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Hi, I'm the quoted David Schwartz... Absolutely not. But it's become the accepted shorthand. I blame WotC's marketing department. ;) Certain assumptions are built into the d20 system, such as hit points, classes, and levels. I like those things, and I decided I wasn't going to write a Modern...

Hey, I just discovered this thread. I'm the author of the article in Dragon #315. There's some more stuff from my Maztica conversion on this thread over at Paizo.com.

How about Nasreddin Hodja?

Given you're going to 4E, would it be blasphemous to suggest Pathfinder Chronicles (Paizo does love Lovecraft, Mieville, S&S, and classic D&D)?

More like Deus Ex Machina. ;)

RPGs. like psychological roleplaying exercises, can help people see things from other people's points of view, and thus improve their social skills. If it can work for nerds, I don't see why it can't work for cons.

Don't tell us how you feel, tell your players.

You might try Michael Stackpole.

Ratatosk

As a counterpoint, I found "Freedom" to be a total railroad. An adventure's climax should not have the PCs doing nothing but watch the characters from a tie-in book reenact the climax of said book. As for "Road to Urik" - what's your opinion of Battlesystems?

orchardist.

Indeed. That book was worth its weight in gold. Advice to anyone putting their PCs on trial: 'community service' is just another word for 'plot hook'. (Of course, demons have a slightly different definition of 'community service'. ;) )

If you don't want to predetermine the verdict, or arbitrate in the character of the judge/jury (too arbitrary?), I'd use something like Hijinx's social "combat" rules. Give the various NPCs (judge, jury, witnesses) a resolve value (hit points) and let the PCs and other characters "attack" them...

One of my best sessions ever involved the PCs on trial. However, this was a Planescape campaign and the judge was a nalfeshnee demon, the prosecutor was a bigoted eladrin, the PCs' defense lawyer was a Xaositect, and the witnesses included an intelligent talking planar horse the PCs had stolen...

Grimm is my favorite setting. No need to justify why there's an evil monarch in every town or a monster in every forest. And there's an embarrassment of story ideas already written for you.

Topologically and narratively, a maze is just really long, twisted hallway. If it doesn't have interesting rooms branching off it, its going to be about as interesting as a straight, doorless passage. In other words, in most cases, a maze should be used to divide encounters, not as an encounter...

Planescapes describes Sigil's Great Gymnasium as (paraphrasing) "a gymnasium in the classical style", which I decided to take literally. In old Greek, Gymnasium literally means 'place of nudity'. This made for an interesting complication when my heavily equipped party needed to access a portal...

Hijinx is in Dungeon #99/Polyhedron #158. I've run it a couple of times, but yet to find anyone else who's done so.

And Planescape...

Not Shakespeare, A. E. Housman