Showing category "resources" (Show all posts)

Where Adventure Writing is Going

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 21, 2022, In : AI 
I have a thing that's quite eye-opening for adventure writers. But first, here's an adventure that's pretty long, but kind of fun, for your enjoyment.

The Missing Alchemist

Synopsis: The small town of Oakdale has recently been plagued by a string of burglaries. The local alchemist, a reclusive gnome named Fizzwick, has gone missing and is believed to be the culprit. The town council has offered a reward for anyone who can bring Fizzwick to justice and recover the stolen goods. It is not clear ...

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One Year of Infinite Sales

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, October 14, 2022, In : Paizo 
Today marks the 1-year anniversary of the launch of the Pathfinder Infinite and Starfinder Infinite platforms. Although I don't contribute to those any longer, I had some significant initial success with them. You much success? Let me break it down for you at the 1-year mark.

As a threshold matter, I have separate DriveThruRPG accounts for Run Amok Games (as a publisher) and as Ron Lundeen (as a content contributor). Everything for the Infinite program is under the latter, so that's what I'm t...
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And now, D&D!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, June 13, 2022, In : Announcements 
As a follow-up to my "I'm leaving Paizo" blog, I'm excited to say that, starting today, I've joined the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast. I'll be a designer there, and I'm already super excited about the things I'll be working on. This blog is going to be quiet for a while, though, as I get my feet underneath me there. But rest assured that I'll be fulfilling the last Kickstarter bits and working behind the scenes to make great things for D&D!
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End of the Paizo Era

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, June 1, 2022, In : Announcements 
It has been an absolutely phenomenal four-and-a-half years, but my time with Paizo has come to an end. Today was my last day with Paizo, and also the day I turned in my last (truly massive and very exciting) freelance project to them. In fact, it's my last freelance project for anyone, and it'll be a while before I pick up another one. There is no way I can say enough good things about all the fantastic Paizo people who have molded my career, taught me their wisdom, and--best of all--been my ...
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Pages from the Boosted Bestiary

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, May 19, 2022, In : Announcements 
You might be curious what the Boosted Bestiary looks like before you go buy it right here. Let me show you, with four examples!

First, here's the first monster section of the book, the axiomite aeon. The axiomites in the Pathfinder Bestiary are level 8. Since I'm statting up monsters that are (usually) separated by 3 levels, so you can just "weak template/elite template" to all levels in between, I included lower-level axiomites at levels 2 and 5. (There are also level 11, 14, and 17 axiomites...
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Boosted Bestiary Cover!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, May 16, 2022, In : Announcements 
Here's a quick art post: the cover of the Boosted Bestiary! This has some atmospheric stock art I pulled from a stock art site I use quite a bit. I'm not sure who that horned fellow is, but there are indeed wolves of various levels in the Boosted Bestiary...which you can get right here!



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Building the Boosted Bestiary!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, May 14, 2022, In : Announcements 
My newest Pathfinder Infinite product, the Boosted Bestiary, is out now! This is a sort of quirky product, born from some tight math in Pathfinder Second Edition and a really, really bold idea.

First, monsters are really only good in Pathfinder Second Edition for about five levels. If the monster is level 9, you can't really put it up against characters of 6th level or lower, because it's too tough. You can't put it against characters of 12th level or higher, because then it's too weak. (Sure,...
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What I'm Playing

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, March 30, 2022,
I tell RPG writers that it's important to play the games you write for. Apart from playtests of your material, it's good to be active in the game so you can see actual games in action. So what am I playing these days? Glad you asked!

1. I'm running a Pathfinder Second Edition game of the Abomination Vaults Adventure Path. The characters are 4th level, so we're about a third of the way through the campaign.

2. I'm running a Starfinder game that's a continuation of our Intrepid Heroes podcast (wh...
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Proof Printing

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, March 24, 2022, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've now made all the edits that my editor caught for the Skaldwood Blight project. A lot of these revolve around the fact that I wrote this more than 2 years ago, but I'm only getting it into final form to give to people now. A lot has happened in the past 2 years! At Paizo, we've made two decisions that impacted this product:

1. First, we decided to rename the thingamajig in which a lich places their soul to be  "soul cage" and not a "phylactery." There's a lich that features across a few c...
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What's Next for the Kickstarter

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, March 9, 2022, In : Announcements 
Now it's probably pretty clear that my time away from this blog was related to the Skaldwood Blight Kickstarter that ran in February. I'm really pleased that reached the success that it did. We made our funding goal in only a week, and reached almost the second stretch goal (which I'll be providing anyway, and I'll describe that in another blog post).

For now, though, I wanted to do two things: first, I want to recognize the excellent work and mentoring that my friend Owen K.C. Stephens provid...
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Infinite Opportunity!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, September 21, 2021, In : Paizo 
A quick note about the newly-announced Pathfinder Infinite and Starfinder Infinite programs, which allow everyone to participate in Paizo's worlds. I'll have more to say about this soon, but information is available here.
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Winding Down to Down Time

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, April 13, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
It's been about a month since my last blog update, which is a long time for me to be going silent these days. I've picked up a time-intensive opportunity outside of the RPG space that I knew was coming yet still arrived sooner than I'd expected. So I've been working hard on wrapping up my outstanding freelance projects so I can focus on that.

Which means I have some thoughts about wrapping up outstanding freelance projects.

First, it's useful to take an occasional break to avoid burnout; I took...

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When a Sorcerer Isn't a Sorcerer

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, March 11, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 

I'm excited to see so many people saying such good things about the first Abomination Vaults Adventure Path volume, Ruins of Gauntlight by James Jacobs. A point came up with one of the key NPCs, and I thought it was worth bringing up. First, so you can see a little bit of how awesome this is and go buy it, here is that NPC: the heroes' patron, Wrin Sivinxi.

Wrin Sivinxi   Creature 5

Unique, CG, Medium, Elf, Humanoid, Tiefling

Female tiefling elf oddities merchant

Perception +12; low-light vision,...


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Skills Don't Do Things

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, February 28, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
Here's a short reminder for your RPG writing: skills aren't actors. They don't take actions. Saying, "A successful DC 15 Engineering check brings the machine back to operation," or "A successful DC 15 Sense Motive check exposes the lie," are both wrong, because a skill can't "bring" or "expose" things.

The thing that slips in the most often is when the skill use "shows" or "reveals" something, as in: "A successful DC 15 Survival check reveals red mud in the footprints." You'll sometimes see ph...

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Structuring an Investigation, Part 4

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, February 23, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've talked a lot recently about how to structure an extended investigation. An example of one is in my PF1 adventure, A Lucky Morning (which you can get right here).

To be more than a little bit spoilery, that adventure is about an evil necromancer getting revenge on a former adventuring group that shunned him. He's killing off the group's former members, and he doesn't care who he kills along the way. The adventure begins with the heroes waking up in the private rooms of a big inn, coming do...

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Structuring an Investigation, Part 3

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, February 18, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
We’re building an extended investigation scene! In Part 1, I talked about how to break down the investigation items into things the heroes must learn, and things the heroes might learn. In Part 2, I talked about the work to support the GM: ensuring your investigation meets your XP and treasure budget, and the best order to present things to make it easier on the GM. Now, we’re getting to how to present things for the players.

This is the step that takes the longest, because it involves th...

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Structuring an Investigation, Part 2

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, February 12, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
When I last posted, I described how to structure an extended investigation. In short, you need to start with your core adventure design. Decide what things your heroes must learn in the investigation; your adventure simply can't proceed unless they learn these two or three (or however many) things. Then decide what things they might learn in the investigation that would be helpful but not mandatory; maybe there's two to four of these. You made your list of "musts" and a list of "mights."

What...

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Structuring an Investigation, Part 1

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, February 2, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
It's often fun--and sometimes necessary--to put an investigation scene into an adventure. You're going through three layers to create one:

* Your adventure design, which requires the heroes find out one or several things.
* Your presentation to the GM, who must understand how to get the players to what they need to understand.
* The players, who must find the investigation engaging and useful.

This is not easy! 

It helps to work on these from top to bottom, and I'm going to talk about writing each...

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A Helpful Bard

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, January 28, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've been making up some NPC stat blocks for Pathfinder Second Edition, and I kind of kept running with it and made up an extra one. Here's a bard you can use as an ally for your low-level heroes, or as a foe to bolster the enemies they face.

Note that in Pathfinder Second Edition, as in Starfinder, NPCs aren't built the same way that player characters are. They look and act more like monsters, and have some impossible-for-normal characters-to-replicate statistics. Frankly, we try to avoid cal...

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Building Fun Scavenger Hunts

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, January 22, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
A very common type of quest in RPGs is a scavenger hunt: go get these three (or four, or five, or ten) things. For example, the heroes might have to go get four kinds of herbs for a poultice, or bring back the heads of five different monsters. I'm developing an adventure right now that has the heroes collecting bugs; in an adventure I recently developed, they need to get parts of a magical key. There are lots of things to go look for, but the general trend is "go get these things then come ba...
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Okay to Screw It Up a Little

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, January 11, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
I was talking to my friend John Godek yesterday for our biweekly chat about Starfinder and our lives, Digital Divination (which you can listen to here). There, we sometimes talk about our Starfinder actual-play podcast, Intrepid Heroes (which you can listen to here). One of the key elements of our podcast that we wanted to include was mistakes. Not that we wanted to screw things up on purpose, but we wanted to keep in the mistakes in math or rules that we make, instead of editing them out to ...
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I Want to Help!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, January 8, 2021, In : Paizo 
Aiding other characters in what they do is an important part of any roleplaying game--it's a team game, after all. The basic rule in Starfinder and Pathfinder First Edition is this: if you want to help someone do X, roll X as though you were doing it yourself, and if you succeed at a DC 10 (no matter what the actual difficulty is; 10 is the DC for the helper check), you give them a +2 to what they're doing. There's no risk to aiding. That lets the GM limit the potential bonus by limiting the ...
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Why Easy Encounters Matter

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, January 5, 2021, In : RPGWriterTips 
I'm deep in the development of Paizo's sixth Adventure Path for Pathfinder Second Edition, but in some ways we're still learning what works and what doesn't. We've carried over a lot of lessons from First Edition, but we're learning that some of them aren't as true in this edition. An example is encounter difficulty: people are finding Moderate encounters in PF2 to be a little more challenging than Average encounters in PF1. We used to put a lot of Average encounters in our PF1 Adventure Path...
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Lost in the Maze...at Paizo.com!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, December 31, 2020, In : Paizo 
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my blog pace here has slowed a bit because I'm blogging for the "big leagues" by making weekly blog entries on Paizo's front page! This has been a lot of fun for me, because I have very focused assignments but a lot of flexibility in how I approach them. I've done mini-encounters, new alchemical items, NPC write-ups, new downtime activities, and more! There are a total of 12 of these blogs, and about 8 (maybe?) have already been released. Near the end of Januar...
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Bombs Away!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 9, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
Based on my analysis from last week, here are seven new bombs for Pathfinder Second Edition!

Acrid Vapor Bomb — Item 1+

Uncommon, Acid, Alchemical, Bomb, Consumable, Poison, Splash
Usage held in 1 hand; Bulk L
Activate [[one-action]] Strike

The substance in this bomb is a weak, sticky acid that sublimates into a debilitating toxic gas when exposed to the air. An acrid vapor bomb deals the listed acid damage, persistent poison damage, and splash damage. On a hit, the target is sickened 1 (sickene...


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Examining Some Bombs

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, December 1, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've been taking a close look at the alchemical bombs in Pathfinder Second Edition. It's nice to have so many neat tools for alchemists, and that they cover so many types of damage, but I've seen some commonalities that allow you to play with the numbers and create more fun toys that go boom.

First, let's lay out what the rules already give, broken down into four categories: damage the bomb does, persistent (that is, ongoing) damage the bomb does, splash damage the bomb does, and other effects...
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Where's the Blog?

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, November 24, 2020, In : Paizo 
So, I've been light on blogging here for the last few weeks, but that doesn't mean I'm not blogging! I've started a blog series on Paizo.com, about a dozen posts in all. They're all connected to the town of Otari, which is the setting for the Pathfinder Beginner Box (which I helped write), the Troubles in Otari adventure (which I helped write), and the Abomination Vaults Adventure Path (which I developed). Paizo is doing a lot of fiction set in and around Otari as well, called the Shroud of F...
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Not Very Good...Yet

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, November 10, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I have a friend who's interested in getting into the RPG business; he's quite young, and wants some advice about how best to get started. In talking things out with him, I realized something about myself. Here's my realization:

My Six Griffons Haunt adventure for Pathfinder (which is retooled as Ghosts of Sparwell Lodge in Pathfinder Second Edition) isn't very good. I mean, it's totally playable and has interesting characters and such, but it's still not very good.

Why? Because nothing you writ...
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The Force is With You

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 28, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I want to talk about the force in Starfinder, and I'm not talking about solarians, who are TOTALLY NOT JEDI despite being lightly-armored mystics who fight with laser swords.

Instead, I want to talk about force damage. It's sort of in a weird place in Starfinder. In similar games (here, I'm thinking of Pathfinder First Edition, Pathfinder Second Edition, and Dungeons & Dragons 5E), "force" is just another damage type. It's a damage type that usually affects ghosts and other such creatures more...
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So Many Little Monsters, Part 2 of 2

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 20, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

Last week, I talked about the basic rules that swarms of smaller creatures have in many systems. Today, I wanted to give you a neat reskinning trick! You can turn lots of monsters into swarms by overlaying the swarm rules on top of an existing stat block.  

Let’s start with a new D&D 5E monster, a swarm of acid wasps! These nasty, intelligent critters lurk in acid pools, deadly swamps, and caustic areas throughout the lower planes. They’re malicious and durable individually, and together t...


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So Many Little Monsters, Part 1 of 2

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, October 16, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
It's interesting to me how games handle swarms of things: bugs, piranhas, spiders, birds, and so on. They're a classic threat, but the rules to support them vary widely between systems. Here's what's generally the same:

* They fill an area like a bigger creature. Even though individual swarm members are really small, the swarm itself is the size of a large creature (sometimes, its squares can bend around a lot, so long as they're contiguous).

* They can fit through small spaces, and other creat...
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Transparency in Games and the Torg Decision

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, October 9, 2020, In : Torg 
One of the way Torg feels different than a lot of other RPGs is in its transparency. Simply put, mechanical information (such as the difficulty of a check) isn't secret. Here's how the game's rulebook puts it:

Transparency
Mechanical information isn't meant to be secret in Torg Eternity. How many Possibilities a foe currently has, what an enemy's various defenses are, and what modifiers apply any given DN [Difficulty Number] should all be apparent or freely shared if the players ask. All four s...
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It's Rontober!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, October 5, 2020, In : Announcements 
It's always a thrill when something I've been working on comes out to the public. It's even more thrilling when several things hit at once!

First of all, here's the October product announcement for Paizo. I worked on the first book listed (Lost Omens Pathfinder Society Guide), and I wrote BOTH of the adventures premiering this month: Dominion's End for Starfinder, and Assault on Hunting Lodge Seven for Pathfinder. Both are great adventures, but they're very different. One is an ultra-high-leve...
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Number 14

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, September 30, 2020, In : Paizo 
Well, after an exhausting push through this weekend and into this week, I've completed and turned in my Starfinder Adventure Path volume kicking off an as-yet-unannounced Adventure Path. I think it's among the best Starfinder AP volumes I've written; it had the potential for being really scattered and disjointed, but I had a few overall framing things and interconnections that I think tie it all together well. My developer will be the first judge of that, and the players will be the second.

I ...
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Where New Monsters Come From

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 24, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
The Pathfinder Bestiary and Pathfinder Bestiary 2 have a ton of great monsters in them. There are old standbys, like giants and golems and froghemoths and stuff, and there are Paizo creations like goblin dogs, reefclaws, and sinspawn. But there are also plenty of brand-new critters in there as well, like the ostrich-like cauthooj and the limb-ripping mukradi. Where do these monsters come from? 

The alphabet.

I'm not just being glib. If you look at the placement of these new monsters--all of whi...
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The Bland Background Makes the Heroes Shine

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, September 21, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I was talking to another freelancer recently. She was populating a settlement in something she's writing and was asking how two unusual ancestries might interact with each other. I didn't know, but I saw a larger issue and asked how many of the NPCs were human. She said not many, because there are so many interesting ancestries available, and asked how many should be human.

My answer? Just about all of the NPCs should be human. Definitely at least 50 percent. Maybe more like 90 percent. This h...
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Will of PCs

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, September 15, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I talked recently about removing "the" from your writing to avoid "othering" certain groups, but this is only one of several words I search for when tightening up some text. Here are three more:

Will: RPG writing is in present tense. You don't say, "the count will reveal his plan to the party," or "if the party stops fighting, the ogres will listen to what they have to say." Put these in present tense: "the count reveals his plan to the party," "if the party stops fighting, the ogres listen to...
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The Bricks You Need

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 10, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I'm writing another Starfinder Adventure Path adventure. It's not announced yet, but I don't think I'm doing the company any harm by saying I'm writing for them again. I don't think anyone is betting that Starfinder is going to quit doing Adventure Paths, or that they're going to quit arranging for and assigning them behind the scenes, before a public announcement. So I can't yet say what it is, I can say I'm writing a Starfinder adventure.

I just turned in my milestone--about half my total wo...
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More CUP Updates

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, September 2, 2020, In : The Law 
I wrote recently, right here, about Paizo updating its Community Use Policy (or CUP). This is the policy that lets fans use their rules and their intellectual property, so long as the end user isn't charged for them. Functionally, it's about giving guidelines and comfort to creators of fan-made websites and videos (and other content, but this seems to be their new thrust).

They've made some further changes to it, although the specifics are tucked into a forum post. I want to walk through these...
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Avoid the "The"

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, August 27, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
Here's a quick tip today: I've been learning a lot recently about the phenomenon of "othering," which is setting a specific group apart because of its differences, almost always to treat them badly or dismiss their opinions or values. This is particularly damaging when applied to real-world people, because it's been used to justify all kinds of odious abuses (to ethnic minorities, to the physically or mentally disabled, and so on). Language that "others" is subtle but pervasive.

Here's a trick...
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The Opposite of Balanced Isn't Balanced

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, August 25, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I'm doing some freelance writing for an upcoming Pathfinder Second Edition book that is going to have lots and lots of spells in it. My assignment is to write lots and lots of spells.

Although I have plenty of neat and thematic new spell ideas, I like to look over existing spells not only to make sure I'm not reinventing the wheel, but to see whether any of them spark any further ideas. I thought I had found a particularly good design space in creating an aggressive opposite of the longstandin...
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Paizo Updates the CUP

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, August 12, 2020, In : The Law 
Paizo has two overall licenses for people to use:

The Compatibility License allows you to make products that use their rules and charge money for them; you can't generally use their intellectual property (proper names, etc.). Those of us producing 3PP (Third-Party Press) materials, like Run Amok Games, use this license. 

The Community Use Policy (or CUP) outlines how you can use their rules and their intellectual property for fan-made stuff. You get to use their intellectual property and even s...
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Six Sentence NPCs

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, August 7, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
Including NPCs in a game seems easy: you just slap a name on a stat block and you're done. This is Gobgor the goblin, who fights the heroes. This is Shopkor the shopkeeper, who sells stuff to the heroes.

I'm not going to get into naming NPCs well; I'm actually not very good at it. But there are easy steps to make any NPC evocative and useful at the table. This is particularly important when you're writing adventures, because the NPCs need to be simple (because some GMs and players will blithel...
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Paizo Licenses, Very Quickly

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, July 28, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I was explaining the differences between the two licenses Paizo offers to a friend of mine the other day, and I thought a quick summary of them would be helpful.

The Compatibility License is for professional publishers who want to make money from their products. This lets you use the Pathfinder (or Starfinder, which has its own similar license) rules and claim compatibility with the game. You don't get to use any intellectual property (or, properly, "Product Identity") in them. So you can writ...
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Sandbox Adventures in Pathfinder 2E and D&D 5E

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, July 21, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
There are not a lot of rules similarities between Pathfinder Second Edition and Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, but I've recently noticed one very significant similarity when designing adventures for each system.

They both usually handle sandbox adventures very well--with certain limits.

I've talked about sandbox adventures before; they're the kind of adventures where the heroes can go anywhere they want in a large area and follow up on whichever leads strike their fancy. It's a lot of choice...
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How the Adventure Went Down

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, July 14, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I posted last Friday about how I was going to write a 5,000-word adventure over the weekend. How did it go? Somewhere right between "okay" and "good." Here's the rundown.

As I mentioned, I knew that the introduction would be about 500 words (it's 430) and the final ambush encounter would be about 1,000 words (it's 1,130). On Saturday, I wrote all of that, then I started writing in more detail about the ogre keep. (Remember, the middle part of my adventure was divided up into "ogre keep" and "s...
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A 5,000 Word Adventure This Weekend

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, July 10, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
Happy Friday! This weekend, I'm writing a 5,000-word adventure. It's for a really neat project, and I'm collaborating with some fun people. I thought it might be helpful to let you know my process. Rather than, "eh, it'll get done this weekend," I'm being quite rigorous about preparation and planning the execution. Here's how I'll do it.

Understand the Parameters. I already know the adventure is for 5,000 words, is for Pathfinder Second Edition, and is fundamentally about attacking a caravan o...
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Podcasting Your Games, Legally Speaking

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, July 8, 2020, In : The Law 
Here's a slight deviation from my standard "so you're an RPG writer" advice, but it touches on the two pillars of my professional life: gaming and the law.

There's been a big push in actual-play podcasting in the last few years. I'm even part of one myself (it's an awesome Starfinder campaign, and you can find our episodes here). With more people meeting virtually, I've heard more people considering recording and uploading their games as actual-play podcasts. This is fun, and the tech availabl...
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Another Adventure Path Kicks Off!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, June 27, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've just finished an important work project, although it's something I can't talk much about just yet. We've announced our upcoming three-part Adventure Paths: the dungeon-themed Abomination Vaults Adventure Path, which I'm developing, and the martial-arts-tournament-themed Fists of the Ruby Phoenix Adventure Path, which my friend and coworker Patrick is developing. As will surprise no one, I've been hard at work putting together the outline for the Adventure Path after that one, which we ha...
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Into the Dungeon!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, June 24, 2020, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I recently contributed to an awesome project that is Kickstarting now. The Book of Dungeon Encounters is a collection of system-neutral dungeon encounters you can drop into any dungeon setting. If you like creepy, cool, fun, puzzling, or challenging dungeon encounters, don't miss out on this! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/philipreed/the-book-of-dungeon-encounters-for-use-with-fantasy-rpgs/
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Stumbling Blocks for New Adventure Authors

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, June 22, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
An online-only PaizoCon had a few wrinkles, but one of the best parts was being able to set up an "Ask Me Anything" thread for anyone to drop in and ask me questions about what I do. One question I received from Andrew Mullen strikes me as a great question a lot of people probably have:

What's the biggest—or what're the co-biggest—stumbling blocks you see from new adventure authors?

