Welcome to the precinct. The Genre Police column has been investigating crimes against tone and atmosphere in roleplaying games for years. From maintaining tension in a horror setting to capturing the kinetic energy of a superhero brawl, this archive collects every case file in one searchable location.
Use the database below to filter through the archives. You can search by genre (e.g., ‘Cyberpunk’), specific problem (e.g., ‘pacing’), or game system to find the briefing you need for your next session.
| Date ⇅ | RPG Tips Title ⇅ | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-02-24 | Genre Police: Uninvent Yourself | The "Genre Police" explores how the shared language of TTRPGs can accidentally limit our creativity when switching between roleplaying systems. |
| 2026-02-22 | Genre Police: Lost In Static | "Help! My player won't leave the inn!" We break down the four types of passive players and how to engage them without railroading. |
| 2026-02-17 | Genre Police: The 5-Step Campaign Refresh | Stuck in a rut? We revisit the five pillars of the Genre Police column - from Dials to The Self - and show you how to use them to design a unique campaign like Arcane. |
| 2025-10-30 | Genre Police: Catch It On A Re-Run | Running the same roleplaying game one-shot for different groups? It's a masterclass in GMing. Learn how re-running a scenario teaches vital skills in design, pacing, refinement, and adapting to group dynamics. |
| 2025-10-28 | Genre Police: System Expectations | Feeling bored with your regular roleplaying games? Challenge yourself as a GM. Learn to push systems to their limits, change basic rules, and mash up genres for exciting new play. |
| 2025-09-29 | Genre Police: Keeping Our Own Gates | I'm an advocate for pushing RPGS into new places and have written at least one article here over the years that in reflection got a little bit to esoteric. But I think it's important to occasionally balance the scales. So let's look at those suppositions. |
| 2025-09-28 | Genre Police: What did we learn? | Last article, I was fully on the soapbox. I talked about how you can change up your expectations of an existing system if you feel stuck in a rut, but also don't want to change the system. At the end of the article, I said I'd revisit some of the ideas to shake up the campaigns I've had over the years. |
| 2025-08-15 | Genre Police: Nega-Dungeon | Timekeep. A ruined city. Destroyed in the recent Perfection Wars, as it stands, it is a cracked fortress of once-great technological wonders. |
| 2025-08-11 | Genre Police: Rule-ing Power | Most games have mechanisms of keeping the 'balance' between the players and the GM, with most systems being weighted in favour of the players. |
| 2025-06-22 | Genre Police: Rule Of Lore | Roleplaying games are an odd beast, aren't they? Explaining one of them to someone who has no idea what one is is quite complex, because you're both explaining telling a story & playing a game at the same time. |
| 2025-06-02 | Genre Police: Mechanical Shutdown | The response floored me. 'That's not how this works, right? We failed the roll, so the information is locked off'. I was totally baffled. |
| 2025-05-29 | Genre Police: A Sense Of Place | When we look at any scene in an RPG, it is taking place somewhere. |
| 2025-05-24 | Genre Police: Big Damn Heroes | I have hit a player issue that I hadn't thought about before that actually goes back to the first ever Genre Police article I ever wrote. |
| 2025-05-18 | Genre Police: Expectation Traps | I recently had a really interesting conversation about how we differ in designing a session of a game. |
| 2025-05-10 | Genre Police: The Big Short | The classic 'white whale' of any RPG gamer's experience is the long-form campaign. |
| 2025-05-04 | Genre Police: Vampire’s End | Each of those endings taught me something about GMing that I think we can look at when we are ending the game. |
| 2025-04-12 | Genre Police: Dragon’s End | This last fortnight, I finished two massive campaigns. Both of the games have been running since 2020 and so together represent about eight years of effective play. This meant a level of pressure – a story is often only as good as its ending. |
| 2025-03-26 | Genre Police: Notes From The Field Part 2 | It's also crucial to make sure that you pace yourself in game prep. Make sure you're not overdoing it. You owe it to yourself to occasionally take a breath and make sure everything feels like you can handle it. |
