19th Level

This is possibly an ongoing series - either that or in a few months I'll need to get rid of that Part 1 when no one is looking... So after doing what we thought would be a one-shot D6 Star Wars game back in May, my gaming group wound up doing an Edge of the Empire Star Wars campaign throughout the summer. We did a 5th Edition D&D game in the autumn and are back to the Edge of the Empire game again. After running the Beginner Set game which was set on Tatooine the group needed something of a "home base". While jumping through the galaxy is traditional in Star Wars, as GM I find Star Wars games go a bit smoother with some unifying element to them, with a sector location working best. In one of my favorite D6 Star Wars games a large portion of the campaign had taken place in the Elrood Sector which had been detailed in   Planets of the Galaxy, Volume Three  as well as the campaign Operation: Elrood . We had a rather memorable climax to that campaign, with the Reb...

Finalized my map of the starting town for my DCC campaign. It was interesting how I began finding a story to match the map. The west side of the map is the older part of the city and the one where the patrician families are most likely to be found. The buildings are made of brick and concrete, the streets are all paved, and there are many pleasant garden areas to be found. One can see the palace of the administrator of the island, the Comes Fraterculus. Nearby is the old market, still in use where one can find more luxury goods. The eastern half of the town is the newer part though it is also not in as good shape. A century ago the town was sacked by barbarians and the walls were breached with much of the town destroyed. It was rebuilt, though many of the eastern half of Tagentium consists of wooden buildings and dirt streets. There's a lot less planning to be found on this side of the river as well, with nice back alleys for cutpurses. We've also got the main market and...

Some dental "fun" (I wonder if clerics can fix teeth) and work-related issues have forced me to delay kicking off my DCC campaign by two weeks. During that time I've been doing some reading on late Antiquity and noodling around with my setting. As I've mentioned previously, my game's feel is inspired by the decades following the fall of the western Roman Empire. I'm not looking to create a 100% historical analogue. But there's a lot about it that screams D&D. You've got your barbarians kingdoms. You've got the eastern half of the fallen Empire that still considers those lost lands part of its territory (paging Emperor Justinian). Now we'll be adding to the mix the undead, dragons, sorcerers, and the like. I've been giving some thought to the starting town of the game, currently named Tagentium. The idea is the game begins on a small island close to a much larger island. I've not been planning on developing it too  much as I expect...

I've spent a bit of free time working out the details for my campaign setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics . It actually took a bit of debate going back and forth between that and Adventurer Conqueror King System. In the end I decided on DCC , largely due to its somewhat lighter workload for the Judge, though I definitely want to run or play a game of ACKS at some point. I've posted some previous musings on this setting and this may contradict some of them - as the game gets closer to its first session the setting is becoming more concrete as some ideas are modified or discarded. As I mentioned previously I'm inspired by what I consider to be TSR's old "mini-sandbox" adventures. I don't foresee running a "true" sandbox game with everything wide open but I do want to incorporate a large element of player control. This is what I observed TSR doing in several of their early adventures. While the Lendore Isle series of adventures remains a big inspir...

White Mountains of New Hampshire Having lived most of my life in Connecticut and Massachusetts, there's certain things that come to my mind when I think of "wilderness". First and foremost, there's trees. In most fantasy settings there are certain sections of the map labelled as "forest". Here in southern New England one gets the feeling were it not for urbanization, pretty much every "hex" would be forest terrain. Moving further north to northern New England we find ourselves in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Green Mountains of Vermont. Before having kids, my wife and I would go hiking in the White Mountains several times each spring and summer. There the terrain was very forested and very mountainous - no surprises there. You'd have tree-covered mountains and more rocky mountains, such as what you'd find in Franconia Notch. The notches themselves are the valleys between ridges of mountains. For me it is one of the most bea...