Bard of Valiant

Yesterday, I was a guest poster on Critical Hits, talking about using Dave’s 5×5 Method in grid form for existing campaigns. If you haven’t seen it, run over and take a look!

Sphere: Related Content

I got amazingly lucky last week and found a $30 Rolodex at a sale for 2$. I immediately thought of using it as an NPC card file and grabbed it.
Here’s how I’m going to use it.
The first thing you should notice is that the first line of each card isn’t their name. Instead, I’m using [...]

One of the more common themes to roleplaying game puzzles is ancient writing that needs translation.
On the face of it, things are pretty simple. The player rolls dice and the character either succeeds or fails. If they succeed, the writing is translated but if they fail? Most game masters just leave it blank. Untranslated, the [...]

Just giving out gold is boring and many Game Masters will substitute some portion of it in gems, jewelry and art but rolling on tables to find out what kind of art is in the hoard takes forever. For a quick and dirty method, go to the Property Room, an online site for police auctions.

The [...]

The quickest way to a great game is to run what your players love most.
The hard part can be figuring that out, because even they might not know and new gamers can have trouble knowing what questions to even ask, let alone get real answers but experienced groups can benefit from this as well.
My group [...]

Image via Wikipedia

Looking for unusual modern RPG inspiration can be as easy as heading over to Joobli and picking a date. Joobli has collected information on hundreds of events around the world.
Just pick your date and get suggestions on some of the oddest events world-wide such as the Jerez Grape Festival and Going Underground in [...]

Finding puzzles and traps for fantasy games is as easy as googling for 2 minutes. Modern mind benders take a bit more work.. until you find the GeekDad feature Puzzle of the Week.
This regular article poses a different puzzle each week then later gives the solution. Written as a weekly contest feature at Wired, GeekDad [...]

Random disaster generation is just too cool to pass up! If you agree, read on:
When of the most important decisions a Game Master will make for any post-apocalyptic game is choosing what actual event ended civilization. I’ve played around with a few notes, trying to develop campaigns of this sort and it can be hard [...]

Image via Wikipedia

There is a Yale University Economics class I’ve audited that I highly recommend you watch when you can, the sooner the better.
This class, titled “Why Not” by Professor Barry Nalebuff talks about getting inspiration, generating ideas, having fun and changing the world.
This seems tailor made for game masters of all systems who indulge [...]

If you’re reading this blog, chances are very good you do alot of your game design on your computer. If you’re lucky, you have a sweet set-up with pretty shelves and nooks for your books right at hand. If you’re more like me, you’re just happy to have the desk.
I’m moving to a new home [...]