As part of my ongoing effort to write a little winter mystery, here is a guide to making a character suitable for the Frozen Moonlight adventure. I'm probably, very likely, going to lean on 2400 or "Just Roll High" for this adventure. DallE attempts to illustrate Norwegians in the 19th century.    Your Investigator To create a character, you and the game master can go through the following steps:   1. Choose a Name 2. Roll for Qualities 3. Select a Background 4. Choose a Specialty 5. Select Equipment Name   Select an appropriate name for your character. If you can’t think of one, you can always make a roll or choose from the table below. Male Names Female Names Family Names Ole Anna Hansen Johan Marit Johansen Hans Inger Olsen Nils Kari Larsen Anders Berit Andersen Lars Liv Nilsen Knut Guri Pedersen Peder Sigrid Eriksen Sven Oline Kristiansen Erik Eli Magnussen Jon Ragna Svendsen Magnus Hilda Knudsen Qualities   Each character receives a set of random qualities...

This post is part of my attempts to write something of a little adventure before Christmas. It’s inspired by the Adventure Calendar jam , but I can’t do daily entries. So instead I will do an entry each week before Christmas. DallE's attempt to illustrate Granholt.  Something is haunting the old village of Granholt, Norway. On the last full moon before Christmas, over the course of three days, a house and its occupants will be found frozen. Candles would be snuffed, the fireplaces refusing to be lit. Some were found frozen in their last moments trying to light their fireplace. The first victim was Old Mrs Lofttun, who was found dead in her bed, clutching a cross. Her cabin on the edge of the village was left abandoned after that. The next victims were mother Sara Myrkløft and little Maria Myrkløft, both found in an embrace by the cold fireplace. The firewood had no single scorch mark even, despite all the spent matches. The third was baker Svein Ravndal, who was baking cookies, but...

So travel is a big part of adventures. Braving majestic mountains, navigating insidious swamps and traversing foreboding forests. Lord of the Rings, the books as well as the movies, would not be the same without their iconic locations. Minas Tirith’s grandeur is incredible in contrast to the Shire. Interspersed between these grand locations, there are also the lesser locations, such as Bree, the Watchtower, the calcified Trolls, the Argonaths, I could go on forever. Yet, it has often been my experience that journeys in RPGs fall short of this. Often in spite of procedures. I don’t have any solutions… yet. In this post, I will describe some thoughts I’ve had about travel in roleplaying games.   Picture by Frank Winkler , used with permission. Where is the fun? For the most part, I’ve experienced travel roleplay in roughly two forms. One is basically a quick summary of “what happened” as the party went from A to B, with varying degrees of descriptions of the landscape. The other is t...

 Last week I wrote about how I run games , but I felt I had more to say on the prep part, so here we are. A more detailed example of how I prep. I decided I wanted to run a sci-fi game, after finding some inspiration from recently watching Cowboy Bebop and playing the new Guardians of the Galaxy game. Since it’s December, I decided I wanted a christmas theme to it and keep it to a one-shot. I just wanted a sci-fi hit again. So I started thinking about what I wanted for this one-shot. The requirements were that it should be playable in 2 hours and feel satisfactory as a one-shot. Matt Colville once said in a video that you could roughly fit 5 encounters in a session - he was talking about 5e and probably a longer session. I think 5 encounters works for 2 hours if you’re doing it free kriegsspiel style. So with that in mind, I figured salvaging a small ship could be a neat little mission. For laughs, I decided to theme it as a sci-fi version of Santa’s sled - except it’s a spaceship...