| 2025-02-16 | Genre Police: Notes From The Field Part 1 | Every so often, I have a bad season and a series of game sessions that don't fire how I expect them to. |
| 2025-02-02 | Genre Police: Progress, Challenge & Growth | Ok, so let's talk about the big elephant in the room. Plot NPCs are the people who move the plot forward. |
| 2025-01-19 | Genre Police: Friends, NPCs And Countrymen | I want to talk about how using the word 'NPC' actually means a lot of things. Because each one you introduce to any RP game has an intent, role to play and ways they can expand. |
| 2025-01-12 | Genre Police: Looking Back, Over My Shoulder | While I've been recently writing about the dark in games, my newest campaign has been, in fact, running a far more whimsical experience. |
| 2025-01-03 | Genre Police: Love The One You’re With? | I was totally blindsided. I'd talked about Mage and advocated for it as a game but never pitched anything specific, compared to sitting in my kitchen as people left for a game and talking about finally running an in-person Cthulhu game. What was I to do? |
| 2024-10-13 | Genre Police: Developing A Complex | I've gone through periods of going very hard and very dark in some games, not always to the games favour. |
| 2024-08-06 | Genre Police: Warning, Content | Think of the worst thing and make it happen. Puncture arteries, shred flesh, go for the damn jugular. |
| 2024-08-04 | Genre Police: Playing The Player | Running an RPG is a kind of arcane act, weaving an illusionary spell of storytelling for a group to devour. But when we think about spellcasting, it's often easy to forget the material component of such a conjuring. |
| 2024-07-14 | Genre Police: The Cameo | You might be tempted to bring that player in to do a 'guest slot' in a game for a few sessions. Well, I think that's a great idea! However, I've been both a GM and a player when this has and hasn't worked as well as intended. |
| 2024-07-01 | Genre Police: The Adventure Is Butchered | I've watched those long-form adventures slowly destroy their desire to use written adventures of playing D&D ever again. |
| 2024-06-03 | Genre Police: The Adventure Continues | So let's examine some of the ways we can process an adventure and prep it for a specific group. |
| 2024-05-30 | Genre Police: The Adventure Begins | Since I went full professional as a GM in 2020, not including any planning time, I've been at actual tables running games with players for a rough total of 2,544 hours. |
| 2024-05-26 | Genre Police: If It Bleeds, We Can Play It | Have you ever experienced a situation where you can't shake an RPG session? |
| 2024-04-28 | Genre Police: Looking For Augusta | So, I had a long discussion about chickens. This isn't actually weird in our house given that we have chickens as pets, but this was especially odd because this particular chicken wasn't real. |
| 2024-04-14 | Genre Police: Rules Of Conduct | While some RPG sessions may thrive on unstructured character interactions, social skill dice help balance the expression of a player's character, especially when personal attributes differ from those of their in-game persona. Games like D&D simplify this with one roll, while World of Darkness offers a layered approach. However, over-mechanizing social actions can restrict the narrative, calling for periodic evaluation and ensuring that mechanics serve the game's intended exploration while allowing for character growth and varied interactions. |
| 2024-03-17 | Genre Police: Role Assumptions | Lately I have been thinking about social interactions and personal relationships in roleplaying games, which lead to an interesting discussion with some of my players. |
| 2024-03-12 | Genre Police: Friendship Is M…echanical | When we look at D&D, often a narrative about a group is about found family or how outcasts come together to trust each other. |
| 2024-02-18 | Genre Police: High Esteem | So let's take a look at how we can boost players' love of your game. |
| 2024-01-21 | Genre Police: I’m In Charge! | I want to now look at a few other ways hierarchical structures in RPG groups can sometimes cause conflict at the table. |
| 2023-12-31 | Genre Police: Who’s In Charge? | So often, a leadership position in an RPG can be a thankless task. |
| 2023-12-17 | Genre Police: Joining The Agency | One of the idioms about GMing games is about making sure your players have agency. And in basic principle this a very good idea. |
