I wrote the first draft of my first indie game (codename: hicks) on the plane back from GenCon 07. It was the perfect recipe for writing: post-con euphoria, extreme exhaustion, lots of caffeine, and complete captivity in an airplane seat. It helped that my partners in con-crime quite sensibly passed out so I was on […]

If you’re like me, you’ve had those times when you’re at your Grandfather’s for Xmas, and your younger cousin who’s really curious about this whole “roleplaying thing” wants you to run a game for her, but you try to weasel out of it by saying you don’t have any dice, and of course she’s like […]

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 […]

And now, a Public Service Announcement: About 8% of males in the US are color blind, the most common type being red-green color blind, followed by the rarer blue-yellow color blind. If you are color blind, it literally means that the colors look the same to you — you see one color instead of two. […]

A dungeon crawl does not fit the superhero genre. Superheroes zip though villain bases, smashing walls or wafting through them with arcane powers. They do not decide on a marching order and do a room-by-room search (or if they do a search, it is glossed over off-screen). Dr Null's base is a complex maze of […]

Forget the ice claws, the glowing brains, and the hooks-for-feet for a minute. Despite their surface differences, all your supervillains fall into four categories: soldiers, menaces, masterminds and thieves. The distinction is not about powers or how much of a threat they pose, it’s about how the supervillain behaves. As a GM if you know […]

Leaping from rooftop to rooftop on a racing train. Streaking to catch a falling civilian before he goes splat. Racing past the sign that says the bridge ahead is out. These are Action Shticks, classic challenges that go with a particular situation or environment. By definition they are not original. They are the things you […]

In my superhero campaign, I name each episode. I tell the players the name at the start of the game session, sometimes even days in advance. I write it on the white board in big letters so everyone can see it throughout the game. There are pros and cons to doing this. The primary advantage […]

I always name games I run. Whether it's going to be a campaign or only one or two sessions, a distinct name gives the players a point of reference, both immediately and long after the game is over. What's more memorable, saying you played in West Marches or “that low level game, the one with […]

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 […]

Zodiac Ring includes Action Shticks in each scene. Much like the hero strapped beneath the death ray by his evil nemesis, you ask me: what the hell are Action Shticks, exactly, in detail? We're primarily talking about gaming in the superhero genre, but the concepts can be applied much more broadly. Without the death ray, […]