From Real Life 1

Recently someone offhandedly said that I was more interested in games than in real life. I heartily disagreed. I find non-fiction books more interesting than fiction. I enjoy keeping up with current events. I often inspire my RPGs with Historical events and True Crime.

With all that in mind I Offer to you this link: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/419/petty-tyrant

I’ve listen to many episodes of This American Life. This particular episode details the rise and fall of a petty neighborhood tyrant. A man who set himself up like the Godfather. A chauvinist who thought of himself as the “Tough Guy” protector of his own little slice of the world.

As far as inspiration goes for a RPG, its the story of a criminal mastermind, but from a surprising place. The whole time he was shaking hands with government official and pulling down 6 figures he was in maintenance department. In the end he thought he was in a thankless job. That he did everyone a favor…

I think players would not see this one coming.

I think Steve Raucci was a real life villain and good inspiration for your next game!

Every Palace a Prison

Art by: Rima Salloum

I've done this before, a mid adventure challenge for the players. I'll provide them a novel environment where they have a chance to do, just about whatever they want, for as long as they want to see if they forget about the task at hand.

After a few days of slaying monsters and crawling into dark caves, we might all want to unwind a bit. Enter an invitation from the Duke of Gustavus who is having an all weekend rager. A party to put Gatsby to shame! Plus they have a hot tub.

The whole scene shouldn't take very long to role-play, just let the players know that exciting events are happening that do not concern the main quest line or anybody who needs help, and don't remind them about it. There will be consequences for procrastinating too long, but it isn't your job as a GM to remind them of this.

I've once had players explore a library for an hour and half of real time. They would just open a book and I would have to think on the spot what the books contents were and what it said as they read it. They even started chatting it up with the librarian. This hour and half of real time was really only maybe 20 minutes in the game world, but the players had fun poking around, and they reminded themselves what they really wanted to do.

Interestingly enough we played that game in a real library, and if they had spent 4 hours pretendint o flip through books I might have penalized them for that.