Thursday, February 24, 2011

Content - Dark Gnomes and Goblins

Dark gnomes and goblins in the Divine Lands.  Read, enjoy, and use them in your campaign!

I had originally intended to publish my campaign setting once everything was complete.  This, however, is taking much longer than it ever should, for many reasons.  For one thing I'm lazy; video games and teh intarwebz take up massive amounts of my time (admittedly because I let them, because...I'm lazy).

For another thing I keep restarting the project, as I tend to do with most of the things I'm working on.  Every time I come up with a good idea in game design, I develop it and things go nicely, but then sometime later in development I come up with a way to do things better.  So inevitably I restart the whole project.  Now granted, each successive iteration is genuinely better than the last.  But...for fuck's sake I'll never finish if I keep restarting!  I need to learn to stick with what I've got, and save good ideas for later.

Finally, the primary reason this is taking forever is that genuine world building is a fucking monumental task.  I am developing not just races, but the cultures that they form, the interactions of those cultures with others, the history of the race and its connections to the histories of other races or specific regions.  I have to develop so goddamn much stuff that making a dent in the broad project as a whole is simply a time consuming endeavor that normally takes whole groups of people to complete.  So, silly me, I've decided to do it all myself.

Be any of that as it may, however, I have decided to start releasing bits of this campaign setting at a time.  I figure that, since I am working on publishing actual fiction soon on lulu, I can use that as my baseline.  Each story of the upcoming series of publications is going to showcase one of the races, cultures, or other aspects of my setting.  So, in line with that, I will begin posting the game material related to those races, cultures, and other aspects here on my blog.  It's all for free, as the crunchy rules side of my setting was always intended to be.

So, as stated, here is the first bit.  Dark gnomes and the goblins they have horrifically enslaved.  Enjoy!

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Thursday, February 10, 2011

Content - Pariah House Rules

Here, I present the Pariah Houserules for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Yes, I realize that I've been posting a lot of D&D stuff lately.  Fact of the matter is, I like D&D.  I like game design, and I spend a lot of time working on various elements for the D&D ruleset that I want to share with people.  So, since I have this place to do so, I'm doing so.

Every gaming group has their own set of houserules.  Every player has things they like to be different, and every DM has preferences in regards to various portions of any given ruleset.  I don't expect everyone, or even anyone, to embrace my houserules whole-heartedly.  Rather, I present these simply with the hope that at least a few people will find at least a few of these ideas useful in their own campaigns.

These are a set of houserules developed, over time, by my current D&D group.  They have been built by the group as a whole, and they are used whenever I DM.  Keep in mind that the presentation is rather bare-bones, and the file was built to be used as an internal document.  I only, on a whim, decided to post these rules here, so I slapped some credits on the end and here they are for your enjoyment.

So, again, here for you are the Pariah Houserules.

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Thursday, February 03, 2011

Content - Realm Walker

Here, I present the Realm Walker.

Among my favorite additions to D&D in the 4th Edition was the concept of epic destinies.  On one hand I enjoy most of the game mechanics introduced by the various epic destinies.  However on the other hand, and this is the more important aspect, I think epic destinies are very much an encouragement to role-play.  They provide a few bonuses, one extra power, and a really fun feature at 30th level that usually makes gameplay fun and over-the-top as epic play should be (though, honestly, some of them are kind of silly).

Yet it is the immortality portion of each epic destiny that I most often read.  Even when I find myself uninterested in a particular destiny, whether because the idea itself doesn't immediately appeal to me or because it's tied to a class or race that I'm not terribly excited about, I almost always read the bit specifying the attainment of immortality.  These almost always have nothing to do with any dice rolls, or even stats of any kind.  They are, instead, ideas for how to role-play your character's hard rise to one form of immortality or another.  Moreover, each form of immortality (barring a few exceptions) tends to be interesting and fun.

I have a few epic destinies unique to my campaign setting, but one that I think fits anywhere.  In fact, its entire premise is one that is designed specifically to fit into all campaign settings and be specific to none.  So, as already linked at the top of this blog, I present the Realm Walker in PDF form.

Also, the document itself uses an image that I think fits the theme rather nicely.  It's a lovely piece by an artist named Joe Wilson who was nice enough to let me make use of his work.  I linked to his Deviant Art page in the file, but I thought I should do so here as well.  He's pretty good, please check him out!

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