Previously On: The Corruption of Saint Barberra & World Building Notes
We played our first session yesterday of Zweihänder Grim & Perilous RPG! I'm so excited to introduce this award-winning system to our Sunday Pen & Paper Guild players. But this post is a bit of a double-whammy with world-building notes and a "previously on." So let's get to it! The World of Saint Barberra I've described this game world as Medieval Europe by way of West Virginia, combining where my family is from with some of my favorite RPG games like Diablo and Darkest Dunge
Design Notes: Party & Backstory Exercise
It has been a busy day of writing! We're expecting to move into the Corruption of Saint Barberra campaign with Zweihänder Grim & Perilous RPG come Sunday! To that end, I've been trying to figure out how to build a more cohesive group web of connections and backstory among our group. With that in mind, I drafted up this exercise as a shorthand zero session for the table. The campaign guide itself has appendices with printouts, but that is far from complete. If you're starting
Design Notes: Ghosts, Memories, & Saint Barberra
I've been putting some broad strokes into the first chapter of The Corruption of Saint Barberra: A Campaign Setting & Guide for Zweihänder Grim & Perilous RPG in advance of our Sunday introductory session. I have a sense of the rules, I've read through the Game Master chapter, and have a world to work with. By building from the resources of Zweihänder, I'm leaning hard into my memories of the original Diablo (1996) computer game, my love of creepy gothic environments, and the
Design Notes: Horror on the Orient Express & Pulp Cthulhu
Player response to this classic Call of Cthulhu campaign was immediate and energized. The classic conventions of Murder on the Orient Express, the rich cache of cultural reference points, and a setting with then cutting edge engineering at the fore seem utterly irresistible. More than any other campaign, players considered dressing up and roleplaying their characters immediately, each with their own concepts. So I've been starting to read up on and figure out how to make this
Design Notes: The Lazy DM, Dungeon World, & Zweihänder
After some conversation tonight, I thought I'd share a few resources that I'm using for my upcoming Zweihänder campaign, "The Corruption of Saint Barberra." In an effort to cite my betters, I'm going to keep this to the point. Image Credit: Wizards of the Coast, Out of the Abyss Sly Flourish, aka Mike Shea, has written two books on the topic of running lightly prepared, highly dynamic RPG games. His first resource, The Lazy Dungeon Master (available here), kept Pathfinder and
