Villainous villains for kids adventures

March 5, 2018April 21, 2021 / martinjlloyd / Leave a comment

Imagine Star Wars without Darth Vader, the Three Musketeers without Count Richelieu or the Hobbit without Smaug. It’s hard, isn’t it? Without a good villain an adventure struggles. Here are some tips on creating great villains quickly.

The two word villain

Remember the article on creating memorable characters with one word? Since our villain is going to be the most important character in the story after the hero we’ll go big. We’ll create them with two whole words. Today’s villain will be an evil space captain, so let’s start making her more interesting by choosing some adjectives.

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Four tips for running a great role-playing campaign for kids

February 25, 2018April 21, 2021 / martinjlloyd / Leave a comment

Running a campaign, a series of linked adventures, for four, five and six year olds requires a very different mindset to running a campaign for adults. These tips are based on the kid’s RPG Amazing Tales, but can be applied to any system you like. Here are the things to bear in mind

1. Keep it short

Campaigns for young kids should be short. Three or four sessions is plenty. Six is definitely enough. That’s not to say you can’t play more sessions with the same characters, just that you probably want to wrap up one heroic quest and start a new one at that point. Don’t overestimate kids’ attention spans.

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Three puzzles for great games

February 19, 2018April 21, 2021 / martinjlloyd / 1 Comment

I find adding puzzles to games for adults one of the hardest things about writing games. My players just know far too much. But when I’m gaming with kids it’s suddenly a lot easier, setting them in game challenges that really make them think is just a matter of realising what they haven’t learned yet.

Here are three simple tools to add puzzles to role-playing games for your kids

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Creating Characters your kids will love

February 12, 2018April 21, 2021 / martinjlloyd / 2 Comments

Creating new characters in seconds is one of the most challenging aspects of running a roleplaying game. If you can do it well and quickly your children will love the characters you provide for their heroes to interact with. Here’s a simple trick to make creating memorable characters easier, I call it Two Word Characters.

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Sketching out an adventure

February 5, 2018April 21, 2021 / martinjlloyd / 2 Comments

I find a blank piece of paper and a pen are essential tools for roleplaying with kids. It starts with deciding what their heroes will be – at age four my daughter was clear that her heroes would have long hair and carry a picnic basket. Only once I’d drawn these essential features onto the page would she consider lesser questions – such as could her hero do magic, or fight monsters?

As adventures unfolded drawing the various hazards and encounters was both a way to explain them and a way to remember what had already happened. Ogres with big pointy teeth, robots with telescopic arms, pirate islands with volcanoes and jungles, all brought to life with a quick sketch, drawn as I describe the situation.

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Amazing Tales has arrived!

December 19, 2017April 21, 2021 / martinjlloyd / Leave a comment

Some photos of the finished product

With which I am very happy indeed

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Small players, big stories

November 27, 2017April 21, 2021 / martinjlloyd / Leave a comment

One of the great things about role-playing is the chance to do the impossible, to be a hero. To have your character matter to a world in a way that few people, perhaps no people, will ever matter in the real world. You could be the one to throw the ring into Mount Doom, blow up the Death Star or pull the sword from the stone. That’s what we think of when we think about fictional heroes.

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Update : End in sight

October 31, 2017April 21, 2021 / martinjlloyd / 1 Comment

So, a quick update. The PDF version of Amazing Tales is done, and ready to go.

But I am determined that we’re going to launch the book and the PDF together. After a bit of back and forth trying to get the formats right it looks like DriveThruRPG are going to be printing me a hard copy test version some time soon.

As in, in the next couple of days.

Then it has to get here. And I have to be happy with it. But you know, we’re very very close.

RPG A day – here we go

August 31, 2017April 21, 2021 / martinjlloyd / Leave a comment

So, here’s the plan. I’m going to answer all the RPG A Day questions for August. For those who don’t know RPG A Day exists to promote the roleplaying hobby. Every August 31 questions are posted with the idea of stimulating discussion around RPGs, and, at least judging by my social media feeds, it works.

This year, watching the answers of my friends scroll by I realised that my answer to many of the questions was, rather predictably, ‘Amazing Tales’. But that’s OK. I’ve decided to take a crack at the questions with a view to providing some insights into how I approach my gaming, and why Amazing Tales is the way it is. A kind of designers notes thing. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t. But it’ll be fun finding out.

#RPGaDay 2017

RPG A Day 1-5

August 31, 2017April 21, 2021 / martinjlloyd / Leave a comment

1. What published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?

Well Amazing Tales isn’t out yet, so I can’t choose that. For me gaming has always been more about the people than the system. I like systems that fade into the background and don’t get in the way of the story. I like worlds that are good to discover, but for me that’s always been more about the quality of the GM than the depth of the source material.

The game I’ve felt most intrigued by lately is Night’s Black Agents. I use it as the system for my own Delta Green game. But I’d love to play in a game where the GM had fleshed out some of the ideas in the book, and really got to grips with the system. I don’t use mechanics much when I GM, but I’d love to experience Night’s Black Agents being run by someone who really knew what they were doing.

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