– E. and SR

So we’re finally getting boxes unpacked, stuff put away and generally settling into life in Colorado.  I’ve been working on setting up the smallest bedroom as an office/library, which has lead me to the realization that I have a lot of books.  The disappointing thing is that after unpacking the obvious boxes, I still have gaps on the bookcases where I various books are missing.  Ah, well, they’ll turn it eventually.

As I begin the process of designing my next campaign, I found myself inspired in a different way than I am used to. Normally, I tend to generate my campaigns based on two major factors: what classes that my players have selected and cues from the backstory of my campaign setting.

This time it’s all about me.

Well, maybe not about me explicitly… but about my NPCs. As I was driving across the frozen plains of Nebraska *shudder*, I came up with some very vivid ideas for some NPCs. In the past, I have stuck to major archetypes for my main characters and improvised many of my lesser NPCs.

A sidenote: often my improvised NPCs are the more memorable ones. Anything born from spur of the moment roleplaying and the influences of sugarfied Vanir is bound to be somewhat memorable.

Anyway, back to the point… the NPCs that I stitched together in my mind varied wildly in character class and background, which left me with another quandary: how do I integrate all of these guys together within one storyline?

Essentially, that’s where I am at now… I’m trying to generate an underlying plot that will span disparate cultures in a meaningful way. I suspect I will create several plot episodes that patchwork these characters together, with a common plot backing material and stuffed with the warm cotton batting of interesting roleplaying.

That’s it for a strange quilt metaphor now, and I’m off to put a log on the fire because the cold is apparently getting to me! Game Masters, how do you generate your storylines? NPCs first? Characters first? Plot first? Let’s hear it!

The astonishingly silent mouth breathers over at Blogger have broken something so badly that we have been trying for 18 hours or so to put up yesterday’s post.

It seems they have created an intermittent problem that forces us to perform arcane rituals with our publishing settings to get anything posted correctly. I am able to post this announcement due to the combined intelligence of the people affected by this issue, who came up with a series of workarounds after it became apparent that the guys at Blogger couldn’t find the handle on this thing. Some blogs have been experiencing these issues since 12/26. That’s last year, folks.

Add one more thing to the New Year’s resolution list: switch to WordPress. I fully expect to hear “I told ya so!” from the rest of the roleplaying blogosphere now.

Thanks for staying tuned, we’ll be back with you shortly.

As we bound headlong into the new year, all of us over at Stupid Ranger Central met and came up with some resolutions for 2009.

Annoying things, begone!

Because of this fact, in the coming weeks you will see some changes over here at StupidRanger.com. We have been using Google AdSense to monetize our site, and two things happened: we’ve made effectively nothing from this effort and we often see annoying or irrelevant ads on our main page. So AdSense is gone for 2009!

This is not to say that advertising will never return, but it will be only to projects very close to our heart and will be entirely relevant to gaming.

In addition, we’ve decided to part ways with CafePress. We truly love many of our shirt designs, but we cannot price them competitively enough to make up the cost of maintaining the storefront. Vanir is going to make some of our more popular designs into desktop wallpaper which will be made freely available as he has time.

For the record, our good buddy Yax over at DungeonMastering.com now has a small collection of newly limited edition shirts! Thanks for the support, Yax!

Getting back to the fun of it!

StupidRanger, Vanir, and I have had a lot of fun with this site over the past year and a half. We’re going to focus on providing the content that is important to us. Speaking purely for myself, I intend to continue to explore the ins and outs of being a better Game Master. That means one of my immediate resolutions is to get a gaming group together in our new locale. We know there is a small body of gamers right in our subdivision, and my coworkers have expressed some interest in getting back into D&D so this should be an easy win.

Both Vanir and Stupid Ranger have expressed a desire to stretch their creative writing muscles, so I suspect you will see more content from them on this front as 2009 progresses.

Relocating across country to a very demanding job has been taxing on SR and I, and Vanir’s new wunderkind has drawn some of his recreational time lately so you can expect that our post frequency might not remain at the daily level that it was through much of 2008.

But that being said, understand this loud and clear: we are not going away. If you do get to feeling lonely and need some extra roleplaying content, you can always go drink from the industrial strength firehose that is RPGBloggers.com. Don’t worry, we’ll be there too with every roleplaying related post that we write!

I hope everyone gets their New Year off right, we’re really looking forward to getting back to the fun stuff in 2009!

Stupid Ranger and I have recently made the long round-trip to Illinois to spend the holidays with our family, and this resulted in a fairly long hiatus from our standard RPG fare. Thankfully, our good buddy Vanir threw in some excellent roleplaying holiday specials for you all to enjoy!

Out with the old… or not?

On the 16 hour car ride from Illinois, Stupid Ranger and I mulled the start of our new D&D campaign, which will begin in coming weeks. I told her that I’ve got some exciting ideas percolating and we should get serious about pulling our group together, and then she asked a fairly innocuous question: “Are you going to run [D&D] 3.5 or 4.0?”

On one hand, we are both intimately familiar with D&D 3.5 and she knows the rules inside and out. When starting to play in a new environment with a new group of roleplaying friends, the familiarity is very attractive. One wants to bring his A-game to a new group, yes?

