The Deep NPC Tale

We talk NPCs and how to make them and your base interesting in an Age of Rebellion setting, as well as the varried locations you’ll run across in Edge of the Empire and Force and Destiny. Continue reading “The Deep NPC Tale”

Eyes Up: Rewarding the Player, not the Character

Let’s talk about rewards for players. I have yet to meet a GM or player who doesn’t get the basics of rewarding players with experience points. In some systems it’s an equation as simple as putting monsters in at one end, running them through the shiny bladed grinder of players, and dropping at the feet of the players blood splattered items of surprising usefulness. This is all well and good, and keeps the characters growing in power, but this can be minor to rewarding the players for their actions instead of just their characters. Continue reading “Eyes Up: Rewarding the Player, not the Character”

Confessions of a Newb GM: Clunky Randomness

I’ve been talking with my D&D 4th Edition DM over the last couple of weeks. After trying to bring my DM to The Mad Adventurers Society and The Angry GM blog, in an attempt to bring the perverbial horse to water, we were discussing how the two of us envisioned a 5th Edition campaign. He wanted to wait for the 5th Edition DMs guide and delve into its depths before he was willing to run a new adventure. The biggest reason he gave for this was his memory of the DMs guide from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons with tables upon tables of things that can be rolled on. He was describing why this was a great thing, but there are some concerns when it comes to random encounters as a base for a campaign. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: Clunky Randomness”

The Hard Crime Tale

We go looking at new ways your players can slip deeper into a crime lords grasp and how you can give the players two choices that they don’t want to take. Ben and David talk about how crime in fiction isn’t always happy go lucky and can be a huge moral quandary for those involved. Continue reading “The Hard Crime Tale”

Eyes Up: Focused Intentions

Hi,

I’m Deuterium Ice, you may know me a bit from Tales from the Hydian Way and Confessions of a Newb GM. I have been doing an article series about how to run adventures, but @TheAngryDM is doing that with attitude, so I’m shifting to something less obvious. When we were recording next week’s Tales from the Hydian Way it became clear to me how I could help and how I can use my own experience, foibles and all, to give ideas and guidance to people doing campaigns to try to make them more interesting. Continue reading “Eyes Up: Focused Intentions”

The Crossed Personalities Tale

We talked about The Crossroads Sector last week. This week we populate it with a family with a dark secret, a desperate criminal with a heart of gold, and a ghost ship that holds a terrifying secret. Continue reading “The Crossed Personalities Tale”

The Crossroads Sector Tale

Wow, we made it to 100 episodes of Tales. We’re celebrating by giving you a huge gift of a new sector with interesting planets and some dangerous places where the profit can be bigger then a smuggler can imagine. Continue reading “The Crossroads Sector Tale”

New Site Announcement

We now can be found at TheHydianWay.com where you can find links to as much of what we talk of as we can find, as well as all previous episodes and some bonus content for our loyal followers.

Confessions of a Newb GM: Communicating Trust

I’ve just started a group in my Lepskin campaign. I trust that they’ll be playing to have fun and to try to tell a good story while working to bring what is cool to them to the table. They trust that I am making adventures that have direction to them, but also that I’ll let them go and explore the sector I have made up a framework for.  I’ve advertised that the players are able to make a sizeable contribution to this campaign setting and, at the moment, I’m trusted to follow through. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: Communicating Trust”

The Public Force Tale

We talk of the repercussions of using the force publicly in the Empire and how it becomes this impending doom that is creeping upon the players. From Moffs to Hutts and every where in between we find the ways people will try to control the power of the force. Continue reading “The Public Force Tale”

The New Player Tale

This week we talk to Susan White, the player of Behr on Dice for Brains. We talk to Susan about being a new player at the table and how to be better at improvisation from the player side of the screen. Continue reading “The New Player Tale”

The Jelly Tale

We have Ross Rockafellow back to talk more about morality, conflict, and sith flying squirrels with us to learn how to use each more effectively at our tables.
Continue reading “The Jelly Tale”

The New Worlds Tale

Ross Rockafellow from Dice for Brains sent us a message about wanting to answer some listener questions with our group of opinionated GMs. Little did he know that we wanted to ask a few questions of our own.
Continue reading “The New Worlds Tale”

