New Year, New Game (NYNG for short) is a new Gnome Stew venture — an annual challenge to GMs all over the world: Run a new game this year.

New Year, New Game is an idea that we hope will catch on with gamers all over the world, much like GM’s Day did (it’s celebrated on March 4th every year). It has a simple mission:

To inspire game masters to run at least one new game each year, because trying new games broadens your horizons, challenges your skills as a GM, and can deepen your enjoyment of gaming as a hobby.

That can mean a new RPG, a new campaign, or both. (A new RPG needn’t be newly published, just new to you.) It doesn’t matter what you play, or what new game or games you decide to try — we just want you to have fun gaming!

The Contest

Entering is simple: Once you know what you want to run this year, tell us about it in the comment section of this article!

In order to ensure that NYNG challenge entries are useful and inspiring for as many GMs as possible, there are a few guidelines you’ll need to follow.

Entry Guidelines

Think of your entry as a pitch for the game you want to run, something akin to an elevator pitch. Why should your players be as excited about this game as you are? What do you need to tell someone who knows nothing about your idea beforehand in order to pique their interest?

To be eligible to win the contest, entries must be 200-400 words long, and should address the following:

• What the game is about
• Why you’re excited about running it
• What system you want to use, and why
• What challenges running this game might involve

That’s all there is to it! This isn’t a formal process, and we hope you’ll find that having these elements to focus on will help you hone your idea into something that may surprise you, and which makes you want to run your game even more.

To make this even easier, one of our sponsors, Tabletop Adventures, is offering two of their products at 25% off for the duration of the contest: Against the Darkness, their Vatican horror RPG, and Halls of Horror, which offers 150 creepy descriptions for modern games.

…and another of our sponsors, DriveThruRPG, is running their annual New Year, New Game sale: 20+ RPGs that cost less than $12 in PDF.

GRAND PRIZE

We reached out to several companies we thought might like to sponsor this contest, and I’m proud to be able to offer one hell of a grand prize package thanks to our four sponsors: DriveThruRPG, Engine Publishing, Obsidian Portal, and Tabletop Adventures. The grand prize will be awarded to our single favorite NYNG challenge entry, and it’s worth over $150.

Here’s what’s in the grand prize package:

DriveThruRPG

Courtesy of DriveThruRPG, a $60 gift DriveThruRPG certificate! This is perfect for picking up the new game to run along with a few supplements — sixty bucks buys a lot of PDFs! DTRPG offers thousands and thousand of products for immediate download, and it’s my favorite place to buy PDFs. They make it easy to find what you need and their customer service is excellent.

Engine Publishing

From Engine Publishing, print and PDF copies of Gnome Stew’s two books for GMs: Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots and Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs (including free worldwide shipping), a $55.95 value. Both books are aimed straight at GMs, and both can save you prep time while giving you plenty of ideas to spur your creativity.

Obsidian Portal

From Obsidian Portal, a 1-year paid Ascendant membership to Obsidian Portal (a $40 value)! Ascendant members get access to features that aren’t available to free accounts, and as a GM you’ll be able to add your whole group to your campaign. I’ve used OP for over a year, and I highly recommend to any GM who wants to be a bit more organized without doing any extra work.

Tabletop Adventures

Courtesy of Tabletop Adventures, any three Tabletop Adventures PDFs (or any one product bundle) from DriveThruRPG or RPGNow!) (value varies)! TTA makes products for the harried game master, and virtually everything they sell is designed to aid you in running a more vibrant campaign of any genre, from decks of names to one-page dungeons.

SECOND PRIZE

We’re doing something a bit different for this contest: awarding additional prizes if we get enough contest entries. We want the first annual NYNG challenge to be a success, and that means having enough game ideas that GMs who browse NewYearNewGame.com will have plenty of inspiration.

If there are at least 50 entries, we’ll award a second prize:

• A $30 DriveThruRPG gift certificate, courtesy of DriveThruRPG
• PDF copies of Eureka and Masks from Engine Publishing (a $26.95 value)
• A 6-month Ascendant membership on Obsidian Portal, courtesy of Obsidian Portal (a $25 value)
• Any two Tabletop Adventures PDFs from DTRPG/RPGN! (value varies), courtesy of Tabletop Adventures

THIRD PRIZE

If we receive 100 or more entries, we’ll also award a third prize:

• A $15 DriveThruRPG gift certificate, courtesy of DriveThruRPG
• A PDF copy of Eureka or Masks from Engine Publishing (a $16.95 value)
• A 1-month Ascendant membership on Obsidian Portal, courtesy of Obsidian Portal (a $5 value)
• Any single Tabletop Adventures PDF from DTRPG/RPGN! (value varies), courtesy of Tabletop Adventures

So if, for example, 62 GMs enter the contest, we’ll select our favorite and second-favorite entries and award the grand and second prizes, but not the third prize (because there weren’t 100+ entries).

How to Win

The authors of Gnome Stew will judge all entries based solely on quality, without regard for any other factors. We’re looking for NYNG challenge entries that make us want to play your game, that grab us and won’t let go, that inspire and intrigue us, and which follow the guidelines above.

“Quality” is entirely subjective, and may be partially or entirety determined by the gnomes’ blood sugar levels, sleep deprivation, caffeine-induced psychosis, fascination with internet memes, or overindulgence in bad action movies. In other ways, don’t take this too seriously — we’re just a bunch of GMs who want to run a contest for GMs.

The Deadline

This contest will run until 10:00 pm Mountain Daylight Time on January 23, 2012. We’ll announce the winner after we’ve had time to read and judge your entries.

The Small Print

You’ll need to be a member of Gnome Stew to enter this contest (because only members can comment). Becoming one is quick and simple. One entry per person, and you can only win one prize. As always, authors of Gnome Stew are not eligible to enter this contest (although we may post game ideas of our own just to share them).

