Every great GM knows that there is always more to learn about your craft. Whether you are just starting on your game-mastering journey, or you have been in the hot seat for a while, The Practical Guide to Becoming a Great GM will be a must on your gaming shelf.
Written by Great Game Master host Guy Sclanders, The Practical Guide will offer hours and hours worth of advice in its bound pages. Learn how to build and upgrade your encounters so they are both balanced and challenging. Discover why people are attracted to TTRPGs to begin with, and how to inspire interest throughout your gaming career. Build a world you love to play in, fill it with interesting villains, and learn how to do it all yourself!
The Practical Guide will contain three different sections to help hone your craft: Phase One will be about why we play RPGs; Phase Two will be about how to build a world and adventures you can have pride in; and Phase Three will be about how both the world outside the game and the world within the game come together.
While this book will not be coming out till September 2022, there is still a lot of works by Guy Sclanders to catch up on. Check out Great Game Master on YouTube, and read his previous two books The Complete Guide To Creating Epic Campaigns and The Complete Guide for Creating Nautical Campaigns!
Pre-order your copy of The Practical Guide to Becoming a Great GM here!
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Set in an age of myth and legend, Follow Me Down is a upcoming short RPG by Joie Martin. Based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Follow Me Down is a two player game about travelling to Hades for love of some kind or other.
Begin the game by creating two characters that are similar in archetype to Orpheus and Eurydice – one the lover who died too soon, the other willing to do anything to get them back. Each Lover has their own abilities that they can use to return to their loved one.
Each game is set in eight different sections. These sections are different Books of the Dead, each built to explore a character’s journey. The game comes to its narrative climax with a scene known as The Gauntlet of Hope and Regret, where the two players decide what happens in the end together. The final scene is the Denouement, or the epilogue to the game, where the players decide what happens to each character after everything.
This game is Powered by the Apocalypse, so if you are familiar with games such as Monsterhearts or Apocalypse World, you will be ahead of the curve. The big twist of this game is that it is GMless… kinda. The two players will trade back and forth being the GM (or The Fates as the game calls them), allowing each character to have time to figure out how to survive the Underworld alone. How will they grow? How will they change?
Back your copy of Follow Me Down right here on Kickstarter!
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Based on the award-winning Image comic, CHEW: The Roleplaying Game is all about saving the world from food related crimes. Take on the role of a detective working for the Special Divisions Unit to stop criminals from selling the most dangerous food of all…
Chicken.
After a massive bird flu outbreak killed millions, the sale of poultry has been deemed illegal. Face off against poultry dealers and superpowered foodie villains as they try to smuggle and sell birds across the world!
Creating a character for CHEW is equal parts gritty and comedy. Your character should be filled with quirks and dark secrets. Whatever you build, there are some odd powers you can wield. Perhaps you will be a tank who can wield tortilla chips as lethal weapons, or a the division’s nice guy who can make friends with animals after eating their gelatin.
This game is based on the Forged in the Dark game rule set – you may recognize the rule set if you have played Blades in the Dark or Band of Blades. CHEW will have some specific in-game mechanics, including Appetite. With Appetite, you can gain an additional die to roll, activate a flashback scene, or help out another character. However, the game will still have familiar rules, such as Resistance, allowing characters to resist some of the consequences they may face from a failed roll or action.
Above all things, remember you are all solving a mystery – so get the corkboard and string, and figure out what is really going on here!
CHEW: The Roleplaying Game comes out in May 2022!
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In all fantasy media, poetry shows up in one form or another. Whether it is elvish poem-riddles to open a door, or fey characters speaking in iambic pentameter, poetry is a large part of the fantasy genre.
Adding poetry into a game can add a lot of world building value to your game environment. Poetry often illuminates characters to old myths of Gods, heroes, and events of importance. They can be riddles that your party may need to solve, or maybe even a love poem from an NPC. Regardless, understanding some basics of poetry writing can be incredibly useful when running your own game. Let’s go over some basics to get you started.
One of the biggest aspects of poetry is rhythm. The speed helps dictate the payoff of the entire work. Not every poem needs a consistent rhythm, but every poem does have a rhythm of one kind or another.
