Movies and books make time travel stories seem easy. We watch with excitement as characters tackle crazy time paradoxes and puzzles, battle villains in a variety of lush settings, and experience fun twists made possible when authors can play with timelines. The scam for us poor game masters, however, is we are more prone to [...]
Archive | April, 2011
How To Fix Botched Encounters In Mid-Game
You often know right from the start when an encounter stinks. It’s boring, or cliché, or maybe confusing. And the reason could be it’s the last encounter of the night and you’re tired, or the players went in a new direction and you’ve got nothing planned, or perhaps it just looked better on paper. But [...]
Dungeon Tile Mastery: 9 Ways To Get The Most Out Of Your Tile Collection
This month’s RPG blog carnival is about cartography and mapping. And I thought dungeon tiles would fit that theme nicely. I like the WotC dungeon tiles a lot and have been collecting sets over the years. They offer a number of advantages over other mapping methods. They save on your toner bill. Printing out maps [...]
Review: Art of Wor City Tiles: The Stone Bard Inn
The Stone Bard Inn city tiles by Three Sages Games are seven slick full colour productions designed to enhance tavern brawls and inn encounters. The tiles are actually letter-sized plastic sheets with anti-skid foam backing. Because of the plastic, you can use wet and dry erase markers on them. Three sheets combine to offer a [...]
Running Adventures with Little Preparation
by Brennan O’Brien Johnn asked me to write on a topic dear to my own heart. Between career, family, and too many hobbies, I often find I don’t have a lot of time to come up with adventures for my characters. When game time comes, I tend to make it up as I go. The [...]
For Awesome Campaigns Build A Player Campaign Book
By Kit Reshawn As I’ve gotten older, I’ve run into a bit of a problem when it comes to running campaigns. Getting people together for a session becomes more and more difficult, so players often forget details about previous sessions. I’ve played with GMs who have a rule that can be reduced to, “If you [...]
Riddleport Session 20 – Showdown at the Gold Goblin
This session ended up being a multi-wave combat with a bit of great roleplaying. The PCs caught up with their enemy Scab, a renegade gang member who screwed them out of a lot of money last session, and tried to tie up this nasty loose end. Session 19 finished on a cliffhanger with the PCs [...]
Review: How to be a Great GM
By Silveressa Today I have the opportunity to review the e-book How to be a Great GM, by Avalon games, an easy to follow 26 page guide that makes a great addition to any GM’s tool kit. Overview Like the title says, the book offers some solid system neutral GMing advice, (especially to those new [...]
Free Heists Deck Helps You Run Awesome Heists
In RPT#512, Robert Corrina offered us a tip about using a special heists deck. to add more fun to heist adventures. The idea was to offer additional inspiration for story twists and turns in your game using a deck of cards. Well, Robert now offers us his deck of cards you can use for any [...]
Darkest of Winters Adventure Synopsis #14
By Silveressa While delayed a couple weeks due to unforeseen dental difficulties, (vicodin makes it hard to do much of anything let alone GM or write coherently) the campaign is back on track with regular weekly updates, this one nearly twice the usual size to make up for the missing weeks. (Like usual, whenever possible I’ve kept [...]