The Blog Glatisant

Month: December 2019

Is DnD a Gateway RPG?

Brendan (from the Necropraxis blog) and I have created a survey looking at DnD as a “gateway RPG” as well as the ways that people play it. There was a lot of debate about these topics recently, so we thought some data would be good for the hobby. Please share it widely! We want to get data from across the RPG landscape, not just the OSR.

Survey here: http://bit.do/dndgateway

The Maze Knights Potion and Spell Generator

The current plan is for magic in Maze Knights to focus around potions. Drink a potion, get a spell. Like in Knave, this makes spells very concrete and forces players to think about their inventory slots, as each potion takes up a slot. There probably will be recipes you can collect as the game goes on, but if you want to get crazy you can always whip up a random potion and hope you get something good.

Like in Maze Rats, I’ve created a magic generator that generates weird spell names. Unlike Maze Rats, it’s 24 tables long instead of 6, and includes tables for generating things like the potion’s consistency, smell, taste, bottle shape, etc. 20,342,016 possible spells! 2,176,782,336 bottles!

It’s probably going to get revised and tightened up as Maze Knights continues to develop, but it’s definitely solid enough to use right now in any fantasy RPG, especially Maze Rats. Click “Generate” to take it for a test drive! Sometimes tweaking a word (like making it plural) helps the spell make more sense.

The generator is free to download below. To randomly generate a potion, roll on the following table to find the name format. If you are using this with Maze Rats, "Effects" are now called "Qualities."

  1. [Quality] [Element]
  2. [Quality] [Form]
  3. [Element] [Form]
  4. [Quality] [Element] [Form]
  5. [Form] of [Element]
  6. [Form] of [Quality] [Element]

Each bolded word has 6 tables associated with it. Roll a die to find the correct table, and then roll on the corresponding 6x6 table to get the final word. (For example, to find a Quality you roll 3d6, getting 4, 3, 6. This means look at the 4th Quality table, 3rd group within that table, and the 6th item within that group.) The referee has final say over the potion’s effects.

If you want the rest of the Maze Knights magic rules and the latest draft of the game, click here to help support Questing Beast on Patreon.

Plot Claustrophobia in Managed Campaigns

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Russ Nicholson

When I’m playing in an RPG and I can tell that the world is basically revolving around the party, I get claustrophobic. That’s the only word I can think of that really matches the sensation. The boundaries of the world shrink. What creatures lurk in this forest? The ones that drive the story forward! What do the major faction in this city want? To hire or kill the party, of course!

Along with this comes the implicit expectation that the DM has put a lot of work into this experience and it would be rude to just drop everything and establish a hog-wrestling arena, even if that would be more entertaining. In a “managed” campaign like this, it feels like the game world is always watching. Long lost relatives and villains from your backstory are always popping into existence at thematically appropriate times. Carefully laid plans are overturned or validated based on whether they “added to the narrative” rather than whether they made sense. Intangible themes and character development arcs hedge you in at every turn, even if only by social pressure.

Maybe what it comes down to is that I like exploring, understanding, and manipulating systems (like the rules of a fictional world), while in managed campaigns you’re really trying to understand and anticipate a person, the DM. I find that deeply off-putting, for reasons that probably reveal more about me than anything else. I like my game worlds as open, adventure-dense, and utterly uncaring as possible.

But I can’t be the only one who actively avoids the main quests in Elder Scrolls Games, right?

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