Campaign Mastery

Characters In General

• A Campaign Mastery 750th-post Celebration includes advice from a host of GMs on just about every subject as the climax of the party (and some from stragglers in the comments). So I’m listing it at the start of each page, as well as a handful of places where specific content warrants inclusion.
• ‘I Can Do That’ – Everyman Skills For Pulp – After (briefly) explaining the skills system within Hero Games’ Champions Fifth Edition, I look at the everyman skills that we give the PCs (and NPCs) in our Pulp Campaign, provide some additional rules relating to their use, then expand on the concept of Everyman Skills to adapt the principle to other game systems, like D&D/Pathfinder.
• The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity – I describe in detail the concepts and processes involved in one of my most useful creative tools. What makes this technique so powerful is a method of free association that is especially capable of direction and stepwise refinement. In effect, you shake ideas loose and then shape them into useful constructions. There are two primary uses for the tool: reinventing old content that has reached its use-by date, and inventing new game content. The list of subjects to which the tool has been applied also determined where in the blogdex this article should be listed: Characterization, PCs, NPCs, Villains, Races, Societies, Character Classes, Theologies, Organizations, Deities, Plots, Subplots, and Plot Threads. At the end of the article, I briefly review Fantasy Coins’ Kickstarter campaign for their Treasure Chests, which continued the trend of mostly backing winners.

Characterization

• The Hidden Key: Resolutions as a window to personality – I ponder the question “Why do people make the same New Year’s Resolutions year after year?” and discover a new tool for exploring a character’s personality.
• Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2 – Part two continues sketching in the background to the Orcs and Elves plotline. This begins describing the key characters, along the way giving the backgrounds and histories of their races within the campaign, covering Elves, Drow, Ogres, Dwarves, and Halflings. I give away lots of freebies from the campaign in the process. There’s also some material about these racial languages, including some key terms and their meanings.
• Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3 – Taking up where the previous article left off, this article describes Orcs, a new race (Dwarvlings), a new character class (The Fated, a reinvention from the ground up of an idea from The Planar Handbook [D&D 3.0]), another new race (The Verdonne), Humans in Fumanor, and a new variant character class (The Paladins Of Thumâin). Includes a little content on Orcish Names.
• Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 – The final preparatory piece of the series points out that each of the PCs has a personal quest in the campaign (and lists them) – something that the players themselves would only peripherally have been aware of. There’s also a demonstration of how a common cultural foundation can unify the look-and-feel of a place during the introduction to and adventures within, The Golden Empire.
• Creating Alien Characters: Expanding the ‘Create A Character Clinic’ To Non-Humans – I extend Holly Lisle’s e-book course in character creation, the Create A Character Clinic, to cover the creation of Alien Races, twisting the central concepts of Dwarves in entirely new directions as an example. And touch on some others.
• Taking everyman skills to the next level: The Absence of an Alibi – I start with the concept of Everyman Skills and evolve a tool for the characterization of individuals that often yields surprising results.
• A Good Name Is Hard To Find – The first article in the series of the same name discusses why good character names are important and offers a bucketload of advice on what to do and what not to do when choosing one.
• The Wellspring of Euonyms – The second part of the series A Good Name Is Hard To Find introduces the concept of Name Seeds, a symbolic distillation of a character that can form the foundations of a name, and shows how to generate a name seed.
• Sugar, Spice, and a touch of Rhubarb: That’s what little names are made of – Article three in the A Good Name Is Hard To Find series discusses simple name structures and how to create a name using a name seed, and as a bonus, shows how to generate a monosyllabic language.
• With The Right Seasoning: Beyond Simple Names – The fourth article in the series A Good Name Is Hard To Find extends the approach detailed in part three to cover complicated name structures, and explores byways such as non-human languages, and Superhero & Villain naming.
• What matters to your character: the value of the shameful secret – I consider the value of deciding your character’s secrets as characterization aid – what we regret can be a signpost to the morals and values of the individual, profiling the character in several key respects.
• Part Three of my series on Writer’s Block addresses two of the primary types of writer’s block: Action (Combat) and Personality (Characterization).
• The betrayal of all that’s unholy: Treason and infidelity in RPGs – I list dozens of plotlines involving oaths, promises, and betrayals. Useful for any campaign, some readers consider this to be essential reference for Espionage-oriented campaigns.
• Leaving Things Out: Negative Space in RPGs – after exploring what Negative Space is in art & layout design, mounting brief excursions into Optical Illusions and Eyewitness Testimony along the way, I examine the benefits and pitfalls of leaving things out in eight areas of RPGs: Narrative, Descriptions, Characterization, Maps, Adventures, NPCs, Rules, and Campaign Planning.
• The Loss Of Innocence: Some unexpected insightsAn examination of the social progress depicted within television series leads to an insight into the Edition Wars and some general observations about the social impact of TV Hyper-Realism, which are relevant to choices of campaign Tone. Not everyone agrees with my position on the subject, and the examples were marred somewhat by a few inaccuracies as pointed out in the comments.
• The Envelope Is Ticking: Insanity In RPGs – Three rules to enable a PC to realistically ‘suffer’ from a form of insanity in an RPG, and six examples of applying those simple techniques. Also available in french at L’Enveloppe fait tic-tac : la folie dans le JdR. One of the most popular articles at Campaign Mastery, at least one twitter account promotes it regularly even though it was first published almost 5 years ago.
• Epigrams Of Life and Gaming: Selection #2 – Some of these are more directly gaming related, which only made it more surprising that these articles did not seem very popular on the website. I might bring them back as an occasional “extra post”, because I fervently believe there’s some good stuff here. In this particular post, there are insights about Genres, Writing, Randomness in real life, and Values, amongst others.
• Ergonomics and the Non-human – As the title suggests, this shows simple techniques for applying the principles of ergonomics to non-human physiologies, showing how everything from furniture to staircases is affected. Elves are studied as an example.
• By Popular Demand: The Ergonomics Of Dwarves – After foolishly mentioning the possibility in “Ergonomics and the Non-human” (above), I got lots of requests for giving Dwarves the same treatment. One reason I was readily persuadable was that while many races (including Elves) had been featured in the Orcs And Elves series (see the subsection below), Dwarves weren’t one of them. One day there will be a part three, applying the principles to Octopoidal creatures, and maybe even a part four looking at Kobolds.
• 3 Feet In Someone Else’s Shoes: Getting in character quickly – A potpourri of techniques for bringing NPCs to life quickly and easily, enabling you to switch from “being” one to “inhabiting” another with scarcely a breath in between.
• Dr Who and the secrets of complex characterization – Unusually for Campaign Mastery, I do a deep dive into a single source of inspiration, Dr Who, and divine the secrets of rich characterization that the show’s hallmark plot device, regeneration, have encouraged. It was in duscussion of the perspectives contained within this article that I started thinking about a Dr Who campaign. Though my speculation about Peter Capaldi’s version proved to be somewhat wide of the mark.
• Ask The GM: Seasoning The Stew (making races feel distinctive) – a reader asks why I go to so much effort to distinguish Elves from Drow when the latter are an offshoot of the former. I spend most of the article looking at the advantages that derive from making the races of a campaign distinctive, not only from each other within the campaign, but from other campaigns, before providing some resources and sources of inspiration on the subject.
• Layers Of Mis-translation: RPGs and Dubbed TV – you have a TV show filmed in a foreign language, full of foreign cultural referances, that has been dubbed into your language by skilled translators and voice-over artists. What you see and hear becomes the basis of your relationship with the character on-screen. How much of that relationship stems from the original performer and how much is added by the voice-over artist? That question unlocks this article on the reality of an RPG as percieved by players, on the reality of player actions as percieved by the GM, and of the individual projecting themselves into what may be printed before them in black and white.
• The Thinking Man’s Guide to Intelligence for Players and GMs – I presage this article with a drop-in editorial concerning what has become known as the Lindt Cafe Seige. I suspect that the huge number of likes this article got on social media at the time had more to do with that editorial than with the content. That content: Practical advice on how to roleplay characters of different Intelligence levels, both PCs and NPCs. The categories discussed are Low Intelligence, Very Low Intelligence, and Very High Intelligence. It is assumed that characters with “Normal” Intelligence require no modification in playing style to represent that intelligence. Readers who find this interesting and/or useful should also check out the two-part article on Charisma linked to in the opening paragraphs, which also (in part 2) demonstrates how to build general perceptions of a race or class into a social structure through house rules.
• Gifts In Gaming: Overlooked Seasonal Plot Hooks – a serious seasonal plot idea, suitable for any genre, dressed up with some fun quotes (both real and invented). Give the PCs a gift…
• Principle, Cause, and Course – Complexities In Motivation – Reveals one of my secret techniques for getting into character quickly while consuming a minimum of my attention, freeing up my attention for other things, whether I am a player or a GM. It is based around four questions that define a personality. I go into detail using my personal ethos as an example. Principles define which Causes a character supports and how actively; they stipulate how a character will react upon finding that an organization he is a part of has adopted a more radical position than he’s expecting, or has sold out; they define the character’s sense of responsibility. Answering these four questions defines a character’s Alignment, his Morality, the circumstances that could produce a moral shift, what the character will do to improve himself and his abilities (when combined with a sense of the opportunities that are open to the character), define his biases and prejudices, explain his past decisions (in combination with the character’s capacity for percieving the options open to him), his current status, what he thinks of that status, and what he’s done and is doing to prepare for the future. The only thing they won’t tell you is how indecisive the character will be. They also enable snap decisions to be made in character. In a sidebar, I discuss an online product that I still wish for whenever I contemplate a modern form of D&D.
• Part 12 of the Basics For Beginners series, Relations, deals with NPC characterization, building on the content in Part 5. I start by describing a tool that delivers only cliche characters for unimportant NPCs (but that have sufficient depth to be believable, nevertheless); the article then shows how to layer two or three such profiles to create a “complex” character. I then move on to two approaches to using the principles from an earlier article to generate alien/non-human characters that are more than “humans in rubber masks”. The first approach works well for individual exemplars, the second is better when creating a race of aliens who are to exhibit individual variations. However, these characterization techniques only really work when the character is being built around a defined and chosen character profile or niche. That generally means that the characters are needed for a specific purpose within the plot, and that this should be the starting point that leads to a characterization and not an afterthought. Going from need to characterization is the real purpose of the article. I have two solutions – a general one, that is described in detail, and a specific one that can only by highlighted, which I dispose of quickly. After spelling out the criteria that I required the general solution to fulfill, I describe it – 12 questions (two of them optional) that a GM, regardless of experience, should be able to answer in seconds. The results should produce a fit-for-purpose and ready-to-play personality in about 40 seconds.
• Fantastic Flop: GMing Lessons from a filmic failure – I deconstruct the failure of the rebooted Fantastic Four movie to discover lessons every GM should learn from. It’s a shame that those responsible for Man Of Steel and Batman Vs Superman didn’t read the article, because they made many of the same mistakes – admittedly to a lesser degree – and compromised their products earning powers and entertainment value as a result.
• Getting Into Character pt 1: NPCs – If your characterization is too deep, you’ll never be able to retain it when the time comes to quickly step in-and-out of character. In this article, I offer 7 techniques for getting into character as an NPC, and they all come down to extracting key points and simplifying either the characterization or the situation in some way. But the article goes beyond that, discussing how to use plot to show off the characterization and uniqueness of the individual, and how to use characterization to solve some plot problems..
• Getting Into Character Pt 2: PCs – To make a PC the central focus of a plotline, the GM needs to get into the PC’s head as he/she is played by the Player, so that scenes can be crafted that lead the PC natuarlly from scene to scene within the adventure. This practice can also help the player get more deeply into character.
• The Breakdown of Intersecting Prophecies – Using conflicting prophetic techniques to generate history and settings. Followed by a brief review of a Kickstarter that, unfortunately, didn’t make its funding target, “Fortune’s Wheel The Game”.
• Transferable Skills From Bottom to Top and back again starts by studying the theoretical foundations of Skills Systems, identifying two different types (bottom up, with lots of specific skills and narrow definitions, and top-down which has few skills and applies them liberally), and determining that a lot of GM problems and GM-player conflicts stem from using the wrong approach with a specific system type. I then find that the D&D / Pathfinder skills system (as of version 3.x) can best be described as “confused” in this respect, and offer three solutions: A bottom-up solution, A top-down solution, and a flexible compromise. I also describe (too briefly, to be honest) the skills system in use in my Superhero campaign.
• Pieces of Creation: Mortus is an extremely radical reinvention of the Marvel Villain, Thanos, one whose backstory and personality conflict with what he does so strongly that it poses fundamental questions of morality and ethics of the PCs who encounter him. In the course of this write-up, I briefly relate a couple of stories of Behemoth, because Mortus originally thought that he was a Behemoth-clone. In dealing with Mortus, the PCs of my campaign went WAY beyond what was expected of them, but I had enough notes about the “Big Picture” prepared to go with the flow – a lesson that justifies including this article in the relevant campaign and adventure plot sequencing sections. Mortus should be adaptable to any campaign in which the PCs are “the good guys”; his impact might be diminished in campaigns where that’s not the case.

The “Focusing On Alignment” series

Johnn recieved a submission to Roleplaying Tips that didn’t fit the guidelines he had established for the newsletter – it was very system-centric, and, importantly, the topic bored him to death. So he offered it to me for Campaign Mastery, and I thought it contained a number of good points well-made, and was well worth publishing – so I accepted and made it the centerpiece and lead-off post of this series.

• An Unnecessary Evil?, was the guest article by Gary Stahl, in which he explains his dislike for the concept of alignment, makes a solid effort to justify it’s expunging from the game mechanics,.and considers just how that could be accomplished.
  
• In part 2, A Necessary Evil?, as a rebuttal to Gary’s arguements, I discuss the justification for alignment being part of the rules, and why some people have problems with it.
  
• In part 3, An Unnecessary Evil?, I offer counterpoints to my own arguements, re-examine the question of whether or not alignment should be part of the rules, and offer some alternative Mechanics for alignment that satisfy both sides of the question.
  
• In part 4, Flavors Of Neutral, I look at the complex subject of neutrality and show how all colors of neutral don’t have to be alike.
  
• In the concluding part, Dark Shadows, I talk about the interpretations and definitions of alignment in Shards Of Divinity (an ‘evil’ campaign).

The “Characterization Puzzle” series

A five-part series in which I look at different techniques for generating the right personality for your NPCs. These approaches also work for players generating PCs. I have also employed them successfully to “reinvent” established PCs, breathing fresh life into characters that have reached their expiry date in terms of GM ideas.

• In the first part, When personalities are hard to find, I examine the problem.
  
• In part 2, I describe ‘The Thumbnail Method‘, which employs free association and right-brain/left-brain discontinuities to generate ideas, interpret them in relevant ways, and finally, filter them to extract only the good juice. There is a variation on this approach for the construction of NPC backgrounds given in The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity.
  
• In part 3 I demonstrate ‘The Inversion Principle‘, with a real-life example from one of my campaigns. Both techniques have been go-to solutions of mine for years, now approaching decades.
  