Additionally, by entering this contest you grant both GnomeStew.com and NewYearNewGame.com the unlimited, non-exclusive right to post your entry there in perpetuity. In other words, your entry can remain online here on the Stew and on NewYearNewGame.com forever, but you own the rights and can do anything else you like with it.

A Tale of Two NYNGs

To my great embarrassment, I found out that DriveThruRPG not only runs a New Year, New Game sale, but they’ve been running it for three years!

We were unaware of DTRPG’s annual sale when we launched this website and our NYNG challenge, but I still feel like a huge dork for not knowing about it. Had I known, I would have talked to Sean P. Fannon over at DTRPG before launching our initiative.

Sean is a great guy, and we’ve spoken about this now. Not only is all well, but DTRPG is one of the sponsors of our NYNG challenge. I chalk this up to great minds thinking alike, and so does Sean.

Their sale runs through 1/13 and features over 20 RPGs that cost $12 or less — a great way to snag a new game for the new year.

Do You Accept Our Challenge?

Thanks for reading and for checking out NewYearNewGame.com. If you like this contest, want to see more entries, or know a GM who might enjoy trying a new game this year, spread the word!

I hope you’ll take us up on this challenge, and I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

As part of our first annual New Year, New Game challenge, we’re also running our first-ever blog carnival!

This is separate from the NYNG contest, although the timeframe is the same and folks are welcome to both enter the contest and take part in the blog carnival.

A blog carnival is an event that features multiple blogs contributing posts on the same broad topic, in this case posts about running a new game. We’ll be linking to NYNG posts throughout the challenge, and then the day after it ends we’ll post a wrap-up that links to all of them.

How to Take Part

If you write or contribute an RPG blog or website and you’d like to join this carnival, here’s the scoop:

• Anytime between now and January 23rd, 2012, publish a post about running a new game. It can be GMing advice, tips based on past experience, a passionate wall of text about a game you want to run, or anything else that fits the topic of running a new game.
• Include a link to this article and to NewYearNewGame.com in your post. If you like, you can use this text verbatim: “This post was written for the first annual New Year, New Game blog carnival hosted by Gnome Stew as part of the 2012 New Year, New Game challenge.”
• When your post goes live, email me directly (martin gnomestew com) so that I can link to it on the front page, include it in our carnival roundup article, link to it from NewYearNewGame.com, and promote it on Google+. We want the bloggers who join this carnival to get as much exposure as possible!

The carnival post on Gnome Stew, including links to all posts contributed to the carnival, will go up on January 24th, 2012, the day after the contest ends.

If you have any questions, fire away in the comments.

Or better yet, a challenge that’s also a contest where you can win cool things?

Or even better still, a challenge that’s also a contest and our first-ever blog carnival?

The first stop on that train to awesomesauce is our latest project, New Year, New Game (NYNG for short).

NYNG is a challenge to GMs all over the world: Run a new game this year. “New game” can mean a new-to-you (not necessarily newly published) RPG, a new campaign, or both.

And NYNG has a mission:

To inspire game masters to run at least one new game each year, because trying new games broadens your horizons, challenges your skills as a GM, and can deepen your enjoyment of gaming as a hobby.

The contest will open January 9, as will the blog carnival, and more details about both will be revealed at that time. What I can say now is that in addition to the Engine Publishing books we’re offering as prizes, we’ve already signed on two awesome sponsors: DriveThruRPG and Obsidian Portal. The grand prize is already worth over $160, and may go up from there.

In the meantime, we hope you’ll check out NYNG — and start thinking about your entry. The full scoop on NYNG is here, and the guidelines for the contest (the full version of which will be posted here on the Stew on January 9) are also available.

Whether you do more gaming or less over the holidays, whether your stocking is full of dice or coal, and whether you celebrate Christmas or another holiday, we wish you and yours the very best and a very happy new year.

20th-level necromancers have determined that approximately 40% of all gnomes turn into dust when exposed to a camera, so here are 6/10 of the Gnome Stew crew celebrating the holidays this year. That technically makes this like some kind of bi-monthly calendar, IE not a very useful one.

First up is John Arcadian, who comes from the Calvin and Hobbes school of snowman construction:

Followed by Don Mappin and his family, who are so festive that I need to go drink some eggnog RIGHT NOW:

And Martin Ralya and his family. The Mappins used up all the red in their photo, so we had to settle for black:

Kurt “Telas” Schneider and his family in their adorable PJs:

Troy Taylor and his wife posing by their Christmas village (large enough to hold miniatures, perhaps?):

And DNAphil and his son, closing out the year Vecchione style:

Merry Christmas from the gnomes!

Kris “Santa” Sinterklaas is many things. Among them is an international criminal mastermind, kept alive on a life-extending alchemical mixture. For centuries he has schemed to bring the world under his jolly boots of doom, earning the trust and admiration of people the world over so that none would suspect until it was too late.

Through AURORA (Arctic United Resistance Of Recognized Authority), he sends his elves out into the world to carry out his means of achieving and maintain the finance of his operation, namely counterfeiting of patented and trademarked material.

As special agents of the World Intellectual Property Organization, charters under top-secret provisions of the Berne Convention, you have been tasked with bringing down Sinterklaas’s elven crime ring before he can amass enough of a fortune through his knockoff goods that he can buy sufficient influence to guide United States policy and with it the reluctant cooperation of the rest of the world.

The players will encounter Santa’s minions in a transport hub in a small town in Germany, an undersea logistics center in the ruins of Atlantis, a candy cane-styled space station for distribution of production materiel, and a bleeding-edge (especially for the PCs!) high-tech factory in the jungles of South America before following the trail to Santa’s lair in Egypt. What, you think he’d be in a place as obvious as the North Pole?

“Do you expect us to talk?”

“No, Agent Krampus. I expect you to jingle all the way… to Hell!

