How to End a Campaign: According to Plan
This is the last post in TT’s six-part How to End a Campaign series (previous entries are linked below). Each post in this series covers one approach to ending a long-running game, including pros and cons.
As Identifying the Tough Stuff discussed, “end a campaign” was one of the most common answers to the question “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do as a GM?,” which I posed in TT’s GMing profiles thread.
This last approach is a bit unusual: Having a plan to end your campaign, and sticking to it.
GMing Lessons from the Dao
A little while back, TT reader and frequent commenter tsuyoshikentsu wrote an article about useful GMing lessons that can be learned from the Dao (or Tao): DMing and the Dao.
He offers up four lessons (my favorite is #4: Trust Your Players), all of which are elegant in their simplicity. It’s a good read.
Suggestions Needed for Our GMing Wiki
I’d like to kick off the Bulk Up the GMing Wiki Project in 2007 (or earlier, if there’s enough interest) — here’s how it works.
The Treasure Tables GMing Wiki is a neat resource, but it’s pretty sparsely populated at the moment. We’ve got some nicely fleshed-out sections, but not much depth.
The Bulk Up the GMing Wiki Project is aimed at changing that, and there are two ways you can help.
Setting Up Your Game Space
Patrick Benson (AKA VV_GM), the author of three previous TT guest posts (genre advice for supers, horror and espionage games), wrote this guest post about something GMs often take for granted: the place where you game.
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Imagine the following scenario: You have an amazing and original adventure that you are positive that your players will love. You do all of your prep work (no really, you do the prep work!), plan for every aspect of the upcoming session that you can think of in detail, and you have mastered your knowledge of the rules to the point that you can cite from memory which pages of the rules book has typos.
Now what could possibly go wrong?
AstroSynthesis for 3D Space Maps
AstroSynthesis 2.0 is a program that lets you create 3D star system maps.
Maps can include randomly-generated features alongside the ones you place, and they can get quite complex. AstroSynthesis drills down to the level of plotting routes between planets (and calculating the distances for you) and allowing you to animate planetary orbits.
I’m not sure I would ever need this much detail to run a space-based campaign, but it would be fun to play with — and nice to know that if I did need to go deeper, I could. There’s also a free trial, and at the moment this puppy has four 5/5 reviews on RPGNow.
Has anyone tried AstroSynthesis?
How to GM a Good Convention Game (from a Player’s POV)
I’ve never GMed a game at a convention, but I’ve played in plenty of them. In the same way that players and GMs often have different takes on what happens in-game (the flashlight vs. the 150 watt bulb), I thought it would be worthwhile to list 9 characteristics of a good con event from a player’s perspective.
Doing the Impossible
I’m currently reading Resolute
It requires a quick setup. A mid-19th Century American whaler has discovered an abandoned British naval ship in the Arctic, and he decides to sail it home. The British vessel is enormous, meant to be crewed by 60-70 people, and the whaler can only muster 13.
“Battered by at least one storm every single day of his two-month voyage, he was continually blown off course. More than once a sudden blizzard, with its accompanying mountainous seas, threatened to destroy the undermanned ship. ‘I frequently had no sleep for more than sixty hours at a time,’ the captain would later tell friends.”
From a GMing standpoint, this raises several questions.
The Immersion Factor of In-Game Food
On Thanksgiving, what better topic to cover than food in RPGs?
While I was trying to think of a food-related GMing post, something hit me: In nearly every game I’ve ever run, food has been described in a fair amount of detail. And in books and movies, the food tends to jump out at me.
At least for me, including food in RPGs increases immersion in the game world.
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Treasure Tables is dedicated to game masters, offering GMing advice and ideas since 2005. I'm Martin Ralya, and I've been GMing since 1989 and writing for the RPG industry since 2004.