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Recently, a NPC in my TB2e game - Lareth the Beautiful - had an enchanted mask placed over half his face, to conceal the scar caused by a Bugbear's fangs: Iron Mask of the Beautiful Half-Elf This mask of polished iron covers the right side of Lareth’s face, concealing a scar caused by a...

I'd always thought that Hobbits were expunged from D&D by the end of the 1970s. But learned yesterday that this is not the case! REF4 The Book of Lairs II was published in 1987. On p 42 it has a medusa-based scenario. And it begins: Local shepherds tell of a strange, ancient structure nestled...

A lot of thinking and discussion about the play of RPGs seems to default to an assumption of map-and-key play. Here is what I mean by map-and-key: * The GM prepares a map; * The GM keys the map - that is, there are notes about what is to be found, or what is happening, at various...

In another thread, @Manbearcat posted this set up for a FRPG scenario: As I posted in that thread, I think Burning Wheel is a good (not necessarily perfect) fit for this game. This thread is for working out the BW set-up. (Will anyone go on to play it? That's something we can find out!)

Here are the healing rules from Greg Stafford's brilliant Prince Valiant RPG (pp 25-26): All physical damage is taken to Brawn, in increments of one or more coins lost. . . . If your Brawn is reduced, you throw that many fewer coins for Brawn until recovered. The loss represents damage...

This thread is about identifying and analysing GM fiat as a way of establishing the shared fiction in RPGing. My experience is that, often, many cases of GM fiat go unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon. Here's one example, that I posted in a recent thread: In this post I want to present...

The 4e D&D rulebooks have quite a bit of advocacy for the players making decisions about the shared fiction: backstory, the focus of the action, what is possible here-and-now in terms of action declaration. Some examples around the focus of the action: PHB p 258: "You can also, with your DM’s...

A conversation a couple of weeks ago prompted me to have a close read of my copy of Dungeon Module UK1 Beyond the Crystal Cave. It's an interesting scenario, but I've really got no idea how it is supposed to be run in its official system, AD&D. It involves mostly social and puzzle-based...

I was looking at the preview page from the DMG on adventure design, on this website - The new D&D core books feature nearly 400 spells and over 500 monsters, but disappointingly few new ideas - and to me it seemed a bit contradictory. Here's what I mean: Follow these steps to create an...

Here's Ron Edwards's answer, in the last minute or so of this video: The enjoyment of the medium for the properties that it offers, that no other medium I know does. It really is a valuable human thing to do. Intimacy. Enjoyment. Creativity. Unpredictability. Varying levels of success as you...

I recently watched the Return of the King film with my family, and the (second-last) ending, where the "last ship" sails from the Grey Havens, prompted the thought that has led to this post. JRRT is probably the most famous conceiver of a fantasy setting, and that setting - Middle Earth - is...

I often read posts asserting that Marvel Heroic RP (ie the Cortex+-based supers game) doesn't allow for PC creation. To me this seems just wrong. I mean, the rulebook has a section on creating characters. And I've personally created plenty of characters for the game, both superhero PCs, and...

A recurring thing I see said is that, in Apocalypse World, players can't declare actions that are not covered by a move. This is just silly. The rules are clear: if a player's declared action for their PC is a move, then the rules of the move are invoked ("If you do it, you do it"). Otherwise...

My friend and I continued our two GM, two player Burning Wheel today. I wrote up our second session here, and we played another session between that one and today's. That session ended rather surprisingly: Alicia and Aedhros escaped the guards, but Alicia then returned to fight them so that...

A lot of games invite players to imagine things while playing them. But not all. Chess doesn't. Nor does bridge. The card game Crew, which is a cooperative variant on bridge, has flavour text that bridge lacks. But the invitation to players to imagine things is pretty tenuous: the card play...

Vincent Baker posted this blog nearly 14 years ago, but I don't think I've seen much discussion of it on ENworld: anyway: Things on Character Sheets (2) The core ideas are this: *A character sheet will set out different aspects of a character - position (who am I? who am I related to? what is...

All the ongoing discussion of the Deck of Many Things prompted me to revisit the Dice of Chaos (from Rolemaster's Creatures and Treasures book) and write them up for Torchbearer 2e: I'm not sure I actually want to use these, of course - like all these sorts of items they are a little bit...

Another recent thread raised the issue of what the GM contributes to the game. This prompted me to think about some of the themes and associated tropes I've consistently drawn on in my FRPGing, especially as a GM. In this OP I'll set out two. The relationship of mortals to cosmic/divine law My...

Various threads - eg the "why rules?" thread, and the agency threads - have prompted some conversations with RPGing friends. At least from my perspective, a recurring theme or element in discussion has been a contrast, between: *Play where the players establish dramatic needs for their PCs...

Around the same time as this session, I ran a brief session of Traveller for my other daughter. This weekend (so after a gap of almost 3 years), we played a little bit more of it. From three years ago, I had three bits of paper. One was a PC sheet: Bob Airrunner B29497, a 30-year old, 3 term...