Plotting out a decent campaign can be difficult, especially for us older hands who are used to keeping everything about our created worlds safely tucked away in a few spiral-bound notebooks. Luckily, things have progressed quite a bit since those golden days, and the vast wonders of the interwebs can make life a lot easier for us Storytellers. Let’s look at a few online resources that could come in handy for planning and running a campaign.
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Image courtesy of DA user mffugabriel-stock
My gaming group has, collectively, an incredibly short attention span. Everyone has an idea for something they want to run, and most of us have several campaigns floating in the works at any given moment. Needless to say, we’ve burned through quite a few systems on our never-ending quest to give reality the finger. In the course of doing so, I’ve noticed a few reoccurring problems over the years that can cripple or kill a campaign before it even gets started. Continue reading »
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Geist: The Sin-Eaters
Geist is one of White Wolf’s more recent system releases, and it’s also one of my favorites. You play as a Sin-Eater; a relatively ordinary mortal who suffered a premature death only to be dragged back into the land of the living by a Geist, a bizarre entity from beyond time and space.
Having cut a deal with the dead, the Sin-Eaters act as gatekeepers between the worlds of the living and the deceased. They help pacify angry ghosts, protect the living and dead alike from the predations of the supernatural and even make the occasional perilous run into the Underworld itself as the need arises.
While life as a Sin-Eater can be bizarre and miserable, it is the strange and tumultuous life of a hard-boiled detective as opposed to a never-ending parade of suffering and drudgery that one might expect. The image links to the free quick-starter document on DrivethruRPG, and I highly suggest that you download it and give the system a try.
After the jump we’ll take a look at some new Geists your character could use, one for each type of Sin-Eater, and see how these strange, alien beings can aid and influence your character.
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Terrifying image courtesy of DA user ~random-anomaly
Weaving elements of the grotesque, horrifying and utterly non sequitur into the story is a longstanding tradition in my group. As a natural consequence of this, most of our GMs are engaged in a fierce contest to see who can inflict the most emotional trauma on the player party. The lead is currently held by a brilliant upstart of a first-time Storyteller, so in the spirit of getting off my complacent keister and busting out some serious soul-searing, here are three… unique tumblrs and some of the possible campaigns that could be wrought from them!
DISCLAIMER: You probably shouldn’t read these at work. None of them are particularly graphic… but you still probably shouldn’t read them at work.
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As tempting as it would be to write this as a one word article (and that word would be “don’t,” for the record) I feel that I’ve learned more about Gamemastering from this particular campaign than any other game I’ve ever run. For those of you unfamiliar with the setting, it’s a high-powered, epic fantasy set in a world heavily influenced by cinematic Wuxia and Chinese Mythology. The players are typically the chosen champions of some of the more powerful gods, gifted with unrivaled supernatural abilities. Said abilities allow them to do things like parry house-sized boulders with a teaspoon and shoot a man through the tear duct from a neighboring country.
Does that sound awesome? You bet it is! Does it sound like a tremendous pain in the ass to run? You have no bloody idea!
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Last week we talked about some of the philosophy and broad stereotypes of Survivalism as they relate to the tabletop RPG. This week we’re going to looking at some of the gear you can use to help even the odds in a Survival Horror game. We’ll talk about Every Day Carry, Bugout Bags and how to make a comprehensive and useful gear list without having to have a separate character sheet just for your rucksack.
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The Apocalypse is very popular right now. Zombies, peak oil, economic collapse, nuclear war and various creative interpretations of the Mayan Calendar have set more and more people prepping for the end of days, or just having fun talking about it and making plans for various hypothetical scenarios.
With our current cultural obsession for the End Times rivaling our fervor for the Futuristic Dystopian Government in the eighties, it stands to reason that somebody’s going to want to run a game about the inevitable rise of the Undead or a nuclear warhead falling on us out of nowhere.
For situations like this, rolling up a survivalist can give you serious edge over the challenges you may face, as well as just being a highly entertaining character to play.
I’ve broken this post up into two sections. The first deals with a few of the different philosophies and lays out a few lovingly tongue-in-cheek templates I’ve developed over years of browsing through various forums and other online communities as well as a few personal encounters with other survivalists. The second section, which will be posted a week from now, is a system-neutral guide to gear, with a few bits of individual equipment, advice on building gear kits for your character, and other pointers for making your wasteland warrior pop.
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Image Courtesy of Corbis Images
Gamers come in a wide variety of flavors. Some are canny, cunning old veterans and others are fresh-faced newcomers with a slightly bewildered gleam in their eye. Math and science majors rub shoulders and butt heads with artists, writers, and drama fiends. The vast majority of us fall somewhere in between these extremes, and most groups usually come out as a hodgepodge mixture of these different elements.
As such, it is no surprise that some people are better at making more powerful characters than others. Some do it for the thrill of power and to lay hideously unbalanced waste to their enemies. Others, like certain members of my group, enjoy breaking a system into splintery little flinders and rolling around in the pieces while making an unsettling giggling noise. Since roleplaying is supposed to be fun for everyone at the table, not just the powergamers, running a balanced game where everyone feels like an involved, contributing member can be a righteous pain in the ass… and that goes double for combat. If you feel like reading a few pointers for giving everyone an equal slice of the murder pie, mosey on past the jump for a few tips on running a better, balanced combat with an asymmetrical party.
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This plan is flawless, I tell you! Flawless! (Courtesy of Corbis Images)
Regulating the flow of information can be one of the most difficult parts of running a game. Give the party too much information, and you’ll spoil the ending for the clever players or risk entire portions of your plot being bypassed altogether. Conversely, if you are too vague, stingy or incomprehensible with your clues, you’ll wind up with a group of bored, frustrated players who are probably going to find the next available suspect and cram them into a industrial mixer full of borscht until they start coughing up some information.
Contrary to the title, this article is really for the benefit of your players. Treating them with fairness and delivering information with clarity are two very important steps to running a successful game, and after the jump we’ll look at a couple of common pitfalls in this neck of the woods and get a better idea of how to avoid them.
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Image Courtesy of Steve Olson and Corbis Images
Combat is the most time-consuming portion of many, many tabletop games. It can degenerate into a chaotic, messy duel of opposed rolls at a moment’s notice, easily leaving everyone at the table bored, spacey and frustrated. While there are a lot of groups that don’t have these particular problems, introducing new players, new systems or a game comprised of nothing but roles-not-rules thespians might find themselves struggling to get through a single combat in one session, let alone multiple encounters on the same game night. Luckily, there are a variety of tricks to speed combat along, and we’ll cover a few of them after the jump.
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Drive Thru RPG
