Illustration based on ‘Mountain 4’
by FreeImages.com / Diana Evans
Starting with a vague outline, and quickly sketching in the details, visualizing step-by-step conveys something close to the original (shown at the bottom for comparison).

The Impossible Mission

It doesn’t matter how skilled you are in your use of descriptive language and extraordinary narrative if you don’t know what it is that you are supposed to be describing. It follows that GMs need to construct and maintain a mental image of their world as it exists at any given moment in order to be able to describe it when necessary.

But that’s only half the story. Depending on your approach, you may need to maintain two or even three separate and yet interrelated perspectives on this world, or more.

There’s the view of the world from the point of view of the PCs. There’s the same scene as viewed by the NPCs. In both cases, there may be – perhaps even should be – individual variations. And then there’s an omniscient overview that describes what is really happening, which doesn’t get described to anyone, but which is used by the GM for decision-making and rules interpretation. Before you know it – four PCs, four NPCs, and an omniscient perspective – you can be up to nine or more simultaneous views.

Let’s think for a moment about each of these world-views as a streaming video that is being produced “live”. Have you ever tried opening eight or nine web pages each of which has a different video streaming to it at the same time? Neither have I, but I’ve had enough of them open to be able to describe the results: Stutter. Freeze. Jumps. Babble. Confusion. Unresponsive computer systems, too caught up in the momentary demands to be able to acknowledge even the movement of the mouse, let alone a click to pause one of the videos or close one of the web pages.

We can’t even devote 100% of our capacities to the purpose: we have to not only translate it all into narrative; we have to anticipate what may be coming next; we have to keep an overall storyline above, and beyond the immediate, progressing, and coherent; we have to deal with rules questions and mechanics questions; we have to make decisions on behalf of the NPCs, and those decisions have to be rational from their perspective and based on what they know or don’t know. We’re lucky if even half of our attention can be focused on maintaining this narrative view.

GMs aren’t superhuman

All of which makes GMing sound like a completely impossible task for any mere mortal to perform. Yet hundreds of people manage it every day; how is that possible?

The reality is that we function like a television director, switching from one “camera” to another, and ignoring the rest. What’s happening in our heads is exactly what happens when you have too many streaming video pages open at the same time, but they start paused and we adjust the timing slider before we unpause them – automatically pausing all the others each time we switch focus. And we’re so busy with all of that and everything else that we have to do that we don’t even notice the mental stutters, and brain-freezes, and jumps, and babble in our heads.

Well, at least, that’s the way we do it when we start out, when we’re beginners. There are better techniques that permit retention of a more comprehensive worldview with smaller overhead that we each naturally develop over time. So subtly does the change take place that often we don’t even realize that our methodology has evolved.

And that means that we don’t know how best to use what we have, or its limitations and how to work around them, or even if our personal technique is as good as that of the next GM – a question that is inherently blurred by the fact that we’re all different individuals with different strengths and weaknesses.

It’s only when you stop and think about what it is that you do, and make notes – mental or otherwise – that you even begin to appreciate the complexity of the problem, never mind the solutions and workarounds that you have in place. You have to be conscious of your subconscious techniques before you can improve them – or even simply take command of them.

I’m very process-driven and a particular strength is analyzing those processes – so it’s fair to expect that I’ve put more thought into identifying and understanding the processes that I use to do nine (or more) impossible things before breakfast – well, before lunch, anyway (you shouldn’t try and GM on an empty stomach, it only adds another layer of distraction to an already over-burdened cerebral cortex).

In particular, there are six primary techniques that I employ, and the purpose of this article is to describe each of them. In combination, they enable me to perform what would otherwise require superhuman levels of concentration – and to leave enough mental capacity in reserve to deal with everything else that being a GM requires of me. The six techniques are:

1. Abstraction/Simplification
2. Selective Detail Focus
3. Omniscience and Error
4. Perspective & Purpose Reload
5. Reaction Flags
6. Visualize, then Describe

Abstraction/Simplification

I always start with an overall impression of the situation. Chaos, confusion, happy crowds, a pastoral scene, a country lane toward low hills and distant mountains, a peasant village built in a quagmire, gleaming perfection, towering skyscrapers crowding in on the streets no matter how wide the sidewalks may be, whatever. A crowd of any sort tends to feature prominently if present – in fact, I will usually construct a mental “Generic villager couple” briefly and then forget it except as associated with a particular descriptive label which I can use to recall that image, at will – for the next few hours, anyway.