Confessions of a Newb GM: The Forever Fight

A few weeks ago I was in a Dungeons and Dragons 4E combat that lasted an epicly long time. The sad part, in retrospect, is that it will not be remembered by anyone who fought in it. The reason being is that nothing substantial happened. Let me repeat this, after an 8 hour fight nothing of value happened, no useful loot was to be had, we didn’t go up a level, no characters came close to being killed (one did get reduced to below zero health one slot in the turn order before being healed). Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: The Forever Fight”

The Menacing Villain Tale

We start with an impossibly powerful villain and try to figure out interesting fashions to make them feel menacing without having them feel staged or forced.
Continue reading “The Menacing Villain Tale”

Confessions of a Newb GM: Played to Death

As a GM, am I out to kill my players?

In a way I am, but it’s more complicated then a yes.

Every role playing game I have played has opportunities for players to die. In campaigns, I have had very few of my characters die since I’m normally very conservative in how I play. When I’m in one-shot adventures I’m not expecting to play the character more, so I try to play to the archetype of the character and choose characters that are different from my normal support styles. Continue reading “Confessions of a Newb GM: Played to Death”

The Bar Brawl Tale

David and Ben talk about how you can get a brawl happening in a bar without your players going murder happy.

From how to split a scene into two encounters to why it’s okay to do so we dive deep into brawling in public.

Continue reading “The Bar Brawl Tale”

The Tale of Fear

We talk of fear checks and how some really dislike them, bringing a full top to bottom examination while giving a few ideas on how to make them much more awesome than a pit trap.

Continue reading “The Tale of Fear”

The Herding Players Tale

This week Joshua asks David and Ben why his players are floundering after giving them an open sandbox to work with.

Discussion erupts around ways to move the story along and ways of presenting story that players care about.

Continue reading “The Herding Players Tale”

Confessions of a Newb GM: Making the Obelisk Smaller

I’m going a bit more in depth on what you can do with the language used on Obsidian Portal today. I do have a tiny bit of programming knowledge which helps me find what I’m wanting on the dense reference page linked by Obsidian Portal. Here are several things I’ve found and bashed into working for me. I’m going to be referring back to my Draeks page quite a few times, so it might be useful to have it open in another tab.

General Formatting:

Formatting for the fluff is pretty simple. Treat it like normal paragraphs, or at most highlight and use the nice little icons at the top of the text box, these are the same that you find in forums almost everywhere. A few recommendations to keep it from becoming unweildy:

  • Keep bullet points to a minimum
  • Choose one heading size and stick to it. The page is already sectioned off into two major halves, anything more no one is reading.
  • Link everything
  • Link everything

The Period:

Textile lets you mess around with commands in its language and combine different commands easily, you can smash together alignment, bold, and size changes all at once with a single leading string of seemingly nonsensical characters followed by a period. It’s the period that tells textile the random stuff that came before are commands to follow.

Linking:

Linking can be easy if information is treated simply. Having long wiki titles and character names becomes unwieldy when more and more entries show up to look through. Tags and the insert links can help, but become a hassle for simple entry. The reason to keep the slugs and the titles short is the ease of Quick Links.

Character Quick Links can be put in with a double square bracket and a colon before the slug. [[:icor]] will bring up and display Icor Brimarch and link to his page with decidedly less typing and creating a link. The colon is what tells Obsidian Portal that the link is for a character.

Wiki Quick Links are a little trickier because you can’t create slugs for them. This is why you want to have the name as short as possible and preferably unique. I can link to The Lepskin Void by putting square brackets around it like so [[The Lepskin Void]] and it becomes hyper linked. The problem stems from long page names and a desire for nicknaming things. The Void, Lepskin Void, and The Lepskin Void all would go to different places. The easiest way of dealing with this is use a short but practical name that can be chosen from a list.

Modifying Links:

Quick links are great, but you can do another thing to them that makes them even better. Quick links can be modified to display whatever you want by placing a | between the link and the description.

