Tag Archives: gm advice

A Taste of Something Different

This article about the Dying Earth RPG originally appeared on DyingEarth.com. The Dying Earth RPG as an alternative roleplaying game system by Lynne Hardy If you don’t know what a roleplaying game is, read this article about the Dying Earth RPG instead. Fantasy was the inspiration for the first roleplaying games, and amongst the inspirations for the […]

An Interesting Place to Visit

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 […]

See Page XX: Yes, But… Part Two (The Scenario)

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 […]

Getting Started with Horror Roleplaying

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 […]

Murder by Checklist

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 […]

A Little Goes a Long Way – Using Historical Settings in Roleplaying Games

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, […]

Playing to Lift: Making Characters Shine

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 […]

See Page XX: The History of No

A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws Previously on See Page XX, I talked about the difficulties we occasionally hear about when GMs who have trained themselves to say “no” come to the GUMSHOE system with those assumptions in mind. This time I’d like to look at how early roleplaying culture took on that […]

See Page XX: Improv and GUMSHOE Scenario Structure

A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws GUMSHOE core games present the GM with a default scenario structure you can use when creating your own mysteries to challenge your players. By following it you can ensure that the investigators have at least one, and preferably many, routes to solve the adventure’s key question, whether […]

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