Samantha Patri's Blog

World Building The short of it is simple: we love world building. We are fascinated by culture, religion, magic, and how this all intersects. What's the point of having a campaign if the characters aren't given the chance to immerse themselves in some aspect of the society they're in or reflect where they're from? We're really not that interested in lots of combat, or delving into dungeons, or world-shaking plots. We're really interested in looking at the cultures of the people around us, what the local faiths are and how they're reflected in the culture, and how these reflect the style of magic used by the local cultures. We're not interested in generic magic or generic faiths or in a culture which matches every other culture in every other fantasy game out there. If it's vanilla, something's missing. For an example? Well. We've a campaign world, Inspiritus . We've not had a chance to run things in that world in over 30 years, but we...

Food for Thought We've seen a number of people - especially game designers it seems - think Good is uninteresting or weak . That evil is a lot more interesting for game play. Whether this be character classes, abilities and options, or simply entire races. Monster manuals? Filled with evil stuff. Opponents and foils? Evil. Who get all the cool powers? Evil. Who performs world-shaking magic? Evil. In most adventures, Evil is rarely the underdog. The PCs are left scrabbling to deal with whatever plot Evil has come up with. We find this boring . Very, very boring. Time and time again it's 'the weak heroes have to band together to stop the all-powerful bad guy'. Here's the thing. It's unrealistic. It's a tired trope. It's overused. We want to see Good creatures given the same treatment Evil creatures are. We want to see powers and abilities given to Good creatures that are on par with the Evil creatures that are depicted. And we want to see th...

Religion is a major interest of mine, and looking at it in roleplaying games fascinates me.  I'm quite prone to making characters with a strong faith, regardless of what the character's chosen profession is.  Rogue?  Faithful.  Magus?  Faithful.  Barbarian?  Faithful.  Vampire?  Faithful.  You get the idea. In a recent discussion, we were discussing the difference between Judaism's God and the Shinto faith and their gods.  Basically, how the religion interacts (nominally) with their chosen people. It came down to this: Judaism People:  We made an exclusive pact with God. God:  Don't do the thing. People:  We did the thing. God:  *SMACK*  Don't do the thing. People:  Okay... but we just did the thing. God:  *SMACK*  Stop doing the thing. People:  You mean this thing we just did? God:  *SMACK!* Look, don't make me come down there. Shinto People:  So, yeah.  We did the thing. ...