MHOR GAMES

Photographer: Simon Harmer There's a good reason why player's asking for a name is such a prevalent meme in the role playing zeitgeist. Names carry a weight of personality that is expected to translate, either through correlation or juxtaposition, into the character themselves. We see this expectation played out culturally as well, see Wikipedia's entry on nominative determinism for a better understanding of how that plays out, but needless to say, names have a kind of magnetism that can draw us in or repel us from a character. I find this especially true when reading. I don't know the number of characters whose names I've changed in my head to better suit my view of them, but it's easily in the three digit range. I think that's why t he unsung hero of my GMing experience is a baby name book, specifically Bruce Lansky's 100,000+ Baby Names: The Most Helpful, Complete, & Up-to-Date Name Book . This wasn't something that was on my radar until it w...

Shakespeare's Coriolanus D&D is, at a minimum, two games played in tandem. The first is the role playing; the "RP" of TTRPG. This is the collective improve experience that has a narrator/game master embodying everything in the world that isn't the players. I've personally found this game composes nearly 90% of my time at the table. I don't know if everyone has had similar experiences, but I can say that D&D for me is a roleplay-heavy experience. The other part, the "war game" part, is odd to me. It isn't that the arithmetic of this other game isn't fun; in fact, I'm deep in the junkyard that is optimization: I'm a living, breathing meme with a ream of characters that will never walk in the mind of anyone but me, and I regret none of the math making up the bones of that graveyard. No, it's not that combat isn't fun in D&D, it's that it isn't synergistic with the other game being played. I do believe that the...

William Morris was a fascinating figure and their entry on Wikipedia is certainly a rabbit hole to lose yourself in one afternoon. Here is a collection of his individually designed letters (raw link below), artifacts of beauty and craftsmanship that are more-than-worthy inclusions in simple one-pager D&D write-ups. They have been my go-to for years to add that little-something-extra to my documents, bringing with them deeper meaning than just a fantasy/medieval aesthetic, though they do that too and very well. ... What follows is more rant than anything and isn't necessary reading by any stretch of the imagination. This is your tl;dr warning! Craft is a Gift I cannot help but feel a kinship with Morris. He was a writer, poet, artist, socialist and in his time fiercely rejected industrially manufactured art and architecture. History does so love to echo and repeat. Though nearly 200 years separate us, it's all too easy to find parallels to my and many others' rejection...

Artist: Kim Diaz Holm A tool I've found useful as a GM is a pregame questionnaire. I'm providing the one I use here (raw link below) in hopes that others find it and make use of it. It is my primer - a before-session-zero investigation to inform my choices for anything I'm going to run beyond five or so sessions. It helps me calibrate expectations for the game ahead, gather information to make the experience at the table safe and welcoming, and helps me better understand what experiences the player's want to explore most. It is not comprehensive by any means, but it is a foundation I think others might find sturdy enough to build on. Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1yFlT9efaicQcbWfdvoKNbh75C140JRiCv_NAMhwFjDo/copy

Without context, here's a  pdf one-pager to maybe get some creative juices flowing for your own spooky-season experiences. Raw link below: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1GTa13sTv_3dpj88CB2BjH-cbrCAJ1WWD Happy Gaming! Artist: Kim Diaz Holm  

Artist: Kim Diaz Holm      NPCs are strange. The zeitgeist has also evolved the term of late, making it an insult, and in some cases, a fetish. In the TTRPG space, NPCs are necessary to facilitate the whole   roleplaying  aspect of the experience, but to act as someone else and understand them enough to maintain that illusive darling called EMERSION is just hard - fake being someone else convincingly enough for the indulgence of fantasy, but not too well or that in-and-of-itself is unsettling. I know the prevailing wisdom suggests that NPCs don't have to be that complex - that you don't need voices, or accents, or affects, or deep motivations, etcetera, and so on, but nowhere in the popular opinion is it held true that you don't need them at all. So all of the advice that downplays their importance tends to ring hollow for me, and I imagine, for many others out there.      With the new 2024 rules (One D&D or 5.5...whatever history decides to c...