Use of tarot as a story builder.

 I started to read Italo Calvino's book "The Castle Of Crossed Destinies". A book in which the famous Italian author constructs short stories based on spreads made with the tarot model designed for the Visconti family, the result or the intention was to present stories that were not vehemently subject to the conductive and fixed line of the narrative cliché.   

The result at the moment does not surprise me, since at the same time that he explains the story, he explains the tarot reading, which becomes a distraction rather than an element that attracts you even more to the story. I think he should have placed the tarot reading process at the bottom of the page and simply presented the story in a concrete way. 

However, the experiment is interesting and allows to demonstrate how the use of tarot reading can generate certain curious narrative experiences, which apart from being a creative element endowed with historical symbols, it seems to me that it does not have a divination or destiny reading value, no, not at all. Just simple cardboard made in China. 

In relation to the design of role-playing games, I use the Art Oracles: Creative & Life Inspiration from Great Artists as a starting point to inspire the creation of an adventure, through the suggestions or concepts the interests of the enemy, his abilities, desires and location were glimpsed, everything was added to make clear the presence of an apparently insignificant being, but that through certain twists of fate, was acquiring the methods to exterminate small groups of adventurers and thus be able to acquire power. 

The process was natural to me and did not take too much time, in general I only used it as the beginning, the seed, because from the first ideas a lot more were emerging and it is a matter of logic to join the scattered elements to build something functional and interesting that is worth publishing.

I suggest the use of these tools, especially focused on narrative elements to build the personal agenda of the npc or bosses, so that they look more striking and full of internal conflicts. I do not think it is advisable that every element of the story or the character's background be controlled by the reading of the cards.

So one of the best things to do is to take this tool as a simple bag full of words with concepts about certain emotional aspects of life. In fact, now that I've said it that way, it would be interesting to do just that, fill a bag with words and that's it.

So i actually made the strange gazibo story - DMG Born out of Longing- on sale now!

HERE

The transition to take an adventure to be published has always filled me with insecurities. To begin with, it takes me a long time to decide what kind of thing I want to publish, a story, a module focused on riddles, traps or magic equipment.  I don't even know why I think about it so much if in the end I've only published adventures, this part should be eliminated from my creative process about RPG related material, but in the end the doubt always comes back, because maybe what I would like to do is just publish stories, but it's easier to be read with a DnD adventure, at least in my totally individual experience. So in the end I focus on writing adventures, for those little moments where I can show off my narrative drive. And hey, that's okay. 

Finally it is a hobby whose main objective is to provide me with a small fund for minor emergency and especially to be able to share my ideas with whoever wants to know about them in the RPG field.

Since the work was published I wanted to continue doing more adventures immediately, but I was losing the momentum, as always happens to me, it is not that ideas do not come to me, in fact I think that is a problem that I do not suffer, what is dwindling in my person is the mood, events happen in life and the energies become scattered, the pen falls to the ground and I do not feel great desire to pick it up off the floor. 

Weeks turn into months and over time, I feel the desire to post something again. What helps me the most is to return to play, something that is less and less common, we all know that it is complicated and that the periods of having a constant table, rarely go beyond a good year or couple of years. Those tables are always shaken by the claims of life.  The fact is that playing at a table helps a lot, it renews you, it makes you remember how much you love the hobby.  

Time helps, therapy, new friendships, traveling, finding a partner and in general the change takes you out of a certain state of mind that sometimes leaves you petrified as if you have just been seen by medusa. However, that petrifying effect ends and then you want to go back to creating absurd, weird and funny things for a world of people you don't know. 

And that is how it should be, create, always create because my inner bird wants to sing and be heard. We are all the same in that aspect, I feel, well at least we who enjoy imagining worlds sitting face to face at a table. That's how it is for us, creators of realities.  

