This image composites three components: Man reading a book image by Capri23auto, Stonehenge image by 10727361, and Bookshelves image by Gerd Altmann, all from Pixabay; shadows, compositing, and other editing by Mike.

Information Dumps, better known as Infodumps, are a necessary evil in every RPG from time to time. Creating and delivering one is a little like trying to feed vegetables to a child – you get the occasional good experience but it’s more often an uphill struggle.

I describe them as a necessary evil because they trap the GM between giving the players all the information their characters might know and use as the basis of a decision while cloaking that information in massive amounts of info that they don’t use and therefore don’t need – but it’s impossible to know what the status of any given fact will be in advance, so you have to deliver them all. And that can make them incredibly boring, as the GM drones on and on and on and…

Creating them represents a massive effort on the part of the GM in deciding what the facts and the story actually are, but this is a task that can’t be avoided – or, more accurately, it shouldn’t be.

The reason is that it’s a lot easier to be consistent, and to avoid accidentally repeating yourself, if you do most of the work at the same time. You may be able to defer some of the final polishing, but more than that is unwise.

“May you be cursed to deliver regular infodumps” doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually one of the nastiest things you can wish on another GM.

Having said that, there are ways to take the sting out of the Infodump. 15 of them, in fact. And then a 16th technique to be the icing on this particular cake. No one of these techniques will completely solve the problem, and there are times when none of them are appropriate, so they are not a panacea – but in eighty or ninety percent of cases, in combination, they can relieve 80 to 90 per cent of the difficulties.

As usual, I like to present a table of contents, a road-map to the content to come, so let’s do that first:

  1. Change & Uncertainty
  2. An infodump is only as good as its source
  3. Personality & Interaction, not a lecture
  4. Non-Critical Flashbacks
  5. Descriptive Narrative Inserts
  6. Infodump Deferred
  7. Regional Festivals
  8. Visions & Memorials
  9. Relics Of Yesteryear
  10. Legacies In Culture
  11. Legacies In Architecture
  12. Sneaky Advances
  13. Talkative Villains
  14. A Little Light Reading
  15. Actual Infodumps
  16. Put Back Some Of What You Take

That’s quite a long list, so I can’t afford to spend too much time on any one of them. Ironically, this particular infodump suffers from the same problems as any other!

So let’s get busy.

1. Change & Uncertainty

Change and Uncertainty transform an infodump into discovery and adventure. There is, after all, no value in spending time reciting information if it has been rendered irrelevant.

The worst possible situation is one in which the PCs are in no position to know that a situation has changed, because that necessitates your spending time creating, and delivering, a substantial tract of text that you know will be completely irrelevant – but you can’t let the players know that because it could influence their decisions in an unrealistic way.

Better by far to find some reason to tell them that the available information is out of date and unreliable than to waste many times as much time in creating that irrelevant information.

2. An infodump is only as good as its source

Where did the person presenting the infodump in-game get his information? if it’s unreliable, it’s far better from a gaming perspective to simply tell the players “X tells you his sources are so unreliable that telling you what he thinks he knows is more likely to mislead than be worthwhile.” This doesn’t have to be applied to the whole briefing – it can apply to a small but important part, a large part, a couple of large parts, or to the whole.

The key objective is to avoid repetition – and that includes repetition in terms of gathering intelligence ‘in the field’. So present the part that’s going to be the most boring to learn ‘the hard way’ as an infodump, and present the parts that can be made interesting, in some other form.

3. Personality & Interaction, not a lecture

Presentation is important in any public address, but perhaps even more important when reciting dry facts. To convince you of that, here’s a string of events that occurred in a random time frame – try reading it aloud.

    1973, January: Israeli fighters shoot down 13 Syrian MIG-21s, triggering hostilities.
    1973, January: Fighting erupts along the Suez Canal between Egypt and Israel.
    1973, January 1: The UK, Ireland, and Denmark enter the EEC.
    1973, January 1: CBS sells the New York Yankees for 3.2 million less than they paid to purchase the team.
    1973, January 2: Eleazor Lopez Contrares, 45th President of Venezuela, dies.
    1973, January 14: The worldwide Telecast of a concert in Hawaii by Elvis Presley becomes the first TV program to be watched by more people than the Moon Landing.
    1973, January 14: The Miami Dolphins become the first and only team in NFL history to record a perfect season.
    1973, January 15: Nixon announces the suspension of offensive actions in Vietnam.
    1973, January 17: Ferdinand Marcos becomes President For Life of the Philippines.

