“I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and…| Halfway Station 3.0
Last month, I covered thematic bosses and how they can support the style, theme, and tone of your adventure. This month, I'm moving on to those people/creatures that work for the boss. In this case, I'm shifting a bit away from directly supporting your adventure's concepts to supporting your boss. There a multitude of ways to approach this, but it comes down to two large categories: direct allies and unwilling support. Mooks Are Important Having a group of people in your boss's organization a...| Gnome Stew
Way back in the first installment of this series, I talked about mood, tone, and theme. In the theme section of that post, I talked about story themes and how they can power the focus in your adventure. Today (and in the upcoming months), I'm going to talk about thematic environments, thematic bosses, and thematic mooks. Each of those will be a different article spread across three months. In that first installment, I urged you to seek out lists and examples of literary-based themes for your ...| Gnome Stew
While it's sometimes fun to flip open a bestiary or monster manual to find a random monster to throw at the PCs, when you're planning a boss for your party to face, it's best to put some thought and care into the selection. You might even go so far as to make the boss of the adventure a full-fledged and statted-out NPC using the typical character creation rules instead of relying on the sparse monster stat block in the book. How much prep you put into the boss is up to you, and is, quite hone...| Gnome Stew
After you have your story arc put together, you'll notice that the PCs will need clues and information to get between the various plot points. The first bit of information they receive is the story hook. This launches the whole adventure. If the story hook doesn't grab them, then the adventure screeches to a complete stop before it gets up to speed. You don't want this to happen. Your opening salvo of information needs to be timely, pertinent to the PCs, actionable, achievable, and not too ho...| Gnome Stew
This time around, I'm going to talk about the order in which you design your adventures. There are many takes on this, and loads of approaches to use. However, I'm going to focus in on what works for me. If it works for you, great! If you give it a try, and it doesn't quite jive with how your creative processes work, that's fine too. As you can tell from the title of the article, I'm going to be talking about adventure design in the order of do the back of the book first, then work toward the...| Gnome Stew
Node-based design was created by Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian and was, primarily, a method for planning and running mystery ttrpg campaigns. Though it can be divisive in the ttrpg community, I was planning to run a mystery campaign in Night’s Black Agents and I did not believe my usual method would work. I thought […]| The Bardic Inquiry
To get your PCs to move from one scene to the next logical scene, you need a series of connective tissues. These can come in the form of clues, rumors, lies, truths, and red herrings. Each one of these serves their own purpose and come from a variety of sources. Some of these will come from evidence found via investigative efforts. Some of these will come from conversations with NPCs. Some of these might even be sourced by overheard conversations. At the end of each scene, the PCs should have...| Gnome Stew
In any adventure, the party of player characters (PCs) will inevitably encounter other intelligent creatures and people. These are the non-player characters (NPCs) of the world that are largely controlled, run, an enacted by the game master. There are moments (and some systems greatly support these moments) where an NPC will be "taken over" by a fellow player at the table to reduce the load on the GM or to allow for a wider variety of interactions. That topic, however, is an entirely differen...| Gnome Stew
