TTRPG Game Masters:
Hone your craft by teaching and learning in a community of experienced GMs.
Brainstorm ideas, share advice on crafting narrative and designing mechanics, and run and play games in live weekly community events.
About the Community
The Game Master Laboratory is a private group of experienced GMs that chat and meet regularly to improve their game-running skills. It's aimed at beginner, intermediate, and experienced Game Masters who are looking for a space to deliberately practice their craft.
We believe the best way to become a better GM is to "engage the field": to actually go try out the ideas you have for encounters, narratives, mechanics, and scenes with real players.
The GML provides a place for Game Masters to do that by:
Running and playing in each other's encounters
Seeking and giving advice about running their games
Brainstorming publicly with other storytellers
Adapting great ideas shared between members
Discussing the craft of running the game
What's Inside
A forum-style discussion board where members post and chat about running games
A learning area where we (your hosts! see below) put all the resources we create for "proactive roleplaying", plus video walkthroughs of how to use them.
A calendar of live events hosted in the community weekly where members run and play in each other's encounters
(When we finish our video course on proactive roleplaying, that will live inside this community, too!)
GML is a free community, but members are expected to participate in discussion and encouraged to participate in events.
For members interested in implementing proactive roleplaying at their own tables, we periodically offer an optional paid live workshop where we guide a small group through converting their campaign to this style (or writing a new one!).
About Your Hosts
Jonah & Tristan Fishel, authors of
The Game Master's Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying
We're Jonah and Tristan Fishel, long-time brothers and long-time Game Masters for many systems. We're on a mission to change the way people play tabletop RPGs by:
Making the Game Master a participant who discovers the story along with the other players, instead of being separated from them
Teaching a game prep system that puts the players in the driver's seat of the plot
Providing easy-to-use resources, organizing tools, philosophies, and game content for Game Masters in any system
That's the power of the way we like to run games, which we call...
"proactive roleplaying".
... it's a way to design a game backwards from the way everyone else does it. And we think you'll be shocked by the creativity and surprise it brings to your table.