I could continue, but that should be ample demonstration. When reading to yourself, you can skim over or abbreviate the dates, and any events that don’t seem relevant; reading aloud, you have much less scope for doing so. The result is a dreary tedium only partially relieved by interest in any specific content. And, if it’s boring to read, consider how much more boring it would be to listen to it! Now picture yourself reciting multiple pages of such material!

The ideal roleplaying is between an NPC, imparting the information, and a PC, receiving it – personal interactions overlaying and overlapping the content may slow the delivery (but you can compensate by deliberately compressing and editing the information into a narrative). But you often can’t rely on that because one of the two parties is not under the control of the GM.

Certainly, you can provoke some interactions with personal commentary by deliberately playing to the PC’s personality / interests, but these are often brief, even terse.

No, if you want depth of interaction, NPC-to-NPC with one or more PCs as interested onlookers being dragged into the situation (in the middle of what is supposed to be the PCs briefing) is a far better way to go. And that permits you to interrupt the briefing with stimulating events that make the infodump process more interesting.

Rivalries, personal contests, personalities, secrets, surprises, antagonisms, side-conversations, interruptions, and revelations – I used all of these and more to keep the players entertained during the big infodump described in Synopsis, Session 2 (from Session 3) in A Long Road Pt 1 last year. I stopped short of dancing girls, but if you can find a way to work them in, go for it!

Because the more you can pad an infodump with interactions, the more interesting it will be – even though it will take longer to get through in terms of playing time.

Dress up your infodumps with interactions!

4. Non-Critical Flashbacks

A lot of information contained within infodumps is not relevant until later. The temptation is to present that at the start, as described earlier, but there’s a lot to be said for extracting all of that information and providing it in flashback form when it’s about to become relevant. This can be achieved simply by replacing the content in the infodump with a general phrase from the third person perspective: “Nathora describes the route and what he thinks you will encounter in long and tedious detail, working from prepared notes. When he’s finished, he hands over the notes for you to take with you as a reminder. He then continues,….”

This does not work well when there’s a major decision or planning of some sort required, though that can also be deferred until the branch point is reached, so it’s only if the decision has immediate impact that this approach doesn’t apply.

An infodump in small doses is a lot more tolerable than a huge one that won’t be relevant for many game sessions.

In fact, an awful lot of content in an infodump can often be extracted and delivered in a different manner. Rather than a solid wall of text, treat it as a jigsaw puzzle, in which some pieces don’t even have to be revealed until later in the adventure. That principle underpins many of the techniques that I am offering in this article.

5. Descriptive Narrative Inserts

This is possibly the hardest technique to employ, because of its limited utility, but some information can be extracted from an infodump and inserted into a narrative description at the point where it’s going to be relevant.

For example,

    “Climbing the hill, the valley of Sanichio is revealed before you. This place is notorious throughout the three Kingdoms as a place of lawlessness and banditry…” and you then launch into a pocket history of the place.

This not only gives you a vector for the injection of information that “everyone knows” but that has never been mentioned to the players before, it gives you a tool for imparting additional content and depth within your narrative – a win-win, if used correctly!

6. Infodump Deferred

Instead of telling them everything in the infodump, the NPC giving the briefing directs the PCs to look up a particular NPC in a particular place en route who will have more recent / better information to impart. This extracts part of the infodump and turns it, at least partially, into a roleplaying encounter.

This can be enhanced by thinking of the NPC to whom the PCs have been directed as something more than a parrot for the information extracted from the infodump. Treat them as a character with their own circumstances, foibles, and problems, into which the PCs are injecting themselves. They may be cooperative or may need to be coerced. They may be neck-deep in trouble and need to be rescued before they can spare the time to tell the PCs what they want to know.

This takes the infodump and turns it into a vehicle for side-plots and adventure and roleplaying. Talk about transforming a liability into an asset!

