Tolrendor DM's Blog

2013: Onwards!! Aspirations for the New Year…

Posted on January 5, 2013 by Tolrendordm

Well a Happy New Year to all; we seem to have decided there is still life after the Mayan calendar, which is good to know, as it means more gaming time! 🙂

Anyway, as I mentioned in my last post, we’ve looked back, so now it’s time to plot the course forward at TolrendorDM’s Blog for 2013. I’m sure it’s a common aspiration to say: “I want to post more, and increase readership!” The question is: how to achieve it!? 🙂

Well, last year, I used my five regular columns as a way to plan my posts and get a regular 4-5 posts per month. This certainly worked to a certain extent, but I did find a few issues. For example, I perhaps became constrained a little in thinking about posts in terms of the columns, so if I was struggling to complete a particular column one month, the end was result was I didn’t post at all!

So going forwards, I’ll looking a bit more flexibly at this. The columns have been going well from a content perspective, so will certainly continue, but I’ll be less concerned with fitting a post ‘idea’ into one theme – if it fits, great, if it doesn’t, just post 🙂 The goal is more posts, not just more columns!

Some other ideas include:

More Maps! The Map of the Month column has been going strong, with a mixture of my own work and highlighting the awesome work of other fantasy cartographers. Of course, this will continue!. But I want more! 🙂 Every year, I subscribe to the excellent Cartographer’s Annual from Profantasy, but it often takes me a long time before I use any of the monthly styles. So I’m setting myself the Annual Challenge: To produce a map related to Tolrendor using each month’s pack for the whole of 2013! So look out for something using the January 2013 pack in the coming weeks … hmmm.

More Midgard! This blog is a major fan (and patron) of Kobold Press’ Midgard Setting, and my ongoing series reviewing the Campaign Setting book have been some of my most successful posts. In 2013, there are more Midgard products arriving, such as the Legends of Midgard, a whole series of adventures for the setting, so I’m sure I’ll be taking a close look. Expect also some posts on how the setting is providing ideas and inspiration for my own home-brew world of Tolrendor.

More Content! I mentioned in my review of 2012 that I was a bit disappointed in the relatively small number of Content Corner columns I achieved. With hindsight, I think I set myself topics which were too large to achieve design, writing and layout in the couple of weeks available if I were to achieve a monthly post. So in 2013, I’m going to concentrate more on smaller snippets that will amalgamate over time into a larger ‘publication’. The main theme will still be the the ‘Havenscoast Project‘, but other topics will also crop up!

More Gaming! This is definitely a New Year Resolution! I mentioned in a November post that, especially in the second half of the year, gaming sessions were scarcer than hen’s teeth! Well, the holiday period certainly helped rectify that, and I mean to continue! Scheduling problems have been the main issue, but if I’m honest with myself, I also wasn’t keeping up with any regular prep, which sometimes meant an available slot didn’t get capitalised on because I wasn’t ‘ready enough’! I’ve been making some changes to my campaign notes and session planning, so I hope that helps! Of course, more gaming hopefully means more ideas for my DM for Kids column!

Wow! All those plans, and many more to come I hope! I’m certainly looking forward to writing for Tolrendor DM’s Blog in 2013. You’re all welcome on the ride …. 🙂

Posted in Cartography, Columns, Content Corner, DM for Kids, Map of the Month, Midgard Campaign Setting, Miscellaneous, Reviews, Roleplaying with Kids, RPG Blog Carnival, The Annual Challenge, The Havenscoast Project, Tolrendor Gazetter | 3 Comments

2012: A Year in Review

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Tolrendordm

It’s that time of year again, i.e. the end! Time to look back, because soon we’ll be looking forward! As ever, it’s fun to look back to the start of the year and see whether any of my targets where met!? 🙂

My main target for 2012 was to achieve an average of 4-5 posts a month, small by the standards of many blogs I know, but hopefully sustainable! So did I achieve it? Well, I managed 4 or more posts in 9 of the 12 months, and no months without any posts, so that is at least positive. Also, by concentrating on producing posts in my ‘columns’, I feel that the subject and quality of the posts has been higher. Although I certainly didn’t achieve a post in each of my columns every month, there was a reasonable selection throughout the year:

Wizards Watch was my most productive column, with 11 posts during the year. The majority of posts were on the subject of DnDNext, which of course has one of the major topics in the D&D world this year. Truth to be told, I’m no longer really following along as closely as I was, as I’m concentrating on my 4E kids’ campaign: Wizards Watch: An Admission.

