The first step is always the hardest. The first step involves to sit down and try. Sometimes you will have hundreds of possible ideas and none the following day. You cannot do anything against that. Even great authors had times where they could not come up with even an average idea. The best way to deal with a blockage is to do something else: Visit friends, go into a pub, watch TV, read a book, but do not try to force it. It would not work anyway. Discipline is of course another thing. When you really want to start writing an adventure, it is necessary to work on it. Work does not always involve pleasure. It also means sweat and tears. A good rule of thumb is to sit down once a week for a few hours to read what you have written, change it where necessary and develop the story a little bit further. Most adventures are not finished, because the authors just wanted to interrupt it for a while and never came back. To come up with a coherent storyline means that you need to have a more or less constant stream of thought in your head.

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Liber Fanatica just annouced their unofficial expansion to Black Industries “The Thousand Thrones”-campaing. In my (very personal) opinion the major intention of this expansions is to fix the flaws the original campaign had. You can download it at  Liber Fanaticas site.

Everyone of us has written an adventure. Unfortunately most are not beware of that and the reason for this cannot be found in alcoholic beverages. Most GMs have spend much of their spare in the creation of an adventure, carefully creating scene after scene, balancing the whole plot, inventing new creatures, places and spells. Others prefer to buy ready made adventure, where almost every aspect is covered and dealt with. Another way is to use small adventure hooks or scenarios that are filled with life. All of them have something in common: They are not perfect! No matter how much time you spend on an adventure, how much money you invested in a supplement or how good you know your players, there are situations where you have to come up with your own ideas, you have to improvise. Your players are human beings and their actions can hardly be predicted (otherwise everyone would make a
million on the stock exchange). This improvisation is the first step to create an adventure, although only small parts of an adventure are improvised, a huge world of new adventures are behind the veil and all that is necessary is to lift it.

Even players create adventures. Roleplaying is not a one-way-street. Instead players manipulate the world they play in - sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally. I remember an adventure where my PC - unintentionally - killed the princes he wanted to rescue; just image all the possible adventures afterwards. These are also the first steps to create new adventures.

There are hundreds of good adventures on the market - and probably thousands of bad ones. This article is meant to show you some of the possible ways to create good adventures. It does not guarantee a good adventure and the one’s that are made need constant modification during game-play. Even if you fail spectacularly, you should not hesitate to try again.

To create an adventure all you need is a pen and a pencil. A rulebook may be nice, but it is not necessary. The rest is your imagination.

More to follow…

This article was written by Leif U. Schrader and originaly published by Strike to Stun in 2001

America has voted.

With this article the series “A stick and a carrot” is finished. I really hope you enjoyed reading this posts over the last months. Honestly I do not like the concept of experience points very much. When you kill ten people you may be more experienced, but you can hardly say that this can lead to better skills in reading and writing. I have always preferred to take down notes who did what. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever taken a look at the map of the Empire? The river Talabec is far more longer thant the upper Reik, nevertheless when both rivers join the river is called Reik:

I recently found this series of excellent documentary films on the web. It is about the history of germany from its beginnings around 900 AD. Especially the first four or five episodes are great as they show a lot of fluff for WFRP and give you an idea how a mediveal/renaissance society worked and looked like. As it is a very new production it only exists in the german original. But I think that it is even worth to watch it even if you cannot understand a word

This is a complex issue. It happens that a PC dies during gameplay. In the end most games are more or less combat oriented. Combat rules occupy major parts of the rulebook and there are few adventures totally free of combat. So you should be prepared to let them die. However do not kill them. There is no bodycount you have to achieve to be granted entrance to the Hall of Fame of GMs. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, November 3rd 2008 the site will not be available between 12.00 am - 04.00 pm GMT +1 due to maintenance work on the server. Both the blog and the forum will not be online during this time. We appologize in advance for any inconveniences.

Respect is also important. Treat your world with respect. Do not hesitate to kill a NPC, but try to play them as human beings. I have seen more than once that a NPC that followed the party was used as cannon-fodder. No one does this. Except for absolute fanatics and dumbheads no one is willing to sacrifice his live for someone else. Play the NPCs this way. Read the rest of this entry »

The Anglo-Saxons didn’t know role-playing. They didn’t need to; they still did their swordplay and adventuring for real. But they had something similar: the Scop. This was the Old English ancestor of the Minstrel, an oral poet who would sing or tell heroic tales after dinner in the hall of the local lord. If you know Beowulf, you may remember the Scop in Hrothgar’s hall.

Why am I telling you this? Because we as GMs, the very modest modern versions of oral poets, can learn from the Scop. His most important lesson is this: Don’t memorize your poem. The early medieval oral poets (and their descendents in Kyrgyzstan, for instance) can reproduce an epic of several thousand lines, the singing of which will last a whole night. Yet they don’t learn it by heart. Instead, they are trained by their masters to memorize the story, its sequence and its characters. The actual lines of the poem are improvised, using formulaic metric sequences. Hence the oral poets recreate an epic instead of merely reproducing it.

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Sewers are an important part of, it seems, every city in the Old World. They do not only transport human waste but also work as places for numberless adventures beneath the streets of human cities. They are a place where rats (both human and animal form) follow their dark business: from smugglers who are using the sewers to conceal their dirty work, beggars that use this stinking places as sleeping places to thieves that wander the sewers to move around in the city unseen. But sewers are of course a place where even worse things hide in the dark. Chaos cultists use sewers as gathering places and there are stories of large, nearly human-sized rats that walk on two legs. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a reason why most of us prefer WFRP’s combat system to Rolemaster’s. It is simple, quick and deadly. In fact, WFRP is probably the best compromise possible between realism and playability. And yet, as straightforward as it seems, running combat poses certain difficulties for a GM. First of all, combat remains the most time-consuming and rule-heavy part of role-playing, even in WFRP. Lots of characteristics, dice rolls and calculations are involved (just think of the rules for Strike to Stun), as well as keeping track of almost every second of game time and the positions and movement of several PCs and NPCs. Thus running a short skirmish between the PCs and a handful of skaven can easily consume half an hour of your playing time. On the other hand, your players may become bored by the sullen routine of attack rolls, dodges and critical hits, because WFRP’s combat system does not seem to present many options. At worst, combat may become a mere game-within-the-game, consisting of dice rolls, maths and munchkin tactics, which has nothing to do with role-playing any more. As a GM, you want to avoid that. The aim of this article is to give you a few ideas of how to keep your players interested in combat.

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Coming to the most important aspect of your game mastering: The world itself. The world with all its inhabitants, being it monsters or civilised people, is your medium to the players. They will judge you very much according to the setting and the reactions of the players.
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Johan. You know, you couldn’ find a braver man. A true hero he was. Held that bridge ‘gainst the onslaught o’ orcs, givin’ those villagers a chance of gettin’ out. That winter, when we were caught in them mountains an’ we thought we were lost, Johan got us out. That day that skeleton woke up from his grave and went walkabout, an’ everyone else fled, Johan stayed behind an’ smashed that that boneman to splinters. A real hero he was, an’ nobody better than you could have wanted at your side. I suppose that’s what makes the whole thing so sad. You see, Johan, despite his strength an’ courage was a real ugly feller. Ugly. An’ all that heroism couldn’ keep him from jumpin’ off that bridge into them waters. I suppose that was his weakness, for all his strength o’ character, he simply didn’ get the respect he deserved on account o’ his face.

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