Setting the Environment—Tips to Brighten Your Burrow and Host Your Party’s Next Adventure

The three pillars of adventure are exploration, social interaction, and combat. The next time you host your party’s campaign, use the following cunning tips to optimize your living space to ensure peak social interaction (and that exploration and combat stay in-game). The pointers below will get your burrow party-ready for campaigns of any length or complexity.

Brightening Your Burrow

Are you a level one wizard? I sure hope so, because your first task is to cast clean. Clean those stains, dirt, grime, mud, and other tiny things in the shared spaces you’ll be hosting your party members in. It doesn’t need to look like a townhouse or the finest inn, but no one wants to spend their day in what looks or smells like a squalid, leaky stable.

Speaking of stables—make sure to dust with a wet rag and sweep up dirt and pet hair in case anyone on your team has allergies. Whether it’s an aerem rabbit, commerce cat, or blind dog, you don’t want the local fauna adversely affecting your adventure.

You’ll need a central space to play that’s large enough for your adventure grid, snacks, and drinks. For smaller parties, this cou [...]

A waterbender smothers the fire of a dragon as it breathes over their party. A druid befriends soot sprites in the ashes of a hearth. A bard discovers that electricity, when channeled through their guitar, makes for a pretty rockin’ instrument. Waterbenders and soot sprites and electric guitars may not be content endemic to your tabletop system, but you can still bring them into your game! How, you ask? Through Homebrew! What Is Homebrew? Homebrew is what we call unofficial content made for a tabletop system by fans or players. “Homebrew” is the broad term—it can refer to anything from a new item to a new monster, race, or feat. So, other than creating cool stuff for your campaign based on your favorite media, why use Homebrew content? First: It lets you customize your game to your table. Every party is different: different people, different play styles, aesthetics, experience levels. Being able to craft things for those people, things that speak to what they want to get out of a play experience, helps personalize things for your players and gives them more of a stake in the world. If your player makes a character who’s a former pirate with an ancient curse, then wouldn’t it be cool to make a curse mechanic that affects their g [...]

For the last few years, we’ve been experiencing a roleplaying boom. Board game sales are up. New gaming cafes are opening across the country. Podcasts and streaming shows are turning RPG gamers into household names. But for all the love and attention given to tabletop gaming lately, there’s an offshoot of the genre—a redheaded, paperback-bound stepchild—that’s been unjustly forgotten during this D&D resurgence.

From the intrigue-laden romantic lives of your setting’s nobles to the pastoral bliss of the innkeep and her doting wife, from the jaded rake who takes a moment away from flirting to sell the player characters some information to the young lovers who defy social convention to pursue their own star-crossed affections: Love and relationships form a great deal of the backdrops of many game and fictional settings.

In gaming terms, “railroading” is when a Game Master tries to force a campaign to unfold in a particular way, driving player characters to follow a predetermined path rather than giving them the freedom to chart their own course. Since so much of the fun of role-playing is in collaboration and improvisation, that can rob the gaming experience of its most essential joys.

Maybe you’ve never moved cities or states, let alone schools. Consider playing role-playing games as adventuring into a new school with a new set of problems: where to sit at lunch, what after-school activity to sign up for, and whom to sit next to on the bus.If you were approaching role-playing like a new school, you wouldn’t immediately pull out your sharp ruler and slash someone’s calves, would you?

“ROLL INITIATIVE!” Those two simple words are all you need to get your players’ full attention. You start your game session right in the middle of the action. While the advice of starting in the middle is weird for eating a submarine sandwich, it works awesome for RPGs.

There is nothing players and game masters dread more than the death of a beloved character. These dramatic events happen for a variety of reasons, and are usually unintended by the game master. Death holds the potential to a derail a gaming session—or worse yet, an entire campaign.