What is the back cover of a book for? Once upon a time, in a land long ago, people would see the front of many books, and pick one. The front of the books enticed people to pick them up, turn the book around, and view the back. Then the writing on the back would convince the shopper to buy the thing by saying ‘quality’, and ‘recommended by the Guardian’.

Sometimes an NPC needs more personhood, because they’re talkative, or the players need to negotiate and have an idea of whom they’re dealing with. And the little notes I put under statblocks saying ‘Wants: cakes’, or ‘Mannerism: suspicious eyebrow’, just doesn’t cut it. So I’m thinking of resorting to interviews.

On the Trail of the Snail Lords had something similar. A few more important character had long example conversations, showing how they cut in, their little bigotries, how they change the subject to what they want. But that module (or ‘campaign’?) babbled too much. It hides its structure among a mess of details, like those conversation snippets. I want to make modules which remain short, in essence.

Random encounters are never the meat. They make for worse events than pre-written events. But they have their advantages around the edges of any module, because they take up less space on the page and demand less memory from the GM. So why stop at random encounters? Other random tables have been relegated to ‘spark tables’ and ‘D100 tavern’ lists, but they might make a reliable and useful Appendix, or even the last section of every location in any module. Like a Sierpiński triangle, modules with a snowflake structure could fake a complete world by detailing the centre-stage and hand-waving the rest with more and more tables and players veer from that central triangle.

Not a lot of stories use the second person singular perspective. Fewer use the second person plural. But this is the primary perspective of dungeon-delving modules, Chtulhian investigations, and space-faring adventures.

Few adventures within Dungeon Magazine’s comes with boxtext, and most of this boxtext comes at the start in a block of a dozen paragraphs, spread across multiple pages. Here’s one such introduction:

As you enter through the large doors, you are suddenly confronted by a massive, 8’-tall humanoid with long yellow fangs protruding from his upper jaw. He stares down at you with great black eyes and empty white pupils. After an empty silence, during which thoughts of or drawing your sword have crossed your mind a dozen times or more, he suddenly breaks into a wide grin and begins to chuckle deeply.

Read More…

People like basic rules, so BIND should have basic rules (I thought). It didn’t quite work out that way. ‘Basic isn’t easy to define’, and not worth the time arguing about. But the game has developed a better split: necessary, and requested rules.

‘Necessary rules’ mean the rules the game has to give you for things the player characters have to do. In BIND, these are:

1. Generic actions
2. Combat
3. Travel
4. Weight
5. Magic

Everyone does the first four. Any witch in the troupe will inevitably do the last.

Chaotician Writer of Mastodon asked, if zany encounter tables are boring, what makes a good encounter table? ‘Return to White Plume Mountain’ makes a good encounter table, because:

• It’s fast,
• grounded,
• repeatable, and
• it develops.

White Plume Wandering Monster Table

The first set is rolled Outside the mountain. The second column shows encounters Inside. The last shows the mountain’s Nucleus.

I’m going roll for encounters, just to see what comes up.

I’ve been thinking about different structures for encounter tables.

Stackable Results

Most encounter tables have entries meant to be run alone. But what if they had elements which lasted a long time, designed for synergies and clashes?

1. Biting winds for the rest of the day. Each repeat makes the weather worse.
2. Heavy snow. Penalties to sight.
3. D3 curious ghasts stalk the PCs, attacking only if it seems to have some advantage.
4. D6 travellers pass, swapping news of where they’ve come from. Any ghasts follow the smallest group.

You might roll the following:

If I had to make a spell-system for Oglaf, it would be this:

• You can only cast spells with a level equal or higher than the last spell you cast.
• Once you cast a spell, you cannot cast it again for a number of rounds equal to its level.

You want to cast Fireball? Let’s warm up with a cantrip first. Yea, Burning Hands works!

Acid Arrow? Yea, that’s some proper magic!

Using action points instead of initiative has been great. It works like this:

Just Go!

We just start, then whoever said they hit the bartender spends an Action Point. Most characters have 3. Once everyone’s spent their Action Points, a new round begins.

The table doesn’t have that feeling of ‘combat!, wait, no, roll initiative, record it, wait for it, who’s first? Okay-go-roll-go’.

Every Initiative System Fixed

The table sometime uses ‘round the clock’ initiative (left-of-the-GM starts, then round the table). Once someone runs out of Action Points, they stop taking actions, but you still go round the table until nobody can act.

Reviewing RPGs seems unreasonable work. Far too many have tried their hand at the seemingly-easy task of writing one, and even worse: sometimes writing really is that easy. Vampire: The Masquerade’s first ’edition’ looks like a series of short stories, but it had plenty of fresh ideas in there. Gamers, GMs, and writers want reviews, but not many want to review. The few times someone’s sent me something included half-baked nothing scrawls, and a few others with excellent ideas, but horrifying layout. So what’s to be done? I have two offers.