Welcome to the RPG Blog Carnival for the Month of March, 2023, on the theme of Taverns, Bars and other places to meet.
Obviously, the important part of the theme is places to meet, this can be where the player characters hang out between adventures, where they meet up with prospective patrons, or perhaps it is where they get together for the first time (“you all meet in a tavern”).
So, let us talk about Taverns, Bars and places to meet. Some ideas: Read the rest of this entry ?
January is almost over and with it, the first thirty-one entries for Petrichor 365! Now we move in February which gets its name from the Latin term februum, which means purification, via the purification ritual Februa performed at this time of year. Note that the Romans considered February an ill-omened month which is why it is only twenty-eight days long (and also my birth month, take that as you will).
Normally, I use the theme of curses for February but that may be subsumed into the whole Petrichor 365 thing, we will see.
What was published in the journal in January 2023, which due to Perrichor 365 has quite a lot, was the following:
August, which is named after the Roman Emperor (or First Citizen if you prefer) Augustus Caesar, the theme will be a month of personalities from the Sea of Stars (and possibly other places) if I can find some inspiration. If there is someone -or something– in particular that you would like to see, write a comment or otherwise let me know.
I will be at GenCon which follows closely after the start of August. Who else is planning to attend this year? Maybe we can meet up and chat.
A slowish month was July, 2022, but not entirely without content in this journal: Read the rest of this entry ?
Over at RPGGeek, there is a discussion about GMing styles (which you can find here) where I replied but I thought that I would share it here as well.
So, my thoughts on how I run a game.
My World, I have the final say about how things are, how they work and how it all fits together. That being said, I love for players to add, adapt and build off of things in the setting. Just because I have the right to veto something does not mean that I want to use it, I want the game to be fun for the player and something they are willing to buy into and make their own as well.
Let the players lead, there are things going on in the world that will happen in certain ways if not interfered with but it is up to the players to decide what their characters do and if they want to get involved in plots larger than “let us earn so money to buy drinks”. I do not use end-of-the-world plots (except in my superheroes campaign where the characters stopping such things is an underlying assumption of the genre) and while the world may get “worse” if the characters do not stop certain things, they will always have a chance to correct course and make things better laters, if that is their wish.
Light Preparation, I rarely have more than a page of notes going into a game, sometimes I highlight people, places or things I want to make sure show up (or at least get referenced) but usually I just have an opening scene and a handful of threads and off we go. I have been trying to be better at taking notes and these days I almost always have a google doc open as I am playing to add notes to as things happen and get mentioned.
There are Consequences, which is why note-taking is important! If the shadowrunners piss off Manawave Technologies and leave clues as to who they are, if the venturers insult a Draconic representative, if our teen heroes foil a plan by the Puzzle Master, these will lead to consequences . . . The games and the adventures do not take place in a vacuum, what the player characters do effect the world, usually in small ways but sometimes in major one and, in turn, the world will affect them.
Naturally, all these interlock, because I know my world(s), I am able to work out how to fit in player ideas and suggestions and to extrapolate the effects of their actions will have on and in the world. I can start with minimal notes and work outward because I have a strong idea of how things fit together and what the general currents are in the campaign.
Notes: photo [Construction Site] Louis Lafon, found on the Met and is in the Public Domain
GenCon is about two weeks away! Time flies. I am hoping this year will seem a little more normal even if masks are still required. So, I thought I would (once again) share my hard-earned experience and try and help out people who are going as I do every year.
Today is the last day of the RPG Blog Carnival for the Month of February, 2022, on the theme of Something, Something, Dragons so still time to join in!
I had hoped for more participation, but this has been a wierd month with lost of distractions (especially over the last few days!).
Codex Anathema talked about the Draconic Prophecies of Eberron (in Spanish!)
Curato Alain linked to this thread on RPG Geek: Not your Usual Dragon.
My contributions were: Read the rest of this entry ?
While the dragons, in theory (as well as in Imperial law and pretty much in fact as well) rule the Sea of Stars, they are fairly rarely seen, or are they?
Arguably the most powerful beings in the Sea of Stars are the Dragons, they defeated the gods and usurped mortal rulers to claim the entire world as theirs. Yet, while immortal, they are not invincible, the gods slew them in their hundreds, the Visse Conspiracy -now called the Sen’Tek- murdered scores and many more have been lost to other causes (not least to intra-draconic conflict).
Each dragon is unique but each is knowable, draconic powers follow their boodlines and with proper research a dragon’s powers and possibly weaknesses may be revealed. Confronting a dragon head-on without knowing anything about it is suicidal, confronting one with proper knowledge, preparation and a plan is just exceedingly dangerous. Read the rest of this entry ?
If there can be said to be a nexus of power in the Sea of Stars, it would be the Empress, while she was not the largest, oldest or strongest of the dragons, she was one of the most thoughtful. Further, she proved to be the one who could inspire and unify the dragons into a single terrifying purpose. Partly, she did this through promotion of the philosophy of Dominae, a philosophy that flattered the sensabilities of the dragons, and partly by being charming and convincing. (It has been argued that the Empress is the most charismatic of the dragons, at least to other dragons, but it is hard for non-dragons to know.) Once the gods were torn down, she and her Seven Stars seized the majority of divine weapons and artifacts, and the Empress used them to make herself the most powerful among the dragons through that theft of divine power.
Welcome to the RPG Blog Carnival for the Month of February, 2022, on the theme of Something, Something, Dragons.
Obviously, the important part of the theme is DRAGONS, creatures so central to our conception of roleplaying games that they are half of the title of the “world’s most popular roleplaying game”.
So, let us talk about Dragons. Some ideas:
Let your imagination soar like a flying dragon (and how do dragons fly?).
I hope you find inspiration. Please leave a comment on this post with a link to your submission. As people post link, please take a look as the idea is to share, inspire and bounce of one another’s ideas. At the end of the month, all of the links will be collected as in a hoard in a final wrap up post.
If you are not a blogger hopefully you will be still be inspired. If you start a relevant thread on Reddit or Discord or a forum or whatever, then please post a link to it in the comments so that can be shared too. The more people involved, the merrier! Let us create some wondrous things together!
My first contribution, the Dragon Empress.
Notes: This will be the fourth time the Sea of Stars has hosted the RPG Blog Carnival, the first time back in May, 2017 with the theme of Occult Mysteries, the second time in February, 2019 with the theme of Making Magic Wondrous, and the third was February, 2021, on the theme of Divine Artifacts.
Thanks to Daemons and Death Rays for hosting the RPG Blog Carnival last month on Political intrigue, Courtly drama and Factions.
Image The Seven-Headed Dragon, Fairy Tale by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Illustration by Kay Nielsen, 1925, from the United Archives, and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
Time ticks away and the first month of the year is almost over, soon February with begin February gets its name from Latin term februum, which means purification, via the purification ritual Februa performed at this time of year. Note that the Romans considered February an ill-omened month which is why it is only twenty-eight days long.
Normally, I use the theme of curses for February but as I am hosting the RPG Blog Carnival on the theme of Something, Something, Dragons, I will be focusing on that (and maybe fit some curses in too). I do hope you can join in on the RPG Blog Carnival, it is good fun and good inspiration.
What was published on the journal in January, 2022, was the following:
Sea of Stars RPG Design Journal 