The Phantom Rollbooth

Chapter 3: The Midnight Opera In which my player indicated to me that he wanted to take everyone to the theater so I narrated an original Opera in 4 parts. The journey to Sharn is over, but the night only begins as our party prepares for The Midnight Opera at the Syrazune Theater in Upper Menthis. Invited by Vedim, our resident smiling and puckish elf lush, the party prepares themselves in their best. Abel wears his cast-off armor and medals, Orival wears glamourweave and a half cape which obscures the dragonmark on his shoulder, and Agata does the best she can with the colorful silks she managed to save from her old life. They fit in, somewhat. Vedim is waiting in a box that he paid for personally. The party is rudely pressed aside to make way for Lord Mayor Cathan ir'Demell, a sweaty, rotund, bald-headed human man with his wife on his arm. They make their way to their private box flanked by a personal escort of eight private mercenaries. The party follows to the front-of-house, a...

Session 2: A Symbol of Demons Our party collects themselves. Rasdaar escorts the half orc and goblin prisoner to the holding cell cart. Meanwhile, Orival takes Vedim’s rapier and jams it into the coupling gauges of the cart as the momentum sends the rocking carriage back into place again. Vedim attempts the same idea with his sheath and misses. The rapier breaks, sending the end skittering beneath the train as Norsys arrives holding forward a connector from her hip parts. At this moment, a siege of arrows drops on the party from above, followed closely by a jar of alchemist’s fire. The three dodge out of the way as the slick material coated and flames up between the railway cars. Agata accosts her countrymen, asking what he is doing here. What they want. The Cyran responded he only wanted the money--just like the others. Agata considers the truth in this, but when asked what he was doing with them, he responds, it doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens next. H...

We began our story in Passage, boarding a train headed for Sharn. Vedim Nailo, an elven noble, thespian and entertainer, arrived first to the station and produced a first class ticket. Norsys, a warforged barbarian, also traveled 1st class, having intimidated someone into giving her their ticket. She quickly drew the attention of Vedim, as well as everyone else on board. Agata, a Cyrei human refugee, boarded with rough trappings and baggage, her ticket afforded to her from a Cyrei relief program. Orival, a Koravar artificer from Aundair, was the last to board--the very last, nearly missing the train. He boarded with a standard class ticket and luggage. Ori found himself boarded in the same room as Agata. He was forward and engaging. She was clearly cut deep from past wounds, but perhaps relieved that someone, for once, doesn’t wish to poke those old wounds to see how deep they go concerning Cyre. Rather than having old wounds dug out, she was instead treated to an hour long expla...

Hi, there, Marsie here, ready with another piping hot article right out of the bad idea oven. There are a great many types of preparation for your games, and we could talk about the concept of what is good prep vs bad prep for days. And the true answer is: It depends on your group. Players have varying needs to accommodate, and so do their characters. So does your game. So does your style. So do the individual themes you want to hit. It's all different. We all do different things to run the best game we can at the time. We mess up, we learn. We take the good things with us, and (hopefully) chuck the bad ideas out the window. The most preparation I've ever done for games revolved around centerpieces for large scale fights. Whether that be preparing ice cube miniatures for an adventure regarding the Lich Queen of Snow, or preparing a Jenga pyre to contain a volatile artifact that needed to be extracted before the whole thing burned to the ground, or Kingsmanning my party ...

Minmaxers, munchkins, metagamers--easy replacements for swearwords in the GM's Dictionary. If you're familiar with my worldbuilding, Game Mastering, and narrative work on The Owl of Lysia, you might be aware that I've run that setting in three other systems. Each system has its own crunch and way to optimize (or unoptimize) characters. And In my early days of GMing I would do a lot to unhorse the antics of my statistics-loving, crunchy, multi-classing &%$!ing minmaxers--some of which I've outlined in detail below. If you're familiar with my GMing now, you can see I've completely embraced this kind of chaos. But something's wrong... Specifically, this article is mislabeled. What this is actually about is the use of standardized measures of skill checks. But I think no one dragged me kicking and screaming into it better than my &%$!ing Minmaxers. On the use of Standardized Skill Checks, this is what they taught me: Mechanical Consistency ...

@MarsieVellan question for you. What is the best way that you've found to build a world using the Cypher System. I have an idea for a campaign but I don't know where to start. — Nerdly Asthmatic (@thtrnerd221) December 30, 2018 Thank you for the question! Also, welcome to my first blog post on the Phantom Rollbooth's blog! I think this also might be my first blog post ... ever? I decided that instead of doing a long thread on Twitter, this way would be cleaner and easier to process. Please enjoy: While I have a B.S. in Geography(a nifty and absurdly expensive tool that I’ve only really used to pick apart and create fantasy maps), the best way I’ve found to build a world using the Cypher System involves a simultaneous top-down (large scale environment and country mapping) and bottom-up (small environmental features of the world, inventions, customs, and people and how they affect the culture around them) approach. Additionally, working with a number of peop...