Circle of Dar Janix

I made some decisions about the cosmos that my city floats in. Remember that I intend to have the city bob up and down through a layer of planes as it also moves laterally through "space". This means it will be shifting through the planes with sinusoidal motion and will reenter each plane in a different place than it exited it. Not only is the city drifting between the planes, it is moving to different places in the planes. I intend to stick with the generic planes to start with. This is both for portability reasons as well as familiarity ones. I may be adding some planes as we go if I think of something interesting. For now I am thinking: Air Water Earth Fire Field of Victory The Underworld Madness Mechanus I still need to decide how they are layered, and what it means to move spatially through any one of them. For now, this should be enough to give me a basic idea of what might be in my city.

I have decided to use GUMSHOE as my rule set when designing this city. I do not expect this to be a rules heavy exercise; it should be very easy to move this city over to another rule set. I do, however, expect to use some of the assumptions in the GUMSHOE rules when writing the fiction for the world. As GUMSHOE is an open rule set, I expect I will make changes and additions to it to suit my city. I don't want to give too much away, but I am going to need rules for power armor. You can find the GUMSHOE SRD here , so it will be free to follow along when I do use rules. I think GUMSHOE is going to be a good fit. After spending some more time looking at the rules, I am confident it can handle the level of combat I expect for this setting. It will have to be hacked a bit for a few elements though.

I need to decide which game system I will use. I spent some time poking around, looking at different systems to see which ones might fit my needs. FATE Core: I have very little experience with this system. I have played a few sessions of Spirit of the Century, and while I found it to be enjoyable, I did not find it to be all that deep. I am not sure that you could make a long-running campaign really work with FATE. It feels pretty superficial. That said, it does facilitate focusing on things other than combat, so I don’t want to dismiss it out of hand. It is also possible that many of my concerns about SotC are addressed in the FATE Core implementation of the rules. I need to look through the book again. Savage Worlds: This system is the mirror image of FATE Core in many ways. I have a lot of experience with Savage Worlds. Like FATE it is a simple system, but unlike FATE it does focus on combat. I have run games with Savage Worlds that were light on combat, but the system is p...

As I discussed last time, I need to determine what kind of game I would like to run in this city before I make any major decisions about it. I am discussing the genre here more than anything else. In my experience, hack-and-slash style games do not work in an urban setting. If the city is to be believable at all, there has to be some kind of rule of law, and the authorities tend to look down on murder hobos inside of the city limits. So, I can eliminate the traditional D&D-style game right off the bat. That isn’t to say that you cannot run a city game using D&D or one of its descendants, I have run D&D city campaigns in the past, most recently a City State of the Invincible Overlord game using Castles & Crusades, but they tend to have a narrow focus. The verb mix of D&D is not great for urban campaigns. While I am not making a game decision at this point, it is likely that D&D and its ilk are out. I have a vague idea that I want this game to be science fanta...

I wound up being offline for most of the weekend because my in-laws visited. I will try to catch up over the next few days. When I last posted about my city project, I was trying to decide which kind of city to design. I have settled on a weird city. While the details will come out as I work through the next few weeks, I have made some general decisions about the city. The city will be an interdimensional city, the city is built on the inside wall of a sphere that bobs up and down through the planes. The city is always moving from one plane to another, the environment outside of the city is in constant flux. Due to changing nature of its surroundings, the city is inhabited by a diverse spectrum of people. I am going to have to define the cosmology that surrounds the city, at least at a rough level of detail. Right now I anticipate that this city would serve as the focus for any campaign set in it. Most of the action would take place in the city itself, there would only be brief ...

Sorry, I did not get time to write much about this today. Several people have indicated that I should go with a weird city, and that is what I am going to do. Now I just need to figure out what kind of weird city I am going to make. One thing I know for sure, it will be weird in a way that has a large impact on the rules of whatever system I use for it. There is no sense in having a weird city if I am just going to run a standard D&D game set in it, it needs to do something weird to the rules too. I have been kicking around a few ideas in my head today. One that I like, that is not fully formed, is a spherical that bobs up and down in a fluid fantasy cosmology. This means that it would follow a kind of sinusoidal path through different planes, constantly being subjected to changing external influences. I haven't really thought about this much. Another idea is a miniature city (like a model) that exists inside of a full-sized city. In my City State of the Invincible Overlord...

I plan to write at least one post a day about creating a fantasy city during the month of September. The first step is to decide which type of city I am going to create for this exercise. I have been thinking about this for a few days, and I have narrowed it down to a few choices. Develop a city that has long existed in my home campaigns, but has never been detailed. In this case, the City of Dar Janix, island home of the Knights Templar of the Circle of Dar Janix, a city of towers. Create a new generic fantasy city akin to City State of the Invincible Overlord or Lankhmar. The downside to this is that there are already plenty of cities like this for RPGs, the plus side is that it is a good way to illustrate my methods since everyone is familiar with the general concept. A floating refugee city. This city is inspired by the aircraft carrier city in Snow Crash and the real world city of Kowloon. It is a densely populated city, full of the cast-offs from other cities. It has a smal...

