Preventing GM Burnout from the Other Side of the Screen

Issue #316 of Roleplaying Tips features an article entitled Maintaining Your GM, which addresses GM burnout from the players’ perspective.

The article discusses four ways players can help keep you from getting burned out: creating PCs with prominent flags, helping with technical details, staying busy when you’re waiting for your turn and acknowledging your efforts.

Interview with S. John Ross

S. John Ross is a prolific game designer, with credits that include Last Unicorn Games’s Star Trek, oodles of GURPS titles and Risus, a free online RPG. More recently, he has produced a variety of products for his own company, Cumberland Games.

He authored the TOS Narrator’s Toolkit, a GMing resource for LUG’s Star Trek RPG, and is also well-known for the free GMing articles he’s written over the years, notably the very handy Big List of RPG Plots and Medieval Demographics Made Easy.

In this email interview, I chatted with S. John about his GMing style, Risus, writing for GMs and, by the end of it, sex.

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Spice Up Your Travel with Dragon #345

“Excursion: Four Ways to Travel the World” (in Dragon #345) offers up four ready-to-use conveyances for fantasy campaigns: an oceangoing trader, a gnomish balloon, an overland caravan and a submarine, all illustrated by the fabulous Jeff Carlisle.

When I wrote this article, the idea was twofold: to give GMs the complete package for each vehicle, including a detailed description, background elements, NPC info and adventure hooks, and to present players with four potential “home bases” to pique their interest.

I’ve been reading Dragon since I was 12, and actually being in it is a pretty amazing feeling. More importantly, though, I think (I hope!) you’ll find this article useful.

Free Adventures from Griffon Publishing

Griffon Publishing Studio offers a variety of free downloads, including five adventures.

Their most recent free adventure is The Charioteer’s Tomb (2 MB PDF), a pulp scenario in which “the characters explore a long-lost tomb belonging to a charioteer hero of the ancient Battle of Kadesh.” (Via Gaming Report.)

GMing Glossary Goes Live

The Treasure Tables RPG Glossary is now open for business.

A draft version of the glossary was posted a little while back, and TT readers and forum members made a ton of excellent contributions and suggestions to help get it shipshape.

Thank you to everyone who helped to create this glossary, and I hope it turns out to be a useful tool.

A Heaping Helping of RPG Prep Resources

Scott M. (author of Llama Fodder) has been working overtime on TT’s GMing wiki for the past couple of days.

He’s been creating wiki pages devoted to different aspects of RPG prep, and he’s put together some amazing collections of links already.

Need help with prep? Check these out: maps and mapping, prepping your GMing references, creating characters and image resources.

Scott, you rock.

Free GMing Dos and Don’ts PDF

The third free Treasure Tables PDF, GMing Dos and Don’ts: Ours Go to Eleven, is now available from our PDF Downloads page!

This is our first PDF featuring all-new material. It contains 4 pages of GMing advice that has never appeared on TT, and the only way to get it is to download the PDF.

Did I mention that it was free?

Gifts for Your Players

As a player, I love getting little souvenirs from the GM. These can be actual gifts, not tied specifically to the game, or in-game props that don’t have to be returned.

For example, at the start of a Stargate SG-4 campaign in 2004-5, our GM, Don, gave everyone an actual SG-4 patch. It was awesome.

But as a GM, it’s something I’m notoriously bad about — I never remember to give my players gifts and things to commemorate the game.

It’s an easy thing to do, though, and it makes a great “Thank you” to your players for showing up every week and making the game possible. Don’t be like me.

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