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Category Archives: World Design


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Making Things Scary

Horror is not my particular genre of choice. I enjoy my sleep, and I dislike anything that might give me nightmares and keep me awake. Moreover, my style of GMing is to empower the players to tell their characters’ stories and allow the possibility of success in everything that they try.

But just like every other type of story, there is a time and place to make things scary. Characters can have powerful moments when they are helpless. The world can seem more real when it is twisted. And you really do find out who you are and what you are willing to sacrifice when death stalks the character that you have put 3 years of love and development into.

So for those of you that want to have some scary moments in your campaign, or a scary campaign as a whole, here are our 3 tips to make your roleplaying game scary.

Start With Normalcy

normal family

“Oh, Timmy.”

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How to Prepare Your Very First Tabletop RPG

One of the hardest places to start gaming is at the beginning. Our hobby is very intimidating from the outside, especially to people that really want to get in. There are so many systems, so many rules, and so much riding on that first adventure.

Today we are offering some advice for those of you that have never run a game before as a Game Master (or Dungeon Master or Beloved Master or Storyteller or Referee or whatever else you kids call it these days). We want to offer some practical advice, and a LOT of encouragement, to get you to try something new and include/make some great friends.

Please believe me, as someone who waited 10 years to finally cross the fence, the other side, that it is SO worth it. Tabletop RPGs are even more fun than they seem, and while not every minute of every campaign will be perfect the rewards far outweigh the fears. Hopefully the thoughts below can help you start gaming with your friends.

Why Write This Post?

I was recently looking at old YouTube blogs I had subscribed to, and in one of them the blogger said something that really hit home. She also thought that she and her friends would really enjoy getting into a tabletop rpg, but she had no idea where to begin. How could they get started?

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Adventure April: TimeStress: A Timetravel Fate Adventure

For all you Chrono Trigger and Doctor Who fans, here is a campaign starter for a time traveling adventure. We’ve talked about it, hinted at it, and touched on it long enough. Now let’s take a look at how to actually do it with an example you can pick up and use yourself!

The campaign is based on Fate Core, and there is a little bit of set up involved. We’ll walk you through all of that and offer some tips for character creation in your world building. The actual adventure brings everyone together and sets them off in the direction you choose for world building.

If you would rather just use this as a one shot to bring a lot of wacky people together from across time, just skip the next section and ignore the part about the “something more out there” at the end.

World Building a Timeline

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Yoda Teaches Us to Play RPGs

Jedi Muppet wisdom is easily applied to all areas of life, and roleplaying games are no exception. Today we are going to see what the wisest of the wise can teach us about the games we love to play.

Worry, do not. Translate everything he says, we will. Able to read it in normal sentence structures, you will be. Real, the wisdom is. Embrace it, you must. That nothing is lost in translation, we hope.

Don’t worry. We will translate everything he says. You will be able to read it in normal sentence structures. The wisdom is real. You must embrace it. We hope that nothing is lost in translation.

Things You Will See. Other Places.

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Plotting Campaign Plots

Did you get a new RPG book for Christmas? Maybe thinking of making a New Year’s resolution to run a great campaign or a character that you’ve been dreaming about? Have you been wanting to hit the ground running after the holidays pulled your game group apart for the last month or so?

January has a few good reasons for us as tabletop gamers to make plans for something new in our games, and so we thought it would be a great time to share a few thoughts in that direction. Today we are going to look at campaign plots, the overall theme for the series of adventures you want to play.

There are more themes than there are genres, so in an effort to be as helpful and useful as possible we will not be touching on system-specific mechanics. These plots will fit a variety of settings, and hopefully they will help get you and your group pushing in the right direction to plan for the game you all want to play next year.

Investigating the Lost Civilization

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Bringing a World to life: 5 easy steps

So you have a little adventure you want to run for a group. They find a village and spend the night. That night, the dead come out of their graves and walk into the nearby swamp. The party follows the dead people to a necromancer’s tower. They deal with the necromancer, and everyone gets experience points.
So does that description have anyone on the edge of their seats desperate to run that sort of adventure? Of course not. It is very short and very bland. Sure it gets the information across, but it is not exciting. And really, an adventure like this should be exciting!
More and more RPGs are coming out that encourage the players to participate in the story and the creation of the world. I love this direction our hobby is taking! Of course, that actually makes a GMs job even harder when it comes to bringing everyone’s world to life.
So today I’d like to share some tips that others have shared with me over the years about bringing your world to life.

1: Building the Foundation

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