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've been running Tomb of Annihilation for my gaming group and the adventuring party ended up in a hex near the east coast that was (as most hexes are in Tomb of Annihilation) pretty empty. In a desperate move to give the adventure some direction, I'd already made an early introduction of the...
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...
Before there was Curse of Strahd (CoS), possibly the most famous 5e adventure, there was the 3rd edition adventure Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Instead of running CoS, I sometimes run Expedition. It's fun for players who have never experienced Ravenloft before, and it's got a few surprises...
Before there was Curse of Strahd (CoS), possibly the most famous 5e adventure, there was the 3rd edition adventure Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Instead of running CoS, I sometimes run Expedition. It's fun for players who have never experienced Ravenloft before, and it's got a few surprises...
Before there was Curse of Strahd (CoS), possibly the most famous 5e adventure, there was the 3rd edition adventure Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Instead of running CoS, I sometimes run Expedition over Halloween. It's fun for players who have never experienced Ravenloft before, and it's got a...
Before there was Curse of Strahd (CoS), possibly the most famous 5e adventure, there was the 3rd edition adventure Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. I run this adventure around Halloween, sometimes starting with Death House, the free introduction to Curse of Strahd. It's fun for players who ha...
Here's the thing about traps. They're the ONLY encounter in an RPG that players cannot opt out of. Once you encounter a trap, whether your character is physically trapped or you're just being blocked from progressing the story by a really hard puzzle, you basically have no choice but to deal with th...
There seems to be a lot of talk these days about character death in D&D and other roleplaying games. It seems that there's an audience that doesn't want their player character to die. Ever.
Which, admittedly, is the point of the game mechanic. If players don't care about death, then there's no poi...
In a previous post, I wrote about how tracking encumbrance made loot more "valuable" by enforcing a weight-based economy. However, tracking encumbrance can be hard. In theory, it's exclusively the responsibility of each player, but if the game master (GM) doesn't announce the weight of each item t...
Everybody has their own tolerance levels for how much paperwork in an RPG they feel is fun. For some people, updating their character sheet is a milestone system for their character. It's as much a part of the game as NPC interactions, decisions, strategy, solving puzzles, and so on. For others, a c...
I track the passage of time in my RPGs, and so should you, and it's actually easy. This blog post tells you how.
What you need
A deck of cards. If possible, use Pathfinder or Starfinder cards, or something similar. You'll see why.
How to do it
Set your deck of cards on the table. When an...
I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. The final chapter, called Corruptions and haunts contains some mechanical effects for the particularly evil GM and the particularly...
I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is called Strange far places and it's about seven different regions on Golarion that are prone to some type of horror, so...
I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is called Strange far places and it's about seven different regions on Golarion that are prone to some type of horror, so...
I picked up the Horror Realms Pathfinder source book in a Humble Bundle, and have been reading it cover to cover. This is my review of the book, chapter by chapter. Chapter 2 is called Strange far places and it's about seven different regions on Golarion that are prone to some type of horror, so...