Happy Monday, Game Master! Friday’s tip about using flashbacks for backstories garnered a great response from the community. You sent in several fantastic ideas on how to take this mechanic even further. Today, let’s look at a great breakdown from GM Allen (pictured here with his Magic 8 Ball USB button) on how to use […]

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The first time I encountered a flashback mechanic was at Intrigue Con here in town in a Night’s Black Agents game. The second time was the following morning playing Blades in the Dark. The cool thing about flashbacks is you can add them to any game system. I’m doing it right now for my Lost […]

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A Brief Word From Johnn Hola Game Master! First, a quick note to say that yesterday I fixed the broken video links in the 7-Day GM Organization Challenge. To get the fresh links, you can re-join the challenge or feel free to email me and I will send you the link list directly. Today’s tip […]

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A quick trick to make melees more exciting from this week’s GM’s Log. Ankhegs are one of my favourite monsters. Looking at their stat block, they’re a one-trick pony. Just a brute that deals damage. But their strategy involves verticality, making the critter agile, reusable, and always a challenge. Ankhegs burrow, but most characters cannot. […]

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Instinct vs. Prep. A GM in our community recently shared a struggle many of us face: “I generate NPC actions by zen and instinct, but eventually there are too many pieces to track. My notes become random, unactionable noise, and the prep becomes an exponential amount of work. How do I stop my campaign from […]

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Read Time: 3 Minutes What’s one thing I do to make every encounter better? This morning I was drafting up a document explaining my CampaignCraft membership program, and I got to writing about my core GMing philosophy of encounters being the atomic unit of gameplay. Players judge our campaigns by how they feel last session […]

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A 1-Minute Read My game on Sunday proved to me again why a bit of combat prep matters. One encounter featured a collapsing bridge, tricky terrain with barnacles and kelp, and a channel with strong tidal water. The other encounter offered only minimal terrain and lacked interesting routes, positions, and discoveries. Guess which one turned […]

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Playing online is a lot different than in-person. Online gaming changes play in subtle ways. Pacing slows a bit. Prep can take longer. Engagement becomes trickier, too. In-person, I find side chatter keeps energy alive and engenders teamwork. Online, it’s just one mic talking to another, and it becomes too chaotic to hear well when […]

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Welcome to the fourth and final part of my series breaking down Game Master V’s tricky session! We’ve explored how to handle passive players, the Multiball cognitive load of GMing several NPCs at once, and turning treasure into hooks. Today, we bring it all together by tackling the Hot Potato and how to keep the […]

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The fighter awoke on flat, wet, cold rock, his face in a puddle of something warm and sticky. His eyes immediately fixated on a tipped, flickering lantern leaking oil right toward him. Thus began my Lost Isle campaign, an homage to The Isle of Dread and the TV show Lost. We started In Medias Res. […]

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Welcome back to our series diving into Game Master V’s tricky session! Last time, we tackled the problem of Passive Players. Today, we’re looking at a big cognitive load pit trap, which I think of as the Multiball problem. This is when too many things are moving at once and we lets things drop. “…the […]

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How can you get players engaged more in roleplaying encounters? Game Master Vildara presents this tricky session situation: Last night was a bit of a first for me and I find myself here looking for advice to avoid a situation like this. The crew is escorting a bride to her new husband on some backwater world. […]

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