Obscure Knowledge can be a great source of uniqueness in an RPG Campaign, but it needs to be handled with care.

No-one enjoys being lectured to, and the more obscure the subject, the less likely it is to be of obvious interest to those receiving it.

There are ways around the difficulties and problems, and that’s the subject of today’s article.

The Value Of Obscure Knowledge

Basing some element of your campaign on a piece of obscure knowledge generates uniqueness because it is extremely unlikely that anyone else will have used that same information in the same way.

It must be remembered, however, that Obscurity is a relative term; all participants in RPGs are exposed routinely to facts from history and nature that are obscure by mainstream standards. When I use the term in the context of this article, you should interpret it as “obscure for an RPG player/GM”, but that’s a bit of a mouthful.

For example, you may have come across a little-known Lithuanian fairy tale regarding a race of miniature people, and have decided to “rebuild” the Fey based on this obscure source, just to make them different (No, I don’t know of any such story – this is an example invented out of whole cloth).

Most GMs love to read books on such unlikely subjects for the inspiration they can derive from them.

But this uniqueness comes at a price.

Which Comes First, the Knowledge Or The Relevance?

One of the problems that you have to consider is that Obscurity is relative – and by using something as a foundation-stone within your campaign, you are increasing the value of that information to those within the campaign, and hence reducing its obscurity from a PC’s point-of-view. That in turn increases the likelihood that a PC will know the information, even if his player does not.

The difficulty that this creates is that the player needs to know the information if his character has it, but the player has no reason to be interested in the subject. If you give the information to the player without making its importance clear to the player, it is likely to be forgotten by the time he is in a position to attach relevance to the material; but if you provide the relevance in advance, you diminish the interest level in the material.

This catch-22 makes obscure knowledge an unusually difficult proposition for the GM.

Focusing On Obscure Knowledge

The simplest pathway through this difficulty is to ensure that the character is not aware of the information until it becomes relevant, and even then, to position it as the solution to a mystery.

Curiosity forms an initial relevance which is sufficient to sustain interest until the true relevance of the information can be established.

The technique is to present the race or species that you are revising in the form of an encounter, either directly experienced by the PCs or indirectly experienced in the form of behavior that is substantially different to that which the player would expect from the source material to which they have access. This creates the mystery.

It is not enough to merely present such a mystery, however; you also need to ensure that understanding the solution is important to the players for some reason beyond intellectual curiosity. This generally involves wrapping a plotline of some sort around the mystery.

There is a constant struggle between what the PCs can be expected to know already and what the GM wants them to have to find out, because it is usually not enough to simply place the solution in the (metaphoric) hands of an NPC for eventual delivery to the players. As a general rule of thumb, it’s a lot easier to make PCs interested in a subject than it is to make the players -interested in that subject (counterbalancing this to some extent is the equally-general rule of thumb that players become more intensely interested in a subject if they are interested at all).

The trick, as is always the case, lies in getting the players to engage with the situation and not to merely pretend to it for the sake of ‘playing their characters’.

Avoiding The Lecture

A key element to achieving that is always to avoid “the lecture” in which answers are presented to the players by an NPC on a silver platter. Instead, you need to construct some route to the solution that the PCs can follow for themselves, then emplace sufficient barriers and challenges around that route that the players feel that they have earned the answers. By presenting the information that you, as GM, always wanted the PCs to have, in the form of a reward, and having the players view it that way, you generate the interest on the part of the players that you need.

There is a secondary challenge for the GM in terms of avoiding the lecture, something that even experienced GMs may not realize. I’ve been caught by it a time or two, myself. That challenge is Demonstrable Immediate Relevance.

It’s all well and good to have a logical connection between the source of inspiration and the interpretation that has been applied to the creature, race, (or whatever) that you are modifying to you unique design, but if the players cannot see that connection immediately they come into possession of the information and cannot make immediate use of it, the connection is too tenuous to sustain both verisimilitude and interest. It’s not enough to simply explain how and why the creature, race, (or whatever) is different, the information has to be immediately useful to the players, and that usually entails making it immediately beneficial to their PCs.

Coherence: The Final Challenge

Another problem that I have seen occur all-too-often is that the GM will introduce some explanation for a point of uniqueness without performing sufficient analysis of the ramifications of the explanation – in other words, not looking at the consequences of whatever produced the uniqueness they have imparted.

It’s really difficult and time-consuming to be completely comprehensive in this, so much so that it is completely impractical. Not only would every line of every official rule-book and source-book need to be scrutinized for possible implications, but virtually every word of the unofficial source material created by the GM. So some level of compromise is necessary.

The objective should not be perfection, because that is impractical and virtually impossible to achieve; instead, it should be Coherence, which is an entirely different thing. Coherence is having identified and analyzed sufficient of the major consequences that the GM can handle anything else on-the-fly simply by remaining aware of the point of distinctiveness that they have introduced. It is a state of prep that is “good enough” and no more, and hence is a lot more practical to achieve.

Different GMs will achieve that state with differing degrees of effort. Individuals will also place their requirements at different standards – some being more comfortable with ad-libbing may require less prep, while others need to think things through more carefully over a longer period of time. This is a subjective standard, not an objective one.

Furthermore, having multiple vectors for uniqueness escalates the difficulty involved exponentially. We all have different capacities, and need to work within those personal limitations.

The Price Of Uniqueness

The paradigm seems so simple at first: Find some piece of (relevant) obscure information and incorporate that into the campaign in such a way that one or more key ingredients are transformed into a unique variation on the core idea.

The reality, as this article makes clear, is not so straightforward. The benefits and rewards of the effort involved remain undimmed, but the practicalities of implementation are such that it is a lot more work than it may at first appear.

It follows that little-or-no effort should be expended on campaign elements that will not yield a benefit to the campaign that is proportionate. If Drow are to be a minor-at-best element within your campaign, don’t waste time customizing them; expend that effort on something that will be relevant more frequently and more substantially.

If, like every GM I know (including me), you are only human and have only limited capacities, it is necessary to pick and choose those elements that are both within your capabilities and that will give you the most creative ‘bang’ for your buck.

There is very little that can be left to chance. And that includes the pathways by which salient details of the game world get into the players’ hands. Information dissemination needs to be carefully pre-planned so that you not only avoid any plot trains, but also avoid making the uniqueness of the campaign setting hostage to the whims of the players. You can’t force them down any particular path, but you can ensure that any path they care to choose leads through a particular font of (relevant) knowledge.

It’s not always easy, but it’s always rewarding – if you can pull it off. Just don’t expect it to happen by accident.