RPG Movies For Game Masters

01. Mar, 2014 • Categories: Tools & GM Aides

Interested in movies for game master and RPG inspiration?

Today you’re in luck! Below is a list of movies submitted by RPT readers as perfect for GMs to watch and get ideas from.

The List: RPG Movies For Game Masters

11:14

13 Ghosts

13th Warrior

Must-watches for any viking campaign. Gritty combat with pseudo-fantasy elements. Also good for a primeval, low-magic campaign. If you liked Braveheart, Apocalypto, etc., then you will like these.

187 24 (TV series)

300 6th Day

8 Mile

911

A movie that shows the power of the church in every day life. It is about how Saint Thomas More refused to proclaim that King Henry VIII had the right to divorce his wife. Henry, who had recently been named Defender of the Faith by the pope, had been refused a divorce by the Vatican. Henry then demanded every one of his nobles proclaim he had the right to defy Rome and divorce his wife. Sir Thomas stuck to his religious guns and refused, and was executed for his troubles. He was subsequently canonized by the pope.

Alice in Wonderland

Alien vs. Predator

Aliens 1+2

Watch the Marines and their close quarter tactics. Watch the aliens make their hide checks. Learn that the only way to be sure is to nuke them from orbit.

American Psycho

Analyze That

Arabian Nights

Babylon 5, the series.

As a sharp contrast to Stargate, the heroes are pawns in a cold war between aliens who likely inspired the stories of angels and demons. Watch this series to better play the parts of Gods and Devils who walk in the world of men, but who seem strangely afraid to act from the coruage of their convictions– and to see what might happen if, at last, they did.

Band of Brothers (DVD series)

Basic

Batman Begins

Beckett

Another movie that shows the power of the church in every day life. This is the story of Thomas Beckett, a rambunctious scallywag and drinking buddy of his king. But when the king posted his friend to the position of the head of the Church of England, thinking Beckett would be a certain political ally, Beckett suddenly discovered his faith, and defied his king’s non-religious ambitions repeatedly.

Ben Hur

Beowulf

I just saw it and I think it’s a great add for DMs. It’s good for character generation, combat description, and encounter ideas. Plus the 3-D is worth checking out. http://gamers.deadgentlemen.com/,The Gamers,A comedy RPG that takes a fun stab at RPGs.

Black Hawk Down

Blade

Blade Runner

A good example of world building. The setting is lush and a good representation of a dark future.

Blakes 7

Another BBC late 1970s series that had some interesting sci-fi elements.

Brotherhood of the Wolf

Buffy the Vampire slayer

Watch this for the tone of the campaign. Buffy is at once comic– darkly funny– and quite serious about its subject matter; any campaign that can imitate this tone will be a hit. Also note that characters of various power levels are employed to good effect, probably some tips can be gleaned for the GM struggling with similar characters.

Butterfly Effect

Casino

Casino Royale (2006)

The first five minutes of parkour show what DC 30 jump and tumble checks really look like.

Circus (2000).

A great British film Noir style thriller about a bunch of gangsters in Brighton all trying to screw each other over. Every performance is great, but Eddie Izzard, funniest man alive, is almost Harlequinesque as the camp bookie who sings pop tunes as he beats up the unfortunate hero, John Hannah. Looking for a primer on street life or the Rogue class at its best, I suggest this movie. Twists and double-crosses, ingenious stings and intricate plots abound.

Clash of the Titans

Cleopatra

Collateral

Combat! (the TV series)

It has a plethora of ideas for small unit missions and combat situations. I have used situations from the series in many of my campaigns with a military background. The Longest Day: There are so many story arcs and adventure beginnings that can be taken from the film.

Conan the Barbarian

The way the plot develops is very much like an RPG. It offers several lessons.

Start with backstory (bad guy killed my family/village). Conan doesn’t know who it was but has a clue (serpent and sun/moon emblem).
Don’t reveal the bad guy up front. Leave some mystery.
Have hooks to bring characters into the adventure.
Story driven character generation. “I’m strong as hell cause I spent 10 years on the Wheel of Pain. The years spent in the fighting pit make me a warrior. Being a barbarian ex- slave makes me poor and ignorant.”
Get the party together. Conan encounters a witch who has a future party member as prisoner. Then he runs into another party member during his first adventure.
Having a patron NPC push the plot along. King Osric offers treasures beyond imagination to bring back his daughter.
Advance the plot even when characters fail. i.e. Conan’s capture and crucifixion on the Tree of Woe.
Use exciting terrains for combats. i.e. The Orgy Room (humongous vat of green, part-human stew to dump down stairs on a bunch of mooks, how awesome is that?) and Battle on the Mounds.
Climax that affects the world – the party’s actions matter.
Finally, music, and how much it enhances and dictates mood. Basil Poledouris was a master we can learn a lot from.

(If you want examples of the best action and combat descriptions, read Robert E. Howard, author of Conan stories among many others.)

Constantine

Crank

Crash

Crime is King

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

A perfect “troubled mentor-student relationship” movie for PCs with mentors or with dependents. Excellent for development of relationships after they’ve been established. Most PCs have Little Jimmy running around and getting kidnapped; this movie can show a GM how to make Little Jimmy not just a 20-point disadvantage, but a driving force behind the plot of the game. Making enemies for the mentor, stealing his gear, exposing him to his greatest foes, even rescuing (or attempting to rescue) the PC when his efforts lead him into too much danger. Or, for NPC mentors, their inoxerable knowing-better, pursuit of and protection of the PCs from threats too great for them to handle, and their eventual exit, giving the PCs further motivation to take on the foe they (hopefully) now have the skills to challenge.

Cube

D&D Cartoon TV Series

A group of kids are thrown into a world where they must search for a way home, armed with magic weapons that an evil tyrant lusts for.

Daemon

Dark Crystal

Watch “Dark Crystal” if you wish to introduce a new, strange world to the PC’s without explanation. Little is explained to the young hero, beyond how important it is that he succeed– but never how or why: he must piece that out as he runs from place to place. Prophecies, events thousands of years in the making, and many other staples of the fantasy genre have a unique and central role to play in this classic.

Deep Blue Sea

Doctor Who

Both the originals from BBC and the modern day versions.

Dog Soldiers

Obviously as a Brit I can’t miss this movie because it looks as though it was designed specifically for role-players (especially those in the World of Darkness). The quickly diminishing heroes react like all most any group of us role-players in such situations, and besides that its a great Beer and Pizza movie. Like Alien, it uses the haunted house premise perfectly. Stick the protagonists somewhere they can’t just walk out of (and in the modern era, can’t get a mobile phone signal) and then set something they are unprepared to battle against them. Under stress each character gets to shine and all sorts of different skill packages can become useful.

Dogma

Dracula

Dune

Enemy at the Gates

Escape From New York

Snake Plissken is the best anti-hero around.

Excalibur

Existenz

Fallen

“Homicide detective John Hobbes witnesses the execution of serial killer Edgar Reese. Soon after the execution the killings start again, and they are very similar to Reese’s style.” I normally don’t like psychopath movies but it provided a interesting premise and problem-solving situation — how to stop a being that can take possession of people, jumping from person-to-person at the moment of its current host’s demise. It was dark but intriguing.

I hope that its not too cold where you’re at and that the rest of your week is good.

Fastlane (TV series)

Faust

Black and white, by F.W. Murnau. The amazing special effects(for a silent era film) inspired me to make props and use whatever I have around the house to enhance my game. Things don’t have to be perfect, they just have to evoke an emotion – fear, amazement, greed, compassion.

Final Destination 1+2

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy VII Advent Children

Finding Nemo

the perfect quest film to watch alongside the LotR, Willow, Quest for fire, Stand by Me

Firefly

A bitter captain on the losing side of the last war, a tough-as-nails soldier first mate, the comic relief pilot/navigator, the none-too-bright weapons specialist, the mechanic with a heart of gold, the holy man with a secret past, the aristocratic prostitute and the healer that’s hiding his psychic sister from the government.

A large sized party with their own base of operations aiming to misbehave. Heist of the week, and character backstories rich enough for in-group interaction and to build whole storylines from.

You can easily bring this over to any role-playing game or genre, and once again its a perfect fit for Eberron, complete with Last War and airships with cool fire effects.

Flash Gordan, 5th Element

Costume, sets and dialog. Description!

Be fantastical and occasionally over-the-top (regardless of genre – extremes and archetypes are memorable). Colors, textures. Think about the mood you wish to convey.

Be thematic. Guys from forestland dress like Erol Flynn in all greens. Hawkmen use feathers and furs. Good guys wear orange casual cloths. Bad guys, expensive designer suits. If it wears a uniform it is a mook.

