Prehistory Fantasy Setting

I've been lax in posting on the blog, I blame my own laziness, my wanting to hang out with a good gaming buddy before she leaves Santa Fe forever, and my own laziness. And anime, and videogames.

Regardless, when I've made time to write gaming stuff, I've focused on a few themes, all of which I've discussed as campaign pipe dreams in my talks on the Unabashed Gaming podcast, but today I'm going to try to word-dump about the game that intrigues me the most about writing/running:

Paleolithic D&D, or more specifically, Prehistory Fantasy Setting. Because there's no way in hell I can mesh this setting with traditional D&D.

What initially drew me to this concept was the realization that players who engage in fantasy roleplaying tend to know all the tropes. They read through the supplemental material, and if you throw a floating many-eyeballed creature at them, they instinctively know it's a Beholder. And that line between player knowledge and character knowledge is super thin, because in the D&D world, a lot of it has been explored and recorded.

Now, looking at my more embraced roots with Call of Cthulhu, even if your players know what a Shoggoth is, their characters have no idea what this protoplasmic mass of bubbles flooding its way toward them is. They don't know what a night-gaunt is. Maybe it's a vampire, or a gargoyle. Or a demon! Call of Cthulhu is all about describing what creatures look like, using sweeping generalities, because characters are not sticking around to draw detailed anatomies of them, unless they're Richard Upton Pickman, and fuck you no one is playing Richard Upton Pickman.

Regardless, this line of thought (coupled with a few sessions spent playing the world-building game Dawn of Worlds) brought me into thinking about the origins of races in D&D, and how they tried to survive in their earliest days. I decided it would be interesting to try to take a party through a hypothetical wooly mammoth hunt, or an encounter with a migrating family of sabertooth tigers. Taking the concept of assigned quests to be exactly that; journeys into the unknown, encountering unfamiliar sites, sounds, and creatures, and returning back to their homes with new stories, trophies, and scars.

I won't get into the minutiae on this post, but I'll drop some future post ideas here for my own personal use later on. Topics such as:

-Which system to use/base this setting off of?
-What fantasy races to include, what unconventional fantasy races to use?
-Whether to incorporate interaction between the fantasy races, or should xenophobia prevail?
-How to incorporate migration, agriculture, etc.
-Whether to include civilizations that are (somewhat) more advanced than those of the player characters.
-Ideas for the types of quests players would embark upon.

Hopefully I'll return to these concepts later.

For now, I'm out.

Expanded Thoughts: Unabashed Gaming Ep. 6 (Part 2)

Haha...so it's been ages since I posted the last blog about Unabashed Gaming episode 6. Regardless, here is part 2 of a potential 4-part series, pros and cons of running published material vs. home-written: Cons of Running Published Material.

1. Free Scenarios: Quality Not Assured

Specifically, those not included with paid material. Stuff you find on forums, or even included with quickstart rules...those are generally meant to go from concept to published within a matter of weeks to months, depending on who's writing the thing.  The sad result is that an adventure can be incoherent, unbalanced, poorly-written, or all of the above.

This can result in you spending more time trying to fix things so that players don’t get confused, which means less time to read the scenario for mood/theme and get familiar with it in that sense.  Having to fix someone else's work is also a wonderful way to get utterly sick of a concept before you even get a chance to bring it to the table.

2. Less Room for Improvisation

This is really more of a hindrance to new GMs who may view pre-written material as sacrosanct (Hint: Nothing is so good that a nice round of ad-libbing can't make it better). However, there is the perception that once something has been bound in a .pdf or a softcover booklet that it's complete. This is an incorrect assumption, because your players will always want to do something that is not written down.

3. Potential Cheat Factor

Obviously this is an issue no one wants to really think about, but it's still one that you definitely don't want to deal with. Regardless, it's still the truth that with published scenarios, you’re playing something that unscrupulous players can also get their hands on, allowing them to game the system/story.  It's not an issue I've ever encountered, but then again I tend to run home-written stuff for the majority of my GM life.

Hopefully you’ve managed to weed out those assholes by now, if you've ever encountered any.

4. A Dearth of Story

Shorter scenarios have very little story to them, for players that thrive on plot and intrigue, it’s definitely not for them. This leaves it up to you, the GM to create the driving plot as it pertains to the storyteller PCs. At the same time, most pre-written campaigns are made so that players can insert any number of 'genned characters in without adversely affecting the plot.

