20 Unusual City Encounters: From Beg, Borrow, & Steal

Posted on 27 January 2010 | Leave a comment
The Procuress, oil on canvas
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Once a month, I publish a newsletter of quick tips for busy GMs called Beg, Borrow & Steal. Some require advanced preparation to use, but most are designed to be last-minute tips you can add to your very next game session — even if that session is tonight. Below is a sample from Beg, Borrow & Steal #2. If you’d like to see more last-minute GM tips, please sign up for the newsletter in the left sidebar.

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20 Unusual City Encounters

Tired of bar fights and pick-pocketing musicians? Do your players find city encounters boringly routine? Here’s 20 unusual (more or less) encounters to help liven up your city trips. Some of these could be played for humor — others are deadly serious and may make your players uncomfortable. All are designed to be used in any genre, though some may need tweaking for a good fit. Roll randomly from the list below or pick one that appeals to you. And, as always, twist, distort, fold, spindle and mutilate these ideas to fit your group and your campaign.

  1. A boy prostitute approaches one of the PCs (male or female) for sex. If the PC sends him away without any money, the group will later hear that his father beat him for coming home empty-handed.
  2. A bear-baiter loses control of his animal, which mauls him and then attacks the crowd. If the PCs kill the creature, the owner tries to bring a law-suit against them.
  3. A small girl asks the party to help her find her lost kitten.
  4. The PCs are in a side street whose only outlets are at either end. Two funeral processions enter, one from each side. Neither party will back up to let the other pass and the situation degenerates into a fist fight between the two procession leaders, with the characters in the middle.
  5. The PCs watch a church procession carrying an icon, relic, or statue. On the other side of the street, a disturbance erupts and in the ruckus, the holy item is stolen.
  6. A small child (age five or six) jumps out of an upper-story window. The PCs should have a chance to save her from harm. If questioned, she will tell them that she was trying to prove to her friend (still in the room above) that she could fly. The friend (also five or six) will corroborate the story.
  7. In a visit to an open-air market, one of the PCs trips over a tent rope that sends him sprawling into the nearest food display. The display contents go rolling out into the public street or market square, where they’re quickly gathered up by nearby beggars. The stall owner demands the PCs pay for the broken stand and the lost produce.
  8. The PCs come upon a crowd in the middle of stoning a woman for adultery. This is even better if it’s a woman one of the PCs seduced recently.
  9. In a very public place, a woman announces that one of the PCs is the father of her child. It’s up to you to decide if it’s true or not, or even if any of the party members have ever seen the woman before.
  10. One of the PCs is a dead ringer for the town’s mayor. People keep stopping her to solve their complaints and problems.
  11. The PCs get roped into judging a beauty contest (for either men or women). If you want to be truly evil, have one of the party members of the appropriate sex coerced into participating in the contest while the rest of his group are judges.
  12. One of the PC is accused of raping someone in the town. A twist would be that the accuser is male and the accused is female (“Your honor, she held a gun to my head and threatened to shoot me.”)
  13. One or more of the PCs mounts or vehicles are impounded by the local constabulary. They claim the PCs did not obtain the proper permits and must pay a fine to recover their lost transportation. The permit is fictitious — the locals are actually trying to make extra money off of unsuspecting visitors.
  14. The PCs come across a beggar child who’s only parent has just died. The city will not help the child (“If we aided one, we’d have to aid all of them and we just don’t have the resources to do that.”)
  15. A horse or working aid animal takes an instant dislike to one of the PCs and will attempt to bite or kick the PC every time they cross paths.
  16. The PCs hear sounds of domestic violence inside a nearby home. To up the ante, a child runs out of the house and begs the PCs to come help because “Daddy’s trying to kill Mommy.”
  17. A goat (from a farmer’s market stall or escaped from a petting zoo) chews a hole in one of the PC’s purse or pouch. Make a hidden roll to see if the PC notices. If not, she’ll be leaking small items from her bag until she either notices or there’s nothing left that will fit through the hole.
  18. A traveling musician sets her sights on one of the PCs and begins to follow him around, trying to woo him. You can make this as humorous (a harmless youth) or as serious (a stalker) as you like.
  19. A pet or small child becomes attached to one of the PCs and follows him around everywhere. If taken home, the pet/child escapes and seems to be able to find the PC, no matter where he is in town. This can be either very funny or very creepy, depending on how you handled it.
  20. The PCs stumble on or are asked to witness the public marriage consummation of a newly wedded couple.

