Best Posts of 2009 at Inkwell Ideas

Hopefully it isn’t too late to look back at 2009.  At Inkwell Ideas, the specialty is to give others tools and ideas useful for RPGs.

Although December was a little slow (working on the largest Inkwell Ideas project, Hexographer, as well as real life issues) there were a few November posts centered on random charts to create location names that sound similar to locations in various cultures. (The link goes to a main page that links to pages with charts for Chinese, English/UK, and Native American Indian sounding names.)

2009 also brought on some other random charts: random potion descriptions and charts of effects of expired potions, for fun.  Further, one set of random charts was converted to Javascript code to create the Magic Item Shop Random Inventory Generator.

Although the major projects at Inkwell Ideas are Hexographer and the Coat of Arms Design Studio, another large task was the 2009 RPG Blog Readership Survey. Hopefully something similar will happen later in 2010, but with more collaboration with other blog writers. Using the RPG Bloggers list it can have questions tailored to more blog writers and receive a higher number of responses.

Because of Inkwell Ideas’ Hexographer product, there are often several articles on Worldbuilding topics.  Three of these were: Timelines (tips for creating a constructed world’s timeline),  10 Ways to Vary Your Game World’s Cultures and 10 More Ways to Vary Your Game World’s Cultures.

By far, three of the most popular entries were for map collections: 101 Fantasy City, Town and Village Maps; Two Sites with Hundreds of Real Historical City Maps (which included direct links to many of the best); and 25 Inn and Tavern Maps.

The Random Dungeon Generators Reviewed article was also very popular.

My favorite advice columns described how our groups often use experience point bonuses and listed the Top 5 Overlooked Rule Subsets of RPGs.