Diary of a Failed Game Designer

Within the caves of Sharak Falls  there is an ancient temple. A temple where worshipers of the gorge once sacrificed locals, casting them through the purifying water of the  falls into the enveloping darkness below. The  statues are now fallen, the cult a memory, a story used to scare children into doing their chores. The  temple is  known as a dark and evil place. A quick map I doodled while watching TV with my wife last night. if anyone has use for it have at it, just let me know how it turns out. So what's in the temple? That's up to you, here are some starting points...  Roll D12 or whatever. It's become a roper breeding ground. The interior is crawling with  roper spawn and spawning   ropers. The are all very aggressive as you have interrupted them  in the midst of getting busy how ever ropers do the do. The  cult never left, their bodies remain strewn around the upper level of the temple . Skeletons piled in the corners liek cord woo, skulls crushed bones bent unnatur

Before You start this post you might want to read this about converting my venerable D&D game to Dungeon World. You might not want to cause you know the blogs not that great. If you do great, it's all related. So I started that process. Converting  my D&D game to dungeon world. I hate it. I'm sorry. Well lets be honest, I'm not sorry, and hate is a strong word. Let me explain. I like Dungeon World very much. I like the  way games are set up, I like the way it runs,  and what I particularly like is that characters right out of the box are bad ass. What I don't like is this: In my mind the transition of characters from humble beginnings to transcendent heroes, is the game. When the last true druid presented the Master a low level druid with a totem walnut and told the Master he was to pledge himself to the earth as it's protector. It was a harbinger of the future, a direction to move towards, a burden of responsibility that the character was in no way ready f

Lately I have been thinking allot about table top miniatures games, such as my "Block game" (the game that consumes all.) So I got to thinking  about  writing a table top game based on the  run-> gun-> loot ->repeat paradigm that exists in many of my favorite video games. (Borderlands and Diablo 3 being the most well known current examples.) I know there are others working on similar (read, better) things that are emulating the shoot and loot genre of video-games. Here are some links. Check out The Preview of "Shoot N Loot" being written by game designer John Harper . This game is a great example of  genre emulation within the exact genre I'm talking about. (In particular I think his Agro system for combat hits a home run. A decidedly elegant and deeply strategic mechanic.) Related  This is a great idea form a man of many great ideas ,   Dyson Logos I love this idea from Dyson it's got a high cool factor, and is what started me thinking about work

What is this? A story of evil ..yes.. and.. Another adventure seed with an ugly map this time. As usual I'm not going to stat out anything for any system, that's up to you depending on what you play. Particularly when it comes to "the evil entity" below, I lave that basically undefined so that any one using this document can fill in that blank in a way that suits their game. Haver's Cube: Deep under the town of  Worndelve there lies a most astounding construction. It is said the  mines were started by dwarves many years before man arrived to roost at the feet of the Squat mountains. These rolling soft peaks being just tall enough to hold snow for a few moons longer than the valley below are known to be a range ancient beyond knowing. When the  engineer known as Haver arrived at Worndelve he was a young man with big ideas. He looked at the old dwarf mines which  were long thought to be exhausted as an opportunity. So he put together a party of surveyors, entered th

3d Art Potion By Ary Laszlo (Ray traced?) You are GM-ing a game, you want throw in an unidentified potion? Fantastic. Why not use a random  color and appearance mixed with random effects and side effects? Here you go a chart of random potions originally written form my AAIE game. Potions: Roll description, color,effect, side effect Once a description / color is matched with an effect they are paired for the rest of the game session. Two effects may share the same description. I would just roll 8d20 pair them off and add each pair to determine what row to look at in each column. It's a lot of dice but not so bad if done ahead of time. POTIONS Roll Description Color Effect 1 Side Effects 2 Bubbly Amber Growth to twice normal size lasts 1 day. Effects damage output health ect. Does not effect equipment or clothing. Nausea D10 rounds 3 Oily Orange Shrink to half normal size for 1 day. Effects damage output health ect. Does not effect equip

This one: Steve Jackson Games, 1990 version. I have been considering  liquidating some of my humble but I feel quality game collection. I don't have allot of stuff but what I have I feel is good usable items. As an after effect of  planning on an ebay sight and all that  ebay requires I have been spending some tie in my attic looking through my old books. A while ago I ran into my old car wars set. I loved car wars when I was in Jr. High and early high school. My friend Mike and I used to design cars and play out scenarios for hours at a shot. It was great fun. Not for the first time I inquired with the group that I game with  to see if they woudl liek to try the venerable old game, and this time we finally set up a four player game. Today we took to the streets of Midville, first on 2 map sections then on 1 map section (to speed things up) I printed out  five cars from here All class five (Around $5000) all pretty evenly matched. We would duel and when someone died they would just

This post was inspired by this post  from the "Disoriented Ranger" blog. Go read that post it's interesting So your  players are working their way through some caverns and you feel they are not yet at one with the inherent danger of life below ground. It's time to throw a random natural hazard their way. Natural hazards are defined by being non-fantastic. A field of giant sentient mushrooms that puff out rainbow colored rot spores are cool. They are not a natural hazard. The entries on this chart are things that could be in any hallway of any cave and don't necessarily require their own map entries. I will include notes about equipment that may be needed to  traverse the obstacle, however I will not include details like die checks, saves, or, damage values as they are system dependent. I will try to word these details in ways that are system agnostic. I will place equipment that might be used up or needed and  possible threats in (brackets) at the end of the entri

Check out this RPG. Kick-starter. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/monkeyfunstudios/spirit-of-77-a-funky-1970s-tabletop-role-playing-g It's a game about action set in the blown out over  the top world of 70's action films. Run off the  "Apocolypse world" frame work. I'm  probably going to back it at the PDF level, because it's similar to something I was kicking around . The game I was working on only lives on Google docs right now and is in it's very infancy so the kickstarter saves me the work / fun of writing a game. (If any one is interested here is the Google docs link to my W.I.P . open for comments. I think I'm going to stop working on the game now that I see someone else is doing it bigger, better, faster, and stronger.Still feed back is fun, instructive, and all that jazz.) This brought a thought to my head. I have watched Fate, Savage Worlds, and  now Apocalypse World become the hackers choice for  game ideas. I am not negatively judging a

No RPG stuff ... This is a sarcastic post about sarcasm, a thing I am becoming less and less a fan of. This has a point skip to the bottom if you like. I was in a cafe about a month ago, admittedly it was a vegetarian cafe that hosts an acoustic open mike night so I was setting myself up in allot of ways. The place also happens to have a good beer selection and killer burritos. A very  trendy and I'm sure quite nice couple are sitting near to us. I'm not jugging, I'm just not trendy so the concept skinny pants is completely lost on me, as is the desire to drink Pabst Blue ribbon even though the last ribbon it won was in 1893. (Even that's debatable.) Enough Digressing  while eating my Burrito I hear this: (please read this with a kind of drawn out  disinterested tone) Guy: "My friend and I went to this  really ironic Mad Men Party the other day where every one brought something made form a 1950's cook book." Girl: "That sounds ... kind of awful."