• Part 4 offers ‘The Window Shopping Technique‘, which was a new one that I developed in early 2010, and which has also formed a stable part of my repertoire ever since.
  
• Finally, the last part,The First Decision, discusses how to choose between the three techniques. The comments to the last part also contain some extra uses and considerations concerning the Inversion Principle.

The “We All Have Our Roles To Play” series

This (still incomplete) series examines the relationships between PCs in terms of their social and character roles within a team and the interactions between them. Unfortunately, right now, these articles take too long to craft, so this series is on hold for the time being. But I will get back to it eventually, even if I have to run it one archetype at a time. So far, eleven archetypes have been discussed out of a total of 31 identified roles (some added after the series started).

• Part 1 introduces the series, then looks at The Heart Of The Team, The Tactician, The Moral Guardian, and the Rock.
  
• Part 2 looks at The Mother Hen and The Intellectual.
  
• In Part 3, I discuss The Faithful, The Air-head, and The Flashing Genius.
  
• Part 4 is the final part published to date with The Maverick and The Strange Uncle.

The “Stat Vs Stat” series

This series was intended to look at the way stats interact, and the implications for both play and characterization. Only two parts of nine planned have been written to date, because the series took a LOT longer to write than CM’s publishing schedule permitted – something that’s been a recurring problem through the years. It will be finished eventually! With so little complete, technically, it should not be excerpted into a subsection like this – but I thought that this would signal my positive intentions in this area, and prepare the blogdex for future additions to the series.

• Stat Vs Stat Part One: Introduction – The Basis and Methods of comparison – The first part was about laying the ground rules and building up the concepts that would frame the series, and is really necessary reading to get the maximum out of the remainder of the series.
  
• Stat Vs Stat Part Two: Strength Vs. Stat – Starts by looking at Strength and what a Stat check can represent before considering the ramifications of opposed skill checks – and quickly discovering that most RPG rules in this area are inadequate.

PCs

• See Also the “Touchstones Of Unification” series on the Genre Overviews page.
• See Also the “Casual Opportunities For Priests” series in the Character Classes & Archetypes section of the Campaign Creation page.
• See Also the “Character Hooks” series in the Plot Ideas section of Campaign Plotting.

• Ask the GMs: Characters not trusting the other PCs – What should the GM do when one character’s mistrust of the other PCs when it starts getting in the way of the game? Johnn & I Advise, others chime in within the comments.
• Paint On A Canvas: A Personality Metaphor – Tony Scott and Beverly Hills Cop II combine to give me a new perspective on how to choose characters who will have chemistry together.
• The Pursuit Of Perfection: Character Evolution Part 5 of the series-within-a-series of the first of my Lessons From The West Wing deals with how the uniqueness of the campaign should impact on the player characters that participate in the world.
• Ask The GMs: An Inconsistency of Play – A GM grew so frustrated at the inconsistency of personality given by a player to their character that he started cancelling sessions. One of his other players asks Johnn & I for help. There’s a link at the end of the comments that is worth reading on the subject as well – thanks, Robert.
• Ask the GMs: What we have here is A Failure To Cooperate – Character-driven PCs tend to be rugged individualists. Diverse backgrounds make this even more pronounced. So how can you get such diverse individuals to bond? How can you generate some party unity? There’s also some useful advice in the comments.
• 50 Assassin Hooks – This excerpt offers a representational fifty of the more than 125 Assassin Hooks contained within Assassin’s Amulet.
• Sophisticated Links: Degrees Of Separation in RPGs – We’ve all heard of the “Six Degrees Of Separation” game. I apply the concept to RPG Characters and come up with ways to take advantage of it within the game. This article only scratches the surface of what can be done with this tool.
• Forging Unexpected Connections: Putting PC Dossiers To Work – I look beyond the concept of a character sheet and invent a character dossier – then show how to put them to work as a way of improving a game. A comment adds another way to use the concept. This article got great peer reviews, so it’s worth your time.
• The Power Of Synergy: Maximizing Character Efficiency – I look at a simple technique that players can use to make their characters more efficient, and the benefits to the GM of doing so.
• An Empty Death, An Empty Life: Making PC Death Matter – All PC Deaths should matter. Heroes should either die a Heroic Death or should achieve victory. That puts the GM in a difficult position when it comes to that staple of D&D, the wandering monster. This article shows how to add meaning commensurate with the risk by making sure random encounters are always plot-significant.
• The Acceptable Favoritism: 34 ‘Rules’ to make your players’ PCs their favorites – My friends and I list the 34 things that GMs should and shouldn’t do to turn your players characters into their favorites.
• Ask The GMs: Fresh Meat In A Hurry – After putting forth a plan to diminish the waiting list for responses (which worked for a while), this article turned to the question of how you integrated new PCs into a campaign after an existing one dies. From first principles, Ian Gray and I derive three key questions that need to be answered before the specific one can be properly answered – “What is the best way to introduce this specific character at this specific time within this specific campaign?”. We then examine nine general answers to the question before moving on to general advice relevant to the situation, before applying all this to the specific question asked (because the campaign concept was an unusual one, placing the answer in an unusual context).
• Casual Opportunities: Mini-encounters for… Barbarians – The Casual Opportunities series was (and is) about presenting opportunities for archetypes to put their character on show. It did so by breaking the archetype down into a comprehensive set of variations, identifying the key features in common to most of these variations, then providing encounter ideas that emphasized one of the key features or stressed the uniqueness of one particular variation. The first part in the series focused on Barbarians.
• The Premise Of Falsehoods – Luck Vs Skill in RPGs – I start with a question that’s been around forever – “Is it better to be lucky or skilled” – and proceed to analyze just what luck is and what skill is. In the process, an understanding of RPG concepts from different perspectives emerges that verges on the revelatory. Several side topics of relevance are explored, including the role of players in how Campaigns evolve, and by the end, even the concept of what a campaign is has been redefined. While it contains nothing of practical value, this is practically certain to give you a changed awareness of the world, and of the hobby of RPGs – which is either worthless or infinitely valuable to you.
• Dream A Little Dream – using Dreams in RPGs – This is about character’s dreams, and especially PC’s dreams, how to make them seem like dreams, and all the things that the GM can do with them, how to do those things, the pitfalls that await, and even whether or not to do those things. The article has been in the top twenty at Campaign Mastery ever since it was published in 2014 – that’s more than four years now – so it must get something right.
• Prodigious Performances Provided In Due Course – There are thousands of feats in print and on the net. Some of these will stack improperly, others will have broken mechanics, still others will simply not fit the campaign. This article describes the approval process that I developed and insisted on implementing within my Fumanor campaign to weed out the intolerable and flag the unsatisfactory for revision if and when there was time. Actually, in most cases, the changes that needed to be made (if any) were so obvious that I could make them at the same time as rejecting the original and accepting the modified version.
• The Wandering Spotlight Part One of Two: Plot Prologues – The first part of a two-part article examining the techniques used to ensure each player is engaged in the plot even when the party is split up and everyone’s doing their own thing. The first part functions as introduction and foundation, looking at character Prologue Scenes and subplots, and the functions that they serve in the Adventurer’s Club campaign. This process makes the adventures longer, both to play and prep, but the benefits – not all of which are listed in the article (because I didn’t recognize them at the time) – more than justify the extra time.
• The Wandering Spotlight Part Two of Two: Shared Stories – The second part of this two-part article addresses main adventures and how we work to ensure spotlight time is shared amongst all the players. As the article closes, I also look at epilogues. One of the key points is discerning what makes an individual PC different from another PC; another key point is discerning what makes one Player different from another. These are both vectors to customizing content to shine the spotlight, however briefly, on a PC.
• Layers Of Mis-translation: RPGs and Dubbed TV – you have a TV show filmed in a foreign language, full of foreign cultural referances, that has been dubbed into your language by skilled translators and voice-over artists. What you see and hear becomes the basis of your relationship with the character on-screen. How much of that relationship stems from the original performer and how much is added by the voice-over artist? That question unlocks this article on the reality of an RPG as percieved by players, on the reality of player actions as percieved by the GM, and of the individual projecting themselves into what may be printed before them in black and white.
• The Thinking Man’s Guide to Intelligence for Players and GMs – I presage this article with a drop-in editorial concerning what has become known as the Lindt Cafe Seige. I suspect that the huge number of likes this article got on social media at the time had more to do with that editorial than with the content. That content: Practical advice on how to roleplay characters of different Intelligence levels, both PCs and NPCs. The categories discussed are Low Intelligence, Very Low Intelligence, and Very High Intelligence (it is assumed that characters with “Normal” Intelligence require no modification in playing style to represent that intelligence). Readers who find this interesting and/or useful should also check out the two-part article on Charisma linked to in the opening paragraphs, which also (in part 2) demonstrates how to build general perceptions of a race or class into a social structure through house rules.
• Phase 2: Baggage Dump from the “New Beginnings” series – This is not so much about clearing your head more than temporarily, it deals with what you want to keep from previous campaigns and what to throw away. Significant areas of attention are GMing (stress & exhaustion & recovery), Races, PCs, NPCs, and Players.
• Phase 9: Completion from the “New Beginnings” series – is mostly about dotting i’s and crossing t’s and a few other tasks that were put off, at least temporarily, earlier in the series. In particular, the categories of Campaign Structure, Adventure Format & Structure, House Rules Theory, PCs, Races, Archetypes & Classes, Campaign Background, and how Players will integrate with the campaign are considered.
• Overprotective Tendencies: Handling Player Risk Aversion – the longer a player lives with a particular character in his pocket, the more attached to that character he becomes, and that can lead to overprotective tendencies and over-planning by players. In this (brief) article, I look at six solutions to the problem, several of which I don’t personally recommend. This post seemed to connect with a lot of readers at the time.
• The Power Of The Question-mark in RPG Plotting – I struggled in deciding where this post should be indexed. It’s kind of about plot structure and kind of about plot writing and kind of about agency and giving some to players while keeping a measure of control as GM. I discuss 7 different uses for the question mark.
• Part 6 of the Basics For Beginners series, Challenges is really about how hard to make challenges to overcome, and building safety nets into your plots in case you get this decision wrong. It starts by describing a challenge I was facing in real life, which seems both ironic and appropriate in retrospect. I then discuss the question, and point out the number of results produced by Google searches at the time for the term “Encounter Balance” (123 million results), “Encounter Level” (another 123 million results) and “Challenge Rating” (145 million results). This shows, I argue, that a lot of people find the subject difficult, and that there’s no shortage of people who consider it important, or even critical. I then look at the reasons why it’s so hard to do, why it’s so important, whether or not it’s actually essential, and whether or not it’s realistic to aim to ptovide balanced challenges every time. The next two sections detail the very abstract process that I employ in written adventures to get a quick and satisfactory answer, and then describe an alternative based on narrative that I employ when improvizing. I discuss plotting within character limitations (the first of two tools that I employ), how it permits the narrative solution to present multiple possible pathways to an overall success or failure, and how to use a skill-check to thus direct the narrative rather than determine the outcome. There’s a very large paragraph containing an example – make sure to read this because subsequent sections keep referring back to it. The second tool is a beginner’s checklist that I use osmotically to set the difficulty numbers of any challenge (regardless of game system). I discuss each item of the checklist seperately, some deeply, others very briefly, look at when such assessments should occur, and illustrate the whole process with a metaphor. I wrap up the article by examining a list of 5 DO’s and 5 DON’Ts (considering a couple of side-issues and the resulting advice along the way), discuss the problems of linking challenges with xp, and recommending that the two experience a permanent divorce. I wrap up with some final advice and a progress report on that real-life challenge.
• The Care and Feeding Of Vehicles In RPGs 2 – Second part of the two-part guest article, with rather more content from myself than the first. This part is all about what GMs should do with vehicles once the PCs have one. Lots of adventure seeds, and serious questions about campaign planning and locations and adventure design for the GM to answer. Once again, if the PCs have, or are likely to acqiure, a vehicle in your game, you need to read this.
• The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity – I describe in detail the concepts and processes involved in one of my most useful creative tools. What makes this technique so powerful is a method of free association that is especially capable of direction and stepwise refinement. In effect, you shake ideas loose and then shape them into useful constructions. There are two primary uses for the tool: reinventing old content that has reached its use-by date, and inventing new game content. The list of subjects to which the tool has been applied also determined where in the blogdex this article should be listed: Characterization, PCs, NPCs, Villains, Races, Societies, Character Classes, Theologies, Organizations, Deities, Plots, Subplots, and Plot Threads. At the end of the article, I briefly review Fantasy Coins’ Kickstarter campaign for their Treasure Chests, which continued the trend of mostly backing winners.
• Getting Into Character Pt 2: PCs – To make a PC the central focus of a plotline, the GM needs to get into the PC’s head as he/she is played by the Player, so that scenes can be crafted that lead the PC natuarlly from scene to scene within the adventure. This practice can also help the player get more deeply into character.
• Ask The GMs: The Great Handouts Question – is “How much should there be?” if you’re wondering. This article defines a range of standards for handouts that are to be distributed pre-campaign, ranging from “The Tolerable Minimum” to “An Extreme Excess”. In the subsequent section, I describe a magic item and accompanying plotline, the “Tome Of Past Destinies,” that seemed to work very well. After some more general notes, I then describe (far more succinctly) the practices for pre-game, in-game, and post-game that I employ and best practice for delivering such background information.
• Sequential Bus Theory and why it matters to GMs – I start by looking at the logic (some might say, ‘Illogic’) of bus timetables and why any given bus is almost always early or late. I then use the phenomenon of passangers getting on or off the bus to create a means of getting rid of monty haulism once and for all, and the distribution of game rewards like wealth and treasure, and (finally) consider a hypothetical way of letting PCs benefit from good character design without coming to totally dominate combat. That last is more of a thought experiment, not yet ready to be seriously advocated.
• Transferable Skills From Bottom to Top and back again starts by studying the theoretical foundations of Skills Systems, identifying two different types (bottom up, with lots of specific skills and narrow definitions, and top-down which has few skills and applies them liberally), and determining that a lot of GM problems and GM-player conflicts stem from using the wrong approach with a specific system type. I then find that the D&D / Pathfinder skills system (as of version 3.x) can best be described as “confused” in this respect, and offer three solutions: A bottom-up solution, A top-down solution, and a flexible compromise. I also describe (too briefly, to be honest) the skills system in use in my Superhero campaign.

Actual PC Examples

MOST OF THE PCs BELOW ARE NOT MY CREATIONS; They are the characters that were created for campaigns that were either mine, or became partially mine.

This list is not, and not intended to be, comprehensive. I may have missed a few, but the greatest likelyhood is that if I didn’t remember a character well enough to include them herein, I would not have remembered to mention them in an article, either. I’ve done my best to order the links in a rational manner for understanding the characters, generally “about the character” followed by “character exploits”, in as close to sequential playing order as I can get.

In the list below, past campaigns are indicated with hollow hex bullets, current campaigns with filled.

