I've been listening to more and more dark ambient electronic music while I write or do game prep. Music with vocals or a lot of wailing guitars distracts me. Dark ambient fits a perfect spot for me; no distracting vocals and it tends to be low key. In addtion to that it has the added …
If You Want a Great Campaign, The Players Must Care About Your NPC’s
If you want a great campaign, the kind you and your friends talk about for decades afterword, then your players must care about your NPC's. They must think of them almost as real people. What do I mean by this? Do your players say, "I hate that guy." And mean it? Do your players say, "We must …
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Building Non-Player Characters
Role playing games, properly understood, are not stories. They are imaginary events resolved by game mechanics which stories emerge from afterward. However, role playing games have a lot in common with stories. One of the most obvious commonalities is characters. I've talked a little bit about player characters here on the blog before but I …
Non-Gaming Resources For Game Masters: Resources on Screen Writing
You are going to get tired of me writing it, saying it, dancing about it but here it comes; RPG's are not stories. They are games that have many story-like pieces. Often they have many commonalities with stories and story telling but they aren't quite the same. We would do well to figure out where …
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Who Is It For? What Do They Want?
One of the critical questions any creator should ask is, "Who is it for?" For a game master creating an adventure or a campaign from scratch, the answer is easy. The people playing my game. For the game designer creating an adventure, scenario or setting; the answer is slightly more complicated. Is the adventure for …
Glen Cook’s _Black Company_
One of my favorite fantasy writers is Glen Cook. I will do later posts about some of his other, lesser known works and focus this post on The Black Company novels. They follow the exploits of the "last of the free companies of Khatovar", a mercenary company perpetually in an ugly dilemma. The first …
BEWARE THE WIZARD!
I have a plastic file box that I carry my gaming books and materials to the game shop every week. Anytime I come across a sticker I like, particularly if it is sold by the artist who designed it, I pick one up and put it on my DMing crate. This week I got a …
Grumpy Wizard 
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