Search results

Travel and downtime are great ways of stretching out the time between levels, but the magic item creation rules as written tend to make DM's want to restrict downtime as much as possible. One idea I'm looking at returning to is left over from an old 1E game. PC's were allowed to accumulate...

One thing I have learned is that players rarely want to actually read most background material, be it homebrew or published. The key is to hide little useful nuggets of information such as "trained horses from region x gain +2 hps" or such in the material. Scatter such bits of useless...

Foundry Miniatures does swashbucklers and pirates and mix well with the 7th Sea minis, also try Redoubt miniatures they have a line of swashbucklers alla 3 Musketeers. Eureka has a line of pirates, and Old Glory has pirates as well along with several historical lines that can be used. We used...

As there are actually a few hundred companies around the world making 25-33mm fantasy figures, try theminiaturespage.com for a more complete listing and daily news.

Staying strictly to fantasy I've got to go with Ars Magica, The Fantasy Trip (20+ years old and still ahead of our time in many ways), and WFRP.

As an aside I just finished running a similar Orc invasion, and one idea that I stole worked very well - the orc shamans made magic items from the skulls of defeated humans that conveyed to the wearer the skills and feats of whomever the skull had belonged to. Thus ordinary orc warriors were...

In highschool we did this several times after an early game magazine printed an actual set of tests that could be correlated to the old Aftermath game. It was fun because it took out much of the subjective ego issues that tend to result otherwise. A similar set of comparative tests popped up...

IMC campaign Duergar have been one of the primary "Bad Guy" races since they first appeared (MM2? I know longer can remember). Their powers stood in mark contrast to the non magic using dwarves of 1st Edition, and thus they came to be the dwarves who had sold out and dared to tamper with the...

My campaign is primarily human centric, as have been almost all long term campaigns I've played in over the last 25 years. Non human bipeds have abounded in most of them, but when all was said and done it was the humans that were usually front and center.

I have a setting for running one off adventures that is meant to be exactly that - a very young world. The great gods of my normal homebrew game make cameo appearances as children and weak fey spirits. Kingdoms long since sunk under the sea in the main game are placed front and center. The whole...

Several things can account for a river flowing perpindicularly through a mountain range - besides the above, the most common causes would be rivers exploiting fault lines and glaciation. Most fantasy worlds render this all of this moot by having relatively short geologic histories that leave...

I recently started off a temp/filler game with mid level characters by starting them off in a remote monastary where the monks were restoring the victims of a long dead flock of cockatrices. They had all been petrified at different times but were the only statues sufficiently whole to restore...

The WFRPG module Something Rotten in Kislev featured a god of aetheism, complete with a shrine. As to the silliest historical god one classical roman poem referred to a god of flatulence! As to homemade gods I recently ran a game which featured the PC's travelling through the realms of the...

IMC campaign the primary church sets out some minimum "rights" they expect all laws to acknowledge. They include no slavery, some degree of freedom of movement, the right to own personal goods, and the right to inherit. It is the responsibility of the nobility to see to it that these rights are...

Well into the 1920's and '30's the term antediluvian was entrenched in geology as an actual fact with many of the Jokalhaups events/floods at the end of the last ice age being used to prove that the earth had indeed been briefly flooded. Throughout the 19th century the word was used to refer...

I ditched the common tongue IMC long ago. As one travels different languages are used as "common" in different places, but no one language is universal everywhere. The key is balancing your campaign. By using more regional common tongues you will avoid slowing play most of the time, but travel...

For nearly twenty years I have used a church of deicidalist "godless" clerics who have usurped the divine magic as a focal point of my campaign. In the beginning (i.e. 1st ed) I was ridiculed by a few players, but most took well to the concept. I later felt validated when the 2E Priest's...

The test for entering a thieves guild shouldn't be about skill, but about loyalty. Thieves guilds are by their nature a collection of people who have already shown that they cannot be trusted by society, so their must be some proof that they can be trusted by the other thieves. Traditionally...

Without a doubt there can be a time for the 3D items, but there are also drawbacks to watch out for. On the plus side they lend great visuals and help avoid confusion, especially in locations that are complex. Careful selection of structures can also be used to differentiate places. For example...

I have used a monotheistic style religion for years, and it has worked well, but the important question is why do you want to use one? IMC I wanted a pseudo medieval church complete with Inquisition, cardinals in the style of Richlieu, and all of the rest. It was difficult to make polytheism...