And here's my (mostly unedited) response to that:

Erratic party assumptions! Too many new writers assume all p...

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How I Develop, 3 of 3: What I Do to Your Words

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, June 9, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

Professionally, I’m a game developer. I focus on developing adventures. That means outlining adventures and assigning writing to freelancers, checking freelancers’ milestones, and developing the freelancer’s text before sending it to the editors. Let’s break those three things down! Finally, the development.

This is the bulk of my job. I’m taking turnover text that you, the freelancer, give to me, and I’m giving it a thorough edit, called a development edit (to distinguish it from ...


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How I Develop, Part 2 of 3: Your Milestone

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, May 28, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

Professionally, I’m a game developer. I focus on developing adventures. That means outlining adventures and assigning writing to freelancers, checking freelancers’ milestones, and developing the freelancer’s text before sending it to the editors. Let’s break those three things down! Second, the milestone.

What A Milestone Is. A milestone is a check-in point where I’ve asked you, the freelancer, to turn in about half your word count. This is to make sure you’re on track, and to make...


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How I Develop, Part 1 of 3: Forging the Outline

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, May 25, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

Professionally, I’m a game developer. I focus on developing adventures. That means outlining adventures and assigning writing to freelancers, checking freelancers’ milestones, and developing the freelancer’s text before sending it to the editors. Let’s break those three things down! First, the outline. 

I work with a lot of internal stakeholders to come up with a project outline that I give to my freelancers. Because I work on the Pathfinder Adventure Path line, the projects I’m outl...


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What Actual Feedback Looks Like

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, May 22, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
So, I wanted to talk about how feedback a developer gives you as a freelancer is going to range from the exceptionally specific to the exceptionally general. I know when I give feedback, this is nearly always the case. And I thought an example would be helpful, but I don't feel comfortable sharing the feedback I've given to others. Instead, here's some feedback I got myself!

Back in 2013 / 2014, I wrote The Choking Tower, the third adventure in the Iron Gods Adventure Path. James Jacobs gave m...
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What Makes a Good Milestone

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 19, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
If you're writing for RPGs, it's pretty likely you'll get asked to turn over a "milestone" about halfway through the process. This is basically a midpoint check-in, where you show you've got about half the word count completed. But a milestone can and should be a greater opportunity for that for you, the freelancer, to interface with your developer. What makes a good milestone?

* Word Count. What is "about half" of your word count? Anywhere near 50 percent is fine, so long as it's showing good...
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That's So Platinum

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, May 14, 2020, In : Wizards of the Coast 
I was looking over a conversation about the "metal levels" on DriveThruRPG, the most significant site for digital RPG sales. These levels (Copper, Silver, Gold, and so on) correspond with sales: higher sales get rarer metals.

I've felt lucky if some of my third party press products even get Copper rated, but I was surprised to find that I actually have three Platinum products! All three adventures I wrote for the D&D Adventurer's League campaign (Beneath the Fetid Chelimber, The Seer, and Quel...
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Another Solo Adventure!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 13, 2020, In : Announcements 
I've released my next solo adventure, a conversion to my popular Night of the Skulltaker for solo play. You can get it right here!
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Bells and Whistles

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 12, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
As an adventure writer, I like to think that the story comes first, and is the most vital thing I'm providing. Sure, there are monsters, but you can go get those stats in a monster book (whether a Monster Manual, a Bestiary, or an Alien Archive). The same with traps; something in the core rulebook is something you can look up yourself. Maps are often really important to tell the story, but you can draw those out yourself, or print the ones I include in the adventure. You've got all the tokens...
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When Results By 10 Aren't Enough

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 6, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
In Pathfinder First Edition, it was pretty common to see results broken up by 5s. Failed to climb that wall? If you failed by 5 or more, you'll fall. Failed to disable a trap? If you failed by 5 or more, you accidentally set it off. I saw plenty of tables, such as for information gathered while investigating something, that came in units of 5: If you got a result of 15 or higher on your Perception/Diplomacy/whatever, you learned X. If you got a 20 or higher, you also learned Y. If you got a 2...
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The Duskwalker's Gift, by Ken Melvoin-Berg

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 5, 2020, In : Hints and Teasers 
In what might be the first piece of fan fiction my works have ever received, here's a short story about Tarklo Dirge, the protagonist of The Duskwalker's Due, the solo adventure you can get right here. It's by my good friend Ken Melvoin-Berg and it's a lot of fun!

The Duskwalker’s Gift by Ken Melvoin-Berg


Hunting is what I was born for, literally. I was born again in this body of Tarklo Dirge and given a mission: hunt the undead to restore the balance of life and death. I was getting a smile ...


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Words Coming Up Short? Dos and Don'ts

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, April 25, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

A coworker of mine recently lamented that she was nearly finished with an adventure she was writing, but it was still under her target word count by a large margin. Although over-writing seems more common than under-writing, it’s important to know a few techniques to get those last several words you need down on paper. My friend Luis and I took turns coming up with Very Bad Ideas and Very Good Ideas about what do in that situation. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader which side I ...


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Solo Play for Pathfinder Second Edition

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, April 23, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
My solo Pathfinder adventure, The Duskwalker's Due, has proven to be a bit hit, so I'm designing a few more solo adventures. I thought this might be the case, so I planned by preparing a fairly generic "here's how to play a Pathfinder solo adventure" section near the beginning of that adventure. With light tweaks, it can go into any solo adventure. Even into yours! If you want to take this language and make it your own, do so! In these strange times, more solo adventures can be a big help.

Pla...


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Night of the Skulltaker, First Edition Style!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, April 23, 2020, In : Announcements 
I've already updated a few of my Pathfinder First Edition adventures to Pathfinder Second Edition, including Teeth of the Storm and The Six Griffon's Haunt (updated to Ghosts of Sparwell Lodge). Now I just did it backwards!

My recent Night of the Skulltaker was concepted and written for Pathfinder Second Edition. But when I saw someone online asking if a 1E version would be available, I looked it over carefully and realized a conversion wouldn't be very difficult. So I put that together, and n...
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Order of Operations

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, April 17, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

Just a quick note today about Pathfinder Second Edition stat blocks. We now list a creature's equipment differently than we did before.

In short, it's strictly alphabetical. But it's alphabetical in a bit of a strange way. Let's say an NPC has the following items: a stunning snare, a moderate healing potion, a ring of climbing, +1 striking composite shortbow (40 arrows), +2 greater striking longsword, +1 resilient breastplate, 54 gold pieces, and an ivory bracelet worth 25 gp. 

The listing is a...


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Beware the Skulltaker!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, April 15, 2020, In : Announcements 
For the news: my next adventure, the all-new "Night of the Skulltaker" is out.

You can get it here!

For some background: I wrote this adventure in just over 2 days. That's from jokey start to final layout and everything. (There were a few extra hours when I woke up, realized my Table of Contents wasn't right, and had to re-upload it in there, too.)

Here's how it got started.

Around Paizo, we joke with each other a lot. This hasn't stopped now that we're all working remotely; it just happens over ...
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Modifying Pathfinder Hazards

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, April 10, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

The Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide is out, and it provides several neat tools. One of these tools is the suite of instructions about how to build a hazard. These are more useful (and less labor-intensive) than they appear, because they also let you modify existing hazards to different levels. Let’s see how! 

First, let me take a classic trap, the poisoned dart gallery, from the Pathfinder Core Rulebook.

Poisoned Dart Gallery    Hazard 8

Complex, Mechanical, Trap

Stealth +16 (expert) or DC 31 (mas...


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Building a New Ancestry, Part 4 of 4 (Ancestry Feats)

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, April 8, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

I’ve been designing gyers, a new ancestry of honorable and reclusive vulture-people. I’ve finished everything but their ancestry feats, but those are the most in-depth part of the whole process! I’ve talked before about how there are certain low-hanging fruit of ancestry feats, like AncestryName Lore and AncestryName Weapon Familiarity, and I plan to use those to focus on gyer concepts, such as their reliance on shields. I flagged earlier that they should be able to change into vultures...


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Building a New Ancestry, Part 3 of 4 (Heritages)

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, April 3, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

I’ve been designing gyers, a new ancestry of honorable and reclusive vulture-people. I finished their introduction and base statistics, so now I’ll turn to their heritages. 
 

Heritages aren’t a thing in the Pathfinder First Edition version of gyerfolk, so that’s something to consider anew now. I could look at different kinds of vultures, maybe, or different habitats of vultures, but I think I want to try something a little bit different to differentiate their heritages: their hatching....


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Building a New Ancestry, Part 2 of 4 (Base Statistics)

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, March 31, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

Last time, I started building out gyers, a new ancestry of honorable and reclusive vulture-people. I finished their introduction to establish their flavor, so now I’ll turn to their base statistics. These are the rules that apply to all gyers, before adding in a heritage (next time!) and picking feats (the time after that!).

Base Statistics. Gyers have 8 Hit Points (the usual), Medium size (the usual), and a Speed of 25 feet and a fly speed of 30 feet (distinctly not usual). 

Now, for the abi...


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Building a New Ancestry: Gyers, Part 1 of 4 (Introduction)

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, March 29, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

I talked last time about what goes into a Pathfinder Second Edition ancestry, so today I’m building one. I decided to pull up my Pathfinder First Edition product, Run Amok Bestiary, and look there for a race to turn into an ancestry. There are two playable races in that product: ulqar (cannibalistic dwarves) and gyerfolk (honorable vulture-people). Since ulqar seem like maybe a heritage for dwarves rather than a whole new ancestry, I’m going to frame out the gyerfolk ancestry here. Their ...


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The Pathfinder Ancestry Checklist

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, March 25, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

By now, word’s gotten out that we’ve done something brand new in the third volume of the Extinction Curse Adventure Path, Life’s Long Shadows: we’ve presented a brand-new, complete, playable ancestry. Shoonies are small, dog-faced people who like simple, pastoral settings and hard work. Normally fishers and farmers rather than adventurers, you nevertheless have everything you need to play a shoony adventurer. 

Speaking as the developer: new ancestries take up SO MUCH SPACE, guys! Back ...


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Behold the Alien Codex!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, March 14, 2020, In : Work with Other Publishers 
In the frenzied run of projects at the end of last year, I added even more fun to the pile by jumping in and providing some Starfinder development work for Legendary Games's mammoth Alien Codex. It's right here!

Now, I only saw piecemeal bits of this massive book, developing a few parts of a few chapters. I didn't see the whole thing in its entirety until just a few days ago when I got my contributor copy. And it's really neat! I already knew there would be fun toys for players, like the Overw...
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Tiffany, Forks, and Doorknobs

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, March 9, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
Writing fantasy games, or fantasy fiction of any kind, sometimes requires a look back into history. I've done a lot of research into medieval flour mills, funerary customs, ancient cartography, and all sorts of other topics that would puzzle anyone reviewing my search history.

For the most part, writing for fantasy is about avoiding anachronisms that take your readers out of the moment. Sometimes, though, you hit items that seem to break that.

My favorite example is the name Tiffany. This seems...
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Topping 150

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, March 5, 2020,
I've been doing some updating of my site, primarily including a more robust and complete set of my "Other Works" and providing links to my Pathfinder Second Edition adventures released through Rogue Genius Games. Combined, these products total 145 published credits to my name. This list includes my work as a freelance developer, but it doesn't include projects I develop on a day-to-day basis as part of my job with Paizo for the last couple of years. Perhaps, for completion, it should include ...
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Monster Relationships with Spellcasting

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, February 24, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
Hey, I'm leaving shortly for a two-week-or-so vacation; this is my last post until early March.

I previously described how you can fiddle with Pathfinder Second Edition monsters' levels, but one of the things to keep in mind is their spellcasting. This is good to keep in mind even if you aren't adjusting the monster levels, because it's a valuable window into how heavily the monsters rely on their spellcasting.

Monsters in Pathfinder Second Edition have two kinds of spellcasting: Innate and The...
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Creating the Psychic Spell List

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, February 22, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

Psychic powers are a staple of science fiction. Many sci-fi games have a psychic powers or even a whole psychic class. Starfinder only sort of does, in that many mystic and technomancer powers feel kind of psychic-y. There’s a phrenic adept archetype and a few psychic power feats, but there isn’t anything that just says “here’s what a psychic gets.” It strikes me that there must be some better spell list that’s something between the mystic’s and technomancer’s (with some of th...


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Stripping a Starfinder Monster to Its Gears

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, February 19, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

Today, I wanted to give you a bit more use out of your Starfinder monster books. There are a ton of monsters available in Starfinder, with three Alien Archivebooks and even more monsters in the back of every adventure path volume. If you need more to prepare for a session, it’s easy to make them; the tables at the back of the first Alien Archiveallows you to quickly build a monster based on its role (combatant, expert, or spellcaster) and the Challenge Rating (CR) that you need. But if your...


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Monsters That Should Not Be

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, February 13, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
We have a lot of neat internal tools at Paizo. These include spreadsheets to let us know what parameters new Pathfinder Second Edition monsters should meet to be appropriate for their level. (This information is going to be in the upcoming Gamemastery Guide for everyone to see, although in a table form, not a spreadsheet.) These spreadsheets are fun to manipulate, and my friend James Case is a wizard at such things. He invented a very rough tool to translate monster stats to different levels:...
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Dungeon Mapping Practical Advice

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, February 11, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
This mini-series of suggestions started with what tools you should have to drawn dungeon maps and how to concept the map as a flowchart. Here are some practical tips to render your map into a final product to go to a cartographer. Most of these are "consider X, but also Y," and it's important to maintain a balance between conflicting considerations.

Consider Reality, But Only a Little Bit. Its important that you consider real-world aspects of the creatures who live in your dungeon. Where do th...
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Designing Dungeon Maps as Flowcharts

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, February 4, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
When designing a dungeon map, you should first start with a flowchart. Draw each room as a small circle or little box, and then draw all the connections to each other room. Make this a solid line if it's an easy passage, or a dotted line if there's something tricky about that passage (such as it's behind a secret door, or needs to be cleared of rubble, or must be opened with a special key). You'll end up with more lines than circles or boxes, and that's just fine; this initial exercise is to ...
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Tools for Mapping

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, January 25, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
We've been talking a lot about mapping here in Paizo: what makes a good encounter-level map (like a dungeon, or a starship) and what doesn't. Most of us spend time redrawing at least some maps we get it, and doing that well is important. After all, we don't want to replace a map that isn't in good enough shape to go to a cartographer with a different map that isn't in good enough shape to go to a cartographer, but for different reasons. So we've been talking about standards.

To be clear, this ...
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The Hidden Bestiary!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, January 21, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

I’ve got a point to make about something tricky in Pathfinder, but first let me give you three new statblocks for mythological creatures.

Nephilim

Giants descended from deities in ancient times, nephilims are all but extinct today. They resemble enormous, noble humanoids with feathery wings, handsome features, and a crown of bone horns growing from their heads. Masters of magical essences and the arts of war alike, nephilims are gracious in peace and fearsome in battle.

Nephilim Hero Cr...


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Looking Over Changes: The God-Host Ascends

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, January 14, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

One of the most exciting times for a freelancer is seeing the final product of the work you wrote. For me, there’s something indescribably satisfying about holding something in my hands that has the words I wrote on a printed page. This is also a good time to look over the product and see what your developer and editors changed! This helps you align future work to what they want.

First and most importantly, realize that not every change is due to a mistake. A freelancer can do everything abs...


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Placing Art

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, January 9, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 

I talked a lot in my last two blogs about all the things to do with adventure text when you’re done with it. One of the last steps I do here at work when I’m done developing an adventure is to write up an “art brief.” This is the direction for the pieces of art to appear in the text. There are a couple things to keep in mind when doing this, and I’ll talk about the first one today: where to place your art in the adventure. 

Note that you’ll be ordering art before you layout your ad...


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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 28 of 28

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, January 1, 2020, In : RPGWriterTips 
I'm finally at the end, both of this project and of the year (and the decade)! There are dozens of teeny steps I've taken with my final text, and I still have more to do, but I wanted to lay them out for you to answer the question: "I've written an entire adventure path, now what?"

Now, it's got to get into a publishable product people can buy and use and play. If you're freelancing for another company, you just send it in and your job is done. If you're publishing it yourself--like I'm doing-...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 27 of 28

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, December 19, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Okay! My writing is done, and I have two more things to share on this whole project. The first is what to do when the writing is done, and the second is a bit about layout. So now I know that there are 28 points in this whole series, and I'm declaring myself too lazy to go back and add "of 28" to all the prior posts!

Completing the writing doesn't mean you're done! You should aim to complete a freelance writing project at least a few days before your turnover date, so you've got some time to d...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 26

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, December 17, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
And that's it! Below are my last two chapters, Chapter 15 and Chapter 19. They're very different! One has a bargain with a lich gone wrong (which ends in a fight with the lich on the heroes' side) and the other has the heroes quashing evil in more discrete adventure locations than I've used in any chapter thus far. 

So, now, if you go back through all my blog posts, you'll have every chapter of an entire adventure path. But I intend to make this much easier on the reader and compile it all tog...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 25

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, December 12, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Part 25, already? Wow, this has been a much longer road than I initially thought. But I'm almost done!

It should be clear by now that adventures (like most movies, and most books) aren't simply written from beginning to end in a line. There's a lot of jumping around. A case in point is today's adventures, which include the finale for this adventure path even though I'm not wholly done with the middle bits (although I have more middle bits to share, too).

Now that I can see the whole shape of th...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 24

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, December 10, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Another chapter! I realized that although I'd given the stat block I intend to use in Chapter 17 (which details the final confrontation against the devil cult), I never actually got around to writing up that chapter. So I did so, and here it is. It's the longest by far (nearly 1,000 words over my 1,500-word limit), and that's for three reasons. First, I wanted to build in a plot reason to confront the pit fiend other than "we just don't like pit fiends running around doing their evil," so I c...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 23

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, December 5, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Here's another chapter! With this, I'm 70% of the way done. I'm starting to feel less like I can pick whatever I'd like for a chapter (as was the case for the first two chapters I wrote, 3 and 16) and now feel like I need to be building the right connective tissue. The plot threads are all coming together now. For example, at the end of Chapter 9, the heroes know their villain (Treerazer/Treereaver) and his location (the Heartwood), and want to go there. I have to get across that the Heartwoo...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 22

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 4, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
It's easy to put mazes in an adventure, but it's really hard to do it well. You can have an intricate maze as a map, but that becomes tedious to draw and boring to navigate. Worse, it doesn't feel particularly immersive for the players (as opposed to the characters), since the players can see the whole maze from a superior top-down perspective at all times. 

The best mazes in adventures give the players the wait-where-are-we-now feeling that their characters should have, and that usually means...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 21

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, November 27, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've been doing a lot of skipping around in my adventure path writing; to be honest, the very fact I've given myself some direction for chapters 12 through 15 has made me feel like I can tackle those a little later. So I've got chapters 9 and 18 to post today.

But first I wanted to talk about maps! I discovered an excellent cartographer named Dyson Logos, who has a ton of maps on his site at dysonlogos.blog. Many of his maps are free for commercial use (which is great for me!), although he has...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 20

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, November 25, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I'm taking a close look at the mid-levels of my adventure path, particularly the events of chapters 11 through 15 or so. I sort of just threw chapter numbers on the map, but I want a way to link them together. You'll remember the lower levels are about "experiencing weird stuff" and "figuring out what's going on," so by these mid levels the heroes should be in the "doing something about it" phase.

But doing something can be really simple ("go to location X and do a thing") or very complex ("he...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 19

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, November 15, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Hard to believe, but I'm just about halfway done with my full 2E AP. I've now got a good thread of story and I've dropped a lot of locations, but I don't feel like I can tie down the second half without making some map decisions. I need to know where in the Northfells the rest of the action is going to occur. Looking over the map and what I've got so far, I see a few changes I need to make. I should have a few more small forests near the "starter towns" of Fallinghollow and Jannasthorpe. I al...
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Getting the Most from Monster Damage

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, November 13, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 

I've stepped briefly away from the Heartwood Blight Adventure Path for another project (see here), but I'll turn back to it soon enough. In the meantime, though, I had a good conversation to bring here.

I’ve been working with a new-ish freelancer on monster design for Pathfinder 2nd Edition. His narrative prose is very strong, and his monster design is good, but I recently talked with him about his monster’s damage, and I thought it would be good to share this.

His monster, which we’ll ca...


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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 18

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, November 5, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
This adventure path has been rolling along consistently in the design process: I think about where I need the story to be, look at monsters available for the chapter's level, list out 12 encounters in a variety of themes, write up the 1500 word (or so) adventure, then seed in the right amount of treasure for the level. Repeat over and over!

I knew I wanted to get back into the forest threats for the 7th level adventure, and I have my eye on that scrap of forest at the eastern edge of my map. I...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 17

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 31, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Warning! This post is long, because it includes 10 percent of an entire adventure path!

Last time, I talked about how I had to do some creative thinking to fill out the 17th level adventure. In building the 5th level adventure, I found I had way too much cool stuff I wanted to pack in. A hobgoblin/barghest thieves guild, a sinister alchemist, and salt miners all working for the secretive devil cult, plus a raid on the devil cult in the Owlbear House, and mind-controlling vampires, and plots ag...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 16

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 30, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've been working on a couple different components of my adventure path at once: the pieces that are urban and focus on the devil activity. This is something of a side quest; the main thrust of the adventure path is about evil fey and demons, after all. But a devil-focused, urban, intrigue-based subplot allows players who really like that type of adventure to shine, and gives the whole adventure path some variety.

I've been specifically working on the 5th-level adventure (which introduces the ...
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Sparwell Lodge is Here!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, October 25, 2019, In : Announcements 
My second Pathfinder Second Edition product with Rogue Genius Games is now out! You can get it right here. It's called the Ghosts of Sparwell Lodge, a haunted-house adventure for 4th level characters. This is a reworking of my Pathfinder 1st edition adventure Six Griffons Haunt (my first Run Amok Games product!), which is itself a reworking of a D&D 3.5 edition adventure I wrote called The Haunted House of bin-Khadij. Each time the adventure has grown and been refined a bit more, and I'm very...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 15

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 24, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
So, I've now got my first three adventures done, and they do sort of what I wanted when I outlined this; the heroes are getting their first taste of troubles, and relying on NPCs a lot (in particular, the scholar Gendal). I ended that by pointing to a place called the Wailing Grove, and someone named Nelthek Sharpleaf (which isn't a very viking-themed name, so I'm already planning to change it to Njoln).

