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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If you have run a game campaign for any period of time, it becomes apparent that the random encounter tables for your adventurers become stale-dated or dull. Even if there are variations by terrain, climate or civilization, the game-provided tables become repetitive. One solution to this...
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Ben Robbins, author of ars ludi, has an excellent post up about the two ways you can use crimes in your adventures. Specifically, it’s about the difference between crimes as plots, where the whole scenario revolves around the crime, and crimes as premises — an excuse to do something...
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Bill and the Gnome Punters wrote to me about a common GMing dilemma: Do you use PC tactics against the PCs — specifically, focusing attacks on a single target rather than spreading the love — or do you pull punches in combat? Bill ran into this situation with his group a little while...
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Every GM improvises, but not every GM is comfortable winging important encounters. Here’s one way to make running an improv encounter a breeze. During a session, your players take the game in an unexpected direction. The PCs are about to get involved in an encounter that you haven’t...
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If you’ve been gaming for long enough, you’ve seen plenty of campaign elements more than once: giant rats and skeletons in low-level D&D games, sinister corporate goons in cyberpunk scenarios and the like. When you first started playing, those things might have been pretty...
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Merry Christmas from Treasure Tables! Last year’s Christmas post was about the worst Dungeon Master ever; this year, it’s about action scenes. Over on ars ludi, Ben Robbins (of Lame Mage Productions) lays out the anatomy of an action scene. His approach involves a simple seven-part...
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I give you the amazing Perilous Cliff Road of Doom, as featured in Dangerous Roads of the World, Part 2. (Via kottke.) Not only is this road incredibly cool, but it fits into any genre — pulp, fantasy, horror, sci-fi, modern, espionage, supers… Seriously, I can’t think of a...
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I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of running a MechWarrior campaign and using BattleTech for in-game mech battles. The fact that the PCs are involved would put a different spin on the wargame aspect (and vice versa), and it sounds like fun. There are other RPG lines that also have (or...
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In the comments on Encounters: A Similar Formula , Ian Toltz of Asmor.com made a great comment outlining three broad types of encounter. His analysis is succinct and useful, and he was kind enough to let me turn his comment into a guest post. – – – – – If I may put...
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Hey you. Yeah, you. Do you know about Gnomecast 21? Why isn’t it in the archives? What are they hiding? If you value your safety… don’t go searching for Gnomecast 21…
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