Showing category "Hints and Teasers" (Show all posts)

The Duskwalker's Gift, by Ken Melvoin-Berg

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 5, 2020, In : Hints and Teasers 
In what might be the first piece of fan fiction my works have ever received, here's a short story about Tarklo Dirge, the protagonist of The Duskwalker's Due, the solo adventure you can get right here. It's by my good friend Ken Melvoin-Berg and it's a lot of fun!

The Duskwalker’s Gift by Ken Melvoin-Berg


Hunting is what I was born for, literally. I was born again in this body of Tarklo Dirge and given a mission: hunt the undead to restore the balance of life and death. I was getting a smile ...
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Be the Beasts!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, November 9, 2018, In : Hints and Teasers 
"Hey, is it true that in the upcoming adventure A Bad Day for Trolls, everyone plays trolls?"

"Indeed! You're all monsters! Grawr!"

"Can I see one?"

"Sure! Here's Maggrak Bigmaw!"
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A Hobgoblin for Halloween!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 31, 2018, In : Hints and Teasers 
A Bad Day for Trolls is coming from Run Amok Games soon (check out the Upcoming tab above), and I wanted to show off one of the enemies that that the troll "heroes" will face. In this adventure, the PCs all play trolls, and I needed an enemy that would put a bit of a scare into them. I decided that an acid-flinging sorcerer would do, but I didn't want to wholly build one from the ground up. I took the draconic sorcerer from the Pathfinder RPG NPC Codex and made a few key edits: I changed the ...
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What's in a Name

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, September 20, 2017, In : Hints and Teasers 
The next product I'll be releasing is very likely A Troll's Life, a unique adventure where all the players play evil trolls. The adventure has sort of a soft ramp-up to teach players about having regeneration, and then a bunch of other surprising events the trolls can bumble through on their quest for revenge.

A Troll's Life started out as a convention adventure; I had a good time playing a pseudo-vampire at last year's PaizoCon, and I thought playing a different set of monsters would be neat ...
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A Halfling with a Mission!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, June 23, 2017, In : Hints and Teasers 
Who's got a shady relative and a job to do? This guy! (Art by Sarah Menzel.)
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The Trolls are Coming!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, November 3, 2016, In : Hints and Teasers 
I'm off to GameHoleCon this weekend, where I'm running a game of my own creation: A Troll's Life. In this game, all the PCs are trolls whose tribe was nearly wiped out by crusading dwarves, and they want revenge! Here's one of the six available PCs:

Urphex the Shadow, Troll Rogue 4

CE Large humanoid (giant)

Init +4; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, scent; Perception +19

Defense

AC 18, touch 13, flat-footed 14 (+4 Dex, +5 natural, -1 size)

hp 109 (10d8+64); regeneration 5 (acid ...


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Idle Hands

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, October 3, 2016, In : Hints and Teasers 
Without any current freelance work, I've turned to some of the older projects I have hanging around and helping other people with projects that they've proposed (including a book of Pathfinder monsters that is looking really good!). I've dug in quite a bit to my idea for the Clockworker Chronicles, a series of 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons adventures. I've solidified the series and their concepts, drafted a lot of background, and dug in pretty substantially to the first adventure (I've com...
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Thinking about the Run Amok Bestiary

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 2, 2015, In : Hints and Teasers 
This fellow looks like quite a thinker...I wonder if he's thinking about the release of the Run Amok Bestiary? In that case, he'd be pleased to know that the print proof is on its way, and the Run Amok Bestiary will be out early this month. This gizzit is just one of the more than 30 new monsters within. Although a nuisance alone or in flocks, the bizarre gizzit can also be taken as a spellcaster's familiar.
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Dog Days of the Run Amok Bestiary

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, November 15, 2015, In : Hints and Teasers 
Who's a good boy? You are! Yes, literally good, in that the aralazar is a celestial canine who restores fallen warriors to fight against evil. Inspired by Armenian folklore, the aralazar is the first of many creatures in the upcoming Run Amok Bestiary.
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Freelancing away, back to running amok!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, In : Hints and Teasers 
So, I've not only turned in my AP chapter, but I've also turned in a few additional writing assignments Paizo has been good enough to send my way (in particular, some monster writing for the Occult Bestiary and some additional racial writeups for Inner Sea Races). I couldn't really unwind after turning in my AP chapter, because I had those other deadlines, but now I feel like I'm caught up. I can't help but turn back to Run Amok matters, though: working through some monster writing for Paizo ...
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Mythic Slime Demons on Display

