Graph Paper Games

One thing I've been slowly working on for the last year is another fantasy sandbox campaign.  My prior one was generally map-based, although a city featured prominently in it.  As time went by, it lost a lot of its "sandbox" quality and became more directed on my part.  In the process, I think it lost something. So, after being away from fantasy for a solid year, it's time to get back to it.  I spent some of that last year thinking about cities.   Some fantasy RPG treat cities on a very detailed level, with maps of streets, etc.  But while that's fun "map porn" for GM's, how often would the players actually be seeing or using a map like that?  And how long would it take for them to just accrue that knowledge by exploring the city.  I've lived in my current city seven years, with a car, and I don't know how all the cities line up.  What I know are areas, neighborhoods, etc. some intimately, others not so much.  And if I was going to a n...

Aaron Allston died February 27th of this year, and the gaming community lost a big contributor to its long and varied history.  I was particularly sorry to hear this, because Allston had written one of the biggest influences to my own gamemastering, the Champions II supplement Strike Force .  I have written about Strike Force at length on this blog before, but for those who missed it Strike Force was essentially a campaign journal in which Allston shares what he learned managing a superhero campaign that spanned several years and multiple gaming groups playing in the same "universe." I mention this because right now, as my Marvel Heroic Roleplaying campaign winds down and I enter into a months-long hiatus, I have been thinking about doing a more intentional job of constructing the next campaign.  That means first understanding the needs and tendencies of the players, and Allston wrote a brilliant little segment that has been borrowed heavily in many other games about th...