| 2023-12-11 | Genre Police: Reading The Intent | It might be obvious but I think it is worth mentioning that any roleplaying game ruleset are a 'text', much as we would look at any sort of media. |
| 2023-12-03 | Genre Police: What’s For Who | I recently had an interesting conversation about flow, and I want to share it because I think it reveals some things about RPG that we don't talk about often. |
| 2023-11-26 | Genre Police: Over The Line | Games become info dumps for new players and massive lore searches for existing players. |
| 2023-11-18 | Genre Police: The Thinimblin Line | In that moment, I understood a concept I've felt in other long-running gameworlds. We'd reached the Thinimblin line. And it made me sad. |
| 2023-10-15 | Genre Police: The People Game | I'm now looking forward to fixing my mistakes with that group – we haven't played since things got a little tense, but I know things went wrong and how I can make things better. |
| 2023-10-08 | Genre Police: Juggernaut | So, we've talked for the last couple of articles about dramatic situations and using them to generate ideas and plot, using the work of Georges Polti as the basis for our investigation. |
| 2023-09-24 | Genre Police: What’s My Motivation? | In 1895, the proto-structuralist theatre scholar Georges Polti suggested that in the making of drama, that there were really only 36 potential instigating situations that could be considered worth presenting. |
| 2023-09-16 | Genre Police: I Am The Law/Am I The Law? | Last time, we looked at GMing through a binary of 'Lawful' versus 'Chaotic', and while accepting that such a binary was an oversimplification, it was worth looking at to think about how we deliver a game. |
| 2023-07-16 | Genre Police: Aligned Playstyles | I've recently been thinking about how different GMs run a game. As someone in the community whose job is to run games and talk about games, I try to listen to many other creators and what advice they bring to the table. |
| 2023-07-10 | Genre Police: The Deaths Of The Author | Do I run them how the original creators thought about them? I certainly don't run them the way the latest owners intend them to be run. |
| 2023-06-17 | Genre Police: Seizing The Initiative | A while back now, I talked about different dying mechanics in systems and enjoyed the difference the mechanics made to how a game felt. |
| 2023-05-14 | Genre Police: Setting The Stage | I think it's important to have an idea of where the game is going at all times. |
| 2023-04-16 | Genre Police: On the Watchlist | When I mentioned to her that the Witcher and Dark Souls also fit in Grimdark, she suddenly realised what sort of game I was talking about, and it wasn't what she'd imagined. |
| 2023-03-19 | Genre Police: All Are One | Perhaps there is a moment here for a hopeful diaspora of players who don't leave the hobby but take this moment to try out new things. |
| 2023-02-26 | Genre Police: Approaching Death | So if we were to think about death and injury in our games, I'd hope we can see that there are lots of different ways to work it around. |
| 2023-02-19 | Genre Police: The Road Winds Ever Onwards | I'm going to take a moment to introduce you to my 'Blending of Shadows' campaign and show you how to evolve a game into something new while continuing to keep the throughline of the narrative. |
| 2023-01-15 | Genre Police: Evolve Or Die | I am sitting in the afterglow of a summer full of blockbuster moments in campaigns, at least one epic 'Empire Strikes Back' style campaign ending, and there are few players who are leaving for other things or shuffling which nights they play on. |
| 2022-12-27 | Genre Police: Passing Down(time) | Last article, I talked about the narrative session structure ('NSS' for short), a way of viewing a game session so you can think about pacing in a constructive way. |
| 2022-12-17 | Genre Police: Making Mistakes | I discussed decoupling narratives and how we can change and challenge stereotypes. |
| 2022-12-11 | Genre Police: Pacemaker | We've never talked about structure when it comes to the nitty gritty of a game; how to build and run a session, how to build and run a campaign. |
| 2022-11-27 | Genre Police: All Adventurers Welcome | The reason I have done this is that I want people to be able to play characters that look like themselves without resorting to stereotypes – not every person with darker skin has to be from some desert empire. |
