The Bonehoard

(warning, wall of text ahead!) Due partially to icy roads only three players showed last night, which created a much different dynamic than the 7ish person parties we've been used to. With less people in the decision making process, shit got done! Also, since they were painfully aware of being under-staffed, potentially hostile encounters were avoided at all costs, leading to much less random bloodshed and speedier travel. Blax Jax the fighter has been taking every opportunity to prove himself in the fighting pits of Zig (muscle priest fight club, have an obsession with bears), initially as a means of becoming more skilled with cesti. We moved to Dungeon Crawl Classics where two-weapon fighting is pretty crappy for fighters with normal dex, so this was a way for him to become competent at what he wanted his fighter doing. It soon enough transformed into a spectacle where the other PCs bet on the fight outcome, almost exclusively favoring his opponent since he had a streak of ba...

When I was running Strigastadt I had a pretty well-developed sense of theme that helped unify the elements of the setting and give the game a certain grimy-glimmering feel to it (although there were some theme swings here and there). I reckon that's one of the inbuilt advantages to having a setting-driven game. By contrast the Forgotten Shore phase we're in now is all about a particular game structure - the hexcrawl. When stocking the hexes and creating the landscape I was left with a feeling of dissatisfaction with the grab-bag nature of the locales, and frequency of generic fantasy stuff I was shoe-horning in. The root problem was that I simply didn't have a solid idea of what the place was trying to be. A ways into the project, I ran across an interview with Yoon-Suin creator David McGrogan wherein he mentions an approach where you compile a 25-word list describing your setting, to use as a reference to encourage setting consistency and strengthen theme [ah, here's...