Roleplaying Tips Newsletter Archives - Page 3 of 15

RPT#661: Five Hazardous Elemental Dungeons

This article is inspired by the hazards from Jesse’s fascinating article in RPT #647: 6 Interesting Hazards. I’ve picked several hazards and woven each into a five room dungeon I’ve created.

The dungeons described below are presented as outlines for you to expand upon according to taste, and the requirements of your rules. The intention is to show you different ways of using hazards within the five room dungeon format.

I’ve also linked these dungeons into a single narrative as a campaign outline. You can choose to use each five room dungeon singly, or as part of a longer plot by an evil Cabal of Elemental Lords.

RPT#660: The Adventure Checklist Part II

Brief Word From Johnn Shelfies There was a meme going around about what’s on your gaming bookshelves. I took a couple quick pics of my own: View my bookshelves What’s on yours? Coming Soon: Adventure Building Workshop Got any plans this summer? How about joining my online Adventure Building Workshop? Details about this are coming […]

RPT#659: The Adventure Checklist, Part I

What follows is the first half of a recipe. It’s an ingredients list. A bit of salt, a bit of sugar, and bits of GM vitamins. Use this list while building adventures, when you get stuck for what to do, or during the Smoothing Things Out stage.

RPT#658: When Players Don’t Show Up – What Do You Do?

I’ve had more players cancel in recent years than during any previous gaming stretch. Families and jobs demand more time as we get older. And we have more things tugging time away from us these days.

So what do you do when a players texts you to say he’s bailing? Do you cancel the session or game on? You game on, of course! And here is a list of ideas and tips, combined from those two RPT newsletters plus some extras, on what to do with that #$?#%#@ player’s character.

RPT#657: How to Create Great Non-Combat Encounters

Brief Word From Johnn Last Day For This Book Sale How do you get holy water? You boil the hell out of it. Speaking of what’s holy and otherwise, today is your last chance to get the Mythic Gods & Monsters GM how-to guide as Pay What You Want before it goes on its regular […]

RPT#656: Quest Cards

Brief Word From Johnn Johnn Chats With Playing Lean For those into game design and making a side business building games, you might be interested in a Hangout I had with Tore Rasmussen where we chatted about his new game, Play Lean. Currently in Kickstarter mode, Playing Lean teaches you how to start and scale […]

RPT#655: How To Get Your Players To Roleplay More – The Flashback Method

Brief Word From Johnn Mythic Gods & Monsters Launches Tomorrow My new GM utility book offers fast and easy creation recipes for gods, pantheons, religions, and monsters. After a bit of a delay it’s nearly ready. My dream was to bring meddling gods down to the tabletop. Drive gameplay with unique religions, deities, and legendary […]

RPT#654: How to Use Meddling Gods to Make Life Very Interesting for Your Players

Five different ways to make lives interesting for the PCs with meddling gods. My world-building framework always starts with the gods because they influence my fantasy games so much. Gods should be active agents in games. Meddlers in conflict with one another. And possibly in conflict with cosmological evils. This instantly gives me adventure hooks, villain ideas, and campaign possibilities. The gods don’t just sit back and watch their favourite show on World TV. Instead, they play chess, sacrificing pawns to capture rooks, knights, queens, and kings. And as always, the PCs are affected.

RPT#652: Walking the Faction Pyramid, Magic Trinkets, Magic Banking

In RPT#644 I showed you how to use a tool called the Faction Pyramid Technique to create organizations that will drive your plots, adventures, and hexcrawls.

I went beyond the simple goals and structure of an organization and added the unique philosophies, lines, and limits of individual nodes to create specific factions. This time, I’ll touch on the nodes with more detail including changes over time, layers within the factions, and character interaction with the organization as a whole and their individual nodes.

RPT#653: Puzzles as Story

Today’s issue covers a Patron request for tips on puzzles. Faster Combat author Tony Medeiros treats us to a nice approach that integrates puzzle-building with storytelling. There’s also a random table of villain types to help inspire your plots at the end.

