Category Archives: Game Master Tips

TL;DR: Microscope, by Ben Robbins, Lame Mage Productions, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐, an innovative RPG for collaborative world building, and a great way to start any campaign with a Big Bang. Having heard great things about using the Microscope RPG for collaborative world-building, I knew that I wanted to kick-off our new science-fiction PbtA campaign with a Microscope session. Heck, our planned setting is literally the first scenario listed on the website: “Humanity spreads to the stars and forges a galactic civilization”! (Fantasy RPG players, the next two are “Fledgling nations arise from […]

In my book Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, I have a chapter on creating a naming language. Namelangs are small languages intended primarily for naming people and places in an imagined world. As such, you don’t need to create a grammar or extensive vocabulary, just a short dictionary. Heck, you don’t even have to be formal about what sounds are included in the language and how they are combined (phonotactics). Now much conlanging is for fun and private amusement, but I ran into a problem with Denju, my naming language that I […]

One of the great bits of tech from Apocalypse World 2e is the threat map, which provides a concise summary of campaign prep. You can adapt it for other systems as well, if your play centers on a holding or home base. Here’s an example from last year for my Stonetop campaign: D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker describe the process of using threat maps as follows: List the players’ characters in the center circle. As you name NPCs, place them on the map around the PCs, according to what […]

DMs and GMs have a lot of different ways they can prep for role-playing sessions, as I’ve learnt over the past three years: These days I’m still using the core of the Lazy DM outline, supplemented by the other techniques. Sometimes I find switching prep techniques just helps be to me more creative and motivates me to actually do some prep! Which, of course, is what I should be doing now! Updates: These essays are now collected in my free ebook, Best-Delayed Plans. Post updated 2022-04-03 with link to threat […]

The Line separates what the GM narrates vs. what the player narrates. In D&D, the player narrates their backstory and their current activity; the DM narrates everything else. Of course, even some DMs in 5e shift the Line a little – “You killed it! Describe your final blow and its death throes!” On the other extreme, take One Shot World by Yochai Gal. The players and GMs collaboratively develop the world. “Set out a blank sheet of paper and ask the player who is the most well-traveled to draw a […]

Stars & Wishes is a tested method to get positive feedback and constructive criticism, helping you understand what your players thought of your TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) session. Here is my adaptation of the method. I use these as my last two prompts at the end of every session (integrated into my custom End of Session move), encouraging each player to contribute: I love these prompts as a formal way to unwind from a session and reflect on what happened and what people would like to see happen next. I […]

My normal prep uses the Lazy Dungeon Master Adventure Prep, though sometimes I turn to the 7-3-1 technique or what I call Monty Hall Prep. When my players in a Dungeon World campaign told me (in Stars & Wishes) that they planned for their PCs to return for a third time to a tunnel to search for the McGuffin, I decided to mix it up. I needed to think differently about this setting, which they’d already visited multiple times. And I’d been wanting to get better at thinking through and […]

You’re GMing an RPG game tonight, and you haven’t done any prep. Normally I use the Lazy DM checklist or the 7-3-1 technique or hexcrawl prep, but when I’m crushed for time I use what I call Monty Hall Prep: I read up on 3 different monsters, either from the Monster Manual, the bestiary of the system I’m playing, or these days from Keith Ammann’s book or blog. I write down 3 “doors” (locations) to choose from, foreshadowing but typically not naming which monster is “behind” each door. In play, […]

So I discovered Dungeon World originally through Sly Flourish’s blog, and he is open about adapting techniques from other systems in his 5e games. He recently blogged about zones in combat, lifted from Fate Condensed: Zone-based Combat in D&D. Prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, I had a lot of miniatures and terrain maps that would come out for battle.  In switching to online play for 5e, I found maps (and icons for opponents) to become a huge time sink. Because battles can look phenomenal in Roll 20, there’s an expectation that […]

My group played our first remote D&D 5e session last night. As it happened, my notes (written before I knew this would be online) called for them waking in the middle of a cavalry battle between centaurs and horsemen. It was certainly a lot easier to manage with a virtual tabletop! We had problems with the Roll 20 app’s audio and switched to JoinMe halfway through: that went much better. We will do that going forward. Unfortunately, virtual D&D brings all of the fun of conference calls to your gaming […]

As I’ve written elsewhere, when I started my current homebrew O5R campaign, I generated a 10×10 hex map using Hex Describe. Even though it is powered by nearly 2,000 tables (!), I found myself missing the cast of characters that populate a town. I came up with a design goal of, within a single page, emulating the keep from The Keep on the Borderlands (buy it!) as a useful starting location for the adventurers, but adding more elements of intrigue. Since Hex Describe is open source, and you can append your own tables […]

Last night I got two hours of O5R play out of one sentence of my session notes! That sentence: A dead man, an arrow in his eye: you find no food or weapons but a saddle and shield. Reacting to my players’ actions, I ended up roleplaying the dead man (thanks to Speak with Dead), the grass (!) his body was found in (thanks to Speak with Plants), and his murderer. The key resource I used during play was a random name generator I had written at the start of the campaign, when the situations […]

I love the Dungeon Contest’s one-page dungeons, where you can see the entire dungeon and its contents at a glance. Especially those dungeons that get beyond the fixed narrative structure of five-room dungeons. My own attempt for the Dungeon Contest was thematic but probably unoriginal, though it did lead to three great sessions in my last campaign and the rise of a new Big Bad Evil Gal (you can download Catacombs of the Lich Queen here). So I was disappointed when I ran Hex Describe for the first time and […]