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Please Answer Survey

Posted on 18 January 2010 | 2 comments

Over at the Guang Keshar website, I’ve created a survey. Okay, the survey’s really at SurveyMonkey, but there’s a link to it from rpgGM.com. Even if you don’t plan on using a new campaign setting anytime soon, please stop by and let me know what you look for in a game setting.

It’s short. Only these five questions. That’s all — and I promise it won’t hurt 😉

I’ll be posting the outcome of the survey on the Guang Keshar website.

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What’s in a Name?: Alphabet

Posted on 15 January 2010 | Leave a comment

Here it is — the final post of our What’s in a Name? series. Today we’re talking about alphabets.

alphabet spiralWell, actually not about alphabets. While you can create a whole new alphabet for your language, it’s a lot of work to do just to create names. Especially since unless you’re writing out all of your game materials by hand, you’ve got to create either a true font or a set of dingbats to represent your new alphabet.

You can actually create something unique by using Roman letters. After all, most languages in Europe and the Americas all use some variation of Roman letters and they all manage to look different.

(Photo courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fdecomite/ / CC BY 2.0)

Go Back to Your Sounds

Remember the list of sounds we made back on the Day 2? It’s time to pull that out. What you want to do is assign one letter or letter combination to every sound you have. What you’re creating here is actually called an orthography.

Now, you can mix up the letters and sounds — but I wouldn’t recommend it. What I mean by that is, you can assign the “sh” sound to the letter “a”. I wouldn’t recommend it because it’ll be a constant headache for you and your players. You’ll constantly have to look back and forth between your  names and your “alphabet” and I’d be very surprised if your players didn’t revolt by the second game session as they try to remember that “Shewsberry” is actually pronounced “thantcamms”.

What you do want to do though, is settle on one way of writing each phoneme you have. Even though in English (for example) “c” can make an “s” or a “k” sound and more than one letter in the alphabet can make the same sound, for simplicity’s sake, I’d recommend one sound, one letter combinations.  That way, you know that “Cebunclane” is always pronounced “ke-bunk-la-ne” and not “see-boon-clain”.

A Note About Diacritics

One obvious way to make your language look different is by using a lot of diacritics. But this can also create a huge headache as you have to remember how to type them or pause frequently while writing to use the “insert special character” (or equivalent) function of your computer. And if you ever want to post your names online, keep in mind that HTML has a very limited set of special characters it supports.

You can actually get a very different look to your names just by using combinations of letters not normally found in English and peppered with a few very common diacritics. Here’s some examples:

  • Nord-Pas-de-Calais (French)
  • Lübeck (German)
  • Zaragoza (Spanish)
  • Algyógy (Hungarian)
  • Bizusa-Bâi (Romanian)

Have fun with this. It can be some work, initially, but once you’ve created it, it really does help give your world a unique flavor. Then, if you decide you do want to create a full language for your world at a later date, you’ve already laid some of the foundation work.

This article series was inspired by Mark Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit and I’ve drawn on it heavily as a resource. If you’re interested in a creating a language of your own, his site is a great place to start.

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End of Year Round-Up: The Top 10 Posts of 2009

Posted on 8 January 2010 | Leave a comment

Here’s a countdown of the 10 most popular posts on Evil Machinations in 2009:

10. An A-to-Z List of Lesser-Known Roleplaying Games, pt. 4: A survey of roleplaying games whose titles begin with the letters Q-U.

9. Building Better NPCs II: 8 Steps to Memorable NPCs: Eight steps for bringing your important NPCs to life and making them unique.

8. How Do You Describe Combat?: A question I posed to my readers. They came up with some great ideas — make sure to read the responses.

