One of my gaming groups plays a mashed up game with three genres: Highschool, Swashbuckling, and Urban Fantasy. We call it Children of the Shroud. In the game we play high school kids in a hidden magic world. As part of our magical learning we are part of the Junior Guardians club. It’s a club for...
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When starting to design an adventure for your home group, the first things I always consider are the mood, tone, and theme of the adventure. This will dictate all design decisions, descriptions, monsters included, sometimes the treasure gained, and the general aesthetics of everything I create for...
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Face to face, out in the heat, hanging tough, staying hungry… — Survivor, “Eye of the Tiger” In a proud GM Dad moment, my eldest daughter just ran her...
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Planning in RPGs has always been a problem. On one hand, it’s often necessary for a group of players to plan out something their characters are trying to accomplish. On the other, most groups are not adept at planning, and even if they were, the activity is never that exciting at the table –...
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As the GM, you are your players’ eyes, ears, and other senses. The choices you make when describing your game literally build the way they perceive their characters’ world, and their perceptions of the world will determine their actions. When they latch onto the wrong thing, be it the goblin barkeep instead of the mysterious figure in the corner or the stale corner of bread instead of the bloody murder weapon, nine times out of 10, it’s a failure of description.
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Welcome to a series of adventure design articles that I’m going to publish over the course of the next many months. The idea for this series hit me hard while I was at the bus stop waiting to pick up my man-child. I’d gotten there about twenty minutes early, and the ideas just starting...
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My gaming group decided to end our most recent campaign and start up a game of Mutants in the Now . We just completed Session Zero, including character generation, and I now have two weeks to put together the first session. Over the decades, I have started many campaigns, and the first session is...
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Do you want to center your player characters’ backstories without making it seem like the whole world revolves around them? Do you want to create emotional bonds as strong as adamantine between not just the PCs and the NPCs but the players, too? Do you want to pull off an enemies-to-allies (or lovers if that’s your story of the game) arc without ham-fisting the heel-face turn? Well then, my friend, allow me to introduce you to a little trick in my toolbox…
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Last month, I talked about giving your character some goals and motivations to support those goals. During a social media conversation about that article, a friend of mine dropped the idea of writing up an article about villain or antagonist goals and their motivations. Matt Dukes (also a fellow...
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Years ago when I was coding, I used to have this thing about Future Phil, Past Phil, and Present Phil. It started with some poorly documented code, where I cursed Past Phil for being lazy and screwing Present Phil (me – at the time) because I had to crawl through this mess of code and figure...
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