MORBIDGAMES

GM Stuff

In the first edition of Ave Molech, this section was really just six pages, but in the second edition I ended up including the Journal series here. I could have probably meshed the stories from the Journals into the History and World portions, and then just broken out the items and creatures into their respective places, but Journals have always been intended as GM resources and as such I felt them best added in their entirety here.

The goal of this section was to give GM’s some insight into the type of GM/DM I am and a few things that have worked well for me. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they will work well for you. If it hasn’t been obvious from my writings or from my recent blog posts, I’m not a stats guy, especially when it comes to games. Because of this I do things in my own game sessions like, not paying attention to XP. I’m a bigger fan of when my players complete a task, take part in a major accomplishment, or do something extraordinary, they get to level. I don’t want to have to keep track of each creatures CR they killed and overall, my opinion is that the more math I have to do in any game, the less I and my friends enjoy it.

Heritage Traits were something I had actually thought of using prior to including races in the game. This goes back to my idea that with the majority of inhabitants living under ground in close proximity to each other that pure races just wouldn’t really exist and as a result I wanted a way to create my own races. Ultimately I ended up including races, but this I felt would work best for my own campaigns and GM’s who thought like me, might find this useful.

I also wanted to through in some ideas and stories that players wouldn’t know, but could discover in their adventures, and some ideas that could help GM’s who were interested in building out campaigns in my world have some more information to go off of. It’s things like this that eventually led me to put out Ave Molech History and World where I strip out all of the game mechanics and equipment and just focus solely on the main story and people within the world.

Journals and Lore

So after Ave Molech was out, I kept writing and rewriting a lot of the notes I had and ended up expanding a lot of them. I eventually came to a place where I had to decide if I wanted to start creating campaigns for my game world or if I just wanted to give outlines for campaigns and let players and GM’s take over. I opted for the latter as my way of hoping to develop some UGC (User Generated Content) for the game and hopefully create a following fan base of the game that would be actively growing it.

This still hasn’t quite gotten to where I had hoped it would be, however, Lore: Forgotten Mythos is completely written by fans of Ave Molech, which is a great collection of stories and I hope that more like that book will come about from players, bloggers or the like. If anyone wants to be involved in a project like that, please feel free to contact me.

I still like my first Journal the best, The Journal, though it’s been criticized the most. The second one, The Bounty Hunter, is by far the most popular though the least favorite of mine. The Red and the Black and The Dreamer never really seemed to gather much attention one way or the other. I suppose this was another of the reasons why I opted to include them into the second edition publication.

Three Storms, the last Journal I released wasn’t included in the second edition and it’s had more popularity than its previous two predecessors.

The First Level Campaign

This was part of a campaign I had had my players take part in prior to the game coming out and it’s never been as good as I wanted it to be. The first problem is that my maps aren’t very good, I’m just not that great of a map maker, though I suppose I should try using a map program rather than drawing things out in Illustrator. The second aspect of this is that while there are some balance issues, it goes back to my idea that characters in my world should be a little strong, in either gear or species than typical fantasy settings.