Browsing Archive: December, 2018

Replaying Adventures

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 19, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've seen the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? more times than I can count. I've rewatched the first season of The Good Place three times in the past six months. I played through each of Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic at least twice. I know plenty of people who can recite huge sections of Star Wars by heart, or entire comedians' monologues--because they've seen them so often.

But RPGs are a different matter. Once you've played through an adventure, you've learned its secrets and s...
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Perfecting Your Angle

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, December 17, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
I have an image blog post today: how to draw angled walls for your dungeons. There's a common way that poses some problems, and a better way that makes a lot of things more clear. The images show this, but the key is this: draw angled walls from the midpoints of squares, not the corners. 



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Illusions of Choice

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 12, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
There's a bit of misdirection involved in all RPGs. The core misdirection is that the PCs need to feel that they might not win each confrontation, but end up winning nearly all of them. Success shouldn't be automatic, of course, but it should feel a lot more unlikely than it actually is. This misdirection falls on the GM a lot of the time (for example, to play up how fierce an ogre is when the PCs can easily defeat it, by the numbers) and the game system a lot of the time (to provide, for exa...
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How to Build a Sandbox

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, December 10, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
Players really like sandbox adventures. The term "sandbox adventure" implies an adventure (or even campaign) in which the characters are free to go wherever they'd like, and address adventure elements in whatever order they choose. There's a real sense of player agency there, and that's one of the reasons they're so popular. They also seem more realistic, as the players know there's something going on all over, and not just waiting for their interaction, just like in the real world.

Yet buildi...
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Adventures as Skeletons and Zombies

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, December 4, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've had a general frame of mind when writing that I used when writing papers in graduate school, when writing memos as a lawyer, and in writing adventures. It's a fairly simple way of viewing a writing project, and I wanted to speak about it in reference to adventure writing.

Your adventure is a skeleton, or it's a zombie.

A skeleton has a solid, visible frame. You start with an outline, and the outline is detailed enough to hang all the "meat" on: you know what encounters are going to happen ...
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Frosty the Graveknight

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, December 3, 2018, In : Announcements 
At the suggestion of a friend of mine, who pointed me toward a discussion about Frosty the Snowman being a lich, I've worked up some stats as well. But I don't think this beloved children's character is a lich. No, I think he's a graveknight. His hat isn't a phylactery, but durable armor into which his immortal essence is infused. As he plainly has the ability to compel children and cops alike, I'm assuming he's also a bard. What is this nefarious creature's end goal? Eternal survival, no dou...
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About Me


I'm Ron Lundeen, game designer for Wizards of the Coast. Before that, I worked as a development manager for Paizo, Inc. and as an RPG freelancer. I've recently had products in print for Paizo, Wizards of the Coast, Petersen Games, and Ulisses Spiele. My opinions here are my own and do not reflect those of Wizards of the Coast.

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