This past weekend I was in beautiful Regina, Saskatchewan for a wedding. While the bride entertained hosted a girls night out for female out-of-town guests, I was paired with a conveniently rounded-up game group for a BBQ and an RPG session. As if I planned it that way, Skulduggery serves perfectly for this sort of […]
A review of Watchers in the Sky, courtesy of Matthew Pook.
Robin discusses Skulduggery on The Game’s the Thing podcast.
The ENnie award nominations are in. Armitage Files has been nominated for best adventure, with Shadows over Filmland taking an honourable mention. And Jérome gets a richly deserved nod for his cover artwork on Rough Magicks. Last July in Page XX, Jérome let us into the secrets of his photomontage technique in creating this amazing […]
Over the last couple of installments (here and here) I discussed structure as something that mostly takes care of itself if you manage the dramatic rhythms of your roleplaying session on a beat-by-beat basis. Now it’s time to break that down a bit. Our first step is to nail down what we mean by a […]
Last time I talked about allowing the structure of a session or campaign to arise organically, as opposed to imposing it in advance. Let’s drill deeper into that idea with some techniques and examples. Organic structures are built on disparate story threads that eventually converge. The best source of story threads are your players. These […]
When we elect to play RPGs in story-driven mode, we have an array of different narrative forms to draw inspiration from. All of them, from drama to fiction to comic books and movies, offer different lessons. Like magpies, we can steal the most applicable ideas and techniques from each form. By synthesizing these with techniques […]
A set of Guidelines for running mysteries in the style of Robert van Gulik’s “Judge Dee” stories using the Trail of Cthulhu rules The Judge Dee stories are a series of mystery novels and short stories written in the 1950’s and 1960’s by Dutch diplomat and Sinophile Robert van Gulik. Based on traditional Chinese stories […]
Ralf Schemmann produced this schematic map, a snap shot really, of the translight corridors connecting The Bleed, the “region” of space where the PCs – lasers – undertake their contracts in the Ashen Stars game. From Ashen Stars: Translight corridors are not fixed in space. They orbit through the universe, just as the rest of […]