As I wrote up the “Wolves in the Walls” article about crafting dungeons, I realized I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about next. I’d covered ceilings, floors, and walls. A year ago I wrote about staircases. And I have an entire book about doors. What was left? Turns out, there’s quite a…
Another month begins and we have another fantastic topic to explore from the RPG Blog Carnival… Gates and Portals from Tales of a GM. Such a simple concept – a doorway into or out of a place. But doors can be amazing vehicles for story to creep in. In this post, I’m going to use…
Today we’re going to do something a little different… When I saw the announcement for a gorgeous Haunted Mansion map from the folks at Heroic Maps show up in my e-mail box, I knew it served a perfect opportunity to bring a number of things together… First, I love the work the Heroic Maps folks…
As we progress into the month, with only two weeks to go, I’m enjoying exploring some of the products I haven’t looked at for a while. One of my favorites is Brick by Brick: Doors and I was quickly able to use the worksheet to come up with: Purpose: Keep it out Purpose descriptor: Decoration…
While working on the upcoming Brick by Brick: Floors product (follow-up to Brick by Brick: Doors), I stumbled across a strange idea. If context is so important for everything in a game encounter, do we sometimes need some sort of inspiration to determine how the PCs have come to a particular place? Arriving at a…
Towards the end of the work I was doing for Brick by Brick: Doors, I came up with the idea of including a worksheet of some sort in the book as a quick reference for GMs to use as a distilled version of all the tables included in the book. Having never designed a worksheet…
Every dungeon has doors. Each door has a story. More than that, every door offers a transition from one thing to the next. Some transitions are easy (no door at all or it’s unlocked). Some transitions are hard (locked or trapped). Some turn out to be dead ends (blocked or jammed). Do you ever find…
Every door and doorway serves a purpose, closing off one area from another but acting as a way to pass between those areas. So as we put a door on a wall, we have to ask why it’s there. Was it designed to be used once or very rarely? Was it intended to be used…
Though I’m still working on the next One Spot, I also have a few other irons in the fire for Moebius Adventures. One of those is a series of products to help inspire more creative descriptions of common elements of dungeon and other encounter designs. The first of these will focus on doors. (This product…
