I’ve been watching some of my old Stargate: SG1 episodes during the last week, and (as often happens) some of the commentary (in the season 9 extras) sparked an interesting question.

The discussion was about the relative merits of Apophis, Baal, and Anubis as villains. This in turn connected in my head with a discussion that I had with my co-GM in our Pulp campaign about a villain created for a future plotline.

Power Level

Obviously, a great villain is not one that can be easily defeated by the PCs. But how far in the other direction should villains go – and what is best? My first superhero campaign featured a villain who was so powerful that initially, the PCs could not stand in his way. As they gained in experience, and hatched plots and plans to even the scales a little, they reached the point where they could baulk him occasionally, and even score the occasional minor victory. As they became greater threates to him, so he began to actively target them and their interferance, and the clashes between the two forces became more personal. Ultimately, they did not defeat him; they found a way in which both could have what they wanted, and began a process that ultimately left him a great character within the campaign mythology, but no longer a great villain.

Nevertheless, in comparison to many of the villains that followed, he was a far better villain than most. The players actually cared about their character’s interactions with him.

Those other villains were a mixed bag – some more powerful, some less – but none of them really captured the player’s hearts as an antagonist to the same extent as the original villain.

I can only conclude from this that power level is, in general, irrelevant to the question of whether or not a foe is a Great villain. So long as the Villain is strong enough to pose a threat, to achieve the objective that he is working toward – in other words, so long as he is credible – power level has nothing more to do with the question.

Variety of Interaction

One of the hallmarks of that first villain was there were a number of modes of interaction with the PCs. He could threaten one week and be a reluctant ally the week after. The same is true of most of the really great villains from comics – Magneto and Doctor Doom. The Flash and Batman both had great rogues’ galleries – in comparison, most of Superman’s were a little lame (at least until the revision of Lex Luthor in the late 80s/early 90s).

They weren’t one-note songs, they had some element that imbued them with a greater variety of ways in which they could interact with the team.

And yet, for every example that I can point to, I can also point to a counter-example in which the results were just… insipid. And as yet, I havn’t quite been able to put my finger on what caused that difference – hence this rumination.

Black Heartedness

I can also point to a number of villains who were (comparatively speaking) one-trick ponies and yet were great villains, in the process undermining everything that I wrote in the previous section. Ultron, for example, or Dracula, or Dormammu, or C. Montgomery Burns. They all have that ‘something extra’ that elevates them above being a mere enemy.

So perhaps it is better to suggest that a Great Villain always has ‘something extra’ that can be a depth of character, or can be an intensity of Malevolence (Ultron, Darth Vader) or Nobility (Dormammu) or Style (Count Dracula), or unstoppability (any Terminator) or even intellectual fascination (The Borg); and that the villain never does anything to interfere with that “something extra”, or if he does, that it does not become canonic to that character. Deathstroke the Terminator was great when he was using Terra to infiltrate the New Teen Titans, but was slowly watered down over subsequent appearances in the comic until he became ho-hum.

The Obsessed & The Cool

But that’s not enough. If it were, obsessed villains would automatically win “greatest villain” surveys all the time. And they don’t; some of the “obsessed villains” that have appeared here and there over the years have been truly cringe-inducing. The flaw in this line of reasoning is that making a villain obsessed has the consequence of holding that villains’ Greatness hostage to The Cause. It’s not even about how much the audiance in question – the players and GM – agree or disagree with The Cause, it’s more a function of how much the cause interferes with the Villain’s Coolness.

Depth Of Personality

So it’s all well and good to give your villains depth of personality, but that’s not enough to make a great villain. You can make Gods of your villains in comparison with the PCs, or make them of roughly equal power – but neither will guarantee a great villain.

The key word, in many ways, was used in the last sentance of the previous section. Some villains are Cool and do nothing to interfere with that Coolness. Avoid that mistake, and you can do just about anything with them – make them antiheros or give them complex psychological profiles or sympathetic urges or whatever.

A verification: The Floronic Man

This is a character from DC Comics who started off being an obsessed lunatic who transforms himself into a plant. Although competantly drawn, the concept should be enough to make you cringe.

And then he was used in a key role during a turning point in The Swamp Thing, in The Anatomy Lesson (issue #21) in such a way that he became really, seriously, cool. Not especially creepy, not especially obsessed, not especially deranged – more like the Hannibal Lector of Plants – icy cold and calm, completely unfeeling.

In the next issue of Swamp Thing, the character’s obsessions began to get in the way of the coolness. He became a featured character in the year’s Mega-epic, Millennium, in which he went way beyond the cringeworthiness that he started with and became dull and tiresome and boring – rather like Millennium itself, really – and every appearance since has simply watered down the Cool.

From Humdrum to Ascendance to Abysmal and beyond. That’s some career.

Evolution

I’m not entirely sure I’ve actually managed to contribute anything much to this subject, despite my best efforts and intentions. The best that I have managed is to define a great villain as a character with some indescribable “X-factor” – that can be different from one villain to another – with which he never interferes. Tricky to do if you are never sure what it is that you aren’t supposed to be messing with!

The fear and uncertainty that the last point engenders can lead you to keep the character monotone and unchanging – and that’s a big mistake. Another common characteristic of great villains is that they are always Fresh in some way – they change and evolve, they just don’t mess with the X-factor.

Ullar-Omega – a recent example

I’ve written before about the big finish of the most recent Superhero Campaign, in “A Grand Conclusion: Thinking About A Big Finish”. At the heart of that scenario was a revelation concerning the nature of the villain around which the entire campaign had been centred (even when it didn’t seem to be). This character started off as a Superman ripoff – the last member of his race, whose home galaxy had been destroyed by his father to prevent his people being corrupted and destroyed (elements of Sauron here) by a race of Moral Invaders who had a weapon that induced depression in others. This was all known by the players (and their characters) from the beginning of the campaign; they also knew that in their native timeline, the character had become a self-sacrificing and idealistic, humanistic, hero; while in this alternate timeline, he had arrived on Earth a decade later and had become an obsessed, ruthless, subversive, villain. Along the way, they discovered his motives and worldview; there were occasions when he was the villain of the peice, and occasions on which he was a (semi-)trusted ally. He even became the Godfather of the daughter of one of the PCs, a child which he helped deliver.

In the course of the final scenario, the players learned that neither incarnation of the character had been left untouched by the Depression Ray of his race’s enemies, and were driven by Survivor’s Guilt as a result – people who searched for a cause important enough for them to sacrifice their life in achieving, and then achieving it (if necessary at the cost of that life). This unified the two characters into different sides of the coin and put the entire campaign – which had the submerged theme throughout of “Obsession” – into context. And it suddenly revealed to the players the X-factor that had made the character Cool – the fact that (in his own mind) he was behaving heroically, sacrificing himself in a vain effort of achieving an ideal that could never exist in the real world. It was this Pathos of Superman-Gone-Wrong that had lain at the heart of the character concept from his very first appearance, and which had made the character Cool enough to be the central figure around which the entire campaign had been woven. Everything that the character had done – both good and bad – was consistant with this new perception of the character – it explained everything.

So how did I come to “get it right” with this character? Well, I had a couple of advantages; I already knew (from appearances of the Heroic version) that the character was Cool, and I already had the central concept at the heart of his personality. When I started thinking about events and revelations that occured in the previous campaign, and realised how the character would have reacted to them without the occurance of some key events that had transfigured his goals in his previous incarnation, the entire concept and theme of the new campaign became aparrant. As a result, I had figured out what made the character “Cool”, and that it would enable him to be a Great Villain just as easily as it would a Great Hero.

I already knew what made him cool, and so was able to ensure that I never messed with that. Outside of that one restriction, I was able to do anything I wanted with the character, and the players could take the campaign anywhere they wanted it to go. Ultimately, there would be a conclusion of some sort, one way or the other, when all the above would come out; but the ingredients weren’t even concieved of when the campaign started.

A practical approach

It’s a sure bet – at some point in a campaign, you’ll create a character to oppose the PCs, and the Players will react to that character more positively than usual. You will have created a potentially Great villain.

