My RPG games follow a format which avoids railroading, without any need for elaborate settings or difficult NPC relations. I call it 'story weaving', because it lets me stretch the metaphor.

Railroads are Inevitable

For all the complaints about railroading, computer games suffer from railroads far more than RPG …

Fancy a game of football on Saturdays? I mean all Saturdays. Every one, for the next few months. We need you to join a pivotal part of the game.

This is you. This is how you sound when you ask people to play D&D.

You can't miss one game, or we'll have to call the whole thing off for that week and no-one will be …

Ronald Knox wrote ten rules on how to avoid ruining a murder mystery with an unsatisfying solution. They apply very well to writing and running RPG modules, with a little alteration.

And just like any module or murder mystery, I'm going to start with a problem, then undress it slowly.

How to Ruin a Story

Suppose your …

The cynics say that we keep reinventing the wheel. They say we have too many RPGs, mostly doing the same thing, and why bother to write yet another RPG about elves and magic swords? And they have one thing right - we should stop re-writing RPGs from scratch. Instead, we should change them.

Knave started as a …

BIND is a fantasy tabletop RPG designed to solve a number of problems:

• Problem: Character backstories are a pain.
  • Solution: Story Points
• Problem: Players never engage in the adventure in the right way; when they should go left, they always go right, but railroading them never gives good results.
  • Solution: Side …