The Champions

• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• Several PCs from the predecesser-campaign to Zenith-3 get mentioned, and some of their in-game activities described, in My Biggest Mistakes: Magneto’s Maze – My B.A. Felton Moment.
• The website of the player behind Backlash is gone for now, but I”ve found it through the Wayback Machine, and you can read about him in This List Of The Best Characters He’s Played.

Behemoth

• In “The Subterfuge Options” section of The Wellspring Of Euonyms: Name Seeds, I introduce the character and discuss the significance of his name.
• The significance of the name, and the character’s role within the team, come up again in the “Naming Superheroes & Villains” section of With The Right Seasoning: Beyond Simple Names.
• One of the character’s early impacts on the campaign is described in the boxed section entitled “Behemoth’s Energy Batteries”, part of the discussion of “R&D/Manufacturing Rules,” one of the Rules issues discussed in Ask The GMs: The Passage Of Substantial Time.
• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• Several PCs from the predecesser-campaign to Zenith-3 get mentioned, and some of their in-game activities described, in My Biggest Mistakes: Magneto’s Maze – My B.A. Felton Moment.
• The character is all over the “A Dues-ex-machina (including Divine Intervention)”, “Live with the consequences”, and “The delayed change – a-PC example” sections of Refloating The Shipwreck: When Players Make A Mistake, discussing solutions to catastrophic player mistakes.
• Behemoth is name-dropped as ‘Theoretical Consultant’ in Warcry’s report on St Barbara and the game physics of how her powers work, presented in It’s Reality, Jim, but not As We Know It: St Barbara.
• The character makes another off-camera appearance in the second Epilog to If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis.
• The character is referenced in identifying a parallel-earth analog in the “Greed Is…” section of , part of the “Imperial History Of Earth-Regency” series which relates the early background of the Zenith-3: Earth Regency campaign.
• The character’s ultimate fate is name-dropped in the title of the planned final adventure in the Warcry Campaign, listed in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) (side-note to my players: recent revelations probably cast this title and implied situation into a whole new light – you may commence speculation, now…).
• The character is again name-dropped in remembering the death of his creator in The Ultimate Disruption: The loss of a player.
• The character is name-dropped as the preferred PC when a spinoff campaign merged with the main Champions campaign, as described in The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity.
• Pieces of Creation: Mortus is an extremely radical reinvention of the Marvel Villain, Thanos, one whose backstory and personality conflict with what he does so strongly that it poses fundamental questions of morality and ethics of the PCs who encounter him. In the course of this write-up, I briefly relate a couple of stories of Behemoth, because Mortus originally thought that he was a Behemoth-clone. In dealing with Mortus, the PCs of my campaign went WAY beyond what was expected of them, but I had enough notes about the “Big Picture” prepared to go with the flow – a lesson that justifies including this article in the relevant campaign and adventure plot sequencing sections. Mortus should be adaptable to any campaign in which the PCs are “the good guys”; his impact might be diminished in campaigns where that’s not the case.

Hellcat

• Hellcat started as a PC in the Project: Vanguard spinoff campaign, but eventually joined the main team as an NPC. Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• Hellcat is used as a principle example of The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity because, after running out of personal development ideas, I had to reinvent the character. Note that while originally a PC, by this time she was one of a vast list of NPCs.
• The character’s later life is hinted at in the Epilog I of If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis.

Phoenix

• Phoenix was a veteran member of the Champions Campaign, joining on the second anniversary of the campaign and remaining, first as a PC and then as an NPC, for more than a decade of play. Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns, though she is never mentioned by name.

Nebula

• Nebula was a founding member of the team at the heart of the main campaign but eventually left to participate in a solo spin-off campaign, and then faded from public view becoming an NPC. Attempts were made to restart the solo campaign at one point but they came to nought. Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns. Nebula is not mentioned by name, but was a central figure in many of the early exploits of the team.
• Nebula, a former PC, was completely reinvented to become an NPC in the Warcry campaign. Mentioned very briefly in that context in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2).

Tempest

• Tempest was the first outsider to join the team, being rescued (in the nick of time) from the oribit of Jupiter. Created as a 1st-level Elven rogue in a one-off AD&D session run for the purpose, he fell afoul of a Wizard who dumped him through a dimensional portal – in the process, completely changing the character’s capabilities and morality, a transformation that the character spent his early days within the campaign coming to terms with. After butting heads with the other team members once too often, he took a leave-of-absence to become hero-in-residence at Stronghold, the super-villain prison, in a brief solo campaign that ran until his player’s basic training began – Peter, his player, had joined the army. In the final session, Tempest’s adopted son, Vortex, was kidnapped by the same Wizard (who wants to know how Tempest gained the “god-like powers” that “should have been his”) to lure Tempest into a trap. For years, they were feared dead. Tempest abruptly returned when Peter’s tour of duty was up, but suffered from depression and refused to speak of Vortex. During the interrim, he had obviously acquired military expertise and leadership, and was no longer the naive happy-go-lucky individual that he had been. Tempest has had multiple stints as team leader, but some members react poorly to his military-standard discipline; his periods of leadership are always transformative for the team, but never last. The character’s first, and so far only, mention at Campaign Mastery came during the write-up of My Biggest Mistakes: Magneto’s Maze – My B.A. Felton Moment.
• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns. Tempest is not mentioned by name, but was a central figure in many of the exploits of the team.

Ichigo

• Ichigo was originally created for Project: Vigilant, a spin-off from the main campaign, but eventually joined the main campaign as an NPC. The Project Vigilant campaign is briefly synopsized in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2).

She was used as a major example in The Characterisation Puzzle: The Thumbnail Method when the character needed to be completely reinvented. Several paragraphs give the ‘existing’ backstory of the character, both in- and out-of-game before discussing the reinvention.

• One of the first visible manifestations of the reinvention were Ichigo’s guest appearances in the Zenith-3 campaign, including being listed as “Psychological Consultant” in Warcry’s report on St Barbara and the game physics that explained how her powers work, presented to readers in It’s Reality, Jim, but not As We Know It: St Barbara.
• Ichigo later became the main supporting character in the Warcry campaign, continually dancing around the prospect of marraige to the titular character, one of the few who could tell him what to do and be obeyed. This involvement is reflected in a planned plotline for mid-way through the campaign that should still give the character (if not the player) nightmares, as revealed in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) – “The Convention Of Cross-Time Ichigos”.

Ivar

• Ivar was a PC from the player who had created Backlash, who had retired into NPC-dom after more than a decade’s participation in the campaign. After about 8 years of active service, Ivar also became an NPC – in part because the other PCs wouldn’t let Backlash stay “honorably retired”. Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns. Ivar is also central to the background of a current PC, Runeweaver.

Aleph-Prime

• Technically, The Spellcasting AI/Robot Aleph-Prime shouldn’t be included here because he is and always has been, an NPC. But I’ve always treated the character as a PC (except when doing some really cruel things to the character!) The Bright Cutter, an NPC in both Zenith-3 campaigns, is a parallel-world analog of the ship whose computer eventually became Aleph-Prime. Unknown to the players, Aleph Prime was turned into a mole within their parent organization for most of the first Zenith-3 campaign by Ullar-Halo’s override codes and a deliberately-placed back door into his logic systems, only to be spectacularly reformed when he, in turn, transformed the Bright Cutter into a mole in Zenith-3’s ranks. Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• Aleph Prime is one of three NPCs named as being capable of a pivotal contribution to the plotline in “The Belt Of Terra,” an example adventure witten up but not yet played, with the processes involved on display in Back To Basics: Example: The Belt Of Terra.

Harmonic

• Harmonic was originally created for Project: Vigilant, a spin-off from the main campaign, but eventually joined the main campaign as an NPC. The Project Vigilant campaign is briefly synopsized in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2).
• Harmonic is described, but not named (which made finding the referance difficult!), in the “Immersion in Conflict: From Gritty to Clean” section of Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 4: About Players.
• Harmonic is one of three NPCs named as being capable of a pivotal contribution to the plotline in “The Belt Of Terra,” an example adventure witten up but not yet played, with the processes involved on display in Back To Basics: Example: The Belt Of Terra.

Project: Vanguard

(see also Hellcat, above)

• Psiber was originally created for Project: Vigilant, a spin-off from the main campaign, but retired in disgrace when the spin-off merged with the main campaign, only to be later cleared of any wrong-doing. However, he was severely injured in that encounter and is no longer fit to adventure. The Project Vigilant campaign is briefly synopsized in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2).
• The character is briefly described in The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity.

Ramjet

• Ramjet was originally created for Project: Vigilant, a spin-off from the main campaign, but was kidnapped by the arch-enemy of his adopted father when the player of both characters joined the army. The Project Vigilant campaign is briefly synopsized in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2).
• The character is briefly described in The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity. Ramjet has shown up once or twice as an NPC in the first Zenith-3 campaign.

Thistle

• Thistle was originally created for Project: Vigilant, a spin-off from the main campaign, but eventually joined the main campaign as an NPC. The Project Vigilant campaign is briefly synopsized in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2).
• The character is briefly described in The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity.

Titan

• Ichigo was originally created for Project: Vigilant, a spin-off from the main campaign, but eventually joined the main campaign as an NPC. The Project Vigilant campaign is briefly synopsized in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2).
• The character is briefly described in The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity.

Project: Vigilant

Team Neon Phi (Agents Of UNTIL)

TORG: The Improbability Invasion

If Wishing Made It So comments
• Fenwicke’s creator’s website is gone for at least the time being, but I’ve found the page on which he describes some colorful incidents from the character’s life through the Wayback Machine – you can read about some of the fun he (as player) and I (as GM) had in that campaign at This List Of The Best Characters He’s Played.

Tetsura

• I first mention Tetsura, from my TORG campaign, in a reply to a comment on The Gold Standard: Mike’s Top Twenty 3.x Supplements (part 5).
• That mention inspired the compilation of The Acceptable Favoritism: 34 ‘Rules’ to make your players’ PCs their favorites, leading to a second name-drop for the character.
• At the time, the player who created and ran the character had a website with a page devoted to Tetsura as one of his favorite characters, so I felt no need to describe the character in any detail. That website is now gone, I’m afraid, but I’ve dug it out of the Wayback Machine at This Link.

Zenith-3 / Earth Halo

For PCs from the current Zenith-3 campaign, see “Zenith-3 / Earth Regency,” below. Most of them were also PCs in this campaign.
See also “Warcry,” below.

• Glory was Ian’s replacement character when Warcry was retired. The transition is described in “Retire the character when it gets to be too much” within the “Other Solutions” section of The Power Of Synergy: Maximizing Character Efficiency.
• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• The character features prominantly as both a personality and as a physical presence in the detailed write-up of If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis.
• In Writing The Game: Using RPGs to Create Fiction, synopses of three Zenith-3 adventures are used as one large example.

Mist

• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• St Barbara and the “game physics” that explain her powers are the subject of It’s Reality, Jim, but not As We Know It: St Barbara. Warcry notes that the nature of her force field prevents the technological-solution ‘Champions Teleporter’ from ‘locking on’ to St Barbara through the field she generates, but some other methods including the poorly-understood-by-him abilities of Mist, still work.
• The character features prominantly as both a personality and as a physical presence in the detailed write-up of If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis.
• In Writing The Game: Using RPGs to Create Fiction, synopses of three Zenith-3 adventures are used as one large example.

Dragon’s Claw

• I introduce the key members and associated NPCs of the now-current Zenith-3 campaign in Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow Dragon’s Claw is mentioned briefly because of his role in the background of Defender, a Kzin martial artist and NPC team member.
• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• The character features prominantly as both a personality and as a physical presence in the detailed write-up of If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis.
• In Writing The Game: Using RPGs to Create Fiction, synopses of three Zenith-3 adventures are used as one large example.

Oracle

• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• The character features prominantly as both a personality and as a physical presence in the detailed write-up of If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis.

Karma

• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• In Writing The Game: Using RPGs to Create Fiction, synopses of three Zenith-3 adventures are used as one large example.

Widget

• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• In Writing The Game: Using RPGs to Create Fiction, synopses of three Zenith-3 adventures are used as one large example. Widget, a former PC, is a surprise participant in one of them, “Riddle Me This”.

Ravenscroft

• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• In Writing The Game: Using RPGs to Create Fiction, synopses of three Zenith-3 adventures are used as one large example. While Ravenscroft does not appear in these adventures, he is name-dropped and his behavior when he was a member of the team is referanced in “Whispers In The Dark Part I”.
• A parallel-world version of Ravenscroft, “Evermore” is the central villain in “The Belt Of Terra,” an example adventure witten up but not yet played, with the processes involved on display in Back To Basics: Example: The Belt Of Terra. The original character is cited a number of times in reference to the “Evermore” variant.

Fumanor: The Last Deity I & II

There was also a “mini-campaign” in between for no other purpose than to put distance between the two so that the subject matter of the second was a surprise to the players.

• One of the three central figures of the first and second Fumanor campaigns (both of which were entitled “The Last Deity” for different reasons), Auralla was a mage in a world that was vuiolently prejudiced against mages, blamed for the apocalyptic events from which that society was only slowly recovering. In The Ultimate Weapon: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 5, an article dedicated to exploring the concepts and limitations of relics and artifacts, I use an example from The Last Deity and synopsize the PCs discovery of and interaction with the example artifact. Two of the PCs involved get mentioned by name because they react to the presence of a spell from the Temple within the town housing the artifact, but all three were central to the plot.
• The outcome of the big finish to the “Last Deity” and a lot of the backstory is described in Theology In Fumanor: The collapse of Infinite No-Space-No-Time and other tales of existence. The entry on Corallan mentions Auralla and Serenity by name in describing his manipulations of the latter’s life.
• There is more detail on the “Last Deity” campaign and how it led into the “Seeds Of Empire” and “One Faith” campaigns presented in the first few sections of Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2.
• In Seeds Of Empire adventure #19, “On A Larger Scale,” the Elvish Ambassador calls up images of the significant mutual threats to “stability and good order” faced by both the Elves and the Golden Empire. These include Auralla. The incident is described in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5.
• The ultimate fate of Auralla (mispellt “Aurella”, a mistake that I keep making for some reason) was never played out; it was intended to be part of an epic finish to the Fumanor Campaigns in “Fumanor: The Ultimate Chaos”. I hint at the content in The Ultimate Disruption: The loss of a player, in which I review my campaigns to try and plot around the death of a friend and frequent player in my games.

Rocky

• Second of the three central figures of the first and second Fumanor campaigns (both of which were entitled “The Last Deity” for different reasons, Rocky was a Cleric who hated rules and regulations and telling people what to do. Naturally, he eventually became Archprelate of a newly-unified (at the Party’s hands) theology – whether he wanted to, or not. In The Ultimate Weapon: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 5, an article dedicated to exploring the concepts and limitations of relics and artifacts, I use an example from The Last Deity and synopsize the PCs discovery of and interaction with the example artifact. Auralla and Ceriseth, two of the PCs involved, get mentioned by name because they react to the presence of a spell from the Temple within the town housing the artifact, but all three were central to the plot.
• There is more detail on the “Last Deity” campaign and how it led into the “Seeds Of Empire” and “One Faith” campaigns presented in the first few sections of Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2. Rocky (real name “Rockerand”) is also mentioned in the section introducing Gallas.
• In Seeds Of Empire adventure #19, “On A Larger Scale,” the Elvish Ambassador calls up images of the significant mutual threats to “stability and good order” faced by both the Elves and the Golden Empire. These include Rocky. The incident is described in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5.