My DM for Kids column started off with a bang with a couple of posts I was really pleased with: The Menagerie, and Session Props, but faded out a little later in the year, mainly due to the fact that we weren’t playing!! Definitely something to improve for next year…

I guess the column I was most disappointed in was Content Corner, as it was probably the one I most wanted to get going regularly, but in the end I only managed 5 posts. The ‘Havenscoast Project’, a 4E Gazetteer of a region of Tolrendor, was intended to be the main subject, but I also published a fun ‘Buying Horses‘ skill challenge, a short delve ‘Rats Below‘ and some nasty Fey Spiders! I certainly found that trying to rush design and publication of worthwhile content is hard!! If I’m going to do better next year, more forward planning is required!

My fantasy cartography column Map of the Month tends to be the most popular on the site in terms of visitors. I had a mix of posts, some showing off my own work, such as this map of the Havenscoast region, as well as highlighting some of the great mapping sites on the internet e.g. here, and here … and many others!

RPG Tech Talk was a lot of fun. I ended up posting 8 times during the year, and covered a varied range of topics: PDF encryption, the iBooks format for RPGs, the Tech Gametable, and campaign note-taking using Microsoft OneNote.

On other subjects, I participated in a couple of RPG Blog Carnivals, always good for getting a few more links into the site. I like these, as the subjects are often a bit outside the area of my typical post, so add some variety!

Having participated in a number of Kickstarter/Patronage projects with Open Design for the last couple of years, the highlight release this year was the Midgard Campaign Setting. Having really enjoyed this product, I decided to do a multi-part review, which is still ongoing (so far, here, here and here…) – it’s a big book after all! This series has generated a large amount of traffic to the blog, co-inciding with my best ever day in terms of hits.

In terms of traffic, 2012 has seen considerable growth – more than twice as many views as 2011, with four of my best ever months coming in the last six – the best ever being this month! In absolute terms, still pretty tiny, but definitely the right trajectory, and given my limited posting targets, I think all I can expect! 🙂

So overall, TolrendorDM’s Blog has had a good 2012, in my opionion 🙂

See you next year for more gaming content, comment and fun!!

Onwards!! (as Wolfgang would say…!)

Posted in Columns, Midgard Campaign Setting, Miscellaneous, RPG Blog Carnival | 1 Comment

Merry Yuletide from TolrendorDM

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Tolrendordm

Across the northern hemisphere of Tolrendor, the mid-winter holiday of Yule has been celebrated for years beyond count. From this day onwards, the nights shorten, and the spring thaw will eventually follow. Many say it represents the time when Baltur the Lawmaker enforced the discipline of seasons on the wayward Sun Lord, ensuring that the world would have respite from endless winter. In any case, at this time of year, the constellation known as the ‘Scales’, which is closely associated with the god Baltur, blazes brightly in the northern sky. Weather permitting, it is easily visible in any of the lands north of the Inner Sea.

In the cold northern regions, the celebration of Yule marks the last feast before the months of hardship, as deep winter continues its hold on the land, and spring, although heralded as the days lengthen, seems still an age away. The holiday lasts three days: on the first, people gather in extended family groups and exchange gifts, often hand-crafted items made from leather and wood; the second day is a religious day, when local communities gather in their holy places, and their priests and shamans make offering to the gods and spirits, beseeching them to grant safe passage through the coming months. On the third day, wrestling and mock-fighting bouts are held, following by a mass feast where the best livestock are roasted over huge fire-pits, and copious quantities of ale and spiced warm mead are consumed.

In the lands around the Inner Sea, where the climate is more forgiving, Yuletide is a season of great parties and tourneys. In Lorondor, the king hosts the Grand Yuletide Tourney every year; knights and paladins from across the kingdom and many other lands journey to compete in five days of jousts and melees. The overall winner receives the title of Yule Champion, which in some years has even resulted in the bestowing of lands and title. Great feasts are provided daily for all citizens, and the queen hosts a Grand Ball on the final knight of the tournament for the great nobles and knights of the realm.

