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Campaign Inspiration

Bringing Your RPG Campaign World to Life: 37 Tricks to Give Your Setting a Soul

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Do your players feel into the campaign setting you’re running, or is it just generic D&D world #124 to them? What can you do to bring that world more to life and make it feel unique to you and your players? What makes a D&D session feel like more than just a glorified board game? Here are 37 of the tricks the 3 Wise DMs use to try to make the players feel immersed in our worlds and give the settings some soul.

DMing 101: 8 Ways the Justice League Snyder Cut Can Improve Your D&D Game

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There are a lot of themes in The Snyder Cut of Justice League that are akin to gaming. In many respects, the superhero genre is the cousin of the Dungeons & Dragons world. Here are 8 things that Zack Snyder’s Justice League did well from a gaming perspective that we should all strive to hit while running and conceptualizing our games.

How to End Your Campaign the Right Way

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Every story needs a proper ending, especially if it’s one of epic proportions. And few tales are as epic as an RPG campaign that reaches the end of its final story arc. Unfortunately, some endings are like The Sopranos, which left the audience thinking “WTF?!” for all the wrong reasons. Others feel rushed, forced or downright unsatisfying. After being on both sides of this equation, I would like to share some tips to prevent your story from tanking in the 11th hour and leave everyone glad they showed up for the final game.

How to DM Epic-Tier Games: 19 Tips for Running – and Ending – High-Level TTRPG Campaigns

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How do you challenge RPG PCs who wield actual cosmic power? How do you bring that campaign to a satisfying end? The time for killing rats is past, here’s how the 3 Wise DMs run and end high-level campaigns.

7 Big Things D&D PCs Could Do With a Little Downtime

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Many D&D campaigns assume that the players change the world most by their adventures. But downtime activities can be every bit as important to shaping the campaign and the world. Sometimes the things done during downtime turn out to be the most memorable parts of your game. Here are 7 of the coolest things I could see players do with downtime and how I would adjudicate them off the cuff.

Party Downtime: When, How and Should You Let the Players Pursue Their Own Character Goals?

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Do you actually give your player characters downtime? Or do you keep them slaloming down the plot with barely a weekend to get their equipment sharpened?

The Case for the DMPC

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Understandably, many DMs and players feel strongly against adding a DMPC to the table. However, I am here to tell you that, if done correctly, this NPC could not only be valuable to the party dynamic but also provide the DM with unique perspective that you’d never get from the other side of the DM screen.

Schrodinger’s DM Prep: Every Encounter Is a Quantum Encounter Until Your Players ‘Open the Box’

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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.

Bringing NPCs to Life: How to Build Legendary Characters Your Players Will Talk About for Decades

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The best NPCs become legends, the rest won’t even be memories. How do you bring NPCs to life so players will engage with, trust and remember them?

DM Inspiration and Influences: The Gaming and Culture Stuff That Makes Us Who We Are

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We all stand on the shoulders of giants in games, whether those are metaphorical giants, literary giants or literal giants. In this episode, the 3 Wise DMs talk about the things that shape their games and how they directly impact what they do.