My favorite non-RPG thing to come out of a RPG is Lords of Waterdeep. Lords of Waterdeep is a fantastic introduction to the worker placement genre of board games and it has a theme based on D&D's Forgotten Realms setting. Light euros are not the kind of games that WotC are usually know for, but they really hit it out of the park with Lords of Waterdeep. Not only is it a good use of the D&D theme, but it is a solid worker placement game in its own right. Better yet, it is a great introduction to both worker placement and strategic board games in general. It is very easy to learn, and plays quickly. It also is very easy to set up, something that you cannot usually say for these kinds of games. This is a great gateway game that can lead to other fantastic games like Manhattan Project and Yedo. My wife and I have played this many times, both the cardboard version and the excellent iOS application.

I guess I am going to have to make the same choice here as 95% of the rest of the participants and say Wil Wheaton. Not only am I a fan of him as an actor, Stand By Me is one of my favorite movies, but he is a celebrity that plays RPGs that is actively helping the hobby. Wil has a talent for figuring out how to make it interesting to watch other people have fun. I was very skeptical of Tabletop when I first heard about its premise, and I was happily proved wrong. I think that with Titansgrave, he has offered one of the best gateways into the hobby that has ever been available. The show makes role playing look fun, and it communicates what it is all about. That second item has always been a challenge, how do you communicate what an RPG is if no one in the group has any experience with the hobby. I think that prior to Titansgrave, the best answer was Mentzer’s Red Box, and game books in general. I think that Fantasy AGE has the greatest introductory box set ever, a YouTube show. Tita...

To be honest, I no longer have a central place on the web to go for RPGs. For years, the Fear the Boot forums were my RPG home, but RPG discussion seems to have moved away from forums and distributed across things like Google+ and Twitter. I find it much harder to stay interested in these forms of communication, they have no history and do not lend themselves to long, in-depth discussions. Things like Roll20 and Google Hangouts offer online gaming opportunities that never existed before, but without a central community, I am not sure how to find people to use these tools. It would be nice to have a place where there was a group of people large enough to offer a pool of diverse players, but small enough that we all know each other. It feels like what is missing from the web since forums went out of style is the ability to talk to small focused communities. You are either talking to one person or everybody now.

I really enjoyed having RPGaDay during August, it gave me something to write about every day. I think I am going to continue that on my own during the next month. I will use the month of September to create a fantasy city, one post at a time. I will be drawing on my various GM/DM guides and city books for inspiration and mechanical guidance. I haven't decided exactly how I will attack this yet, I may post a schedule of blog posts in the next few days, or I may wing the design throughout the month. I am likely to use the 3.X Dungeon Master Guide system for classifying the city as it is well organized and people are familiar with it. I am not a cartographer, but there will be a map or maps. I generally use procedural methods for detailing my campaigns, so there is likely to be random charts. I imagine I will detail factions and NPCs as well. More to come.

I guess I could take the easy route with this and just say WEG Star Wars and be done with it. It has been years since I last played it, and I am unlikely to play it again anytime soon, but I don’t want every one of this posts to be about that game, so I will go with Alternity instead. I really enjoyed Alternity at the time, it was an attempt to have a universal game for science fiction the way that AD&D was a universal game for fantasy. This was a few years before 3rd edition and the advent of the d20 system that was set up to handle them both. From a rules perspective Alternity kind of existed in a wierd place between chaos of AD&D and the unified mechanic of d20. It moved towards the idea of having a standardized task resolution mechanic, but the mechanic itself was still pretty fiddly. It wasn’t a bad system for the time, but it is not one I see myself going back to today when I have choices like GURPS 4th edition and Savage Worlds. The best thing about Alternity was its...

I wasn't too sure what he meant by this. I could take it to mean, "Favorite idea for merging two campaigns into one," or I could take it to mean, "Favorite idea for merging two game systems or settings into one," so I will just take it both ways. I have a lot of experience with merging games. I have run different groups in the same campaign world, sometimes even the same dungeon, for a number of years. Most recently, I have drawn all the heavily used areas from my recent fantasy campaigns into one world. This was pretty easy to do, I just cut out those sections of the maps and then glued them back together. They key was that by eliminating all of the history that my players never encountered in game, I found I had almost no conflicts that would have to be explained away, even if all of the players involved discovered everything that the other players knew (unlikely). I think they lesson here is that if you only create what you need, and do not get attached to ...

