Adventures of an RPG Game Master
Back to Part 3 We are up to session 12, we have two dungeon masters running regularly (Andras is running the Trivale domain next door to Polemar), we have two new dungeon masters in training, we had 16 players at the last session and 6 others with characters who didn't happen to show up that …
Continue reading Constructing an Open Table Campaign for D&D 5e: An update
Back to Part 2 Spoiler Alert: If you are a player in the open table games you should not read this if you do not wish to spoil any sense of suspense, or to lesson the enjoyment of revelation during exploration. You have been warned. The big day for the first public flight of this …
Continue reading Constructing an Open Table Campaign for D&D 5e part 3
Spoiler Alert: If you are a player in the open table games you should not read this if you do not wish to spoil any sense of suspense, or to lesson the enjoyment of revelation during exploration. You have been warned. Following on from Part 1 the next step was to work out some specifics …
Continue reading Constructing an Open Table Campaign for D&D 5e part 2
Spoiler Alert: If you are a player in the open table games you should not read this if you do not wish to spoil any sense of suspense, or to lesson the enjoyment of revelation during exploration. You have been warned. This year I am creating a campaign for Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition that …
Continue reading Constructing an Open Table Campaign for D&D 5e part 1
How to go about prepping less and playing more.
This is a Low Prep RPG Philosophy article. The article on Low Prep, Rich Traveller Campaigns : A Game Structure Overview gave a framework for building the physical and broad political layout of a campaign This article begins to clothe that space with NPC groups that are doing things. What is a Faction? A group …
This is an example of the level 1 detail for the low prep, rich Traveller campaign building system. Astro Nations of the Free Terran Confederation Campaign Year 2332ce History. Humans expanded from sol starting in 2120ce using jump 1 ships. The first colonies were corporate run from the city of Olympia on Mars. Earth at …
This is a Low Prep RPG Philosophy article. In the Traveller RPG, if you are creating your own setting rather than an existing one such as The Third Imperium, you use the classic mechanism of taking a blank sector sheet, populating it with stars and generating the planets. This procedural generation mechanic basically produces isolated …
Continue reading Low Prep, Rich Traveller Campaigns : A Game Structure Overview
In the previous article you learned about the meta future boundary (MFB) being the place from which all time travel is initiated. Also that when anyone time travels they contaminate the temporal coordinate they jump to on the meta now with part of that boundary. The MFB and its contaminations are known as “change waves” …
Continue reading Time Travel for Role Playing Games : Propagating Changes
I was interested in creating a smuggling scenario structure, since I have need of it in my Traveller Campaign. So I began designing one. It turns out smuggling can include lots of sub structures. Even if I took a narrow definition of “smuggling” its big. As it is my definition of smuggling is “to take a shipment from one place to another secretly”. So in this article I will lay out a very high level structure and break it down into components at a fairly broad level.
