I’ve hit a rut recently where a few bad experiences have soured me on role playing games. I’m still in love with the various card/board/dice games that I play at random with friends. However, I’m starting to dread cracking open the dice bag, whipping out my character sheet, and...
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Like horror? Try this little guy on for size: It’s a real creature, the 25mm promachoteuthis sulcus, a squid found a mile below the surface of the Atlantic. (Here’s its Tree of Life entry.) But in a different size, or sticking out of someone’s stomach, or in place of an otherwise...
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Without exception, in every RPG I’ve ever played that used a fear check mechanic — a roll players have to make to keep their characters from running away — that mechanic is always incredibly frustrating. “Fear check” is a general term that covers morale checks, horror...
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Most fantasy RPGs feature a variety of gods, and those gods tend to play a prominent role in the world. There’s a spectrum, of course, ranging from settings where the gods are in the background to worlds like the Forgotten Realms — where, in the form of their avatars, the gods...
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Strange Horizons, an online magazine of sci-fi stories (alongside other genres), has an entertainingly dry list of Stories We’ve Seen Too Often in their submission guidelines. There’s plenty of overlap with RPGs in this rundown of tired sci-fi plots — for example: “Visitor...
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My friend Sam, who I game with every week, pointed me to this saucy little minx (thanks, Sam!): The Dungeonomicon, a lengthy thread on the WotC forums that attempts to justify, explain and tweak dungeons, along with a variety of other fantasy RPG staples. It’s broken down into sections, but...
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Courtesy of Jeff’s Gameblog, a flowchart for espionage missions from Top Secret designer Merle Rasmussen. This chart originally appeared in Dragon #40, and while (as Jeff points out) it does lack Bond girls, it more than makes up for that omission in cleverness. (Via RPG...
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This guest post by Patrick Benson (AKA VV_GM) is the fourth in our continuing Genre Advice for GMs series. In this post, Patrick shares a few secrets for driving your players nuts — in a good way. – – – – – Espionage games are one of the more difficult genres of...
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When you’re running a sci-fi RPG, how much the game world differs from the present day will depend on how far into the future the game projects — but given the rapid pace of technological advancement in the past hundred years, an awful lot is likely to have changed. This can lead to a...
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This guest post by Patrick Benson (AKA VV_GM) is the third in our new Genre Advice for GMs series. In this post, Patrick reminds us that little things can be scary, too. – – – – – Horror in RPGs is a lot like horror in the movies. The first time you set up a good...
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