Themes help players build up “knowledge” of your world. Your descriptions will build on each other, so eventually just a few words will bring forth vivid and detailed images in players’ minds. This also lets you drop cool clues, such as a bit of torn green cloth that will immediately inform the players forest dudes were here.

Flesh + Blood

Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Castle assaults, how dirty/brutal life was in medieval times. From IMDB: “A band of medieval mercenaries take revenge on a noble lord, who decides not to pay them, by kidnapping the betrothed of the noble’s son.”

Four Rooms

Full Metal Jacket

Gangs of New York

Genre – Mystery movies.

What’s a D&D campaign without at least one murder mystery? I’m sure you’ve probably done a whole weekly about murder mystery movies before, but I didn’t see a link to a past article like you had for the swashbuckling flicks.

I can’t suggest any one great mystery movie. And writing a mystery for a D&D game is a totally different beast, but it never hurts to get some inspiration.

Ghost in the Shell

Ghostship

Ginger Snaps.

This is perhaps the most important movie from the perspective of the curses or supernatural character. The lead characters first change comes with puberty and the fear of change itself is wonderfully portrayed. This film does a good job of using the rigors of adulthood as a Pseudonym for the Rite of Passage era in a characters life, whether they be Garou awakening to life as a Werewolf or a psychic learning of their mutant abilities which will forever set them apart from others.

Gladiator

pretty faithful depiction of life in the Roman army and as a gladiatorial slave. Good intro to Roman politics under the emperors. Good costumes and sets for descriptions.

Godzilla

Goonies

Add some realism to your low level play.

Harry Potter

Hawk the Slayer

Although it’s a B-grade movie, it plays out like a standard RPG adventure with specific scenes and setups that can spark ideas for your campaign. This has the legendary Jack Palance (as the character of Vultan) who has a pact with a demon’s healing stone and turns on his younger brother out of jealousy. The interesting thing is that they introduce a dwarf, elf, giant and sorceress to as a new party to help protect a nunnery. You won’t forget the elf’s bowmanship either!

Heartbreakers

Heat

Hellboy

Hercules(TV Series)

Hero

“Preparing for combat.” Or, if you please, “winning before you start fighting.” The titular character wins his battles by choosing the time and place for them. He chooses the location, which gives him an advantage, but more than that he prepares his enemies with manipulation and psychology before he fights them- or he gets other people to kill them for him. Hero, like many other Jet Li movies, also includes a radical reinterpretation of the story, right at the end; the evil master becomes the dupe, the heartless mercenary becomes the noble warrior. If nothing else, you should get your players to watch it so that they understand what an incredible difference motivation makes to someone’s actions.

Hooligans

Hostage

House of Flying Daggers:

Double-crossing double-crossed double-crossers. An excellent example of how PCs with radically different goals and alignments can work together because of circumstances or temporary alignment of sub-goals. Also has excellent examples of how to exit long-running PCs with dignity and give them a tearful send-off, and to get the other PCs engaged in their living as something besides spectators. One more thing; the use of colour in the film will blow your mind. Using colour to set mood or indicate allegiance is a real useful technique (see Avatar: The Last Airbender for more examples), and Flying Daggers does a superlative job of it.

Hunt For Red October

Lots of tension and on cable almost every other night.

Ice Age 1+2

Identity

Imperium der W?lfe

Incredibles

this is how a family or team of supers works, has a great villain with several kinds of underlings and traps that test and train the supers.

Indiana Jones

great action scenes (chases, fights, and races), wonderful secondary characters on which to base NPCs, good basic plots to adapt for a game or campaign. The pacing in these movies is excellent and provides a good example for GMs as to how to keep the momentum going. The music is also perfect for action scenes.

Into The Blue

Jason Movies

Once or twice, when players are happy with themselves for defeating a big bad and are healing and searching for loot, have the “dead” big bad arise and get a surprise round on the party. Then start combat anew. The big bad keeps rising from apparent death until the party figures out the key to its true destruction.

Jurassic Park 1-3

Kanal

Based Warsaw 1944, it is not really a WWII movie. For the purposes of fantasy DMs, it’s about getting lost, going crazy, dying in sewers/dungeons. If dungeon/sewers aren’t where your players spend 1/2 their time and you want to make the one time they enter one memorable, this movie will help.

King Arthur

Plots and battle ideas. You are soldiers to a foreign king and must do his bidding to earn your freedom. Your small group is sent on a rescue mission to an ungrateful and uncooperative man, and must outwit an overwhelming force to gain his safety. A great battle against the large force is waged on an ice-covered lake, which is used creatively to win the battle. The soundtrack makes for great gaming background music as well.

Ladyhawke

Last Man Standing

Lawrence of Arabia

Layer Cake

Legend

Mad Max

Matrix

Memento

Merlin

Mindhunters

Mission Impossible 2

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

National Treasure

A modern day Indiana Jones. A Heist. Puzzles. Secret Passages. A secret treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence? If you can’t use that, I can’t help you. I can’t wait to port that directly into my Eberron campaign onto the original Galifar code, or even the Treaty of Thronehold. What better way to send the party on a “red-line-on-the-map” treasure hunt visiting every country on the globe.

Nightmare On Elmstreet

Have an enemy that can’t be defeated by normal combat. Get your players thinking beyond their swords and fireballs.

No Way Out

Starring kevin costner – a good bit of double/triple cross.

Oceans 11+12

Once Upon A Time In China

Series of movies featuring Jet Li as Wong Fei Hung, famous Chinese hero. These probably aren’t so useful fortraditional fantasy, but great for Asian fantasy, though. These are good action movies that everyone who doesn’t hate Hong Kong martial arts action movies should see.

Original Sin

Original Star Trek

Plots. Especially plots with moral consequences/decisions. One anti-lesson: Star Trek NextGen. Dues ex machina – don’t use it.

Pans Labyrinth

Pathfinder

Must-watches for any viking campaign. Gritty combat with pseudo-fantasy elements. Also good for a primeval, low-magic campaign. If you liked Braveheart, Apocalypto, etc., then you will like these.

Paycheck

Pearl Harbour

Pirates of the Caribbean 1-3

Pitch Black

Planet of the Apes (all movies)

Platoon

Plunkett and Macleane

The heady mix of Old world glamour with a twentieth century twist is the perfect mood piece for games of Changeling: the Dreaming. Along with Neverwhere this movie is the one I watch most to get in the mood for Changeling. But the not quite true to history historical era (slightly echoes in a Knights tale as well) can also be food for thought in fantasy games. Warhammer’s pseudo-European setting and 7th Sea’s world could benefit from this movies irreverent version of the past. Additionally, it is a great movie to watch both for rogues (the heroes are highwaymen) and for early forms of justice and law keeping.

Princess Bride

Required watching. It has the best player character death mechanic evar! “He’s only mostly dead, quite different than all dead.”

Princess Mononoke

Prison Break

One innocent man, one mastermind with a plan to free him, and a handful of other inmates, some extremely dangerous, forced together to escape their cells guards, escape the guards, escape the traps and escape the prison itself. And that’s just season one.

Once you make it out, you have to deal with life on the run, the guilty conscience of the criminals you helped escape, former prison guards out for revenge and federal agents. And that’s just season two.

You might wind up in a foreign country, in an even worse prison before. But with some familiar faces….possibly even some of those who have been hunting you. Now you have to break out again, but this time you don’t already have a master plan.

The TV show does an amazing job of mimicking a D&D campaign. Just when you have everything planned out, something goes wrong and you’re faced with a bigger problem. Plus alignment questions and cliffhangers almost every episode.

To keep the “easy fit for Eberron” theme going, you can start with a local prison and build up to the inescapable Dreadhold. Or start with Dreadhold, and find something even worse on Xen’drik, Argonnessen or the planes.

Pulp Fiction

Purpurnen Fl?sse

Rambo 1-3

Reign of Fire

Vanzan and his bunch of Gung ho Dragon Hunters make a perfect gang of Monster hunters. If half the players are survivor villagers and half are mercenary or wandering freebooters as in this movie, the tension for a good story is already present. The same set up work in modern horror, fantasy or science fiction.

Reign of Fire – why the heck to stay away from dragons: they are big, they are bad, they breathe fire; also good plot for introducing dragon or dragons into a fantasy game ? twist on the ?dragon destroys the village? idea.

Reservoir Dogs

Resident Evil

Riddick

Rob Roy

You asked for swashbuckling Films? Rob Roy is a damn good one. The final sword fight is both entertaining and realistic, and often lauded as the best ever filmed. The two combatants actually take and show the effects of damage. Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth and John Hurt all giving a very passable Scottish Highlands during the time of the upheavals.

