Lew was Contributing Editor to Dragon, White Dwarf, and Space Gamer magazines and contributed monsters to TSR's original Fiend Folio, including the Elemental Princes of Evil, denzelian, and poltergeist. You can follow Lew on his web site and his Udemy course landing page.
Plot twists in a story can surprise the reader, but they need to be believable, to derive from what came before. Deux Ex Machina, on the other hand, is poison, breaking immersion and possible...
In RPG campaigns the characters often move through several stages of life as they increase their capabilities (and responsibilities). We don’t see this in one-shot adventures, yet distinct stages...
Where do heroes come? Some are destined from birth to be heroes, while others rise to the occasion. Your RPG system of choice likely determines which you get to play.
Tabletop game publishing is a big step to take, but the reality is it's very difficult for an unknown designer to get a game accepted by an established publisher. So what’s a designer to do?
This is a continuation of a discussion from last time. Remember, strategy is what you do long before a battle takes place, and tactics is what you do in and during a battle. But I'm not going to...
What are we looking for when playtesting a (tabletop) game we have designed? That is, what tells us it might be worth pursuing further? I am going to generalize here to most tabletop games, since...
I recently saw a musical analogy for my board game Britannia that made me think about a related analogy to explain opposed games versus puzzles, and further, RPGs. Let’s have a go.
In the first article we discussed the definition of a barbarian. In the second, we discuss ways that barbarians might factor into a setting or campaign.
Hard magic systems have clear rules about how they work; they are predictable. Soft magic has no clear “system” and tends to lack any kind of connection between one spell and another—more or less...
While the typical monumental defensive wall is much less impressive than the Great Wall we see in photographs, they did serve a purpose, and many were built. How might they fit into a fantasy world?
Use of stratagems goes back at least as far as Odysseus and the Trojan Horse. Fans of Glen Cook's "Black Company" series about a fantasy mercenary company will recognize their preference for...
Making a Tolkien-like history for a game can beself-indulgent if you let it get in the way of the game. Making it for written stories is something else entirely.
I’ve always thought that combat-oriented Dungeons & Dragons-style tabletop role-playing games become less fun to play as characters reach double-figure levels of power. Here’s why, and how to fix it.