Castlevania Inspiration

 So just posting a few pics from the internet that I'm looking at as inspiration for Losh Nekkar. Two of them are art from the resent Castlevania Lords of Shadow game, the tall castle is from an artist on deviant art (sorry not sure who, I think I got the image from one of  the posts on The Land of Nod). The last one is a really cool map from Simon's Quest, which was my first Castlevania game as a little kid.

 

Have a fun and safe weekend!

Nekkar Cross Section

This picture is really the meat of what I have so far. Its kinda a cross section of the castle, but the main purpose of the pic is to layout the various levels and sections- and show me how they relate to one another. I like how many of the levels are interconnected. It will eventually become possible to unlock direct paths between certain lvls.  For example the Inner Courtyard is initially inaccessible from the Lower Court, but after fighting through to the Upper Battlements the party will be able to lower a draw bridge to connect the two courtyards.

Also the Chapel deserves some mention. It is intended to be a safe zone so the party can withdraw from the dungeon and rest in relative safety without having to slog it all the way back to the town.

I'm planning for Losh Nekkar to start in a kind of dormant state a gradually "wake up" as the PCs explore it. The dungeon for example will be sealed off from the rest of the castle until the PCs blunder on down there, releasing various dungeon themed creatures. Gradually the dungeon creatures will start appearing in other places as they migrate around the castle.

And this is a very early sketch which was super heavily based on the stages from the Super Castlevania IV game, the names of boss creatures and things are scribbled all over the place. The game is a linear sidescroller so I was trying to figure out how the various locations would logically fit together in a "real" castle.


(Click for larger Pics)

More  later...

Nekkar Exterior

Ok, so here she is. my fairly rough diagram of Losh Nekkar and the surrounding area (click the picture for a much better view) . I'm pretty happy with the design of the Castle itself but the nearby village and stuff needs a little work, but most important elements are visible.  That's a bat's eye view of the castle in the lower right. Losh Nekkar is gonna be kinda of like a giant haunted house/fun house dungeon.  All the classic horror monsters will be lurking somewhere nearby if not in the castle directly.

  

The castle will certainly be the "tent pole" of the setting but there will be several other adventure sites located in the area.  Much like Ravenloft or any of the games though the action will be fairly restricted, there is a sort of contained sandbox around the castle and a well defined border keeping the PC's trapped in the Count's blighted domain.

More pictures and detail soon but feel free to ask questions or offer up ideas.

"What is a man?...

 .....A miserable little pile of secrets! But enough talk... Have at you!"
                 - Dracula (Castlevania Symphony of the Night)
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MM_Q0nfaG0
Awesome piano tune.

So, one of my many back burner projects is the creation of a mega dungeon. A mega dungeon heavily inspired by Dracula's castle from the SNES game Super Castlevania 4 and Castle Ravenloft, with a good measure of my own stuff thrown in there.

As soon as I stop being lazy and actually unpack my scaner I can post some digrams and sketches I have come up with -boy do I love maps.

So for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the Castlevania game series I will tell you why it is cool. Well it pretty much is just cool, particularly the early stuff, before it got all melodramatic and Japanese rpg style soap opera all up in there. Its basically just a rad story about a guy with a whip fighting his through a castle to get to Dracula.

As a young kid playing snes I made up an imaginary rip-off castle based on Castlevania (the literal name of Dracula's castle), I named my version "Losh Nekkar"- im not sure why. I pretended Losh Nekkar was in the woods on the other side of a swamp  just down the street from my house.  Anyway though, I'm naming this mega dungeon Losh Nekkar,and this will be the first in a series of posts about the place. Theres actually quite alot to tell. Not sure where to start.

More on this later...

B?X Magic

Yeah, I'm posting kinda light still. trying to pick it up a little.

Ok, so for the B?X project I am removing Vancian spell casting and taking a different approach.

Basically when a wizard wants to cast a spell he or she picks any single spell that he or she knows. Each spell will have a casting difficulty number.  To successfully cast the spell the wizard will have to beat the difficulty number on a d20 roll (adding intelligence modifier). If successful the spell casts. If the roll fails then the wizard will be forced to wait a number of turns equal to the spell level of the failed spell before they are able to attempt to cast another spell.

So a wizard tries to cast a lvl 1 magic missile but fails, the wizard is not allowed to cast a spell in his next turn. This makes it a lot safer for the wizard to try casting a low level spell every turn and makes trying to cast a high level spell very risky... fail a level 6 spell and the wizard will be unable to cast any further spells for his next 6 turns.

There will also be 2 types of arcane spells -

Incantations, quick "simple" spells, can be cast in combat situations.

example: fireball

&

Rituals, long complicated spells, cannot be cast in combat situations.

example: scrying

more on this later.

Here is another stormtrooper

by Feng Zhu

http://www.fengzhudesign.com/

Im back

Alright, took a bit of a break. I was moving back home and starting at my summer job not to mention seeing all my buds again, so I was busy, but I really didn't mean to leave this so long.

Sooo, whats new?

Well the poll for a name for my B/X thing were kinda inconclusive, of a total 5 votes there was a two way tie between 'Hero Story' and 'Leave your own suggestion in the comments'  with two votes each. There have been to my knowledge no suggestions though. I'm going to give it some more time and flesh out the rules more before I decide on a final name. I think B?X is an appropriate working title though (inspired by a typo).

I got a bunch of new project ideas zooming about in my head, and hopefully I can get some more work done on my current projects too. I want to focus on showing rather than telling, and will try to post a lot of pictures of the kind of stuff I'm doing and the aids I use to run my game. I'm a Fine Art student and have some drawing ability which I try to use as much as possible when running games, so I will get some scans up of my work.

