This article on the Dying Earth RPG originally appeared on DyingEarth.com between 2004 and 2007. What is the Dying Earth RPG? by Lynne Hardy The Dying Earth is a rich fantasy world, full of complex characters and detailed environs. Thus it presents itself as a perfect setting for a roleplaying game and indeed one has […]
Tag Archives: gm advice
This article originally appeared on DyingEarth.com, between 2004 and 2007. You can find part one here. A column about roleplaying By Robin D. Laws Last month we plundered the gilded halls of improv theory, appropriating for our own roleplaying purposes the “Yes, but” technique. GMs using this technique avoid answering player requests with a categorical […]
Are you a new GM looking to dip your toes into the horror genre? Are you hoping to nudge someone into running a scary game for you? As part of their Adventure Goddess program, which encourages women to take the GM’s chair, Carolyn Noe of Superheroines Etc organized this virtual panel featuring Kenneth Hite, Robin […]
One of the Things I Always Say is that a GUMSHOE investigative ability list is basically a list of questions the players can ask the GM – but it’s also a useful list of questions to ask yourself when writing an adventure. Certainly, when I initially conceive of an adventure, I’ll come up with three […]
By Conrad Kinch I was a seven year old Kinch when I got my first gaming book. It was “Redcoats & Minutemen: The American War of Independence” by Jon Sutherland, a choose-your-own adventure book from a little-known series called Real Life Gamebooks. My parents thought fantasy was a bit frivolous, but the 18th century was alright, […]
by Elina Gouliou The “Play to Lift” Technique There are some game sessions where all the characters shine and the action is awesome and cinematic. I thought it was a matter of luck or circumstance, until I encountered the Play to Lift technique and realised that it is often the result of all the players […]
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 […]
A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Having appeared on GM advice panels for lots of years, I’m always on the alert for changes in the types of questions audience members put forward. These can vary quite a bit depending on the convention. An expensive destination show like Gen Con, or one directed to […]
In GUMSHOE,when your character needs to do something tricky and where randomness adds tension, you roll a d6, add points you spend from an Ability pool, and if you make the Difficulty number, you succeed. The number of points you spend on a test can represent the effort a character is making, but usually they […]