Ceriseth

• The third of the central PCs from the first Fumanor campaign was a Druid named Ceriseth. He is described in the “Some Backstory” section of Flavours Of Neutral – Focussing On Alignment, Part 4 of 5 (fairly briefly, because most of the post is about investigating his death, and in looking at all the myriad overtones that can be implied by a “Neutral” alignment). He is also mentioned in relation to a number of factions, some of whom supported him, and some who opposed him for various reasons.
• Ceriseth is also mentioned in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3, in the section on Verde.
• The synopsis of the Fumanor: One Faith adventure #8, “The Brown Heart” in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1) describes the events that surrounded the conclave of Druids that was the subject of the “Neutral Alignment” article listed earlier.
• There is another synopsis of the One Faith campaign within Things Done and left Un-done that sheds further light on some of the material provided in the preceding link.
• In The Ultimate Weapon: Spell Storage Solutions Pt 5, an article dedicated to exploring the concepts and limitations of relics and artifacts, I use an example from The Last Deity and synopsize the PCs discovery of and interaction with the example artifact. Two of the PCs involved get mentioned by name because they react to the presence of a spell from the Temple within the town housing the artifact, but all three were central to the plot.
• The outrcome of the big finish to the “Last Deity” and a lot of the backstory is described in Theology In Fumanor: The collapse of Infinite No-Space-No-Time and other tales of existence. The entry on Corallan mentions Auralla and Serenity by name in describing his manipulations of the latter’s life.
• There is more detail on the “Last Deity” campaign and how it led into the “Seeds Of Empire” and “One Faith” campaigns presented in the first few sections of Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2.

Serenity

• Serenity started as a PC with the intention that she would become one of the central figures of the campaign, responsible for rehabilitating Elvish society from its totalitarian nationalistic obsession. The player couldn’t wrap his head around the changes that I had introduced to the race even though he agreed they made perfect sense in light of the background; they were simply too different from the ones in the Player’s Handbook. He kept fogetting and trying to play as an ordinary “D&D Elf”. After struggling for a while, he decided to leave the campaign (without notice). Serenity was immediately killed off – but her burdon, her role within the campaign, had to be taken up by another of the PCs. More of this story is told in Theology In Fumanor: The collapse of Infinite No-Space-No-Time and other tales of existence, in the entry on Corallan.
• There is more information about the ‘Elvish Problem’ and its causes in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2. Serenity is not mentioned by name, but this was very much the culture that she was supposed to be fighting against – for the honor and redemption of her people.

• Warcry started as a member of Zenith-3 but was eventually spun off into his own space-opera/polical/superhero campaign, which is summarized briefly in Clash of the Timetables, an article that I subtitled “(Too many GMs, not enough players!)” and discusses how I was scheduling my RPGs at the time, and more importantly, why it was necessary.
• St Barbara and the “game physics” that explain her powers, were the subject of It’s Reality, Jim, but not As We Know It: St Barbara; this also contains reactions, decisions, and thought-patterns from Warcry because he was the one attempting the analysis.
• You can glean further insight into the personality and abilitie of the character from Ask The GMs: The Passage Of Substantial Time in the section “R&D/Manufacturing Rules”.
• Warcry and his research into the other PCs is mentioned in If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis, even though it takes place after he has left Zenith-3.
• The design approach taken by the player who created the character is the source of much of the content in The Power Of Synergy: Maximizing Character Efficiency and included for the insights it offers into the character. This article also describes the origins of the Warcry spinoff campaign.
• Warcry is used an example , explicitly in point 33 (in “Things the GM should NOT DO”), “Let a character dominate the campaign”.
• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.

The Adventurer’s Club

• Tommy is introduced (along with three of his fellow PCs) in the “Colorful Characters” section at the end of Zot! Zap! Crash! Character Conventions In Pulp (Continued).
• The campaign is synopsized adventure-by-adventure in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1).
• Tommy was a featured PC in the “Things Of Stone And Wood” adventures, a mini-series within the main campaign that was synopsized briefly in The Wandering Spotlight Part One of Two: Plot Prologues.
• Part-way through the last adventure described in the adventure-by-adventure synopsis linked to above, Tommy’s player passed away. The completion of that adventure, without naming the character, is discussed in The Ultimate Disruption: The loss of a player.

Captain ‘Blackjack’ Ferguson

• Ferguson is introduced (along with three of his fellow PCs) in the “Colorful Characters” section at the end of Zot! Zap! Crash! Character Conventions In Pulp (Continued).
• In the “Points Of Distinction: Flaws & Limitations” section of The Wandering Spotlight Part Two of Two: Shared Stories, I discuss the Captain’s usual reaction to his crew being placed in danger and how that can be used to generate impetus within a plotline. In the “Points Of Distinction: Preferences” section of the same article, we discuss his player’s aversion to Mystery plots and how we use the other players to compensate for the problem.
• The use in plots of Captain Ferguson’s vessel, the Antares, is discussed in “Encounters – an insert by Mike”, part of The Care and Feeding Of Vehicles In RPGs 2: A 2-part guest article.
• The campaign is synopsized adventure-by-adventure in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1).
• The character was a featured PC in the “Things Of Stone And Wood” adventures, a mini-series within the main campaign that was synopsized briefly in The Wandering Spotlight Part One of Two: Plot Prologues.
• A later adventure is synopsized and discussed from the point of view of the props created to support it in the “Different Handouts for Different Purposes?” section of A Helping Handout. This summation then leads directly into the synopsis referred to in the links below.
• House Rules – For Pulp (and other RPGs) contains, in a boxed-off yellow section “The story behind the story”, a brief synopsis that bridges the gap between the ‘handouts’ article above and the ‘train-wreck’ article below. Most of the PCs aren’t named.
• Some later adventures are partially synopsized in An Experimental Failure – 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session, which describes how a major adventure planned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the campaign almost destroyed the campaign, and 10 lessons that my co-GM and I took away from the train-wreck.
• Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade contains some thoughts on the pulp genre in general, and imputes more information on the adaption of 1920s-30s material for a modern audiance. No-one who knows the beliefs of ISIS could fail to note the parallels between them and those of Lon Than, for example, giving this game material a relevance not obvious to anyone else. The primary purpose of the article is to relay four pieces of content from the Adventurer’s Club campaign for others to use: Compiled information on “the mystic properties of jade”; Lon Than, a pulp villain (and his organization), who could easily be translated into a Fantasy or Superhero Genre (there’s some advice on doing so at the end of the article); and a ‘reinvention’ for game purposes of the Hindu Goddess, Kali, and a “twin sister”, Kalika, whose duality has an unmistakable resemblance to Cyrene, the Deity featured in Assassin’s Amulet. Trust me when I say that it would take an expert in the faith to find where we have twisted the lore, but the cumulative effect is to produce a figure that is far more sympathetic and relateable than most RPG representations (who don’t see beyonf the Thugee and get most of their information on that from the second Indiana Jones movie). The fourth item is a very brief summary of the way these items were used in-game, from dangling plot hooks through to adventure.

Father Justin O’Malley

• O’Malley is introduced (along with three of his fellow PCs) in the “Colorful Characters” section at the end of Zot! Zap! Crash! Character Conventions In Pulp (Continued).
• The character is used extensively as an example in Casual Opportunities For Priests: Analysis and Commonalities. Several incidents from the character’s in-play life are described, as is a larger plot thread that we built up for resolution in the 10th anniversary adventure. Despite the catastrophic disaster described in another article (also listed below), that objective was achieved.
• Father O’Malley is only briefly mentioned in Casual Opportunities For Priests: The Common Encounters, in the course of introducing “The Power To Fight Evil” plot seeds, but we have subsequently used several of these plot hooks with the character.
• The campaign is synopsized adventure-by-adventure in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1).
• The character was a featured PC in the “Things Of Stone And Wood” adventures, a mini-series within the main campaign that was synopsized briefly in The Wandering Spotlight Part One of Two: Plot Prologues. His living circumstances are briefly described in the section, “The Dynamics of a static environment”.
• That “home situation” is further described in the “Points Of Distinction: Circumstances” section of The Wandering Spotlight Part Two of Two: Shared Stories.
• The character is referenced in Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 5: Characters in discussing how a GM’s villain/character concepts should evolve to suit the PCs that they are to confront, in the “antagonist” sub-section of “Step Three: Using each of the techniques listed, describe in one line an idea for filling that hole”.
• A later adventure is synopsized and discussed from the point of view of the props created to support it in the “Different Handouts for Different Purposes?” section of A Helping Handout. This summation then leads directly into the synopsis referred to in the links below.
• House Rules – For Pulp (and other RPGs) contains, in a boxed-off yellow section “The story behind the story”, a brief synopsis that bridges the gap between the ‘handouts’ article above and the ‘train-wreck’ article below. Most of the PCs aren’t named.
• Some later adventures are partially synopsized in An Experimental Failure – 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session, which describes how a major adventure planned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the campaign almost destroyed the campaign, and 10 lessons that my co-GM and I took away from the train-wreck.
• Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade contains some thoughts on the pulp genre in general, and imputes more information on the adaption of 1920s-30s material for a modern audiance. No-one who knows the beliefs of ISIS could fail to note the parallels between them and those of Lon Than, for example, giving this game material a relevance not obvious to anyone else. The primary purpose of the article is to relay four pieces of content from the Adventurer’s Club campaign for others to use: Compiled information on “the mystic properties of jade”; Lon Than, a pulp villain (and his organization), who could easily be translated into a Fantasy or Superhero Genre (there’s some advice on doing so at the end of the article); and a ‘reinvention’ for game purposes of the Hindu Goddess, Kali, and a “twin sister”, Kalika, whose duality has an unmistakable resemblance to Cyrene, the Deity featured in Assassin’s Amulet. Trust me when I say that it would take an expert in the faith to find where we have twisted the lore, but the cumulative effect is to produce a figure that is far more sympathetic and relateable than most RPG representations (who don’t see beyonf the Thugee and get most of their information on that from the second Indiana Jones movie). The fourth item is a very brief summary of the way these items were used in-game, from dangling plot hooks through to adventure.

Dr Matthew Hawke

• Hawke is introduced (along with three of his fellow PCs) in the “Colorful Characters” section at the end of Zot! Zap! Crash! Character Conventions In Pulp (Continued), and this then made the center of attention for the rest of that article in “Matthew Hawke: A case study in characterisation” Note that none of the options considered was ultimately chosen for the character, though the “established” elements remain. Instead, a more colorful backstory again was created for the character.
• The campaign is synopsized adventure-by-adventure in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1).
• The character was a featured PC in the “Things Of Stone And Wood” adventures, a mini-series within the main campaign that was synopsized briefly in The Wandering Spotlight Part One of Two: Plot Prologues.
• A later adventure is synopsized and discussed from the point of view of the props created to support it in the “Different Handouts for Different Purposes?” section of A Helping Handout. This summation then leads directly into the synopsis referred to in the links below.
• House Rules – For Pulp (and other RPGs) contains, in a boxed-off yellow section “The story behind the story”, a brief synopsis that bridges the gap between the ‘handouts’ article above and the ‘train-wreck’ article below. Most of the PCs aren’t named.
• Some later adventures are partially synopsized in An Experimental Failure – 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session, which describes how a major adventure planned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the campaign almost destroyed the campaign, and 10 lessons that my co-GM and I took away from the train-wreck.
• Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade contains some thoughts on the pulp genre in general, and imputes more information on the adaption of 1920s-30s material for a modern audiance. No-one who knows the beliefs of ISIS could fail to note the parallels between them and those of Lon Than, for example, giving this game material a relevance not obvious to anyone else. The primary purpose of the article is to relay four pieces of content from the Adventurer’s Club campaign for others to use: Compiled information on “the mystic properties of jade”; Lon Than, a pulp villain (and his organization), who could easily be translated into a Fantasy or Superhero Genre (there’s some advice on doing so at the end of the article); and a ‘reinvention’ for game purposes of the Hindu Goddess, Kali, and a “twin sister”, Kalika, whose duality has an unmistakable resemblance to Cyrene, the Deity featured in Assassin’s Amulet. Trust me when I say that it would take an expert in the faith to find where we have twisted the lore, but the cumulative effect is to produce a figure that is far more sympathetic and relateable than most RPG representations (who don’t see beyonf the Thugee and get most of their information on that from the second Indiana Jones movie). The fourth item is a very brief summary of the way these items were used in-game, from dangling plot hooks through to adventure.

Steffan Bednarczyk

• An adventure from the campaign is synopsized and discussed from the point of view of the props created to support it in the “Different Handouts for Different Purposes?” section of A Helping Handout, in the process introducing this character. This summation then leads directly into the synopsis referred to in the links below.
• House Rules – For Pulp (and other RPGs) contains, in a boxed-off yellow section “The story behind the story”, a brief synopsis that bridges the gap between the ‘handouts’ article above and the ‘train-wreck’ article below. Most of the PCs aren’t named.
• Some later adventures are partially synopsized in An Experimental Failure – 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session, which describes how a major adventure planned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the campaign almost destroyed the campaign, and 10 lessons that my co-GM and I took away from the train-wreck.
• Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade contains some thoughts on the pulp genre in general, and imputes more information on the adaption of 1920s-30s material for a modern audiance. No-one who knows the beliefs of ISIS could fail to note the parallels between them and those of Lon Than, for example, giving this game material a relevance not obvious to anyone else. The primary purpose of the article is to relay four pieces of content from the Adventurer’s Club campaign for others to use: Compiled information on “the mystic properties of jade”; Lon Than, a pulp villain (and his organization), who could easily be translated into a Fantasy or Superhero Genre (there’s some advice on doing so at the end of the article); and a ‘reinvention’ for game purposes of the Hindu Goddess, Kali, and a “twin sister”, Kalika, whose duality has an unmistakable resemblance to Cyrene, the Deity featured in Assassin’s Amulet. Trust me when I say that it would take an expert in the faith to find where we have twisted the lore, but the cumulative effect is to produce a figure that is far more sympathetic and relateable than most RPG representations (who don’t see beyonf the Thugee and get most of their information on that from the second Indiana Jones movie). The fourth item is a very brief summary of the way these items were used in-game, from dangling plot hooks through to adventure.

