In most of the role-playing games I’ve played the combat narration has been somewhat one-sided; The player narrating what their character is doing and then the GM narrating the results and all that the NPCs are doing. If there is some game mechanism for reacting to attacks by parrying or…

Last week I started pondering what the inside of a dungeon looks like with only artificial lighting. The way D&D and other F20 games clearly delineate between light and dark, with an area of shadowy light between. I know that Dungeon Fantasy is built on GURPS, so it is able…

A wiki is a phenomenal collaboration tool for your gaming group. It collects all of the campaign information in one place and anyone in the group can add to it. Wikis also make it easy to correct things, from typos to established facts about the campaign world. I have been…

I’ve been spending more and more time on my Dawn of Arcanum campaign. In addition to writing adventures and enemies, plotting the meta-plot and reading about the history, I’ve started relearning my World of Darkness lore. Halls of the Arcanum is part of the Mage: The Ascension line of the…

My current main campaign is “The Dawn of Arcanum”. It’s a late 19th century game based on the Mage: The Ascension spinoff “Halls of the Arcanum”. It’s about paranormal investigations in a more academic vein. More library search, less monster hunting. My players are really into it and I myself…

Exploring strange cities in RPGs — In some urban weirdness stories and campaigns the focus for the weirdness are not the characters, but the settlement itself. Everything else flows from that source of strange energies. The city or town may look normal on the outset, but as the characters experience more of it, they find out…

I always want to encourage players to participate in world building. There are two good reasons for it. First of all they get to affect the shared world deeper than just with their character’s actions. Secondly it lessens the creative burden on the the GM. As the whole group is…

Something I’ve been toying with is the idea of a single star system sci-fi campaign. This came up as I was preparing for yet another sci-fi campaign. The amount of preparation seemed overwhelming. If you don’t go the improvizational Stars Without Number way, you need to prepare at least the…

In some games the player character group will have an NPC leader who is present most of the time. Unlike a quest-giving NPC, who doesn’t leave their base, this presence causes some problems. It is easy for the players to refer to their boss all the time; asking for advice…