musing Archives - Page 4 of 7 - Neitherworld Stories

December 30, 2007

Rules of the Second Age

I can see running this with a variety of rule-sets: d20, heavily-modified D&D, house-ruled Burning Wheel, high artha flow Sorcerer (& Sword) Maybe something else? The first two here are more differentiated by degree than type of rule-set. If we went the heavily-modified route, I’d be tempted to write a modified magic system that looked a bit like the stuff...

December 18, 2007

Magic Items with Purpose

I always liked the idea of intelligent magic items in D&D with special purposes. I appreciate that 3rd ed expanded the options to include things other than weapons. I was thinking, though… what if all permanent magic items had purposes? Maybe without a purpose, a magic item couldn’t sustain its magic. This wouldn’t require the magic item to be intelligent...

December 11, 2007

Brief respite

I have a bit of a breather at work. This is necessary for my sanity after working all weekend and into the wee hours last night. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to give much thought to gaming things of late. I did order a few things from Paizo’s Green Ronin sale (which ends tomorrow) – lots of books are $2....

November 28, 2007

Confession Time

I’m not a real roleplayer. I know people who, while playing in an RPG, will take on a role so thoroughly that their thoughts become, largely, those of their PC. In a LARP, they might sit in the corner giggling madly the entire game. In a tabletop game, only a fraction of their roleplaying occurs at the table. Much of...

November 17, 2007

Spell Synergies

I had a neat (and probably unworkable) idea yesterday about the d20 spell system that would likely require too much work for me to actually write up fully, but I thought I’d share it. Here’s the idea. You cast a primary spell and (assuming you know a spell that has synergy with it) you can cast the secondary spell at...

November 4, 2007

Cyberpunk PCs

What sort of PCs should be playable in a cyberpunk game? I plan on doing a survey of the cyberpunk-type RPGs that I have around, but I want to ask the question before I really look into what other games have done. One place to find an answer is to look at Cyberpunk literature and stories. You should be able...

October 2, 2007

XO Giving

I’ve been looking at the XO Giving program of the One Laptop Per Child Project. For $400, you buy two of these fascinating little green laptops. One of them goes to a child in a developing country. The other one you keep. There’s some controversy about the laptop and the program, but I think that it is a fascinating experiment...

October 1, 2007

Rites of Passage

So, last week I was at a conference that focused upon cultural competency with respect to social services. Yeah, it was as exciting as it sounds. The conference was in a hotel (right near O’Hare) that I knew I’d been in before. It took me a little while to realize that it was the home of WindyCon. Anyway, one of...

August 30, 2007

Facelift

This blog has been in need of a makeover for a bit. Some of the links are out of date and there isn’t a good way to sort posts by label. I ought to have a link, at least, to my OGL content. I should also add some graphical elements – perhaps even an avatar of sorts. I may do...