Home to Cthulhu Hack, Sanction, The Dee Sanction, and more
At the weekend, I spent some time wandering around Waterstones and a branch of W H Smith fingering my way through various books, manuals, magazines and newspapers. While I have a draft of my adventure module that stills demands attention, I admit to have become side-tracked with the business of layout.
I have been working on The Stench of the Sea as a boring old Word document. I’m looking to reformat into something slightly more appealing.
The ‘No Expense Spared’ character sheet for the System I Made Up ruleset used for the playtest on Monday. Assign 3-2-1 to the top boxes, then choose four traits associated with those attributes.
Want to wrestle a giant crab? Then roll Body + Heave. How about working out what all that screaming might be about without getting too close? Maybe a Soul + Sense. Need to cast a quick sonic blast spell? Then get that Mind + Recall sorted sharpish.
Throw as many six-sided dice as your Attribute + Trait. Add more dice if you can justify an advantage, a useful piece of equipment or beneficial circumstance. Roll a 5 or 6, a success; but lose a success if you roll a 1 or 2. Compare against the successes of an opponent if doing something contested.
If the game session last night has anything to teach me it is that you can’t underestimate the value of a playtest with a diverse group of players. I had a group of four and we played the initial element of the Stench of the Sea adventure module I have been working on. I think we may have worked our way through about two or three pages of the module proper. Given that we played for two hours, that might say more about the focus of my group than the practical longevity of the game. However, the game did support that length of play with locations, people and a combat encounter, so the text of the adventure did add into the mix.
"Bert knows how many one is... And one is not enough."The Rule of Many
I have always believed in simplifying the role playing experience for myself whenever possible. The business of GMing a role playing game holds too many complexities and points of preparation to make it any harder. If I read an adventure, I will take notes. I will litter the text with highlighting, Post-It notes, sticky bookmarks or index slips. I will photocopy bits for personal reference, or transcribe important elements into a notebook. If I can photocopy three different bits and fit them on the same page, all the better. Actually, I have a thing I did for a Dragon Age adventure that ended up being a sort of booklet, containing snippets of rules, maps, characters and notes – all gathered into one spot. I wanted to fit it all in, so some of it didn’t even appear the right way up. I scanned one thing, then another – then cut them up and created a weird sort of GM support decoupage of something. All very crafty and chaotic – but, it helped a great deal in the end.
I believe that different game-masters and storytellers seek varied levels of detail from the supplements, adventures and modules that they buy. I think some will appreciate layers of atmosphere and flavour, while others prefer sparse, concise descriptions that get the point across without labouring it. I know that I prefer something with a solid sentence or three of flavour, followed with reasonable detail on features and pertinent encounters.
I spent most of the last weekend drawing pictures. Despite my plans to complete the first draft of my planned adventure module, I ended up concentrating on the visuals. In practice, I know I didn’t waste any time here. A picture, as we all know, paints a thousand words – so, I think I managed close to 10,000 words this weekend. Only kidding.