Eliza Black

• Eliza is a relatively-new member of the team, still staking out a niche. A former mountie, current operative of Candaian Intelligence, and wealthy daughter of a Canadian rail robber-baron, and very good with her knives, she is introduced in A folder for every file: My Document Organization for RPGs, as an example of the “Character Notes” document and explanation of the content. Prior to that, there is a long list of illustrations for another adventure from the campaign which was a “star vehicle” to help establish the character.
• An adventure from the campaign is synopsized and discussed from the point of view of the props created to support it in the “Different Handouts for Different Purposes?” section of A Helping Handout. This summation then leads directly into the synopsis referred to in the links below.
• House Rules – For Pulp (and other RPGs) contains, in a boxed-off yellow section “The story behind the story”, a brief synopsis that bridges the gap between the ‘handouts’ article above and the ‘train-wreck’ article below. Most of the PCs aren’t named.
• Some later adventures are partially synopsized in An Experimental Failure – 10 lessons from a train-wreck Session, which describes how a major adventure planned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the campaign almost destroyed the campaign, and 10 lessons that my co-GM and I took away from the train-wreck.
• Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade contains some thoughts on the pulp genre in general, and imputes more information on the adaption of 1920s-30s material for a modern audiance. No-one who knows the beliefs of ISIS could fail to note the parallels between them and those of Lon Than, for example, giving this game material a relevance not obvious to anyone else. The primary purpose of the article is to relay four pieces of content from the Adventurer’s Club campaign for others to use: Compiled information on “the mystic properties of jade”; Lon Than, a pulp villain (and his organization), who could easily be translated into a Fantasy or Superhero Genre (there’s some advice on doing so at the end of the article); and a ‘reinvention’ for game purposes of the Hindu Goddess, Kali, and a “twin sister”, Kalika, whose duality has an unmistakable resemblance to Cyrene, the Deity featured in Assassin’s Amulet. Trust me when I say that it would take an expert in the faith to find where we have twisted the lore, but the cumulative effect is to produce a figure that is far more sympathetic and relateable than most RPG representations (who don’t see beyonf the Thugee and get most of their information on that from the second Indiana Jones movie). The fourth item is a very brief summary of the way these items were used in-game, from dangling plot hooks through to adventure.

Agent Paper

• This blogdex entry marks Paper’s first mention here at Campaign Mastery! Paper (not her real name) was a “buying agent” for the British Museum, a minor member of the British artistocracy, and thrown by them into situations whenever something strange manifested itself. The character became an NPC when the player (temporarily) dropped out of the campaign; after a failed return with a “pulp gadget tester” whose name I forget, he rejoined with Steffan (see above). Paper has reappeared a time or two since then, revealing that she manufactured a “fall from grace” so that she could keep government, aristocracy, and (aparrantly-former) employer at arms length while investigating a few things with the potential to blow up spectacularly into scandal. The campaign is synopsized adventure-by-adventure in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1).

Alberto Mediteraneo

• Alberto was a PC who eventually retired to NPC status. He’s “consulted” or “advised” the PCs on a couple of occasions since. The campaign is synopsized adventure-by-adventure in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1).

John “Mack” Mackenhay

• “Mack” was a PC who eventually retired to NPC status when his player needed to focus on his university studies. The campaign is synopsized adventure-by-adventure in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1).

Paulo Lumierre

• Paulo was my PC who eventually retired to NPC status and then quietly vanished so that I could co-GM the campaign. He is mentioned several times in the “A Depth Of Character” section and once in the “Pretty Girls And Macho Men” section of Bang! Blat! Whoomph! Character Conventions In Pulp (Continued).
• In The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity, I describe the process that was used to generate the character’s background. He is then specifically referanced as an example of the usage of the technique in the section “PC: Paulo Lumierre”.
• The campaign is synopsized adventure-by-adventure in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1).

Fumanor: One Faith

• Gallas was a Drow thief-turned-cleric and the starring and central figure of the Fumanor: One Faith campaign, synopsized in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1). His footprints are allt through each and every adventure in that campaign, which was intended to be solo campaign for a player who had taken a job in another city and who would not be able to get back every week for the Seeds Of Empire campaign – so his plotlines were excerpted from that Campaign Plan and a new campaign constructed around them. As it happened, the position didn’t work out, and in about 6 weeks – having missed just one game session of the Seeds campaign – he returned to take up the reigns of both Gallas and Eubani.
• There is another synopsis of the One Faith campaign within Things Done and left Un-done that sheds further light on some of the material provided in the preceding link.
• Gallas got written up as “Gallas – Introducing an Overachiever” in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2 by virtue of being an Elf about to come into prominance (because he was a central PC in the One Faith Campaign, of course!)
• Gallas’ role as an agent of change made him instrumental in assembling the party for the Seeds Of Empire campaign. That in turn gets him a brief mention as part of Corallan’s description in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 4.
• In Seeds Of Empire adventure #19, “On A Larger Scale,” the Elvish Ambassador calls up images of the significant mutual threats to “stability and good order” faced by both the Elves and the Golden Empire. These include Gallas. The incident is described in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5.

Sebastian

• In the second adventure of the One Faith campaign, a troublemaking Bard named Sebastian became the second PC (see Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1)). We were in the middle of adventure #11, “Goblin, Goblin” when Stephen, Sebastian’s player, passed away.
• Knowing that, the analysis of how to repair the campaign after Stephen’s passing, discussed in The Ultimate Disruption: The loss of a player without naming the characters, will also tell you more about the character and the plans for him.
• There is another synopsis of the One Faith campaign within Things Done and left Un-done that sheds further light on some of the material provided in the Naming Adventures article.
• In Seeds Of Empire adventure #19, “On A Larger Scale,” the Elvish Ambassador calls up images of the significant mutual threats to “stability and good order” faced by both the Elves and the Golden Empire. These include Gallas. The incident is described in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5.

Arazal

• The last PC to join the One Faith campaign was Arazal, hooking up with the campaign in Adventure #8, “The Brown Heart” (described in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1)). Originally intended to be an NPC, and the driving force behind adventures 9 and 10. Surplus to requirements thereafter, he was then to be written out – a plan that changed when he became a PC. This was a beneficial change in campaign terms, because it solved a plot problem that was looming: Gallas had things to do in the next phase of the campaign for which Sebastian was totally unsuited. So the plan was to bifurcate the campaign, with each player generating a secondary character – Sebastian, Arazal, and Gallas’ player’s secondary character would embark on one strand of adventures, while Gallas and the other two secondaries would go off together on the main campaign. And, eventually, it would all tie back in together.
• There is another synopsis of the One Faith campaign within Things Done and left Un-done that sheds further light on some of the material provided in the preceding link.

Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire

• Tajik is an Orcish Cleric and PC from the Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire campaign. Whenever you read a synopsis of that campaign that mentions an Orc, and any time when such mentions a Priest who isn’t Undead, it’s talking about Tajik. You can read a brief synopsis of Tajik’s adventures in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1); he was a pivotal member in each of the adventures, even if not singled out by name. He also appears by name only in Adventure #9 of the Fumanor: One Faith campaign to synchronize the timeline of the two campaigns.
• The poetry of meaning: 16 words to synopsize a national identity, in the section on “Promise”, provides additional information about Fumanorian Orcs, and therefore about Tajik.
• Campaign Update: Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire gives a more thorough synopsis of where the campaign was at in July of 2009, and inevitably gives a lot more information on the PCs and Not-quite-PCs: Tajik, Eubani, Chrin, Verde, Leif, Julia, Ziorbe, and Arron.
• There’s some more of the campaign backstory and early adventures in A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs, though none of them are mentioned by name.
• The campaign is further synopsis, leading on from the “Campaign Update” above, in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 4 (first half) and Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 (second half). The latter also contains a description of the personal quests of each of the party members (they all had one).
• To illustrate The Characterisation Puzzle: The Inversion Principle, a character generator, I use it to generate an arch-enemy for Tajik, in the process expanding on the PCs own characterization.
• The relationship between Ziorbe, the most intellectual member of the party and yet often the most naive, and Tajik, gets mentioned in the writeup of Ziorbe that can be found in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2.
• Tajik, and his racial background, is described in greater detail in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3, which also contains details of the theological crisis underway in the society, a crisis that Tajik was supposed to resolve at the end of the campaign.
• The ultimate fate of Tajik was never played out; it was intended to be part of an epic finish to the Fumanor Campaigns in “Fumanor: The Ultimate Chaos”. I hint at the content in The Ultimate Disruption: The loss of a player, in which I review my campaigns to try and plot around the death of a friend and frequent player in my games.

Eubani

• Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign? (briefly) introduces Eubani (a PC from the Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire campaign) in the Combat section. Other PCs are discussed in the two following paragraphs without being named. Just as Tajik was the ubiquitous “Orc” and almost-equally-so “Cleric” in that campaign, so Eubani was the Fighter, the Braggard, and the Elf in any synopsis of the campaign. Interestingly, Eubani was originally intended to be a different player’s PC (but that potential player then changed his mind), became an NPC (see the entries for “Ziorbe” and “Arron” later in this section) but was taken over as a PC shortly into the campaign by the owner of “Gallas” (see later in this section).
• Campaign Update: Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire gives a more thorough synopsis of where the campaign was at in July of 2009, and inevitably gives a lot more information on the PCs and Not-quite-PCs: Tajik, Eubani, Chrin, Verde, Leif, Julia, Ziorbe, and Arron.
• There’s some more of the campaign backstory and early adventures in A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs, though none of them are mentioned by name.
• One of Eubani’s exploits, and some of the real-life backstory, is described in “19. Favorite Characters are given an early ‘Moment of Awesome’ ” in The Acceptable Favoritism: 34 ‘Rules’ to make your players’ PCs their favorites.
• Eubani’s characterization is described in detail in “Eubani – The Rebel Philosopher” in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2. Much of the preceeding text relates to his racial background and their social profile and recent history, adding context to the character. The Dorw, Ziorbe, has a complex relationship with Eubani that is highlighted in “Ziorbe – Struggling to find his way”, part of the same article.
• Another character within the campaign, Leif, also has a strong relationship with Eubani that is detailed in “Leif – An Ambassador Alone” in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3.
• The campaign is further synopsized, leading on from the “Campaign Update” above, in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 4 (first half) and Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 (second half). The latter also contains a description of the personal quests of each of the party members (they all had one).

Chrin

• In the synopsis of Adventure #5, “Captive Audience” of the Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire campaign within Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1), I introduce Chrin, who was supposed to be a one-shot guest PC but who ended up being pivotal to the next several adventures as an NPC – until I could write him out, and (at the same time) explain some extreme characterization problems. See also the synopses for adventures #7, 8, 12, 13, 14, and 15.

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• Campaign Update: Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire gives a more thorough synopsis of where the campaign was at in July of 2009, and inevitably gives a lot more information on the PCs and Not-quite-PCs: Tajik, Eubani, Chrin, Verde, Leif, Julia, Ziorbe, and Arron.
• There’s some more of the campaign backstory and early adventures in A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs, though none of them are mentioned by name. Some of the history of Chrin’s home, “The Golden Empire” is related to the reader.
• The campaign is further synopsis, leading on from the “Campaign Update” above, in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 4 (first half) and Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 (second half). The latter also contains a description of the personal quests of each of the party members (they all had one).

Verde

• The player who had brought Chrin to life had so much fun that he wanted to join the campaign full-time, and so, about 4 months later, Verde joined the campaign, as described in the synopsis of Adventure #9, “Air” of the Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire campaign in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1). Adventure 10 gives more information on the character. Unfortunately, at the start of Adventure 11, the player had to stop RPGs altogether, leaving the character an NPC. Nevertheless, the plans that had been laid for his presence continued, as described in adventures 15 and 16.
• Campaign Update: Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire gives a more thorough synopsis of where the campaign was at in July of 2009, and inevitably gives a lot more information on the PCs and Not-quite-PCs: Tajik, Eubani, Chrin, Verde, Leif, Julia, Ziorbe, and Arron.
• The campaign is further synopsis, leading on from the “Campaign Update” above, in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 4 (first half) and Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 (second half). The latter also contains a description of the personal quests of each of the party members (they all had one).
• The Drow, Ziorbe, was wary of Verde, as explained in the “Ziorbe – Struggling To Find His Way” section of Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2.
• Verde is described in detail in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3, starting with “The Fated” (his character class), “The Verdonne” (his race), and then “Verde – Puppet Of Destiny”.
• Verde aparrantly met his “final destiny” in Chapter 77 of the “On The Origins Of Orcs” story, but Chapter 80 hints that there is still more to the story.
• That hint is further reinforced by the hints contained in “Fumanor: The Ultimate Chaos” within The Ultimate Disruption: The loss of a player, in which I review my campaigns to try and plot around the death of a friend and frequent player in my games.

Leif

• Shortly after “Verde” joined the party, another new PC, Leif, also joined. Run by Peter E, who tried out for the campaign. Unfortunately, he simply couldn’t keep up, and the problem was impacting the other players enjoyment of the campaign; although I wasn’t happy about it, I was forced by an ultimatum from the other players to make the choice between him and the campaign. I wish we could have found a way to keep him as aa player, he had so much enthusiasm for the game and the campaign, and sincerely hope that he has found another group with whom to play. (If I’d had the time, I would have offered to run a solo campaign just for him). Leif was the closest thing I had in this campaign to a “protected favorite NPC”; for as long as the campaign ran, I did with his character what I think Peter would have wanted. (It might surprise the other players to know that everything that Leif has experienced was discussed with Peter – in general terms – and his reactions planned out by the pair of us, in advance). Leif is still Peter’s character, so far as I’m concerned – he just can’t play him. Leif’s debut is described in Adventure #10, “Earth”, in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1), but you could probably learn even more about the character elsewhere; this adventure was later excerpted, shorn of its campaign connections, and presented as the three-part adventure presented here at Campaign Mastery, The Flói Af Loft & The Ryk Bolti. Midway through adventure #11, Water, the player was forced to drop out once again, this time (if memory serves) for health reasons. Leif’s story continues in Adventures 15, 16, and 17, all synopsized in the Naming Adventures article.
• Campaign Update: Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire gives a more thorough synopsis of where the campaign was at in July of 2009, and inevitably gives a lot more information on the PCs and Not-quite-PCs: Tajik, Eubani, Chrin, Verde, Leif, Julia, Ziorbe, and Arron.
• The campaign is further synopsis, leading on from the “Campaign Update” above, in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 4 (first half) and Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 (second half). The latter also contains a description of the personal quests of each of the party members (they all had one).
• You can get a sense of Leif’s speech patterns the way they would have sounded to the other PCs. from the examples in the “Roleplaying Another Culture’s Speech” sub-section of Ask The GMs: Rubbing Two Dry Words Together.
• Leif’s relationship with Eubani is discussed in “Eubani – The Rebel Philosopher” in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2.
• Leif is described in some detail in the section “Leif – An Ambassador Alone” within Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3.