| 2022-11-13 | Genre Police: Widescreen | Now I'd like to crank the dial the other way and up the scale to the nation and world-changing campaign. Focus on giving your campaign a sense of depth and scale. How do you make a world and story feel massive? |
| 2022-11-06 | Genre Police: Finger On The Scales | I have been running a few D&D campaigns for almost two years, and I've watched the stories we tell slowly shift upwards in their viewpoint. |
| 2022-10-09 | Genre Police: Players And Positivity | The story has stuck in my head, not only as a laughably bad example of how not to respect player agency but also as an interesting thing that can happen during games. |
| 2022-09-25 | Genre Police: Generic Police | But before we begin talking about what generic systems can offer, we have to talk about how I can serve what you are looking for. |
| 2022-09-11 | Genre Police: Un-Genre Police | I was recently asked by a reader to cover how I would approach using one game system to run a different game or setting. |
| 2022-08-15 | Genre Police: Contenders, Ready! | I have pretty much always wanted to run an arc in an RPG game that involved a fictional tournament. |
| 2022-07-02 | Genre Police: Siege Mentality | I hope that gives you an idea about a different structure of adventure/encounter to throw at your players, one that will shake up the status quo and pull your players together. |
| 2022-06-12 | Genre Police: In Defence Of The Monster | I hope it helps keep you from falling into the traps that we've come to associate with the term DMPC |
| 2022-05-29 | Genre Police: Unstoppable Evil | A few villains who might be a little more extreme in their relationships with the players. |
| 2022-05-08 | Genre Police: The Many Faces Of Evil | I hope this gives you something to think about and use in your game. Try designing a villain that fits each of these archetypes for your game, and see what you come up with! |
| 2022-04-16 | Genre Police: So Bad, It’s Good | Some villains are great because they are just out for one thing – but that thing doesn't leave room for us to continue breathing. |
| 2022-04-03 | Genre Police: Choose Your Own Adventure(s) | Last time we talked about new RPGs and how to get players to try them. But how do you even begin to work out what you want to play? |
| 2022-03-13 | Genre Police: That Difficult Second Album | You delivered a satisfying conclusion with a cathartic payoff. Now it's all over. The game is done. And you already miss it. |
| 2022-02-27 | Genre Police: Tangled Up In Blue | You have, let's say, a character who has a romantic subplot. While it's come up in play, both the player and the GM want to flesh this out. But you can't really dedicate the time to one player's date night. |
| 2022-02-13 | Genre Police: Deep Think | Roleplaying can be a really emotive, cathartic and challenging experience if you want it to be. |
| 2022-01-23 | Genre Police: World Wide Woleplay | Last article, we looked at a model of a shared roleplaying world. I talked about each of the seven groups I had playing campaigns that affected that shared, or 'living' world and examined the way I had chosen to weave the groups into each other. |
| 2022-01-02 | Genre Police: Life Map | This is an example of a living world. Which is the model presented above. A game world that is affected by several play groups and the knock-on effect of actions in one game, change those in others. |
| 2021-12-26 | Genre Police: Parallel Play | Sometimes, roleplaying games can become very focused on the heroes. |
| 2021-12-19 | Genre Police: Zero To Hero | What's session zero? The GM gathers a group and informs them about the game; you discuss expectations and characters. Where did it come from? |
| 2021-11-21 | Genre Police: Strange Brew | We've finally got to the point of my articles about universal terminology in the RPG community, where we need to talk about the term 'homebrew'. |
| 2021-11-06 | Genre Police: Too Cool For School | Ok, this is maybe the most frustrating thing I have encountered as a player. |
| 2021-10-24 | Genre Police: Not The Destination, but the journey | So you have a group of wandering heroes. They need to get from a village in a woodland to the far north, an orcish settlement surrounded by ice and snow, to see if they can treat with the leader of the clan. |
