Making a Graphic Novel – Pitching and Writing Cheer Up!

People are curious how books get made, and the process can seem mysterious if you don’t work in publishing. From the outside, you might think “Wow, this book must have always been a perfect, full-formed product!” But behind the scenes, creating a book is a long process that involves a lot of people refining each others’ work at every step. Like turning thumbnails into a sketch, and finally into a piece of art, you revisit and perfect your ideas to make it a little better each time.

Like most books, Cheer Up began as an elevator pitch—a short description you can, in theory, give in the time it takes to ride in an elevator with someone (elevators are rarely involved in practice)—that I sent to Oni along with two other books. The original pitch was simple:

Cheer Up: Annie is a smart but antisocial geek starting her senior years of high school and forced by her mother to join the cheerleading squad to make friends and get an athletics credit for her college applications. She expects a stereotypical clique of stuck-up popular girls, but instead finds genuine warmth, especially from Beebee, a trans girl who came out and transitioned last year. Beebee outwardly seems like a perfect, popular girl, but inside she’s a bundle of insecurity who feels like she has to live up to high standards to be accepted instead of just being the imperfect person she is. She and Annie become best friends, and romance soon blossoms. Cheer Up is intended to be a standalone slice-of-life graphic novel.

As you can see, some things stuck, like Annie being smart and anti-social, but a lot of details didn’t exist yet. I knew there were cheerleaders. I knew they smooched. The girls didn’t even have last names yet, Bebe’s name had extra vowels, the whole element of them having been friends before didn’t exist yet.

After this, my original editor, Ari Yarwood loved it and asked me for a full pitch treatment. A full pitch includes a very basic summary, some talk about the book’s final format, an overview, and a loose outline. Cheer Up’s initial outline looked like this:

Cheer Up!
Two queer girls on the cheerleading team—antisocial cis lesbian Annie and the eager-to-please trans girl Beebee—find each other through the school’s cheerleading team and rekindle a friendship they both thought they’d lost. They eventually learn there’s a lot more to the other than it seems on the surface, and eventually find love.
Format
Cheer Up! is a standalone story that would best fit a 100-120 graphic novel, but could work as a miniseries of 5-6 monthly floppies. 
Synopsis/Overview
Annie is a smart but antisocial geek starting her senior year of high school and forced by her mother to join the cheerleading squad to make friends and get an athletics credit for her college applications.

Beebee is a pleaser—she feels like she needs to be to survive. Her parents treat her transition like an imposition and won’t let it continue if she can’t keep her grades up, while the entire school only seems to accept her because the cheerleading team took her in.

Both girls have their flaws and their strengths, and find something missing from their own lives in the other, and after they find each other through cheerleading, they form a friendship and eventually romance that helps them both grow into more complete human beings.

Cheer Up! looks at growth and maturity from a variety of sources, and how to recognize what you need in others, as well as modern queer youth problems like microaggressions, conditional acceptance, and respectability politics. It is also a lesbian love story between a cisgender and transgender character, and in my own overwhelming optimism I hope it helps teach young cis lesbians that there’s nothing wrong with dating trans women, hopefully undermining the current antagonism that occupies a corner of the queer women’s community.

There’s also an outline that’s much closer to the final script, including a few short dialogue snippets like the first iteration of Annie’s line “and then I will explain in gratuitous detail why the Seven-Years War SHOULD be called World War I!”

But even this pitch outline isn’t perfect. This early iteration was darker, with Bebe’s parents being less supportive and Jonah’s creepiness playing a much bigger role. Around this time, the core theme of the book—“Girls Supporting Girls”—began to take shape and I revised the outline more to reflect that. The story became a little less of a romance and more about how making friends helps us grow. Bebe teaches Anni to be gentle and Annie teaches Bebe to stand up for herself.In this original pitch outline, Annie saves Bebe from her creeper, but thanks to some re-writes and editor feedback, Bebe learns to save herself in the final script.