7. Regional Festivals

Consider this:

    “As you ride into Xahavin, banners are being erected and doors and windows decorated, mostly with red balls – some woolen, some glass, some ceramic. The banner tells you that this weekend is the 214th annual Fire Festival. On one side of the central plaza, a stage is being erected for a puppet-show, and benches positioned to serve as seating. Either the village is a lot larger than it appears, or practically the entire population is expected to be in attendance…”

With a buildup like that, it’s only natural to ask a bystander – just some random stranger – what the Fire Festival is all about.

    “Why, that commemorates the day the ball of fire came down from the heavens and threatened to incinerate the town, only to be driven off by the great hero Name-drop,” comes the answer. “There are re-enactments of the battles, religious services, and it culminates in a feast followed by a drunken celebration of life itself.”

A regional festival or day of commemoration or anything along those lines can be used as a vector for local history. And that’s extremely preferable to simply telling the story in an infodump – it transforms that piece of infodump into an experience with interaction. Local History brought to life!

Of course, the person whose name gets dropped has to be relevant to the current adventure.

But the benefits of this approach don’t end there – you also get to distinguish a community and it’s social practices and make it all more than just a place on the map.

8. Visions & Memorials

I don’t know how many readers watched Star Trek: Voyager. In one episode, the crew are affected by a memorial to a past conflict that is malfunctioning, imparting the experience of living through the conflict – the personalities of the participants, the mistakes made, and so on. At first, when they figure out what is going on and why several of the crew have been traumatized, they contemplate shutting it down – but decide instead that the experience was so profound that they should repair it and place a buoy in orbit to forewarn visitors of what to expect.

Why not take that idea and adapt it? “Some deeds are so dark and terrible that the memory of them lingers on in the places where they took place as Visions of the past, visions with which the participants can interact – not as themselves, but in the role of one of the key characters in the story.”

If that’s a little too extreme for you, simply erect a memorial with a brief notation on a brass plaque. In the next community they come to, the specifics on the plaque give the players a specific incident to ask the locals about. The infodump becomes a source of interaction between the locals and the PCs.

9. Relics Of Yesteryear

    “Legend has it that a great battle was fought in the vicinity of Thizzelwood long ago, as an army of light confronted a patrol of Evil, but I’ve never investigated the specifics.”

This is just a bit of color in the infodump, but it becomes significant when the PCs approach Thizzelwood and one finds a rusty old blade marked with High Devorica runes in some underbrush. As a weapon, the find is worthless, but as a tangible clue to the (potentially relevant) history of the area, priceless.

It’s yet another technique for taking history out of the infodump and placing it in the PCs path.

10. Legacies In Culture

Of course, almost anything can serve the same purpose. You can hide key parts of the history in Tapestries, Paintings, Folk Art, Folk Songs, and Local Legends. At their simplest, these can simply trigger a piece of deferred infodump – at their most complex, they can shed fresh light on past events and even throw plot twists into a story.

Of course, the locals won’t have it right every time, so those plot twists may just be the result of misinterpretations of events – but even a short-lived episode of thinking that they may have signed up to the wrong side in a conflict can drop the bottom out of PC complacency.

How much soup to make out of the bones presented in 9 and 10 is up to you. Don’t do the same thing every time!

11. Legacies In Architecture

    “The lintel of the great stone gate catches your attention, [name of party member with high Architecture knowledge] Only the Elves of Deeping Down used that particular technique, but they vanished without trace centuries ago – and there’s never been any mention of Elves in these lands.”

This small snippet not only intrigues, it tells the players (if they are paying attention) that knowledge skills have practical value in the campaign, and that various cultures in this game world have architectural distinctiveness that can sometimes provide a useful clue. There’s not only a mini-mystery dropped into the players’ laps by this inclusion, but if their main adventure should happen to involve Elves in some fashion….

12. Sneaky Advances

If you are sufficiently ahead of the game with your prep, you can sometimes sneak some of your future infodump into an earlier adventure. You run the risk that the information will be forgotten by the time you actually need for the PCs to remember it, but it generally takes a lot less to remind them of things already learned than to impart the education in the first place.

