Adventures of an RPG Game Master
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 …
Continue reading Low Prep Traveller Factions : Basics
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.
There are plenty of time travel films and TV series, Back to the Future, Looper, X-Men Days of Future Past, The Time Tunnel, Doctor Who and so on. Physics doesn't look too kindly on most of these. The reality appears to be pretty dull so, for the sake of adventure we are going to redefine …
Continue reading Time Travel for Role Playing Games : The Basics
"Something Wicked This Way Comes" can be a good way to start an adventure. But what happens when the "something wicked" is the person you admire and look to for help? I found the horrors of Call of Cthulhu and its sanity loss mechanism to have been the most viscerally scary role playing system I …
