The best links of week 15

It's Link-sunday again here on Behold the Dice. Reading the gaming blogs so you won't have to.

Adventure Design Deskbook
The Underdark gazette takes Mythmere's Adventure Design Deskbook Volume One for a testdrive. They show how an adventure is made using the random tables from the book. I'm really curious about the book!
Link



Thousand Suns
James Maliszewski talks on Grognardia about his Sci Fi RPG Thousand Suns. It's a game with limited background information. He talks about the challenges you have to face as a DM running an open ended sandbox campaign in the SciFi genre, while your characters have their own starship.
Link
Thousand Suns can be bought here from RPGNow and here from Rogue Games themselves.




Languages
Kobold Quarterly has a great post on the working of the Speak Languages skill. The skill doesn't work as a skill, since you either know a language or you don't. In the blog, the skill is modified to work as a skill, with examples of DCs for different tasks etc. I never really thought of this one, bu I like it! This will be employed in our campaigns.
Link

Traveller inspitation
The Zhodani base links to 5 free ebooks from the project Gutenberg to use as inspiration for your Traveller game. It's old stuff, but good stuff.
Link



Some of my own books for Traveller inspiration:




Gamma World adventure
Sly Flourish has an exciting Gamma World adventure on his blog. Go check it out!
Link

Review: Kobold Quarterly 17

This month, the 17th number of Kobold Quarterly was released. For those of you unfamiliar with Kobold Quarterly, Kobold Quarterly is a quarterly magazine focussing on Pathfinder, Dungeon and Dragons 4th edition, Dragon Age, and system neutral materials. Since the demise of Dragon, it is the sole torchbearer of quality RPG magazines.



Kobold Quarterly 17 is packed with ideas and resources for your games, review of fiction, and questions and answers. A few highlights of issue 17 are:

Rules for archenemies
This article from Michael Kortes describes a series of rules to make the recurring villain in your campign even more memorable. A really nice approach is to give characters certain benefits, such as improved diplomacy when aquiring information on the villain, or an extra 5 foot step to represent the extra mile characters are willing to go to slay the villain.

Interview with Jeff Tidball
The interview with Jeff Tidball (twitter) focusses on the practical aspects of game designing and working as a freelancer in the games industry. Very valuable to see a little bit of the inside of the industry.

Secret of the Four Golden Gates
This article describes new societies and new items for monks. A monks weapon that is presented in the article is a magic prayer wheel. Somehow it's a funny thought seeing a monk beating the living daylights out of a drow using a prayer wheel.



Fireworks
Jonathan McAnulty writes an article on fireworks, and the magical effects they can have. These effects range from being blinded to sustaining damage, and finding the way north in the wilderness.

Kobold Quarterly shows that there is an important place for print or PDF magazines in addition to all the online content that is out there. The articles and artwork in this issue generally are of a higher quality and higher editorial standards than blogs and other online content.

Kobold Quarterly is available in print and pdf