Remember player agency!
Now that my co-bloggers here at Arcane Game Lore have chimed in as well, I figured I’d better put up my entry for the month’s RPG Blog Carnival and post one of my all time favorite NPCs. I had intended to do this post a week or so ago near the middle of the month [...]
Little while back I was running a Star Frontiers game with a table top group. We were running the classic Volturnus Campaign with some changes and new plot twists. I decided to introduce “Jimmy” named after Jimmy Olson of Superman fame. He was a lowly and relatively unskilled crewman from the ship that crashed on [...]
As a kid I use to look at the ads in Dragon Magazine or Space Gamer magazine and wonder at all the interesting gaming materials that my local book store never carried. The Paranoia RPG was at the top of the list. More than a few years later I discovered the world’s biggest yard sale, [...]
Since this month we’re hosting the Blog Carnival (thanks to dagorym) I decided I would do a couple of my favorite NPCs. One of the funnest NPCs I got to play was an individual named Homie. Homie was a puppet familiar that was owned by my GMs character from another group. By some weird turn of [...]
The final gem I really liked in the D&D 4.0 DMG2 was the monster template system. It was essentially a game master’s tool kit to take a standard monster and apply a template to it which would change it up and possibly surprise players. It inspired me to create a dragon lich as a major [...]
Dagorym’s post on “The Highwayman” got me to thinking about one of the most notorious NPC’s in my Earthdawn game. For those of you familiar with Dungeons & Dragons module HHQ3 Thief’s Challenge, there’s a character known as “The Gullwing Bandit”. The Gullwing Bandit is a son of a noble who’s land was stolen away [...]
This is the second in this series of blogs on Gems I found in the D&D 4.0 rules, specifically the Dungeon Master’s Guides. The first post was here: http://arcanegamelore.com/2013/06/03/gems-from-dd-4th-edition-adventure-companions-in-rpgs-2/ The DMG2 opens its section on vignettes with this statement, “Add moments of character interaction to your game with vignettes- specially shaped scenes in which players [...]
I took a 20 year hiatus from D&D and around the time I was turning 40 I reconnected with a local D&D group playing edition 3.5. I was prepared to craft an interesting character and had a specific character concept in mind but quickly discovered that was not how the game was played. The expectation [...]
Characters Everywhere Everyone has a favorite player character, whether it is one of yours when you were a player or one played by a member of your gaming group when you were game master. It’s the character you trot out and reminisce about when remembering the grand adventures of the past. But characters don’t live [...]