World Building Archives - Roleplaying Tips

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Mastering the Depths: Enhancing RPG Mines

Mastering the Depths: Enhancing RPG Mines Sometimes, a couple of extra details makes all the difference in helping players imagine our encounters and take interesting actions. RPT GM Chris N. sent me some great insights into the complexities of running a medieval or fantasy RPG mine. We can use these fantastic details to flesh out […]

The Swamp Is Calling: d12 Swampy Tips

The Swamp Is Calling: d12 Swampy Tips Do you have any upcoming swamp encounters or adventures? To celebrate my newest GM Cheat Sheet for swamps that I released on the weekend ($3 on DTRPG, free to Wizards of Adventure), here are a dozen swampy tips to enhance your campaign. Play Up the Atmosphere Swamps are […]

Save Your Village From Murder Hobos – 5 Quick Tips

Save Your Village From Murder Hobos – 5 Quick Tips How do we protect villagers from Murder Hobos? We planned some great roleplay in town, but then the party decides they don’t like being sassed and suddenly we’re rolling for initiative. Here are a 1d4+1 ideas, inspired by Dragon Magazine #109, on how we can […]

Simple Sandbox Economics – 4 Tips

A GM had this tip request: Any ideas of emulating/tracking a robust economy in osr style sandboxes? Good question. Here are a few tips and then I’ll end with some resources. Create a Treasure Budget I call this Treasure Crawl in my sandbox creation checklist. Forecast at each level or tier, to the projected end […]

Create Extreme Environments In 3 Steps

Create Extreme Environments In 3 Steps It’s pretty chilly here right now. But good news: it’s warmer than it was yesterday! Haha. So I took the screenshot above on my phone while thinking we should add extreme environmental conditions into our adventures more often to take gameplay to 11. Creating extreme conditions is not difficult […]

A Quick Trick To Generate Details For Your World

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1209 I have a short tip for you today. Quick enough not to earn a newsletter number. And it’s about world building. One struggle we have when crafting settings is detail. It’s easy enough to generate a map, such as with Azgar’s. But we need more detail to make our stage interesting […]

My Secret Ingredient For Making Great Puzzles

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1204 A Brief Word From Johnn Think too small and think too big. We’ve got a critter making a nest under our deck. We can’t see it because it’s found a good crack to inhabit. But we can hear it. It’s chewing something. Leaves maybe. Paper perhaps. The bones of some poor […]

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A Divine Way to Manage Your Meddling Gods – a 3 Part Framework

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1150 This is a guest post by Jonathan Hardin, sojournersawake.com based on his original article at Sojourners Awake. How can you have gods walk your realm without whacking campaign balance? How can you turn deities into Plot Factories? And how can you roleplay divine beings in interesting ways that do not spell […]

What’s Your World’s “Only Factor”?

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1003 What facet of your world affects gameplay in a way no other setting does? Two key pieces here. First piece: your world needs at least one unique factor or you might as well save yourself the time and use a published setting. Why bother putting all that creation work in? What’s […]

World-Building In Five Steps

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0934 RPT GM LadySeshiiria asks a big world-building question. Good timing, LadySeshiiria, because I’ve just started planning out my realm called Duskfall for season three of Hobos of the Apocalypse. So I can hopefully help today with a high-level overview of my world-building recipe. Here is LadySeshiiria’s question: Johnn, What is a […]

A Quick Way To Make Awesome Rewards

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0922 Saw a great tip on Twitter from Mike Shea the other day: Adding a daily spell to a magic itemis a great way to make it boththematic and mechanically useful. This is an awesome method to customize and enhance treasure. You could also surprise players with cool boons like this. The […]

Darkness Ignites the Sunless Citadel

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0853 I started a new campaign last Friday with the Murder Hobos group. I’ve put my Hobos of the Apocalypse campaign on hold while I do some additional prep for it. The campaign is going full sandbox, and I’m currently thinking through the faction stuff. To fend off GM rust, I picked […]