Looking back at my outline, I see that levels 4 to 7 were the ones where I want the heroes...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 14

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 22, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
So, I've got the 1st level adventure, and I've got the 3rd level adventure. Now I need to connect them by filling in the 2nd level adventure. I look at how the first adventure ends (an arboreal has killed a duergar from the Wastingdeep Mine, the scholar Gendal is kidnapped) and how the third adventure begins (upon returning to Fallinghollow with Gendal, stuff happens) and see that the second adventure is about rescuing Gendal from duergars. That seems like a dungeon crawl to me, and having th...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 13

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 17, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Last time, I presented the first adventure in the adventure path I'm writing. Today, I want to talk about how to end it. I haven't yet put this together, because I think it will depend a lot on how the 19th-level adventure goes, but I want to put down some thoughts about the 20th level finale of this campaign.

* It need not have 12 encounters. I've been building every chapter with 12 encounters to make sure there's enough experience for the heroes to level up for the following chapter. Since t...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 12

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 10, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Okay! Here is the entire 1st level adventure. This is how the Heartwood Blight Adventure Path will kick off!

Chapter 1: Raiders of Fallinghollow (1st level)

The heroes all begin in the town of Fallinghollow, a small community in the Northfells of about 1,000 people. It’s best if the heroes have some connection to this town, such as by being from there, or having recently moved there. They might be connected to Headman Sigrir, the town’s efficient and no-nonsense mayor; Sheriff Arskej, who i...


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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 11

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 8, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Now that I'm 11 posts into this project about writing an entire Pathfinder Second Edition adventure path, I'm ready to start! That is, I'm ready to take a look at how I'm going to design the first adventure, which will launch this adventure path right. The start of an adventure path needs to do these things:

* Establish the Theme. The way the adventure path feels should be established in the first adventure. If the adventure path is going to be a gritty, urban, noir theme, the first adventure ...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 10

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 3, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Okay! Now that I've got some names I can plug in, let me finish up the 16th level chapter I outlined earlier. This is a bit long, 1,600 words rather than 1,500, but I can trim it up a bit when I ensure it's connected to the 15th level adventure that comes before it and the 17th level adventure that comes after it, which I already know is going to be an urban adventure culminating against the pit fiend Balzzevarian, which I set up here.

Chapter 16: Monastery of Frozen Stone (16th level)

The hero...


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Name Checks

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 1, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I'm taking a quick step away from my lengthy blog series where I'm writing an entire adventure path to talk about names. More specifically, I'm talking about how you check them. Here's what I do, whether I'm writing something myself or developing an adventure for someone else. At some point near the end of the writing/development, you're going to want to run your document through a spellchecker. Have a Google window open at the same time. For each proper name you find, before hitting "Accept,...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 9

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 26, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 

So I’ve been throwing out names as they come up (for example, the town in Chapter 3 is Fallinghollow), but I now want to be a little more definitive about this. What is the region going to be called? What will the towns be called? And, perhaps most importantly, what is the entire adventure path going to be called?

Naming adventure paths is hard. Here at Paizo, adventure paths are almost all my small team does, and all of us agree that finding a good, evocative name for an entire adventure pa...


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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 8

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, September 24, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Let me get right to it: below is my entire 3rd level adventure for my adventure path! I'm 1/20th of the way done! It's right near 1,500 words, and therefore my target length. I dropped this text into my layout program (a free product called Scribus) and see that it's just a few lines shy of 3 pages. That seems perfect. Here it is!

Chapter 3: The Cat’s-Paw Deception (3rd)

The heroes returned the missing scholar Gendal to his home in Fallinghollow, but the forest town of Fallinghollow has troub...


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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 7

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 19, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Every writer hits a point of "Oh, crap. Word count!" at some point. Sometimes it's that you're done with a project and don't know how to fill the rest of the words you've been assigned. Much more often, it's when you realize that you have many, many more words than your word count allots to you. This latter problem isn't so bad; it forces you to refine your presentation, picking only the best and clearest words. It's really hard to kill words, but being forced to do so makes for better projec...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 6

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, September 17, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Last time in my series of posts about designing a whole Pathfinder Second Edition adventure path from scratch, I worked out a robust outline for the 3rd chapter, which amounts to an adventure for 3rd level characters that will get them to 4th level. I'm now doing the same for 16th level, because I wanted to jump into this for a low-level adventure and a high-level adventure.

The 16th-level thinking and ultimate outline is below. But I don't want to bury the takeaway of this exercise at the bot...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 5

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 12, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Welcome back! My last post described one adventure in my adventure path, Cat's-Paw Deception, for 3rd-level characters. That outline isn't quite yet done, because the adventure doesn't yet have any treasure. Fortunately, the Pathfinder Core Rulebook makes choosing treasure easy. Page 509 provides that a 3rd-level adventure should give out a total of 500 gp of treasure. This breaks down as 2 Level 4 permanent items, 2 Level 3 permanent items, 2 Level 4 consumable items, 2 Level 3 consumable it...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 4

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 12, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Okay! Enough of the overview planning and such. Let me tackle a couple of the 20 adventures in this adventure path (one level's worth of encounters) to see what that takes. I'll pick, semi-randomly, Level 3 and Level 16. This gives both a low and a high level, and both levels work fine in isolation--that is, I'm far enough away from the Level 1 start of the adventure path and the Level 20 conclusion of the adventure path that I don't need to worry quite so much about the details of the meta-p...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 3

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, September 9, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I'm continuing the adventure path design! With a powerful villain now in play, it's time to think about lesser minions and lieutenants that will serve as the foes for lower levels, leading into the final fight against Treerazer. 

So let's think about sub-villains, and the foes the heroes will face at lower levels.

I've already boxed myself in a bit with my super-short word count, as I can't rely on lots of lengthy stat blocks for villains with class levels--or, as Pathfinder Second Edition uses...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 2

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, September 3, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
More planning for my adventure path! I'm not thinking at a high level about art and maps. These are both important to any product, but they require separate skills; people who can do both well are rare and should be treasured. They both have some wildly different costs.

Art comes in two general types for the third-party publisher: custom and stock. Custom art is made to your specifications, and is a lot more expensive. You'll get exactly what you need in art, and your art piece will be unique...
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I'm Writing an AP in Front of You, Part 1

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, August 29, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've had a lot to say about writing adventures, but I want to think a bit bigger. I'm going to write a Pathfinder Second Edition adventure path. Sort of. Over many posts. In this first post, I'll provide some thoughts about the framework. Later posts will get into the details. I hope talking through this is helpful for mapping out your own large RPG projects!

Let's think about scope. A Paizo-type adventure path is about 300 pages long. A hardcover campaign book for other systems would also be ...
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Things You Haven't Noticed About Pathfinder Second Edition

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, August 19, 2019, In : Paizo 
This blog is probably Part 1 of multiple parts, as I'm still learning the new edition, but here are a few things that weren't immediately obvious to me:

1) Touch spells don't require an attack roll unless they say so. In First Edition, any spell with a Range of "touch" required you make a touch attack roll against your foe to hit it. That's not the case now. Now, plenty of spells have a Range of "touch" but don't require any attack roll. The spell text says if it does. For example, chill touch...
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Mother of Monsters Super-Adventure for 5E D&D!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, August 16, 2019, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've had the privilege of contributing adventures to an exciting upcoming product: an entire adventure path for 5E D&D called Mother of Monsters. This is a fantasy Greek-themed adventure path set in a vibrant world with a lot of adventure opportunity. It's Kickstarting now, and you can back it right here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zagoragames/mother-of-monsters-the-awakening-of-naehurdamia

Several things really impressed me from the beginning with the way Adrian set this up. He'd ob...
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Intrepid Heroes Take Flight!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, August 15, 2019,
I've done a LOT of gaming in my time, but I'm doing something totally new now. My Starfinder group--which recently finished Dead Suns to the great enjoyment of all--is starting up the Dawn of Flame adventure path. This time, though, we're podcasting it! You can check out our episodes at IntrepidHeroes.net. Each one is around 45 minutes to an hour long.

We're looking to fill a particular niche here: actual gamers at play. I've seen a lot of the "actual play" genre get overwhelmed with professio...
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RIP Blake Wilkie

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, August 14, 2019, In : Announcements 
I just learned that one of the artists I used for several Run Amok Games products, Blake Wilkie, passed away yesterday. The look of Run Amok Games products wouldn't be the same without Blake, and I regret I didn't have the opportunity to express my appreciation before his passing. My favorite cover art he did for me was the cover of The Underdelve Menace, but his distinctive comic-book style shows up a lot. RIP Blake.
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How I Redeemed Lawyers

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, August 9, 2019, In : Paizo 
Here's a quick story about my hand in the creation of Pathfinder Second Edition.

There are a lot of backgrounds in the book. Backgrounds give you, among other things, training in a skill and a specific skill feat. These skill feats map to the skills: you might get the Medicine skill and the Battle Medic feat, but the background shouldn't grant a mismatch between a skill and a skill feat. In reviewing the backgrounds, though, I noticed precisely one mismatch: the Barrister background gave you t...
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Second Edition Tips!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, August 7, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I'm back from GenCon, and one of the best things about it was being able to finally talk, in full and unvarnished detail, about the new Pathfinder rules. No more saying, "wait and see," as it's now here! If you're an adventure author for Pathfinder Second Edition, here are a bunch of things, in no specific order, to keep in mind when working with the new system.

* New XP. There's a new method for calculating experience points, and it's entirely based on the level of challenges compared to the ...
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Teeth of the Storm - for Second Edition!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, August 2, 2019, In : Announcements 
Great news! Pathfinder Second Edition launches today, and I've partnered with Rogue Genius Games to present (on launch day!) a Second Edition update of my popular 1st level gothic horror adventure, Teeth of the Storm. No simple conversion, this is rebuilt and re-imagined from the ground up with Second Edition in mind. Teeth of the Storm is the perfect way to kick off a new Pathfinder Second Edition campaign--if your heroes survive! You can get it here!



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My GenCon Schedule!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, July 26, 2019, In : Announcements 
Hey, I have my GenCon schedule finalized at last! Generally speaking, you can find me at Paizo's booth in the Exhibit Hall during Exhibit Hall hours, talking about our new edition. I have lots to say about it, so come by!

I'm also presenting in three panels. These are all in ICC:212, the Paizo seminar room (which is the same seminar room as last year).

Thursday, August 1st
In the Exhibit Hall pretty much the whole time it's open. There will be long lines for our new book!

Friday, August 2nd
Dungeo...
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Feeding the Fandom

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, July 23, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
When you're writing an adventure, don't think of yourself as writing a book for a casual reader (despite the fact that many of your readers will, in fact, be casual readers). Instead, think of yourself as writing for your fandom: a group of people who will dissect everything you provide, question it, review it, and build on it all on their own. This means you should keep a few things in mind:

* Make motives crystal clear. When an NPC does something, spend the words to make sure you're clarifyi...
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Converting Adventures

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, July 19, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've done a fair amount of adventure converting this year, to and from Pathfinder First Edition, Pathfinder Second Edition, Starfinder, and Dungeons and Dragons. I thought an overview about how I approach an adventure conversion would be helpful. I've broken this into nine steps. I'll use "native" for the original rules set and adventure, and "target" for the new rules set and adventure you're producing.

First, read the whole thing. Mark it as you go along for strange things that were expressl...
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Map Duplication

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, July 16, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I now have a couple projects in the works that use the same dungeon map twice. Earlier in an adventure (or in an earlier adventure), the heroes go through the dungeon. Later, they come back to it, and go through it again. Why on earth might I do such a thing? A few reasons:

* Familiarity. A reused map takes away some of the burdens of exploration (in the parlance of my prior blog post, the heroes jump right to phase two), allowing more focus on the events at hand.

* Encourage In-Game Thinking. ...
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Three Phases of Dungeon Exploration

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, July 12, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've said for a long time that there are three phases of dungeon exploration as a player:

First, you are just entering the dungeon, and you don't have any solid information about its scope, denizens, or dangers. (This is the phase when players tend to be the most paranoid, checking carefully for traps, and so on.)

Second, you have a sense of the scope of the dungeon, but you haven't yet "mastered" it; there's still several unknown areas and, most importantly, you haven't yet encountered the "bo...
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How I Wrote 15,000 Words in Two Days

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, July 8, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I'm back from vacation! I hosted a family reunion over the week of the 4th of July at my house. And I had an adventure milestone (of about 17,000 words) due the following Monday: today. If I'd been more rigorously scheduled, I would have finished this milestone before my vacation. But I had fewer than 3,000 words together when my family all arrived. I had grant plans of working a few late nights during the reunion, but those opportunities, unsurprisingly, vanished. All I had time to do during...
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More Torg Writing!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, July 6, 2019, In : Torg 
Hey, my contribution to the upcoming Torg Kickstarter has been revealed and unlocked! Pick up the new box detailing the fantasy realm of Aysle to get my adventure! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ulissesspiele/torg-eternity-aysle
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No Secrets

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, June 28, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Secrets are a great part of an RPG narrative: the ally who is secretly a traitor, the supposed villain who is really someone in need of help, or the simple general store that's a front for an evil cult. Even secret doors have a long tradition in RPGs. But when you're writing RPG adventures or rules, you should absolutely not be keeping secrets from the GM. You're not being clever writing about the Cult Master through the first third of your adventure and then...surprise! The Cult Master is re...
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When Games Reflect Real-Life Trauma

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, June 21, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
It's exciting to put very tense or dangerous situations in roleplaying games. Part of the fun--for some, the largest part of the fun--is participating in thrilling danger without actually being in any danger. RPG authors create the atmosphere for that. Yet RPG authors need to keep in mind that some concepts of danger or trauma can be triggering for players who've had similar traumatic real-life experiences. 

This came into the news recently when a gamemaster at UK Games Expo ran a game purport...
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Second Edition Publishing License: What's Different?

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, June 19, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
So, Paizo just released their updated Compatibility License for Pathfinder Second Edition! What does it look like? Well, a lot like the Compatibility License for first edition. But it's not the same, and you can't use the first edition license for second edition products. You need to agree to the new license if you want to produce Pathfinder Second Edition products. But it's so much legalese! Is there anyone who can put these side-by-side and let an overworked third party publisher know what'...
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Avoid Punting from the Outline

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, June 14, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
My freelance workload is currently such that I prepared several adventure outlines at roughly the same time, then simultaneously built them into full adventures. This gave me a good look at my process, and specifically where a shortcut in my outline made much more work for myself in the adventure writing phase. So I though I'd share my list of "never do again" phrases from an outline (because I'm learning they make MUCH more work for me down the line). It's fine to punt on things like a speci...
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File an Evacuation Plan

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, June 11, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've talked before about thinking critically about how your monsters actually live in a dungeon setting--how they interact with their neighbors, the tasks they do on a day-to-day basis, and so on. Sure, undead and constructs can simply stand immobile for decades on end, but living creatures should have a bit more verisimilitude in how they utilize their home. One good way to think about this is to do the same thing you should be doing for yourselves--have an evacuation plan!

This process works...
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Understanding Your Contract

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, June 6, 2019, In : The Law 

Hooray! You have a contract for your work! You look it over and are met with a wall of legal gibberish. But these things are probably standard, so you make sure the rate is correct and sign it and send it back in. You’re not a lawyer, after all, you’re a freelance writer. But in the back of your mind, you wonder (and maybe worry) about what you don’t understand in that contract. I’m here to help, with a breakdown of standard contract provisions! Complete with “Buts,” “Ands,” a...


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My Own Jargon

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, June 3, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Last week, I posted about how using natural language instead of jargon in your game is useful, but I acknowledged that sometimes jargon can be necessary or helpful (such as when presenting game statistics). That got me thinking about some of the jargon I use in this blog, and how I'm long overdue to explain what I mean by some of these jargony terms. If these are all well-known to you, that's great (and you probably review lots of games and game blogs). I try to explain terms I focus on, like...
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Jargon in Your Games

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 29, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I had a great PaizoCon last weekend. It felt more relaxed than last year, even though I participated in more panels, because I chose to "run" laid-back games of the revised Pathfinder Adventure Card Game rather than typical RPG sessions. As a big fan of the previous edition of the PACG, and the related modern-day game called Apocrypha, I was eager to give the revised PACG a try. I was a bit worried, because "old" PACG uses a lot of natural language on the cards, but Apocrypha uses so many sym...
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My PaizoCon 2019

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 22, 2019, In : Paizo 
We're gearing up for another great PaizoCon, where the company plans to show off a lot of the Starfinder Beginner Box, the revised Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and (of course) Pathfinder 2nd Edition. Here's what I'll be doing:

Friday 5/24
8:15 am to 10:45 am: Helping with registration and handing out swag bags
11:00 am to 12 noon: Secrets of Golarion seminar (Cascade 13)
12 noon to 1 pm: Dungeon Dissection seminar (Cascade 13)
2 pm to 4 pm: Helping out at the Delve
4 pm to 5 pm: Solving Puzzles ...
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Final Push for the Gauntlet!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, May 17, 2019, In : Announcements 
Sunday is the Gauntlet, the board game event for charity I'm participating in (along with the spectacular Joe Pasini, Katina Davis, and Whitney Chatterjee, we make Team Paizo). Please consider donating at at this link!
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Hand It to Your Players

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 14, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Many adventures use player handouts: things the GM prints and hands to the players to look at. I'm personally a big fan of these, and an adventure can't have too many of them. They immerse the players in the adventure in a tactile way. But what materials make for a good player handout? What good are they? There are many answers!

* Art. First and foremost, player handouts are designed to be looked at. Although it's possible (and, in fact, common) to have a text-only player handout, it should st...
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Freelancing Process 4 of 4: After You're Done

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, May 10, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 

Hey! If you've liked this blog series (or my blog in general), please consider donating to the Gauntlet, a charity board gaming event I'm participating in on May 19th. The link is here: https://thegauntlet2019.causevox.com/RonLundeen

Rather than talk about the nuts and bolts of rules and adventure design, I'd like to take a step back and talk about freelancing for a bit: specifically, some thoughts around freelancing RPG work for another company. This is the fourth in a series of four blog pos...


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Freelancing Process 3 of 4: When It All Goes Wrong

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 7, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 

Rather than talk about the nuts and bolts of rules and adventure design, I'd like to take a step back and talk about freelancing for a bit: specifically, some thoughts around freelancing RPG work for another company. This is the third in a series of four blog posts on this topic.

It’s not uncommon for something to go wrong during your writing. Here’s how to handle some of the common problems that come up; nearly always, it involves talking to your developer (the person who assigned the pro...


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Freelancing Process 2 of 4: Day Planner

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, May 3, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 

Rather than talk about the nuts and bolts of rules and adventure design, I'd like to take a step back and talk about freelancing for a bit: specifically, some thoughts around freelancing RPG work for another company. This is the second in a series of four blog posts on this topic. 

Once you’ve gotten your assignment, understood its scope, and signed (and returned) a contract, it’s time to dig in! But how?

Schedule Your Days. I’ve written before about how important it is to know your writi...


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Freelancing Process 1 of 4: When Not to Write

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, April 30, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 

Rather than talk about the nuts and bolts of rules and adventure design, I'd like to take a step back and talk about freelancing for a bit: specifically, some thoughts around freelancing RPG work for another company. This is the first in a series of four blog posts on this topic.

It’s exciting to get the opportunity to write game material, and even more exciting when you know you’re going to get paid for it! Before you start any writing on a freelance assignment, however, you should do the...


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Building Connections

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, April 25, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Something I run into frequently when writing (or developing) adventures is how to connect encounters in a meaningful way. Although there's nothing technically wrong with a string of unconnected encounters (fight an ooze in this room, fight some orcs in the next room, and so on), an adventure seems far more authentic if there's some connection between the heroes' fights. I talked about this in an earlier blog, remarking on how dungeon denizens should know their neighbors, but I wanted to branc...
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Your Half of the Trailer

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, April 22, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
My good friend Del, years ago, would hand out bonus rewards in-game (action points, hero points, possibilities, or whatever) for what he called a "trailer moment": when one of his players would do a stunt so awesome or produce a quip so funny that it would be in the trailer for the game, if it were made into a movie.

As an adventure writer, you'll want to think about how your adventure would look if it were made, beat for beat, into a movie. More importantly, you want to think about what the t...
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To Claim the Gauntlet! For Charity!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, April 15, 2019, In : Announcements 
I'm participating in a board game competition for charity called the Gauntlet. This competition happens every year, and for the first time I'm in Paizo's four-person team to participate! I'm excited to be part of it, and particularly excited for the "vintage circus" theme they've picked for this year. Please consider contributing! My contribution page is thegauntlet2019.causevox.com/RonLundeen.
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Ending a Campaign

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, April 4, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Here's some advice about how to effectively bring a long-running campaign to a close. I've done this a few times, most recently in the several campaigns I was running before moving from Chicago to Seattle. So I've put down several points of advice for GMs doing the same. I also want to give a shout-out to Mark Seifter, whose excellent thoughts about preparing a final encounter will appear in the upcoming Pathfinder #144: Midwives to Death.

* Get the Gang Together. When you're bringing a long-r...
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How to Incorporate Bonus Adventures

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, April 3, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've been watching the Paizo.com message boards about the Tyrant's Grasp Adventure Path very closely. Considering that this adventure path has been my primary work for the last 9 months, I'm very interested in what people think. I want to make it the best experience I can, especially because it's the last adventure path for Pathfinder First Edition (the last adventure in this adventure path is Pathfinder #144: Midwives to Death, which is followed by Pathfinder #145 Hellknight Hill, the first ...
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What Boxed Text Shouldn't Say

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, March 28, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've talked before about how boxed text, or read-aloud text, is the most direct way an adventure author speaks to the players. This kind of text is great for setting a scene, relaying critical mission information, or focusing player attention on specific elements. However, there are a several things good boxed text shouldn't include. Here are my rules for what you shouldn't say in your boxed text.

* It shouldn't mention creatures. Your boxed text shouldn't say things like "..and then four orcs...
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Game in a Game

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, March 27, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Lots of adventures include subsystems. By "subsystem," I mean any kind of rules system that stands outside the core rules of the game and is useful for (and perhaps specific to) a particular adventure or campaign. One of the most well-known is Paizo's Kingmaker adventure path, which uses a complicated set of kingdom-building rules so the players can grow their empire as their characters advance in levels. But a subsystem can be simple and add a lot to your adventure. Here are 3 straightforwar...

