Some gaming thoughts and links while I'm vacation "relaxing."
- Charles Saeger converted a David Hargrave Arduin Grimoire monster to GURPS in his latest post. For DF, you'd want to deploy a few of these guys at once or just use the larger version he suggested in the text. But it's a good, unique, threatening beast that your players are unlikely to have seen before.
- Douglas Cole posted about our latest game session, which I participated it from abroad. It's got a really good note about how polytheistic pantheons mean you worship all of the gods, but perhaps one more than the other, not a "pick one and that's your only god" kind of thing. That's critical - with a modern eye it can be hard to not think it's my god vs. your god. It's more like, toss a sacrifice into the sea before a ship voyage to placate the sea god, offer prayers to the god of fertility when you wed, seek to ward off the eye of the god of death before a dangerous task, etc. You might even have a patron god, but that's a "first among equals" kind of thing.
- Always bring a note pad on vacation. I use the same one for every trip, making a chronological log. It's handy for anything you need to write down about the trip (phone numbers, addresses, plans, etc.) but also to jot down gaming notes. The one I have dates back originally to my 2009 return trip to my old hometown in Japan, and it's got gaming notes galore in it, much of which made it into Felltower.
- One comment I made on Doug's post needs reiterating. As the GM, it's worth making clear, obvious, and plain language pronouncements about game elements the PCs would perceive. In his session we met with a local official. From his title, it sounded like he was a moderate-ranked guy doing a job passed down from above. In fact, he was like a right-hand man to the top lord of the area. Aha. That would have been clear to our PCs, and our actions as a group weren't appropriate because that wasn't clear to us. It's worth just saying things outright if they're known. Save the hints and subtlety for when puzzles and subterfuge are the order of the day, not for the vast majority of encounters.
This is a random thought that might be interesting to add to your DF game, at least to me. You have factions of evil that oppose each other why not try factions of good? I would be interested in something like this and I like to read your blog because it is sort of a laboratory for role playing. So adding something like sectarianism might be interesting. It would give some versimiltude to the DF genre since the dark ages was full of sectarianism and wars between groups claiming to be good.
ReplyDeleteI think the issue with this would be:
Delete- I don't want conflicts in "town," I want it to be a safe base for dungeon exploration;
- I want to keep the PCs focused as close to 100% on dungeon delving;
- I don't want intra-party conflict fostered by the setting;
- I don't want sectarian splits to take away from the very prosaic goals and pragmatic decisions of dungeon dwellers.
I think anything more than very light surface faction differences is asking to distraction from all of those.
Ideally I want faction splits to play out this way:
"Hey, MY cult of holy warriors is more focused on killing the undead, the Good God hates those."
"Yeah, well MINE focuses on killing demons, the Good God hates them too."
"Sounds great, let's try to get down to level 4 today. Maybe there are undead and demons!"