Late Again??
Oops. Well, folk, I've been a tad busy, getting ready to move back to college, visiting with an old friend, that sort of stuff. So, I'll keep things brief by offering a little something for all of you to peruse. I'll be [...]Read on >>
Setting Sketch: The Queen of Roses
tweetmeme_url = 'http://jachilli.squarespace.com/blog/2010/8/15/setting-sketch-the-queen-of-roses.html'; I've been working on Wintergris over the bachelor weekend while my wife and daughter are away, and in some of th[...]Read on >>
Using Wikimedia Commons To Flesh Out Your World
I’ve been working on this weird Earthsea/Odyssey/de Camp/Howard setting for a while now, but was having trouble describing some of the locations of the world. For those who haven’t heard it before, the Middle Isles [...]Read on >>
Send In the Clans
tweetmeme_url = 'http://jachilli.squarespace.com/blog/2010/8/11/send-in-the-clans.html'; Fundamentally, clans and traditional RPG classes do the same thing. They represent how a player wants to play the game. When you[...]Read on >>
51 Facts About Our World To Remember When You’re Building Your World
When you’re creating a world for your game or novel, it helps to have a bunch of facts about our world at your fingertips. This serves two purposes: You get the dimensions of things on our world as a guide whethe[...]Read on >>
Wintergris Outline
tweetmeme_url = 'http://jachilli.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/21/wintergris-outline.html'; So, as I mentioned before, I'm working on an old-school adventure game setting. I'm planning to publish it, but that comes late[...]Read on >>
On the Naming of Monsters and Critters
An Enlightening Blog PostWell, like no more than a few other posts, this (somewhat late) post started as an inspiration from another blog post. It caught my attention because it was amusing and incredibly true. There's a[...]Read on >>
Worldbuilding: Keep It Weird, Part Two
tweetmeme_url = 'http://jachilli.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/4/worldbuilding-keep-it-weird-part-two.html'; In Frostholm, the dragons were all druidic instead of wizardly, to emphasize their connection to nature. It's [...]Read on >>
Worldbuilding: Keep It Weird, Part One
tweetmeme_url = 'http://jachilli.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/2/worldbuilding-keep-it-weird-part-one.html'; Part of the reason I love the Wilderlands of High Fantasy so much is that its broad geography includes lots of[...]Read on >>
Hexmap Alphabetical Random Charts: Ruins
If you’ve determined that a given hex has some “Ruins” the following chart will give you some ideas of what those ruins may have in store. You may want to roll/pick multiple options from the last column[...]Read on >>
Farstead Part 1
I am starting a new 4E campaign and will be building a fresh world from scratch. These Farstead posts will be about the process of building that world. Its intent is to show a practical form of world-building as it happe[...]Read on >>
What I’m Playing: Echo Bazaar
I’ve been horsing around a bit with Echo Bazaar. The game itself is nothing special: It’s a clickfest in the idiom of Mafia Wars and Vampire Wars and presumably any number of Wars preceded by a compelling nou[...]Read on >>
Inspiring imagery
June 2, 2010 from The Seven-Sided Die
Filed under: GM Advice, Inspiration, RPG Hub, World Building, Worldbuilding
June's Blog Carnival is about inspirations, and I find a lot of mine in images. Here are some sources of compelling images for your own inspiration.[...] Filed under: GM Advice, Inspiration, RPG Hub, World Building, Worldbuilding
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Mage: The Sterile Version
Mage: The Ascension is on my mind again. I’m planning to run a game at Anime North where the characters’ objective is to assassinate the Second Coming of Christ. I decided to continue fooling with the Dirty V[...]Read on >>
Hex Map Glossary: Scale (Part II)
(Read Part I.) Larger Scale Maps A hex map in the shape of a D20. (This was a very simple example without labels or lines for roads, rivers, boundaries, etc.) As you move up to larger scale maps, the practicalit[...]Read on >>
Hex Map Glossary: Scale (Part I)
A map’s scale is a key point to consider when creating a hex map, or any map for that matter. Three driving factors behind that decision are: Are you creating a local area map, a country/region map, a map of an [...]Read on >>