Les contes de la rue Broca - Big Inspiration material

When looking to generate an interesting twist while creating an adventure module for D&D, one of the most complicated things nowadays is to be able to generate an interesting twist throughout the adventure or at least at the very end. Since resorting to the classic, monster at the end of the cave, is not bad, but I believe that it could generate a feeling of being ripped off to the person who bought your material. And although some people will always complain about everything, I want to feel satisfied when I deliver something that is at least strange or a little curious.

So what I look for is always to take two elements when building a story, whether it's a song, movie, book, another module. I always integrate two elements and try to combine them with some of the settings that have official D&D material. And I have always found the results to be enjoyable.  

On this occasion, I took one of the main plots of the book "Les contes de la rue Broca" (stories with their own caricature). To join them with some of the towns surrounding the ring city of Sigil in the Planescape setting. 

And I think I'm going to do the same with all 26 stories created by Gripari, as they are completely crazy and I love them.  Such kind of approach are not innovative or so flashy within the SLO scene, but then I see that D&D players get very stuck in the typical and although many interesting things can emerge from such niche, I feel that they fail in the aspect of crazy, surprising or bizarre. 

So I like to add the weirdness to the formula of the D&D world, that was the reason I started publishing adventures in the DMG. Of course, a lot has to do with the huge audience it enjoys and the fact that even though I don't love the system, I understand it and find it functional. 

As we say in my country "some of whitewash and others of sand".

Some video about Hamlet

 

Soooo...you like it?

The main inspiration for "Diamond"...creation of a D&D module

Diamond is an adventure of 30 pages that this week I put for sale on the Dungeon Master Guild website

HERE!

And well, now that it is published I would like to share the main source of inspiration on which the adventure is based, as I consider it good to share the creation process to see if that encourages other people to create materials related to the hobby.

Okay, before we start, please note that I'm going to tell a big SPOILER about the adventure, so if you are interested in experiencing it, please don't continue reading.

After reading Eberron-Rising from the Last War, I was fascinated by the kind of adventures proposed in the city of Sharn, a monolithic metropolis with the air of a great capital of the modern world, where imposing buildings are mixed with neighborhoods lacking basic services. A city where crime, corruption and abuse prevail over the desires of any renowned personality, the city devours you, whether you want it to or not.

 As that was the message that the city conveyed to me and taking into account that at least a quarter of the book focuses on elements that can be useful to build adventures in that specific city, I looked for a book, film, musical piece or image that would give me a starting point to start generating the whole adventure.  I wanted to focus on espionage and suspense, so I started watching movies focused on the post-war paranoia that emerged during the cold war.

Of all that I came across, the film "Three Days of the Condor" really caught my attention, so I went on to divide the story of the film into its three main acts, and then find a way to convey its content to the world of Eberron. 

In order to avoid committing basic mistakes that could leave important information out of the module, I always use as a reference the index of one of my favorite adventures "Better than any man", because I really enjoy the way the pnjs and places of that adventure are presented.

With the foundation ready, I start to distribute the sections and I start writing as I feel like it, I don't have so much to worry about because the different sections already have a title that makes clear the need for content, but to be more specific, what you should never forget is this:

1. Section to talk about the main npc's, describing their personalities and goals.

2. Section about the different places where the adventure will take place.

3. Sections for rules or specific creatures, rules, items or traps proposed by your module.

4. And what will occupy more space; describing the events that the players will face sequentially.

For the fourth point, which may sound like the most complicated, just go by the structure of the story. Beginning, middle and end, it doesn't really have to be more complicated. Well, you can make everything much more complicated, but the result leaves much to be desired. For example in the adventure "Big Puppet" where it starts explaining everything that is happening practically at the end of the book, what you do is confuse the reader. It is better to explain the events of the module at the beginning or middle of your book. 

Diamond's main objective was to take "The three days of the Condor" and place the adventure in the city of Sharn, to begin with I didn't want the adventure to need any external module to work, so I started the module explaining in a general way details about Sharn.

