The Mythosan Grimoire

I've added a couple new maps to the  Downloads  page. One is a map of Mythosa with a silhouette of Europe overlaid on it, the other the same but with a map of the continental United States.

The Mythosa Cyclopedia has been updated. Changes include: Renamed "Cyclopedia" to "Codex". Added items for categories other than geography, including religion, organizations, history, cosmology, and more. Added an index of the Codex entries I also changed the layout, as I was having issues with  GM Binder  for what I was trying to do. The Codex can be downloaded from the Downloads page.

I may not have been posting on the blog but I haven’t been idle. I’ve just posted a revised map  and version 1 of the new " Mythosa Cyclopedia ". I’d like to say I’ve tweaked things slightly, but that would be a little inaccurate. But in my defense, that wasn’t my original intention! Below is a long rambling about how this new version came to be. Though I’ve changed Mythosa quite a bit over the years (that’s actually part of the world lore now; the cycle of destruction and rebirth is a central part of a universal "monomyth"), the last incarnation was intended to be the last one. I was happy with the world, but my map looked too amateurish. So I started to look online for someone to hire to make a professional-looking map of Mythosa. In the process I found an application called " Wonderdraft ". I’d never heard of it before, but once I bought it and started using it, I was amazed. This was the mapping program I’d wanted for years, it just didn’t ex...

When it comes to dungeon maps, I favor utility over artistry. Maps with rendered furniture and torchlight shadows are nice, but if they’re only seen by the GM, they’re not very practical. I want maps that are clear and make layout with dungeon tiles easy. If they can convey additional information without being too busy, all the better. Given the above, I really like this map of the venerable “Caves of Chaos” I found on The RPG Cartography blog . Not only is it practical but it contains a lot of useful information without being overdone. The only thing it’s really lacking is a square grid, though that might have clashed too much with the other elements (maybe tick marks on the outside of the walls could have been substituted...?). I’m not sure how much use I’ll get out of this map, but it’ll definitely be a model for ones I make myself in the future. (Note: The first link is to a JPG of the map, but the PDF you can download from the second link is much higher quality).

There's been plenty of discussion over the years about the impracticality of the armor female characters are often portrayed wearing, but can we take a moment to discuss this travesty? This is from Dragon #52 , for a D&D ad. It's kind of a chainmail half-shirt but slashed diagonally up the side for...reasons? Maybe he gets a Charisma bonus to distract female orcs with his partially-exposed pecs...

(Has it really been 10 months since my last post? I really need to post more often! I do have things I can put up here...anyway, I digress). While tweaking my Campaign Guidelines page  recently (though I'm still not satisfied), I realized that I’m not a huge fan of “house rules”. I use them like everyone else, but I’m trying to minimize that. To me, when you sit down to a game at someone’s table and they say they’re playing “Game X”, if you already know that game you shouldn’t have to re- learn a bunch of things you already know. I can’t get away from tinkering a least a little bit, but ultimately I have to ask myself if a change is really necessary. Most of the time, it isn’t. That said, I do consider there to be two types of “house rules”: rules changes and option availability. The former are actual changes to existing rules, like saying that active Perception rolls can’t be lower that a character’s passive Perception score, or that items need to be saves if their ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 .

In a previous post I discussed the details of settlements in Mythosa. This is a follow-up to that post, summarizing the availability of businesses and services in each of the settlements. They are shown in the table below (businesses are in brown ). Most services that produce physical goods are not listed as their presence is implied based on the equipment lists in the PHB (i.e.; if the PCs can buy a sword in a settlement, you can assume that there are smiths; if they can buy arrows, assume fletchers are present, etc.). If a percentage is shown, that is the chance that one individual of that type is found in the settlement. Service/Business Hamlet Village Town City Metropolis Alchemist None None 50% 3 (2 to 5) 5+ Artist None 50% 3 (1 to 5) 10 (5 to 15) 15+ Astrologer None None 50% 3 (2 to 5) 5+ Bank None None None 2 (1 to 3) 4+ Boatwright* None 50% 3 (1 to 5) 10 (5 to 15) 15+ Book Dealer None None 50% 3 (2 to 5) 5+ Bounty Hunter None None 3 (1 to 5) 10 (5 to 15) 15+ Bre...

