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Patreon backer Edwin brings you an episode all about making effective use of landscape in your games. I talk about landscape a lot on this show, but believe me, not as much as I did in grad school!

The Tome of Tombs is on Kickstarter now!

Thanks to Ray Otus for our thumbnail image. The intro music is a clip from "Solve the Damn Mystery" by Jesse Spillane, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Comments

Steve

You use of the word specificity reminded me that on Wednesday we went to the excellent but too short Fantasy exhibition at the British Library. There were a group of 9 year olds sitting on the floor, all filling in fantasy maps on an outline that had been given them. The woman in charge asked the children about their maps and demanded "specificity" which is a bit much for pre-teens. And she kept repeating it, as if repetition induces understanding. So yes, locals are all in to that.

Steve

And specificity is what moves monster out of the manual and into the imagined world. It's not just a red dragon, it's the one that prefers eating sheep to cows, and that gets up each morning to watch the sunrise. And it probably has a name too that it roars at scared shepherds when it's had its fill of their livestock.

monsterman

When you're a dork like me, teaching younger kids is a constant battle not to use language that's a little too advanced for them.

monsterman

In a way, this is just another entry in the long-running conflict between making monsters useable in game and making them so familiar they stop being fun.