Quasar Knight's Christmas Sale

Christmas Image from WP Clipart

It's hard to believe that I've been writing role-playing sourcebooks for half a year, but here we are.  I've always sought to make my work both original and affordable in comparison to the many other offerings online by tackling concepts and ideas which have been relatively unexplored in 3rd Party  fantasy d20 games and retroclones.  I decided to host a sale for the holidays and the end of the year, but instead of holding it for one day I'm extending it from today to New Year's Day.

My entire catalog is 50% off on Drive-Thru RPG.  I specialize heavily in Pathfinder at the moment, but I do have an OSR book I'm sure classic fans will enjoy.  If you had any of these items in your shopping cart or wish list, now would be a good time to check them out!

The Magic School Campaign, Part 1: Themes and Motivation

Image Courtesy of Little Witch Academia, designed by Studio Trigger

Since early August I've been running Arcana High, a Pathfinder campaign for a solid group of four players I've had the pleasure of befriending online.  Even before the popularization of Harry Potter the concept of a wizarding academy has been a strong fixture in the fantasy genre.  It might go back as far as 1968, with Usula LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea.  Even our own table-top community has made inroads to this subgenre with Redhurst: Academy of Magic back in 2003 and an upcoming Sigantium: Academy of the Arcane project on KickStarter.  Another major influence for my campaign are the Persona series of video games, where students at a normal Japanese high school secretly go out and fight supernatural monsters while balancing their social lives (an equally important aspect of the game).

Even before I first set out my first planned adventure, I realized that the overall themes and design considerations of such a campaign would be very different than a typical Dungeons & Dragons adventure.  The setting would be based around a central school/city hub rather than adventures traveling the world; the party make-up would lean entirely towards spellcasters over the mundane classes; and the drama and conflict of a young adult's social life is too ripe for role-playing opportunities to pass up!

This is but the first of several planned articles for this unique kind of campaign.

Themes, Motivations, and Experience

Unless your school's set up to be an adventuring academy, your student PCs probably have hopes and dreams unrelated to exploring dank dungeons in search of gold and artifacts.   Perhaps one of them wishes to continue the long and proud tradition of family illusionists; another might not even want to be there, viewed as cursed for their sorcerous ways and shunned by family to get their budding mage out of their hair.  They might even be inheritors of a heroic legacy or members of a secret organization safeguarding the mundane world from the forces of evil.  

Traditional D&D gives an incentive for player behavior by making the accumulation of experience and gold add to character growth.  In a magic school campaign, experience points should be handed out when the PCs stay in line with the themes of the game.  Altruistic mages who use their spells to save a burning house full of innocent citizens deserve just as much of a reward as if they were saving the people from a vicious monster.  A prospective gnome studying necromancy in spite of her culture's taboo on it might gain experience for tasks and quests related to the advancement of this goal.  Social interaction, conflict resolution, and personal identity are all major influences on the PCs in a magic school campaign.

The Theme System

Drow Prodigy by Maxa-art of Deviantart

PCs choose 2 themes at character creation, reflecting some kind of goal, personality trait, or social bond to another character or group of characters.  The DM is encouraged to create conflicts focused on said themes, and PCs who successfully overcome this conflict gain experience points for doing so.  This is not the only way of earning experience in the game, but it encourages a sort of group-based means of adventure generation by having the Dungeon Master create scenarios his players will be most likely to follow.

In order to benefit from a theme, it must occur during the course of the gaming session and inconvenience the PC in some way, shape, or form.  A PC or party which manages to overcome the theme’s challenge is awarded bonus experience points depending upon the severity of the theme.  PCs who manage to overcome and/or deal with obstacles related to their theme receive bonus experience points about equivalent to one near the average party level.  A minor conflict might be monsters up to 2 levels lower, a conflict with some noticeable risk of tangible loss equal to the party level, and a significant and urgent matter up to 2 levels higher.  In the case of Pathfinder, levels represent an equivalent monster's Challenge Rating, while for an OSR game the level might represent an equivalent monster's hit dice.

Asking players about their character's backstories and what they want out of life can be a great way to design obstacles and tasks.  All experience gained is divided among the party, even if said challenge really affects only that PC.  This encourages teamwork and cooperation, in that everybody stands to gain something if the PC’s struggles are overcome.  Plus, it’s always nice to know that your friends got your back!

My next post on Magic School Campaigns will cover group composition and the unique considerations and  challenges facing an all-caster party.

