When starting to design an adventure for your home group, the first things I always consider are the mood, tone, and theme of the adventure. This will dictate all design decisions, descriptions, monsters included, sometimes the treasure gained, and the general aesthetics of everything I create for the adventure. Before I jump in, you’ll note that I’m leaving genre out of this list because I’m assuming you already have an established genre for the game you’re running for your group. If you’re working with a “clean slate” (meaning no campaign in flight for this adventure), then you really shoul ..read more

Licensed games usually take the approach of presenting material that can happen far away from the canon events of the setting. This works especially well in settings like Star Trek or Star Wars, where there is a literal galaxy of locations available for storytelling. Player characters may hear about canon events, and there may be a butterfly effect on some of their options, but the assumption of the game is that the player characters aren’t going to be directly confronting and potentially contradicting the fictitious history of the setting. Despite this, there are some fans who want exactly t ..read more

https://polygamero.us/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Gnomecast186.mp3 Ang, Chris and Josh chat about mixing up genres in our RPGs and as a result touch on what genre is, and why we can and should mash it all up together! Links: D&D Lego! The Nebula Awards Daggerheart Playtest ..read more

Try all the options We are all familiar with the trope of a regular gaming group. You know, the one who meets on regular days in the regular gaming location. And while the particularities of the imagined group differ, the factors of time and space stay constant, but so too does the cast. Although we all know how wonderful a regular gaming group can be, I am here to suggest that there’s several benefits of regularly shifting up the cast around your gaming table as well. I will discuss the pros of this, and of course mention some of the cons while suggesting how they can be remedied or at leas ..read more

Game of the year? I’ve reviewed so many other things, and I feel like I’ve been missing a fundamental item in all of this. It’s key to understanding all of my other reviews. Today, I’m going to review the process of reviewing. I’ve literally been reviewing things from the time I was born. I remember my siblings showing me Land of the Lost, and when I saw the Sleestak for the first time, I said nope. My very first review, and a lot more succinct than I would become once I had a better vocabulary. Disclaimer I was not given permission to discuss the process of reviewing the review process. I ..read more

Planning in RPGs has always been a problem. On one hand, it’s often necessary for a group of players to plan out something their characters are trying to accomplish. On the other, most groups are not adept at planning, and even if they were, the activity is never that exciting at the table – worse if you are the GM who is more of a spectator. All of this is worse if you are under any kind of time constraint, like running a one-shot.  That is the problem I was having. In a few weeks, my high school gaming group is having a reunion, and we wanted to play some games. One of our group’s main ..read more

It’s become a bit of a meme for people to declare characters from different genres to be “magical girls.” Prince Adam lives his life, during the day, as an unassuming royal heir that hasn’t quite grown up enough to assume his full responsibilities, but when he holds his sword aloft and says “by the power of Grayskull,” he transforms into a big buff dude that can punch holes in tanks. He’s even got a talking cat. But a lot of those memes assume that the concept of the magical girl is really about Sailor Moon style stories. You have young women living a normal life at school, with normal student ..read more

We know the meme: players latch onto the most insignificant goblin of a side character and ignore the walking plot hook in the fancy cloak. They’ll obsess over the most minor, minute details of a crime scene while completely missing the big obvious clue tacked to the board on the wall. They’ll squander all their time in the big city shopping and negotiating the price of a room instead of following the leads to the cultist sewer hideout you ever so painstakingly laid out for them. The meme is funny because it’s true, but it can also be exhausting, especially if you’re not running a sandbox cam ..read more

Welcome to a series of adventure design articles that I’m going to publish over the course of the next many months. The idea for this series hit me hard while I was at the bus stop waiting to pick up my man-child. I’d gotten there about twenty minutes early, and the ideas just starting flowing. Like any good writer, I have a notepad and pen in the center console of my car. Within a few minutes, I had the small notepad page filled with ideas. Before I was done, I had most of the following ideas brainstormed and titled. I also reached out to social media to see if anyone had concepts to add to ..read more

Library organization is always key… An Infinite Digital Bookcase I can still remember the first roleplaying game that I got in the early 1990s, the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. The colorful cover with a roaring dragon and fiery wizard left an indelible mark in my memory. I have long since traded or donated that book, and my collection has expanded and contracted over the years to include the Star Wars Roleplaying Game, Earthdawn, Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition, and now Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. Over that time it was not only the games that have changed, but ..read more