A set of basic things to remember that will aid your description of the places your players are in.

Busy GMs need help prepping for games faster. And you can create fantastic magic items in just three minutes using my stat block.

An alternate way to present your campaigns history, (or a weapon/piece of equipments legacy) to your players.

GMs definitely need to enforce strict "in character" play, eliminate "across the table" chatter, and by doing so - set the scene for an awesome role-play experience!

In the World of Star Trek," authored by David Gerrold, Gene Roddenberry explains how a central character trying to solve one or more needs builds drama into any type of story.

Advice on how to handle land ownership in fantasy settings.

Ever wanted to add a legendary artifact to your campaign, but you were worried about PC’s getting their hands on it?
Or you put the Legendary item in your game and the PC’s already managed to get it?

What to do, and how to fix it.

With first-time players, learning the rules may seem like a burden and rolling up characters can be glossed over. We used a new method for explaining the rules and creating characters which the Harry Potter-setting made possible and which I would recommend using in other adventures.

From Feudal Japan to the modern Pizzaria, you can learn a great deal about gaming from food.

A little advice on magic items reposted from the Runebearer website.

As a way of defining your character better

If you are a GM you will frequently find yourself in need of quality allies and enemies for your campaign and find yourself pressed for time.  Any old NPC will often not do.  You want someone with a full conceptions and some history.

I have to admit I HATE the number of casual magic items that appear in the average fantasy game, D20 being the worst. The amount of magic is being reinforced by the rules and the treasure chart. They are just “power ups” of the video game nature. They don’t add anything to the game except requiring bigger and badder bad guys.

Say, MoonHunter, have any packs to give to a character to make them actually roleplay instead of just dictating their character’s actions? The majority of my players just do this.

ME:“You see a grizzled old knight with a scar over his face. He walks up to you and greets you with an ancient Cardomian salute, though he is unfamiliar to your eye.”
THEM:“I say “Hi.”
ME:“That’s it?”
THEM:“Yes. Now, I walk around him and open the door.”
ME:“But, but, he’s an important story character!”
THEM:“F**k the story! I want gold and XP, dammit!”
ME:“I hate you more than you’ll ever know.”

Action sequences in movies are fast, furious, and over all to fast.  They are exciting moments that most gamers are looking forward to.  Yet combat in most games is slow, ponderous, and takes up much game time. Gamers tend to blame the game systems. It is not the System, it is the group.

I am not a normal fantasy GM. If a player is delving through a dark tomb searching for loot in my campaign, he is probably on a fruitless quest. I dislike the dungeon crawl. I have since the earliest years of DnD. I mean where in Tolkein did they really crawl through a dungeon or other tomb/ place of mystery?

Language is an essential part of any culture. Culture wouldn’t exist without some form of communication, and humans communicate by speaking. But the connection is deeper even than that. The language helps to define the culture which uses it, and is in turn affected by that culture. This dynamic process is what keeps a language “alive”: Latin is a dead language because the culture to which it belonged no longer exists.

What makes great entertainment for Gamers? Movies. They love action movies, even if their favorite pastime is reading books, writing websites, learning ancient languages, or gaming like madmen. If you pattern your games and campaigns after movies, you are sure to have an entertaining game.

Excalibur. Stormbringer. Sting. I blame fantasy authors and history professionals that have over simplified things for this preoccupation with swords.

Some GMs, and the computer game industry too, seems to think gemstones, gold and magic weapons are the only way in which to reward the players. Most experienced GMs know this isn’t true, so I created this thread here to let us remind each other of the different alternative rewards a player can receive, and to have a place where ordinary item descriptions can be posted.