Join us as we sit down with Ryan Smith, a talented TTRPG map maker and professional DM! Jared: First off tell us a little about yourself? Ryan: What is there to say. I've always been a lover of games ever since I was a kid. Playing board games with my family, everything from chess checkers, Chinese checkers, backgammon, all that good stuff in the beginning and then you know the game of life, risk, strategy type games, all of that was just amazing fun for me as a kid and I carried that passion for gaming into being an adult.

By: Jared B. We covered animals and medieval-era vehicles last month. This month we are going to talk about proper modern vehicles. Or should I say a little post-modern. I am going to be pulling from the Traveller 2e from Mongoose Publishing for this. For your party of sci-fi explorers, there are a host of types of vehicles you can get your hands on if you have the credits, and we are going to look over the common options, where you might find them, and how you can customize them!

By: Todd Jeffcoat There is a common piece of advice in modern adventure design: keep your room descriptions concise. Give the GM the information they need, cut the prose, and get straight to the mechanics. There is certainly merit to that approach. A GM doesn't need to read a novel every time the party enters a room. But I think the goal has been overstated.

By: Jared B. As we conclude Labor Day weekend in the USA, let’s talk about the labor mechanics in TTRPGs for things that the PCs may not directly do, but they can purchase and influence, and how this could affect the economics of a given settlement, whether that is a small town or a bustling city! First, we will look at what the…

By: Jared B. Picking up where we left off! In this article, I am going to show you how I put together inventory for a shop. I am going to continue my example of the magic shop from before, then also touch on other types of shop inventory and possible menus for taverns and restaurants. So for this magic shop, The Silk Chupacabra, I want to kind of limit the rarity that is available.

Join us as we chat with the creator of Dark Mage Games and his journey into professional GMing. Jared: First off tell us a little about yourself? Joshua(DM): My name is Joshua, and I'm the creator behind Dark Mage Games. I'm a martial arts instructor, husband, and father of two. When I'm not teaching or spending time with my family, I'm usually building worlds, writing adventures, or running campaigns.

By: Joe Gaylord (LabLazarus) Since 2018, I’ve been regularly publishing TTRPG content, supplements, adventures, games, settings, and so on. I can imagine a lot of people in the hobby want to be involved in this side of TTRPGs, but don’t have a clear sense of how to get started. This is part of a series of articles on my process for developing games and other TTRPG content.

By: Jared B. In my last article, I walked you through my process for making NPC shopkeepers. I used Del Bog as my example shopkeeper running a magic shop in a big city. What I normally do next is put together a description of the shop. My general formula here is 1-2 sentences for the outside description and 2-3 sentences for the inside description.

Join us as we chat with the creator behind Mystic Waffle and his upcoming world-building project. Jared: First off tell us a little about yourself? MW: I am TheMysticWaffle! I grew up in small town Kansas, some passions I have are singing, D&D, acting, gaming, miniature painting, and drawing. I used to be a shy keep to self person in middle/high-school, but found the courage to try and do things like acting and such to improve how lonely I felt and such!

My: Maryanne Cullinan TTRPG summer started with a bang in Columbus, Ohio, with the 50th anniversary of Origins Game Fair. This annual five-day gaming convention was held at the Columbus Convention Center the weekend of June 19th, 2026. Why Origins? An Overview If you are a snobby East Coaster like me, you may never have been to the MidWest or Columbus, Ohio.

By: Joe Gaylord Since 2018, I’ve been regularly publishing TTRPG content, supplements, adventures, games, settings, and so on. I can imagine a lot of people in the hobby want to be involved in this side of TTRPGs, but don’t have a clear sense of how to get started. This is part of a series of articles on my process for developing games and other TTRPG content.

By: Jared Biti While pondering how I build out cities and settlements for my larger metro areas in some of my campaigns, I have decided to let you all in on my system for creating a series of shops, or “Markets.” In this article, I am going to go over how I make the NPC shopkeepers in D&D 5e 2014 and give a few brief examples of ones I have made for the large city that I have referenced in previous articles.

By: Zaronis Overview In August of 2014, Wizards of the Coast published the first of three books that would lay the foundation of Dungeons and Dragons in tabletop gaming for the next decade. The Player’s Handbook for D&D 5th edition plays double duty as a core rulebook, and inspiration for players to make their own adventurers in worlds of fantasy, magic, and heroics.

