The other day I get an email that says (basically) “Hey, your ideas are great. I’m writing an adventure that I’m going to publish, and I’m imitating a lot of your stuff like Revelations and Action Shticks. Is that okay?” Okay? Not only is it okay, I absolutely encourage it. If I’ve come up with […]

If you are going to publish an adventure (or whole game system), playtesting is critical. Working out kinks or conceptual flaws during playtesting means that allllll those gaming groups that run it later will have more fun at the table. It takes effort, but it's a huge multiplier of work vs fun: a single hour […]

I’m not exactly breaking new ground when I say art is powerful. Sight is the king of the senses in humans (er, “us humans” I mean), usually riding roughshod over weaklings like touch and hearing — we don’t have both eyes on the front of our head for nothing. Unlike text, which requires an intermediate […]

When you’re preparing a game for your own group, you know who the characters are: Fred is playing the druid with the dire sloth, and Charley still has that annoying ring of invisibility. You know what kind of challenges would suit them and what wouldn’t. But when you’re designing adventures for publication, you don’t have […]

A published adventure scenario (or “module” as we used to call it in the old days) is not a game. It's a Do-It-Yourself kit the GM will use to run a game. The players will never read the text of the adventure. At most they might listen to canned sections read out loud by the […]