The setting is the West Coast through the dark dreamlike mirror of 197X. Perhaps a decade prior, rifts ripped open to a hellish other realm of beings that feast on fear- they emerged with their forms shaped by the nightmares of humanity. Their awful flesh flowed into twisted imitations of the ghosts, aliens, cavemen, robots, glowing deep sea divers that haunted our collective subconsciousness, shaped by the fears of the area they arrived in. | Silverarm
In picking a game setting the GM has to strike a balance between the familiar and the weird. Too bog standard and expected and the game can be boring- but too weird and unexpected and the world the game takes place in is difficult for the players to grasp and have the context needed to […]| Silverarm
Apparently this is the year of the beta release. I ran a campaign using Mothership house rules I called Beyond Iskander’s Gate for 6 sessions that I canceled due to scheduling issues. But 10th century Central Asia is so rad and deeply underhyped as a setting for fiction and gaming and learning about the workings […]| Silverarm
Ever feel like your players aren’t as deeply engaged in your game world as you’d like? Collaborate and build the setting together! In my games I want players to know the background of the setting, have a general idea of what’s going on and how things work. It gives them context to make interesting choices […]| Silverarm
Games don’t last forever. I really want them to but a perpetual game is an impossible goal by definition. So many cool things can emerge from a really long term game that strives towards that longevity but in my experience I haven’t been able to pull it off. Life happens. People move, schedules change. A […]| Silverarm
The megadungeon has a creative call to it, this grand and imposing space mapped out for adventure, a beckoning otherworld to explore. People dig superlatives, the biggest, the tallest, the most dangerous, the most powerful, the deepest. But the challenge of making something epic in scope can swamp even the most dedicated GM. It’s very […]| Silverarm
Downtime is sweet, it breaks the campaign into chunks, making time pass and allowing players to pursue personal goals that might not be interesting to the rest of the players to play out for an entire session but lead to interesting developments and more hooks into the world. Time becomes a resource as torches burn […]| Silverarm
If your players can’t touch, smell, be murdered by, manipulate, blow up, discover, or loot your history it doesn’t matter.. Since it’s my blog I can have opinions and I think that if setting history isn’t designed or revisited with the background thought, “How can this maybe lead to interesting gameplay for my players?” it’s […]| Silverarm
A hundred spells Phandaal personally had formulated — though rumor said that demons whispered at his ear when he wrought magic. Pontecilla the Pious, then ruler of Grand Motholam, put Phandaal to torment, and after a terrible night, he killed Phandaal and outlawed sorcery throughout the land. The wizards of Grand Motholam fled like beetles […]| Silverarm
The dungeon is the primordial ooze that tabletop RPG’s wriggled out of. There is something elemental and powerful about a mysteriously connected location to explore with treasures and dangers hidden within. It’s just plain fun game design. Many of the layout and design elements that make a dungeon great can also be applied to the sandbox region around it in the form of a point crawl where paths connect locations just as hallways connect rooms in a dungeon. | Silverarm
How have I not posted here since October? I've been busy and am easily distracted and but part of the delay has been overthinking what it means to post a blog. I got some quality advice from the prolific Prismatic Wasteland to break out of the slump.| Silverarm
Hex crawl sandbox settings can suffer from an overdose of non meaningful choice without enough information to make informed decisions. I think using a point crawl makes choices more interesting by constraining them to detailed specific choices.| Silverarm