On Action Points and plot twists...

Well, my plans to use a Pathfindered version of Monte Cook's Hero Points have had mixed success... so it's time for a spot of tinkering!

Here's the original idea, straight from our campaign wiki:

“Joss” – An adaptation of what I read here on Monte Cook’s Hero Points, Pathfindered, and given a name players are familiar with already: Joss Points are gained through excellent roleplaying, creating memorable moments in game, contributing to this wiki – for example by posting to the Adventure Log in-character – and so on… They can be used for:

SpyCraft: Mission 1 - Annual training exercise

Our first mission in Codename: The Increment was standard training fare for our newly-created seasoned (5th level) characters.

We were tasked with infiltrating a Ministry of Agriculture laboratory near a sleepy rural town, and liberating some sensitive documentation stored in a safe. This was not a live fire exercise, but we were fully expecting the building to be a front, manned by other Secret Service employees. We had two days to get in, get the information, and get out...

World Creation - Gods

Image via Wikipedia (public domain)Just a note to say that the Goddesses of Ond have been created and installed in their place over the lowly denizens - some of which have also been profiled.

Each Goddess is an aspect of the original Creator - she was consumed by conflicting desires and close to insanity (as beings of incredible power must surely often be) and divided her power between four aspects. These represent the classic LG, CG, LE and CE alignments, while the races are intentionally aligned along one axis or the other but not both, leaving the now Neutral Creator to oversee them...

Spycraft 2.0 - first impressions

Image via Wikipedia (cc)Well - I have to say I'm impressed.

Spycraft is, along with Pathfinder, refuelling my love of the 3.5 rules system... the core mechanics are the same, but the variety that different publishers can squeeze out of a d20 is amazing.

CraftyGames have done an excellent job of bringing something fresh to the table, particularly in making INT and WIS still useful in a non-magical universe.

My favourite class?

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??