Tag: RPG

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A is for Alleys – City of Adventure Alphabet (Preview)

That’s right, I am making one of those marvelous “cool thing” Alphabet books the magnificent Michael Curtis invented! I wanted to create this for a long while. In fact, I have list and lists of entries of “Alphabet Book” of many types, at least one for each of my games. And since now I wan working on finalizing the edits and revisions on Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells 2e for publication, I wanted to make something to go with it to have some cool urban crawl adventures, and I wanted to have something going on in here, on this blog! Thus, we are here now, as I write the letters of this City of Adventure Alphabet book, I will post previews of those entries here. Not in their entirety, but with a good portion so you can see how it’s turning out.

So let’s start with…

A is for Alleys

Public Domain cute artwork of a city. To be substituted by an artwork of an alley I hope to make someday…

Alleys are everywhere, and they lead to nowhere. Well, unless you really know where you are going. Or you found a secret passage to a hideout, stumbled upon a portal to another dimension, was dragged down to the Abyss by a demon, or any sort of other weird things that often happens at such dark, narrow, smelly, and secretive locations. More common in less savory areas of the city, alleys are often where those that want to remain unseen meet, and hide their affairs. From common bandits, cultists, corrupt guards, to sorcerer cabals, demonologists, alien cats, to things much weirder and more ominous.

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WIP – My Dream(less) Journal – What is it?

I am working on a new game called My Dream(less) Journal (that’s actually the game’s 5th name already in its brief existence). I had a flash of inspiration one day talking to my wife, Raquel, about dreams, about how I wish I could remember them, and about writing a Dream Journal. I suddenly realized all these solo games, journaling games, and generators would be perfect to manually generate dream I could write about!

And thus came to be the idea about a solo journaling game about dreams, where you can create your own dreams, based on your own experiences and memories, and then use it to write your own fake dream journal. A Dream Journal for the Dreamless we called.

What follows is a preview of the part in where I explain what is is in the draft of the game. This means this is not the final text folks, but I am enjoying it a lot so fat!

I daydream so much that when I lay down to sleep, my dream pool is all used up. – Diogo Nogueira

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Describing Scenes to Prehistoric Characters

A cave person carrying a torch and illuminating a cave wall with a weird symbol.
Art by Felipe Maria

The way the characters in the game see and recognize people, objects, structure, and other things is not like we do. We see a small oval vertical smooth placid lake hanging on a cave wall that casts your reflection back at you and we immediately recognize a mirror, they will not.

When we look at something we try to understand it with the library of things we already understand, so as to make it “less scary”. And we know more than any other humans ever knew. The characters in Primal Quest do not have this knowledge however, so they will need to “understand” the things they find in the mythical and weird primal world of the game with what they know, which is not much beyond what they see in the primeval setting they live in.

So when you are describing the world to the players, being their sense in the game, make sure to remember that. Try to imagine you don’t recognize any of these things, and can only rationalize them through the natural world and early technological objects. And then try to explain this to the players. Here are some examples to help you get inspired.

Crashed Plane: A huge creature made of this shining hard rock that makes loud clattering noises when hit. It appears to have wings, but one of them was torn apart from its side, and hundreds of small blank eyes stare at the nothingness. A small mouth on the side lies open, and a furry humanoid is getting in, carrying a sack on their back.

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Primal Quest – Players as Ancestors

Art by Felipe Sarau

In the mythical primal world of Thaia, the ancestral spirits of the world can sometimes  influence the fate of their descendants by interfering with the world and by lending these individuals their talents. Almost like how players do with their characters.

Thus, in Primal Quest, players also act in the role of Ancestors of their characters, watching over them, lending their strength, and granting them benefits from time to time. As their descendants go out into the world and face a myriad of challenges, they grow, change, and earn Ancestral Points (AP). Then, the players can spend these AP either to improve their descendants through Character Improvement or to grant them Ancestral Gifts.

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