Category: Role-playing

  • 30 Days of Game Mastering, Day Nine

    Have you met 30 Days of Game Mastering Challenge? No? Well please get acquainted… Player “homework”: what do you ask of your players before and between sessions? As you can guess from my previous post on world-building, I prefer to focus the world/campaign on the player characters. Like characters on a TV show, the action…

  • 30 Days of Game Mastering, Day Eight

    30 Days of Game Mastering Challenge, etcetera and so on. How do you prep for each session? I know there are GMs out there that maybe don’t do a lot of prep between sessions. I respect GMs that can really work on the fly, because I am not one of them. I’ve gotten better at…

  • 30 Days of Game Mastering, Day Seven

    30 Days of Game Mastering Challenge, yadda yadda yadda… How do you prep for the start of a campaign? Most of the Game Master prep I do at the start of a campaign was touched upon in yesterday’s post. To sum up, I heavily detail everything immediately around the party’s start location, because this is…

  • 30 Days of GMing, Day Six

    This is the 30 Days of Game Mastering Challenge, coming to you live! World-building: What’s your process? The Pathfinder RPG is about 70% of my gaming these days, so not a lot of world building involved. More like “world fleshing out” (a topic for another post). But when I do use my own campaign world, I…

  • 30Days of GMing, Day Five

    30 Days of Game Mastering continues! Stealing like an artist: what inspiration have you drawn from other games, books, movies, etc? It might be easier to list sources I haven’t used as inspiration. To the best of my knowledge I haven’t drawn on the Etruscans for anything, but I could be wrong. In seriousness, though,…

  • 30 Days of GMing, Day Four

    I feel like you guys should know what’s going on by now, so I’m just jumping right in. Do you use pre-published adventures or write your own? These days it’s about an 70/30 split between pre-published and the fruit of my own fevered brain. It has been many years since I have run a campaign…

  • 30 Days of GMing, Day Three

    Day three of 30 Days of GMing, and I’ll get to the question in a moment. I just want to take a moment to remind folks I am taking part in the Extra Life fundraiser this year. Along with a bunch of friends I am a member of Team Knifeshoes, and we’re raising money for…

  • 30 Days of Gamemastering

    No, I’m not GMing every day for 30 days. That would be amazing, but no. Instead, I’m taking part in the 30 Days of Gamemastering Challenge over at Triple Crit. Every day I’ll answer the GMing question of the day, and I’ll try to keep my answers concise. Since I’m a day late to the…

  • Brent’s Dragon

    Since I was a kid playing my first role-playing games, I thought about writing my own gaming material. And of course I did; I still have binders of stuff I’ve written for campaigns, seen by no one but me and the occasional player. But I always had the idea I could maybe write gaming material…

  • Review: Mythic Adventures

    I was a big fan of D&D 3.5, right to the end. Even when they were shotgun releasing to get product out the door before announcing 4.0, I liked most of the source books that came down. One of my biggest disappointments, though, was the Epic Rules system WotC put out for 3.5. While I…