Workshops & Panels
We teach folks how to be great players, Game Masters, and writers (fiction and gaming content) via panels and hands-on, interactive workshops throughout the greater Kansas City Metropolitan area.
See below for our current topics – or request a topic on our Contact page!
Tabletop RPGs
We run exciting and immersive games in virtually every genre and system at local game stores, community centers, and events – such as local and regional gaming conventions. We can also bring custom games directly to you!
In addition to our standard games, we offer premiere gaming experiences as part of our Signature Series. Watch for those on our calendar, stop by and see us at an event, or, better yet, sign up for our mailing list to stay informed! We promise we’ll only deliver relevant content, not sign you up for Daily Dragon Facts!
Fiction/Gaming Writing
We write our own game content – from character sketches, NPCs, settings, and encounters to fully developed adventures. We also write fiction (short stories, novellas, and novels), non-fiction (e.g. reviews, instructional materials), and audio / video scripts.
We can also create custom letters and other props to add that extra “jazz hands” to your game!
As an added bonus, we can script and produce custom voiceovers and short audio clips for you to use at your table.
Current Workshop and Panel Topics
Which TTRPGs Should I Be Playing?
Are you ready to expand your game horizons and give a new system a shot? Are you looking for a game that captures a different vibe, uses new and interesting mechanics, or takes different approach to collaborative story building? Do you want to try some fun-looking indie titles, but just aren’t sure where to start? If so, THIS content is for you! Our Adventure U GMs will talk about their favorite lesser-known (or at least lesser-played) systems and new / upcoming systems about which they’re excited, answer your game nerd questions, and even help you select titles you might think are fun! Come prepared to talk about YOUR favorites as well – we’re always looking to find out about games we missed!
Converting Your Players to a New TTRPG System
Are you excited to try a new system, but you’re not sure how to get your players on board? Do your players want to try a new system, but you’re worried about learning new rules? Are you just not sure where to start with giving a new system a go? If so, this workshop is for you! Join us as our Adventure U GMs walk you through how to embrace – and how to get your players to embrace – new and exciting game systems! Be sure to come ready with your questions, struggles, success stories, and suggestions as well – we love hearing how others address this issue!
GM Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices
Whether you’re considering becoming a GM, are a new GM with some questions, or are a veteran GM looking for new ideas and fresh takes on the craft, this panel is exactly what you’re looking for. Our Adventure U GMs are excited to share some of their favorite techniques for game prep, table and player management, game play handling, encounter creation, and more! Be sure to come ready with questions – and with strategies of your own to share!
Running a Great One-Shot Adventure
Running a one-shot adventure – whether at a con, a game store (or library or a community center) or just at home – is a bit different from running a regular campaign session. Variables such as setting, audience, time constraints, space, knowledge of the game, and more, combine to make running those games a challenge. In this session, our experienced Adventure U GMs will share how they select or design, prep for, and run one-shot adventures.
Great Encounters: Martial / Combat
Many GMs identify combat as the most difficult type of encounter to prepare and run. Planning a good combat encounter takes time and thought, and can still end in an anti-climactic one-shot monster death or devolve into a boring slugfest. While combat can be a unifying experience that brings the party together and makes them care about the outcome and furthering the story, It can ALSO feel forced and artificial, and it can make players who aren’t optimized for fighting lose interest and engagement. But fear not! Our Adventure U GMs are here to share their experience and provide you with strategies and tactics to keep combat interesting for everyone – including you!
Great Encounters: Social
Social encounters are the banes of any a GM’s existence. While some players revel in the chance to talk and explore and ruthlessly interrogate NPCs, others regard it as boring or a waste of time. Coming up with voices and personalities and maintaining a steady flow of dialogue can be exhausting, and players often say things that surprise or fluster the GM in ways that regular “player logic” doesn’t. Luckily, our Adventure U GMs are ready with tips and tricks to help you prepare and run fantastic social encounters!
Great Encounters: Puzzles, Riddles, and Traps
Nothing is more disheartening as a GM than watching your players fight their way through hundreds of monsters, think their way through environmental hurdles, and talk their way through delicate social situations only to end up stymied by a puzzle you copied off of the back of a box of Fruity-Os cereal. We at Adventure U know your pain. Join our GMs as they walk you through creating and running puzzle, riddle, and trap encounters that will keep your players guessing – but not for TOO long.