Watch For The Signs

So the first requirement of a practical approach is to make sure that you can recognise the signs when this occurs. Things to watch out for are the players talking about the villain during breaks, speculating about the villain, etc. Another clue is to observe the intensity of the interaction between the players (in the guise of their charactes) and the Villain – it will definitely lift a notch. Side-conversations will be less prevalent, with the players paying more attention, and having more fun than usual. The final sign will be that you find it easier than usual to step into character, and it will be fun for you to roleplay.

Identify The Cool

Here’s the trickiest bit – identifying what it is about the character that has produced this reaction. It might be a gimmick, or a circumstance, or a tone, or a piece of characterisation, or a concept, or any one of a dozen other things. The most practical approach is to list everything that it might be; it will usually be something that can be described in just a few words.

Then try imagining the character in a variety of modes of interaction that work with the character as he was. One by one, try varying each item on your list; if you lose that ease of roleplay and that sense of enjoyment, circle that item on the list; otherwise, cross it out.

Anything that is circled is potentially the X-factor for that character, something not to interfere with, something to be reinforced if possible (without going too far and taking it over the top unless that’s part of the charm). Anything that is crossed off is fair game – at least at this point.

Next, find ways to involve the character a second time in the campaign, taking care not to make any lasting changes, and using them in a slightly different way to their first appearance. Bring them back from the dead somehow if you have to! If the players still react the same way, you havn’t messed with the magic; if the character falls flat, then go back to where the character was before you made that last change for their next appearance, and make sure that the area you changed is marked “do not disturb” in the future.

After a while, either by talking with the players or by putting yourself in their shoes, you will figure out what the X-factor is. And then you’re set!

I took the picture to the right last night just before we ate them. They came from the first garden I’ve had in about a decade, and the first garden veggies we’ve grown since moving to Edmonton. A minor theme in my Riddleport campaign is handling most of the creation ourselves, as a group. The rules (Pathfinder), the world (Golarion) and the city (Riddleport) are all based on Paizo products. They give us the sandbox borders in which to play. Everything else, though, I am either designing myself, or the group designs collaboratively. This is different from recent campaigns where I used pretty much 100% published materials. So, like my peppers, my campaign has a tasty and satisfying home grown feel.

Which brings us to RPG Cartographer for the iPad. While I’m using the Riddleport map from Paizo, other maps I need to draw up myself. RPG Cartographer is brought to us by Brad Talton Jr., the same whiz who created my favourite iPad RPG app – DM Toolkit. With Cartographer, I can map locations out using my favourite computational device in fairly quick fashion and produce great-looking designs.

Tile based mapper

You draw tile-based maps with Cartographer. This means you have a number of graphical objects to choose from, such as straight tunnel, turning tunnel, T split tunnel and so on. You select your desired tile and lay it on the map. Repeat. Lay tiles beside each other to form bigger entities, like long, twisty tunnels. Think of it like Wizards’ D&D Tiles but on the iPad.

I like the app’s tile manipulation a lot. It took me a minute to get my head around it, but that’s because I’m old and slow. You youngins’ should have no problems figuring it out immediately. Resize and rotate tiles using two fingers. One finger serves as the anchor point and stays in place. The other finger moves around to perform the rotate or resize. After doing this for a bit, it now feels natural and I whinge when I have to return to mouse-based operations on my PC.

Building a map generally consists of these operations:

• Create a new map and name it
• Select your background
• Select a tile from the library
• Lay down the tile onto your background
• Rotate and resize the tile as desired
• Lay down another such tile, or select a new one from the library
• Repeat

There are some nuances you pick up through use. For example, you can change the background anytime. So, I tend to design on a bright, simple background so I can see tiles the best. Then when finishing the map I’ll choose its final background.

Another example is synching to scale and then designing without a grid. In Cartographer, you can lay on a square or hex grid anytime and remove it anytime with a single touch. You can also draw without a grid overlay. So, I’ll typically lay down my bounding tile first – something that is the outer frame for all the tiles, such as outer walls of a building, or the four corners of a wilderness scene. I’ll scale and rotate those tiles with grid on, so I get the proper orientation and dimension, then I’ll turn the grid off and use the bounding tiles as reference for the rest of the tiles. I turn the grid on once in awhile, but otherwise design grid-free.

Fiddling with tiles is sometimes tricky

I’ll send Brad a link to this review once posted, because I have some gripes, but it could be my lack of understanding with the app instead a lack of app features. I’ll correct this review if the latter occurs.

One gripe is lack of tile duplication. If I lay down a tile and rotate or size it to suit, I’d like to make an exact copy of that tile. Currently, I need to lay down a new tile from the library and resize and rotate it to match the current design. Perhaps if I could hold a finger on a tile for a second a duplicate option pops up.

Another issue is layered tiles. I love how you can stack tiles on top of each other. Physical tiles get awkward when stacked sometimes, but digital tiles have no such problem. Stack away! Put that bookcase on top of the floor tile atop the building tile atop the water tile. My issue is grabbing the wrong tile for manipulation. I am constantly fingering the wrong tile. There is no undo command, so when I accidentally manipulate the wrong tile, I need to fix that and then go for the intended tile again. It would be super if a tile could be locked down so it cannot be accidentally moved or selected.

Layers feature

RPG Cartographer have five layers. You put tiles on a layer and they stay on that layer. Thing is, only one layer is visible at a time while editing. You can view all layers by touching the eye icon, which is super as it lets you group stuff on layers without distraction of other tiles already laid down, but some kind of multi-layer visibility while editing would be ideal. That would let me put a tiles on one layer and move to another layer for more tiling, and the tiles on lower layers get locked in place, meeting my need.

Actually, I am mis-stating things here. You can see tiles on lower layers, but they are difficult to see sometimes as they’re shadowed out to a 10% or so fill, and details on the tiles are lost. So, if you are doing precise operations like matching up one tile to the inner boundary of another, you need to frequently touch the eye icon to see all layers to help orient yourself.

You can move tiles between layers, turn snap-to-grid on and off with a single touch, and delete tiles by dragging them to the trash can. It is a joy to basically do finger drawing, and objects are easy to manipulate with the natural iPad interface.

A big tile library

The tile library has 1000+ items in it. Some tiles are standalone. Just plunk them down and resize, such as trees and pools. Other tiles are more utilitarian and you need to place them, rotate and resize to get the map you need. Corridor tiles, for example. There’s a T tile, so you need to place it down and then rotate/resize to match the T orientation you need. I found the inventory decent. I would vote for more interior and urban tiles for future releases.

Scaling

The map scale buttons let you zoom in and out. Super for drawing big stuff at 2x view, then zooming in for small placeables at 1/8x zoom. A gripe here is to allow finger pinch zooming. Rather than five preset zoom levels, I’d prefer a zoom level that shows the whole map and finger pinching for all other zooming. A small gripe, but that would remove four icons from the interface.

Interface and features

Speaking of the interface, it’s intuitive and I love it. Again, some tweak requests for the designer. Make the trash and compass a lot smaller. Dragging tiles to the trash is easy, but perhaps a better method is to touch a tile for a bit and tile options pop-up, such as duplicate, delete, and switch layer.

The tile selector icon in the top right is great, but that extra little bubble at 7 o’clock always throws me. The bubble at 5 o’clock triggers the tile selection library. So, I figure the bubble at 7 o’clock should do something as well. I find dial-based selectors intuitive in video games, so I propose putting more functionality in the tile interface widget. I also figure double-tapping a tile should let me do stuff, but I’m not sure what yet. :)

I mentioned the compass. When you touch it, the compass turns red, which means you are in panning mode. This lets you lock down tiles and pan around the map without disturbing your design. A valuable function and I use it a lot.

Design mode and Play mode

RPG Cartographer has two modes. I just talked about the design mode. The second is play mode, which you use when playing the map in the game. This offers excellent functionality, because indeed the two modes for GMing are completely different. To switch, just touch the little map icon on the right side of the screen, select your desired mode, and voila.

