In Pathfinder and Tales of the Valiant and similar fantasy roleplaying games, you go on adventures to find treasure and magical items and weapons so you can go on even bigger adventures. That's meant to be exciting. But with great power comes the potential for great boredom, because when you sto...
I like to be able to build characters for a tabletop roleplaying game quickly. A fast build is useful for a player when you're planning a short one-shot session and don't want to spend half of that session on character generation. It's useful for a Game Master when you're trying to generate several...
The D&D 5e book Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft includes an adventure called House of Lament. Last year, I ran House of Lament as a side quest in an Expedition to Castle Ravenloft game. This is my review of the House of Lament module as a Game Master. It mirrors my review as a player.
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The D&D 5e book Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft includes an adventure called House of Lament. Last year, I ran House of Lament for a group of players, and later that year I played in House of Lament with a different group of players. This is my review of the module as a player.
Before I b...
I like re-playing RPG adventures and I don't let my knowledge of the module interfere with the way my character follows clues. Should you re-play an adventure, though, there are some important things to keep in mind.
1. Yarn wall
My primary rule is pretty simple. If I can't trace a decision my...
I get bored during action scenes. Books, comics, movies, it doesn't matter what it is. But sometimes an action scene actually works for me. The scene somehow manages to be engaging, maybe even tense, and something makes me want to read or watch it. What's the difference between a good action scene a...
Player characters in an RPG can be tricky. A player character is an imaginary person who you're meant to speak for and control. The character is meant to be distinct from you (in reality), and you're also supposed to be mindful of fellow gamers at your table (in reality) which obviously your fiction...
I love pre-built characters. That might seem strange, because I also love building characters. On a week when I don't have an RPG to play, I'll often sit down with a rulebook and build a character that will probably never get used. And yet, I love a system that provides a good array of pre-built cha...
I'm running Tomb of Annihilation as a Pathfinder 2e adventure, and as usual there have been some surprises when comparing what a book says and what happens in a game. I regretted starting my players in Port Nyanzaru because, as hex crawls go, Tomb of Annihilation is not exactly the best. It's ab...
I've written before that you can never have too many spells for roleplaying games like Pathfinder and Tales of the Valiant, and that's as true for the Game Master as it is for player characters. The problem isn't having too many spells to choose from, it's how to know what spells you have avai...
At the time of this writing, I'm preparing to run Tomb of Annihilation for the first time. It's been out for a good 5 years, and I've played scenarios from it, but I've yet to run it. As I read through the book to prepare for the game, I've decided to post about my impressions. This review contai...
At the time of this writing, I'm running Tomb of Annihilation for the first time. As I read through the book, I've decided to post about my impressions. Although I started this review before the campaign started, I'm now running this module (using Pathfinder 2, incidentally) for my weekly session,...
At the time of this writing, I'm running Tomb of Annihilation for the first time. As I read through the book, I've decided to post about my impressions. Although I started this review before the campaign started, I'm now running this module (using Pathfinder 2, incidentally) for my weekly session,...
At the time of this writing, I'm preparing to run Tomb of Annihilation for the first time. It's been out for a good 5 years, and I've played scenarios from it, but I've yet to run it. As I read through the book to prepare for the game, I've decided to post about my impressions. This review contai...
I've run the mega-dungeon Rappan Athuk twice so far. Once in AD&D, and currently in 5e. From its marketing, Rappan Athuk is "legendary," but I'm honestly unclear whether that's a claim about real live people knowing and loving the book, or whether it's a reference to fictional people in the game wor...
The Curse of Strahd (5e) and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft (3.5) modules feature the use of fortune teller cards to determine certain aspects of the adventure. For Curse of Strahd, the deck of cards is called a Tarokka deck, and in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft you're told to use a Thre...