The Power of Names: Choosing Good Ones

When you’re choosing a name for an NPC, place, sinister ritual or sci-fi gadget, if you nail it on the first try, you usually know it — “That’s the perfect name!”

But what about when you’re naming an important campaign element and you’re not sure it’s the best choice? Here are five ways to make sure you picked a good name.

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Megastructures in Sci-Fi

Megastructures, an article in Strange Horizons, is all about fantastically large objects in science fiction — “any single artifact that challenges human preconceptions of size,” from Dyson spheres to space elevators and Halo’s ring.

The best of these are awe-inpsiring — excellent fuel for worldbuilding and campaign design, as well as being just plain cool. (I freely admit to being biased: I’m a huge sci-fi buff.)

This article offers a good overview of around a dozen of the best-known sci-fi megastructures, suitable for use as locations for set-piece encounters or backdrops for entire campaigns. (Via Metafilter.)

Character Development and Starting Power

When you run a campaign — using any RPG, in any genre — do you see a correlation between the PCs’ starting power level in mechanical terms and the amount of non-mechanical character development that happens during the game?

In other words, if the PCs start out fairly wimpy in terms of stats and abilities, does that lead to more or less development of their personalities, relationships and interactions with other characters than if they begin the game at a higher power level?

Setting Familiarity from Moment One, and Immersion

There are two interesting threads about campaign settings right now in the TT forums:

• How would you incorporate setting into actual game play?, which explores what’s involved in getting players — especially players who (understandably) don’t want to read hundreds of pages of published material — really immersed in your game’s setting.

• Getting players, from day 1, to feel as if a place is familiar to their PCs, which offers lots of good suggestions for making the PCs feel like part of the world from the first moments of the first session.

They’re both great topics, and the second one is new to me. I’ve never explicitly considered that question before, and prodding it opens up lots of roleplaying possibilities — especially for urban campaigns, which tend to feature home bases and well-developed core themes.

Technology that Improves your Game

Here’s a quick list of five gadgets that can improve your game — helping with organization, speeding things up and opening new avenues.

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Out-of-Print RPG Books: Resurrected

Via a news item on Gaming Report, I just saw that KenzerCo is offering many of their out-of-print titles as print on demand (POD) books on Lulu.

Several larger RPG publishers already sell their OOP products in PDF form (White Wolf and Wizards of the Coast, for example, each have hundreds of PDFs available on DriveThruRPG), but this is the first time I’ve seen OOP books offered in print form.

This strikes me as a very good thing for GMs — especially if you don’t like PDFs, or prefer physical books for longer products. I hope this is the start of a trend, and that every other RPG publisher will follow suit.

What do you think? Would you like to have this option for every OOP product?

Want to Be an Evil Overlord?

Do you like the evil overlord concept (in brief: have a second set of players run the big-picture factions in your game via email)? Been itching to play an EO, but don’t know any GMs that are recruiting? Or want to see what it’s like before trying out the concept in your own campaign?

If that sounds like you, you’re in luck! TT forum member elector count is looking for four evil overlords for his Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign. He’s written up some excellent faction info, and he’ll be filling the open spots on a first come, first served basis.

There’s also one other open call for EOs on our Evil Overlord Recruitment Bureau forum, for DrunkenEwok’s Eberron campaign. This one hasn’t seen activity for a little while, so it may or may not still be open.

If you’re on the fence, check out elector count’s writeups and see if any of them grab you. And if you’re interested, don’t wait too long — I expect these four slots to go pretty quickly.

Ka-Pow: Best Roll Ever

This past Saturday night in my group’s Stargate campaign, I made my best roll ever in 20 years of gaming.

I rolled my character’s two attacks simultaneously, and when they both came up 20s I was in shock. I went on to confirm both crits, and had the pleasure of doing 54 points of damage — in d20 Modern, with my fists.

This roll made me think of something odd, though: When I’m GMing, I don’t really get excited about my rolls. Usually if I roll spectacularly well, it means a PC is going down — and that’s a tough thing to get excited about.

Have you noticed this when you GM? And what was your most amazing roll ever (on either side of the screen)?

(My thanks to Sam for the phonecam pic — I’m so glad you thought to take a picture!)

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