Looking Back, and a Big Thank You!

On the last day of the year, I’d like to take a moment to do three things: mention a useful tool, share a few numbers — and say thank you for a great year!

Read more

Teaching Beginners, Urban Flavor and Organizational Tips

TT’s GMing Q&A Forum went live on the 28th, and it’s already a buzzing hive of activity. We’ve signed up 39 members in less than 48 hours, and there are lots of good questions — and answers! — being posted. If you haven’t joined the forum yet, I encourage you to do so.

This is TT’s first forum roundup, highlighting great threads in the forum as a way to spur cross-pollination between the forum and the blog. This week’s topics are teaching roleplaying to beginners, urban “dungeon dressing” and organizational tips.

Read more

Fictional Chemicals and Substances

This Wikipedia entry lists dozens (hundreds?) of fictional medicines, compounds and chemicals, from ferrocrete to phoenix down. Great for adding flavor to your game (no pun intended). (Via Roleplaying Tips #293.)

The GMing Q&A Forum is Live!

Treasure Tables now has a forum for asking and answering GMing questions, aptly named the GMing Q&A Forum.

This grew out of an open question from earlier this month, Should We Have a Forum for GMing Questions?, and I’m very excited about it. I think this could turn into a great resource for GMs, and an excellent addition to TT.

All you need to do to start asking (and answering) questions is head on over to the new forum and sign up. The forum’s one-month trial period starts today (and is explained in this post on the forum).

I’ve also “seeded” the new forum with three questions, just to get the ball rolling:

• What are your top 3 organizational tips for GMs?
• Do you hold onto your group’s character sheets?
• How do you organize your gaming shelves?

I hope to see you there!

Photos of Abandoned Urban Sites

Opacity offers oodles of haunting pictures of urban ruins — perfect fodder for modern games (especially horror).

Featuring Danvers State Hospital, the Staten Island boat graveyard and many others. (Via MetaFilter.)

See Page XX: Powerlessness in Horror Games

Robin Laws’s latest See Page XX column, The Creeps and How to Get Them, offers some good advice on running “victim horror.”

Call of Cthulhu is ideal for victim horror; Hunter: The Reckoning is the exact opposite, requiring a different approach to scare your players.

How Different RPGs Define the GM’s Role

Chris Chinn, of Deep in the Game (one of the best RPG blogs around), recently wrote a post entitled An exercise for the viewer at home.

In it, Chris excerpts a snippet of text from the intro to Exalted that reveals a lot about the assumptions underlying that RPG. I love this idea (thanks, Chris!), so I’m going to try it here in a slightly different form.

I went through 30+ RPGs and wrote down their definitions of the GM’s role — and found a range of definitions, from appalling to marvelous (including some that will make you wonder how so many people ever got into GMing). With reader contributions, 97 games are now covered on this list.

Read more

The Worst Dungeon Master Ever

Merry Christmas! Here’s a little GM-related humor for the holidays, courtesy of the thingsihate.org archives: The Worst Dungeon Master Ever.

“Then he had us roll for breast and penis size.“

Next Page →