Posted by Ravyn on March 4, 2013
Weather is one of the easiest things for a writer to forget. It’s all around us, but while it impacts us, it doesn’t always impact us much—modern conveniences tend to work around the worst of it, unless it’s reached the point of catastrophe. As a result, a lot of us—particularly those of us in “Weather? [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, World-building |
Tags: plot, roleplaying, scening, weather, World-building, writing | 
3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 18, 2013
All of the conflicts I’ve seen work have made two major points to the players/characters: It has to be you, and it has to be now.
It has to be you. This is probably the most important of the two, playing as it does to the egos of the players—and to the verisimilitude of the overall [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Motivation, Plot, Technique |
Tags: conflict, GM Advice, motivation, plot, roleplaying | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on December 25, 2012
When you’re trying not to make your hints too obvious, or you want to give people a cross-section of what’s going on in a location, sometimes just one rumor isn’t going to do the job. Instead, you’ll want a rumor cloud: a set of rumors with varying levels of truth and relevance. I find the [...]
Categories: Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Tactics, Technique |
Tags: exposition, plot, roleplaying, rumors, world, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on December 24, 2012
I’ll be honest—when I first started writing this post, I’d been going to spell out steps for devising a single rumor. Then I realized it isn’t necessarily sequential; I, for one, start with the subject and message when I’m planning a rumor ahead, but a lot of the time I have to come up with [...]
Categories: Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Tactics, Technique |
Tags: exposition, plot, roleplaying, rumors, world, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on December 18, 2012
I talked a lot yesterday about how useful rumors as a narrative device can be, but they often run afoul of dubious execution. In particular, I find one treatment of rumors that, unless the whole point is not-so-subtle herding, drops a lot of what makes rumors useful: when the story falls under the description “All [...]
Categories: Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Tactics, Technique |
Tags: exposition, plot, roleplaying, rumors, world, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on December 17, 2012
Whether they like them in the real world or not, when it comes to their own worlds, plot creators—writers, GMs, you name it—tend to love rumors. Why?
Rumors are everywhere. You don’t have to worry about justifying people maintaining such a perfect oral tradition that the one little poem that perfectly describes how to circumvent the [...]
Categories: Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Tactics, Technique, World-building |
Tags: exposition, plot, roleplaying, rumors, world, writing | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on December 10, 2012
Is there any writer—GM—creator of any sort who has not at some point dropped a metaphorical mountain on at least one member of her cast? I don’t think so. Tragedy and trauma may not be quite as ubiquitous as ants in San Diego, but they come pretty close. It’s pretty easy to tell why mountain-hurling [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, Mood, Plot, Technique, Voice and Style |
Tags: emotional trauma, plot, roleplaying, Voice and Style, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 20, 2012
Yesterday, I talked about building a world around characters, rather than building enough of a world to mold characters into and moving outward from there. I’ve been toying with this recently, and I’ve found a pretty good sequence for trying to grow outward from one or two characters to a plot and a world.
I start [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, World-building |
Tags: concepts, plot, Technique, World-building, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 19, 2012
I’ve always looked at putting together a story in a fresh new world as starting with the world, getting enough of it together to give yourself ideas, then sticking characters in it, then letting them bounce off each other until you have something approximating a plot. Wasn’t that how all the people with the really [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, World-building |
Tags: concepts, plot, Technique, World-building, writing | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on October 16, 2012
Yesterday, I talked about the idea of culture as character. To say that I’m a fan is a bit of an understatement—one of the things I was thinking, while sitting through the panel that set off yesterday’s riff, was that I keep trying to angle for an RPG of manners. It’s not just one appealing [...]
Categories: Concepts, Cultures, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, World-building |
Tags: concepts, culture, plot, roleplaying, World-building, writing | 1 Comment »