Posts belonging to Category Mood
Posted by Ravyn on January 19, 2012
(Do I even need to tell you what prompted this post?)
When last seen, the broken walls of the old buildings had shimmered in the starlight, haunted by the soft strings and fluting of the lone musician; now the musician is gone, and in the sunlight the walls are merely ruined stone. The carnival last night [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Places, Scening, Technique, World-building |
Tags: locations, mood, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, scening, the perfect version, World-building, writing | 
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Posted by Ravyn on January 18, 2012
My participation in RPG Blog Carnival: Fantastic Locations continues!
Light levels in a scene may be one of the most subtle ways of creating the mood for the perfect version of a location, but they’re not the most counterintuitive way; that honor goes to the people who create a location. After all, people aren’t part of [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Places, Scening, Technique, World-building |
Tags: locations, mood, people, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, scening, the perfect version, World-building, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on January 17, 2012
This series was written for RPG Blog Carnival: Fantastic Locations.
When I used yesterday’s post to introduce the idea of the perfect version of a location, one of the mood-contributing factors I discussed was light. It’s easy to forget, as an element; we’re used to always having at least some around us, and to not being [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Places, Scening, Technique, World-building |
Tags: light, locations, mood, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, scening, the perfect version, World-building, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on January 16, 2012
This one’s back to writing for RPG Blog Carnival. I love the way it makes me think about aspects of the theme I wouldn’t have looked into.
One of the things that a lot of people forget about making locations, fantastic or otherwise, is that the locations themselves are in a constant state of flux. The [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Places, Scening, Technique, World-building |
Tags: locations, mood, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, scening, the perfect version, World-building, writing | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 20, 2011
Over the past week and a half, I’ve been writing about factors that are going to influence how characters react to something that scares them. Now let’s put it all together and look at a step-by-step process for writing a character’s fear reaction.
First (assuming an immediate threat), let the instinctive, startle-reflex reaction hit: fight, flight [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, fear, mood, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 19, 2011
You’ve probably noticed one of the more odd blanks I put on my fear profile template: the role of fear in the character’s life. After all, not all characters deal with fear in quite the same way; there’s what they think of experiencing it, how willing they are to show it, how much it affects [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, fear, mood, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 18, 2011
I find that people’s ways of reacting to fear stimuli fall into two general categories.
On the one hand, you have direct responses to the fear itself: attempting to in some way eliminate the immediate need to be afraid. For some people, this might be removing themselves from the location of the fear-source, or trying to [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, fear, mood, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 14, 2011
Sometimes, it’s easier to approach something when you can fill in the blanks; characters’ fear reactions are no exception. The following is the skeleton of a possible way of recording a character’s fear profile; her standard reactions, her greatest fears and those most expected but least likely to actually bother her, her sensitizations and habituations, [...]
Categories: Characterization, Exercises, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, Exercises, fear, fear profile, mood, roleplaying, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 13, 2011
For a lot of people, it’s easy(ish) to imagine fear reactions when dealing with immediate threats to life and limb. Big guys with bigger weapons and apparent invincibility? Earthquakes that create yawning chasms right under them? Thing in the darkness picking off their allies one by one? Straightforward, for fear. But not all threats are [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, fear, mood, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 12, 2011
Fear reactions don’t just vary by character—they can also vary within a character’s emotional range by what exactly the fear stimulus is. How long-lasting is this threat? How intense? What sort of thing is it? How much room does the character have to respond to it? One of the things we can do to get [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, fear, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »