The Faerie Tiend

First up for today, it’s another question… For those of us who have never heard of it could you give us a link to something on the Tiend? I tried a google search and got not much that looked trustworthy. -Burning8Bones The Faerie Tiend – or Tithe – is a medieval notion. Once upon a [...]

Game Testing and the Thinking Designer

Pop Quiz! Testing Your Games Isn’t Optional I suspect that the ability to actually recognize what’s already good and what still needs improving is just as rare as determination. -Thoth Recognizing it at first glance is tough. But we have a lot of tricks. The first is to simply play the game and remember what [...]

Eclipse Character Traits Explained

There have been a couple of questions about the Character Traits option in Eclipse. Now, that particular section assigns scores to pairs of personal qualities – such as Valor and Caution, or Patience and Restlessness. Those scores are linked; each pair always totals twenty-one – and no score ever goes below one. Some of the [...]

Eclipse – Spellcasting Modification Feats

First up for today, it’s a quick answer to one of the more common Eclipse questions – how a spellcaster can modify how particular groups of spells work. Sometimes that’s merely special effects, and so doesn’t actually require a power; it simply requires the consent of your game master. You want all your spells to [...]

Eclipse Abilities – Immunity, The Fourth Wall

Players do request the oddest things sometimes… This isn’t an ability I’d normally allow at full strength. At that level it would pretty well eliminate the role-playing aspect unless (perhaps) the character started routinely arguing with – or even outright defying – the player. That might be fun for a little bit, but I suspect [...]

The Endowment of the Dark Gods

Dark cults, evil secret societies, and hidden orders of killers are a standard part of most d20 settings. Yet it’s very hard to say where they come from. These are d20 universes here. You don’t have to join a dark cult to obtain mystic secrets, and any library holds out the promise of arcane power. [...]

Arcania: Gothic 4 Analysis

Here we have a contribution from Editorial0. Today, a quick long look at designing games, particularly video games. Today I’m going to discus Arcania: Gothic 4. This isn’t a review, although some reviewing will be involved. Instead, I’m going to look at the game and peel back what makes it the mediocrity it is. In any [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 162 – Being Raised by Wolves

Raphael was busily getting connected to the local Kadia network and monitoring for any references to himself. You never knew what you might pick up that way. Hm. It was a bit odd… He was still in the form of a six-tailed fox with a thin mist drifting about. Normally that would have changed with [...]

The Hell Chronicles and Alignment-less Templates

Here we have an item from Editorial0… I promised to put up some alignment-less templates, and they are rather fun. Thoth wanted some explanation of their origin, since these at least are all me, and he can’t take the blame this time. The Hell Chronicles was a strange variant d20 setting with a strong hint [...]

Dramatic Spell Research and Radius Potions

Here we have a couple of questions from Derek regarding The Practical Enchanter. You have a lot of good stuff for spell design but one thing is missing- failure. I was thinking about failure for psionic power design (ie screwing up one’s own mind) and it hit me that it could be applied to magic [...]

Package Deals – the Sarkari Order

The Sarkari Order is dedicated to the gathering of wisdom and ancient lore. To this end, they train their initiates in mnemonics and self-defense, so that they can memorize whatever wisdom they may uncover and bring it quietly home, to be poured into the great pools of memory from which the order draws. One of [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session Timeline IV

 To help everyone keep track of the sequence of events in the Federation-Apocalypse game, here’s the timeline so far. Note that this is in-game time, which has been running a great deal slower than real-world time since the prequels. Prequels -2 Years: Raphial begins major research in augmenting cybernetic systems with magic. -4 Weeks: The [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session Index IV

Here’s an updated index for the Federation-Apocalpse Session Logs to date, since there are so many that it’s rather hard to keep track of them otherwise. Session 1: Gathering the group, mission briefing, and setting out. Session 2: Gating to Greenwald, first Praetorian encounter. Session 3: Debriefings and Madness Memes. Session 4: The search for Singular, [...]

Should Paladins Have Counterparts For Other Alignments?

Here we have another contribution from Editorial0, with some minimal editing and an afterword. Paladins have always encountered a lot of hostility. Whether you liked them or hated them, they were just plain weird. As a class, they were Fighters, except they weren’t. They were Clerics, except they weren’t. In 3rd edition, they were really [...]

The Chronicles of Heavenly Artifice, Part I

Student artificing had been terribly easy. You used one of the small-scale, part-time, facilities attached to the Academy, you made minor, low-priority, items for other students, for the staff, and for the occasional godling too low in status to get something done by an official source. You showed your better pieces to the instructors, and [...]

The Educated Designer

If You Don’t Know Something – Learn! In Thoth’s recent article on Infravision, he stated: Sure, you can say that the physics of your world works some other way – but then you’re going to have to build and explain that physics as soon as someone starts experimenting (if you want to go that route, [...]

Federation-Apocalypse Session 161 – Party Accommodations

Raphael had been pretty happy where he was… OK, running about the Manifold was amusing in some ways – but learning centuries worth of Core Technology – which worked in FAR more places than Imperial Technology – was utterly fascinating. Deciphering the secrets of the Singular Cellular Replacement Technology (and why it slowly failed in [...]

Recordings from the Holocron of Kira Keldav – Session 59

Note: While Xiang has now remembered her real name, her general personality – as determined by the player – has in no way changed. Ergo, she’s still going to be referred to as Xiang for the moment. And so we sat and waited. Or at least, I sat and waited. The others were still busily [...]

The Immortal Rants of Sean K. Reynolds – “Infravision should be brought back for 3rd edition!”

Editorial0 has contributed a set of article-replies to some of Sean K. Reynolds rants about third edition design decisions. Those decisions have heavily influenced a lot of game designs since, so I’ll be putting those up – along with some additional comments. To avoid excessive reprinting, you can find the general introduction to this series [...]

Infravision – Why and How

The primary reason for using “Darkvision” in 3.0 and 3.5 is “because it’s much simpler mechanically”. To quote Mr Sean K. Reynolds – one of the 3.0 game designers – “Infravision rules have a lot of holes in them, and cleaning up those holes isn’t worth the time and effort to do so. Darkvision is [...]