After my more depressing last post on the situation in California, on to a lighter note. While all those news must be disturbing for those living in California, others will find plenty of gaming inspiration in this mess. For this reason, I've added quite a lot of material to the California section of the Arcana Wiki.

I am particularly proud of this article and the gaming ideas therein - including a four-way struggle for supremacy between the human survivors of the government collapse and subsequent earthquake, rat kings spreading their filth throughout the state, a super ant hive mind controlling the coastal areas, and mysterious fire creatures emerging from the ground!


I might not quite have reached the level of Ken Hite's Suppressed Transmissions columns, but I'm trying to get there. ;)

Does anyone here remember the anti-D&D hysteria of the 1980s?

Well, not me - I got started with gaming in 1990. But over on RPGNet there is a thread with scanned newspaper articles from a Canadian town where this became a hot issue.

My favorite quote is this one:

"Also, the fact that it's mostly boys and men that show greatest interest in the game is an important consideration, for they are the future leaders of our country. Should we not be careful what we feed into their minds?"

Inspired by a recent RPGNet thread (login required to read), I started working on an entry for Arcologies on the Arcana Wiki. I thought a bit about possible adventure and campaign ideas, and then wondered how to use them in different genres.

Take fantasy, for instance. Sure, you could just use some giant building chiseled out of a mountain by a legion of dwarves. But that's been done before. So how about making the whole arcology into a gigantic, living creature - either artificial or natural? The human inhabitants could be seen as either parasites or symbionts - the creature would be able to provide them with food from its bodily fluids, and also recycle their waste.

Furthermore, these creatures might be migratory. Given how much energy they would require to move, they would likely move very slowly - possibly slower than human walking speed. Using legs as locomotion would not be a very smooth ride for the inhabitants. But maybe they move similar to slugs - they travel on a single, massive "foot" and crush the vegetation - including entire trees - below them and eating them - leaving a massive slime trail behind them which serves as compost for new plant growth.

Now imagine a herd of such creatures traveling through a vast forest into the direction of the sunset, each inhabited by thousands of people...



I really need to use that imagery...






Note: If you have any other good ideas for using them in games, please add them to the Arcana Wiki!

I just saw someone over at RPGNet trying to promote a new setting he wanted to sell. And he got promptly banned for spamming.

Still, his website is rather amusing - if unintentionally so.

( Read more... )

I don't want to be too harsh on this guy (even though he is a spammer). After all, he has obviously put a lot of effort into creating this setting and this website - something I can relate to with Urbis.

Unfortunately, from what he presented a lot of this effort was misplaced effort - and this means that he produced a science fiction heartbreaker.


EDIT: And after getting banned on RPGNet, he promptly creates a new user account and posts this message...

Hit this page until you have found inspiration.




Yes, I finally did manage to create a proper random page function for the Arcana Wiki...

If you have any good stories to tell from your gaming nights - memorable quotes, spectacular deaths, inspired plots - then I have a place for you where you can tell us all about them:

The War Stories Wiki

So far, three different tales by three different people have been uploaded:

The Trouble With Gankorou
The Marriage of Frisco Flagons
Captain John McCleod

I hope to see your stories there as well!

I've just posted a lengthy essay on how to deal with sociopathic player characters over at ENWorld. You might find it interesting.

The Arcana Wiki has grown nicely in the last two weeks - but of course, it could still grow faster. ;)

Here are some news for it:

- The first Arcana Wiki Contest has ended (only two people contributed...). The winning entry was for the Black Shuck, one of the many names of the spectral hounds of British legends. The winner will soon get his $25 gift certificate...

- I've started a new contest which will run for the entirety of August - this one is about "Places of Myth and Legends". Again, the winner will get a $25 gift certificate for RPGNow.

- I've started working on a historical timeline which is intended to showcase all sorts of interesting historical news and events. At the moment, most of the entries are merely "weird" newspaper items (see the 2007 entry for examples), not the sweeping moments of history that I hope for. But give it time...

- I've started a Tropes section, which is intended to mirror the TV Tropes Wiki - a brilliant resource for gamers, no matter what games you play. My intention is to integrate tropes into the adventure seeds provided with each entry - see the new entry for Pilatusstadt, a "sunken city" in Germany, for examples.


That's it - for now. But I'd like to spread the word about the wiki even further so that I can attract more contributors. Any suggestions for how to do that?

My plans for my ENWorld blog seem to be progressing nicely... :D

Oh, and I've just posted another review - this one is for Suppressed Transmission: The First Broadcast.

EDIT: I'm proud to say that I am currently the only person listed in the Best Entries and Best Blogs category - let's see how long I can keep this up.

Yesterday I noticed with delight that ENWorld has a new blog feature. I immediately started a blog of my own there. Two of my posts there are reviews of Exalted and GURPS Space. These concentrate on what these books have to offer to people who play D&D first and foremost, and I plan to write more reviews like them.

