Preparing Urban Chaos for the Table A city can breathe fresh life into any fantasy RPG. They’re where intrigues are born, gold changes hands, and alliances get sealed or shattered over a drink. But when we GMs need to prepare one, especially for just a session or two, cities can feel like an overwhelming tangle …

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Hit Points Are a Lie (and That’s Okay) In a previous article about the Encounter Damage Tally, we explored a clever way for tracking monster damage: rather than counting down hit points for each individual monster, we tally up the total damage dealt in the encounter. When the tally reaches a monster’s average HP, we …

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Running effective D&D one-shots can feel daunting – we DMs must deliver a complete adventure within a tight timeframe. With only three hours to play, clarity and structure are essential. And that’s where the following one-shot outlines come in. In my experience, in three hours we can realistically run three distinct scenes. Plus a mini …

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Custom Backgrounds for Campaign Buy-In Session Zero our chance to tie characters to the campaign’s world from the start—and one of the strongest tools we have is often overlooked: custom backgrounds. Used well, custom backgrounds act as anchor points. They ground characters in the setting, hint at future plot threads, and give players a starting …

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Sometimes you need a quick NPC. Someone for the characters to interact with in a scene. The NPC should have some unique features, a personality, and something to help the DM roleplay the NPC. That’s what the Illusory Script NPC Generator is about. We have written previously about NPCs, and this generator is built on …

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Sometimes, campaigns lose momentum. Players seem less engaged, the energy at the table dips, and we, as DMs, start feeling less excited about preparing and running sessions. Maybe we’re even anxious about the game. If we find ourselves looking forward to the next campaign more than to the current one, it might be time for …

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