Posts Tagged ‘campaign’

Fantasy Playing Cards for Your Game

In fantasy games, taverns are often full of patrons drinking and playing cards. It strains our suspension of disbelief when we hear them draw the King of Hearts or play a game of Spades or Blackjack.

While it would be nice to have a fully developed deck quite different than our standard 52-card deck, it would not be compatible with most of the games we know, so we would also have to come up with new games. Some have the time (or money) for that, but most of us don’t.

Instead, a simple re-skinning let us draw the Empress of Arrows or play a game of Shields or Black Knight, adding a little bit of fantasy flair while still keeping the real-world cards and allowing us to play the games we know.

Zodiac: Pandas vs. Tigers

Low on time to prep our group’s regular Pathfinder game this week I decided to run an intro game of Savage Worlds. I asked my wife “What should you guys fight tonight?”. She listed off several things that were inherently unfightable before finally jokingly suggesting “Pandas!”. I suddenly recalled seeing this image of an armoured red panda recently and my Zodiac campaign setting was born!

Little did I know that vengeful blade-fisted tigers, panda whirlwinds of death (not in the way you’d think, either) and spirititual resource wars were soon to rear their awesome heads!

Reusing NPCs

I was reading this post about reusing NPCs over at the Spirits of Eden and I realised I had a lot more to say than could fit in a comment. So I’ve been inspired to write my own post on the topic.

I find that my players become very intrigued when they encounter an NPC who has been through some noticeable change since the last time the players saw them.

I’ve been using the same RPG world since I started running games, but legends of the PCs’ adventures live on and so do some NPCs…

Minigames: Knifey-Dicey

I recently had an NPC ask a PC if he’d like to gamble, but I hadn’t thought of the game they would play. Before I knew it I was saying in character as the NPC: “So, have you ever played… knifey-dicey?” On the spot, we came up with some quick rules for this two player minigame.

Demonsea: Setting Sail

Fact one: demons are awesome. Fact two: everything is better with pirates.

Combining them is an obvious move, yet I can’t think of a campaign setting I’ve seen that was dedicated to this concept. Hence, my new campaign setting: Demonsea.

I’ll be using Pyres of Vam as a place to preview material from Demonsea, so that readers can follow the development of this brand new campaign setting. But for now, read on to get the first sneak peek at this swashbuckling, demon-slaying world of mayhem and adventure!

Let the PCs Build the World

I’ve just finished running a short-term campaign with long-term in-game consequences. The PCs stopped the BBEG from completing her ritual to recreate the world (well, the continent, really) as she saw fit. Instead, they completed the ritual themselves and we worked together to create a new world from the player characters’ conscious and subconscious desires.

Return top

WHAT YOU'VE GOTTEN YOURSELF INTO

Pyres of Vam is a website about roleplaying, stories, world building and game mastering. I'm your host, Mockingbard. I'm also host to my alter ego(maniac), Vam, who doesn't quite "get" the world, but wants to rule it anyway. He's quite obsessed with monsters, magic, humanity and modern life. Forecast is cloudy with a chance of brainstorms. Welcome to the madness.