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I think the first part is pretty close to the way I handle things when I'm behind the screen, but I'm a little hesitant about "ability to know." Consider a spellcasting character who doesn't know any spells which invoke magical fire yet - no burning hands, certainly no fireball. I could see not...

Oh, RC, you magnificent bastard. Why must you tempt me to pull out my megadungeon notebook that I keep telling myself I will never run? The idea of the megadungeon reflecting the history of the setting is something that I've incorporated into the background and layout notes for my megadungeon...

No, I'm saying that the mechanics are too abstract for my tastes. I don't want an "On Fire" condition that's negated by a FATE point. I want, "You're on fire and taking 1D6 general damage each round until you put it out."

That sounds like bridge. 'Lidda bids no trump.' Not the experience I look for out of a roleplaying game.

I'm confused. Lidda takes the "consequences" Reticent and Disheartened, yet as far as I can tell, neither of those consequences is reflected in either her actions or the roleplay text. She seems neither reticent nor disheartened by the mercenary's success. What am I missing here?

That would be me as well. As far as fictional settings go, I used 'Golden Age' Charted Space for pretty much every Traveller game I've ever run. Charted Space is so big, and so thinly detailed, that even if you want to run nothing but canon, there are wide swaths of the setting that are at best...

Most fires are anthropogenic in wildlands - it's part of our footprint on the planet. The ones that aren't come from lightning, volcanic eruptions, and asteroid impacts. A portion of those anthropogenic fires are aboriginal prescribed burning, primarily for range improvement and vegetation...

Don't take my word for it, then.

I was a wildland firefighter for thirteen years, and I've fought fast-moving grass fires caused by thunderstorms. They're quite common, and can grow quite large very quickly.

The adventurers in our game are fleeing Paris for Grenoble, exiles following a duel gone bad. I asked them if they were going to follow the roads, in which case the journey would take about a week, or if they wanted to avoid the roads and cross-country most of the trip, in which case it would...

Lightning . . . grass fire . . . stampede of herd animals! Grass fire . . . burned area . . . no forage for adventurers' mounts . . . change routes or risk animals falling out. Burned area . . . vegetation burned away reveals previously hidden ruins. Burned area . . . attracts carrion eaters...

In the beginning, my settings were 'the dungeon' and the immediate environs - the Temple of the Frog in Blackmoor, El Dorado County in Boot Hill, and the Warden in Matamorphosis Alpha strongly influenced how I saw roleplaying game settings. Later I began to take a more top-down approach...

I like to think through the demographics because it suggests ideas to me when I get down to the level of creating npcs for an area. If a town is surrounded by steep slopes covered with olive orchards and grazed by goats, then that tells me that the most influential merchants are olive oil...

I'd like to run Flashing Blades with Daniel Auteuil (Lagardère in Le Bossu), Mandy Patinkin (Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride), Johnny Depp (Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl), Sophie Marceau (Eloïse d'Artagnan in La Fille de d'Artagnan), and the...

They call me MISTER Shaman! And if they're smart, they'll do it from a position of supplication. In our Flashing Blades game, anyone who thinks they can get away with it wants to be addressed as monsieur, madame, or mademoiselle (mon sieur, "my lord"; ma dame, "my lady"; ma demoiselle, "my...

I was thinking of France along the Loire River - very densely settled, by agrarian community standards, by the sixteenth century, once the English were sent packing and Plague outbreaks became less frequent. Auvergne, on the other hand, is closer to the Scottish Highlands - small villages...

Yup, and often quite a bit less as the Middle Ages shaded into the Renaissance. Same thing in the Himalayas, same thing in coastal Alaska or Greenland, same thing in the Great Basin. The key being, these settlements must be relatively small. Sizeable towns and cities - not so much. These small...

A goodly portion of those townsfolk can actually be farmers as well, working the fields in the area immediately surrounding Welford, so while they live in the town proper, they can still make their living at the plow. I didn't see the post immediately before mine in the queue until after I hit...

A couple of impressions . . . First, way too many townspeople to farmers; assuming you're going for the traditional faux-medieval vibe, a ratio of 80-90% farmers to 10-20% townspeople would make a bit more demographic sense. Even if you're assuming something like druidic magic is routinely...

Browsing history? I guess my Caligula fetish is catching up with me. When I see the ad again, I'll grab the url and forward it.