The twist of Santa’s lair being in Egypt is what sold me on this being the kind of game that I want to run for my group around the holidays. Just imagine the climactic final struggle as Sinterklaas and the PCs duke it out on the back of the sphinx while the peak of the Great Pyramid slowly opens to reveal Santa’s doomsday weapon that will plunge the entire world into a new ice age!

I’m telling you that the gift of this game concept is a gamer geek’s Christmas miracle! *Sniff!* I think my heart just grew three sizes! I am still keeping all of the roast beast though…

Congratulations ManiacClown! You will be receiving an email for your $25 Drive Thru RPG gift certificate as soon as I get your email address from the Gnome-in-Chief!

Please join me in congratulating ManiacClown by leaving a comment below, and I wish you all a joyous holiday season!

For the novice gamemaster, designing a level of a dungeon can be a daunting, yet rewarding, task.

Keep in mind, a good dungeon crawl should contain a variety of elements.

There should be something to challenge each party member’s specialty ability or skill set, as well as something to amaze, to amuse, to frighten and  perhaps something it would be best to evade or avoid.

Above all, though, is the big room. Or should I say, The Big Room.

This is the centerpiece of the dungeon level. It often is where the PCs encounter the big bad evil dude, dudette or monster. It can be — but not necessarily is — the climatic point of the adventure. Which means, hopefully, the Big Reward is somewhere nearby.

It’s the place where the clautrophibic atmosphere of the dungeon opens up into a chamber of vast wonders. It is daunting in size and scope. It also’s the place where distance becomes a factor and creatures (or constructs or mechanisms) of great size can encountered.

And here’s the fun part:

This is where the GM gets to “think big.” You want something outlandish? You want the proverbial “sharks with frikkin’ lasers on their heads” moment? This is where it goes.

You want evil dwarves guarding a decaying stone bridge over a flow of lava — while harpies circle overhead dive bombing each time you try to cross? You put it here.

You want a thousands lit torches revealing the stone coffins of a hundred mummy kings arrayed before an altar to an evil god presided over by a lich king? As good as spot as any.

You want a gladitorial arena featuring a death-defying obstacle course of pendulums, traps and pits? (Guarded by a host of minotaur centurians, of course). Blood on the sands, indeed.

Let yourself think big. Go wild. You know that special monster you always wanted to run but never really could find a reason to fit it in? It goes here (right along side the elder red dragon and its pile o’ stuff).

Often on Gnome Stew we talk about restraint, about keeping things manageable. We’ve got advice on plot points and structure and NPCs written for a specific purpose. We address structure and balance. All excellent things.

But letting yourself think big – that’s the reward for being a gamemaster.

How to begin

Take that graph paper and outline a huge area in the middle of the sheet. Do it first. That’s your Big Room. The rest of the level’s lesser chambers can be drawn and filled in later.

Now imagine some great artificial or natural terrain feature. A bridge. A great altar. A pool. A vault. This is your Bridge of Khazad Doom. This is your Chamber of Secrets. This is your nuclear silo beneath The Planet of the Apes.

Now, open up the rule book to either the spells or traps section. You need to gimmick it up. Add some kind of magical, mystical or mechanical effect. You are constructing a place of power. Let it emanate.

Next, populate it with NPCs or monsters, or preferably, both. This is your centerpiece. Go wild. (You can worry about adjusting for game balance later). Feel free to indulge your whims. Think like a bad guy. What would you want in your evil lair?

Pile up the loot. Should your players survive this, they’ll deserve some reward. Make it worthwhile for them to have navigated this.

Lastly, add in the atmospherics. Dress up the room. Eerie or dazzling lights. Creepy or ornate tapestries and furniture. Gaudy or grotesque ornaments. Machinery that throbs, hums or creeks.

Now, you’re almost done.

Take a step back. Look at what you’ve created. Now it’s time to tweak it, adjusting the powers and effects to what would be appropriate to your party’s level. But hold to your original vision. Don’t change the names of the monsters or the devices, just adjust their powers and strenghts. If you want super-powered kobolds or a nerfed remorhaz, do so. It’s all under the hood anyway.

Just remember to leave the door to the room cracked open. You want the PCs to come in, after all.

I’ve been a DM/GM for several years now. I’ve never had any complaints about my stories or settings, but I’ve never felt very comfortable with describing what I’m seeing in my head. “The pungent stench of mildew emanates from the wet dungeons walls as stagnant water sloshes around your feet” becomes “you’re in a sewer and standing in about a foot of water”. How can I improve my ability to frame scenes without spending time writing out each one before hand?

If your players are enjoying the game, you’re probably hitting the right notes. That said, we all like to grow and improve (even to Medium size without a pesky enlarge person), so let’s discuss a few handy techniques.

Purple Prose

Ah, the dreaded “box text”. When you’re running an adventure, the writer often crafts an evocative image–if your players have the patience to wait. The balance here is tricky; players usually wait just long enough to get a good image in their mind, but they’re mine usually act instead of waiting to hear how thick the tomes on the shelves are.

While this isn’t the solution you’re looking for (pre-writing is something that comes from modules more than home campaigns), you can still suss out your players’ tolerance for description by imitating different writers’ styles. It often depends on the moment–I know that I’ll listen to wallpaper being described to set a spooky scene, but if there are opponents and weapons, I react to the obvious threat. In danger, more than a sentence or two of description seems out of place–my character’s worried about the quarrels zipping his way, not the teak panels behind the orcs.

If you want to read a fun debate about box text, Walt’s article and comments feature interesting takes. Heather at Errant Dreams had a good article about making use of detail that might help you narrow in on appropriate levels of description.

Illustrations

If you have the right image in hand, a picture IS worth a thousand words. John had a great article about sharing the book’s artwork to get everyone on the same page. Similarly, in my wife’s campaign, she found 6-8 images from the web for key elements (monsters, ravines, etc.) in the upcoming night’s adventure. She’d save them as a slide show, advance to the proper slide, and turn the screen to face us. It was very cool to see the chasm–you could see the river glinting below; creepy pictures of half-rotted corpses shambling through the swamp set the scene very effectively. They weren’t generic zombies after we had an image to fix in our minds.

