Category: Games

These are game related blog posts.

Warlock Patron: Animal Spirits

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on September 21, 2019

Warlocks are not evil. This is something that should be said up front. It is tempting to think of them, if not evil, as shady. They make deals. They have pacts which provide them with power. Their patrons are dangerous. Infernal beings are either dangerously chaotic or just trying to gain power at the cost of your soul. Elder horrors from time and space bring only destruction and madness when they enter the world. The Fairy lords are unpredictable and alien enough to think little of the discomfort of mortals.

It is understandable to think that only evil comes from such deals, but recent additions have helped expand our definitions a bit. Are there some dark elements implied by the naming and themes? Yes. But they are not required to be.

I only write that as preamble because people may question the patron I am presenting today. The Animal Spirits are not friendly spirits, of course. They are the spirits of wild things and care very little for people, but they have no implied moral qualities. When writing this up I was thinking about the stories where witches cut deals where they can become different animals. I was also thinking of Shamans in Shadowrun who often chanel animal spirits to define their magic. It was a soup of ideas that this was born from. I hope you will find it useful.

I should also put a John Maynard Keynes joke here…

Warlock Patron: Animal Spirits

Other Than Gods

Other Than Gods

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on May 11, 2019

This post was inspired by a question I asked on Twitter. How do you explain clerics in D&D in a world with no gods? There were some excellent responses. I decided it was worth expounding on.

The cleric is one of the older ideas in Dungeons and Dragons. The idea of the cleric was originally a bit more like the priestly monster hunters from Hammer Horror films crossed with a crusader era European priests. The original cleric write-ups made almost no mention of individual gods. They were just nebulously holy in some manner and could cast spells as a result.

Oath of the Grave Paladins

Oath of the Grave Paladins

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on March 24, 2019

I have a long affection for gravediggers. I played a gravedigger in a larp for around a decade, and I have been a fan of them ever since. I have written D&D stuff around them before. I am also a fan of Death as being seen as a good thing. Too often we treat death like a villain and that is not a healthy way to look at things. I am not saying we should all go out and embrace our inner goth, but anyone who has cared for terminal patients or a large number of other medical condition can tell you that sometimes death is a mercy.

With that in mind, I give you the Grave Knights, those paladins who follow the Oath of the Grave.

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 5: the Licensed and not so Licensed

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 5: the Licensed and not so Licensed

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on March 9, 2019

I am sorry it took so long to get this last but together. I was sick for the better part of a month and it pretty much ate my brain. Who knew you needed to be able to breath to write?

Anyways, in this case, we are wrapping up our look at official D&D settings (The first post found here) by looking at the licensed setting. These are officially published settings based on previously published works and presented as D&D versions. Before I get too into that, I should talk about Deities and Demigods and other early products which kind of involved improper use of settings they didn’t have permission for or the permission was murky.

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 4: Micro-settings

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 4: Micro-settings

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on January 26, 2019

And we are here again. When I started talking about the many D&D settings it was a simple Twitter thread. I was trying to list all the official D&D published D&D settings. I was trying to figure out what Wizards of the Coast might release next as a setting in 5e. They had already released a large amount for Forgotten Realms and had just announced Ravnica and Eberron books. I thought I could list them all off as I had been around for most of them.

I managed to get most of the big ones. The ones I missed were the sub-settings (subsets of the larger settings), meta-settings(settings that crossover to other settings) and the micro settings. Micro settings are small tightly contained campaign settings with little thought given to a larger world.

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 3: The Meta-Settings

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on January 1, 2019

Alright, I took a little break for family holiday madness. It is time to resume my exploration of the many official settings of D&D. My previous posts (found here and here) listed the more traditional settings. Today I am going to write about the meta-settings.

I suppose I should talk about definitions first. Up until now, I wrote about “settings” which can be defined as a fictional world in which the action of the story or game occurs. “Sub-settings” are small, thematically encapsulated settings inside the larger one. Thematically they are different enough to feel like a separate setting, even if they are still inside it. A “meta-setting” is a setting which is, by its lore and design, is intended to be a cross-over between multiple settings. This means it may have its own lore and geography, but much of its content is about how it crosses with other settings.

