Plotty Plot Plotting (For Adventures)

If you get over the bulls$&% notion that planning a plot is somehow railroading, you’ll discover just how powerful plot threads are as tools for designing adventures and campaigns. In this article, we’ll discuss the basics of plot points and how to build simple and complex adventures around them.

Glue: The Binds that Tie Your Campaign Together

Every campaign needs something to hold the players together. That’s because players are constantly trying to blast apart. It’s like nuclear physics. Which is why you need gluons. Or glue. Or tortured, mixed metaphors. Whatever.

Don’t Roll the Dice When You Can Hide Them Instead

We play games because we don’t know how they are going to turn out. And games use several tricks to keep us from knowing the outcome. The problem is GMs only ever use one of those tricks. And it’s the worst one.

The Italian Campaign: On Shape and Glue

Designing a campaign is like ordering dinner at The Olive Garden. Except for the parts that aren’t like that at all. Which is most of the parts. Anyway, let’s talk about campaign structures, about the Shape of your game and the Glue that holds it together.

Villains and Characters: Villains AS Characters

Villains are stories, but they are also people. And that means they have personality traits and fears and hopes and dreams and interactions, right? Well, if you want a good game, you don’t want too much of that crap.

Villains and Plots: The Villain AS Plot

When is an NPC not an NPC? When it’s a villain. Because villains are more than mere NPCs. Because villains create plots. And I don’t mean evil schemes. I mean stories.

Antagonizing Your PCs

While not every NPC is a monster, every monster is an NPC. And that’s what this is all about. NPC antagonists. The violent and the non-violent. We’re talking enemies today.

Getting There is Half the Fun

They say that the journey is its own reward and that getting there is half the fun. Yeah? Well, not in D&D. Overland travel in D&D sucks. But here I come to unsuck it. Or to help you just get rid of it altogether. Either way is fine. Just pick one.

Resistance is Futile: Assimilating Your NPCS (Into Factions)

People like to make a big thing out of factions, guilds, collectives, churches, cults, and organizations. But they don’t need to be complicated at all. In fact, they are remarkably simple. You just need a little lesson from Star Trek. You know, before it got crappy.

Who’s Driving This Adventure Anyway

Few Game Masters think to ask who is meant to drive the plot in the adventure they are writing. Which is a shame, because there are lots of ways an adventure can be driven. And by lots, I mean two. There are two ways. And understanding them can help make your adventure writing easier.

A Plot, B Plot; One, Two, Three Plot (An Ask Angry Special)

It started as a simple question about how to juggle two plot lines. It became an entire treatise on building campaigns with multiple plot arcs. This article is the first ever article under the category “How to Build a F$&%ing Campaign.”

The Unexpected NPC

What do you do when your players force you to turn a nameless, faceless nobody into an actual NPC? What do you do when they don’t even start with a nameless, faceless nobody? How do you make NPCs out of nothing?

Tip: Interact with NPCs to Receive Quests

Everyone knows that the easiest way to start an adventure is to just have some damned NPC show up and tell the PCs what to do and how to do it. After all, that’s what MMORPGS do and it works for them. So why not do the same in D&D? Because Quest Givers can be so much more than expository text. Don’t waste that potential.

Here Comes Tagalong: Henchmen, Allies, and DMPCs

Tagalongs: NPCs that join the party. They are often derided, frequently misunderstood, and rarely used well. Because people are dumba$&es. Which is sad because Tagalongs are a GREAT Tool for your GMing Toolbox!

What Even is an NPC (And How to Do Them Right)

Building compelling NPCs is a tricky, tricky business. And it’s made even trickier by the fact that people don’t even REALLY understand what NPCs are. That’s a shame, because good NPCs are literally the key to emotional investment in games.

Previously, On The Angry GM: The Art of the Recap

GMs suck at giving recaps. They give too much information or too little information or the wrong information or they make it boring or they let the dumba&$ players do it or they do it by e-mail. Recaps are a very powerful that no GM understands, let alone uses well. Except me. Because I’m a genius.

When Episodes Ain’t Episodes: How to Structure a Session

Tabletop RPG sessions are a lot like TV shows. The problem is the one very important way in which they are not at all like TV shows. If you always want to leave your players hungry for more, you have to learn how to structure your SESSIONS like episodes, NOT your adventures.

I’m Making This Up As I Go: Pulling Story Out of Your A$%

The problem with players is that they always want to run around and do things in your game. Things you weren’t ready for. Or ask questions you don’t have answers for. And sometimes, even your own brain will turn against you and demand you add a crazy idea to your game. So how do you change the story of your game on the fly?

Keeping Pace

Pacing: it’s one of those words that everyone thinks they know. And they don’t. Let’s talk about Pacing, Flow, and how to build a good pace into your adventure.

Death Sucks

Lots of things piss me off. But one thing pisses me off more than any other for the purposes of this article: when people ask me how to punish PC death. Isn’t death punishment enough? Why do GMs have such a hard time dealing with death?

Ex***tion and Information Management

Tabula rasa is the philosophical belief that every player enters your game stupid. And if you don’t want them to stay that way, you’d better learn how to use your scene-building knowledge to manage information.