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Common Words in Uncommon Settings

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, March 22, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
RPG settings are truly fantastical, with incredible terrain and inhuman opponents. As a result, the language we use in our everyday world requires careful consideration in RPG writing. Be aware of the following points, which I see from time to time and occasionally make myself:

Killing the Dead. You can't kill dead things, or even undead things. Undead don't fight "until slain" or "until killed"; they fight "until destroyed" or similar. The same goes for constructs, robots, or similar. Wheneve...

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ABM (Always Be Monologuing)

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, March 19, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
An important aspect of RPGs is their collaborative storytelling nature. The players are a key part of the storytelling, and if they don't get the story, that's a recipe for disappointment and missed opportunity. As a result, it's important to put as much information in the hands of the players as possible, particularly information about motivations and plans of the villains they face.

What's a good mechanism to communicate a villain's motives and thoughts? The monologue! Sometimes derided, the...
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Villains Do Villainous Things

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, March 14, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Let's start with two quick lists: the first provides good traits to give a villain when you want to show they're villainous. The other list provides bad traits to give a villain when you want to show they're villainous. 

Good traits to show someone is a villain:
Cruelty or abusiveness
Hypocrisy
Sadism
Greed
Casual or wanton destructiveness
Corrupted motives 
Vengefulness

Bad traits to show someone is a villain:
Ugliness or disfigurement (especially facial disfigurement)
Exceptionally overweight or drama...

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Presenting Encounters

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've been thinking a lot recently about how to present encounters. Pathfinder and D&D do this very differently; here are a few examples showing what I mean.

* The Pathfinder Method: Makes encounters very long in column-length; different sections and effects are set apart; aims to be comprehensive.

D2. Goblin Prison
The goblins keep the rare prisoners they capture in the five wooden cages in the back of this room. They aren't particularly skilled at locksmithing, and have simply attached stolen d...
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Free Adventure: Against the Evil Keep!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, March 7, 2019,

Here’s an adventure! 

While the heroes are traveling through a narrow valley, they spot an evil keep. The massive fortress of dark stone is 35 feet across and nearly 50 feet tall. Flags hanging from iron spikes depict flames, gruesome beheadings, and other wickedness. Two massive iron ballistae are mounted atop the keep’s tall towers. 

Creature: If the heroes approach, the evil keep attacks!

The Evil Keep      CR 19

XP 204,800
Advanced fiendish mimic
NE Colossal aberration (shapechanger)
Init +3...


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The Secret Language of Character Descriptions

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, March 5, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Adventure authors don't speak to players directly; the communications are filtered by the GM at the table. There are some obvious exceptions to this, such as boxed text meant to be read aloud to set a scene, but there are some secret ways an author can communicate tactics to savvy players. It's sort of like a hidden language. Much of it rests in how the adventure describes the enemies the players face.

An enemy's appearance doesn't just convey the likely threat (and armored hulk with a huge sw...
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Elbow Room

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, February 28, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Here's a short piece of advice that's good to keep in mind: monsters need room to move. Even novice adventure writers know that you can't fit 12 orcs into a 10 foot-by-10 foot room. But with a dizzying array of monsters, most of which are presented with only a single standalone image in a bestiary or monster manual, it's easy to overlook how BIG many monsters are. A purple worm may seem like a good underground threat, but it's so big it can't fit in many tight subterranean tunnels and really ...
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How Long is Your Adventure?

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, February 26, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
My brother wrote a book. It's here, and it's really good. But this blog post isn't about shilling my brother's book; it's about being intentional about adventure length. When Robert was writing his book, he started with the seed of his story, but then he took a hard look at how long he wanted to take to tell the story. Final page count was something he had his eye on early in his process, and that struck me as similar to RPG adventure writing.

That's not to say you should focus on page count s...
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Strange Weather We're Having

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, February 25, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
You might have heard that we in the Pacific Northwest have been buried under a surprising amount of snow. That got me thinking about how most RPG adventures assume good weather (or at least no weather of note), but the reality is we sometimes experience downright bad weather. That's something to keep in mind during your adventures, whether you're running them or writing them. From a narrative perspective, weather can often help set the mood.

Now, most games have some weather-related rules in t...
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Horseshoe Calamity Reviewed!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, February 22, 2019, In : Work with Other Publishers 
My adventure for Legendary Games, The Horseshoe Calamity, just received a four-star review from epic reviewer Endzeitgeist. Check it out right here.
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Words to Kill

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, February 1, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 
Let's talk about words to avoid in your game writing (and, as a bonus near the end, what not to kill). These words and phrases generally produce weaker writing, so doing a find-and-replace for them prior to turning in a project makes the whole thing stronger. It also cuts a surprising number of words, if you find yourself over wordcount.

Will. This is the big one! RPGs should be written in the present tense, not the future tense. You don't say "The ogre will smash the first PC to walk into her...

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Your Best Resources

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, January 20, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 

(Side Note: My hosting site was down for a bit, but is back up! Yay for more blogs!)

No author writes an RPG adventure or supplement in a vacuum. Resources are key to creating good, compelling adventures, and here are some of the most important on-line resources I use.

On-Line Rules. It’s nice to have the physical copy of the rules you’re writing for at hand, but nothing beats a searchable version of the rules—something like Archives of Nethys, or even .pdfs of the rulebooks. This is ex...


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Roll for Initiative!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, January 4, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 

I’m afraid I once deterred my younger brother from playing D&D by explaining it as “a game about doing math and waiting your turn.” But I’m not wrong. Taking turns is important in most RPGs, particularly in combat, and there are as many methods of doing so as there are RPGs. Here are some common ones, and a few observations about each.

Roll Once, Set an Order. D&D, Starfinder, and Pathfinder all work like this. Everyone has an initiative modifier. At the start of a fight, every parti...


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Let's Recap

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, January 3, 2019, In : RPGWriterTips 

Several blogs spend the first post of the new year recapping the previous year. That’s not the kind of recap that I’m talking about here. I’m talking about adventure recaps!

I like talking to players about the campaigns they’re in. Hearing things from the player perspective helps me see how an adventure is communicated to the ultimate recipient. I’ve had two different friends, in two different games, recently tell me that they have a lot of fun playing the games they're in, but the...


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Replaying Adventures

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 19, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've seen the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? more times than I can count. I've rewatched the first season of The Good Place three times in the past six months. I played through each of Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic at least twice. I know plenty of people who can recite huge sections of Star Wars by heart, or entire comedians' monologues--because they've seen them so often.

But RPGs are a different matter. Once you've played through an adventure, you've learned its secrets and s...
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Perfecting Your Angle

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, December 17, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
I have an image blog post today: how to draw angled walls for your dungeons. There's a common way that poses some problems, and a better way that makes a lot of things more clear. The images show this, but the key is this: draw angled walls from the midpoints of squares, not the corners



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Illusions of Choice

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 12, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
There's a bit of misdirection involved in all RPGs. The core misdirection is that the PCs need to feel that they might not win each confrontation, but end up winning nearly all of them. Success shouldn't be automatic, of course, but it should feel a lot more unlikely than it actually is. This misdirection falls on the GM a lot of the time (for example, to play up how fierce an ogre is when the PCs can easily defeat it, by the numbers) and the game system a lot of the time (to provide, for exa...
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How to Build a Sandbox

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, December 10, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
Players really like sandbox adventures. The term "sandbox adventure" implies an adventure (or even campaign) in which the characters are free to go wherever they'd like, and address adventure elements in whatever order they choose. There's a real sense of player agency there, and that's one of the reasons they're so popular. They also seem more realistic, as the players know there's something going on all over, and not just waiting for their interaction, just like in the real world.

Yet buildi...
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Adventures as Skeletons and Zombies

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, December 4, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've had a general frame of mind when writing that I used when writing papers in graduate school, when writing memos as a lawyer, and in writing adventures. It's a fairly simple way of viewing a writing project, and I wanted to speak about it in reference to adventure writing.

Your adventure is a skeleton, or it's a zombie.

A skeleton has a solid, visible frame. You start with an outline, and the outline is detailed enough to hang all the "meat" on: you know what encounters are going to happen ...
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Frosty the Graveknight

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, December 3, 2018, In : Announcements 
At the suggestion of a friend of mine, who pointed me toward a discussion about Frosty the Snowman being a lich, I've worked up some stats as well. But I don't think this beloved children's character is a lich. No, I think he's a graveknight. His hat isn't a phylactery, but durable armor into which his immortal essence is infused. As he plainly has the ability to compel children and cops alike, I'm assuming he's also a bard. What is this nefarious creature's end goal? Eternal survival, no dou...
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Building Monsters from Both Directions

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, November 29, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

I’ve been designing a lot of monsters in the past year, and I’ve noticed that I tend to do so from one of two directions regarding the art: either my text comes before ordering the art, or my text comes after the art exists. Both directions warrant some careful consideration to make sure the creature’s powers align with its image. A GM often shows a picture of the monster to the players (“you see…THIS awful thing!”), but the players also get a sense of the monster ...


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Monsters Should Know Their Neighbors

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, November 27, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

A classic, old-school dungeon is a series of connected rooms, each containing traps or monsters. This is fun, but modern RPG players expect more verisimilitude from dungeon inhabitants. If there’s an ogre in one room and a roper in the next, a lot of questions naturally arise: do they know about each other? Do they get along? Will one come running if the other cries out for help when outmatched by intrepid adventurers?

In any dungeon you design (and I use the term “dungeo...


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I Found a Secret Monster!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, November 26, 2018, In : Paizo 
Here's a short update about a neat thing I just discovered. The Pathfinder RPG Bestiary has several monsters with variants listed. The stone giant, for example, has stone giant elders that are a bit more powerful and lead their people. Wights have brute wights (ones made from giants), cairn wights (powerful wights that guard crypts), and so on. These variants are called out with their own headers or boldface entries. They're also listed in a table at the back of the Bestiary for ease of refer...
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Rule of Three Clues

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, November 21, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
There's a very good piece of adventure design advice that goes like this: you must leave at least 3 clues for something you want the PCs to do. As they could miss one, or even two, of these clues, you need to have enough there to point the PCs in the right direction. I wanted to talk about why this rule works, and give some advice about putting it in action.

As an initial matter, this rule isn't about getting the PCs from one room of a dungeon to the next room of a dungeon. They'll just walk t...
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Spells to Cause Fights

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, November 20, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
I was kicking around some ideas for new Starfinder spells with my friend Conor last night. We were reworking many of them to either dial up the space-fantasy theme or to work around the rough edges of some rules. He'd suggested one spell that would deal damage in an area based on the number of electronics in that area--you'd just count the squares in the area with electronics, and more electronics-filled squares meant more damage dealt by the spell. I spotted a problem with this: there's an i...
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Tying Forward and Back

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, November 14, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
I've got the great privilege to be developing the Tyrant's Grasp Adventure Path here at Paizo. Although I know quite well where the entire 6-part arc is going, I'm currently just over halfway through the development. I've done enough now to categorize in my mind the connections I'm working hard to make across all the adventures. They make good points for any adventure author to keep in mind, whether writing a simple 5-room dungeon or an entire campaign. I call them seeds, callbacks, and theme...
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Never the Ideal Party

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, November 13, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
Many adventure authors assume that players are going to have the key bases covered: a tank-y fighter type, a nimble rogue type with a lot of skills, a healer, and a blasting spellcaster. These follow from the core classes of fighter, rogue, cleric, and wizard, but there are many combinations that make up a balanced group like this (and some classes, like an oracle, can do nearly any of them depending on specializations). 

This leads into a few suppositions that adventure authors make: that PCs...
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Be the Beasts!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, November 9, 2018, In : Hints and Teasers 
"Hey, is it true that in the upcoming adventure A Bad Day for Trolls, everyone plays trolls?"

"Indeed! You're all monsters! Grawr!"

"Can I see one?"

"Sure! Here's Maggrak Bigmaw!"
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What Failure Feels Like

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, November 8, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

I mentioned in my previous blog that I’m part of a group playing through Doomsday Dawn, the 7-part playtest adventure to test very specific parts of the proposed 2nd Edition Pathfinder rules. We went into this knowing that the playtest adventure isn’t like other adventures—although we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the plots thread running through it. One thing we’ve noticed about the game, though, is that it feels pretty punitive overall. That's particularly obviou...


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Through the Grinder

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, November 7, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

Even though I work here at Paizo and have close access to the designers, playtest materials, and the first of the Pathfinder 2nd edition material, there’s no substitute for actual table play. I have a group that’s been going through the Doomsday Dawn playtest adventure, in all 7 of its parts. Like many people playing this adventure, our group is behind the formal “one part per two weeks” schedule. We rotate through GMs and play every other week, but life happens to get...


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What PCs Love to Kill

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, November 2, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

No adventure author or GM can really predict what their players are going to truly love and remember about any particular session or campaign (in my experience, it’s often to be a groan-worthy joke as anything else*), but you can get a sense of what monsters they’ll remember fighting. If you plan out encounters with these monsters carefully, you can craft encounters they’ll remember long after the campaign is done.

Players’ stories about satisfying, memorable victorie...


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A Hobgoblin for Halloween!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 31, 2018, In : Hints and Teasers 
A Bad Day for Trolls is coming from Run Amok Games soon (check out the Upcoming tab above), and I wanted to show off one of the enemies that that the troll "heroes" will face. In this adventure, the PCs all play trolls, and I needed an enemy that would put a bit of a scare into them. I decided that an acid-flinging sorcerer would do, but I didn't want to wholly build one from the ground up. I took the draconic sorcerer from the Pathfinder RPG NPC Codex and made a few key edits: I changed the ...
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You Can't Get Away So Easily!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, October 29, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

I recently talked a lot about why flying foes can cause problems for low-level PCs, and it reminded me about a related topic from one of the first published adventures I wrote. There’s a monster in 3rd edition D&D called an ethereal marauder. It lives in the Ethereal Plane, from which it can see into the regular world but can’t be spotted or attacked except by certain specific, high-level magic. It darts in from the Ethereal Plane, attacks, and retreats there all in the sp...


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Giving Your PCs "The Talk," Part 4 of 4: GM Text

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, October 26, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

A critical part of many adventures is when an NPC gives the PCs the quest, a summary of the situation, or critical information about upcoming events. There are a couple of ways to present this information: in boxed text, in bullet-point lists, in likely-questions-and-answers format, or just in text informing the GM to convey how she sees fit. This week, I’ll break down a few of these and how and when to use each in your adventure prep or adventure writing.

Today I'm talking...


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Giving Your PCs "The Talk," Part 3 of 4: Question and Answer

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 25, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

A critical part of many adventures is when an NPC gives the PCs the quest, a summary of the situation, or critical information about upcoming events. There are a couple of ways to present this information: in boxed text, in bullet-point lists, in likely-questions-and-answers format, or just in text informing the GM to convey how she sees fit. This week, I’ll break down a few of these and how and when to use each in your adventure prep or adventure writing.

Today I'm looking ...


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The Trolls Are Coming!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 25, 2018, In : Announcements 
I've finally had a chance to finish off my last Run Amok Games project for 1st Edition Pathfinder. It's also the most unusual project I've done, in that everyone plays trolls! In "A Bad Day for Trolls," you're the only trolls left in your clan after a bunch of dwarves wiped out everyone else. They thought they'd taken care of all the trolls--but not you! Now it's time for revenge!

I had a TON of fun playtesting this at a couple different conventions, and I'm excited to see it finally see the l...
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Giving Your PCs "The Talk," Part 2 of 4: Bullet Points

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 24, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

A critical part of many adventures is when an NPC gives the PCs the quest, a summary of the situation, or critical information about upcoming events. There are a couple of ways to present this information: in boxed text, in bullet-point lists, in likely-questions-and-answers format, or just in text informing the GM to convey how she sees fit. This week, I’ll break down a few of these and how and when to use each in your adventure prep or adventure writing.

Today, I'll talk...


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Giving Your PCs "The Talk," Part 1 of 4: Boxed Text

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, October 22, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

A critical part of many adventures is when an NPC gives the PCs the quest, a summary of the situation, or critical information about upcoming events. There are a couple of ways to present this information: in boxed text, in bullet-point lists, in likely-questions-and-answers format, or just in text informing the GM to convey how she sees fit. This week, I’ll break down a few of these and how and when to use each in your adventure prep or adventure writing.

Today I'll talk a...


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Flying Foes

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 18, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 

In one of my recent blog posts, I talked about how flying foes might not be appropriate for low-level parties? But why not? And when might flying foes actually be good to use?

You can’t win if your enemy can strike you, but you can’t strike back. Flying foes seem like the ultimate creatures that can attack with impunity while laughing at land-bound PCs, but they aren’t. Look at the low-level flying foes common in many games, and you’ll see melee creatures that need to a...


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What Traps Say

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 17, 2018, In : RPGWriterTips 
Traps fill a lot of different roles in an RPG, and they usually say something. Be aware of the message your traps are sending in where they are placed and how they trigger.

Trap in an obvious place (like a vault door): "The builders were serious about this. You should take it seriously, too."

Trap in a not obvious place (like a hallway): "You weren't sufficiently attentive. Here is some injury. Move along."

Trap with effects over multiple rounds: "Pause to consider your abilities. This is an obs...
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Masked Mollusks!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 16, 2018, In : Paizo 
The creepy mask-wearing Embri race were one of the handful of aliens I designed for the new Starfinder Alien Archive 2. There's a blog about the embri and much more here: https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6sgbh?Alien-Archive-2-Eclectic-Boogaloo
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Bargain-Style Flying

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 16, 2018, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I'm working on a faction of monsters for an upcoming project where, conceptually, they can all fly. But slapping a fly speed on a monster is often too powerful, particularly for low-level monsters. I instead had to do some thinking about what kinds of abilities give the theme of flying or aerial maneuverability, but are more limited in scope. In relative descending power order, here are some ideas:

* gains a fly speed; this is the most powerful option, especially if its fly speed is very fast
*...
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At the Forefront of Adventure

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, September 25, 2018, In : Paizo 
I don't think I mentioned this, but with the departure of the fantastic Crystal Frasier from Paizo about two months ago, I've stepped into her work. Instead of handling the backmatter for adventure path adventures, I'm handing the adventure path adventures themselves! It's a very different style of work--a series of single month-long projects instead of rapid-fire multiple-things-in-a-week projects, but I like being able to really dig in to these adventures.

I did the development on Cradle of ...
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Starships You Fly Around In

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, September 21, 2018, In : Paizo 
I've been doing a lot of writing for Starfinder, and that means a lot of designing starships. I've become pretty comfortable with the rules for this, which are different from (but overlap in some interesting ways with) the design of monsters. This is particularly noteworthy because I've been designing quite a few monsters that are so big they fly around in space and function just like enemy starships.

Starship-sized monsters are super interesting, but they pose a design challenge: they've got ...
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An Interview about Against the Aeon Throne!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, September 4, 2018, In : Paizo 
Apologies for the long vacancy--working at Paizo is as fantastic as it is busy!

I was recently interviewed for my adventure "The Reach of Empire," the first adventure in Starfinder's Against the Aeon Throne adventure path. I had a lot of fun writing it, and I get to talk a bit about the adventure and a lot about working for Paizo in the hour-long interview here: 

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Starfinder!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, March 29, 2018, In : Paizo 
Here at Paizo (for more than 3 months now! Yeep!), I've been primarily developing the articles in the back of the adventure paths, including both the War for the Crown Adventure Path and the upcoming Return of the Runelords Adventure Path (as well as a little bit for the As Yet Unannounced One After That). But I'm now picking up some development of Starfinder work, and that's pretty exciting! Currently, I'm not actually playing any Pathfinder games; I'm playing Starfinder, and some Pathfinder...
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Torg Living Land is Live!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, March 28, 2018, In : Torg 
Hey! I wrote an adventure for the Living Land realm of Torg, and I got to see it established--and surpassed--as a stretch goal in the first couple of hours of the Kickstarter. The Living Land Kickstarter is ongoing, and looks to have a lot of great stuff. To be honest, I always considered the Living Land the least interesting of the cosms, but this new incarnation is packed with adventure and is a great place to set an entire campaign of its own. The Kickstarter is here.


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A New Edition of Pathfinder!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, March 16, 2018, In : Paizo 
Now, the news is very public that Paizo is producing a new version of Pathfinder. That doesn't come out until August 2019; in the meantime, Paizo is undertaking a very large public playtest of the new rules. The playtest rules come out on August 2018. Of course, being here in the office, I've gotten a chance to take the rules for a spin several times, and weigh in on my thoughts. 

Most of my play has been with a 9th-level gnome bard (in honor of my friend Ken, who shuns any fantasy RPG that do...
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A Month In

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, January 30, 2018, In : Paizo 
Well, I've been working at Paizo for just over a month now, and it's fantastic. It's just as much detailed-oriented work as I've done as a third-party publisher, but with vastly superior resources and coworkers that are friendly and helpful. I suppose it's like going from a garage band to the big time; you're still making music, but with better equipment, better support, and a wider audience. At the same time, I've been able to be involved in world-building as well--not a lot yet, but a littl...
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Paizo Bound!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, December 1, 2017, In : Announcements 
I'm pleased to announce that I've taken a full-time job as a game developer with Paizo Inc., starting later this month. I'll be working on the Starfinder and Pathfinder lines. (I'm also moving with my family to Seattle, which is why I wrapped up my ongoing campaigns, as described in my last blog post.) This is the start of a new and wonderful adventure!
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Wrap-Ups

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, November 24, 2017,
For reasons I'll announce in a later post, I'm wrapping up several of my ongoing campaigns this fall. This has proven remarkably easy, and I thought I'd mention briefly a few campaigns and their resolutions.

My Kingmaker campaign was nearing the end of book 5 (of 6) when I decided to wrap things up. As book 5 is an extended dungeon crawl, I simply cut that short by subtly guiding the PCs to a shortcut to the end. I condensed book 6 into two sessions--one outside the mythical fairy realm and on...
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The Horseshoe Calamity is Legendary!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 24, 2017, In : Work with Other Publishers 
My first adventure for Legendary Games is the 7th-level Pathfinder adventure called The Horseshoe Calamity. You can get it here. I'm quite proud of it, and happy to have suggested one of my favorite artists, Marco Morte, as the cartographer for it.

It's written to plug into the Reign of Winter adventure path, but it's also a GREAT plug-in to the Kingmaker adventure path, as I just described on the Paizo forums as follows:

How much, if any, of this adventure could be appropriated to fit with the...


