I said I was going to go through Eldritch Role playing page by page to get my thoughts in order for my next campaign but I need to do something first. Avalon Games has a series of PDF's offering advice on "How to.." various aspects of running and playing RPG's. The one titled "How to run a Great Campaign" contains some pretty good stuff the most important for me was to start where you plan on ending. Sounds crazy but if you read the PDF it makes sense. Obviously the dream of the next "Greyhawk" or "Forgotten Realms" is strong in DM's but a more realistic goal (particularly for working adults) is a single story at a time. If the story and gaming group works well you can just start the next one where you leave off.
Why one story at a time? Our hobby in general seems to attract the insatiably curious (and possibly easily distracted) so there is always some G+ post popping up that fires the desire to game that event. If you plan out a whole world and everything in it something else is always going to be there tugging at your interest. I call it the shaken key ring syndrome which anyone with toddlers will laugh while being slightly offend by. I can't take any credit for this concept as many RPG's have in the introduction or advice to the GM section the advice to start small. Too bad people rarely read those sections.
Eldritch has a default setting that does the grunt work of here is the continent level geography and some ancient history to work off of. It also has a really awesome premise that lets you add anything to it, we'll get to that in the section of the book.
+Michael Desing (who writes some good games as well) has advocated for some Latin phrase I am to lazy to look up right now meaning starting in the middle of the action which I am going to follow. The first action will be on a stretch of road between two points that the party is on for a pregame reason. I will list some points I am going to need answered as I review the rules and get set to play.
1) A bad guy who is more than attack/defense/hit points. This is the End Encounter bad guy for the story arc.
2) Significant places that reoccur like the "home" town and big city where you would need to go to get special stuff.
3) A red herring or three minor story lines that happen in the area of the big one with the possibility of getting confused with the main story.
4) Allies as full people and antagonists who may or may not be part of #1's evil plan.
5) Ways to have players play Eldritch rather than a different D&D. Fantasy RPG's can to often be straight jacketed into the party of 4 Fighter/Cleric/Thief/Wizard because it is how we think of them. Eldritch (and many others I suppose) allows you to not be held to this and it is up to the GM to come up with ways to encourage players to explore an alternate way, or not if they so choose.
6) Coming up with a usable player's guide to convey the tone of my game. Bram Stoker would run a different game than C.S. Lewis.
Hopefully this will help if you don't quite understand what the heck I am babbling while I go over the rules.
No comments:
Post a Comment