Dave 
A confounding villain scheme can be the thing that brings your campaign to life. It’s even better when you can make multiple villains crisscross and double-cross with the players in the middle trying to catch up. Here’s how to build a truly tangled web of intrigue starring the Kingpin and some of Marvel’s competing heavy hitters.
In a recent episode, we discussed how to go about introducing new players to the hobby. During our discussion, we got around to the topic of roleplaying, specifically about ways to encourage people who are brand new to tabletop gaming to act and speak as their characters would act and speak. This would have been my response to the question, had my brain not decided that it was time to, I don’t know, catalog my grocery list for the coming week while going live!
So, you’re looking to set the right tone, the one that will begin your epic, world-shaking, heartbreaking, history-making, legendary campaign? To introduce the people seated around your dining room table to the fantastical world that they are about to enter? To begin, as our own Universe did, with a Big Bang? In our most recent episode, we delved into the tips and tricks we use to bring our campaigns to life: setting, descriptions, mechanics, etc. However, I thought it would be very helpful to revisit some of the nuts and bolts to my evolving method of Session Prep.
In our latest episode, we answered a listener’s question regarding how to handle players missing sessions. This led to a brainstorm about how to build a campaign that turns this apparent weakness into a strength. Starting from the basic idea of a West Marches-style campaign, I offer you “The Cannonball Run.”
Is the key encounter/NPC/Lost Tower of Super Badness this way or that way? Maybe it’s both and neither? Everything in your world can be simultaneously alive and dead until the players open that box and find out what’s inside. Here’s how to use that to your advantage and save time on DM prep.
Our discussion around inclusivity, sensitivity and awareness of other-abled people at the game table, as well as using D&D in therapy, got me thinking about why we play TTRPG’s and what they teach us about ourselves and each other.
How do we feel about playing characters from popular fiction? Well, here’s how I did it with a 5E modern setting and Aeron Pendragon … King Arthur’s long lost descendant in Philadelphia, PA.
When we left our heroes, they had found their party member to be missing, possibly kidnapped, by the group known only as “The 13.” Hot on the trail of their compatriot, with the help of the mysterious Visitor, our brave adventurers found themselves transported into a modern-day fairy-tale in Harbor City and their strange City Hall, a former amusement park known as “Storybook Land.” Prepare yourselves for the conclusion of this 2-night Halloween adventure as we travel into the weird, terrifying and true tales of The Black Pines!
In our most recent episode, we discussed crazy stunts that our players have pulled on us – things above and beyond what I call “just D&D.” And I talked in-depth about the short, multi-night adventure that I took a group through years ago. An adventure that took our heroes to the terrifying wilds of “Weird New Jersey.”
Playing a TTRPG is an incredibly subjective experience, almost like a Rorschach test. With this in mind, I wanted to shift our perspective from the system and edition wars that populate so many social media feeds to something much more basic: What makes a TTRPG in the first place and what could we learn from that to improve our enjoyment of all our games (instead of firing shots at someone else’s fun)?
