“And my top game mastering tip is… Handouts! I love handouts!” - Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. Post your cool handout experiences and ideas here!

When creating a plan for a session, what are some methods you all use and how do you keep things creative? Currently a year into a campaign and I'm trying to figure out how many battles for each session, and how many social encounters, etc. How do you keep encounters entirely unique?

Hey folks, Jonah and I try not to use the lab to spew our own cynical, penny-pinching schemes too often, but this is both pretty relevant to the lab and has a really big impact on our work, so I thought I’d share it anyway. You can preorder our book through Barnes and Noble here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-game-masters-handbook-of-collaborative-campaign-design-jonah-fishel/1147035456 Barnes and Noble is running a preorder discount on a bunch of books, including our own! Preorders make a huge, HUGE difference in the success of a book in physical retailers—they’ll decide how many books they want to buy/stock when it actually releases, so if you’re at all interested in our next book, please consider checking it out. If the book preorders well, they’ll place a larger order, which (1) helps us sustain our authorial careers, (2) makes our publishers more likely to approve future projects for them, and (3) helps us work on future cool projects for here! With that said, we always advocate for shopping with your friendly neighborhood bookstore, so if you prefer, hold off until they’ll carry it! There are other folks who’ll carry it as well, the easiest to access for most people being Amazon. We’re extremely proud of this book, and in many ways we think it’s an overall stronger work than the previous one (and we certainly had a lot more experience when we wrote it). You also don’t need to have read the proactive one if you want to read this one, although the two books can work well with one another. If you’re interested in any level of narrative in your game, consider checking it out! Thanks everyone, we’ll see you in the lab.

So I recently finished reading through Jonah and Tristan’s role playing book as well as Return of the Lazy DM. Both excellent reads by the way and you should check them out as a game master, but does anyone suggest other books on running games?

Hi all! Name’s Jude. Pronouns he/him. I’m 25 years old and have been playing RPGs since I was about 12. I got started with the Old West End Star Wars RPG and AD&D2e, but since then I’ve tried a lot of games and am always looking to try more. Lately I play a lot of PBTA and Resistance System games, though I also enjoy the various Chronicles of Darkness splats and me and my friends design our own games pretty frequently. I’m working on a superhero game myself. Currently, the four campaigns I oscillate between are an FFG Star Wars game (GM) set 200 years after the original trilogy about how the New Republic became corrupted; an Apocalypse World game (GM) about a flooded world presided over by strange monsters created by psychic phenomena; my friend’s Spire game (player) where we’re setting up to take the fight to the High Elf military; and my other friend’s hack of the Lumen Light system (player) where we’re Destiny Guardians in a West Marches game, exploring the planets post-Final Shape! I really enjoy trying odd games, anything off the beaten path and breaks the mold interests me. Crunchy, rules-lite, doesn’t matter as long as it has something interesting to say about its subject matter and pushes boundaries of game design. With that in mind, I guess for my intro question: what system’s rule(s) reinforced the themes of a game you played/ran?