Requires Concentrate - A GURPS Blog

I recently discovered Requires Concentrate, a GURPS blog on GMing primarily science fiction (hell yeah!) and fantasy games. And while I am still poking through it as I type this, I have to say this post on what happens to stuff in vacuum already has me in love with it!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: These kind of little details are what breathe life into exotic settings, like living in space. The idea of the glues that hold door signs to walls outgassing and losing efficacy when a ship decompresses is just cool and weird. That eggs won't be bothered by what can suck a human through a far-too-small hole in a very gory way is amazing. These little things will draw your players in. Use them!

So that's it for now. Go check out Requires Concentrate and tell me what you think of it in the comments below.

More Progress on Architect of Worlds Automation

I'm happy to report that I'm ever so closer to being up to date with what Jon Zeigler has already published. I've not completed Step Eleven (yikes! that was a mess) and finished off Step Twelve, as well. That just leaves a little more basic planetary information from Step Thirteen, and I can dig into the moon stuff.

If I am able to get this done before Jon drops the next portion of the system, I'll go back and try to clean up the mess I've made everywhere I making this work. I think I can get it much cleaner than it currently is. Then I'll start working on using the data generated to create a database I can further manipulate in a program like Access.

That or I'll get back to fleshing out mechanics and making setting content. Either one will work. But being able to generate systems quickly is key to making this game work at all. I want players to have the agency to just shoot off in a random direction or ask, "What's over here?" and I'm just a couple mouse clicks from some sort of answer.

Reorganizing the Blog

Now that I finally managed to get 1,000 gp and cast resurrection on myself, I'm reassessing the blog and its organization. I may be shuffling some stuff around a little, so expect some possible changes to tags, tag structure, and pages. I don't see myself pulling down any posts, but since I am currently on a two-pronged attack to content creation, I think I need to sort posts along those lines a little better. If not for your sanity, for mine.

As a side note, I am hoping to be able to return to every-other-day posting in the near future, but I'm not quite ready yet. I'm still putting together content from my Science Fiction project and my fantasy stuff. A few things to expect at some point: a lot of power-ups, an alternate approach to DF character generation, and a methodology and step-by-step setting generation for the science fiction setting.

A Monster a Day...

Mapping this abbey has made me realize how few demons I have statted up at present. To that end, I have done a little work on developing a couple of demon lords and am working on the kinds of demons, spirits, and undead they command. So far, I've already beefed up my list a little and am trying to maintain a pace of one to two monsters a day until I feel comfortable stocking a dungeon thematically.

A nice side benefit is that I'm accruing some Hidden Lore (Demons) and Hidden Lore (Undead) information that players might discover depending on what they investigate. Of course, even if they don't look into such things, it will provide a structure that should provide that much-needed cohesion amidst gobs of otherwise desperate monsters. I know funhouse dungeons are a staple in the genre, but I prefer there to be more internal logic. It helps maintain an ambiance.

What sort of background do you use to help seat your monsters in the worlds you create? Do they just exist on a whim or do they have deeper origins?

Mapping an Abbey

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While it may not look it from my posts as of late, I have been trying to split my time between making progress on a science fiction setting and doing some mapping and worldbuilding for dungeon crawls. To will be a post on the latter.

So lately, I've been mapping up a small abbey to serve as the first level of a larger dungeon. Naturally, it is dominated by its cathedral that has two towers and a central dome. Unlike traditional catholic cathedrals, I decided the bells would go in this dome, and the entry-way towers would be spires. This just felt good when I was making the map.

The outlying buildings are a two-story affair with the usual rooms associated with a monastery - refectories, calefactories, scriptoriums, and lots of other churchy-sounding names. And like any good dungeon entrance, this abbey has a cellars and an underground burial catacomb so the monks and nuns that live there never need leave the walls of their sanctum.

So that's a quick rundown on the abbey, but how does it sit within the region? Well, for starters, it is an ancient complex perched upon a forested hill about a day's ride from what remains of the village that once supported it. Both are now abandoned, but the abbey has fared far better than the village. Many legends and superstitions attribute the abbey's well-preserved condition to any number of supernatural causes - none of them particularly holy or good.

This is what I'm currently working off of. I'm sure it will grow deeper as time progresses, just as Alnwich did when I worked on it. For now, though, I can definitively say that there is an abbey - with a map! - that definitely qualifies as a Bad Place, and under it is some sort of dungeon. How mega it will be is up in the air.

Automating Architect of Worlds Update

I feel like I haven't made much progress on my automation of Architect of Worlds project. Step Eleven has proven far more troublesome than originally anticipated, largely owing to the fact that I didn't save enough information from Step Ten - specifically how far inward the dominant gas giant migrates. I had just stored the final position for later use. Oops.

Once this was rectified, I ended up reevaluating my approach to Step Eleven to put it more in line with what Jon wrote in the first place. See, originally, I was generating all of the orbits, stocking all of the orbits, and then deciding which orbits to delete, but I realized this was just taking extra time and wasting memory. So now the Step Eleven function will run through Step Eleven then decide whether or not to place another planet, and continue from there.

There is also the matter of how I will store all of the planets' data. I am still not 100% sure about how to set up the data structure for this project in the most efficient way possible. As it stands, I have a bunch of separate objects, but I'm starting to wonder if these should go in lists in a variable in the parent or not. So, frex, System has a variable called Stars that contains a list of Star objects, and each Star object has a variable called Planets that contains a list of planet objects, and so on.

I'm not sure I like this and haven't committed to it, yet. But it looks like I will need to pass a list of planets out of Step Eleven, and future steps will process this list, one planet-object at a time. I am really hoping someone leaves some suggestions in the comments, below, because this is definitely pushing my understanding of data handling.