A Sense Of Location

Location is one of those things that is easy to lose track of when playing in a table top RPG. So easy in fact that I know there are lots of folks out there, players and gms, who often don't even really bother with it be[...]
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Flashback: Character Death

First, I apologize for how late this is going up. Something about Mondays just makes me miss the update time. I'll have to work on that. On the plus side though, I did have a good weekend. The game on Saturday that [...]
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Combat Avoidance: Why Won’t They Fight?

As I admitted in the opening post for this month’s RPG Blog Carnival (still open; post away!), I’m notorious for my combat avoidance; if there’s a way to get out of a fight, I will find it, and I’[...]
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Familiar but not: GMing someone else’s setting, with them as a player

So I am quite a fan of the ConstantCon that Zak spawned all those months ago, which now sits in the good hands of dozens of GM's.I've had chances to be in many different settings:  from Urutsk, to Wessex, The D[...]
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Creighton’s Corner: Starting a New Campaign

There are two basic ways you can start a campaign. Both are valid and both have a number of pros and cons. As always, the one you pick depends on your personal preferences and those of your players. Method 1: Choose a mo[...]
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Ancient Scroll’s Secret Room: Roleplaying Sacrifice

This past week was tough with a lot of real work in my real job, not leaving much space for RPGs. Once I told my friend we were born in the wrong time. With few orcs left to hunt, dragons even more rare, and princesses&#[...]
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Friday Knight News – Gaming Edition: 6-APR-2012

Welcome to another installment of weekly link love here at Game Knight Reviews. I managed to go a little overboard collecting links this week since my 5/week posting schedule has gone awry in an attempt to avoid burning [...]
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What Is Fair?

let's just wrap up the content discussions for this week with another problem I'm currently facing as a GM. See, I'm in kind of a tight bind as I work on the prep for my Deathwatch game this Saturday. The PCs have taken [...]
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Magic Weapons

Depending on your game, and the level of magic in your game for some of those games, your approach to magic weapons is going to change. For some games a +1 magic sword is something that every adventurer should have at le[...]
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Game Styles: The Supernatural

Every GM has a type of game that they favor and are really good at running. For some of us, we excel at running narrative epics where the PCs become, or are supposed to become, larger than life heroes whose songs will be[...]
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Supplement Review: Hand Drawn Cities: Volume 1 by Alyssa Faden from Torn World

Many times I’ve mentioned my fascination for maps. There’s something about not only gaining perspective about places new and old, but learning from the point of view of the cartographer who drew those maps. W[...]
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Friday Knight News – Gaming Edition: 30-MAR-2012

First thing I have to say is that I’m sorry this issue is a bit light (but only a little) on content. I’m exhausted after several days at a software conference and I haven’t had time to peruse the usual[...]
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NPC Tracking

Apologies for how late this is going up but, amusingly enough, my time for writing the blog yesterday was used up by game prep and then I had an early night due to not feeling the greatest. All that said, today will hope[...]
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Game Review: Nights of the Crusades by MJ Alishah from Aetheric Dreams

Occasionally I get the opportunity to review something that is at once both familiar and completely new. There’s nothing wrong with variations on a theme, but it’s nice to see a fresh take on roleplaying that[...]
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Adventure Review: The Tribute (PFRPG) by Carl Bussler from Timeless Adventures

Don’t you just love double-edged swords? You can swing them this way or that way and they do a lot of damage in the hands of someone who can swing them effectively. Unfortunately, there’s a downside… Yo[...]
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Making Your Villain’s Plan

Over the last 6-8 months I've killed about 3-4 different "big" writing projects because they stalled out. They all stalled out for different specific reason, but when I looked back at them recently I noticed that they al[...]
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Creighton’s Corner: What’s A Campaign Anyway?

