Old Skulling

by Filipe Faria The main job of a Referee is to create adventures that the players will enjoy. They do not create stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, but they create situations with locations, NPCs, problems, and complications, and potential solutions for the player characters to interact with and, as a result, create a story. The Five Questions When creating an adventure, you can begin trying to answer five important questions about it: “Who?”, “What?”, “Where?”, “Why?” and “How?”. This helps you organize your thoughts and makes you focus on what really matters in the adventure. Who? Who are the main movers and shakers? What are their assets? What are their weaknesses? What do they want? What motivates them to do what they do? Think about all of these questions and how each of those individuals relate to one another. Are they rivals? Allies? Enemies? How could they meet with the PCs and how would they relate to them? Try to create individuals and factions that can be manipulat...

In a violent and savage world inhabited by ancient beasts and monsters spawned in the deepest abyss, traveling is a feat in which few people regularly engage. Going from one City-State to the next is an adventure all on its own. Many dangers can befall travelers in their journeys, not only monsters and bandits, but many other hazards such as storms, wildfires and fetid swamps. Additionally, when adventurers explore savage and unknown lands, any raging river, steep mountain, or tortuous trail can become an obstacle. In game terms, each character needs to make a Luck Roll for each leg of the journey. If the majority of the group succeeds, nothing bad happens. However, if most of them are unlucky, something unfortunate befalls the group. When this happens, roll on the table below. d20 Travel Hazards 1. Mundane animals of the region are strangely agitated and act in weird and disturbing ways during the night. The group cannot sl...

Art by Bradley K. McDevitt It’s really hard to define a foolproof formula for creating good adventures, but some elements certainly help make it more interesting and exciting for everyone playing it. Like everything else, however, a single group may not be interested in all of these elements, but it’s usually a good idea to try to insert them in the adventures first to see how they respond. Choices that Matter RPGs are first and foremost about making choices--choices that matter,not simply mechanical choices during character creation, or whether to attack one bandit or another,. Choices can  dramatically alter the events in the story, so these choices need to be informed choices too. It makes no difference to choose between two paths in the forest with absolutely nothing to tell them apart from each other. Give them information, feed their senses. Think about what you can tell them about the choices they have to help them make a judgment call, and let their choices really ...