There are dozens of potential meter forms. More often than not, meter is determined by how much emphasis you put on one syllable compared to the next. Without getting too complicated, let us just say that the best way to mark meter is through the counting of syllables.
The easiest way of going about meter is to find a consistent syllable count per line and stick to it throughout the poem. If you are just starting writing poetry for a game, begin with an even number of syllables per line. Classics poems, including Shakespeare Chaucer, sit at 8 – 10 syllables every line. There is a natural flow to these that is easy to replicate and learn from. Check out any of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale for a better idea.
I will begin with a very polarizing statement: not every poem needs to rhyme.
Poetry can take numerous forms. The early poets of the Renaissance and before would fill their works with rhyming schemes. Couplets, triplets, quadruplets – their all there. However, nowadays you may find rhyming schemes less common.
So, should your poem rhyme? In my experience, it depends on the context. Rhyme was prevalent during the Renaissance because it showed that the author was cultured. It showed they knew how to read, which was a rare ability of the time. They knew how to make writing sound beautiful. It was meant to be read aloud to crowds, not hidden away inside your mind.
On the other hand, we see a lot of poets today that will not have rhyming schemes. They will focus on imagery, experience, sensation. Poems are much more solitary. Unless you are visiting slam poetry competitions, you may never hear someone read a poem out loud except for English class.
So, the question for you is – What is the purpose of the poem? Is it at a stage performance? Is the poem hidden in an ancient tomb?
Regardless, it is always your call about if you want to rhyme. If you do, go for it. If not, then hold back and let the imagery and experience do the talking.
Imagery is one of the biggest appeals for poetry fans. Creating strange and beautiful images by combining different ideas, places, thoughts, and things is the magic of poetry. Regardless if your poem has eight syllables per line or twenty, if your poem rhymes or not, put some interesting and beautiful images in.
How do you do this? Well, what do you find beautiful? What images inspire awe in you? Use those. Combine unconnected objects and places together in order to create fantastic and whimsical images.
And remember, if you don’t get the desired effect on your first poem, that’s alright. Just make sure you do it again. Practise is the only way to craft beautiful things.
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Freshly announced at the Future of D&D panel at the D&D Celebration stream, Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse is the next rules expansion to Dungeons & Dragons!
Monsters of the Multiverse will be your all in one guide for different monsters and races you have seen outside of the Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual. This collection book will ensure you don’t have to carry around every expansion sourcebook to your next game. Instead, you will have access to every monster card you need, edited down so DMs can run them with ease!
Even more than that, this sourcebook has access to all the playable races in the game, a total of thirty different options. No longer will you need to search through seven different books to remember race abilities. It will all be in here!
As mentioned before, this book will be part of the Rules Expansion Gift Set coming out in January next year. This collection will include Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and Monsters of the Multiverse. The set will also include a DM screen and a three book collector sleeve for the set. Don’t miss out!
The Rules Expansion Set comes out January 25th, 2021! Mordenkanien Presents Monsters of the Multiverse will be coming out as a stand alone later next year.
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Blade Runner is coming to a game table near you! Set in the world of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner, and Blade Runner 2049, face off against androids while challenging your own understanding of humanity.
The year is 2037. Take on the role of a Blade Runner, whether you be human or Replicant, and begin hunting down androids who have escaped from their work protocols. Whether they be Nexus-5 to Nexus-9 Replicants, it’s all the same – they need to be put down. The question is – will you be able to pull the trigger? Or will your see the humanity underneath the wiring?
But don’t think you will only be retiring Replicants throughout your sessions. The game will offer numerous ways for you to get involved in Los Angeles politics, face great existential questions, and uncover conspiracies by both man and machine. The LAPD will put you on numerous cases to solve, all the while determining your own mortality in your choices.
The game will be using a modified version of the Year Zero Engine, so make sure to have plenty of d6s to go around! The game will be published by Free League, who is responsible for other great roleplaying games, such as Tales From The Loop, MORK BORG, Vaesen, and ALIEN!
