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.

NPC's are the tool of a GM. They are how you draw the players into your world, they're how you communicate with them, they're expressions of all your plots and schemes and worldbuilding. They're entertaining, they hold secrets to uncover, they allow great roleplay, and work together to create suspense! Easier to just say they do everything. So we better make 'em good. We offer our NPC Creation Guide in order to do just that.

Want to work up a corner of your world that feels rich with history, friendships, rivalries, and details that all kinda make sense? Something that makes the party curious, and allows you the space to improv more at the table, while keeping it all connected? That's what we're talking about today, with the help of our culture creator.

Want a faster route to planning out the major players in an adventure? Something that focuses you efforts like a laser, and results in a living, breathing world? In this episode we use the four-corner opposition method to create rich, dynamic antagonists for our adventure. Trying to cook up awesome villains can be tough. Many failed approaches were attempted before we found this one. We've spent ages crafting what felt like the perfect villain, only to have them not really resonate. We've jammed all our "baddie" ideas into one mega villain, only to have it feel disjointed and out of place. We've read tomes of lore from different settings, just to have none of it feel quite right. With this approach, we now outline a handful of awesome, custom opposing forces in the time it takes to listen to this episode.

Want to ensure your TTRPG campaign is a success? Start with successful session zero. In the first episode of our first official season, we provide a complete guide that will help you give your players a game they'll love. Whether you use it as is, or just snag a few new ideas, you'll hear us talk through it and use it to establish the foundation for a new adventure.

The Basilisk. A violent, monstrous lizard that can turn you to stone with a glare. While fun at first glance, this monster betrayed us. The first time using it turned into a panic, when we realized how immediately and irreversibly deadly they can be against a fledgling party of adventurers. “Wait, petrified? Like, for good?” Not only that, but they come across like a beast to just plop in front of the party for slaying. But wait! Turns out there’s plenty of lore and real-world inspiration we can use to turn these scaly brutes into battles to remember. In this episode, we run through inspiration and frameworks to create a compact horror adventure around the Basilisk.

Ever throw down a giant nasty monster only to have the most memorable moment be when you couldn’t figure out the hp math for a minute? Without the party even realizing this was supposed to be the fight? We’ve been there. The last episode introduced our method of running massive, world-ending monsters in a way that feels complex, with frenetic action, epic scale, and lots of collateral damage. In this episode, we take that format and flesh out three scenarios of different scales. Hopefully, it helps your next gigantazord to be that much more intense.

We all desperately crave the boss monster moment. When we pull out the miniature bigger than our heads and slam it down on the table. The players go wild. One of them is screaming while ripping out chunks of hair. One is vomiting in their dice bag in the corner. One is lighting the map on fire. You sit back and cross your arms, a satisfied grin creeping across your face as the chaos grows. Okay, maybe that’s a little much. But in order to get this kind of grand reaction, there’s a little leg work we have to do. If we don’t, people will get a little excited. Then they’ll run up and start swinging. Then 4 hours later, they strike it down. Or, maybe you made it real tough, in which case they can’t hurt it, get frustrated, and die. Also not fun. In this episode, we cover some planning you can do to ensure your boss-monster fight lives on forever as an epic moment.

Incredible concepts for games can be ruined without a few key details. Open-world "sandbox" games can leave players feeling lost and unmotivated, meandering through locations. Epic storylines can be swept away because the player characters didn't seem to care. Hours of game prep can be lost from players not realizing how compelling that direction could be. Grand finales can feel like math class. With just a few key details these problems vanish, and games can go as smoothly as we imagine they will when we're preparing for the big night.

You consume a story. Maybe a movie, or book. You love it. It speaks to you. It moves you. You want to jam it into your games, but how do you jam in the things that captured you? The things that matter? Throw in a character with a bullwhip and a fedora, you're not going to have what made Indiana Jones great. On the other hand, perhaps you are running dry on inspiration. Your mind, like ours, can act as a sieve that retains nothing of value. When it comes time for game prep, you slap at concepts like "monster" and "quest", hoping that something happens. In this episode, we hope to help you create a font of inspiration that matters to you, and never runs dry.

There are some odd addendums in the spell description of Alter Self. The challenge of using this spell for both GMs and players is that the rules as written confines us from the places where our imaginations naturally go. What a pain. With some minor clarifications and gentle relaxing of the rules, we can find some middle ground that both sides of the table can love.

Returning with another literal book full of wisdom is Keith Ammann. He's bringing the same strategic brilliance that he's brought to monster and player offense to base defense. It creates games that feel grounded, flexible, and full of potential. Most of all, it gives you the tools to create the lair of anyone or any monster you can dream up. We love it, and we think you will too.

The Firbolg represents an archetype that's been around a long time, and is a blast to play—the gentle, nature-loving giant. Like most player options, however, there's a few traps to fall in if we don't consider their potential. Firbolgs are more than just the cultural equivalent of druids. And they can offer so much more than cliches about hippies or becoming the "shaggy" of the group.

The group of adventurers pledging themselves to a dangerous mission...The guttural clicking of a monster stalking the party...A passing shadow that clues the party to look up, its source an enormous red dragon. All tropes! All Incredible moments! We were once resistant to the power of tropes, until we realized that you can't avoid them, and that they're actually a useful tool for running games. They're a shorthand that gets everybody into the moment because we all have a meaningful reference point. For this episode we have the talented Paige Ford joining us! She's used her favorite tropes, mostly horror and romance, to write a delightful plethora of gripping adventures for different TTRPG systems.

Revenants capture a particular genre of monster, and we love it. They have been represented in the great slashers in the form of characters like Jason and Michael Meyers. No matter how many times you think you got 'em, they're back and angrier than ever. And as a GM, nothing sounds more fun than chasing the party with an undead foe that, no matter how many times you blast to bits or behead, will just keep coming. But to use them in a satisfying way, as always, we need to do more than plop them into a session. They risk being a boring fight that just turns into a chore every time they come back from the dead. That's why we go through three stages of a revenant adventure that will hit all the right beats to terrify and delight your table.