I have often focused too narrowly on what will happen when the players follow the trails that I have laid out for them. But what do you do when the players don’t want to play with any of the plot you’ve got prepared for them? And what happens with the problems that they’re ignoring?
Author Archives: Henry
Queen of Demons, by David Drake
Queen of Demons is the second book in the Lord of the Isles series, printed in 1998. David Drake continues to show that he knows his craft, with this sequel giving a suitably dramatic follow-up to the beginning of the epic. This time I wasn’t skeptical at all, and I was right not to be. That musty scent of genuine historic fantasy setting, cobbled together from the corpses of bits of real history, takes life once more.
Lessons I’ve Learned about Naming NPCs
Names are hard. You want to make sure that the people and places you’re creating sound believable, and you don’t want to keep repeating the same things over and over (unless there’s a name like Michael in your game world, in which case you should probably just name everyone that since that’s how it works in real life). I’ve made and seen some pretty funny mistakes with naming things, so here are a few of the things I’ve learned…
How I Run a Game
Much like with Jason’s article, this is not meant to be an exhaustive discussion of how to run a game. It also isn’t meant to be prescriptive. Like it says on the tin, I want to share with you how I go about running games these days. Curious about success through brainstorming and improvisation? Keep reading.
Lord of the Isles, by David Drake
I had always thought of David Drake as a military sci-fi author. He has a long history of writing exactly that, with Hammer’s Slammers and Northworld being the examples I’m most familiar with. So when I came across Lord of the Isles while browsing his wikipedia page, I was a little surprised. A renowned sci-fi author tries his hand at epic fantasy?
I shouldn’t have been skeptical. Continue reading
Short Story: Paying the Tab
I wrote this first draft of a short story over the course of one week, as a morale-boosting project. You might think of it as fantastical historical fiction.
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Andre sat with his back against the tavern’s wall, his legs draped down the length of the bench. They didn’t go very far down the bench, since he only ever reached four feet three inches on a good day. The portion of the bench that he did cover he clearly dominated with his muscular bulk, as might be expected of a healthy dwarf of his respectable age. He and his drinking companion were a study in contrasts.
Fistful of Wits 