Horror Campaigns 1 Horror Campaigns 2 Esoteric rites, dark magicks and twisted experiments are classic horror elements that surface time and again in popular culture. Classic horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Mary Shelley use experimentation and meddling in the supernatural as sources of moral conflict and graphic horror. This is especially true in [...]
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Psychic visions are popular plot devices in fantasy and film. Everything from Star Wars to Heroes uses visions of the past, present and future to help move the story along and provide sources of anxiety and conflict. Despite the value of divination as a plot source I find that psychic visions are often mismanaged in [...]
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Posted in Character interaction, Characters, Conflict, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, Hero System, Inter-player conflict, RPG, Roleplay on Nov 29th, 2010
Thanks for sticking with us for 100 posts. Your support and comments have made this entire effort worthwhile. As a celebration, the four of us got together for our first podcast to discuss character deaths. We talk about everything from the unfortunate inability of Pensive to play a survivable rogue to Gestalt’s magical ability to [...]
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For today’s black Friday post I thought I would talk about one of my favorite dark classes from 4th Edition: the Warlock. Warlocks are by nature a misunderstood and mistrusted group of people, reviled by the traditional arcane community and ostracized by the “mundanes” who fear the power of their nefarious/otherworldly patrons. Many players interpret [...]
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I’ve decided that I needed to do something cheesy today and make a holiday related post. Gaming has given me quite a bit over the years and I wanted to list what I’ve been most thankful for in gaming. First I’m thankful for friends with imagination and lack of self-consciousness to be willing to take on another [...]
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On my list of “ways to make a city memorable” staging a revolution sits pretty high. Of course having a city were a revolution took place without your players somewhat defeats the purpose. There are a few different ways to introduce your players to a revolution and depending on your party make-up one might be [...]
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In any good horror movie there’s always at least one character who wasn’t what he or she appeared to be. Sometimes these characters can be obvious and cliche, but true masters of horror always sucker-punch you with the “sleeper” bad guy. Today’s post is about planting a traitor in your party at the start of [...]
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I’ve talked before about the importance of creating a character that is distinctly different from yourself (here), so now let’s tackle one of the biggest differences of all: gender. Roleplaying the opposite gender, or cross-playing, is often one of the most difficult things for even an experienced player to pull off consistently. Adding to the difficulty is the [...]
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Horror games are very dear to me, I have always loved mystery and horror books and a lot of those influences come through in my campaigns. The high tension, the mystery, the difficult encounters and the risk of failure are all things that horror campaigns bring to the table. Also I feel that horror adds [...]
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Posted in Character interaction, Characters, Conflict, D&D 4th, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and dragons, Hero System, Information control, Inter-player conflict, RPG, Roleplay, Star Wars, backstories, storytelling on Nov 18th, 2010
I’ve been thinking about a new Star Wars campaign a lot lately and have been working on character archetypes and teaching some players who are not very military or Star Wars savvy how to play characters in this setting. Teaching the value of trusting other PC’s with your PC’s life might sound simple, but it’s [...]
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