On the other hand, if I am never forced to fully acclimate to the new rule set I am unlikely to ever learn it. Our small group of players are returning to D&D after a long lapse, so they will be unfamiliar with either option which should allow some bandwidth for SR and I to learn along with them. Regardless of the final decision, I’m going to get out my D&D 4.0 books and really give them another read.

I will gladly welcome sage advice on this matter as I plunge headlong into campaign planning!

Thanks for putting up with the cold winter hiatus, we’ve got some exciting things in store for the new year that will be announced soon! Stay tuned!

Twas the night before game night
and on his PC
the DM was scheming
to kill you and me

Three traps were set
at the entrance with care
with hopes that the rogue
would not find them there

The CR’s were set
about seven too high
and the players, he thought,
were destined to die

Through pit traps and owlbears
through freakish large kobolds
through mephits on crack rock
and axe-wielding stirges

Suddenly ghostly white vapor appeared
And swirled ’round his feet, as he saved vs Fear

The spirit jangled etherial chains,
“I am the Spirit of Awful Campaigns!”

“You spend all your time crafting mayhem and doom,
and yet not one player has fun in this room!”

“Give them a challenge, but still make it fun.
Encourage roleplaying from everyone.”

The spirit fell silent, bathed in dim light,
and just then the DM’s rebuttal took flight.

“I’ve tried for years, but they just won’t budge.
They just make fart jokes and eat E.L. Fudge.”

“They ignore my puzzles.
My plots are dismantled
They min-max. They rules-lawyer.
I’m +5 disgruntled!”

The spirit then nodded and reached in its pocket,
filling the heart of the DM with fear
But all that came out was one social contract
“This should evoke much more roleplaying cheer.”

“Steroidal beholders are not a solution,
and neither are mindflayers armed with C4.
You’ll both give and take, and set down the ground rules
and quite soon your issues shall be no more.”

With that the spirit faded away,
and the DM’s CHA score gained three points that day.
And laying a pencil atop of their sheets,
the players were awarded two bonus feats.

And the DM told all,
as the players arrived
“Happy game night to all!
Please try to survive.”

The way I see it, you have one of two options:

1. Stop spamming your shit on our blog please. I am tired of cleaning it up.
2. Give me 1000gp a day, and you can post as many retarded gold spam comments as you want. Hell, we’ll let you write a guest post. (But, in the popular urban vernacular, bitch had better relinquish my money lest they suffer the backside of Bigby’s Pimpin’ Hand.)

The choice is yours.

This week, Stupid Ranger and I are seperated by the vast expanse of 900 miles as I am back in Illinois working this week. She will join me next week to celebrate Christmas with my family, but in the meantime we’ve both been experiencing severe bouts of winter weather.

I had the good fortune to drive home in nearly four inches of snow and ice, so the going was slow. I had quite a bit of time to think about the site, and I remembered this post from an especially strange bout of weather we had earlier in the year and thought I’d put it up again for your continued consideration.

We are still experiencing our holiday gaming drought, hopefully we will get our gaming schedule (and therefore our posting schedule) back to Regular Status after the new year. Until then, expect to see roleplaying themed holiday merriment, glimpses back into our archives, and new content as the muse strikes us!

Originally posted by Dante on 2/4/08

Here in StupidRangerVille, we have been experiencing some very strange weather today. It is what is known as a thundersnow (or winter thunderstorm) where the primary precipitation of snow and sleet is accompanied by thunder and lightning… it is relatively rare and quite interesting to behold.

Sir Geekelot, one of our current campaign-members messaged me to confirm said strange weather and heralded it as a sign of The Apocalypse… and that got me thinking about weather in the context of our D&D sessions.

Wow, it’s raining again…

In most of my campaigns we have often hand-waved weather, or used it as a relatively cliche’ foreshadowing element to illustrate impending doom. I know that many rules systems exist for actually interacting with weather-systems and how to use it in your settings, but often having to look up those charts for movement encumbrance or situational modifiers to attack and damage is too much work for me so I regularly just use an ad-hoc method of doling out pluses or minuses depending on the situation in front of me.

I have found that as characters advance in levels, their level of concern for environmental conditions seem to wane. Flipping through a few of the Monster Manuals, I have found a few elemental based baddies that seem to be intense concentrations of (or elementals created by) terrible weather conditions. We had a seafaring campaign in college that actually got to experience some of those creatures first-hand, and I can tell you that it is a unique experience.

If you don’t like the weather, just wait a few days.

I haven’t loosed any of these terrors on our current campaign (yet), but I would be interested to hear if anyone has done anything cool with the weather based elemental creatures or used weather in an interesting way to color your campaigns.

Has anyone been able to make the environment significant enough that characters actually care how it impacts them as they progress to higher levels?

Before everyone starts sending us boxes of E.L. Fudge cookies and order-by-phone pizzas as provisions, never fear… its supposed to be 50 degrees here tomorrow! (Although donations of sugar and pizza are always readily accepted!)

On The Twelfth Round Of D&D
My DM Gave To Me:

12 Garys Gygaxing

11 Runes Exploding

10 Mounds A-Shambling

9 Umbers Hulking

8 Fighters Tanking

7 Clerics Casting

6 Rogues A-Sneaking

+5 Ring of Protection

4 Ioun Stones

3 Undead

2 Saving Throws

And A Hit I Rolled Critically