How do you invoke an enchanted item? I always want magic to be evocative, and to help the players become more invested in the situation. For those reasons, just saying “I use my staff on the bad guy” seems… boring. … Continue reading
Tag Archives: tips and tricks
If you’ve seen Pacific Rim or its advertising, you’ve seen the work of Wayne Barlowe. He’s done concept design work for lots of other movies, shows and games, and it’s very distinctive. If you know his work, you might even … Continue reading
My last panel of Convergence. This one also went pretty well. We started by discussing how different types of gaming are socially sanctioned. Are social games more acceptable somehow? What about games that are easier to interrupt with other activities? … Continue reading
Apologies for not posting in a few days. I’m trying to work through my backlog of WisCon posts. More soon! In the meantime, here is a zip file of four clouds I’ve taken photos of; all are pretty good candidates … Continue reading
At last year’s WisCon, there was a fairly interesting panel called Creating a Religion. It was nominally about how to create religions for conworlds. Mostly, though, it just kept coming back to polytheism vs. monotheism as the main axis of … Continue reading
Yesterday was a one-shot game with most of the weekly group members. It was with a GM we don’t usually play with, and a system we don’t usually use, and a genre (horror) that we don’t usually play. The game … Continue reading
Ever found yourself wanting to approximate a hypotenuse quickly? Probably the most common situation where this happens, at least in my experience, is when you want to know the range between two combatants on a battle map when one is … Continue reading
For an enchanted item to have amazing powers is fun. But at least as much fun can be discovering the history of the object. Finding out that your sword makes a high-pitched keening sound when you’re near water is neat, … Continue reading
If your group is used to heavily railroaded, GM narration-centric games, it can be tricky to introduce player narrative control. If you’re the GM, you may not be ready to open the doors full-width to player’s getting control of what … Continue reading
Toughness is a pretty important characteristic in B&C. It gets used lots of places. It’s hopefully not a ‘god characteristic’ (that is, the One Important Characteristic that must be had at all cost), but it can be pretty important to … Continue reading