Old Skulling

"You! You just died!" - Photo by Douglas Fóis When I first started playing RPGs, I would try to prepare for every possibility I could think of. I almost tried to write "Gamebooks" to run as adventures, with numbered index cards and sayings like "if players try to do this, go to card 15" or something. It was exhausting, and mostly useless. Players will do things can't ever imagine ourselves. And that's awesome! So I needed to come up with a method that could provide me with enough information so that I could run a game, but not so much that I would lose more than half of it because it never really appeared in the game. Preferably something that could take as little time as possible. So, taking inspirations from many sources (which I can only remember now as Tome of Adventure Design, The Lazy Dungeon Master and Fiasco), I came up with what I call the Adventure Structure method, and it works as follows.

These tiles can generate some pretty hectic streets! This one is going to be a really quick post. I just wanted to share something I found while I was thinking about how to generate street maps for my Urbancrawl campaign. Suddenly browsing through my Board Games, I saw my Tsuro of the Seas and thought it might be pretty cool to use the tiles as templates for actual streets on the game. I could simple draw a tile and place it on the table. Once the PCs ventured outside of it, I could just draw another one, and keep going. But since I wanted to publish my City Toolbox someday, I had to research how to do that, how many combinations are possible and etc. And I found some pretty cool thing. You can generate your own tiles, and even a board for them here . There are only 35 possible tiles apparently. So to make a 36 table (with a d66 roll) I would still need another one, that I decided it's going to be a big plaza that all paths lead to. So that's it. Need some street maps? ...

Making notes for the upcoming urban campaign! I am about to being a new campaign using Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells . It's going to be focused on urban adventures of a band of mischiefs in a decadent, dirty, perilous but full of opportunities City-State in my personal setting (that I intend on publishing as a setting toolkit, inspired by the great books such as Vornheim, Yoon-Suin, Hubris and others). My intention is to make it a sandboxing urbancrawl campaign . I want to work on the project of creating a city toolkit for it, and at the same time playtest it with my players. They will be adventurers in the style of Fafrd and Grey Mouser, ambitious men and women looking for opportunities to earn gold, fame, power and whatever strikes their fancy. But I want to city to be alive too. To spring things at them in unexpected way and times. So I am studying a lot of possibilities and other RPG materials that can help me do this. However, even though I want to have an open ...