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 January 9, 2012
Sometimes, we find ourselves needing a new course of events. It might be for a counterfactual exercise, a chance to use new people in a pre-existing world (or to replay the same world with the same people but different characters), a way of answering somebody’s what-if, an alternate universe the characters have figured out how [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, History, Plot, Technique, World-building |
Tags: alternate timelines, meta, plot, roleplaying, Technique, World-building, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on January 5, 2012
More for RPG Blog Carnival, or at least inspired by it. This is my brain on poetic when mixing having just finished The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms with knowing location design is on the topic list in the very near future.
The root of a world is “What if”.
No, wait, that’s not quite right. The root of [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, Places, World-building |
Tags: freewriting, locations, my brain on poetic, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, World-building, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on January 4, 2012
This month’s RPG Blog Carnival is on fantastic locations. When I first saw the topic, before I read the post, I’d been kind of worried that it would be about the found only in fantasies sort of fantastic, rather than the awesome and memorable kind—and there are a lot fewer things that can be said [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Places, Scening, Technique, World-building |
Tags: fantastic locations, roleplaying, scening, World-building, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on December 29, 2011
I originally wrote this for an early RPG Blog Carnival on the subject of gods and religion. It all came down to one question: were the two necessarily mutually dependent?
I’ve always been partial to chicken-and-egg questions, particularly within the context of invented worlds. And I always come back to this one: Do gods [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Gods, Religion, World-building |
Tags: gods, religion, reprise, roleplaying, World-building, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on November 22, 2011
Yesterday, I talked about the importance of getting places to resonate with the people in a world and thus through them with the audience, even before anyone actually sets foot there, and talked about what sorts of factors might give the places that resonance. The next step, then, is to figure out what sorts of [...]
Categories: Description, Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Geography, History, Places, Scening, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
Tags: Places, resonance, roleplaying, World-building, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 21, 2011
One of the things I’ve always loved about a good world-building is a sense of place: the idea that after a little while, hearing a place name alone will bring in all the echoes of what the place actually means to the characters. It’s important, particularly in a narrative that bounces about between cities and [...]
Categories: Description, Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Geography, History, Places, Scening, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
Tags: Places, resonance, roleplaying, World-building, writing | 3 Comments »