Midgettosser
First Post
My 4E homebew campaign is in full construction mode right now, and I thought I'd share some of the ideas that have come out of this effort for people to steal or mock (or tell me someone has already said this before and better). If anyone cares I can get into some of the details of the setting later, but these are some of the tools and ideas I am liking at the moment.
About 20% of my game is going to be done electronically. I've set up a wiki for my campaign setting (an idea I stole from an enworld poster), and I will add in locations and NPC's as they are discovered. Players can easily recap past events, and not work so hard to remember basic stuff.
The characters have lived in this city for a considerable time before the campaign starts. Before each session, I will set up a brief electronic session on the Wiki that are a sort of flashback about when a character encountered a previous npc or event. For example, if Danny the One Eye'd Pimp will be making an appearance in the next session or two, I'll post a flash back on each character's wiki. Maybe Danny was a surrogate to the party's rogue years ago, and the fighter almost had him arrested for robbery. Each character gets a chance to personalize their character, get a little xp, and learn about the game world. This will be high on fluff and low on crunch.
My campaign starts with all the PC's returning to the funeral of their mentor (they had a falling out). The players really don't care about this character even if their characters should, so over time I can develop this dead character in flash backs so that by the time real revelations come up about the falling out, they will actually care.
Every idiosyncrasy about my setting gets a quest associated with it (at least for the first campaign set here). In my setting (a Planescape rip off) the city is built around a magical, multi-tiered river. People that "drown" in it don't actually die, they become infused with a ravenous lust for life that turns them into a combination of junkie / ghoul. The first quest addresses this little twist.
I used Sketchup (google it, it's free and easy, someone has probably already posted this) to develop some visuals for the city, and in the future some dungeons. It's free and super easy to use. I'll up load some pictures of what you can do with no experience. When I draw things out, I come up with like 100 extra bonus ideas just by getting a better visual.
I'm also going to be giving them "civic" quests with (semi) tangible rewards. Example, buy back and reopen the detective business their mentor owned. Reward +20% gold on future quests (due to reputation).
Formalizing the quest system (i.e. notecards) which I'm sure a lot of people will reject as being too meta-gamish seems like a good motivator to make players (especially any new ones) invest in things like a bitchin' lair. And it makes sense, at least to me, that people will pay you more to kill something if your lair is a skull built into the side of a volcano vs. a room in an inn.
I might be digging myself a hole on this one, but I'm going to try and get players to invest alot of their money as the game goes on into ruling the city.
About 20% of my game is going to be done electronically. I've set up a wiki for my campaign setting (an idea I stole from an enworld poster), and I will add in locations and NPC's as they are discovered. Players can easily recap past events, and not work so hard to remember basic stuff.
The characters have lived in this city for a considerable time before the campaign starts. Before each session, I will set up a brief electronic session on the Wiki that are a sort of flashback about when a character encountered a previous npc or event. For example, if Danny the One Eye'd Pimp will be making an appearance in the next session or two, I'll post a flash back on each character's wiki. Maybe Danny was a surrogate to the party's rogue years ago, and the fighter almost had him arrested for robbery. Each character gets a chance to personalize their character, get a little xp, and learn about the game world. This will be high on fluff and low on crunch.
My campaign starts with all the PC's returning to the funeral of their mentor (they had a falling out). The players really don't care about this character even if their characters should, so over time I can develop this dead character in flash backs so that by the time real revelations come up about the falling out, they will actually care.
Every idiosyncrasy about my setting gets a quest associated with it (at least for the first campaign set here). In my setting (a Planescape rip off) the city is built around a magical, multi-tiered river. People that "drown" in it don't actually die, they become infused with a ravenous lust for life that turns them into a combination of junkie / ghoul. The first quest addresses this little twist.
I used Sketchup (google it, it's free and easy, someone has probably already posted this) to develop some visuals for the city, and in the future some dungeons. It's free and super easy to use. I'll up load some pictures of what you can do with no experience. When I draw things out, I come up with like 100 extra bonus ideas just by getting a better visual.
I'm also going to be giving them "civic" quests with (semi) tangible rewards. Example, buy back and reopen the detective business their mentor owned. Reward +20% gold on future quests (due to reputation).
Formalizing the quest system (i.e. notecards) which I'm sure a lot of people will reject as being too meta-gamish seems like a good motivator to make players (especially any new ones) invest in things like a bitchin' lair. And it makes sense, at least to me, that people will pay you more to kill something if your lair is a skull built into the side of a volcano vs. a room in an inn.
I might be digging myself a hole on this one, but I'm going to try and get players to invest alot of their money as the game goes on into ruling the city.
