At Will

A perfect stlorm of professional and personal frustration resulted in an epic “eff-it-all” moment from yours truly…on twitter. Why twitter? I don’t know but before you knew I was ready to throw all my gaming work down the toilet. All the dissapointments, missed opportunities, aggravations that I’d been working through perfectly fine until that moment, just came pouring down…some people think it was just because of not being on a mailing list, but I’ll protest that I’m really not that shallow or thin-skinned. Needles, haystacks, etc…that’s what was going on but that is so over now.

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You have a lot of creative license as a GM, but sometimes your vision for an epic campaign doesn’t always meet the expectations of your players. It’s important to make an imaginative world a two-way street, where the players help to evolve the world in which they play.

One way to set-up this collaborative story telling from the start is to use it to create the PCs’ back stories. Once everyone has sat down and introduced their character to the group, go around the table once more and have each player say one thing they know or have heard about the other PCs.

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While I’m a fan of the frequent small traps scattered throughout a dungeon, I’m also a fan of the large and unusual kind that usually take up an entire room.  I’ve collected quite a lot of them from old AD&D modules, and today I am presenting one of my favorites: the frictionless room.

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I recently talked about what makes a villain work in the context of an RPG campaign. Today I’m going to talk about three different types of villain. The next few Fridays I will give specific examples of the villains, ready to be dragged and dropped and possibly re-skinned (painful!) for your 4e games. In the spirit of “The New Breed” , we’ll lay out some basic background and psychology for :

• The Well Intentioned Villain
• The Nihilist Villain
• The Faustian Villain

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Artemis Entreri

Say the title five times fast or you’re a minion!

Jonathan (The core Mechanic), Michael (MadBrew Labs), and I have been talking a lot about villains lately. None of us are considering taking up the profession ourselves mind you. Well, maybe. It is a sweet gig in many respects, so I guess you have to at least entertain it, if for no other reason then to practice your diabolical laughter.

The main course of discussion has been: What defines a villain? What makes a villain tick in an RPG from a player’s viewpoint?

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