I’ll use the same technique for each of the major features that I might be called upon to describe – I’ll visualize each, then set that visualization aside in favor of a vague placeholder in my general mental overview. Unless there is something distinctive or unusual about the object being simplified, and that something is likely to be of interest/relevance to the PCs, it will only take 1-3 seconds to visualize each element of the overall landscape or setting.

Another element that I will focus on during this process is the tone or mood of the scene. Wherever possible, I like to have this either reflect or contrast with the detailed elements of the overall scene. That means that for each element, I need only to recall whether it contrasted or complimented the tone to have a clue as to the visual particulars of the element, and can choose my narrative language accordingly.

With that mental image constructed, I can describe the general scene, with special focus on establishing the tone. As a general rule, I will describe overall images in one of three sequences, or a combination thereof: top-to-bottom as though it were a painting, projected image, or stock movie scene (ie distant to near); left-to-right [those who read right-to-left should use that sequence], ending at the most important object in the scene or skipping over it entirely if it is not “hard right” in the image; or (in dramatic situations only) weak contrast to strong contrast, which usually equates very roughly with either increasing importance or increasing closeness. On occasions, where the most important take-away is to be a sense of travel from one place to another, I will employ a front-to-back/near-to-far approach.

There’s always more to say about these techniques than there’s room, or time, to convey. One point that I was unable to squeeze in that was too important to disregard is this: no matter what the internal logic is that you employ for determining the narrative sequence, the most memorable and important object is the last one that you mention – whether that’s what you intended or not.

This technique is very film noir in many ways, painting a broad overview in almost poetic language as succinctly as possible. “Waves of purple bracken and grass rise and fall with the warm summer breeze, and for a moment it seems the entire plain, as far as the rocky foothills, is paying repeated homage to the mountains, bowing and scraping before the lords of nature.”

Gaps and Discontinuities

Now read that example again, paying attention to how few particulars were actually provided: “bracken, grass, warm summer breeze, plains to rocky foothills, mountains”. More important is the tone of majesty and dynamism conjured. Yet, the image that was conjured up was far more detailed, because the listener’s mind “fills in the gaps”.

If those imputed details are replaced with a more-specific version in the next few seconds that conforms with what has already been presented, the overall impression in the listener’s mind is updated accordingly; if not, there will be a discontinuity, with the specific version existing in mental isolation from the overall scene. The exact time-frame will vary from one individual to another, and that clock keeps ticking regardless of any interruptions experienced. Practice, experience, and knowledge of the players combine to permit a vague judgment about how much detail I can provide in any given description before that occurs.

Whatever the deadline is, I have that long and no more to squeeze in additional background detail before I have to turn my attention to the foreground. Never try to continue with background beyond the limit; not only will half your “audience” fail to integrate the additional background details in their own mental image of the scene, half of them will try anyway, and lose track of other important details, no matter how unimportant the replacements may prove to be. In particular, the carefully-established tone will tend to wash out and become generic.

As a broad rule of thumb, no more than three additional sentences or conjoined statements, each no more than a line-and-a-half long (typed) or 2-3 lines long (handwritten). I can invest all of that in one specific object, whose importance within the scene grows accordingly, or can spread the love.

Note that it is far too late to illustrate the process here – the internally-conjured picture has had time to become fixed in the minds of most of you. There had better not be any significance to any of those background elements because your image won’t be the same as that of the next GM over. The same thing happens with players.

And so, the narrative moves on from the background to the foreground – and that’s the province of the next technique that I employ.

Selective Detail Focus

You don’t have time to describe everything that can be seen except in the most generic overtones. You have to be selective in what you choose to highlight, as already stated.

But there’s a complicating wrinkle: you don’t have time to fully describe anything in complete detail, either. A detailed description always has to consist of suggestive shorthand, an extract from the melange of verbiage that you could use to describe the object. At best, you can allocate a specific into a general class of like objects, imbue it with one or two specific qualities that sub-categorize it, and provide one or two specific details that identify and distinguish this specific example.

And a further complication: unless you somehow manage to perpetuate the tone and dynamics of your general scenery, those are the first things that get drowned out by an excessive deluge of detail, unless your audience make a special effort not to lose them. Any request to do so tends to break the mood all on it’s own, just to further complicate matters.

Fortunately, the poetic use of vocabulary can effect a partial rescue of this difficult situation. And that’s a strength that only tends to grow with time and expertise.

For example, let’s insert a lone, isolated, tree into that previous image, in the middle of the field. Describing the bends of the limbs and the shape of the leaves and the color and texture of the bark and the dynamics of the situation on the specifics of the tree could easily require a thousand words or more – but you don’t have a thousand words, you have six lines at most, and that has to cover every object to be detailed.

