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.

You might also be interested in reading...

• Monsterhearts Actual Play – Edgegate, Part 1
• NPC Description Tables
• Dungeon World: Sarrenor Rules Compendium
• Let’s Back Monsterhearts
• Kobold Quarterly #14 for Free!

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.

You might also be interested in reading...

• IAYC: Fantasy Newspaper (Free Download)
• Dungeon World: Sarrenor Rules Compendium
• Monsterhearts: ‘Ask Questions’ Reference Card
• Things Role Playing Bloggers Tend Not To Write About
• GMing Cues: Impressions, Aims & Pitfalls

• Double rainbow! OMG! http://yfrog.com/evr88yj
• I managed to do 623 words at lunch today. That’ll do. I’m still almost two days ahead. Now time for #pathfinder and Chinese!
• This http://bit.ly/d4A1sI made me investigate ICONS then this http://bit.ly/a6iLnb and the currently half-price PDF made me buy it #rpg