SWORD & SHIELD: Rage Against the DM

SWORD & SHIELD: Rage Against the DM



Courtesy of Sword & Shield blog (and Tracy Hurley's Twitter post which led me to it), I found out that Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine fame played Dungeons & Dragons as part of a high school group.



Neat!

Product Spotlight: Old School Monster Classes

As of November 26th, I put the finishing touches on my latest book and uploaded it to the online stores.  Right now you can get it immediately on Drive-Thru RPG and RPGNow, and hopefully Paizo and D20 Pathfinder SRD in the near future.  Old School Monster Classes is a Labyrinth Lord-compatible supplement containing 14 new classes, all of them based off of existing iconic and mythological monsters such as the gnoll and the harpy.

I had the idea for quite a while, since last year in fact, but I never began the project proper until I was in the middle of designing my Playable Monsters supplement for Pathfinder Role-Playing Game.  There are many problems with monster PCs in a lot of D&D games: for one, lots of folk play them as-is with abilities intact, even if said abilities would be disruptive to the core of the game; who needs to adventure when the genie can conjure precious metals at will?  Another is due to the game's roots where monsters were primarily adversaries lurking at the edges of civilization, guarding treasure to be claimed and laying siege to villages.  It's no surprise that most monstrous beings are attacked on sight in most campaigns, and don't really have a lot of cultural detail in comparison to dwarves, elves, and halflings beyond the whims of individual homebrewers.

My two primary objectives for designing this book were to make the iconic traits of these 14 monsters in line with existing spells and class features at reasonable levels, and to give them interesting societies as fodder for role-play material and reasons for why they wouldn't be villified by the entire world.  Playing as a monster might be fun and nifty, but if their society is one-dimensional and uninteresting and one-dimensional it does not become a very attractive option.  Look at my previous post on my blog about gnolls: there's still room for the raider archetype, but I expanded their role beyond that one facet.  

Although this book might not be for everyone, the idea of playing as monsters for a change is a very popular idea in D&D which is sadly under-used in sourcebooks these days.  If you're an avid fan of B/X D&D and its retroclones, consider checking out my work and seeing if it's a good match for you and your gaming group.

Drive-Thru RPG Link.

RPGNow Link.

Paizo Link.

D20 Pathfinder SRD Link.

DMing Tools: the Bioware-Style Journal

DMing Tools: the Bioware-Style Journal

Image Courtesy of Moby Games

It's inevitable that the Dungeon Master of any long-running game will accumulate a healthy assortment of notes, plans, and bookmarks for their regular sessions.  Now that I've been using Roll20 recently, I have a much easier time organizing and saving relevant parts.

Going to video games, the RPGs Bioware is famous for producing (notably Dragon Age and Mass Effect series) include a "Journal" (or Codex) choice in the options menu.  Basically how it works is that whenever your character encounters some new bit of lore, be it the contents of a book in a musty library or the first encounter with a species of monster, the relevant data is added to the Journal.  What's great about it is that knowledge is gained incrementally: you won't get everything related to Elven culture when you visit one of their settlements, and the entries update depending on events which take place in the game.  Sometimes the journal entries will be in-character, with the entry on wolves written by a scribe discussing superstitions and folkore surrounding them.  Combine this utility with alphabetical entries organized by subject, and you have an easily-searchable journal full of knowledge that is fun to read.

So how can this be applied to traditional table-top games?  Well, for one, every Roll20 campaign comes with its own message board to be filled with the posts of the DM and players.  For my Arcana High campaign, I searched the chat archives and campaign journal entries when I had some free time, going over the major characters, nations, religions, and compiling them in the posts of a new thread.  I kept the entries simple, usually no more than 1 or 2 sentences.  Like my earlier style when doing "skeleton settings," I only made entries for characters, places, and events the characters encountered or heard about in the game sessions.  That way the journal's growth is organic instead of feeling like a huge infodump on the players.

Even with this brief information of a sentence or two per entry, it has been immensely helpful for my players to keep track of things.  Sometimes we can't always make it to the game, or the DM gets sick.  Simply trusting people to remember things, even important characters and events, isn't always so simple when we have real life getting in the way.

As for those not using Roll20 or other online games, compiling a "codex" to e-mail to players who ask for it can be a great idea as well.  I recommend to send them only the relevant bits they ask for in case the journal gets quite long.