This will occasionally leave players without an in-game hook to keep pursuing the plot, especially if you're just reading and following along as they are, and not adding a bit of your own spice to the game.

5. Overstaying One's Welcome

Everyone's had to deal with interest drain at some point in campaigns. Either the plot isn't moving as swiftly or in a direction you're engaged with, or perhaps the players have been losing interest in their characters' stories. Perhaps its a combination of a multitude of factors, and the end result is you're looking at sixteen more sessions of written material while players start looking towards new systems or campaigns.

It's easy to get stuck in this kind of rut, especially with ambitiously long pre-written scenarios. The important thing to remember is you can drop a game at any time or, with enough creativity, find a way to end it in a few sessions. Just don't get stuck in a bad relationship with a pre-written game, because your players deserve better than that.

Expanded Thoughts: Unabashed Gaming Ep. 6 (Part 1)

So, I've been podcasting with my good friend (and GM) David Larkins, and our most recent uploaded episode is regarding the merits of running published material, compared to writing your own. My commentary was verbose, as always, but my preparation was even greater, and because I have this handy blog I thought I'd share some of my unabridged thoughts with everyone.

Merits of Running Published Material

There are a lot of positives to running published material, whether through ease of preparation or a catering to a GM's own occasional laziness or ambivalence towards game preparation (we've all been there). It's important to note, going in to this post, that there is no right or wrong way to prep for a game, provided the end result is that the table consensus at the end of the session is some permutation of "Good times were had by all; except for that asshat Richard. He never has a good time. I don't know why we keep inviting him to games."

1. You don’t have to write anything, you basically read and take notes.

The best reason to run published material. If you're in a creative slump, or on short notice, or were violently ill the week before game time, it's super easy to pick something up and read it, compared to trying to write out a balanced game for players in a super-short period of time.

2. With luck (Or you paid for it) it’s been edited and playtested for balance.

Another great reason! Have you ever spent hours poring over different sourcebooks or .pdfs, trying to find the perfect way to create encounters or play sessions that involve all the players and don't utterly drag in execution? Well, most paid products have already had that lucky benefit of playtesting and tweaking, so unless you're reading from a text file you copy/pasted from some Angelfire website, chances are the writer put some thought into making the game coherent and interesting for players!

3. Takes substantially less prep, even to include in an original setting

This is sort of obvious. When someone else does most of the work for you, there's less to take your mind away from thinking about how to run your game, compared to what you're running for your game. And if you're in an ongoing campaign, you can copy/paste names of your original NPCs or locations into appropriate places in the adventure. What's easier than copy/pasting, I ask you? A lot of things, I'm sure, like calling a player and telling them it's time for them to put on big-boy pants and run a goddamn game once in your life instead of complaining about mine, Richard.

4. Can give you ideas for where to go next if your group is in a rut

An under-appreciated gem, this one. There are so many things that can put some malaise into your weekly game, whether through player infighting or a new system release, or just plain summer laziness kicking in. Or GTA Online finally releasing their content creator. Or a really good Steam Sale or Humble Bundle. You get the point. Inspiration is low, players are losing focus. When you get to this point, a great place to turn to is published material, where they come up with some really deadly ways to get players back on their toes, or to really inspire a GM with a memorable villain or dangerous situation. This isn't a sure-cure, as players who want to stop playing a game generally already have an idea of what they want to do instead, but if the rut belongs to you, GM, this tactic can get you back on track.

5. Fantastic for introductions/one-shots if they are short

What if I'm starting out as a GM, you ask. What if my players are new? Or the system? Or someone wants to break in a new set of dice? Or perhaps an old gaming friend is coming in from out of town and wants to roll some dice for an evening?
One shots, baby. There's nothing like them, and if you can make them fast-paced enough or deadly enough, any complaints by long-time angsty players named Dick or Rich or Richard will be constantly drowned out by other players asking why the hell a rusty bed frame just knocked them out of a window onto the concrete path below for 3d6 damage. Because Call of Cthulhu, naive new player. Because Call of Cthulhu.

Tune in again for Drawbacks of Running Published Material!