Hmm... well sadly it looks like the planned Pathfinder Evil Villain campaign is on hold, - its my fault though, I'm just feeling kinda burned out from Pathfinder and running a lvl 10 game ... is not something I really want to commit to.  The good news though is it should open up some time to focus on my long neglected Warhammer armies, I might finally get some games in maybe.

So that is whats up right now. Hopefully I will be back up posting semi regularly again, maybe Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays but we will see.

Here is a storm trooper.

M is for My Pretty Lady

Me and my pretty lady have been dating now for over 4 years. She is pretty, and smart and cool and a big nerd like me.  After we started dating she started playing d&d  with my group, it was a little wierd at first having a girl at the table.  Not because we didn't want her there or anything but just cuz we never had a girl player before. My pals say I stopped doing my weird voices when she started playing.

Anyway, the pretty lady has since then blossomed into a hardcore nerd, shes better than me at a lot of video games, shes a way better warhammer painter than me and shes ruthless as all hell during D&D sessions. Now my guy players aren't exactly squeamish when it comes to "doing what has to be done", but my NPCs live in dread of the day they might stand in the way of the pretty lady and her goals.

The pretty lady has had a variety of characters since we started playing; an assassin, a vampire assassin, a witch (pathfinder), and an oracle (also pathfinder), most recently she has started playing barbarians.  Shes stating out a level 10 evil barbarian named Miley Cyrus for my summer evil villain campaign.  Her favored weapon is the earthbreaker- a massive spiked hammer found in pathfinder.

Anyway, I'm hoping that some day she will take over DMing duties for me. She is cool, I like her a bunch. Theres a link to her blog on the right. Shes pretty sporadic with posts cause she is really focusing on school but has some interesting stuff.

L is for Lairs

I never get these out on time.

Lairs- this would more accurately describe dungeons, but I already used the 'd' post.

I recently had a revelation about dungeon design. Now, previously pretty much every so called dungeon I've run has been a ruined underground structure, that's cool I guess, but most creatures and traps and thing were pretty much random. Its hard sometimes to come up with a reason why the various creatures living in the dungeon are even there, never mind trying to explain why they haven't killed each other.

My idea was to make living, functional dungeons, instead of always just random ruins type dungeons.  My idea calls for a dungeon like Minas Morgul - the "Tower of Black Sorcery" where the Witch King dwells.  Here it isn't abandoned, there are hundreds of orcs or more living in it at any time. The orcs are fairly disorganized though, and dwell only on the mid levels and guarding the battlements. the depths are home to to fearsome forgotten beasts and shadows, and in the tallest towers the Nazgul work their dark magic.

A stealthy band could slip in through a drain pipe and move carefully through the lower levels without drawing too much attention, perhaps even sneaking all the way up to the tallest towers without the alarm being sounded.

So thats kinda the example I thought of, but on a smaller scale it could work with any number of things. Dungeons can actually represent real dungeons beneath the evil overloard's keep and not be dungeons in name alone. Monsters could actually make sense in their placement, and heroes would be wise to actually try being stealthy and fast for once so as to not alert the entire castle. Finding hidden enterences suddenly becomes super important, and so does the crazy drunk in town who is always raving about how he escaped from the Dark Keep. I bet most people already play like this and I'm preaching to the choir, but it was a pretty mind blowing idea for me.  I'm going to include more evil overlords and their strongholds from now on in my games.

K is for Kingdoms

Ok, another late and short post.

World building is a hobby of mine, I'm sure many DMs would agree it is one of the highlights of our job.  I have over the years built a pretty stable campaign world  that I feel like I would be comfortable DMing games in for along time to come, one of the best parts is that it is constantly growing and expanding. There are sizeable kingdoms with well defined borders- most landmasses are least partially explored. This is the world I have been playing in for several years now, my current Pathfinder games are set there, and overall it is just a pretty cool place.

Once you get that specific, and the world is that detailed something is lost though.  I can't simply have the characters roll through an area of wilderness and roll up a random castle, I just can't. It wouldn't make sense; who built the castle and why?- something like a castle can't be random. And thus my world has alot less room for me to improvise and let the chips fall.

As I work on my B/X thinginy I have been thinking alot about the setting and the world I plan for it to be played in.

I'm picturing a vast wilderness, like points of light taken to a level I have never used before. There are all these tiny pocket kingdoms or civilizations lost among a sea of wilderness. The kingdoms have little to no knowledge of, or contact with, the neighboring kingdoms. Each kingdom is maybe a small city,a town or two and a few outlying villages, and totally self sufficient.  isolated pockets of civilization and culture.  There could be virtually anything anywhere out in the wilderness.  Once they pass the last village and start off roading I can random table stuff as much as I want until I decide they get to another pocket kingdom.  The pocket kingdoms themselves could have any makeup or type of culture I want.

I got the idea for this type of approach from fantasy adventure tv shows like Xena Warrior Princess, Herclues the Legendary Journeys, and my favourite animated show Conan the Adventuerer.  In these shows the heroes travel pretty much randomly across the land and in every episode come across a new kingdom where there is trouble afoot.  Sometimes they make allies, sometimes the kingdom is in ruins by the time they leave. I'm working towards making a world where adventure of the week type gaming and long term deep story gaming are both equally valid ways to play.

Night.

J is for Jabberwocky

Really short post. Got a big exam tomorrow. Don't know who did the top picture but the bottom one is by Alex CF http://alexcf.com/blog/?page_id=6 , he has got some really crazy cool art. It will be possible to make a Jabberwocky using my legendary creatures rules, they will most likely be built under the dragon entry. Night.