Around this time, Oni paired me up with the amazing artist Val K Wise, and that’s when everything started coming together. Val and I chatted, and learned that we’d grown up close to each other on Florida’s Gulf Coast. It was at this point we decided to specifically set the book in Florida, in an amalgam of the communities we grew up in. Suddenly a lot of details began to fill in: Bebe became mixed-race Latina in my mind. Annie was a specific kind of Florida grunge girl we both knew growing up. The town had its own look, and we pulled local institutions like the ice cream shop and the movie theater from our own childhoods. With Val’s input (and his amazing character sketches), I re-wrote the outline to be something much closer to the final shape of the book. Along the way you’re making notes about dialogue and character quirks and scenes you want to include.

The very last stage of outlining—for a graphic novel or comics, at least—is taking your general outline and all your notes and making what’s called a page-by-page. A page-by-page is exactly what it sounds like: You number out all your pages (originally we thought Cheer Up could fit into 100 pages) and you look at your outline and you say “this will happen on page X, that will happen on page y,” and so on, until you know what each page of your book needs to include. It doesn’t need to be detailed, but you need to know how you’re using the space and the pacing.

And then the writing begins.

Comic book writing is different than screenwriting or prose writing, because you need to be a dialogue coach, but also a set-designer. You need to decide how many panels each page will have and tell your artist what’s going on in each panel: who’s there, what are they doing, where are they, what kind of emotions are they showing? Ideally, you’ve got a great relationship with your artist and can talk to them if you get stuck or need inspiration. And then you also need to write the dialogue.

Here’s a sample page from the first draft of the Cheer Up script:

TEN—3 PANELS
Panel 1: Exterior establishing shot of ANNIE’S HOUSE, a small, 1920’s bungalow-style wooden house with overgrown flowering shrubs all around it.
1. ANNIE (off):	Mom, I’m home!
2. MS. GINTER (off)	In the kitchen, sweetie.
3. ANNIE (off):	...I might have gotten detention.
Panel 2: Interior establishing shot of ANNIE’S KITCHEN, which is large and old-fashioned, with plants everywhere growing in flower pots and old cans and cartons. A lot of the plants are little seedlings, but some of them are large and overgrown. The kitchen looks very old-fashioned and a little messy, but lived-in and cozy. There are antique hurricane lamps on some of the shelves and several bundles of herbs are hanging from the high ceilings to dry.
Annie is walking in and dropping her bag. Her mother has several makeshift planting pots and a bag of soil on the counter and is planting strelitzia seeds (which involves pulling off their orange hair before planting them).
REFERENCE: Hurricane lamp
REFERENCE: strelitzia seeds
4. ANNIE:	It wasn’t my fault.
5. MS. GINTER:	Mmhmm...
6. ANNIE:	These guys picked a fight, but somehow I’m the only one who got in trouble!
7. MS. GINTER:	Oh? You’re held to a different standard because of others’ preconceptions?
8. ANNIE:	Exactly!
Panel 3: Close-up on Ms. Ginter, as she finally looks at Annie and gives her that smug “valuable teaching moment” look that says “gotcha.”
9. MS. GINTER:	Kind of like you did to your old mother this morning about her cheerleading?

As you can see, you can even include links to images you want to include in the shot. Different artists like different levels of detail from the writer, so it’s always important to talk and make sure you’re giving them what they need without weighing them down.

After you’ve got the script, it’s time to hand everything over to your artist. But we’ll pick that up tomorrow…


Cheer Up! Love and Pompoms from Oni Press will be available from your favorite booksellers beginning August 11th!

Phantasmal Killer—Fight Your Mysteries!

Welcome back to Phantasmal Killer, a blog delving into weird and fun game mechanics and how you can take advantage of them to bring new ideas to life at your tabletop. In each article I look at using a game system in unexpected ways to create unique or bizarre characters to pummel your players.