Examples:

[[:icor | Bantha Express Executive]]
[[:draeks | Fuzzy Commander]]
[[sullustan brotherhood| smugglers]]

 Tables:

Tables are a little weird but easy to implement if you take time to deal with them. The thing to remember is width; you want to make it as easy to remember the width as possible. The Obsidian Portal back end automatically widens the column to the width of whatever is in there, a long sentence will become a really wide cell which makes for a very wide column. Textile has a few cute tricks that I’ve learned to use. This is the result of my meddling with my little table.

Dreaks

Surprisingly enough the usual width of stat blocks works, either the D20 eight or the FFG Star Wars six. Underneath the header cells can go the values for each header and this makes it easy to figure out what number go with which attribute.

The reason you want it to be as condensed vertically as possible is ease of grouping. If you have two rows of things that people are looking at and they are aligned vertically it’s easy to pick out what is being done, and easier to maintain while adding more stuff without reformatting, adding layers and layers to a big table club house sandwich.

As you can see I have double width columns for skills/talent names as well as implying one thing describes two separate stats. Towards the bottom I have full across lines that are there for equipment. This is allowing extra information to be stored while not making a single column become too wide and looking ‘weird’.

Basics

The very basics are vertical lines | and they are the start and end of a cell, they split up everything you want to split into another cell on the same row. Vertical breaks are dealt with by line breaks in the edit field, what’s on one line stays on that line and what is on the next line goes on the next line. With just that you can make a stat block.

EG

|Brawn|Agility|Intellect|Cunning|Willpower|Presence|
|1|2|2|4|3|3|

Creates

Brawn Agility Intellect Cunning Willpower Presence
1 2 2 4 3 3

Splitting Cells

The ‘fun’ is when you start wanting to combine two cells to either make room for more stuff, such as two longer words, or giving the implied use of one header to two lower cells. This is also used for making one cell take up more columns such as where I’m using a whole row as a title line. You can also have a cell become two high making it apply to the two things next to it. The command for this is a slash followed by a number followed by the command period to activate it, before the entry in the cell. The slashes have meanings \ means a horizontal amount of cells being combined and / means a vertical number of cells being combined. The number is the number of cells combined and they can even be combined so that |\2/2. Turns into a 2 cell by 2 cell block where you can put whatever text you want.

EG:

|\2.Defense|, |/2. Weapon quality|.

Slight Tweaks

Every table needs a few tweaks to get it to display the way you want. There are things like the _ that turns cell into a header cell and gives the contents an emphasis (normally bold unless you get really creative) and centers it in the cell. There is the justification groups < left, > right, and = centered. If you have a large cell and want justify you can use the left and right together to tell it to <> justify. In tall cells you can do ^ to put it on the top, and ~ to put it on the bottom.

Out of the Cell

Most of the tweaks can be used for a paragraph, the p tag, or headers, the h1 through h6 tags, as long as you follow it with a period.

If all you want to do is mess around with only a few words out of a whole, you can. Using _ on both sides of a word make it italicized, using * on both sides of a word makes it bold, and using + on both sides allows it to underline (yeah programmers make little sense).

Medium Tweaks

I like making my tables with color, what I’m using for it can apply to just a cell, a whole row, or an entire table. The difference in usage from coloring a cell and a row is fairly minimal. The main part of the code bafflegab that the color is formed is {Background:#hhh} the ‘fun’ part is that after the # comes a web safe hex color number (first two digits on the left hand side and the last on the top). Using the same basic structure we can change the text color, while inside the cell and next to the text you want to color put in the bafflegab of {Color:#hhh}  using the linked color palates. To change things across an entire table a line before the first | is put in Table{anyofthecommandsyouwant}.

A Closing

What I’ve described here has been the virtual entirety of what I have used to create the Lepskin Rising site. This has been fun to detail and next week I’ll be getting back to more on efficient planning.

The Modified Tale

We look at Special Modifications this week and find that there is a surprising amount in such a small book.

We have a bonus sized episode for you to make sure we at least got through the start of the character stories.

Continue reading “The Modified Tale”

Confessions of a Newb GM: Through the Dark Glass

While listening to potelbat Ep. 18  I was introduced to Obsidian Portal, I looked at it and thought, “This is kind of cool to use as a repository for all things campaign related.” Working with Obsidian Portal proved both easier and harder than I expected.