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Julia Sureblade

• A few months after Leif was recruited, and in the latter stages of the same adventure (see Adventure #10, “Earth,” in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1)), a new PC, Julia Sureblade was recruited. A Paladin lost in time from a past age, she was a delivery vehicle for a lot of background and a constant reminder of how much the PCs had already experienced.
• Campaign Update: Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire gives a more thorough synopsis of where the campaign was at in July of 2009, and inevitably gives a lot more information on the PCs and Not-quite-PCs: Tajik, Eubani, Chrin, Verde, Leif, Julia, Ziorbe, and Arron.
• There’s some more of the campaign backstory and early adventures in A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs, though none of them are mentioned by name.
• The campaign is further synopsis, leading on from the “Campaign Update” above, in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 4 (first half) and Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 (second half). The latter also contains a description of the personal quests of each of the party members (they all had one).
• Ziorbe, the Drow Mage, felt threatened and uneasy by Julia’s presence, as explained in the Ziorbe section of Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2.
• Julia herself is described in “Julia Sureblade – Exile from Yesterday”, and her Order of Paladins are detailed in the preceding section, “The Paladins Of Thumâin”, both within Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3. The sections “Humans In Fumanor” and “The Ages Of Existance” are also relevant – Julia comes from The Age Of Heresies (a.k.a. The 7th Age), half of human recorded history ago.

Ziorbe

• Technically, Ziorbe should not be listed here, but he was an NPC party member in the Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire campaign who was treated as though he were a PC who just happened to be run by the GM. In particular, complex relationships were formed between Ziorbe (Drow) and Eubani (Elf) which extended way beyond the racial stereotypes. Affection and respect were the foundations of those relationships, and that alone tells you how unusual they were. Ziorbe is mentioned in the synopsis of Adventures #1 and #6, described briefly in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1), but was a constant source of intellectual analysis (even if he had little raw power as a mage) throughout the campaign.
• Campaign Update: Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire gives a more thorough synopsis of where the campaign was at in July of 2009, and inevitably gives a lot more information on the PCs and Not-quite-PCs: Tajik, Eubani, Chrin, Verde, Leif, Julia, Ziorbe, and Arron.
• There’s some more of the campaign backstory and early adventures in A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs, though none of them are mentioned by name.
• The campaign is further synopsis, leading on from the “Campaign Update” above, in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 4 (first half) and Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 (second half). The latter also contains a description of the personal quests of each of the party members (they all had one).
• Ziorbe’s relations with his fellow party members and his personality are described in the “Ziorbe – Struggling to find his way” section of Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2.
• Ziorbe is also mentioned in the “Recent Developments” and “Verde – Puppet Of Destiny” sections of Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3. The first of these is especially valuable because it represents the way that Ziorbe thinks.
• Ziobe’s ultimate fate was never played. The players all know that it had something to do with Elvish Reunification, but don’t know what. It would have been very poignant, more than that I can’t say. You might be able to get a few hints from the “Naming Adventures” article linked to at the start of this sub-section – but don’t bet on it, I was careful.

Arron

• Arron is another PC-who-is-really-an-NPC from the Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire campaign. I forget his character class, but what the Ogre brought to the party was “Gentle Wisdom” and the unflappable ability to calm things down when they became exciting. Unsophisticated and uneducated but very very clever. Arron is only mentioned in Adventure #1 (see Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1)) but he was the heart and mother-figure of the party in many ways. Arron also made a guest appearance in Adventure #9 of the Fumanor: One Faith campaign (en route to meeting Tajik for the first time); that encounter is described later in the same article.
• Campaign Update: Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire gives a more thorough synopsis of where the campaign was at in July of 2009, and inevitably gives a lot more information on the PCs and Not-quite-PCs: Tajik, Eubani, Chrin, Verde, Leif, Julia, Ziorbe, and Arron.
• There’s some more of the campaign backstory and early adventures in A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs, though none of them are mentioned by name.
• The campaign is further synopsis, leading on from the “Campaign Update” above, in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 4 (first half) and Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 (second half). The latter also contains a description of the personal quests of each of the party members (they all had one).
• Arron is described, relatively briefly, in “Arron – The Gentle Wisdom” but you should read the entire “Ogres In Fumanor” section of Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2.
• Arron’s perceptiveness is mentioned in the “Julia Sureblade – Exile from Yesterday” section of Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3.
• I discuss Arron’s personality further in “The Emotional Arrow” section of asual Opportunities: Mini-encounters for… Barbarians.

Zeneith-3 / Earth Regency

• I introduce the key members and associated NPCs of the now-current Zenith-3 campaign in Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow.
• The name of the character, and it’s relevance and source, is described in “Naming Superheroes & Villains”, part of With The Right Seasoning: Beyond Simple Names, Part 4 of the “A Good Name” series.
• The character, and more particularly, the “game physics” that explain her powers, are the subject of It’s Reality, Jim, but not As We Know It: St Barbara.
• The tactical roles within the team are discussed in The Tactical Masterclass – Preparing a player to lead on the battlefield.
• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• St Barbara features prominantly as both a personality and as a physical presence in the detailed write-up of If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis.
• In Writing The Game: Using RPGs to Create Fiction, synopses of three Zenith-3 adventures are used as one large example.
• The relationship between an important NPC in the first Zenith-3 campaign and St Barbara is discussed in “Solution 6: The One-sided story”; and the character’s reaction to an NPC in distress is featured in “Prerequisite: A clear action”, both part of the “Persona Blocks” section of Breaking Through Writer’s Block Pt 3: Action and Personality Blocks.
• The villainous pair named Maxima and Minima are devotees of a radically-extreme televangelist, and are described in Pieces Of Creation: Maxima and Minima. Their powers are designed to be complimentary and Force Multipliers (a Combat / Military concept) for each other, a potent demonstration of what can be done in the Hero System with only a little deep thought about the design – so much so that many GMs wouldn’t hesitate to house-rule them out of existence. I briefly mention the Roman Catholic Church of this game world and it’s leader, Gregorovich II. St Barbara and Blackwing are explicitly involved in the backstory of the first (and so far only) encounter with the duo. There are suggestions for adapting the concepts and design techniques to D&D / Pathfinder and other genres such as Cyberpunk through magic items and rewards.
• St Barbara appears in an example of By The Seat Of Your Pants: Using Ad-hoc statistics, where her stats and skills at the time were used to measure how efficiently she could perform various tasks and how long she could do them before (1) wanting a break, or (2) needing a break.
• The character is referenced in an example of plot-hooks-to-plot-blocks processing within Eureka! – Some inspiring notions, a review of the Engine Publishing product.
• St Barbara is a central character in the concepts incorporated into “The Belt Of Terra,” an example adventure witten up but not yet played, with the processes involved on display in Back To Basics: Example: The Belt Of Terra.
• St Barbara appears in a supporting role within a major charater arc for Blackwing, developed in conjunction with that character’s current player, and which is described as “A Big Example” of foreshadowing in The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure.

Runeweaver

• I introduce the key members and associated NPCs of the now-current Zenith-3 campaign in Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow, and very briefly hint at some of the character-driven plot arcs planned for each as part of the campaign. Runeweaver is currently still in the early stages of his mana-addiction plotline mentioned, but when the fall comes, it will happen suddenly.
• The tactical roles within the team are discussed in The Tactical Masterclass – Preparing a player to lead on the battlefield. This is especially relevant to Runeweaver because he is the field commander of the team; the article is about how we planned to educate him (and anyone who comes after him) into his role.
• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• Runeweaver is a central character in the concepts incorporated into “The Belt Of Terra,” an example adventure witten up but not yet played, with the processes involved on display in Back To Basics: Example: The Belt Of Terra.
• Runeweaver has only a minimal supporting role within a major character arc for Blackwing, developed in conjunction with that character’s current player, and which is described as “A Big Example” of foreshadowing in The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure, but his addiction plot arc is integral to the timing of this series of connected subplots, and some of the most personally-crushing consequences land on his shoulders.

Blackwing

• Blackwing is a character with a fascinating history, both in-game and out-of-game, that makes the character useful as an example in many, many ways. Both are described in some detail in “Example: The Blackwing Evolution,” part of The Moral Of The Story: The Morality and Ethics of playing an RPG.
• I introduce the key members and associated NPCs of the now-current Zenith-3 campaign in Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow, and very briefly hint at some of the character-driven plot arcs planned for each as part of the campaign. Blackwing is currently in the middle of the “rehabitulation” plotline described in this article, which will all make a lot more sense after reading the first article linked to above.
• As part of the writeup of Énorme Force, one of the villains from the campaign, I give a thumbnail version of the origins of Blackwing in Pieces of Creation: Énorme Force. This article also explains (very briefly) some of the game physics including the basis of magic and psionics and the equivalent of clerical powers within the campaign.
• Blackwing is a central character in the concepts incorporated into “The Belt Of Terra,” an example adventure witten up but not yet played, with the processes involved on display in Back To Basics: Example: The Belt Of Terra.
• A major charater arc, developed in conjunction with the character’s current player, is described as “A Big Example” of foreshadowing in The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure.
• Blackwing was “name-dropped” in relation to a planned future adventure in the Warcry campaign, listed without incriminating details in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2). The same article contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns. And yes, the gargoyle illustration at the start of the article is what we currently imagine the character looking like.
• Blackwing is used an example a couple of times in , explicitly in referance to point 27, “Favorite Characters belong to their player”, but also in point 25, “Favorite Characters have a non-mechanical interaction with the game”.
• More of the darker elements of the character’s in-game personal history were revealed in the “Keeping Secrets” section of What matters to your character: the value of the shameful secret.
• The tactical roles within the team are discussed in The Tactical Masterclass – Preparing a player to lead on the battlefield.
• The character features prominantly as both a personality and as a physical presence in the detailed write-up of If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis.
• In Writing The Game: Using RPGs to Create Fiction, synopses of three Zenith-3 adventures are used as one large example.
• The villainous pair named Maxima and Minima are devotees of a radically-extreme televangelist, and are described in Pieces Of Creation: Maxima and Minima. Their powers are designed to be complimentary and Force Multipliers (a Combat / Military concept) for each other, a potent demonstration of what can be done in the Hero System with only a little deep thought about the design – so much so that many GMs wouldn’t hesitate to house-rule them out of existence. I briefly mention the Roman Catholic Church of this game world and it’s leader, Gregorovich II. St Barbara and Blackwing are explicitly involved in the backstory of the first (and so far only) encounter with the duo. There are suggestions for adapting the concepts and design techniques to D&D / Pathfinder and other genres such as Cyberpunk through magic items and rewards.
• The character’s player-history is referanced in Dr Who and the secrets of complex characterization as another example of complex characterization as a result of multiple players making the character their own. It’s ironic that the article is about that phenomenon in Dr Who, and Blackwing’s player would (in part as a result of this article) take on the role of “The Doctor” in the Lovecraft’s Legacies campaign.
• The character’s player-history is also relevant to to “The Interpretation Spin” sub-section of Layers Of Mis-translation: RPGs and Dubbed TV, about the way a player’s interpretation of their PC should impact the adventures that the GM designs for a campaign.
• That player-history and the reasons for it are part of the discussion in Ask The GMs: Parting is such a frayed plot thread, discussing ways to handle a player leaving a campaign.

Vala

• I introduce the key members and associated NPCs of the now-current Zenith-3 campaign in Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow, and very briefly hint at some of the character-driven plot arcs planned for each as part of the campaign. Vala has found that her presence on the campaign world has had far more profound and complicated consequences than she ever expected, and theological extremists have already produced super-“villains” to confront the team because of her presence.
• The tactical roles within the team are discussed in The Tactical Masterclass – Preparing a player to lead on the battlefield.
• Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2) contains a brief synopsis of the first and second Zenith-3 campaigns and the preceding Champions, Project:Vanguard, Project:Vigilant, and Team Neon Phi campaigns.
• Vala is an important character in the concepts incorporated into “The Belt Of Terra,” an example adventure witten up but not yet played, with the processes involved on display in Back To Basics: Example: The Belt Of Terra. The plotline is designed to have significant psychological ramifications for the character.
• Vala has a critical role ib bringing a major charater arc for Blackwing, developed in conjunction with that character’s current player, and which is described as “A Big Example” of foreshadowing in The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure to a climax.

Dr Who: Lovecraft’s Legacies

• The character is referanced in Dr Who and the secrets of complex characterization as another example of complex characterization as a result of multiple players making the character their own. It’s ironic that the article is about that phenomenon in Dr Who, and Blackwing’s player would (in part as a result of this article) take on the role of “The Doctor” in the Lovecraft’s Legacies campaign.
• In the “Context” section of Traditional Interpretations and Rituals Of Culture, an incident from the character’s televised history is briefly described (with links to a synopsis of the solution to the problem that he found and implemented).
• The purpose of the current companion – well, one of the purposes – is described in “Logic Breakers” within The Crochet Masterpiece: One-player games as Campaigns, part of the “One Player Is Enough” series and listed here for whatever that lets you infer about the main character of the campaign.
• I give a general summary of the campaign in the “- variety of threats – ” and “- Variable Difficulty -” sub-sections within the “Opponants” section of Me, Myself, and Him: Combat and Characters in one-player games, part of the “One Player Is Enough” series. Later in the same article, in a boxed sidebar within the “Characterization Focus” section, “In play” sub-section, “- Fewer opportunities for variety in relationships -” sub-subsection, the companion is further described and the opening adventure briefly synopsized. A later adventure is then briefly synopsized in the “- Melodramatic Collapse and the Descent into Soap Opera -” sub-subsection that immediately follows that boxed sidebar. subsequent sub-subsections “- A British approach -” and “- A unique manifestation of relationship -” add further information about the campaign.

Other

• I formally introduce this character, which is a PC that I created for another GM’s superhero campaign (and that’s all he told us about it in advance, please note) in “PC: Binary” within The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity. As this brief introduction suggests, this was a character designed to dig into issues of identity, and honor, and ethics, and rationalism, in a world with artificial technological people. In support of that, I had created a rogues’ gallery, visual appearance, blueprints, NPCs, and a 98-page character background that stretched from prior to the big bang to “now”.
• The campaign didn’t last very long, maybe six months, maybe eight. In that time, not one of the character themes, NPCs, or rogues gallery made an appearance. When it closed, the GM gave me back the binder containing the character and admitted to never having read it. But, as I explain in the final comment on The Pursuit Of Perfection, Part 5 of 5: Character Evolution, it wasn’t wasted effort.

Villains

• See Also the “Touchstones Of Unification” series on the Genre Overviews page.

