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Category Archives: Tropes


Afterschool Tropes Special: What’s That Fridge Doing at the Table?

I’ve decided to rename my trope series because the posts feel like I’m writing a new season. I’m also experimenting with slightly different formats of trope posts. It remains to be seen if I’ll be jumping the shark or making the series grow a beard.
Have you ever had the experience, at school, in your [...]

Afterschool Tropes Special: The Campaign as a British TV Series

This trope post is going to be a bit different.
Instead of applying tropes to characters or adventures, why not explore a few tropes that could apply to the actual structure of a campaign?
As I’m pondering about my last campaign, I decided that I would spare you the analysis and discuss the key lesson I learned [...]

Mining Tropes for RPG Nuggets: The Truman Mirror Tomato Surprise!

This is a series that explores Tropes and tries to apply them in RPGs. Have a look here, I wrote over 20 of these so far.
So Sorry for the double feed, something happened when I posted this the 1st time and 1/2 the text was eaten!
One of the things I’ve seen GMs struggle with [...]

Chatty’s Mailbox: The Magnificent Villain

While I was writing my 300th milestone post, I got a very interesting email from a reader. Here’s what he wrote:
Good afternoon! I’ve been a long time reader of and commenter on your blog, and I was looking for some brainstorming help. Specifically,
what kind of holds could a magnificent bastard have over [...]

Mining Tropes for RPG Nuggets: The Quest Improbable

It’s been too long I know. After having done more that 20 Trope related posts, it becomes kind of daunting to try to produce one that won’t be a re-hash of a previous one (or, you know, bad!).
As I was losing time on the TV Tropes wiki looking for some more character specific trope [...]

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