The Viking Hat GM

Honi C844789-7 Ag S "The Coin" With both sci-fi and fantasy games, we Hex On Up and generate a random setting. Because the dice are always right.  As with the fantasy setting, we go  deep rather than broad . You don't need a starmap of a 12,000-system Galactic Imperium - the players will never visit them all. At most  they will visit one world each game session, typically weekly. In a year that's at most 52 sessions, and given holidays and life happening, 40 is more likely - plus if a world's interesting the players might spend a few sessions there. Probably a dozen worlds will do before someone says, "Look, I just wanted to play Mechwarrior."  Here's the summary. select a starting world, and using  this random generator , create a system for it.  develop this world in detail, using Zozer's Universal World Profile  (UWP), and not forgetting its starport , if any. and its system create a subsector, using random generation. You may choose to do th...

Gear needed for this article: snacks AD&D1e  Dungeon Master's Guide AD&D1e  Monster Manual Polyhedral dice Hex paper and notepad, or Laptop with internet connection Commonly GM guides will tell you to draw a world, then a continent, put in mountain ranges and so on. This "top-down" approach (as detailed very well by Bat in the Attic ) is lots of fun, because we all like to draw big maps. But it's less than useful for running a game, because you invariably get caught up in minor details that'll never see the light of play. On the principle of "the teacher only needs to be one chapter ahead of the students in the textbook," the GM only has to be a few hexes ahead of the players in the game world.  You only need a small scale. If you have a location service on your mobile phone you can review it and see that most of us only have three or four places we always go. Most medieval villagers never went more than twenty miles - a day's hard walk - fro...