Mad Gaming Madness

So, week 2 of the challenge involves making a map of the area for the players to investigate. Having recently picked up the Bundle of Racial Justice and Equality , I was reminded of Hex Kit, which had a very successful Kickstarter campaign . I gave it a try. It's pretty barebones, but that's the idea -- it's supposed to be a lightweight simple mapping program, and that's exactly what it does. THE HAUNTED SHORE The guidelines in the Gygax 75 Challenge booklet recommends the following features: One settlement of significant size: this is Ramshackle (hex 0707), the starting town for the player characters. "A few hundred buildings built in a thousand different styles." It's hit or miss in Ramshackle, much like the name implies. Two other settlements: I have placed Seldon Farm (hex 1006) a little way down the coast, and a hidden elven homestead (hex 0504) at the edge of the haunted forest, for the party to discover. One major terrain feature: this is th...

So, the challenge for Week 1 is very basic. The steps are: 1. Develop Your Pitch Come up with 3-7 bullet points that describe what you conceive of the campaign to be. The pitch for my home game idea is pretty simple. This is to be shared with the players to give them an idea what the campaign is about. Fairie Tale Frontier. The campaign takes place in a frontier coastline where the fantasy has a fairy-tale air. Any faerie tale or fable could conceivably have taken place here. Beastmen and Wild Men. The frontier is infested with magically-created and -influenced creatures that have reverted to a feral state. Empires and Outlands. The campaign takes place on a frontier far from the reach of any nation-states, but that doesn't mean they ignore the area. The great, merciless empires tread the frontier with no regard for the natives. Points-of-Light Hexcrawl. The campaign will proceed in a hexcrawl fashion. The players will begin in a small frontier town, and be able to exp...

Over at the OSR Pit, Ray Otus has started a thread about the Gygax 75 Challenge , which is based on an article Gary Gygax published in the April 1975 issue of Europa , a wargaming newsletter. Ray also wrote a booklet about it which is available here for free. The idea is to jump-start the creative process for making a campaign. When I first started running games, I put them in my own homebrew setting. I borrowed elements from all of the various things I was interested in at various times (Middle Earth, Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné setting, the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, etc.) but there wasn't really much rhyme or reason to it -- I would put in something I thought was cool, at the point I thought was cool to do so. And it worked fine, but it was small-picture stuff. I had the idea that there was a huge campaign world in my head, but I just needed some time to get it sorted. Later, I revisited that setting after decades of r...

I've been rereading old Dragon and Dungeon magazine for ideas I can rip off for 5th edition. One of the features I always loved were the tomes of forbidden and magical lore. These were usually just literary framing devices for the introduction of new spells, but some authors actually described interesting books that dripped with plot hooks and other elements a DM could use in her game. While the first to do this in the pages of Dragon was probably Ed Greenwood, with his popular "Pages from the Mages" features, the column I remember most vividly is "The Fire-Eye Scrolls" by Harold Dolan, from issue #129 (July 1987). It described eight new spells and a magic item, all that remained of the "Academy of Fire Magic" from the "Valley of Lanshaw." These scrolls were the only ones recovered from the Academy's destruction, and reside in the "Mages’ Guild of the city of Val Dalya." For the most part, people used these articles for n...