Running games and product schedules

Last weekend was the 39th annual Winter War gaming convention in Champaign, Illinois. I had submitted to run two games set in bySwarm's Dark Golden Age, and I am really glad I did.

I also volunteered to run two Pathfinder Society tables, and the workload from my new job had made me second guess running four slots in a 7-slot convention. By the time the con started, I wished I hadn't submitted the bySwarm games because of the time needed to organize and run.

Running an open collaborative effort is stressful. It's really hard to get people moving that you aren't paying to do work, and so you have to excite them about the project. I learned that goes for me, too. By the time the weekend was over, I was eager to see bySwarm publish and really had fun running games for new players.

People really enjoy the Dark Golden Age setting. It's not a typical fantasy setting, but it is definitely fantasy and easy to relate. I enjoy it as people click different elements of the setting into their understanding.

While my enthusiasm has refreshed, we are not going to be able to release our first product as we had scheduled. If you're looking to get involved, now is a perfect time. I need an editor or two, a layout, and contacts with artists. If you're interested in getting your name on a published product, let me know.

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Getting a permanent alias for d20pfsrd.com content

3pp.d20pfsrd.com is a service of bySwarm to provide permanent links to d20pfsrd.com content. With over 10,000 pages and content being re-organized on a regular basis, permanent links can be very important for publishers who want to put a link do d20pfsrd.com that will be usable even if a page changes its address. Mike Bohlmann at bySwarm created this system that crawls the d20pfsrd.com site every few days, following the links that it finds on each page. The crawler creates a permanent alias based on the unique identifier hidden within each page.

How to find an alias for a page

Let's say that you wanted to have a permanent link to the Crossbowman archetype for the Fighter class. The first thing to do is find the Crossbowmen page at d20pfsrd.com. Copy the page address - the URL - from your browser. Next go to 3pp.d20pfsrd.com and paste the address into the box near the top of the page. 

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The system will then show you the permanent alias for that page. In this case, it is http://3pp.d20pfsrd.com/crossbowman. That link will always go to the Crossbowman archetype page as long as the crawler knows where it is currently located.

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How to request a new alias or update a page

If you search for an address and there is no alias provided, you can ask the crawler to check an address the next time it runs, usually within an hour. To submit an address to check, use the Crawl Request box on the right. This can be useful, too, if you find a page that needs to have its target address updated. For example, if the Crossbowmen page changes addresses at d20pfsrd.com, you can tell the crawler where it can find it on its next run. Without that, it could take the crawler a little while to find the new address.

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RPG Blog Carnival: Beastfolk in the Dark Golden Age

This month's RPG Blog Carnival is hosted by Tower of the Archmage, and the theme is animals in RPGs. What better time to talk about the Beastfolk of the Dark Golden Age from bySwarm. In the Dark Golden Age, magic failed just a few years ago and has finally become a shadow of what it once was. Prior to the Collapse, magic was very prevalent: golems were utilized in massive construction projects, animate objects tended to household chores, and fantastic creatures were enslaved through powerful enchantments. The Beastfolk are among the creatures that were created and enslaved before the Collapse.

When we thought of Beastfolk in the Dark Golden Age, we thought of how humans would want to create races of creatures that would put the best of animal traits into human form and why. Because of this point, the Beastfolk races often have perceived traits of their animal kin plus additional traits to help them in their intended roles. Even though they have animal traits, they are still bipedal and appear as perhaps monstrous humans. Here are a few examples.

Houndings - Dogfolk
The Houndings are excellent trackers and known for their loyalty. Because of humanity's close relationship with domesticated dogs, the houndings tended to have the easiest time being among humans. 

Galadines - Mongoosefolk
The Galadines are a race of Beastfolk created to root out spies and thieves. They have excellent reflexes and are very flexible. Because of their created role, they have a hard time lying.

Testudo - Turtlefolk
The Testudo are one of the few Beastfolk races that varies significantly in appearance from humans. The Turtlefolk actually have a carapace, although not one strong as an actual turtle's. They were created to serve as manual labor.

We have several other Beastfolk races that were are developing, and some of them are more "traditional" Beastfolk such as Bearfolk, Catfolk, and Lupines. Check out the Beastfolk section of our web site for more information.

