Articles from July 2009
Posted by Ravyn on July 21, 2009
You wouldn’t know that they’re hurting. It’s not visible, like a limp or a scar; they’re too proud for that. They’ve modulated their voices so the choke goes away, convinced themselves it doesn’t really matter well enough to fool you, and though they’ve voiced their objections, it didn’t seem like something that was all that [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, The Real World |
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Posted by Ravyn on July 20, 2009
One of the best things about writing and gaming is that they take skill synergy like almost nothing else in the world does. No matter what you do or learn, odds are that some part of it can apply to the writing desk or the game table. Sometimes it’s direct, sometimes it’s obvious when you’re [...]
Categories: Biology, Cross-discipline, World-building |
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Posted by Ravyn on July 19, 2009
Title says it all. And no, I don’t mean the deaths of your minions, or of your enemies, or your lieutenants, or even that thing with the big eyes and bigger fangs you keep around to scratch behind the earholes and feed your enemies to. I mean your own death. Dying, dealing with it, and [...]
Categories: Generic Villain |
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Posted by Ravyn on July 18, 2009
This week, I talked about familiar as character prop. My best example for that isn’t Shizuyo, though she does pretty well on her own; rather, it’s a little fellow named Chiko.
Chiko was designed for my primary RPG character, Tuyet, from the species up. What I began with was a foot-long gliding lizard, with elemental inclinations [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
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Posted by Ravyn on July 17, 2009
I’ve always been fond of magic items that were very much a product of their histories. You know there’s a story, and there are relatively intuitive ways to figure out what that story is. (And not just “Ask the item”, either, even if it does have intelligence or a talkative spirit.) But there’s one element [...]
Categories: Backstory, Characterization, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Technique, World-building |
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Posted by Ravyn on July 16, 2009
If there’s one thing most good GMs and writers have in common, it’s that they want to get better at what they do. It’s hard for people to be objective when looking at their own work, though; that’s why they ask for comments. Only a lot of people aren’t very good at giving them. I [...]
Categories: Feedback, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Player Advice, Technique |
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Posted by Ravyn on July 15, 2009
Familiars: a perpetual presence on a character’s shoulder, not quite thinking in lockstep with the character but not entirely separate, either. I’ve written about familiars before. But that was about the familiar as a character in her own right; tonight, I’m going to talk about the familiar as an outgrowth of a character. (Needless to [...]
Categories: Character archetypes, Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Nonhuman characters, Player Advice, Secondary characters |
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Posted by Ravyn on July 14, 2009
For RPG Blog Carnival—you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to try to fit “D&D” when you’ve got a system-neutrality policy. You could also call this one “Why I Swore Off New Adventuring Parties”.
Walking into the tavern, for me, is like walking through molasses. It’s what everyone does. Only reason I’m doing it is that [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, stories |
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Posted by Ravyn on July 13, 2009
What value is the image that people want others to see?
You’d be amazed.
That image has caused otherwise clever people to fall into stupid traps because to do otherwise would risk damaging the image, and caused otherwise stupid people to do clever things because they feel that is what’s expected of them. It’s caused otherwise intelligent [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, The Real World |
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Posted by Ravyn on July 12, 2009
In the beginning, there were stories, but there was no conflict—sure, little things like “His piece is bigger!” or “The property line is HERE!”, but not big-C Conflict. And the forces of narrative causality looked upon this and were bored. And in this boredom they split the light from the dark. And to the dark [...]
Categories: Generic Villain |
Tags: original posts | 2 Comments »