By: Jared B. How I made jobs for an Adventurer's Guild's job board. For this article, I am reflecting on how I put together jobs for a job board I had made for the Adventurer's Guild, which I had based the campaign out of. This campaign is set in a large medieval fantasy port city with all of its politics and undercurrents.

By: Jared B I said last in an earlier post that I was going to go into more depth about how I do equipment crafting, so here we are. In this article, I plan to go over the basics of how I allow my PCs to craft items for themselves and as a way to make income to pay for other things they may want in the game settings.

By: Joe Gaylord (Lazarus Game Lab) Since 2018, I’ve been regularly publishing TTRPG content, supplements, adventures, games, settings, and so on. I can imagine a lot of people in the hobby want to be involved in this side of TTRPGs, but don’t have a clear sense of how to get started. This is the start of a series of articles on my process for developing games and other TTRPG content.

3 Years! Man, does time fly when we are having fun! In that time, we’ve had 2,600 views from 2,100 visitors! That is a 130% increase from last year! We appreciate our growing audience and all those who like and share our content across multiple platforms. We have recently added Facebook and Bluesky to our Social media presence! Here are the top three of our most viewed articles (excluding interviews) from the last 12 months.

Join us as we chat with Joe Giarrusso, a GM who gets paid to run TTRPGs as DM Noctem! Jared: First off tell us a little about yourself? Joe: My name is Joe Giarrusso, I’m 42 years old and live in Central Florida. I’ve been in the hospitality industry for decades and am an aspiring professional GM. I have a love for fantasy that began at a very young age with Tolkien, and have been an avid reader since.

By: Kevin/DeepArk Games (NOTE: There is generative AI content in this blog, but this was previously cleared by the editors prior to the addition of our new submission guideline, which details that no generative AI will be accepted.) At many 5e tables, the healing potion has become a red glass pause button. Someone drops, someone spends an action, the cleric breathes for one more round, and the bottle disappears from the story forever...

By: Joe Gaylord (LabLazarus) Intro Railroading is one of those topics that obsesses the TTRPG community. GMs work to avoid it, and players complain about it. The entire hobby seems to have shifted away from strong narrative lines in response to concerns about railroading and advocacy for player agency and collaborative and emergent storytelling.  Yet, a lot of GMs, myself included, still want to tell specific stories.

How to handle players who are unexpectedly unavailable for a gaming session? Or a series of game sessions? I will give some ideas here with some examples of what I have done in my games. Magic Ghost The first option is what I call the “Magic Ghost” or the “Ghost” is where the missing player’s character is just handwaved in and out of existence.

By: Jared Biti In this article, I am going to talk about the variety of defensive equipment that can be found in TTRPGs. I will also address a few ways it can be acquired in those game worlds/setti…

By: Jared Biti In this article, I am going to talk about the variety of defensive equipment that can be found in TTRPGs. I will also address a few ways it can be acquired in those game worlds/settings. This will include buying it, crafting it, and earning it. Alright lets start with the simple things. Armor and defensive “weapons”. So armor is pretty straightforward.

By: Jared Biti In this article, I want to talk about what I have seen at the game table for healing. Specifically, how healing mechanics can be used as items, spells, and racial abilities, and how this can affect the pace and feel of combat and the time between combat encounters. Let us start with the simple things. The potions. These come in a couple of forms in…

By: Joe Gaylord (LabLazarus) “We have so many collaborators, each character is written by a different author, and one of the biggest collaborators, if not the biggest collaborator, is NON-SENTIENT! It’s a pile of plastic shapes!” - Brennan Lee Mulligan ( This video from Brennan Lee Mulligan felt explosive in terms of how to describe a TTRPG. I had not considered framing dice (or whatever randomizer your preferred game system uses) as a co-author before, but that understanding has a lot of benefits in terms of thinking about the process of running a game.

by: Jared Biti With Easter just passed and all the talk of rabbits and eggs, let us talk about the Harengon race. This is the rabbit-like race that is featured in Dungeons & Dragons 5e. They are creatures of the feywild introduced in the supplement “The Wild Beyond the Witchlight”. What I am going to talk about is how they got brought into a campaign of mine and how I wove them in as a race into my setting.