Posts Tagged by inspiration
| 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…
| February 21, 2013 | Posted by Scott Martin |
Sometimes your villain needs something a little out of the ordinary to set him apart. Or maybe that hapless NPC has a redeeming quality. If you’re feeling inspired, working out extra details for characters can be interesting, but if you’re on a deadline–or really not feeling inspired–sometimes a blunt tool is what you need. Below are 4 tables to encourage an out of the ordinary encounter even when you’re brain’s not at maximum creativity. Villainous Secrets (Modern) [d8] 1: Secretly supports a local animal shelter.…
| March 21, 2012 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
As a GM, you’ll often have extra ideas that you have no current use for or ideas for some future game. Stealing an idea from writers, you can write a few sentences about each one (so that you don’t end up stumbling across a note like “junkyard angel and transceiver of the gods” and wonder what the hell you were thinking) on a post-it note and stick the notes on an idea board. If you like, you can certainly color code them, putting all characters…
| November 8, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Gnotes from Gnome Stew HQ RPG Mapping Software For many years, I’ve felt like I wasn’t a true gamer because I didn’t have a world I’d been building since I was a little kid. I’ve built pieces of worlds, and helped write plenty of worldbuilding fiction, but never had a world all my own, like so many gamers do — one that I’d been adding to, bit by bit, until it became a rich and interesting place. A couple weeks back, that changed. Fellow gnome…
| January 24, 2011 | Posted by Don Mappin |
Inspiration for our games surrounds us in many forms and traditional media is particularly rich in ideas. These also serve as test beds for what one ought to do or not do in narrative storytelling. In this case, Tron: Legacy has more than a few nuggets we can learn from. Fair warning: Spoilers ahead! Retro is Chic Over the past decade retros, retreads, and reboots have been all the rage. From entire franchises (James Bond, Batman) to scratch-your-head “what were they thinking” movies (The A-Team,…
| August 14, 2009 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Evernote has changed my life. No, seriously — I’m not exaggerating. Capturing Ideas I have a spotty memory for some things, particularly random thoughts and ideas that pop into my head — they tend to disappear quickly if I don’t write them down as soon as possible. And I get a lot of ideas. My mental back burners are running 24-7 — and I hate losing ideas. I learned a long time ago to always have a notebook near at hand, and there’s a lot…
