Archive for April, 2015

Disease and Despair – the healing-resistant nightmare

Another filler article today, I’m afraid. By skipping half the things I was supposed to do over the weekend I finally got my sleep schedule back to something approaching my standards of normality. One of the things skipped was preliminary work on the next part of the New Beginnings series, leaving me with just enough […]

Comments Off on Disease and Despair – the healing-resistant nightmare

A Legacy Of War: The Founding Of National Identities

A History Lesson: The ANZACs This Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of a seminal date in Australian History. April 25, 1915 was the day the Gallipoli campaign began, part of World War I, “The War to end All Wars”. Intended to drive the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War with a single bold […]

Comments Off on A Legacy Of War: The Founding Of National Identities

New Beginnings: Phase 7: Skeleton

This entry is part 8 of 11 in the series New Beginnings

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the process of creating a new campaign in detail. So far, we have a campaign plan and a development plan for the game world along with a schedule for that development. We’re now dotting i’s and crossing t’s and building up the foundations of […]

Comments (1)

Shadows In The Darkness – The nature of True Evil

It started in the course of a planning session for the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club (Pulp) campaign, “Prison Of Jade”. We were fleshing out the villain’s motivations, and I (Mike) made a comment about the nature of Evil. Blair disagreed, saying “I don’t think that’s true evil at all” (or words to that […]

Comments (3)

Inn Through The Side Door – Reinvigorating the cliché

After a solid effort, it’s become clear that I’m not even close to having the next part of the New Beginnings series ready to publish, and the deadline is now less than 20 minutes away, so I’m resorting to another filler post, one that I’ve been saving for just this purpose. This was inspired by […]

Comments (4)

Principle, Cause, and Course – Complexities In Motivation

Character Motivation can be the hardest thing to unlock for any character, and yet the most useful. Knowing a character’s motivation can provide a cohesiveness of personality and decision-making context that simplifies the complex task of getting under an NPC or PCs skin down to one or two basic issues and their ramifications. Knowing why […]

Comments Off on Principle, Cause, and Course – Complexities In Motivation

Stealth Narrative – Imputed info in your game

I was incredibly tired after Co-GMing on Saturday – while the game session went well, this was only the second time that I have GM’d since undertaking a regime to control my blood sugar after the recent Diabetes diagnosis, and it took a lot more out of me than I expected. In fact, I ended […]

Comments (3)

Always Something There To Surprise You – Plots as Antagonists

The subject of today’s article emerged during a twitter discussion between John Kahane (@jkahane1), Joe Kushner (@JoeGKushner), and myself (@gamewriterMike) on Twitter last week. The conversation started when I mentioned to John that I had just started a mystery plotline in my Zenith-3 (superhero) campaign, and that special effort was going to be needed to make […]

Comments Off on Always Something There To Surprise You – Plots as Antagonists