Props

John also has a good article about using–and improvising props. As a GM, I tend to be less prop intensive, but I know that I’m very impressed as a player when a GM pulls out a scale model of the ship, or the sewers we’re trekking through.

Sound files can make excellent props. You can play the sound of a waterfall, drawing everyone more completely into a scene, instead of just describing the rush of water. Some sound effects for gaming were produced by World of Twilights, who volunteered the prizes for Gnome Stew’s first contest a few years ago.

Mental Images

Your instinct, to visualize the scene then describe it, is excellent. If you never thought about how a room looks, you’ll never see the details and describe them in a way that makes them come to life. (I don’t know how many adventures I went through with tapestries, when I’d only ever seen them in a textbook. Once I saw some real life tapestries, I had a much better sense of their feel and impressive presence. That’s hard to capture with a 3″ high picture.)

Troy’s article about getting in touch with your wild side reminds you to get out and explore in real life. It’s much easier to describe the creepy slickness of the cavern wall when you recently visited a cave, or the susurration of grasses as the breeze gusts across the plains, when you’ve got a great mental image to call up.

Reminders

For my prep, notes and reminders are where I concentrate my efforts. Matthew has a great location template that reminds you to include key elements when you prep a new location. Note that “ambiance” is the second element that he lists; a few key words or phrases (the whoo of an owl, the erratic splatter of rain as the wind gusts from west to south and back) can help you convert your mental image into a vivid description come game time.

Similarly, locations in FATE games have aspects–key elements–that can be brought into effect by both sides. Boiling a location down to three or four aspects is enough for a solid feel, without tying your hands to box text. For my 1930s game, I had the following aspects for Campeche in the Yucatan: Bustling, thriving market; Oppressively warm; Jungle crowds close. Having those aspects on a 3×5 card before me guided me in setting flexible scenes across the city, while ensuring that the city had a coherent feel. If they had stayed in town longer, districts and neighborhoods would have received similar treatments, but because the game was an Indiana Jones style globetrotting game, broad strokes illustrating the differences between locations worked best.

3×5 cards are a great solution. You can either make them general–something you refer to each time you describe something, or specific but random–a list of specific prompts and ideas that you build a deck of and draw when a new situation develops.

Example of “general solution 3×5 card” (probably pinned inside your GM’s screen):

-Weather effects
-Smell and Ambient Sound
-Representative action

Conversely, a deck of specific prompts might include the following cards:

-Gnaws on hardtack while others talk
-Reeks of something dead
-Cape sweeps up and tugs at his neck in the stiff breeze

A general card prompts you to describe specific things–whatever you don’t regularly remember to describe in the heat of the moment–like smells. Specific cards give you random prompts, forcing you to improvise, but providing you a prompt so you’re not starting with a blank page. Why does the nobleman reek like something dead? How will the stiff breeze affect the torches everyone’s depending on to navigate the moonless night?

Building a deck of specific images, scents, and sounds lets you take advantage of inspiration between sessions. It can balloon quickly–jotted notes can be transferred and added to the deck. Similarly, if you have two or three things that you’re working on, and you want them to show up until you make a good habit of working them in, you can create two or three color coded decks (smell, action, etc.) and draw a card from each, working them into the scene whenever possible.

How do you craft evocative scenes?

What tricks are in your arsenal to create vivid scenes? Do you write descriptions beforehand, crafting perfect sentences with the time between sessions? Do a few keywords prompt an entire image for you? Or do you have a template of your own that you use to create consistent scenes, drawing on all the senses? Please share your tips and tricks in comments.

The campus of Bradley University certainly gives off a creepier vibe when post-apocalyptic bad guys have the run of the place (instead of the usual liberal arts majors).

As a good GM, he has the ability to take something we consider commonplace — even mundane — and twist it enough to put the players on their toes. I remember a few years ago he did something similar with a d20 Urban Arcana scenario that cast modern-day Springfield, Illinois, in an entirely different light.

The “same but different” approach is a good one for GMs to emulate, especially if they wish to introduce horror or suspense into their games. It works because players can easily imagine themselves in a spot, but lose their comfort level because not everything is as it seems.

Back to the future

A key feature of post-apocalyptic games is having player characters that 1) either have to adjust to their new circumstances or 2) were born to thrive in a future where things are most definitely not bright and shiny. This goes for players and their PCs or GMs and their NPCs.

One of the lessons I learned from writing for Masks was that characters designed for post-apocalyptic settings were, in fact, actually two different people. There was the character as they existed before the fall, and the one that emerged afterward.

For example: Haysen, King of Waverly Drive (No. 567) , was a garbage collector in the old world, but a despot and (human garbage) in the new. Kitty (622) was a suburban homemaker before she lost her family, and in the aftermath she’s a hell-on-wheels motorcycle riding bounty hunter.  And Creeger (460) was a grocery store delivery person who finds himself on a self-destructive quest at the head of army of survivors.

Backstory

I love to build backstories for my own characters. But that’s not for everyone, I understand. But in a post-apocalyptic game, it’s almost a given. For GMs who have players who are reluctant to provide them, I suggest asking the following two questions to at least lay a foundation of character background.

1. What was your character’s occupation before civilization fell?

2. What was the name of one person you cared for or loved that did not survive, and their relationship to you?

Nothing elaborate there. But by touching on the PC’s past, you might get the people around the table thinking about how their characters relate to this brave new world you are presenting to them.

What are your suggestions for creating memorable characters in a post-apocalyptic setting? What approaches have worked for you in gaining buy-in from the players in your unique vision of the future? I’d love to hear what you think.

I mean, if going more extreme fits you, be my guest. One member of our gaming group took a safari to Africa last year before running the Serpent’s Skull adventure path set in Golarian’s jungle analog, the Mwangi Expanse. Hey, that’s dedication.