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Torg as a Game

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 11, 2017, In : Torg 
I've recently had a revelation about Torg that I wanted to share: it doesn't play like an RPG, but like a board game or card game.

One of the defining features of RPGs, particularly those like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, is the fluid start and stop positions, and preserving your state from game to game. Say you finish killing a bunch of kobolds in the Caves of Chaos and you know there's a minotaur in the caverns up ahead. You look at the clock, realize it's past 11 pm, and everyone dec...
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What's in a Name

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, September 20, 2017, In : Hints and Teasers 
The next product I'll be releasing is very likely A Troll's Life, a unique adventure where all the players play evil trolls. The adventure has sort of a soft ramp-up to teach players about having regeneration, and then a bunch of other surprising events the trolls can bumble through on their quest for revenge.

A Troll's Life started out as a convention adventure; I had a good time playing a pseudo-vampire at last year's PaizoCon, and I thought playing a different set of monsters would be neat ...
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City of Seven Seraphs is Closing

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 7, 2017, In : Work with Other Publishers 
The kickstarter project for which I'm doing some exciting writing is closing in just a couple of days! If you haven't already, take a look at (and back!) the City of Seven Seraphs kickstarter here!
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City of Seven Seraphs Kickstarter

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, August 28, 2017, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've agreed to participate in an exciting project Kickstarted by a long-time friend of mine, Christen Sowards. It's a vast, unique planar metropolis with several exciting factions, rules, and adventure opportunities. I'm humbled by the great cast of freelancers that have also joined in on this project--Christen knows a lot of people with a lot better writing chops than me, so this will be phenomenal!

You should check out (and back!) The City of Seven Seraphs here
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Another AP Chapter is Away!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, August 28, 2017, In : Paizo 
I ended up smooshing four different vacations together recently: two family reunions out west, a weekend trip (and exhausting bike ride) up in Wisconsin, and GenCon. Somewhere in there was my final turnover date for my chapter of the War for the Crown adventure path, Pathfinder #129 The Twilight Child. I had to spend a few vacation days working--and neglecting this blog a bit--but I finished that up and sent it out.

I came home from those peregrinations and immediately realized that another tw...
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Blog about Blood of the Sea

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, July 12, 2017, In : Paizo 
A few weeks ago, Paizo let me write their daily blog about a project I developed called Adventurer's Armory 2. They've done it again, letting me blog about the development task I had after that--a product called Blood of the Sea. That blog is here.

Adventurer's Armory 2 was packed with crunch--so many tables, items, and rules that I felt I had to make sure there was some world flavor around the edges, so to speak. Blood of the Sea was very different. The author, veteran Amber Scott, had includ...
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Branching Out into D&D

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, July 12, 2017, In : Dungeons and Dragons 
My first Run Amok Games product for Dungeons and Dragons is now live. It's an adventure for low-level characters that hints at further adventures to come--whether those materialize will depend a lot on how this one is received! It's called the Sawmill Horror, the first of the Clockworker Chronicles series, and you can get it at DMsGuild right here
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A Halfling with a Mission!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, June 23, 2017, In : Hints and Teasers 
Who's got a shady relative and a job to do? This guy! (Art by Sarah Menzel.)
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Blog about Adventurer's Armory 2!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, In : Paizo 
This isn't the only place I occasionally blog; I've written for Paizo's blog a couple of times--including today, where i mentioned two of my favorite bits about developing Adventurer's Armory 2. You can see it here!
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Torg Kickstarter is Live!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 31, 2017, In : Torg 
I'm super excited that the Torg Kickstarter has begun...and it's crushing all its stretch goals quite handily! The storm has a name...and it's a popular one, apparently!
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Another PaizoCon for the Books!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 30, 2017, In : Paizo 
I'm freshly back from PaizoCon and, as always, it was a great weekend of gaming. Lots of the buzz was about the upcoming Starfinder game, and I'm doing a lot of writing for that, so it was good to get that energy.

This year, more so than most, I spent a lot of time running games. Thanks much to my great table for the author-run Pathfinder Society game, my crazy table of bumbling trolls trying to get revenge, and both of my Torg Eternity demo tables. I had a blast at each.

I also played a lot of...
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Pay for Play, and Exit

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, May 19, 2017,
I don't know whether I've mentioned it here before, but I'm a big proponent of my friend Joshua's idea of a fair cost of "pay for play." In short, I expect to be reasonably entertained for an hour for $5. (If I go to a 2-hour movie, I'll spend around $10, for example; a novel that costs $20 but is an enjoyable read for about 4 hours feels fair.) If a game or activity costs less than $5 per hour per participant, then it's a good "pay for play" ratio.

In this line of thinking, board games and RP...
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To the Stars!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, April 26, 2017, In : Work with Other Publishers 
It seems like it's all space-themed RPGs these days! From some development for the Legendary Planet adventure path, to receiving the gorgeous Aethera book, I had more than enough space fantasy to go around--but now I'm writing for Paizo's Starfinder setting, too! More details on that later, but I wanted to drop a note to say I'm keeping my head in the stars!
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Development Reflections

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, April 12, 2017, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I had a heavy load of RPG development for a few different companies recently (development is taking an author's turnover and ensuring it's consistent in tone, high-quality, and appropriately styled to go to editing and layout), so I've been seeing a lot of great work from a lot of great authors. Here are a few takeaways from that:

* Authors plainly have strengths. Some are super tight in rules knowledge but don't have great prose; others have super evocative prose and naming, but don't think t...
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Getting Legendary!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, March 28, 2017, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I'm deep into some development work I'm doing for Legendary Games' sword-and-planet adventure path, Legendary Planet. It's neat! I think there's something of a steep learning curve for the world they're creating--learning the Accord from the Hegemony and the elali from the jagladines from the klaven from the bil'djooli--but once you get a mental picture of who's who, the themes are easy to grasp and the overall plot is strong. It's worth checking out!
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Fangs of War is Coming!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, March 15, 2017, In : Paizo 
As an author, I sometimes get advance copies of Paizo products (in pdf) before they're generally available. I just received the first two issues of the Ironfang Invasion adventure path, including my adventure, Fangs of War. It looks fantastic! I love the layout of this AP--the page borders remind me a lot of Warhammer Fantasy volumes, and in a good way. The text of my adventure was tweaked in ways that make for a better overall experience (particularly in making some of the NPCs less static, ...
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A Deep Dive

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, March 7, 2017,
I find myself handling a lot of underwater rules, adventures, and such these days. The work I did on the nearly-all-underwater adventure for the Ruins of Azlant adventure path has turned into some other editing/writing work for underwater adventures. I don't even particularly like encounters underwater as a player (because of my dwarf that drowned in a still bay all those years ago, Greg), although I've had a lot of fun with them as a GM.

And I foresee more of it: my Kingmaker players are abou...
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A Glowing Review

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, February 22, 2017, In : Paizo 
I just saw one of my most delightfully positive reviews ever, for PFS7-27 Beyond Azlant Ridge. Here are some quotes from it:

"Events towards the end of the mission are incredibly cinematic, to the point that I would close my eyes and smile imagining what the GM described like when I was a kid. It was a thrill to the imagination that all scenarios should aspire to. Magnificent.

[...]

This scenario also does something with encounters that is as vital a design element as it is rare: each encounter ...


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Some "Developments"

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, January 31, 2017, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've been a little light on the design side of RPGs recently, although I did create some additional treasures for the Ruins of Azlant adventure path that was a lot of fun. Instead, I've been doing some development work behind the scenes for a few different groups. That's basically editing, but it's the most fun part of editing--taking something that's already written and making it more awesome. If the rules aren't quite tight, tighten them up; if the words don't flow together clearly, rewrite...
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A New Card Game

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, January 10, 2017, In : Announcements 
I had a very productive New Years break. In fact, while playing games with my family and reading The Maltese Falcon for the first time, I had an idea for a card game. The concept, design, and prototype all came together very quickly, and I'm in pretty rigorous playtesting now with lots of groups (if you'd like to be involved, please contact me!). The game doesn't yet have a name--or rather, it does have a working title but, as my brother wisely pointed out, "Target won't sell a game with that...
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Dreams of Treasure

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, December 12, 2016, In : Paizo 

One of the most exciting parts of my just-released Dreams of the Yellow King is the treasure. More than half of the adventure takes place in the Dreamlands, where the PCs come and go psychically. Although the PCs can bring psychic echoes of their normal equipment with them, this transfer doesn’t work the other direction; more specifically, the equipment they gather in the Dreamlands doesn’t return with them to the waking world.

This allowed me to seed the Dreamlands with ridiculously pow...


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Where Do You Dream?

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, December 8, 2016, In : Paizo 

My Dreams of the Yellow King is finally out, and it’s one of my assignments that I’ve liked the most. I had to do a lot of research into H.P. Lovecraft’s works to give it the right tone, and a fan of Lovecraft will see lots of sections that hit the same tones. I wanted to touch on some of these, but…

 

….there be spoilers ahead!

 

Much of the adventure takes place in the Dreamlands, a section of the Dimension of Dreams with some consistent geography, much of which is taken from ...


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We See Seas Fall in Seafall

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, December 1, 2016,
Just dropping a note to talk about some new gaming we're starting. Apart from some excited kickoffs to the new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Mummy's Mask set, I've gotten a group together to start the legacy board game Seafall tonight. I've heard good things about it, and I'm particularly interested to see how a board game can tell a narrative story; that is, how the designer can act as "Dungeon Master" for players of the game all over the world.

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Torg is Coming!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, November 15, 2016, In : Torg 
The Torg quick-start rules are coming soon! I've been trying to get these through demo and playtest channels, without luck--but it seems like we'll all be able to get them shortly!

http://www.ulisses-us.com/ramping-up-torg-and-ulisses-social-media/

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GameHoleCon Update

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, November 10, 2016,
I'm still recovering from a fantastic GameHoleCon; probably the consistently best GameHoleCon in the three years I've attended. None of the adventures were particularly bad (and I've had some terrible ones at past GameHoleCons), and many were quite excellent, with fellow players, GMs, and adventures that really shined.

As with last GenCon, I found myself playing several Cypher-system games: one generic fantasy game (with a distinctly Conan flavor), one The Strange game, and two Numenera games ...
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The Trolls are Coming!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, November 3, 2016, In : Hints and Teasers 
I'm off to GameHoleCon this weekend, where I'm running a game of my own creation: A Troll's Life. In this game, all the PCs are trolls whose tribe was nearly wiped out by crusading dwarves, and they want revenge! Here's one of the six available PCs:

Urphex the Shadow, Troll Rogue 4

CE Large humanoid (giant)

Init +4; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, scent; Perception +19

Defense

AC 18, touch 13, flat-footed 14 (+4 Dex, +5 natural, -1 size)

hp 109 (10d8+64); regeneration 5 (acid ...


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A Visit to Paizo

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, October 24, 2016, In : Paizo 
I recently returned from a visit to Seattle, where I was able to meet at the Paizo offices for several hours with many fine folks there (particularly Owen KC Stephens, Amanda Hamon Kunz, and Jessica Price) about development opportunities and further work. It was a great experience, and I filled several notebook pages with thoughts, advice, and next steps. Thanks particularly to Adam Daigle, who gave me a tour of the offices. It was great to see where all the magic happens! 
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All Kitted Out

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 19, 2016, In : Paizo 
I'm working on a Players Companion product for Paizo, and I suggested adding new kits, or groupings of equipment to buy all at once. I should have checked first--Pathfinder already has a ton of kits that seem to cover every environment, character class, theme, career, and foe you might need. Let me show you what I mean; here is a list of the kits I could find that already exist in the game so far:

Alchemist's kit, Alchemy crafting kit, Animal disguise kit, Antidote kit, Arcanist's kit, Arctic ...
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At the Edge of the Empire

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, October 14, 2016,
For many, many years I've had West End Games' DarkStryder boxed campaign sitting on my gaming shelf. It's a very unique Star Wars campaign, with a lot of "Star Trek" elements (the PCs are the command crew of a large ship traveling in unknown space, they go on away teams, etc.). I thought it was a really neat campaign idea, but I never pulled together a group interested in playing it. But now I have! Just this week, my intrepid players embarked upon the first flight of the Far Star, launching ...
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A Delay? Now?!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 4, 2016, In : Paizo 
I'm very excited to see my Dreams of the Yellow King see print. It's always exciting to see what of my text has changed, what art was added, and so on. It should be released any day now! Unfortunately...there was a delay in the printing that is pushing this back a month. So I've got to wait a whole other month before I get to hold this in my hands! 

Although that's one month closer to seeing my Fangs of War and Tower of the Drowned Dead in print, I suppose.
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Idle Hands

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, October 3, 2016, In : Hints and Teasers 
Without any current freelance work, I've turned to some of the older projects I have hanging around and helping other people with projects that they've proposed (including a book of Pathfinder monsters that is looking really good!). I've dug in quite a bit to my idea for the Clockworker Chronicles, a series of 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons adventures. I've solidified the series and their concepts, drafted a lot of background, and dug in pretty substantially to the first adventure (I've com...
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The Plate's Nearly Empty

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, September 16, 2016, In : Announcements 
A month ago, I felt like I had way too much writing going on; with the Ruins of Azlant adventure path chapter for Paizo still a long way from being done, my work on the Heroes of the High Court nearing a deadline, and the D&D adventure I hadn't really started, I felt like my plate was very full.

Now, I'm in one of those rare moments where I don't have any current work for Paizo, and I'm planning to polish up and send in my D&D adventure tomorrow (well in advance of the October deadline, but I ...
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Another AP Away!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, September 2, 2016, In : Paizo 
Whew! After a pretty grueling week, and several very late nights, I just finished up my turnover of Pathfinder #125 Tower of the Drowned Dead. Woo hoo! The only thing I have left to turn in for it is my map set. I have those drawn out on graph paper, but those are my annotated reference copies, and I need to pretty them up quite a bit, to make it easier for whichever cartographer gets those. I've got some plans with my family this afternoon, but I'm expecting to turn in very early tonight and...
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Another Paizo Project Down!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, August 30, 2016, In : Paizo 
While doing my larger work on the adventure Tower of the Drowned Dead for the Ruins of Azlant adventure path, I've had another couple of projects keeping me busy as well. One of those is now off my plate as of this evening--Heroes of the High Court. I was given the great opportunity to develop the outline for this entire project, and then pick as much of it as I wanted to write. Knowing that I'd be juggling this with the Ruins of Azlant adventure, I only assigned myself half of the book--but ...
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More GenCon Stories

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, August 25, 2016,

Although I was most excited about playing Torg this last GenCon, I was able to play a lot of other games at GenCon 2016 as well. Many of the games I played were Cypher system, both at the request of my friend Joshua as well as a desire to play No Thank You, Evil! with my kids. All three of the Cypher System games I played (combined with the home game of the Strange I played in a few months back), I feel like I’ve seen a lot of different ways to play this robust game system. To me, the Cyphe...


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Ruins of Azlant

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, August 12, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
One of the things announced at GenCon was the next Paizo adventure path: Ruins of Azlant, where the PCs travel to the shattered, sunken continent of Azlant (the Pathfinder world's analogue of Atlantis). I'm writing a chapter set in a sunken tower where a powerful undead wizard lives. I hear you saying, "wait, wasn't that your Choking Tower in the Iron Gods adventure path?" Yes, sort of. I suppose I'm the "undead wizard's tower" specialist when it comes to adventure paths!

That makes my fifth A...
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TORG!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, August 9, 2016, In : Torg 
I just got back from GenCon 2016, an exciting and game-packed long weekend. Although I had many fun games--some of which I'll touch on in future blog entries--the highlight for me was the chance to slip into a sold-out game of Torg.

I've been a fan of Torg since the 90s, and the news that Ulisses Spiele was relaunching the game put me into a tizzy last year. News has been slow, however, until last week. Although the rulebook is very sparse (only 31 pages, akin to a quick-start set of rules) an...
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RIP Steven Russell of Rite Publishing

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, July 11, 2016, In : Announcements 
I heard the news a few days ago that Steven Russell of Rite Publishing, had died suddenly in a car accident. He was 42 (also my age). This was a tragic loss for the gaming community, because Steven helped so many people get a start in writing, art, cartography, and all the other aspects that make up game publishing--not to mention the many, many great products that have enhanced people's games at the table.

I wrote quite a bit for Rite Publishing in the early days of my freelancing, all of it ...
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The Power of a Good Outline

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, July 8, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've done lots of freelance work for Paizo, and in virtually every case I'm given a comprehensive outline of the entire project (even if I'm only writing a part of it). I appreciated, but didn't fully understand, how much thought and effort went into these outlines, and how much they set the tone and guidance for the whole project. The outlines are as much "don't do this kind of thing or go this sort of direction" as they are "here, do this kind of thing" (in one project about human races, I ...
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Encountering Nearly Complete!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, June 27, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've been hard at work on multiple simultaneous projects for Paizo and Wizards of the Coast. Right now, I'm finishing up my work on the Encounter Codex, one of the hardcover books announced at PaizoCon. I've been working through about 20,000 words of that, and I'm just about done--that is, I'm at about 22,000 words and I'm giving my wife the unenviable task of cutting down all my extraneous verbiage.  Although this wasn't a particularly easy project--the goals and guidance changed a few times...
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A Successful PaizoCon!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 31, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I made a quick trip to PaizoCon last weekend, and I had a great time. The events were all quite fun, and I was able to sit down an talk with many of my developers about projects I'd recently completed for them, as well as pending projects they'd like me to write.

There was also the usual series of announcements at the banquet. Most years, I have a good sense of what those will be, and I'm rarely surprised. This year, I knew that the Ironfang Invasion adventure path would be announced (I wrote ...
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Yes/No Adventures!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, May 13, 2016,
One of my most useful tools as a GM is my d6 labeled "Yes" on 3 sides and "No" on the other 3 sides. It's my Yes/No Die, and it solves all sorts of questions in combat. Between the rogue and the oracle, does the mindless monster attack the rogue? Is it the wounded orc that falls into the pit? Are you closest to the statue? And so on, and so on. As a recent experiment (and as a playtest of an adventure where I needed to test the story rather than the rules), I invented a whole gaming system ba...
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Digital Has a Tighter Schedule

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 11, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
It's been a while since I've written a Pathfinder Society adventure, but developer John Compton reached out to me to see whether I'd revisit the site of Azlant Ridge from an adventure five years or so old. I eagerly agreed, and was assigned PFS7-27 Beyond Azlant Ridge in early April. After a lot of writing over the last month culminating in a fun playtest last night, I'm practically done with it--although I need to cut over a thousand words to bring it under word-count. My due date isn't tech...
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A Murderous Word

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, April 20, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've been playing around with haunts for a Pathfinder adventure I've been asked to write. Man, they can get unbalanced fast, and need to be sharply reined in to serve the story being told. Here's one that is legitimate by the rules, but can kill just about any low-level character without recourse. I absolutely promise I'm not using this one.

 Murderous Word CR 6

XP 2,400

CE haunt (a room 30 ft. square)

Caster Level 6th

Notice Perception DC 15 (to hear a short intake of breath, as though s...


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New AP away, and revisiting PFS

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, April 12, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Whew! My fourth adventure path is finally away. It's the second chapter in an as-yet-unannounced adventure path from Paizo (the one that follows Strange Aeons). I'm pretty happy with how it turned out: I was able to get right near the wordcount without having to add a bunch or (even harder) cut a bunch, the three new items I created turned out pretty neat, and there are four separate sections that each have their own feel and play to different character types. Crystal has been a great, respon...
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Evil Triumphs Over Good!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, March 29, 2016,
My group goes through a lot of campaigns, and we're trying something neat on Wednesday nights this year (and into next, I'm sure). I'm running the Hell's Vengeance adventure path (where all the PCs play evil characters) and my friend Greg is running the Hell's Rebels adventure path (a concurrent campaign where all the PCs play good-hearted revolutionaries). We have pretty much the same group in both (Greg plays in my game and I play in his) and we switch off on alternate Wednesday nights. But...
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I'm The Seer!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, March 13, 2016, In : Wizards of the Coast 
My next 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons adventure for the Adventurer's League has been announced. It's DDAL04-05 The Seer (which, in development, had been "The Esper," although I like the name "The Seer" much better). It required my to get deep into the lore of the Vistani, the Romany-like people of the classic Ravenloft setting. It was a lot of fun to write, although I overwrote it by quite a lot and had to trim it back pretty substantially (as I mentioned in a blog post about two months ag...
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Another Milestone, and Worries Averted

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, March 13, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Paizo tapped me write a chapter in the upcoming Adventure Path after Strange Aeons. I can't say a lot about the AP itself until it's announced at PaizoCon, but I can say that I'm working with a new developer. She's developed (and written) several adventures, but this is her first opportunity to develop an entire AP line. I really want to impress her with my adventure--not only because I want her first AP to go well, but because this is my first work for her and I want to keep up my reputation...
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A Surprising Way HumbleBundle Hurts Paizo

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, February 29, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
So, the last week or so has been hard for Paizo. They offered a ton of products to a pay-what-you-want charity site called HumbleBundle, and they were wildly successful. The charity is making a ton of money, HumbleBundle is getting a good cut so they can keep doing their great work. Paizo is getting a ton of new customers. 

Then everyone that bought pdfs from the HumbleBundle sale went to Paizo's site to get them, and it all came crashing down.

Paizo's download page just wasn't set up to handle...
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Flirtation with Fey Gets Five Stars!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, February 18, 2016, In : Announcements 
I'm pleased to report that A Flirtation with Fey received its first review--and it's five stars plus a seal of approval from Endzeitgeist! I couldn't be happier that the work Greg and I put into this adventure was so well received. This adventure started life as part of an adventure path for Headless Hydra Games, but when that didn't pan out we were able to take it back, revise it heavily, and release it in the format you can see today. Check it out!

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The Emergency Settlement Collection is almost here!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, January 24, 2016, In : Announcements 
As a quick update, I'm finishing layout today on the Emergency Settlement Collection, which I should be able to print proof and release in February. I've uploaded its cover picture as well--take a look!
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How to Write a Player's Companion

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, January 22, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've done plenty of writing for Paizo's Player Companion line: Magical Marketplace, Champions of Balance, Giant Hunter's Handbook, Melee Tactics Toolbox, Black Markets, and the soon-to-be-released Blood of Shadows. Although there is some world-specific flavor in these books, they're primarily aimed at giving new rules for players: new spells, feats, traits, equipment, magic items, and sometimes entirely new rules subsystems. They're very crunch-heavy.

