by Dariusz Kułak Hello! My name is Dariusz Kułak, and I am the designer of Wanted: Rich or Dead, a Western-themed party game scheduled to debut from Galakta at SPIEL '17. I wish to tell you a little about my newest game and how I created it.Actually, despite being a quick and easy game, Wanted: Rich or Dead (as it came to be known) took a long time to design. Its first version left my drawer over four years ago in 2013! Considering that people like Uwe Rosenberg manage to create, say, A Feast for Odin — a game the size of a giant — in half that time or less, I guess I should be ashamed of myself.Anyway, the first version of the game was called "Acreage", and it was supposed to be a rather simple strategic game of Small World weight. Different races controlled by players would fight for resources, land, and food. The thing that would make this title stand out was its theme: birds, with tomtits that specialized in quick food collection, combat-oriented grackles, and the sparrows who are builders extraordinaire. Most of the mechanisms were based on action cards being played simultaneously and used to create paths to resources, build nests and storages, or expand to new territories. However, a hexagonal board and units with unique statistics resulted in many similarities with Neuroshima Hex!, and in the end I stopped on an early-prototype level.Some time later, one of the Polish game publishers proposed that I create a strategic game that would consist of only 55 cards. Although it seemed like a tough task, I returned to the idea of "Acreage" and started making serious cuts. After some time, I was left with a number of areas presented on cards, simultaneous actions, and a deck of items providing certain bonuses.I also created a more sophisticated background to strengthen the theme; the game was still about birds, but they turned into bird gangs trying to prepare for the coming winter by gathering sunflower seeds. Each bird species became a different organized crime group such as Yakuza or Cosa Nostra. I even drew my own art so that playtesters would be immersed even deeper in this brutal world of bird-eat-bird. (Plus, it's quite hard to find gangster bird artwork...) In this way, "In Your beak!" (more commonly known as "Birdies") was born.In "Birdies", each player controlled one of five different bird gangs. Five areas were placed on the table, and players simultaneously played one of six action cards to move their pawn to a certain area. If a player was alone, they got their resources. Otherwise, a quarrel had to be settled. It can't be simpler than that, right?The things that people liked were very quick gameplay, practically no downtime, and a light, amusing theme. One of the unique mechanisms was based on the birds getting "fat" with sunflower seeds; the more a player had, the weaker they became, which is the opposite of a snowball effect. By... Read more »

by W. Eric Martin Every day with every play I relearn the folly of thinking that you can play a game once and understand how it works, especially when you make small rule errors that destroy the effect the designer intended to create. Even if you manage to avoid making such errors in the first place, the second play is almost always better than the first simply because you start the game already embedded in the experience.The latest game to retransmit this lesson is Cuckooo! from József Dorsonczky and Mind Fitness Games, a card game that will debut at SPIEL '17. I've loved Dorsonczky's Six Making and Hack Trick, both two-player-only games that reward heady thinking and outreading your opponent.Cuckooo! is for 3-5 players, and your goal each round is to come as close to 21 as you can without going over that total — but don't mistake this game for a Blackjack variant as the two games share only that magic number and nothing more. Each round, you'll sum the numbers on one of the two owl cards in front of you, 0-2 sparrow cards that you play from your hand, and possibly a cuckoo tile that you were forced to take from the table. That cuckoo is your nemesis, but if you literally play your cards right, sometimes the cuckoo can turn out to be your savior.The game uses a unique deck seven-color deck in which one color has sparrow cards numbered 1-8, another 2-8, another 3-8, and so on up to the seventh color with cards 7 and 8. With four players, you strip out the 8s, and with three you also remove the 7s; this ensures that you deal the cards at the start of the round, each player has exactly seven cards, and you know all the sparrow cards in play. You also start with two randomly dealt owl cards, with these going from 7 to 18. A number of cuckoo tiles equal to the number of players are revealed at random, with these tiles being numbered 1-6.After looking over your hand, you pass three cards of your choice to the player on your right and collect three cards passed to you. What will you want to pass? You'll have no idea until you've played a few rounds, so just roll with it and learn as you go.Whoever has the highest card in the longest suit places this card in a discard row, then the player to their left takes the first turn, and on your turn you can:• Discard a sparrow face down in front of you as part of our flock; you can have at most two sparrows in your flock.• Discard a sparrow card to the discard row as long as it matches the number or color of the most recently discarded card in this row.• Discard your entire hand, but only if you cannot discard a card into the discard row; place these cards face up by the cuckoo tiles, then... Read more »