| 2021-09-18 | Genre Police: Sand in the Eyes | You thought you were ready. You'd planned a series of twenty or so hooks in the city. A massive hotbed of intrigue and factions. Session three, the players leave the city because they've angered the law and never look back. You have to improv in the wilderness. None of it sounds as good as the city would have done. |
| 2021-08-29 | Genre Police: Staying On Track | In reality, some of the comfort of certain games comes from their predictability. |
| 2021-08-01 | Genre Police: Wangrods and Warriors | I think 'The Wangrod Defence' is the perfect example of what happens when we refuse to view the meta. |
| 2021-07-25 | Genre Police: Meta-Lurgy | Meta. The term is mentioned a lot in D&D circles. When someone does something outside of what their character knows, people roll their eyes and say 'uhh..meta'. |
| 2021-07-11 | Genre Police: Keep On Marching | When you begin a West Marches game, it's worth thinking about your player base. |
| 2021-06-20 | Genre Police: Towards a shared language | People had been using words in game with each other and only sort of even been in the same ballpark. |
| 2021-05-23 | Genre Police: Just the Two of Us | This changes the dynamic instantly, altering our attitude, throwing us into conflict, one against the other for dominance, where before there had been a shared story. |
| 2021-05-09 | Genre Police: Dialling Back In | Some people I know are really good at handling massive player groups and making sure people have a great time. |
| 2021-04-18 | Genre Police: Storming The Dungeon | Ever notice that the dynamics of your campaign can change? |
| 2021-04-04 | Genre Police: Player Roles | While it is useful to recognise those skillsets and use them to add extra elements to your game, it is easy to overlook the other skill set that people bring to your table: social roles. |
| 2021-03-20 | Genre Police: The Resource That Talks | Players are maybe the best hidden resource the Role playing game format has. |
| 2021-03-07 | Genre Police: Risk assessment | We've been discussing safety for a while now, and while it pains me to say it, it is likely that at some point, there will be a moment when a game goes somewhere you didn't expect, or you make a mistake about safety. |
| 2021-02-14 | Genre Police: Stay safe | During the conversation, the player said to me 'you know, looking back, I realise I wasn't really comfortable with some stuff in the game'. Even though most of it was related to a single players actions, that was hard to hear. |
| 2021-01-31 | Genre Police: Safety Dance | So what can we conclude about safety tools? They are a necessary element, but they need to come as part of a more holistic approach that involves making the table a safe space for all to play. |
| 2021-01-24 | Genre Police: Working From The Same Playbook | This time we're going to look at a mechanic that changed the way I look at the process of character creation: the playbook. |
| 2021-01-17 | Genre Police: Creation Stories | The process of character creation is a framing device. It shows us as players what the game cares about, how we are supposed to navigate it and what is likely to be important going forward. |
| 2021-01-10 | Genre Police: Bring Me the Horizon | This article is about one of D&D three pillars. The previous articles, an introduction, combat and social pillars. |
| 2020-12-13 | Genre Police: The Social Dilemma | I'd posit that while social interaction is often the most thrilling or engaging part most RPG games, it's maybe a difficult master to serve. |
| 2020-11-21 | Genre Police: Combative Behaviour | The clash of weapons, the thudding of bodies into each other, the split second moments where it can get totally out of hand, the variations of wounds. |
| 2020-11-15 | Genre Police: Benji Vs The D | It's time to talk about D&D. |
| 2020-11-01 | Genre Police: Character Study | When you have a small number of players who want to tell a slightly bigger story or a small group but lots of ideas, you can create a situation where people play more than one character. |
| 2020-10-11 | Genre Police: Take The Power Back | Let's talk about control for a minute. Any time one person has a kind of control over another, there's a power imbalance. This is constantly true about RPGs. |
| 2020-09-26 | Genre Police: Elsa Was Right | The heart of most RPG is a collaborative effort dictated by a conversation. The programming loop of most games is 'player dictates own narrative, makes check, GM describes narrative until they are prepared to give it up, then they hand narrative back to players', and it can seem jarring to deviate from that. |
