate that word. It’s so hard.

Youseph: What turns you on?

Jon: Creatitivity. A good idea.

Youseph: What turns you off.

Jon: Willful ignorance.

Youseph: What sound or noise do you love?

Jon: That is a fine question. It’s got to be rain on a roof.

Youseph: What sound or noise do you hate?

Jon: The wrong note.

Youseph: What is your favorite curse word?

Jon: The F word. I also like to say “curses”.

Youseph: Very villainy of you.

Jon: Yes. -Laughs-

Youseph: What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?

Jon: Really anything, but if I had to pick one I would say full-time writer as opposed to part-time writer, which is what I do now.

Youseph: What profession would you not like to attempt?

Jon: Probably anything where I would have to be really angry or really aggressive all the time.

Youseph: If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you reach the pearly gates?

Jon: I guess you were wrong. -Laughs-

Youseph: -Laughs- Well Jon, that’s it. Thank you so much for your time. I had a blast doing this.

Jon: You bet. Any time.

Related posts:

1. Interview with Chad Underkoffler
2. Interview with David Bezio
3. Robin D. Laws interview

P.1 – Addiction and Acceptance

This articles discusses the addiction that many of us GM’s face in gaming, the addiction that is world building.  Many of us get hooked on world building.  This article approaches that subject and introduces this series.

P.2 – First Things First

This article talks about never forgetting to build at least a little Old School; even though we might have tons of web based programs and sites which can help us build our campaign settings, never forget to pick yourself a good old fashioned notebook.

P.3 – Getting Started with World Tone

This article takes a look at world tone.  Some worlds are going to be humorous and funky, some need to be spooky scary (as opposed to gory scary).  Deciding on the tone you want for the world at large when you start building your world is probably a very good idea.

P.4 – Campaign Setting Genre

The Genre of your setting is second only to tone (maybe its more important, but that is really up to you).  It is a good idea to decide early on whether or not your world is going to be high fantasy, super fantasy, or steampunk; it can be pretty hard to change setting genre mid-stream.

P.5 – Macro Meets Micro

There are two pretty well accepted world building techniques – top down, and bottom up (macro and micro).  But, do they really have to be kept apart?  This article focuses on combining these two techniques to keep yourself motivated and your campaign setting construction process moving.

P.6 – Get Smart, Get Sneaky

You should steal as much stuff for your setting as you are comfortable with.  Just don’t get caught doing it. JK.  Every good GM will look around the real world and take from it inspiration and ideas and use those to help build up their world.  You should probably do the same.  This post also focuses on some of the places to “research” for you setting.

P.7 – Inside Your NPC’s Heads

Have you ever had a conversation with one of the NPC’s in your world?  You should think about trying it.  Having a convo with an NPC is a good way to see how your world is developing and make sure that everything is working the way you want it to.

P.8 – Kicking off you Homebrew Setting Campaign

Here, I discuss ways that you can kick off your campaign and get things rolling when you actually want to play with it (remember that is why you’re building a campaign setting after all).  In this article, you will find some useful information regarding the different types of ways you can start your campaign.  I take a look at the elevator speech and writing campaign setting primers among other things.

P.9 – The Don Draper School of World Immersion

You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.  Ok, that might be a bit harsh.  Your setting may in fact be very special and actually, it is a very unique snowflake, but your world is one among many and it is very, very hard to sell your setting to a group of players.  This article focuses on selling your setting to your players and getting them immersed in your world.

P.10 – The End of the World as We Know It?

The last in my 10 part series on world building.  Is the world going to come to an end? Only if you want it to, and even then it will always live on in your head.  As long as you are passionate about your setting and want to keep working on it, your setting will live on.  If you can get people excited about your setting too, than your setting will even live on without you.

Link Round-up

Before I close things out completely, I wanted to mention some of the sites that I use for building my settings which I think you might find useful.  First off, I wanted to bring up Obsidian Portal This site offers you the ability to put together a campaign wiki which you can use for whatever purpose you might desire.  I use it to actually put together a campaign setting bible that uses hyperlinks between pages; I also use this site for actually tracking one of my ongoing games, a Play by Post Shadowrun game.  The site supports just about any system you could possibly desire.  I don’t have a paid membership yet, but I will be upgrading soon.  With the free membership you get up to 2 campaigns for your account and you have access to all of the basic features – but, with the upgraded, paid account (which is pretty cheap actually) gets you unlimited campaigns and also allows you to store significantly more date.  It also gives you some other cool features like the ability to send out e-mails to all of the players in your group whenever you update your campaign wiki.

