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Talisman Fantasy Adventures from Games Workshop/Pegasus Spiele.

OMG. You're so right. Can't believe I didn't think of that. :)

Mike Carr played the first cleric in the history of fantasy tabletop role playing games. Like, the very first. Ever. In the decades since, the character class has earned a spot at the core of the hobby, so when Carr casually mentioned in an email that he played the first one in a now-legendary...

Central Iowa gamers, cosplayers and fans took a trip down the rabbit hole last weekend for DemiCon 29. The annual science fiction, fantasy and gaming convention held at a Holiday Inn in Des Moines, Iowa, provided an impressive variety of options for entertainment, from art and music to...

Thanks for looking into this! The local historical society, unfortunately, doesn't have a whole lot to say of the region's Native American history, but Sac and Fox are definitely the two nations most commonly associated with the site along the Wapsipinicon that became Quasky. As for the...

There are two distinctive camps. There are those who pronounce it 'Kwa-SQUEE-ton.' And then there are those who pronounce it 'KWA-skwa-ton.' The difference is in the emphasis and the long 'e' sound in the middle syllable. I grew up in the camp that goes with the second pronunciation. 'Quasky' is...

I grew up in a tiny town in northeast Iowa where you won't find a single stoplight or public library, let alone a game store. With fewer than 600 souls, it's probably the last place you'd expect to be immortalized in the pages of one of the most influential Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules...

That's a great point! Tying the PCs' goals and quests to the long-term viability of the location is a great way to ensure the characters will invest in the location.

Most role-playing game adventures depend on the player characters going out into the world seeking adventure. They leave their homes or bases of operation and travel to a dungeon, a wizard's tower or a newly discovered planet. But sometimes an adventure designer wants to take the story to the...

Thanks for this perspective. It's not one that has occurred to me before. Some of Call of Cthulhu's classic scenarios deal with sanity pretty heavily. What are your thoughts on "The Sanatorium," which is considered among CoC's best-loved scenarios? Does it deal with sanity and mental illness in...

H.P. Lovecraft, the giant of horror fiction who created the Cthulhu mythos, scared his readers in all kinds of ways, filling his works with nightmarish elder gods and a sense of humanity's insignificance in the cosmos. But many of his works relied on the same handful of universally frightening...

Let's talk about a valuable lesson game masters can take from The Force Awakens and 2009's Star Trek, both directed by J.J. Abrams. Maybe you've heard of them. Those movies often polarize fans of the respective franchises, but game masters can take some lessons from how Abrams mixes...

Gamers have gotten pretty comfortable over the years with the triumvirate of books that form the core of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, I suspect many gamers allow their familiarity with the three-book format to keep them from closely reading the entirety of those texts. Those gamers, myself...

I would actually jump at a chance to play in a campaign that started out like that! Especially if the alternative is to carouse in the tavern for a couple hours before stumbling onto generic quest giver #7.

One of my favorite Ferengi Rules of Acquisition says, "Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack." In the realm of rpg design, I might modify that to say, "A good adventure idea and an empty sack is worth the sack." In this case, I'm talking about grand, imaginative, thrilling adventure ideas...

You raise a lot of questions that I've been asking myself of late. Can we change the conventions of the genre in a way that serves players and game masters better? I've seen adventure modules that includes handouts meant to be read by players, but they're never very lengthy and not usually of...

Here you go! :) http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/182608/How-to-Write-Adventure-Modules-That-Dont-Suck

One of the first rules they teach you in those pesky freshman-year composition courses is "know your audience." Before you sit down to write a text, consider who's going to be reading it and plan accordingly. When it comes to tabletop role-playing games, I've always considered the game master to...

I've always felt that having players who are invested in their characters improves the game, so I never kill a character without the player's permission. That is, if you fail your death saves, I basically leave it up to you if your character dies or revives in a severely injured state some time...

The party I'm running is currently exploring the Savage Frontier. They made it to Bargewright Inn, a Zhentarim stronghold. I had Kella Darkhope lure the party into Old Bargewright, where they were ambushed by the Vampire Aric Stillmarsh. One PC dropped quickly, then the rest of the PCs...