inspiration Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Neitherworld Stories

May 11, 2008

Iron Man

Angela and I went and saw Iron Man last night. I was impressed for all the usual reasons – good acting, good story, great visuals, and enough fidelity to the source material that the deviations didn’t bother me. What’s more, the movie succeeded without the overabundance of supervillains that plague superhero movies these days. This is really heartening. Hopefully, it...

April 11, 2008

The Gnoble Gnoll?

I’ve always had a soft spot for gnolls. I’m fairly certain that it is the visual of a hyena-person that I appreciate, since I don’t actually like most of what D&D has done to them over the years. I’m not a fan of their demonic associations. I don’t like the characterization of them as shiftless and overly-lazy. I don’t really...

March 11, 2008

Ramblings on monster diversity, combat, and Oblivion…

A lot of people love monsters. Personally, I like reading bestiaries for fun. I can sit down with a Monster Manual, Fiend Folio, or Creature Catalog and read it cover to cover. I think Angela has MMI-MMV and has made noises about acquiring others. Do we really need that many monsters, though? If so, why? I’m pretty sure it isn’t...

February 26, 2008

The Price of Power

I’ve been reading C.S. Friedman’s Feast of Souls. It is pretty good, so far. In the world that Friedman creates, magic is powered by the spark of life. Most witches can only use their own life force to power their magic, which results in them tending to live shorter-than-normal lives. This isn’t a new idea, at all. Novels are full...

February 7, 2008

Planescape, Revisited

I wrote this up a long time ago as potential notes for a neo-planescape campaign. I’ve added a couple notes since then. Maybe I will do something along these lines someday. Until then, maybe someone else will find this useful. It is unlikely that this will make sense unless you are familiar with Planescape.The Lady of Pain:Largely unchanged, though perhaps...

December 6, 2007

Why aren’t humans weird?

About a month ago, Jeff wrote this nifty post describing religion in a home-brew campaign world he’s creating. In it, he describes how religion is a distinctly human activity and other races find it kind of creepy. Personally, I think the idea would work without his cosmology… even letting other races believe in the existence of gods without worship or...

December 2, 2007

Movie and books

I’ve been feeling vaguely sick for the last few days, so I’ve been unmotivated to do just about anything… including blog. Last night, a few of us went to see Beowulf. We saw it in 3D, which was sort of interesting. Overall, though, I found the CGified style of the thing distracting. The men looked significantly more real than the...

November 28, 2007

What do you want to play?

I’ve been getting the GMing itch lately. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to run a game until February at the earliest. One of my first reactions to the idea of running a game was to think about asking people I play with the following questions: If you could have me run any RPG campaign for you… What genre would it...

October 15, 2007

Lessons from history

My last post got me thinking about using sites of real-life coolness as gaming inspiration. I’ve done this in the past (a few times, but I am just going to write about one today). Once upon a time, I lived in Washington, D.C. (in the Dupont Circle area, for those of you who know D.C.). I ran a large and...