Contacts as Starting Resources

Allowing players to begin the game with some number of contacts from their character's past experience is an idea I've been tossing around recently. Based on my last article last week, it's obvious that I see starting characters as generally inexperienced in the world of adventuring. However, it would be a grave error to assume that they sprang fully formed into the world with no past connections or experiences whatsoever.

Level 1 Characters

Level 1 characters, or, starting level characters, have always given me pause. Specifically, the question I ponder is "What does level 1 represent?". Typically starting level characters range from truly incompetent to vaguely capable depending on the system you are playing in. There are a few systems, though off hand I can't recall which ones (I'll try to get that answer for you in another article), that allow for the creation of fairly capable characters right off the block so obviously each system answers this question differently. Or do they?

How Boring Demographics can become Exciting Adventure Hooks

While some of us do actually enjoy reviewing demographics, up to a point, they are not on their own particularly interesting for adventurers. However, by doing a little pre-game work on a city and figuring up its demographics, there are ways to extrapolate any number of interesting adventure hooks for your players.

Walk your World

First, I apologize. No pun was intended. Now then, moving on.

When I work on a world setting, I used to find myself building lots of high-level structures (not in terms of character level but in terms of framework) such as government types, tax levels, demographics, etc. As a result, I often ended up with excess material that player's almost never needed and found myself having to flesh out towns and cities on the fly. Not necessarily a bad way to run, but if I'm running based on a pre-designed setting, I need more information from the ground up and less from the top down. Thankfully, I found a solution to this situation.

Shifting Focus

My focus has shifted a lot, for the last few months, between work, preparing for my infrequent games, working on Renaissance and working on my world setting. I prefer to focus on one project until it is done and then move on to the next and while that is effective at work and with some projects others require periods of down-time which make it inefficient or ineffective to maintain such singular focus.

A long time ago . . .

Ages ago I promised you a review of the new role-playing system, Galaxy Prime, that I was given the opportunity to sample one Saturday in place of my regularly scheduled game. Life has been . . . kind would be too optimistic, but it hasn't been harsh. Time, on the other hand, has been down right elusive. If you will follow me to the full article I'll give you the run down on the system and my thoughts on it.

Too Many Rules

I haven't updated things in a while (and I know you're still waiting on that Galaxy Prime review) but work on Renaissance and table-top role playing have been on unintentional hiatus for a while. In part because of scheduling issues preventing everyone from being able to get together and also partly because of SKYRIM!!! I'm 100 hours or so in (on one of my characters) and I'm still psyched about it every time I think about it. I'm sure this excitement will die down eventually, but maybe not.

Returning to my original topic, though, I was making a note to myself about some table-top thoughts I'd been mulling over and thought they'd make a good article, maybe something others could benefit from as well.