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, February 27, 2015, In : Hints and Teasers 
Here on the edge of releasing Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition, I thought I'd share another one of the creatures that I worked up with mythic abilities for the new version. Omox demons are powerful and disgusting slime-demons; mythic omox demons are even worse! Here they are:

Demons of the Sap (3)   CR 17/MR 6

XP 102,400 each

Advanced mythic omox demon rogue 2

CE Medium outsider (aquatic, chaotic, demon, evil, extraplanar, mythic)

Init +19M; Senses blindsight 120 ft.; Perception +31

Defe...


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Happy New Year!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, January 10, 2015, In : Hints and Teasers 
After some whirlwind travel over the turn of the year, followed by jumping back into three straight nights of great gaming (my Fifth Edition game based on the Legacy of Fire adventure path, a new Pathfinder game I've joined starting the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, and my longstanding Pathfinder campaign using the Shattered Star adventure path), I'm finally able to take a look back over 2014. I started, as might be appropriate, with looking back at New Years 2014.

I remember resolvin...
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A Mythic Cover!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 3, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
Here is the cover for the upcoming "Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition", with art by Jeff Strand!
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Flirtation with Fey Rewrite

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 23, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
I'm very fortunate, as I've mentioned, to have my lovely wife--with a PhD in English--to edit all my work. Sometimes, she gives the whole thing a pass with hardly any changes; other times, she's a much harsher critic. She just finished the review of A Flirtation with Fey and had some major revisions: entire sections that were too wordy got cut, and one of the villains had to be redone. But I'm incorporating those edits now, and it's a stronger project.

I've had a last couple of posts about rew...
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Don't Touch That Wagon!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 25, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
I've gotten an encounter map in for one of my upcoming adventures, "A Flirtation with Fey" and thought I'd share it. This is the PCs' map, so it doesn't show all the monsters and traps--but, really, what is there to fear from a simple wagon...its contents ravaged and scattered...its driver slain...its pony felled with a single bladed strike...no, nothing suspicious or strange about this at all... 
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A Mythical Dragon!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition is moving along quite well--well enough that I've updated my "Upcoming Products" page to include it (I've also moved The Emergency Villain Collection to released products, as it will be available later this week). As a teaser, and to show the re-working I'm doing to about forty percent of the encounters in Kingdom of Toads to make Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition, here is the updated version of the powerful dragon Avoravax:

Avoravax             CR 21/MR 7

XP 4...


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Mythical Thinking

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, September 8, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
When I was deep in the writing of Kingdom of Toads, I heard about the Mythic Adventures hardcover coming out. This sounded like a good fit: the story of Kingdom of Toads is a bit fairy-tale, a bit myth, and a lot of over-the-top encounters. However, the mythic rules were pretty new, and would require that I master them pretty deeply to provide a good mythic product. I'd also have to unwind a lot of the writing I'd already done, I believed.

It's quite some time later, and I've got a much better...
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What's Next?

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, August 7, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
Normally I have a pretty good sense of the release order my next Run Amok Games projects, but right now I've got a a few aaaaaalmost done projects, and some sporadic art for each--but here's some! This is one of the villains in the upcoming Emergency Villain Collection. He's a very angry tree-person named Boughbrother. Is the Emergency Villain Collection next? Probably, but who knows?
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A Friendly Badger

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, February 26, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
In revising A Lucky Morning, I've realized that one of the NPCs the heroes will meet is someone they won't likely fight. Now, players are a rambunctious lot, and they could pick a fight with anyone; in this case, however, this NPC is entirely helpful and is intended to be a bit endearing. So I elected to remove his combat statistics from the adventure as they won't be needed 95% of the time. 

So they don't go to waste, though, here is Badger (not his real name), a friendly but simple-minded gn...
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A Lucky Villain!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, January 15, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
Here is one of the villains from "A Lucky Morning," the vengeful necromancer Nudd.
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2014 Schedule is Coming

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, January 15, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
So, with all the jumping around I've been doing with my writing, I've realized I should put everything into a consistent, planned schedule. And then I should put that schedule here, in my Upcoming Releases tab. So expect that update soon. The order of those projects is likely to change, but I've been pushing forward on each, so they'll see the light of day sometime this year.

