Posts

Adventuring in Hostile Climates

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Mountain Path by Reza Afshar The campaign I am currently writing takes place in the frozen fjords of the north-lands (I know, it doesn’t sound like a terribly original setting). When the players venture out into the mountains they’ll be walking through thick snow, howling winds and blizzards. But how do you represent this with in-game mechanics? I’m not fond of the “roll a constitution save vs the environment every hour” approach; a naked adventurer with a high constitution bonus shouldn’t be able to wander your world’s not-Antarctica just by luck of the dice. Going to the other extreme, I’d rather not stat every item of clothing the players are wearing and it’s relative insulation values. Hopefully this system also avoids the players feeling that “You’re now freezing and will take penalties to dexterity checks” is pure GM fiat (or spite). Since the area will be available as a hex map, should the players feel the need to strike out into the wilderness, I’d also like a system th

Cultural Randomness

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Tribe Leader  by Daniel Romanovsky A few days ago I was reading through Gundobad’s blog entry on historically coherent campaign settings . The article lays out a great technique for creating map locations with proper history and context, I thoroughly recommend giving it a read if you haven’t already. After reading it I got to thinking of a few tables to give some more inspiration to anyone not sure what aspects the civilisations they were introducing should have. These are based on my (extremely limited) historical knowledge and while I’m sure they could be expanded and improved upon, hopefully they’ll be enough to get someone in a rush started making campaign factions. There are four tables below handling why this group has appeared, how they live, what they believe and how they fight. If one choice makes more sense then don’t bother rolling, or re-roll if the option doesn’t fit with your setting; like all random generation tables these are meant to help the GM, no