PocketMod for Taking Notes

Here’s a sexy little idea: PocketMod, “the free disposable personal organizer.”

I get random ideas for games all the time, and I always keep something handy to jot them down on. This looks like a neat, inexpensive option, and it’s quite customizable. (Found via Roleplaying Tips.)

Opening Themes for Your Game

In Ritualized Openings, Jeff Rients (of Jeff’s Gameblog) suggests reciting an opening theme before each session. Imagine sitting down to play Star Trek, and kicking off with “These are the voyages…” — I like it.

Blogging Your Game Sessions

Keeping a written record of what happens in your gaming sessions is a good idea. Keeping that record in a place where all of your players can interact with it is an even better idea. For a long time, doing both meant creating your own campaign website or using a messageboard — both good solutions, but neither of them ideal. That’s where blogging comes in.

This post is an introduction to the many benefits of blogging your game sessions.

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More Ways to Find Players

As a follow-up to last month’s link to FindPlay, here’s a list of messageboards and services to help you find players (posted by John Kim).

I’ve used two of them: I got nothing but spam from my Access Denied posting, and met my current group through EN World.

Jumbo RPG.net Thread for GMs

This thread is a grab-bag of GM resources from other RPG.net threads, from eerie events to places to have a shootout.

Martin’s Maxims for GMs

Johnn Four, of Roleplaying Tips, encourages gamers to “Have more fun at every game.” Robin Laws wrote Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering. Vincent Baker came up with the Lumpley Principle.

All three are concise, effective ways of summing up Johnn’s, Robin’s and Vincent’s views on gaming — and more importantly, they’re useful to the larger RPG community.

In thinking about what drives me as a game master, I realized that I have my own philosophy of GMing. It’s been very helpful to me (and still is!), and I hope it will be similarly useful to other GMs. It needs a catchy name, though, so I’ve decided to call it Martin’s Maxims for GMs.

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Articles at the Burning Void

The Burning Void website, run by Heather Grove, offers a variety of articles for GMs.

It’s been around since 1998, but I somehow missed it until fairly recently — perhaps it will be new to you as well!

Blogging for GMs Roundup

The Blogging for GMs project has ended, with 19 posts by 10 different RPG bloggers, and 9 additional posts from me, for a total of 28 posts. A wide range of topics of interest to GMs were covered — you can check out the Blogging for GMs Project category to view all of the posts that were part of the project.

My thanks to our contributors, Mike Barker, Cayzle, Chris Chinn, Frank Filz, Shane Garvey, Brannon Hollingsworth, Jonas Karlsson, Jukka Koskelin, Scott M. and Arref Mak. These folks wrote some interesting posts for this project, and if you haven’t visited their blogs I encourage you to do so.

Given that Treasure Tables had only been around for 3 months at the start of this project, think it’s great that Blogging for GMs was able to attract 10 contributors, and I had a lot of fun with it. I hope you enjoyed the Blogging for GMs project — if you have any feedback or suggestions, let me know in the comments!

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