Category: General

Man, it’s been a year already, hasn’t it? Everything has been turned on its head thanks to the pandemic and many of us are dealing with more than a little anxiety and dread about the current state of the world. For me, the lack of my gaming conventions and seeing the wider social circle of my...

Over the last year or so I’ve ditched being active on most social media. The only one I actually visit with regularity anymore is Reddit. Partially this is because I enjoy “consuming” it more than participating in it, but also because the focus there is on the thing not the...

When designing dungeons for a dungeon-crawl session, consider making one of those rooms an “information” station.  When doing a rough calculation, one in ten rooms in a given dungeon should have this purpose.  (It’s customary to put monsters in about half the rooms, traps or hazards in another...

I just recently finished a playthrough of Final Fantasy VIII remastered (with all the McIndus mods to make it truly remastered) and was surprised at how much of the ending I had forgotten from my first play through… well a damn long time ago. Whatever your thoughts may be on the game as an...

I tend to be a very generous Game Master. I give players a lot of options, and I pick generously from the monster manual when challenges need to rear their ugly heads (all of them… Hydras are fun… Sorry Nym, Jarrah, Zinnia, and Emil… you’ll survive… probably…...

  When I was in my Monday night Zoom game this week, the GM’s kid came into the room and an interaction like this ensued: Kid: “Hey, I was reading ahead in the book and I see we’re going to be fighting a green dragon. I want to buy stuff to protect against acid!” GM:...

In March, I was organizing what Angela Murray has labeled a “bespoke artisanal convention.”  We were thirty friends planning to spend a weekend in April at an inexpensive hotel playing roleplaying games.  One month before the con, we determined that because of COVID-19 concerns, it would not be...

I like modern settings in my roleplaying games. Very often, I set them in a specific year and draw on real life events to fuel what happens in the game, or at least things that are referenced in the game. To be completely honest, I’m not sure I am ever going to set a game in the 2020 we are...