Yuletide is also a season of peace, partly because it is often impossible to carry out a campaign of war past this date due to the weather. Treaties often come into force on this date.

Wherever you are, whoever you’re with, whatever your reason to celebrate, TolrendorDM’s Blog wishes you a happy and peaceful holiday period! 🙂

Posted in Miscellaneous, Tolrendor Gazetter, World Building | Leave a comment

Midgard: Campaign Setting Review – Part 3

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Tolrendordm

And so onto Part 3 of my review of the Midgard Campaign Setting. (You can find the previous posts here and here). This time, we cover Chapters 5 and 6. These are, at least to my reading so far, possibly the most interesting regions, and certainly are a twist on standard fantasy fare. What are you waiting for then, climb aboard the wagon, this caravan is heading south!

Chapter 5: The Dragon Empire and the South

When the chapter begins with a full page image like the one shown on the right, what’s not to like! An evocative image, and certainly one which leads you straight into the main flavour of the region: an eastern empire with the taste of decadent Persia or Arabia, with the added pungent spice of dragons, sprinkled liberally!

The Mharoti Dragon Empire is an empire literally ruled by a cabal of ancient dragons, where the nobility is made up of lesser dragons, drake and dragonkin (Midgard’s equivalent I guess to 4E dragon born), and humans and other ‘normal’ D&D races are subservient. The exception of course, is the (current) Sultana, a human with dragon-blood, who is allowed to rule because its a chore the draconic overlords would rather not bother with!

All this makes for a land teeming with adventure possibilities. Dragons of course, always want more treasure, so the Mharoti is necessarily an aggressive expansionist empire, with lots of hooks for military style campaigns. There is a side-bar describing a typical Mharoti army, made of all sorts of fantastic sounding troop types, including dragonkin cavalry, elementalists and fire dragons. Great stuff, which makes me want to break out the wargaming table, let alone run an RPG!

The chapter provides an in-depth description of the various ‘castes’, from the lowly humans, dwarves etc, to the citizen kobolds and dragonkin all the way to the eight Morza, the original ancient dragon lords. Each of these is described alongside the province they rule, as well as a section on the capital of Harkesh. Lots of material here for political intrigue-based adventures.

But there’s more! The chapter also describes a number of other states. From the slaver city-state, the Despotate of the Ruby Sea to the Egyptian inspired River Kingdom of Nuria Natal, the Free City of Siwal and Ishadia in the deep south, this region is ripe with exotic locations and flavour. A sidebar hints at the ‘Kingdoms of Gold and Salt’, ancient lands far to the south, which cry out for another source-book in the future 😉

Keeping with the exotic, the chapter rounds out with some crunch: strange trade goods found in bazaars, magic items and curiosities, and a section on Dragon Magic.

Chapter 6: The Seven Cities

If the inspiration for Chapter 5 is the eastern lands of history and fable, then Chapter 6 is straight out of Machiavellian Renaissance Italy! Centred on a large peninsula jutting out into Midgard’s inner sea, the region presents seven distinct city states, bound together by geography, shared history – and of course, war and intrigue!!

In the Seven Cities, war is portrayed as a religious requirement; most of the cities pay homage to Mavros the God of War. The chapter starts off with a whole section on the regional approach to war, bound by many rules and customs, which prevent wholesale destruction, and is mainly aimed at raising the ‘status’ of generals and captains, making fortunes for the mercenary companies who are the main protagonists, and finally of course, wringing some political concession out of the enemy.

The remainder of the chapter covers the city-states themselves, each of which has a distinctive style: from the self-styled Imperial Valera, to the druidic Duchy of Verrayne guarding against the western wastes; from the Oracle-ruled state of Kammae Straboli to the maritime power of Triolo, and others besides. This is a mainly human area, but also has a significant population of minotaurs, including a whole island ruled by them.

There is not much crunch in this chapter, save a few snippets presented as side-bars (such as the drug Requiem found in Kammae Straboli), but this is more than made up for by the sheer amount of ideas presented here! One thing I did notice however, is that in one of the few obvious editing errors in the whole book, this chapter has been missed completely out of the table of contents! Its definitely worth searching for however 🙂

Westwards again…

I found these two chapters a great read – they are so full of ideas and twists on historical and fantasy sources, that my mind was racing as I read, thinking of adventures, or planning how I might steal ideas for my own campaign – and that is surely the main goal of a campaign setting!