I also use Artweaver, a German freeware image editing program.  It works a lot like GIMP, but is a little bit less powerful, but what it does offer is speed and size.  The program doesn’t require nearly as much processing power to use as other photo editing programs around the net, which means that if you are running a netbook, like I am, you won’t be burning out your RAM, but you still get all of the power you need.  I use this program for doing banners and art, but mainly, I use it for doing maps.

Speaking of Map Making, I am a member of the Cartographer’s Guild Forums This is a really good spot to find tips on map making as well as some really amazing maps that users have generated.  I troll these forums and pick up tips more than anything, but I’ve posted one of my campaign maps up their for critique.

Though I like to make my maps in Artweaver, I am also very aware of the power that hex maps have and I do like Hexographer.  I don’t use this program very often, but it does offer a lot of powerful mapping capability, especially the ability to add little markings to your map.  Very good stuff. This article may come out too late for most people, but Hexographer PRO is actually on sale right now for the GM’s Day sale, you can get it for $15.98; the free version of this software is only usable online, but the pro version works offline as well.

Finally, get on some forums around the net.  That is just good advice.  There are tons of forums out there.  You can find one you like easy enough.  Those are the areas where you are going to get the most feedback regarding your setting.  Blogs might be good for writing stuff on your setting down, but actually, forums are still probably the best medium for getting quick feedback regarding your setting.  Unless you have a very popular blog, it is going to be pretty hard to bring people to you in order to get feedback on your campaign world – you are probably better off taking your setting to the people.

Ok everyone.  Thanks so much for reading this series.  I really appreciate everyone that commented or mentioned these articles to me around the web.  If you have any feedback that you want to share about this series – even if you just want to e-mail me to tell me how much I suck, fee free.  I always love getting criticism on my articles.  Good Night! Good Luck!!

Related posts:

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3. World Building Part 10 – The End of the World as We Know It?

This week’s Free Stuff is: Save Versus Death‘s Saturday Night Delves #1: Revenge of the Iron Lich

I love materials that can provide inspiration for my own home brew campaign. Save Versus Death‘s Saturday Night Delves #1: Revenge of the Iron Lich is just that. An adventure that has provided me with great inspiration for my own personal game. Just keep in mind this is not your normal everday run of the mill adventure. Save Versus Death set out to create an adventure that was designed to kill your party. It truly is something to be taken very seriously if used.

On Save Versus Death’s website they wrote this stuff up: Saturday Night Delves are a series of fourthcore dungeon adventures designed to be played in a single 4-hour session. Published quarterly, Saturday Night Delves feature extremely difficult encounters, a variety of challenges ranging from combat to puzzles, and evocative adventure sites that are both memorable and sinister.

Packaged with a complete suite of materials for DMs and players, SNDs are a great way to throw down an evening of high-energy, high-stakes, tournament-style Dungeons & Dragons.

So what are you waiting for! Head on over to Save Versus Death’s website and download the first (of what I am sure will be meny) Saturday Night Delves! Just make sure you take a moment to thank Save Versus Death for all their free stuff!

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This week’s Free Stuff is

Character Sheets for Mutants & Masterminds.

On The Green Ronin Website They Wrote This Stuff up: Character sheets for the third edition of Mutants & Masterminds are now available — in black & white and in color!

Color Character Sheet

Black & White Character Sheet

So get your copy of the Mutants & Masterminds Character Sheets free today. Then be sure to thank Green Ronin for their free stuff!

Related posts:

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This week’s Free Stuff is

Did you know that Green Ronin released Errata for the DC Adventures Hero’s Handbook? They did! Best of all it’s FREE!

On The Green Ronin Website They Wrote This Stuff up: The DC Adventures Hero’s Handbook errata file is now available!

