In Hillfolk the GM acts as the custodian of the overall narrative. You mostly do this when calling your own scenes. You use these to heighten tensions, add new fresh developments, and picking up previous ones that got dropped along the way. Less evidently, you can also intervene during player scenes. This requires utmost subtlety. […]
In the latest episode of their life-giving podcast, Ken and Robin talk photosynthetic aliens, cartographic books, lightning round and nukes on Mars.
Resources for Seven Wonders Blank character sheet for Before the Storm (A4 format) Blank character sheet for Before the Storm (US letter format) Blank setting sheet for Before the Storm (A4 format) Blank setting sheet for Before the Storm (US letter format) Blank character sheet for Heroes of the Hearth (A4 format) Blank character sheet for Heroes of the Hearth (US […]
by Becky Annison It all started with Fiasco, a game by Jason Morningstar. Until then I’d loved and played many traditional games but nothing like Fiasco. It had no GM, required no pre-game prep and everyone created bits of the world and story. I’d never see anything like it before! The idea of no prep […]
Can’t find the specific issue of Ken Writes About Stuff you’re looking for, or keen to make sure you’ve got all the GUMSHOE Zooms? Here’s the complete list of all the individual issues, which you can buy in the webstore. Alchemy. (Volume 3) Chemistry or magic? Madness or miracles? Poison or power? Blend all those elements […]
I ran two Trail of Cthulhu sessions over the weekend (a stealth proof-of-concept of a possible upcoming setting). At a three or four hour convention game, the pressure of time means every scene has to count. There’s little time for backtracking or encounters that don’t go anywhere, and that pressure’s compounded if you’ve got a […]
by Ian Chilvers Download Ian’s 13th Age encounter manager here. A lot of my time used in the preparation of 13th Age sessions is in the creation of encounters. Particularly in the specifics of balancing (or deliberate unbalancing) of encounters to a party’s level. 13th Age has a reasonably simple method for calculating an encounter’s […]
There is so much GUMSHOE goodness coming up this year in this, our tenth anniversary, that I offer a short retrospective later. But January is a 13th Age month, and we kick off the year with a bunch of new 13th Age releases. Rakshashas & Reavers is the first issue of the new 13th Age Monthly […]
The weather’s been miserable for the last few weeks, so I’ve been cheering myself up with virtual holidays in the sunny foreign climes of the Dragon Empire, going through the maps of the first of our Battle Scenes book, High Magic & Low Cunning: Battle Scenes for Five Icons, and its accompanying map folio, which […]