Borrowed terminology

Every object that we describe has a specific vocabulary assigned to it to describe the object. The language used to describe a tree’s particulars, for example. Sometimes we can get more mileage from using the specific vocabulary associated with some general element or elements already specified as present in the scene, creating an association between the object and the scene in which it is to be located, making it feel a natural part of the overall scene.

For example, we could describe the tree as “majestically tall” and the leaves as “silver-topped by the sunlight” – both imagery associated with mountains. We could describe the bark as rough and broken, or we could use the terminology associated with rocky outcrops and hills: “craggy”. This language has to come naturally; there is an inherent discontinuity between the subject and chosen terminology. Where this discontinuity is small, the language adds to the description; when it grows too great, the description becomes disruptive to the growing mental image.

This fact demonstrates that there is constant feedback between a visualization and the language that we choose in order to express that visualization, something that even many writers don’t seem to realize.

There is one sure test that I know of for detecting this sort of over-reaching, and it only works with the written word, which has the quality of permitting the re-establishing of mood by re-reading what comes before the disruptive description: insert a deliberate mental discontinuity with an inappropriate action being performed by, on, or to the object and note how strongly the mood is disrupted. If the break is strong, then the language works; if it is weak, then the effect of the disruption is also weak.

Describe the tree and then have someone cut it down with an axe. If the mood is shattered, your language works; if there is no sense of that shattering, then the mood was already broken, and your description has gone too far.

“In the center of the field stands a majestic elm of the sort that immediately begs the inner child to look for hand-holds. Craggy bark is hidden by a surcoat of green and white, the leaves brightly silver-topped in reflected sunlight on their upper surfaces.”

Two sentences, but they bring the tree to life. Adding anything more – a scorch-mark where the tree was once struck by lightning, or marks carved into the bark – begins to run the risk of breaking the mood, even though it further defines and distinguishes the tree.

Describe the three most important things, at most, using a total of six sentences, at most – and try to avoid those limits if it doesn’t leave out something important. Those are the limits that we usually have to work with before moving on to the interaction between characters and environment. That mandates squeezing every last skerrick of value from those words.

The flow of attention

Another element that requires attention is the flow of narrative. You can’t usually skip around; there needs to be a continuity of flow from one thing to the next as the mental “eye” travels across the landscape we’re visualizing.

That’s why the most important element is the last thing that gets described, or rather why the last element described looms in the mental landscape of the listener as the most important element – it’s the most “attention-arresting” element, by definition, because that’s where we arrest our attention.

To demonstrate this, let’s now turn attention to a couple of other elements in our example, starting with the mountains. If we were to describe these before the tree, there is a natural continuity closer to the PCs, and the tree becomes most important; if we describe the mountains after the tree, the distance, and hence the sense of traveling over that distance, becomes the most important.

There is a complicating wrinkle in that some of the most obvious visual language has already been usurped for use in describing the tree – that puts that narrative content off-limits, in effect stating by implication that the tree is more important than the mountain, because the tree has usurped the narrative content of the mountain.

“Jagged peaks jut into the sky in shades of soft purple, framed by wind-swept clouds poignant with impending rain. One in particular looms like a broken shark’s-tooth, and somehow you know that to be your destination.”

Let’s dissect that example for a moment. There’s a reinforcement of “craggy” elements – from hills to tree-bark to mountains, helping cement the whole as being a single scene. There’s a color that we hadn’t mentioned before, but that is implied by “bracken” at least in my mind – though maybe I was thinking of heather, come to think of it. Not being a native of England – and this is clearly a pseudo-English scene, in my mind – I’m a little fuzzy on some of the specifics. The advantage of preparing narrative in advance is that we can pause and research these details, but let’s assume this is being done on the fly at the game-table, and that we can’t afford such a luxury – so there may or may not be a reinforcement of purple coloration in the mind of the reader. The framing provided by the clouds is very important, adding contrast to the scene – anything even slightly dark in front of something light looks even darker and more significant. There’s a reinforcement of weather – summer breezes in the general description, and wind-swept clouds in the mountain description – and we’ve added a slightly ominous note in impending rain, which also implies dominance by the mountain. And I end with a specific shape and a reinforcement of the sense of distance and travel. This uses none of the terminology stolen for use in the tree and that further unifies the location as a single scene.

