Initiative Tracking Tools

Initiative tracking is very important when it comes to running a Dungeons & Dragons game. Gamers all over the internet have come up with some unique and creative ways for tracking initiative. I thought I would take a[...]
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It’s Called Tabletop Gaming Not “Rebooting My Laptop” Gaming

Watching my fellow players and their fixation with technology in the past months has got me thinking quite a bit about the place of technology at the gaming table. They use their iPhones to store their character stats, r[...]
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recession-proof gaming VII – mission to game

Is that light at the end of the financiapocalyptic tunnel?  Maybe.  Here's some more stuff anyway. Browser Tools hack/ has produced some neat RPG bookmarklets.  I've mentioned... Click the title if yo[...]
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World Building 101: Incorporating New Content

Roleplaying games evolve continually. Even “dead” editions, that have been retired by their publishers, can still see unofficial support from fan communities. For systems still in print, new content tends to emerge[...]
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War Campaign musing

I've joined Arm Chair Generals forums to work through some of my campaign problems.One of them, I'm stuck on is military readiness. Using GURPS mass combat, plotting the precise human resource is very hard and difficult [...]
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Virtual Table Top and DDi

No, this post is not going to give you an update on the status of WotC’s Virtual Table Top Program.  Sorry to disappoint you.  I know that some people are eagerly awaiting the announcement that it is complete and[...]
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Reader Voicemail: Building an Adventure

The response to the voicemail has been pretty fantastic so far, and there’s probably no way that I’ll be able to take advantage of all the voicemails that have come in through a podcast alone, so I thought I&[...]
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The Old Girl: Vehicles as Characters in Your Game

 "She's not old, she's in her prime." I'm not going to lie to you gentle readers, I'm an inveterate gearhead. I love machines of all kinds, but vehicles especially turn my crank, as it were. Anything from a 50cc min[...]
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Take My Car For A Spin Around The Block

somewhat WoD related...My players and I are discussing the idea of sharing the mantle of Storyteller in our Changeling: The Lost chronicle. I think it might be a lot of fun to see what can be done with the campaign in th[...]
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i4e review

I’ve been meaning to post this review for awhile. At the end of last year I blogged about playing without my character sheet. In the comments, DM Ron suggested I check out a iPhone/iPod Touch program called i4e. It[...]
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A Hidden Gem

I played Hackmaster 4th edition, but I never served as GM.  HM4 is something of a bitter sweet memory to me, one that I haven't discussed to date.  I do plan on discussing some of my group's experience with th[...]
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Previews for RPGs (No, Not the Catalog)

Here's a nifty trick I tried based on advice in the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG: Previews of the next session! Now, DWAITAS is strong on genre emulation, and since it is based on a tv show, it recommends[...]
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The A-Team: A model for RPG campaigns?

Yesterday while watching  an episode of The A-Team on TV, it struck me. Wouldn’t The A-Team make a perfect model for a RPG campaign?  Let’s look at the basic premise, which is summed up pretty good by the voiceover[...]
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Playing it right

Well, I have hit a stone wall (or is that a duracrete wall?) in regards to the Star Wars Saga Theatres of War campaign. It’s been flagging for more than a while now, I was starting to worry and then I heard back f[...]
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Ask The GMs: Penetrating the veil of mystery

Why are mysteries so hard? Campaign Mastery was asked, I’m making a Hero System 5.5 campaign for some of my friends. I wanted to do a non-power game that was mystery based. First session went off fine, and I [...]
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The Good(?) Guys, Random Allies

Character creation in Cyberpunk 2020 includes rolling up a “lifepath” or series of events that has happened to your character before he started adventuring. Unless they’re very unlucky, players will usu[...]
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I Don’t Know Anything

Those poor fools. Playing in the Forgotten Realms at the height of TSR's Silver Age. Dolts! I went to bed reading GURPS 4e last night. When I got burned out on AD&D 2e I played GURPS 3e revised and thought I'd found [...]
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Where do you game at?

When we first started gaming in our current home, I would set up one card table to DM from, one to put my battle-map on and everyone else would sit on the couches and use TV trays. This set-up worked just fine, except it[...]
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Shorter Games are Cinematic Games

The Game Knights get together once a week (Friday or Saturday) for gaming from 8 pm to about 10-10:30 pm. Of course, it usually takes a little time for everyone to look over character sheets, grab some snacks and drinks,[...]
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Help Me With A Campaign Portfolio

The other day, I was struck by a brilliant idea. I’m running a modern game where corporations have a great deal of negative impact on the world around them. I decided to have our character creation session be run a[...]
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GURPS Mass Combat – Fief Manpower tables

Manpower is produced by a warlord's fief or province. They don't have a cost to raise because these are duties peasants and nobles owe the master of that realm. This can take many forms: Feudal obligations, Civic or Reli[...]
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I blame Wolfgang Baur!

Who is responsible for all of the following AWESOME? Personally, I blame Wolfgang Baur and his crew over at Kobold Quarterly. Now, allow me to explain. Yesterday, our friends over at Super Genius Games (SGG) announced a [...]
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Live The Dream: Building a Career in the Games Industry – Marcelo Figueroa – GamesU 2009

Marcelo Figueroa is a 17 year veteran of the games industry. In that time, he has held just about every position in field. Retail sales clerk, demo team member, author, game designer, talent agent and national sales mana[...]
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The Characterisation Puzzle: The Thumbnail Method

This is technique number 1 for getting inside your character’s heads. It’s something I was taught in a Graphic Design course that I completed back in 1992 – so here we are 18 years later, and it’[...]
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The opening crawl, the perfect campaign intro

As a Level 1 GM, I have not had the opportunity for much table time as a player. So I think I have witnessed three campaign intros at the most in-person, two done by experienced people. Everyone basically had the same so[...]
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March 2010 RPG Blog Carnival: How to be a Better GM?