by max wikstrom My name is Max Wikström, and apart from being a game designer in the Toadkings company, for my day job I work as a freelance set- and lighting-designer for the theater. I've found that the creative processes involved in both jobs complement each other.As a player, I have enjoyed a wide variety of games from Stratego to Diplomacy, from Chess to M:TG. One of my big favorites was Diplomacy, with which I competed in the European Championships during the mid-1990s. I also have a thirty-year history of active game mastering with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (with modified first version rules). I have had the same group of players since the late 1980s.My latest game is called Space Freaks, and it will be published in Q4 2017 by Lautapelit.fi and Stronghold Games. It is a 2-4 player tactical combat/skirmish-style board game with a strong sci-fi theme mixed with absurdist humor. Thematically, it might be something like the lovechild of Monty Python and Judge Dredd. One game takes around 60-90 minutes of intensive, fast-moving combat.Space Freaks is a game with lots of possibilities and a huge variety of "right" decisions. One of the best things is that you can really feel the presence of your enemy from the beginning to the end. Good timing is also crucial when it comes to activating the special equipment and weapons supplied by your team sponsor.In Space Freaks, each player becomes a coach for a team sponsored by one of four galactic mega-corporations. You first design the perfect freak and clone it into a 3-Freak team, then lead them into the Arena of Annihilation for six rounds of thrilling battle. When your freaks die — and they will die — new ones spawn again in the arena. The team that scores the most points by completing missions, occupying landing-zones, or destroying enemy freaks and bases wins. The coach of the winning team becomes a celebrity (or even a living legend) throughout the galaxy.Aside from me, the core team for Space Freaks' design and development has been my fellow Toadkings: Markku Laine (who also brings his skills as a graphic designer), Saku Tuominen, and Kare Jantunen. Harri Tarkka has been responsible for the characterful illustrations. How It All Started, and How the Idea Metamorphosed During the ProcessFrom the first ideas to the ready product is a long journey. The original idea was sparked as early as 2014. It is a very important part of a designing process to have your head open for changes and be ready to re-create the game after each test session.I got the idea for a board game in a science-fiction setting that combined tactical combat with paranoia. Each player would have secretly built a team of three units, comprised of combinations of troopers, defenders, mechanics or medics. Each team (working for a galactic mega-corporation) would have been locked into the closed surroundings of a space station, abandoned mine, or starship, with rooms, corridors and other places of interest. The goal... Read more »

by W. Eric Martin In case the early 2018 release of Warhammer 40,000: Heroes of Black Reach from Devil Pig Games (as detailed here) won't satisfy your desire for games set in a far-flung ultra-violent future, you're in luck as WizKids has announced a multi-year partnership with Games Workshop that will "extend the Warhammer 40,000 universe IP across multiple categories, including Dice Building Games™, board games and more!" Here's the rest of the press release from WizKids, which indicates that the publisher has a license for more than just Warhammer 40,000:"We're thrilled to be working with Games Workshop and the Warhammer 40,000 license," said Justin Ziran, president of WizKids. "This beloved franchise is known the world over and our partnership will allow us to create amazing products and experiences for fans everywhere."The multi-year deal will span numerous categories and include the most iconic Warhammer 40,000 characters and more. WizKids will create two new board games, along with dice games based in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, with additional plans to republish classic board games Fury of Dracula and Relic.WizKids will begin rolling out the new product lines in mid 2018.... Read more »