In each case, the process (for me) goes a ...
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Over-writing is No Fun

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, January 14, 2016, In : Wizards of the Coast 
So I'm normally quite good at sticking to word counts. I keep a good, close eye on the targeted number of words. Normally, I shoot a little bit high and have to trim back on some words, which is fine because tighter editing improves the final product anyway. Sometimes I'm right on or just under my word count, and that makes me feel like I can't edit the words down as tightly as I otherwise would--but I'm consoled in the fact that I'm "on budget" for words, which developers really appreciate.

F...
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The DMs Guild is Out!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, January 13, 2016, In : Announcements 
Well, this is all happening a bit sooner than I'd like, but it's great to see.

Wizards of the Coast, in conjunction with OneBookShelf (the engine behind DriveThruRPG and RPGNow) have produced their own storefront called "The Dungeon Master's Guild." This allows people to create and sell their own materials using all of the 5E rules, Forgotten Realms intellectual property, and even some basic art and maps that WotC has provided (although not maps of the Forgotten Realms world, unfortunately). 

W...
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The New Year is Off and Running!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, January 7, 2016, In : Work with Other Publishers 
The New Year is here, and I lost the first four days of it due to a sudden illness. This puts me a bit behind for the start of the year, as I have a fifth edition adventure due on the 15th and another quick turnaround project for Paizo due on the 18th. Neither is very large--the fifth edition adventure is one of the "two hour" Adventurers League adventures and is therefore only 5,000 words, and the Paizo product is only 3,400 words, and I'm making good progress on both.

I'm also working on ano...
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The Bestiary is Loose!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, December 21, 2015, In : Announcements 
The Run Amok Bestiary is now available from all the usual outlets. Tons of monsters, including adventure seeds, and lots for PCs, including new races, new familiars, animal companions, and more! 

Check it out!
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A New Chapter, Nearly Complete

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, December 19, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
My next adventure path chapter, which is due Monday morning, is finally (almost) complete! I have all the text, and it's just a few hundred words (out of 36,700) over wordcount, which is just fine. My lovely wife is going to edit the whole thing--all 122 pages, with the text blown up to an editable font size for her--and then I'll be able to submit it. My only last points is to make sure all the treasure the adventure provides is sufficient. I think it might be a little short, so adding a few...
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Thinking about the Run Amok Bestiary

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 2, 2015, In : Hints and Teasers 
This fellow looks like quite a thinker...I wonder if he's thinking about the release of the Run Amok Bestiary? In that case, he'd be pleased to know that the print proof is on its way, and the Run Amok Bestiary will be out early this month. This gizzit is just one of the more than 30 new monsters within. Although a nuisance alone or in flocks, the bizarre gizzit can also be taken as a spellcaster's familiar.
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Halfway There!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, December 1, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Yesterday was my "milestone" day for the adventure path chapter I'm writing. I had to show at least half of my wordcount, and also provide all of my maps (3 pages' worth: I decided to go with two full-page maps and two half-page maps). For most of my milestones, I prefer to be well above halfway through my wordcount--and if I can be 80% or 90% of the way through, all the better. This time, I was just over--I provided about 18,900 words of my 36,700 word assignment (that breakdown is a 32,500 ...
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Dog Days of the Run Amok Bestiary

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, November 15, 2015, In : Hints and Teasers 
Who's a good boy? You are! Yes, literally good, in that the aralazar is a celestial canine who restores fallen warriors to fight against evil. Inspired by Armenian folklore, the aralazar is the first of many creatures in the upcoming Run Amok Bestiary.
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Beyond the Outlines

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I turned in my outline for both my Paizo adventure path adventure, and for my Adventurers League adventure. In both cases, I intentionally went beyond the general outline expectations, just to make it crystal clear what I'd be doing.

For the Paizo outline, I was shown a previous outline for the product; it was about 2,000 words. I kept what I thought were some pretty good parts of that, filled out the rest, and expanded it all. My outline was about 6,500 words. 

For the Wizards of the Coast ou...
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It's Now Unleashed

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 27, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
In my last post, I mentioned a 9000-word Paizo assignment for a new project--now that the name is released, I can say it's for Heaven Unleashed. It was exciting to be delving into the motivations, lairs, and conflicts of angelic beings, and I think this will be an exciting product!

Although I could peaceably turn to my adventure path assignment and have all my writing time fully occupied, I actually picked up yet another freelance assignment: a short adventure for the Adventurer's Guild campai...
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More from Paizo! More! More!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 20, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I was talking with Mark, one of my developers at Paizo, last GenCon. I observed that, although I get work from a few different developers at Paizo, I only seem to get work from one of them at a time--I joked that there must be some whiteboard with the freelancers' names on it, and the developers mark them off as they're using them. This isn't the case, but it wasn't until this month that I actually overlapped on Paizo products--and how!

I was asked to contribute to an upcoming Pathfinder Campa...
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Farewell to Aw Yeah Games

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 15, 2015,
I was ridiculously excited six months ago when our local comic shop, Aw Yeah Comics, opened a sister store across the street called Aw Yeah Games. It sold board games of all sorts, lots of Magic the Gathering, and a small but promising stock of RPG titles. I immediately made it my game shopping destination, buying lots of games for myself and my kids there, and participating in some of their game events (notably, DMing the D&D Encounters seasons of Princes of the Apocalypse and Out of the Aby...
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Run Amok Bestiary is on its way!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 14, 2015, In : Announcements 
Just dropping a note that the Run Amok Bestiary is fully written and now in layout and final editing. It should be available in the next week or two.

The timing is great, because just as I finished up the Run Amok Bestiary, I received two separate writing assignments for Paizo (one short, one medium-length, both fun).
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What I Wrote for Inner Sea Races

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 1, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I received my contributor copies of Inner Sea Races, and I have to say I'm very impressed--seeing my bare words on the printed page, with art and borders and layout and such always gives me a thrill. In this case, it's particularly exciting because it's the first hardcover book I've contributed to.

I was hesitant about stating publicly what I'd worked on in Inner Sea Races before seeing this, because I know that a lot can change in development and they might have decided to jettison some of my...
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The Current Gaming Slate

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, September 18, 2015,
Here's a blog post that I've been looking to write for a while; I've wanted to set forth the games I'm currently playing and running. I think this is useful to see where my "head is at" regarding games--what systems I'm practicing, whether I'm having immediate familiarity with high-level play, and so on. So here is my current schedule, as of this month:

Alternate Mondays: GM, Kingmaker adventure path (we are at the beginning of chapter 3 of 6)

Alternate Mondays: Scheduled Pathfinder Society Car...
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Lucking into Inner Sea Races

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, September 12, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Paizo's latest big release is Inner Sea Races, a product that I wrote a lot for (in fact, I had my initial assignment, which I completed--and they gave me another, which I completed--and they gave me a third, which I also completed; by the end of that, I felt like I'd written half the book!). It was exciting to see a recent blog post on their site about it, showcasing "10 Secrets from Inner Sea Races." One of these is about halflings:

7. Halflings consider unexpected greetings to be an unlucky...
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We're on our way Out of the Abyss

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, September 9, 2015, In : Wizards of the Coast 
I've been running the D&D Encounters at my local game store for the past 6 months or so, up to the dramatic conclusion of the Princes of the Apocalypse mini-campaign last Wednesday night. Tonight, we begin the Out of the Abyss adventure, which I expect to go for several months. We've got quite a crowd--three tables of six or so players each--and all of us are starting up Out of the Abyss tonight.

The name is evocative, and actually quite true: at the start, the PCs are all prisoners of the dro...
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Occult Bestiary is Out!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, August 25, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Paizo's Occult Bestiary is out, and I just received my contributor copies yesterday (which may be the earliest I've received my contributor copies for a product--it's still more than a week until the release date). For the curious, I contributed:

* the alter ego template
* the chyzaedu (there was very little canon existing on these, so I was very glad to be able to invent the culture, religion, etc. here)
* the feargaunt (originally called the lucid nightmare, but I see why it had to be changed ...
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This Guy Does NOT Like Teeth of the Storm!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, August 13, 2015, In : Announcements 
Well, it had to happen someday! I spotted my first one-star review for a Run Amok Games product on the Paizo boards (the review was actually left a couple of weeks ago, but I just recently noticed it). I've had some one-star reviews of my writing in the past--particularly from people angry about how my Pathfinder Society adventures played--but this is the first one-star review Run Amok Games has had. It's for the intro-level horror adventure, Teeth of the Storm.

The person that left it has no ...
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Blogging for Paizo

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, August 11, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
This isn't the only place I'm blogging any more! I was asked to prepare a guest blog post for Paizo due to my extensive labors (of love) on the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. You can see my guest blog post here. I'm excited to get this exposure!
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Kingdom of Toads Mythic Edition Earns Four Stars!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, August 5, 2015, In : Announcements 
I'm still recovering from GenCon, but I wanted to announce that the hardworking reviewer Endzeitgeist has just reviewed Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition, and given it four stars. That's a one-star step down from the non-mythic version of the adventure, due primarily--it seems--to a "vanilla" application of the base mythic rules. I think that's fair--I didn't familiarize myself with some of the other great third-party publisher mythic options and stuck to the core mythic rules alone. So there ...
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GenCon Bound!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, July 28, 2015,
In less than 24 hours, I'll be off to GenCon with several friends and family members. We've got a fairly light docket, but it includes the All-Access D&D game running cross several slots, as well as a muppet-inspired Meep on the Borderlands event and, I think, a Dr. Who event. I also hope to get in some of the Season of the Righteous games for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. I'll provide a full download once I'm back!
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Scattered Projects, Now Focused

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, July 26, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've gotten my 5th edition writing project turned in, a guest post for another blog drafted, and Bloodlust Corsairs released. I feel like I've been able to get a lot of smaller or near-final projects finalized and out the door in the last few days, allowing me to focus on the large Paizo project I've got (which I've only been able to do in scattered bits here and there so far). It's been a bit more tiring than I'd like, but it pays off in stages--immediate response on the immediately publishe...
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Summertime Writing!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, July 17, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
It's been a whirlwind past few weeks, but I wanted to take a breath to report on all that I've had going on.

First, I talked with one of the Paizo developers at PaizoCon about a large writing project. I expressed strong interest in that, and was waiting to get an outline and some further direction. I certainly had enough work to keep my busy--I'm writing a Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition adventure for their organized play program, and that's required fine-tuning my writing to the new system, ...
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And Family Gaming There Was!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, June 19, 2015,
So I'm back from my family reunion, and we ended up getting in much more gaming than I planned. I did get a chance to playtest the 5th edition adventure that I'm writing, and I learned that rust monsters aren't nearly so frightening in the new edition (although when your PCs snipe from range and don't risk their precious melee weapons, they have less to fear!). 

I also ran a session of Mythender, which is a fantastic one-shot game that really lets creativity (and awesome metal imagery) soar. M...
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Family Gaming

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, June 7, 2015,
I'm off to a family reunion over the next week or so, and it's always a decision as to which games to bring (or prepare, when the family is here in Chicago). I'm fortunate to have a lot of gamers in my family. Two years ago, I ran an early playtest version of Perils of the Broken Road for my brother-in-law and nieces and nephews; that was the only playtest the adventure got, actually, and the final version is quite a bit different (including the addition of Pathfinder Beginner Box materials)....
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Road Gone Bad

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, May 30, 2015, In : Announcements 
I'm back from PaizoCon, and I had a great time. Although there were tons of fun memories--taking the new Wrath of the Righteous Pathfinder Adventure Card Game for a spin, putting the hurt on Rovagug in John Compton's Golarionender game, and seeing the monastery of Tar Kuata I wrote for Osirion: Legacy of Pharaohs from the player side in the Pathfinder Society adventure "Test of Tar Kuata"--one of the highlights was running a slightly condensed version of Perils of the Broken Road in a premier...
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Off to PaizoCon 2015

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, May 21, 2015,
Later today, I'm flying out to my second-ever PaizoCon in Seattle. I've got a neat slate of games planned--including play of the new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game set (Wrath of the Righteous), some Pathfinder Society games (although I've played only one or two PFS games in the last year), and some events I was able to get into by lottery. One of these is Necromancer of the Northwest's "Iron Adventurer" game, where you bring your own character and hope to survive the rigors thrown at you. I t...
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Jumping in to D&D 5E!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, In : Wizards of the Coast 
A few months back, I heard that Wizards of the Coast had announced an open call to be a writer for the Dungeons and Dragons Adventurers League adventures. I thought that sounded pretty neat; I play and run a bit of fifth edition, but I'm pretty much committed to writing for Pathfinder. But  I thought it might not hurt to look into it; I regret passing on Green Ronin's open call for monster authors near the end of last year; I had a few neat ideas for that I didn't pull together in time. Anywa...
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Freelancing away, back to running amok!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, In : Hints and Teasers 
So, I've not only turned in my AP chapter, but I've also turned in a few additional writing assignments Paizo has been good enough to send my way (in particular, some monster writing for the Occult Bestiary and some additional racial writeups for Inner Sea Races). I couldn't really unwind after turning in my AP chapter, because I had those other deadlines, but now I feel like I'm caught up. I can't help but turn back to Run Amok matters, though: working through some monster writing for Paizo ...
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A Timeworn/Legacy Quality

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, April 28, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
So I haven't yet been able to dig through my latest Paizo publications and compare them on a close basis with my turnovers. I did notice that each of the three tombs I submitted for Tombs of Golarion included a 300-word sidebar detailing the burial customs of each of the three cultures I touched on (Kellids, Yamasans, and Rahadoumi), but these sidebars didn't make the final cut. I hope they show up somewhere else, although I suppose a Burial Customs of Golarion book is not likely.

I had an int...
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Done with the new AP Chapter!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, April 27, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
So, today is my turnover date for my latest AP chapter. I was told I could have another week or so if I needed it,, but I wanted to get it done and out the door. I've got yet another freelance gig that's due on the 11th, and I wanted to be able to turn to that.

What were the last few days like? Pretty hectic.

I took a look at my saved files for The Choking Tower, and that adventure had a lot more still outstanding words on the Friday before my turnover was due--I remember that weekend being a p...
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A Perilous Campaign Idea!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, April 15, 2015,
Although I write products for the Pathfinder RPG on the assumption that people are using the standard rules, I almost never use the standard rules in the campaigns I run. I'm constantly tinkering with variant rules and inflicting them on my players. Mostly, that's good; I like ramping up the power of the enemies and the characters both. For example, in the Shattered Star adventure path I'm running, I'm using allowing my players to use some lightly modified gestalt rules--each character gets t...
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Taking 10!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, March 18, 2015, In : Announcements 
With Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition, I've now produced 10 products for Run Amok Games. That's actually a pretty good number for a one-man shop run by a busy guy; I'm really proud to have made it this far. The schedule I'd set for myself is one product every quarter, which would have had me at 14 products by now. I can't say that I'm too upset about falling short of that, considering so much other freelancing I've done in the meantime (mostly The Choking Tower, but also a lot of satisfying w...
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My AP Chapter At Halfway

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, March 14, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
So, my "milestone" day for the new adventure path chapter I'm writing is just about upon me--that's the date I have to turn over whatever I have so far and show that I'm on the right track and about halfway done. I'll be powering through a lot of writing this weekend for that. I'm already at half my word count, so I'm not worried about being behind, but I note that much of my word count so far is already taken up with stat blocks. The adventure I'm writing is high-level, so the stat blocks of...
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Mythic Slime Demons on Display

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, February 27, 2015, In : Hints and Teasers 
Here on the edge of releasing Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition, I thought I'd share another one of the creatures that I worked up with mythic abilities for the new version. Omox demons are powerful and disgusting slime-demons; mythic omox demons are even worse! Here they are:

Demons of the Sap (3)   CR 17/MR 6

XP 102,400 each

Advanced mythic omox demon rogue 2

CE Medium outsider (aquatic, chaotic, demon, evil, extraplanar, mythic)

Init +19M; Senses blindsight 120 ft.; Perception +31

Defe...


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Getting Mythic This Weekend!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, February 24, 2015, In : Announcements 
Just a note to say that Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition is going to be available soon, very likely on Saturday, from the usual outlets in .pdf and print. Get mythic!
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The AP Adventure Diary

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, February 19, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
So, as an update, I submitted a 6,000-word outline last Monday, and it took only three days or so to get feedback--feedback that a lot of what I'd done was really good, but that the second part (of four parts) needed reworking. I didn't yet have any clear ideas on how to address that part, but there was plenty of other sections for me to dig into. I actually started writing the article at the back of the AP, too, but only just found out yesterday that I was cleared to write that--good thing, ...
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Mythic Landing Soon, and Back to Basics Thereafter!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, February 13, 2015, In : Announcements 
Just a quick update: Kingdom of Toads Mythic Edition is on track for release at the end of this month. We then dial back from mythic rules to beginner rules, as Perils of the Broken Road, with its alternate stats to run under the Beginner Box rules as well as the normal Pathfinder RPG rules, lands in (I suspect) early April.
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Another Adventure Path? Yes, Please!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, February 9, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
So, I've got some very exciting news--last week, I agreed to write another adventure path chapter for Paizo. That's all I can say right now--the name and subject of this adventure path hasn't been announced. I do want to talk in broad strokes about the process, though, since people might find that interesting.

Last Monday night, I got an email from Paizo's senior developer asking if I was interested in writing another adventure path chapter. This is the email I've been waiting for ever since I...
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The Freelance Discussion

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, February 2, 2015,
I don't generally provide click-through links on this blog, but there's a valuable conversation going on over at ENWorld about freelance writing generally. It's an interesting read about how little folks actually get paid in this industry.

Very few of my projects have ever made any money (yet; there is an incremental uptick when I release a new product in sales of old products). I pay commissions for art and map, rarely using any stock art: this increases my costs, but lets them exactly match ...
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GenCon Ahoy!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, January 25, 2015, In : Announcements 
I'm working alongside some friends to orchestrate a big group of us going to GenCon this year. Although the convention seems quite a ways out, housing registration was today--although I got to it only 6 hours after housing registration opened, I'm still stuck in a hotel several miles away. At least it will be with some great friends--looking forward to the convention!

Run Amok Games isn't going to have any sort of formal presence at the show, but I look forward to catching up with the folks I ...
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Missing Boots

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Authors of Paizo's adventure path volumes usually write more than the adventure itself. We also write up the statistics for the two or three NPCs featured in the back of the adventure, the new magic items, and even sometimes the new monsters (in The Choking Tower, the thought harvester and the thorgothrel are both mine).

Here's one of the items that I submitted that didn't make the final cut to be included in the adventure. Partly that's because the smoke furnace needed to be included among th...
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Happy New Year!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, January 10, 2015, In : Hints and Teasers 
After some whirlwind travel over the turn of the year, followed by jumping back into three straight nights of great gaming (my Fifth Edition game based on the Legacy of Fire adventure path, a new Pathfinder game I've joined starting the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, and my longstanding Pathfinder campaign using the Shattered Star adventure path), I'm finally able to take a look back over 2014. I started, as might be appropriate, with looking back at New Years 2014.

I remember resolvin...
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The Flirtation is On!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, December 27, 2014, In : Announcements 
A Flirtation with Fey is now live, and the "Our Products" page now links to the places you can get this new urban investigation adventure. Check it out!

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Here's Gustavus...for now!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, December 21, 2014, In : Announcements 
In A Flirtation with Fey, the PCs aid a gnome scribe, only to return to find the gnome scribe kidnapped. The PCs must follow clues to find him, exposing a much larger conspiracy. Although the PCs only meet this scribe--a gnome named Gustavus Hodgedar--at the beginning (and hopefully, at the end!) of the adventure, the adventure provides his statistics. And here they are, should you be in need of a slightly alcoholic, former adventuring gnome scholar:

Gustavus Hodgedar  CR 3

XP 800

Male gnome...


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Shield of Rannick

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, December 19, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
So, I'm almost complete with layout of a full adventure path for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, using the Rise of the Runelords base set and its six adventure decks.It will be called "Shield of Rannick." I won't say much more about it here--it relies on Paizo's Community Use Policy which, as a third-party publisher, Run Amok Games cannot use. I can use it independently as an individual, though, although I plan to keep the Run Amok business and this side project separate (except that I'm ...
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Flirtation with Fey for Christmas!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, December 19, 2014, In : Announcements 
I've got a print proof that both Greg and I have approved, so we're sending in copiesof A Flirtation with Fey to the Paizo webstore and making Flirtation with Fey available all over in the next week. So you'll be able to get this--in print or pdf--or or about December 26th. Merry Christmas!
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A Mythic Cover!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, December 3, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
Here is the cover for the upcoming "Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition", with art by Jeff Strand!
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December 17th is a Big Day for Products!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, December 2, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I just noticed that two Paizo products that I did a lot of writing for are both coming out on the same day. The Giant Hunter's Handbook was a lot of fun, and required finding design space for a lot of mechanics (feats and so on) as well as learning a lot about giants in the game--what their commonalities are, how big they are in relation to each other, and so on. Lost Treasures also required a lot of mechanics--as I created about half of the items in this book--but it also allowed me to do a ...
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Flirtation with Fey Goes to Print Proof

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, November 29, 2014, In : Announcements 
So, when I have everything all lined up to send to get a print proof, I like to hurry to do so--I know that the print proof can take as much as a week to get accepted, printed, and arrive for my review, and I might have to run the proof a second (or third) time. So as to not waste time, I rarely sit on final-but-not-quite-final-for-a-print-proof versions of my publications. I find myself having done just that over the past week or so with Flirtation with Fey. Mostly, that's been due to writin...
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Games of GameHoleCon

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, November 24, 2014,
I went up a few weekends ago for my second-ever GameHoleCon in Madison, Wisconsin with a few friends. I had thought that a convention named after the first line in the Hobbit would have been around for a while, but it turns out it's only in its second year, too. 

Being so close to the home of many of the initiators of Dungeons and Dragons has its advantages--a lot of well-known folks from the early days of D&D come to play. It also hosts a variety of games from the "Dead Games Society," so you...
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Sailing the Plunder-Filled Seas!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, November 5, 2014,
So, I've had a fairly long stretch of doing no real writing; perhaps my longest all year. This is primarily due to have a succession of awesome friends in town, and also to the fact that Paizo released the first set of organized play scenarios for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game at the end of last month. We're big fans of the PACG in my household, having playtested the entirety of the Rise of the Runelord path, then played through that whole path when it came out, then playtested the entir...
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Flirtation with Fey Rewrite

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 23, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
I'm very fortunate, as I've mentioned, to have my lovely wife--with a PhD in English--to edit all my work. Sometimes, she gives the whole thing a pass with hardly any changes; other times, she's a much harsher critic. She just finished the review of A Flirtation with Fey and had some major revisions: entire sections that were too wordy got cut, and one of the villains had to be redone. But I'm incorporating those edits now, and it's a stronger project.

