Posts Tagged by adventure
| October 5, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article is by Gnome Stew reader Rickard Elimää, and it details a fantastic technique for GMs: the “fish tank” model for creating a mystery adventure. Thanks, Rickard! Why is a mystery like a fish tank? Imagine a fish tank with some piranhas in it. The tank and the water are the environment of the latent mystery waiting to be disturbed. The fish represent the people and their relationships with each other. Now imagine the GM throws the PCs into the tank, sits back…
| March 26, 2012 | Posted by John Arcadian |
It sits there in your hand, this awesome module that has an incredible story, a great concept, a well thought out adventure path, and it’s perfect for the game you’ve always wanted to run…. except it’s not in the system you or your group likes to play. While standing in the game store, you mull over your options. You could pick up the source books for the system and work to learn it, you could see if someone else who is more familiar with the…
| February 13, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article comes from reader BryanB, who tackles one approach to running non-linear adventures in a comprehensive, usability-focused way. Thanks, Bryan! I used to use a fairly linear approach to adventure design, much like the writers of a typical module utilize. I’d often do a painstaking amount of detailed game prep. As many of my players tended to go off path during an adventure, I grew tired of seeing more than half of my preparation effort never see any use at the table. A…
| October 17, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Of the many ways to give the big villains in your campaign depth and make them fun for the PCs to go up against, one of my favorites is having a developed set of motivations and other cues for the villain. If you know what the villain wants, what they’re like, and how they approach the world, you can switch into “PC mode” when you’re planning or when your players surprise you. In other words, you can play your most important villains just like your…
| August 1, 2011 | Posted by John Arcadian |
A while back (quite a while back actually) I was given a complimentary PDF copy of Courts of the Shadow Fey for review purposes. The concept was interesting and I was looking for an excuse to get my group to give 4th ed. D&D a valid try. My goal was to give the mini-campaign a decent play test. Sadly, before my group could get familiar enough with 4th ed. so that I could jump them into the higher level adventure, the group imploded under the…
| December 7, 2010 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Along with DNAphil, I’ve recently switched to using a template for my session prep. Phil uses a template he created; I’m using the one from the Decipher Star Trek RPG Narrator’s Guide. The Trek RPG template is really two templates: an outline for the episode (adventure) as a whole, which follows the three-act model common to Star Trek and many, many other TV shows (and movies, and books, and plays, and…), as well as a template for each individual scene. With five sessions of this…
| June 9, 2009 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
We’ve all been there: The game is going gangbusters, but it’s getting late. People have work or school in the morning, and you have to stop soon — even though the adventure isn’t over. Before my baby daughter Lark was in the picture, I was up for gaming until two or three in the morning on Saturday nights. I could sleep in the next day without any worries, so quitting time didn’t really matter. These days? I need my sleep. So what do you do…