In play mode all the tiles are locked down and you just have access to layers four and five. A super feature in play mode switches the tile library up to offer you a selection of PC, NPC and monster tiles (I’ll just call this whole group character tiles from now on). Tons of tiles here, and you just drop the characters you need onto the map and drag them around as they move and whatnot. Super easy gameplay.

You can manipulate character tiles just like all the other map tiles – resize and rotate. So, if a PC drinks a potion of growth, you just resize the character’s tile. Sweet. If facing is important in your rule set, then just rotate the character tile to point the desired direction.

As in design mode, you can lock to grid, zoom and pan, turn grid on and off, and switch grid between square and hex.

Exporting Maps

With Cartographer, you can save and export your maps. A great feature lets you export to different scales. The app offers you five scales (1 page, 4 pages (16 squares = 1″), 12 pages (4 squares = 1″) and 48 pages (1 square = 1″)). If you need a map for your GM binder or just for reference, choose 1 page. If you intend to print out the map for use with minis, use the other scales. If you want to post the map online, you have a nice selection of scales.

Feature Requests

To make this app even more useful to me, I have the following feature requests for the developer. Oh, I should note the developer offers a website and forums over at level99games.com where he is active and responsive to community feedback. In addition, I’ve emailed Brad several times and he’s fast with the reply button. So, thumbs up for personal and good support.

• Links between maps. Like, clicking on stairs, for example, brings up the new map to where the stairs lead.
• VGA output. I’d like to project maps onto a monitor at the game table.
• Status conditions on map and character tiles. If someone is slowed, bloodied, or whathaveyou, it would be super to manipulate the tile in some fashion. Ditto for area effects, such as Entangle, or traps and hazards. It’s a tile based mapper, so this might be difficult, so I propose adding a Hue option where you can change the colour of a tile to designate some condition. This would allow only one condition to be displayed though, so this needs more thought.

Conclusion

This is a great app. Well designed. Lots of features and options. Quite usable. If you like tile-based mappers, check this one out. This app’s strength is exterior maps, though there are plenty of interior tiles to choose from. A great use for you might be setting up overall areas, printing them out, then using WotC tiles, minis and other props to get further utility.

I give this app four out of five stars.

By the way, we ate those peppers in a salad last night. Just like a homebrew campaign with homebrew maps, it was delicious.

Addendum: I just remembered something else. Brad offers an excellent license with this app. You are free to create maps and post them online, sell them, use them in products, and so on. A nice feature for GMs who post their campaign stuff online, and for publishers looking for a convenient mapping solution for their products.

More iPad RPG reviews?

I love my iPad. I use it more now than my PC. And I’ve tried out a mega ton of apps to find the selection I want for running my Riddleport campaign. I’m not sure how many iPad owners read Campaign Mastery, though. So, I’m not sure if more iPad reviews are desired. Let me know.

How good are you at doing two things at once, both of which require concentration?

That’s what I thought! Few people are. And yet, we GMs often seem to expect our players to be able to do just that, and on a regular basis. We expect them to be able to take a verbal description of a scene or setting, integrate a mental image of the action that is taking place there, and still be able to concentrate on roleplaying elements like characterisation and dialogue – all while keeping an eye on the bigger picture that is composed of the significance of everything.

It’s a big job, and when you phrase it in the way that I have above, it seems remarkable that ANYONE can do it, let alone do it well. And that list of tasks completely ignores the factor of rules and game mechanics!

One of the secrets to being a successful GM is finding ways to make these tasks easier for the players, and there are a lot of techniques that can be employed to do so. This article is going to focus on just one of them, the use of illustrations.

Picture This

In practice, what happens? We describe the scene or setting, painting a picture in prose of the environment in which everything is taking place, with emphasis on both an overall perception and on any particularly important details. We then let most of that fade into the background and describe the participants and their actions – or simply name them and let them be faceless generic entities, if the description is not all that important. And then we let most of that fade into the background as well, and simply focus on the characterisation and dialogue and story elements of whatever is happening, bringing in key elements from the descriptions previously provided only when they become directly relevant.

How much simpler life becomes when we can point to an image that illustrates some or all of these items with no need for additional language. Even if the image isn’t quite right, and we have to verbally adjust it (The place looks like this [hold up picture] except that the light comes from oil lanterns suspended from the ceiling, and there are a lot of cobwebs in the rafters, and….) it spares the player a LOT of the work they would otherwise have to undertake just to keep up.

This not only gives the players a common foundation apon which to craft their mental images, it gives them a touchstone to continually refer back to in order to refresh that mental image.

A perfect sunset behind snow-capped purple mountains gives way to a sunny blue sky overhead, and thence to a star-filled night sky within which the moon shines forth full and bright. Rolling hills lead toward the mountains, lush and green; the more distant hills are covered in deep forest. Leading to the hills are a plain of rich grassland, populated here and there by scattered bushes, fields of flowers, and great trees standing in magnificent isolation. All this is visible between tall marble columns of impossible perfection, arranged in a circle around you; between each fluted column is a throne of magnificence, of varying materials, twelve of them. Seated in these thrones, forming a circle around you, are the twelve Gods.

To Illustrate or Not To Illustrate

There are a number of considerations that I take into account when deciding whether or not to craft an illustration of something for one of my games. The first is the importance of the information to be provided by the illustration; if words alone will do, those are what I’ll use. A good rule of thumb is how clearly I can picture the scene in my own mind. If I can’t see it clearly, at least at first, how on earth can I expect my players to do so?

The second is how much emotional impact I want to convey. It’s one thing to talk about an alternative earth in which the British Empire rules the western world and was the subject of the 9/11 attack; it’s quite another to actually combine a photograph of an attack and one of a British Icon like Big Ben to illustrate the attack in question.

The third is the time that I have available. Some images are quick and easy, taking anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of minutes to construct. Some involve nothing more than a Google search or a visit to Wikipedia. Others combine many elements and much design effort, and could take days or even weeks. That’s obviously a problem if I’m going to need it next saturday!

And, fourthly, I have to confess that part of the decision-making process is how much I want to actually create the illustration. Some appeal to me strongly; others, not so much.

“Early in my search for Asgard, my team and I found themselves on a tiny planetoid, not much more than 10 square miles in surface, which was strangely covered with curved lines and arcs. Where the lines intersected, pyramidal structures one meter high pointed skywards. There was no sun in the sky, but the planet itself glowed with sufficient light for us to see. With one exception, these were the only surface structures; otherwise, the planetoid was as smooth as a cue ball. It also had an intensely refractive atmosphere, bending light so much that the entire planetoid’s surface was visible – we could even see ourselves with a decent pair of field glasses, it was like being at the bottom of a mirrored bowl of infinite height.

It was that one exception that was the most interesting feature of the planetoid. A pentagonal spire of glowing black opal, it seemed to have been carved from a single gem some 600 feet tall. On closer inspection, it became apparrant that the material was actually some dark translucent material, and the coloured “veins”of the opal were actually runes in ancient Greek, and Latin, and Norse runes, and Sanskrit, and Egyptian Heiroglyphs, and a dozen other languages that I didn’t recognise at the time. On each facing of the spire was a steep staircase leading into the heart of the structure through an arched doorway. In the centre of the the single room was a raised golden bowl of water surrounded by trees growing straight out of the “opal” mineral.

