Attitudes of Soldiers in your Campaign
I've never served in the military, neither in my native country England nor my adopted country Australia. However I do run role playing games that contain worlds with soldiers in them. I play those soldiers to the best of my ability without really knowing how they think or feel. Sure, I can look at the characterization of service people in the movies but I have no idea how one movie character or another compares to real people who have seen action in the military.
So when trying to get ideas for how to characterize a military NPC I searched around for a bit of inspiration and found that there is a new research paper from the Pew Research Center that takes a look at the attitudes and challenges of American veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It gives some simple statistics that, while interesting on their own, can give some inspiration for military characters. I'll present a few of my ideas to start you off from a few of the statistics there. I'm using the same subset that was presented in the freakanomics.com blog post where I first found about the paper. read on...
Using Maptool for the Basics
Map from my campaign. The party mopped them up.
Recently I mentioned in my previous post that when DMing a one on one game of Dungeons and Dragons 4e over Skype I use Maptool from www.rptools.net as a pretty basic digital battlemat during combat. Seeing that I've heard some people talk about Maptool as if it's only great if you have a lot of time to prepare and learn all of it's features I figured that it was worth writing about how I use it to try to dispel those myths.
Maptool is virtual tabletop software that allows you to display a map and put objects and tokens on the map to represent a combat encounter area in an RPG. It replaces the battlemat and miniatures that you might use in D&D and puts them on a computer screen. It's useful for playing over the internet because players or extra DMs can connect to a central Maptool server and share the play space, including having limited control over it. read on...