Category Archives: RPG Content

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 […]

In my Impulse Drive campaign, before facing the BBEG, the PCs needed to run a last gig to earn some lucre to repair their spaceship, buy some gear, and pay down their debt. I typically offered two or three gigs for the PCs to pick from, having them choose at the end of a session so I could prep the right gig. In this case, I really wanted to play the Mothership adventure The Cleaning of Prison Station Echo (by Haig Morrison and Dave Kenny), so I offered two gigs inspired […]

Free League Publishing is currently crowdfunding a new edition of its Coriolis science-fiction RPG­ – Coriolis: The Great Dark. The new edition is based on the updated Year Zero Engine, which powers their RPGs based on licensed properties: Alien, Blade Runner, The Walking Dead, etc. Unlike those games, Coriolis is their own IP, their own setting. I discovered its predecessor, Coriolis: The Third Horizon (ironically, its second edition) when seeking science-fiction modules for my Impulse Drive campaign. While I’ve never used its game engine, I did find the setting to be invaluable for prep and adventures. Billed as “Arabian […]

DM: You can’t see any towers. The redwoods here are hundreds of feet tall.Cleric: As we fly above the trees, I use Locate Object to try to find the same type of stone used in the other towers.DM: The cleric follows his senses till it brings you to a pond among the redwoods. The pond is about six hundred feet in diameter. The wind whispers softly through the trees.Artificer: Let’s land about 120 feet away from the pond, just in case.DM: OK.Artificer: Can someone give me Water Walk?Wizard: I will.Artificer: […]

Back in November, one of my players asked me to run a one-shot campaign for her son and his wife, as one of them always DMs, and they’ve never both played in the same game. I asked them what they wanted and they said that they would like “to have a one-shot with high-level characters, like level 15 or so, and possibly mostly a dungeon crawl with puzzles and games and things.” I’d never run a session for higher than level 7, so after first thinking about writing my own […]

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 […]

Thought experiment: What should a generic pantheon look like? For a hexcrawl module I’m writing, I didn’t want to go with specific gods, but I’ve struggled to come up with something generic that the DM could easily adapt to their setting. I want to make less work for GMs. This is prompted by me encountering things in modules like “A steep hill rises from the forest and at its top there is a shrine where stands an old statue of Yemathic, about 20 feet tall” and not finding enough about […]

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 […]

For my current hexcrawl campaign, the Hexedland, I created a 10-by-10 hexmap using Text Mapper. I used the random generator based on Erin D. Smale’s algorithm, then kept tweaking the results by hand until I got something I liked. For instance, I wanted the starting hex to border each type of other terrain (forest, mountains, hills, swamp, lake, grassland) so that players could choose the type of environment (and therefore monsters) they wanted to encounter. I lengthened a mountain range that divided the middle of the map, and had the […]

The general advice for DMs building their own campaign worlds is to recognize that most of world creation won’t end up being experienced by the players. While you can go full Tolkien if you wish (to obey your own muse), you’re typically better off creating simple systems and then using fractal design to zoom in on those parts that players show an interest in. For my Hexedland campaign, rather than write The Silmarillion, I developed a one-page pantheon, where the description of each god shared the major myth associated with […]

Another bit of advice that I find particularly useful from Sly Flourish is to add three features to a fantastic location for players to interact with (see “What are three fantastic features of this location?” in Creative Mind Exercises for D&D). For a recent delve into a mine, for my 5e campaign, my three were a rusted minecart, rail track, and a trellis bridge over a deep chasm. I didn’t create any rules for minecarts, nor do I think you should. Instead, improvise rules for features using your RPG system’s […]

The hook: A Saltmarsh merchant says his woodcutter partner, Concisor Maplesky, hasn’t been heard from in a month. The merchant needs the party to find out what happened to the woodcutter and to ship two masts down Kingfisher River. He’ll pay 100 gp per player. He provides a boat to go upstream and a map showing which tributaries to traverse to reach the logging camp at Flicker Creek. If you’d like to read the rest of my one-page adventure, it’s available in the new DMs Guild exclusive ebook, The Lonely […]

My players’ characters are visiting a village smithy, so I decided the local bard will sing this poem as they approach (then ask them for money!). Since our homebrew campaign world is set in Stone Age Eurasia, I changed the references to Christ and Sunday worship to more neutral items. My edited words are in italics. (With apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.) The Village Blacksmith UNDER a spreading chestnut tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of […]