In the meantime, Blake Wilkie keeps turning in great work for 2014's first Run Amok Games release, "A Lucky Morning." P...
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Resolved!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, January 8, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
I'm not normally one for New Years resolutions, but this year I've made a writing-related one: I plan to write at least 1,000 words each day. Normally, my writing is in spikes: several days without writing, then a burst of productivity of several thousand words. Trying to be disciplined about this will help even things out and, I suspect, make me more productive this year overall.

A thousand words isn't much: I can put together a few stat blocks to reach that, or kick through a chunk of an enc...
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"Beyond the Serpentine Lock" Through Layout!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 30, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 
I'm now prepping the print version of "Beyond the Serpentine Lock" to get a proof, which will take a few weeks. The .pdf version is just about done, including the map file--here is a small part of a great map by Marco Morte, the primary cartographer and illustrator for this adventure.

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Paizo Lists by Level

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 29, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 

In a move that seems obvious, in retrospect, Paizo now lists all of their available adventures by PC level range: adventures for 3rd-level PCs all together, adventures for 4th-level PCs all together, and so on. This includes not only Paizo adventures, but third-party publisher adventures like those Run Amok Games produces. It’s always good to see my adventures listed in new ways!

The next step would be to have an “Adventure Path Frame” that would take a string of adventures that were...
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The First Run of the Broken Road

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, August 19, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 
I had several family members in town for a reunion last week, and some of my siblings and teenage nieces and nephews were looking for me to run a game. I jumped at the chance to run a very, very rough version of one of my distantly-pending projects, Perils of the Broken Road. So they each picked the PC they liked best from The Emergency Character Collection and a fistful of dice.

Then I killed them all in the second fight.

They had cleverly bypassed several critical clues about an upcoming enc...
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The Perfect Librarian

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, June 20, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 
Kingdom of Toads is about more than fighting garden snakes. Here is a helpful fellow the heroes are likely to meet--the Clockwork Archivist!

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Another Way to Skin a Monster

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, June 20, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 
While finishing the layout for Kingdom of Toads, I was able to take a more global look at the monsters I designed for it. I noticed that in a couple of places, I was pretty shameless about "reskinning" existing monsters (that is, taking the stats for an existing monster and simply describing it as something else). When the stats "fit" the way the monster ought to play at the table, this should be fairly seamless.

The two examples I have from Kingdom of Toads are when the heroes are, in essence...
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Order of Appendices

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 29, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 

I’ve been spending altogether too much time thinking about appendices. Most of my adventures have a few appendices, and some of these have been:

·        *  How to scale the adventure for higher- or lower-level PCs

·         * New rules items (such as new monsters or new magic items)

·         * A timeline of events

·         * All of the player handouts consolidated into one place

·         * A few pregenerated PCs

All or some of these are likely to appear in future adventures a...


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Free is Key

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 20, 2012, In : Hints and Teasers 
I wasn't exactly sure whether producing a free excerpt from The Emergency Character Collection was a good idea. However, in the last week, the free excerpt has more downloads than all of my other products put together. So people are grabbing it, and although there aren't yet any reviews (or even much chatter) about The Emergency Character Collection, I'm sure I can attribute at least some of my sales of the full product to the popularity of the free excerpt.

So, free excerpts seem to sell prod...
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Upcoming Art

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, February 17, 2012, In : Hints and Teasers 
I've received the first art piece for the upcoming gothic-horror themed "Teeth of the Storm" adventure, and I'm quite pleased with it. Chaz Kemp's art nouveau style isn't typical for fantasy RPGs, but will definitely give the art in this adventure a unique style!





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A High-Level Project in the Works

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, December 18, 2011, In : Hints and Teasers 
I'm working through my two upcoming projects (The Underdelve Menace and Teeth of the Storm), and I'm considering which product to dig into after that--either another short adventure, or a long project that's been brewing for quite some time. I was generously given a great, flexible set of stock maps from Raging Swan Press and I'm thinking they would work quite well with a very high-level (17th or 18th level) adventure I've been kicking around in my head. I know that high-level events appeal o...
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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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