But just a hike in the woods or a trip to a nearby zoo can be good resource for adding flavor and description to your encounters. But it may give you a good reason to look at some of the mechanical aspects of your game as well.

Peoria Zoo's male lion.

Look at this fellow. King of the jungle, right there (or, at least, king of the Peoria Zoo). And as imposing as he appears, Mrs. Lion is considered the true huntress of the family. Male or female, they’re ferocious creatures, and a great monster to throw at the characters. But the lion’s not even listed in either D&D Fourth Edition’s Monster Manual 1 or 2 (though I suppose you could substitute a tiger’s stats, making it a Level 6 skirmisher). In D&D 3,5, the lion is a CR 3, which is respectable for a low-level adventure. But if ever a monster deserved to scale up with the characters and continue to provide a challenge as they advanced, it’s this guy. Certainly, coming up with some combat worthy crunch for a lion is a worthwhile activity for a GM in their downtime, regardless of system. And if nothing else, just looking at this picture gives me a better idea of how a lamia, a lammasu or chimera might behave or act (aside from yawning and sleeping in the sunshine, as this big lion did).

Our family forays to the nearby parks paid off at the game table, recently. I attended one of Ed Healy’s Gamerati get-togethers, this one at Just For Fun, a game store in Peoria. We threw together a quick game of Pathfinder. So while the players rolled up 2nd level characters, I spent the time coming up with four encounters we could pass the time with. I was stumped for a wilderness scenario, until I thought of some recent hikes at Matthiessen State Park.

Fort at Matthiessen State Park

The park encircles an upper and lower dells, which when viewed from the sky, looks like a footprint. Using that as a starting point, I designed quick encounters for the park’s signature features: scavenging goblin dogs and tengu raiders at the abandoned fort (which is real life is frequented by crows), bomb-tossing goblins at the waterfall bridge, ghouls at Strawberry Rock,  and a final encounter against the instigators for the adventure, an ogre guardian and a small tribe of troglodytes sheltering in the caverns at the foot of the dells.

Our exploration of the park served me well as I plotted out our little adventure on the fly. Before long the adventurers were making their way through the greenery and down into the sandstone caverns for the final confrontation.

Sure, I could have designed a quick dungeon delve. It would have served on such short notice. But using some real-world references helped galvanize the shape of the adventure in my mind. And, when players asked “why” such and such was one way, or they needed a description of a particular area, I could give it to them from memory. Which was good, as I had no notes upon which to rely.

So, if you’re not adverse to a little sunshine, or if you’re stumped on a locale for your next wilderness adventure, I’d recommend visiting a park or animal reserve near you. I think you’ll be well-served when it comes time to mapping out your next adventure.

If you have had any experiences building encounters or adventures based on real-life locations, I’d please share them in the comments section.

According to lore, 1000 Blank White Cards was created by Nathan McQuillen of Madison, Wisconsin. During a coffee run, he spied a box labeled, “1000 blank white cards” and was inspired to create the game of the same name.  More history can be dug up from the internet archive of his website. Since the game is open source, fun and simple there are multiple fan sites, each with their own take on the game. The most commonly cited version is Riff Conner’s 2001 version.

Materials:
To play 1000 blank white cards, you minimally need a pack of blank white cards (another use for the gamer’s favorite, the index card) and some writing implements. However, due to the nature of  the game, players often find their games incorporating other materials, some mundane, some odd, so bringing a variety of tokens, chits, writing paper, and other tidbits may be advisable.

Rules Summary:
There are three stages in the game. In the preliminary stage, players make a few new cards, shuffle them in with some older cards and some blank cards, and then deal out a hand to each player. Play then proceeds with each player first drawing a card from the deck, then playing a card. Once players are no longer able to play cards (or some other victory condition agreed upon beforehand or created by a card is reached) the game is over. The winner is usually the player who has accumulated the most points from cards, but not always. Then the players go through the cards and pick their favorites for future games.

Card Creation:
A card consists (usually) of a few things: a title across the top, a small drawing, a few lines of text detailing what the card does, and (optionally) the initials of the creator. Cards most often either have some game play effect or grant points (which traditionally range from –1000 to 1000 in increments of 100) or both. However, like all other facets of the game, there’s no real rules on card setup or content, and even if there were, a card could easily alter them. Thought most card functions are obvious, it’s not uncommon to have a card with uncertain effects or effecting targets that may not exist.

Setup:
At the beginning of your game, each player makes some cards. Usually 5 or so each, but this can vary depending on everyone’s tolerance for being creatively put on the spot. After these cards are created, mix them with 5 extra blanks and 5 extra pre-made cards from your stockpile per player. (You’ll make your stockpile after the first time you play in the epilogue stage.) This gives you 15 cards in your deck per player and a 2-1 mix of pre-made to blank cards.

If you don’t have a stockpile already (You’ve never played before), you can simply add more blanks instead of stockpile cards but this changes the ratio to 1-2 Pre-made to blanks which can heavily tax the creativity and patience of players. Alternative solutions include; having each player make 10 instead of 5 cards before the game (which holds the same problems), asking a group that has played before for a “seed deck”, making a stockpile of cards yourself before you play, or copying cards from a website that host images or databases of cards they’ve made.

If your group balks at the “work” of creating 5 cards each before the game, which isn’t uncommon, it’s easy to skip that step and add 5 more pre-made cards per player into your deck from your stockpile (or from wherever you’re adding them). This means less new cards per game, but that’s fine. You’ll find your stock of old cards grows prodigiously anyway.

Once the cards are ready, shuffle them all together and deal out five cards to each player. If you’re using standard index cards shuffling can be difficult, so just put them face down on the table and mix them thoroughly. If a player gets all blanks, or no blanks, they’re  welcome to stick their hand back in the deck and draw a new hand.