Next, prepare for the journey to turn rather weird, as we head to the Western Wastes and beyond.

Posted in Midgard Campaign Setting, Reviews, World Building | 5 Comments

RPG Tech Talk: Taking Notes

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Tolrendordm

I recently picked up a book Never Unprepared: The Complete Gamemaster’s Guide to Session Prep. An interesting read, and one which I’m sure will bring some changes to my game prep activities. The link to this column, however, is that there was a chapter devoted to prep tools, which discussed the use of Microsoft OneNote as one possibility for this.

If you’re anything like me with your role-playing campaign, organisation of your campaign and game notes becomes a bit of an obsession!? Your adventures, NPCs, locations, maps etc or have to be catalogued in a manner that makes sense (to you, if no-one else…), and hopefully, makes your actual game at the table easier. Sound familiar?

In the old days of my Tolrendor campaign, well before there were even widely available word-processors for home computers, let alone ones that offered a WYSIWYG option, ring-binders and dividers was the only way. I’ve posted before about my complicated mapping system, and written notes were no exception.

Nowadays however, the computer comes to the rescue, especially in the sense of being able to hold (and carry about) a huge amount of information. But is it any better organised? I started using Microsoft OneNote a couple of years ago, when I first got back into gaming with my kids. This application has been part of the Office suite since 2003 (I believe), but it seems to be very much the forgotten cousin. I’m surprised at this, as its actually a really useful tool.

Essentially, you create pages of data, where a page is essentially a collection of snippets of information – text, screenshots, imported images, files etc. However, it’s the ability to organise your pages that makes it great for my purposes. The hierarchy is Notebooks,

Section Groups and then Sections, which contain the actual pages (and in fact you can also have sub-pages). This allows me to create and organise all my campaign notes in one place. In the screenshot, you see my main Tolrendor Notebook, with top level ‘Campaigns’ and ‘Gazetteer’ section groups, and so on … down to the pages and sub-pages that comprise the actual entry for the Town of Fallcrest Overview. You can also see a number of sections pertaining to Fallcrest, including Detailed Locations, Non-Player Characters and Groups and Factions. Each of these sections has its own page structure.

You can also create hyperlinks between different pages, and also search pretty efficiently. One neat trick is that you can embed PDF files as a series images (per page), and the text in the PDFs is then searchable. Tools for highlighting and annotating your information are also available.

One thing I definitely like is that there is no massive complex library format; rather the whole notebook is contained in a folder-based structure. Each section group is a sub-folder, and each section is a OneNote .one file. This has several benefits. First, there is not one massive file that you’re completely dependent on, and if it gets corrupted, then bye-bye notes! Second, I find it convenient to store any other files that relate to your data in the same folder structure, rather than separate locations. And thirdly, it makes it very simple to sync your whole set of notes via Dropbox (or some other cloud service) without any specific functionality in the app itself. I can quite happily work on my campaign on my laptop while I’m travelling, and have it automatically appear on my home computer on my return.

Sadly, no application is perfect! 🙂 A few things about OnNote frustrate me, although not enough to stop using it! As it is designed for note-taking, there is only limited control on the layout of individual pages. That’s great for quick editing, but a pain if you want to print your notes out in a presentable manner. It would also be great if there was more native support for PDF documents e.g, if you have a PDF embedded in a page, it would be useful if it could support paging through the document in-situ, rather than having to either embed it as images (which looks ok but I’ve noticed does hugely inflate the .one file size) or an icon, which means it launches in a separate app.

Another limitation is its handling of embedded files – to show these on a page, the app actually embeds them in the .one file. From there, you can open and edit them, but the actual file is hidden from you. I really don’t like that – call me paranoid, but I like the ability to physically see my files on disk, to rename/version them etc! Given that other Office programs support linking to files, and in-place editing, I’m a bit surprised at this lack.

In summary, I like Microsoft OneNote, and prefer its free-form functionality to any of the RPG-specific applications I have tried. But it’s certainly not the perfect solution.

