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 […]
Continue reading1d12 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 […]
Continue readingYou 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 […]
Continue readingRoleplaying 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 […]
Continue readingd12 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 […]
Continue readingRoleplaying 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 […]
Continue readingRoleplaying 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 […]
Continue readingRoleplaying 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 […]
Continue readingRoleplaying 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 […]
Continue readingRoleplaying 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 […]
Continue readingRoleplaying 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 […]
Continue readingSo, what exotic diets might people eat in different lands?Dining on cats is normal for the half-orcs and goblins in the slums, but the royals worship a goddess with feline characteristics so they revere the animals.
Continue readingHere are some cool tips to pass along from your fellow game masters.
Continue readingWhat are seeds? In my lingo, a seed is an idea not fleshed out yet. For example, good drow running from evil kin. It’s an idea but not a plan. And here’s how to…
Continue readingFrom John Large Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0646 A 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 […]
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