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Thursday, March 14, 2013

The eZine and the Kingdoms

I've been debating whether to include 9 and 30 Kingdoms setting material in the ezine. I've been getting the urge to write up some of my campaign ideas as material to be used by others, particularly the elf and goblin material. But it doesn't quite fit the focus of an ezine I plan to call "The Last-Minute GM". I'm conceiving it as being mostly practical tools, rather than campaign-specific interpretations.

Perhaps instead I should plan one or more modules/adventures, each focused around a specific 9 and 30 Kingdoms-related concept, plus additional material related to that concept. For example:

  • A goblin dungeon built around my idea of insane, semi-intelligent goblins instead of a " savage humanoid race with a legitimate, if primitive, culture", with a section on the goblin backstory from the 9 and 30 Kingdoms, which can be adopted by others as the backstory for all goblins in their campaign or just one small tribe.
  • An adventure to find/loot one of the lost elven homelands destroyed by the worms, again with the material on elves and other backstory that can be adopted for your entire world or just for that adventure area.
  • An adventure that features both neutral and chaotic orcs and chaos druids, plus backstory for the cult of Red Orc.

It's very tempting, but I have no idea how interested people are in really divergent interpretations of the traditional races.

4 comments:

  1. There's probably a few of us who are interested in looking alternative backgrounds. I seem to be reading more posts on the topic right now as well as making minor contributions to the discussion.
    Once you move from the stories that inspired the hobby to running the game, I think you realize that, especially for the humanoids, the story backgrounds tend to be "they're the bad guys" and then the action commences. And that's not enough for the game, unless you're just putting up cardboard targets for the PCs.
    I like your idea of including them as background notes in adventures, I think that would work well. Oh, and where do I subscribe?

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    1. Re: subscriptions: it will be an ezine, at least for now, so you can just download it when it's ready. But I haven't investigated yet whether Google Docs will let you upload EPUBs, so this may need to be worked out.

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  2. I'm interested in the 9 and 30 modules, certainly.

    Google Docs is now Google Drive, so I think it lets you upload pretty much anything. I still prefer Dropbox myself though, even though it has less free storage.

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    1. I'm hoping Google Drive lets you upload everything, but I wasn't sure. I think I was confused because they're still using the name "Google Docs" to refer to the collaboration feature on Google Drive, so some of their help pages seem to talk about restrictions to specific file formats. But after digging around, I can't find anything that specifically says "You can't upload these types of files".

      Now, whether there are restrictions on what files can be shared? That's another matter. I guess I'll have to just test it when I'm ready.

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