7.  An A-to-Z List of Lesser-Known Roleplaying Games, pt. 1: The first post in the survey of roleplaying games. Covers letters A-F.

6. Character Questionnaire: A list of questions to flesh out your character and bring those sets of numbers to life.

5. Handling Problem Players: A list of online resources for dealing with those players who make your gaming life hell.

4. What’s Good About 4th Edition?: Another question for my readers. Creating a wonderful discussion that came up with some great points in favor of 4the D&D. And without becoming an edition/flame war 🙂 .

3. What GMs Really Want (Poll): A survey where I asked readers what kinds of articles they’d like to see. It’s still active, if you’d like to leave your ideas.

2. “Where are we again?”: Creating Unique Fantasy Cities and Towns: A list of Internet resources for creating cities and towns.

And finally, the most popular post of 2009 …

1. Your Teacher Was Right … Creating Adventures with the Six Ws: How to create an adventure by answer six basic questions — who, what, when, where, why, and how. Featured in Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #469.

Thank you to all my readers. Without you, I’d have no popular posts to share. Keep reading here — I’ve got lots more ideas I can’t wait to share with you in 2010 😉 .

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What’s in a Name? Tone and Sound Constraints

Posted on 7 January 2010 | Leave a comment
Small latin A with acute (á)
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Here’s part 4 of our series on creating a naming language. Today we’re talking about tone and sound constraints.

Tone

Tone in language is the way you inflect a word or phrase. We don’t use tone on word basis in English, but several Asian languages (and there may be others) use it. The best known of these is Mandarin Chinese, where a change of inflection can change the meaning of a word. As an example, let’s look at the Mandarin word ma:

  • ma (flat, no intonation) means ‘mother’. There should be a bar over the ‘a’, but I’m limited by HTML’s available diacritics.
  • má (rising intonation) means ‘hemp’
  • mâ (falling then rising intonation) means ‘horse’. Actually, the circumflex on this ‘a’ should be inverted, but HTML doesn’t seem to support that.
  • mà (falling intonation) means ‘curse’

As you might suspect, this does make the language more complex — probably too complex for a simple naming language, but it can be a lot of fun to play with.

A simpler way of adding tone to your words is to use a pitch accent. Here you denote that the stressed syllable of a word has either a high pitch or a low pitch. Some languages that use a pitch accent are Japanese, Norwegian, as well as Latin and Ancient Greek. While there’s no reason you couldn’t use a rising then falling pitch or visa versa, it might make the language more complex than you actually want to use.

Of course you don’t have to use a pitch system. Many, many languages (including most  of the European ones) get by just fine without it.

Sound Constraints

Sound constraints can go a long way to making a language sound not only internally consistent, but also distinctive. Sound constraints help determine what can and cannot be a particular word in a specific language. For example, English speakers know that coss and trannel could possible be English words, while ctain and mtour couldn’t.

Developing sound constraints for your language is easy. Simply develop a syllable pattern. For example, my language of Keshari uses a

  • (C)V(C) constraint. Every syllable must have a vowel and there may or may not be a consonant at the beginning and/or end of the word. It cannot have two consonants or two vowels next to each other.

Make up any syllable pattern you like. Some languages even include a restricted set of letter options. For example, Mandarin Chinese has a syllable structure of

  • (C)(i,u)V(w, y, n, ng). Every syllable must have a vowel and may end with one of four sounds — w, y, n, or ng. Also, a syllable can begin with a consonant, possibly followed by an i or u.

For sake of ease, I’d suggest using a simple and very general pattern. Even something as easy as requiring a structure of CV(C) can really make your language sound unique, particularly when you pair it with and unusual phoneme frequency. These two things alone may be all you need to create your new language.

Next time we’ll cover creating an “alphabet” and a pronunciation guide.

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What’s in a Name? Stress is Good

Posted on 30 December 2009 | Leave a comment
Stress the right syllable
Image by quinn.anya via Flickr

It’s day 3 of our series on creating a naming language and today we’re talking about stress. Not that kind of stress — this is the emphasis we place on one syllable over the others within a word or name. Setting a set stress pattern for names can help keep your language from sounding like English with funny pronunciations.

