The Mythosan Grimoire

(This is related to this post from a few years ago). Before I wrote the latest version of the Mythosa PDF (well, version 1.0 at least), I was trying to determine a new format that was both useful and practical. Generally, campaign books follow a fairly standard design that we’re all pretty familiar with by now: some sort of summary introduction (sometimes with a bit of fiction that is usually terrible), then an extensive chapter on the world’s history that will mostly be ignored, a chapter that goes into way more detail than necessary on the political entities of the world, another one fleshing out the religions, and then others that vary but cover things like why these elves are different, and what the various organizations and factions are, possibly a bunch of new mechanical elements (for games like D&D or Pathfinder this would include new monsters, new magic items, new spells, new feats, etc.). Now, let me make it clear that I’m a fan of campaign setttings; I love reading up o...

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...

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...

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...