Got to love it. Short and sweet. So get your copy of the DC Adventures Hero’s Handbook Errata free today. Then be sure to thank Green Ronin for their free stuff!

Related posts:

1. Free Stuff Friday: DC Adventures Character Sheets
2. Free Stuff Friday: DC Adventures Quick Start PDF
3. Free Stuff Friday: Mutants & Masterminds Character Sheets

What is this post? First and foremost a review of the GameMastery Plot Twist Cards… What are this cards I speak of? Well they are part of a series of GameMastery Cards produced by Paizo that illustrate treasure, items, NPCs, etc. While I was originally intrigued by the idea I was less than thrilled when I got the original cards. True having a card with the image of a certain piece of equipment or a magic item may be cool but I discovered that I forgot to hand them out or some players really did not care for them. Maybe I was not using them effectively. Paizo has gone on to produce decks themed to their different Adventure Paths and I imagine this must be a boon for those who play the Adventure Paths.

However the fine folk as Paizo then produced the Critical Hit Deck and the Critical Fumble Deck, both excellent products.  So after these two excellent products I was really interested in the Plot Twist Cards. Please indulge a little detour on this review… Let me tell you why.

Since beginning my, currently in hiatus, Pathfinder RPG campaign I wanted a different feel to it. I wanted to encourage swashbuckling actions and the feel of action/adventure movies. To accomplish this I implemented the use of Action Points (the old D20 variant that appeared in the 3^rd ed version of Unearthed Arcana not the new Hero Point rules recently published for Pathfinder, I began the game long before the book where they appeared was published) and included Scratch Factory’s Swashbuckling Cards to allow the players to alter the game in significant ways.

Over the last couple of years I have embraced the idea of shared storytelling where players influence the flow of the game. I have not gone full indie, all narrative no GM, “dice be dammed we are telling a story” storytelling just yet, but enough to allow the players to impact the flow of the game in significant ways. I don’t use all the Swashbuckling Cards; I revised them all and removed two I believed might prove problematic.

I also allow players to draw two cards per session and use them, either for the effect described or as a free Action Point. As a GM I also draw two cards I can use during the game with any opponent or NPC or use as Action Points for the player’s opponents. If I feel a certain card would simply ruin the game I can refuse to accept it and immediately give the player a new card. I have only done this once in over a year of playing.

My players have embraced the cards and their inclusion has greatly enhanced the game. So along come the Plot Twist Cards, I saw the cards and snatched them right away. They come with their own rules and each card has an evocative title, a small illustration and various suggestions how the card may be used in game. They are excellent as even the seemingly negative cards have suggestions that may be beneficial or fun. The idea is that player can use the cards to help them or make things more challenging, depending on the story they create together with the GM.

I doubt my players would use any of the cards to make things harder for them. They may prove me wrong, but I don’t see it happening. Each card also has a rules bonus or penalty that can be used instead of the more esoteric opportunities presented by the card.

I think the open nature of the cards, the need to interpret and come up with possible applications for the cards will be the hardest aspect of the Plot Twist Cards. The Swashbuckling Cards I’m currently using, while open in many instances, have a specific effect that may need adjudicating, but it’s easily applicable. Rarely have we spent more than a minute or two clarifying a doubt on the card’s wording.

The Plot Point Cards require more interpretation and are much more open ended unless you simply use the penalty or bonuses printed on them, but if you limit yourself to this you are robbing yourself of the myriad opportunities the cards bring. They present a true opportunity to include the players in the creation of a collaborative story.

The rules that come along with the cards call for the GM to give two cards to the players at character creation, and an extra card when they go up a level. This seems too little for my current campaign, but that is the feel I am going for, larger than life adventure. The suggested pacing may work better for a traditional campaign.

Will my players like the Plot Twist Cards? That remains to be seen, I plan to show the cards to the players and discuss it with them. I am a little concerned with the open nature of the cards, I can see some players embracing it, other struggling, but I think that is part of the magic of the Plot Twist Cards. They encourage role-playing, to me that is a good thing!

