How can we improve our mystery adventures? Mysteries can be tough nuts to crack. Players miss clues, Logic Bombs detonate, and the plot can crash when characters hyper-focus on red herrings. Last time, I shared my approach to designing mysteries like an onion to avoid plot roadblocks, and asked for your favourite resources to help […]

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Long-time Roleplaying Tips fan Jeremy Brown sent me a list of adventure ideas. Included was this tricky one: The PCs must be captured for the adventure to continue. There’s nothing PCs hate more than being captured, and if they feel it was arbitrary they hate it three times worse. I like the idea because it […]

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A Brief Word From Johnn Hola Game Master! I’m starting a sale today on a 102 page PDF collection of random tables that create adventure outlines and encounter seeds. It’s a triple birthday sale, as mine is on the weekend, my wife’s is in early November, and Roleplaying Tips turns 27 on Nov 6. I’ll […]

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What do you do to lighten the mood when the group loses its humour, forgets it’s a game, and gets too intense? Game Master K asked in June’s Monthly Q&A call: My current group has become very serious, and so it feels a bit like playing at a wake where it’s a serious game with […]

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Our brains evolved to be pattern-matching machines. That weird movement in the tall grass…is it the wind or something that wants to eat me? Growing up, I did well with the Sesame Street game, One Of These Things. Pro tip: It’s always the single article of clothing from a missing child. To make our horror […]

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CampaignCraft GM K. asked me how to signal lethal danger up ahead in a dungeon. Like him, I prefer to stock dungeons with a variety of encounters, some of which are too powerful for the party at its current level or in its current state. Dungeons are tricky though, because we’ve got less space for […]

The post Dead Men Tell Tales – How Do You Signal Lethal Danger In A Dungeon? appeared first on Roleplaying Tips.

Horror is tough to pull off at the table. I don’t run scary games often, but when I do, I rely on one technique that punches through the beer and pretzels and gets players uneasy and scared. Deny Them Meaning When you have lots of clear information you feel confident. And confidence is the last […]

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Arvind’s Maptober Do you like to create maps? Over at the Roleplaying Tips Community, Arvind started a daily mapping challenge for Maptober: Join us in the #maps-terrain-minis channel for a daily quest and to check out others’ creations: https://discord.gg/hqE6gfs5P Any map creation method is welcome! Instant Cyberpunk Gigs, NPCs, and Events My friend Ray, aka […]

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A CampaignCraft member recently asked me how to master the lexicon when running a new genre for the first time. The game mechanics and general narrative were no problem, but technical and insider details stumped her in certain cases. Describing vehicle manoeuvres, piloting controls, gear, and how NPCs interacted with their environment were a big […]

The post Better Descriptions: d7 Ways To Steal Great Words appeared first on Roleplaying Tips.

The Quarry Pit Trap In a Basilica campaign session, combat in a quarry almost stalled out like an airplane losing speed and starting to drop like dead weight. I could tell the pace was slowing down, but when a player asked after a few moments of table silence, “Whose turn is it?” I knew the […]

The post What To Do When Combat Stalls appeared first on Roleplaying Tips.

I’m prepping for a Dragonbane game, using the campaign from the great boxed set. I love the campaign seed, which involves the game’s iconic powers, dragons and demons. The goal is to explore a valley and stop an evil plot centuries in the making. Dragonbane is based on the 1980s Swedish RPG, Drakar och Demoner […]

The post 3 Easy Fixes for Classic Adventure Pitfalls appeared first on Roleplaying Tips.

Years ago in my Riddleport campaign I said this: “There’s a large shark circling in the harbour.” The characters went down to the docks for a closer look. The shark attacked. And on its turn it launched into the air, sailed right over the party, and splashed down on the other side. The shark jumped […]

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