So, an important tradition at the start of each game session for us usually involves the “In the previous episode of our story” bit where someone reminds everyone what happened the week before. It’s a great way to get everyone focused on the game and away from the snacks or the startup banter and remind everyone where the story is. Also, if anyone missed the previous session, they can catch themselves up. But, we all know that the game isn’t always a weekly affair, and sometimes, with lots of conflicting events, it can sometimes be a month before the group reunites. Memories get hazy and deta ..read more

  From the forthcoming tome: The Collector's Compendium of Creatures! Name: Phased Serpent Description: This is a large serpent, around 30 feet long. It is black in color, with some small eyes. It has a strong sense of dimensional magic, and so lives most of its life out of phase with the Great Reality. This means that it can move through physical matter as if it weren’t there, it can’t be attacked (except with magic or magical weapons) or attack until it phases into reality. They generally are found near the shores of Ghendal, though it can be found on other worlds on occasion.&nbs ..read more

 How to Be a Great Narrator (Game Master) #3 Sometimes you plan for weeks and weeks to make your campaign ready. You spend days in worldbuilding, days in the maps, hour after hour making the core NPCs, and even more hours working out the storylines. Other times, you’re just sitting around with some buddies and you want to throw down some dice. While they’re whipping together some quick characters, can you improvise an adventure? Can you make something interesting and exciting? Here’s a fast formula you can use to put out an exciting and compelling adventure! It’s “SNGC” - you could possib ..read more

 As part of our work on the new THT manual: The Creatures Compendium, We'll be sharing monster teasers here every other monday! We hope you enjoy throwing them at your players and parties! If you do, come back and comment how the encounter went! Name: Vast Squid Description: The Vast Squid is a huge cephalopod-like creature that drifts and slides through the ethers of the Vast. It eats large masses of matter that float in that extradimensional space. This is mostly rock and stone, but they have been known to attack and consume Vast ships and other hominid-crafted items that travel the ..read more

 A while ago, we found this great person out in the Twitterverse named @ttrpgkids. She's all about helping families play role-playing games. Well, we're all about that as well, so Jacob reached out and they reviewed Roll Dice, Build Character. Then, he set up an actual gaming session online. We all jumped onto facebook chat and played one day, with Brendon as the Narrator, and we all had a great time. So, today, she posted a review of the game on her blog site, and WOW! What a review. I was so thrilled to see her mention some of the aspects and mechanics of the game that we had worked so ..read more

 This is a template to help you describe your scenes better You see ________________ You Feel _____________________________________ The weather is _________________________________________ You smell ___________________________________ You hear __________________________________ ..read more

Ghosts! Yeesh! Creepy! Scary! Here in our first podcast/vlog episode, the design team of The Hero's Tale talks about ghosts! How do run them as a gamemaster, how to deal with them as a player. How to make them spookier to intensify the emotion in the game action! How to deal with character possession while still giving the player some autonomy. Then, in the second half, we talk about how to visualize the game. Do you use "Theater of the Mind", or do you display your fights with meeples or miniatures with dungeon tiles or terrain? How does that change when you're doing online games? Check i ..read more

Some rules systems are very “crunchy”. By this, we mean that they are full of lots of tiny, detailed rules. Think of “crunching numbers” as an idiom and you’ll get what I’m saying. Like all of gaming, and of life, this brings both good and bad.  The good of it is that there is consistency. When you cast this spell, this is what happens. When you meet up with that monster, then these are the things that it can do. If you try to buy a new suit of armor, or a horse, you can look up how much it will cost you. It also means that the game master doesn’t have to guess at so many things. They ..read more

This is an excerpt from the upcoming book "Roll Dice, Build Character: How to Use RPGs to Help Raise Great Kids" Keep coming back for more excerpts and for publication alerts. +++ Remember how I said that one of the greater evils of RPGs was the time suck? Remember how I said that if you let it, it will rob you of focus and balance in your life?  That’s a very real danger. So, to start with, make sure that you set up ground rules so that gaming becomes a good, fun, and healthy part of life, rather than something that takes over your whole life. I recommend that you start by setting ..read more

Why we love fantasy Early childhood is a time of wonder and learning. Everything is new, and it’s easy to slip between the world of imagination and the world of reality. During this impressionable time, many of us grew up hearing classic fairy tales, either in their original form, or revisited as a movie. While a lot of us outgrow that, I think for most of us we hold a spot in our hearts and minds where we love to imagine. As we grow up, we discover that these stories were just made-up tales, but we still love them. Then, as we approach adulthood, we start to fill them out with other thin ..read more