Robin of Sherwood

It’s a three-season television series from Britain (starring Michael Praed as Robin), first released in the 80′s. It’s full of plot-ideas, gloomy castles, a mysterious, godlike being, a huge forest, peasant-villages and ofcourse a lot of battle with the unfortunate men who have the lethal job of working for the sheriff of Nottingham. Some slightly over-the-top characters make this a worthwile addition to a GM’s DVD collection. (Plus: right now, here in the Netherlands at least, the series is dead-cheap: three seasons of about 12 50-minute-episodes each for about 20 euros = about 15 dollars).

Sahara

Saw 1-3

Scarface

Scream

Seven

Shichinin no samurai (aka the magnificent seven),Yojimbo (aka A Fistful of Dollars) & Rashomon, By Akira Kurosawa

These are great stories, as proven by the many remakes and transliterations, especially into spaghetti westerns. What I’ve learned most from Kurosawa is personality, emotion. Any of his characters make excellent NPCs. He shows how to convey their personality through action, dress, mannerisms, facial expressions, and camera angle.

When I do NPCs now, I try to think back to these movies and use facial expressions, large arm/hand movements, stand up straight, slouch, stare players in the eye, ignore players, cast eyes down despondently, etc.

Rashomon is great for learning that, even if you described something one way (i.e. as the characters saw it), it is not necessary to forever be held to that if plot/fun requires changes. Use sparingly though, and only if neutral/positive for characters.

Sin City

Smokin Aces

Spartacus

(1960 with Mr. Douglas) ? excellent presentation of life as a slave in Rome, good descriptive potential for battling ancient armies, the horrors of hand to hand combat en masse, and the legal aspects of slavery (which a lot of GMs use as often as Nazis for ?instant bad guy?).

Spiderman 1-3

Star Wars 1-6

Stargate SG-1( TV Series)

The premise is ancient races spread civilization/magic, false gods enslave man, one group of men rebel and now fight against the false gods for the freedom of all men. That is an awesome campaign right there. You could keep the multiple planet thing, or use multiple planes, or replace “planet” with “nation” and stay on one world.

Remember Arthur C. Clarke’s quote: “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” To add SG-1′s concept to your preferred genre, just use the ideas of portals, portals require addresses (keys), and that through portals are exciting adventures and technology (magic). If your players can resist that, they are comatose. This would also be great for a campaign of loosely connected one-shot sessions.

Many of the cultures SG-1 encounters are perfect for fantasy. Egyptian, Cretian, Greek, Scandinavian, European Medieval. I’ve used sets and costumes from the show to enhance/improve my descriptions. The Ori are awesome medieval culture/villains. I’ve used a couple puzzles (obscured slightly so players would not recognize) featured on shows.

Many of the show plots are excellent fodder for adventures. Watching entire seasons show how to weave sub-plots/side- plots into larger campaign plots, and how to have an “on the edge of your seat” cliff hanger.

Stargate is a good demonstration of the military campaign. Characters belong to, are beholden to, or are commanded by some organization. But, they have a lot of freedom to act how they please as long as they get the missions and objectives completed.

SG-l also shows you how to handle things when characters get out of line. Star Trek Deep Space Nine is another good source of this.

Steven Spielberg’s TAKEN.

While its not the greatest piece of writing on TV the Aliens powers to manifest thought certainly mirror the effects of Chimestry / illusion magic. The reactions of the victims after the event is worth remembering as well. An interesting primer on certain supernatural abilities.

Stigmata

A good representation of the Church at its darkest as well as some ideas for Church sanctioned ‘operatives’. Even if you are unable to accept the true crimes of mother Church in the real world, you will probably accept that they are this bad in the World of Darkness or other modern horror games. But then you have the lone faithful man facing the things his church does not accept. He could be a part of earths catholic church or any number of fantasy or Sci fi religions and the way he faces the supernatural are the same. The soundtrack Album is also perfect for the World of Darkness and other horror games.

Talos the Mummy (also called Tale of the Mummy)

A British movie which, while lacking the pulp fiction mood of the Brendon Fraiser epic still rocks as an Egyptian-bad-guy-back-from-the-dead Schick! The cameo by Christopher Lee is a nod towards the old hammer movies and Jason Scott Lee in the lead role helped bring in the American finances no doubt by the real gem is still Sean Pertwee’s loony toons act! Nice twists, some great moody rollercoaster rides and not too shabby special FX for the bad guy either.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin

Here is a great martial arts flick that gives an experience-progression feeling learning various melee attack techniques.

The Addiction (1995)

While this movie is a tad too Arty and suffers from trying to be two good films at the same time, it does make a good reference for the other side of the Vampire nature. A philosophy student is turned into a vampire because she lacks the strength to resist and sinks into a spiral of inhumanity and detachment. Through it all she attempts to find Justification (a path of Enlightenment) through the teachings of others and through an undead guru but in the end falls once more into the comfort of bloodlust before eventually finding balance through Faith, or perhaps her own understanding of the nature of evil. Replace the state of Vampirism with that of a cultist of the old ones or being enthralled by a succubus and its still got some great themes to purloin.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

The Da Vinci Code

The Dragon Slayer

The Dungeons & Dragons Movies

Provides plots, characters, flavor, and general feel for what fantasy adventure is all about. [Comment from Johnn: this entry will be a bit controversial, I suspect. Best read a range of user reviews before spending your money, to properly set your expectation levels. ]

The Exorcist: Director’s Cut

I’ve always liked to play the cleric. It’s one of those classes you either love or hate to play, and I’m on the former side. While watching this movie I realized it was a lovely situation in which to roleplay a cleric.

If I’m not mistaken, there is an Exorcist prestige for clerics in D&D. It has specific spells to banish a demon that possesses someone, which should make the game straightforward.

What if a more powerful demon requires a longer ritual, though? Weeks, maybe months? Can you imagine a fight that takes this long, slowly wearing both combatants down? And your opponent is inside a little girl. A little, helpless one. How far would you go to drive the demon off? (Remember Emily Rose?)

It gets interesting on the psychological side too. Suppose you get a good roleplayer invited to play both the possessed and possessor. One that makes the child’s cry face as convincingly as the devil’s snarls, curses, and lies. How does your cleric player handle it?

It can also be applied as a metaphor. Your quest is to destroy some evil, and protect something pure. However, the evil is inside your object of protection. How do you attack the problem?

The Game

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

It is said that a western is just a set in which to tell any kind of story, and this is the case with this movie. I’d suggest the good and the ugly be played by PCs, and the bad and his band by NPCs.

The story is about a treasure and its three parts, with characters knowing just half (or thinking they know half) of the information to reach it. Talking, persuasion, and intimidation skills are used more than fighting.

There is a war, a bridge to be destroyed, a huge cemetery, information to be collected everywhere, and a monastery to be visited. At one point, characters use disguise to enroll inthe army.

This is not only a movie to create an adventure, it is meant to be a whole campaign.

The Hobbit

The Hunted

With Benicio del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones, this is a great movie if you want inspiration for high-level druids and rangers, sneaky traps, and other cool outdoor fight scenes.

The Last Unicorn

The Lion In Winter

Peter O’Toole, Anthony Hopkins, Katherine Hepburn, and a few others. This movie is indispensable if you are running a political intrigue game. There is more skullduggery, devious manoeuvring, and back-stabbing than even Machiavelli could ask for. It’s also one of the finest movies ever made.

The Lion King

The Lord of the Rings 1-3

The Mummy 1+2

One of the best pair of action movies ever: great villain, solid heroes, cheerable supporting characters who are actually smart enough to live through what is some of the best horror moments in a monster film. Great mix of action (especially chase scenes), romance, gaslight environment, horror, and comedy (very quotable lines). Character development is believable and fun to watch, villain is fun to hate, but has understandable and even sympathetic reasons for what he does.

The Odyssey (TV movie)

The Prince of Egypt

The Rock

Think of Sean Connery as an NPC guide to a dungeon crawl with incinerator flames.

The Sword and the Sorcerer

Some interesting plot turns, environments and a tricked-out 3-bladed sword. There are more political motivations of a ‘hidden demon’ that has been infiltrating behind the ranks.

The Ten Commandments

The Three Musketeers

The version with Gene Kelly as D’artagnan. Yes, Gene Kelly the dancer. Aside from being the only version I’ve seen that really shows what a scoundrel D’artagnan was, it has some amazing choreography of the fight scenes, largely because of Kelly’s abilities as a dancer.