I created my one free campaign to see how things would work out from the GMs side of campaign creation and to see how quickly I could break it. I’m glad that the programmers linked to a textile help page so I could start muddling with how I can get tables and different things to display properly.

 

Dealing with Obsidian Portal is a bit of a bear, especially for the uninitiated. I’m going to give a few examples of what I do for player characters, NPCs, and general wiki entries. I’ll also show a basic layout that allows for quick reading while getting across as much info as possible.

Today’s article is going over the basics of the character wiki pages. In the next article I am going over how Slugs are used, how links are created and modified, and how tables can be used to simply create a quick character sheet without CSS.

Character Creation:

The first two things that are needed are what you’d need on paper. Generally I’m copying off of scratch pad or filled character sheet anyway. Obsidian Portal provides a Description and a Bio; both are useful though I’ve mentally separated them into crunch with leading flavor text in the Description, leaving all of the fluff that you and the player want.

Since this is about the character sheets specifically, I’ll touch on a few of the entries that come up only on character pages. For all examples I’m going to be using Draeks from the Lepskin Council.

Character Name:

What it says on the tin. This is what the character is called and what will be displayed at the top of their page. This also will become the slug seed if a slug isn’t chosen.

Slug:

The slug is the most important thing you can adjust. This is how everyone for this campaign links back to the character. Preferably this is something simple such as first name, last name, nick name, or generic description. It is important to keep it short and unique since other people will use it and can use it when not mentioning a character by name, such as Gands.

Examples:   Han1, Bothan3, itswhomnotwhat, or Fettissarlacfood

Tags:

This is the way to order your characters and wiki entries. This works just like the ones on The Mad Adventurers Society, click on them and you get taken to a page with all of the things tagged with this. Usually this is done at creation, but anyone who has access to the page can add tags. Again, this calls for brevity in what is put in. I can put in Lepskin Council as a tag, but Council or The Council would be preferable, unless there is more than one Council. Normally I toss in everything I can come up with, for Draeks I put in tags to show his links and where he can be found. It’s not crucial, but it doesn’t take long and it’s quite recommended to do at the time of character creation since it is so easy to forget.

Examples for Draeks:   Bothan, Council, Commander, Rebel, and Catiwhinn

Quick Description:

This section is a small description that everyone who is browsing the character section will see. Leaving this description blank is an option, but one that should be exercised rarely since it just becomes a list of names without anything for context. Even short three word phrases work and can be enough to spark some imagination for what the character is.

Description:

This section has two uses. One is a description of how the character is and acts and should be short, manageable paragraphs to keep from painting people into corners when thinking about the character. The description is also for putting ‘the crunch’.

The crunch is the hardest part to do since all it contains is numbers and simple descriptions’; making it readable is near painful. Obsidian portal is putting together a series of Dynamic Style Sheets that use Cascading Style Sheets and information skimmed from the description section. Sadly the one for Edge of the Empire and Age of Rebellion is nonfunctional and ends up overwriting existing information in spots.

For this I have thrown together a table that looks okay and is fairly serviceable for putting things in an organized fashion.

Biography:

This is where the fluff goes, even if you don’t put anything in this section the vestigial section still shows up for everyone. Character history blurbs are great but a new character or NPC doesn’t need a long one since the character is at the start and everything before should be more boring than what is about to happen, or the character is about to die. A slowly growing journal adding a paragraph or two after each session or adventure is a good idea and gives a bit of history to an established character, this also allows for people to remember what happened a year ago in a fast moving campaign.

The Check Boxes:

Check those that apply. Having people constantly e-mailing updates to other members or their GM can quickly lead to either ignoring notifications from Obsidian Portal all together, or cause the one receiving the notifications to take a negative view of the one causing them.

 Note:

At the time of writing this I don’t know CSS and haven’t played around with it much beyond fixing other peoples pages. It is something I hope to get good at since it seems to be easily learn-able.

The Art Tale

We look to the art of Fantasy Flight Games to glean inspiration for adventures and even campaigns.

Work coordinated and curated by Zoe Robinson has been an inspiration during her time at FFG, and this is our tribute to her work as she departs to Blizzard.

