Posts

Showing posts from 2017

The Truth About World-Building

Image
I recently read a somewhat old post about world building from the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque blog . I've talked in the past about simplifying world presentation, and the post really resonated with me. Years ago, I definitely was the type of DM who wanted to detail his world to the nth degree (though generally after I over-detailed something I would get tired of it and move on to something new - tells you something about doing that which I didn't catch onto for too long...). But I've seen that, in general, your players really don't care about that sort of thing. Heck, when I'm a player I rarely care about that much detail. Which is the point that the post above makes, among other things. World-building is a fun activity, and if you want to go into hyper-detail mode, go nuts. But don't think you're doing it for anyone other than yourself. Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't flesh out anything in your world or just drop it

3D Printing Project: Fortified Temple

Image
A couple months ago I backed Printable Scenery 's "Time Warp" Kickstarter , specifically the "Rampage Castle" (the Western buildings were cool but I didn't need them, and the Europe line, also cool, wasn't something I was that interested in). The first thing I built with the castle sets was a basic tower; I'm not going to go into that here since detailed instructions on available on the PS site and in their YouTube channel. My second project was a simple stronghold. Took awhile to print (~400 hours) between two printers. Actually took longer than that since I miscalculated some of what I needed and ended up printing a few pieces I didn't need (though that gives me a jump on the next castle, I suppose). It actually looks more like a church or temple - a friend mentioned it reminded him of the cathedral from Diablo - but that's OK :) Anyway, I told the  3D Printed Terrain & Miniatures  group on Facebook that I'd provide a parts list f

3D Printing Game Terrain

I recently (well, about 7 months ago) got into 3D printing, initially spurred on by Fat Dragon Games ' second Kickstarter for their Dragonlock line . Since then I've also been printing objects from  Printable Scenery , free objects from  Thingiverse , and other places. As I've been a little light on blogging here, I figured I'd start adding discussion about this new facet of the hobby. It's very cool, more affordable than ever, and the potential is pretty amazing. More posts coming...

On Wilderness Travel and Evolving Gaming Styles

While cleaning up some old bookmarks, I found this blog post from almost 10 years ago:  Guiding player movement . It's interesting since what Shamus describes is something that I've started doing recently (with a fair amount of success), though I originally got the idea from the excellent  Hill Cantons blog . Specifically, his first post on  "point crawling"  (and one of the commenters references the other article). I may end up writing up some posts on how I use "point crawling" for my game, but I'm still working the kinks out. In any case, I think it's preferable to using a hex map since it makes it easier to "fast-forward" wilderness travel if nothing interesting is happening, but it still allows for player choice. The choice isn't as great as "which direction of the six do you want to travel out of this hex", but it tends to be a more meaningful choice. Hex crawls have the danger of turning into punctuated slogs, wherea

Campaign Guide updated

The  Campaign Guide and House Rules page  has been updated to reflect allowed material from Princes of the Apocalypse  and the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide , as well as clarification regarding material from Unearthed Arcana .