The scene near the beginning of the movie where the cardinal’s guards interrupt D’artagnan’s duel with Athos, Porthos and Aramis is what all swashbuckling fights should be. Kelly skips around his opponent, climbs atop a monument to hide, and then reaches down to swat the guard on the butt (a classic use of Tagging, for all you 7th Sea players), and leaps back and forth across a little pond to lead his opponent on a merry chase during the duel. And he does it all with a smile on his face that makes him look like a kid having the time of his life at the circus. Absolutely classic.

The Tribe TV Series

This Sci-Fi series (259 episodes) is aimed at kids but it is in fact one of the best written things TV has seen in years, even though the introduction of Technology based stories has been a bit hard to swallow. Basically, for those of you who haven’t seen it, the Tribe is set in a world after a virus wipes out all the adults and the kids struggle to survive in a post apocalyptic city. Gangs form, new weird religions bringing false hope, new plagues left by the old world and mad dogs all threaten the young and the meek who have inherited the world. The entire concept of politics from a teenagers point of view works well for Changeling, Cyberpunk: Cybergeneration or any Zombie or post apocalyptic game.

The Usual Suspects and Lucky Number Slevin

both of these movies have twists that make them utterly fantastic; they also have characters that are just short of completely irredeemable, but understandable and sympathetic for all that. The backplot is complex, but the way it is revealed makes perfect sense, and what you see is not really what?s going on. Great for story ideas and how to weave multiple plots, PCs and NPCs together, also good for NPC concepts and histories.

The Warriors

Really good chase/gauntlet ideas.

The Wedding Crashers

The Wizard of Oz

Tomb Raider

Tomcats

Total Recall

Training Day

Transporter 1+2

Traumschiff Surprise

U-Turn

Ultraviolet

BBC series about a small team within the Government set up to combat Vampires. Although it only ran to 5 episodes and did the extremely Hollywood concept of wooden bullets, it was still a nice show. A perfect guide for Conspiracy X or mortals in the World of Darkness.

Unbreakable

Under Suspicion

Underworld 1+2

What Dreams may Come

You want emotion? Passion? Angst? nuff said!! You want a quioxite quest through insane landscapes and the need to solve illogical puzzles? this is the primer for that journey.

Wild Things

Willow

“A reluctant dwarf must play a critical role in protecting a special baby from an evil queen.”

X-Men 1-3

Xena (TV Series)

Young Sherlock Holmes

Zatoichi, The Blind Swordsman

Many movies are based on this character. Zatoichi is a great source for plots, unique combat terrains/situations, and to lesser extent, NPCs.

Zombie movies, any

What to learn here is that fear, hopelessness, and impending doom are great fun. Throw out the idea of level appropriate encounters – boring.

Instead, tell players they may encounter things they cannot defeat (this is important for game systems like D&D where players expect to be able to defeat everything they encounter). Then, occasionally slam them with overpowered foes.

Be sure there are ways out of encounter. Don’t set out to kill them, but don’t prevent their deaths either. Truly leave character fates in the players’ hands. The feel you’re after is that mere survival is victory.

More in line with zombie movies, have them face easy foes they defeat without problem. But make sure there are _a lot_ of these foes, an endless amount that never stops coming. Forcing high level characters to retreat from “wimpy” monsters, such as orcs, is a change of pace and challenges players in a different way than tougher and tougher monsters do.

10 Comments

Eight Tips For Using Real World Locations In Your Games

26. Sep, 2013 • Categories: World Building

By Jesse C Cohoon

You probably know your hometown well. Its streets, landmarks, people. So why not use it as an adventure location?

It’s easy drawing from memory and picturing the details to make descriptions vivid and mapping easy. And there’s a lot of inspiration there to draw from based on your experiences and stories you heard growing up.

But if you use the real world in your games, you have a bit of a conundrum. How do you balance the fantasy elements of the game with how things operate in the real world?

Well, here are some suggestions on how to do exactly that.

1. Use Old Maps

Go online or to your local library for maps to show you how things were many years ago. That way, even if the locations are still there, they’ve changed drastically since.

An added bonus is you can take the basic structure of the town or street and add character as you see fit.

2. Use Common Landmarks But Change Their Significance

For instance, if you use a mansion you know of in your town, you could make it into a library, church, gathering hall or castle. You could take a house and make it a bar (or visa versa).

But don’t limit it just to buildings. Consider using parks/nature preserves, fountains/statues, or the local college as a place for adventure.

Just because it is ordinary in one sense, doesn’t mean it’s not extraordinary in another. It could have information hidden in the library, a desk, or other common object that needs the right key to unlock.

Think about the spaces inside, and add trap doors, hidden rooms, or security features like cameras, guards, or motion detectors.

Don’t be afraid to take pictures to give you cues when describing the scene.

3. Add Mystery To Common Places

Think about your favorite fast food or pizza joint. What mysteries could they be hiding?

Are they actually a secret drug-smuggling ring? Is there prostitution going on? Do people come in, but not everyone leaves? Is the owner a werewolf or vampire?

4. Choose A Gathering Place And Give It A Lot Of Detail

It could be a neighborhood bar, one of their houses, or where a PC works (the latter is particularly handy, especially if they’re working in a building with multiple offices in it). This place could be the “meeting place” between adventures and the rest of their lives.

5. Don’t Neglect Transportation

In lots of major metropolitan areas, there are cars, busses, trains and planes. The gathering crowds at office buildings, stores, transportation hubs (bus or train depots, airports) could be the source of adventure and mystery.

When looking at public transportation, try to get maps of the area or the routes the bus or train takes.

Here’s some ideas that you could use:

A little child has lost their parents
A mysterious package was left behind by accident (or on purpose!)
Lost luggage has something important in it that needs to be tracked down

6. Don’t Forget By-Standards

In lots of games the action takes place deep underground, in dark alleys, or vast forests, plains or mountainous regions – places that not many people visit.

In a city, there are lots of people packed into a small space. Even something that normally would be relatively small can have lots of bystanders and quickly get out of hand.

Did that person who just sneezed have a cold or something more serious? Was there something more sinister in the accident you were just a part of?

7. Don’t Forget Technology

In this world of computers and technology, instant messaging, emails and social media, don’t forget these can be used to gather a great number of people quickly.

Maybe there’s a flash mob of vampires and all that is left are bodies. Will the group be able to investigate without sticking out like a sore thumb? Could they review video footage of the area instead to get a sense of what was going on? Are there werewolves or other monsters in the woods? What does the grainy cell phone footage really show?

8. Background Matters

The PCs could have met in a bar, are working for an investigative agency, or got thrown together because of a tragedy.

Whatever and however they meet, they meet. And they should be inexorably drawn back to the place for something important to happen.

Tags: Encounters

1 Comment

How To Become A Better Actor?

04. Aug, 2013 • Categories: NPCs

A reader sent in this plea for help. Do you have any tips for him?

Hi Johnn,

In many ways, there is no scope for subtle NPCs in an RPG. I need to portray strong personality traits to ensure these features are made clear to the PCs.

Plus, it would help to distinguish my NPCs from one another.

Do you know actors for whom you would be happy to watch them do anything?

Some film characters just sizzle on screen from the way they are portrayed, and I would want to watch them for far longer than the plot allows.

Now, I know ALL my NPCs cannot have this sizzle, but I would like for some of them to have that quality.

And I feel my delivery of NPCs is lacking.

I can see I need to improve how the NPCs behave, to emphasize their traits, but I cannot help but think my delivery of acting the NPC falls short too.

I may simply be a poor actor, but I would like to improve.

How can I be a better actor at the game table?

- The Bad Actor GM

If you have any acting tips for our unsizzling GM, please post a comment below with your advice and ideas.

Tags: Tip Request

40 Comments

Your First 15 – A Key GM Technique For Great Game Sessions

24. Jun, 2013 • Categories: GM Techniques, Storytelling

RPT Reader Juaquine Silveira offers this great tip and tip request:

I am a fairly new GM, and while I have some skill I still have a lot of questions.

We all know people have short attention spans.

So if you are going to get people excited about your gaming session you have to grab the attention of nearly every player in the first few minutes of a session.

In my experience you need to get each person to complete at least one action within the first 15 minutes of play.

These first 15 minutes are even more important if your group meets for less than 2 hours, like mine does.

What I am wondering is how do you set up and execute your first 15 minutes of a game?

The tactic I have adopted is 2 prong. First thing I usually do in a session is have the party get attacked by some small creatures. Nothing powerful enough to make it a challenge, but something to get them moving, talking and rolling dice. Once that is done they usually start talking to each other.