by Emerit Alexandre My name is Alex, and I live in France, fifty miles south of Paris. I have been playing board games for more than fifteen years, falling in love back then with gems like Puerto Rico and Euphrat and Tigris, but it is only recently that I took the plunge and started designing my own games. At the end of 2017, it is with a lot of emotion and a bit of fear that I will see the release of my first game in stores: Boom, Bang, Gold. I take advantage of this little diary to tell you more about this wonderful adventure.Boom was my second prototype. I started it during mid-2015, when it was then called "Gold Fever in Ghost Town". As a beginner in game design, I thought that it was probably wise to start creating with simple concepts and rules as it would be easier to get them out of my head, build the prototype, test to see if they work, and tweak. Well, that approach has a major drawback as you have to find an idea that stands out.For "Gold Fever", I wanted to make a fast game that can appeal to a large public, a game that has simple rules, and most especially one in which you play with the box. (I love games like Château Roquefort, The Magic Labyrinth, Niagara, and Kayanak to name some classics.) I wondered what I could do differently. My brain grinded for several weeks until this key moment, almost magically (as you never know when, why, or how such ideas happens), when the idea came of shaking and hitting the game box. The spark is this idea of a mechanism: Players would have to hit the bottom of the box with one of their fists to make the tokens inside the box "jump".All I would need to try it out is a box and a hundred tokens.With this mechanism came instantly an idea of theme. Players would be in the far west, and hitting the box would mimic the effect of dynamite revealing gold in a mine. The tokens would all have one side with stones and the other side would be more stones or gold or a bonus.In more detail, at the start of a game, one player throws a handful of gold and bonus tokens in the box, along with tokens that have stones on both sides. Another player takes the game box, shakes it, then opens it — then at the same time all the players try to grab any revealed gold and bonuses. Among these bonuses would be dynamite, and the player who grabs it gets to hold the box with one hand and hit it on the underside with their other hand so that it would reveal more gold that only they can take. Hmm, this sounds fun and looks like a good starting track. I try to put aside this "far west" theme to think of another one, but no, the... Read more »

by W. Eric Martin Let's take a break from the recent stream of designer diaries to recap some of the non-SPIEL '17 game announcements that have occurred:• Fantasy Flight Games has invited you to sell a kidney or two to keep up-to-date with Star Wars: Destiny, which will see two new starter sets — Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett — released in Q1 2018, along with the Legacies series of 160 cards that will be sold in booster packs.On top of these items, FFG has Star Wars: Destiny – Rivals Draft Set, a supplemental set of cards and dice that is meant to enable competitive drafting of Star Wars: Destiny. To draft, each player opens three Star Wars: Destiny booster packs of any type, combines the cards, drafts one, passes the pack, drafts one, etc. You repeat this for a second set of three packs, passing cards right. Then you supplement the thirty cards you drafted with the contents of a Rivals Draft Set, which contains an assortment of cards and dice that are meant to fill out a deck and support whatever you were trying to do in the draft.• In addition to that money vacuum, FFG is following the launch of Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game in early October with a luscious wave of content, specifically one new "Dynasty Pack" a week starting in early November 2017 until all six chapters of the "Imperial Cycle" have been released. If you want to build up a world quickly, I guess that's one way to do it. FFG has lots of preview picks from the packs on its website. • In a vain attempt to keep up with FFG's output, WizKids has announced four releases for early 2018, starting with a North American version of Johannes Schmidauer-König's Team Play, which Schmidt Spiele debuted in 2015. In this card game for 3-6 people, players try to draft and pass cards with a teammate so that they can individually complete face-up goals on the table and move their team to victory.• That title is due out in January 2018 along with Blade Runner 2049: Nexus Protocol, which bears this description and no designer name in the solicitation:In Blade Runner 2049: Nexus Protocol, detectives, citizens, and Rick Deckard compete to figure out who is a replicant posing as a human. They know that one of them is a replicant, but not even the replicant knows who they are.In this deduction game, you use your influence to meet contacts, gather information, and reveal evidence to identify the replicant. If you discover that you are the replicant, you have to scramble to conceal your identity and avoid early retirement.Will you find the replicant, or will you be retired?• February 2018 should see the debut of Richard Yaner's Dark.net, wth the game seemingly inspired by all the sci-fi I read back in the late 1980s:The tech-future which mankind has been working towards is finally upon us! Sadly, the tech-future is not all we... Read more »

