Why You Should Play Pre-made Settings

Late last year I ran across this post on twitter that I found incredibly insulting. The argument, which I won't link to because I don't want to pile on the author, essentially argued: "If playing role-playing games is a creative endeavor, why do so many players choose to use the intellectual labors of other players…

The Frontier isn’t the Frontier

Recently I’ve been reading the book America Moves West by Robert E. Riegel and Robert G. Athearn and I was struck by the following passage: As it does today, when applied to such fields as science, industry, education, or religion, ‘frontier’ meant something new, relatively unknown, but always promising and exciting. To the pioneers the…

Let’s Go Exploring – If We Can Ever Find Somewhere Unexplored

Recently I started running a game of D&D set in the Forgotten Realms; and as I was describing where the players were in the world it occurred to me at how civilized the Realms (and my beloved Greyhawk for that matter) really are. The world still has wild spaces but there are clearly defined boarders…

The Gygax ’75 Challenge: Dungeon Level 3

For the Third Level of the Forgotten Temple I’ve decided to include a prison level. There’s a lot going on here that I don’t want to give away so that’s about as much a description as I’m going to have here. Suffice it to say that I'm really excited for when my players make it…

The Gygax ‘75 Challenge: How to Build the Gygax 75 Dungeon

How do you build a dungeon? For Gary Gygax this represented a fundamental question of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in 1975. In the course of play the players might spend their time exploring the world map, or visiting the town where they’ve established a base, but it was in the dungeon where the real adventure…

The Gygax ’75 Challenge: The Map Around the Dungeon

The second part of the Gygax ’75 Challenge is to create a map of the world. Gary suggests in the article that we use a large piece of hex ruled paper and a scale of 1 hex = 1 mile (or 1.6 km) although he admits to using different scales as well. I don’t have…

The Gygax ’75 Challenge: The Setting of the Campaign

The first step in Gary Gygax’s plan for creating a campaign for Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is to decide upon the overall setting of your campaign. For me this is typically the hardest part of the whole process because I tend to struggle with self-imposed limitations on what can, and cannot, go into a fantasy…