In English, we learn which syllables to stress on a word-by-word basis. Indeed, different regions of the English speaking world can stress different syllables of the same word and names are no exception. Changing the stress pattern of word or name can change it’s pronunciation. For example, most non-natives will pronounce my home region of Oregon’s Willamette valley as WILL-a-met or-EE-gone, when it’s actuality pronounced will-A-met (to rhyme with “damn it”) OR-e-gun. Another example is the word “laboratory”. In American English, the stress is on the first syllable (LAB-or-a-tory) while in England, the stress is on the second syllable (lab-OR-a-tory).

Other languages are more regular. Hungarian stresses the first syllable, while Polish stresses the second-to-last syllable. Other languages can have more complex stress rules, depending on vowel placement within a syllable or length of syllable. My language slightly stresses the last syllable of a word.

You certainly don’t need to set a fixed stress pattern, but it can help make your language sound distinct

Next time: Pitch

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It’s a Brave New World — Guang Keshar

Posted on 20 December 2009 | 1 comment

It’s been a long-time coming, but I’ve finally done it. After nearly thirty years of kicking the idea around (and thanks to the guys at the Gamer Lifestyle program), I’ve finally take the plunge and started my own small-press game company, rpgGM.com.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time now, but just never really was in a position to do before. At least for now, rpgGM.com will focus on publishing my own original game world, Guang Keshar. The world is going to be published for sale as PDFs in a modular format — that way you only have to buy what interests you. If you want something about the Great Houses and the ruling Council, you can buy that. If you’re interested only in the geography of the world itself, then that’ll be available too.Many of these smaller products will be gathered up and published as larger compilation products (with some new material thrown in for good measure 😉 ), which will give you a price break from buy each one separately.

Soon I’ll also have a newsletter going out dedicated to the development of this world. It’ll contain exclusive content, development news, sneak peeks at products, game world tips and much more. The first issue of this should come out the end of December or beginning of January. You can sign up for it now on the company website. The site will also have free information, company and product news and tips, as well providing a place for you to provide us with feedback.

I’m really excited about this and can’t wait to share my product with everyone. But don’t worry about loosing this blog — I’ll still be posting here at least once a week (I’m trying for twice, but we’ll have to see what time permits) with the same type of content I’ve been writing all along. The newsletter Beg, Borrow, and Steal will still be published, though I may have to go to once a month, rather than once a week.

[Sales pitch over, we now return you to our regularly scheduled ponderings 😉 ]

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What’s in a Name? The Music of Language

Posted on 14 December 2009 | Leave a comment

Welcome to Day 2 of our series on creating a naming language."I love you" in several languages

Every language has its own particular sound. Japanese sounds different from Spanish and few people would mistake guttural German for tonal Chinese. Frequently, with just a little education, we can tell which language is being spoken, even if we don’t we don’t know a word of it. To me, each language has its own particular music and once I figure out the music, it’s easier for me to learn or create a new language.

Step to Your Music

Our naming language should also have it’s own music. What do you want your language to sound like, overall? Is it lilting and musical, straight-forward and down to earth, or harsh and demanding? What kind of people live in this area? Are they extremely poetic, which could lead to a fluid-sounding language. Or are they “salt of the Earth” farmers, who are more likely to create names that are practical and straight-forward?

The Beginning of Language

Your next step is to find out what letters give you that sound when spoken together. For example, Tolkein’s Elvish has a lot of l’s and vowel sounds, making it sound fluid and musical, while his Orcish is harsh and gutteral. Think about the languages you speak and find the phonemes1 that will give you the sounds you’re looking for.  If you’re still needing inspiration, check out some language learning sites on-line that have examples of spoken languages. I’d actually recommend listening to languages you don’t understand, so you can focus on the music of a language and not get bogged own in the words. What sounds do you hear that you’d like to use? Write them down phonetically in a way that makes sense to you.

