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Clarification: allegory C. S. Lewis' denial that Narnia is an allegory, like that of J. R. R. Tolkien and LotR, should probably be viewd in the context of their background in Medieval literature and history. In a Medieval context, "allegory" has a very specific meaning--it represents a...

I hope this extended lull in posting means that Old One is up to his eyeballs in lucrative, well-paying, emotionally satisfying work. :-)

I never find any of my own creations perfect; I'm always tweaking in some way or other. My players (who are all either brothers or friends of 15+ years now) know this about me and tolerate it. One variation on all of these skills would be to use something other than a linear scale for...

One other caution would be the ease of creation skill bonus magic items. . . Actually, you could combine these special abilities with some other limiting mechanism, such as a subdual damage cost, to limit their abuse. Making them restricted skills would also help. Then you would be coming...

When I saw the title for this thread, I thought you meant Romantic (movement) angst. Although that isn't what you had in mind, there are some sources that you might consider for plots. Frankensteinian angst: a veddy veddy Romantic novel. Protagonist creates creature, rejects creature. Creature...

A slight variation on a theme others have presented: Reality exists because we collectively believe it. Magic is the effort by an individual to bend her or his own belief, thus changing reality. Divine magic is the power drawn from the collective shaping of beliefs of many individuals. This...

Several weeks (months? Time passes strangely after child #2) ago I posted a small poll to attempt to get some sense of what people who read the story hours looked for in a good one. Although the response was smaller than I hoped, there was a fairly clear consensus that most people wanted, not...

Several weeks (months? Time passes strangely after child #2) ago I posted a small poll to attempt to get some sense of what people who read the story hours looked for in a good one. Although the response was smaller than I hoped, there was a fairly clear consensus that most people wanted, not...

I'm afraid I can't offer the insightful commentary you're probably after. Much of this looks very similar to the variatn rules in my own campaign, but the details will ultimately tell whether or not your system works to create the feel you're after. I've been using a compromise position on...

This has some similarities to the homebrew system I've developed. One way I mitigated the effect of CON on caster power was to create alternate ways to supply power. First, you could have magic items that function like the psi crystals (the caster channels a certain amount of power on one day...

You could follow the lead of spells like goodberry and make all of their magic dependent on some local flora and fauna for its effect. Goodberry, for example, could only work with certain types of berries. For that matter, you could simply give druids some sort of geographic range--their...

Like Greybar, my "European with a twist" has a twist involving the inversion of symbolic categories: in my case, black/dark is associated with life, fertility, and power, and whiteness is associated with death, sterility, and weakness. This basic symbolic opposition finds parallels in politics...

In addition to the very good advice above, I like to do a rudimentary time line--what will happen when if the players don't get involved. A time line can be useful in fleshing out the entire community--what are other NPCs doing in reaction to the events of the antagonist? Not only can that...

I use a combination of several of these guidelines. First, if at all possible, I try to have most of the players there. We have had to cancel once (the party wizard's player's wife was having ababy; we thought it only proper to let him go to that instead). We only get to play rarely, so it's a...

You could use the expert class, and give them a "contact" every few levels, limited in that it can only come through some aspect of their business ("I have a friend in sanitation who might be able to help you with the padlocks on the sewer covers"). There are rules for contacts in the Star Wars...

My homebrew system uses the Star Wars basic mechanic, with a vastly expanded powers list (more like standard d20). I chose Star Wars, but I've actually tried to combine the best of several systems. As Vaxalon has correctly written, it depends on what world you want it to fit in.

In my own low-level campaign, I've used the class defense bonus from Wheel of Time, allowing it to stack with armor for all classes . So far, it hasn't produced any problems, but we're spending some extra time around third level so I can't comment on its fairness at higher levels.

I remember when I was a young and foolish DM. I designed a monstrous, jam-packed dungeon full of creatures, traps, possible allies, and mazes. It covered nine sheets of small-rule graph paper with over three hundred separate encounter areas (realistic dugeon ecology be damned!). It was, in my...

Connie Willis' The Doomsday Book tells the story of a time-travelling historian in England in the 1420s. Although it may not be pertinent enough for your purposes (there is also a modern plot set in the near future that takes up part of the book), there are some good historical details. I also...

To answer the original question, it seems that most of the posters on this thread see evil as an absolute; most see it as a particular force with particualr embodiments, and only a few like their game worlds to be colored in many shades of gray. The reason for this preference seems to be that...