TPKtalk for Dec 14
It’s our last TPKtalk of the year, so there’s some fun things in store today, including magnetic dungeons, gaming reflections, and some wonderful holiday games.
TPKtalk for Dec 7
Hope you’re having a great Saturday so far. Just to let you know, there’ll be no posts from Dec 16 to Dec 30, on account of us taking a few weeks off for the holidays. Still, many more things to come after that. Also, if you’re local, you can catch me live at next week’s Nerd Nite, playing music as their artist in residence! It’s at 7pm on Tuesday, Dec 10 at the Rum Runner Pub in Kitchener, Ontario. Anyway, lots of great links this week, including mini hacks, good games, sounds, and real-life D&D.
TPKtalk for Nov 30
It’s Thanksgiving and Black Friday and all manner of other things that we don’t have here in Canada. It’s a busy weekend. However, all of our links are free and contain no calories or trans fats, so take a look around and I’m sure you’ll find something you can take home with you.
Reforged!
Wiki Update
Today’s wiki update is quick, and more of an upgrade! Obsidian Portal, the site that hosts our wikis, just went through a wicked update thanks to their Kickstarter campaign at the beginning of the summer. Every wiki is more mobile friendly, has some more customization options, and they’re slowly rolling out additional features as they get their code working. This has me really excited, not just because I love having websites, but because I like managing information about my game and encouraging people to participate. So even though it means a big reformat for me, I’m looking forward to overhauling it, and I thought I’d psych myself up by posting a couple of things that I want to do with my wiki.
TPK Talk for Nov 16
Short post today because it’s late and because I am watching Desert Bus and playing Feed the Beast again.
3 Ways to Use Religion in Your Game
Getting back in the habit with a post I’ve wanted to write for a while. Religion at the gaming table can be an interesting and sticky subject. There are a lot of ways to treat it, and I could write for months about it. I’ve played with people of a few religious stripes, from those with none at all to pagans and various flavours of Christian, and they’ve really helped me define my idea of what belonging to a religion means, and how it can matter narratively. I’m an apatheist myself, but I understand the power of religion as a cultural force in the lives of millions of people, so I’ve always wanted to give it a treatment that resonates with faithful people without disincentivizing secular players. There’s a wide gulf between representing real-world religion vs. fantasy religion, but today I want to pay attention to fantasy religion. We’ll talk about the way I do it next week, but here’s three other ways you could treat religion.
Pre-Published Adventures?
30 Days of GMing
While I’ve sung the praises of modules before, I’ve run precious few of them. In fact, I think I’ve completed a total of one in my twenty years as a GM. I blame getting my start as a Larper, where there are no modules and everyone is a snob (myself included). Still, it’s something I’ve been thinking about.
Finding Players
30 Days of GMing
Finding players can be a challenge in a lot of ways. When I started I knew no one who played rpgs, and later I knew so many people that it became hard to pick just four or five for a campaign. I usually keep a mental list of people who tell me they want to play D&D, and when starting a game or filling a spot, I draw from that in order. But there are lots of other considerations.
Favourite GMing Tools
30 Days of GMing
I love tech at the gaming table, but use precious little of it. My 10 year old battlemat is still being drawn on with washable markers, and we only just moved to using minis from using dice to represent characters. Such is the ghetto table of the starving student. I use a lot of tech in my online game, Google Hangouts, Gametable and Xsplit, but they all seem like pretty simple tools to me. Just software that gets the job done. But not all tools are tech.
TPK Talk for October 5
Many awesome videos this week, as well as a killer kickstarter and a challenge! Which I have accepted. See you on Monday and for the next thirty days straight with the 30 Days of Gamemastering!