And then I went on to focus on the story of the film, highlighting the elements that I found most interesting for an adventure...And that you should never forget, you are not writing a novel or a story, what you are doing is making a guide that someone else will use as inspiration to create their own version of what you are writing with their gaming group. Or that's how I feel books related to RPGs should work.

Ok...the most important elements of the movie are:

1. Condor works with nice friends at a place that does things for the government.

2. Condor goes out for lunch for everyone and upon returning to work finds that all of his friends from work have been murdered

3. Condor asks for help, but only receives assassination attempts

4. Condor looks for the best way to hide, in the process he falls in love and discovers who ordered them to be killed.

5. Condor confronts a corrupt general, but is overtaken by an assassin hired by someone higher up.

6. They tell Condor that they will let him live for now, because they know that although he knows a lot about the government's dirty dealings, the truth will change nothing.

Very well, my first problem starts with points 1 and 2, since they happen during the first 15 minutes of the movie, but they are vital since they completely change the main character, generating in his being a great feeling of persecution and guilt. In short, for the adventure to work, a bond must be generated with the group of npc's.

So I started to look for the kind of businesses that work in the city of Sharn, immediately it caught my attention to take a theater company and put the characters to role-play within a role-playing game, on the one hand to generate a funny scene, but mainly to produce a closeness with the secondary characters of the theater.  However I understand that on many gaming tables, maybe generating a strong bond to later shatter it can be very hard, so I put different warnings for scenes that I consider somewhat heavy. 

Apart from the theatrical work scene, there is also another scene where the characters go out drinking with their companions. And for the npcs, I focused on describing a group of tender, flawed, but simple people in love with their profession.  So that it becomes very easy for a couple of romances to blossom on the night out.

After the first day the adventurers are asked by multiple means to leave the theater to run some errands and when they return, they will see their companions reduced to rubble. Which starts points 3, 4 and 5 ... leaving love out of the formula. Being the middle of the module I propose what to do according to the routes that the players want to do, being the most common to be chased and observed constantly by the street.

Similarly, they have the option of trying to solve the crime, ask favors to the groups with which they have patronage and seek multiple ways to escape from the city, but if by some miracle they survive to the dawn of the 4th day, the group may encounter the final scene of the film, where one of the government guys tells the Condor that they no longer care and that in the long run they are going to die.

That was the general structure, but with changes instead of the government I put a couple of renowned criminal groups from the city of Sharn, I give importance to different locations of vital importance to escape from the city and set everything straight with a few random encounters that can break or create more tension as decided by the DM.

And so that's more or less how to create a module, maybe a simple one, but I think functional and sure to leave your gaming group with a lump in their throat. I could expand more on the topics of adventure creation, but I think it would be interesting to do it with another one of my adventures. 

Diamond an adventure that captures the more darker aspects of Sharn

Greetings, I'm Mexican Dicen and in a few days I'm going to publish on the Dungeon Master Guild page, the adventure "Diamond", which focuses on the coexistence of the players' characters with a group of beginner comedians in a ruined theater. The characters will have to navigate the streets of the city of towers with extreme prudence if they want to survive. 

Diamond is an adventure that I have been working on for almost a year, I am very happy to be close to publishing this work that has cost so much sweat. I think it will be my best work to date and I hope it will be enjoyed by all who get to buy it.

Apart from having a beginning that seeks to bring the characters closer to a fun group of actors, the adventure has a description of the different places they visit and a random table with random encounters. Apart from having a beginning that seeks to bring the characters closer to a amusing group of actors, the adventure has descriptions of the different places they visit and a random table with various encounters. The table has generic encounters (hobos, tattoo artists, robberies and more) so that it can be adapted to any adventure that takes place in the city of Sharn. 

And its most striking feature is the opening of the city to the players, since during the middle of the adventure, players are asked to walk around the city, so there is a description of multiple locations as well as the opportunity to make use of old contacts obtained in past adventures. 

Besides the game has a strong touch of suspense and is somewhat dense in its content, so it has different alerts, so that the DM decides with his group if they want to live certain scenes. The streets of Sharn have no mercy, but this is a game and each table decides how to play.

