Under the Big Top: More Circus Ideas Last year, I wrote some tips on circuses: A Clown Cart Rolls Up and Disgorges Endless Foes. Roleplaying Tips GM Jeremy Brown sent me some great follow-on tips. But before I get into those, why do I like circuses? As a GM tool, we get these outcomes: There […]

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Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0110 A Guest Article By Jared Hunt To those on the outside, being the boss may seem like the best job around. Seen from the top, however, the sacrifices, responsibilities, and woes involved make being in charge a little less glamorous than it might appear. Here are just a few of the […]

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Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0050 Rewards: How To Help Your Players Develop Compelling Characters During Play These tips are all about helping your players develop interesting and unique characters during play. A player who really enjoys playing their character is almost always enthusiastic during play and has more fun at the game table. And feeling interested […]

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Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #882 You could slice-and-dice hazards a number of ways, pun intended. However, you might benefit by taking a step back and thinking about their game purpose and choosing them that way. Hazards have three cool combat and action scene effects: danger, senses, and movement. Add Danger Make encounters more lethal with hazards […]

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Monday I explored some scifi stuff with Orbital Trouble: d12 Space Outpost Hooks. Got some great responses and tips from fellow Roleplaying Tips GMs: Outposts vs. Colonies From Wizard of Adventure ExileinParadise First, for my Salvage Space RPG, I am pushing both “colonies” and “outposts” What’s the difference? Colonies are “mostly” self-sufficient on food, air, […]

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Had some large blocks of “waiting time” on the weekend, so I started noodling on what might make space outposts interesting. Why? I’m a sci-fi RPG noob, aiming to run my first game when things settle down a bit over here. And I’m not very familiar with the details and tropes of the genre. So, […]

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Adding strange, wondrous, and interesting races to your homebrew world can get challenging, especially if you have a long list of races to brew up and you want to make each one unique. Here are three tips to ensure each race is distinct and thematically fitting to your setting. 1. Start With a Unique Anchor […]

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I love Jeff’s blog post here about how to flesh out your world by asking yourself a few simple questions. It reminds me of the tip about ensuring there’s a gameplay layer to your world building because we have players, not a passive audience. If you haven’t clicked over to Jeff’s post, here are some […]

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Last year I ran a quick poll on the Roleplaying Tips Discord: Not scientific. And small sample data set. But it, and a newsletter on the topic, garnered some great thoughts from RPT GM Lord High PigMonkey, which I’ll share out with you today (bolding, tiny text tweaks, and line breaks are my edits): Hi […]

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Chat GPT recently launched a scheduled tasks feature. One task you can create will email you stuff. I’ve used followupthen.com and task features in my email app for years now to do this. For example, there a neat trick I learned from an HR consultant who did a presentation at the day job in the […]

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Legacy Gems is a set of homebrew rules created by Wizard of Adventure Auke. In his world of Tem, certain gems can be incorporated into magic items to enhance their power. The strength of these Legacy Gems grows alongside the wielder, reflecting their mastery and dedication. Download Auke’s gem homebrew rules here (3 page PDF, […]

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Today’s tip is inspired by Wizard of Adventure ExileInParadise who used images in a clever way for his session two weeks ago. He described each encounter in his 5 Room Dungeon to GPT. Then he asked for a representational image. Then he shared each image with players as they triggered the encounters. From there, it […]

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