"1. Build your settings to be destroyed. Players tend to wreck things, so create structures that your players will have fun obliterating, or at least trying to obliterate. Make the setting such that you will root for them when they do so. Give them oppressive regimes to topple, or enemy armies to incinerate, or ancient wonders to reduce to rubble. If you can't get them to feel wonder and pathos, at least get them to feel triumphant."I can't say how eye opening this is. This unlocks the one problem at had with the misty isles of Harn that I could never put my finger on. Harn was so perfect, so beautiful, I really never considered having a war that ravaged the countryside and burned down a city. I never had that problem with other settings, by the way.
Grand events are memorable events. That is what adventure is all about. And the willingness to bust up the world really opens things up and if the players are responsible for starting or finishing that devastation all the better.
Old School DND - Has posted a link to someone that collected all of the old Wormy Comics from Dragon magazine. I loved the art in this strip but never really followed the story as I accumulated the earlier magazines bit by bit and out of order.
Dave Trampier was one of my favorite D&D artists back in the day. Apparently he had some kind of falling out with TSR and disappeared as far as the gaming world was concerned. Skyland games has put together a nice explanation of what little is known about Trampier after he disappeared from gaming.
Oubliette Magazine has photos of a neat Magic User spellbook project that I'd love to see more of. It would be really nice to see a Wizard provided with only the spell info they know in this sort of format instead of allowing them free reign on the various manuals. Let them take notes of different spells they've seen used so they can work on researching them later.
Oubliettemagazine - Has an old article about Games Workshop looking for a new CEO. They are still around so they must have sorted things out. The post got me wondering what I would do if made CEO of a company like Games Workshop.
First, I'd hire someone to create a simplified OSR rule-set) designed to be fast and easy to use, D&D Basic Set easy to sell to newbies. This is the free/cheap sample that introduces people to the Warhammer Old World. And also a very similar one for the 40K world. Then take existing Warhammer and 40K stuff and adapt it to those rules (and thus make it OSR compatible). Release it all using the OSR SRD hoping for sales as well as to entice others to join in Old World fun. The idea is to make all that existing stuff easily accessible to the rest of the game world. The Old World source books alone would probably garner a large number of sales.
Second, I'd probably close the least successful game shops and make the rest a line of RPG hobby shops that would *also* sell Warhammer miniatures (instead of being all about Warhammer miniatures and only about Warhammer miniatures). I'd be willing to sell franchises to help folks set up such shops if they were afraid to go independent as a hobby shop, or sell off our existing shops to folks willing to pay the franchise fee to keep whatever name we've created for the hobby shop lines and advertising.
I don't know if Game Workshops currently sells singular minis or if they just sell armies but if they don't sell them solo I'd ensure they did. A regular hobbyist isn't going to buy an army-load of figures but they'll buy them a la cart because Game Workshop miniatures are beautiful. If this is not economically feasible these days I'd work on having 3d printers print them on demand in the hobby stores, and every miniatures would have a name and statblocks.
I'd also bring back the idea of war-bands skirmishing rules or at least adapt some of those ideas as an expansion for the new RPG set. Sort of give the gamers a taste of the full Warhammer Fantasy Battles line.
DIY and Dragons - Has a post on the Glogosphere - I don't play Glog but I love the way they are forming a community known as the glogosphere. With the end of Google+ and the fracturing of the OSR this seems a nice way to build community. Tiny communities but communities none-the less. Although this creates factionalism it also means that there are smaller, closer, communities which I think would be beneficial. I'm not sure if such groups should align by game (the way the glogosphere did) or along some other lines, I'm not sure that distinction even needs to matter.
Elfmaids and Octopi - Has posted Gnome Hall Dungeon, a wonderful one-page dungeon. It's a location based site that leaves the missions up to the GM.
It's a beautiful dungeon that includes a random encounters table called "After the Fall" which judging by the entries I'm assuming this means after the Gnomes no longer control the place. This simple table opens up the site for multiple uses, a GM can use as a patron as the Gnome King sends hte players to do something and then something else, or simple has a waystop, then at some point they return to find the Gnomes gone and the place overrun. Or, in reverse, an evil party could take out the Gnomes and later find it more comfortable with Goblins and Hobgoblins roaming about.
More location adventures should include this sort of thing, a simple table an a site is fresh again.
Personally I'd prefer to see the map be a two-page spread with the second page including the 6-mile hex around the gnome hall and Hills wandering encounters table, but I understand the desire to keep to the single page format.
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