Category: Tools for GMs
| May 9, 2013 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Written by award-winning authors Phil Vecchione and Walt Ciechanowski, the fourth book from Gnome Stew and Engine Publishing is coming in July: Odyssey: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Campaign Management. Opening with a foreword by RPG industry legend Kenneth Hite, Odyssey is, to our knowledge, the first book of its kind. It offers up 200 pages of system-neutral advice on starting, managing, and ending campaigns for game masters of all stripes and experience levels. Tell me more! You may have guessed from the title…
| May 2, 2013 | Posted by Scott Martin |
Last time, we talked about The Invisible World; a world that has grown so familiar that it goes unnoticed. This time we’ll talk about one of my favorite setting tropes, The Hidden World. The hidden world setting is often a world that begins by modeling the world around us, but adds a concealed truth. There are levels and levels of hidden worlds; sometimes the secrets are literally unknown worlds (like the hollow earth popular in pulp novels–a great place to stash your dinosaurs), others feature…
| April 30, 2013 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Microscope is a superb game in its own right, and one I recommend without reservation, but it also features two things that you can easily make use of in other games: collaborative setting creation and its yes/no list. Collaborative setting creation is the point of Microscope; it’s the whole game. When you play Microscope, you build a setting and its history together in a unique and fascinating way. After two sessions, when my group wrapped up a game bracketed by humanity’s first contact with aliens…
| April 18, 2013 | Posted by Scott Martin |
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (Leslie Poles Hartley) The Invisible World I found a recent post at Datastories.in very interesting. It’s a post titled, Of Visible and Invisible Luxuries. There’s another distinction here that’s useful – between what’s ‘visible’, and what is ‘invisible’. We treat some of the infrastructure of our daily life as so important, as so critical, that we barely notice it – it’s like the air we breathe and we don’t think of these things as…
| April 10, 2013 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Jesse Butler of Calico Games offered me an advance copy of Short Order Heroes, his combination light RPG, character creation supplement, and spontaneous NPC creation aid, and liking how it sounded I accepted his offer. It’s on Kickstarter for $20, with more cards possible if stretch goals are met. It’s that last use — NPC creation — that interests me, and that I think is most likely to interest Gnome Stew readers. I’m a sucker for anything that lets me quickly develop characters, like our…
| March 26, 2013 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Lately I’ve been on an RPG reading tear, and I’ve been fortunate to find, stumble upon, and have recommended to me four excellent GMing books that I’d like to recommend to you in turn. Apart from all being good books, they share a slant towards fantasy and setting creation, but also another important trait: It’s easy to use them for other genres, too. Red Tide If I could only have one book about building a sandbox fantasy campaign, it would be Red Tide. The first…
| March 21, 2013 | Posted by Scott Martin |
One trait for your villains is how they influence the world. Is your villain the King of Latveria, issuing public decrees and whipping up his people into a genocidal froth? Does no one know who turned the nobility to the worship of Asmodeus? Some villains are subtle, barely detected in the shifting of alliances and minor tweaks to the laws of the land, while others are brutally direct. Providing your foes with a mix of power manifestations can help to differentiate them. Struggling against unknown…
