Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Chaos to Order

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Work is still cooking right along on the Terrors and Treasures book, and I wanted to get your input on arranging the creatures and adding some order to my chaos.

Currently I have separated out some creature types:

Insects + Vermin
Animals
Dire Animals
Dinosaurs
Swarms, Flora, fauna and fungi, Oozes & Slimes
Demons & Devils

Then other creatures Abolteth, Minotaurs, Orcs. Lycantheropes, Skeletons etc. are  all i the Terrors section.

Okay why do it this way? because when I design adventures and stuff I just want to find a slime, or some vermin, or a dire animal and I like to be able to see them all at one time and not flip through pages and pages trying to compare them....but that may be my own hang up.

So I can either continue to section out by types (Aquatic, Undead, Humanoids) or scrap the whole damn thing and just alphabetize it all from A to Z regardless of type.

Thoughts and opinions are most welcome!


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7 comments:

  1. ewookieSeptember 17, 2014 at 7:19 PM

    that sounds good for the reasons you gave. however, sometimes i don't know or remember what 'type' a creature is. could you also have an alphabetical index of sorts?

    Aboleth...p20
    Bugbear..p6
    Cat.........p30
    etc.

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    Replies
    1. Fenway5September 17, 2014 at 7:25 PM

      An alphabetical index? Sure if the type demarcation is done that is a must!

      It would end up much like the Magi Carta: Spells are grouped by IQ while the index lists them all alphabetically.

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    2. ewookieSeptember 17, 2014 at 7:28 PM

      that's perfect!

      Delete
  2. Jeff V.September 17, 2014 at 9:04 PM

    I concur with ewookie -- I too prefer an organization that let's me sort by type, because I usually use something else to guide my monster selection (like, say, environment or general location) which points to a general category of problem. But similarly, I like to be able to throw in the occasional "twist" by giving the players something entirely unexpected to stumble across, and for that the alpha sort works best.

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  3. mabon5127September 18, 2014 at 5:13 AM

    I agree with the above. Type listing with an index. I like to look at all my dinosaur choices at one time!!

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  4. Brett SlocumSeptember 18, 2014 at 10:13 AM

    I'm in the "organize by type and index" crowd.

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  5. Fenway5September 18, 2014 at 5:37 PM

    Thanks for the continued feedback, I really appreciate it!

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