• Sophisticated Links: Degrees Of Separation in RPGs – We’ve all heard of the “Six Degrees Of Separation” game. I apply the concept to RPG Characters and come up with ways to take advantage of it within the game. This article only scratches the surface of what can be done with this tool.
• The Anatomy Of Evil: What Makes a Good Villain? – It seems a simple question, but those are often the most difficult. Some great discussion in the comments expands on the subject.
• Making a Great Villain Part 1 of 3 – The Mastermind – A hero is only as good as the villains they fight – but what makes a villain great? This mini-series of articles offers a different answer for each of three different types of villains.
• Making a Great Villain Part 2 of 3 – The Combat Monster – The second article in this trilogy considers how to make this most obvious type of villain, interesting.
• Making a Great Villain Part 3 of 3 – the Character Villain – The third in this article trilogy focuses on villains who oppose the heroes ideologically or for personality reasons.
• The Scariest Villain – I follow up the trilogy on Great Villains by looking at what Fear is, how each villain type would use fear, and then look at a fourth Villain category that I argue is even scarier. Along the way, I dip into Nazi German social programming and the reputation of the venomous wildlife of Australia.
• Inversions Attract: Another Quick NPC Generator – “You can never have too many quick NPC generators,” the opening paragraph of this article asserts. This article describes one that I often use when I need the NPC to have one specific character trait for plot reasons, with a couple of real-world examples from the same starting point. There’s an art tip in the comments.
• If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis – You may be wondering what a synopsis from my superhero campaign’s archives is doing in this section. In a nutshell, this takes what is essentially a fantasy idea, wraps it in a classic sci-fi trope, adds a new perspective on life if you could shrink to a quantum scale, and makes the whole thing palatable in a sci-fi or superhero context. The quantum stuff alone makes it worth including, never mind the implied example of how to “retool” ideas from one genre to another.
• Super-heroics as an FRP Combat Planning Tool – An unlikely confluance of fragmentary half-thoughts came together to yield an insight and a theoretical construct based on that insight. By the time I got to write the article, that theoretical construct had evolved into practical advice – but to explain the advice (and justify the unlikely principle behind it), I had to re-create the mental process that led me to it within the text of the article. I conclude the article with mini-reviews of a couple of kickstarter campaigns – one (flat plastic miniatures) that was doing incredibly well, and another that unfortunately did not succeed for running adventures online.
• Ask The GM: Seasoning The Stew (making races feel distinctive) – a reader asks why I go to so much effort to distinguish Elves from Drow when the latter are an offshoot of the former. I spend most of the article looking at the advantages that derive from making the races of a campaign distinctive, not only from each other within the campaign, but from other campaigns, before providing some resources and sources of inspiration on the subject.
• The Thinking Man’s Guide to Intelligence for Players and GMs – I presage this article with a drop-in editorial concerning what has become known as the Lindt Cafe Seige. I suspect that the huge number of likes this article got on social media at the time had more to do with that editorial than with the content. That content: Practical advice on how to roleplay characters of different Intelligence levels, both PCs and NPCs. The categories discussed are Low Intelligence, Very Low Intelligence, and Very High Intelligence. It is assumed that characters with “Normal” Intelligence require no modification in playing style to represent that intelligence. Readers who find this interesting and/or useful should also check out the two-part article on Charisma linked to in the opening paragraphs, which also (in part 2) demonstrates how to build general perceptions of a race or class into a social structure through house rules.
• Gifts In Gaming: Overlooked Seasonal Plot Hooks – a serious seasonal plot idea, suitable for any genre, dressed up with some fun quotes (both real and invented). Give the PCs a gift…
• Phase 5: Surroundings & Environment from the “New Beginnings” series – Specific topics cover Adventure Location, Campaign Background, Villains, NPCs, Geography, Economics, Culture & Society, Politics, Races, and Character Classes / Avatars.
• Phase 8: Enfleshing from the “New Beginnings” series – deals with Archetypes, Races, Villains, Other NPCs, Adventure Locations, Encounters, Plot Ideas, and Campaign Structure to form the additional ’tissue’ referred to by the title.
• Shadows In The Darkness – The nature of True Evil – My pulp co-GM and I debate and discuss the question of what is “Absolute Evil”? The goal was to define a functional answer that was universal in nature. Did we get there in the end? Well, kinda…
• Part 5 of the Basics For Beginners series, Characters is actually about generating NPCs. It starts by examining the five general sources of character ideas, and finds them all inadequate in the same basic way. I then explain a process of organizing, filtering, and combining the ideas that work (as opposed to those that don’t) – there are 10 steps, but most of them are brutally simple. I then list (and link to) allt the articles at campaign mastery to date that are about generating ideas and NPCs, most of which was a direct cut from the original blogdex, and so is now out of date. I conclude the article by creating an NPC for a D&D / Pathfinder campaign, expanding on the concepts of the game world in the process, and conclude by deriving two adventure seeds and several additional encounters revolving around or involving the NPC.
• The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity – I describe in detail the concepts and processes involved in one of my most useful creative tools. What makes this technique so powerful is a method of free association that is especially capable of direction and stepwise refinement. In effect, you shake ideas loose and then shape them into useful constructions. There are two primary uses for the tool: reinventing old content that has reached its use-by date, and inventing new game content. The list of subjects to which the tool has been applied also determined where in the blogdex this article should be listed: Characterization, PCs, NPCs, Villains, Races, Societies, Character Classes, Theologies, Organizations, Deities, Plots, Subplots, and Plot Threads. At the end of the article, I briefly review Fantasy Coins’ Kickstarter campaign for their Treasure Chests, which continued the trend of mostly backing winners.

Actual Villain Examples

Most of these ARE my own creations, for my own use. I’m careful to give credit to sources of inspiration when they are relevant. I expect to have missed a few.

• In Mage Guild Mastermind Survives Pirate Haven, Johnn describes his thought processes while outlining an organization and its villainous head, Syzzinar the Schemer, for his Riddleport campaign.

Baron Winthor (aka “Captain Winter”)

• The section “Dynamic Linguistics” in Ask The GMs: Rubbing Two Dry Words Together describes (briefly) Baron Winthor (who was nicknamed ‘Capatin Winter’ by those in his command), a Drow infiltrator, because I used a slight-but-consistent difference in how he spoke to subconsciously implant the idea “there’s something not quite right” in the heads of the players.
• More information on Baron Winthor may also be found in Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 2.

Mister Whisper and Jamison Riddle

• The “A Villain Idea” section of By The Seat Of Your Pants: Six Foundations Of Adventure discussed two villains from the first Zenith-3 campaign (we’re currently playing the second): “Mr Whisper” and “Jamison Riddle” – one of which sounds like a cool character but largely fell flat, and the other of which was expected to be a one-off character who proved so popular that he’s resurfaced twice more and will eventually get a fourth appearance. And maybe a fifth.
• Both Jamison Riddle and Mr Whisper appear in the three synopses of Zenith-3 Adventures Writing The Game: Using RPGs to Create Fiction which are used as one large example.

Torquemada

• Torquemada is a villain from my first Zenith-3 campaign, and a rather difficult character to write into an adventure; the plotline has to be “just right” or it goes on like a wet sock. He was a religious zealot (inspired by Marvel Comics “Galactus” (ignore the version in the second Fantastic Four movie) and an early episode of Babylon-5) who found a way to give himself vast powers through the destruction of the impure – then set the bar of “purity” so high that none but he could ever achieve it. Torquemada was described in a reply to Robert on The Anatomy Of Evil: What Makes a Good Villain?.

Cyrene

• Cyrene Revealed: an excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet is a feature devoted to Cyrene, the Goddess Of Life who is central to the plot of Assassin’s Amulet. While she is not a villain, she is definitely NOT a PC, and not a Hero either. And the article describes relationships with other Deities who definitely can be characterized as Villains from the commoner’s perspective, so….

Ullar-Halo (aka “Ullar-Omega”)

• In Dr Who and the secrets of complex characterization, I describe Ullar, who was the ultimate hero of the first phase of my Superhero campaign, and who was transformed into the ultimate villain of the Zenith-3 offshoot campaign.
• Touchstones Of Unification Pt 1 – Themes adds to that discussion, though there is some overlap.
• Ultimately, the character had no-one but himself to rely on, but still believed implicitly in his cause, and so transformed himself into “Ullar-Omega”, the ultimate manifestation of “Give Me Liberty Or I Destroy It All”. Ullar-Omega is described in The Anatomy Of Evil: What Makes a Good Villain?.

Inchon

• In Me, Myself, and Him: Combat and Characters in one-player games, I discuss Inchon, the main villain of my Dr Who campaign (in about as much detail as the PC knew at the time). NB: “Inchon” was the name of the original host body and is used purely as a convenience. It has just been revealed in-game that the character’s real name may be of significance.

Lon Than

• Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade contains some thoughts on the pulp genre in general, and imputes more information on the adaption of 1920s-30s material for a modern audiance. No-one who knows the beliefs of ISIS could fail to note the parallels between them and those of Lon Than, for example, giving this game material a relevance not obvious to anyone else. The primary purpose of the article is to relay four pieces of content from the Adventurer’s Club campaign for others to use: Compiled information on “the mystic properties of jade”; Lon Than, a pulp villain (and his organization), who could easily be translated into a Fantasy or Superhero Genre (there’s some advice on doing so at the end of the article); and a ‘reinvention’ for game purposes of the Hindu Goddess, Kali, and a “twin sister”, Kalika, whose duality has an unmistakable resemblance to Cyrene, the Deity featured in Assassin’s Amulet. Trust me when I say that it would take an expert in the faith to find where we have twisted the lore, but the cumulative effect is to produce a figure that is far more sympathetic and relateable than most RPG representations (who don’t see beyonf the Thugee and get most of their information on that from the second Indiana Jones movie). The fourth item is a very brief summary of the way these items were used in-game, from dangling plot hooks through to adventure.

Kali & Kalifa

• Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade contains some thoughts on the pulp genre in general, and imputes more information on the adaption of 1920s-30s material for a modern audiance. No-one who knows the beliefs of ISIS could fail to note the parallels between them and those of Lon Than, for example, giving this game material a relevance not obvious to anyone else. The primary purpose of the article is to relay four pieces of content from the Adventurer’s Club campaign for others to use: Compiled information on “the mystic properties of jade”; Lon Than, a pulp villain (and his organization), who could easily be translated into a Fantasy or Superhero Genre (there’s some advice on doing so at the end of the article); and a ‘reinvention’ for game purposes of the Hindu Goddess, Kali, and a “twin sister”, Kalika, whose duality has an unmistakable resemblance to Cyrene, the Deity featured in Assassin’s Amulet. Trust me when I say that it would take an expert in the faith to find where we have twisted the lore, but the cumulative effect is to produce a figure that is far more sympathetic and relateable than most RPG representations (who don’t see beyonf the Thugee and get most of their information on that from the second Indiana Jones movie). The fourth item is a very brief summary of the way these items were used in-game, from dangling plot hooks through to adventure.

Mortus

• Pieces of Creation: Mortus is an extremely radical reinvention of the Marvel Villain, Thanos, one whose backstory and personality conflict with what he does so strongly that it poses fundamental questions of morality and ethics of the PCs who encounter him. In the course of this write-up, I briefly relate a couple of stories of Behemoth, because Mortus originally thought that he was a Behemoth-clone. In dealing with Mortus, the PCs of my campaign went WAY beyond what was expected of them, but I had enough notes about the “Big Picture” prepared to go with the flow – a lesson that justifies including this article in the relevant campaign and adventure plot sequencing sections. Mortus should be adaptable to any campaign in which the PCs are “the good guys”; his impact might be diminished in campaigns where that’s not the case.

Énorme Force

• Énorme Force has about as convoluted a character creation story as you can find. He started out as a generic brick, but quickly proved too bland to be the focus of anything. So I threw all sorts of ideas at the character, hit the ‘blend’ button, and strained the mess to extract a truly tortured soul. The character was described extensively – well, as extensively as is known to the players in my campaign – in Pieces of Creation: Énorme Force. In the process of describing the character, I also give a thumbnail version of the origins of Blackwing (one of the PCs from that campaign), explain (very briefly) some of the game physics including the basis of magic and psionics and the equivalent of clerical powers within the campaign.

Maxima & Minima

• The villainous pair named Maxima and Minima are devotees of a radically-extreme televangelist, and are described in Pieces Of Creation: Maxima and Minima. Their powers are designed to be complimentary and Force Multipliers (a Combat / Military concept) for each other, a potent demonstration of what can be done in the Hero System with only a little deep thought about the design – so much so that many GMs wouldn’t hesitate to house-rule them out of existence. I briefly mention the Roman Catholic Church of this game world and it’s leader, Gregorovich II. St Barbara and Blackwing are explicitly involved in the backstory of the first (and so far only) encounter with the duo. There are suggestions for adapting the concepts and design techniques to D&D / Pathfinder and other genres such as Cyberpunk through magic items and rewards.

Mictlan-tecuhtli

• A villain from the Zenith-3 campaign who would readily translate into sci-fi and cyberpunk. Translating him into D&D / Pathfinder would be more work but yields a more fascinating (and unexpected in most campaigns) outcome. The character is described in Pieces of Creation: Mictlan-tecuhtli together with a locked-room mystery that reveals his “style”. The character was inspired by two characters from Larry Nivel stories relating to Gil “The Arm” Hamilton, Loren and Anubis; the latter also inspired the villain’s name. The mystery and background also add to the background of Earth-Regency.

Miscellanious Others

• In the comments section of Ask The GMs: PC Choices and Consequences, a reader describes the archvillain of his campaign.

