Heroic Roleplaying in a World of Swords, Sorcery, and Steam
I’d like to introduce Aetrimonde, a TTRPG I’ve been designing with heavy inspiration from the houserules my group used back in our Dungeons and Dragons 4e days. I’m not ready to publish Aetrimonde yet, but I’m opening up this blog to discuss its design principles, mechanics, and systems.
recent posts
about
Category: GM Advice and Tools
Posts about the guidance, tools and material provided in Aetrimonde’s Game Master’s Handbook for would-be GMs to run adventures (and write their own).
-
Today I’m going to go over the GMH’s advice on pacing: how to space out scenes (particularly combat encounters) so that they push players to conserve resources without becoming insurmountable. The advice here is a counterpart to D&D 5e’s concept of an “adventuring day,” being Once you have a rough idea of how your scenes…
-
Since I’m on the topic of adventures, in preparation to write Aetrimonde’s starter adventure, I think a great subject for this week’s post is adventure seeds: short, flavorful concepts that can form the basis of an adventure for a GM willing to write their own. The advice I’ve written in the GMH on writing your…
-
Today, since I’m gearing up to write Aetrimonde’s starter adventure (and if you haven’t voted on a setting for that adventure yet—please do! I want feedback here…), I’m going to talk about adventure structure: the way that scenes link together in an adventure to form a plot that the players can work through. The structure…
-
Today, I thought I might talk about failure, and how Aetrimonde handles it. Failure is a looming threat in any roleplaying game: at any moment, you might make the wrong decision, or just have a horrible streak of luck with the dice. It’s my opinion that failure should matter: it should have consequences, but ideally…
-
In my continuing column on the Game Master’s Handbook’s advice to would-be GMs, I’m going to cover the book’s introduction to two of the core components of Aetrimonde’s adventure structure paradigm: exploration and interaction. There are a lot of ways to approach writing and running RPG adventures: the way I’ve chosen to describe things in…
-
I’ve recently gotten the Game Master’s Handbook to the point that I can start sharing excerpts of it on a more regular basis. I’ve still got a lot of material to write–but then, that’s part of what this blog is for, to help me organize and trial material going into the GMH. Today, I’m going…