Here is looking forward to the Condition Cards…

Related posts:

1. Fortune Cards, my two cents…
2. What about the GameMastery Combat Pad? A review…
3. What about the GameMastery Guide? A review…

We gathered at the beach apartment of a friend (the benefit of living in a tropical island) created characters and began a campaign using the DC Adventures RPG. Despite my love for ICONS It proved to be too rules light for my group, the prefer a little more crunch in their gaming diet, so we went with the Mutants & Masterminds 3^rd edition rules as presented in the DC Adventures book.

I know I proposed a Virtual Book Club to read DC Adventures and I am YET to publish a post about it, but real life (work, illness and other minor details like that) has kept me from writing a post to discuss the game as thoroughly as I’d like. So the real review of DC Adventures is still forthcoming (talk about wasted expectations!). What I intend to talk about is the campaign itself and two tools I’m using to enhance the experience.

Want to learn more? Read on…

Despite having told my players we’d be playing this past weekend well in advanced by the time the weekend came around only three characters were ready!

We only had three copies of the books among 7 players and a GM, making a Mutants & Masterminds character requires some math and since I was the only person who had read the complete book I decided I would help the players create their characters. I quickly realized I needed some technology tool to help me speed things up and keep track of all the possible power combinations. At first I was going to get the Mutants & Masterminds 3^rd edition rule set for Hero Lab by Lone Wolf Development but since this is only a beta release I decided not to. This is NOT a knock on Hero Lab! I own the Pathfinder RPG rule sets and use them extensively, there are excellent, but I wanted to explore other possibilities for this game.

The first thing I did was go lurk in the Atomic Think Tank, the message boards for Mutants & Masterminds. It is a really helpful community full of interesting and well informed discussion of the game in all its versions. I found the DC Adventures/3E Resources topic and there I found the link to an Excel Character Generator for DC Adventures.

The Excel documents created by Ski is EXCELLENT, if you are familiar with Excel you should have no problem navigating the generator. I fiddled with it one afternoon and pretty much got the hang of it, there was a learning curve as I began using it but it proved invaluable for character generation. It allowed me to build the individual components that make powers, put them together and simplify the math needed for character generation.

Character generation still took anywhere from one to two hours, but only about half the players had a working knowledge of the system and we took our time to make sure they ended up with the character they wanted.

After character creation we began playing on Saturday from about 12 midnight to 5 am and then from noon to 7 PM on Sunday. Needless to say we had great fun and everybody was stoked for Tuesday’s regular game. While prepping for the game I began to think of ways to distribute information about the campaign to the players in an effective way. I write a lot of background for the game, use images and pictures for NPCs. In the past I would print them out and hand them out to the players. I’ve also tried e-mail and Yahoo and Google groups. While all my players use computers they have different level of skills or interest. Groups I’ve created in the past have suffered form only about half the players actively participating. E-mail has been a little more effective but not as efficient as I’d like.

Recently Facebook unveiled their new groups which allow the groups to have a group chat, an e-mail address and to be created as a group open to everybody, closed (membership is public but not everybody can join) and secret. The group allows you to share pictures, post news, updates, and links, create events and share simple word processing documents.

I created a group and soon began sharing images for the PCs and NPCs in the campaign. I also created three documents, one a roster of PCs, a list of NPCs (34 so far in 3 sessions) and a collection of new items about the events happening in the world around them.

Think what you will of Facebook it has become so ubiquitous that ALL my players use it to communicate. The group may not be the most user friendly option out there; I still think Google Groups and Google Documents offer much better options, but alas, not all my players use them. Facebook is just too convenient. So far the players are commenting and participating. Are all of them using the group? Not all, but I have hopes, let see how it goes!

So there you are, two new tools I’ve begun using for my new campaign. What new tools and ideas are you integrating in your games, be they new or ongoing? I’d like to know…

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1. Initiative Tracking Tools
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3. Game Mastering Conundrums… Limiting player choices!

ACE: Acronym CrEator

It generates all sorts of amusing results, and in the Advanced Search you can select which words of your lists of keywords MUST be present. Granted some results are rather strange, case and point the title of this post, generated with the very same online tool.

As a bonus, if you are wondering what a particular acronym stands for there is the Abbreviations and acronyms dictionary. I hope these resources inspire you and they are up to par with FIRE standards, the Fellowship of Internet Resources Evaluators.

Have a great weekend everybody!

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