Qerth for Cinemechanix
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From the Archives: Adventure Ideas for Halloween
We all love Halloween, but except for those wacky Lovecraftian investigators who spend every October 31 trying to stop another evil cult from summoning up yet more Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, most RPG characters never get to celebrate the holiday. That’s just wrong, so here are a few ideas to help get…
Campaign Design Walk-Through 10: Odds & Ends
By this point, you’ve got the “big idea” stuff about your ficton figured out. You know the basics of the setting, have some ideas for plot points, know who the characters are, and have some stock adventure ideas to get thing moving. If you’re halfway good at improvisation, you can probably run a session of…
Campaign Design Walk-Through 9: Conflict!
Before we get into the next section of Guardians of Shymeria campaign design, I realized that I’ve been missing an important game-specific trait. Since characters become Guardians as recognition for an act of great heroism, it would probably be nice to know what the characters did to get noticed by the Guardians. So I’m going…
Campaign Design Walk-Through 8: Rules Adaptations
A few of the Cinemechanix core rules require the group to make decisions about how they apply to the game at hand. Determining the starting Hero Factor (see last week’s blog) is one example of this. Another is deciding whether a character who reaches “Broken” status ends up dead, forced into retirement by his injuries,…
Campaign Design Walk-Through 7: Character Creation Rules
Now that you’ve got the ficton lined out, it’s time to start thinking about the rules, and character creation is usually the best place to start. By this point, you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what kind of characters the PCs can choose from, so all you’ve got to do is figure how…
Campaign Design Walk-Through 6: The Rules
A long damn time ago, I defined the word “ficton” (it’s a contractual obligation) and told you that you could break a ficton down into 5 main components: Influences, Setting, Genre Trappings, Tone and Mood, and Dramatic Rules. Now that I’ve talked about all the rest (and procrastinated a lot), let’s talk about dramatic rules….
Cliches, Tropes, & The Rules
Hey kids! Did you know there are still some openings for the Cinemechanix games I’m running at GenCon this year? Guardians of Shymeria is sold out, but the other 3 still have some seats left. If you’re going to be at GenCon and want to see how the Cinemechanix system plays, buy your ticket today!…
Campaign Design Walk-Through 5: Tone and Mood
Tone is the attitude that the players take toward the game: is the goal immersive role-playing, a more beer-and-pretzels experience, or something in between? Mood is the atmosphere of the story: are you telling a grim story about characters trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, or an action-packed story about kicking zombie butt? Since it’s…
Campaign Design Walk-Through 4: Genre Trappings
According to Merriam-Webster, genre is “a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content.” Genre trappings are mostly the things in the “content” part of that definition: people, places, and things that help define the genre. While these trappings help us recognize which genre a story belongs to,…