Recent content by Joerg Baumgartner

I cannot really say how often I have read through the Lord of the Ring or some of my other favourite fantasy classics, and while they did not serve me as much as a guide to practical GMing, they taught me narrative structure and deep world-building. I haven't yet given any player character or...

A Golden Age rpgs: for whom, exactly? Measured as income or growth for WotC as the market leader? I have no idea about 6e (or for that matter, 5e, last D&D I tried was 4e, and then some 13th Age). Measured in convention attendance: Sure, GenCon is the biggest event in the industry. There are...

I decided to vote "a balance of realistic and cool". While I grew up and lived in a naval port (Kiel, Germany) for most of my life, I never served in the navy (or any other sort of military), and only rarely worked as a contractor on naval facilities or ship-yards. That means I am rather...

In SF role-playing games, fleet encounters serve as a reminder of sovereign or projected power of some faction or authority, usually strong enough to quench murder-hobo behavior. Most routine player character interaction with space navies will be with border control (possibly sealing offensive...

While the honorverse has keyhole space anomalies connecting distant systems in almost no time, there is a more pedestrian FTL drive "in the higher gravitic bands" traveling in a way similar to the warp drive. Overall, the Honorverse space navies start out as a parallel to Napoleonic era where...

Late to the party, and missing the first setting ever published along with a role-playing game: Tekumel. Sure, the (deceased) author has been caught writing right-wing nutcase drivel, but his fantasy world was written earlier.

One thing to keep in mind with lightless environments like caves, deep sea or dungeons is that these typically experience an influx of nutrients from the light zones where autotrophs have optimal conditions for multiplication, often outperforming the heterotroph activity. This results in dead...

Over here in Germany we have Gaming Retreats in a hunting chateau somewhere in the back of nowhere of Brandenburg, aka Kraken Convention. Not focussed on any WotC products, though, more Chaosium games and those of designers attending.

If I assign such classifications, it works more along something like tech level or Universal Planetary Profile as inherited from Traveller. Countries are useful shapes on the map but don't really are the units that define cultures or cultural advances. Language families for instance are shared...

Other questions: What keeps the gods from interfering personally with the setting? There should be realms where the will of the gods will shape the environment, like a master dreamer or illusionist or holo-deck programmer directing their wishes, and then possibly hardcopy it into the setting...

Coming from RuneQuest and Glorantha, my questions are maybe a little different. Assuming that gods are real in the setting, and that they were involved in the creation of the setting, or at least aspects of that setting, or that they entered the setting at some point after its creation (or...

There was recently a debate on basic-roleplaing.org whether Warhammer Fantasy should be counted as part of the D100/BRP/RQ family, and from my recollections of the game, there isn't much of a learning curve switching between this system and RQ. The Strike Rank system needs a short introduction...

I claim first mention with my mention of "anthropomorphic waterfowl". I have run campaigns in Glorantha where nobody got exposed to any ducks, at least not in personal interaction. Hard to avoid if you are active near Beast Valley or the Upland Marsh, or riverine wetlands in general, but they...

I switched to RuneQuest when AD&D 1st ed still was alive and kicking, because the rules were so much less complicated. And there are no levels, no character classes, with the cults offering magic and a few specialist skills much like prestige classes used to do in those handbooks for fighters...

Essen Spiel is held on a commercial fair area, in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Essen. You need an exhibitioner's day pass to walk in and out freely, your ordinary day pass or pass for several days allows you to enter once on a given day and to leave whenever you want. Essen doesn't...