We love orcs. They're our lovely little fighting monster featured in - one way or another - so many narratives. They can wear many different hats! The created as slaves to a dark master's army variety from Lord of the Rings. The noble shamanistic species corrupted by dark magics that we see in the Warcraft series. The brutal, fungal monsters created to be an army of insane football hooligans that we see in the Warhammer 40k universe. WAAAAGH! etc. A Face only a Mother could love. -- Orc mask, Grim Zombie. CC-by-SA. In all of these, they act as a narrative device. They're an antagonistic force that is meant to be battered against and survived. Or not, as the case may be. In TTRPG fantasy, the orc exists in an ecosystem of such forces. Demi-human or humanoid monsters are there in the various monster manuals to be faced as antagonists. But each one fits a distinct niche. Goblins are craven, sneaking thieves and murderers who make due on the fringes of society. Bugbears ar...

We didn't play Stonehell this weekend, unfortunately. But, that doesn't mean I can't share a fresh article! The party is six days into a fourteen day journey across the Highwind Plains. They've been very meticulous in tracking their rations, spending time foraging and hunting, finding fresh water, and setting camp. The GM is rolling for random encounters one or two times per day, and an encounter has come up three times in a row. The GM braces themselves, lets out a low breath, and rolls the d6. 6. Again. The thought of running another combat against 2d6 wolves is galling. But a good GM can weave together a story - maybe the grassy plains are rife with wolves who've been pushed out of the nearby wood by hunger and now roam wide, seeking to fill their bellies with whatever they can catch be it rabbit or man. But what if you want to run something that has a bit more of a mystery to it? Something perhaps that rewards the players for exploration with either a curiosit...

 Today I want to just spend a short little time talking about houserules. You can check mine out  here  for the OSE Stonehell game that I'm currently running.  When you decide to run a game - any game - you, the gamemaster, have a very important series of choices to make. And it comes down to the kind of game that you want to run. The rules that are there in the book that you're using for the RPG you've decided to play are not computerized. They're not controlled by some third party arbiter. It's just you, the book, and the players.  You can simply choose to discard everything in there and sit around playing make believe if you want to. Your imagination can go completely wild and the players could add whatever elements suit their fancy in that moment. However, you're not going to have a very structured time. So we use rules to make the fiction fit into what the game is meant to be about and to do as a system.  Each RPG system has a theme and milieu that's b...

    Session 1 Here!   The party was awoken from their watch by Runum in the early hours of the morning by Kobolds come to get some work done on the gatehouse. After some debate, the group decided to take a more active approach to the situation. Instead of watching the kobolds work from above, they descended to the ground floor of the gatehouse and approached. Immediately, the workers retreated. With a bribe of some gold, they spoke with one of them about the Kobold situation in Stonehell. They shortly learned that Trustee Sniv runs Kobold Korners and that all are welcome there. With a bit more gold, the party asked their interlocutor to tell Sniv about them and broker an introduction when they arrived. The kobolds were suspicious, but ultimately agreed to mention the names of their group to Sniv.   In the morning, they set about exploring the canyon. On the southern wall, they found a small outpost constructed some time ago that has been used by other expeditions...

  Running a pre-written megadungeon is a challenging undertaking. Combing through a setting built by another person that spans kingdoms and continents is in many ways easier. There are large swathes of terrain left undetailed in the latter. You can write up and plop in just about anything your devious mind can imagine, as the writers of campaign settings make sure to leave plenty of space in the margins for just such a thing.   In a megadungeon, it's very different. It has all the elements of a normal dungeon, sure. Rooms, corridors, encounters, NPCs. But in a normal dungeon, you're in and out in a few sessions. Then the space is left behind to molder and rot until you need it again, if you ever do. With a megadungeon, you're there for quite a long time. The goal is to have the dungeon be the campaign. So you sort of have to choose the right dungeon and then prepare to live and breathe that space.   I've been running Stonehell for only thr...

  I live pretty far away from my friends. I've moved around a lot, so the group has become somewhat spread out over the last few years between Georgia, California, France and Switzerland. This is not a problem normally, because we can keep up with email, or discord or whatever. But playing TTRPGs with them can be a real challenge. Over the last five or so years, I've run many one-shots and three major campaigns online. It can be a real challenge to figure it out from first principles, though.  I thought I would share what works for me to get a game running smoothly every time. It's a simple checklist that I follow to keep me on the right track.   Step one - Choose your inspiration!   There are a lot of games to choose from, and near infinite possibilities within them of what kind of game to run. Assuming you're not entirely new to RPGs, you probably already have a few favorite games you like running. I prefer fantasy RPGs. You may like Sci-Fi or Contemporar...

  Inner gatehouse: Beeston Castle by Stephen McKay.  Session 1 report here The goblin's willingness to launch into an attack for just a bit of gold in the adventurer's pockets was a bit sharper than the party really expected - and their swords were a bit sharper, too. Tuesday the thief was cut down on the first floor of the gatehouse. But the goblins were defeated and the last of their number was interrogated. The black tongue of the monster wagged freely and earned the goblin's freedom. As he ran off into the wilderness outside stonehell's crumbled wall, the party began to take Tuesday's body (minus a few choice pieces of equipment) to be buried. Two voices calling out for them grabbed their attention. Runum Graves and Fayanna the locksmith - two members of the party who had been delayed by the Wardens Regulant in Absolution   - had arrived. Working as quickly as possible, they built a low cairn for Tuesday out of the tumbled down stones of the walls before retu...

  We didn't do a session 0. That's primarily because these aren't strangers but rather players that I've been gaming with for at least a couple of years now. I have some pretty consistent gaming rules, but they've never had to be enforced. No cheating No intolerant behaviors (homo or transphobia, no racism or sexism, etc) No sexual content Keep to a tone closer to LOTR than Monty Python. If you have an hard limits on content, let me know, and if you have a concern about something that’s happening in the session then ping me privately. I've typed them out so many times that my phone's auto-correct predicts them.   Instead of a session 0, I followed my game setup checklist to get ready. It’s a simple checklist that boils down about 6-8 hours of concentrated prep time. I'll post the whole checklist in another post.   In the first session, I introduced the town of Absolution and got the players to the box canyon tha...