Continue reading “The Art Tale”

Confessions of a Newb GM: A Plan Comes Together

Most adventuring parties only see an innkeeper as the provider of ale and food with the possibility of lodging and rumors if things go well, but the innkeeper can become the gateway to the whole town when the players look deeper. In a quick pass through town, or as a single adventure without a twist that the innkeeper is involved in, nefarious things are all that’s needed, but, when it won’t be just a single adventure, it becomes more important to know why the innkeeper is doing things. Having the innkeeper be knowledgeable about the shady things in town is a common trope and makes sense if they’re the classic bartender like Shotglass, but it can take on a sinister tone if the information they feed the party leads to cleaning out a potential competitor or if they use the party as the heavy hand of the thieves’ guild. The innkeeper in a small town is a huge source of wealth that wouldn’t normally be available and this wealth filters down to the artisans of the town such as the inn’s chef, the town brewer, tailor, farrier, miller, and surrounding farmers; allowing the innkeeper to behave as town leader as far as the party is concerned. How the innkeeper, or other NPCs, are connected to the world, matters.

When you come across a  GM character once, most people pay them no mind, but when they start to become part of the world, it brings a much better connection to the narrative. One of the tricks is to find  points of connection you as a GM already have that the characters can fill. The junk dealer that the party uses as a fence turns into an agent for the local governor to keep tabs on the underworld. The captain of the guard that gives the party quests is underpaying the party and pocketing the extra money that would pay for the squads of soldiers that the party is replacing.

On to the Council

The Lepskin Rebel Council presents an interesting challenge; it’s easy to see the council as a separate section, but it overlaps with the sector in general. They have jobs and motivations, creating simple characters, which continue on beyond what the players will see. This is one of the ways that Obsidian Portal shows its worth as a framing device. I find it easy to deal with the council as a single entity of people and the sector as a single entity of planets, the two together is much hazier. These two seemingly separate sets have common points and should allow for ideas to grow as different aspects are worked on. Working on The Council gets me thinking about the planets these people are associated with and then how that shapes them.

My best example of this is a five link chain that is linked through a set of coincidental ideas. The links go from Catiwhinn, an up and coming maintenance yard on the fringe is the seat of The Council, to Icor Brimarch, a member of The Council and the vice president of business expansion for Bantha Express Transportation, and finally to Axel the headquarters for Bantha Express.

Normally my thought process would connect two of these things, because it’s in Icor Brimarch’s character description that he is part of the Bantha Express, but not the rest of them. Thanks to the linking of the rebel council to Catiwhinn and Icor Brimarch’s position on that council I now have another link for the character, and a reason for him and his company to be so far from their home system.

I find that these unexpected links are what make a setting seem more real. Having them in mind, or at least easily available, is great for when players want to do things that you’d never normally think of. The ways this knowledge can impact and be used for plot purposes is delightful but even moreso if the players link these things themselves without huge glowing signs saying “Shreb is tied to Rooksense” or something similar.

A wonderful part of Obsidian portal is that some of this linking can be visible to only to the GM and select others which allows for the rabbit hole to go much deeper than in a single sheet that the players have unfettered access to. Creating these links ahead of time allows for less work when a player tries to do something almost unthought of. It can be looked up while having a quick planning break.

Thin Skin of Reality

This can be a level deeper than most players want to go, but it can be rewarded with making difficulties just a little bit easier if the players are looking for how it’s interconnected and want to play off of it.

This depth of thinking about a relatively throw away concept I find useful. It brings me deeper into knowing what I’m helping to create and helps me to think beyond swinging the group from trope to trope. I know if I start to put in a few not so hidden gems for characters I can allow the players to start seeking it out on their own. A rescued tech in one adventure gets hired onto a repair shop at the end of another and finally takes it over at the end of the next campaign. Growing the world around the players allows for a reality to form, instead of just being able to cause relentless devastation while being an evil raiding party.

The Challenge Tale

Two listeners asked us about skill challenges in Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars system and we decided to give our thoughts on it.

From outlining what they are for those unaware, to ways the advantage and threat skew how you can use them.

Continue reading “The Challenge Tale”