I have a personal philosophy in game design: You are what you model. If your game system is built around combat, most of your encounters will come down to fights. If your game system is built around skills, your players will wander through the story and sensibly flee from shoggoth. The results will vary from group to group—especially if you have a bard—but ultimately adventures will do best when they reflect whatever the system handles best.

But what about when you want to build an entire adventure around challenges your system doesn’t reflect?

There’s plenty of space for handling unusual encounters via roleplay and skill checks, leaving the details up to player imaginations and acting, but there’s also a lot of added tension when you build a subsystem to handle that interaction. Having some rules adds the same sense of tension and chance that combat normally has. But building a subsystem means investing a lot of time into creating new rules, playtesting new rules, and writing cool flavor text for your cool rules for your blog. If only someone had already built a cool rule system to do handle that cool mystery or romance subplot your wanted to run!

Someone has. The game designers!

Here’s the thing: Most games already have a fleshed-out combat system, already well-balanced and chocked full of adversaries. The only thing separating swordfight from a political debate is how you describe it.

Continue reading “Phantasmal Killer—Fight Your Mysteries!”

Phantasmal Killer—Leveling Weapons

Welcome back to Phantasmal Killer, a blog delving into weird and fun game mechanics and how you can take advantage of them to bring new ideas to life at your tabletop. In each article I look at using a game system in unexpected ways to create unique or bizarre characters to pummel your players.

Let me paint you a picture:

Delfinia only learned of her family history—the glory and the shame—when she found the sword in the attic. With its blade like poured moonlight, it was clearly a blade of kings and gods, secreted away in a miserable corner of their mud stained farmhouse. At first she railed against her father: Such a blade could only be stolen. But over a third large glass of whiskey, her father revealed the truth: The sword—called Urchel, the Wyrmcutter—was their legacy, and its first wielder—the Golden Knight Guillame, savior of the Seven Kingdoms—was her father’s father. A legacy her father turned his back on and fled to their miserable, forgotten corner of the lands her family once ruled.

Delifinia inherited her grandfather’s thirst for adventure, just as her father knew she would, and wine on the lips is sweeter than mud under the nails. Once she knew the truth, she would never be content with a hardscrabble life in a miserable little farm on the border marches. The Golden Knight had vanished when her father was still in swaddling clothes, and the young champion needed to know what became of the family legends she had only just uncovered. And so, with Urchel strapped to her hip, Delfinia set out for the wilds to find new peoples and uncover lost relics as she followed in her grandfather’s footstep. Some day, some how, she would find him and reunite their blood with the moonsilver blade to guide her.

And while raiding her first dungeon she found a +1 sword and sold Wyrmcutter for beer money.

Continue reading “Phantasmal Killer—Leveling Weapons”

Phantasmal Killer—Tiered Villains

Welcome back to Phantasmal Killer, a blog delving into weird and fun game mechanics and how you can take advantage of them to bring new ideas to life at your tabletop. In each article I look at using a game system in unexpected ways to create unique or bizarre characters to pummel your players.

Admit it. We’ve all beaten the villain in a videogame before and said “That was way to easy,” only for the villain to return, powered-up and ten times as challenging. As each iteration of the villain falls, they bounce back bigger and meaner than ever! It’s the anime trope that launched a thousand memes. But it’s also something that tabletop RPGs—mostly rooted in early 20th-century fantasy fiction, rather than video games and anime—don’t capture as well.

Tiered villains are opponents who bounce back immediately after defeat with more power, more health, and posing a far greater threat to the conquering heroes. They provide a fun bait-and-switch for an encounter, as the players think they’ll encounter one threat only to face another, but they also provide a way to raise the narrative stakes of the adventure, as the danger literally escalates before the heroes’ eyes. What they thought was a decisive victory suddenly becomes a far more dire fight for survival. A tiered villain is also a handy tool for “boss battles” that end too quickly and easily thanks to a lucky critical or a bad initiative roll. If your heroes take down the final villain of the storyline too easily, it can feel unsatisfying, and ad-libbing a “final form” for that opponent unleashed by their defeat lets you re-use that un-used statblock.

