I just finished playing the demo for Dragon Age II and I found it had an interesting take on storytelling. Gameplay was sometimes cut with scenes of a character, in the future, talking about the hero. It was interesting because a) the storyteller was alluding to events that had yet to unfold, and b) the storyteller sometimes lied. What was cool, though, was that you played those lies and then played the truth. This technique is a kind of frame narrative (a story within a story), and twists on storytelling like this can be interesting in pen and paper roleplaying games too.

Here’s an outline of another campaign setting I’ve been working on. Feel free to use and alter it as you wish. If you do use it or have some ideas about it, I’d love to hear them.

Very young children use the spark sporadically, for play and their own simple purposes, without thought. As children grow older, they begin to understand their powers better, using them consciously and with more control. Around age 10 for girls and 12 for boys, Transition begins.

Children undergo many physical and psychological changes during this stage and it is when their spark is at is peak, very powerful and unpredictable.

Transition is a stressful and strange time for children and many lose control of their magic as the power flares and fluctuates, burning brightly before it is snuffed out entirely. Girls usually complete the Transition by ages 15-17, while boys usually complete it by ages 16-18. After this, the spark is dead forever.

Because adults are unable to harness magic, children are highly valued for their abilities. Many children do not utilise the spark effectively and are more dangerous to themselves than others, or are merely an annoyance. However, children of particular talent and power are recruited into harsh military programs to perfect their control over the spark and harden them into tools of war. Children are taught from a young age that fighting for their faction is the highest honour and the greatest deed that one could hope for. Propaganda floods the schools, homes and streets, and armies recruit children as young as 8 to train to fight their horrendous battles.

Emergency services are inundated with calls that they terminate because they appear to be pranks or non-emergencies. Stuff about aliens and werewolves. That kind of thing.

That’s where Hang Ups comes in.

They’re an independent (and not technically legal) group that intercepts these abandoned calls and sifts through them for seeds of truth. Armed with their knowledge of the paranormal, they respond to potentially legitimate calls to help those that the authorities ignore.

When I present this to my players, I’ll explain most of this as we go. But to get them excited for, it I made this one-page PDF flyer. Feel free to use it with your own group.

I’ve just started using TiddlyWiki for worldbuilding and it is such an excellent tool that I just had to post about it. If you haven’t heard of it, it is a free downloadable and portable personal wiki that can be used offline.

I love worldbuilding, but the problem with that is that I just want to keep on building. I get an idea and make a setting, then I have another idea that doesn’t fit with the setting we’re now using, or a sci-fi device while we’re playing fantasy, or something else that just doesn’t fit. So, I write it down for later. Using a basic Word document is fine, but it is static. Using a wiki allows you to link anything to anything else.

Let’s face it, some players don’t like writing backgrounds for their characters. Parents? Dead. Friends? None. Hobbies? Fighting. What if you could flesh out their backgrounds through play instead of having them write it all down at the start? Well, with mini-flashbacks you can! And they’re not just a good tool for background-phobic players. Players who are into writing pages and pages of background can still benefit from this technique. It can also help link the players into the world and the immediate situation.

• #FreeMarket just arrived! Here’s a photo of the unboxing http://twitpic.com/2nxdkd
• My limited edition copy of #FreeMarket is no. 171. Haha, check out the tech malfunction! Thanks @projectdonut http://twitpic.com/2nxftp
• Barring a door from flaming zombie horde, the sorcerer rolled a… ZERO! (Critical miss with -1 to Strength). Lucky he’s got Action Points!

Avast maties! It be Talk Like a Pirate Day! To celebrate we be postin’ a piratical article about the colourful characters ye be likely to meet if ye be so bold as to venture into Haulshore: a treasure-hunter’s paradise in the Demonsea campaign settin’. We’ve even got a big campaign seed for ye, and hooks for each o’ the captains. Ye could also use this here article for some other world, but if ye arrren’t privy to the secrets o’ the Demonsea, cast ya eyes yonder to read of a world of demons, pirates and adventure on the high seas!

I don’t know how it happened, but I got this idea for a campaign setting in my head recently that wouldn’t go away.  The basic premise was Pride and Prejudice meets Jurassic Park. I just had this image of a parasaurolophus pulling a slightly steampunk carriage through Victorian London. This is a London where regular animals have died out and genetically resurrected dinosaurs have taken their place, both as pets and in the wild.

When the PCs eventually encounter a monologue-spewing villain or a weighty Tome of Exposition, instead of them sitting there listening to you – the all-knowing GM – reading it, why not have them play out the events through flashbacks? It’s not something you want to be doing all the time, but every once in a while it can really make an impact, highlight the importance of the information, and even give players a chance to play a different character. It gives a different perspective and allows for unusual outcomes and situations.

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.