Hook and Chance Hook and Chance

All Hollows Eve is upon us, and like many, we often find ourselves scrambling to create a memorable Halloween gaming experience. Costume panic and game prep panic, it all feels the same. Can we muster up a session that we can run with minimal prep that feels unique and fun?

Ever wished your tabletop RPG sessions felt more like epic 'do-or-die' tales and less like casual dice-rolling? Well, in this episode, our friend Ollo delivers us a golden key to unlock another level of immersive storytelling and roleplay. Character status, both internal and external, is that roleplay key, but the players are the ones who hold it.

Great moments are created on the foundation of well-designed encounters. But encounter prep is hard to get right every time. It's easy to forget something or miss the mark. We've done it in nearly every imaginable way. From those mistakes, and with the help of our patrons, we've created a system that streamlines great encounter prep. It's system agnostic. It has a broad definition of encounter. It's as thorough as possible while only including what is absolutely vital.

Homebrew adventures. The unlimited freedom to follow the fun wherever it leads. The ability to create thrilling sessions time after time, following the path that the party feels driven to follow, and feels satisfied in doing so. This is what we want for our table.
But there are so many ways to miss the mark. And we've missed it plenty. We've run meandering campaigns, spent hours on game prep only to not use it, or have just confused ourselves. Had cool ideas we didn't know where to put. We've seen our tables lose interest, stop roleplaying, and start making decisions they aren't excited about based purely on the numbers on their character sheets.
Well, we've solved all that with a simple storytelling structure. This episode breaks it down, puts it to use, and shows you how you can use it to cut down prep while playing the best games.

The final showdown. After smashing aside all the diversions, mental games, tricks and traps, the party has caught up to the villain. They've been forced to face their demons along the way, made sacrifices, but have finally earned the chance to end the villain's reign of terror once and for all. That's the kind of villain we want to bring to the table. And in this episode, we're discussing our best techniques for doing just that by creating a charismatic, manipulative father figure villain for our adventure, Corruption in the Temple of Trials.

Some of the best moments in a game come from when a brave party of adventurers stares the worst conjurings of your imagination in the eyes and says "Not today, death!" Especially when the monster feels unique, like it's come into the world just to face down these heroes, and even manages to shock and delight the players. In this episode, we show by example how we go about achieving exactly this.