Campaign Mastery

A False Start Last week, I was discussing an image that I had composited for the pulp campaign with my co-GM. I made an off-hand remark about how justified I felt about expending the time and effort on the image. He agreed, positing that the greater the demands on the imagination of a scene, the […]

Yesterday, I was browsing around in an online digital music store when I came across an Album that I would most certainly have purchased much sooner if I had known that it existed. This is one of the major problems that has beset the music industry over the last twenty or so years. The Drake […]

Attitude and Intensity We all have NPCs who are more driven than most, more obsessed or more sassy. This is never as easy as it sounds. We all have to raise our voices a little just to be heard clearly from all parts of the gaming table. Simply employing the “intense whisper” for the dialogue […]

This was intended to be part of a single, self-contained article – but the more I look at it, the more inevitable it seems that what did happen, would happen. Make sure you’ve read Part 1 before continuing! I intend to dive straight in and pick up exactly where I left off, but first, there’s […]

One of the essential skills that has to be in every GM’s toolkit is the ability to interleave research into subjects that they, and their players, know nothing about into the stories that they craft for their campaigns. Way back in September 2014, I produced an abbreviated list of subjects that a GM arguably had […]

While introducing the players to the characters for the chase mechanics playtest a couple of weeks ago, I found myself ruminating on (of all things) the Charisma stat and what it represented. You might think that this is a simple question – but it’s not, as readers will see by the end of this article. […]

It took so much longer to plan out the article that I intended to publsh today, and it contains so many sections that I hasd grave doubts that I could finish it in time. Rather than risk having nothing to post in what is already shaping up to be a very busy week, I decided […]

Chase mechanics are some of the hardest things in an RPG to get right – so much so that a lot don’t even try (and sometimes go to considerable lengths to hide the fact). So I was very interested when Evil Genius Games offered me the chance to review the chase mechanics from their upcoming […]

I’ve written over 1,800 answers on Quora and for every one, I’ve read 40 or 50 answers (probably more) written by other people in response to a question by someone else again. A surprisingly small amount of what I’ve read has been directly RPG-related. That’s because most of the content that gets offered derives from […]

I was thinking about this month’s Blog Carnival subject (Gods Of The Multiverse), hosted by Gonz over at Codex Anathema, when I was struck by a thought that had never occurred to me before. Deities, by their very nature, don’t belong in Dungeons and Dragons – or in most other RPGs, for that matter. Before you […]

Not long ago, I saw a game result that bucked the established trend in outcomes, a potent reminder of the unpredictability of sports. After losing the first four games of a five-game series against Australia (T20 International Cricket), the Sri Lanka team posted a comprehensive win to salvage some pride and deflate Australian egos just […]

For a long time, I’ve been working on a Lifestyle / Wealth system for my superhero game system, which is loosely based on the Hero System (4th ed). The rules needed to be simpler than the official rules, less able to offer benefits to PCs and NPCs beyond the value that would normally be associated […]