Last time we talked about taking a moment to think about what you and your players want to get out of a game. Armed with this knowledge, the GM can start to think about what kind of campaign to actually run. A campaign c[...]
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Ancient Scroll’s Secret Room: Oh peaceful village, oh village of joy…

Today I want to share some thoughts about playing with PCs in a single location. Most fantasy adventures and campaigns are designed as a never-ending journey & quest pursuit. There are only a few RPGs (that I know) [...]
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Friday Knight News – Gaming Edition: 23-MAR-2012

Another week buried in Java code. But I did get some gaming in last Sunday thanks to Jason, Mark, Jonathan, Ben, and Ben! Sure, we were stuck in a sewer for the majority of the evening, but hey… it was a very nice [...]
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Publisher Interview: Christopher Merwin of BlackStar Games

Back in October 2011, I caught wind of the Shadowlands Epic Fantasy Sci-Fi Mashup project at Kickstarter. When I checked out the project page, I was impressed by the art, the descriptions, and most of all the new approa[...]
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The Gassy Gnoll: Flea Tinted Glasses

The Gassy Gnoll had his yearly flea dip this week and had an odd thought while gagging on the cloud of dust… How does a flea see the world? A shorter life, plus the occasional killer blizzard, frequent earthquakes,[...]
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Don’t Change The Character, Change The Story

This is part of a 2 part series. This part, the first part, is addressed to the GMs of the world and is to address something I've seen a lot of new GMs do when trying to get their games going. Tomorrow's entry will be to[...]
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GM Essentials: How to keep a handle on clues, communication and collateral damage.

Regulating the flow of information can be one of the most difficult parts of running a game. Give the party too much information, and you’ll spoil the ending for the clever players or risk entire portions of your p[...]
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Suddenly Serious

A lot of grim, dark, and horrific stuff can get glossed over at the game table. Sure, we all joke about the Paladin obliterating that ork chieftain with his smite, but the actual visual related to that can be gruesome. I[...]
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Adventure Review: Shadowed Keep on the Borderland by Creighton Broadhurst and Martin Tideswell for Raging Swan Press

Sometimes all you need to kick off a new campaign is a good adventure. Something with some twists and turns, well-defined encounters, and a path that your players can stray from when they need to wander. Though the occas[...]
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When Even the Player Doesn’t Know What’s Wrong

Not every character catches on with the player; I think it’s safe to say we all know what it’s like to play a character who just isn’t fun, whether that’s not fun yet, no longer fun, or never that[...]
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Creighton’s Corner: Know Your Players

So you’re a GM thinking about starting a new campaign. No doubt, you’ve got some cool ideas and are champing at the bit to get started, but how do you know your players will enjoy what you’ve planned? Better yet, w[...]
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Ancient Scroll’s Secret Room: One Bad Hand (Open-ended Adventure Seed)

(Editor’s Note: Robert offers us something a little different this week with an adventure seed that could be used for a modern horror setting…) Sometimes all it takes for a murder is a bad hand of poker…[...]
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Friday Knight News, Gaming Edition: 16-MAR-2012

What a week! But on the plus side, tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day! I know this may not mean much to a lot of people, but it’s my second favorite holiday behind Thanksgiving. I not only get to cook (the Crock P[...]
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GM vs. Players: Who Owns What?

Ownership is a funny thing when it comes to RPGs. There was a time (the 90s is when I saw it the most) where the act of touching another man's dice was worthy of a beating that the toucher would be seen as to blame for. [...]
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Filling In The Gaps Of PC Back Story

I've been doing a lot of self assessment lately, trying to find things I can improve upon and things that I genuinely like about my GMing style, and one of the things I came across as being a bit too vague is something I[...]
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Serious Business

Most of us have seen something that qualifies as Serious Business. It’s not going to change the world, it’s not life or death, it might not even seem like anything more than a simple pastime, but to the peopl[...]
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Victory Does Not Mean Total Victory

RPGs are funny things sometimes. In fact, they can be downright frustrating at times. See, we all come together to tell a story, play a game, and have some fun. However, that isn't always what happens. Misperceptions can[...]
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Adventure Review: BP3: The Prophecy Revealed (PFRPG) from Jeff Gupton and Blackbyrne Publishing

When we last left our heroes in the Dark Veil campaign from Blackbyrne Publishing, they were exploring the town of Gull’s Port in BP2: The Manor of Deceit. Now, in BP3: The Prophecy Revealed by Jeff Gupton, the PCs[...]
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The Problems and Promises of Real-World Settings

When we’re creating our stories, or choosing our game systems/settings, we’re generally given a choice: create a world of our own/use a fictional setting that’s already there, or use a variation on the [...]
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Ancient Scroll’s Secret Room: High School… Horror!