I didn’t have time to translate the script because we weren’t alone. Everywhere the eye looked, there were war machines attacking one another. Some looked like tanks, some were vaguely insectoid, others were giant humanoids, some were spheres, or spiked cylanders, or, well, you name it! These were in the process of smashing, shooting, slicing, or crushing each other and using the resulting parts to repair themselves even while coming under attack on another side. There must have been hundreds of them! And, of course, they saw us as just another strange machine. Immediatly we arrived, one of the Tank-like machines began firing some sort of energy artillery at us, while another that looked like a self-powered mobile trebuchet, with a giant axe instead of a basket, charged us, and a giant humanoid with some sort of force blade 30′ long turned it’s attention from slashing at a machine that looked like a giant pile-driver with some sort of antigravity suspension, and began to lope in our direction…”

Choice Of Technique

Because I’m into graphic illustration, I’ve built up a number of techniques. The choice of which one is best is a big factor in the time element. Here’s a list of the techniques that I frequently employ, with a rough time-scale:

• An existing image from the web: An obvious starting point. I’ve built up a reasonably large library of images that have been posted in various places. Some of them are public domain, many are not. I’m always careful about where and how I use the images that I collect – I would never use one I wasn’t sure of to illustrate a blog post here at Campaign Mastery for example – but using one to enhance a verbal description to friends with the intention that it never be publicly distributed is quite a different kettle of fish. How long this takes depends on how specific my requirements are. I’ve also gathered a lot of links to sites offering free clip art and public-domain/royalty-free photographs.
• An slightly-edited image from the web: The obvious next step. I’m not the most accomplished digital artist on the web, but I’m not the worst, either. I’ve built up a comprehensive set of image-manipulation tools to facilitate it. Quite often, an image might not be quite right – but can be made close enough with a little cropping or perhaps some colour-shifting.
• Rough Pencil image: This is the starting point for anything more substantial, and often the end-point as well. I keep a book of art paper and pencil handy and can knock up a rough sketch in anywhere from a couple of minutes through to about half-an-hour. These are usually less than half an A4 page in size – sometimes as small as a couple of inches across.
• substantially-edited images from the web: sometimes, I find elements of what I want and have to stitch them together. Often, the image is fine but the background doesn’t suit the context. This can take 30 minutes to a couple of hours.
• Detailed pencil sketch: This is often the best choice, especially if what I’ve found on the web in terms of graphic referance is too far removed from what I need. Sometimes I’ll attempt some other solution, but be forced back to this because time is running out. Again, this rarely takes more than a couple of hours.
• Simple Original Computer Graphic: There are times when detail is less important than having something to show, but a pencil sketch is too messy. When that’s the case, I’ll often do something fairly quick and easy from scratch. There are also times when I can cheat; some games like Heroes Of Might & Magic II have level editors that can be used to craft an image, or part of an image, quickly and easily, to custom specifications.
• Massively-edited images from the web: Every additional element that has to be incorporated into the finished image adds about 25% to the overall time required, as a rough rule of thumb. The image of the Flói Af Loft involved more than 25 different elements – martian surfaces and desert scenes and multiple layers of sand and grit, all using a different perspective, all colour-shifted in various ways – and took many hours to craft. But the scene was too evocative and important not to make that effort.
• Inked image: Something more from my past, but I still drop back to this from time to time. It generally takes about twice as long to ink a pencil sketch as it did to draw the original.
• Ink & Pencil: This is a technique that I’ve never seen anyone else use, in which grades of black and black-lead pencil are used to create texture and solidity within an inked image. It’s something that I started experimenting with in high school art. Doing this adds about 50% to the time it takes to complete the illustration.
• Ink & Colour: This is also an original technique that I have developed through the years. I wanted to be able to replicate the look of a full-colour comic book but only had coloured pencils to use – which are not naturally prone to those sort of saturation levels and consistancy. The process that I developed uses a combination of black ink, texta colours, and coloured pencils that can be very effective – but also very time-consuming. The texta is not really visible, but lends depth and texture to the pencilled rendering – most noticeably in the hair. In fact, I developed the technique beyond what was in the comic books of the day to something approaching full-colour computer-based art rendering. A full-colour image like the one used to illustrate this section of the article takes six-to-ten times as long as a straightforward black-and-white image. One-to-three days per A4 page is pretty close.
• Painting: I don’t often do it these days, but occasionally I’ll get out the watercolours or acrylic paints and produce a painting. This is often a last resort when other methods have failed and colour is important. A painting can take hours or even days. I’d love to do more of it, and especially to get into oil painting, but I simply don’t have the time or money.

So there are lots of techniques available to me. Some emphasise colour, others are monochrome or grayscale. Some are more illustrative, others more realistic. The choice depends on what is important in the image that I’m trying to depict, the time available, and to some extent, whether or not I can find what I need on the web.

Blair: The Copenhagen Hilton is the largest and best Hotel in the City, or so you were informed at the Airport after telling the customs & immigration agents where you were staying. Six stories tall – which makes it one of the tallest buildings you’ve seen in Copenhagen – 86 rooms, and highly luxurious. It perhaps says something about Doc Storm that this is the hotel that Doc has chose without even thinking about it.

Mike: But clearly, ‘luxurious’ means something different here in Copenhagen than it does elsewhere. By New York or London standards, this would rate no better than 3 to 3½ stars out of 5. It’s clean and it’s fairly new, having been built in 1924, about 9 years ago, but there isn’t much in the way of conspicuous extravagance.

Immediatly you enter the hotel, another difference between the Hilton and most luxury hotels becomes clear; the concierge is also the booking clerk. You immediatly sense that something unusual has happened; the concierge, standing behind the desk, has a newspaper opened in front of him and held at arms length, while all the other staff members in sight read it over his shoulder. They all seem to be visibly distressed by whatever it is that they are reading. There are no other guests in sight as you approach the desk.

The Most Valuable Illustrations

The illustrations that almost always end up being the most useful are the ones that I come up with on the day, on the fly, to clarify something that isn’t clear to the players. These are horrendously rough in appearance, produced in the shortest possible time-frame – usually between 5 and 60 seconds. They look absolutely horrible in terms of artistic merit – but they are invaluable as game aids.

Occasionally, when the game-play stalls for whatever reason, I will doodle up a quick representation of some fact or other that I don’t think the players are fully appreciating. There are times when these are worthless, meaningless scribbles that are immediatly ignored; sometimes they completely reorient the character’s perceptions, such as the time I did rough height-and-width boxes for the different PCs, showing their eyelines. Stick figures gave very basic anatomical information. When one of the players suddenly realised that their character’s waist was about as wide as another character’s thighs, and that their eyeline was at a third character’s naval, it changed the way that player thought about the other characters, and made them seem far more tangible.

But the illustrations that are the most valuable are the ones that permit the players to orient themselves within the world, and make it seem more tangible to them. No, your eyes aren’t decieving you: the mountain above really is red, with yellowish suphur-drifts where snow would be expected, and the trees on the lower slopes really are a dark blue in colour. It’s easy enough to describe such a setting, but it is so far outside the normal experience that actually seeing an image permits the characters to assimilate it far more readily.

The more alien the landscape, the more valuable these simple visual aids become, and the more easily the players can picture themselves, clad in the persona and trappings of their characters, in these locations.

Complex diagrams and relationships and maps that would have required long expositions by the GM can be synopsised, and used to explain to players what it is that their characters are seeing, rather than trying to paint a picture in words for them. Consider the image above, which displays corridors of wild magic surrounding dead magic zones – a phenomenon that the players have yet to understand. How many words would it take to describe the complex interplay of energies depicted in this illustration? As it happened, I left the image at home on the day, attempted a verbal description, and ended up having to create one of those rough-and-ready quick illustrations to try and explain it in terms the players could grasp. What should have taken only a few seconds to relate took close to half an hour – during which time, all the impact of what they were seeing was completely dissipated.

Only slightly less valuable are illustrations that permit players to put a face to their friends and enemies. The picture to the right depicts an enemy from my superhero game, a member of a McCarthies law-enforcement body called the SID, whose mandate was to seek out those guilty of Unamerican Activities. It was based on modern military attire, but the facelessness of the masks and the combination of silver and black leather and cloth is immediatly reminiscant of an SS uniform (even though it bears no resemblance to one in any detail) – the psychological impact of the design is intimidating.

Even if you lack the talent or expertise to be able to craft your own images, being able to create a digital collage from ‘found images’ may be within your grasp. To the left is a mashup of seven different images: the part of the cave in the background, the part in the foreground, the dragon, the elf in green, the priestess, the dwarf, and – in the left-hand foreground – a pile of skulls.