When it goes on sale, I hope you will be encouraged to purchase this adventure, so that you can enjoy it with your group. It is somewhat short, at most it could be spread over three 3-hour sessions, but it could still be resolved in one long session. It requires a lot of initiative from the players and I hope it will involve your players in a personal way with the dark side of Sharn's alleys.

I wish you good rolls. 

 

 

Witchburner (Indie Review)

 

The indie title I am reviewing this time it's Witchburner by Luka Rejec. Inside the book we are presented with a dark fantasy setting of heavy and somewhat dense writing in a certain romantic style.  

The rules are simple and draw inspiration from early editions of D&D (OSR) and also from contemporary narrative-centric games. The game tells us about a very concrete situation, where the players occupy the role of investigators who are called by a village in the middle of nowhere to find the witch that makes their lives a torment. The time period of the title seems to be set at the beginning of the industrial revolution and the religion reminds me of the ecclesiastical structure of game of thrones, you know, many gods and elaborate rituals that go beyond praying and singing.

The point is that the players are in a small town and must find the witch who is generating countless evils on the innocent villagers. The plot is extremely simple, but we have the description of 30 npcs and several random tables that will allow us to generate conflicts and tensions between the characters and the villagers. Another very important element is that we have a detailed chronogram of the events that could happen during 30 days, each day divided into morning, afternoon and night. 

These 30 days could be defined as the time limit for the group to find the witch or better yet, escape from the town, an option that, as the days go by, starts to look like the most sensible one. And although there are rules for the resolution of conflicts and the development of combats, much of what happens in the game will depend on the observations and especially on the relationship that the players have with each of the 30 main villagers.

The most interesting part of the game are the villagers, because the feeling that each one of them has towards the players is fundamental to define the path of the adventure. For example, if most of them harbor hatred or resentment towards the characters, then the investigators will end up being the ones accused of witchcraft.

In Witchburner the experimental aspect does not come from the rules, the innovation is found in the construction of relationships as a method for conflict resolution. The characters could act like madmen and burn whoever they want, but they still get more allies and opponents who will get them into more trouble.

I love the month-by-day guide that the book has, since it helps to divide the events and to have a precise follow up of the scenes and situations in the village. But I must say that I don't like the narrative material that accompanies the descriptions of the npcs, I'm sure many people enjoy it but the style is too cryptic and doesn't tell much about the life of those characters.

What I can't deny is that the adventure captivated me, obvious reason why I narrated the whole adventure but using other rules. Instead of following the book's suggestions, I preferred to use a trusty old school manual, but keeping the time rule and the town's love rule. 

By time rule, I mean that the game suggests keeping only three possible interactions with npcs per day per player or group, so that they are forced to plan their days in case they want to move forward with the investigation. On the other hand, with the love of the people, I mean that Witchburner has a list of the main npcs in which you should note whether they love, hate or are indifferent to the party. The more people love them, the more the npcs will be willing to burn the folks that hate the players, but if hate wins out, the adventurers will most likely have the npcs end up at the stake. 

In the same way, pay special attention to the rules related to the witch's trial, in which there are some indications or evidence requirements (mandregoras under the bed, dead cats under the table, dream catchers, drawer full of worms, etc...), which need to be gathered to convince the jury of the town.

It could be said that if the group has managed to burn the witch, everything has ended satisfactorily, although the best of all is that the book has several options to complicate the picture. The group of 3 investigators that I had to narrate, managed to stay successfully for 17 days in the village, accused 3 people of witchcraft, but ended up releasing them for lack of evidence. And who knows, maybe the group would have continued with their investigations had it not been for the accumulated hatred of so many inhabitants. So the only thing left for them to do was to escape from the town in order to save their own skin. 

Although it seems to me that the pdf has a high cost, I recommend that you get the adventure on discount dates. What I am sure of, is that from now on I will have the works designed by Rejec under my gaze.