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CampaignCraft: Announcing My New Secret Weapon for Building & Launching Successful Campaigns

The secret weapon I wish I’d had in my first dozen campaigns… GMing long-term campaigns is hard. I’ve started dozens over the years. Some crashed. Some fizzled. And a few became legends. What made the difference? How I started. Big worlds. Big plots. Big prep. Those campaigns buckled under their own weight. The best ones […]

Two Villains That Shape Your Campaign

I’m back. Thank you for the emails and well-wishes. I had some unscheduled downtime, but all is well. More news on that another time. Been thinking lately about villains. They’re actually the topic of a writing challenge I started a few days ago to get me back into rolling up some words. There are two […]

Daily GM Inspiration Trick

Chat GPT recently launched a scheduled tasks feature. One task you can create will email you stuff. I’ve used followupthen.com and task features in my email app for years now to do this. For example, there a neat trick I learned from an HR consultant who did a presentation at the day job in the […]

Peer Deeply Into the Map…

A map is higher bandwidth than text. With text we take in one word and one page at a time. But a map shows words, locations, terrain, continents, and villages, all at once. The secret ingredient to getting the most data out of detailed maps and remembering them easily, almost without trying, is to peer […]

Mastering the Moment

Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed a wonderful New Year’s Eve. Mine was excellent — I had a great sleep. Getting old, lol. Got something a bit personal for you today about my GMing credo. I have, at the top of my Roleplaying Tips writing file, this line of text: I play the Infinite […]

Kill An NPC Every Session

Let me clear up some potential misconceptions about, and make some amendments to, my kill an NPC every session rule. For example, from the RPT Discord: Hey all, I have been working to bring a new npc each session and then to also kill off one npc per session as Johnn has suggested. I find […]

Pantsers vs. Plotters: Being an Agile GM

In our August Wizard of Adventure Q&A Zoom, the topic of plotting came up. Afterwards, fellow GM Loren sent me this note about different ways of plotting a book: Quick note on “pantsers and planners”: I’m sure I’ve seen it elsewhere, but James Scott Bell starts his “Write You Novel from the Middle” with discussion […]

The Plus, Minus, Delta Method: A Easy Way to Improve Your GMing

I do three Evaluations after each session. Seems like a bit much, doesn’t it? But each has a specific job to do. And #1 is very fast. Let’s talk about #1 today, as I recommend you install it into your GMing practice right away because it is so effective. Right after a session I do […]

Defeating Shiny Object Syndrome

I’m now more interested in running the next game concept. I run into this issue every campaign: there comes that point where things are moving along, and it’s not quite the end, so I start thinking about the next project, and boom I’m living that night and day and don’t want to finish this one. […]

Here’s How One GM Improvises Plots & Campaigns

Before I forget…again…this Saturday is the monthly Wizard of Adventure GM chat. Get help from me and smarter GMs to help your prep, encounters, world building, player issues, or any other aspect of your campaign. Wizards of Adventure, the meeting link is here. Roleplaying Tips GMs, if you’d like to join us and get some […]

Bingo! Prep

(Game Master, I shot a short video explaining today’s article. You can watch it on YouTube here.) A GM I’m consulting asked me how I create and use Templates in my campaigns. My answer was “Bingo!” And that made no sense at all. First, what’s a Template? I have also called them Stat Blocks in […]

My Strategy For Epic Campaigns

In 2018 I got back into board games in a big way. I had stopped playing in 2003, so did not get to experience the new wave and evolution in design of the 2000s and 2010s. Then I dropped into a board game day at a local shop and became hooked again. So many new […]

Confident Minimalist Prep

An RPT GM asked me this great question about Tiny Prep. Paraphrasing two paragraphs: How can I gain more confidence in my ability to run a game with minimal prep? My solution for this is a methodology called Prepare to Improvise. I don’t know who invented that phrase, but I learned it at Toastmasters. In […]

Gamify Your Daily Prep

Do you know the difference between game masters and players? Game masters get to play every day! If you find session preparation a grind, put it off, and then panic come game day, one reason you’re in this vicious cycle is you aren’t having fun with prep. I’ve seen this lead to fizzled campaigns and […]

How Do You Eat a Tarrasque?

My latest book just released! It’s called Tiny Prep, and was co-written by Che Webster from roleplayrescue.com. You can buy our Tiny Prep book through this link to get a discount. Tiny Prep will transform your GMing with tiny tools that garner you big swings at the game table. Our book will: It’s the perfect […]

Use My Core Gameplay Loop When Your Game Stalls

During Monday’s game master coaching session, one GM, Mr. Snakes, encountered a plot block. His players had just completed an epic 5 Room Dungeon on a demon-infested ship, caught up in faction play while trying to solve a murder mystery. (Well done, Mr. Snakes!) He asked about my core gameplay loop because, after the ship […]

The Merchant’s Machination of Relic Reagents

RPT GM Jabmist shared this cool plot with me yesterday: In a campaign I was running, the party had to go to the elemental plane of fire and kill a demon lord who was causing mischief. To get there, they had to trade with a merchant who collected rare and expensive things (to buy necklaces […]

How I Prep My Basilica Campaign

How do you prep? While chatting with a GM during a coaching call, I realized I don’t prep the same way many GMs do. Let me explain, using my Basilica campaign as an example…. My current campaign is sandbox meets hex/dungeon crawl meets story path. I’m looting Temple of Elemental Evil (and hope the PCs […]

Prep This Instead Of Plans

RPT GM Steffen asks: Maybe you have a tip for a problem I’m having with prep. In my group, we sometimes play fairly open RPGs. Open in the sense of an open world. At the end of a game session, I don’t know how the players are going to approach a problem, and then I […]

The Story So Far

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1213 I mostly run sandboxes these days. That means I wrangle a lot of details. After a few sessions I’ll have dozens of Pages and Log Entries in Campaign Logger. After a year, they’ll be in the hundreds. Here’s an example from Wizard of Adventure ExileInParadise’s Sword Coast campaign: And here’s a […]

What Do You Do When Characters Fail? — 5 Solutions For You

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1196 What do you do when the dice betray your players? When the party seems to meet a dead-end? When your adventure stalls due to bad luck or bad choices? That’s the topic of today’s tips. But before you dig into them, please take the associated poll here: How to Prevent Dead […]

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3 Easy Ideas To Generate Instant Adventure Ideas – Plot Factory Tutorial Part II

From JohnnFour Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1175 Last week we talked about Plot Factories as a tool in your GM Toolbox. Think of them like spawn points in a video game. Foes keep emerging to assault your character until you destroy the spawn point. In our adventures and sandboxes, we do the same via Plot Factories […]

Use This Clever Tool To Herd Your Cats – Plot Factories

From JohnnFour Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #11731 A Brief Word From Johnn Today’s tips are about one of my favourite GM techniques. But before I share my ideas on Plot Factories, I wanted to let you know about a Kickstarter my friend Mike Shea of Sly Flourish fame is running. He loves clever GM techniques too, […]

9 Ways to Prep For Sessions Faster

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1172 Brief Word From Johnn A couple of quick notes before we dive into today’s tips on how to prepare for game sessions faster. I was a guest recently on the Geezers of the Game podcast. We talk about my crazy origin story with RPGs amongst many other things. You can listen […]

My 7 Keys to a Great Sandbox Game

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1164 New RPT GM Eddie asked for advice on homebrewing adventures: I love that a campaign can be going strong that long. The one I’m running is like 6 months old. Even though I’m pretty new to the game (less than a year) I’ve been looking more into old school revival and […]

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