Pretend you're a player in a new campaign

Ok, so you're a player in a new RPG campaign I am putting together. I present you with the two paragraphs below. What I want to know is what I forgot to mention or what questions can I expect from my players?

You live in a world that is beset with wars over land,artifacts and people. From one year to the next people don’t know who they will owe tithes or sacrifices. Things are constantly in chaos and flux as warlords and wizards exert their power to to gain more power only to have their underlings revolt to seize their own power. The world was not always so, in the distant past the world was more stable and the gods bred fear among their worshippers.

Over 1000 years ago an organization was formed to oppose the control the gods enforced over their mortal subjects. The members acquired enough personal power, god powered items and elemental support to be able to challenge the gods themselves. The result was the down-throw of the gods leaving a world without direction and discipline. Once their mutual enemies were destroyed, individual members fought to gain control of the now godless lands and its people starting a seemingly never ending cycle of chaos, violence and death.

How should I improve my descriptive vocabulary?

Ok, I'm trying to improve my DMing. I want to be able to come up with descriptive words at the right time that convey the right feelings for the areas my players are in. In an effort to add these words to my vocabulary I have spent some time searching for words, hopefully in list format so that I have many to choose from. I am not sure what words I will need though, I have started with a couple and have provided those below, but what other words should I find synonyms for? Where do other DMs find their words and inspiration?

For instance, I know there's a number of words for a mausoleum:

boneyard	charnel	charnel house
churchyard	city of the dead	crypt
marbleown	memorial park	mortuary
necropolis	ossuary	polyandrium
potter's field	resting place	sepulcher
tomb	vault	funerary grounds
God's Acre	boot hill	catacomb
cemetary

I have looked up words for castle but what else should I be looking for?

Anything New?

Haven't posted in a bit.

Reason 1 - We skipped a week of gaming, our host had something come up so we did not have a place to play and we would have been short of our 3/4 quorum.

Reason 2 - Other than not having a game session to talk about, I haven't had much else I wanted to talk about.

So I have decided to ramble a bit before I continue preparing for another session of D&D this week.

Regarding D&D
I have started using more and more a program called Masterplan. This is an application specifically designed for 4th edition, though with the extensibility that is supposed to be built into the app, I suppose it could be adapted for any game system.

Masterplan is designed around libraries, which are collections of objects. These include monsters, map tiles, templates, traps and skill challenges. Each object has its own editor, specifically designed to capture the information that is important for the object you are creating. The only object that doesn't have an editor is the map tiles, instead these are imported images of the WoTC Dungeon Tile products. You can find these images elsewhere on the net, or I suppose you could scan them yourself if you own the tiles like I do. The image in my previous post is a screen capture of a map I made using the tiles, though I planned the dungeon out with my tiles beforehand so that I knew I wasn't using duplicates.

The main work area of Masterplan is the Workspace. In here we can create plot points and join them together in decision tree format. I have used it to this point just to organize my thoughts and prepare for the near future, it would probably make more sense to break down each mini adventure into plot points and keep them seperate. I'm still trying to decide how this will work best for me. I'll try and give some more feedback regarding my experiences as time goes by, but in the meantime, go check it out for yourself at http://www.habitualindolence.net/masterplan/

Expectations?

One of the 4th edition campaigns I am running started with the first module for this editions, H1-Keep on the Shadowfell. Since I started with this module and have a few maps in the DM's guide I decided to continue using the maps and locations provided, I have re-created the map provided in the DM's guide Soon to be posted here. I did add my own twist with an overarching storyline that is supposed to get the characters involved.

Edit: Here is a link to the map that I made from the one provided in the DM's Guide.
Winterhaven and surroundings


You see a couple of centuries ago an oracle just spouted out an epic, as oracles sometimes do. In the epic it was described that the royal family was destined to be the end of Orcus, or at least banish him for a millenia. That epic lists out where the hero is expected to go, what he is expected to use and how he is supposed to end Orcus' reign.

Here are some stanzas that the players have already discovered:

From the past, the future's written
Of the blood of ancient kings
They shall be Orcus' destroyer
Through powerful prismatic rings

In their path, shadows fallen
His death, black and painful fated
By his master, unlife granted
until his soul's hunger sated

Mountain's protectors have the answer
To travel the path of glory
Forged by their ancestral spirit
A ring begins the blood's story

Before ancient Shadow's Pillars
Beneath the shadow darkened sun
With heartening strikes on Orcus
The cleansing war has begun

Bright now is their shadowed future
Strengthened by the coming sun
Fear and horror reduced to nothing
In the end the battle is won

Part of the story is a mercenary company that was hired to guard the royal family until the prophecy came to pass. Red Mithril stayed with the family wherever they went, unfortunately There was an incident at the Keep on the Shadowfell that broke up the mercenary company and scattered the few remaining members of the family.

Assuming the characters find all the information they need, what do you think the chances are that the campaign will go as expected?

Didja notice?

I was re-arranging my blog today. I wanted to keep my blog related items up top but also wanted to make my amazon links more visible.

I started thinking about two things.
1. Do any of my readers ( like 3 of them ) know the 20 year history I have with the name Laslo? and...
2. Why do I have D&D amazon links on my blog page if I haven't really talked about it?

I'll start with #1, but in doing so I'll delve a little deeper into my past and my adolescence. When I was in 8th grade, about 30 years ago ( go ahead, do the math ), we were required to have homework or something to read for half of our lunch period. I was fortunate enough to sit across the table from someone who had already been introduced to D&D. He usually had the "Monster Manual" with him and allowed me to peruse the book during our "study" time. The images and the statistics listed for the imaginary creatures intrigued me, it was so stimulating to my imagination that I had to learn more. I got to know another classmate, who was also into the gaming scene, both roleplaying as well as strategy games. I still call him my friend, and we get together once in a while with our wives and other couples. Him, another friend and I stumbled into the roleplaying world of "Basic Dungeons and Dragons" not knowing exactly what we were doing other than playing make-believe.

Years went by, we tried many different roleplaying games. Fantasy Games Unlimited had quite a few games that were unique and interesting. Aftermath, Daredevils, Villains and Vigilantes and Bushido were FGU products we played. We played some Champions, Car Wars, and of course AD&D.

On to college, I was strangely enough assigned to room with a gamer and learned that my college campus has an RPG club that met every week. All it really did was provide a place to meet without having to deal with pededstrians stopping by to ask "What're you doing?". It was in that group, my first character with that group that Laslo was born. The system was a mixture of AD&D and some very well done homebrew rules. Spells were "invented" by the player by combining words to make the spell effect and every character started with a social status background to help determine their place in the world.

Laslo started with mediocre stats and a horrendous social status. I rolled a 1 on a 20 sided die. This didn't make me a bastard child, this didn't make me a slave, this made me the bastard child of a slave. That's right, Laslo's mother had been a slave in the middle-eastern style city of Kaylith and his father was some northern mercenary who just passed through. So by combining the traits of these two fictional characters, Laslo was a blond haired, well tanned short street urchin who grew up thieving from the plentiful merchants of Kaylith. He went on to have many adventures in many places and became one of my favorite characters.

As far as #2? Maybe I'll cover that next time, I'm DMing a 4th edition campaign that I run on a weekly basis that started in the area that is provided in the DM's guide and the first module. I can talk a little bit about it, but my players haven't really gotten into the meat of the campaign yet so I will have to be careful about what I discuss.