| 2020-09-07 | Genre Police: One More Time | You should always make sure that any session you design with time travel in mind should have a planned structure – a focused view rather than a wide angle. |
| 2020-08-23 | Genre Police: Time After Time | These notes are for anyone wanting to use time travel as an adventure option but also to people who are planning a whole weird campaign where the point is to get lost in the river of time. |
| 2020-08-02 | Genre Police: Time Stand Still | RPG tips on how and why speeding up, slowing down or even cutting up the flow of time can make you a better Game Master. |
| 2020-07-19 | Genre Police: Deep Time | If you've ever said 'And we skip to the next morning', you've moved the time dial up for a moment then put it back. |
| 2020-07-06 | Genre Police: The Quickie | When we talk about the third dial of game structure – Duration – perhaps we should just pause and understand that often, this dial is dictated by people's lives. |
| 2020-06-21 | Genre Police: Going the Distance | It's a format I have barely ever heard discussed: The Long Weekend Game. |
| 2020-06-01 | Genre Police: Coming Up Short | One Shots are difficult. This is not the game on easy mode, if anyone has lead you to believe that, they've lied to you. |
| 2020-05-17 | Genre Police: The Long Game | In this RPG tips article, we look at the role of longevity in campaigns; its merits, flaws and what to do about them. |
| 2020-05-03 | Genre Police: Serial Killer | We look at continuity in this series of practical take-home tips to write and run better roleplaying campaigns. |
| 2020-04-19 | Genre Police: Please, Continue | If the players really remember something and react to it, use that, because then they will do the work for you. |
| 2020-04-05 | Genre Police: A Structured Argument | If you are a GM, you probably think about structure a lot without even trying – balancing combat, intelligence challenging & social encounters, making sure you check the clock to deliver a good cliffhanger, that sort of thing. |
| 2020-03-07 | Genre Police: Filling in your blank canvas | Tips from GM Ben and the genre police on how to best use and get inspiration from art in your tabletop RPGs. |
| 2020-02-23 | Genre Police: Dropping the ‘TT’ | How often do we investigate the medium of space in our games? |
| 2020-02-09 | Genre Police: Let’s Get Physical | When portraying any character in the game world, it's possible to use physicality to portray emotion and subtext in what a character is saying. |
| 2020-01-19 | Genre Police: The Beat Goes On | Here's how the thoughtful use of music can make your tabletop games better and more memorable. |
| 2020-01-05 | Genre Police: Out of the Box Thinking | There's a whole host of ideas buried in the structure of various games that can be adapted. |
| 2019-12-22 | Genre Police: Remembering the G | We sometimes forget that RP comes with a G at the end, that part of its structure and medium is that it is a GAME. |
| 2019-12-09 | Genre Police: When In Rome… Steal From this column! | For a minute, let's just stop. We've come a long way together. If you have read Genre Police from the very beginning, then when the... |
| 2019-11-16 | Genre Police: It Came From The Cinema Screen! | While at the time B-Movies were often viewed as a lesser form of entertainment, it's clear now that once they escaped the cycle of continuous western stories, they became a breeding ground for experimental and new types of storytelling and theatre. |
| 2019-11-10 | Genre Police: The Truth Is Out There… Somewhere | While we now have a world where both surveillance and sousveillance technology has openly revealed the flaws of those in power but, paradoxically, every piece of data is seen as a clue to a greater conspiracy. |
| 2019-10-20 | Genre Police: The Flasher In the Jitty | The genre police take a look at urban myths and how to spin an RPG out from them. |
| 2019-10-06 | Genre Police: Horror Redux – Revenge of the sub-genres | So, follow me into a jagged history of blending the lines between reality and fiction. |
| 2019-09-07 | Genre Police: It’s Thriller Time | It's like something is lurking hidden, underneath, ready to come to the fore. If we look for it, will we ever stop being able to know the truth? |
