Justin Schmid

Justin started tabletop gaming in 1983 with Basic D&D (red box) and never looked back. He runs and plays in a wide variety of games, including Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Trail of Cthulhu and many, many more. He also writes professionally for role-playing games, including writing and creating Night's Edge an Alternate Reality Universe for Cyberpunk 2020. He went on to write eight more adventures and sourcebooks in the Night's Edge line, adding vampires and other supernatural perils to the already dangerous world of Cyberpunk. As a freelance writer, he wrote The Bermuda Triangle for Call of Cthulhu, Shadows of the Mind, and Psi Wars for Conspiracy X and contributed to Last Unicorn's Star Trek RPG, as well as to Cybergeneration sourcebooks, and many other games. When he's not creating imaginary worlds for his daughter, he's running games for his friends and writing new adventures or designing new game systems. He currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

Aug 182016
 
#RPGaDAY 18 2016 – RPG Groups Could Benefit Most From What Innovation?

It’s hard to say what innovation RPG groups could most benefit from, mainly because most of the best ideas I’ve heard of are no longer innovations. Nevertheless, I really like the concept from the Apocalypse World games of having to create bonds (history or Hx in the game) between players. It’s something that went on before that game, but strong ties between the player characters [Read the article]

Aug 152016
 
#RPGaDAY 15 2016 – Best Source of Inspiration for RPGs

As with most people, I get my inspiration from a variety of sources, but I would say that movies are one the top sources of inspiration when I am getting ready to run a game or to get me inspired to run something. I’ll typically track down a movie or two that are set in that genre/setting to watch before running a game to help [Read the article]

Aug 152016
 
#RPGaDAY 14 2016 – My Gaming Dream Team

I’ve played RPGs for about 34 years, so considering all the people I’ve played with over the years, it’s hard to pick and choose a few people out so many great gamers. They’ve all brought different perspectives and skills to the table. However, of people I have never played with, I would love to play with Ken Hite, who I knew back in my freelancer [Read the article]

Aug 142016
 
#RPGaDAY 13 2016 – What Makes a Successful Campaign?

Although there are entire books written on the subject, I’ll focus on the three keys to what I see as a successful campaign. First off, it needs to actually play out fully, in other words, end properly. Too many campaigns are started and never finished, usually through no fault of anyone, it just works out that it never really ends and there’s no satisfying conclusion, [Read the article]

Aug 122016
 
#RPGaDAY 12 2016 – Game I'm Most Likely to Play Next

Currently, I am running the Three Kings Achtung! Cthulhu adventure using my own homebrew system. This followed a lengthy campaign in the Warhammer Fantasy role-playing game universe, and prior to that we played some Trail of Cthulhu. My horror bent has been driving our games for a while, so it might be time for a change of palette.

Aug 112016
 
#RPGaDAY 11 2016 – Gamer Who Most Affected The Way I Play

We’ve all had strong influences at one time or another. For gaming, most of my life was spent playing with friends and family who either came into the game around the same time as I had, or on their own had come into gaming generally around the same time or much later. As a result, I usually had as much or more experience than those [Read the article]