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Orbital Trouble: d12 Space Outpost Hooks

Had some large blocks of “waiting time” on the weekend, so I started noodling on what might make space outposts interesting. Why? I’m a sci-fi RPG noob, aiming to run my first game when things settle down a bit over here. And I’m not very familiar with the details and tropes of the genre. So, […]

5 Room Dungeon Outline Generator

In awesome news, my mom’s final radiation treatment was yesterday. We had a special dinner to celebrate and she is doing very well. My wife also had her second chemo treatment yesterday, and those are rough. But she is strong and doing ok. Related, I had a stack of Pathfinder 2E books I was selling […]

Use Charisma as an NPC Personality Generator

There’s a great article in Dragon #243 about using charisma to determine personality. It supplied a small seven row table with examples. I love this idea. While definitions of charisma vary, it makes sense that it will affect an NPC’s personality, or at least, their surface personality. Further, tying a few personality traits to charisma […]

Cursed For Divine Transgressions (a d20 Table)

I’m homebrewing a setting called Duskfall, and I’ve reached the creation step I call The Powers That Be. With this technique, I ask: What powerful NPCs can control or influence the setting, and more specifically, can affect my plotlines and the party’s actions? By NPCs, I mean gods, powerful monsters, villains, factions, and any other […]

To Boldly Go Where NPCs Should Not

Why would you find people in the treacherous places where characters go? RPT GM Michael asks: One of my bigger challenges is to come up with friendly NPCs in hostile environments. Mostly why are they there and how is it conceivable and not an obvious plot device for lack of better words. Places adventurers go […]

d12 Clever Castle Defenses

Could I interest you in some interesting ways to defend a castle? There’s a fantastic article in Dragon #185 (a Dark Sun special, nice!) that lists 20 ways to defend castles in D&D. Below I give you d12 methods: some of my own, and some from the article rewritten in my own words. 1. Get […]

d20 Noble Obligations

Privilege & Power: Using Nobility in Your World-Building and Plots. Read Part I here. And happy Wednesday. Yesterday, we looked at the rights and privileges nobles may get in your world. This helps flesh out noble PC backgrounds, aids in world-building, and inspires plot and encounter ideas. A fantastic way to balance out some of […]

d8 Non-Combat Encounter Seeds for Weak PCs

Before digging into today’s GM tips, I wanted to mention a podcast I was on with Harley Stroh of Goodman Games and Ian Rotondi-Gray from StoryTogether. Listen to the podcast episode on Youtube here. It was great talking about Dungeon Crawl Classics, GMing, and creativity. d8 Non-Combat Encounter Seeds for Weak PCs Part II, GMing […]

Privilege & Power: Using Nobility in Your World-Building and Plots

Privilege & Power: Using Nobility in Your World-Building and Plots. Read Part II here. The idea of nobility comes up often in our campaigns. Villains, character backgrounds, NPC classes, settlements, and intrigue and politics, for example, can make nobility important in your milieu. Noble NPCs are special because they have special privileges and responsibilities most […]

Failing Forwards & Upwards: My d6 Go-To Results to Streamline GMing

We need not know every way to Fail Forward. We only want a few reliable go-tos. In the discussion after last night’s Story Stakes Workshop, the topic of skill checks came up. For d20 games, I mentioned that a fail doesn’t have to be a hard no or a binary 0 result. Any game system […]

Celebrate Character Birthdays (d12 Birthday Events Table)

Something I haven’t done in years is track the PCs’ birthdays. This realization came while I was reading an old Dragon Mag yesterday. We used to roll for character birth dates. When the calendar rolled ’round there was a celebration, even if it was a loaf of bread with torch mashed in to blow out. […]

1d6 Ways To Create Deadline Urgency In Encounters

Add some element of urgency to almost every encounter as a GM habit you develop, if you haven’t already. When we do this, we get many GMing benefits: An effective way to create urgency is to build in a deadline. Have the players and their characters race against the clock. Here are 1d6 ways to […]

d12 Great RPGs For Your GM Bucket List Shelf

My recent piece on Hasbro’s shifting away from pen and paper D&D to a purely online version drew a incredible response. And one common request was for a list of suggestions of other RPGs to try. These lists are all over the internet, methinks. But for what it’s worth, whether I’ve played, GM’d, or just […]

