What Strikes Fear into Your Players?

Is there a specific game element — a rule, mechanic, monster, ability or something similar — that always puts your players on edge?

Just to establish a baseline, examples might include level drain (D&D), aggravated damage (White Wolf), foes with grey or white dice (Burning Wheel), critical hits (WFRP) or the tarrasque (D&D again) — all of which present “special threats” to the PCs.

Evil Overlords: Free Treasure Tables PDF

We’ve just released the sixth free Treasure Tables PDF, Evil Overlords: Faction Players in Your Campaign.

This PDF collects World Powers and Big-Picture Plotlines, my post introducing the evil overlord concept, and The Care and Feeding of Evil Overlords, Tom Bisbee’s post detailing how he implemented that concept in his current campaign (with his permission — thanks, Tom!).

Heres the short version: If your campaign features power groups and events in the background, and those elements have an impact on the PCs (the foreground), why not recruit a few gamers to play the factions and world powers via email?

Combined with our Evil Overlord Recruitment Bureau forum, this PDF gives you everything you need to try out faction players in your own campaign — I hope you’ll give it a shot!

Monster Brains: Horrifying and Fantastic Artwork

Like artwork with horrific, monstrous and fanastic themes? Looking for inspiration for a horror game? Got a few hours to spare? Then check out Monster Brains (NSFW).

It’s deliciously simple, but absolutely packed with good stuff. My favorite links include crazy-good Cthulhu paintings, charmingly unsettling Japanese art, mecha-Cerberus and one of the creepiest images I’ve seen in a long time (at least, until I saw this).

It’s a huge timesucker — I went through every month in the archives, clicking merrily away on artists that interested me. And I haven’t even started on the sidebar of links to like-minded sites! (Via Metafilter.)

Bribing the GM

Back in high school, I gamed with a GM who openly encouraged us to bribe him with things (like snacks) for XP and other in-game privileges. Fifteen years on, man, that seems weird.

Or is it? Is this secretly commonplace outside of high school?

It’s got such a Knights of the Dinner Table vibe that I’m going to be pretty surprised if it’s common — but then, I was wrong about there not being a kobold name generator, too.

Edit: To clarify, I’m not talking about things like writing campaign journals, drawing maps or otherwise helping with in-game tasks in exchange for bonus XP (etc.) — that’s a good thing, and it’s not really bribery. What I’m getting at is more along the lines of “Give me a soda and I’ll give you a thousand XP.”

Need a World? Try Planetocopia

Planetocopia describes itself as: “a group of model worlds supporting intelligent life. Some of these worlds are set in our future, some are alternate Earths, some are purely imaginary experiments in planetology, biology, sociology.”

Looking at worlds like Inversia (Earth, but the seas are landmasses and the continents are oceans), the totally badass Lyr (a beautifully-mapped water world) and a terraformed version of Mars makes me want populate them with my own ideas — or dive into worldbuilding, which I haven’t done in years.

The coolest thing about the site is the level of detail. World maps are clickable, with each section linking to a closeup and a description of that region, and there’s a ton of information about every aspect of the various planets. From my layman’s perspective, the science looks pretty solid, too. (Via Ken Hite’s LiveJournal, by way of anyway.)

Oops Moments: You’re Not Actually Dead

The PCs are fighting a tough, dramatic battle. Their foes are pulling no punches, and an ogre’s lucky critical kills one of the PCs, the fighter.

The battle continues, and a couple of rounds later you realize that you made a mistake: you forgot a modifier, and if you’d remembered it that ogre wouldn’t have hit the fighter, and she wouldn’t have died.

Oops. Now what? Here are five simple ways to fix this mistake.

Read more

One Week Left for the Wiki-to-PDF Project

The Wiki-to-PDF project ends on February 14th — there’s just one week left to contribute to two upcoming Treasure Tables PDFs, Finding Players and Problem Players.

Take a peek at what’s already been written by John Arcadian, Scott Martin (ScottM), myself, Kurt Schneider (Telas) and Scott Turnbull (Streamweaver). You could print both articles out right now and drop them into your GMing binder — even unfinished, they cover the bases very well.

And in a week, they’ll be even better — with your help. Signing up for a wiki account only takes a moment, and you can contribute as much or as little as you like to these PDFs. See you on the wiki!

Post-it Easel Pads: Instant Whiteboard

On one of the rare occasions that I watch commercials, I caught an ad for Post-it Easel Pads last night and immediately thought, “You could totally use those for GMing.”

Along the lines of Post-it sortable cards for GMs (and a host of other office supply fetish material on TT, most of which can be found in the archives under GMing tools), these pads are non-tacky and should stick to most smooth surfaces.

They come in two varieties: easel pads and wall pads. The latter are slightly smaller (20″x23″ vs. 25″x30″), but the whole pad sticks to the wall — draw on the top sheet, tear it off and start over on the next one; the easel pads require an easel, and the individual sheets stick to the wall (they also come gridded, which would be great for maps).

I can see these being very handy if (like me) you don’t have space for a wall-mounted whiteboard, but want some permanency for your in-session scribblings (if you don’t need the permanency, give hand-held dry-erase boards a try), and for conventions or other offsite GMing (student lounge, friend’s house, etc.).

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