Continue reading “Phantasmal Killer—Tiered Villains”

Phantasmal Killer—Filing Off the Serial Numbers

Welcome back to Phantasmal Killer, a blog delving into weird and fun game mechanics and how you can take advantage of them to bring new ideas to life at your tabletop. In each article I look at using a game system in unexpected ways to create unique or bizarre characters to pummel your players.

As a busy gamemaster in a time of global crisis, you have a lot to juggle. You’ve got a job and a dog and band of fourth-level murder-hobos stuck in a dungeon and they’re getting real sick of battling albino elves and mushroom-folk. Maybe you could come up with something really out-there and fun, but who has the time to build a bunch of new statblocks from scratch?!

You do, madam. With cheating!

Continue reading “Phantasmal Killer—Filing Off the Serial Numbers”

Adventure Design 101 – Pitch & Theme

Narrative design isn’t quite fiction writing and it isn’t quite game design. Being good at one or the other—or both—doesn’t necessarily mean you can spin a fun adventure, and you can be good at adventure writing without exceling at either of those. Adventure design is its own thing that borrows elements from creative writing and mechanical tinkering but stands far enough apart to be internet BFFs rather than a torrid lover of the two. And it’s unfortunately a skill most of us have to earn organically by reverse-engineering published adventures or subjecting our early players to all sorts of abuse. Lots of game books—especially those dedicated to gamemasters—discuss how to make a plot and how to balance encounters, but most of them leave the details for you to learn.I won’t pretend I’m a good adventure designer, but I am an experienced adventure designer, and that counts for something. If you want to learn some of my secrets for building an adventure—either for my home group or for publication—keep reading.Today I want to talk about the two most basic elements of an adventure: your pitch and your theme.Pitch is the bare-bones description of your adventure; no backstory, no twists, no character details. It’s how you describe the whole thing in a single sentence, no matter how complicated the adventure gets as it progresses. Here are some pitches from published adventures I’ve written:

  • An in-over-his-head cultist unleashes a city-wide zombie apocalypse (Pathfinder: Empty Graves).
  • Mercenaries are hiring local gangs to sew discord (Starfinder: Soldiers of Brass)
  • A plot device gives all the animals in the city super-powers (Mutants & Masterminds: The Reign of Cats & Dogs)
  • A rich demagogue thinks traders have incriminating evidence of his past crimes (The Expanse: Two Kinds of Prayer)

All these adventures have a lot more going on that what’s contained in the pitch, but the pitch grabs the most important “who,” “what,” and maybe “why.” If your adventure was a toyetic plastic vehicle marketed to kids, your pitch is the picture on the front of the box. It doesn’t list the features, you can’t see inside, it just sums up the soul of what you’re doing.Your theme is more abstract. It’s the message or moral or emotion you want to build your work around—the central flavor of your dish. Your pitch describes the adventure overtly, but your theme describes the heart. It might be a solid idea, like “Never trust anyone over 30,” or “love wins in the end,” or it can be a more general idea like “community,” or “patience,” or it can be a recurring motif like cooking or the color red—whatever it is that elements of your plot keep coming back to or describing.A theme ties all the elements of your plot together even if they’re otherwise all over the place and gonzo. Here are the themes from the adventures I listed above, and how the adventures use that idea:

  • Empty Graves: “Nothing stays buried forever.” The dead are literally rising from the ground. The disaster is caused by an artifact that was supposed to be hidden forever but was found. The villain’s main motivator is an abusive relationship with his mother he can’t suppress. Several encounters revolve around deliberately hidden legacies being revealed.
  • Soldiers of Brass: “Hidden Depths.” The central villain hides behind local operatives. The rank-and-file villains aren’t overtly evil. Several businesses operate secret criminal operations behind legal fronts. Moving forward requires finding hidden passages.
  • Reign of Cats & Dogs: “Good intentions without empathy.” The villain thinks she knows what’s best for everyone without considering others. The villain’s family try to accommodate her rather than understand her. Saving the city is much easier if the heroes just attack confused and scared but otherwise innocent animals. The villain recruits minions “for their safety” without any regard for their safety.
  • Two Kinds of Prayer: “Guilt makes everything worse.” The villain’s crimes escalate as he worries he’ll be caught. The heroes are only drawn into events because of a rich man’s paranoia that they know too much. The villain attempts to ingratiate himself to the PCs so they feel they’ll lose too much by turning him in. The villain’s accomplice keeps blackmail information because he won’t be convicted alone for his crimes. The villain’s henchwoman feel obligated to defend his corruption because she feels indebted to him.