Play:
Play begins with the player to the left of the dealer drawing a card from the deck and then playing a card from their hand and proceeds in this fashion clockwise around the table. However, cards can change these base rules, so it’s entirely possible that you find yourself in a prolonged rock paper scissors tournament for points until one unlucky player returns from running laps around your house.

In general cards can have any effect and they can be played on players, other cards, objects, effects, or any combination of the above in any number. Thus you could chose to play a card on yourself, three of your cards and another player’s shoe. In practice however, most cards imply appropriate targets with their effects and to keep things simple most cards are played either on a single player, a single card, the effect of a single card, all players, all cards, all similar effects, or all cards of one player. If it’s hard to tell what was intended with a card, ask the creator if they’re present, or just make a group ruling and perhaps write a note on the card. If cards only produce a one time effect, they are discarded after use. If they give points or have some other permanent effect, they stay in play until they are removed by another card.

By default, once there are no more cards in the deck for a player to draw and they cannot play a card the game ends. No more cards may be played aside from those which are triggered by the game ending. Other cards or pre-agreed conditions may also signal the end of the game.

The default win condition is having the most points once the game ends, but this is frequently altered by cards. Further, it’s entirely possible to make cards that are unreasonably powerful or cheesy, so don’t get too hung up on winning. After all, next time you can have a card ready to counter other players’ shenanigans or to start shenanigans of your own.

Epilogue:
When play is over and a winner is determined, the final part of play is to go through the cards used in the game and create or add to a stockpile for use in future games. Most groups keep three categories of cards; favorite cards which are kept in the stockpile for use in future games, banned cards that are permanently removed from play, and everything else. Each player should select their favorite cards to be added to the stockpile. If there are cards that a player feels should be permanently removed, they can make a case for it (we ban cards that require destruction or alteration of other cards, contain subject material we don’t want randomly popping up if our daughter plays and cards that are too messy to figure out). All card that aren’t selected as favorites or banned (also called the “suck box”) are put aside in their own container.

What is gameplay like?
Gameplay is different for every group and every game. Some games are straightforward point gathering, some are rife with combinations and themed cards. Some groups focus on crazy challenges for points, some games focus around strange complicated rules or odd win conditions. What your games will be like is entirely a function of your players and your cards.

What if some players hate making cards?
Some players don’t like making lots of cards at once and others just don’t like having to be creative on demand. While making cards gets easier with practice (and between sessions, most players invariably get a few ideas just from everyday life)  there are steps your group can take to make the game more comfortable for everyone. The easiest option is to reduce the number of starting cards required of all players and increase the ratio of premade to blank cards in the deck.

An option that ensures that all players get to make as many or few cards as they want is to make the pre-game card making requirement optional, and to use two separate decks; one composed entirely of pre-game and stockpile cards, the other entirely blank cards. Players can choose to draw from either deck, and the blank deck need not be depleted to trigger the default end game conditions. This setup changes the game a little. It ensures constant access to blank cards to counter or modify other cards, and allows players more comfortable with creating cards more control over the game, neither of which is ideal, but it completely removes forced card creation.

What if my stockpile gets stale?
Some players report that the majority of the cards in their stockpile are so favored that it becomes static, so aside from the new cards created during a game, every game uses the same cards. That’s why you kept that giant stack of non favorite, non banned cards. Instead of selecting all your pre-made cards from your stockpile, select half from your stockpile and half from your “other” pile. You’ll find cards you completely forgot existed.

I figured now was as good a time as any to look under the hood at M&M.

(Yes, you are allowed to pause and wonder why I’ve never picked up M&M before. We’re talking about its third edition here, after all. What can I say? I never got around to it.)

In particular, I was interested in reading how M&M utilizes super villains. In the Defining the Threat section, the book says, “Supervillains’ schemes are the forces that drive a M&M series, since the main job of superheroes is stopping the villains from getting their way. … So choosing a scheme is typically one of the first steps in creating a successful game.”

I guess this surprised me a little, in that the focus isn’t on what constitutes villain is in game terms (what cool and sinister powers he commands), but rather on what plot you can generate using him.

Hmmmm, should I insert a shameless plug for “Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters”? I mean, on page 297, there looks to be well over 100 listed plots in the index that could be adapted to the supers genre. (I’m just sayin’ you know.)

As I think on it, the entry from the M&M book is really good advice for a supers game (my plug for Eureka not withstanding). When I think about one of the best rogues’ galleries in comics, Batman’s list of villains immediately comes to mind. And with the exception of that homicidal lunatic Joker, the James Bond-inspired global mastermind Ras al Ghul or most recent adversary Hush, most of Batman’s bad guys are basically costumed bank robbers. And what sets them apart isn’t really their “powers,” which are trivial at best, but their various schemes and plots. When Riddler, Penguin and Killer Croc are at their best, they’ve got Batman chasing false trails and other feints while they angle for the big score.

Now, I’ll be honest, plots are a tough thing for me. My GMing style is much more sandboxy: Here’s a city, go explore it. But not every adventure can begin with Batman and Robin on patrol. Even then, for the adventure to have some meat on it, the goons they initially encounter have to be connected to something deeper and nefarious. Mapping out plots is essential.

The M&M book also suggests reaching for the source most readily available to a comic book fan, you know, the stacks and stacks of titles they pick up every Wednesday. And just because most supers games are really about super teams, I’d lean on pulling plots from the team books. They usually feature encounters that multiple heroes can face at the same time.

For my part, that means tearing into some Justice League and Birds of Prey issues for ideas. But your mileage may vary.

But really, I’d like to hear from those of you who game regularly in the M&M sphere. What plots have worked best for you, and why? Please share them in the comments section below.

Is it just a summer thing? Or does the fact I have two boys who run around with their holsters, cap guns, bandanas, stick horses and range hats have something to do with it?

Or how about the fact that there is nothing like plopping down on the couch late at night and watching “Duel at Diablo,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” a train-lovers’ guilty-pleasure in “Breakheart Pass,” or just about anything else with chaps, six-guns and a lot of cowboys.

