Coronas Hide

I download the Mouse Guard playing card set (available from here), scrubbed all the text off the conflict cards, and put my own text on instead. I did it for two reasons. First, the text was rasterized, and as a design professional this offends my soul. (Just kidding, I don’t have a soul. But text through a JPEG meatgrinder like that. Ouch, man. I appreciate why it was done, but I can still hear a sad little dirge for every artifact-laden letter-halo.) The second reason was because I didn’t find the text entirely helpful. I … Continue Reading

I think the Mouse Guard recruitment section is well done (as is all of MG) but it is missing two things to make it really great. First, it’s not apparent from the text that this should be a collaborative process. Nobody should be making this stuff up in a vacuum. You bounce each piece off the other players and the GM, everyone contributing. Second, I wish there was more guidance, or at least a set of questions, to turn character-building choices into roleplaying backstory. My inclination is to build some of this second part. We’ll see how it goes. … Continue Reading

I have been putting mental energy behind coming up with ways to make travel more fun and interactive. All the action right now takes place in a location called the Witchwood, so, you know, it’s woody. I started out doing the lame thing: You want to cross the woods you have to make Nature checks. If you fail you get lost. This was not fun. Let me revise that. It was fun in only one way, which is that it made the elf ranger a very important person in one gaming session, because without her nobody was getting back to town. … Continue Reading

Social classes from top to bottom:

1. Nobles and merchant-princes (hereditary)
2. Enchanters Guild (merit,intellect)
3. The Watch (merit,martial)
4. Merchants & crafters (heredity, with occasional new grants)
5. Beggars, thieves, elves

It’s a mercantilist society, where city-states are ruled by a combination of land-owners and production-owners. Both have assigned themselves various titles, but the only real rank among them is wealth. (Rogue Trader dynasty style, with profit factors.) The Enchanters Guild “own” the means of production of spells, with a massively dominating market share of spell research. The reason for this is that their structure is so over-arching that it’s usually possible to gobble up any competitors that arise, and just … Continue Reading

Now that the lich-queen is establishing herself in the Three Towers, folk are leaving off calling the place the Warwood (which was a reference to the end of the Indric Age, kind of a long time ago now) and starting to call it the Witchwood, due to the…well, witchiness that is currently going on.

I have decided that rather than brew up a custom theme (Indric Builder), I am going to import directly the Artificer from the Eberron setting. It is almost exactly what I was going to invent anyway, and all the work is done — and hopefully reasonably well-balanced. In order to make this work the way I want, I am going to create an Artificer theme in the same way that 4e At-Will has been doing classes-as-themes for multiclassing. The other thing I’m bringing in — athough I am going to meddle with it a little bit — is the Warforged race. … Continue Reading

Belief for alignment This is one of a series of hacks I will be implementing in a D&D 4e game. Some of the ideas for this hack were stolen and adapted from articles at 4e At-Will. Instead of alignment, which I have always felt is kind of vague and purposeless, we’ll substitute beliefs. Characters have one or more of them, and they can be “discovered” during play as well. The concept is to write down specific guides to action. It is perfectly fine to come up with any beliefs you like, but because such a wide-open intellectual space can make it … Continue Reading

Tiefling There are neither demons nor devils in Merindrea, and never were. As much as a million years ago, a very human-like but pre-human race became geographically isolated, and their “devilish” features became pronounced. By the time migration brought them into contact with humans again they had diverged down a different evolutionary path. There is no compatibility between tieflings and humans or elves. They are a different species. No one is surprised to see tieflings, and there is no supernatural overtone to their appearance (even in elvish religions there aren’t any malignant spirits as such). Humans look down on them much the … Continue Reading