| 2019-08-24 | Genre Police: It’s A Disaster | The Genre Police take a look at disaster movies and what we as roleplayers can learn from them. |
| 2019-08-11 | Genre Police: We’re All Out Of Bubblegum | But let's be honest, sometimes you just wanna blow stuff up and fight all the enemies in widescreen sprawling combats that define your character as a complete and total ass-kicker. |
| 2019-07-28 | Genre Police: No Am, All Dram | Given that the emergent style in modern RPGs is a heavily character driven adventures based on flaws, goals and other quirks it amazes me that we haven't talked about how we go about aiding players and what we can do to avoid tipping into the lair of the deadly Melodrama. |
| 2019-07-14 | Genre Police: This Water Is Not Window | These techniques are made to generate ideas outside of your normal scope and can be really good if you feel you're stuck in a rut with the same ideas surfacing all the time. |
| 2019-06-30 | Genre Police: Sir, Reality | 'That session was pretty surreal' is a term that gets thrown around a lot in our games. |
| 2019-06-16 | Genre Police: Party Like It’s 1984 | Dystopian fiction is often seen as a reaction to current trends. So can that have meaning inside the context of RPGs? |
| 2019-06-01 | Genre Police: RP in the High Castle | So, what do you need to do to present an alternate historical universe? Here are some pointers for the genre. |
| 2019-05-19 | Genre Police: Once More Unto The Breach | The problem arises when we as GM's begin to think about putting out own stamp on a game. |
| 2019-05-05 | Genre Police: The (Role)play’s The Thing | Comedy in is perhaps the hardest genre to bring to a tabletop game. |
| 2019-04-21 | Genre Police: Is this a DM I see before me? | When I look back on my RPG experience, I find that most of my favourite moments come when the heroic narrative is upended – a moment when we realised a long D&D campaign was going to end with the cost of victory being too high. |
| 2019-04-07 | Genre Police: Sonnets & Sorcerers | We need to talk about how cool Shakespeare was. |
| 2019-03-24 | Genre Police: A Different Kind Of Fantasy | Here's a few games you might want to try in order to flex your romance muscles... |
| 2019-03-16 | Genre Police: Drugs & Dystopias | Teen tales evolved from The Outsiders, through X-Men and Sweet Valley High to The Hunger Games becoming very different to its origins through several decades. In that time, its become one of the most beloved and (simultaneously) hated genres of the last decade. |
| 2019-02-25 | Genre Police: The Kids Are All Right | The 'Kids On Bikes' genre has really taken off recently. |
| 2019-02-16 | Genre Police: Power Word: R.K.O | Before we begin, do me a favour: name a medium that has its own genre conventions and mythology. It also has magic items everyone wants,... |
| 2019-01-27 | Genre Police: Literary Genie-Us | The original One Thousand And One Nights shows a great number of literary tropes that we use and understand as part of today's literary structures and you can see at least parallels in some pillars of western literature, like The Canterbury Tales. |
| 2019-01-06 | Genre Police: How Grim To Grimm? | It can feel at once mischievous and a throwback to what is viewed as the 'original stories'. But do we lose anything when we veer away from the recognised trope set? |
| 2018-12-22 | Genre Police: Nowt As Strange As Folk | Let's talk about what we're actually doing when we play a roleplaying game for a minute. |
| 2018-12-08 | Genre Police: I Believe In Father Christmas | No one knows when it began, but each year, a battle is joined over an ancient question, one that can never be answered. Scholars lock... |
| 2018-11-25 | Genre Police: Actual Police | So it's taken us a year to get to it, but genre police is going to finally look at the genre that inspired its name.... |
| 2018-11-11 | Genre Police: The Spy Who Critted Me | Espionage is an instantly recognisable genre. Due to its very clearly defined tropes, everyone can remake a spy movie - just think about it now,... |
| 2018-11-04 | Genre Police: Where DM’s dare | The War genre is widely variable. Depending on nation creating the media, the level of patriotism acceptable in the cultural environment and the directors intent,... |
| 2018-10-27 | Genre Police: Pouches & Punishment! | If you were researching comics history and you asked Wikipedia for its opinion, you'd see posits that the publication of Watchmen creates a modern, more... |
