101 plug and play communities in 10 sub-categories
A collection of 30 bardic tales you may hear sung in the local tavern or empresses' court, complete with bardic verse excerpts from all 30 tales themselves.
Many of these tales can also be used as quick plug in adventures for Gm's looking for a side quest. (And let the players exploits be turned into the song by a near by bard perhaps?)
Tips on how to create five room dungeons that can be used for any location, are short, are quick to plan, easy to polish and plan, flexible in size and easy to integrate into your campaign.
CodexYou have what?! On your equipment list? For real?
Books of all kinds and purposes, their short summaries as well as wide descriptions, come and enjoy.
How to make combat interesting and more than: "Well, I’m going to hit him with my sword."
Codex
This is a list of laws, axioms, and strong recomendations from published and/or famous game designers/ writers I have recently collected. If you find them, add them. Please do not just add “any old” gamer’s axions, laws, etc.
The excited, almost frantic sound of a mallet instrument erupts from the forest to your left. Within minutes, your party is confronted by a host of short, sprite-like gnomes clad in vivid greens and earthy browns. Attempts to communicate fall flat. The gnomes seem to ignore your words entirely, and you cannot understand the humming/whistling/snapping that apparently makes up their language. Luckily for you and your fellows, however, they don't seem hostile . . .
What makes great entertainment for Gamers? Movies. They love action movies, even if their favorite pastime is reading books, writing websites, learning ancient languages, or gaming like madmen. If you pattern your games and campaigns after movies, you are sure to have an entertaining game.
Some GMs, and the computer game industry too, seems to think gemstones, gold and magic weapons are the only way in which to reward the players. Most experienced GMs know this isn’t true, so I created this thread here to let us remind each other of the different alternative rewards a player can receive, and to have a place where ordinary item descriptions can be posted.
A fight scene should be more than just rolling dice and counting numbers. It should be a chance for you to roleplay.
Awhile ago I started a small list of random villages…I think many turned out to be plots, but thought I would throw them out here for fun.
Action sequences in movies are fast, furious, and over all to fast. They are exciting moments that most gamers are looking forward to. Yet combat in most games is slow, ponderous, and takes up much game time. Gamers tend to blame the game systems. It is not the System, it is the group.
Have you ever needed to play out a scene that would of been embarassing to you or between your character and another that would of sucked up hours of game time leaving everyone else bored to tears? Scene Journals are your answer.
Ok, there is no real place to put this but I think it needs to be said and put up here for everyone to view. This is not for gaming terms, it is not how to view rules or your gamers better. But it is an idea on how to respect your fellow Strolenites.
These are minor things that can be dropped in anywhere to add "narrative flavor", to make it more than just another road, field, forest or beach.
The many ways of the Citadel to bind ideas together.
In a nearby town villagers tell tales of adventurers being driven mad by an unknown force within the woods…
I am not a normal fantasy GM. If a player is delving through a dark tomb searching for loot in my campaign, he is probably on a fruitless quest. I dislike the dungeon crawl. I have since the earliest years of DnD. I mean where in Tolkein did they really crawl through a dungeon or other tomb/ place of mystery?
The Poison Eaters Tribe dwells deep in the jungle glades of the Ushaika, in the lowest reaches of the undergrowth where no sunlight pierces through the leaves, and where the marshy ground wells up with tea-colored water at the lightest step.
An alliance between bitterest foes in a desperate bid for their survival, thus was the beginning of the Shrew-Wars
CodexAn enchanted forest where music permeates the fabric of life, leaving its mark on fauna and flora alike.
CodexNo one goes to the Western Woods. There are things that come out at night that it would be a very bad idea to meet. The Western Woods have a reputation of being haunted, or rife with wild magic. Or both.
New Submissions
Potions and other alchemical concoctions are often no more than funny-colored water in a bottle; what of the strange and unusual components used to craft these marvelous items?