I often come up with ideas for new campaigns. Some of these are rubbish and discarded almost immediatly; some get saved, stored up for when I might need them; but most often they just get thrown away because I have no hope of ever using the idea. One such concept came to me recently, and [...]
Every campaign needs a game physics, whether the GM knows it or not. And, in fact, they all have one, whether it’s specified or not, and whether the GM knows that or not, as well.
Boy, that was a short article! Now that we’ve established both need and solution, can we move on to another topic, [...]
We all have problems with our imaginations freezing up on us every now and again. While there are a number of things that you can do to kick-start your creativity when this happens, I have always found that it’s a good idea to have a stockpile of ideas that can be developed as needed for [...]
We hesitated before running this piece, which was written prior to the disaster on Haiti. It is certainly not our intent to trivialise what has occurred or in any way to be insensitive to the ongoing emergency there. Ultimately, we chose to run it at this time so that we could encourage all those reading [...]
Prophecies and prophetic visions are a staple of just about every game genre (even in Western Campaigns, the Indian Medicine Men might have them).
GMs like using prophecies for a number of reasons:
They impart a sense of wonder to the campaign
They confer the impression of a wider universe around the PCs
They show the players that the [...]
Some GMs read nothing but official gaming product. Others expand their horizons to include Game Supplements from other sources, both officially-sanctioned and homebrew. A few go further, and seek out genre-related works and referances from which they can seek out inspiration and detail. Very few are what I would describe as “Literary GMs”, who read [...]
Part 1 of this blog post listed nine general supplements. Parts 2, 3, and 4 added three planar supplements, four supplements about magic, and four supplements about game settings and gaming environments.
That makes a full twenty-count by my tally. This fifth part is all about honourable mentions: supplements that didn’t make the final list, but [...]
Someone once asked me why D&D bothers to include skills at all. After all, the GM generally tells the players anything they really need to know (rather than seeing all his hard work in preparing the game crash and burn); and even if he doesn’t, players can always take a twenty.
After further discussion, this person [...]
And so 2009 begins, and with it the countdown to the third most popular date in Science Fiction (behind 2000 and 2001). Funny, it doesn’t look all that different to the tail end of 2008.
That shouldn’t be surpising, since it takes the passage of several years and quite a bit of hindsight to be able [...]