When an elf has the luxury, he makes his preperations [for death], bestowing his meagre worldly posessions, and then, in the company of friends, undertakes a pilgrimage to one of the Havens, the seaports from which the elven Andruril or “Holy Vessels” sail forth, carrying a dozen or more Yssidrial jouneying to Ammathamalia. The ships set sail apon the night of the full moon, at the moment when it is at its zenith, and sail toward the image of the setting moon, until, at the very moment it is swallowed by the horizon, they find themselves transported by the Andruril to “The Greatermost Sea”. From there, they follow a path which only the Andruil knows, guided soley by the forces of wind and wave, until the dawn breaks over the Blessed Isle after many days beneath the starry skies. There they join with those who have gone before, living a life of idyllic repose.

When Not To Illustrate

I am hardly the first GM in the world to discover the rich benefits of eye candy for their campaign. The problem is that too many GMs go too far, drowning their article in images – just as I have (quite deliberately) done in this article.

Learning when not to illustrate something might be an even more important lesson than learning how to illustrate one in the first place.

There are several situations, I have learned the hard way, in which it is better not to illustrate something:

• When the illustration makes the fantastic look mundane: The human imagination has an unlimited special effects budget; no illustration can match it, and sometimes, making the fantastic accessable to your players can also trivialise and ‘mundanicise’ it. When you mix too many colours in paint, you end up with what my art teacher used to call “mud”, a nondescript brown that looks blah on everything. It’s the same with colour in an RPG sense – save the illustrations for when they really matter.
• When the illustration would be confusing to the players: Almost as bad as ripping the sense of wonder and adventure from your campaign is turning it into an anarchic kalaidescope in which the players can never tell what matters. While there will be times when that is the situation confronting the characters, it should never reach the metagame level or confusion replaces fun for the players. And then empty chairs replace the players in the campaign.
• When the illustration’s static nature interferes with its purpose: this one doesn’t come up very often, but there are times when it becomes all-important. The more dynamic a scene or setting is, the less successfully it can be easily rendered as a static illustration. There are ways around this; comic-book artists have been struggling with this problem for most of the last century, and traditional illustrators before that. Even so, there are occasions when this doesn’t work very well, for example “morphing” from one image to another. In general, when the action or transformation is more important than the fact of the illustration, trouble lies ahead. At most, show a before-and-after; anything more and it stops being about illustrating the campaign, and becomes an exercise in showing off your latest trick.
• When the illustration would be distracting to the players: Unless you illustrate almost everything – and there are artists fast enough to do that – your players will interpret the effort as signifying importance, and pay close attention to whatever the subject of the illustration is. That brings with it the constant temptation to illustrate something mundane to get the players distracted, or to fail to illustrate something fantastic when you normally would do so; just so that the players don’t pay close attention to it prematurely. DON’T DO IT. Sure, it will work – but it will undermine the value of every illustration you produce for the campaign from that time forward. And that’s too high a price to pay.

Get the picture?

The ability to illustrate is one worth cultivating. Hopefully, this article has inspired you to start your own collections of eye candy for those moments when a picture can save you a thousand words – and let you invest some of that savings in other areas of description and narrative.

And, of course, there is always the other benefit of collecting eye candy: if all you have are inspiring images, then any random image can be the foundations of an idea when you really need one!

If you make each image worth a thousand words (or so), and only use one when the scene deserves a thousand words (or so), you won’t go far wrong – and will enhance your campaign more than anyone who hasn’t learnt the technique will believe. These days, you don’t even have to print the images – just save them on a memory stick or USB drive and any laptop can display them, zooming in to show finer detail. Every time you can get your players to “ooh” and “ahh” over something they have found, your campaign becomes both richer and more real.

Lilith Laing asks the GMs: “Recently I started playing in a Vampire: The Masquerade Old WOD game. Even after one session, it is probably the best game I have ever played in (or even run), but I have never played this sort of political game before. Do you, the GMs, have any tips for how to deal with political games like Masquerade, that is, the paranoia and intrigue? Trying to work out who you can trust and what to do when the GM is being obtuse with details and you know something is going on!”

Johnn’s answer:

Hi Lilith, it sounds like you are part of a great game; congratulations. Mike and I have several pieces of advice to help survive a political campaign. I will dive into three tips of my own, then hand things over to Mike so he can supply his counsel.

Separate fact from fiction

Pierce through the lies, deceptions, innuendos and half-truths to focus just on what you know to be true. Stay open to all information, news, gossip, rumors and clues – you want to be a player in the action to achieve your own objectives, after all. But privately hunt down and confirm facts so you can make decisions based upon a solid foundation. Otherwise, you will act on falsehoods, thus making you ripe for manipulation and being used by others while they pursue their own ends.

Three lists

Make three lists and update them every chance you get. Base your gameplay on a strategy of adding information continuously to your first and second lists, and then through roleplay, observation and investigation, promote as much as you can from these to your third list. Such a strategy combined with good organization imposed by the lists will give you an edge over the other players.

List #1 Theories

Record all your hunches, suspicions and theories. These are internal only, just your own mind at work. This information is unproved and untested, so under suspicion. The list is a great tool for eliminating assumptions by writing your thoughts out.

For example:

• Is Revan allied with Harpad?
• Harpad’s true motive is claiming Rella as his bride
• Does Morphid have The Item?
• Is Allis blackmailing Revan, and if so, with what?
• I think Salus might be selling information to the Blackguard

List #2 Clues

Players will tell you things, sometimes as rumor and sometimes as fact. So will the GM. Regard everything you have not personally verified as truth as a clue. You decide what clues have the most merit and then prioritize those for investigation and confirmation.

While list #1 contains stuff only you’ve thought up, list #2 is for what everybody else is telling you. Keep these buckets separate so you do not confuse your thoughts from thoughts others put in your head.

It is easy for others to manipulate us. Players can be persuasive with logic, emotion or apparent kinship. Unless you stay objective and on top of what you know for fact versus unverified information, your decisions will get corrupted.

Watch out especially for fear, doubt and uncertainty. FUD. Keep facts separate from interpretation. For example, you might have confirmed Morphid knowns where The Item rests, but he does not have it. Harpad whispers in your ear that Morphid knows where The Item rests and he could use it to cause you harm. Note the insidious assumption being planted by Harpad – that Morphid can access The Item and is able to use it just because he knows the location. But is that true? It would be worth finding out, for if Morphid cannot get to The Item and won’t for awhile, you might have been sent off panicking in the direction Harpad wanted – to stop Morphid or get The Item first, based on your fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding Morphid and The Item. Tricky stuff, but no so much if you use your lists.

Another trap catches you seeing through the lens of others. You need to form your own opinions and theories and conclusions. Do this by separating fact from viewpoint, and by staying curious and not just accepting the limited information presented to you by any one faction.

For example, the 6 o’clock news covers fires at three locations. The stories talk about evacuations, injured firefighters and the heroics of a few. The next day, typically the analysis period for news stories, you hear reports of arson and conjecture about who the arsonist is and news of a massive manhunt for the arsonist. Day three, typically summary and wrap-up for stories, you get information about how to protect your home from fire, how to stay alert for arson and how to report suspicious activity to authorities. All kinds of tips about fire protection, fire extinguishers, evacuation plans and family safety pour out through the airwaves.

Later in the week a big story breaks – police have apprehended the arsonist! Whew, you can rest easy now and go back to your normal life.

A curious person might think beyond the news and entertainment offered by Channel KAOS on TV. Where exactly were the fires? Did those buildings have any special importance? Who lived in them, or what businesses operated out of them? Who owns those businesses? Were the fires truly the work of one person? What evidence do the police have on their suspect – the news reported an arrest, but that is a far stretch from proof of guilt. What else happened the night of the fires? News stations only have a limited number of camera crews – could be they were diverted to the fires to prevent thorough reporting of other things happening at that time.

If this little storyline was offered in a game, I’d go to the police station and find out who the officer in charge of the investigation is and talk with her. Ditto with fire crews who were on site. And I’d go to the records office to learn more information about the buildings. I’d scan the net for other reports from people of other things happening that night.

