Tag Archives: gm advice
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 […]
Mar
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
by Steve Dempsey Dreamhounds of Paris is a very rich game. The player characters, the surrealists, each have a detailed history. Paris, both in its mundane and magical incarnations, has locations, stories and conspiracies. And that’s even before you add in the Dreamlands and the rest of the Lovecraftian canon. As someone who runs improvised […]
by Jason Fryer “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them…” ~ The Naked City (1948) Be it police procedural, horror, or spy thriller, characters are integral to the GUMSHOE campaign, influencing and expanding the narrative with their personal stories. However, although ever-present, one vital character remains oft-forgotten […]
The Night’s Black Agents book is big, heavy and beautiful, but it can be intimidating to new GMs. The Night’s Black Agents game is a pulse-pounding thrill ride, pursued by vampires. How can we get from the big book to spy action, when the players are new, and you’ve never run NBA at a convention […]