X1, The Rings of Doom

X1, The Rings of Doom, my adventure for The Secret Fire RPG, made it to DriveThruRPG.com just in time for Halloween. You get 18 pages of old-schooly, underground mystery and death for $7.99. I recommend it highly, of course, but I would. With any luck, it will garner a few impartial reviews before too long.

I'd love to write more about it now, but I'm swirling round and round in the deadline drainpipe and if I don't keep my mind on the money, I'll get flushed. So it's back to work. I promise that I will give a fuller accounting of X1 sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Lure of the Unknown

“The unknown” has a hypnotic lure. If you’re anything like me, then you started exploring the dark recesses of the closet the moment you were old enough to switch on a flashlight. After the closet came the basement, the attic, the garage, neighbors’ yards, the woods down the hill, and eventually the storm drains that carry runoff hundreds of yards beneath the streets through pitch black, echoing concrete pipes the perfect size for a 10-year-old to crouch in.

A world without secrets is a world that doesn’t need adventurers. It might need heroes to save it from some catastrophe or looming evil, but it doesn’t need explorers willing to strike out into the darkness with no guarantee that they’ll make it back home to the light or investigators driven to peel back layers of concealment and deceit from ancient horrors or modern crimes.

Let’s look briefly at three types of secrets that can be buried in a campaign: geographical, historical, and magical.

(Read the rest at Kobold Quarterly ...)

A Terrible Place to Visit

How often have you heard the phrase, “It’s a great place to visit but I’d hate to live there?”

When designing a fictional world, you’re actually aiming for the opposite reaction: “It’s a terrible place to visit, but I’d love to live there.”

Your world is a terrible place to visit because it’s falling apart at the seams. It might be threatened with conquest by a godlike necromancer and his undead legions; it could be undergoing some sort of magical catastrophe; it might be in the final throes of social collapse, overrun by zombies, engulfed in war, split into dozens of squabbling city-states ruled by iron-fisted, would-be emperors, or at the beginning stages of rebuilding from the ashes in the wake of any of the above.

(Read the rest at Kobold Quarterly ...)

Adventure Notebook: The Land Beyond the Shrine

This week, Adventure Notebook takes you to the secret land beyond the forgotten shrine. This is a great little gateway to further adventure deeper down inside the Earth (or wherever your adventures take place). I'm a sucker for lost world romances, and this is the back door to the lost world.

This might be the last Adventure Notebook for a few weeks. Interest seems to be waning, if the number of page views and downloads is a reliable indicator, and my time will be at a premium until early November. We'll see how things go this coming week.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy The Land Beyond the Shrine. I'd love to hear where it leads your heroes.

• The Land Beyond the Shrine

Follow Friday

I'm proud to be a member of a writer's group called the Alliterates. This group was started way back in the '90s, with members drawn entirely from the ranks of TSR. It's expanded a lot since then. We now have 32 members, including people who never worked for TSR or Wizards of the Coast. Our complete membership roll is below.

This being Follow Friday, you can tune in to everything the Alliterates do -- which is quite a lot, between games, novels, kickstarter projects, ebooks, poetry, art, and whatnot -- by subscribing to the Alliterates list on Twitter, by liking our new Facebook page, or by checking the Alliterates website.

• Alliterates on Twitter*
• Alliterates on Facebook
• Alliterates on the WWW

* You should also follow Steve Sullivan. He's one of the more prolific Alliterates, but because it's his list, he can't put himself on it.

Alliterates Roll Call

• Wolf Baur
• Jason Blair
• Bill Bodden
• Stan! Brown
• Tim Brown
• Jamie Chambers
• Monte Cook
• Bruce Cordell
• Troy Denning
• Matt Forbeck
• Dave Gross
• Jeff Grubb
• Scott Hungerford
• Rob King
• John Kovalic
• Jennell Jaquays
• Jess Lebow
• Will McDermott
• Jason Mical
• Doug Niles
• Don Perrin
• John Rateliff
• Thomas Reid
• Mike Ryan
• Steven Schend
• Lorelei Shannon
• Lester Smith
• Stephen D. Sullivan
• Monica Valentinelli
• Eddy Webb
• Johnny Wilson
• Steve Winter

Apocalypse or Post-Apocalypse?

All my favorite RPG settings are either apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic. Yours probably are, too.

Is that a surprise? Take a moment to think about it.

The most obvious footprint of the apocalypse is the ruins it left behind. When was the last time you saw an RPG campaign map that didn’t have a symbol for ruins in its key?

Somewhere in the Gazetteer there will be a discussion of the empires that rose and fell in the centuries leading up to the current era. The causes for their downfalls always involve megawar, anger of the gods, or techno/magical calamity on an unimaginable scale—assuming the place wasn’t just overrun by zombies.

The fact is, an apocalypse has much to offer a world of adventure.

(Read the rest at Kobold Quarterly ...)

Adventure Notebook: Maze of the Dreamer

Another Monday, another Adventure Notebook!

This one is a bit trippy, and that's by design. It's a case of an idea that's too big for this format. I'd love to design a full-size dungeon around this theme. It cries out for more. If you use this, throw in whatever else pops into your head. It will work.

The tiles in Maze of the Dreamer were drawn by David Millar, who hasn't been featured in an Adventure Notebook before now. AFAIK, Millar is the man behind Dave's Mapper, the online tool that generates these Adventure Notebook maps. I can sit in front of the computer, clicking up new maps endlessly and just exploring them with my eyeballs. Dave's Mapper is a really excellent tool. Experiment with it for a while and I'm sure you'll agree.

• Maze of the Dreamer