You've done it!! You've spent hours, days, weeks even, preparing for your campaign. You've created an intricate story to seduce your players with the promise of adventure. You've developed lively towns and masterfully-written NPCs with motivations and objectives of their own. Every clue, hook, and plotline is detailed in your notes. You're ready, from the… Continue reading Roll With It!
It's Story Time! This is my first post in a series of things I find interesting, entertaining, or just outright wonderful...and what better way to begin than to talk about a place that is near and dear not only to my own heart, but the collective heart of Cambridge as a whole: Heffers Bookshop! When… Continue reading A Story about a Bookshop
In "What I Learned from DMing for Children", I talk about running a D&D adventure for kids. In this post, we will explore some of the things that take place before you get to the table when writing the adventure. While there will be some overlap, I recommend reading that first post before you continue to read… Continue reading Four Tips for Writing Family-Friendly Adventures
And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream We have a large bookshelf in our dining room...the sort of square, modular kind with sixteen cubes, all filled to the… Continue reading A Scribbler’s Musings
The first series of the D&D Storytelling Workshops came to a close last weekend, with a fully customized, Scene-by-Scene one-shot in which the children had the chance to take turns acting as the DM. The adventure was inspired by the students themselves, using their ideas from the first two Workshops. In Workshop One, they created a… Continue reading Workshop Notes: Passing the DM Screen
“It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children.” J.M. Barrie People all around the world have been enchanted by fairies for centuries, to the point that we have an entire subgenre of stories named after them: the… Continue reading Concerning Fairies
Why do we do the things we do? What guides us to believe the things we believe? Each of us is shaped by our own unique blend of experiences, which creates a lens of perspective, through which we observe and interact with the world around us. For example: whenever I got sick as a child,… Continue reading Workshop Notes: It’s All About Perspective
"There's always room for a story that can transport people to another place." J.K. Rowling Before the written language was developed, we shared tales, information, and history through oral storytelling. It is a tradition as old as humanity itself and continues to thrive today. As cultures intermingled and grew, so did our storytelling traditions. Today,… Continue reading An Evolution of Storytelling
Hey there, Scribblers! Time for a quick, between-posts update: First and foremost, a HUGE thank-you to Argon Skies Art for these beautiful portraits! Be sure to follow her on Twitter @Argonskies and Instagram @argonskiesart for more of her fantastic character art! Second, I am now officially part of The British Nerd Network, an international community of… Continue reading Update Time!
"Old books smell weird." The child stated, his face screwed into a distasteful expression as he put the book back on the table. We were in the middle of our "Five Senses" activity, which opened with observations about the bookstore hosting our workshop. It must have been a strange sight, the small group of adults… Continue reading Workshop Notes: Old Books Smell Weird (a.k.a. Plot and Elements of Story)