Examples

Setting = Forgotten Realms

Sub-setting = Kara Tur

Meta-setting = Spelljammer

A meta-setting is a multiverse setting, where tales can stretch across multiple worlds. Their origins are almost always shrouded and obscure, but they have clear ties to other existing settings.

That definition in place, lets begin…

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 2

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 2

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on December 9, 2018

Alright, this is part two of my review of the official settings of D&D. The first one I covered Greyhawk, Mystara Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance. The first three were developed as home campaign settings that were elaborated on to become settings. The fourth was made as adventures and was revealed over time. All of these were published when D&D was produced by TSR. Greyhawk was the only one directly influenced by Gygax and, arguably, could be his vision of what D&D settings should be. The rest were mostly developed by other people and sort of reflected range of what you could do with the game.

That said, all of the ones in the 70’s and 80’s at least started with certain commonalities. They all carried a flavor based on western European fantasy. You had Merlin-like wizards, knights, kings, peasents, elves, dwarves, halflings and all the other tropes one associates with western fantasy. While the sword and sorcery genre was what Gygax pointed to as his influences, it is hard to ignore how many of these tropes were influenced by the works of Tolkien. Any proper Tolkienian will tell you the elves and wizards in D&D don’t really resemble the Middle Earth versions. Their presence are elemental to the conception of the fantasy world. Simply put, Tolkien is the gold standard of world building up to that point, so anyone following him will have some similarities.

In the 90’s, and the post-Gygax era, TSR began to experiment more with their settings. They didn’t completely lose those elements and they continue today, but the willingness to experiment away from the classic western fantasy/Tolkien model is certainly there.

The Many Settings of Dungeons and Dragons part 1

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on November 28, 2018

This idea started as a twitter thread. I started listing the various settings of D&D. That was both useful and a reminder of the limits of Twitter. What I ran into was the limited character count of twitter. This made me abbreviate the list in places where I shouldn’t have. I also failed to list a couple of major items. This post is part of my attempt to be more thorough.

The many names of spells and how to change them.

The many names of spells and how to change them.

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on November 7, 2018

In D&D, spells have names. This is based on some fiction and some legendary sources so it didn’t start with D&D. The notion of names having power is actually pretty old. The concept appears in ancient Egypt and Greece by various terms. By naming the spell, they describe its power.

Most of the spell names in D&D are relatively innocuous if descriptive of their effect. A Fireball spell creates a big ball of fire. Simple and easy. Then there are some spells that have little more story to them. They not only describe the effect, but carry the name of the wizard who created it.

This has been a part of D&D since the earliest days. It is evocative tells you something of the world. If you know that there is a Tenser’s Floating disk, then you know that Tenser is an important figure in the world your playing in. He made a spell that is important enough that you learned it without meeting him. You might have questions about this Tenser person? or Bigby? or Melf?

So, what do you do if your world has no Melf? No Bigby? Do you just leave them the same or do you change the names to reflect your world? This will depend on your world.

5 Things Superhero RPG’s Should Have, in my own biased opinion

Published by Jeremiah McCoy on September 18, 2018

I have been thinking alot about Superhero RPG’s lately. I am a fan of them and I have been since the TSR Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game came out in the 80’s. I went on to run multiple games in multiple systems, but Champions certainly got most of my time.

I love comics…let me restate that…I LOVE COMICS!

I read a whole bunch of comics. I have been reading them pretty much since I learned how to read. Most of them were superhero stories, so enjoying superhero RPG;s ties into that. I fell off playing the superhero RPG’s about a decade ago. Over time as the design sensibilities of RPG’s moved on, but a lot of the superhero games did not follow those changes. There have been a couple of major games developed since I stopped running them, so maybe they caught up.

I recently started watching Calisto6 rpg streams. It is a superhero game set in a cyberpunk future, using the Cypher system, and involving the players from the Star Trek RPG stream, Shields of Tomorrow. They are doing a good job with the games and it has refreshed my desire to make a good superhero RPG of my own.

With that in mind, here are some design guidelines I would use and look for in a superhero RPG.