Spider Queen

I don't ask my players "What do you (want to) do?", like the old, well worn advice in the front of the rulebook says. Instead, I ask them "What's the plan?" It's not just that my subscription to Roll20 has me paying by the word - it's a small point, but it's genuinely a better phrase. And since its the starting point for the whole structure of the game ("...a conversation, between the players and the GM..."), I think it's kind of important. The first reason I do this semi-intentional thing is because plans are purposive. Of course, when players act, they do so with purpose. But they don't always share their purposes with the GM. I think some players have this innate suspicion that the GM is out to jump on their plans. Maybe it's the ghost of Gary "Legendarily Competitive DM" Gygax, but there seems to be a feeling that the player should detail each individual action leading up to their plan, without revealing the pu...

Let's get some practice with this setting stuff. I had a brainwave earlier: What if I used soloing to help flesh out the lore of my own multi-player campaign? The advantage of this, I thought, would not only be providing prompts for content generation for the campaign, but also that it would give me the opportunity to get to grips with my own lore and setting a bit more. See, I often feel at the table like I'm grasping for something just out of reach, or like the details of my setting are nebulous and undefined (a lot of the time that is the case) - I'm lacking a ready familiarity with the material. Playing around with it, interacting with it with characters of my own, should solidify it in my brain. So, here's a link  to a Google doc in which I play around with creating setting details for my Wave Rats campaign using Ask the Stars. If it wasn't already obvious, the man called Billabong is Crocodile Dundee, but taken to the nth degree; he is literally constituted of...