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Amene 08-29-05, 11:35 PM

What are your techniques to improvise? how do you come out with stuff that seems plausible? how do you improvise all night long yet no one notices? 1: Get a Notepad improvising is cool, but consistency is cooler, if you are improvising, take notes, just in case the PCs decide to return somewhere. It's useful to flesh out stuff out-game, and to avoid paradoxes. It avoids the use of cliches, you will notice faster if you are repeating yourself. 2: NEVER, never, never try to improvise while deprived from sleep, it will just not work, and also never run too long sessions improvising everything (keep them under 3 hours, and do breaks every hour, people can only be concentrated for an hour or less), it's best to leave players wanting more. 3:Somethings are hard to improvise, it's easy to come out with a culture really, but it's dam harder to give them a cool name, even in a hurry you can come out with a lot of names before a game. Post your ideas, resume them, give examples, give pointers on how to flesh it out, I will make a list in here. Creating Cultures: Cultural Mix: A fast way to create cultures is mixing two cultural stereotypes. To do this you need to follow some steps: 0.- Pick two cultures 1.- Decompose the Stereotype 2.- Mix the components 3.- Name it Example 1.- Chinese and Gypsies. 1.a: Chinese: All about tradition, they had an Emperor, they practise martial arts, they are very refined. 1.b: Gypsies: they are nomadic, they are all about the family, they dance, the see the fortune (divination magic), they sell stuff that bring from other places, their women are cute, they have a secret language. 2.- Chinese + Gypsies: A nomadic trading culture, that's all about the family traditions, they have a special faith based around Divination and ritualistic animal dances (kungfu break dancing monks!), they have the most gorgeous and refined women in all the earth, they are ruled by a matriarch, and keep records from ancient times to look for prophecies (they write it down in a secret language) 3.- Name: Nesegies Fleshing Out: Is it a new race? a sub-race? try to give them cultural feats that may only be taken during character creation, make some exotic weapons (no need to do anything flashy, flavorful is better), create names for random NPCs of this culture. New Monsters: Change the description! One of the easiest ways to come out with new mosnters is to change their descriptions. Take a troll for example, is it still a Troll if it's a humanoid made of quicksilver? (and since it's a metal it's still afected by acid, the fire in the other hand is not as obvious, but you could say that the creature needs a certain temperature under X °C to "flow" properly) first you need to look at the creature stats, special abilities, and everything that it's not in the description (try to use creatures that are familiar to you, so you don't forget about something). Does it have a grapple attack? don't use a crit with no arms (yet with inventive you can come out with pretty interesting stuff, like psionic cubes of ice that grapple with their minds) Change the descriptions, follow logic and you will have a Infinite Monster Manual