The inspiration for games I run tends to come from two places, books and maps. Generally, I get science fiction inspiration from books and fantasy inspiration from maps, although this is not always the case. I think this is because my science fiction games tend to be about an idea, usually a "what if question", and my fantasy games tend to be about a journey or exploring a place.  Almost any kind of book can inspire a science fiction game, from a science fiction novel, to a book on phone phreaking. Sometimes I will get an idea while reading a history book or a social science book. The inspiration almost always takes the form of a question, from the dumb, "What if this happened in spaaace?" to the more complicated, "What would a democracy look like if everyone could vote on hundreds of little issues every day through the internet?" Even when I am dealing with a licensed scifi game like Star Wars, the basis tends to come from a question. To a certain ...

This one is really hard. I am having a hard time coming up with a mechanic that I feel is really revolutionary. And I am going to answer this from the perspective of what felt revolutionary to me when I encountered it. That means that if someone else did it first, but I never encountered it, too bad. While there are plenty of times that I have found a mechanic clever, I can only think of two times that I can say I was surprised by one. The first was saving throws, it actually took a while for me to get my head around those. Part of that was that I was 10 years old, the other part o it was that it was the opposite of the way everything else in the game worked. You generally rolled to make stuff happen to another character, not to keep it from happening to you. I was comfortable with hit points when I first encountered them, they were the same as hearts in Zelda, but rolling to keep a status from being applied to my character was a bit mind bending. The other was the conflict resolut...

My favorite house rule is my dungeon crawling house rule set for Castles & Crusades. While C&C is great as written for most things, it does need some tightening up for extended dungeons crawls of the type I run. While I am always working on my house rules, the general gist is to get combat out of the way quick, and to have a very strict exploration round. I have talked about these rules before. I slim down combat by using group initiative and break combat into phases, each side takes its turn before moving on to the next phase. The phases are Missile, Melee, and Magic. I extend the combat round to 1 minute so movement can mostly be abstracted. I also treat all enemies in a group as a bucket of hit points. When you kill one foe worth of hit points, I subtract one enemy from the group. Any damage dealt beyond what is required to kill an enemy is applied to the hit point bucket. This means that characters regularly mow down multiple weak enemies in a round. This makes them feel ...

I wasn't exactly sure what this question meant, so I am going to assume that it means which game I would want to play if I could always get enough people. For me, the answer is GURPS. For all the time I spend talking about, and running, rules-lite games, I actually prefer crunchy games with a high level of granularity to skills and mechanics. I think this is because, if I could run any kind of game, I would run hard science fiction games. I prefer that kind of game to have several different kinds of physicists and chemists, not just a generic "Science" skill. And it isn't just in hard scifi that granularity matters to me. I love Savage Worlds, but I have some problems with the system in long campaigns or back-to-back campaigns. Savage Worlds does not have a very high level of detail in its skills, this is great, it is what makes it so fast and easy, but it can make everything start to feel the same after a while. I have found that two Savage Worlds campaigns in a r...

Today's question was, what is your perfect gaming environment? For me the answer is either a gaming store or a convention, and I prefer a gaming store. I have several reasons that I prefer public gaming. One, I like big groups, eight is my favorite table size, system allowing. I find it is usually easier to pull this off at a con or a store, for reasons of space and having enough people. Second, I believe that the best way to get people into the hobby is for them to see people playing a game. Gaming stores are the perfect place for this. There are a surprising number of people in a gaming store that have never played a RPG, or have not played one in years. These are people who are generally geek inclined since they are in the game store, and a table with six to eight people sitting around it having fun draw attention. RPGs are actually somewhat less intimidating than many of the other things going on in the store, there aren't $800 of minis on the table, or a whole bunch...

Favorite RPG Setting If you have read my previous answers, it should come as no surprise that my favorite setting is Star Wars. I am not going to go on about it again here, I have run two campaigns to completion in this setting and loved both of them. I can actually be more specific because both of those campaigns were set in the Elrood Sector, the subject of one of WEG's Galaxy Guides. The great thing about the Elrood Sector is the level of detail at which it is described, each planet gets a few pages, some hooks, and a few characters. There is enough there to build a campaign around, but not enough there that it becomes cumbersome to remember it. In fact, while both my campaigns were set in the Elrood Sector, they were two very different versions of the sector. I should mention two other settings in which I have run a lot of game sessions, Stonehell and The City State of the Invincible Overlord. I don't think it is a mistake that these are both very limited set...

Like Super Hero RPGs, I have very little experience with horror RPGs. The only horror RPG that I have any real experience with is WEG's Bloodshadows, and I am not sure that counts. Bloodshadows was part of WEG's Masterbook line. Masterbook was an odd duck generic system that used custom cards in conjunction with dice for the core mechanic of the game. It was interesting, but on the clunky side in actual play. You had to roll dice, consult a chart, and play cards. If I remember correctly, you also had to know what "stymied" meant. Bloodshadows was also an out-of-the-ordinary setting. It mixed '30s-'40s noir with hammer horror monsters and spellcasters. To be honest, the setting was not a great match for the rules. We generally did not play this game as real horror, our sessions tended more towards campy action. I think this was mostly driven by the artwork in the books, which had a very pulpy feel to them. The game hardly qualifies as horror from a thematic ...