Shadows Over Sharn

My first exposure to the craft - I joined a club because a woman I wanted to date said she was curious about the hobby. After one session the DM quit and I took over.

The group was playing 4th Edition - famously gamey, less roleplay-y, and so my challenge with this game was to integrate social and roleplaying elements into our group, while simultaneously teaching myself the game - I loved it.

(That woman and I never dated, but boy did I gain something from the experience)

Masks of Nyarlathotep

After the first campaign, I was hooked. I began looking for a new way to challenge myself.

I found it in the concept of Shadowplaying - not only having players in the game, but giving the villain roles to real life people as well. Every single week, I’d email four different people across the country what their villainous characters learned and the results of their actions, and every week those people would send me back orders for their characters.

It created a deeply immersive and lived in game - and after 50 sessions the players never guessed that they were butting heads with real life foes.

World War Cthulhu

After playing Masks of Nyarlathotep, and the reveal that the gang had battled real opponents, we were all looking for a way to up our game.

Masks is a 1920’s pulp game, so the children of those characters would be adventuring age in the 1940’s - just the time to fight an occult battle behind the scenes of World War 2. So I proposed we play the children of our original characters.

Now that I had thrown down the gauntlet, my players surprised me by pushing themselves to engage with the craft of roleplaying more deeply.

We created a complex, interweaving story of characters who came of age, fell in love, celebrated, grieved, and felt every emotion you could fathom. I may never experience a campaign as great as this one ever again - but I always try.

Dungeon Crawl Classics

We must always return to fantasy.

This campaign began with a question: What if I, as the dungeon master, did absolutely no prep work for games. 100% improvised. If this sounds crazy to you, know that it definitely was crazy.

I compiled as many resources as I could - roll tables, books about places, about fantasy peoples, everything. When my players sat down, we looked at a map and I would say “So where do you want to go?” They would point their finger at some place, and I would just start inventing enemies, allies, conflicts and puzzles.

I learned a lot about being creative on the fly while doing this, lessons that I love to apply to basically everything I do now.

Guardians of the Forbidden City

To be honest, this one came about because I watched Bloodsport and HAD to run a game about a secret martial arts competition.

Running a tournament game pitted real player against real player, an amazing deviation from the norm.

If you’ve never done it, run a tournament arc. Trust me. It rules.

LA Noir

Next I combined the two big genres associated with Los Angeles in the 50’s - Raymond Chandler Noir and Atomic Scifi.

What I landed on was a detective-style mystery - it started ordinarily enough, a missing movie star, a dead mobster, you know the story.

But at every turn, the players discovered more and more strange goings on, eventually uncovering an alien conspiracy millions of years in the making.

Our this was our tensest game - no one thought they’d make it out alive. They almost didn’t.

What’s next?

My players don’t know this yet, but I’ll tell you.

In my wandering, looking for a new game to run, I’ve decided to run a big robots campaign - mecha vs. kaiju.

What’s the creative move this time? No idea. Figuring that out is my next challenge.