Second, I will reward a player for asking another character (PC or NPC) about their back story. This gets them role playing.

This approach works well with my group because it breaks the ice with the gaming side of an RPG. Once they are comfortable they really start role playing.

I am sure other GMs use other strategies and methods. So what does everyone else do?

1. Start With Action

Juaquine, you took the first tip right out of my mouth. Start with action.

I run action- and combat-oriented games. I try to capture the feel of Indiana Jones meets Godzilla.

So I like to roll initiative and jump into a conflict right away during my First 15.

Knock the GMing dust and cobwebs off, get everyone excited and focused, and kick the session off with a bang (or a pierce, slash or bludgeon).

You also made a good point of not making the first combat take all night.

I aim for 30 mins or less for all my combats (except boss battles or major plot fights).

So anyone trying this tip should ensure the fight that started the session doesn’t also end the session, lol.

In a past edition of RPT, I gave the tip to start sessions with “Roll for initiative!”

Try it. It works.

2. Pick Up Where You Left Off

Another great GMing technique is to end sessions with a cliffhanger.

If you do that, then you have probably the best First 15 start point you could ask for.

Cliffhangers work for two reasons.

First, they involve story. Even if it’s just how the fight will turn out. Will the injured PC bleed out? Will the boss escape? Will the descending ceiling crush all the treasure?

Second, cliffhangers create tension.

Our brains want resolution to all open loops.

There’s a whole school of emerging neuroscience that shows how our brains “work” in stories and how they desperately seek closure. Two sides of the same coin, and a very effective way to learn and remember.

For RPG, it’s pure gold.

So you’ve probably heard the cliffhanger tip before. But here’s a couple extra details to get even more out of this GM technique:

Setup Communication Channels For Your Players

Coffee, lunch, email, G+ group, Facebook Group, Wiki, whatever.

Your goal is to get players talking between sessions.

And the cliffhanger is going to be a natural hot topic.

The more they talk about that, the greater the anticipation for next session.

The greater the anticipation, the more eagerness and energy in your First 15.

Hang The Story

It’s easy to end sessions mid-fight. But try to mix-up your hangings.

Roleplaying encounters – how will the Sheriff respond to the PCs’ revelation? Chairs or chains?

Skills – the thief rolls a 15. The lock clicks once. Trap or treasure?

Chases – the villain kicks the block out from under a cart wheel. The cart rolls downhill…straight towards an unsuspecting pregnant woman and her two children! Rescue or run past?

There is really only one best way to create a cliffhanger, and that’s to hang the players mid-story.

It doesn’t matter what type of encounter it is. You just need to stop the story right at a juicy part.

Like those timeless old radio shows and serial stories do so well!

[Here are some more tips on cliffhangers.]

3. Recap The Story

Kick-off your First 15 with a recap.

Get a player to do this so you can work on GM stuff and get your game face on while everybody listens.

I have two conflicting tips for you about this.

One, pick the best storyteller in your group for the recaps. This player will do a great job most nights putting everyone in the right mood and mindset while reminding everybody about what happened last session.

Two, pick a player who needs practice roleplaying, storytelling or speaking up. The recap will encourage them to talk more the rest of the session.

Maybe mix it up. Do what’s best for your group. Maybe rotate the honour.

Regardless of approach, I want you to make your recaps do one thing.

Think about the intros from TV shows. Many do great recaps. They clip key moments, great visuals and big plot points to get you the viewer engaged right away.

Aim for the same for your recaps.

And focus more on the story and key plots than specific details.

Instead of telling how many hit points the big troll had, tell how the troll howled that strange name with his last burning breath.

Instead of telling how Bob made his stealth check and spied on the evil mercenaries last session, tell how Garrus the rogue snuck up on the group’s hated foes and learned the Sheriff is secretly paying them to stop the party.

Instead of covering just last session’s events, recap how the characters started out as weak commoners who fled their burning village, who then survived DeathHell Dungeon and emerged toughened heroes, and who are now on the verge of discovering the identity of the villain who burned their homes to the ground.

Here’s your chance to get rid of all that pesky game rule talk and numbers essential for gameplay, and to tell a story of the campaign so far like a true storyweaver.

Use recaps for story, not numbers.

4. ???

Ok, those are three tips from me for making your First 15 awesome springboards for exciting sessions.

What do you do to launch great game nights?

Share your comments below.

8 Comments

Reader Tip Request: How do you handle split parties?

22. May, 2013 • Categories: GM Techniques

Reader Tip Request: How do you handle split parties?

split-parties Today, I’d like your advice and tips on how to handle split parties.

Daniel S. writes:

“How can I make everyone happy when groups are split in their decisions for destinations and plans?”

One tip I have is to go around the table and give each split-off player or sub-group a bit of spotlight time.

GM them for a short period, then find the perfect moment and switch the spotlight to the next player(s).

What’s the perfect time?

At a cliffhanger, naturally.

Switch the spotlight just before:

An important dice roll
An important result from you
A key character decision
A key NPC decision or action
Revelation of a fact
Just after revealing a twist
Just after revealing a clue

All these situations have something in common: an open loop.

An open loop happens when a situation we’re interested in goes unresolved.

Our brains desperately want closure. It’s how we’re wired.

We have to know what happens – to shine light in dark corners – or we feel tension.

And our brains work overtime to resolve that tension.

Storytellers have known this for ages, and use it to keep their audience glued to their words.

Learn how to spot open loops and how to create them. Instead of telling a split player what’s around the corner, tell the player they hear a creepy noise, and then switch the spotlight.

In RPG, we are blessed with many opportunities to do this. Dice roll results, player questions, character actions.

Learn how to hint at answers and switch the spotlight smoothly.

This is effective with non-split groups too. Create temporary moments of tension, call breaks at such times and end sessions at these moments.

But with split groups, this open loop technique is also effective at keeping everyone at the table interested. Players without the spotlight want to learn what happens to the others and their unresolved loops.

Around and around you go until the party is united once more.

Over to you now. What tips do you have for Daniel on how to handle split parties?

50 Comments

Reader Tip Request: Fantasy Chase Scenes

25. Feb, 2013 • Categories: GM Techniques

RPT Reader Devon Creamer asks:

I was wondering how I could do a chase scene in one of my campaigns.

My dilemma is that chase scenes are supposed to be fast and action packed, no dull parts or slow parts.

But with Pathfinder’s usual movement rules, it’s too boring and my players lose interest.

Thanks for the request, Devon.

Readers, we’ve had car chase tips in the newsletter, but not fantasy-based tips.

I’m especially interested in chase scenes involving villains on foot. Those seem to be rare and difficult to pull off.

I look forward to reading your tips below!

Tags: Encounters

45 Comments

How to Think Faster On Your Feet While You GM

08. Dec, 2012 • Categories: GM Techniques

Adventurers looking in all directions: where to go?

Image credit: Patrick Crusiau

A couple weeks ago I sent out a Reader Tip Request for the spouse of a GM in need. The game master was having problems reacting to in-game events. He needed to think faster – or different – on his feet so he could handle unexpected player decisions and actions better.

Here’s the request from RPT Reader F.:

Reader Tip Request: Thinking Fast on Your Feet

Hello! I’ve been subscribed to your tips for awhile now and I’ve enjoyed them and found them useful. I don’t have much experience GMing myself, but my husband has GMed for years. The only problem is, due to a brain tumor and other brain trauma, he doesn’t think as fast anymore.

Trying Something Different to Get You These Tips Faster

This Reader Tips Request generated a huge response. Over 100 emails! Thanks so much to everyone who wrote in with their thoughts, ideas and advice. Roleplaying Tips readers are such a smart and generous group.

The overwhelming response became just that. I was unable to use my usual way of doing things, which is to collect all the tips into an article or free ebook.

I try to edit, condense and piece everything together into a single narrative so everyone benefits from each others’ ideas.

With 100 emails and thousands of words to work through, edit and combine into something cohesive though, I was paralyzed.

It was truly overwhelming based on the free time I have available.

Then Andrew Quee emailed me with a brilliant suggestion: blog it. (D’oh. Why didn’t I think of that!?)

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll post the initial Reader Tip Request, and then in the Comments section below paste in each reply.

That way, everyone benefits from the tips, I can publish the tips faster, and most importantly, the reader who made the request can evaluate the responses sooner than waiting weeks for me to process everything in detail.

I will make responses anonymous (name abbreviated and no email address posted) in case readers do not want to be identified. We can all use the comment reply button to hold a conversation and give feedback or post more ideas.

Thanks again to everyone who responded! And thanks to your great suggestion, Andrew.

