A Pirate's Life II: Naval Combat

Last time we went through a game structure for ship movement during naval combat. It wasn’t super simple, but the result was (hopefully) something intuitive with strategic depth. Let’s do the same for the combat itself. The limitation of the ruleset is that it only keeps one player occupied at the table unless each player is commanding a different ship. So we need things for the other players to do that are also intuitive and have strategic depth,...

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Serial Saturdays III: Getting By

Isda put her arm around Jacque’s shoulders and put the weight of her left side on him. “How bad is your ankle?” Jacque said. “I don’t think it’s anything a little ice and rest can’t take care of. How bad is whatever you’re storming away from? The look on your face when walked into each other...it was a little intimidating.”...

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A Pirate’s Life: Naval Movement & Travel

My PCs are planning to leave Haven after just one quest. It’s not because they didn’t like it, but the party’s Captain is playing a cleric of Tali. As such he doesn’t like staying in one place for too long. After putting a lot of work into Haven, I’m having strong urges to railroad them back there but I’m going to channel this into expanding the sandbox to the high seas. Let’s go sailing. ...

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City Squares II: Stocking Haven

Today we’ll fill Haven with contacts from each layer, information for those contacts to dole out to the players, and the encounters the information leads to. In addition mechanics will be discussed, specifically the City Turn and how it is played in the urbancrawl. From the Alexandrian: “Unlike a dungeoncrawl, the goal of an urbancrawl doesn’t default to treasure hunting. It defaults to finding something interesting.” The idea is that the...

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Serial Saturdays II: Gone Wrong

The guards came back into the dining room. The one leading the others said, “There’s no sign of him, sir. He isn’t here. We did find vials of the toxin hidden in the mattress stuffing. There were nine of them.” He held up a sack and handed it to the officer. Glassware clinked inside. Then the guards stomped their way to the front door and into the rain. Muddy boot tracks stained the wood floor everywhere they had searched. The officer turned...

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Haven, the City Square

The next session is getting a little close and it’s about time I flesh out the PCs impending destination, the city of Haven. This session will be when the transition from railroad to sandbox reaches the gaming table. With my fledgling sandbox full of squares promising adventure and intrigue, I can design Haven as the platform for launching hooks which lead to those squares. In the first post I said this blog is about taking theory and putting...

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Filling in the Blanks

NB: Trying to keep campaign secrets from my players so some parts are whited out, highlight for spoilers. Let’s get started. Once again the second rule of dungeon craft necessitates a secret for this major piece of the world. I’m assuming from here on out you’re familiar with the Fall from Heaven setting so I don’t have to retell the world’s history. Here’s the secret: Haven was built on top of the ruins of an ancient Patrian city from the...

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Serial Saturdays I: A Good Day

Each Saturday I’ll be channeling my plot driven railroading urges into actual writing. It’s going to be set in the FfH setting, mostly involving characters of my own creation. Had some fun putting this together. I thought, hey, if this is set in D&D why not use chapter 4 to jumpstart things. For once I wanted to write about a guy who was a working schmuck, so I picked the guild artisan background, and chose his bonds, ideals, and flaws....

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From Railroad to Sandbox

First on the agenda: the map. The campaign is set in the Fall from Heaven setting. There’s a computer game called Civ4 that simulates the rise and fall of civilizations on a world map. Then there’s a Fall from Heaven mod adapting that game for the setting. It seems like a no brainer to take a game of civ and use it as the campaign map. Even better, there’s a pre-mapped scenario using all 21 civs and is a pretty great set-up. No civ gets lost...

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Introducing a World

Hi, folks! My current Monday night game is based on a much beloved dark fantasy setting, and for years I’ve thought about how to do it justice in a D&D campaign. I finally started it, and after several quests it’s been going well, though I feel like something was missing. It could be better, but I just didn’t know how. So I started reading online D&D blogs and stumbled across some truly genius articles about how the game is written and...

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