The Campaign Setting Hates You: Gods and the World
In this new regular feature, The Campaign Setting Hates You, I’ll offer Dungeon Masters advice and inspiration on how to build, run, and evoke the most callous, bleak, brutally oppressive 4th Edition world possible[...]Read on >>
Seeds in the Garden
tweetmeme_url = 'http://jachilli.squarespace.com/blog/2010/4/22/seeds-in-the-garden.html'; As a followup to the entry on building gardens instead of museums, let’s look at a few techniques that allow for fl[...]Read on >>
Build Gardens, Not Museums
tweetmeme_url = 'http://jachilli.squarespace.com/blog/2010/4/15/build-gardens-not-museums.html'; Worldbuilding comes with perils, not the least of which is often the tendency for a designer or writer to want to a[...]Read on >>
Worth Watching: The Hayao Miyazaki Canon
tweetmeme_url = 'http://jachilli.squarespace.com/blog/2010/4/8/worth-watching-the-hayao-miyazaki-canon.html'; My daughter loves Hayao Miyazaki’s movies. She’ll be two soon. I love Hayao Miyazaki&rsquo[...]Read on >>
Crossovers, Continuity Porn, and Fan Fictioneering
Last week, Comics Alliance released their lineup for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: America 1988. It was an April Fool’s joke, of course, but had Emmett Brown, B.A. Baracus, MacGuyver, Jack Burton and Kelly LeB[...]Read on >>
I Love The Smell of Roleplaying In The Morning
Smell seems to be a vastly overlooked component in roleplaying. Gamemasters describe what characters see, what they hear, but rarely what they smell. Perhaps it’s because we expect smells to be awful in adventuring[...]Read on >>
Two Designers…
tweetmeme_url = 'http://jachilli.squarespace.com/blog/2010/3/29/two-designers.html'; More accurately, two designers who didn't work on D&D jabbering about what they're doing in D&D and why parts of the game the[...]Read on >>
Lessons From the Fall of Purefold
Purefold was supposed to be everything social media wonks, democratic Web advocates and SF nerds wanted – oh, and it was supposed to make money, too. It’s based on Blade Runner! They hired Cory Doctorow! It was going[...]Read on >>
The Unspoken Drawback: Your Character Stinks
Want to add some verisimilitude to your game? Introduce the concept of personal hygiene. Regardless of genre — fantasy, science fiction, horror, pulp, superheroes, whatever — adventuring characters are freque[...]Read on >>
Belluna Serenissima: Solo 4e Campaign Plans
tweetmeme_url = 'http://jachilli.squarespace.com/blog/2010/3/23/belluna-serenissima-solo-4e-campaign-plans.html'; Several years ago, I ran what I still regard as my best D&D campaign. Set in a fictitious version of[...]Read on >>
“Stocking First”
Here are a pair of strong posts on building a compelling sandbox. Part One Part Two I like that the construction of the world adheres to a set of principles that describe how the creatures function. This is a great w[...]Read on >>
Peace Through World Creation
It's been a rough couple of days in the online gaming community, with some hot heads getting the best of people, and some nasty back-and-forths going on both publicly and privately. I've had my fill of that, so I tend t[...]Read on >>
World Hex Template
Global maps, hex-style Long story short, I got to thinking about rendering a global map in hexes, using the hex templates I already created. If you’re interested in hexing out your campaign world and are only mildl[...]Read on >>
Adventure-Guided Worldbuilding
One way to build a world is to start with a single adventure and build outward. You make it up as you go along, based on elements suggested or implied by the setting. This can be a published adventure, whether or not it&[...]Read on >>
Magna Cartas
One of the keys to being a successful gamemaster is playing to your strengths. One of the ways to identify those strengths is to list out things that you like in the type of setting you want to run, and things you dislik[...]Read on >>
Loss as a Positive Characteristic
I've been peeking around at a few freebie games scattered across the web and found one that manages to strike a resonant chord with me: Elegia by John Higgins of Relative Entropy Games. It's a retro-clone, as are so fash[...]Read on >>
Stuff on the Internet!
Well, I just found something very fun on the Internet. On DriveThruRPG, there was a Pantheon Generator for free download. It was created by a group called Chaotic Shiny Studios. These generators include things like th[...]Read on >>
Another Instant Challenge!
