Datum by Datum

The following is a bit of story from my homebrew campaign of Tharstradt. Linus Redmond. A man destined for great things. Destined to be a sorcerer in the time of the Dreadmancers of West Flach and the Fourth Highland Dynasty. Surrounded by politics fueled by magics, Linus had to be, and was, the kind of tactician to use those same magics to make powerful and subtle ritual curses on his political enemies. Nothing illegal of course, at least not that anybody knew about. The laws of West Flach and the Vaubrich Academy are old enough to have dealt with the issues of white, grey, and black magic of course. In the end all magic ends up a bit grey, but in the eyes of the law and of the state what really matters is what kinds of spells are allowed to be used in society. Once Linus reached the peak of his power, scrutiny was much more a tool for him to use rather than something to worry about, but until then he had to be cunning in his plots if he was to succeed. It was 966 and...

I worked hard on a space RPG system that I can enjoy. My ultimate conclusion was that I lack the skills at this point to finish the project to my desired specifications, but if you want to check out what I made (and playtested) I'm putting it out there! Click here for the main play manual.

Designing a setting for a campaign is a rather daunting task. You can take several approaches to this, with one end of the spectrum being insanely detailed to the point of ecological information being established and the other end just being a typical fantasy world that transplants existing setting rules. I went with the former, because I don't know how to pick tasks that are of a reasonable scope. Using the Savage Worlds system, one of the worlds that I came up with for an RPG campaign that I ran was a small-ish continent in a world of haphazard magic along various ley lines. The premise was that people from Earth were reborn in this place with no memory of their prior life. As time went on their memories slowly returned and as the ages progressed eventually every life that came to Tharstradt was through a newborn that inherited memories instead of being born as an adult in a mysterious shrine towards the center of the continent. Understandably, it can be very hard to get a fe...

I was recently reading this article by Rock Paper Shotgun 's contributor Sin Vega. I was suddenly reminded of the numerous struggles I've had when trying to convey any sense of history or meaningful presence as a Game Master in various tabletop role-playing games. Surely video games have an advantage in this arena as they offer a real physical place in relation to your character(s), which is simply impossible to maintain beyond small arenas in the tabletop realm. However, the elegance and effectiveness of purely using imagination to fill in the holes you didn't even know were present in a setting is pretty spectacular. A person... ...in a place. It's totally acceptable if a game has idiosyncrasies all over the place, but hits just enough marks to convince your brain that its setting is a real enough place. Fallout 4 is a game full of "jank" on multiple levels. In terms of believability, the skeletons that litter its world only make s...