RPT#624: Lessons From The Movies — Alien and Aliens

Lessons From The Movies — Alien and Aliens Matthew Ipock Two of the best horror-sci-fi movies ever made have to be Alien and Aliens. You know, the ones about the space creature that latches onto your head, shoves an egg down your throat that eventually claws out through your chest and becomes a big, blackish-green […]

RPT#651: Switching to Mapless Combat & Making Class Matter

Brief Word From Johnn Murder Hobos Session 12 The plan was to go to Cragmaw Castle and finally deal with the villain, the Black Spider. Everyone agreed. It was how the session began. But then the past caught up with the wizard, and everything went sideways…. We began session #12 with nearly a full table, […]

RPT#650: Monsters Under The Skin

Brief Word From Johnn 650 – Another Milestone It takes at least a year to write, edit, markup, and publish to reach 50 issues, and so RPT#650 means another great milestone, another year of having more fun at every game. It’s also a “monster” of an issue with that topic being the theme of #650 […]

RPT#649: Focusing the Spotlight, Story Overlays, Magic Flags

Brief Word From Johnn Caliban’s War a Good Book I just finished Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey. It’s the second novel in The Expanse series, a great sci-fi space opera. There is lots of action. The plot keeps moving forward. And there are many interesting situations. That’s my recipe for a great game, too. […]

RPT#648: War-Winning Missions

Brief Word From Johnn Mythic Gods Winners It was great to see the divine creations sent in for the Mythic Gods contest. For top-down type world building, there’s no better place to start than the powers-that-be. And for GMs looking for campaign seed ideas, conflicts with immortals are always fertile plotting grounds. Congratulations to the […]

RPT#647: Dresden Files & Fairy Tales – Adventure Tips For Urban Fantasy Games

Brief Word From Johnn Phandelver #10 – Torm’s Disfavour What happens when the God of Justice has it in for you? It begins with lightning and ends in Oh Snap! We played the next chapter of the campaign Friday night, and Torm got a small Chuckle of Justice at the expense of the self-named Murder […]

RPT#646: The Mythic God Generator (and a new contest!)

RPT#646: The Mythic God Generator Brief Word From Johnn Wanna Be A Video Game Designer? My friend Pablo Farías Navarro from Australia has a cool Kickstarter called Complete Mobile Game Development Course. Pablo is creating an online school and will teach you how to build 15 different types of mobile games for iOS, Android, and […]

RPT#645: Use This Awesome Storytelling Technique

Brief Word From Johnn I have a special opportunity coming tonight just for Roleplaying Tips Patrons (you can become a Patron here). I’m starting up an epic, weekly online campaign for just 6 players. I’m taking three of my all-time favourite mega-modules and converting them to 5E. Then we’ll tell some incredible stories together every […]

RPT#644: The Faction Pyramid Technique

Brief Word From Johnn GM Musing Here’s something to mull over. Why are player characters saints in their backstories and villains in their gameplay? Just askin. RPT Gems Changing Format You might have noticed the RPT Gems emails on Fridays have stopped. It was a tough decision. In the fall I started consolidating things to […]

RPT#627: How to Create a Critical Path Walkthrough

How to Create a Critical Path Walkthrough What is a Critical Path Walkthrough? Wikipedia says a critical path is “the longest necessary path through a network of activities.” In game terms, it’s the longest path through your game a player needs to take to complete your game. However, I like to look at it another […]

RPT#626: Making Undead Cool Again

Making Undead Cool Again Earlier this month, Roleplaying Tips kicked off the RPG Blog Carnival with the article Making Undead Cool Again. Featured in both the Roleplaying Tips Newsletter on October 6th, you can find the article here. Remember that if you want to get the earliest access to the Roleplaying Tips Newsletter, as well […]

RPT#625: Lessons From The Movies: The Princess Bride

Lessons From The Movies: The Princess Bride Matthew Ipock The Princess Bride has become a great romantic-comedy cult classic. This is because the film has all the necessary ingredients of a great movie: action, comedy, memorable characters and dialogue, and “true love”. Because the movie has these needed ingredients, The Princess Bride can also serve […]

RPT#623: Happy House Ruling – How to Use Game Design to Create New Gameplay Experiences

Johnn Four Introduce constraints through house rules and game design to offer unique gaming experiences and encourage creativity. A couple of old school AD&D modules come to mind. EX1: Dungeonland and EX2: Land Beyond the Magic Mirror I think are the names. (All my books are in boxes in the garage at the moment.) The PCs are shrunk to […]

RPT#622: Focusing the Spotlight: How I Handle Split Parties For More Drama

Brief Word From Johnn The Productive Game Master Johnn Four Did you know I recently doubled my reading speed? It took minutes. No, really. There’s a way of reading on-screen where the words just flash by. All you do is focus. I did a reading test first, because I was skeptical. I did two, actually. […]

RPT#621: Six Ways To Crank A Character Up To 11

Six Ways To Crank A Character Up To 11 Johnn Four RPT Reader Fitz asked for tips on making PCs great: I’m struggling a bit with my player character. Would love a bit of guidance on how to take a boring or underwhelming PC and turn it up to eleven, as Spinal Tap would say. […]

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