Music: Give Your Campaign an Opening Theme

TV shows benefit enormously from having an opening theme — it’s a powerful hook to draw you into the world of the show, and it triggers all sorts of associations with the world of the show, as well as useful assumptions about the way that world works.

That sounds pretty useful for gaming, too.

Don Mappin, who runs my group’s Stargate campaign, has used this technique on several occasions. He also plays Stargate SG-1 music throughout our sessions, which works well, too.

Along the lines of Ritualized Openings, an excellent post by Jeff Rients (previously linked here on TT), my idea is to formalize that a bit: Pick a song that fits your campaign, and play it at the start of every session.

If you wait until the pre-game chatter has started to die down, your game should enjoy many of the same benefits that TV shows derive from their opening themes. What do you think?

GMing on a Bad Night

When game night arrives and — for whatever reason — you just don’t feel like running the game, what do you do?

Do you plow ahead anyway, hoping that once you get rolling you’ll perk up? Or do you call off the game, and play cards instead? Or something else entirely?

Starting Sessions with a Recap

Opening a session with a recap — a short summary of what happened in the previous session — is pretty standard practice, and it’s a good idea.

I’m sure there are other approaches, but I’ve seen three ways to handle recaps — and two of them have something odd in common: low player interest.

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What to Do When Your Favorite RPG Goes Out of Print

This guest post by Patrick Benson (AKA VV_GM) addresses a topic I’ve never seen covered anywhere else: what to do when your system of choice is no longer supported by the publisher.
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If you’ve been gaming long enough (about a month, usually) you know what it is like to hear that your favorite system will no longer be published and/or supported. No new supplements, no new expansion sets, and the biggest problem of all being no new published adventures. For all intents and purposes your system is dead to the world.

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Interview with Wolfgang Baur

Wolfgang Baur has been writing RPG material since the early 1990s, originally with TSR and later as a freelancer. During his years as an Associate Editor at Dungeon Magazine, he edited dozens of adventures — and he’s written more than a few himself.

Since going freelance, Wolfgang has embarked on the Open Design project, which relies on patronage (in the sense that Renaissance artists had patrons) to provide funding for the writing of custom-designed scenarios.

I interviewed Wolfgang via email, where we got a chance to discuss writing and editing adventures, the Open Design project and his approach to GMing.

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Engage Every Player

The latest installment of Save My Game, DM Judgement, has some decent advice on the title topic (nitpicky players) — but the real gem is this:

“I developed a system of small name cards that I would hold in my hand as I talked with the class. I cycled through the deck as I asked questions to make sure that I kept everyone engaged, but I had to pay attention and make myself do it.”

Not only is this yet another use for index cards, but it sounds like an excellent way to make sure that you’re not ignoring your quieter players in favor of the chattier ones. Simple, intuitive and potentially quite useful.

Quick Real-World Timeline Resource

Writer’s Dreamtools offers a neat timeline of real-world historical events by decade, from the 1650s to the 1990s.

It’s full of snippets, not depth — perfect, in other words, for GMs looking for historical details who don’t want to wade through lots of text to get to them. Topics include bad guys, what’s “in,” entertainment, religion and more.

My only quibble is the format, which runs together on the screen; it could use a bit more differentiation. That definitely doesn’t keep it from being useful, though. (Via kottke.)

It’s Like a Party Full of Bards

What do you do if one PC is obviously overpowered when compared to the rest of the party?

Let’s look at some reasons why this can happen, and what to do about it.

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