To all, I hope the following tips contain a nugget or two for your own GMing.

Cheers,
Johnn

He’s tried GMing again and he just can’t keep good control of the party. He says he has to plan out every possible avenue players may take in detail beforehand because he can’t think on his feet well enough (and that would take a long time).

It’s either that or he has to shoehorn the party and make the story too linear (which most parties won’t like and many will try to break it without even knowing what they’re doing).

He designs his own adventures. He has difficulty figuring out what happens after each encounter.

But the biggest problem is keeping players in line. Because it takes him a few extra moments to think about what happens next, the players tend to steamroll ahead before he’s ready (which causes him to have to rethink everything he has just come up with, which takes more time).

I play in his games and try to moderate when I can (I know what he looks like when he’s having a hard time) but it doesn’t always work out.

He’s just gotten so defeated that he feels like he can never GM again, and I want to show him that he can.

I was wondering if you or the community have any tips or tricks to try and help him? Thanks for your help.

- RPT Reader F.

Below are the responses I received by email. Lots of great advice in there! And feel free to add a tip of your own.

116 Comments

Slumbering Tsar Author Reveals Adventure Creation Tips

26. Jun, 2012 • Categories: Campaigns & Adventures

Slumbering Tsar cover The Slumbering Tsar Saga just crushed my mailbox. This thing is huge! And epic.

Flipping through my thrilling purchase, I had some questions about the mega adventure. So I reached out and asked Tsar author Greg A. Vaughan some questions. As a bonus, I rolled a 20 on my Diplomacy check and he’s shared some GMing tips with us!

The first thing I want to ask you, Greg, is how you stayed fresh during the writing of hundreds of encounters and almost 1000 pages. Where do you get your inspiration from?

Greg: Stayed fresh? What is that? This thing sucked the life of me like a good demon lord should.

The inspiration for the adventure came directly from Rappan Athuk, which I’ll get into more in a bit. As for the encounters, I kept a little notepad with me at all times, and every time I had a thought on a good encounter or NPC that would fit in with what I was wanting to do, I took notes.

I kept it by my bed and carried it with me. I ended up filling two steno pads with notes for encounter and design ideas.

I worked on it for a year and a half, which gave me lots of time to come up with stuff, and the result was that I horribly overwrote the thing. Bill wanted about 100,000 words, and I gave him 550,000. However, it also allowed me to use all of my ideas without abridging them, which was pretty awesome I have to admit.

I’m a backer for the Rappan Athuk Kickstarter, which gets funded July 2nd 1:59 PST [hint, hint readers]. Is there any way I can use that campaign with Tsar? And, does Tsar allow GMs to run side adventures throughout, or is it fairly linear in style?

Greg: You can absolutely use them together since they’re both big sandbox adventures. There is an overall plot to Tsar, but it’s not a railroad for the PCs to follow but rather a series of secrets that they can discover.

Likewise, Tsar’s development led to the creation of an overall plot for Rappan Athuk, since the two are intimately connected. However, other than the difficulty level of encounters, there is nothing to dictate what order things are done in.

So, a party with some teleport spells could absolutely bounce back and forth between the two. I think that would probably create an even richer gaming experience as the players could see how the relationship between the two unfolds.

In addition, there is at least one magical gate in the lower levels of Rappan Athuk that leads directly to the Hidden Citadel in Tsar. So, they are a natural fit together.

Tsar starts at PC level 7. And I’m salivating at the thought of running it. However, I like it best when PCs start out at first level. It gives campaigns nice continuity. Plus, when the group finishes Tsar, they can brag about how their characters were just wee pups when it all began.

What build-up adventures would you recommend I run to bring the PCs from level 1 to 7? Feel free to mention Frog God adventures, or any others. I’m just wondering if you have any recommendations that fit the theme and style for a smooth transition to Tsar.

Greg: I wrote Tsar with the Necromancer Games adventures The Wizard’s Amulet, The Crucible of Freya, and The Tomb of Abysthor in mind as the lead in. In fact, that’s how I ran it for my own group.

The Tomb of Abysthor will take PCs to above 7th level, so you’d have to have them head out early to get them into Tsar at the appropriate level.

For my own game, I had the churches of Thyr and Muir in Bard’s Gate contact the PCs with the mission to Tsar just after they had raided the Temple of Orcus on Level 4 of Abysthor. That not only fit in thematically (there is a temple in Tsar that emulates the temple in Abysthor), but it also allowed them to learn a bit about the Justicars of Muir and their tombs which ties directly into the first book of Tsar.

My idea was to tie a bunch of Necromancer Games products together when I first wrote Tsar, and that goal continued into its current incarnation with Frog God Games.

Alternately, now that Rappan Athuk is being expanded to include play for first-level PCs, you could also have a party cut its teeth for 7 levels on the upper portions of the Dungeon of Graves before heading over to Tsar since they both tie directly together.

Long-term campaigns have just come up as a topic in Roleplaying Tips. A game master was having problems making his campaigns last. What advice do you have for GMs thinking of running a long-term campaign like Slumbering Tsar?

Greg: Other than one-shots in convention play, long-term campaigns are just about all I play. I have always found that to keep it going long-term is to make it about the characters not the adventures (though you definitely need cool adventures, too).

I have my players roll up their first level characters and provide me a paragraph of backstory (more if they like) subject to my approval.

I then take those backstories and weave more into them, some of which they know and some of which they don’t and will have to find out over the course of the campaign. It creates a huge buy-in from the players as they not only get to contribute to the meta-story of the campaign with their backstories, but they also get to have the experience of learning the secrets about their characters’ own personal story as they progress.

I know campaign fatigue can be a problem – especially with a meatgrinder like Tsar – but my group spent seven years playing through it and stayed engaged throughout because it was always about the characters and their stories first and the adventure itself second (one PC actually murdered another one without the others knowing, and the victimized player took it in stride because it fit their characters so well).

It takes some creative thinking on the part of the GM to personalize an adventure or series of adventures, but that is something I think gamers typically have in spades and is not an insurmountable task.

When you wrote all the installments for Tsar, did you have the whole plot outlined in advance? Could you tell us a bit about how you went about planning a massive adventure?

Greg: I planned the overall plot for Tsar from the beginning when I made my initial pitch to Bill, and then spent a year and a half filling in the details.

Since it was originally a three-book series, that wasn’t as difficult as it sounds since I wasn’t juggling 14 separate components. Only later, when we decided to publish it as a serial, did it get divided into 14 parts along the most logical divisions.

As for the planning of the adventure, it all began with Rappan Athuk. There’s a little bit of flavor text history at the beginning of Rappan Athuk that talks about the battle of Tsar and how it resulted in the creation of Rappan Athuk.

I always felt that paragraph left a lot of unanswered questions and was just rife with potential. My whole thought process began with: Why, after the Army of Light was defeated at Rappan Athuk, did the city of Tsar remain abandoned if it had been such a stronghold for the victorious followers of Orcus?

That led me to believe it all must have been part of some greater master plan, and from there it was just writing the history of Rappan Athuk by exploring what happened at Tsar.

A lot of it practically wrote itself since there was such a wealth of undeveloped campaign detail in many of the products by Necromancer Games. I think the biggest compliment I ever received was when I was still working on the third book building off of material that Bill and Clark had created, and Bill sent me an e-mail saying, “Hurry up and finish. I want to see how this ends.” Highest praise, in my mind.

There’s an obituaries section at the end of the book for successful GMs poor characters that don’t survive. That’s awesome. Whose idea was that? Have any fans reported back on their kill counts?

Greg: That was created by Bill, if I recall correctly, and I think that just gives a little insight into the mind of the man who personifies Tsathogga. What can I say, he thinks adventurers are delicious.

I have seen messageboard threads here and there talking about PC kills, but nothing organized yet. However, the book was only recently released, so I’m expecting for something like that to pop up eventually.

[Update: Frog God just let me know there's a PC obituaries section up at their website now. :)]

Encounters are the building blocks of great adventures. Could you give my readers two or three tips on how they can improve their encounters and make great ones?

Greg: Forget the math and trying to balance it. Come up with a cool encounter idea that is atmospheric, fun, challenging or all three. Then go back and make it fit the game balance you want.

The worst thing to do, in my opinion, is set out to make a bunch of perfectly balanced encounters with level-appropriate monsters and treasure. I think that just creates bland, predictable, homogenized encounters.

Make awesome encounters that are fun to play and run, and then tweak them so they fit the power level you want. The rules are there to help you, not hurt you.

What are you working on next? Will it be so heavy it collapses my mailbox too?