by Vangelis Bagiartakis The following was also posted in parts on AEG's website.In The BeginningVangelis Bagiartakis (VB): After designing Dice City, I knew that the "dice-crafting" mechanism it had could find many uses in other games as well. That’s why, even before Dice City was actually released, I began to explore other options to see where I could go with this "system" I had come up with.At its core, the mechanism in Dice City is about "crafting" your dice. Each die is represented by six cards (one for each side) and by placing new cards on your board, possibly on top of existing cards, you are effectively changing the faces of your die. As a concept, this could theoretically apply to all kinds of games that use dice.The idea that I initially wanted to explore was that of a dungeon-crawler. Going with that idea would also define the first characteristic of the game: This would be a cooperative game (as opposed to the competitive nature of Dice City). The players would not compete with each other, but would work together instead. In turn, this would allow the core mechanism to be tweaked a bit to give players the option to interact more with each other. For example, you could spend one of your dice to move one of another player's if needed.Another key characteristic also came from the theme. Since the dice would correspond to various attributes of the characters (like speed, combat, magic, etc.), why have a single board for all of them and not separate ones? If one die, for example, was the race, another one the class, another the weapon, etc., why not allow the possibility of mixing-and-matching? Not only would this increase replayability, it made perfect sense with the theme as each player would be able to create their own character as in a role-playing game, a hero with the attributes they'd want.I made a rough prototype and started testing the idea. I sketched some rooms with tiles, I came up with rules for their placement, I made a few quick enemies and some simple player abilities and started playing. Although way too early in the process, the experience was fun and I knew this could lead to something good. To check whether I was on the right track, I showed the prototype to some people and explained the concept behind it. EVERYONE loved the idea behind the modular boards. It was really cool and seemed very promising. However, they weren't thrilled with the dungeon board. As one friend put it: "There are actually two games on the table. One here (pointing to the player boards with the dice and the character abilities) and one there (pointing to the board with the mock-up enemies)." There was simply too much stuff going on for the game to be viable. Not only would it be insane production-wise — tons of boards, cards, miniatures, etc. with less than half of the game being more than all of Dice City... Read more »

by W. Eric Martin I love card games. I'd be fine with never playing a board game again as long as I had card games available to me. Each time you pick up a hand of cards, it's like opening a present. You have some idea of what might be inside, but the details of the thing are what's important. Which cards do you have in hand this time? What don't you have? What's possible?! The more that you play a card game, the better you get, and as your knowledge of the game increases, you start playing the same hand three times: once when you first look at the cards and imagine what could happen, again when you're actually playing, and a third time when you're assessing how things went and what you might have done instead.I'm not even close to that level of understanding with Christian Giove's Origami, which dV Giochi will debut at SPIEL '17 in October. I've played three times on a rough preproduction copy from dV Giochi, each time with three players, and I still haven't even seen all the cards in the game.Origami is for 2-4 players, and the game includes five families of animals with each family being a different color. To set up the game, choose 2-4 families — with that number matching the number of players — shuffle them, then deal each player face-up cards until they have ten or more folds on their visible cards. "Folds" are the currency in the game, and one of the few nods in the game toward the "Origami" name, the other being the origami-like animal images on the cards.Once everyone takes their cards in hand, you lay out four cards in a face-up market, then start taking turns. On a turn you can:• Draw cards from the market that sum up to at most four folds. Refill the market to four cards, then add these cards to your hand, discarding at the end of your turn if you have more than eight cards.• Spend cards from your hand to pay (exactly!) the cost of a single card in your hand. If a card costs 6, for example, you must discard cards that feature exactly six folds. Place this card on one of two collections in front of you, making sure that each collection is no more than one card larger or smaller than the other collection.• Use the special effect of an animal card on top of one of your collections.That's it! Rinse and repeat until you've gone through the entire deck twice, shuffling discards as needed to create a new deck, which you will need to do since after the deck runs out a second time, you still complete the current round, then each player takes one final turn, then you count your points on cards played to see who wins, with some cards having special scoring bonuses.Four savannah animals; the number at the lower-left shows the number of copies in the deckGameplay... Read more »