Other NPCs

• Former PCs as NPCs – Johnn takes a reader’s suggestion, submitted to Roleplaying Tips and builds on it with details of how to put it into practice. The article ends with links to sites where GMs can submit NPCs for use by the greater gaming community.
• Book of Dead Characters to Celebrate Your Gaming – Johnn expands on his thoughts in Former PCs as NPCs by connecting the idea to his Book of Dead Characters. This should very much be read as a supplement to the earlier article.
• Sophisticated Links: Degrees Of Separation in RPGs – We’ve all heard of the “Six Degrees Of Separation” game. I apply the concept to RPG Characters and come up with ways to take advantage of it within the game. This article only scratches the surface of what can be done with this tool.
• The Ubercharacter Wimp: Plotting within your PCs limitations – TUW, or ‘The Ubercharacter Wimp’, is a tool that I devised for the generation of quick and easy NPCs. This was a really hastily-written article to cover my obligations to the Blog while I was moving house.
• GM’s Toolbox: Prep Tools Part Three: NPCs – Part of the GM’s Toolbox series by Michael Beck with contributions by Da’Vane and the occasional comment drop-in from Johnn. The series is aimed at both beginners and more experienced GMs and strives to articulate all the things that you will need tools and techniques for, in order to successfully run a campaign. This article looks at the creation & management of the NPCs needed for a game session or adventure.
• Look beyond the box: a looser concept for NPCs – I develop a simple (and universal) system for defining complex aspects of NPCs. Try it, it works!
• By the seat of your pants: the 3 minute (or less) NPC – I break an NPC into smaller pieces: three general framing decisions, the eight most important details, a list of secondary items that aren’t needed for every character, and a pair of optional extras that may be needed for some campaigns – and show how to employ the structure to generate an NPC in less time than it takes to hard-boil an egg. Even experienced GMs get something out of this article, I’ve been told. It’s a perennial favorite amongst our readers. I’d completely forgotten that I intended to develop a worksheet for it – but I mentioned it in replying to a pingback. So that’s back on my radar, for anyone who’s been waiting!
• Leaving Things Out: Negative Space in RPGs – after exploring what Negative Space is in art & layout design, mounting brief excursions into Optical Illusions and Eyewitness Testimony along the way, I examine the benefits and pitfalls of leaving things out in eight areas of RPGs: Narrative, Descriptions, Characterization, Maps, Adventures, NPCs, Rules, and Campaign Planning.
• Lessons Learned: A change of perspective brings plot rewards – My Pulp co-GM and I had spent three months working on an adventure which was wiped out in a hard-disk crash. While piecing it back together, we were forced to confront a number of difficult plot problems that remained stubbornly insoluble using our usual techniques. This article spells out the solutions and the lessons we learned from the experience.
• Ten Million Stories: Breathing life into an urban population – My front window overlooks the twentieth busiest road in Sydney. From traffic patterns and estimating how much busier those other roads are relative to this one, I estimate that the busiest road in the city takes part in ten million personal stories a day about the inhabitants of the city. Note that at the time this article was written, the city’s population was being officially measured as just over 5,000,000 – a factoid I’m including to let you scale that 10M stories to other metropolises. “George” is an individual who is resident here. One day, he is approached by a stranger named “Sam”. From their conversation, if it’s extensive enough, George not only comes to life as an NPC, but so do various facts about the city and what it’s like to live in it, using a technique that I include and a deck of cards. This technique is fast enough that it can be applied “live at the table” and even interactively with the players contributing. This article has also been translated into French at Dix millions d’histoires de gens, and has been rated as 9.3 out of 10.
• Inversions Attract: Another Quick NPC Generator – “You can never have too many quick NPC generators,” the opening paragraph of this article asserts. This article describes one that I often use when I need the NPC to have one specific character trait for plot reasons, with a couple of real-world examples from the same starting point. There’s an art tip in the comments.
• Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep – There are multiple techniques given above for creating NPC personalities quickly, and some in the section that follows on getting into character quickly. This article is all about determining the minimum character mechanics that you need so that you don’t spend a lot of wasted prep time doing more than that.
• The Flunkie Equation – quick and easy Hors d’Combat – An organization is comprised of the people who work for it (amongst other things), but you rarely need to treat these even by NPC standards. “The Flunkie Equation” is a system by which the essential information demanded by the Partial NPC doctrine (explained in Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep) can be generated more quickly and easily, making an already-fast process even more efficient. This article also explcitly builds on techniques described in The Ubercharacter Wimp. You should read both those articles before this one.
• The Thinking Man’s Guide to Intelligence for Players and GMs – I presage this article with a drop-in editorial concerning what has become known as the Lindt Cafe Seige. I suspect that the huge number of likes this article got on social media at the time had more to do with that editorial than with the content. That content: Practical advice on how to roleplay characters of different Intelligence levels, both PCs and NPCs. The categories discussed are Low Intelligence, Very Low Intelligence, and Very High Intelligence. It is assumed that characters with “Normal” Intelligence require no modification in playing style to represent that intelligence. Readers who find this interesting and/or useful should also check out the two-part article on Charisma linked to in the opening paragraphs, which also (in part 2) demonstrates how to build general perceptions of a race or class into a social structure through house rules.
• Phase 2: Baggage Dump from the “New Beginnings” series – This is not so much about clearing your head more than temporarily, it deals with what you want to keep from previous campaigns and what to throw away. Significant areas of attention are GMing (stress & exhaustion & recovery), Races, PCs, NPCs, and Players.
• Phase 5: Surroundings & Environment from the “New Beginnings” series – Specific topics cover Adventure Location, Campaign Background, Villains, NPCs, Geography, Economics, Culture & Society, Politics, Races, and Character Classes / Avatars.
• Phase 8: Enfleshing from the “New Beginnings” series – deals with Archetypes, Races, Villains, Other NPCs, Adventure Locations, Encounters, Plot Ideas, and Campaign Structure to form the additional ’tissue’ referred to by the title.
• Stealth Narrative – Imputed info in your game – This builds on the techniques described in the Secrets Of Stylish Narrative series to further compress, compact, and polish narrative by sneaking it into other parts of the game. There are considerable side-benefits that result. One small section discusses perception / spot checks and when it’s least-disruptive to the game to request them. An example sneaks both room and character description into the beginning of a roleplaying sequence.
• Incredible Truth and Improbable Stories: Oratory in an RPG – Australia’s Prime Minister at the time this article was written had a massive credibility problem. He could say the sea was wet and not be believed by anyone but the most extreme right wing of Australian Politics. After describing how things reached this point (and providing some appropriate context), contemplation of the situation leads me into a review of how oratory works in most RPGs, and why it’s not quite good enough. I then identify five factors that dictate how well a speech is going to be recieved, and offer three different methods of increasing complexity for integrating the results into a game’s mechanics.
• Rat On A Stick – In remembrance of Terry Pratchett – I discuss the work of Pratchett in general terms, contrasting it with that of Robert Asprin and Douglas Adams and Monty Python; discuss the problems that the “Clacks Code” suggestion of memorializing Terry will (in some cases, did!) entail, and conclude by drawing a fundamental connection to RPGs.
• Stealth Narrative – Imputed info in your game – This builds on the techniques described in the Secrets Of Stylish Narrative series to further compress, compact, and polish narrative by sneaking it into other parts of the game. There are considerable side-benefits that result. One small section discusses perception / spot checks and when it’s least-disruptive to the game to request them.
• Principle, Cause, and Course – Complexities In Motivation – Reveals one of my secret techniques for getting into character quickly while consuming a minimum of my attention, freeing up my attention for other things, whether I am a player or a GM. It is based around four questions that define a personality. I go into detail using my personal ethos as an example. Principles define which Causes a character supports and how actively; they stipulate how a character will react upon finding that an organization he is a part of has adopted a more radical position than he’s expecting, or has sold out; they define the character’s sense of responsibility. Answering these four questions defines a character’s Alignment, his Morality, the circumstances that could produce a moral shift, what the character will do to improve himself and his abilities (when combined with a sense of the opportunities that are open to the character), define his biases and prejudices, explain his past decisions (in combination with the character’s capacity for percieving the options open to him), his current status, what he thinks of that status, and what he’s done and is doing to prepare for the future. The only thing they won’t tell you is how indecisive the character will be. They also enable snap decisions to be made in character. In a sidebar, I discuss an online product that I still wish for whenever I contemplate a modern form of D&D.
• Part 5 of the Basics For Beginners series, Characters is actually about generating NPCs. It starts by examining the five general sources of character ideas, and finds them all inadequate in the same basic way. I then explain a process of organizing, filtering, and combining the ideas that work (as opposed to those that don’t) – there are 10 steps, but most of them are brutally simple. I then list (and link to) allt the articles at campaign mastery to date that are about generating ideas and NPCs, most of which was a direct cut from the original blogdex, and so is now out of date. I conclude the article by creating an NPC for a D&D / Pathfinder campaign, expanding on the concepts of the game world in the process, and conclude by deriving two adventure seeds and several additional encounters revolving around or involving the NPC.
• Part 12 of the Basics For Beginners series, Relations, deals with NPC characterization, building on the content in Part 5. I start by describing a tool that delivers only cliche characters for unimportant NPCs (but that have sufficient depth to be believable, nevertheless); the article then shows how to layer two or three such profiles to create a “complex” character. I then move on to two approaches to using the principles from an earlier article to generate alien/non-human characters that are more than “humans in rubber masks”. The first approach works well for individual exemplars, the second is better when creating a race of aliens who are to exhibit individual variations. However, these characterization techniques only really work when the character is being built around a defined and chosen character profile or niche. That generally means that the characters are needed for a specific purpose within the plot, and that this should be the starting point that leads to a characterization and not an afterthought. Going from need to characterization is the real purpose of the article. I have two solutions – a general one, that is described in detail, and a specific one that can only by highlighted, which I dispose of quickly. After spelling out the criteria that I required the general solution to fulfill, I describe it – 12 questions (two of them optional) that a GM, regardless of experience, should be able to answer in seconds. The results should produce a fit-for-purpose and ready-to-play personality in about 40 seconds.
• The Backstory Boxes – Directed Creativity – I describe in detail the concepts and processes involved in one of my most useful creative tools. What makes this technique so powerful is a method of free association that is especially capable of direction and stepwise refinement. In effect, you shake ideas loose and then shape them into useful constructions. There are two primary uses for the tool: reinventing old content that has reached its use-by date, and inventing new game content. The list of subjects to which the tool has been applied also determined where in the blogdex this article should be listed: Characterization, PCs, NPCs, Villains, Races, Societies, Character Classes, Theologies, Organizations, Deities, Plots, Subplots, and Plot Threads. At the end of the article, I briefly review Fantasy Coins’ Kickstarter campaign for their Treasure Chests, which continued the trend of mostly backing winners.

Playing Characters

This is primarily about how the GM plays NPCs. Advice on playing PCs that does not apply to this definition will be in the “PCs” section, above.

• See also the “One Player Is Enough” series on the Game Mastering page.

• Go Hard Or Go Home: Graceful Character Aging – How I now simulate Aging in my campaigns, some of the approaches I’ve used to handle character aging in the past, and why those weren’t successful.
• Ask The GMs: How to survive political games with paranoia and intrigue – The question might concern a Vampire The Masquerade campaign, but Johnn and I look beyond that to offer advice on how to handle games filled with in-game politics. With a postscript piece of advice in the comments.
• Roleplaying Assassins: An excerpt from Assassins Amulet – An excerpt from our then-forthcoming sourcebook, Assassin’s Amulet offers advice on how to roleplay an Assassin. And there’s a link to part two of a great review of AA in the comments, and a link to the site where you can buy a copy.
• In Part Four, I wrap up the Primary types of writer’s block with solutions to Dialogue Block and Narrative Block in the fourth part of a series on this writing problem.
• The Premise Of Falsehoods – Luck Vs Skill in RPGs – I start with a question that’s been around forever – “Is it better to be lucky or skilled” – and proceed to analyze just what luck is and what skill is. In the process, an understanding of RPG concepts from different perspectives emerges that verges on the revelatory. Several side topics of relevance are explored, including the role of players in how Campaigns evolve, and by the end, even the concept of what a campaign is has been redefined. While it contains nothing of practical value, this is practically certain to give you a changed awareness of the world, and of the hobby of RPGs – which is either worthless or infinitely valuable to you.
• 3 Feet In Someone Else’s Shoes: Getting in character quickly – A potpourri of techniques for bringing NPCs to life quickly and easily, enabling you to switch from “being” one to “inhabiting” another with scarcely a breath in between.
• Layers Of Mis-translation: RPGs and Dubbed TV – you have a TV show filmed in a foreign language, full of foreign cultural referances, that has been dubbed into your language by skilled translators and voice-over artists. What you see and hear becomes the basis of your relationship with the character on-screen. How much of that relationship stems from the original performer and how much is added by the voice-over artist? That question unlocks this article on the reality of an RPG as percieved by players, on the reality of player actions as percieved by the GM, and of the individual projecting themselves into what may be printed before them in black and white.
• The Thinking Man’s Guide to Intelligence for Players and GMs – I presage this article with a drop-in editorial concerning what has become known as the Lindt Cafe Seige. I suspect that the huge number of likes this article got on social media at the time had more to do with that editorial than with the content. That content: Practical advice on how to roleplay characters of different Intelligence levels, both PCs and NPCs. The categories discussed are Low Intelligence, Very Low Intelligence, and Very High Intelligence. It is assumed that characters with “Normal” Intelligence require no modification in playing style to represent that intelligence. Readers who find this interesting and/or useful should also check out the two-part article on Charisma linked to in the opening paragraphs, which also (in part 2) demonstrates how to build general perceptions of a race or class into a social structure through house rules.
• Overprotective Tendencies: Handling Player Risk Aversion – the longer a player lives with a particular character in his pocket, the more attached to that character he becomes, and that can lead to overprotective tendencies and over-planning by players. In this (brief) article, I look at six solutions to the problem, several of which I don’t personally recommend. This post seemed to connect with a lot of readers at the time.
• Part 1 of the Basics For Beginners series, Beginnings, details what you really need before you start, with exercises to help you develop it if you don’t have it. Re-reading it, I was struck by how down-to-earth the advice was on Roleplaying NPCs (it’s harder than roleplaying a PC), Rules Knowledge, Materials requirements, How often you play, how long a game session will be, game complexity & continuity, explaining the fantastic in-game, setting aside time for research and self-improvement, resources and how to accumulate them, and giving yourself permission to fail. One example needs to be excerpted and echoed: Don’t try to make your dream campaign your first campaign.
• The Secret Arsenal Of Accents – Three techniques, two standards, and two general principles, are all that you need to go from “I can’t do accents” to being able to fake it well enough to fool players at the game table – provided they don’t speak the language you’re faking, of course.
• Getting Into Character pt 1: NPCs – If your characterization is too deep, you’ll never be able to retain it when the time comes to quickly step in-and-out of character. In this article, I offer 7 techniques for getting into character as an NPC, and they all come down to extracting key points and simplifying either the characterization or the situation in some way. But the article goes beyond that, discussing how to use plot to show off the characterization and uniqueness of the individual, and how to use characterization to solve some plot problems..
• A Stack Of Surprises: Blog Carnival November 2015 – After introducing the month’s Blog Carnival (it was once again Campaign Mastery’s turn to host), listing all the things that could be written about under the heading of “Suprise” and “The Unexpected”, I turn to analyzing the sticky question of “Should Surprise Stack?” – or it’s more intrinsically comprehensible alterntative form, “Do multiple surprises compound?” in both D&D / Pathfinder and the Hero System. This article does NOT follow the usual Campaign Mastery pattern, with practical application first, then generalizing and theory afterwards. As usual, when pushed too hard, I find that all three game systems’ rules have a hole that may need to be patched with a House Rule. There’s a lot of logical analysis of combat mechanics and principles, and both alternative answers are given a thorough going over before avoiding a definitive general conclusion. Instead, this is shown as one issue that each GM and each campaign could and perhaps should handle differently. The impact of genre on that choice is also discussed.
• Transferable Skills From Bottom to Top and back again starts by studying the theoretical foundations of Skills Systems, identifying two different types (bottom up, with lots of specific skills and narrow definitions, and top-down which has few skills and applies them liberally), and determining that a lot of GM problems and GM-player conflicts stem from using the wrong approach with a specific system type. I then find that the D&D / Pathfinder skills system (as of version 3.x) can best be described as “confused” in this respect, and offer three solutions: A bottom-up solution, A top-down solution, and a flexible compromise. I also describe (too briefly, to be honest) the skills system in use in my Superhero campaign.
• Visualizing what’s going on is a critical GM skill, but any reasonable list of exactly what’s involved makes the task seem almost impossible.Obviously, it’s not, but beginners can be overwhelmed at first. With experience, we develop new techniques that are far more efficient and effective, so subtly and gradually that we’re hardly aware of it happening. Which makes it kinda hard to study other GMs’ techniques. In I see with my little mind’s eye: The power of Visualization, I detail (with examples and an exercise for the reader) the six techniques that I use to develop and manage my visualizations, how to translate them into description, and the big differences (aside from being able to try different things to see whether or not they work) that doing it in advance makes vs improv.