Spikes Of Danger Tease Your Players While Filling Them With Fear

Even though we try to balance adventures, not so much for fairness but for fun, it is tough to get right. There are so many factors involved. Current character health. Whether it’s session start and players are fresh, or session end and players are making mistakes from fatigue. Whether the characters have just rested or […]

RPG Theme Example: Beauty, Value, Usefulness

Adventure themes create deeper immersion and better play experiences. It’s like the difference between drawing with random crayons or painting with a coherent colour palette. If the theme you’ve picked resonates with your players, they will see the patterns and theme-connected relationships of your people, places, things, and plots. You can game this for clues, […]

How To Create Your Own Plot Factory, Part IV

In this final part of the Plot Factory series, we confront a major problem some GMs have. So far we have solved two of our Plot Factory requirements: A fast way to create short adventures A way to keep all your plots and details well-sorted Robust hooks for those plots so characters get involved Let’s […]

How To Create Your Own Plot Factory, Part III

With 5 Room Dungeons as our core short-adventure building technique, we can introduce and intertwine multiple plots running at once in our campaigns. We do this so we put the odds in our favour that every session a climax or major milestone will trigger. This keeps our players engaged. And it gives you more control […]

How To Create Your Own Plot Factory, Part II

We add more NPCS to your campaign to create more gameplay options and interesting situations (you don’t jealously cling to and railroad NPCs when you have a wonderful abundance of them). We should add more plots or storylines for the same reason. Imagine if every session a plot thread was about to reach an exciting […]

How To Create Your Own Plot Factory, Part I

Unending plots become a grind. Encounter after encounter with no resolution or reward in sight causes players to lose enthusiasm. And when they lose their drive, game sessions fall off the wheels. When Players Sabotage Your Game For example, why roleplay hard to squeeze clues out of reluctant enemies when it’s not going to get […]

Beat Dungeon Slumps With Dungeon Sumps

The first issue of 5 Room Dungeons Zine features underwater gameplay in a location you would not expect to have to swim or fight. Part of the reason I made this unusual environment the 5RD’s Feature Location is to challenge your players to master the underwater rules. When your group learns edge case type rules […]

World Story Meets RPG Story For Designing Better Adventures

A tip for you today about making your world feel dynamic and amping up your stories at the same time.

Ramping Up Tension In A Roleplay Plot

Here’s what I look for when I have roleplay plots. 1) A core Problem, 2) Three Intensifiers, 3) Everything has a Secret.

This is easier said than done though, so let’s see how we can use these GM Toolbox techniques to give our roleplaying plots lots of juicy tension.

Easier Campaigns With A Storyline Mad Lib

I tweaked my approach to Loopy Planning. I had three problems: I’m GMing three campaigns. I need to keep each plot clear in my mind and not get things mixed up. Because I like factions and side plots, even for dungeon crawls, I have about 12 plots running in each campaign. That’s 36 plots to […]

Back Pocket Encounter Idea: Planar Rifts

Here’s an idea for your fantasy campaign that’s a great back pocket encounter you can drop into a session for any reason. Open up planar rifts for the characters to encounter. Below is a table pasted straight out of my Demonplague Campaign book to get us started. As part of the hexcrawl portion of the […]

Add Spikes Of Danger To Get Deeper Campaigns

An RPT GM asks about a design technique from my Adventure Building Workshop: Hey Johnn, I was reviewing the links in your 2019 Compilation and saw reference to “Spikes of Danger”. What is that referencing? I googled around and couldn’t find anything. Thanks, Paul I replied to Paul directly, but thought I’d share with you […]

A Simple But Effective Adventure Template

Sometimes all you need is a skeleton. With a few guiding bullet points, you become unblocked and inspired to create next session’s adventure. I’ve featured a couple of adventure design templates in the past, including the Hook, Line & Sinkers Mad Lib (March 2017), the Mad Lib 5 Room Dungeon Idea Generator (July 2017), the […]

3 Tips For Better Sessions

I came across this post on a blog called Semper Initativus Unum and enjoyed some of the points the poster made. Today, I thought I’d share my three favourite ideas from that post along with some commentary, with a focus on what we can do to make our sessions even better. Make a balanced world, […]

This Fantastic Keyword Puzzle

You stand before a door. Magic seals it tight. Runes begin to glow. They read: Door is closed Beneath this phrase, more runes appear: water – angry – open – window – soft I found this cool puzzle on Reddit. Here’s how it works. Characters can swap closed with a word in the list. For […]

Revealing More Information Is Like Making A Peanut Butter Sandwich

I was lucky in school back in my day when we had to roll dice uphill. Both ways. At the bottom of a lake. In one class I learned about algorithms. Simple procedures or recipes for doing things. For example, how do you make a peanut butter sandwich? Two slices of bread and some peanut […]

Crafting Intrigue Adventures — A Couple Of Quick Tips

When I asked RPT GM Alex M. via email about what his biggest GMing struggle is he had an interesting reply: Right now we’re playing an evil campaign in a post apocalyptic setting. My biggest struggle is making smart enough, non-linear / classic intrigue cases . Like political rivalries, behind closed doors agreements and the […]

How To Run Several Plots At The Same Time Without Stress

Players love it when their characters get special side plots built just for them. Side plots hook your players and get them involved in your campaign. Side plots allow PC growth and development in ways character sheet upgrades cannot. And side plots make your campaigns feel deep and personal. Problem is, with one side plot […]

Character Stories — How To Keep Players Highly Engaged

RPT GM Sebastian has seven players and asked me for tips on how to handle large groups. My article Handling Large Groups: Keeping Players Busy has good advice. But I have a different tip for you today. One not shared before. And this tip applies to every party size — especially large groups. We’ve covered […]

You Can’t Touch Wet Paint Without Changing The Color Of Your Hand

Here’s an email exchange I had with RPT GM Edward Sawlaw about how he outlines and runs his campaigns. It’s a bit of a long convo, but I thought you might find bits of it interesting. Edward: Hi Johnn. I loved the “How to Get Your Players to Care” RP Tips email. I think a […]

Campaign’s Pillars: How to Pacing Your Game’s Exciting Moments

Manage pace during sessions instead of scripting it. This lets you react to your game as it unfolds and is one less strict plan you must track. But, leaving pace to encounter-level decisions burden you with yet another thing. Until you’ve made pacing a habit and can spot opportunities to switch energy up mid-session, it […]

A Great Staging Example from Blades In The Dark

I had a great time again at the spring edition of Intrigue Con. I was hoping to GM but did not get time to pull a game together. However, I enjoyed playing in D&D 5E, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Blades in the Dark games. The Blades game had a wonderful example of two GMing techniques […]

Storymastery: Don’t Make This Mistake with Your Reveals

Reveal something at the wrong time and it could backfire. But have a little patience, and your grand effects will dazzle. I was on an adventure consulting call last week with Adventure Building Workshop member Michael, and something we discussed was the timing of a prophecy in his campaign. In my experience, introduce a prophecy […]

Campaign’s Pillars: How To Pacing Your Game’s Exciting Moments

Manage pace during sessions instead of scripting it. This lets you react to your game as it unfolds and is one less strict plan you must track. But, leaving pace to encounter-level decisions burdens you with yet another thing. Until you’ve made pacing a habit and can spot opportunities to switch energy up mid-session, it […]

6 Examples Of Published Sandbox Campaigns You Might Run

What are some different configurations of sandbox campaigns you might run? Here are a half-dozen approaches based on what I’ve GM’d or have put on my bucket list to game master someday.