Great Encounters: Environmental
Environmental encounters are some of the most important, but most neglected encounter types out there. They carry the potential to immerse the players and their characters in your world, and to make them care. Environmental encounters are more than just raging rivers and impassable mountains – they are opportunities to showcase your world and the PC and NPC places in it. In this panel, Adventure U GMs will talk about how to create interesting, meaningful, and engaging environmental encounters to really bring your adventures to life!
Using Published Modules Effectively
We’ve heard a lot of GMs reflect negatively on published modules, saying they are hard to use, trite or predictable, or even just bad. While there ARE bad modules out there, there are also some very, very good ones, and even modules that are sub-par overall often have encounters and elements that are fantastic. Our Adventure U GMs are excited to talk with you about some of their favorite modules, how to read, interpret, and learn from them, and how to extract the good stuff for use in your own campaign!
GM Plans, Player Logic, and Other Hilarious Fictions
Most of our Adventure U panels focus on specific topics. This one is different. While we’ll have some prepared questions on hand (because we’re professional like that), we hope that this session is about YOU and what you want to know or share. This is an opportunity for GMs – and players – to bring their three “big books,” The Book of Questions, The Book of Grievances, and The Book of Ramifications, to the table and talk, laugh, commiserate, and learn together. We’re inviting some special GM guests from the community to join us on this panel!
Choices, Grudges, and Ramifications
Players and their characters make choices every single session. Some of them are good – like the players deciding to help a town that sheltered them. Some of them are bad, like a player deciding to eat the last homemade chocolate chip cookie before the GM has had one. Each of these actions has potential immediate outcomes both in and out of game, such as the reward of the good will, coin, and a sweet heirloom magic item, or the penalty of a sudden and devastating meteor shower. Some outcomes, though engender bitterness and fester over time, or appear as an ongoing series of repercussions. Figuring out how to respond to player actions and enforce consequences that are reasonable and effective (as they need to be), but still fun, is often a hard balance to strike. In this session, our Adventure U GMs will share their favorite techniques for responding to player actions. Come ready with your weirdly specific scenarios and your preferred techniques – we always love to share new ideas!
Building Better Baddies
What makes a villain….villainous? But perhaps more importantly, what makes that villain a meaningful adversary that will engage and motivate your players? In this enlightening hour-long session, our GMs will share their favorite techniques for making bad guys that both compel players to put a stop to their evil deeds, and, ideally, relate to them and their plans to create drama and pathos.
The Basics of GM-ing for Any System
This session is a live gameplay session and workshop combined, designed to introduce participants to the role of Game Master. While D&D is the system that will be used for the demo, the content we provide is applicable to virtually any RPG system.
GM References and Resources
Game Mastery can seem like sorcery! How do experienced GMs manage the volumes of information – player types and preferences, PC abilities and items, locations, NPCs and monsters, experience, rules, table rules, history, encounters, etc – they have to track to keep the game running? In this session, attendees can expect to receive invaluable resources, tips, tricks, tools, and time-savers to help them keep the game interesting and engaging for players – and for themselves.
Selecting / Writing and Running a Convention One-Shot
Home games and shared campaigns have the luxury of time and space to build engagement, tension, and storylines. Convention games (and other one-shots) have just four hours. In this session, our experienced GMs share their tips, tricks, and techniques for writing short-form games, selecting good modules (and module sections), and running those sessions at cons while achieving and maintaining player / character agency and engagement. Attendees may share their ideas as well!
Introduction to GM-ing
Making the jump from player to Game Master is exciting! But it can also be intimidating, confusing, and even scary. There so many decisions to be made, items to prepare, and things to consider and manage that it can be overwhelming. Many GMs traditionally came to the craft with a mentor who guided them through the process, but the explosion of TTRPG popularity combined with the erosion of in-person and game-store-based communities has made those mentors harder to find. That’s where we come in! We want to be your mentor and help! In this two-hour session, we’ll cover key topics and questions that we see all the time among at our workshops and in our various communities. Plus, we will leave the floor open to discuss whatever topics you want with respect to GM-ing and TTRPGs in general! Come for the content – STAY for the swag! We’ll be giving away a number of items donated by our sponsors.