Blade Runner is planned to come out in 2022! Keep an eye for more updates as they come here!
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Erebos is at war. The old gods are dead. The Norns are destroyed, pulled from the tethers of fate by the new gods, the Oligarchs. The only remnant of the fates left are the Blackbirds, trying to save the world one thread of fate at a time…
BLACKBIRDS is a upcoming RPG inspired by Europe during the Hundred Years War. You take on the role of a Blackbird, a mortal chosen by destiny to change the world. You can choose from races inspired by Norse myth, including Humans, Aes, Daimn, Jotenkin, or Nephilim! Then choose your Path (class), focusing in any of the following options: Bow and Blade, Charm and Manipulation, Craft and Expertise, Od and Ritual, or Shadow and Subterfuge!
This game is powered by Zweihander: Grim & Perilious RPG. The Zweihander system relies on rolling percentile dice to achieve a outcome. You gain abilities that allow you to reduce the percentile cost of an action, and you have to roll below your percentile score.
The BLACKBIRDS rulebook will cover numerous locations and lore for the Fateweaver (GM) and the players to dive into. Learn more about the continent of Erebos and choose your side in the War of Empty Thrones! Want to start in the corrupt cities of Highsalt or Corbel? Or do you want to dive into the countryside and face off against the worst creatures you have ever imagined? The choice is yours… but make sure to watch your step. You never know what will be squirming beneath your boot.
BLACKBIRDS is projected to come out in July 2022! Pre-order your copy of the game here!
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So – you want to run a political intrigue session or campaign. It can be very intimidating to jump into this kind of game because it implies very complex political systems the party will have to face. It can make Game Masters feel like they have to crack the history tomes just to figure out how it all works.
However, you shouldn’t need to know everything about world history to know how to run a political game. It may look like chess, but I promise it isn’t. Let’s go over all the stuff you really need to keep in mind as you start preparing your sessions.
Political games are, above all things, stories about relationships. It’s about getting allies, determining who your enemies are, and cutting them out of the equation before they do the same to you.
Start with the context. What is the problem? Don’t go into the minutiae of every little thing, broad strokes are key here. Is there war? Is there economic strife in the country? A new religion popped up that people are concerned about?
Establish who the players are. Just include the people who would get involved in the issue, both publicly and secretly. Create a little bit of context about who they are and what they do.
There are two very important things to establish when defining characters. The first is: what does each character want? Most characters should want subtly different things. Allies might united under a common cause, but each ally might have a different idea about what happens after the alliance is completed. This offers possibility for betrayal or secret dealings.
The second thing to keep in mind is not a question, but a philosophy: if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. Someone may not be pulling the trigger when assassinating a key figure, but they better be the one writing the order. Everyone knows that bureaucracy is the death of efficiency, and obtaining power is the most dangerous game you can play. It needs to be done carefully. Also, it offers a paper trail for your players so they don’t become lost or confused about what lead to follow next.
Political games are all about obtaining power. Everyone wants a piece to achieve their own goals. Goals can range from: money, social currency, religious influence, political influence, economic influence, military influence, reputation/regard, authority, etc. Control or social mobility is the name of the game.
How can people achieve these things? You will first need to clarify whether this game is micro or macro scale. Micro scale is focused on individuals in a city, town, or region using their own tactics to achieve power. Think of a general attempting to become emperor, or a small cult trying to become the dominate religion in a country. Macro scale is when large groups and communities attempt to obtain power on a global scale. This could include war, revolution, etc.
By differentiating the scale, you can clarify what kind of tactics your NPCs or groups could be using. Would they use something outright aggressive or something subtle? Here are a list of common tactics that could be useful:
Micro:
Macro:
Many of these tactics require a ruthless lack of regard for human life and suffering. Why are the characters willing to allow this to happen? Consider the old saying: the road to hell was paved with good intentions. How far are the NPCs willing to go in order to achieve their goal?
If you take nothing else away from this article, I want to leave you with some inspiration that you can read or watch on your own. These works will help you see political intrigue plots in action, and offer unexpected ways to build conflict and find solutions.
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