If this visualization and description comes before that of the tree, it emphasizes the tree as a pause in the journey; if it follows that of the tree, it emphasizes the journey and turns the tree into punctuation along the journey.

Flow with a third Element

Now, let’s add an Orc under the tree. Again, we only have two sentences to capture his presence. (Actually, because he’s the only thing with volition in the scene so far, we can probably squeeze in a third – let’s see how we go).

“Shading himself beneath the tree from the heat is an Orc, reclining against the trunk, dressed in dark-leather jerkin and wine-toned leggings. From a set of hand-carved pan-pipes, he blows an evocative tune of the majesty and purity of nature and the wonder of life.”

“I waste him with my crossbow!!”

There’s that discontinuity test, deliberately inserted because I had this Orc doing some decidedly non-traditionally-Orcish things. I don’t know about you, but the test showed me that the Orc and his activity fits the scene, however discontinuous the activity might be with respect to tradition and expectation. And yet, there is the sense that something is wrong with the description of the scene.

The problem is that we have gone from tree to mountain to Orc, and that doesn’t make sense in terms of visual flow. Because he has volition, and is normally hostile, and is close at hand, the Orc is clearly the most important element in the scene; he has to come last, but that doesn’t fit the flow that had previously been defined.

Below, I’ve recast the sequence in the more logical sequence of “General – mountain – tree – Orc – disruption test” – observe how much more strongly the disruption is felt:

“Waves of purple bracken and grass rise and fall with the warm summer breeze, and for a moment it seems the entire plain, as far as the rocky foothills, is paying repeated homage to the mountains, bowing and scraping before the lord of nature. Jagged peaks jut into the sky in shades of soft purple, framed by wind-swept clouds poignant with impending rain. One in particular looms like a broken shark’s-tooth, and somehow you know that to be your destination.”

“In the center of the field stands a majestic elm of the sort that immediately begs the inner child to look for hand-holds. Craggy bark is hidden by a surcoat of green and white, the leaves brightly silver-topped in reflected sunlight on their upper surfaces. Shading himself beneath the tree from the heat is an Orc, reclining against the trunk, dressed in dark-leather jerkin and wine-toned leggings. From a set of hand-carved pan-pipes, he blows an evocative tune of the majesty and purity of nature and the wonder of life.”

“The tree tears him limb-from-limb!”

It’s like a splash of cold water, or a slap to the face, isn’t it? We have this steady accumulation of tranquility, in which a distant hint of rain is the greatest threat, so powerful that even the Orcish nature has yielded to it – and then there’s that sudden disruption, experienced with so much more force, because when the flow is incorrect, the tone stops accumulating. Putting the mountain description in the wrong place saps the power from the tree and the Orc’s description can only recover that lost ground at best.

“General, Mountain, Tree” works, and so does “General, Tree, Mountain”. “General, Mountain, Tree, Orc” works – but “General, Tree, Mountain, Orc” doesn’t flow and doesn’t work anywhere near as effectively as a result.

The absence of detail

It’s also worth noting that there is nothing particularly distinguishing about the Orc other than his behavior. That’s because any such description would undermine the significance of the behavior by making the Orc seem more typical of his kind, or by adding to the discontinuity between expectation and presented reality beyond the point of sustainability.

I was originally going to add a third sentence mentioning a yellowish scar over one eye and a notch missing from one ear, providing that specificity, but when I got to “wonder of life” I knew instinctively and through that I could go no further without undermining the effect that I had achieved. You can try it for yourself, if you want. Instead, I decided that it would be better to hold off on that description until after the initial interaction between PCs and Orc – an interaction that I would expect to be a parley, not an act of violence.

As a general rule of thumb

As soon as I have the general description, like a rough sketch, I will visualize it and select the visual flow that best suits what I want to present to the players as a scene – then visualize each element in sequence along that narrative flow. That means reserving any terms that I might want to usurp for a later descriptive element, as was the case with the tree borrowing from Mountain “descriptive language”.

If I’m preparing my narrative in advance, it is often easier to visualize things in out-of-continuity order and then re-sequence them, exactly as this example has demonstrated. I find it easier to focus on the scenic elements that I want to convey when I do so. Your mileage may vary.

Omniscience and Error

Does anyone here know how a GIF animates with such a relatively small file size – compared to an uncompressed video file? MPEG-II, III, and IV changed the balance of such things, but comparing a GIF with an MPG-I of the same animation is startling. 10K of GIF file can become 1M of video or more, especially if against a plain background.

The secret is that the MPG encodes every point of light or color in each and every frame, while the gif only records the differences from the last frame. Complicated backgrounds with light and shadow and movement fight against this means of file compression, while a solid background emphasizes it.