How To Build A Fantasy City In 47 Seconds

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0852 Need a city fast for your campaign? Follow these 6 steps to build a fantasy town or metropolis in under a minute. Drawing or consulting a map is my First Move. [Kill GM Procrastination With Your First Move] So we’ll begin this recipe with a quick fantasy city map generator. Let’s […]

How To Rock Your Encounters With This Monster Design Tip

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0746 How To Rock Your Encounters With This Monster Design Tip Here’s a tip from Faster Combat: when you chose or design a monster, start with how you want the PCs to defeat it. I say “choose or design” because it doesn’t matter whether you’re picking the foe from the monster manual […]

Monster Challenge

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0761 Had a great game of Out of the Abyss on Friday. Lots of funny gameplay stories came out of it. Here’s two, plus a challenge for you. First story is about housekeeping. As a player, always confirm your XP! I’m playing a 4th level cleric who runs around saying “Praise Helm” […]

Character Home Bases – Part III: Example Village of Coldwater

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0759 On Monday we covered how to get players to care about home bases. Wednesday I showed you a simple three step village creation recipe that you can world-build from. And today I’ll walk you through a quick example that you can also drop right into your campaign this weekend. Note that […]

Character Home Bases – Part II: How To Create Villages Fast

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0758 Character Home Bases – Part II: How To Create Villages Fast Last tip I rambled on about building character home bases and several ways you can invite players to care about them. While the Hobos of the Apocalypse will likely be creating a village community from ground up, I will want […]

Character Home Bases – Part I: 6 Tips

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0757 Character Home Bases – Part I: 6 Tips The Hobos of the Apocalypse (formerly The Murder Hobos now reborn as positive change agents) need and want a home base once they emerge from the bowels of the elemental dungeons they currently cleanse. The problem is, they’ve got few stakes in the […]

More City Flavours

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0815 Ciao %FIRSTNAME% Last week, I shared a list of flavourful things the PCs might see happen each day in your city. I received some great comments from readers I’d like to share with you today. Here’s a great campaign kick-off “birds eye view” approach from Tom Ganz: I started my Curse […]

What’s Night Life Like In A Fantasy City Like?

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0813 What’s Night Life Like In A Fantasy City Like? New Roleplaying Tips reader Nathan M. sent me a nice list of city details. In his words, “Here are a few of the things adventurers might come to expect as they return or leave the bustling cities. After all, you do not […]

Use Setting Questions To Avoid A Tossed Salad

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0812 Last Musing we explored the idea of Setting Questions. Getting your players to help you flesh out your world with new details from their imaginations and character perspectives. We talked about making sure you add adventure details into your questions so players will care more about their characters, the adventure, and […]

Mad Lib 5 Room Dungeon Idea Generator For You

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0809 Use this Mad Lib to create a ton of 5 Room Dungeon seeds for your campaigns: [A GROUP] [IS DOING SOMETHING] with [AN ITEM] at [THE LOCATION] in order to [MOTIVE]. The location is the site or setting of your 5 Room Dungeon. The group is an NPC or faction from […]

Add Corruption To Your World

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1107 I was reading a Dungeon World worldbook for Star Wars the other day and there was a section on corruption that caught my eye. I often plan corruption within plots and factions, but I have not thought of it in world building terms before. So I did a bit of research. […]

A Quick Way To Make Player Victories Sweeter

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1104 I just finished reading the Kobold Guide to Plots and Campaigns. I highlighted and flagged a few pages, so expect a tip or two I’ve gleaned from the guide in the future. On page 23 there’s a great tip about making player victories sweeter: Designing a finale specifically to a setting […]

When Fluff Spawns From Rules, A Great Game Emerges

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0790 Guten morgen %FIRSTNAME% I’ve long had a fascination with how game rules affect game settings. Too often in game world products, I see a setting likely created separately as fiction in a word processor or wiki, and then the game patched onto it. What I quest to build is a setting […]

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