Posted in Adventures, Character interaction, Characters, Dungeons and dragons, Inter-player conflict, RPG, Roleplay, Tropes, Uncategorized, backstories, storytelling, world building on Sep 1st, 2011
In his last post, Gestalt wrote about creating characters with more traditionally medieval values in his fantasy games. Now in reality, if you are striving to recreate (for lack of a better term) the most historically accurate medieval fantasy game ever to exist, that’s going to be very difficult. Many of the pieces of literature [...]
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Literature is full of tropes, symbols and devices that create intricate settings for encounters between colorful casts of characters as they adventure through the plot of a story. The art of planning a campaign that is interested in storyline and contains a strong, character-driven plot may require the DM to participate in a certain degree [...]
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Everyone who has seen the original Star Wars trilogy remembers that classic scene where Han and Luke dress up as storm troopers and take Chewie up to the detention level. The scene is finished off with Leia famously saying that Luke was too short to be a stormtrooper. Thinking on this scene I realized that [...]
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Zombies are huge in popular culture these days. The genre of zombie movies has experienced a popular reemergence and the familiar brain eating bad guys appear more in video games, comic books, and table top RPGs than they ever have before. When planning a session for my Urban Arcana game I decided to use zombies [...]
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Posted in Characters, Conflict, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, Hero System, RPG, Roleplay, Tropes, backstories, storytelling, world building on Feb 3rd, 2011
Amnesiac heroes are one of the most poorly used tropes out there. The worst example I can cite is Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII. Cloud was a tool. I’m still convinced to this day that they gave him amnesia because they were never sure how his character was supposed to develop. He’s not the [...]
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Posted in Conflict, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, RPG, Roleplay, Tropes, locations, storytelling, world building on Dec 7th, 2010
Tropes are powerful devices. Devices that help define genres and styles and are incredibly useful tools for developing portions of your story. One of the most common tropes in fantasy stories is the massacre. Some impossibly bad-ass fighting force or rampaging monster ventures into a town or hamlet just to wipe everyone out with our [...]
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