So what do I want?

Well, the one aspect that frustrates me the most is the inability to create something once, but use it in multiple places. For example, I may have written a great city introduction in one section of my notes, but when I create a PDF layout of a regional guide, or need a side-bar of information in my game session notes, I want to be able to use the same piece of text without copy and paste, or complex back and forth linking. Of course, I want the freedom to be able to edit the text to suit the new requirement, and to be able to specify whether the changes override or branch the original.

The essence is that I’d like to be able to treat my writing ‘snippets’, my images, my maps etc as individual assets, and be able to re-work and combine these in many different ways without losing the source information. The closest analogy I can think of is the content management systems used by news and magazine publishers, where journalist and writers submit copy, photographers and artists upload their images, and these are combined into various formats (newspaper, magazine, webzine etc) by layout specialists and graphics designers.

Sounds cool, right? Maybe one day … 🙂

Posted in Columns, RPG Tech Talk, RPG Technology, Self-publishing | 9 Comments

December Update

Posted on December 8, 2012 by Tolrendordm

It’s been a while since I did a beginning of the month update, generally because I like to highlight the upcoming posts, and to be brutally honest, there hasn’t been enough forward planning in recent times to support this! 😦

November was a good month for TolrendorDm’s World – we managed to have our busiest day ever in terms of hits, following the publication of the second part of the Midgard Campaign Setting review, and we passed a nice milestone in terms of overall hits. The absolute numbers are still pretty small compared to some of the big blogs out there, but I’m still pleased that we’re getting some traffic.

So what’s up for December? Well, as usual, the details are on the Content Calendar page. I’m hoping to get another two posts of the Midgard review completed – this setting book is such an interesting read; I’m very keen to share my views on it. RPG Tech talk is intended to make a re-appearance after a couple of months off – after some inspiration from a book I picked up recently, and more, of course…!!

To a steal a (Chief) kobold’s phrase: Onward!! 🙂

Posted in Miscellaneous | Leave a comment

Map of the Month: Mapping Worlds

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Tolrendordm

This month, take a look at another great site for fantasy cartographers: Mapping Worlds, by Swedish mapper Pär Lindström. On this site he showcases a number of his maps, especially those of his fantasy world of Etrakien. You can find large-scale overland maps, regional maps, and especially stunning city maps!

This site is an inspiration for me as Pär uses CC3 and the add-ons City Designer and Dungeon Designer a lot – before taking them into Photoshop and really taking them the extra mile. He also has some excellent tutorials on some of his techniques.

Pär is well-known also on the Profantasy website: his posts here are also cross-posted on the Profantasy blog if they concern CC3 etc, and he is extremely active on the forums. As well, he is the artist behind two beautiful ‘hand-drawn’ overland styles that have been developed as part of the Cartographer’s Annual; one way back in 2009, and the other about to be released in one days time…

Check it out – this is fantasy mapping at its best! 🙂

Posted in Cartography, Columns, Map of the Month, RPG Technology | 3 Comments

DM for Kids: No RPG Slots!

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Tolrendordm

No D&D for the last couple of months! 😦

A combination of in-laws and other relatives staying with us most of the last 3 months; my son starting his first year at secondary school in September, with all the acclimatisation and homework that involves; me travelling for work every other week for the last two months (as least it feels like that…); and the ever increasing menu of sporting activities that both kids are committed to in the weekend (including multiple weekends away show-jumping for my daughter); well it all leads to the D&D slot getting squeezed out of the picture…

This is of course disappointing, but at least the kids and I have still been managing to get a few fantasy ‘fixes’ in:

The first is the Merlin TV series, showing on BBC One in the UK at the moment. This is a great fantasy series, with lots of D&D-like features: knights and battles, witches and wizards, dangerous quests and mythical monsters! It’s been a family favourite (including my completely non-gamer wife) for a number of years, so we’re quite upset at the announcement that this is to be the series finale, although I’d had my suspicions given some of the fore-shadowing of Arthur’s death (at Mordred’s hand) that we’ve had glimpses of. All good things come to an end I guess … and we can always start again from the Series 1 DVD 🙂