The Nine Infernal Kingdoms are regions of the plane of Maledicium where powerful archdevils have established their domains, pockets of stability and order surrounded by demon-infested chaos. Brief descriptions of these "kings of Hell" and their dominions are listed below (in order of relative power, weakest to strongest). Note: Each archdevil is listed with aliases as it is ill-advised to say their names aloud, outside the context of a ritual or invocation. To do so is said to invite misfortune upon oneself. ⁜ ⁜ ⁜ ⁜ ⁜ Ilsidris, King of Avernus The Hawk, the Whisperer Ilsidris is the ruler of Avernus , and is the third ruler of this kingdom in recent history. He has the form of a human male with a hawk's head, bird wings, and taloned feet. Ilsidris speaks in a sinister whisper, causing feelings of dread and uneasiness to those who hear his voice. The avian archdevil is the weakest of the infernal kings, but he is able to ally and manipulate the others in...

The Mythosan world map and PDF show and document a number of towns, many cities, three metropolises, and one hamlet. Hopefully it is obvious that this is not the entirety of settlements in the known world; to show every village and town on the map would be major overkill and a lot of unnecessary work (and to be honest, I have no idea where every village or hamlet is; I add them as I need them). That said, there's nothing that documents the specifics of settlements in the context of Mythosa other than the general terms listed in the world guide. This post is intended to clarify that. There are five types of settlement in Mythosa: hamlet, village, town, city, and metropolis*. On the world map, settlements are shown based on their size (relative to the scale of the map) or their significance. Given that, all the cities and metropolises of the known world are on the map. Regarding towns, the ones that appear on the world map have some particular importance (like Irongate due to its ...

Yes, you read that right - a new version of TableSmith has been released! I realize it's long  overdue, and it's not a huge release, but it is something (and finally addresses the folder access problem that's plagued 5.1 since Windows Vista was released). There are some new features, but this is primarily a technical update to address two things. First, the standard installation puts the program and other "read-only" files into the "Program Files" folder of Windows, while the tables, config file, and other mutable files go into a TableSmith folder in the user's Documents folder. This is the expected installation that Microsoft encourages, and fixes the issue where everything was installed into "Program Files", which then created issues when TableSmith tried to save it's configuration information. "Back in the day" (i.e.; Windows XP and earlier), you could do that, but Vista and later didn't allow for that. Ironically, ...

I've uploaded a small (one-page) PDF for the town of Irongate (found in the Ruinlands  region) that I put together for one of my current Mythosa campaigns. It can be found on the Downloads page.

I finally updated the Mythosa PDF (available on the Downloads  page). When I switched from a static HTML site to Blogger, I obviously wanted to preserve the Mythosa pages. Originally, I just printed the pages to PDF and stitched them together into a single file. This was good enough for a start, but not for the long term. I took the contents of the PDF, cleaned it up, reformatted it, and reposted it. It still could use some more artwork, but that will come later.

While reviewing my backlog of PDFs, I was looking through a small campaign settings book (what and by who is irrelevant). As I'm looking through the Table of Contents, I see the same standard chapter - Races, History, Organizations, Religion, etc. On the one hand, this is a good, boilerplate approach to a setting and organized in such a way as to be easily digested by the reader. But on the other hand, I was thinking, is this the only way? We've been following the same basic template for presenting setting information since the late 70's. It's not bad (I certainly have done and am doing the same thing), but is there a better way?

While there is an "About" page on this blog (link over to the right), I figured I'd post some explanations of what is going on with this blog as well as the old Mythosa site. Currently, the old website is gone (even after I spent a bunch of time revising it…sigh), and this blog is the Internet home for Mythosa, TableSmith, my iOS apps, and whatever other projects I may be working on. I got rid of the old site for a couple reasons. First, I realized that "fantasy campaign setting" sites really aren't a thing any longer. Most of them are gone, and the handful that remain haven't been updated in years (some have been sitting idle for over a decade). Farland is still going, but it's an exception (and has always been at a higher level of quality than most every other world site, mine included). Other than that, most people have moved their content to blogs rather than static HTML sites. Now, just conforming to the current fashion isn't a rea...

Compiled by Andrew Roy The table below provides density figures for many common (and some not-so-common) substances. This information is useful for determining the weight (or volume) of objects and cargo. This table was pieced together from a wide variety of sources, listed in full at the bottom of the page. The inspiration for this comes from the old Dragon magazine article, "How Heavy is My Giant". These figures have not been rigorously checked. Do not rely on this as a scientific reference! Note on measures: Specific gravity is a measure of an object's density. A cubic centimeter of water at 4°C weighs 1 gram, and has a specific gravity of 1. The specific gravity numbers below can be read as "grams per cubic centimeter" (or kg/liter). A solid object with a specific gravity greater than 1 will sink in water. Weight in pounds per cubic inch and foot is also provided to save non-metric users some time on the calculator. Material Specific Gravity Pound...