Summer is when I get my cowboy on.

Knowing when to switch up

Summer reading material

A good GM knows when his players’ interests shift and then finds the right game or setting to meet that demand. While the players in the gaming group I belong to seem satisfied with the medieval adventures of Steffenhold, they aren’t my only audience.

For me, that means catering to my sons’ interests as well. But they’re not in a roleplaying frame of mind yet. Hopefully, that’ll be somewhere on the horizon. But a board game will hold the attention of my 7-year-old and 5-year-old. Sadly, the pickin’s are slim for cowboy-themed board games in their age group. (Oh, to have grown up in the 1950s. I bet there was no shortage of cowboy games then).

The answer, of course was to make a game — from scratch.

Every GM’s a designer, right?

That brings up another summertime activity GM’s should embrace: game design. Whether its trying one’s hand at spinning out some homebrew rules for their favorite rpg or adapting a board game, there’s nothing quite like tinkering with rules. And it’s an exercise that has its roots in the formative days of rpgs.

In a recent podcast provided by the folks at Roll for Initiative, former TSR designer Frank Mentzer (Dungeons and Dragons rules set, 1984) talked about a favorite pastime of the wargamers of the 1960s and 1970s, especially those in the Evansville, Lake Geneva and Minnesota groups that would later create the scenarios and rules sets that would be the forerunners of D&D. Basically, in the downtime after running their weekend wargaming battles, they would deconstruct games from Avalon Hill and other publishers, adapting them and changing them to suit their needs.

Homemade card game

And this tinkering bug strikes people of all ages. It took me by surprise to see this scene when I took my daughter to summer camp. In the registration area, where the lines to wait are interminably long, these young folks were playing a homemade collectible card game. Eric, the young man in the rust-colored shirt, made the game from index cards, illustrating them in stick-figure fashion, noting powers and spells and whatnot on the fronts. (The fact he mentioned that his school library has a copy of “Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots To Inspire Game Masters” in its gaming section was super cool, too.)

The goal of the exercise is learn how game mechanics work. Maybe it’s because GMs like broad vistas, over-arcing story lines and big-picture scenarios, but as a breed, I think we’re less into the mechanics than many players, especially the optimizers. Still, books such as Unearthed Arcana (AD&D, Third Edition) exist because GMs love new ways of doing things.

So, what did I cook up?

Legends of the Old West board game

I modestly cobbled together “Legends of the Old West,” a board game I made with two goals in mind: teach the boys about the historical people of the west, the hardships of living in pioneer days, and maybe a smattering of western U.S. geography. (Well, that’s really three things. I hope the geography comes in handy when they’re ready to play Empire Builder.)

Basically, drawing from the deck of cards tells you how many moves to make on the outer track, and, by suit, what effect the current conditions are in the west. (The outer track is full of conditions, such as flooding, bandits, T-storms and drought).

The players then draw a Legend card, on each there is a paragraph biography and photo of western legend, such as

Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson or Annie Oakley. Then the occupation cards let

A few legend cards and the condition track

the players earn travel chits, which enables them to visit the state corresponding to their legend card, whether that be by wagon, horseback, stage, steamer or railroad. Beware the Jokers. Draw those and someone has challenged you to a shootout (and the loser packs up to start the game again in Independence, Missouri). The winner is the one who collects the most legends cards after a number of predetermined rounds.

What’s in your chuck wagon?

If you’ve ever tinkered with the rules of your game, invented one out of whole cloth, or even shares my summer hankering for cowboy and western fun, I’d love to hear about it. Share your experiences here.

The First Born’s final class assignment for her social studies unit on the medieval period was to construct a catapult. So, armed with scrap wood from my shop, an instructional video from the good folks over stormthecastle.com, a table saw and good length of rope, we set about constructing a backyard water balloon launcher.

We settled on making the torsion catapult, since this was the closest thing to a mangonel — which we thought was the engine type truest to the period. Of course we made a few concessions (it was to be a working model, after all, not an era-specific replica), nylon rope being foremost.

From the gaming side, the thing I took away from our little experiment was the feasibility of on-the-fly trapmaking. The next time my adventurers want to play McGyver and construct an improvised trap to spring on unsuspecting dungeon inhabitants, I will have to judge their success based on the materials on hand. (I mean, they can’t exactly run to the Home Depot when they are short a 2×4.)

However, I also (re-)discovered the utility of a length of rope. In fact, in a dungeon setting, climbing might well be the least reason for needing rope. But, if I continue along this line, you might hear me rant — once again — on the necessity of a Use Rope skill in rpgs. (Why 3.5 nerfed it and Pathfinder and D&D 4E eliminated it is beyond me).

All in all, a fun experiment. And there’s a lot of medieval discovery fun at stormthecastle, so if you are in the mood to make a paper castle or a shield of cardboard for gaming needs, it’s a great place to stop and learn how.

Back to the bookshelf

Just picked up the Third-Edition supplement Kingdoms of Kalamar on the secondary market. I look forward to digging into Kenzer’s long-established setting — mining it for ideas and inspiration.

Two other Kenzer products have served me well over the years. (Why it took me so long to dive into the company’s signature setting, I’ll never know.)

The sourcebook on Geanavue has been a “go-to” NPC supplement of great utility and the Villain Design Handbook features great advice to novice (and veteran) GMs on running adversaries of all sorts.

The first part of the serialized novella is a cliffhanger, for Conan stumbles into a trap as he explores the jungle palace ruins. It reads:

He turned toward the arch — with appalling suddenness the seemingly solid flags splintered and gave way under his feet. Even as he fell he spread wide his arms and caught the edges of the aperture that gaped beneath him. The edges, crumbled off under his clutching fingers. Down into utter darkness he shot, into black icy water that gripped him and whirled him away with breathless speed.