I’d even check into the news station to learn who calls the shots, literally. While the whole city was caught up in stories of peril and danger and heroism, perhaps in complicity with KAOS News, a whole other truth could underly the events.

You would put your thoughts on this stuff into list #1, clues uncovered into list #2 and facts verified into list #3.

List #3 – The Truth, As You Know It

That brings us to the final list. Here you write out verified facts. Keep opinions and theories out of it – that’s for the other lists. For each fact, note when you verified it, and who or how you verified it. Note one fact per line. You can group facts, but that’s dangerous, so be sure you also have a way to browse facts unsorted as well.

Review this list often. Challenge your verifications so you do not get trapped into a trap or trick designed to lead you the wrong way. Read each fact and ponder it. Use facts to put items in list #1 and #2 to the test. Use list #3 to see who is lying to you. Use list #3 to stop you from lying to yourself.

Update your lists after every session, and more often if possible. You want to move items from the first pair of lists to the list of facts, else be able to cross them off as you disprove theories and catch others misinforming you.

Create dossiers

Profile every player and character. Like a brief you’d see in a detective’s file, you want an inventory about every player, PC and NPC in the game. Note their biographical information, relationships, abilities, backgrounds. Note their movements and activities. Note their resources, revenues and expenses.

Create a profile for each player and character. Update them regularly. The more you know, the better you can avoid getting caught in others’ webs.

Create a relationship map. Draw a box for each PC and NPC. Connect them as you learn about relationships between them. On the connector lines, make a brief note about the nature of the relationship. In their dossiers, make fuller notes.

Note I say to profile players, too. This is meta-gaming, but it can pay off. Learning two players are roommates, for example, should flag them for priority investigation for collusion, regardless of characters played. Noting player styles and prejudices can help you as well.

Figure out why

Determine each character’s wants and needs. Get clear on why people are doing stuff; get to their true motives. The clearer you are on true motivations and real needs, the more leverage you have. Be sure you understand your own, as well, lest it be used against you.

Prove your theories

The GM will not likely hand you the truth about NPCs or important things outright; you will need to work for it. Do this by gathering as much information as you can, to circle around the truth, until you spot what the truth might actually be. Armed with this theory, figure out how you can prove it and then take action.

Avoid being in reactive mode. By thinking about the campaign and how characters, events and locations relate to each other, you get above the tactics and put yourself in the general’s chair. Then you define your tactics – the actions you take and your approach to taking them – to prove out your theories and execute your strategies. If you stay in tactical mode and reactive mode all the time, you take on the role of a pawn. With your head always down, the others just need to figure out what buttons to push to make you do what they want.

Do not make assumptions. Remain objective so you do not get waylaid or tricked. Avoid being baited, as getting emotional befuddles you, which is what they want.

There is no such thing as trust. In a game of paranoia and intrigue, you cannot trust anyone or anything. The game master can bend reality at will, and PCs and NPCs are subject to their own pressures and weaknesses. Therefore, trust nothing, and test motives and circumstances at all times to see if anything has changed.

Hopefully these tips help. Good luck in your campaign. Stay sharp.

Mike’s answer:

As usual, Johnn’s answers are absolutely great, and give you a lot to work with. So much so that I’m going to restrict myself to a couple of how-to’s that amplify points that he’s made, as everything else is covered!

Detective Work The Scientific Way

The Scientific Method is to observe, generalise, theorise, and test.

• Observe: Document the information available to you, including your own instinctive reactions and impressions, in short, factual sentences.
• Generalise: Many of the documented observations will appear to form a pattern. Try to identify and document that pattern.
• Theorise: Devise one or more explanations for the patterns that you have identified.
• Test: Devise a test to prove or disprove the explanations by predicting a consequence and then verifying or disproving that consequence.

Applying the scientific method to games of politics:

Make a list of ‘facts’ presented by others, number them. Include notions of your own. These are Johnn’s first and second lists. For each one, ask yourself “What does it mean, if fact ### is true? What does it mean if it’s a lie?”

Try to build up connections between them until you have a number of simple theories all resting on one key truth-or-lie assumption. Number these as well, using a different scheme – something as simple as prefacing the theory number with a ‘T’ will do. Make sure to list under each theory the fact numbers and true-or-false assumptions that have gone into that theory. The list of theories and supporting evidence and the assumptions on which they are based actually falls in between Johnn’s lists.

Note that what I mean by these is something more susbtantial than Johnn’s speculations – something more along the lines of “Nimmick, who is supposed to be my ally, is conspiring with Juicer to blackmail the Svengali into supporting the Concrete Underground Conspiracy, whose true goal is to overthrow the Mason’s Guild, because the Masons are in league with General Mattix in plotting to fix the next Grand Council election”.

As the game progresses, try to anticipate how each situation will develop next IF theory T## is correct. Each time you guess right, that one gets a ‘+1’ added to it’s truth score – a simple tally of how often a theory has proven a reliable guide to what will happen next. Each time you guess wrongly, it gets a ‘-1’. If presented with an invitation to a Nightclub, for example, and the Svengali is also in attendance, you might predict that some information will be passed to Nimmick in the course of the night, and that you are there simply to give him cover and protection against the unexpected.” If Nimmick and the Svengali get into an argument in hushed tones, after which you find yourselves under attack, I would consider the theory plausible (+1) and add to the theory that the Svengali has refused to be blackmailed and has brought in enemies to oppose the Nimmick-Juicer conspiracy.

Each time a fact is proven (by your investigations, or by revelations within the game) or disproved, use your ‘fact list’ to cross off theories that are no longer viable at the same time as you migrate them from lists 1 and 2 to list 3. Don’t get rid of these theories permanently, and don’t leave them ineligible, as the ‘proof’ might itself be faked to mislead others!

After a couple of sessions of scoring theories, a few should emerge as leading candidates for ‘what is really going on’. When that happens, it’s time to consider the differences between them and become more active in trying to verify them. If you don’t want to tip your hand, you should not try and verify the facts directly, but should identify a consequence if theory X is right and try to verify if that consequence is correct. But don’t stop scoring “Truth” scores while undertaking these investigations.

That should enable you to eliminate more of the theories, until you are left with just one. That’s when it’s time to get even more direct, and try to test the theory more directly.

And if you end up with no theories? Then it’s time to question those “proof or disproof” results – starting with those which you did not directly instigate. You are looking for a theory that permits someone to falsify the ‘proof or disproof’ result, restoring one or more of your discarded theories. You will be greatly aided in this by the fact that even if you have disproved it in your own mind, the most likely theory will have continued to rack up “truth” points in the meantime.

Once you know what’s really going on, or think you do, you can start plotting to take advantage of the plots and intrigues to achieve your own ambitions. Until you reach this stage, you should be doing nothing but gathering resources that you can eventually use. Don’t try to run before you can walk!

The Perfect Lie

Knowing how to lie effectively not only enables you to deceive others as necessary, but how to recognise that deceit when you encounter it – and in this type of game, it’s a sure bet that you WILL encounter it! There are only a few principles required, but you should master all of them.

The Gilted Ratio

A perfect lie is one part deception to two parts truth. One of those ‘truths’ should be easily verifiable, if not already known to be true, while the other should be something that is valuable information if proven, but be harder to verify. If you can arrange it, try to get confirmation of the first truth to the target of the deception by some channel that is seemingly independent of you. Get the mix right, and the package will be swallowed whole. I call this the “Gilted Ratio” because while the whole product appears to be gold, it’s really only a shallow coating.

The Bigger The Lie

The more astonishing a statement is, the more it sometimes seems to make sense. The shock of hearing the Big Lie makes people pause to reorient their entire perspective on a subject in order to assess the truth or validity of the claim. If just a couple of things are explained by the statement that were previously inexplicable, people tend to believe it.

Be especially wary on any subject in which it seems unthinkable for someone to lie. If someone admits to have committed a crime, for example, we take the claim seriously, even if it is providing an alibi for a more serious crime.