Greg: As revealed by the sneak peak at the end of Tsar, my next major project is The Sword of Air as a sequel of sorts to Tsar (though it will also start at first level).

It will be big and will be released in a serial format and will be big (did I mention that), but I expect it will not be as big as Tsar. I expect I’ll never write anything as big as Tsar again because, let’s be honest, writing Tsar that big was nuts.

It was the ultimate gamer dream of writing and publishing his campaign exactly how he wants it with basically no restrictions, but it’s not a very practical idea. I think Bill would not consider me to be a very much of a contributing part of Frog God Games if I only cranked out one adventure every 8 years.

But it’ll be big, and it’ll be fun. So your mailbox should be safe…unless it was perhaps structurally weakened by the delivery of Tsar, in which case all bets are off.

We’re also in development of a new series of adventures by Richard Pett revisiting his decadent and desolate home campaign world that has previously been represented by the Styes in Dungeon Magazine and Carrion Hill through Paizo. It’s going to be a lot of creepy fun.

And then I’m off to write the campaign world to tie all the Necromancer Games and Frog God Games products together and for us to work from in the future. So just a couple little things on my plate.

That sounds awesome. Thanks for your time, Greg!

No, thank you. It’s been fun. I hope you and your players have a lot of fun with Tsar. And be sure and fill up those pages in the back!

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Roleplaying Tips GM Interview – Eli Smith

23. Jun, 2012 • Categories: Uncategorized

Eli Smith Eli kindly volunteered to do a GM interview. However, he completed this ages ago and I’ve only just gotten around to posting it. Sorry for the delay, Eli.

How long have you been a GM?

6 years

What are your favourite game(s) to run?

Deadlands Classic, d20 Modern, Mutants & Masterminds, Pathfinder, A Song of Ice and Fire RPG.

How did you first get into GMing?

The first game I ran was a free D&D 3.5 adventure available on the WoTC website. My gaming friends and I had just started roleplaying a few months before. Me being the DM was a spur of the moment thing that was sort of pushed on me peer pressure style at about midnight on a Saturday.

I had a blast, and so did everyone else. We played until 9am Sunday and then went to breakfast at Denny’s. It was so much fun that we pretty much followed that routine every Saturday for the next two years.

How has GMing made a difference in your life?

Most importantly, being a GM has kept me busy writing all the time. I had always dreamed of being a writer but thought I would never have enough motivation to spend enough time writing to get good.

Fortunately, roleplaying kept me writing long enough after I had ‘given up’ on it for me to realize that I was writing all the time and had actually gotten decent.

What is your usual gaming schedule? (Session frequency, time and length.)

We play every Thursday from 7pm until Midnight. Me and two of my friends who also GM have a three game rotation, so I run my game every third week. This helps a lot with the burnout.

Where do you play?

We play in the dining room of my apartment. I move the normal table and chairs into a corner of the living room, and we pull out a few fold-out tables to play on.

I usually have the rulebook, a GM screen, a notebook, a pencil, my dice, a large easel pad printed with a 1 inch grid, sharpies of all different colors, gaming beads, and a tablet on standby if I need to google anything.

Do you use published material or create your own?

I create my own adventures, although I do pull a lot of tidbits from the creations of others. I find the game more successful if I am able to tailor an adventure to my group’s play style. Plus, I love to write.

What non-digital and electronic GM aides do you use?

The easel pad and gaming beads mentioned earlier. I also make simple props sometimes. The group is playing a team of special agents in my current game, so there are a lot of office memo’s, mission reports, archive files, and classified manila folders around the table.

Minis or no?

We mostly use gaming beads for minis. I also have about twenty wooden cylinders that are about .5” x 1” we use for the player characters.

For large scale battles that come up in some D&D games and just about every Song of Ice and Fire session, I have a bucket of small multi-color painted wooden rectangles, circles and triangles.

What is your biggest GMing stumbling block right now? What could you do to fix that?

Lately I have found myself skipping over details I had intended to cover in a session. Hints at the content of the next session, clues to help better solve a mystery, etc. I have been writing out a list of these things before each session and taping it to the inside of my screen. It helps some.

When was the last time you were a player? What insight about GMing did you pick up?

I play two out of every three weeks. Having the opportunity to play in game run by two out of the four people who play in my game is wonderful.

The three of us feed off of each other’s good qualities. Nothing is better than a friendly GM on the other side of the table as a player who is always able to see the structure of the game from a different perspective than a normal player, and who helps keep everything on track and running smoothly.

Describe your perfect gaming session with you as GM.

First, everyone has to be involved and having fun. After that, perfect for me is achieved if all the players have had a chance to showcase talents of their characters and their own, and I can say bye to everyone knowing that my session will be on their mind for the next three weeks.

What is the one thing you want to hear your players say after a session, other than “great session!”?

I like to know I have conveyed a mood well. So I always appreciate, “Wow, I really felt the tension there,” or the like.

Describe in a few words your GMing style.

I spend a lot of time prepping, especially enemy stat blocks, interesting locations, and NPC personalities.

I try to keep these three categories separate so I can assemble the right enemy with the right personality in the right place to fit the vibe of the game at that moment.

I let players motivate themselves and move the story along in a way they feel comfortable with.

Most of my sessions begin at the end, with me explaining where the PCs are at when it’s over, or perhaps by having a superior tell them what they need to get done. Then I let them figure out how to get there in the way that is the most fun for them.

What are the top qualities you look for or need in a player?

Punctuality, willingness to roll with the punches, personally motivated to participate, and willingness to roleplay or willingness to get drunk enough to roleplay.

Describe in a few words your group’s playing style.

Our best sessions are usually high on intrigue and adventure. Big personalities, big locales, and, if it comes down to is, big guns.

Describe in a few words each of your players and their playing style.

Fellow GM. Great grasp of the rules (useful player to have). Usually plays strong-willed moral characters with a flaw that keeps them grounded (drunkenness, overly agressive etc.)

Fellow GM. Always makes characters with well thought out personalities, usually plays someone attempting to rise above their bad lot in life.

Player Three. Plays wisecracking characters, usually an official with a dirty streak. (Whoring priest, gambling addicted mayor, etc.)

Player Four. Plays characters who begrudgingly serve their purpose in society. Usually have views opposed to the norm in radical ways. (Secular in an obviously god-filled world, fear of technology in future game etc.)

What is your best GMing skill or ability? What advice would you give to a GM wanting to improve in that area?

Preparedness. My advice would be to set aside multiple periods of time before the game (long enough to get something done but not too long to get sidetracked; 1-2 hours works best for me).

Set a small goal at the beginning of each prep period. It can be overwhelming to have to prepare an entire game in one sitting, and I find working through a series of smaller goals helps keep me motivated.

What is your typical session planning process?

I usually spend 4-8 hours in the weeks before a session preparing stat blocks, encounter locations and the like. I keep in contact with my players on Skype or in person, so I can pick their brains for where they want to take the game the next time we play, so I can better prepare a through line for the story.

What are your favourite online resources for GMing?

Although it might be cheesy to mention it in this setting, I have found a lot of useful information on roleplayingtips.com. It also is an understatement to say that the Pathfinder SRD is useful when running Pathfinder.

Google maps is great for place names and quick city maps. Need a name for the diner the player characters stop in on the highway while passing through Oklahoma? Just type in Diners near M Oklahoma and see what city names pop up as suggestions and pick one.

In my example, I went with Muskogee, OK and found the following diner names: Boom-A-Rang Eastside Diner, Paul’s Diner, Dust Bowl Diner and The Cattle Cove Cafe. I could go on forever (there are 581 results).

The point is not only does it help give you cool place names, but you can click the link and see pictures of the food, the logo and reviews to help clue you in to the atmosphere. Talk about immersion.

What pressures do you face as GM? (Do those pressures come from you or your players?)

I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform well while GMing and find myself questioning a lot of the decisions I made when I review a session in my brain afterwards.

What can Roleplaying Tips do to help alleviate those pressures?

Roleplaying Tips has hundreds of neat ideas to help me prepare better, and I usually find myself scanning through the archives after a game looking for advice on ways to perform better in certain aspects the next time I GM.

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Interview With Author of The Vacant Forge

16. Jun, 2012 • Categories: News

Darrin Drader photo Darrin Drader has written for the top game companies, including Wizards of the coast and Paizo. With over 50 writing credits to his name, he’s got experience crafting stories and adventures.

I emailed Darrin and asked him if I could pick his brain about how he creates his adventures, worlds and stories. Here’s what he had to say.

Johnn: You have some game settings under your belt. What’s your best tip for GMs creating their own settings? And, how do you go about making each setting different?