When my daughter (and wife) are off competing horses, my son and I aren’t allowed to watch Merlin! 🙂 We have to wait until the whole family can watch together! The solution? A game of Castle Ravenloft! This is a great way to spend a couple of hours, with never the same results. We’ve played twice recently and the first time we got roundly defeated by some (pathetically low level…) monsters; the second time we triumphed, although one more round and I think we’d have gone down. It’s a good D&D ‘fix’ alternative…

Who remembers this series? My kids are young teens now, but they still love being read to – it’s just that the stories have changed a bit! For the past year or more, I’ve been reading them installments from the Belgariad 5-book saga … and we’re now approaching the final climax where Garion (the main protagonist) gets to fight the evil god Torak. This series has all the trappings and tropes of classic fanstay – and snappy intelligent dialogue and hilarious stereotypes and characterisation all the way through that really appeals to my kids.

And of course, its only another couple of weeks until this comes out – required family viewing!! 🙂

So whilst it’s definitely a bad thing that we’ve haven’t been able to schedule a proper D&D session, you can see we’ve had plenty of fantasy related fun instead.

Still, roll on the Xmas holidays – I’ve got definite plans for a role-playing binge – the Amber Tower campaign is starting to hot up and there’s plenty of adventure to be had …

Posted in Columns, D&D Nostalgia, DM for Kids, Roleplaying with Kids, The Amber Tower Campaign | 8 Comments

Midgard: Campaign Setting Review – Part 2

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Tolrendordm

As I said in the first part of this review, this setting book is big! 300 pages of fairly small font text, 7 major regions, 2 RPG rulesets! My first time through was really just a quick flick, which was almost overwhelming 🙂 Now I’m going through each chapter in a detailed and very enjoyable slower read – there is just so much information to take in! This post covers the first two ‘regional’ chapters of the book: The Crossroads, and the Rothenian Plains.

Chapter 3: The Crossroads

The chapter opens with a full page image that will be familiar to many readers of Kobold Quarterly and other Kobold Press publications – a city watchman walks down the middle of a street in the Free City of Zobeck, his lantern casting light only a few feet around him; whilst in the shadows, the denizens of the night are work …

In fact, this is one potential issue with this chapter – as the region centred around Zobeck, the initial starting place of the Midgard Campaign in print, much of the material here has already been detailed in other Midgard books: The Zobeck Gazetteer, the Imperial Gazetteer, the Iron Gazetteer and Tales of the Old Margreve all describe this area in some detail, and of course there have been many articles in Kobold Quarterly magazine. I even found a passage or two that were lifted straight out of previous articles. Some might find this less than ideal, but I don’t have any problem with it. Given the importance of this region in the lore and geography of the setting, it would be impossible to have skipped it.

In any case, there is still plenty of new material in the chapter, such as the Magdar Kingdom, Perunalia, and Krakova, all detailed for the first time (to my knowledge). Each of these lands has a distinct culture and style of rule, and the writing brings this out strongly. There are strong eastern european overtones, and lots of detail about trade and warfare in the region. Each nation has a distinctive military tradition, and a lot of emphasis is given to the details of their troops, and their strategic castles and strongholds. There is also a complete section on the mercenary companies in the region. As a gamer with a strong interest in military history, this hits the spot, and reminds me of the original Greyhawk setting.

The artwork is fantastic throughout, with a detailed regional map, a city map of Zobeck, and a number of full colour illustrations, some half page. Each region or nation starts with a side-bar and heraldic arms.

Chapter 4: The Rothenian Plain

The previous chapter was definitely a very strong start to the sevens regions of the setting; in contrast, Chapter 4 seems a bit disjointed. This may partly be the geography, which is basically the wide plains of the east, roamed by nomadic tribes, with a few kingdoms or realms scattered around the extremities.

There is some very interesting material here: Baba Yaga wanders the region, the demonic gnomes of Neimheim, Vidim with its tengu population, the silver dragon ruler of Domovogrod, and the intirgues of Demon Mountain. They just seem to be a bit ‘plonked on the map’.

However, a significant portion of the chapter is given over to descriptions of the nomadic races: the Rothenian centaurs, the Windrunner elves, and the human Kariv. This is good stuff – the cultures are clearly drawn, and are interesting twists on the standard D&D tropes. Even the Kariv are not your standard eastern steppe nomads, but have a little of the gypsy in them.

