A Letter from Captain Gothnog Dragonheart

Transcription

1 August 2013 Sa m ple file Issue #2

2 A Letter from Captain Gothnog Dragonheart Greetings my fellow adventurers. Welcome to the second issue of Theater of the Mind. Thank you to all for making the first issue a great success. So far, the magazine has been very well received by our readers, and it is now available in print. We have two new columns in the magazine this issue. The first is called Appropriate Muse, and it will discuss using movies, television, books and other media to inspire your role playing game. The second column is called Two Page RPGs, and as the name implies, each issue will contain a very simple role playing system based on a different genre. In other news, we have been debating about the magazine s release schedule, and after serious consideration, we have decided to change over to a bi-monthly schedule. The reason for this is that we need to have a more regular flow of incoming submissions to sustain a monthly publication, and we re not quite there yet. This is where you come in. Theater of the Mind is intended to be a magaizine of role players, by role players and for role players, which means that reader participation is not only desireable, but essential. At the back of this magazine we list the upcoming themes for the magazine, as well as the kinds of content that we re looking to receive. Now some of you may say to yourselves well, I m just not good enough to submit anything to a magazine, but that s not true. Chances are you are better than you think, and even if you re not, we have some excellent editors who can polish it up, or if it s just too rough, we can pass on the idea to another contributor to pick it up and run with it. The point is that we can t do this without you. Let s create the greatest role playing magazine together. Sincerely, Alex Guillo te aka Captain Gothnog Dragonheart Editor-in-Chief, Theater of the Mind Magazine 2

3 Issue #2 August 2013 Editor-in-chief Editors Katrina Ray-Saulis Kerowyn Guillotte Writers Ander Wood Brian Gregory Brian M. Sammons Ferdinand Boleslawski Forrest Bugay Jessica Pink Kirk Wiebe Michael Natale Rob Davis Runeslinger Publishers Kerowyn Guillotte Art Director Artists Runeslinger Tim Harper Creative Advisors Ander Wood Contents 2 From the Editor 3 Credits and Contents 5 Copper Trimmed Golden Rule by Ander Wood 5 Random Map: The Hidden Cabin 7 Genre by Forrest Bugay 8 Limbo by Brian Gregory 10 Story: Under the Bed by Michael Natale 15 Getting Lost by Kirk Wiebe 16 Creature Feature 17 Comic: Shape Change by Tim Harper 18 Taking the Rules Literally Travel and Getting Lost by Ferdinand Boleslawski 21 Story: The Streets of Southbridge by Jessica Pink 22 From the Fringe: Review: Zombie Dice by Kerowyn Guillotte 23 From the Fringe: Review: The Art of Shen Ku 24 One Page Adventure: Aroca Prison by Rob Davis 25 Appropriate Muse Lost and Loving It by Brian M. Sammons 27 Story: Tales of the Blue Dragon by Kerowyn Guillotte 28 Two Page RPGs: Fantasy Edition by 30 Small Beginnings Violence in Children s Games 32 Playing a Role Beyond the Pale by Runeslinger 34 The Void 35 A Vacuum in Role Playing 37 About the Publishers 3

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5 House Rules This section is intended to describe house rules in very general terms, and should be applicable to many different systems, styles and genres. Illustration by Sébastien Allard COPPER TRIMMED GOLDEN RULE by Your Main Man Ander Wood Despite the ubiquitous placement of comments throughout rule books, which explain this term, many RPG groups miss a fundamental core RPG concept that rules are only a choice. A choice that the RPG s designers settled on. At any point in game mechanic design there are several possible paths a game can go down. Understanding the fact that game designers must make choices, many of which are arbitrary, should make you feel more comfortable in exercising your own choices. Games are not designed to be played RULES AS WRITTEN. Their rule sets are designed to help GMs convey the tone and theme of that particular RPG in the fashion that seems most natural to the designer. That being said, the designer might have a completely different GMing skill set than you. Bend, break, twist, adapt, and change every rule that gets in your way. Rules are not sacrosanct. In fact, they are no more than mere facilitators. The greatest danger of the rules as written mentality is a natural tendency to strangle creativity. Examples of this behavior abound. It is often not possible for a game designer to allow room in a work for an advantage for every sort of weapon. If, for example, a certain advantage is given to a dagger, the rules should present no problem in modifying this advantage to accommodate a character that wishes to use that advantage with throwing axes. The reason for this is that both of these weapons typically have a similar power level in most games and can both be used as thrown and/or melee weapons. Depending on the nature of this advantage, it might not be wise to use it for a higherpowered weapon such as a sword. Then again, that advantage, or an extrapolation of it, might work well in that instance. This may cause you to wonder, when should I allow for such modifications. The truth is, any time it feels right. Explore the ideas of rules, successes and missteps. These explorations will lead to growth in your understanding of both Game Mastery and character portrayal. No one, including anyone who has ever designed a game, gets it right all the time. The key is to learn from your mistakes. Do that and you ll do just fine. Ander Wood is a video blogger and game designer with over 20 years experience in role playing. He is currently publishing an innovative role playing game called Within the Ring of Fire. 5 Blood and Guts One of the biggest issues people tend to have with any system is how it deals with injuries, wounds and their various effects on the character. When house-ruling hit points (or whatever they are called in your preferred RPG) it s important to decide how lethal you want your game to be, and how long you want combat to take. A general rule of thumb is that the faster the combat, the more lethal the game, and vice-versa. The more lethal games tend to be grittier, more realistic, and generally focuses on role playing. After all, if combat is extremely lethal, then the PCs will be much more likely to talk their way out of a fight than charging in with guns and/or swords a-blazin. The biggest complaint about the hit point system for Dungeons and Dragons is that a powerful enough fighter can fall from a crazy height and still survive. So differentiating between combat hit points and other damage might make sense. Using the D&D fighter example, instead of taking hit points from a fall, he could take Constitution damage. This would put everyone on more or less equal footing. In other words, a fall from 1,000 feet will be lethal, whether the character is a 20th level fighter or a no-level peasant. Another way to modify hit points is to tweak how those points are restored and how quickly. That way, you can make combat deadly without crippling the character for the next four game sessions. Finally, it s important to decide what hit points mean. When the fighter gets hit with the arrow, is he actually hit (taking physical damage) or is it more like a kind of battle fatigue until the final, lethal blow is delivered? Of course some of this boils down to the desired realism of the game. Despite what Hollywood would have people believe, in real life a single bullet from a firearm will more than likely incapacitate the average human, regardless of their training. A soldier can be trained to tolerate more pain, and so continue to function with serious damage to their body, but they would certainly not be unaffected by it. So don t be afraid to play around with your damage system, and don t get hung up on words like hit and damage. It s up to you to decide what those mean in the context of your game.