Today I’d like to share some adventure ideas with you. Something that might even inspire you to run a modern horror adventure in… high school. Last weekend I missed writing a Saturday column (Sorry, Fitz!) be[...]
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Friday Knight News – Gaming Edition: 9-MAR-2012

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of Friday finally arriving! Unfortunately at my house, that also means that the Spring season of soccer is gonig to start and I’m going to be spending lots of time on a socc[...]
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Adventure Review: BP2: The Manor of Deceit (PFRPG) from Jeff Gupton and Blackbyrne Publishing

A couple of days ago I took a look at the adventure BP1: The Hidden Current from Jeff Gupton and Blackbyrne Publishing and noted a few issues with page layout and art choices. Today, I’m happy to say that the secon[...]
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A Monument To Their Sins

Not 100% sure where today's post is going as of the time of writing. I have an idea for what I want to talk about, and I guess we're going to see where it goes. Sorry if it comes off as rambly or ranty, but it will be wh[...]
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How Much Agency Do You Give?

This is something I've been thinking about a lot in relation to my own games. The question is simple, and right up there in the topic. The question comes down to how much control do you give to your players? Does it chan[...]
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Things You Might Want To Know When Planning An Assassination

Let’s face it, assassins are ubiquitous; you have to work at it to find a genre in which they aren’t hiding behind a post somewhere. And since they pop up in a lot of plots, it’s important to know how t[...]
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Adventure Review: BP1: The Hidden Current(PFRPG) from Jeff Gupton and Blackbyrne Publishing

Not every product is perfect. And, like a lot of GMs, I suspect that I am willing to overlook certain issues with a product if it meets my needs. But in my role as a reviewer, I want to make sure that I touch on both the[...]
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Artifacts of Anticlimax

It might have been played up just a bit too much in order to provide motivation. Or maybe it’s to justify the fact that everybody with a name, a backstory and/or an even remotely solid set of stats seems to want to[...]
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Ending A Story

this being the release day of Mass Effect 3, I figured I'd do something small about what you might want to look for as you end your story. Hilariously, and by pure chance, this post coming out on time and on the actual d[...]
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Game Review: The Shotgun Diaries: A Zombie Survival Roleplaying Game by John Wick

Yes, The Shotgun Diaries is an older game, written back in 2009. Yes, it’s probably been reviewed a hundred times before. But I’ve had it in my queue for a while and decided to check it out. At a mere 16 page[...]
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The GM Is A Player

I'm going to be upfront. This blog post was inspired by this post from The Action Point. In the post the writer makes a lot of good points. They do, however, forget one key point. Or at least, that is how it seems to me.[...]
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DIY Digital D&D (Guest Post by Angela Taylor)

Computers make D&D a whole lot smoother, but if you don’t want to pay through the nose every month for D&D Insider, you’ll have to do some preparation on your own. Here are a few must-have tools for DIY D&#[...]
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Friday Knight News – Gaming Edition: 2-MAR-2012

February is short, but where did it go? March zipped in under the radar and I wasn’t ready for it. Yet, here it is! Sorry about only one review this week, but it’s looking like next week we’ll shoot for[...]
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Appearances

How much thought do you give to the appearance of your table top character? I mean, sure, everyone gives at least some thought to it. The basic physical descriptors are on most character sheets I've seen: height, weight,[...]
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What Do You Like About Char Gen?

Simple and small post for today. I don't have much to talk about, but I am intrigued about a comment that Rob Donahue made on twitter today.The topic being discussed was character creation in the new Marvel Heroic RPG. A[...]
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