Every Good Game Devolves Into Pirates
Thoughts and musings from four friends who have spent too long discussing TTRPGs
Worldbuilding is one of the most fun parts of preparing a TTRPG campaign, but it’s easy to get lost in the excitement of creating continents and fail to define what matters most to tell a good story. After a recent worldbuilding session, I realized that despite having spent hours describing city-states, geography, and gods, my …
Continue reading “Practical Worldbuilding: Stories are Stronger than Facts”
In today’s article I’m going to tackle a few things; namely why I cancelled my most recent D&D campaign. I decided to take some time to reflect on what it was about my previous campaign wasn’t doing it for me, and how I could help other GMs in crafting a campaign setting to avoid burnout, …
Continue reading “The GM’s Smithy: Forging a Campaign to Suit Your Habits”
One of my favorite RPG adventures to run or be a part of is a modern paranormal or supernatural investigation campaign. While all RPGs are an escape into the imagination and lets players live and experience a totally new world, there’s something so intriguing about having my players navigate the modern world they are familiar …
After a particularly brilliant session, I was walking home with our friend group’s GM. Although he had run another session just three days earlier, this last session was a fantastic, fully fleshed out adventure. I imagined him spending late night after night tinkering in his DM workshop, I asked if my DM was okay. “I …
Critics commonly like to joke that sci-fi and fantasy authors have a poor sense of scale, and indeed it’s true that sometimes our reach can overextend our grasp. Any GM has doubtless fantasized about planting larger-than-life worlds into their games, whether those worlds take the form of sprawling megacities, kilometers-long starships, or space stations the …
My experience growing up with Tabletop RPGs was fairly traditional; a furnished basement with me and my party all huddled up on the couch and chairs around a large battlemap ridden table, and our GM at the head, surrounded by a library or rule-books and notes. Nearly every weekend we’d follow the same routine and …
Continue reading “Online Sessions: a Double-edged Sword for Attention.”
This week I was going to write a long-winded article about an alternative way of running boss battles in D&D, but why write an article when I could make a boss battle for you instead! This is a 4CR boss battle against a giant bird of prey that you can use as anything from the …
Continue reading “A Different kind of D&D Boss Battle: Encounter Included!”
It was late after work, and we were sitting around the table, dice in hand, talking. The scene had been set by our DM. We were a ragtag band of religious missionaries trying to save a city from being slaughtered by Coalition forces. After the enemy army had ambushed the army in a nearby field, …
Last time I wrote a piece about bandits, but this time we’re going to talk about another monster with a very specific narrative role. Except this monster isn’t a monster at all. It’s just an animal. Those of you who read my last article saw this one coming a mile away. I’m talking about wolves. …
Some of my favorite adventures have been horror themed sessions. Whether it was tracking down and finding ourselves at the whim of a murderous hag, or investigating a case of fishing town disappearances only to come across the abominations of a crazed inn keeper, some of my favorite moments in my RPG history have been …
Every Good Game Devolves Into Pirates