The Sounds Take Care of Themselves

Every language has some phonemes or sounds (letters) that are more common than others. This is a large part of what gives each language its own sound. For English e, t, r, and a are among the most common letters used. In a language I’m currently creating, the most common sounds in the language are hard k, ts (like the Russian ‘tsar’), short a, long e, and m. Take your phonetic list and rank the phonemes in order of frequency. I usually go most frequent to least frequent, but you can use any method that works for you. Separate out the vowels and consonants into their own lists and rank them individually.

That’s it for today. Next time we’ll cover the importance of stress.

1pho.neme (n). any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that correspond to a set of similar speech sounds (as the velar \k\ of cool and the palatal \k\ of keel) which are perceived to be a single distinctive sound in the language.
— Meirram-Webster Online Dictionary

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What’s in a Name? Language!

Posted on 11 December 2009 | 1 comment

Creating names can be one of the most challenging parts of creating a game setting. Sure, you can name things whatever happens to come to mind, but that can create names from all over the map (literally, if you’re borrowing names from the real world). You can end up with the Boxboggle river in the city of Sparrow Hill in the country of Wwoauntyz on Planet Q. While that kind of naming is common in the modern US, it doesn’t really help give players the feeling that your setting could be a real place.

street signs(Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/philliecasablanca/ / CC BY 2.0)

Another option is to use words that describe something about the area. For example, Meadowbrook or Razorback Wallow. This is often a good choice. Because you’re using names from one language (usually the language your group speaks), these names often have a more unified field. They feel as if they come from the same culture and they can give your players an idea of the culture of an area.

There’s a third option, though. You can create a naming language.

What’s a naming language?

Unlike creating a full speaking language (which can be fun, but takes a lot of time and energy investment), naming languages have a few simple rules and can be created in an evening. Your goal here isn’t to create  an in-depth grammer and lexicon; it’s to create some rules about letter and sound patterns so that your names feel as if they all came from the same culture.

How to Create a Naming Language

Naming languages can be very simple to create. Creating full languages can involve creating new consonant and vowel sounds, as well as pronouns, grammar, sentence structure, standard word order … whew! Before you feel overwhelmed, remember that your sole purpose here is to create names. That’s it. You don’t need a complicated grammar or set of pronouns or whatnot. The names you’re creating don’t even have to mean anything (though they can, if you wish). You’re just looking for something that sounds internally consistent.

I’ve broken the process down into a series of steps, which I’ll cover next week over the course of several blog entries. These steps are:

  1. Decide what your language sounds like.
  2. Choose the most common sounds.
  3. Figure out the stress patterns of your names.
  4. Create tones.
  5. Determine sound constraints.
  6. Create an “alphabet” and pronunciation guide.

Other Sources

There are some excellent resources on line for creating languages, if you’d like more in-depth information. Here’s some of my favorites:

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Open Gaming Table Vol. 2 Taking Nominations

Posted on 10 December 2009 | Leave a comment

Open Gaming Table is an anthology of roleplaying blog posts. Published in March 2009, it’s definitely worth checking out. Now Jonathan Jacobs, the editor-in-chief for that book is putting together a volume 2. You can nominate your favorite RPG blog posts on this nomination form. Here’s the nomination rules from the form itself:

The Rules
1. You can anonymously nominate as many blog posts as you want. Keeping in mind that, the more you submit, the more work the reviewers have to do.
2. ANY RPG BLOG POST CAN BE NOMINATED. The type of content that is submitted is extremely broad: any “RPG blog” is eligible to be nominated – let the reviewers figure out if an individual post is appropriate.
3. Nominations must be for specific RPG blog posts (you must send in the URL). This is not a “Best RPG Blog” contest; but it is intended to be a showcase of the RPG blogging community’s best content.
5. Blog posts that were printed in Open Game Table Vol. 1 will not be accepted for Vol 2.

(http://rpganthology.wufoo.com/forms/open-game-table-vol-2-blog-post-nomination-form/)

You can nominate up to five posts on one nomination form. There seems to be no limit on the number of nomination forms you can submit. All nominations are kept anonymous. The deadline for nominations is 15 January 2010.

The success of this work depends on the entire gaming community — not just those of us who write these blogs. So please, take a moment and vote for your favorite blog posts. Not just from Evil Machinations, but also from the other great blogs out there.

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