I just MC’d my first session of Monsterhearts yesterday and it was awesome! We all had lots of fun and I highly recommend the game. It was also the most fun group prep work / character building stage we’ve ever had. Making the home room was lots of fun and set up lots of triangles and messy relationships between PCs and NPCs.

One of the Principles of MCing Monsterhearts is to ‘Ask provocative questions and build on the answers’. Joe Mcdaldno, the author, has given some great examples in the text of reasons for asking provocative questions. As soon as I read them I thought it’d be handy if they were pulled out onto a reference card to prompt me during play.

I made this quick reference card, and seeing as it now exists, I thought I may as well upload it for fellow MCs. I’ve included three versions: one sparse, clean one with just the question prompts, a second one with the example questions from the text, and a third that’s just a copy of both in the same document because why not. Enjoy.

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In the comments of my old post about Savage Worlds with Aspects, LordOrlando asked me if I could share my experience using this system. It was a well timed question, as my wife and I are just reworking how we approach aspects in our new Savage Worlds campaign. I thought my response would get pretty long – and I was right – so I’ve made it a brand new post, rather than just a comment on that old post. So, here we go. Continue reading…

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No Plot? No Problem! is a great little book that describes itself as ‘a low-stress, high-velocity guide to writing a novel in 30 days’. It’s written by Chris Baty, the guy behind Nanowrimo, which I’m participating in this month for the fifth year running. Writing a novel in 30 days requires at least some improvisation. GMing often requires a lot. I’ve read this book each year but I figured looking at it from a different angle it may have some hidden insights into gamemastery. And I think I’ve found some.

The book talks about, among many other things, making two lists: one with all the things you like in novels and one with all the things you don’t. It’s not quite a pros and cons list, but close. It’s sort of a list of cues or reminders for yourself. I realised that doing the same thing for RPGs could keep us GMs on track, especially for on-the-fly or improv-heavy GMing.

It was my birthday recently and my awesome wife made me some NPC Description Tables! <3

They’re some handy tables for generating various physical characteristics and behavioural traits of NPCs on the fly or during prep all contained on a single page. Choose results or roll once for each column. She didn’t design it to make coherent NPCs by reading across the rows, but I think you can get some pretty interesting ones by doing that too.

When rolling, for the large table roll a d6 twice and check the results in order, or roll two different coloured d6s. For the d8 tables, if you happen to have only a d6 handy you can just use that, as the results that a 7 or 8 would bring can easily be ignored as they are the least common.

Also, some results have a few choices, sometimes as opposites or alternatives (hairy/hairless) and sometimes to just give a little more choice (bandaged/stitched). When you get a result like this, choose whichever you like best or whatever seems most appropriate.

If you don’t like a result or it doesn’t make sense with something else you’ve already rolled, simply re-roll or choose something else.

I hope you enjoy this gift as much as I have.

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Here’s a simple table for coming up with quick and dirty NPC motivations. It requires a little bit of thought on the part of the GM, but gives a good starting point. Simply roll a d4 and a d6 and compare the results to the table: d4 for the column and d6 for the row.

Some of the results overlap somewhat (like desire for freedom could be a desire for change) but it gets the job done fairly well. I’m hoping this will give me, and others, a good starting point for NPCs.

If you roll and realise that this guard the PCs are talking to has a Fear of Truth, then maybe that gives you the idea that he’s taking bribes and is afraid of that getting out, or maybe he has some evidence that one of his fellow guards is a murderer but is afraid to believe it.

The goal here is not to generate fully fleshed out motivations, but to give the GM a spring board for their creativity. Usually something going on in the plot or the PCs stories and hooks will give you an idea of where to go with the motivations.

NPC Motivations

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I participated in and completed Nanowrimo last year, for the fourth year running. I’ve learnt more and more from it each year, about myself, writing and even roleplaying and gamemastery. This time, there were some particularly useful things that I wanted to share. So, here’s what Nanowrimo taught me about roleplaying.

I’ve talked about it, I’ve tweeted about it and now here it is: my first post in a series about reskinning monsters. I think this is one of the simplest and most powerful tools in the GMs toolbox. Put plainly, reskinning means to take the stats of a creature and describe it differently. It’s when your PCs encounter a long serpentine crocodile with a red lion-like mane, but you use the stats for a generic wolf. If the wolf can trip, your crocolion can chomp down on character’s legs and snap them to the ground. If the wolf has some sort of howling ability, make it a fearsome roar instead.

Most of the time, your players will never know the difference and they’ll be entrance and in-awe of this weird new monster they’ve never seen in all your monster books and supplements. It also has the benefit of them not getting the upperhand on you through player knowledge. “Oh, watch out guys, wolves can trip you”. If it doesn’t look like a wolf, they won’t immediately know its abilities.

There’s a lot more to it than that though. You can have a lot of fun with it and step-by-step build up an unique monster with ecology, tactics, weakness and strengths actually quite different that the base creature. In this post, we’ll take a look at the basics and reskin a creature as we go. I’ll follow up this article with a deeper look at other aspects of reskinning.

I’ve just started using TiddlyWiki for worldbuilding and it is such an excellent tool that I just had to post about it. If you haven’t heard of it, it is a free downloadable and portable personal wiki that can be used offline.

I love worldbuilding, but the problem with that is that I just want to keep on building. I get an idea and make a setting, then I have another idea that doesn’t fit with the setting we’re now using, or a sci-fi device while we’re playing fantasy, or something else that just doesn’t fit. So, I write it down for later. Using a basic Word document is fine, but it is static. Using a wiki allows you to link anything to anything else.

It’s a windy and stormy day outside with clouds darkening the sky… something bad must be about to happen. Oh wait, this is real life, not an RPG. GMs often forget about the weather in their games. It’s always assumed to be a fairly average day unless otherwise mentioned. And the only time it is mentioned, is as a dramatic or plot device. I’m guilty of this too.

Weather adds believability, increases immersion in the game, and is a good hook for roleplaying and story. In this post we’ll look at how to incorporate weather into our games, including a simple method for determining the current weather, and how this can affect the story and game world.

Let’s face it, some players don’t like writing backgrounds for their characters. Parents? Dead. Friends? None. Hobbies? Fighting. What if you could flesh out their backgrounds through play instead of having them write it all down at the start? Well, with mini-flashbacks you can! And they’re not just a good tool for background-phobic players. Players who are into writing pages and pages of background can still benefit from this technique. It can also help link the players into the world and the immediate situation.