Making NPCs come alive!
After bashing NPCs on a previous post I think this time around I’ll show them some love. I won’t claim the advice I’m going to give is wholly original. It’s the collected wisdom...
January 26, 2011
Improve Your Game
Advice / Fluff/Inspiration / Humor / Improve Your Game / Mutants & Masterminds / Non-RPG / Other Systems / Pathfinder / Random musings / RPG
Letting go of that NPC
Attention: Slight rambling ahead, with a point to make about RPGs somewhere in there, you have been warned! I recently finished reading the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (that’s the girl with the...
January 24, 2011
World Building Part 5 – Macro meets Micro
I want to advise going against both using micro and macro world building alone and actually combine both of these techniques into a happy middle ground.
January 14, 2011
Bridging the Gap
There is a lot of animosity between the old-school and new-school gaming groups. A lot of this I think is unnecessary. I mentioned briefly in my introduction that I am more of an...
January 10, 2011
World Building Part 4 – Campaign Setting Genre
Last week, I took a short break from this series because of travel and the holidays, but I am back this week to talk about the genre that your game world is going...
January 7, 2011
[Horror] Take Your World and Break It
One of the most powerful ways to run a modern day horror campaign is to take the familiar and start blending in a little bit of strange. The differences don’t have to be...
January 5, 2011
World Building Part 3 – Getting Started with World Tone
Last time, we talked about making sure to keep it at least a little bit “old school” when it comes to world building by never leaving your handy notebook behind. Today, we are...
December 31, 2010
Advice / Ask The Readers / Fluff/Inspiration / Improve Your Game / Mutants & Masterminds / Other Systems / RPG / RPG tools
New game, new tools!
This past weekend I began a new campaign. We reached a natural lull in the ongoing Pathfinder RPG campaign, which has run for 65 (almost) weekly sessions and decided to put the game...
December 23, 2010
Advice / Ask The Readers / Fluff/Inspiration / Game Design / Humor / Improve Your Game / Random musings / RPG
And then she said, “Wait, Professor Jones can help us with this one!”
Have you said that in a game? For the longest time that was taboo in my games, but these days I’m willing to consider it. I’m not talking about Professor Jones per se,...
December 15, 2010
Advice / Fluff/Inspiration / Humor / Improve Your Game / Other Systems / Podcasts / Random musings / RPG
Learning to say no…
It’s hard. There I said it! What? No, no get your head out of the gutter. What I meant was saying no when people want to play at my table. And why should...
November 29, 2010
Reimagining ourselves…
I recently read Superman: Earth One. “WAIT! This isn’t a comic book blog”, you say. I ask, bear with me for a minute I will get to my point. This reimagining/retelling of Superman’s...
November 25, 2010
Advice / D&D4e / Fluff/Inspiration / Guest Post / Improve Your Game / Other Systems / Random musings / RPG
Death & Traps
As a Dungeon Master (DM) I have a confession to make. I want to kill a player character at my table. Just one. Not the whole party. Just one, or maybe two and...
November 2, 2010
Infinities
Roleplaying game settings based on an existing book, movie or computer game franchise can be either a boon or a curse. On the one hand you usually get a fully fleshed-out world which...
October 26, 2010
Advice / Ask The Readers / Feature / Fluff/Inspiration / Humor / Improve Your Game / Just my two cents / Random musings / RPG
Gaming fiction weal or woe?
Role playing games are so entrenched in their literary roots, from Beowulf to El Cantar del Mio Cid, from Howard’s Conan, to Tolkien’s Middle Earth that it is sometimes hard to separate one...
October 11, 2010
“A rose by any other name…” Poetry and Role Playing Games
The much quoted line in this post’s title is from a play you might have heard about, Romeo and Juliet, written by a Billy Shakespeare. This guy was old school, so much so...
October 7, 2010
Telling the story my way…
As a long time Game Master I like to try different ways of telling a story. My latest session serves as an example. The previous adventure had ended as the players set forth...
September 28, 2010
You Don’t Always Need A Home Run
Hi there! This is Zachary Houghton from RPG Blog 2, stepping in for my buddy Michael and his pals at Stargazer’s World. This seems to be a week for GM advice, so I...
September 9, 2010