Here, the use of a trap is not an obstacle to be overcome. For storytelling reasons, it is inescapable, in fact. But it does no harm to him, except to sweep him away to another section of the ruins. It is Conan’s avenue to another part of the adventure.

I think for many GMs (myself included) and especially those who game in D&D’s 3.5 and 4E versions or Pathfinder — we’ve become accustomed to using traps simply as a tool that serves as a challenge for the game’s tactical aspects.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Such an approach makes them quite useful in constructing engaging encounters. In fact, the rules use a rating system to describe the lethality of the traps and their appropriateness to test each adventuring party’s skill level. In this regard, traps are like puzzles, and they carry with them a consequence for failure.

But going back to the example of this Conan story, the trap is not a challenge. It’s a literary device to advance the plot. It could have been a magic teleporting circle, a slide, a long hallway or any number of conveyances — except in REH’s deft hands, it’s the thrilling conclusion to one part of the story. The handhold gives way and Conan is carried away by the underground stream.

For storytelling reasons, it might serve us well to consider using traps in this fashion occasionally. Standard traps, such as those detailed in rulebooks, are actually stop signs in the adventure. The characters must stop and deal with the trap, just as they would have to stop and deal with a monster.

But this other trap is an avenue to another adventure. And it’s not unknown to D&D-style games. But I think its use has been forgotten amid the passage of years and the growing piles of supplements. But early on, using a trap this way was encouraged.

Looking at my copy of the 1980 Moldvay version of the D&D Basic rules, there’s a sample dungeon within. And Room No. 4 of the East Tower features a trap beneath a rug in the floor. And it’s not a trap/challenge. It’s a trap/avenue, a means of getting to the second level of the dungeon (which if you look at the cutaway diagram of the dungeon by Erol Otus, that second level is a loooooooooooong way down).

Before using this kind of trap, however, GMs need to be prepared to cope with player reaction, which will probably boil down to this:

Players, being conditioned to coping with the trap/challenge, might well jump up in arm-waving exasperation or game-stopping reactions, unwilling to be dropped down a hole and swept away without calling upon their various abilities to overcome the trap. “Surely I perceived the trap and would have avoided it!” “My reflexes are amazing, can’t I just step aside?” “My character had his climbing gear ready just for this eventuality.”  And so on.

This point, it becomes a matter of trust. The players have to be convinced the GM isn’t using a trap to wear down the characters’ hit point totals with some arbitrary falling damage roll. Moreover, this is very much an instance where the GM has actually robbed the players of “choice.”  The trap/avenue is the very definition of railroading. The players can’t get off these rails (at least for the moment).

But it’s for the sake of story, and for transporting the PCs to another adventure site, where they can explore, fight and uncover treasure at their own pace and direction, once again.

It may take some adroit handling to send the players hurtling from one part of the dungeon to another by means of a trap/avenue. But described with a bit of flair, and by making it clear the adventures are still the heroes of the story, it can be part of a rewarding session.

Or a cliffhanger in its own right.

For a variety of reasons, I’ve cut way back on the number of gaming books I’ve bought over the past year — and as a bookworm who never has enough space for all of my books, and whose wife drops regular hints that her Kindle really cuts down on the impending need for additional shelves, that feels pretty weird.

As a GM, I’m used to buying a lot of books for games I run. That’s always made sense to me: I need more of them than my players, and I need them in between sessions, not just at the table, so I want my own copies. I also love reading and owning books, so I rarely need much of an excuse to pick up a new one.

So why the hiatus? It’s not really intentional: I didn’t wake up one morning and say, “I’m going to stop buying gaming books for a while.” It just happened.

Looking at my personal whys raises some interesting GMing questions, which we’ll get to in a moment. Here are the three main whys, first:

1. Lack of need. I own almost every book for the Star Trek RPG that I’m running right now, and all of the pertinent books for my group’s on-deck Birthright Campaign. If I buy a gaming book these days, it’s a) out of pure personal interest (“Diaspora looks amazing!”), b) for intended future use (“I want to run this someday”), or c) because it fills a new niche (a system-neutral supplement, for example). “Ooh, shiny!” is not a consideration right now.
2. Dead product lines. Birthright and Star Trek are dead, so there’s no new product clamoring for my wallet’s attention. I’m used to playing mainly in-print games, so this is a new one for me — and, in some ways, the weirdest aspect of this situation. I like buying books for the games I play, and not being able to feels wrong somehow.
3. Lack of time. This is the biggie: I have a stack of unread gaming books, unread non-gaming books, unplayed video games, and unplayed board games — and let’s not talk about all of the RPGs I’ve owned for years, or decades, and never gotten around to playing. Time is precious and scarce right now, and if I can’t handle what’s already on my plate, why add to the problem? Or, at least, why add to it at a breakneck pace — I mean, I’m a geek, so of course I’m going to keep collecting geek stuff…

I expect #1 and #2 to change as time marches on: we’ll start playing an in-print game, or I’ll run into a GMing situation I want printed help handling, and books will begin finding their way onto my shelves with greater frequency again.

But #3? That doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon, as I march into my mid-thirties, my daughter gets older, and my life as a whole gets busier. So does that mean I’m looking at a bleak future in which I buy gaming books only rarely?

That…well, that sounds…awful. Awful!

Ahem.

So, the GMing questions:

1. Are you in a similar boat, usually an avid book-buyer and no longer buying as many gaming books as you used to?
2. How come?
3. How many books do you need to run a good game? (Boy is THAT a loaded question!)
4. As a GM, can you ever have enough gaming books?

#1 and #2 are more personal, but #3 and #4 are much more general — and, I think, pretty weighty questions.

My answers to the last two questions are “3. Enough to give me lots of ideas, and lots of places to go for new ideas, as well as enough resources to cover my bases nicely. ‘Enough’ varies from game to game: I used snippets of a dozen Mage books for my last campaign, but need fewer books to run Star Trek.” and “4. Nope!”

How about you?