Part 3 of a series on designing and running one-shot scenarios. If you missed any of the earlier articles, find them here: Designing the Adventure part 1 • Design part 2 Give out Characters Beforehand If you decide to use pre-generated characters, send the character sheets to your players before game day. This will allow them … [Read more…]
For the first time, I left the evening of D&D feeling accomplished. This time, things seemed to click. The DM drew us further into our character development, and I felt more connected to the character I had essentially created as a joke, as well as a game that was still extremely foreign to me. My … [Read more…]
In part 1 of this series on single-session adventures, Michael gave the broad strokes of adventure design, from the desired playstyle to decisions on system and settings. Now we move into more specific adventure construction advice. If you missed the previous article, find it here: Designing the Adventure part 1 Consider Multiple Environments George Lucas … [Read more…]
This is RPG-ology #32: Doing Something, for July 2020. Although this is actually about a gaming referee technique, I’m starting with an example from a book, my novel Verse Three, Chapter One, freely accessible on the web. It also begins with magic items, but moves beyond that to objects in other settings and genres. As … [Read more…]
Part one of a four-article series on designing and running a one-shot, single-session adventure. See the end of the article for links to the rest of the series. Unfortunately, I’ve never been to a gaming convention, but for years I have been intrigued by the early tournament adventures of the late 1970s and early 1980s. … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #32: Zealots, for July 2020. Some years back in one of my games an important local military official was murdered, and under the authority of their cavalier the party took over investigating the crime. They had out-of-character reason to believe that a certain local cleric and his two acolytes were … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #30: Conflict, for May 2020. A few years back my band Collision left its equipment set up in a church in which we had been practicing. The drummer had gotten our logo made as a drum head cover, so there was this picture of the earth crashing into a giant … [Read more…]
This is RPG-ology #28: Character Death, for March 2020. A couple times recently I have seen social media posts calling for role playing gamers to express their opinions about character death. The promoter indicated that he was planning to write an article on the subject, and eventually I had the opportunity to read it–but honestly … [Read more…]
This is RPG-ology #24: An Amusing Dungeon, for November 2019. On June 1, 2001, Gaming Outpost began publishing Game Ideas Unlimited with an introduction to the author and the series plan. The following week this article appeared, only slightly edited for republication here, under the title Game Ideas Unlimited: An Amusing Dungeon. Some years … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #22: Individualism, for September 2019. Quite a few years ago now I was playing a character in an experimental Attorney class in a game largely based on original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons™. I had just successfully defended a player character (an Antipaladin) on a murder and robbery charge, and the … [Read more…]