Classical Literature

Tutorial Tuesday

Once upon a time I ran a Dungeons and Dragons game. It was Awesome. I spent hours and hours coming up with evil villains to fight, fantastical locations to plunder, and devious puzzles to solve. I drew map after map, developed governmental systems, and created realistic ecosystems for the flora and fauna. For weeks and months I worked on this campaign, devoted myself to it, all for the enjoyment of my players. With unbridled excitement I brought it to the gaming table....and it fell apart. The players pulled it apart, piece by piece, shat on my maps and wiped their mouths with its tears (I admit that's not entirely true. They drank it's tears).
I was gutted.
I was absolutely shattered. All that work for nothing. Months of my life gone to waste... And it was for a stupid stupid reason.
When I brought the game to the table, arms full of maps, models and dice, I had made the simplest, and most obvious of mistakes: I wasn't prepared for my players to interrupt my story.

I had written a story, a path that seemed obvious to my me, for my players to follow and to lead them along to show them the wonders of my magnificent world.... and they were having none of that. The veiled stranger approached them at their tavern table, and instead of talking to them, they stabbed him in the heart, looted his corpse and f***'d off to look for "elven ruins".
I had developed a book for the players to be actors in, not something for them to explore and this was extremely hard for me to come to terms with.

Luckily, despite being ruthless asshats, my players are also awesome guys and one of them pointed me in the direction of Dragon Magazine, and more importantly a series of articles about creating a functioning gaming world... Not a story.

I spent the next few weeks converting my gaming story to a gaming world. And spend the next couple years running a multiple sessions per week game. And the guys still talk about it 10 years later (*Cough* Broderick *Cough*... and yes that's an inside joke only a few people that read this blog will get.)

Now imagine my surprise when, during my last move I found these old Dragon magazines and even better, found all of them available online.

And now I'm going to share them with you all. I present unto you all....

Ray Winninger's "Dungeoncraft"

note: Yes, that is a link. You should click it.

 The above series of articles are the complete series of articles written by Ray Winninger about crafting a comprehensive and awesome gaming world. He takes you step by step through the process of creation and gives you hints and tricks to keep it functioning. The site that hosts it also includes a wonderful .zip file download so you can have the complete series for yourself.. which is nice because lugging around all of these old magazines is a bit of a pain.
If only i could find something similar for all of my White Dwarf magazines... all 300+ of them...

So get those pencils out, grab some grid paper and get to work!
Bean out~