Screech Biography

Dead, but not forgotten...

Screech Bio

Episode summaries, by Marsha/Seph

I put this together for my reference, but am sharing in case you're interested too: Episode Summaries, 1-6

What's That Sound? (Setting-Specific Wilderness Encounter Table)

You're walking through the wilds of Evenoria and stumble upon...

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Is RPG Worldbuilding "Writing"?

After rehearsal last night, my pianist (whom I met in grad school for English) and I retired to a local pub for drinks and conversation. Since we hadn't seen each other for a while, we did the usual catching-up Q&A.  Among one of the first questions out of his mouth was, "so... have you written anything lately?"

He was referring to fiction and poetry, to which my answer was (sadly) "no".  But as I was driving home later, I caught myself thinking about all of the worldbuilding, adventure-creating, and connected blogging that I've done here recently.  Does this stuff count as "writing"?  I'm not sure. On the one hand, it feels very creative and certainly requires a lot of word production. On the other hand, though, people (my fellow players, folks who read this blog) don't really seem to care about the writing itself. Rather, they like the interaction with the ideas, whether that means going through one of my adventures at the game table or borrowing ideas to use in their own games.

What do you think?

Does Ancient Elven Have Glottal Stops?

With the new campaign starting up, I've been trying to add to the Celtic/Viking ambiance of my game and its world.  Campaign I took place in a more cosmopolitan age, when many cultures had already made their way to the Isle and intermingled. Its feel (intentionally or not) was similar to that of most D&D games' default setting.

With Campaign II, I have made a more conscious effort in terms of cultural and linguistic flavoring. To wit, I've created some new settlements in the north of Evenoria and have renamed (or secondarily-named) others using certain language guidelines. So far those guidelines include:

• using transliterated Irish for the Midlander (native human Evenorian) names of people and places, often with an English "translation" of the name as well (e.g., "Ravensport" and "Cuan Eandubh" being two names for the same city)
• using transliterated Icelandic and Old Norse for Northlander people and places
• using transliterated Welsh for elven, annwynn, and other fey beings and places
• giving places two (or more) names if they are home to or recognized by more than one culture

By "transliterated," I simply mean spelling the names so as to be pronounceable by modern American English speakers, shifting the occasional vowel or consonant as needed. I've no illusions that my names have any kind of legitimate or correct meanings or pronunciations! Although I've perused the Poetic and Prose Eddas as well, most of my "research" has simply been done via Google Translate. 

If anyone out there would care to comment, I'd love to know you go about creating place names in your campaign world. Or do you even think about the logic behind such things, instead just picking out names that sound cool?

You Gotta Serve Somebody (New B/X-Style Clerics for Evenoria)

After years of having them simply be window dressing, I've finally started putting some flesh on the bones of my setting's deities.

First task: creating clerics!  In the linked pdf, you'll find cleric options for 5 different deities.  Enjoy!

Quick disclaimer: the artwork in this file (and in the previous character class document) is not mine. Also, I neglected to collect the attribution info when I nabbed the images off Google. If you know who created each drawing (or if that's you), let me know and I will make sure to embed a link in the next version and/or remove the image if you don't want it used that way. That said, I'm not trying to make any money off of this or anything--it's simply material for my homebrew game that I'm willing to share with other hobbyists!