Dungeon Musing

Tabletop RPGs are distinct among many kinds of games because the players work together cooperatively rather than working against each other competitively. But sometimes players tend to develop their characters in isolation, making it difficult to imagine a compelling reason that this group should stay together for longer than it takes to get a drink at the tavern. Of course, we often hand-wave this issue, since we NEED to hang as a group to make the game work. Some campaigns can use an overarching organization to bind the PCs together, like the Harpers of Faerun or a military organization. My proposed Lost Clan campaign setting offers exactly that kind of group connection (the PCs are all dwarves on a mission to find a lost colony) but most campaigns don't have any formal ties connecting the PCs. So, I like to create them! During character creation, each player either chooses two connections their character has to two other players in the group (or rolls 2d20 to determine them). Th...

 Even though every character we will ever play in an RPG embarks on a career of dangerous adventure, it is important to realize that this is not the experience of everyone else in the world of your setting. Voluntarily venturing into darkened tombs, long-forgotten ruins, and the towers of mad wizards, facing lethal traps, unearthly magics, and powerful monsters literally out for your blood on the slim hope of recovering some golden coins--these are the foolhardy risks of madmen. D&D 5th Edition tries to supply reasons character go adventuring in the form of Bonds and Ideals, but these reasons often strike me as a little too theoretical or nebulous. I have another motivation that I like to give PCs: desperation. In my games, each character starts with a dilemma, a large personal problem that they can only resolve by adventuring. Either they need a large influx of cash, they need to get out of town quickly, or they have some other goal they need to achieve that makes adventuring ...

The shelves of a modern game store carry a staggering number of roleplaying systems, and I have only tried a mere smattering. But what I have learned is this: the systems we use have a strong effect on the stories we tell at the table. A Bit About Me I have been playing editions of Dungeons & Dragons since 1981 (using the blue boxed set) and for decades, it was the only role-playing system that I knew about: D&D was  roleplaying. But after college, I wanted to tell different kinds of stories than the now "standard" heroic fantasy. I imagined campaigns in an Iron Age Celtic setting, or in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time  series, or even stranger or futuristic environments. D&D seemed to have too many systems and rules that were highly specialized for a pseudo-medieval, Western-European-centric fantasy setting. Also, as a class-based system, it funneled characters into prescribed role and archetypes that sometimes didn't match the world I was imaging. It was a...

 I recently picked up a copy of Veins of the Earth  by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess. It's an amazing work, like an RPG setting explained by your genius artist uncle with schizophrenia and a meth habit. It whipsaws between brilliance, incoherence, inspired mechanics, inscrutable ramblings, evocative descriptions, and gonzo monsters. It presents an alien underground world vastly different than WoTC's Underdark or even traditional dungeons, a place filled with creatures and environments so foreign to even experienced players that they will be truly exploring as if for the first time. In short, Veins  presents a thousand prompts to stir the imagination. To that end, while I am enjoying being a player in a friend's homebrew D&D 5e campaign, I am working on a couple of setting ideas for the next campaign I will run, which will surely incorporate ideas from Veins of the Earth.  I will be bouncing back and forth between two main setting concepts, and after the curre...