| 2018-09-27 | Genre Police: A Change Is Gonna Come | Mostly when I write a genre police story, I begin by picking the genre and then discussing the issues around the context and creation of... |
| 2018-09-09 | Genre Police: Look, Up In The Sky! | Is it a bird, is it a plane? No! It's the wonderful world of superheroes. Easy to discuss Supers, just check out Captain America, right?... |
| 2018-08-27 | Genre Police: Pulp Fiction(s)? | So, Pulp. I've left this one off for a long while because I think we needed to discuss a few of the other genres to... |
| 2018-08-12 | Genre Police: Trenchcoats & Tragedy | I know you've put the trenchcoat away since we did Gothpunk but it's time to get it out again. Put it back on, find a... |
| 2018-07-29 | Genre Police: You Call it Wuxia, I call it Wushu | From a western perspective, Wuxia and the Samurai genre can be very easy to blend together. In reality, though, Wuxia is a different beast. It... |
| 2018-07-17 | Genre Police: Eventually We Had To Mention Katanas | The Samurai is now culturally everywhere. Most western geeks understand the concept of Bushido code and can happily argue the difference between wakishai and a... |
| 2018-06-17 | Genre Police: The Only Good Pirate Is A Fake Pirate | Hoist the mainsail! Stow the booty! Set Sail For Outer shores! And while we're at it, make sure we paint over anything that might make... |
| 2018-06-10 | Genre Police: The Sum Of All Fears | It's far too late, far far too late to do anything about it. The end is not nigh, it's been and gone. All that remains... |
| 2018-06-04 | Genre Police: Taking Up Space? | Okay....this is gonna be a difficult one. It's gonna really be a column about how we can't do a column that turns into a column.... |
| 2018-05-27 | Genre Police: Showdown At High Noon | Many of you might be wondering why I'm even bothering with the Western. Nowadays it's viewed as a diminishing corner genre. When you say 'Western'... |
| 2018-05-13 | Genre Police: Crafted By Love | Yes. You Guessed it. It's the Obligatory Cthulhu Column. Or 'Cosmic Horror' if you will. The genre owes a great deal to Lovecraft's original creations,... |
| 2018-04-25 | Genre Police: Blogpost Of Vile Darkness | Splatterpunk horror is a title that tends to set eyes rolling. Viewed as the lowest form of horror, splatterpunk lives up to its name. The... |
| 2018-03-11 | Genre Police: Oh The Horror! | Over the next few columns we are going to be diving into Horror. While we've looked at topics that have bordered the genre before, we... |
| 2018-02-25 | Genre Police: Gothpunk: The Learnering | When we suffix -punk to a word and create a genre, often it's about a scientific development and it's effect on the individual or the... |
| 2018-02-19 | Genre Police: Getting Steamy | Now, calm down. It's not as bad as you think. Last time, we took a look at the Cyberpunk genre. Since its inception, it has... |
| 2018-02-11 | Genre Police: The Mother Of All Punks! | Hi guys, welcome back to genre police. Now we're done looking at fantasy, we're going to deal with a different section genre you can smash... |
| 2018-01-28 | Genre Police: More Than Just Semi-Nudes – Sword & Sorcery | Welcome to back Genre Police, a series of articles where I take a look at a genre or sub-genre, how it has been handled in... |
| 2018-01-21 | Genre Police: Alienating half my readership by choosing High Fantasy! | Welcome to back Genre police, a new series of articles where I take a look at a genre or sub-genre, how it has been handled... |
| 2018-01-07 | Genre Police: Down And Dirty With Grimdark | Welcome to back Genre police, a new series of articles where I take a look at a genre or sub-genre, how it has been handled... |
| 2018-01-02 | Genre Police: Go Mythic, Or Go Home! | Welcome to Genre Police, a new series of articles where taking a look at a genre or sub-genre, how it has been handled in gaming... |
Showing 0 cases
Case Closed? The archives are constantly updating as new evidence comes to light. If you have a GMing problem that requires immediate investigation, or if you disagree with the findings of a previous case, leave a report in the comments.
If you know a Games Master struggling to make their campaign feel authentic to the genre, slide this dossier across the table to them. It might just save their game.
Creative Commons credit: Library of Ruins by Seamewtime.
