Three years ago, when I started Treasure Tables, it was in large part because outside of Roleplaying Tips, there just wasn’t that much GMing material on the web — or if there was, I couldn’t find it.
Now I can easily foresee a time when I won’t just be able to cull the best GMing links for my Gnome Rodeos, I’ll actually have to pare those down to a manageable number as well. It’s ridiculous how much good stuff for GMs there is online these days (get off my lawn, uphill both ways in the snow, etc.) — and I like it.
Gnome Rodeos are our regular link roundups. Provided everyone doesn’t simultaneously stop talking about GMing for a week, you should see one most Fridays.
GMing Regulars
→ Musings of the Chatty DM: If you can read about Phil and his son, Nico, collaborating on a bedtime story RPG without going “Awwwwww….” and immediately wanting to do the same thing with your own young ‘un — or if you don’t have kids, filing it away for future use — you are clearly a soulless robot programmed only to kill.
→ Dungeon Mastering: I love Yax’s thinking on this one: The Golden Rule of D&D is that the world doesn’t have to make sense. I’ve never thought about it that way, but he’s absolutely right.
→ Roleplaying Tips: Issue #412 is my favorite RPT in a long time, because its feature article is six insanely practical organizational tips for GMs. I drive my wife nuts with organizational stuff, so this is right up my alley.
M.U.S.G.M.L.E.
(That’s “Millions of Unusual Small Game Masters Lurking Everywhere” — man, I feel old.)
→ Danger Magnet is a new magazine for Hollow Earth Expedition, fueled by donations and offering a free preview (which is pretty solid). I think Dragon and Dungeon going digital-only has opened up a huge void in the gaming industry, and I see magazines like DM as one way of filling it — and a positive one, too. (That doesn’t keep me from missing Dragon and Dungeon, though.)
→ Congrats to our gnomies at Kobold Quarterly are in order: industry legend Wolfgang Baur’s fan-driven Open Design Project has won the 2008 Diana Jones Award. Go, Wolf, go! I’ve never really figured out the DJA, but it’s badass that they won one.
→ Dave the Game (Gnome Stew reader and Critical Hits author) took a great set of GenCon 2008 photos. There are several screens from the upcoming (eventually?) D&D Insider, if that’s your cup of dwarven fungus beer.
→ As soon as I saw this mentioned on Gaming Report, I sent out an email to several friends that went like this:
Subject: The Sultan
Holy fucking shit.
Yeah. According to Dante of Stupid Ranger, it weighs in at around $10,000, so don’t get your credit card out just yet. But like I said: holy fucking shit!
→ John over at The Mighty Atom has put together a killer tutorial for creating custom D&D battlemaps, but it’s totally beyond me. His starting and ending points remind me of those little drawing exercises that show you how to draw, say, a herd of zebras in four steps, starting with one circle: 1. square grid, 2. um, what?, 3. okay, seriously, I barely know how to crop, 4. can I just copy yours?, 5. awesome battlemap! If your PS skills are above Level Suck, you should definitely check it out.
→ I haven’t read through the whole thing yet, but I definitely want to give How to Host a Dungeon a try. It has nothing to do with the series of commercially available “How to Host a…” games available — it’s a solo dungeon-creation semi-game, where the goal is to produce a fun, playable dungeon with history and surprises. (It’s most like the Dawn of Worlds PDF, actually.) You can get the whole shebang for $19 in print, $5 in PDF or $Free as a barebones PDF. Check out this crazy-awesome finished dungeon and tell me that doesn’t make you want to try this out. (Via Attacks of Opportunity.)
Have a great weekend!
Hey, thanks for checking out How to Host a Dungeon. I’d never seen the Dawn of Worlds PDF. It looks very cool. I’m going to try combing the two for the next D&D campaign I run.
@tony
I ran the Dawn of Worlds game with my group a few weeks ago. Scott’s post on the topic pretty much gives you the preview you need, and everyone in my group was totally pumped to run the game.
A few words about my own experience, since while I had fun, I didn’t come out of the session with a finished world I wanted to DM in.
1. Don’t mess with the RAW much. I spent way too much time beforehand coming up with house rules that only ended up slowing down the game and not adding much fun, and not near enough time addressing…
2. have some idea going in what can and cannot happen in your world. I have some wacky players, and once I allowed one silly thing to happen, many other silly things followed that I couldn’t bring myself to ban.
3. Get some poker chips to keep track of points. It always helps to have something tangible to represent the give and take of power that happens round to round.
4. Six hours seems like a good amount of time for the game to take. We had to rush at the end of a four hour session to get a couple third age rounds in.
Again. Despite all of this, it’s definitely a lot of fun to play. so enjoy.
I played Dawn of Worlds with my group, too, and we did end up with a great world to play a game in. In fact, I like it so much, I might try to work at least some aspects of it into other games.
As Itliaf said, you do need to have some idea of what you’re going for. We knew we wanted a world with pirates, and without just the typical D&D races, and something not too silly and not too serious.
Our game took a lot longer than six hours, but that’s in part because we were playing online, and the first age involved a lot of sending image files around. After that, I took care of adding cities and whatnot, since I have the best image program.
My suggestion: Read the rules very carefully, think about them, and don’t be afraid of changing your interpretation mid-game. We realized halfway through the third age that we’d been looking at Advance all wrong. We’d been using it just to give a civilization the technology, which we realized we should have been using Command City/Civilization for. And there was definitely a lot of arguing about what certain rules did and did not apply to.
We also did run across something of a PvP issue. We had some different ideas about what was ‘polite’ in the game, and took it out on each other’s races. We ended up with some epic battles, which was great, but sometimes the points that got poured into raising armies could have better been used adding to other aspects of the world.
The only house rules we came up with were these:
1. Avatars can raise armies without needing to command a city. We had some nomadic civilizations that wanted to get into fights, but since (at least according to our reading of the rules) you need a city to raise armies, there was nothing that could be done. Raising armies with just an avatar is much slower than if you also have a city or two, which makes sense, given the time and effort required to unify a nomadic people into a fighting force.
2. Avatars can fight on behalf of an army, giving it a +3, but if the army loses, they will die. This made sense to us, as it seemed like having an avatar on your side should confer some benefit. We came up with this towards the end of the game, so it could probably use some tweaking.
How hard do you think it would be to run DAW as an online game, say through a forum? I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to try it on my own, but I might host an online game if people are interested.
If you have somewhere to host the image file that everyone can download from/upload to, or some kind of paintchat type deal, it should work just fine.
I think a forum might be a little harder than a chat, just because of the time lag issues; there’s enough stuff to keep track of that it’s a little hard to keep track of if you’re not doing it all at once. Plus, you’ll need people who are honest about their dice rolls. AIM chats have a dice rolling function, so that wasn’t a problem for us – everyone’s rolls were right there.
I’ll have to check out How to Host a Dungeon. I’ve been recently hooked on some pretty amazing random generators. I’ve been spending a lot of time at http://www.Scaldcrow.com (http://www.scaldcrow.com/17.html) checking out some fairly simple but remarkable generators. I’m not surprised though, I’m hooked on their fantasy game, The Dark Fantasy of Sundrah.