Starting Spycraft

Because I haven’t posted anything for a while I thought an update might be in order. Last games night the players took the time to generate some characters for the Spycraft 2.0 game that I am going to run as a filler game between our Pathfinder adventures. Well that was the idea anyway; however after reading the games substantial rules set and then spending considerable time to develop my own setting it’s clear that this is more than a causal game but a fully developed campaign in its own right.

Yarr! Free stuff, me hearties!

Yo ho ho!

Not only be Talk Like a Pirate Day a loomin' but I just got myself a message in an e-bottle sayin' they're givin' away free booty on the good ship DriveThruRPG...

(Posted a link above, YARR!)

Pathfinder campaign planning

Firstly, Pathfinder is amazing. However, that's not what I'm blogging about today - campaign planning is.

Firstly, I don't have a lot of time. I've been looking for tools to help and frankly the NPC, settlement and campaign planning sheets from the Pathfinder GameMastery book are a great start - I'd recommend reading it to fantasy DMs using any system.

I've tried TiddlyWiki in the past with mixed success - for this campaign I'm moving on to Obsidian Portal as it offers worldbuilding, character profiling, session reporting and so much more straight off the bat. I'm toying with the idea of posting photos of character minis for those that have them, and making HeroMachine characters for those who don't.

With Obsidian Portal letting me wikify everything that'sgoing on in the world - please don't ask me to think in straight lines! - I was looking for some inspiration for building the world. Enter an amazing idea courtesy of welshpiper.com: quick and dirty map generation tools, with the ability to roll "encounters" for each major hex, let me approach the world from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives at once. Let's hope I can resist the urge to try to generate the whole world!

Using the welshpiper templates for Hexographer, I'm generating a simple map that can be whacked into Obsidian Portal's Google-Maps-powered map tool to put the locations in the right place when I get round to wikifying them. Now I just need to build, or find, an adventure/encounter to go with each location and I'm about set up. Enter the GameMastery Guide's acres of tables...

Once I get a system down, I'll give a more structured breakdown. Anyone interested, or got any tips??