Posts Tagged by names

osmap

Ever since Troy’s article about running red box D&D for his kids at the end of January, I’ve been immersing myself in the OSR (Old School Renaissance). It’s been a ton of fun, and one aspect in particular has been some of the most fun I’ve had as a GM in years. Even though I started gaming with the Mentzer red box, I never fully experienced old school play in the most classical sense (a group of treasure hunters/tomb robbers go on dungeon crawls to…

A couple of weeks ago I was at a convention and got to jump into a game of Apocalypse World. Definitely an interesting system with some unique elements and ideas, but one of the things that struck me most about it was a very non-unique element – something I remember doing a long time ago and that somehow slipped out of my library of gaming tools. It was a simple element on all of the character playbooks and in some of the Game Master materials…

On my last post about running an Improv game, Toldain asked if I could share my setup for Improv games. Since I run a lot of convention games, I thought the best way to share the setup would be to do a photo filled post showing exactly what is in my setup. It all starts with a box . . . THE BOX I usually carry a courier bag to conventions, but I found it just wasn’t cutting it as far as keeping stuff organized.…

GMingAdvice03

Gnomestew reader Idran’s comment on Martin’s article on the Decamer Campaignstarted me thinking about RPG monsters. Turns out, they’re quite an international bunch, and while I certainly don’t begrudge the creators and designers of RPGs from drawing from a myriad of sources, and though it’s never bothered me before, suddenly it became obvious the nonsensical nature of the convention of retaining original names when drawing from a wide variety of sources. Using Martin’s Decamer campaign which features only ten monsters as an example, we have the slaad (made up name),…

GMingAdvice04

I love names. As a player, naming my character is one of my favorite aspects of character creation. It usually shakes out one of two ways: I hit on the perfect name right away and it instantly helps me define the character. Sometimes this comes at the end of the process, sometimes at the start (it’s better at the start). I agonize over choosing a name. I try real names, random inventions of my own, names from the huge list of names I keep on…