Deck O’Names Software and Cards

Amy Vander Vorste, who goes by Avlor on the Treasure Tables Forums, has just had her first RPG product published by Tabletop Adventures: The Deck O’Names Generator.

There’s also a version designed to be printed on cards, which can then be shuffled to come up with names on the fly. Both offer male and female names, with 34,000+ combinations altogether. Congrats, Amy!

1,000,000 Pageviews and Counting

Treasure Tables crossed the 1,000,000 pageviews mark within the past couple of days, which I think is pretty darned cool. I’m a fan of celebrating milestones, so I wanted to make sure I at least posted about this one!

True 20 Review: A Better Mousetrap

I picked up the hardcover version of True20 a few days ago, and I have to say that it’s been a long time since I was this excited about an RPG.

And I wasn’t predisposed to be excited about it, either — I’ve got oodles of d20 material that I’m quite happy with, and I wasn’t in the market for a new game. I’d also read some scathing criticism of some of the handwaving that plays a role in True 20, which didn’t exactly set my spine a-tingling.

But I do like to browse new releases, and in this case I’m glad I did: It’s got a few rough edges, but True20 is the natural evolution of D&D 3.x and d20 Modern, and it’s an excellent book.

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Use Index Cards and a Cork Board for Game Prep

This is a guest post by Laura Heilman (Collegia Obscura on the Treasure Tables Forums), who brought up this excellent idea in our thread on organizing campaign ideas.
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Organizing your campaign ideas can be a challenge. This is especially true when the ideas have not entirely gelled into a cohesive whole.

Try using 3×5 index cards and a cork board to easily organize and reorganize your ideas in flux.

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Star Wars Deck Plans

Courtesy of RPG Blog, I just found out about the Star Wars Deckplans Alliance — it’s a work in progress, but there are lots of great sci-fi deck plans up there already. They work from a variety of sources, they’re very attentive to detail and — naturally — they’re gamers.

Save My Game: Older Gamers

“Mature” Gamers, Part 2 is a Save My Game column about running games for 30+ year-old gamers, and it’s full of solid advice.

My current group (ages 25-35) uses suggestion #2 (alternating games), and I’ve put #1 (”Less often doesn’t have to mean less gaming”) to good use myself.

GM as Video Game Designer

Wired recently did an issue on videogames, and one thing that piqued my interest was this concept: Video game designers have to strike just the right balance with the difficulty of their games — too easy, and the player gets bored; too hard, and they give up.

That middle zone — where the game is difficult enough to be challenging, but easy enough to stay fun — is also an ideal goal for the majority of RPGs. And as GMs, that’s where we come in.

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We’re Engaged!

Alysia and I got engaged this morning at La Caille, right by their vineyard. I think the picture says it all!

Just so there’s a tenuous connection to GMing: It won’t be too long before we start making little GMs.

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