The chapter rounds out with a couple of pages of ‘equipment’, based of course on the races and cultures described earlier. I’ll be honest, in a setting product, I’m a flavour guy, so don’t take a lot of notice of the ‘crunch’, especially in this case as it’s Pathfinder RPG based and my campaign is 4E. However, I like how its distributed in the book – each chapter has a section given over to more meaty content, but it varies in topic; for example in Chapter 3 it was information on travel and trade in the region; here it is weapons and poisons found on the Plains. Useful and focussed, without being overwhelming.

South and West …

is where we head next, into the lands of the Dragon Empire, and then westwards to the intrigues and petty warfare of the Seven Cities. I’m certainly enjoying the ride so far, and hope you stick along!

PS I’ve already posted about this, but I have to say it again, as I’ve been writing this part of the review with the physical book alongside me. This product is stunning! The previous post was based solely on the PDF, and that’s lovely too, but you don’t quite get the full impact as with the beautiful hard-cover book.

Posted in Midgard Campaign Setting, Reviews, World Building | 8 Comments

RPG Blog Carnival: Game Writing…

Posted on November 24, 2012 by Tolrendordm

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival is hosted by a blog I hadn’t come across, before, Triple Crit. The subject is Writing in RPGs, a really interesting topic and one that really suits the blog, which is packed with articles and tips on writing. It’s certainly one I’ll be following in the future!

One of the key reasons I started this blog was to stimulate more regular writing, with the hope that this would also result in more attention to the needs of my campaign world, Tolrendor! I’ve been running a 4E D&D campaign in this setting for my kids, and that has inspired me to get back into my world, updating it to the new ruleset. So what are the types of writing I use and enjoy in the RPG hobby?

Long before I discovered RPGs in the early 1980s, I was an avid consumer of fantasy fiction, stimulated by my father reading us the classic Narnia series and the Hobbit around the dinner table. This in turn got me hooked on world-building: drawing my own world maps and describing the nations, creatures, and armies (especially armies – war gaming and military history being my other hobbies at the time!). This lead onto attempting to write my own stories, although I’m not sure I ever managed to persevere in this long enough to finish anything!

Eventually, along came D&D, and pretty quickly I became most interested in DMing. This was heaven – I got to draw maps, and write – and these have always continued to be the most important parts of the hobby for me. I do enjoy playing the game, but in many ways the endless hours spent creating Tolrendor are the real pleasure. My D&D inspirations quickly became the World of Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms boxed sets, and I set out to craft a world as detailed and complete as these settings (hmm…). Back then, it was all handwritten notes, which I still have, and am in the process of updating with modern technology and rules. My goal is to one day have a full Gazetteer of my world – but of course I’ll never make it, as there’ll always be more to write!

I also love the formulaic type of writing used in putting a cool encounter together, especially using the 4E style. There is something very satisfying in producing a well-crafted write-up, that gives dramatic flavour to the up-coming combat or interaction, but then follows with the concise but complete information needed to run the encounter effectively. Its true that I probably go a bit overboard in this area 🙂 Lately I’ve been trying to slim it down in order to reduce my prep, but given the time …

Another favourite writing mode is campaign history – I’m a sucker for this in any published setting, and it’s one of my favourite types of writing as well. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga, one of my most read and re-read sections was not the story, but Appendices A and B, which painted a picture of the vast sweep of Middle-Earth history down the ages of the world. This was the inspiration for much of my ‘historical’ writing about Tolrendor; another was the ‘Times Atlas of World History’ – obviously connecting my love of maps and writing!!

I still enjoy fiction writing, and have attempted over the years a few short stories and (beginnings of…) novels set in my world, but to be honest I do find it more laborious than RPG writing. Maybe this Carnival topic will inspire me to dust off my efforts and start afresh 🙂

So you see, I could quite happily spend day after day buried in my world, crafting my historical lore, compiling my Tolrendor Gazetteer, constructing adventures, and telling fantastic tales … for me the RPG hobby revolves around writing!! 🙂

Posted in RPG Blog Carnival, Self-publishing, Tolrendor Gazetter, World Building | 2 Comments