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The GM's Guide

In-depth podcast on how to improve your campaign, focusing on the adventure, world and character design. We apply proven and practical game design techniques to the world of running pen and paper campaigns. There's a lot to get into, so let's get started.
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Now displaying: February, 2021
Feb 12, 2021

Designer Reuben Covington returns to chat about designing Boss Fights in TTRPGs. The two give some advice, and tell a LOT of stories about memorable boss battles they've made and played against. Feel free to steal them (like always). 

Feb 7, 2021

Dan and guest Reuben Covington break down how to design and run Dynamic Adventures, where the GM role is treated more like a player than a job.

Link to the adventure notes: Cold-Blooded

Feb 7, 2021

Prepare a full adventure setting, a full region of your world, with just a single page of notes. This format, the one-page setting, is what I use to prepare vast open worlds with diverse and interesting regions with just a little bit of work.

Feb 1, 2021

A great sandbox campaign is incredibly fun to play in, and it’s a great introduction for new players. I often start new groups in sandboxes rather than carefully constructed narrative games. It’s a simple pitch: Here’s a fantastical wilderness filled with monsters, treasures, dungeons, and dragons. Want to go explore it?

However, while sandboxes can be a lot of fun to play in, they can be intimidating to think about building. Preparing one adventure is hard enough, how are you going to prepare dozens? In fact, I think a sandbox campaign is actually much easier to build than a linear campaign and takes me much less work to set up. There are a lot of tricks I use in my own sandbox campaigns and we’re going to go through the big ones today.

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