Adding Culture: Gnolls, the syncretic nomads

Adding Culture 2: Gnolls, the syncretic nomads

Desert Gnoll by Gary Dupuis

For my latest work (and for my upcoming OSR version) I designed player character-friendly variants of existing iconic monsters in Pathfinder, such as the giant and the medusa.  Many 3rd Party Pathfinder books which provide playable races create new options as opposed to drawing upon existing fantasy archetypes.  There's nothing wrong with that, but it always felt weird to ignore the myriad creatures which already exist in the Monster Manuals.

When designing new monster PCs for Playable Monsters Vol. 1, I came upon the gnolls. Traditionally they weren't much different than orcs: evil, might makes right society, enslaved those weaker than themselves, live in the wilderness, etc.  As part of redesigning their society, I decided to  make them nomadic, people born and raised among the plains, badlands, and deserts of the world.  Eventually their far-flung migrations gave them a distinct edge in trading rare goods, and many gnolls took up the art of mercantilism.

Gnoll clans also resorted to raiding in lean times, but they tended to restrict their theft towards stealth at night to avoid sparking violence and blood feuds.  As long as they took only what was necessary, gnoll clans tolerated this as a necessary evil.  Of course, this does not always end ideally, and a lot of folk who might otherwise welcome their trade fear them in times of drought and famine.

Due to their travels, gnolls interact with all manner of cultures, and as a result they learn of more faiths than sedentary villagers would.  Gnolls acknowledge the existence and influence of many deities and spirits, and often pay homage to local shrines and temples so that the deity of the region's people would grant them safe passage.  Bouts of good fortune might even turn their one-time show of respect to long-time worship, and the pantheons of many gnoll clans are a widespread combination of nature spirits, elemental entities, and deities of many races and cultures who line up well with the clan's traditions.

Note: Regarding gnoll religion, I always found the choice of limiting monsters to their own deity or pantheon odd in settings where there are so many deities of different portfolios.  As many people of campaign settings pay homage to deities in meaningful areas of their lives (like blacksmiths praying regularly to the god of the forge) and true monotheism is very rare, it would be natural for humanoids to adopt more deities into their religious rituals over time.



If this take on gnolls sounds cool and interesting, then I suggest that you check out Playable Monsters on RPGNow, or Drive-Thru RPG.  Both have full-sized previews to give you a taste of things to come.

Quasar Knight Enterprises: What I Write and What I Do

I've always wanted to be a writer since I was a kid.  From Dungeons & Dragons to the Final Fantasy series, RPGs served as ample fodder for both fond memories and engaging imaginary worlds and stories.  Three years ago I started writing reviews, homebrew materials, and the occasional article on the message boards I frequented which shared an interest in science fiction and fantasy games.  After playing 3rd Edition and Pathfinder for many years, I decided to get writing on a small project in late 2013 as part of a creative writing thread on the Something Awful RPG subforum.

It was a rough start.  I had to get legal advice about the OGL to make sure I properly understood its conditions.  My computer broke down after the first month, and I had to manually extract the files to recover what I lost (thereafter teaching me to save multiple copies of everything on cloud storage and external hard drives).  I was a newcomer to self-publishing and had to juggle the writing process with finding stock art, setting up shop on Drive-Thru, Paizo, and other places, and doing the formatting myself.

After several months and a rocky start, I ended up with a finished product, the Abstract Thief, in early June, and Quasar Knight Enterprises was born.  Once that first book was released I found it easier going forward, for in 3 weeks I had another product out!  Ever since I've been working and releasing one-man projects around a monthly rate.  I've been sticking with what I know so far, which includes Pathfinder and OSR rulesets, but over time I hope to broaden my horizons by writing material for other popular games and maybe eventually my own.

When designing new projects, I always build upon potentially popular ideas which remained more or less untouched in 3rd Party Pathfinder and other OSR products.  There are boatloads of sourcebooks containing new feats, but Nice Things for Fighters was intended to appeal to those players upset with the imbalance between martial and spellcaster classes.  Death to Alignment was a rules variant which combed through existing feats, classes, magic items, and spells and redesigned them for gaming groups who wanted to remove alignment as a game mechanic (but wanted to still keep demons and paladins).  In a fandom where the number of 3rd Party Pathfinder products on Drive-Thru is 4,000 and still growing by the month, it's nigh-mandatory to make work which is original and stands out to get noticed.

My advice to would-be publishers and writers in the RPG industry is this: the first step is often the hardest.  The writing, the research, the initial fears of dipping your toes into the sea of products.  But once you get in the water, that vast ocean will seem a lot smaller.  And as a writer there's no better feeling in the world than when you put the finishing touches on your current project, uploading it to the Internet, and seeing people buy it to use in their home games.

So that's my story.  I hope that you enjoyed it.