Uncle Figgy’s Guide to Good GameMastering Remastered

About a hundred years ago, I told my wife that the first book I was ever going to write was going to be called Uncle Figgy’s Guide to the Universe, or, “There Are No Gaming Geeks in Vermont”.

That never happened. Instead, as a long-time player of roleplaying games (RPGs), and a long-time GameMaster (GM) or “Dungeon Master”, the first thing I ever wrote that saw widespread distribution was a guide to running RPGs the way I enjoyed both running and playing. I was pretty amazed by how popular Uncle Figgy’s Guide to Good GameMastering, or, “How to Manipulate Friends and Influence People” became, by how fast it spread (it was translated into quite a few languages), and more recently by how long it has stuck around. The success of that first Uncle Figgy’s guide, and the subsequent guides, got me invited as a guest speaker to various science-fiction and/or gaming conventions to talk about gaming, game design, and running and playing roleplaying games.

Since then, the tabletop gaming world has been rocked by the advance of the Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Game (MMORPG), but it still has a following and it’s still where I came from in the world of gaming. So, after many years, I’d like to present the new Uncle Figgy’s Guide to Good GameMastering v2.0 — some of the old stuff from the original, but updated with a few more years worth of lessons from playing and running RPGs (both tabletop and MMO).