Plot and Storycraft for Writers and GMs
You have a fantastic idea for a world, and some amazing plans for encounters and NPCs. But how do you put all that together in a story that can be divided into sessions? If there’s an over-arching plot, how do you make sure it’s present in every (or almost every) session? Our GMs and writers will share how they manage to run their games while telling the stories they want while also giving players agency and the ability to share in the storytelling, and give participants a chance to share their ideas as well.
Beyond D&D: Other Great RPGs for Every Gaming Taste
Dungeons & Dragons is still the ubiquitous and de facto pen-and-paper RPG, but in ever-increasing numbers, players looking for different worlds to explore and new systems to try. A staggering number of games are added to Kickstarter on almost a daily basis, adding to the wild variety of games from well-known publishers, from popular IPs to Old School Revivals (OSRs), and not to mention the delightfully wild and immersive indy titles. Participants will get to discover what our GMs are excited about and playing, and can share their own fantastic finds!
Making them Care: Engaging Your Players with the Story
You carefully craft NPCs, towns, and storylines, and then die a little inside when your players and their characters fail to embrace the elements of your adventure you thought they would. Sure, they’re happy to romp through your creation, but they simply don’t seem to want to save the orphan or prevent goblins from rampaging through the adorable village of sentient rabbits you dangled in front of them. Not one of them shed a single tear when the NPC who has joined them for the last six sessions perishes when an arrow-to-the knee ends their story arc. Our GMs will share their thoughts on how to help players become emotionally attached to the story and really invest in your world.
In this information-packed hour, our Game Masters will discuss what GM-ing is for them, and how they think each of the GM roles – World Builder/Chooser, Storyteller, Adversary, and Judge, Referee, and Coach – fits into the game. Attendees can expect to discover how experienced GMs interact with the world, the PCs, and the players, get some tips and tricks for running their games, ask their own questions – and provide their personal insights.
Game Mastery can seem like sorcery! How do experienced GMs manage the volumes of information – player types and preferences, PC abilities and items, locations, NPCs and monsters, experience, rules, table rules, history, encounters, etc – they have to track to keep the game running? In this session, attendees can expect to receive invaluable resources, tips, tricks, tools, and time-savers to help them keep the game interesting and engaging for players – and for themselves.
Plot and Storycraft for Writers and GMs
You have a fantastic idea for a world, and some amazing plans for encounters and NPCs. But how do you put all that together in a story that can be divided into sessions? If there’s an over-arching plot, how do you make sure it’s present in every (or almost every) session? Our GMs and writers will share how they manage to run their games while telling the stories they want while also giving players agency and the ability to share in the storytelling, and give participants a chance to share their ideas as well.
Home games and shared campaigns have the luxury of time and space to build engagement, tension, and storylines. Convention games (and other one-shots) have just four hours. In this session, our experienced GMs share their tips, tricks, and techniques for writing short-form games, selecting good modules (and module sections), and running those sessions at cons while achieving and maintaining player / character agency and engagement. Attendees may share their ideas as well!
Writing and Running Heists and Capers
Running a standard dungeon crawl or adventures is something at which most GMs excel. But heists and capers are a bit different and can feel more challenging and complicated to run. From designing clues and puzzles to creating intriguing and unexpected obstacles, these games tend to require a bit different take and touch. Participants can expect to discover some amazing strategies for coming up with engaging adventures that challenge the standard gaming fare – and share ideas of their own!
Join Adventure U GMs as they discuss all things RPG. This exciting session gives you the chance to ask your most pressing questions, whether you’re a GM, a player, or someone who is just curious about the hobby. Participants will be able to ask questions – AND share their own personal insights.
In this information-rich discussion, Adventure U GMs will answer some of the most common questions they get asked: How to manage the people and characters at their tables. We will explore some of the most common player archetypes, what the behaviors really suggest, how those players are problems, and how at least SOME of those players might be blessings in disguise.
Worldbuilding
- Do you have great ideas for a module or game world but just aren’t sure if it all “works” together?
- Do you want to create a custom game world but aren’t sure where to begin?
- Do you find yourself wondering if a given encounter will “fit” in your current campaign?
If so, this Q&A session is for you!
A rich, well-crafted, and consistent world that “feels” real and that invites players to interact with it in meaningful ways is a hallmark of successful and engaging modules and campaigns. In this program, we’ll explore the creation of exciting worlds where you and your players can find challenge, reward and – above all – fun!
Topics covered will include such key elements as magic and technology, flora, fauna, geology, and geography, socio-political structure, and myth, religion, and taboos.