Player Tips: Being Persuasive

In this latest Player Tips article, we discuss the various ways we can engage in social encounters, mix up the way we roleplay our characters, and succeed more in being persuasive. How often do you find yourself having to persuade an NPC in your TTRPGs? If the games that you're playing are made up of …

Player Tips: Looking For Trouble

In this article, I once again delve into the awesome 'The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide' by James D'Amato to bring you another advanced technique, to enhance the narrative of your tabletop games. This time, we're looking at Looking For Trouble - the art of landing your character in fun but perilous situations. To create drama …

Player Tips: Playing to be Affected

I first heard the term 'playing to be affected' in the rather excellent book The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D'Amato, and I encourage people to go out and read it. Today in my own humble blog, I'd like to cherry pick why I think this could be the best piece of advice for …

Railroading Or Narrative in TTRPGs

Railroading has a bad reputation, but does it mean that the game world's narrative can never play out without player input? Railroading is when a game master forces an RPG down a predetermined story path that they've already decided the outcome or main beats of - and, as such, it cannot be changed regardless of what the …

Soulbound: Shadows in the Mist Review

Glorious news: yesterday my roleplaying group and I finished Shadows in the Mist, an adventure set within the Age of Sigmar RPG, Soulbound! As a group of 5 and playing almost every week, we started 1st December 2021 and finished 26th July 2022, averaging about 4 or 5 sessions per episode. (Psst: You can watch …

Wrath & Glory – Jarlan Kendreth III

Tier 3 Ascension This is a short story to flesh out my character's transition from tier 2 to tier 3 in the 40k TTRPG, Wrath & Glory. They are an acting Interrogator under the command of Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor Krazius, taken into his warband for their latent psyker abilities and skills developed in high society …

Why GMs Should Play Too

If you have encountered people in leadership roles, you will no doubt notice a difference between the ones who have done the job of the ones who they are leading, and the ones who haven't. For GMs and players, its very much the same. I find that the journey from Player to GM, back to …

Secondary Objectives in D&D

Last year I ran a homebrew campaign set in the Magic: The Gathering/D&D crossover setting: Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica - a 'magicpunk' plane that allows players to sign up to one of the world's ten powerful guilds, and climb their ranks by completing quests. I set out to make a mission-based adventure, where the players …

Things To Steal From: Soulbound

Welcome back to my series which currently only has one entry, Things to Steal From! This is where I go through an RPG system and pick out mechanics that I find interesting and perhaps get those homebrew thoughts going. Some of these are probably difficult to splice into another system, but the essence of them …

5 Things I’ve Learnt about D&D in 2020

Like a lot of folks, I've turned from the unending horrors of 2020 into the comforting reprieve from real life that is Dungeons and Dragons. I've played a record number of hours since March and steamed through a campaign from levels 1-13, set to end in the next month or so - my chance to …