The Gaming Den

A problem with your Vanes description, weregild and Wodin are references to the Anglo-saxons, who didn't arrive in great Britain until the 4th century. The anglo-saxons wouldn't have been Druidic or Celtic in religion. Very good catch, thank you. The problem isn't whether D&D has gish classes (...

The gish, or fighter/wizard concept, is something that should be old with a long and rugged tradition in mythology and folklore. Unfortunately, there isn't actually a hell of a lot to go on in this regard, particularly not as any sort of defined magic knight concept. So I would like to fill in the m...

Advanced as in "progressed" or "moved from."

Well, in the old days a spell wasn't just a bunch of ink, you needed special high-quality inks and the more powerful the spell, the more pages it took to write it down. Power Word Kill was nine pages long and cost hundreds of gold worth of precious inks. Which is part of the reason printing spellboo...

Maj wrote:Spellbooks should be scrolls that aren't used up. Or something.

They tried that in Earthdawn, but the problem is that grimoire-casting turned out to be way better than other types of magic.

D&D spellbooks arguably peaked with Ed Greenwood's Pages from the Mages , which described every book as a unique entity with its own colorful construction, history, and contents. Above and beyond being a means of introducing new spells into a campaign, the spellbooks became plothooks and backgro...

It's one of my earliest short stories; the majority of it was written quickly on the back of a set of yahoo driving directions. So there's a certain amateurish quality to it, at least in my eyes. The Thor/FastJack imagery is so obvious it's almost silly, there's a straight up rip of a bit from James...

The typos alone are pretty jarring. For all the insistence they had in choosing published authors, they didn't make much of an effort to support their work with proper editing. Understand: this book sat untouched for over a year . I want to say two years, but I'd have to check the dates. Every line...

You'd have to ask Randall or Loren, but my understanding was they hoped "established authors" would have more of a draw than the poor schlubs actually writing the game.

Given, writing sourcebooks is not the same as writing short stories, but it was a dick move to not even let them submit.

Please understand...none of the Shadowrun freelancers were even allowed to submit stories for Spells & Chrome , except for Jen. The reason the anthology as held up so long is because many of the stories are fucking bad, and display a tremendous lack of understanding of Shadowrun. Steve Kenson's ...

Good and evil would be subjective, the idea is that a character's actions directly reflect some of the abilities they can develop - instead of every Paladin having set powers that they develop as they massacre their way from kobolds to demons. It allows systems where, say, instead of a wizard needin...

This risks running into the exact same problem that Spawn ran into, you know. I sort of like the idea of an RPG with a built-in limitation beyond TPK, a natural clock or ending-point that can be arrived at based on the actions of the characters. I also like the idea that player characters will star...

I like the idea of dark side XP and light side XP, but I'm still on the fence about how to apply them, both mechanically and within the context of the game's setting. I don't want a straight rip of the D&D alignment system with "evil & chaos" in one corner and "law & order...

Part of my intention is to have an analog of starting off at first level. Except instead of starting off there because you're a newb, you're starting at the bottom because you're clawing your way back up. The difference is, natch, that you don't have skill and power caps. You could totally be an ex-...

Random idea for a fantasy RPG. Requesting feedback. You're broke. Homeless. Addicted. Hurt. Sick. Through crime and betrayal, your family and friends have disowned you or been driven away. Your karma well and truly sucks. You owe money to the orc mob. You've sold everything you own or could steal fo...

I'm going to bring this up once in the vain hope that'll be the end of it. There will be rishathra . Hell, it won't even be limited to humanoids. Dragons are so fucking unpicky that anything remotely alive and with a discernible anatomy is fair game. And city or settlement on the border of two disti...

The people that are writing White Wolf games now fall into two camps: the people that were reading White Wolf games 10-15 years ago, and the ones that didn't. The former are excited about being apart of a game they first ran into when they were children or teenagers, back when books with all-black c...

This is the difference between Harlequin (the adventure) and Dawn Of the Artifacts. And it is a huge difference. Do not put the big reveal at the beginning. Seems simple enough, right? There is no big reveal for DotA. None. Somewhere in the distant past there was a vague conclusion in mind for DotA...

Cigarette Burns - The little floating burning holes you see in movies from time to time, which let the guy running the projector know when to change the reel. Except you see them in real life, just flitting in and out of your vision for a second.

So the big point would have been Horizon actually making a mistake? Hm. That's a bit ... lackluster, considering such things are more or less daily occurrences. Nothing against small scale plots, but this is just not what I'd have expected it to be (or what I was told it would be). Imagine a brain ...

AH is my read on Horizon even close to correct? Or is it just wishful thinking on my part :) One of the problems with Horizon is that no one ever sat down and figured out what the fuck to do with them. If there was a big metaplot reveal that was supposed to happen later on, it died years ago. Even ...

The sad thing is, part of the idea of SR4 was to take Shadowrun back to the streets. We didn't want great dragons and immortal elves sniping at each other in a supposedly underground-but-public forum anymore. The first couple of books tried to be...well, street-level. Runner Havens , Corporate Encla...

Well, to be perfectly fair there have been times where I've defended crap that I wrote, even when I knew it to be crap and wrong. When I get my Irish up I'm an irrational bastard and should no be allowed near the internet.

It's a really nifty idea, I just put some thoughts towards adapting it for Call of Cthulhu: Link.

The SR4 Companion is a train wreck. Not because it lets you play weird character types, but because the rules are unplaytested, unproofed, and ill conceived. I mean, what the fuck? I take my fair share of the blame for tht. RC stuff was relatively rushed and didn't get the playtesting it really nee...