Using Flickr to Find RPG Images

Photos can be a great resource for your game, both directly — to show the players what their characters see — and indirectly, as inspiration for the scenarios that you write.

Flickr, a free photo site that supports social tagging, is a neat place to find photos to use in your games.

Read more

Abulia Savant Discusses Cross-Gender PCs

Don Mappin has written Are You Bi?, the follow-up to sex, Sex, and SEX! (previously linked on TT).

This time, Don looks at some reasons why players choose to play cross-gender PCs, why some GMs ban this practice, and the issues that it raises.

Using Climate to Build a Richer World

GMing Q&A Forum member Auke Slotegraaf posted a lengthy piece on using climate types to flesh out your worlds.

The details that he discusses look like they’d be easy to implement, and they’re all geared towards RPGs — this is solid, fun and practical info.

100+ TV and Movie Fonts

TypeNow offers over a hundred fonts covering everything from Star Trek and Star Wars to Murder She Wrote and Smallville.

If you’re running a movie- or TV-themed RPG, or making props for your game, this is one to bookmark. (See also: Gaming Fonts on RPG Blog; via LifeHacker.)

Give Your Players a List of NPC Names

Here’s a random fantasy/sci-fi NPC name: Vexrathaire.

Now turn away from your screen, grab a piece of paper, and try and write that name from memory. If you got it right, pat yourself on the back — but you’re probably in the minority.

When you introduce new names in your games, that’s a lot what it’s like to be a player. “Veksru…what?”

There are lots of ways to deal with this, but the best one by far is just to give your players a list of your NPC names.

Read more

Space.com: A Trove of Sci-Fi Images

Running a sci-fi RPG? Check out Space.com’s image galleries for tons of dramatic photos and artists’ renderings — all of which make great inspiration and background color for your game. (The site can be sluggish, but it’s worth it.)

Post-Apocalyptic Adventure Seeds

Expeditious Retreat Press has just released Post-Apocalyptic Seeds V, to which I contributed 5 adventure seeds (you can see which ones on my list of published work).

The Seeds line — currently 33 small PDFs — is a lot of fun, and it’s a goldmine of ideas for GMs.

The Eight-Page Character Background

Thor Olavsrud writes: “For many, a massive exercise in character backstory is seen as the hallmark of an invested player, something to be admired and encouraged. While I won’t claim that all such backstories are dysfunctional, I do suspect that a great many of them are.”

Sharp insight into recognizing this type of abused player syndrome, and dealing with it.

← Previous Page — Next Page →