A theme doesn’t dictate every single encounter, but it helps you color events, characters, and dangers in ways that help the entire story come together. If your adventure is a cool, colorful mini for your warband, your theme is the undercoat color that helps tie all those garish elements together… usually without anyone even thinking about it.Why Do You Need a Pitch?What makes a man? Well a human doesn’t exist without a core structure to support their body. Sure, there’s more to a human being than a spine, but without a spine it’s a lot harder for all those dangling parts to stay together.A pitch isn’t for your reader or your players. It’s probably not even for your developer, if you’re writing your adventure for publication. The pitch is for you. It’s important that you know what your adventure is about. And I already know what you’re going to say: “But I’m literally the one writing my adventure! Of course I know what it’s about!”Well you’re right. BUT. It’s easy to get excited about all the possibilities a new adventure holds. You start thinking about NPCs’ histories and location details and chasing that narrative rabbit across Wikipedia links like a certain unnamed author whose blog you follow! And every now and then it’s super helpful to come up for air midway through reading about the San Juan Pig War and remind yourself “Oh yeah, this adventure is about faeries stealing babies to make magic rubies.”I like to add the pitch as its own line just under my adventure title in my outline, but you can scribble it on a post-in note, put a daily reminder in your phone, or set it as your desktop background. Whatever it takes to help you overcome your particular flavor of ADHD. And I know you have ADHD you need to help yourself manage because you’re off reading about the San Juan Pig War right now, aren’t you?!Think about what your adventure is at the core, what motivates it, and what stops it from being easy. Are the heroes raiding a lost tomb? Cool! Where and why? Are they moving from Point A to Point B? Excellent! What’s going to make that hard for them? Is someone trying to kill one of your heroes as disproportionate revenge for perceived wrongs? Marvelous! Who are they and how?Why Do You need a Theme?What makes a man? Purpose. Passion. The drive for self-improvement! Sure, there’s bones and monkey meat and maybe some pizza rolls, but the real substance of a human being is the idea that pushes her forward and the questions she asks herself along the way.All media delivers a message above and beyond its story, even stories that seem straightforward, simple, or mindless. Sometimes the message is clumsy and obvious while other times it’s so subtle you don’t notice it at first glance. Sometimes that message is just “The status quo is good,” or “You should solve problems with violence.” If you really get into the weeds of media analysis, you can read a story through different lenses to make it mean almost anything—which can be a fun exercise that can help you learn a lot about your own intentions as an author.The theme is your message. You might think of it as your adventure’s tone or aesthetic or moral. It’s the emotional core, big question, or statement you’re trying to make with your writing. It can be something you believe in or an idea you think will be fun to play with, but it’s an element that helps inform the big conflict and a lot of supporting elements. However you want to look at it, it’s a concept you should try to come back to whenever possible to inform the rest of your writing. You might have a vague notion of what your adventure’s big mood is—most of naturally look at their world through themes, concepts, and shorthand ideas to make sense of the world—but taking a moment to make it clear in your mind and write it down once again keeps it handy as a reminder. I like to write my theme down just below my pitch, along with a few keywords to help start my brain pumping.A theme gives your entire adventure a harmonious “flavor.” Not everything in your adventure needs to relate to the theme, just like your cocktail doesn’t need to be all whiskey, but they should all play nice with you theme. Sometimes mixing unexpected elements together can even create a thing of beauty, like combining whiskey and absinthe! Using your theme can help you pick out monsters and assign NPC motivations, and it can give you ideas for locations that strike just the right mood. A theme helps you play with your pitch and give a new twist or think about old tropes in a new way. If you like you plot but it feels stale, giving your adventure an unexpected theme can breathe new life into the idea. Combining a traditional trope like “the dragon has kidnapped the princess,” with a theme like “beauty slays the beast” can leave you with an adventure with a very different victim in need of rescuing.Perhaps the best utility for your theme is tackling writer’s block. If you aren’t sure how a monster or character fits into your story, look at your theme for a motive. If you aren’t sure how to link two scenes of your adventure, look at your theme for inspiration. Whenever you don’t know what to do next, look to your theme and pull together some random idea related to it, and if nothing else, those thematic ties will keep it from feeling too out of left field.Even if you end up writing a bomb in an ice cream shop.Coming Up with Your Pitch & ThemePutting your pitch and theme down on paper can be the easiest or the hardest step of adventure design, depending on how inspired you feel and how you come to your plot. If your adventure starts out as a “big picture,” it’s easy to distill a pitch from that. If your adventure starts from a mood you want to capture, that leads naturally into your theme.But what if all you have is an idea for a villain you want to use? Or a cool set piece action scene? Or your PCs’ actions have drawn them into this weird circumstance and you need to plan to get them out next session? If you’re coming up with your adventures organically, it can be hard to boil down your ideas into strong core principals.Remember, your pitch doesn’t need to describe every twist and turn your plot will take, and your theme doesn’t need to apply universally to every single character and encounter. They’re both guidelines to help you stay focused and remind you of your goals. They’re “big picture” elements, and to describe them you just need to think about the major movements of your story. Do you only know your players will finally confront their long-time rival, the gnome anti-paladin who destroyed their village, and you want a big fight over a bunch of chemical vats at the end?  Your pitch can literally be “Tracking a villain through and industrial hellscape,” or “Hunting an evil warlord,” and your theme can be as straightforward as “the wages of sin” or “comeuppance.” They don’t need to be perfect high-concepts, just useful ones. Never be afraid to tinker with your pitch and theme later, or just put off creating them until you’ve got more of your plot and twists fleshed out. If you start working on your crusade against the gnome tyrant and decide “the wages of sin” doesn’t fit because you want to play up this gnome using illusions and lies to paint the heroes as monsters to the locals, change your theme to “revealing the truth,” and see if you can tweak some of your existing plot points to focus more on revealing deeper truths or context throughout. You are the only person who knew your original plan, so no one will ever be able to testify against you in gnome court!It can still feel like a struggle to come up with unifying ideas for your adventures, so here are some tips that have helped me in the past:

  • Go Random: Random generators are a writer’s blessing. You no longer need to wrack your brain to be creative when you can make the computer do it for you! With a random plot generator or a random theme generator, you can shuffle though dozens of ideas until you hit one that starts turning the gears in your brain. Plenty of gamemaster-guide stylebooks include tables of random adventure ideas as well, so don’t overlook your analogue options.
  • Grab a Quote: If you’re struggling especially for a theme, get online and grab a random quote for a book or movie. And think about how you can apply that idea to your plot and characters.
  • Read a Book: If you aren’t sure where you go with your adventure, pick up a book—especially an old favorite—and start reading at random. A quote or situation might spark your own ideas or provide that theme that’s been eluding you. Poetry collections are especially great for this, and my favorites include Goblin Market by Christine Rossetti, Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barret Browning, and The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Short story anthologies are a great source of inspiration, too, including collections of fairy tales, fantasy stories, or modern material like one of my personal favorites, Strange California, collected by Jaym Gates and J. Daniel Batt.
  • Phone a Friend: When I’m really struggling with an idea, I turn to my genius wife or another writer friend to talk out ideas. Most of my best work is the result of collaboration; someone gets excited about an idea I pitched and fills in details, or I do the same with an idea they feed me. A good circle of authors means you get help when you need it and you get to talk out your friends’ awesome ideas, too!
  • When All Else Fails, Cheat: Let’s be honest: Star Wars is just The Hidden Fortress with a coat of scifi paint. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that; you can enjoy both stories on their own for what they are. Most of human culture is just looking for new ways to re-tell the same handful of stories and your adventures don’t need to be free-range, grass-fed genius from start to finish. Grab and adventure you know and love from a movie, TV, a book, or even an RPG line and adjust it to fit your needs. Even if you start out with a blatant copy, along the way you’re likely to start adapt the idea and making it your own. Use the familiar as a jumping off point, scratch off the serial numbers where you can, then go back later to change the obvious rip-offs.

If you’re having trouble distilling your adventure down to a simple pitch or theme, you might be trying to juggle too much for a single adventure, or you might want to trim some excess from your adventure to give it more focus. It’s okay to build adventures around Byzantine plotlines and complex characters—I would argue it’s a lot more fun to do just that—but a pitch helps you remember what important elements you need to keep in mind and communicate, while a tone helps you decide how to present all of that same information.Hopefully this is enough to get you started. But I’ll be back next time to talk about the all-important title!

This post originally appeared on my Patreon, where all Patrons receive my content two weeks early!

Phantasmal Killer—The Skill Trap

Welcome back to Phantasmal Killer, a blog delving into weird and fun game mechanics and how you can take advantage of them to bring new ideas to life at your tabletop. In each article I look at using a game system in unexpected ways to create unique or bizarre characters to pummel your players.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: The pressure is on and time is tight! A hero must unlock a door as the water rises to the knees, their waist, their chest! Or a sparking panel needs to be repaired in the radiation-flooded engine room! Or the bomb ticks down as a shaky pair of hands vacillate between the red wire and the blue—cutting the correct wire will save the day, but failure will spell disaster! These are all common tropes in books and film, but the skill systems in many RPGs just don’t bear out that risk and tension. If you screw up diffusing that bomb, the campaign ends. So obviously everyone knows that bomb will be safely diffused. Most RPGs just don’t have a skill system that provides tiered drawbacks for failed skills the way they do combat.

Or do they?

There’s at least one category of skill checks most RPGs provide level-adjusted consequences for, but for a very narrow model of play: Traps!

Continue reading “Phantasmal Killer—The Skill Trap”

Phantasmal Killer: The Multivillain

Welcome to Phantasmal Killer, a blog delving into weird and fun game mechanics and how you can take advantage of them to bring new ideas to life at your tabletop. In each article I look at using a game system in unexpected ways to create unique or bizarre characters to pummel your players.

One of the most common dramatic problems for a GM in any RPG is that powerful, single villains tend to be a gamble. If they’re not significantly more powerful than the player characters, the action economy—how often each side gets to act—means your heroes can rip them to shreds before you roll their first attack. But if your villain is too powerful, they can unleash attacks that entirely overwhelm your heroes in a single blow. You might balance the action economy by giving your Big Bad Evil Guy a band of minions, but tactically-minded players know to skip the bread basket of evil and dive right into the main course. You might instead hand-waive your BBEG’s early damage rolls to give your heroes a fighting chance, but many players love the challenge of pitting their wits and luck against the gamemaster’s and resent a curated experience keeping them alive.

Continue reading “Phantasmal Killer: The Multivillain”