Tag: campaign creation

  • RPG Blog Carnival: Making Deities

    This month’s RPG Blog Carnival topic is Divine Worldbuilding, which comes at a fortuitous moment as I have had to begin designing a pantheon or two for my home campaign. I really should have given it thought much sooner, as I have two clerics and a paladin split across two groups. When it was just…

  • November RPG Blog Carnival: Worldbuilding

    This month’s RPG Blog Carnival is all about world building, something I’ve been doing a lot of for my two D&D 5e campaigns. I thought I’d share a little something from the primer I created for my players to help give them a sense of the world. While I generally kept the mechanics of the…

  • From the Campaign: Fae Trickery

    I am always on the lookout for ways I can make magic seem more…well, magical, in my tabletop games. In most systems the use of magic seems very mechanical, and undercuts the mystery of using mystical power to shape reality. The Vancian systems of D&D are perhaps the best example of a very mechanical approach…

  • Engaging your Players: Player Homework

    I prefer to build a world/campaign focused on the player characters. Like characters on a TV show, the action of the story should revolve around them. I also want the world to feel fleshed out, so I include things that have nothing to do with the players. After all, in the real world there are…

  • From the Campaign: Emberhaunt

    Here’s a little something I thought I’d share, that will make an appearance in one of my upcoming D&D sessions. I’ve been developing a haunted location in my game, and I wanted something a little special to spring on my players. Enter the emberhaunt. After I’ve had a chance to run it a few times I…

  • From the Campaign: Tome Guardian

    Even though I’m not entirely finished with this creature, I thought I’d share something I pulled together for my home D&D campaign. My party is going to be exploring many places which have not been seen for almost five hundred years or more, and this is one of the creatures they may encounter in their…

  • New Campaign Smell

    A week ago we started our brand-new 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Ever since I got the new books (a birthday gift from my Thursday night Pathfinder group, oddly enough) I knew I would want to run a 5th Ed game. But I also knew I wanted to do things a little differently from…

  • Campaign Creation: What’s Dead Can Never Die…

    Looking back through the logs, and it has been a while since I did one of these. So let’s start with a quick recap of what I’ve done so far: created a starting location (The Ruin and environs) created some NPCs important to the party picked the main monsters/monster types the characters will encounter first figured…

  • Campaign Creation: Random Encounters

    As we head ever closer to Christmas, I want to make sure I stay on top of blog posts. So they’ll keep coming this week, they’ll just be shorter. In that spirit, here is a Random Encounter Table for The Ruins. You can use whatever method you like to determine when an encounter happens; I…

  • Campaign Creation: In the Depths

    Last time, we talked about all the nasties awaiting our brave adventurers above ground. Now I want to look at what (or who) might be lurking underground. Giving it some thought, I want to split the Depths, as I’ll call them, into three main areas. The first area will be just below the surface, at…