In this New York Times article about the desertification of Northern China, there are some great drone-camera videos of the landscape. The article is light reading and the imagery is top notch. Have a look.
Got it?
As the players have decided to undergo a journey of perhaps a hundred miles to return an old man to his hometown, I've taken a stab recently at the roughest, crudest possible first version of my own wilderness/travel damage system (as originally conceived by commenter Zzarchov, and implemented by Alexis here and elsewhere, and discussed here too.) Thus I find this kind of material inspiring. Traveling from place to place should not be a cakewalk for the characters. It should sap their energy and wear them down so that that every roadside inn, oasis, fellow traveler sharing food, or friendly forest creature is a boon.
As I go along I am starting to think that the knowledge skill system has more potential than the (admittedly massive) task of defining exactly what information the player character knows about the world, and exactly what capabilities the character has as choices for maneuvering and manipulating in the game world.
I think the knowledge skills could also serve to define the knowledgeability of a society. And this could, for starters, be based on the Intelligence (or other scores) of the society's inhabitants.
I watched plenty of animated movies as a kid, but only one has stuck with me for years and years: The Thief and the Cobbler. It wasn't a Disney movie, it wasn't any big-picture studio -- I always had the vague idea it was some small British outfit -- and it was totally surreal and artistic and unlike the other movies I was exposed to as a child.
Today, while talking with my friend Caroline who is heavily into animation, I learned that the version of the film released on video, as I saw it, was a cobbled-together, big-studio-driven money-recouping edit of a piece of handmade animation art that one guy worked on for years.
First off: this isn't an apology post. Here's something a bit substantial which I tackled lately: the rules for handling the creation of undead. They're not complete but the concepts are there.
Most of the work I've done on D&D in September is just adding miscellaneous rules the website -- and I've barely even been doing that for the last couple weeks. Things aren't hectic at school, and my free time hasn't decreased too badly, but what's happened is that my spare mental energy has gone down. And I've been running a game again for five or six weeks now, after not actively DMing for three years.