How do you run better games? You deliver more immersive stories. The Recipe Rising Tension Invoking a Variety of the Five Senses A Risk Worth Putting It All on the Line For Delegating to the Dice In the time honored tradition of tabletop role-playing games, the outcomes of...
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You already imagine colorful characters inhabiting stunning settings, you bring them to life with your words. You already plot ambitious adventures and direct the pacing of play to precise peaks. You do this because you love to run games and create content, and you’re so much better at it than you...
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Want to write better adventures? Want to prep more efficiently? Sick of players skipping all of your best content? Prep Smarter, Not Harder, with Encounter Theory Encounter Theory: The Adventure Design Workbook is a fresh way to look at adventure design by Ben Riggs, the voice of the...
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I’ve always been a fan of spiral notebooks for GMing notes, particularly spiral notebooks with perforated pages and durable covers. But there’s always one problem with them: When you stick them in a bag of gaming books, the spines have a tendency to get smooshed. Enter the Five Star...
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I picked up a copy of Weird Las Vegas and Nevada for my upcoming Mage: The Awakening Sin City chronicle, and it turned out to be a great buy. It’s full of supernatural, bizarre and otherwise offbeat stuff about Vegas and Nevada, which is perfect for a World of Darkness game. They publish a...
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Back when I was in high school, four-panel GMing screens — a huge improvement over three-panel screens — seemed to be pretty rare (my first was the one for Call of Cthulhu 5th Edition). Six or seven years ago, the only way to get a hardback screen (one with panels like the covers of a...
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I picked up Spirit of the Century at this year’s GenCon, in part because I enjoy pulp games but mainly because I’d heard that it was full of good GMing advice. And so far, it is — and not just for Spirit, or even just for pulp games. It offers good foundation-level tips on...
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Following on the heels of yesterday’s post about Treasure Tables at GenCon, I’d like to share some of the cool stuff for GMs I saw (and bought!) at this year’s GenCon. (Pictured here is Kenzer & Company’s limited edition B.A. Felton bust (from “Knights of the...
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Three great links from the GMing community: • Behind the Screen: Listen to your players…: Dante of the new site Stupid Ranger posted this little gem about paying attention to what your players say at the table. Sounds obvious, right? Well, it is — but in a good way. Since getting...
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Way back in 1992, Dragon Magazine #184 featured an article by C.M. Cline entitled “The 7-Sentence NPC,” and it’s by far one of the best GMing tools I’ve ever used. I mentioned it in 2005’s Vibrant NPCs here on TT, but I thought it deserved a post of its own. The basic...
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