Darkness #RPGaDAY2025

 

I don't think I've ever managed to convey a proper sense of darkness, which is why the “Veins of the Earth” made by this blogger  ...The module appeals to me so much. The module includes different ways to generate natural caves, with their obvious risks and a description of the creatures based on the sounds they make, their scent, and changes in the ambient temperature.

The creatures are divided into two types: individual creatures that can cause problems for adventurers, and others that are neither aggressive nor carnivorous, but whose alien behavior or inability to relate to our reasoning causes them to oppose the interests of explorers who have made the ambitious error of delving too deeply.

The other type of beasts are presented as societies or communities, plagues, entire species that function differently from simple individuals, whose descriptions can be an entire adventure or campaign in themselves. In reality, there is a lot to review. Some entries, however, are simply incomprehensible, but this aspect is not overused, as the incomprehensible barely covers a few pages.

I find it very difficult to work in the dark, as we are generally asked to rely on other senses that we are not very familiar with. And I think that the fact that a character cannot even see their own hands leaves them somewhat immobilized.

If you add a torch to the terrible darkness, everything becomes much more manageable. But if we find ourselves in a game where practically everyone has night goggles, what's the point of night or darkness?

So I dare to point the finger at the fifth edition of DnD for steering me away from the habit of storytelling that emphasizes darkness, too many spells, environmental elements, and abilities that come from ancestry... Perpetual and eternal day, for fear of causing fear and despair. The tyranny of joy sweetened with sugar glass strikes again.

Path #RPGaDAY2025

 

A Path ?... Why?

I have often tried to go out and walk without any destination in mind, but my anxious mind always wants to set a goal, a mission. I feel that many players are the same and find it difficult to deal with the sandbox in its raw form, an objective role-playing game where the world simply reacts to the truly significant actions of the adventurers, leaving the big storylines as side quests that can become central over time. However, other points of departure could arise. At the end of the day, it's a sandbox, and the adventure is defined by the wandering paths that your boots leave in the mud.

Flavour #RPGaDAY2025

 Bringing flavor to the game through art. It's complicated, I don't usually use graphic support in games, and music tends to fade into the background. Similarly, my acting skills are similar to those of any actor in Turkish Rambo.

Humph.....so...

What to do??? Hum...

The flavor, however, is present and changes depending on the moment in a role-playing game and varies according to the title being played. Between Dnd and Paranoia, it is clear that the flavor change is palpable.

And sometimes it's hard to get players to mix with a new flavor they're not used to. Oh, it's possible that some will do so and others at the same table will prefer to be part of their individual fantasy. It is difficult to convey the feeling and make others understand the intention you want to convey as a narrator. The plot, the setting, the secondary characters—those are the ingredients that give flavor to any role-playing game, set it apart from the rest, or maintain a dynamic that keeps the tone agreed upon for the campaign (if applicable).

If in Paranoia I want to create a sense of chaos and danger, the way I chose to do so was through cynical and paternalistic discourse on the part of the highest-ranking officials responsible for guiding the players.

Mistakes, fouls, or jokes that didn't attract anyone's attention could be punished with deaths that felt unfair by any standard. The actions of the computer, the stiff and cynical behavior of most NPCs. 

In this way, I guided the players down a specific path. Rewarding the jokes that made me laugh with Moxies, dynamics, and characters managed to convey a particular flavor that is very different from the style of the Ravenloft campaign I am currently playing.

In this sense, the rules can help, whether certain behaviors are received with appreciation or negatively, all of which needs to be taken into account. However, I am left with the feeling that I am only scratching the surface of a complex and difficult-to-understand rat king.

This requires books on theater theory; with simple experience alone, I don't think much can be revealed about the meaning of flavor in a role-playing game.

Origin #RPGaDAY2025

 The origin of it all is a story that now makes me cringe, but I'm going to share with you everything that happened and the reasoning behind the first game in which I took on the role of narrator, DM, or whatever you want to call it.

THE ORIGIN

At that time, I was obsessively playing GTA 3, which led me to become quite familiar with the city of Liberty City. I was 12 years old and had played a game of DnD with my brother a few weeks earlier, so after reviewing the Call of Cthulhu manual, I wanted to run a game without knowing what I was doing. With a lot of ignorance and enthusiasm, I got down to work.

So I let myself be guided by teenage enthusiasm, anime, and my complete lack of knowledge about Lovecraft and the Cthulhu myths. So I simply chose one of the missions in the game and cast my brother in the role that Claude Speed plays in GTA 3, a simple, unscrupulous errand boy.

I travel around the city, committing crimes on behalf of some mafia boss, and then a fleshless angel descends from the heavens and attacks me. Making full use of my AK-47, I manage to take the angel out of circulation, only for the summoner who brought the creature into the world to immediately appear on a kind of floating dragon. The anime villain appeared and then flew off on his sinister creature. I forgot to apply the sanity rules, and soon that first session ended.   

 So cringe-worthy. Cheers.

Inspire #RPGaDAY2025

 My sources of inspiration are varied, so I really appreciate this blog post because it gives me the opportunity to share a little bit of what I love so much about life.

I especially seek to focus on the literary world and other role-playing modules when I set out to create a new adventure, because I believe that creativity is simply a recombination of what already exists, of what is known. Originality is just jargon that means nothing in reality. When I created a module based on one of the islands from the Forgotten Realms setting, I wanted to make my own version of a story that many others have already touched on... The Shadow Over Innsmouth

So, taking elements from the story and mixing aspects of the official setting, he created a kind of mystery that I think combines well with different aspects of the story, although the beginning is more like the old Simbad films.

