Pulling a fire out of the hat: Marvel Superhero Roleplaying Campaign update

My elaborate plan for the previous week's game having been smashed to pieces by the players' unforeseen decisions, this game session took a very different tack. We started with the aftermath of the heroes' unexpectedly quick smashing of an attempted ambush by a cadre of supervillains. Titanium, flush with success and dragging the severed torso...

The perils of planning: Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying campaign update

Let's start at the beginning, shall we? Well, not the beginning, but a beginning in medias res, as it were... Having restarted the Marvel Superheroes campaign after months of hiatus (one of the few good things to come from this garbagy coronavirus pandemic is that the daughter is home and we've got enough people in...

Menagerie (aka the Amazing Elephant Girl) – An origin story

After the second session of our superhero roleplaying campaign, my daughter decided to write something about her character's background. That old-school TSR-developed game system really helps fire up the imagination. Janey Nevitt turned into an animal for the first time when she was six years old. She had been walking hand-in-hand with her father in...

The Return of the Indestructible Girl – Or, this is why we play

Friends, THIS is why we play our geeky games. My son posted the following on his blog after our second Marvel Super Hero Roleplaying session. I'd link to it, but it's friends only, so he let me republish it here. Table-top RPGs are really fun. You get to make a character and interact with a...

The amazing elephant girl! Classic Marvel roleplaying campaign, week 2 (part 1)

So here's a little thing I wrote -- I guess you could call it flash fiction -- to get the players set up for our second Marvel Superheroes roleplaying game session. It picks up the tale a few days after our characters' first superhero action ever. Wednesday, in the not too distant future The alarm...

A quick way to build colorful NPCs

As a gamemaster, you're responsible for narrating and describing the world your characters inhabit—but players often take sharp left turns into places you didn't expect them to go. Sometimes this can severely tax your ability to think on the fly and keep things interesting. So how do you avoid having your characters wander a landscape...

Gamemastering tip: How to integrate character backstories into your game

Since the FAR System is all about simulating a character's experience in an awesome story, it's important that every character have some sort of backstory. The backstory places your character's motivations—the FAR System calls them Story Aspects—in context and helps set the tone for the rest of the game. Backstories can be brief summaries of...