Posts Tagged by campaign
| December 10, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
A bit less than a year ago I wrote about the patronage project for Open Design’s Midgard Campaign Setting, which has now been released by Kobold Press ($39.99 softcover + PDF). I was offered a review copy, and as a fan of Wolfgang’s work and a GM with a hearty appetite for fantasy campaign settings, I gladly accepted. Midgard already sounded like it would be my kind of setting book a year ago when I first heard about it, and it is. Like most of…
| September 12, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Looking back at the first game you played, or GMed, can be illuminating, and as evergreen gaming questions go, “What was your first RPG?” is a good one. But another equally interesting question tends to go unasked — so I’m going to ask it here: What was the first setting you ran a game in? And as a follow-up: How has that setting influenced your GMing since then? The first setting you ever experienced as a gamer is also a good one to consider, but…
| August 17, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s guest article about keeping excitement up during extended game breaks, today’s article is all about keeping your players jazzed between sessions. The author, Grayson Davis, is a writer and gamer living in Chicago. He writes Edition Wars, a Tumblr lovingly dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons arguments, as well as Beeps & Boops, a video game blog. As all GMs know, it can be tough to maintain excitement between sessions. Weeks or months may pass before you continue a game,…
| May 7, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
This is a companion piece to my previous article, A “Realistic Enough for Fantasy” Calendar, but it also stands on its own. If you want to combine a fantasy calendar with randomly generated weather, you may enjoy them both. For my Bleakstone hex crawl, weather and the calendar became connected when I ran across the idea of pre-generating a year’s worth of random weather in advance. That post, which is fantastic, included enough Excel code in the comments to get me rolling. This sounded like…
| April 27, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article was written by Tom Puketza, and it’s about a topic that has always seemed to be of special interest to Gnome Stew readers: sandbox-style gaming. Tom’s approach is an excellent one, and I think you’ll like it. Thanks, Tom! Previous articles have offered great advice on building campaigns using the five Ws. This approach offers a different but equally rewarding method for building a campaign. I used this method to build the D&D 3.5e campaign I currently run, and the results have…
| April 25, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
I recently created a calendar for my fantasy hexcrawl, Bleakstone, and since it was a fun process and I’m pleased with how it turned out I thought I’d share it here. I wanted a calendar that was largely similar to the one we’re used to (the Gregorian calendar) without being identical, that evoked the flavor of the world, and which didn’t have any fussy bits — no leap years, no months with varying numbers of days, etc. Divide up the year After doing the math…
| April 3, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article was written by reader Andrew Bell. He’s about to swap places with the GM of a long-running successful campaign, and he’s got some excellent ideas to share about making sure his game is every bit as good — but different, too. Thanks, Andrew! In a few short weeks, the game in which I currently play is coming to an end after seven years. Loose threads are being tied up, plots are coming to fruition, and the universe needs saving thrice over. Seven…