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bySwarm at the Gamerati Tour 2011 stop in Urbana, IL

If you're connected to the online gamer network, you've probably heard about Ed Healy's Gamerati Tour. Just in case you haven't though, Ed is taking a loooong road trip throughout the United States on a tour of friendly local game stores (FLGS). This Saturday, he'll be stopping by the Armored Gopher, my favorite FLGS in the area. If you haven't been to the Armored Gopher or haven't been there in a while, Saturday will be a great day to come visit.

Among the events that day will be games and visits from area game designers, bloggers, and more. One of those events will be a session of Pathfinder set in the Dark Golden Age that I'll be running starting at noon. The game will be one of these four possibilities, probably the first one. Be sure to stop by the store!

A Lesson in the Divine
Before the Collapse, divine magic did not exist; arcane magic did everything anyone would want. After the Collapse of magic, tales of the devout manifesting magical power began to surface. You are being sent on a diplomatic mission to convince this cult to ally with the Wild Ones of Free Tesaya or to at least find out what you can. 7th level characters are provided.

The Missing Currant
An agent of the Red Currant Syndicate has gone missing while investigating a lead on the cause of the Collapse of magic that seems to point to the conjurers of the School of Worlds. Willem Analore has dispatched the PCs to find out what happened to him and what secrets are being kept hidden.  7th level characters are provided.

In the Hands of Eternity
The Thieving Prince of Halag, a tengu by the name of Rokinu has a task for them. As their lord and ruler, they are expected to perform it - although they may receive reward if successful. His advisory druid Maluk was scouting a Sascrian caravan with a small group of guards. As they watched the caravan, they were attacked by a Sascrian heptaviron, a group of witch hunters that seek out magic users who are taken back to Sascria for unknown purposes. 5th level characters are provided.

A Devil's Tale
Legends say that the humans of the Whale Islands are actually descended from angels and devils who came to Gondal and intermingled with humans. While the legends have been little more than folktale for centuries, things have begun to change since the Collapse of magic three years ago. After the cataclysm, stories and sightings have popped up with greater frequency. The School of Worlds has dispatched a group of trusted agents to investigate and report back what they find. 5th level characters are provided.

 

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Session 10 of my first time GMing online is in the books

I've been GMing Dungeons & Dragons plus its descendants for about 20 years now, and I love that it's a craft I continue to get better at doing. Last spring, I started my first online campaign after recruiting a handful of players from the Paizo forums.

Tools
We're using MapTool for a virtual table and Skype for voice chat. I know my usage of MapTool is pretty basic, but it does enough to help us run combats. If I knew I'd get reuse out of it, I'd like to do better maps and make use of macros. If someone knows a good tutorial for going from novice to pro, I would appreciate a link.

Wants
As a GM, I pull together pieces of content and mechanics from all over and then combine them into my prep notes. Evernote helps me with this organization, but it's not enough. I'd like to make all these things talk to each other because integration is king. I have some ideas stewing on it, but they are not yet complete and definitely need lots of work.

Players
One thing I am definitely not lacking is a good group of players. They have good dynamics, and they definitely enjoy exploring the Dark Golden Age. Tonight's session let them in on a little secret we have about the setting, an we'll see what they do with that information.

Posted from Champaign, IL

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Announcing our first four products for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game System

These are the first four products planned for release from bySwarm. The two modules will explore the Dark Golden Age of a world recovering from the Collapse of magic just three years prior. The characters will explore ancient tombs in search of what magical items remain and find themselves in the middle of Beastfolk and human schemes alike.

While the modules are set in the Dark Golden Age campaign setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game System, the Beastfolk Races and Godless Divine products will be suitable for any setting utilizing the Pathfinder system.

Module: Into the Dark Golden Age

This module will be a free download to introduce newcomers to the Dark Golden Age campaign setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game System. It is intended to take a party of 1st level characters to 2nd level.

Target release: February 2012

Beastfolk Races

This product will include Beastfolk, feats, traits, and other Beastfolk-specific things. They must be well-playtested by then. Paizo will be releasing the Advanced Races Guide for Pathfinder in April 2012. A playtest for Advanced Races Guide will begin in the fall of 2011. The Beastfolk Races product page has more detail.

