FRPG Tips — January 2026

Over on Bluesky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I post daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players. At the end of each month, you get the full collection of that month’s tips right here for your reading pleasure. And please feel free to follow me at either of the above locations to get new tips every day, fresh out of the idea forge.

FRPG GM Tip: Coming up with holidays and celebrations is a great way to bring your campaign world to life, but holidays needn’t be monolithic. Different cultures, calendars, and traditions mean that characters might usher in the new year multiple times a year depending on where they travel.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If incorporating analogues of real-world events into your games makes those games harder to enjoy, set them aside. If incorporating analogues of real-world events into your games lets you find some measure of catharsis, embrace them. 

FRPG GM Tip: Especially if you’re running games on a virtual tabletop, don’t feel compelled to run a combat encounter just because you’ve spent time setting it up. Always let the players and characters bypass combat with strategy or subterfuge. 

FRPG Player Tip: Never be afraid to ask the GM, “Is this something my character would know?” You understand more about your character and their life than anyone else at the table, but not even you can remember all the things your character has seen, learned, and done.

FRPG GM Tip: Spells that allow enemies to be charmed or rendered into a magical slumber can upend combat faster than just about anything. Embrace that idea, and prepare for it long before it happens by making sure that every combat encounter is about more than just the fight.

FRPG Player Tip: Great stories are often built around strong goals and obstacles. What does a character want? What stops them from getting it? Giving the GM a clear sense of your character’s desires, alongside the hangups getting in the way of that, can tie you into a campaign better than anything.

FRPG GM Tip: The ideal number of environmental effects to add to an encounter area (whether a combat encounter or otherwise) is always greater than 0. The fewer other details the players need to focus on, the greater the usefulness of the environment to help them slip fully into the scene.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If your game focuses heavily on specific types of actions and what those actions allow the characters and their foes to do, don’t be afraid to improvise if your intended actions don’t fit the action economy. “What do you want to do?” should always be your starting point.

FRPG GM Tip: No one ever has as much free time as they’d like, but as much as possible, try to spread your free prep time over a number of days rather than one day. Prepping 10 minutes a day over the week will help focus your notes and ideas better than two hours’ prep only on the day of your game.

FRPG Player Tip: If there’s a particular game, genre, setting, or set of optional rules you’ve always wanted to play but haven’t had any luck finding a GM to run for you, congratulations! You’ve just given yourself the best possible reason to sit down in the GM’s chair for the first time.

FRPG GM Tip: It’s okay to have NPCs recap important details, especially in a complex, lore-driven campaign. But every such exposition scene should have something for the PCs to do besides just listen. One easy option: Have the recap come during a battle while the heroes fight to keep the NPC alive.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: In-game romance isn’t necessarily a hard line that needs discussion in session 0, but some folks find it uncomfortable. If you love romantic roleplaying and get the sense that other players don’t, respect that and take a moment to talk about how best to approach it.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially early in your GM career, keep an eye on the number of enemies in a fight to determine the maximum number of foes you can run without feeling overwhelmed. And if you ever have need to run more foes, seek out rules for running creatures as swarms or mobs — or write your own.

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re in a campaign with a strong, straight throughline, don’t be afraid to suggest side quests based on developments in the story. Especially if they’re running a prewritten adventure, most GMs love the idea of the campaign taking custom detours on its way to the endgame.

FRPG GM Tip: Never feel obliged to make use of every encounter, NPC, secret, trap, lore reveal, or other element of your game prep. Needing to throw things away during a game can make it feel like you’ve failed somehow, but anything you don’t use just puts you ahead on your prep for your next game.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Everyone on both sides of the table should make note of each named NPC who appears in the game. Not only will you want to refer to some of those NPCs later, but reviewing those names every once in a while makes for great touchstones to recall the events of the campaign.

FRPG Player Tip: If you realize a particular game or campaign story isn’t what you wanted, there’s never a great time to politely step away. But if it becomes necessary, don’t let things go past the point where not enjoying that specific game starts souring you on the idea of enjoying any game.

FRPG GM Tip: Leave descriptive details open-ended — even minor details — to encourage the questions that can maximize engagement. Don’t immediately say, “The air in this chamber smells like ____.” Say, “There’s a strange scent here,” and let the players ask and think as they figure out what it is.

FRPG Player Tip: Whether on paper or electronic, a character sheet is just the starting point for tracking statistics and details. Record your combat stats on a sticky note for easier access. Use index cards for tracking gear and backstory. Set up a separate doc for making notes as needs be.

FRPG GM Tip: The passage of time can rewrite the landscape dramatically through erosion, landslides, deforestation, reforestation, floods, and more. Any time the characters are using a hundred-year-old map to lead them to a desired site, be aware of how inaccurate that map is likely to be.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: It’s absolutely possible for half the players at the table to want a hack-and-slash game while the other half want deep, immersive roleplaying. The key to making that happen is for players on both sides to respect the different choices their fellow players make.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially with players you don’t know well, it can feel like going back on a ruling you’ve made will undermine your authority. In fact, the opposite is true. Players respect a GM who demonstrates that they’re willing to admit mistakes in the name of fairness and fun.

FRPG Player Tip: Never be afraid to suggest a house rule to your group and GM. Whether it’s something you’ve found useful in another game or a response to noticing an issue arising from the unique nature of your current game, trying new ways to make your sessions more fun is always worthwhile.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Sharing food is a noble gaming tradition, but be mindful when snacking. Not only do you want to avoid messing up books and character sheets, nothing slows your brain down faster than overloading on carbs. Unless you’re gaming while doing a marathon, go with healthier choices.