It’s even more likely to stick if you can somehow make the excerpt from your planned infodump relevant to the earlier adventure somehow. For example, making it part of the ‘reward’ earned tells the players that this is going to be important, even if the PCs don’t appreciate the significance at the time.

A variation on this technique is to actually create an encounter or an adventure for the express purpose of delivering, in an interesting and adventure-relevant way, information that you would otherwise have to dump on the PCs at some later point. But that takes a LOT of careful planning – you actually need to plan out the adventure that is supposed to contain the infodump AND write the infodump itself, before you start work on the “extra” adventure or encounter.

13. Talkative Villains

One of the problems with infodumps can be that they let the cat out of the bag too early. Saving a revelation or two for the monologuing of an over-talkative villain eliminates that. If there’s anything in the adventure that could be anticlimactic because of an infodump, seriously consider this approach, or some variation. You can even arrange for the villain to win a first battle with the PCs, leading to them being captured and thrown into the villain’s dungeon, where a fellow prisoner gives them the last piece of the puzzle of how to defeat the villain!

14. A Little Light Reading

I’ve done this on a grand scale with the Elves And Orcs series here at Campaign Mastery. In essence, it gives the players a handout (real or virtual) to read in advance, comprising part or all of the infodump.

Telling the players the significance at the time makes it more likely that the document will be read. Refusing point-blank to revisit it in game-time further reinforces that likelihood.

The utility of this technique depends on the personalities of your players. But it can be a useful tool to have in your pocket.

15. Actual Infodumps

If you take everything that you can present in some other form out of the infodump and insert it elsewhere in the adventure, you will naturally be left with a residuum that cannot be delivered in any other way, and that is critical to immediate decisions by the party. You can’t fully avoid infodumps; there are times where they are the best choice. That’s where the tips on restructuring the infodump to make it more appealing have maximum value.

16. Put Back Some Of What You Take

My “bonus tip” is this: put back some of what you have taken out – but twist it, layer in some doubt or uncertainty or absolute falsehood (unintended or deliberate). Distort things a bit – then let the players discover the true story through one of the alternative techniques. The game world immediately becomes richer and more complex as a result, and your ‘expert’ NPCs gain a little tarnish and realism – never a bad thing.

Parting Wisdom

The subtitle of Campaign Mastery stems from my decades of experience as a GM, but that doesn’t mean that I get infodumps right every time. It does mean that I’ve learned from those experiences, however. See, for example My greatest mistakes: Information Overload In The Z3 Campaign.

It can be enlightening to review the massive 3-part article referred to earlier, A Long Road, to see several of these techniques in action. As much as possible, information has not been provided until just before it becomes relevant (or even just after, in the case of the Rheezok). What infodump remained was critical to decisions being made in advance of the action. A local guide was provided to give the PCs additional information when it became relevant. Key parts of the adventure related to establishing his credibility in the eyes of the PCs. He went from ‘hired expert’ to ‘road companion’ to ‘trusted guide’ to ‘friend and ally’ over the course of the adventure.

I build campaign elements for the long haul. Always have, always will (even if I haven’t decided how they will fit in at the time). That’s both a blessing and a curse when it comes to infodumps – it makes them bigger and more complex, and more essential. There are large parts of The Tangled Web that could have been hand-waved – the entire trip through Brazil, for example – but if you cut everything out except what’s immediately relevant, you also cut out a lot of the fun and life. At this point, with the PCs deep into the road trip phase of the Adventure, they have had enough options presented that at any moment the players could decide to pull the plug and make The Big Choice. So while the search for a new Base Of Operations remains the theoretical objective, from this point on, the real significance is putting additional pieces of the game world on display. Fun encounters are planned, so I hope the players don’t pull that plug. But the original purpose of what they are doing has been achieved, and what remains simply uses that as a framing device.

But it’s all about presenting the players with information – in the most entertaining ways possible.

The Key to success with infodumps is to turn them into something else as much as possible – get as much content OUT of that info-dump as you possibly can, then use it to your advantage. Who knows? Get successful enough at it, and infosumps might even become your favorite campaign tool. Stranger things have happened (just don’t ask me when)!


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