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With the conclusion of my most recent Corporation campaign, I have been working on the prep for my new All For One campaign. As with any new campaign I run, I like to try to shake things up, doing things differently from campaign to campaign. In my previous Corporation campaign there were very few reoccurring NPCs (largely because the players did not leave a lot of witnesses), and ...
In my last installment of Prep-Lite, I talked about the concept of Wireframes & Skins; using and re-using condensed NPC stat blocks, as a way to reduce prep time. In this article I am going to discuss, in more detail, some of the assumptions I was working under, how I condensed the stats I needed, and how I populated different tiers of NPC’s.
The Assumptions
So lets start with a ...
Jokes. Movie quotes. What happened in Fringe last week. Talk about the new supplement that is coming out. Dinner plans. Discussion about why the new WOW update is the reason to join/leave. These things swirl about the game table every session. When left unchecked they can break down the 4th wall of the game, cause players to miss key information, and grind a session to a halt. It ...
While I love the creative and storytelling aspects of being a GM, also I love the mechanical aspects of games. In my downtime from running games and stirring the Stew, I read a lot of rulebooks, many for games I am not planning to run, just to read about different mechanics. I love to see how different designers handle skill checks, car chases, or character growth. With my ...
Let me tell you a story. Late last year, I concluded a three-year long Iron Heroes game. It was a great campaign, but it was a lot of work, and not without its drama. We parted company on good terms, but I was kind of happy to be out of that long-term relationship. However, I am not the kind of GM to be without a game, so after ...
Yesterday, I gave a review of the Corporation RPG, and today, we I present an interview with Corporations lead designer, James Norbury. I Recently got a chance to ask James some questions about Corporation, as well as GMing, in general.
About James
James, can you tell us a bit about yourself, and your RPG background.
I’m James Norbury. I live with my fiancée Ruth and my herd of animals in ...
A Bit of Background
The Corporation RPG was released in the UK in 2006 by Brutal Games. The game was available in print in the UK, but there was not a US distributor, so we Yanks could only get it directly from Brutal Games, shipped internationally. The PDF was posted on RPGnow, in May of 2008, which was how I first encountered this game.
In the time since its ...