In the end, if I think about the different aspects of the story, I'm sure I could figure out where the idea came from in most cases, although sometimes the inspiration gets totally blurred by the passage of time and the recombination of memories.  The results are HERE !!

Another version is Fish Fu**ers by LOFTP, which generally has interesting ideas, but due to the company's style, it doesn't seem to structure a particularly unique background plot, leaving it a bit up in the air in my opinion.

In the case of my adventure "Diamond", the main inspiration was the film Three Days of the Condor. It fits perfectly with the world of Eberron, specifically the city of Sharn, which has a corrupt air reminiscent of Al Capone's New York. Huge skyscrapers, criminal gangs that dominate the black market, corrupt authorities. Everything provided in Sharn combined effectively with the story, but I preferred to give it a more personal touch. 

The adventurers live alongside a group of actors who have become the sacrificial pawns in the schemes between the city's criminal gangs. After spending time with the actors, the adventurers return to the theater to find the poor actors turned to stone and broken into dozens of pieces. 

The group flees, asks for help, but everyone turns against them. If they manage to stay alive long enough, after the third day the persecution ends and one of the killers tells them to stop worrying, the new boss has them off the hook.

Fear, persecution, paranoia, and ultimately indifference in a city corrupt to its very core.

And in regard to the most recent adventure, which I still don't dare to release, the inspiration comes from Goya's black paintings, seeking to ensure that each of the rooms in the dungeon contains magical traps that are directly related to one of the paintings. 

A half-submerged dog, despair, a room slowly filling with mud. If you want inspiration, it could be...

Explore #RPGaDAY2025

 A setting that I feel comfortable exploring. They are varied, but one of my favorite campaigns is related to the fact that it took place in the world of one of the games I know best. The title would be Final Fantasy Tactics, a game that I have been replaying every two or three years since it was released to this day.

Its an Strategy Role-Playing Game, one of my favorites. And because I've played it so many times, I've come to know the story and its characters well, the conflicts, the reasons behind each of the conflicts, many of which are only mentioned textually and fleetingly.

I set the campaign in the exact same sequence in which the game's story unfolded, allowing the main characters in the story to interact constantly with the adventurers, without them taking on their roles directly, but making the group carry out most of the most significant actions in the story.

Use the OVA system, a generic system focused on representing anime-related settings, which features a series of talents and an experience system that significantly rewards the achievement of specific objectives. So there were two moments in the game: one in which the group was carrying out their particular objectives, which varied from player to player, and another in which the main drama unfolded.

I was fortunate because, without discussing it formally and definitively, the players agreed to what I wanted to present in the campaign. However, things could have ended earlier than planned because some players were satisfied with completing their personal missions.

But despite feeling that the plot had come full circle for their characters, they gave me the benefit of the doubt and went ahead with the whole story of the game the way I had thought of telling it. And the result was spectacular. In the end, we cried with joy at finishing the campaign, and I can say that we all enjoyed the experience.

What made it work particularly well, in my opinion, was something that depended on several factors:

  *Players who had the time available and were interested in following the plot.  

 *Extensive knowledge of the world, the background, and the actions that the most important NPCs would carry out.  

*A simple RPG system that was adaptable to most of the battles and skills that were developed in the campaign world.  

Remembering how wonderful it was to explore this setting, how familiar it felt to me, and how much I came to know about the world, makes me think about the possibility of exploring the middle lands, since there are currently some manuals based on Dark Souls.... I want to see what happens if I repeat the same thing but using the lore of Elden Ring. We'll see.

It's problematic, since those kinds of stories are inherently murky, with the characters and the world is blurred, because that's how they were designed... but we'll see if I dare. 

Journey #RPGaDAY2025

 A contemplative and optimistic journey, it makes me think of a couple of modules I would like to visit, but due to the impatient nature of several players, I don't know if I will ever be able to put them on the table in a long-term campaign.

UVG would be one of the two. The illustrations, description, and strange equipment or substances that can be used provide a psychedelic setting with dangers, but at the same time sustained in a great contemplation that I am not sure I have the ability to generate through my descriptions.

Cats with mental powers that allow them to rule a city through magic and narcotics, temples inside a giant mutant worm, and fossilized remains of gods. It all sounds interesting and intriguing, but once the treasures and objectives that help you complete the game are explored, they are unclear and leave players floating in the middle of nowhere.

The atmosphere is overly bizarre, and in that sense, it depends solely on the creativity of the players to advance and generate meaningful conflicts for the adventurers.

The descriptions of locations and cities are abundant, although not overly detailed. They remain on the surface of any cult, faction, situation, city, or culture that you encounter, providing just enough information to interact. And yet the strangeness of the ideas and the beauty of the manual convey a sense of an unknown place that I would like to visit, a universe in which I would like to immerse myself completely.

The other book would be Obijama Tales from the Tall Grass.

It is clearly and directly inspired by Studio Ghibli films.

It works with the fifth edition rules and features an island with several locations that have a background, factions, characters, calls to adventure, seeds, and an overall plot. Although it primarily functions as a sandbox that invites travel, contemplation, and deep breathing, a feeling that is conveyed to me when I watch several of those films... a panoramic shot and you feel like stretching your arms and breathing deeply.

I feel like bringing it to the table, starting a journey into the world they want to share with us, but I can't quite bring myself to do it, because I have doubts and concerns. Will they understand it? Will they be able to relax and enjoy it?

And what if they understand it too well?

Will something happen?

Because if, in the end, they end up running a normal business where something curious happens from time to time, then I'm not so sure I want to be narrating an adventure with those characteristics. 

Action and contemplation can be better combined when there is a script, but considering that role-playing sessions cannot be guided with such rigidity, I have doubts and end up sighing. 

They look beautiful, but at the end of the day, perhaps they are more aesthetic experiences than games.