If you have an ENWorld account, please feel free to give these reviews good ratings. I'd love to be the first person who shows up in the "Best Entries" column for the ENWorld blogs... :D

Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd

"I'm so mad that there's a new edition of The Better Joy Cookbook out. Thanks for making my old copy obsolete, you greedy hacks! For five years now, my friends have been coming over for my eggplant Parmesan, and now I'm never going to be able serve it again unless I shell out 35 bucks for the latest version."

I think he nails it.

Ever since the announcement of D&D 4E, gaming forums have been gone crazy with rampant speculations, rumors, hearsay, and denouncement of every single snippet of information that has been presented about the new edition. A large number of gamers have already made up their minds that they are never going to buy this new edition - without ever actually having seen the new rules.

But really, we have been here before. Let me show a small selection of Usenet posts (does anyone here remember Usenet) from rec.games.frp.dnd, around September in the year 1999 - more than half a year before the publication of D&D 3E.

( Walking down memory lane... )

You might see why I am experiencing a strong sense of deja vu at the moment

"If shooting Jörmungandr in the face with a rocket launcher is wrong then I don't want to be right."

- by Rachel Cartacos

Well, it seems like Gleemax, the new online gaming community thingie from Wizards of the Coast, is online. It is still in alpha testing though, so some clunkiness and bugs should be expected.

Personally, I will probably spend quite some time there because this looks like a good opportunity to plug Urbis some more to d20 gamers - especially the blog feature (though I won't put much original material there because WotC effectively owns the content according to their terms of use, and instead focus on more general ramblings and thoughts).

My first blog entry can be found here

This is in reply to something I read on a world-building forum:

"Yeah, Poe beats Lovecraft hands down. Tolkien beats them both as a world builder though. The Cthulhu mythos is really just a composite of H.P.'s various works, and thus I feel lacks the soul that Middle Earth exhibits."


Well, of course the Cthulhu Mythos lacks a soul. I mean, it is populated by mad, alien gods whose very existence mocks the point of a human soul, so what did he expect? ;)


But seriously, I think the Cthulhu Mythos nevertheless has some important aspects which world-builders should keep in mind.

Lovecraft wasn't a world-builder, and he admitted as such in his correspondences. He only dropped the names of what would later be collected by his successors into what is now known as "the Cthulhu Mythos" to hint at greater cosmic mysteries behind the stories themselves. Thus, the Cthulhu Mythos remains a stitched-together corpse full of seeming inconsistencies.

But I maintain that this isn't a flaw - to the contrary, for the purpose of gaming and world-building, this is part of its brilliance!

Let me explain. Humans were designed by evolution to find patterns - so good, in fact, that they are able to see patterns where in truth none exist. Thus, human create stories to explain away all those inconsistencies, ranging from the myths, legends, and fairy tales of old to modern comics and conspiracy theories. And these stories in turn have inconsistencies, since they were told by many, many people with different perspective - but then you can tell new stories to explain those inconsistencies away. The result is a rich body of myth and lore which is prime gaming material. When you just list the true "facts" of a setting, everything is known and opportunities for development by individual GMs are limited. When you only hint at possibilities, like Lovecraft did, then everything is open again - and every GM can tell his own story to explain the truth behind it all, which in turn will spawn further myths and stories as long as they keep on telling them.

This stance has been of the guiding design philosophies of Urbis, and it is observable in many of its components. Let me take a recent entry as an example - the elven city of Tyaril:

"A city located in the easternmost outlier of The Siebenbund Alps, Tyaril serves as the breadbasket of Avareen. Thanks to the powers of The Autumn Court, it is eternally Autumn in the local valley—and thus, the crops and fruit trees of these valley are eternally ripe and ready to havest. Once they are harvested, they quickly grow anew to be harvested again. Thus, this single valley supports most of Avareen with its food, although most other elves avoid talking about the city at all because of the presence of the Fair Folk court.

There is a price for the fertility of the city, and it is this: The first night of the true season of Autumn belongs to The Autumn Court, and the inhabitants of the valley do not remember anything that happens during this night, although they often are bruised in strange places on the next morning.

Sometimes, some inhabitants disappear entirely during this night, and it is forbidden to mourn them openly. Sometimes, children are born nine months later who forever have a strange sense of longing for something unknown in their souls."


Now, I could have written down precisely just what the members of the Autumn Court do to the inhabitants of this city on this night - but what purpose would that have served, other than unnecessarily restricting GM creativity? I'm sure that any GM with an active imagination - and what gamer doesn't have one? - come up with any number of really disturbing explanations for the true events behind that night - and thus, the stories that can be told of this place will become much stronger.


So when it comes to world-building, I'm leaning more towards Lovecraft than Tolkien - to me, there's no need to detail everything, or be 100% consistent with everything. Often it is better just to hint at the truth than to spell it out.


What are your thoughts on this?