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Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio

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Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio

Lew was Contributing Editor to Dragon, White Dwarf, and Space Gamer magazines and contributed monsters to TSR's original Fiend Folio, including the Elemental Princes of Evil, denzelian, and poltergeist. You can follow Lew on his web site and his Udemy course landing page.

Worlds of Design: Escaping Tolkien

Sep 18

In my previous article we discussed technological differences; this article focuses on cultural differences. Perhaps the cultural differences aren’t as clear in one’s awareness, but can be very...

Worlds of Design: When Technology Changes the Game

Sep 04

Any change you make from the real world will have consequences, possibly massive consequences. If you want your world to hold together, you have to figure out those consequences, which is hard to...

Worlds of Design: What's in a Name?

Aug 21

Character names and where we might get them from are today’s topics. This is important insofar as we don't want to delay the start of the actual adventure because someone is trying to think of a name!

Worlds of Design: The Lost Art of Running Away

Aug 14

How often does an adventuring party avoid an encounter, even run away from one? This used to be common in earlier versions of the game, but less so now. What changed?

Worlds of Design: The Cost of Trade

Aug 07

This is related to world building, and also related to player characters when they choose to invest in or participate in trading activities in your world/campaign. In some rulesets the characters...

Worlds of Design: Making Megadungeons Make Sense

Jul 31

When D&D originally came out Gary Gygax more or less taught GMs that they should make huge multilevel dungeons that the adventuring party would enter and loot, killing the monsters who were...

Worlds of Design: Is Combat Now Passe?

Jul 24

In April 2020 my column was titled “Is Fighting Evil Passé?” Readers pointed out that it was a misleading title, and it was: my original title was “Is Fighting Evil the Focus of Your Campaign?”...

Worlds of Design: Medieval Travel & Scale

Jul 17

We previously established the fundamentals of world-building; with a world’s basic rules down, it’s important to consider how you get around in that world. And travel was very different (read...

Worlds of Design: RPGs as Microcosms of Life

Jun 12

When I first saw D&D I said “I hate dice games.” But I discovered that it wasn’t a “dice game,” played properly. It is a microcosm of Life: do everything you practically can to avoid having to...

Worlds of Design: Worldbuilding 101 (Part 2)

Jun 05

We continue our “beginners notes” for world building, answering questions ranging from the gods to magic to transportation and communication.

Worlds of Design: Worldbuilding 101 (Part 1)

May 29

If you want to make up your own adventures, your own campaign, instead of using something someone else wrote, then sooner or later you’ll need to approach world building. This is “beginners notes”...

Worlds of Design: Always Tell Me the Odds

May 22

If GMs (and game designers, and gamers) understand “the odds” they will be able to make better choices and understand why some things happen in their games - and some don’t.

Worlds of Design: The Four Laws of Character Death

May 15

A problem that I have in GMing RPGs, and I imagine a lot of other people have, is reluctance to kill characters that players have become strongly attached to. I'll describe my evolution in how I...

Worlds of Design: Rolls vs. Points in Character Building

May 08

Let’s talk about methods of generating RPG characters, both stochastic and deterministic.

Worlds of Design: Is Fighting Evil Passé?

Apr 24

When I started playing Dungeons & Dragons (1975) I had a clear idea of what I wanted to be and to do in the game: fight evil. As it happened, I also knew I wanted to be a magic user, though of...

Worlds of Design: Creativity and the Game Designer

Mar 20

What part does creativity play in game design? Novice game designers often have a confused idea that game design is all about creativity, which is very far from the truth. Creativity is important...

Worlds of Design: More Human Than Human

Feb 28

30-some years ago I wrote an article "My Life as a Werebear" (in White Dwarf #17) that provided rules for player character monster species such as blink dog packs and giants. Nowadays we take...

Worlds of Design: Shooting Magic Missiles from Silly Places

Feb 14

A GM once described a game that was going along the way he wanted until one of the players asked if he could shoot his magic missiles from his groin! According to the GM, the game collapsed into...

Worlds of Design: A Question of Balance

Jan 31

Some people think that every character class must be equally balanced with every other class, but why is that necessary? Are they competing with the other players in a co-operative game?

Worlds of Design: Monster Workshop Part II

Jan 10

I've been talking about good ways to devise RPG monsters for tabletop games (See "Just Say No to Boss Monsters"). In the previous installment we covered the unknown, unusual characteristics...