Hello, and welcome back to Guidance! For three long weeks we’ve been discussing how to go about designing something for your Pathfinder or Starfinder game that fills in gaps in the system. We’ve been looking at the armored solarian...
A lot of the monsters I make on this blog are ones that I have strong ties to, usually from my childhood. This week on another nostalgia-powered blog I take a look at another game that I spent way...
Anyone who has ever watched a horror or adventure movie or gamed for more than an hour knows you never split the party. But we also know that if you don’t split the party, things don’t get done and...
After creating the basic premise of an adventure, the next thing I usually do is to figure out who my major NPCs are. It’s important to try and create a broad mix of interesting people for the PCs to...
I used to run one-shot RPG games frequently, as filler between campaigns, holiday events, and sometimes just because players were free on an unexpected night. I still run a fair share of one-shot games and (as then) most are...
Hello, and welcome back to Guidance! For the past two weeks, we’ve been talking about design as a product of need, or as “a thing you do to fill gaps in a game.” We’ve been looking at the armored...
The very first video game console I had was the Super Nintendo. I was five years old and it came with two games: Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart. One of the first things you encounter in Super...
The Know Direction Network is teaming up with Paizo’s Director of Game Design, Jason Bulmahn, for the #knowthemahn contest! As the leader of the Pathfinder design team, the lead designer of Pathfinder First Edition, the lead designer of the...
Will the real blue dragon, please stand up? Adjudicating illusions is often a tricky affair, and I don’t see a new edition changing that. In many cases, the aftermath of an illusion-based encounter is often a bit of a...
Dear DovahQueen: My group is all in for Pathfinder 2. How are we supposed to wait two years for it? –Conductor of the Hype Train Dear H-Train: Patiently. Ok, in all honesty, lemme ask you this: what will PF2...