Posts Tagged by template
| August 31, 2012 | Posted by John Arcadian |
Inspired by Troy’s Fantasy Wagon Train article, it struck me the other day how much I loved walking into weapons shops in the video game RPGs. Having this small, free form area that was full of interesting visual tidbits, a couple of interactions with NPCs, and a selection of items which might add some element of uniqueness to my current play experience delighted me to no end. I also remember that experience in my first roleplaying game. The Game Master drew out my search for…
| August 28, 2012 | Posted by John Arcadian |
Inspired by Troy’s Fantasy Wagon Train article, it struck me the other day how much I loved walking into weapons shops in the video game RPGs. Having this small, free form area that was full of interesting visual tidbits, a couple of interactions with NPCs, and a selection of items which might add some element of uniqueness to my current play experience delighted me to no end. I also remember that experience in my first roleplaying game. The Game Master drew out my search for…
| May 15, 2012 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
The Five Room Dungeon has been around almost as long as RPGs themselves, and has been enjoying a surge of popularity in the past few years as a quick and easy way to build a dungeon crawl. Interestingly enough, it turns out there are only 9 base designs for the five room dungeon. With so few, it’s very easy to simply grab one of the nine, populate it and run a crawl, but it’s also easy to run the same basic layout multiple times until…
| January 19, 2012 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
If you’re like me you’ve found yourself thinking the following: “I need to make an encounter table for this area. It’s a swamp, so I’ll just go though all my monster books and make a list of all the monsters that can live in swamps…” and then three pages of paper and way too much time later you succumb to information overload, shelf it and go do something else. A simple template can help reduce option paralysis and provides structure for an encounter list. Guidelines…
| August 22, 2011 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
GMs must populate their settings with plenty of fun and interesting locations and after a while it can be tough to create new and fresh locations and to keep similar locations distinct from one another in your head. Over time every creepy forest tends to blur together and you don’t remember the difference between Fenwood and Bramblescar. Locations also have the capacity to be a major prep time-sink. Good locations are a centerpiece of your game, but it’s easy to spend far too much time…
| September 24, 2010 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
I have recently begun a journey, on which I like to think I am not alone, to drastically reduce the time it takes me to prep my sessions. In doing so I have compiled, and in some cases created, some tools for speeding up my prep and aiding me in the running of my games, while maintaining a complexity I like in the games I run. I have nicknamed this overall effort my Prep-Lite Manifesto. The first tool which I want to share with you…
| April 13, 2009 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Over the years, I’ve met lots of GMs who’ve created and lovingly detailed their own campaign settings, most often for D&D. These settings are usually extensively developed, complete with maps, country write-ups, elaborate histories — the whole nine yards. But as much as enjoy writing setting material, I’ve never actually done this myself. I’ve dabbled — drawn detailed maps for fantasy worlds, written chunks of material for specific cities, etc. But I’ve never had what I consider to be one of the quintessential GMing experiences:…