I handle all those different visualizations of a scene that may be required using exactly the same principle. I don’t try to envisage the complete environment from each character’s point of view – I focus on maintaining awareness of the omniscient perspective and the differences between that and how each character perceives what is happening. Since, by definition, the omniscient perspective is “what is really happening in the scene”, every such difference becomes a point of erroneous perception by the character.

Take our Orc sitting in the shade. If the PC’s advance, making parley gestures, the Orc would assume that because his actions were not hostile, he is being granted safe passage if he leaves, NOW. Fearful, he would leap to his feet, bow, and start to retreat, still facing the PCs, with an expression of fear on his face. If I were a paranoid PC or NPC, or one with military or hunting expertise, I would assume that it is a trap and that he has a companion hidden up the tree, and is attempting to “lure us into range” with his trickery, and would keep arrows notched and at the ready, pointed up into the hidden recesses of the tree – the GM’s off-hand mention of “a tree begging to be climbed” occupying the forefront of my mind.

Since no NPC knows exactly what is in the player’s minds, and the NPC perspective might or might not be correct in assuming the possibility of a trap, but our omniscient perspective knows better, both the Orc’s behavior and that of the paranoid PC/NPC are framed around erroneous interpretations of the situation.

Further simplifying the impossible problem posed earlier is the fact that many of these erroneous perspectives will be common to several different characters, with (perhaps) minor variations – it thus becomes possible to have one set of differences for multiple characters.

Perspective & Purpose Reload

Key to the ‘Omniscience and Error’ technique is maintaining awareness of each character’s Perspective and Purpose, i.e. what they want to achieve in any situation with which they are presented. I regularly refresh and reload this information into my conscious mind, in particular at the start of play and before any important scene in which they appear. I always want to be able to answer the mental question of “why does this matter to the character?”

Doing so not only assists in roleplay, it helps me determine what a character will pay attention to in a visualization and how they will interpret it and react to the circumstances presented to them – and that, in turn, helps me to sharpen the visualization in the ways that matter to the character.

Reaction Flags

The other characterization aspect that holds particular relevance to my internal visualization of a scene are ‘reaction flags’. A Reaction flag is anything that is likely to trigger a particular response on the part of a PC. This is a lot easier with the Hero System, where these are explicitly defined for each character, but even in D&D I’ve found the concept useful; it just requires a greater exercising of analysis and judgment.

By way of example, let me point readers at three specific parts of the Orcs and Elves series.

• Part 5 contains a specific section of relevance, “The Personal Quests” of the members of the PCs party. It’s about 4/5ths of the way down the page; look for the second map, which is labeled “The Golden Empire”.

To put those personal quests into perspective,

• Part 2 discussing Elves, Drow, Ogres, Dwarves, and Halflings in Fumanor and specifically introduces three of the members of the PC party: Eubani, Ziorbe, and Arron.
• Part 3 does the same for Orcs, Dwarvlings, The Verdonne, and Humans, and specifically introduces Tajik, Leif, Verde, and Julia Sureblade.

Those personal quests and character backgrounds define what matters to each of the characters, and that in turn dictates their relationships. They also define how each character will perceive events around them, rather vaguely in the case of the PCs, and rather more precisely in the case of the NPCs. They are a focal point for each character – because this was/is a campaign about quests and their fulfillment.

Visualization 101

It doesn’t matter what it is that you’re trying to describe, it is far easier to do so if you can see it in your head before you decide on word one, however vaguely. The more complex the situation, the more difficult such a visualization becomes, but the benefits of doing so are also proportionate to the complexity.

That was supposed to be the last word in this article. But, along the way, I remembered an exercise in creative writing that I was once introduced to, and that may be of benefit to readers. It isn’t a solitary activity; it requires the assistance of someone who can do some sort of rough sketch at the very least, and the more artistic capability that person has, the better. This person should not be one of your players.

A Handy Exercise

Read the general description to the artist. Have them very quickly and lightly sketch whatever they think the scene looks like. Read, in turn, the descriptions of each element, and have him sketch them in more detail and more affirmatively. This may require some erasure. When you’ve finished, look at the sketch – is that what you intended to convey? Is there anything missing? Is there anything wrong?

The theory is that the more skilled the artist, the better they are at illustrating whatever they can see in their mind’s eye; and therefore, they provide a direct test of the effectiveness of your descriptions at conjuring images within that mind’s eye. You can only get better with practice.

And that is the last word!