I think when it comes to gaming settings, sometimes the goal is not to make them different, but rather, make them not the same. Some people refer to this as filing the serial numbers off, in which case what you’re really trying to do is tell stories in an established implied setting without copying copyrighted material.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Take the conceits behind D&D: you have humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings as your core races. You also have a technology level around the medieval level, as well as magic, dragons, undead, orcs, goblins. For a lot of people, they need look no further.

Put that onto different geography with different names, and different people fighting over different things and you’re there.

Now, say you want to push things a little further, you need to customize it. D&D is good about including everything that can be considered fantasy and working it into the world in one way or another. It includes everything from Greek myth to H.P. Lovecraft, and takes from virtually every intellectual property and mythology along the way.

So the thing isn’t to figure out what to include, but what not to include. If you’re publishing the world, there are things you can’t include because they’re owned, but there are so many things pulled from myth that they’re totally fair game.

Also consider there are the works that inspired D&D so old now they’re public domain. So, you can have elder gods, orcs, goblins, trolls, and many other mythological elements.

So, I’m kind of answering your question with a building blocks approach. It’s been said there’s no such thing as an original idea, and I tend to agree with that, so creation is a matter of finding the ideas you want to play with and then finding a way of presenting them that seems new.

Keep in mind Shakespeare didn’t come up with any of his stories, but he’s been famous for hundreds of years because he was able to put his own spin on them. I think that’s what every author or world builder should realistically aspire to.

Once you’ve decided, in a broad sense, what’s in the world, then figure out if there are any major environmental differences. Maybe the world is mostly desert or glaciated.

Once you have that, you need to answer what are the major conflicts? This is one area where you can get creative. Is it humans vs. humans? Elves vs. dwarves? Humans vs. dragons? Gods vs. the elder gods? Cowboys vs. aliens?

More importantly, how do the characters take part in this conflict?

Once you’ve figured out the answers to those questions, you’re well on your way to creating a new and original fantasy world.

Johnn: Tell us about your new book.

Which one? *laughs* I have a novel coming out soon called Echoes of Olympus, and it’s being released by Dark Quest Books, but I suspect that this isn’t the one you’re curious about.

First, let me make this clear – what I just released isn’t a novel. The Vacant Forge can be considered either a long short story or a short novella.

It comes in at 33 novel-length pages. It’s a self-contained story, but it’s also the first of a new series of stories I’m writing and releasing at a pace of one per week, at least for the short term.

It’s also set in a shared world created by Scott Fitzgerald Gray, who has written a great deal of fiction in this world.

The story starts with a blacksmith’s apprentice, Antilos, awakening one night to find his master murdered under bizarre circumstances. Although he’s an apprentice, he also helped fight off a tribe of orcs when they invaded a couple seasons ago, so he knows his way around a blade.

He is joined by two of his friends, an animys caster (similar to a cleric in the Endlands setting), Tanryn, and another friend, a half-elf rogue who has just landed in a great deal of trouble during a bungled robbery, named Nalgaar. Through their investigation, they learn about a major threat to the city that could have much wider consequences.

As I said earlier, this is the first part of a series, so even though the story is a self-contained tale of adventure, it also poses questions that will be answered in later parts of the series. Like a television show, or the dime novels of old, the stories will be episodic. It will help if you read them all, but you can also get away with skipping one or two without missing so much you won’t be able to catch back up.

Johnn: The book uses the setting of The Endlands, created by Scott Fitzgerald Gray and shared by the Monumental Works Group. Can you explain what this is about?

The Endlands is a setting that was created by Scott Fitzgerald Gray, who is a screenwriter and occasional Dungeons and Dragons contributor.

The Endlands is a large and complex setting of his design he has graciously opened up to other authors he’d like to work with. He has several novels and stories set in this world available for sale at Amazon.com.

The Monumental Works Group is a group of up-and-coming fiction writers, of which I’m proud to be associated. Many of its members have profiles posted to the main site, though some are choosing to lay low, at least for the time being.

Many of us have ties to the gaming industry, though there are a few members, such as Daniel Rider and Cara Maddy, whose work has more of a literary bent.

Johnn: What’s your writing regimen like? Do you write a bit each day or in bursts or….?

I was on staff as a writer for 38 Studios for the past two years. Sadly, the company ran out of money and is now in bankruptcy, so I’m between jobs at the moment.

That said, I was in the habit of producing a decent amount of output every single day. That does conflict with the writing I did in my spare time, where I would mainly try to produce a lot of material during the weekends, or at night after the kids were in bed.

Right now, given the demands of doing a story a week, I’m forced to either be outlining, writing, editing or producing material every single day, except for the weekends. So long as I’m keeping to that schedule, it’s a regular thing.

Johnn: How do you go about your writing? Do you create outlines, draw maps, make things up as you go?

I outline as much as possible and I try to look for logical holes and bad characterization as I go.

Good storytelling doesn’t have characters doing strange things or acting against their own best interest for reasons that are never explained (LOST). A good story should have a pre-planned arc, where eventually, something of world shattering proportions will happen, even if you get there one episode at a time (Babylon 5). The series shouldn’t just reset after every episode, but you should be able to catch up.

I plan as far ahead as much as possible. I outline the major plot elements and scenes.

Occasionally an idea will hit while I’m writing. Maybe a character will want to do something I hadn’t planned for, or a scene goes off in a different direction than I had originally intended. It’s cool when that happens, and I like to follow what the character wants when they’re trying to suggest things to me.

But at the same time, I follow the rule that whatever happens has to make sense based on things we know now or will know in the future. I will also draw maps if I feel the area where a scene takes place is complex enough that it needs it.

Keep in mind that a story isn’t the same as an RPG dungeon. You don’t have to explain that a character takes a left, goes down a corridor, into a room, through a secret door, down another hallway, into another room, and finally meets up with the orc king that’s trying to kill him.

Instead, you can summarize a lot of that because the reader doesn’t care to mentally map the dungeon. The reader is in it for the scenes and for the stories. And no matter how convoluted it looks on paper, it’s always a straight line from one event to the next.

Johnn: What was it like working for Wizards of the Coast? And what was a typical day like?

When I worked at Wizards of the Coast, I was at the beginning of my professional writing career. I was doing customer service by day, and then by night I’d put on the Bat Suit and become an RPG freelancer. I doubt you’re all that interested in answering customer emails, particularly those where some player was trying to get us to help them overrule their DMs (happened all the time).

As a freelancer, the key is to write, hit deadlines, get things turned in on time, and not suck.

It turns out when writing is your day job you pretty much do the same thing, and the emphasis on not sucking grows immensely. When you work freelance for a company like Wizards, you try to polish up your stuff as much as possible, and then that gets handed off to editors, and they make take it and make you look like a rock star. When you’re on staff, sometimes you are the editor, so the polishing phase needs to lead to a much more professional and polished piece than it does when you aren’t.

Aside from interacting with the creative people who were on staff whenever I could get a minute of their time, I couldn’t really tell you what it was like to be there at that time.

I can tell you I’d be nowhere if it weren’t for Chris Perkins, who assigned several of the projects I worked on to me, and who took me under his wing and taught me a lot of the fundamentals I now know – things like avoiding the passive voice, avoiding the “to be” verb as much as possible (it’s not always possible), and various other tips that you don’t get outside of a classroom (and sometimes within).

Johnn: What advice do you have for GMs who want to tell awesome stories?

When it comes to roleplaying, a lot of the time awesome stories happen not because of what you’ve prepared, but because of how the players react to the scenarios you put in front of them.

The key to telling good stories through roleplaying is the same as telling good stories through fiction: learn how episodic storytelling is accomplished.

If you want the textbook model of how to tell a huge story in an episodic format, watch all of Babylon 5, from beginning to end. People sometimes ask me who my influences are, and Joe Michael Straczynski is probably my greatest one.

To do this well, you have to have some idea of how long your series is going to be, then you have to plant hooks. Sometimes you build an entire episode around a plot point, and it doesn’t seem that important right now, but later it comes back and turns out to be an essential piece to whatever is going on.

When I was working for 38 Studios, we always looked back to Babylon 5 when we were putting things together. It’s a shame no one will ever get to experience that content, because it was unlike any MMO on the market.

We used to say that we wanted to build a world people would want to save. I think anyone building their own stories and settings should remember that above all else, because if you can accomplish that, you’re more than halfway to telling a great story.

* * *

Thanks for the great advice, Darrin! Best of luck on your new series.

Roleplaying Tips readers, if you have any questions for Darrin, just ask in the comments below.

Tags: Interview

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