Campaign Ideas

Three concepts for role playing game campaigns:

• Red Hand of Mars: Mars is inhabited by the HG Wells Martians--squidlike builders of fighting machines. It's also inhabited by Barsoomian Red Martians and four armed Green Martians. And the Great Powers of Earth are setting up colonies, as in Space: 1889. Deep in the past, people from Earth (perhaps Atlantis?) found or made the teleport gates to Mars, such as the one John Carter discovered; those people became the Red Martians. The Green Martians are related to the Wells Martians--possibly genetically manipulated, or just a different species. Now some Red Martians are allied with or clients of the Earth powers, some are opposed, and some even raid Earth; Green Martian tribes raid everyone who doesn't bribe them; and the Wells Martians factions fight among themselves and everyone else.
• Ragnarok 1632 : The Thirty Years War unleashed death and destruction across Northern Europe. When Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, is killed at Lutzen, so fell the final bar holding back Ragnarok. Now, as Imperial and AntiImperial forces jockey for position and pillage the countryside, dwarf armies and jotun march from the North, and great monsters prowl the world. You are an einherjar, a valkyrie, an alchemist, a musketeer--and you must hold the world together.
• Burning Gold: the sun has gone out, and no one knows why. Creatures of darkness are coming down from the mountains, and the dead are walking. The only light comes from dwarf magic: burning gold. There's no time to wait for the High King to gather his knights and wise men. You must find the ruins of a dwarf city and retrieve the secret of making light. You must gather up what gold you can carry and march East to the edge of the World, and find the place of Dawn. And then you must, somehow, make sure the Sun rises again. (Inspiration: Blog of Holding, the "star mining" ideas from the GitP forum, and the Navajo worlds myth).

Encounter Design: Battlefields

"You're fighting on an endless, featureless grey plain..."

Sounds like a pretty boring place to fight. What that encounter needs is some terrain. 

Possible properties of terrain features:

• Impedes Line of Sight
• Impedes Line of Fire
• Impedes Movement
• Hazardous
• Moving
• Altitude / Distance

Note that a feature can have multiple properties: a stone wall impedes LoS, LoF and Movement; poisonous bushes are hazardous and impede movement; tear gas might impede LoS and be hazardous and moving. 

I was going to differentiate between "active hazard" (as in something that aims and shoots at you when you're in the room) and "passive hazard" (such as a barrel of gasoline, or a pillar covered in sharp spikes). However, something that's actively hazardous is probably better thought of as a monster even if it's not alive or mobile. "Okay", you ask, "so what about Moving terrain"? That could be something like a railcar, an escalator, or an elevator. 

Hat tip to The Angry DM's Guide To Battlefields and Battlefeels and well as the scenario generation rules of In Her Majesty's Name.

Monster Characteristics, System Agnostic

RPG monsters tend to have a sameness about them, at least with the GMs that I've had. The monsters see you as you see them, the monsters attack, they fight to the death. If any of them flee, they cease to exist as soon as they step off stage; they don't run to bring reinforcements, set up ambushes, go tell the women and children to hide, or trail the party and try to snipe them.

Michael Prescott, on I'll See It When I Believe It, had an interesting post about what he describes as "Non-Mechanical Difficulty Levels for Monstrous Threats". If you know you're going to face a hundred orcs in an area, would you rather the orcs were all lone wolves, or trained like a Roman century?

Prescott lists several categories, although I've changed a description or two:

• Speed: immobile, slow, medium, fast
• Cohesion: hostile, rivals, neutral, fragmented, factional, cohesive, unit, gestalt
• Aggression: evasive, defensive, aggressive, predatory, ambusher
• Perceptiveness: oblivious, inattentive, alert, vigilant
• Territoriality: immobile, site-bound, territorial, regional, relentless
• Numbers: single, few, many, horde
• Lore: fully understood, familiar, unfamiliar, unknown
• Camouflage: invisible, stealthy, obvious, blatant
• Morale: panicky, fragile, firm, heroic, fanatic

If there are two dragons in an area, they might be Fast (they can fly), Hostile (they're more likely to fight each other), Aggressive, Terrritorial (if you don't poke your nose into the lair, you're reasonably safe), Alert, Single (you won't encounter more than one at a time), Fully Understood (everyone knows all about dragons, their strengths and weaknesses and motivation), Blatant (no one is in any doubt that there's a dragon around), and Panicky (once a dragon feels threatened, he's going to try to flee or negotiate).  Your orc warband (drilled as a unit, aggressive, firm morale) will feel different from your goblin tribe (factional, ambusher, vigilant, territorial, panicky).

Some of these (speed, for example) should already be built into your monster stats; adding the rest should make your monsters stand out from each other.

Tiny Epic Roleplaying

At LibertyCon, I was in a game of the Tiny Epic RPG, run by its creator Todd Lyles. It's designed for fast character generation while still giving some flavor. You draw three Avatar cards, such as Steam Dwarf, High Elf, or Half Giant, and select one. Then draw three cards and keep one for your Profession, such as Spy, or Gladiator. Finally, choose one of three Legends, which set you apart from ordinary folk; for instance, your Half Giant Gladiator might choose "I'm Not Left-handed", which lets you add your Strength and Agility together (instead of using just one) for your attack modifer. Put these three cards together and you have your character, including his stats (Strength, Agility, Intellect, Charisma), special abilities, and even suggestions on what gear he's carrying and how he knows the other party members.

The mechanics are pretty straightforward. Roll a number of d6s based on the appropriate stat for the task, with 4, 5, and 6's being successes. If you're fighting someone, a 6 also lowers his Defense, so even if you can't hurt him at first, you can still wear him down if you can survive and keep attacking long enough. This wasn't a problem in my case, though; my Gnome Sorceror Prince of Thieves had a Psychic Blast based on his 10 INT, which meant I was killing my targets even when I wasn't really trying.

What you buy is the deck of cards for character generation. The Player's Guide, GM's Guide and some scenarios are available for free from the website. Note that the game is intended for one-shot convention scenarios, where you teach people the rules, play for four hours, and you're done. There's no guide on loot or character advancement, and there aren't complex tactical rules. Just deal the cards, grabs some d6s, and you're on the way.

The scenario we played was an attack on a pirate base, where our team of four had go ashore and eliminate the pirate gun batteries around the island before the fleet arrived. For one battery, we got the pirates to brawl each other. For the next, our Chronomancer and I zapped half of them; then our Kitsune (legend: "Fairest of Them All") stripped naked and beguiled the rest of the men. We used the beguiled pirates as cannon fodder to attack the tower; once inside, I located the powder magazine, our tinker put together a fuse, and we pulled back and watched the tower go boom. A quick, successful scenario and we got it done in about two hours of play.