FRPG GM Tip: You probably instinctively avoid setting up multiple combats against the same foes, but be equally wary of fights with a too-similar feel. Constantly mix up mob battles, solo-monster skirmishes, environmental challenges, ambush scenarios, and other options to keep things feeling fresh.

FRPG Player Tip: Describing the action as your character fights is one of the best ways you can help the GM keep combat encounters moving and feeling exciting. And especially if you’re a player for whom coming up with description is easy, your example can encourage quieter players to join in.

Art by Dean Spencer

The Dream Tombs: Backstory as Adventure

As a GM, I’ve always been a big fan of when character backstory works its way into the campaign. I enjoy when players see fit to reveal secrets about their characters. I love when backstory is revealed in key moments to underline the drama of a roleplaying scene — or sometimes even a combat encounter.

Character backstory working its way into the campaign spontaneously often comes in response to specific beats of narrative pressure. Something happens in the campaign and a player sees the opportunity to have their character react in a way that reveals something about who they are. Other times, fate or the actions of villains push the heroes into a corner that inspires the revelation of a secret a character had hoped to take with them to the grave — but which their player has been dying for a chance to let slip.

Sometimes, though, the opportunities for characters to reveal backstory don’t come as often as we’d like, or certain players might not have as much emotional investment in backstory as others. So if you’re looking for an excuse to bring a bunch of backstory into your game in a fun way, the following adventure setup can help you make that happen.

What Dreams May Come?

This adventure setup is taken from a dungeon site called the Dream Tombs, which I set up for one of my weekly CORE20 campaigns. What follows is entirely generic, though, and suitable for pretty much any fantasy game.

To set up what I wanted to do, I sent the players the following email before our session:

Unlike many of the adventuring escapades we share together, the one we’ll be starting today comes with a bit of homework. I’d like you all to come up with three bits of backstory for your character that you’re comfortable sharing with the group. This can include story elements in the three secrets you all provided at the start of the campaign, but doesn’t have to.

What I’m looking for are specific meaningful events from your character’s life involving action, other characters, and so forth. So perhaps a pivotal interaction with family or comrades, a dangerous situation that had to be overcome, a moment during an important job that went really well or really badly, et al. Something momentous on a personal level that would make a good scene in a movie.

The “three secrets” mentioned in the email refer to the pre-session-zero character-building conversations I like to have with the players leading into a new campaign. It’s totally not necessary to make the Dream Tombs scenario work, and I find that even without that kind of preliminary framework, many players have a sense of a secret or two their characters are keeping to themselves.

Records of the Past

The Dream Tombs in my campaign were a complex of ancient crypts protected by powerful magic and holding secrets the characters were looking for. But the choice of location for this scenario is totally up to you. In addition to a tomb or crypt, the theme of secrets and backstory being brought forward into the campaign might be apropos for a magical library, a warded laboratory or guildhall, a ruined wizard’s tower, or any other location where suitable magic can come into play. 

As the characters explore the site, alongside whatever other location features you prep, work in one physical detail — small pieces of parchment that are scattered across or hidden within the site. Some of the parchment fragments are old. Others are relatively new. All feature notes in different languages and different handwriting, with each parchment a record of some incident or event, anonymous and unsigned. 

Describe the notes as seemingly written by someone wanting to record a thing they’d done, a conversation they had, or something that happened to them. As the characters have a chance to find more of the notes, describe them further as carrying a sense of yearning for the past — or in a many cases, a sense of regret or fear for that past.

Living the Memory

At any appropriate points during the session, the magic of the site triggers. This could be a thing that happens at regular intervals while the characters explore or linger, or in response to characters touching certain things, fighting certain guardians, and so forth.

Choose a character randomly and have their player choose one of the memories they came up with. Then have that player narrate that backstory memory. Describe the scenario as the character slipping into a kind of fugue state and going through the motions of the memory event, even as illusion magic unfolds around them to share that memory with the other characters. Work with the player to build up the description of the memory vision and make it real, asking questions to expand certain moments, suggesting additional details, and so forth.

Then, when the vision is done, tell the players that even as the illusion magic fades away and the character comes back to their senses, that character sees a piece of parchment manifest in front of them to fall to the ground. On that parchment, they see a written record of the vision just shared, magically scribed in their own handwriting.

Cost or Reward

Depending on the nature of the site where these dreams manifest, the revelation of backstory and secrets might be enough of a narrative reward to carry your memory scenes. But you might also attach benefits or drawbacks to each memory, so that the characters are rewarded or punished by the magic tapping into their psyches. For example, if the characters are making an incursion into an enemy site set to end in a boss battle, the magic might provide them with one-off benefits as their memories let them recall moments of past inspiration or draw new resolve from memories of failure. 

Alternatively, if the characters are exploring a site that calls out for putting pressure on them as they explore, each memory might impose penalties or conditions on the character experiencing it — or even on all the characters as they share that memory. (When I used this scenario, the Dream Tombs were that kind of site. The characters were searching for a specific tomb and the treasure it contained, and the longer they took, the more debilitating memory-visions they would have to face.)

Inspiration for Story

In addition to the fun of bringing specific backstory elements and secrets into your campaign within a solid narrative framework, this adventure setup can have the added bonus of inspiring players to think more about their backstories — especially players who are more about playing in the moment, and who might have given little thought to their character’s life before the campaign began. One of the best bits of feedback I got from a player after we finished our Dream Tombs scenario was their lament that they hadn’t gotten a chance to share all three of the memories they’d written up. Especially if the players in your campaign aren’t naturally big into backstory — and this can often be true of new players — bringing memories to life this way in the course of an adventure can be a great start.

Art by Dean Spencer