by Christian Giove The idea for Origami started a couple of years ago, but I'm not able to say which arrived first between the game mechanism and the setting. In my memories, it was always about origami and with its core system. I've always liked card games in which a card can be used for multiple purposes and I wanted to create something like that. Meanwhile, the correlation between origami and their folds seemed to fit perfectly.At first, I defined the concept of adding victory points and various kinds of special effects to the cards in order to have a lot of possible combinations and to give the player many ways of scoring and performing actions over time. I then tried some "mental playtests" — I usually play out 5-10 rounds in my mind, assuming different cards are drawn, in order to spot big errors or bugs BEFORE creating the first prototype — and I immediately discovered that the possible actions could grow too quickly due to some special effects.Thus, I decided each player could play their origami on only two different stacks, called "collections", in order to limit the number of special effects a player can benefit from at the same time. This arrangement of the origami also creates more timing issues for the players and makes them face harder choices.Then I created my first prototype, searching for images of animal origami on the web to get a better feeling of what it could look like and to help playtesters recognize the cards. At that time, the game was a single deck of 90 cards, and I played it with 2, 3, and 4 players.The game worked quite well, aside from a couple of flaws, mostly due to the deck containing too many cards for a two- or three-player game. I needed to adapt the deck to the number of players, but it was hard to identify which cards had to be removed and this procedure was also very time-consuming for the set-up of a quick game like this.In the end, I decided to divide my cards into five different decks called "families", and each game would play with one family per player. This set-up was much simpler and also gave the game a lot of replayability.Cards from the first prototype Because the game was fun and the rules were stable, I started showing it during fairs and events. (Its first public appearance was during IdeaG, an Italian meeting of game designers and publishers happening each year in Turin, Italy.) I got a lot of positive feedback and a couple of proposals from different publishers.The most interested publisher was dV Giochi, but they asked me to reduce the game length — which was very good advice, so I reduced the number of actions per turn to two and in the final playtesting this number was reduced to just one. Originally, with four players and three actions per turn, nine opponent actions took place in a round before your next... Read more »

Publisher: Skirmisher PublishingThis free download includes complete replacement spell lists for the various character classes customized for use with The Noble Wild OGL “Animal Player’s Handbook,” which was nominated for a 2008 ENnie award in the “Best Monster or Adversary” category. In addition to old spells that function as normal, the lists in this supplement also include both existing spells that have been added to a particular spellcaster list or had their levels adjusted for noble animal characters, and the new spells that are fully described in The Noble Wild Chapter 6: Magic and Spells. Check out all the Noble Wild products: The Noble Wild Updated Animal FamiliarsPrice: $0.00... Read more »

Publisher: Jeremy HartPrice: $2.24... Read more »

Publisher: Jeremy HartPrice: $2.24... Read more »

Publisher: Jeremy HartPrice: $2.24... Read more »

Publisher: Jeremy HartPrice: $2.24... Read more »

Publisher: Jeremy HartPrice: $2.24... Read more »

Publisher: Jeremy HartPrice: $2.24... Read more »

Publisher: Jeremy HartPrice: $2.24... Read more »

Publisher: Jeremy HartPrice: $2.24... Read more »

The beginning of this week saw the hashtag #metoo trend to increase awareness about how many women have been harassed in their lives.  On my Facebook feed alone, I’d estimate that around 85% of the women I know posted something. The actual number of women who have been harassed is higher than that, based on […]... Read more »

Many are the epic arms forged in your fantasy game. But sometimes the most powerful armaments require tools as powerful as they are. Enter these forges of power, able to bring forth the most fantastic of creations. Cold Iron Forge: Created by a race of arctic dwarves, for whom fire was a luxury, this huge […]... Read more »

UPDATE 10/19/207:  Sadly, on Monday night (10/16/2017) the creator of CRGE, Zach Best, passed away from a long battle in cancer. A bundle was created in his name on DriveThruRPG as “Zach’s Book”, and while the bundle has ended, you can still use the page to donate money to his family. Tell me if you’ve heard […]... Read more »

I’m doing things a tad bit backwards here. This week’s GnomeCast was Matt, JT and myself rambling about the elements of a good one-shot game. It was a hastily thrown together episode due to how busy I’ve been, but Matt jumped in and did some research on the Stew’s archives and noted that, other than […]... Read more »

I’m going to admit something right up front. I’m cheating with this review. I’m running a Dresden Accelerated game, and reading through this book is allowing me to review it, as well as potentially steal things for my campaign. Does that make me a bad person? My love of the Dresden Files is what led […]... Read more »

  “The sword of duquesne gets stolen by the naked man…” Community did an excellent episode where they played Dungeons and Dragons, and it was advanced! One of the things that has always struck me about that episode was the part where the character Neil’s sword gets stolen out of spite by another player . […]... Read more »

One of the most time honored adventure hooks is the treasure map. Essentially they exist to get characters from point A to point B, maybe with a little adventure in the middle. Here are some alternatives to the basic treasure map that serve the same purpose. The Compass: An enchanted compass that always points to […]... Read more »

UPDATE: 10/19/2017 – Mentzer’s Empyrea kickstarter was cancelled yesterday. Mentzer has recently been involved in some public issues with leaving the Dragonsfoot Forum and issues brought to light on twitter by Jessica Price. He has a rebuttal on his facebook page. People are not necessarily their work, but we must decide if we engage with […]... Read more »

