Check out L’Art du Rythme, Des Descriptions Évocatrices, and La préparation intelligente, the French translations of The Art of Pacing, Random GM Tips: Evocative Descriptions, and Smart Prep, respectively.

… que faites-vous? has also started translations of the GM Don’t List, under its English title. (For reasons I’m curious to understand.) English versions of the GM Don’t List can be found here.

Since I’ve been making some efforts to learn French this year, I’ve quite enjoyed my fairly inept efforts to read my own prose as rendered in a foreign language.

I’m actually a fair bit behind on sharing these international efforts, so if you’ve sent me an e-mail letting me know about a translation you’ve completed and it hasn’t been highlighted either here or on my Twitter account, I’ll be getting to it ASAP.

On that note, if you’re interested in writing translations of articles here on the Alexandrian, please contact me from the About page. I’m generally pretty easy going about giving permission unless there’s some specific reason why an article can’t be translated, and I appreciate knowing when the translations are available so that I can share them with other people.

It’s time for our local membership drive!

First, I want to thank all of current Patrons for all of their support. The Alexandrian has been pretty reliably updating 12-13 times to month in 2018, and that’s only possible because my patrons give me the time to create all the nifty content which (if you’re reading this) I hope you enjoy!

Since the last time I actively pimped my Patreon, there have been some changes to the way it’s structured. This is primarily because Patreon has been aggressively working to eliminate the micro-payments which originally made the platform so attractive. Without the support for those micro-payments, there are now two primary ways of supporting the site:

PER POST: Simply set a per post contribution. The goal is for the Alexandrian to update on a schedule of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday every week. This translates to 12-13 new posts, which usually translates to at least 20,000 words per month.

MONTHLY: If you’d rather make a flat monthly contribution (regardless of how many posts I actually make), simply donate that amount AND set that amount as your monthly maximum.

TIER REWARDS

EARLY ACCESS: All patrons of the Alexandrian get early access to the posts. Sometimes this “early access” is only a matter of a few minutes because a post is going live immediately after I write it, but even then it can still be valuable because patrons get exclusive access to PDF versions of the articles.

Higher tier rewards include:

HANGOUT CLUB: Join me for a free-for-all chat on Google Hangouts. We’ll chat about gaming or anything else that tickles your fancy. The patrons are in in charge here!

REQUEST LINE: For special patrons, I’ll write articles or reviews on request. (Subject to approval.)

GAME CLUBS: For the highest tier levels, you can also join my ongoing open table campaign(s) via Google Hangouts. Check out the Patreon page for details.

WHAT’S COMING

What, exactly, will you be supporting? Stuff currently on my radar for development here at the Alexandrian:

• So You Want to Be a Dungeon Master? A step-by-step guide to becoming a DM.
• A fully developed hexcrawl mini-setting.
• An open table structure and adventure set for Prince Valiant.
• More Scenario Structure Challenges, Open Table Manifesto exposés, and Smart Prep focuses
• … and, by popular demand, my Taint and Kaostech rules for D20.

And, of course, the Running the Campaign featurettes following the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign will also continue as a regular Friday feature.

If you enjoy the content here at the Alexandrian, please consider supporting us! Even just $1 a month can make a big difference!

… even the smallest of pledges can add up to wondrous things.

I finally motivated myself to finish putting together the index pages for the (as I am now freshly reminded) prodigious archives here at the Alexandrian. We recently crossed the threshold of 1,500 unique posts, so systematically going through all of them and figuring out how to organize them was a time-consuming project. (Far more time-consuming than I’d been anticipating, honestly.)

The index pages can be accessed through the side bar on the right. Several of these had been spun up previously, but have now been expanded/finalized:

Gamemastery 101: Has all of the GM-focused essays I’ve written about RPGs in general. This includes adventure design stuff like the Three Clue Rule, Node-Based Scenario Design, and game structures; The Arts of the GM essays; open game tables; and Random GM Tips.

RPG Scenarios: This has all the scenarios (for a bunch of a different games) that I’ve posted here at the Alexandrian.

RPG Cheat Sheets: Links to all of the RPG system cheat sheets I’ve written up. There’s about a dozen of these at the moment.

Ptolus – Shadow of the Spire: Includes links to all the campaign journal entries and the Running the Campaign essays related to my D&D 3.5 campaign.

Reviews: Here you’ll find the What I’m Reading series of novel reviews, every review I’ve written on the Alexandrian, and the archive of my old RPGNet reviews. (This latter archival project is one I need to get back to, as there’s still several dozen reviews I haven’t had a chance to reformat and post yet.)

Shakespeare Sunday: Shakespeare Sundays was a series of essays I wrote when I was the Artistic Director of the American Shakespeare Repertory, but I’ve also slipped in some additional Shakespeare-related posts over the years. (I need to finish archiving the ASR performance scripts at some point.)

In addition to these, I’ve now added a number of new index pages:

RPG Miscellaneous: The top section of this index has an archive of old articles, Tales from the Table, design notes from my personal projects, and a miscellaneous collection of essays and other material. The rest of the index organizes the material I’ve written up for specific games like Eclipse Phase, Numenera, Technoir, Ten Candles, and so forth. (Although I’ve generally avoided listing material on multiple indexes, this is the one exception: Reviews, scenarios, and system cheat sheets for specific games are included here with everything else I’ve written for those specific games.)

Check These Out: Collecting every post I’ve made where I’ve recommended checking something out elsewhere on the ‘net. (Many of these include additional discussion and insight.)

Essays: Long-form essays and similar thoughts on any topics that aren’t quite large enough to justify having their own index page.

Thoughts of the Day: All of my little interstitial “thoughts of the day” posts broken down by topic (Roleplaying, Politics, Pop Culture, Technology, Miscellaneous).

Dungeons & Dragons: The biggest index page of them all. This includes classics like D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations, Reactions to OD&D, and my review of 4th Edition. It includes Advanced D20 Rules (including Untested mechanics), cool stuff (feats, magic items, spells, monsters), reviews, scenarios, and miscellaneous essays.

If you’re an old hand in these parts, you might take a moment to poke around and find some old favorites. If you’re new in town, then this project has probably unearthed some lost gems that were lurking under your feet without you ever being aware of them.

Have fun storming the castle!

A couple years ago I posted Doctor Who: The Temporal Masters, a fanciful outline of the hypothetical season of Doctor Who I would create if I wanted to craft a villain suitable for replacing the Daleks as a rival for the Time Lords.

Martin Tegelj has taken that material and is doing something incredibly cool with it: He’s designed an entire campaign based on The Temporal Masters for the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game:

1. A Conversion Before Christmas
2. Something Old, Something New (aka The Doctor’s Granddaughter)
3. Dawn of the Temporal Masters
4. The Riot
Prelude: Donna
5. Fugue State
6. Alliance of the Daleks
7. The Genesis Extermination
8. The Master Plan
9. Black Hole Bluff
10. Andromeda Burns
11. Another World
12. Time Lord Ascendant

Places to Go, People to Be, a French RPG ‘zine, has posted a translation of my review Ten Candles. (The original review in English can be read over here.)

They’ve also done a translation of Opening Your Game Table, which I promptly rendered obsolete by writing the Open Table Manifesto. (Sorry, guys!)

Node-Based Scenario Design has been translated into Hungarian by LFG. (The original for that is located here.)