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Want tips on how to come up with great adventures? New to GM'ing? Or just looking for a different perspective on GM'ing from experienced GM's? Then check out these insightful articles on GM'ing.
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If your campaign feels static, like nothing ever changes except what your PCs
happen to do, spice it up with Kingdom Events.
It will breathe life into your campaign by giving
it a sense of history, and will be a ready source of plot hooks and adventures for your PCs.
$1.99 Buy at drivethrurpg.com
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Well of Many Worlds
Where it stops, nobody knows!
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Want some ideas for a forest in your campaign? Or a city? Or an Elven NPC?
Search across all of Scabard for pages with a given category to help inspire you for your own campaign.
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Let's face it, the weather rules in D&D and Pathfinder are too complicated and you don't use them, right?
Well, here are simpler weather rules that you might actually use.
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Ever tire of wandering monster rolls? Burned out from rolling on 4 different tables every game hour (weather, monsters, getting lost, etc)?
Ever been tempted to just say "OK, you get there," because it's just too hard?
Well, this is the deck for you! Your party can lose things, food can spoil, their campfire can get out of control; and yes, they can even encounter monsters! All from one convenient deck - just draw once, twice or thrice daily.
A 28 card encounter deck for Wilderness Travel.
Free with registration.
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The PCs want to sell a magic item they found in a dungeon. The rule book says its worth 50,000 gp. How do you handle that? Do you just say, "OK, you find this guy who buys it off you," and send them back to the dungeon for more?
Isn't that just too easy? Shouldn't selling such a powerful item to an NPC be handled through role-playing?
Well, worry yourself no more. Download the free 23 card "Buying Encounter" deck to use in such circumstances.
Free with registration.
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Need some inspiration for your next adventure or for generating Kingdom Events? Just roll these pictogram dice and let your imagination run wild. There are 9 six-sided dice, each unique; so that's a total of 54 different pictograms!
My daughter received this as a gift from relatives. They rolled all the dice at once (and there are a lot!) and came up with very long stories, so I recommend just grabbing three or four at random to keep things simple (adventures with too many elements, twists and nuances just end up confusing players).
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How to inject humor into your campaign with practical jokes. And since gnome are well known as pranksters, a gnome village is included!
Free with registration.
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External Links
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A weekly podcast and blog on GM'ing. The hosts, Derek (aka Zendead) and Joules Watts (such an electrifying name!) recently interviewed our own Stolph about Scabard.
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John Ross' collection of RPG plots. He built this list by examining the premises of hundreds of published adventures for all systems (including those systems dear and departed from print), trying to boil them down to common denominators. Turn to this list when you're stuck for a fresh premise for next week's session of your campaign.
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Random Generators
Since 1999 Seventh Sanctum has been your source for random generators of ideas, from story concepts to science fiction weapons to extremely silly spells. If you need ideas, inspiration, full stories, or a good laugh, then go on and enjoy!
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RPG Articles and Blog
If you want to tell unforgettable stories and master the art of game mastering, this is the right place.
If you are struggling to figure out what's wrong with your game, this is also the right place.
Johnn Four runs this site, which is devoted to helping you improve all parts of your game, from getting organized to creating edge-of-your-seat encounters to building long-term campaigns.
He's been GMing since 1980, published a GM advice column in Dragon Magazine, has written four books about how to improve your GMing, contributed to the Dungeon Master's Guide II and has written over one million words on the topic of running better games.
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Story Elements
A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes are the means by which a story is told by anyone who has a story to tell.
My first reaction when I dug into this site was that tropes should be avoided because they've been overdone. But I've since embraced them. They are tropes for a reason: they are fun and enhance the story!
Suppose there's a chase scene in which the vehicles pass a huge stack of cardboard boxes on the sidewalk. It's just more fun if the vehicles run into them and send them flying!
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RPG Blog
The beneficent bard, dispensing bite-sized nuggets of advice to Game Masters and Players alike. Huzzah!
I really enjoy this blog. Useful and hilarious at the same time. The captions on his images alone are worth the read.
Not to be confused with the Ed who works at Scabard.
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