For the past few months, I have been wrestling with this small but annoying problem in the Hydro Hacker playbooks. It is a section of the playbook that defines your relationships with the other players. When I run this at conventions or in playtest groups, players always fill the section out incorrectly. Over several iterations […]... Read more »

The beginning of this week saw the hashtag #metoo trend to increase awareness about how many women have been harassed in their lives.  On my Facebook feed alone, I’d estimate that around 85% of the women I know posted something. The actual number of women who have been harassed is higher than that, based on […]... Read more »

Many are the epic arms forged in your fantasy game. But sometimes the most powerful armaments require tools as powerful as they are. Enter these forges of power, able to bring forth the most fantastic of creations. Cold Iron Forge: Created by a race of arctic dwarves, for whom fire was a luxury, this huge […]... Read more »

UPDATE 10/19/207:  Sadly, on Monday night (10/16/2017) the creator of CRGE, Zach Best, passed away from a long battle in cancer. A bundle was created in his name on DriveThruRPG as “Zach’s Book”, and while the bundle has ended, you can still use the page to donate money to his family. Tell me if you’ve heard […]... Read more »

I’m doing things a tad bit backwards here. This week’s GnomeCast was Matt, JT and myself rambling about the elements of a good one-shot game. It was a hastily thrown together episode due to how busy I’ve been, but Matt jumped in and did some research on the Stew’s archives and noted that, other than […]... Read more »

I’m going to admit something right up front. I’m cheating with this review. I’m running a Dresden Accelerated game, and reading through this book is allowing me to review it, as well as potentially steal things for my campaign. Does that make me a bad person? My love of the Dresden Files is what led […]... Read more »

  “The sword of duquesne gets stolen by the naked man…” Community did an excellent episode where they played Dungeons and Dragons, and it was advanced! One of the things that has always struck me about that episode was the part where the character Neil’s sword gets stolen out of spite by another player . […]... Read more »

One of the most time honored adventure hooks is the treasure map. Essentially they exist to get characters from point A to point B, maybe with a little adventure in the middle. Here are some alternatives to the basic treasure map that serve the same purpose. The Compass: An enchanted compass that always points to […]... Read more »

UPDATE: 10/19/2017 – Mentzer’s Empyrea kickstarter was cancelled yesterday. Mentzer has recently been involved in some public issues with leaving the Dragonsfoot Forum and issues brought to light on twitter by Jessica Price. He has a rebuttal on his facebook page. People are not necessarily their work, but we must decide if we engage with […]... Read more »

For the past few months, I have been wrestling with this small but annoying problem in the Hydro Hacker playbooks. It is a section of the playbook that defines your relationships with the other players. When I run this at conventions or in playtest groups, players always fill the section out incorrectly. Over several iterations […]... Read more »

Each one of us has opinions and ideas on how to make our D&D games great. It's harder, however, to group all of these opinions together to find the commonalities. By categorizing a random sample o... Read more »

Keeping combat scenes fresh and interesting is a hard job. Many players have played and will play through thousands of combat encounters and it's up to us DMs to make each one memorable. We DMs proba... Read more »

In another episode of the DM's Deep Dive, I had the wonderful opportunity to talk to my friend and co-creator of the Don't Split the Podcast network, James Introcaso about running games on Roll20. Jam... Read more »

The fantastic roleplaying game Dungeon World is a treasure trove of wonderful ideas we can bring right into our fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons games. We've talked in the past about using fron... Read more »

This article has been updated from the original written on 6 September 2011 Prepare what matters to our game. That's the core mantra for the way of the Lazy Dungeon Master. It's an easy statement to... Read more »

Note: This article has been updated from the original article posted 3 August 2009. More than ever, we have numerous fantastic ways to run combat in our Dungeons & Dragons games. Over forty years,... Read more »

In October 2016 I ran a 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons survey of 6,600 dungeon masters to better understand how DMs prepare and run their games. I wasn't happy to stop there, however. Lately I've... Read more »

In July 2017, on the DM's Deep Dive I had the privilege to talk to Matt Mercer of Critical Role about bringing NPCs in our D&D games to life. Matt is a professional voice actor and very popular st... Read more »

The hardest part about running a Dungeons & Dragons game is finding players and keeping them coming back to your table week after week. We love to pontificate the importance of preparation, buildi... Read more »