Automatic dungeon generators are rubbish. Some are pretty, but all of them are completely unusable. You enter a room, it has a goblin, or treasure, or nothing. Next room. It makes no sense. Why was the goblin sitting there? Why was there treasure in the next room, and why didn't the goblin take it? Everything looks …

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'Session 0' is the pre-game evening to talk about the game, without having the game. I don't see any reason for five people to lose an evening, planning future evenings. I want to run through the standard arguments, just to give solidity to the feeling of wasted time prompted by the phrase 'session zero'. People should …

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Character Creation While I'm remaking the World of Darkness Combat system , I'm starting to feel that Character Creation could stand to be a lot more balanced. But it's more of a Storytelling system. This isn't about killing trolls for gold pieces - it's adult story-crafting. ...that's what I hear the books echo back …

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A hundred paces down the dark tunnel, you see dozens of goblins dancing round a fire and singing about eating anything that moves. At this point the crew begin to plot. Could we just stay here and shoot at the goblins? We should be able to get a load of arrows off in three rounds. If we run back to where we avoided …

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Every fantasy work has two characters: magic and the landscape. Landscape In Earthsea, the water compartmentalizes the locations. Here, Ged grew up. There, he learnt about magic. And every time we want to know more about this land, water provides punctuation to the story and isolates the area. Middle Earth has a very …

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Pre-Game Post a link to the pdf (but assume nobody will read it) Get snacks (or make dahl if you're feeling fancy - everyone loves dahl) Put water and glasses on the table Dice, rubbers (or 'erasers' in American), pencils, and coins Plan smoke-breaks (even if you don't have smokers) Intro Hide the beers until the …

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I feel like the Old School Renaissance ('OSR') games could achieve their goals easier. The exact goals vary, but it's something along the lines of: like old D&D don't fill the character sheet with 1,000 special skills simple rules lethal game-play, forcing players to be clever Rather than ditching feats and …

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My recent background-watching videos covered the Old School Renaissance ('OSR'), which looks to revive a lot of old-school D&D-style play. I started with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, so a renaissance intrigued me. Strange Premises While I've not heard of some of the more egregious rules returning (thieves …

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I've made an alternative World of Darkness system, where players enter Contests instead of Combat . Here are the highlights from a campaign. Setting In Belgrade (in Hungary), in the year 1130 AD, four people fell to the Cainite embrace in a church, and were forced to survive the political machinations of the existing …

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Systems should represent genres, and some do this better than others. System Excellence Dr Who One Dr Who RPG (I forget which) contained an absolutely genius initiative system. The initiative turn-order was: Speak Run Use an item Attack This clearly produces unrealistic results. The system cannot allow anyone to shoot …

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