Have you, or someone in your game group, always wanted to give GMing a shot, but haven’t yet taken the plunge? What if we told you that by the first week in February, you could be an honest-to-goodness GM—and it’ll be easy! January is New Gamemaster Month, and we’re joining our friends at Monte Cook […]
Tag Archives: gm advice
Following on from this article – the advice to use Investigative Abilities as a checklist for an adventure applies doubly to Yellow King games. Unlike, say, Night’s Black Agents or Esoterrorists, where the player characters are highly competent and well-rounded investigators, Yellow King characters tend to be unusually narrow in their range of backgrounds, especially […]
In the latest episode of their well-oiled podcast, Ken and Robin talk fitting your PCs into historical events, the spy career Anton LaVey made up for Robert W. Chambers, ironic horror of the early 80s, and automaton maker John Joseph Merlin.
For International GMs Day, Ken’s favorite GMing tip is very timely indeed. GUMSHOE is the groundbreaking investigative roleplaying system by Robin D. Laws that shifts the focus of play away from finding clues (or worse, not finding them), and toward interpreting clues, solving mysteries and moving the action forward. GUMSHOE powers many Pelgrane Press games, […]
This idea was suggested to me by the Chatty DM, although in doing due diligence I found that Rob already mentioned it in a “Rob says” sidebar in the 13th Age GM’s Screen & Resource Book. So, the first piece of useful, actionable advice in this article is “go read the Resource Book in detail, […]
Have you, or someone in your game group, always wanted to give GMing a shot, but haven’t yet taken the plunge? What if we told you that by the first week in February, you could be an honest-to-goodness GM—and it’ll be easy! January is New Gamemaster Month, and we’re joining our friends at Monte Cook […]
When running a most improvised scenario (either something as ambitious as the Dracula Dossier or just riffing off a paragraph or two of notes), One Useful Trick is to have a copy of the investigative ability list for your game to hand, and check off abilities as you call for them or the players use […]
The following article originally appeared in an earlier iteration of See Page XX in June 2008. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws The Trouble With Tasers Technology is ruining the storytelling business. Lately it seems like every new innovation of communications technology renders another classic plot device moot. GPS tracking, widespread closed circuit […]
This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws In Make It A Gimme I talked about looking for instances where the resolution system offered by the rules should be jettisoned in favor of an automatic result—in this case, a success for the player. This time […]
This post originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. A column on roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Like most creative endeavors, the GMing craft comes with its share of eternal conundrums. One classic example is the question of whether you carefully prepare adventures, or improvise them in response to player choices. Carefully prepared adventures […]