So, for those that haven’t seen Instant Game yet, I’ve even had a comment from one of its two creators, the brothers in charge of Animalball Games. On their frontpage, they state: “Many moons ago, Anim[...]Read on >>
X Marks the Spot: 11 Map Making Tutorials
Image via Wikipedia You’ve spend weeks, months…maybe even years creating your world. You’ve detailed new races, have exciting new character classes, have worked out your worlds ecology, history, monetar[...]Read on >>
Random Name Generator for Indian Names/Locations
Late last year I started putting together a number of random charts to create names that are reminiscent of the names of cultures in the real word. The goal is to make it easy to create names that seem to be from a parti[...]Read on >>
Best Posts of 2009 at Inkwell Ideas
January 18, 2010 from Inkwell Ideas
Filed under: RPG Hub, Tools, Worldbuilding, advice, gm tips, rpg inspiration
Hopefully it isn’t too late to look back at 2009. At Inkwell Ideas, the specialty is to give others tools and ideas useful for RPGs.
Although December was a little slow (working on the largest Inkwell Ideas proje[...] Filed under: RPG Hub, Tools, Worldbuilding, advice, gm tips, rpg inspiration
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Presenting The Middle Isles
It's nowhere near ready yet, but I've been working on a new campaign setting over at Obsidian Portal. The Middle Isles are my experiment of what happens when you cross a bit of Le Guin with Gygax (scary mix, I know). A[...]Read on >>
A Language Tree For My Setting
Here's a language tree I whipped up in Paint for a future campaign setting I've been working on (click to enlarge):Professor Tolkien I'm not, but I've always been interesting in languages in an RPG. Why is there a "Comm[...]Read on >>
Presenting Information: Control Your Density
Often, one of the biggest problems with communicating immersive world lore is its density. With many very detailed worlds, the developer or writer bludgeons the player or reader with a dense block of text or long, unskip[...]Read on >>
Presenting Information, Part II
So, to follow up from the last blog entry, I want a solution to the problem of not wanting to read text dumps that break me out of the immersive game experience. But first, some caveats: Not everyone cares, as evidenced[...]Read on >>
It’s a Brave New World — Guang Keshar
It’s been a long-time coming, but I’ve finally done it. After nearly thirty years of kicking the idea around (and thanks to the guys at the Gamer Lifestyle program), I’ve finally take the plunge and sta[...]Read on >>
Presenting Information, Part I
Playing through Dragon Age, I'm surprised by how many books I've found. Similarly with Aion. These are both recent games, and yet, they rely on the old-fashioned text dump to immerse the player in their world -- and I us[...]Read on >>
Parsing Tech Levels
Our tech goes (almost) to eleven… Being multi-genre, Chimera accommodates campaigns in any time or setting. There’s an obvious need to quantify a campaign’s Technology Level (TL), and to keep things sim[...]Read on >>
Reading T&T 7.5 – Trollworld p.162-171
Today I wanted to close this series with the last section of the 7.5 rulebook, the Trollworld Chronology. From page 162 to page 171 we are treated to a long list of happenings on Trollworld. It begins at 100,000 B.K. an[...]Read on >>
What’s in a Name? Language!
Creating names can be one of the most challenging parts of creating a game setting. Sure, you can name things whatever happens to come to mind, but that can create names from all over the map (literally, if you’re [...]Read on >>
Aion In Retrospect
Joshua Loomis put up a post recently about his mostly positive experience with Aion, which is an enjoyable read, especially on the level of the player relationships that form. My experiences weren't the same as his, so a[...]Read on >>
Let Us Give Thanks: Chinese Harvest Moon Festival
With this being Thanksgiving weekend here in the US, I got to thinking about harvest festivals in general. I rarely see harvest celebrations in RPGs and yet in real life, they’ve been an important part of life througho[...]Read on >>
Let Us Give Thanks: Homowo Festivals or “Hoot at Hunger”
With this being Thanksgiving weekend here in the US, I got to thinking about harvest festivals in general. I rarely see harvest celebrations in RPGs and yet in real life, they’ve been an important part of life thro[...]Read on >>
Random Location Names that Resemble Native American Language
Over the past few days, I’ve put together some charts for randomly creating city names that sound like English/United Kingdom cities and Chinese sounding city names. Today I added a set of charts for creating na[...]Read on >>
