Yora – Page 115 – Spriggan's Den

The paradox of starting a website

This isn’t the first website I started, but once again I am facing the same somewhat paradoxial problem:

To get my site known, draw in visitors, and show up on web searches, I have to have some quality content to show. However, if I am writing large post on the greatest ideas I have now when I still have barely any audience, almost nobody is ever going to read them and spread the word about them. RPG Bloggers won’t even list your site until you’ve been writing for at least three months. But if I just stick to writing trivia, I am never going to get a major audience.

So yeah… paradoxical.

The Bane of Dungeon Design

Inception is a movie about many things, but primarily it’s a movie about telling stories. And for both GMs and game designers, what I consider the most important scene in the entire movie is the one where Cobb hands Ariadne a block of graph paper and asks her to show him a demonstration of her creative abilities as an architect. And none of the mazes she draws for him are satisfactory until she flips over the block and uses the plain backside instead of the graph paper.

If you are playing on a battle grid and want to be able to exactly determine the number of squares in any given room, you can still copy or trace the map onto graph paper. But other than modern houses, the world is not arranged along neatly places squares. Trying to create maps for forests or caves, and even villages or castles along the grid of graph paper never really gets you anything that looks really good.

But once you ditch the grid all kinds of new possibilities become open to you. Which can result in such awesome maps as the ones made by Kevin Camplell presented at Dyson’s Dodecahedron.

Starting my RPG Site

This is my new site dedicated to my work and thoughts related to RPGs of any kind. As you can see, I still need to set up a good theme for the page and figure out a propper name and adress.

Update: If you are looking at the site now, you see that it looks quite pretty, has a name, and a real URL. This is now the finished site for the time being and you can bookmark it if you want to.