How to make a custom villain-based plot engine.
The essay at the heart of this first Table Tools pdf was originally published by Johnn Four in issue 645 of Roleplaying Tips newsletter. Here the villain-based plot engine is updated and expanded. Learn how to custom-build the three tables needed for your plot engine:
Villain
Action
Victim
Alongside the basic essay, I include step-by-step... [click here for more]
Reprinting the 11 most popular articles of 2017 at Tales of a GM.Tales of a GM ran from August 2013 to December 2017. By the end, this meant bloated archives which were hard to access as the blog had well over 1,000 posts. Trawling through so many articles was no simple task, no matter how good my index.
Thus, for the last few years, I produced a pdf of the most popular pages... [click here for more]
Erik the Red, Little John, Alexander the Great.
History, Mythology and Fantasy are full of characters with nicknames. Heroic Nicknames is a collection of tables to help any fantasy GM add a variety of colourful nicknames to the GMCs in their world.
A lengthy introduction explains the merits of a good nickname, and the ways this can teach your Players about the setting. A particularly... [click here for more]
Can the Hero find a path through the Mountains?
Will he succumb to the Void within himself?
How can he resolve his personal journey to enlightenment with the needs of his Quest?
Will Duty lead him on?
Find the Path is a quest for Becoming: a Game of Sacrifice and Heroism, by Brian Engard. The text is a hack of one of the ready-to-run scenarios included in the... [click here for more]
A set of tables to distinguish your mooks.
While running my Tales of the Hero Wars campaign, I noticed how much my Players enjoyed wading through a horde of mooks before confronting a major foe. These mooks were relatively faceless, yet I needed a way to distinguish between them. I wanted to give my Players more options than just "I hit the one who hit me!”
By adding... [click here for more]
Reprinting the 12 most popular articles of 2016 at Tales of a GM.Tales of a GM has been running since August 2013. This means the archives are expanding steadily, and progressively harder to access. The blog has well over 1,200 posts. Trawling through so many articles is no simple task, no matter how good my index.
Thus, I thought it might be helpful to produce a pdf of... [click here for more]
Reprinting the 10 most popular articles of 2015 at Tales of a GM.Tales of a GM has been running since August 2013. This means the archives are expanding steadily, and progressively harder to access. The blog has over 1,000 posts. Trawling through so many articles is no simple task, no matter how good my index.
Thus, I thought it might be helpful to produce a pdf of the most... [click here for more]
The 1812 retreat from Moscow as a DramaSystem pitch
On the Smolensk Road began with a contest at RPG Geek run in April 2015. The contest was for a DramaSystem Pitch, and run by Yohann Delalande. The contest invited pitches in the style of those in Blood on the Snow, but there were no restrictions for theme or content.
I choose to write about Napoleon's invasion... [click here for more]
A collection of nine, system-neutral planar NPCs.
The Warlock's Journal Contest is a product of the Gamer Lifestyle community. Each month, this roving contest jumps from one member's blog to another. In October 2014 the wandering Warlock's Journal contest returned to my Tales of a GM blog for a third visit.
The contests on Tales of a GM focus on the organisation Storm... [click here for more]