Category Archives: Game Master Tips

The following map and location template are for you to use to develop your own cavern-exploration adventures. They’re derived from William Crowther’s descriptions of the Bedquilt section of Mammoth Cave.

For my TTRPG Planet of the Week, I’ve created adventures on 11 different planets so far. Which has required me to create at least one miniature constructed language (conlang) for each planet. For unlike Star Trek, with its magical, invisible, instantaneous translator, in Planet of the Week the Universal Translator (UT) is a device that has to be trained over time. So characters always hear a bit of the new language before translation kicks in.

When you embrace co-creation or shared narration with your players it can sometimes lead to a pastiche, less like Middle Earth and more like Narnia. For instance, my hexcrawl setting was initially conceived of as Iron Age, but my players kept bringing Medieval elements into it.

You as GM can certainly handle factions solely through the fiction and the regular rules, but it is great when the game supports factions mechanically. Your characters help this faction, but in doing so run afoul of that faction, and the GM tracks this in some way.

Prepping a planet for a session requires embracing some tropes and being generous with your hooks. I grew up on location-based prep. “Here’s a dungeon or a hexmap. It tells you where and what everything is.” In contrast, you can’t prep a planet at that level of detail, unless maybe it’s one of the planetoids visited by The Little Prince! Fortunately, the tropes common to space opera simplify what players expect.

Here are some ideas for when you need a dungeon for your players to explore: Dyson’s Dodecahedron maps, Roleplaying Tips’ five-room dungeons, the One-Page Dungeon Contest, Perilous Wilds, Improv Almanac, and Hex Describe.

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.

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.

While different playbooks have unique moves in Apocalypse World for PCs, the GM doesn’t have different moves depending on which playbooks are being used. Masks was one of the first PbtA games, if not the first, to give the Game Master playbook-specific moves. For instance, for the playbook The Outsider, the GM gets the moves: For The Protégé: Many of these moves are tied into the character arc and challenges faced by the corresponding playbooks. Thirsty Sword Lesbians offers three GM moves per playbook: Chasing Adventure does this as well, and I think any GM of […]

Improv Almanac: Dangers and Discoveries for 88 Places is a 467-page resource for the busy Game Master. Did your players take a shortcut through a swamp, and you are looking for ideas for encounters? Are they trying to cross snow-capped peaks, and you don’t want to evoke The Fellowship of the Ring? Are they sailing, and you’ve run out of ideas for what’s on the next island they’ll encounter? The primary way to use this ebook is to look up the type of location your adventurers will be exploring. You’ll find questions […]

One of my custom GM moves is “Bring in backstories and world-building.” This isn’t always easy, but I try to make history come alive as more than just signs on a wall.

This post is an excerpt from The Best-Delayed Plans: The Game Master’s Guide to Adventure Prep. Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games—games in the school of design of Apocalypse World—often outline moves and principles for Game Masters. While these are typically intended for use during play, they can also be useful in prep, no matter which RPG system you use. Principles Here are some principles to keep in mind during prep— Moves While principles guide overall play, in PbtA games “GM moves” are the types of responses that GMs make […]

I ran 5e with 8 to 10 players for two campaigns. The first campaign was an open table at our FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store). That campaign quickly grew from 3 players the first session to a peak of 12 players once (on which occasion we split into two separate tables with two DMs). Given the shortage of DMs, you too may find yourself with lots of players. My key advice: In general, just embrace the chaos! Roll with the punches! All my plans went out the window fairly quickly […]