I've had a last couple of posts about rew...
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Writing is Revising

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
A partner at the firm I once worked for insisted that "writing is revising." It's true, but sometimes more true than other times.

A few weeks ago, I turned in one of my larger Paizo freelance assignments: three of the tombs in the upcoming Tombs of Golarion book. I thought each of them was quite good, in its own way, with some flavorful maps. I received an email about a week ago asking for a rewrite of one of the tombs. The map wasn't large enough--and the new map necessitated several new room...
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The Choking Tower is Released!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 9, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
This is a quick update. My first Pathfinder adventure path volume, #87 The Choking Tower, just hit my downloads today. I'd seen a post-development pre-edit version of it, and I'd already seen some of the art, but it was glorious to see it all together in a final product. I see quite a bit of my original writing shining through, and areas where it's been changed has been to streamline my encounters or to fit the adventure in with the other chapters of the Iron Gods Adventure Path.

In all, I'm p...
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Foray into Fifth Edition

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, September 29, 2014,
I've started my first Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition game last week. I intended it to be a one-shot adventure to show off the rules, but wanted to leave some opportunity to have it grow into a more robust campaign. I'm using the Legacy of Fire adventure path, and starting off with Howl of the Carrion King, the first adventure in that series. It converts incredibly easy, primarily because one of the core monsters in the first few encounters meshes so neatly with 5th edition rules (pugwampi g...
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Don't Touch That Wagon!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 25, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
I've gotten an encounter map in for one of my upcoming adventures, "A Flirtation with Fey" and thought I'd share it. This is the PCs' map, so it doesn't show all the monsters and traps--but, really, what is there to fear from a simple wagon...its contents ravaged and scattered...its driver slain...its pony felled with a single bladed strike...no, nothing suspicious or strange about this at all... 
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A Mythical Dragon!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition is moving along quite well--well enough that I've updated my "Upcoming Products" page to include it (I've also moved The Emergency Villain Collection to released products, as it will be available later this week). As a teaser, and to show the re-working I'm doing to about forty percent of the encounters in Kingdom of Toads to make Kingdom of Toads: Mythic Edition, here is the updated version of the powerful dragon Avoravax:

Avoravax             CR 21/MR 7

XP 4...


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Mythical Thinking

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, September 8, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
When I was deep in the writing of Kingdom of Toads, I heard about the Mythic Adventures hardcover coming out. This sounded like a good fit: the story of Kingdom of Toads is a bit fairy-tale, a bit myth, and a lot of over-the-top encounters. However, the mythic rules were pretty new, and would require that I master them pretty deeply to provide a good mythic product. I'd also have to unwind a lot of the writing I'd already done, I believed.

It's quite some time later, and I've got a much better...
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Chelaxian Halfling Slave-Chants

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, September 1, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I was proud to have an article accepted to Wayfinder #11 (the Weal or Woe article titled "Vice Rising"), which had a theme of "Cheliax," the devil-ruled nation in the Pathfinder game world. I also had a second submission that wasn't accepted, which I thought it was a combination of silly, clever, and a bit gruesome--so here it is! 

Chelaxian Halfling Slave-Chants

(excerpt from Chapter 14 of “Anthropology of the Halfling People” by Professor Julian Delphus of Absalom)
 

As has been previousl...


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Skull and Shackles Arrives!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, August 30, 2014,
My version of the Skull and Shackles base set for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game arrived today, and we played our first game. It was familiar, since we'd playtested the entire Skull and Shackles adventure path for it already, but it was very neat to see the full-color art and the mechanics that had some of the proud nails hammered down. It's been quite some time since I spent so much time saying "oooh, what does that do?" over this game, and it was really neat. Looking forward to playing ...
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Three Down, Plenty to Go

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, August 26, 2014,
So how many copies of my RPG products did I sell at Wizard World Chicago? Three. One copy of each of The Underdelve Menace, the Emergency Character Collection, and Teeth of the Storm. I met a lot of neat gamers, but on the whole, comic convention attendees are quite certain what the "Pathfinder" game is; I had a lot of people give my products blank stares.

My friend gets most of his sales from conventions like this, and very little on-line. I'm the reverse: I get most of my sales on-line, and ...
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Off to See the Wizard!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, August 23, 2014, In : Announcements 
Just a quick note--I'm off to Wizard World Chicago for the day. A friend of mine owns a comic company and obtained an exhibitor booth and badges, which he's kindly sharing with me in exchange for a place to crash during the convention (he's attending all four days; I'm only attending today). How many of my RPG adventures will I sell at a comics convention? My prediction is "some, but not many." Let me be a little more specific with numbers: my friend is bringing around 60 copies of each issue...
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And the winner is...the Emergency Villain Collection!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, August 20, 2014, In : Announcements 
Whether my next release would be The Emergency Villain Collection or Perils of the Broken Road came basically down to which art came in first. The text for both is complete, and I've even started the layout for each (to the extent I can do so without the final art). Today, I received the last of the great pieces of art from Rick Hershey for the Emergency Villain Collection, so that will be the next product Run Amok Games releases. It's also a pretty consistent--although unintentional--organiz...
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"Stalker: Donning the Mask" is Kickstarting!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, August 15, 2014, In : Announcements 
On old friend of mine started his own comic company just about the same time I started a game publishing company. He's had a good run in his first line, a story about a superhero named Stalker, and he's trying to put it together in a graphic novel compilation via Kickstarter. It's worth a look, to see if it's worth your dollars (it's worth some of my dollars!). You can find it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1086568316/stalker-donning-the-mask-graphic-novel
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GenCon...ish.

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, August 9, 2014, In : Announcements 
I hadn't planned on going to GenCon this year, but some longtime friends are making a special trip out, so I'm headed down to play with them. I'll be there only Friday night and Saturday morning/afternoon, but I'm really looking forward to it. I'll be playing the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons in the slots I'm signed up for (or, more accurately, the slots my friend Russell signed us all up for) and I plan to bring the same character that ultimately survived the Lost Mines of Phandelver s...
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What's Next?

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, August 7, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
Normally I have a pretty good sense of the release order my next Run Amok Games projects, but right now I've got a a few aaaaaalmost done projects, and some sporadic art for each--but here's some! This is one of the villains in the upcoming Emergency Villain Collection. He's a very angry tree-person named Boughbrother. Is the Emergency Villain Collection next? Probably, but who knows?
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Things to do in Fifth Edition when you're dead

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, July 17, 2014,
I got to play an awful lot of the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons last weekend--about 20 hours in total. A few months ago, I had given up on an earlier playtest version of the edition as being "not complete enough to really play," and I'm pleased to see that has been fixed (obviously) for the final release.

I made a stalwart human fighter named Harald Knauf. He lasted less then one combat. I got to make only 4 rolls with him: an initiative check (which he rolled reasonably well, but was sl...
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PaizoCon!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, July 10, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Last weekend, I was able to make it to my first ever PaizoCon, the convention held every year in Seattle by Paizo Publishing. I was able to play in some very fun games run by Paizo employees, and attended several seminars about how to improve my writing and the state of third-party publishing. Perhaps best of all, I was able to sit down with several of my developers and talk about what they liked that I did, what I could do better, and how I can get more work from them in the future.

Also, I s...
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Lost Treasures

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, June 27, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Back in May, I mentioned a large project for Paizo where I'd taken on 13,000 words to describe several magic items with complex backstories and campaign uses. That project was announced recently--it's called "Lost Treasures", and it's more than just magic items. There are valuable non-magical items, quest items, and so forth all included. I'm excited to see how my work appears in the final product, and what other goodies the tome contains!

Link is here.
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A Simple Bat'leth

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, June 12, 2014,
Our usual board game group has some moderate roleplayers who sometimes really get into the exploration in Betrayal at the House on the Hill or the characters in the Pathfinder Card Game. So last Tuesday I decided to roll out Fiasco for the group, though I'd never played it before and hadn't really finished reading the rules.

It was a blast.

For those unfamiliar with it, Fiasco is an indy RPG with no game master; the players all build webs of relationships based on the setting, before deciding o...
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A Lucky Evening!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, June 10, 2014, In : Announcements 
Huzzah! A Lucky Morning is now available at all the usual outlets (with print copies on their way to the Paizo store now). I'm quite proud of this little investigative adventure, which is equal parts creepy and murder-mystery-y (patent pending on that word, I guess). Check it out!

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A Lucky Morning in Mere Days!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, June 5, 2014, In : Announcements 
So, I liked the print proof of A Lucky Morning. I'm sending several copies to Paizo for them to vend in their on-line store, but the adventure itself should be available in print and pdf this weekend from the usual places!
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Choking Tower Feedback

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, June 5, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I received the post-development copy of my upcoming Paizo adventure, "The Choking Tower" over the weekend. I was not at all surprised to see it more closely tying in to the upcoming technology book and Iron Gods adventure path as a whole, but I was pleasantly surprised to see so much of my work tightened up to flow better. That is, the work I'd submitted is still very visible, but improved. I don't generally see how my freelance work looks until it actually appears in print, so this "post-dev...
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No More Demands

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, May 22, 2014,
Just a couple of nights ago I finished GMing a very good, long adventure called The Dragon's Demand. I'd collected a group of players who, for the most part, didn't know each other. Most of them hadn't played Pathfinder before, so they were learning the game as we went along, too. Eighteen sessions later, the brave band of heroes confronted the dragon Aeteperax is his lair and bested him--with only one character death!

I had a great time--an even better time than I expected I would have, actua...
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A Lucky Morning Proof on the Way, and "Beginning" with Perils of the Broken Road

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 21, 2014, In : Announcements 
The layout for A Lucky Morning is all done, and I've uploaded the cover file and interior file for printing. They're being matched, and then the proof will be sent my way. If it's good, I'll open A Lucky Morning for sale in print and pdf (I could open it to sale for pdf right now, but I'm waiting until I can do both at once).

Meanwhile, I spent a little time on layout for Perils of the Broken Road. It's got less "goodies" than A Lucky Morning; it doesn't have any player handouts, for example, ...
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Layout of A Lucky Morning Nearly Done!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 14, 2014, In : Announcements 
Just dropping a quick note to say that the layout of A Lucky Morning is nearly complete, and I'll be sending my proof version to the printer by the end of the week, I expect.

To my surprise, Perils of the Broken Road is nearly "caught up" to A Lucky Morning; my lovely wife is still proofing Perils of the Broken Road, but I've already begun layout. I still need to get the art back, but the last bits of the art order went out today, so I'm hoping this moves pretty quickly.

But I also have a new P...
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Piles of Magic Items!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, May 6, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I just finished a recent project that I found to be exhausting, but quite fun: 13,000 or so words of magic items and other flavorful treasures. I did my best to give each its own story--we'll see how well those are received!

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In the Balance

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, May 3, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I don't think I mentioned it on this blog yet, but I wrote quite a bit of Champions of Balance, the Paizo Publishing product about how to play neutral-aligned characters. Since it's not clear from just looking at the author list who did what, I thought I'd mentioned what I contributed to it--and what I contributed to it that never made it into the book.

I wrote the chapter on Bastions of Balance (the neutral nations and the neutral planes), Neutral Organizations, the new spells (one of which, ...
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More 40K

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, April 28, 2014, In : Announcements 
I had a great time this last weekend playing Warhammer 40K at a local tournament, giving my Chaos Space Marines (with a Nurgle emphasis) a try. It was a three-game tournament all Saturday long. After the first two games I was tied for 5th place, and poised to leap into the top 3 if I did very well in the final game. I did not do well in the final game. Iyanden Eldar wiped me out pretty handily. Still, I was pleased to win the "Best Sportsmanship" award for, as the organizers put it, "being ca...
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At My First Adepticon

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, April 10, 2014,
So, Adepticon was quite fantastic. I played a small Necromunda tournament and did not particularly well--having three members of my plastic gang die in the first round put me at a disadvantage in the rest of the tournament.

In the Warhammer 40K combat patrol event, I did much better, placing 15th out of 44 participants--not at all bad for my first foray, I think. My combat patrol was a few Chaos Space Marines, a few Plague Marines, and an Obliterator for some heavy firepower. It was enough to ...
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Off to Adepticon!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, April 4, 2014,
Although I play, run, and write a lot of Pathfinder RPG stuff, I am a geek in larger spheres, as well. I'm off to a weekend at Adepticon--one of the larger miniatures games tournaments--where I'm hoping my Chaos Space Marines may win me a few games. Many folks I know are off to an RPG convention at the College of Dupage this weekend called CODCon, which will be featuring a lot of Pathfinder Society adventures. 

The RPGers/miniatures gamers divide is never wider than when two conventions sit on...
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Erevos is Coming!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, April 2, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I was delighted to be approached by a company with a very interesting idea in organized play--they would take subscribers, and these subscribers would receive customized adventures that they can use to shape the world. A lot of "living" campaigns allowed some world-shaping to some degree: Living Greyhawk had special events and even adventures where the results of play shaped future adventures; even Pathfinder Society, the least "shape-able" of the big living campaigns, has gone back to set se...
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It's Official: I'm Among the Iron Gods!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, March 26, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
So...that big Paizo project last fall that had me all tied up and giddy with excitement was my first Paizo AP adventure, Chapter 3 of Iron Gods, The Choking Tower. Paizo just announced it right here. The Choking Tower itself is already a part of Numeria--you can read about it in the Inner Sea World Guide--but my adventure has an awful lot more to it than just the tower--including a lot of surprises.

I'm excited to see this develop, and humbled to be among such great Paizo authors!
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A Lucky Morning Cover Posted!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, March 25, 2014, In : Announcements 
Here's the final cover of A Lucky Morning. I'm most of the way through layout, and working backwards, in a way unusual for me but seems to be working here (I have all the handouts already set out, but not yet in the order the appear in the adventure, for example). Also, I have the full Thaven gazetteer through layout, and I think it works quite well.  Since I'll be using it here and in at least one other (as yet unannounced) upcoming adventure, I wanted to give it special polish.

And, through...
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More Work!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, March 10, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've just been offered another project for Paizo, and it's one that seems like an expanded version of the work I did for the article at the back of #74: Sword of Valor.  I'm excited to be digging in!

This project comes at a very good time, because I'm just finishing the text of both A Lucky Morning and Perils of the Broken Road. (In fact, I'm expecting the final piece of artwork for A Lucky Morning any day.) I can run those through editing while working on this next assignment, and get those t...
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A Friendly Badger

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, February 26, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
In revising A Lucky Morning, I've realized that one of the NPCs the heroes will meet is someone they won't likely fight. Now, players are a rambunctious lot, and they could pick a fight with anyone; in this case, however, this NPC is entirely helpful and is intended to be a bit endearing. So I elected to remove his combat statistics from the adventure as they won't be needed 95% of the time. 

So they don't go to waste, though, here is Badger (not his real name), a friendly but simple-minded gn...
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Beyond the Serpentine Lock Gets Five Stars!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, February 8, 2014, In : Announcements 
A great five-star review for the most recent Run Amok Games product, the low-level adventure "Beyond the Serpentine Lock." You can see it right now at www.endzeitgeist.com. Beware, though--there are spoilers aplenty in the review!

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A Frantic Playtest Wraps!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, February 3, 2014, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Part of the reason I've been a bit silent recently--other than being sure I'm taking the time to work through 1,000 words a day, which is harder than I'd initially thought but keeping me very focused on writing--is that I'm also participating in a playtest of the next set of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, based on the Skull & Shackles pirate-themed adventure path. Our playtest reports are due today, and we've still got three scenarios to get through before I can make my final reports and...
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New Products Announced!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, January 17, 2014, In : Announcements 

I've had two projects percolating for a while that I'm glad to announce: Nasty Bastards, and the Emergency Villain Collection.

"Nasty Bastards" is intended to be a mini-campaign along the lines of Paizo's well-received "We Be Goblins" and "We Be Goblins Too."  Nasty Bastards has a bit more serious tone, and is much bigger in scope, as it takes the brutal humanoid PCs from 1st to 5th or 6th level. This will be a more expensive product than our usual price point, as it's more than twice as long ...
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A Lucky Villain!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, January 15, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
Here is one of the villains from "A Lucky Morning," the vengeful necromancer Nudd.
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2014 Schedule is Coming

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, January 15, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
So, with all the jumping around I've been doing with my writing, I've realized I should put everything into a consistent, planned schedule. And then I should put that schedule here, in my Upcoming Releases tab. So expect that update soon. The order of those projects is likely to change, but I've been pushing forward on each, so they'll see the light of day sometime this year.

In the meantime, Blake Wilkie keeps turning in great work for 2014's first Run Amok Games release, "A Lucky Morning." P...
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Resolved!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, January 8, 2014, In : Hints and Teasers 
I'm not normally one for New Years resolutions, but this year I've made a writing-related one: I plan to write at least 1,000 words each day. Normally, my writing is in spikes: several days without writing, then a burst of productivity of several thousand words. Trying to be disciplined about this will help even things out and, I suspect, make me more productive this year overall.

A thousand words isn't much: I can put together a few stat blocks to reach that, or kick through a chunk of an enc...
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Happy Holidays to All!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, December 29, 2013,
As with many, I've been caught up in the joyous press of the holiday season: entertaining guests, last-minute shopping, and so on. I'm very appreciative of all my fans, and looking forward to 2014! Thanks to all!

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Print Version of Beyond the Serpentine Lock

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, December 20, 2013, In : Announcements 
For those who get print versions of our stuff from Paizo, the print version of Beyond the Serpentine Lock is on its way there now, fighting upstream through the holiday shipping traffic, I'm sure!

Happy holidays!

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Ineligible

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, December 14, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Paizo's RPG Superstar 2014 contest just started. I've got mixed views on this contest, which you enter by submitting a magic item of your own creation. I've submitted a couple of times in the past few years, but I quit in an immature huff two years ago, after I saw the contest reviewer commentary for my item (I thought my item twisted the rules in a clever way, but the contest reviewer made some commentary that indicated he didn't actually know the rules I was bending for my item). His misund...
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41,851 Words

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, December 9, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 
At last! I have just turned in my longest--by far--freelance writing project ever. 41,851 words. 73 pages. Whew.

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Front Page News!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, December 9, 2013, In : Announcements 
Paizo Publishing uses its blog for marketing, which makes a lot of sense. Usually they're announcing their new products, or upcoming games, and so on. Every now and again, though, they put up a blog post about the recent third-party publications offered in their online store.

They don't have to do this; in fact, there's some logic in saying that they shouldn't do this. We third-party publishers aren't nearly Paizo's size, but we're technically their competition: if someone buys something from ...
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Beyond the Serpentine Lock is Here!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, December 5, 2013, In : Announcements 
The print proof for Beyond the Serpentine Lock looks good, so I've activated it for sale from RPGNow in print and pdf. I'll get it up at Paizo and the d20PFSRD store shortly. Check it out!

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In the Home Stretch for a Big Project

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, December 3, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've got not quite one week to finish up my largest freelance project ever (in prestige as well as length!) for Paizo. Many thanks to my good friends who gave up part of their Thanksgiving weekend for a playtest--although I spotted more errors due to the playtest than I'd guessed there were, it was good to have them bared for me to see, so I can fix them before my final turnover deadline.

More details after this is publicly announced, of course!

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Beyond the Serpentine Lock to Print

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, November 18, 2013, In : Announcements 
I've just sent off Beyond the Serpentine Lock to print, and hope to get a print proof before too long (usually, this is about three weeks).  If the proof looks good, I'll put this out for sale. I'm hoping to have Beyond the Serpentine Lock available in the first week of December. I'm not too likely to get my next product out by the end of 2013 (I'm not even sure yet whether it will be "A Fortuitous Morning"--which has a title change coming, to something a little more euphonic--or "Perils of t...
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The Basilisk Still Rankles

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, November 15, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 

I keep an eye on the forum talk regarding my products whenever I can, and I recently saw a couple of one-star reviews of my Pathfinder Society adventure “PFS #4-07 Severing Ties.” A bit of spoiler territory ahead (and in the title you already read—sorry).

The thing that seems to rankle people even now is the encounter with the basilisk. The adventure covers levels 1-5, and people seem fine with fighting a basilisk at levels 3 through 5. It’s the presence of the basilisk at level 1-...


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That's Super!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, November 6, 2013,
Although I do all sorts of gaming, I've never really gotten very deep into superhero games. My friend Jake loves superhero RPGs of all kinds, though, and he convinced me to take a long Saturday and drive to a not-quite-so-nearby convention called GameHoleCon last weekend. We played three slots, all in one day: a rendition of the well-known indie game Lady Blackbird using the Savage World rules, which I know well; a Marvel superhero game using delightfully antiquated percentile dice and charts...
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"Beyond the Serpentine Lock" Through Layout!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 30, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 
I'm now prepping the print version of "Beyond the Serpentine Lock" to get a proof, which will take a few weeks. The .pdf version is just about done, including the map file--here is a small part of a great map by Marco Morte, the primary cartographer and illustrator for this adventure.

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Paizo Lists by Level

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, October 29, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 

In a move that seems obvious, in retrospect, Paizo now lists all of their available adventures by PC level range: adventures for 3rd-level PCs all together, adventures for 4th-level PCs all together, and so on. This includes not only Paizo adventures, but third-party publisher adventures like those Run Amok Games produces. It’s always good to see my adventures listed in new ways!

The next step would be to have an “Adventure Path Frame” that would take a string of adventures that were...
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Relic Mechanics

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 24, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 

This is the second of three blog posts about my first in-print article for Paizo, “Lost Relics of the Crusades.” I thought I’d discuss a bit about the process of developing the mechanics of my items. In part, this is the “meatiest” part, because the specific, mechanical effects are what the PCs apply every single time they use an item.

I had plenty of word count for all of these items. Most magic items must fit in a very small word count (such as the 300-word limit of Paizo’s R...


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Paizo's Author Listing

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, October 21, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 

I’ve done a lot of work for Paizo recently, but they seem a little erratic about when they list authors for upcoming releases. I’m listed as an author for Champions of Balance, due out in February 2014.  But I’ve also done work for three products due out before then (specifically, Magical Marketplace due out in December 2013, and both Osirion, Legacy of Pharaohs and a new monster in Adventure Path #77 Herald of the Ivory Labyrinth, due out in January 2014) that are still listed as wri...


