Posts Tagged by prep
| August 7, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article was written by reader Ben A., who has learned a lot about creating fun dungeons by playing the Legend of Zelda games. Thanks, Ben! The dungeon: One of the big staples of tabletop RPGs. While the word conjures up images of a Tolkien-esque band of treasure hunters looting a medieval crypt full of skeletons, the term “dungeon” could just as easily apply to a corporate research lab in Shadowrun or a supervillain’s secret lair in Mutants and Masterminds. Once the context is…
| July 30, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article was written by reader Ryan Latta, who took Phil Vecchione’s Prep-Lite articles — and other articles about keeping prep light — to heart, put them to use, and wrote about the results. Thanks, Ryan! I hate prepping for a game. In fact, the more prep work I find myself doing, the less excited I am to GM whatever it is I’m prepping. Naturally, I was captivated by many of the articles here on “Prep-Lite” and began to apply as many of those…
| June 4, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Gnome Stew’s latest book, Phil Vecchione’s Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session Prep, is now available for preorder: Preorder now! If you preorder, you’ll be able to download the PDF version immediately — weeks before the book is available for purchase anywhere else. And of course you’ll receive a print copy as well, shipped to your door as soon as we receive the first print run from our printer. Preorders will close June 29th, and copies of Never Unprepared will ship out…
| May 29, 2012 | Posted by Kurt "Telas" Schneider |
DNAPhil has covered the disadvantages and downsides of published adventures in a separate article. I do not wholly disagree with his assessment; it’s one Gnome’s valid opinion. But more than one of us felt that a counterpoint article should be written, and my compulsion to volunteer led me here, to defend the published adventure. (Don’t worry, Phil; I’m technically unarmed.) Published adventures (or, as we old farts called them, modules) are often seen as GM’s training wheels or the mark of an amateur, but there…
| May 11, 2012 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
There. The title says it. I admit it. I don’t like published adventures. In my 30 years of GMing I have used published adventures only a handful of times. For the most part I stay away from them and write my own materials. Why don’t I like published adventures? There are a few reasons. A Gradual Falling Out Published adventures, or Modules as we called them when I was just a fledgling GM, are complete stories for a given game that are meant to be…
| May 7, 2012 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
This is a companion piece to my previous article, A “Realistic Enough for Fantasy” Calendar, but it also stands on its own. If you want to combine a fantasy calendar with randomly generated weather, you may enjoy them both. For my Bleakstone hex crawl, weather and the calendar became connected when I ran across the idea of pre-generating a year’s worth of random weather in advance. That post, which is fantastic, included enough Excel code in the comments to get me rolling. This sounded like…
| April 27, 2012 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article was written by Tom Puketza, and it’s about a topic that has always seemed to be of special interest to Gnome Stew readers: sandbox-style gaming. Tom’s approach is an excellent one, and I think you’ll like it. Thanks, Tom! Previous articles have offered great advice on building campaigns using the five Ws. This approach offers a different but equally rewarding method for building a campaign. I used this method to build the D&D 3.5e campaign I currently run, and the results have…
