Guest Post by Scott “Rocketman” Rochat “Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.” –Anton Chekhov I’m going to start with something basic, but true. Your players can’t see your characters. I’ll give you a moment to recover from the shock. It’s a problem every author has. […]
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Designer’s Notes: Magical Tradecraft
This one was another one of those things that was a blast to write. I mainlined Burn Notice for several days, while taking notes for cool feats of skill or times when magic would have just been insanely useful to have. I then watched a few spy movies, made a few more notes, and then […]
Continue readingDesigner’s Notes: A Song of Many Worlds
Another article that started out a campaign material and then I whipped into shape to become something more publishable. Like most of the articles I pull directly from my campaigns I had very few pieces to cut because it was so concentrated. This was also the article where I fixed what I viewed as a […]
Continue readingCarpe Blogiem: Session Writeups and Criteria
So this is something that +Peter V. Dell’Orto, +Douglas Cole, and others have been talking a lot about lately. (See here, here, here, and here.) So I’ve been thinking about what Peter said here and here’s my feeling on it. Omniscient GM Perspective I like to write from this perspective – so I’m done with this. […]
Continue readingDesigner’s Notes: May the Shadows Guide You
With “May the Shadows Guide You” I began to hit my stride. I’d half a dozen articles under my belt and a hit in Metatronic Generators (which is still fairly popular years later). The meat of this article actually hailed from a defunct fantasy campaign I ran. My significant other wanted to use GURPS Powers: […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: The Three Ring Circus – The Malefactors
+Peter V. Dell’Orto talks about rules-lawyering here and +Mark Langsdorf talks about it here so I guess I’m going to talk a little bit about it myself. First, let me talk about how I run RPGs. I assume (as does anything I write on my blog or when handing out advice to other games on other platforms) that the […]
Continue readingDesigner’s Notes: Purveyors of the Priceless
Purveyors of the Priceless originally started out as “What the heck do I write for Low-Tech III?” I didn’t get involved in the previous Low-Tech issue because I felt it was extremely far out of my comfort zone (which led to issues with Purveyors itself – I felt I needed to come up with some […]
Continue readingCarpe Blogiem: It’s Been an Aeon…
My new campaign setting, Aeon, has proven to be quite interesting. The base idea of the setting is the question “What if superpowers became real one day?” It’s not a particularly novel idea. But it became more (and I can’t really discuss what I mean by this – because my players read this blog) the […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: A Novel Approach to GMing, Part III: Here’s the Plan
Guest Post by Scott “Rocketman” Rochat It’s the heart of a hundred novels and screenplays: the team of experts, moving like a well-oiled machine. With wit and muscle, they work their way past every obstacle, thanks to their intricate and well-rehearsed plan. But there’s a reason audiences don’t watch a rehearsal. Put it at the […]
Continue readingGamemaster’s Guidepost: A Novel Approach to GMing, Part II: Do I Feel A Draft?
Guest Post by Scott “Rocketman” Rochat “…I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.” –Carol Windley, Boston Globe interview Revise. Revise. Revise again. Few words are hated more by an author. And few might seem […]
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