Target release: May 2012

Module: The Bandit Kings of Halag

A group of 2nd level characters set out to influence the bandits of Halag, a lawless place liberated by Beastfolk from human masters. While set in the Dark Golden Age, it will be usable with other campaign settings as well.

Target release: July 2012 / Gen Con 2012

Godless Divine

This product will include alternative systems for divine magic and god-less realms for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game System. New material includes our system for Cleric Domains and deities, Domains, spells, archetypes, and more.

Target release: December 2012

 

Filed under  //   Pathfinder   rpg  

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Using Gen Con recovery to channel some Gen Con energy

For the last couple years, I've used the day after Gen Con as one more vacation day to recover from what is always a tiring and exciting experience. After taking care of some day-job things this morning, I set about planning and doing several things. I did a little work on Prong B (Pathfinder freelancing) and C (community business web hosting), but I spent most of the afternoon and evening on Prong A - bySwarm.

I finally moved the bySwarm site over to the new hosting at Linode. While the hosting will save some money over my previous hosting, this is really more of a functionality move. The biggest benefit is more control over the hosting environment.

Now that I can use some other tools for maintaining the software behind the scenes, I was able to clean up a lot of things such as old modules no longer needed and transition to some new ones that are better than their predecessors. One of the biggest improvements that I hope users will notice is that any time a page's title is used in the text of another page, it will automatically create a link in the text. That should save a good amount of time.

Product-wise I now have four envisioned between now and next Gen Con. I'm going to save the specifics until I've spent a little more time thinking about them, but they will coincide well with at least one of Paizo's releases in the coming year.

It's a great time to check out the site and get involved if you haven't already. If the setting looks interesting, I am considering starting a second online game if I find getting a local game too challenging to schedule.

Enjoy!

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John Wayne as Marion Morrison, the Duke of the Arena

This month's RPG Blog Carnival is about taking a real life individual and using them as inspiration for an RPG character. This post is my response to that call.

The Dark Golden Age from bySwarm is a wild place where monsters like chimera, hydra, owlbears and others were magically kept under control to fight in combat for the entertainment of the masses in large arenas. We created a prestige class for Pathfinder called the beast wrangler to represent the individuals that made a career out of wrangling these beasts both between fights and during combat. In thinking about this month's Carnival theme, it hit me that John Wayne would make a great inspiration for an beast wrangler NPC by the name of Marion Morrison (John Wayne's birthname).

Youth

John Wayne earned the nickname "Duke" for the dog that often accompanied him as a child. He also is viewed as a cowboy in popular culture although he himself was never one.

Marion Morrison was born about 40 BC (Before the Collapse) in the city of Halag on the western edges of Sascria. His family raised and sold domesticated and enchanted beasts as pets to the city's middle class. Marion first became acquainted with beast wranglers at the age of 16 when he started working with one as an assistant on hunts for beasts in the wilderness. Sascria's magocracy had a firm control over the magical beasts of the region via the beast wranglers. The beast wrangler took to calling Marion by the name "Duke" after the large mastiff that Marion brought with him on hunts. The beast wrangler focused especially on horse-based beasts such as the pegasus, the unicorn, the hippogriff, and the dragon horse.

Rise as the Duke

John Wayne became rather influential in American pop culture and politics. His films were extremely popular and sometimes used to sway public opinion.

By the time he was 20, Marion was himself a beast wrangler who most frequently worked with a hippogriff by the name of Dawn Rider (name of John Wayne's earlier movies). By 25, Marion was becoming somewhat influential because of the number of fights that his beasts had won. In Halag, he had become known by the informal title of Duke of the arena there. While he had no formal connections to the magocratic council of Halag, he held a great deal of influence over them and magocrats throughout Sascria.

Controversy

 

John Wayne was embroiled in his own share of controversial subjects. One was his involvement with the "Red Scare" and the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives. Also while he acted in many military films, he was always kept ineligible for the draft. Finally, he also made many racial comments in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1971.

