Category Archives: RPGs

When designing your game, it’s important to understand what your Harm and Recovery System is doing for your game. Both should create drama-filled moments, which means they need to have Costs associated with them: but those Costs not only need to be sensible for the touchstones evoked during play, but also carry a level of interest and intrigue all on their own. 

Jack Guignol has an oft-quoted post, “Just Use Bears,” about using the stats for a bear when the players outpace your prep and end up facing “some cool, weird-ass monster that you don’t actually have stats for.” Lars, at Dice Goblin, expanded this further, to leveraging animal archetypes in general, “Just Use Bears… Or Wolves, Dragons or Spiders.”

Powered by the Apocalypse games take diverse approaches to representing injury, stress, and deteriorating health. Unlike traditional RPGs with their focus on hit points, PbtA harm systems often try for other narrative consequences. Thoughts about Harm Clocks, Debilities, Conditions, Stress, Dice Pools, and NPCs.

After a thorough review of dozens of science fiction PbtA games, and after hacking the last two TTRPG systems we played quite a bit, I decided to create my own game with exactly the vibe I wanted. Why a new system? Well, I’d just published Reflections on PbtA Design, so it seemed apropos to design a game from scratch rather than just hack up an existing system.

Urban prep is different than traditional dungeon prep. For a dungeon, or a hamlet or keep, you might key every location, but you’re almost never going to do that for a town or city. These are typically run much more loosely, with handwaving around movement through the city.

Dungeon World 1e is the geomorph set of fantasy PbtAs, thanks to it being one of the first TTRPGs to use the Creative Commons license. You can cut it out and reassemble it, build on it as desired. Here are some of the many works that are compatible with Dungeon World 1e.

Most roleplaying games take place linearly, but some embrace the tropes of fiction and lean into narrative tricks like flashbacks. For instance, in a movie, one of the main characters will say to the others that they have a plan, and then the next scene will flash forward. You won’t learn what that plan is until later, as you see it unfold or as you see a flashback. If that fits your style of play, here’s a move you can add to your game.

Planet of the Week is my PbtA homage to shows like Star Trek, Firefly, and Stargate: Atlantis. You’re the away team of the research vessel Endeavor Maru. You’re the first group to land on each new planet, making first contact with aliens, investigating strange phenomena, and giving whatever assistance is needed. Can you stay true to your values as you explore?

We started a campaign using the second edition of Apocalypse World. At the end of July 2024, Vincent Baker announced a beta of AW: Burned Over 2024 for his Patreon subscribers. We began using the reworded basic moves where we could. It took quite a few months before I managed to get three of my players to convert their playbooks.

Most GMs like to prepare those specific aspects of NPCs that are important to them: names, drives/instincts, loyalty, connections, attitude, voice, media models, appearance, faces, actions / GM moves, and system-specific detail.

Reflections on PbtA Design is a collection of my past blog posts that discuss different facets of PbtA games—from their core principles to specific implementations across various genres and settings. It also includes plenty of new material. Whether you want to design your own PbtA game, get a broad view of how different PbtA games handle things, or read reviews about other games, this is the ebook for you. Bonus: All the sections I wrote are now licensed under the Creative Commons.

What we know about Dungeon World’s upcoming second edition: 1) Luke Crane, the publisher, bought the rights from the two authors, so that he could hire new designers. 2) Helena Real, author of Against the Odds, and Spencer Moore, author of Chasing Adventure, will design this edition. 3) They are looking for feedback and contributions. 4) To stay updated, you can share your email or join the Dungeon World+ Discord.

Many PbtA games have a core set of moves that the GM is to make during play. Apocalypse World has five additional modules of threat moves. Subsequent games by other authors extended this modularization of GM moves. For instance, Dungeon World added threat moves for over 100 monsters, and Masks added playbook-specific GM moves.