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Praise for The Emergency Character Collection

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, October 19, 2013, In : Announcements 

When I was updating the purchase links this week, I ran across a great review that I hadn’t seen before. Nathan C., one of the featured reviewers of RPGNow, gave The Emergency Character Collection five stars, mostly due to all the extra details I put into this. Or, in his words, “The great thing is that the writer doesn't just stop with throwing some character blocks in a book. He takes the time to explain other variants, build theories and slight alternatives. This little bit of extra ...


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Where to Get Run Amok

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, October 18, 2013, In : Announcements 

I’ve spent a little bit of time recently updating all the links on the Our Products page, so you can jump right to your online retailer of choice to get any of our five products (mostly, these were to add the Paizo links to recent products and D20PFSRD store links to all products). Everything seems to be clicking through fine. If you see something misdirected, please shoot me an email at runamokgames@gmail.com


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Five Stars for Kingdom of Toads!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, October 17, 2013, In : Announcements 

Endzeitgeist, tireless reviewer and masterful guide to the sea of third-party Pathfinder products, has once again endorsed a Run Amok Games adventure with his top rating of five stars plus his seal of approval! He says: “Author Ron Lundeen tries his hand at one epic high-level adventure breathing the spirit of broad repercussions appropriate for the level and manages to provide a module that challenges beyond its statblock-builds and also offers some food for the mind. Mind you, that does...


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Quite a Weekend!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 16, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Although it's now early Wednesday, I'm still recovering from a monumental weekend. I not only ran my first marathon (the Chicago Marathon on Sunday), but I also completed my milestone for my longest Paizo project to date. My total project is about 41,000 words. For a milestone, you need to show progress by sending in at least a third or so of your words; I sent in about 20,000, so I've made a good start.

For this particular project, I also had to turn in a handful of completed magic items and ...
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Designing Relics

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 9, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 

Now that my first in-print article for Paizo is out (“Lost Relics of the Crusades”), I thought I’d discuss a bit about the process of designing magic items for that article. I’ll break this up into three parts: designing relics as magic items, developing the mechanics of the items, and developing the story lore of the items.

First, designing relics, and a bit of background.

I was presented with very little by way of an outline—just the art orders describing the five items I would ...


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Another PACG Scenario

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, October 4, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 
We're still enjoying the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game at my house; here's another custom scenario I designed:

The Pillbug's Revenge scenario is intended for characters who have completed The Poisoned Pill (and may have completed all of the Perils of the Lost Coast and even some or all of Burnt Offerings). Plentiful poison damage makes this scenario challenging.

Freshly escaped from prison, the notorious poison-merchant Aliver "Pillbug" Podiker has vowed revenge upon Sandpoint! Pillbug Podiker...


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Some Simple, Good Advice

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, September 25, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 
As I've mentioned, I'm doing a lot of writing for Paizo recently, which is why Run Amok Games products have slowed a bit (but some good news on that in my next update!). I recently got some great advice from Paizo's superstar freelancer Neil Spicer, who told me:

Just meet your deadline and write awesome stuff. :-)

Seriously. 


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Pathfinder Adventure Card Game - and Custom Scenario!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, September 6, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 
The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is at last available, and I was very excited to get a copy. I playtested the game pretty extensively, and it was good to see several of our group's proposed recommendations implemented. One of the strong advantages of the game is how easy it is to create custom scenarios. The first solid custom scenario I made can't yet be built--it includes cards from sets that aren't released yet, and might have changed--but here is a custom scenario I created that you can...
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Name in Print in Paizo!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, August 23, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I have four Pathfinder Society adventures out with Paizo, which are available in .pdf only. Recently I've been working on several print products for Paizo as well. Although the first of these--an article on artifacts and magic items called Lost Relics of the Crusades in Adventure Path 74 Sword of Valor--doesn't come out until next month, this month's adventure path contains, as usual for Paizo, a "Coming Next Month" page listing the contents of the next month's issue. Lost Relics of the Crusa...
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The First Run of the Broken Road

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, August 19, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 
I had several family members in town for a reunion last week, and some of my siblings and teenage nieces and nephews were looking for me to run a game. I jumped at the chance to run a very, very rough version of one of my distantly-pending projects, Perils of the Broken Road. So they each picked the PC they liked best from The Emergency Character Collection and a fistful of dice.

Then I killed them all in the second fight.

They had cleverly bypassed several critical clues about an upcoming enc...
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A Quick Trip to GenCon

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, August 19, 2013,
Although I used to be a very regular GenCon attendee, I haven't been to that massive convention in a couple of years. I had the opportunity to drive down just for the day yesterday, and I was able to meet several folks at Paizo I've worked with, connect with a few old friends, and peruse some of the very high-quality 3PP products that were recently released (such as Midgard and Razor Coast).

On Run Amok news, I received my print proof of Kingdom of Toads early last week, and several of the pic...
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Another Way to Get Run Amok Products!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, August 1, 2013, In : Announcements 
I'm pleased to announce that I now sell my products through a third vendor, other than paizo.com and rpgnow.com.  This is the d20pfsrd storefront. A good resource for open-source Pathfinder rules, this site recently added a storefront and carries a lot of third-party publisher materials.  Run Amok materials can be found at:

http://shop.d20pfsrd.com/collections/run-amok-games

Shop away!
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Rivalry's End is at Three Stars

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, July 20, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 
My latest Pathfinder Society scenario, #4-23 Rivalry's End, is currently hitting a middle-of-the-road three stars. This seems to be an average of people who thought it was great and people who thought it was terrible. Although I read all reviews and commentary about my adventures, I'm particularly interested in why people don't like my material.

Here, the complaints seem to fall into two types: first, the scenario is too hard. Second, the "twist" ending is disappointing.

Regarding the "too hard...
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Kingdom of Toads is Live! (in pdf)

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, July 16, 2013, In : Announcements 
Kingdom of Toads, the high-level super-adventure for PCs of 17th-18th level, is now for sale in .pdf at Paizo.com and RPGNow.com. The print version is still a few weeks out, but I wanted to get this out there to find out what people think of our highest-level offering yet!

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The Perfect Librarian

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, June 20, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 
Kingdom of Toads is about more than fighting garden snakes. Here is a helpful fellow the heroes are likely to meet--the Clockwork Archivist!

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Another Way to Skin a Monster

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, June 20, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 
While finishing the layout for Kingdom of Toads, I was able to take a more global look at the monsters I designed for it. I noticed that in a couple of places, I was pretty shameless about "reskinning" existing monsters (that is, taking the stats for an existing monster and simply describing it as something else). When the stats "fit" the way the monster ought to play at the table, this should be fairly seamless.

The two examples I have from Kingdom of Toads are when the heroes are, in essence...
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A few updates

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, June 3, 2013, In : Announcements 
I've added "Beyond the Serpentine Lock" to the upcoming product descriptions and included its summary at last. As far as timing, Kingdom of Toads will come out here in June, and Beyond the Serpentine Lock in July.

I noticed that the only review for "The Emergency Character Collection" thus far--a nice 4.5 star review, too--isn't here. So I added that.

I've also dropped an announcement about my next Paizo product, the Pathfinder Society adventure 4-23 Rivalry's End. This adventure doesn't come o...
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Order of Appendices

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 29, 2013, In : Hints and Teasers 

I’ve been spending altogether too much time thinking about appendices. Most of my adventures have a few appendices, and some of these have been:

·        *  How to scale the adventure for higher- or lower-level PCs

·         * New rules items (such as new monsters or new magic items)

·         * A timeline of events

·         * All of the player handouts consolidated into one place

·         * A few pregenerated PCs

All or some of these are likely to appear in future adventures a...


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Kingdom of Toads is Big

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, May 20, 2013,
I don't have a specific word count for Run Amok adventures. The adventures range somewhere between 13,000 to 24,000 words, but vary a lot based on the source of the adventure (whether it was originally written as a one-shot event, for example) and whether the adventure is investigation-heavy or more linear.

Last weekend, I substantially finished everything for "Kingdom of Toads" (more specifically, I still need to adjust the treasure available across the entire adventure for the CRs faced, an...
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An Exciting Opportunity Returns Home!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, May 9, 2013, In : Announcements 
I've mentioned my work with Headless Hydra Games on their Viridian Legacy adventure path. Unfortunately, their adventure path has not panned out for several reasons, including Axel Carlsson of Headless Hydra taking on a separate exciting setting-and-rules-system project. I had written a full adventure for the adventure path already, and it was one I'm pretty proud of. Axel generously returned the rights of this adventure to me.

What this means for Run Amok is this: with a bit of rewrite to un-...
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Dark Waters Rising in Hand!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, April 23, 2013, In : Work with Other Publishers 
My adventure Dark Waters Rising for Raging Swan Press came out last July, and was quite well-received. Raging Swan has only a few print products; nearly are all pdf-only, with a distinctive simple white-on-black color style.

For Raging Swan's third birthday last month (congrats on three years!), they put three of their popular products out in print. One of these was Dark Waters Rising, which I was very proud to hear!

Creighton Broadhurst at Raging Swan was kind enough to send me his print versi...
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They're Playing Teeth of the Storm!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, March 7, 2013,
Here's a very neat thing: a group is playing "Teeth of the Storm" over at the Paizo forums. You can take a look at the play-by-post sessions, which as of now are currently ongoing, at http://paizo.com/campaigns/TeethOfTheStormGMIliad

It's very neat to see one of my adventures being played, and I've checked in on this every few days since the GM told me he was running it.

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In the Sandbox

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, February 19, 2013,
It's no surprise that the Pathfinder Society adventures I write for Paizo Publishing get much more play--and are much more talked about--than the work I do for Run Amok Games or other third-party publishers. This is simply a matter of exposure: Paizo is the largest tabletop RPG company there is, and the Pathfinder Society campaign is their heavily-promoted organized play campaign. I don't have any hard numbers, but I would guess that each of my Pathfinder Society adventures is played thousand...
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Writing Mountains Behind the Scenes

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, February 14, 2013, In : Announcements 
Just to drop an update that's necessarily thin on information: I'm currently working on two exciting projects for Paizo. One is an adventure with some surprising developments, and the other is an article that I hope a lot of players will find useful. I can't speak in more detail about either, but you'll see both this year.  The projects are very different, so it's keeping my brain occupied.

Speaking of keeping the brain occupied, I've revised a puzzle section in Kingdom of Toads that should pr...
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Charging Forward in the New Year!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, January 15, 2013, In : Announcements 
I lost a bit of momentum with Run Amok in the last few weeks; we took our Christmas vacation in the middle of December, and since recovering from the holidays, I've been elbows-deep in developing an adventure for Headless Hydra Games for an author I hope will do some writing for Run Amok this year. 

Now that's past, and it's full steam ahead for Run Amok Games. I'm finishing the high-level Kingdom of Toads in the next few weeks, and I've got a few other projects in the works that will, before ...
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Love Letter to the Editor

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, November 23, 2012, In : Announcements 

I don’t give my wife Stephanie nearly enough credit. In addition to the support she gives me for all my writing—and now all the work in running Run Amok Games—she also edits everything I write. Everything. Not just Run Amok products, but all the work I do for other publishers, from outlines to final adventures. Just about the only thing she doesn’t review in advance are these blog posts. I thought it high time I acknowledge her, and admit that I wouldn’t be nearly so comprehensible ...


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Severing Ties is released!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, November 14, 2012, In : Work with Other Publishers 

My third freelance project for Paizo Publishing, the Pathfinder Society scenario 4-07 Severing Ties, was released several days ago. It received surprisingly few changes in development, which I take to mean that I've turned over solid work that needed little by way of rewriting--good news, as I love working for Paizo and look to do more of it.

One observation about my Paizo adventures: I've already run Severing Ties more than my other two Paizo adventures. I ran my first adventure, Tide of Twil...


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Teeth of the Storm this Halloween!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, October 31, 2012, In : Announcements 

For anyone looking to run a great Halloween-themed game, many Run Amok adventures will serve you well on this spooky day! Teeth of the Storm is the most overtly horror-movie adventure we've released, but The Six Griffons Haunt is a haunted house/murder mystery that plays in about 4 hours--perfect for gaming on a Halloween night!


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Updated ECC

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, October 19, 2012, In : Announcements 
I've made a few updates to the .pdf version of the Emergency Character collection. Primarily, these are .pdf-focused changes and not print-worthy changes, so I'm not planning to update the print versions. The updates include:
  • Providing two separate layouts for Vinkia the druid: the original version with her animal companion statistics on the same page as her statistics, and a second version with the animal companion separate from her statistics.
  • Including nested bookmarks.
  • Providing stats for Lu...

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Free is Key

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, September 20, 2012, In : Hints and Teasers 
I wasn't exactly sure whether producing a free excerpt from The Emergency Character Collection was a good idea. However, in the last week, the free excerpt has more downloads than all of my other products put together. So people are grabbing it, and although there aren't yet any reviews (or even much chatter) about The Emergency Character Collection, I'm sure I can attribute at least some of my sales of the full product to the popularity of the free excerpt.

So, free excerpts seem to sell prod...
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Emergency Character Collection is Here!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, In : Announcements 
The .pdf version of The Emergency Character Collection is now out, along with its FREE sample version. You can get it at RPGNow.com and DriveThruRPG.com now, and at Paizo.com soon!

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The Emergency Character Collection is Arriving!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, September 11, 2012, In : Announcements 
As the first non-adventure product for Run Amok Games, I've adjusted my usual process a bit for The Emergency Character Collection. First, I workshopped it, asking a fairly large group of friends to evaluate the layout, find errors, and give feedback on the art (and there is a LOT of art here). Second, I've decided to produce a free product, to show off two of the 13 PCs and hopefully drive more sales by letting people know what they can get.

I needed to revise the cover art at the last minut...
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Teeth of the Storm is out now!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, August 2, 2012, In : Announcements 
Print and .pdf are both now available for Teeth of the Storm. Enjoy our third adventure, a chilling tale of gothic horror for 1st level PCs!

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State of Run Amok

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, July 18, 2012, In : Announcements 

As a quick heads-up, here’s the status of the three “in the works” products:

Teeth of the Storm is fully through writing and editing. All of the art is in. I'm just finishing layout this week. I plan to release this in print and .pdf at the same time. Some of the illustrations, while great, may be a bit too dark, so I’ll be scrutinizing the print proof before approving this for public sale. Expect Teeth of the Storm near the end of July.

The Emergency Character Collection is fully w...


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Everyone Loves the Creepy Temple

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, July 5, 2012, In : Work with Other Publishers 

I had someone point out just the other day that my “Temple of Empyreal Enlightenment” for Paizo Publishing http://paizo.com/products/btpy8qq1?Pathfinder-Society-Scenario-321-The-Temple-of-Empyreal-Enlightenment is the highest-rated Pathfinder Society Scenario ever—it currently has 10 five-star reviews. Other PFS scenarios have had exclusively-five-star reviews, but none have so many. The Paizo forums have given an awful lot of praise for this adventure, for which I’m very grateful and...


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Dark Waters Rising Now!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, July 3, 2012, In : Work with Other Publishers 
My adventure "Dark Waters Rising" for Raging Swan is now available here: http://paizo.com/products/btpy8tga?Dark-Waters-Rising. Creighton Broadhurst of Raging Swan has been great to work with, and a real exemplar of third party publisher interaction. He was open to my pitch of an adventure idea, suggested tie-ins to his existing products that I could use, and provided clear direction for how he wanted the final product to look. Creighton gave me a document template with the appropriate styles...
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The Viridian Legacy Kicks Off!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, June 25, 2012, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've been fortunate to do a lot of work for Headless Hydra Games already, but a big project that's been in the works for a while is now coming to the surface. The Viridian Legacy adventure path will soon be released in its installments, and the Viridian Legacy Player's Guide is now available at RPGNow.com and Paizo.com. I put together the skeleton of the adventure path and wrote the player's guide and GM's guide, but it's neat to see how Axel at Headless Hydra Games has really put a professio...
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Pregenerated PCs Are Coming!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, June 5, 2012, In : Announcements 
I've announced a new product, "The Emergency Character Collection." It's the first non-adventure product Run Amok Games has produced, and I'm a bit nervous about its reception. I've been really lacking a stable of pregenerated PCs, either for my games or in other people's games (RIP Daremo the halfling rogue, who was eaten by a hezrou). However, lists of pregenerated PCs rarely seem to be a viable (or interesting) product on their own. I decided that my ideal pregenerated PC product would hav...
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New Pathfinder Society Adventure

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, May 31, 2012, In : Work with Other Publishers 
Now available is my second Pathfinder Society adventure, "The Temple of Empyreal Enlightenment," which you can get at http://paizo.com/products/btpy8qq1. This is a creepy Stepford Wives-type investigation adventure, where all is not as it seems in an isolated temple to a benign god. Check it out!
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Viridian Legacy, Chapter 1

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, May 30, 2012, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've been working with Headless Hydra Games quite a bit, and most recently in connection with developing an adventure path for them. This adventure path has about a dozen chapters, a few of which I'm writing. I just turned in the final updates to Chapter 1--which was begun by the talented Tom Baumbach--so that should be available in the near future.
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Free Three-Part Run Amok Adventure: Scattered Sheaves

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Monday, May 7, 2012, In : Work with Other Publishers 

Rite Publishing just released the next issue of their free Pathfinder RPG 'zine, Pathways, which includes the first part of a three-part adventure I've written for them. Called "Scattered Sheaves," this adventure details the PCs' quest for stolen pages from a magical tome. In each of the three parts, the PCs investigate a different location to recover the missing pages. The three parts and be run in order. This is very tight location adventure design for me, and is a good exercise in packing ...


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Underdelve Menace Now in Print!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Saturday, April 28, 2012, In : Announcements 
I've already received some really great reviews and comments on The Underdelve Menace. It's now available in print at Paizo.com, RPGNow.com, and DriveThruRPG.com. If you want the print version, I recommend getting the print/pdf combo. It's only $2 more, and you'll get the .pdf file including the full-color printable encounter maps too. Enjoy!

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Underdelve Menace Released!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Thursday, March 29, 2012, In : Announcements 

The Underdelve Menace is now available! Availability comes in stages, though: right now, you can get the .pdf at RPGNow and DriveThruRPG. The .pdf should be available at Paizo.com in the next day or two, print versions at RPGNow and DriveThruRPG in a week or two, and print version available at Paizo.com in the week or so after that.

I considered whether to delay the .pdf release so that print and pdf are available at all site simultaneously. I decided to get the "Underdelve Menace" .pdf out so...


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Underdelve Menace will menace you soon!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, March 21, 2012, In : Announcements 
I've finished with layout of The Underdelve Menace, and I already have all the cartography--only a few more pieces of art to come in, and this rural investigative adventure will be ready to release!
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Upcoming Adventures with Other Publishers: "Temple of Empyreal Enlightment" and "Dark Waters Rising"

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, March 14, 2012, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've been juggling several products for other publishers that should see print in the next few months. I've written another Pathfinder Society adventure, "The Temple of Empyreal Enlightenment" for Paizo Publishing (no, not *that* ToEE), and I'm writing a tense rescue-type adventure called "Dark Waters Rising" for Raging Swan. Look for these soon!
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Upcoming Art

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, February 17, 2012, In : Hints and Teasers 
I've received the first art piece for the upcoming gothic-horror themed "Teeth of the Storm" adventure, and I'm quite pleased with it. Chaz Kemp's art nouveau style isn't typical for fantasy RPGs, but will definitely give the art in this adventure a unique style!





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"Moso's Bluff" in Pathways #12 and Underdelve Menace update

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Tuesday, February 14, 2012, In : Announcements 

My short mini-adventure "Moso's Bluff" in Pathways #12 by Rite Publishing just got a great review; I spent a lot of time crafting that mini-adventure and working in Yakuza-themed elements, and it's rewarding to hear good things about it.

Also, I'm midway through layout of the second Run Amok adventure, "Underdelve Menace," and hope to have that out in early March. I'll also be adding a few site updates in the next few days.


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"Six Griffons Haunt" in print everywhere!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, February 1, 2012, In : Announcements 
The Six Griffons Haunt is now in print at Paizo.com, so it's now in print from anyone that sells it online.  You can also get the print and .pdf as a bundle together--I recommend this, so you get the printable full-color maps for your gaming table as well as the print adventure itself.

I also have print copies for sale at Chicago-area game stores: Chicagoland Games and Games Plus, but others to come!
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"Six Griffons Haunt" in print on RPGNow.com

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, January 13, 2012, In : Announcements 
I've finally negotiated the RPGNow.com print process, and you can now order "Six Griffons Haunt" in print, to hold in your very hands: http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=96249. It'll be another few days before I get print versions available at paizo.com as well, but that's coming soon. Now that I have this figured out, the lag between product .pdf availability and print availability of all of our products will be much shorter.
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"Make Haste!" Adventure Design Article in Kobold Quarterly

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, January 8, 2012, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I developed a new mechanic for an adventure I wrote for Headless Hydra Games (Wreck of the Keening Crone) called "Haste Points." The adventure is fundamentally a race, and the faster the PCs hustle in early encounters, the easier they find the later encounters to be. I thought this mechanic could be generalized as a useful tool for GMs designing time-pressure adventures. I proposed it as an article to Open Design and they accepted it for their Kobold Quarterly magazine.  It's called "Make Has...
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A High-Level Project in the Works

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, December 18, 2011, In : Hints and Teasers 
I'm working through my two upcoming projects (The Underdelve Menace and Teeth of the Storm), and I'm considering which product to dig into after that--either another short adventure, or a long project that's been brewing for quite some time. I was generously given a great, flexible set of stock maps from Raging Swan Press and I'm thinking they would work quite well with a very high-level (17th or 18th level) adventure I've been kicking around in my head. I know that high-level events appeal o...
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Run Amok Games is in Pathways!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Friday, December 2, 2011, In : Work with Other Publishers 
I've just been published in Pathways #10 magazine from Rite Publishing. I provided them with a short article called "The Fleshgrafter's Foe" that introduces a helpful NPC, a gruesome new magic item based on Rite Publishing's "30 Fleshgrafts" product, and a combat encounter. Quite a lot to pack into a short article, and worth checking out.

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Six Griffons Haunt on its way to print

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Sunday, November 13, 2011, In : Announcements 
I'm working through the process of getting a print version of The Six Griffons Haunt available. It looks like it'll be about a week out or so; I'll drop a message here when it's available.

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New Game Company Launched!

Posted by Ron Lundeen on Wednesday, November 2, 2011, In : Announcements 


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About Me


I'm Ron Lundeen, game designer for Wizards of the Coast. Before that, I worked as a development manager for Paizo, Inc. and as an RPG freelancer. I've recently had products in print for Paizo, Wizards of the Coast, Petersen Games, and Ulisses Spiele. My opinions here are my own and do not reflect those of Wizards of the Coast.

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