Beware Of Fine Print

The more details and specifics are included in an assertion, the more we tend to believe it. A sure way to make a deception more plausible is to include lots of facts and figures and details, and most people both know it and tend to go too far in providing those facts and figures, dotting every ‘i’ and crossing every ‘t’. Few people ever think that if something appears to come complete, wrapped up in a pretty little bow, it might be because it has been deliberately manufactured and packaged that way.

Beware Of The Vague

The other extreme is also not very reliable. An assertion with no specific supporting evidence is automatically suspect. So a very clever technique can be to make a deliberately vague assertion that means the exact opposite of what you want people to believe, or to manipulate a third party into doing so. People will immediately deem the pronouncement ‘suspect’ and assume that it’s a lie, when it is actually the truth, or something close to it.

Beware Of The ‘Tell’

People often have trouble lying with a straight face. Try to identify mannerisms that suggest that they may be deceiving you. Looking away and to the left, for example, is often an indicator of falsehood, while looking someone in the eye tends to indicate truthfulness; looking away and to the right is an indicator that people are searching their memories. This is made more complicated by the fact that everyone is lying in an RPG because they are NOT their characters, but it can still be a useful tool when they aren’t speaking in character or recalling character stats. Look online for tips on conducting job interviews, they will be directly relevant!

Beware Of The Poker Face

People often try to keep themselves expressionless when trying to lie, as a consequence of avoiding a possible “Tell” (whether they have one or not). So treat anything delivered in this way as suspect. The best liars are those who don’t change their expression or voice or characterisation while being deceptive. The Poker Face is hard to master, but lying without using it is even harder – and more successful.

Beware Of False Logic and Hidden Assumptions

Bumblebees can’t fly, according to the physics of the pre-1980s 20th Century. Their wings are too small and too slow-moving to overcome the aerodynamic inefficiencies of their bodies, and a number of physicists and engineers said so. Only once flexible wings are understood, where the shape of the wing actually changes on up and down beats, can it be understood why the Bumblebee can fly.

The director of IBM once famously stated that he thought there was a world market for perhaps 12 computers. But, at the time, computers occupied a substantial part of a building, cost the equivalent of billions of dollars, and had less capability than a basic pocket calculator or digital watch. In the early 1990s, the typical family car’s engine had more computer power than was used for the Apollo moon landings. The typical modern PC is superior in every way to the computers that made Cray Supercomputers legendary.

We were once told that the Earth could not support more than 4 billion people. The global population in mid 2009 was almost 6.8 billion. Concorde was going to disrupt the Ozone Layer, melt the polar icecaps, and doom the world. It didn’t. These days, it’s global warming resulting from carbon buildup in the atmosphere that’s going to melt the icecaps. I don’t believe that either, as I explained in a previous post, The Frozen Lands. The moral of these stories is to beware of false logic and hidden assumptions that make conclusions untenable.

Have A Theory and Act as though you believe it

It doesn’t matter what this theory might be, or how accurate it is. Your character’s theory might be that Pixies pull everyone’s strings like puppetmasters, or that the General of the Army is a closet crossdresser, or that the President has been replaced with a Soviet Double, or whatever. The more comprehensive it is, the better. If you can make everything that you say or do reflective of this entirely fictitious “theory”, you will send all sorts of false signals to everyone else, which (a) helps in getting them to lower their guard; and (b) helps you disguise what you are really up to.

The tricky part is figuring out who else is doing so.

Some Thoughts On Dossiers

Johnn’s suggestion about compiling dossiers on everyone is a great one. Here are a few non-obvious items that I would definitely consider adding:

• What Do They Want? Everyone wants something, has some ambition. Identifying what someone wants gives a solid handle on their behaviour. This also gives a basis for bribery and/or blackmail – by yourself, or by someone else.
• How does what they are doing get them what they want? People arrange their lives to give them as much as possible of what they want. If someone’s current activities don’t give them what they want, it’s a sure bet that they are doing something outside of those current activities.
• Who do they Overtly support? This is not necessarily the person they answer to, it might be a principle or an organisation or some other third party.
• Why? An example: The Chancellor Of The Exchequer usually supports economic prosperity because it brings his office more money, which in turn gives him more power. He will generally oppose anything that reduces economic prosperity because it weakens his power.
• Does this support get them what they want? Another possible indicator of someone who is saying one thing but doing another.
• Would covertly supporting someone else get them MORE of what they want? Now we’re getting to the important stuff!
• Who? There may be more than one candidate.
• What measures has the character’s Patron taken to ensure their loyalty?

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer

In conclusion, I want to actually disagree slightly with something that Johnn has written. Even in this type of game, there is trust to be had – but never Blind trust. Always consider the possibility that someone you are trusting might betray that trust, and have a secret plan up your sleeve to deal with the consequences and fallout. Make alliances of convenience, and betray them if you must – but try not to do so all the time, as getting a rep for being ‘trustworthy’ only makes your own eventual betrayals all the more unexpected.

Having said that, remember always that this is just a game, but betrayals can inflict real pain on real people. If you betray a character in the course of a game session, make sure you have something to do to to win back the friendship and trust of the character’s player afterwards. Even something small, like “Buy you a soda?” or “Have a brownie?” can have a big impact, underlining that your behaviour toward others within the game is not how you will behave in real life.

And one final point in this regard: We often get into the habit, while playing, of referring to our characters as “I”. It comes naturally, and is generally a sign of good roleplaying. When announcing an act of betrayal, ALWAYS refer to your character in the third person. “Gal-gotha bribes the guard to shoot Nimmick”, not “I bribe the guard to shoot Nimmick”. That little bit of extra distance between the act and the person helps insulate against the game spilling out into real life.

Have fun!

Just a quick post to apologise to anyone affected by a breakdown in our RSS feed systems last week, which were the result of problems outside our control – one of our service providers upgraded their systems without notifying us. The problem has now been fixed and policies put in place which will hopefully prevent that exact problem from recurring. Special thanks to reader Felicia who brought the problem to our attention!

Campaign Mastery was asked, GM Izzy: “I am a very green GM running a pulpy run around campaign set in modern day London, everyone has a laugh each session but it is impossible to progress with any major plot points because the party stoically refuses to coalesce into, well, a party! I have tried throwing in threats to their safety alone, NPCs hinting they may want to stick together, bonding them through their crimes and even casually asking them out of character if they ever intend to work together. Put simply, I am at the end of my tether trying to make them work together without being a mad fascist dictator about it.  Any advice? I have a party of 6. I gave the group a character brief ‘someone who would live/or be in London’. So I have: a member of the house of Lords, a merchant banker, a stunning russian socialite, a theatre critic, an MI5 agent, an office peon and a theatre critic. After the opening session, the theatre critic, MI5 agent, peon and socialist all sat in a cafe together and bonded, then went their separate ways. The Lord stole the bag of clues the party had been given and drove off and the merchant banker after being stabbed by an NPC went alone to A&E.  I had given them the act of murder against an NPC along with an important set of clues and another NPC who told them to stick together – but they ignored that.  Then the next day I managed to contrive to get them in the same place at the same time, where they all discovered what they had in common (semi possession by a mythical god), and then still managed to decide to go their separate ways rather then working together. I left them at the end of the last session in their separate places with only their God’s for company, we are taking a few weeks off because of exams, and I said I would work on character development via email for the 2 weeks. But I am stumped, I left England on the brink of economic meltdown because of the Gods and the party still doesn’t seem to want to coalesce.”

Mike’s Answer:

Thanks for the kind words, Izzy. I’ve never come across a group so unwilling to work together except in one case where the players had conspired together because the GM was always foisting plot trains on them and never listened to their input, so I’ve never been in your exact situation. As a result, my advice will be fairly generic, I’m afraid, and at the moment is limited to a couple of thoughts:

1. They don’t seem to be feeling threatened by events personally, so they have no stake in mutual cooperation. Have bad things happen to all of them as a result of the problem that they are not confronting. The banker gets accused of misappropriating funds, the theatre critic gets fired from his job, the MI5 agent gets accused of being in the employ of a foreign power (and the socialite of being his contact) out to destabalise the currency, and so on. If they aren’t working to stop it, then they can easily be misperceived as part of the problem – so have some NPCs jump to conclusions about the ‘perty’ members.