Wow, time really flies and it's already March. I remember signing up to host the RPG Blog Carnival back sometime last year and now the RPG Blog Carnival is pitching their tents for the first time at the Questing GM.As fo[...]
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Social Combat

social combat in actionIn regards to story telling systems, a poster at RPG.net wrote, "Why do I want to spend several sessions engaging in nothing but social combat? That's what I do all day at work!"I had a nice chuckl[...]
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GURPS Mass Combat Cards

GURPS Mass Combat is a tool so that you can run a fun and exciting War Campaign.I've trying to run a war campaign for the longest time. I've made several attempts and there are just too many problems at times. I do admit[...]
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The Sandbox and Player Character Backgrounds

My post yesterday on structuring your sandbox has been making the rounds of other blogs. Like this one at Trollsmyth. This caught my eye.There’s been some talk about getting players “plugged in” to the campaign. [...]
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Mapping Outdoors: The dilemma continues…

Here is the second twisty little cave complex in the Caves of Chaos. Luckily the rest of the lairs are much easier to map, being much more traditional 10' corridor style dungeons.So do I just give this to the players on[...]
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World-Building 101: Watch your Language!

Anyone who has read Lord of the Rings has encountered the fictional elven tongues Tolkien created for Middle Earth. Anyone familiar with Star Trek has heard snippets of Klingon. Fans of Star Wars can more than likely r[...]
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Come see the Neoncon crew at Gen Con 2010!

I am proud to announce that Neoncon has been selected as part of the first class of Gen Con Marketing Fellows. Congratuations also go out to our fellow classmates, Wolfgang Baur and the crew of Kobold Quarterly. To get a[...]
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Worth More Than Gold

Fantasy games are a funny thing. Most English language games are based on a European-like setting and background. In many ways, we tend to have a romantic view of historic elements that are put in the setting. One such a[...]
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Are You Afraid of Hurting Your Characters?

24. Arguably one of the most popular television series of the last decade. The premise is simple, each one-hour episode depicts an actual hour in the main character’s life. That character is Jack Bauer and over the[...]
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Liege-Killer–Post-Apocalyptic Role-Playing Inspiration on Space Colonies

Liege-Killer by Christopher Hinz is an older novel, but still well-worth your time. Since this series of posts focuses on a post-apocalyptic campaign, the Earth is, of course, blown all to hell. However, rather than a st[...]
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Some structure for your Sandbox campaign

In this post at the Old Guy's RPG Blog Chgowiz talks about a difficult session he had as a DM. One comment caught my eye1. Make some defined missions available. Not everyone wants to go out and explore and just figure [...]
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Mapping Outdoors: What’s the best way?

I have worked the original module B2-Keep on the Borderlands, into my group's D&D3.5 game. The party are trying to find the lair of a White Dragon, which is ravaging the lands and cities held by their patron, Lord Le[...]
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The Hundred-Dollar RPG

In this post, I present a fairly detailed review of what I do and don't like about the 3rd Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play.You may or may not have seen the latest edition of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, the versio[...]
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Well done, my young apprentice

Every do often I talk about my own methods, but a lot of them tend to be of the game mechanics sort. It has been a fair while since I talked about what happens at the table. Or rather, what happens before we get to the [...]
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DMs Should Join Other Games

I think the best thing any Dungeon Master can to do improve his or her game is to join a game. You can learn a lot from other games and gamers. I find that I learn so much about how to improve my own DM’ing skills [...]
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World Building 101: Legends of Yore (and Mine)

A good campaign setting has a rich history, with plenty of legends and stories of past heroes and epic deeds, gods, monsters, and powerful magics. These stories can add atmosphere, give color to the fireside conversatio[...]
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Management and Role-playing II; Problems with Pure Evil Races

Continuing The use of the Art Critical Thinking in RPGs.1. Making High-Stakes Decisions - This is the introduction to the lecture and poses to the listener how people decision and how there are techniques that improve[...]
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Ask The GMs: Essential Game Master Skills

What are the essential skills of a GM? Loz is a frequent contributor to the comments here at CM. So when he submitted a question to Ask The GMs, we were inclined to pay close attention. Here’s what he had to [...]
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Barding it up around town

I’ve always thought Bards made cool characters in books, but implemented horribly in roleplaying (and most computer) games. The 4e PHB2 introduce a Bard class that doesn’t suck. We’ve had a Bard in my r[...]
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Pamphlet Prop

The last few posts have been background information for my campaign planning because I was inspired by something posted over at Held Action back in October about making pamphlets for players. It’s an absolutely bea[...]
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Regions Sizes in a setting

On the Swords & Wizardry forum here a question what asked on how size different realms on a map. This is my answerEstateFundamental unit of feudal societies this is typically 1,500 to 3,000 acres supporting a landowe[...]
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Playing the ‘bad guys’

So, consider this. You have a group of five guys. A pilot, a scout, a highly connected noble, a sniper and a natural leader, all Imperial stormtroopers. They begin their story on a dropship, being dropped off on some pla[...]
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Hating the sound of my voice…

Just a quick post to plug two things… I had the chance to join in on a discussion of the “Underdark” book over at “The Tome Show” podcast with the show’s host, Jeff Greiner and two add[...]
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February 2010 Blog Roundup: Choice Bits

I keep telling myself I’m going to do a weekly roundup of posts I like in the blogosphere, but I never get around to doing it. So here in no particular order, are ten of the many posts I bookmarked this past month.[...]
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Anatomy of a TPK, Addendum

I made a key dungeon mastering mistake during last week’s near total party kill in my Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition campaign.  I share it here as a warning to those who follow. As I’ve mentioned, I’m using Harl[...]
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