Religion has almost always been seen as a weakness within Sascrian society. When arcane magic is able to give you everything you could ever imagine, what does religion have to offer you? In 10 BC, religion was tolerated and had been growing in popularity even among the ruling magocratic class. The Chancellory and the Deans of the Schools saw religion as a potential threat to the stability of the nation and instituted a program to root out and quash religious practices. Marion was very active in this program due to his ability to track down individuals and move about the countryside quickly. He reportedly was involved in more than a few killings to destroy small cults, especially among magocrats. Apart from these somewhat safe encounters though, Marion was never forced into servitude during the many military conflicts between Sascria and its neighbors.

Beastfolk had been part of everyday life in the Dark Golden Age for hundreds of years, but most races of these half-man, half-animal beings were seen as subhuman and therefore had few if any rights. Marion was known for being on the side of keeping all but the most valuable and intelligent beastfolk outside of any rights within Sascrian society. He typically used his influence within the magocracy to make sure that only those he thought worthwhile received the same rights as humans.

After the Collapse

"Out here, due process is a bullet!" John Wayne in The Green Berets

A few years ago, magical power throughout the world ceased functioning in what is now known as the Collapse. The world as he knew it collapsed all around Marion. The beasts he wrangled broke free from their enchantments with the exception of Dawn Rider, with whom he shared a special bond. It is believed that the two of them fled Halag into the wilderness once it became obvious that the city was lost to beastfolk. Rumors abound that the Duke has contracted a wasting disease while living in the wilderness, but he still occasionally appears to attack beastfolk or protect humans from beastfolk bandits. Rumors say that when he captures a bandit who pleads for mercy, he says to them, "Out here, mercy is an arrow through the head."

 

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Using long drives to imagine new RPG setting content

While making a long drive during my recent vacation, I thought it would be useful to use the time to find inspiration for things in the Dark Golden Age setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game System from bySwarm. Looking around us is one of the best ways to find inspiration for role-playing, and the method was quite successful until my iPhone battery got too low to edit in Evernote. For the trip home, I'm thinking I will use my laptop instead of my phone. Here are a few of the things I created during the first half of the trip.

Sascrian Highway System
Inspiration: US interstate system
If you have lots of technology and resources, you can build something like the interstate highway system in the United States. In the Dark Golden Age, the Sascrian nation had large amounts of resources and even larger amounts of magic to make use of those resources. To achieve a transportation infrastructure that could efficiently move large amounts of cargo, the magic Schools crafted the Sascrian Highway System. They combined mundane materials with magical materials for a highways that allowed those traversing the system to float just slightly above the surface of the roadway. While the Collapse of magic within the setting caused the levitation effect of the highway to fail, the system is still hundreds of miles of very smooth road.

Basilisk scale armor
Inspiration: Truck weigh station, ie. scales
In the last session of the online game I'm running, the adventurers encountered a basilisk. As I thought about the powers of the basilisk, it seemed like it might be too dangerous or not very entertaining to have as a combatant in the monster battles of the arenas. Instead of being a combatant, I thought it would be interesting if the Sascrians used basilisks as stop gaps for situations where the combatants got out of control or to keep things in order. To control the basilisks, beast wranglers would need to be resistant to their gaze. Basilisk scale armor was their solution.

Shadeland
Inspiration: Shadeland, Indiana
While I didn't see the actual town, the name of the town made me think there had to be something in the Dark Golden Age setting called Shadeland. The apocalyptic nature of the Collapse of magic triggered a lot of hauntings and other undead-related events to occur. Some places such as battlefields and arenas have become permanently haunted by poltergeists and ghosts of those who passed, empowered by the magic that used to be in the area. I decdided these places should be given the label of Shadelands.

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New year, new determination

With the start of the new year, re-energize our effort for creating content for the Dark Golden Age. We have two products in the works at bySwarm - two adventure modules for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game - and both of them need more content. A few members of the bySwarm community have been particularly active, but more work still needs to be done. There's a lot of opportunity for new members to get involved.

I have set a goal for myself of writing or editing at least 10 pieces of material every week. If you set "get my RPG work published" as a goal for yourself in 2011, bySwarm offers you a chance to do that as we are taking contributions from anyone wanting to put good material into published products.

More information on our two products can be found here:
Enter the Dark Golden Age (DGA01) - free introductory module for 1st level characters
The Bandit Kings of Halag (DGA02) - follow-up module to DGA01

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