Homebrewing – that’s this month’s RPG Blog Carnival topic. For me, there are two sides to homebrewing: the flavour side and the mechanical side. I have been making up games and creating house rules for existing games from about the time I realised that Lego was not meant for swallowing. My interest in making fantasy worlds and characters developed at about the same time, because, for some reason or the other, I needed a plausible reason for the brave Lego knights to attack the GI Joe stronghold to save my sister’s stolen Barbie dolls. The knights needed names, motivation and background stories to take on Cobra Command. So to did the GI villains and Barbie victims need similar attributes.
As of yet, I haven’t decided which aspect of homebrewing I’d like to write about to contribute to September’s Carnival. In the meantime, however, I’ll leave you with some handy homebrew links:
Dawn of Worlds: A group game used to develop fantasy worlds.
Dire Press: Lots of random generators to get the imagination engines turning.
Fantasy Name Generator: Elves always need apostrophes in their names. This generator knows how to use apostrophes.
When it comes to homebrewing, leave the gangsters out of monopoly… they just make things choatic
Comment by Anonymous — 4 September 2008 @ 3:48 pm
It all began a long long time ago when my, then permanent DM got tired of doing things that DMs do and I took over. Young and naive, I hurtled head first into creating a small area in the world for the PCs to romp in. It was a classic sword and sorcery setting with the usual whacky magical items e.g. dancing sword that causes everyone to do the boogie and a scroll linked to the fire elemental plane which had a chance of gating in an elder fire elemental…which inevitably burned down the tavern. There was no real story just the PCs doing as they wished.
Fast forward a few years. Now my campaigns have a stronger story element usually riding on one or more of the PCs, and so when PCs arrived, new sub-plots where interwoven with the already large uber-plot. My campaigns tend to have large events that occur if the PCs do NOT do certain things and the PCs messing around in the world could cause these large events, if they do occur, to have different outcomes. I feel that this sense of “anything can happen” can only arise from a world where everything is under the DMs control. Plus world building is loads of fun, especially when throwing in an apocalypse or two and gigantic magical effects.
While I enjoy having a story line per PC, most of the actual sessions usually have nothing to do with the PC’s background at all, they just stumble around into interesting areas on the way to complete one of their sub-plots. One such example would be the great inverted floating pyramid in the desert. This pyramid sucked in all gnomish ships from miles around and crashed them on its surface. hence there was a thriving colony of gnomes on top of this slowly revolving, inverted pyramid, in the middle of the desert, living off gnomish ship wrecks. The PCs arrive and stumble straight to the pyramids self-destruct mechanism. Aah good times.
Making the above world, I set out to create the overall layout of the world then added a few nasty apocalyptic occurrences and the overall plot. Then each session’s general points were worked out the day before the actual session using the previous sessions encounters to decide where to go from there. Most, though, was just winging it.
Having the freedom to assassinate the king or help him, makes for a fun and memorable story.
Comment by avianfoo — 5 September 2008 @ 9:03 am
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.
Comment by sandrar — 11 September 2009 @ 12:12 am
Thank you. Come again
Comment by avianfoo — 11 September 2009 @ 7:03 am