Gnome Stew has an article up today: Hot Button — Secrets

Upon further reflection, I’ve decided that I don’t understand the practice of giving flowers at a funeral.

On the day itself, they are beautiful and I was deeply touched by the gesture (and deeply in need of seeing how much my mother was supported and loved).

But as the days pass, the flower arrangements become something that you desperately but futilely attempt to care for until they wither and die before your eyes.

It seems like the last thing I really want to be reminded of.

Something that I touched on only briefly in my Hexcrawl series was the subject of tracks: The system I use for encounter generation features the ability to create random encounters, lairs, and tracks. Random encounters provide immediate obstacles and interludes while traveling; lairs spontaneously generate new locations in the hexcrawl (organically building up material along well-traveled routes as the campaign develops); and tracks are a trail that can be followed to a point of interest.

What I didn’t really extrapolate on is the fact that the concept of “tracks” isn’t necessarily limited to hoof prints in the sod. In the wilderness exploration of the hexcrawl that sort of physical spoor is most likely very common, but the concept of “tracks” really generalizes to “clue”. For example, if I generated a result of “tracks” for bandits that might include a merchant caravan in panicked disarray due to their latest highway robbery; the dead body of a bandit that was critically wounded and abandoned; a bolt-hole containing documents implicating the mayor of a local village in collusion with the bandits; and so forth.

Roger the GS recently posted “Almost Encounters: Sights, Sounds, and Leavings” which breaks this sort of thing down into some useful categories:

• Sights (“a pair of griffins flying across the sunset, many miles away”; “a brief red glow, sighted across a far-away ridge line”)
• Sounds (“snatches of shouting and song down in the valley”)
• Body Parts
• Victims
• Tracks
• Smells and Vapors
• Environment Damage
• Intentional Markings

Check it out. There are a lot of great examples over there.

It includes all three original rulebooks and all four supplements. Each booklet has new cover art, but is “otherwise a faithful reproduction of the original, including original cover art”.

As you can see, the mock-up promotional picture shows eight booklets. I’m guessing that’s an error. OTOH, if WotC had somehow convinced Rob Kuntz to finish Supplement V: Kalibruhn (the original unfinished manuscript of which Noble Knight auctioned off a few years back) so that it could be included in this thread, I’d be spending the next nine months drooling. (Or maybe they’ll include either Chainmail or the Swords & Spells supplement, although neither is listed among the current contents.)

Lone Wolf Development (who previously brought you Hero Lab) is currently running a Kickstarter for their new Realm Works campaign management software.

Personally, I’ve usually been pretty skeptical of campaign management software. I find that it usually only offers marginal advantage over just using a word processor, while usually featuring a less intuitive interface and all the liabilities inherent in a closed format that becomes obsolete as soon as the developer disappears.

But much to my surprise, I think Realm Works is winning over my skepticism:

There are three key features which have really captured my imagination.

First, the ability to share specific points of information with my players. I wish that the software also included the ability for my players to add their own information to a node in the database (so that it would completely replace the functionality of the campaign wiki I currently maintain). But I think it may be a literal game-changer, “Okay, they’ve interacted with Character X. So I’ll unlock his description.” Or to unlock locations on the map of Ptolus that they’ve visited so that there’s a consistent, pervasive, and evolving understanding of the city.

Second, the explicitly node-based method of content organization:

This is self-evidently well-suited to the kind of node-based scenario design that I use in my campaigns. It would be nice to be able to specifically associate content with the connections (i.e., you could click on one of the arrows and see what clue/clues that line is representing). (I’ll also be interested to see if I can “nest” these story networks.)

Third, and the thing most likely to make a backer out of me, is the way they handle maps:

The ability to selectively reveal a map to players is potentially interesting, but appears to be fairly limited at the moment. (It really requires the integration of virtual tabletop features.) But what’s really captured my imagination is the “pin” system. Just a few days ago I mentioned that I prep my dungeons using a Monster Roster that’s independent of the map key. This allows me to dynamically run groups of monsters through the dungeon complex (reinforcing, fleeing, barricading, setting traps, ambushing, etc.).

While the roster helps, this sort of dynamic dungeon complex can still be something of a juggling act. But if I could prep the dungeon in Realms Works so that one set of pins contain the key for each room, another set of pins contain each encounter group in the dungeon, and I can move the second set of pins dynamically during the game?

I never thought I’d want to run a game from my laptop or tablet. (The screen is simply too small compared to the visual real estate I can leverage at the gaming table by laying out multiple pieces of paper and reference books simultaneously.) But if the interface for this stuff in Realm Works is clean, fast, and easy?

It might completely change the way that I run games.

So, yes. This is me recommending that you become a backer of what looks to be a potentially awesome piece of software.