I've been running an epic fantasy campaign with one of my mates via Virtual Tabletop for about a year now, and it has reached truly crazy-epic proportions. The game has become insanely fun. And one of the most fun things about it is that I...
When you're playing with an experienced group, particularly people you've played with for a long time, it is usually fairly easy to transition into Cooperative Storytelling. Your gamers are likely also GMs in their own rights, or at least find it very easy to be...
You remember a past long hidden to you, something hidden in the blackness of your mind, but suddenly dredged free: You stand amidst the blackened ruins of the once-great city of Nipirill. It has been attacked and ravaged by your armies. The strength of your...
I've been stumbling around slowly learning how to make great adventures. You'd think it'd be easy, but it's not. Particularly if you don't take stand alone modules but instead let a story grow organically, based on the problems the players are faced with, and then...
I recently ran a few games at Aethercon IV, the Online Convention. As you might be able to tell from the name, it's the fourth year that it's been running, and I've been lucky enough to be part of it from the beginning. That alone...
I have been gripped by a gaming revolution. It’s not mechanics (though they help). It’s not setting (though this, too, makes a big difference). Rather, it’s playing style. Namely, I have totally changed my concept of action, and what’s interesting in a story/scenario/adventure. Instead of action taking...
Weston "The Wez" Prestage (also known as Agent Festaskull and Obsidian Blackbird McKnight, amongst other titles), was my first DM and the disseminator of all things RPG to a whole generation of young men who would otherwise have spent it in drink and women (though...
I had an amazing game last night, and it really inspired me to write some more about Dynamic Combats. We were playtesting our epic fantasy game Myths of Khoralla, and shit just got real. To cut a long story short, our hero ends up finding himself confronted with a...
When you first think of running large-scale combats, even battles, you may find the prospect seems exciting at first...
Initiative is a subject that has received a minimal amount of attention over the years, at least by a good chunk of the games out there. From what I've seen of Initiative systems they usually seem either way too static or way too clunky (hmm...
Like most of you, I've run a lot of combats down through the years, from all sorts of systems like Rifts (and the Palladium universe), AD&D, D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, Whitewolf and then a few smatterings of others. And one thing I've found is that combat is usually treated...
I was recently running an adventure for a couple of avid gamers in a Star Wars themed setting. As republic soldiers, their mission was to transport a dangerous criminal from a remote holding bay on a jungle planet to a more secure facility closer to...