Most role-playing games have some form of experience points that allow characters to gain strength and abilities over time.  But sometimes experience point awards don’t factor in all the aspects of RPGs that most people want to encourage. Several years …

Experience Points Should Reward All Gaming Styles Read more »

Often, when a party gets to back into a reasonable sized town, they want to look for a wizard’s shop (or similar) to see if there are any magic items they can trade or purchase.  Determining the shop’s inventory can …

Announcing the Magic Item Shop Random Inventory Generator Read more »

A timeline or history of your world can add a great deal of depth that can have as much impact on your storylines as you like.  Timeline facts will often even suggest new story ideas.  “Building a history provides you …

New Worldbuilding Article Posted: Creating Timelines Read more »

This month’s RPG blog carnival topic is “The Future of Roleplaying” and it is hosted by Roleplaying Pro.  Naturally, I wrote an essay on April 29th (just before this blog carnival started) titled  “A Roleplaying Resurgence is on the Horizon.” …

Bright Future for Roleplaying Games Read more »

The list below covers a number of rule subsets that get forgotten in RPGs.  These groups of rules get overlooked or game masters feel they may bog down a game or for some other reason they are not enforced.  But …

Top 5 Overlooked Rule Subsets of RPGs Read more »

The popularity of the “retro-clone” RPG games (those that attempt to emulate the orginal D&D game or the Basic/Expert/Master/etc. D&D boxed sets or even 1st edition AD&D) makes me think that the RPG hobby isn’t dieing, but instead it is …

A Role-Playing Game Resurgence is on the Horizon Read more »

I’ve updated my reviews of the random dungeon generators available on the internet because two of them were updated since I reviewed them. The full review (including links to the generators) is Random Dungeon Generators Reviewed. First, “The Demonweb” random …

Random Dungeon Generators Updated Read more »

The “Random Dungeon Generators Reviewed” article I wrote almost a weekend ago received some great feedback.  I’ve updated the article with the changes.  Below is a summary of the differences: Another impressive dungeon generator (the one from Wizards of the …

Random Dungeon Generator Reviews Updated Read more »

Random dungeon generators go way back to the early days of computer games.  Text-based dungeon crawls like Hack and Moria randomly created their dungeon levels using ASCII characters, but even they have since been given graphics front-ends. A dungeon generator …

Random Dungeon Generators Reviewed Read more »

A day has already passed into the new year so before it gets too much further allow me to highlight a few of my favorite essays here from the past year. One of my most popular essays (and in this …

Top 5 2008 Essays @Inkwell Ideas Read more »