Beyond Gold Pieces: Amp Up Player Engagement With These Rewards

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1225 Amp Up Player Engagement With These Rewards Looking for different ways to reward players and their characters? Gold and gems are great, but you can’t dance to them. The best rewards engage characters and players, keep the Infinite Game going via story progression, open up choices and action possibilities, and create […]

d20 Ways To Hide A Golem

Dragon Magazine #139 offered great ways to hide a golem in a room. I love animated objects and golems as monsters. They need no air, water, or food, so make perfect dungeon foes. But if we serve up such obstacles and enemies the same way each time, it gets boring fast. So here are 20 […]

1d12 Most Common Encounter Mistakes

1d12 Most Common Encounter Mistakes nuqneH TEST! I don’t generally dwell on the negative. We’re here to have fun at every game, after all. However, sometimes it’s great to review a list of gotchas and see if any resonate. If some do, we can then take action to fix. So today I have 1d12 mistakes […]

Surprise Your Players: Betrayal Twist Mad Lib For Your Encounters

You know I’m a huge fan of adventure plot twists. That’s what Room V is all about. But we should try to add encounter-level twists, as well. Then we get to surprise and delight our players several times during sessions! Here is one of my favourite types of twists and d12 examples to help you […]

A Way To Make MegaDungeon Rooms Interesting (Have Your Dice Ready)

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1222 A Way To Make MegaDungeon Rooms Interesting An RPT GM asks: Facing the Dungeon23 challenge, I wonder how to come up with different rooms instead of falling into tired tropes or ending up with repetitive floors. My answer: roll for it! First, theme your megadungeon and its levels. Next, make yourself […]

d12 Forgery Adventure Hooks

d12 Forgery Adventure Hooks Let’s commit some forgery in our campaign. Here are d12 ideas. But before we get into that, why would we want forgery in our game? What benefits do we receive, and how can we wield forgery as storytellers? Easy Hooks Little Phingers goes to shake the noble’s hand. Almost too late […]

The Mad Lib d12 Random Quest Generator

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0849 A bit of fun inspiration for your campaign today. RPT GM Tony shares a random quest generator in Mad Libs format. What I like most about his plot generator is it creates a named and enumerated quest purpose. You could use this template to create legends, world wonders, artefacts, Spikes of […]

How Do You Make Encounters More Interesting? — Introducing The Chorus Line

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1112 What to do with NPCs in the background to make encounters more interesting? That thought came to me as I bumped into a random blog post on writing, and this snippet jumped out at me: One of the things to watch out for when choreographing a scene is the chorus line […]

8 Ideas For Your Next Adventure

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1109 RPT GM and Adventure Building Workshop alumni Jesse Cohoon reached out and asked if he could help with the newsletter. Thanks Jesse! I asked him to come up with some adventure seeds, as game masters often get stuck for ideas. Here’s what he came up with for us: Fey Games A […]

Stories Within Stories

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0810 Roleplaying Tips GM Michael Downey has this great tip for us about finding story opportunities in NPC reactions. Hey Johnn, Just thought I would share a new trick I found for adding some variety and depth to NPC reactions. When I create an NPC, I roll a d10 to determine their […]

d10 Things You Hear In Town

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0711 I often stumble over thinking up rumours on-the-fly. Especially in my sandbox games where there are so many possibilities. I end up just slandering a character or bad-mouthing the establishment. While good for a laugh, that doesn’t drive the campaign forward. So Jochen and I just added a new generator to […]

Teleport With Style

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0808 Hau?oli Friday, %FIRSTNAME% Today’s Musing is both a fun bit of inspiration and some age-old advice. While surfing, I found a great table from John Stater over at Land of Nod. It asks, and answers, the question of how you appear when coming out of a teleport. Here’s a few of […]

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