Yea, ‘bottom-up’ is a great way to put it.

Like, I can still add a totally different gnoll tribe later on in a module, or just add one ‘from the icy South’, and let the GM imply a world without yammering about it.

The thing is, this is still tying culture to race.

I had a go at breaking past this barrier, and found it extremely difficult. I started with the idea that geography informs culture, and made a split between elves in the frozen South and elves tropical jungles. This left me with half the normal space to write about elven cultures.

So I figured I could do 2-3 cultures per race, and end up with (5 x 2.5) ~13 descriptions of fantasy cultures. But who wants that? I can’t use that much in my own game. Writing because you have to write something makes for bad writing.

Another route is to limit cultures even more. Maybe dwarves and gnomes basically live the same way, as do gnolls and humans. But then it seems odd that gnolls having the mouth of a canine changes nothing about them. If nothing else, their language has to be deeply different, given the lack of lips.

So in the end, I’ve decided to just fill in a very small part of the world, and leave an underlying assumption that elves, humans, and gnolls might do things differently elsewhere.

Goblin culture doesn’t have a concept of “Property”. A stick on the ground and a tool in a locked shed are equally up for grabs if a thing needs doing. They casually take and leave things all over their communities, eat from communal pots, and genuinely Do Not Understand why the Core Races are so Angry and prone to Violence all the time.

This is nice. It reminds me of the Piraha notion of ownership. If they swing by someone’s place to use their boat, but the person isn’t there, they’ll just use the boat anyway. Once they return with a catch, the boat-owner gets the first pick (e.g. the biggest fish), because it’s ‘their boat’. So they still have property rights, but they overcome the potential waste of someone not using a boat.

I have cultures’/ races write-ups in BIND.

Here’s some snippets:

Roleplaying Dwarves

Check then double-check.

• Does this person really know where the lost temple lies? Ask him about the rooves, doors, and other items made of wood. If the temple was lost three centuries ago, those constructions must have degraded. Does his story match?
• Does the beer taste good? A really good beer still tastes good when you drink three in a row.

Roleplaying Elves

The various elven languages have no words for good', bad’, or `evil’. As a result, elves to not fully understand or use these words, even when speaking other languages.

Bread cannot go bad' -- it has mould. They will never call a song good’ – the song feels lively, or sounds like a Sunrise, or makes one think of home. They would never call someone evil' -- they might say destructive’ or useless', or selfish’, but never use language which characterizes anything with such a wide notion as good' or bad’.

If someone says your plan sounds good', make sure to clarify if they mean that they want the results of the plan, or if the plan seems likely to succeed, or if the plan has been stated clearly. And when you hear something is bad’, clarify that too.

Roleplaying Gnomes

Think sideways.

Can we apologize to the mage and make amends instead of killing her? Can you use a hammer to communicate? What else do shoes do?

Gnomes see the world from a different perspective. They look up people’s noses all day. Gnomes see the ceiling while others look down at the ground.

Gnomes travel slowly but it looks like a large space to them. From a relative perspective, a travelling Gnome has travelled farther than the rest of the troupe. Are we counting footsteps or miles? Did you know that every mile has 5.280 feet?

Where did the mage commission her traps? Is the architect still alive? Does he have standard schematics for his traps in a workshop where he builds traps for people?

What kind of contract do you make when you sell someone a trap to guard a dungeon? What happens if I roll a boulder down the stairs? Have these traps killed before? Where do the bodies go? Does someone climb down to get them out and do they use a ladder? If we dig out the stream nearby, we could flood the dungeon.

The latest version is a wip, available here (Chapter 4).

I tried to understand how merging several columns into one would work

It’s this button.

Also there are no in cell checkboxes in Calc,

Checkboxes:

https://ask.libreoffice.org/uploads/short-url/biHcqD9rpmk0V92ShVFWZwDVIUD.ods

Something new with Calc? Not to my knowledge, though I’ve never found something I couldn’t do. What additional features do Google Docs have?

For online-usage, nothing will ever beat spreadsheets. They exist to crunch numbers and compare values. They work with both text and numbers. And they’re flexible.

• Want to add +2 to perception for elves? Check if race = "Elf" and if so, add +2.
• Want to add a fixed list of weapons for the player to choose from? Stick the entire list on a secret sheet, then reference them in a drop-down menu.

If a bespoke tool ever came out, it would only do one system, badly. Spreadsheets do any system, and the skills you learn with them are transferrable to almost all other spreadsheet programmes.

There’s my indie RPG character spreadsheet (requires Libreoffice Calc). Fill in your name, and it’ll use numerological constants to find your race and stats, then tracks your XP every time you buy a skill.

People want to use something like a pdf because it looks like paper, but this instinct is wrong. PDFs are for printing. Their fill-in text boxes are ugly, and programming them is clunky.

My game has fewer rules than Pathfinder by any measure, although ‘a page or two’ seems a very low number - that sounds more like a little zine than a fully-fledged RPG.

I like this idea, but given that players never read the rules, it’s a little like asking my granny what kind of package management system her computer should use.

Upon stepping into the room, the players are ambushed (see the core rules for ambushes) by a drow mage (see the Monstrous Manual for more on the drow) riding a Grizwoz (see Appendix B: New monsters). The drow is level 7 (the GM should prepare a spell-list before the adventure starts).