Blog Spotlight: North of Reality

As a service for my readers (the few, the proud...), I thought I'd spotlight a very useful blog called North of Reality. It's a fiction blog written and edited by Uel Aramchek, and it is just chock full of fantastic inspiration for fantasy gaming. Each entry is a snippet of his bizarre, wonderful imagination, and many of them have gaming application -- in fact, they're written in a way that I think he games in his spare time.

For narrative gamers (using, say, Dungeon World), many of the entries could be used as written (look at, for example, The Understeel). The next time your group finds a potion, choose something from the archive that's been tagged "bottled goods." Introduce binari into a remote city's economy. Some snippets are dripping with potential character backstories.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fantasy Friday: Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Races (OSE)

Image
 So, one of the many games I've backed on Kickstarter is Old School Essentials , which is a cleaned-up, streamlined, and corrected version of the B/X version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons (Moldvay/Cook) rules. Gavin Norman (who posts as Necrotic Gnome) does an incredible job editing and collating info into a super-easy-to-read format. One of the modifications to the B/X rules introduced in the OSE Advanced Fantasy book is separating race from class. In original B/X, the races are represented as classes, with the idea that, if you're playing an elf, that should be special enough in-and-of-itself. If you allowed non-human races to take classes, then players will play the non-humans because their innate abilities make them better than equal-leveled human characters. Separating race from class, the default introduced in AD&D, caused huge flamewars and continues to do so today. The Advanced Fantasy book has reasonable versions of the races so that, if it's your preferen
Read more

Eberron 5E: Race -- Shifter

With shifters, the problem is the new edition's focus on simplicity. Shifting changed your characteristics, and if you wanted your shifting to become really good, you had to take a tree of shifter feats. There were builds focusing entirely on maximizing your shifter advantages. The new edition doesn't really do temporary ability score changes in the same way -- the barbarian's rage, for example, gives a boost to damage and hit points, but doesn't require recalculating your character's abilities. Similarly, the gauntlets of ogre power / amulet of health / headband of intellect change the impacted ability score to a flat 19 -- a +5 bonus that's easy to plug in, and lasts indefinitely as long as you leave the item on. So I decided that 5E shifters should get their +1 stat bump from their trait, and tried to make the traits (which I had to rename "legacies" because "trait" in 5E is a very specific thing) almost as powerful as a feat,
Read more

Wondrous Wednesday: Robe of Blending (Waring 3-speed)

Image
There were two robes of blending that basically had the same shtick -- instead of the robe "blending" you into the background, it "blended" you like a kitchen blender. Ha ha! The first was Allen Hammack, who wrote one up in his article “The Lighter Side” in Dragon #35 (March 1980), about typos in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. The second was the prolific John M. Maxstadt who put the Waring 3-speed into his article “Still More [Gods Forbid] Outrages From the Mages” in Dragon #144 (April 1989). But I thought, you know, there's room for a robe that can shoot blades at opponents, and giving it a curse isn't the worst. So, here's the result.
Read more