Welcome to Great Arkham

Great Arkham is a thief. One day you get out of bed, and you’re in a city you’ve never seen yet know intimately. You have a job, a favourite pub. You go about your day, and there’s something nagging at you, but you can’t place it, so you do your best to put it out […]

Finishing a campaign

Roleplaying campaigns end all the time. Too bad they rarely finish. It took me years of GMing to actually complete a campaign, not merely see it dissolve. And I’m not the only one: Far from a representative poll, certainly, but it lines up with my experience. Almost 2/3rds of campaigns don’t reach a satisfying ending. […]

Musings on Perfection

We’ve wrapped up our Apocalypse World campaign recently, and it’s left me pensive. Throughout the game, I embraced the AW maxim: “play to find out what happens”. Embraced it to such an extent that I discovered the true “motivation” of the psychic maelstrom (the not-really-well-maybe-antagonist of the world), doubling as the moral lesson for the […]

Backup Campaign

Getting the whole group together for a game night can be tricky. As we grow older, obligations and kids accumulate. I’m amazingly fortunate that my players are still committed to weekly gaming. Well, almost. We’ve agreed that we’ll still play if one out of our five players is missing, otherwise we’d never get anything done. […]

Building up an Adventure

Last week, two of the players in our group couldn’t make it, so the regular game was cancelled. I seized upon the opportunity to try out something different, namely Shadow of the Demon Lord. It wasn’t enough to write a First Impressions post, however the experience of rewriting the adventure was perhaps noteworthy enough. Because […]

Running an RPG for kids

I ran a “Dungeons and Dragons” event at a public library last week, with six 10-or-so year old kids showing up to my table. It went well, but boy was it a challenge. How do you prepare to run a game for kids you’ve never met? The system obviously needs to be both simple and […]

Sunless Fate 3

Welcome to the final (at least for now) installment in the seriesĀ convertingĀ Atomic Robo rules to run a Sunless Sea-inspired game. Previously, we covered character and ship generation, as well as ship combat, trading and zeafaring. This post will have little to do with rules, instead focusing on exploration and mystery of SS, and how to […]

Settings, Systems and Stories

I have my own setting. Many GMs do, that’s hardly newsworthy. I’ve developed it over the course of several campaigns, starting with D&D 3.5, then 4e, and now a 13th Age being run by one of the past players (exciting, seeing it take on a life outside my own head). It’s a D&D setting, is […]

Dancing in the Flames

This is the second, a bit less fluffy part of my thoughts on collaborative storytelling in RPGs, I suggest you read the first part for context. Bad ideas I’ll start with acknowledging that there is such a thing as bad ideas. Of course there is! Torching the tavern in a typical D&D game (no, seriously, […]

Torching the Tavern

Tonight’s post is going to be somewhat rambly. Yes, even more so than usual. I have a topic in mind, and I’m going to try and figure out what my thoughts on it are. Stick around. The topic in question: cooperative storytelling in rpgs (buzzwords!). Imagine a stereotypical game in broad strokes. The party arrives […]