2. They are obviously weaker as individuals than they would be as a group. Take advantage of this. Have them all arrested as accomplices to the murder, for example. Interrogate them individually, let the police suggest that another of them is cooperating and has given evidence against the rest – then let them compare notes in the cells (where they CAN’T go their separate ways). They can be released eventually, pending a hearing, if one of them puts up the bail for all. That gives one of them a vested interest in holding the group together as a party, but make it clear to the characters that they must all stick together or they will all be hung separately!

3. Have their Gods weigh in on the subject of cooperation, in their own styles of course. Remember the scene in Ghost with the singing of “I’m Henry The Eight I Am” 24 hours a day until the psychic gives in?

4. Let the bad things happen, then let the characters go hunting for a 13th-hour solution to the problem. Players and PCs should never be protected from their own stupidity. It may be metagaming, but they should have been looking for reasons to team up and coorperate in the first place.

5. Rework the scenario so that they can solve the problem piecemeal at first, each handling their own little piece of the puzzle.

Johnn’s Answer:

Mike has provided some awesome in-game suggestions, so I’ll focus on the meta game angle with my reply.

6. Ask them out of character to cooperate. I’ve done this for my last 4 campaigns. When the players made their characters, one of the initial PC creation requirements was that the PCs all had a desire to work together.

This fends off typical alignment clashes, player grudges from previous campaigns, and gives players a parameter to get creative with. In my new campaign, for example, some PCs knew each other beforehand, some had common quests, but they decided the unifying element would be an inn they all owned.

It’s not too late for you to have a chat with your players and ask them directly that they give their PCs a reason to cooperate and join forces. Let your group decide what that is and whether it needs to be gamed out, or if it’s a background element that has just now come to the surface.

7. A divided party costs spotlight time. Make the cost of being split up known to your players. If everybody is always in their own exclusive scenes, then players will need to wait up to 5x as long (fill in your own number here where it equals # of players -1; 4 players = 3x, 5 players = 4x).

This is because each player will go their turn to do their actions, but no one is sharing the scene, so no one else can participate or even feel present. So it’s complete isolation.

8. Ask your players why they are not cooperating. The answer might surprsie you. Perhaps they are waiting for you to produce a heavy-handed plot-driven unifying moment. Or perhaps the players have created characters who do not cooperate, and they feel like they’re roleplaying their PCs perfectly. Could be your players think this is what the game is supposed to be like – the old board game mentality.

You won’t know until you ask. Do not superimpose your own thoughts while listening to their answers. This is difficult, but try to hear their answers objectively. You need to understand their viewpoints so you can get to the bottom of things. Making assumptions and leaping to conclusions, as we are all wont to do, will end up leaving the root of the problem undiscovered.

9. As Mike has suggested, change the structure of your game. Let everyone do their own thing as seperate citizens, but plan sessions to have big encounters that result in everyone rallying together. This is a Hollywood style campaign where the audience is treated to just the big moments in a couple hours.

10. Similar to point #6, ask players never to do anything alone in the game, if possible. This is a directive I’ve given in my current campaign. I want players to share scenes as much as possible.

In my game world though, it would be unusual, and sometimes tactically undersirable, to walk around as a large group. That’s just asking for trouble in Riddleport. So the PCs often pair off or go in groups of three, except for key actions where the entire group’s resources are needed.

In-game, this makes sense because the PCs are weak and will likely get assaulted or worse if caught out in the dangerous pirate city alone. My players are fine with this and try to comply wherever possible.

I hope all these suggestions help, Izzy. Please let us know how your campaign progresses.

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Q-Workshop sent me some lovely Pathfinder Curse of the Crimson Throne dice. These dice are beautiful and they made me think of politics, which then made me think about plots where an NPC or PC has been framed for a serious crime they did not commit along with clever use of spells as the punishment.

What better way to celebrate dice than with some random tables? So, please use the tables I’ve created below inspired by political machinations, one table for each type of die that comes in the Curse of the Crimson Throne set, to generate a political plot as follows:

In the [Type of State] of [State Name of Your Choice] ruled by a [Type of Government], a character must undergo a [Type of Trial]. He has been framed by [Power Behind the Throne], and if found guilty of [Type of Serious Crime], his punishment will be [Spell-Based Punishment].

I’ve Been Framed random generator thanks to dice generously donated by Q-Workshop

Type of State

	Type of State
1	Archduchy
2	Barony
3	Diocese
4	Caliphate
5	Margraviate
6	County
7	Duchy
8	Emirate
9	Grand Duchy
10	Fief
11	March
12	Principality

Type of Government

	Type of Government
1	Autocracy
2	Bureaucracy
3	Confederacy
4	Democracy
5	Dictatorship
6	Feudalist
7	Magocracy
8	Matriarchy
9	Military Dictatorship
10	Monarchy
11	Commonwealth
12	Oligarchy
13	Plutocracy
14	Republic
15	Syndicate
16	Theocracy
17	Demonarchy
18	Technocracy
19	Coalition
20	Totalitarian

Type of Trial

	Type of Trial
1	Trial by combat – Fight to the death, winner is innocent
2	Trial by ordeal – A challenge that taxes the accused to their limits
3	Trial by jury – The accused must convince a group they are not guilty
4	Trial by council – Stand before authority, plead your case and be judged
5	Trial of wealth – Raise enough wealth by the deadline and you are innocent
6	Trial by judge – Stand before authority, plead your case and be judged
7	Trial by magic – Magical examinations are performed until a clear verdict can be rendered
8	Trial by question – Often it’s the questions, not the answers, that decide if you are guilty

Power Behind the Throne

	Power Behind the Throne
1	A monster or group of monsters – mind flayers, a beholder, giants, a dragon
2	A cult or brotherhood – bound by a mission and code
3	A collusion of guilds – uses resource control for leverage
4	A magic item – sword, relic, wondrous item

Type of Serious Crime

	Type of Serious Crime
1	Treason
2	Murder
3	Embezzlement
4	Spying
5	Counterfeiting
6	Terrorism

Spell-Based Punishments

	Spell-Based Punishments
1	Bestow Curse. The prisoner loses 6 off his ability score. That is devastating, possibly cutting it in half or worse. Forcing them to become an imbecile is a good way to keep the person useful doing menial chores without needing high security. The GM can also craft their own Curse effect, such as 50% chance of lying down every six seconds – it’s hard to escape while taking a siesta.
2	Baleful Polymorph. The prisoner permanently changes into a small animal. One of my favourite D&D modules is Castle Amber. Wouldn’t it be a neat twist for the central garden to be the prison of several banished beings changed into the form of small animals? If the subjects fail their second saving throw, they even gain animal intelligence, in effect becoming just another creature in the garden.
3	Imprisonment spell. According to the spell description, the creature is entombed in a state of suspended animation in a small sphere far beneath the surface of the ground. Cast Freedom to release the prisoner. Imprisonment and Freedom indicate you can reach the prisoner, so presumably you can choose the prisoner’s location. This is a perfect setup for dungeon design – put the prisoner at the heart of it.
4	Resurrection. You just need a portion of the creature’s body to bring them back to life. So, kill the prisoner and bring them back when their sentence ends. There’s an expense of 10,000 gp, but a wealthy family might be given annual Resurrection privileges for an hour or so if they pay the bill.
5	Insanity. The imprisoned can only act normally 25% of the time, and their state of mind changes every six seconds with equal chances of babbling incoherently, hurting themselves or attacking someone else. Being imprisoned in your own skull is a harsh sentence.
6	Flesh to Stone. Perfect for filling an art gallery or museum. Under careful watch of security to prevent an ally from casting Stone to Flesh, prisoners can be put on display as an example to all, or kept in a private collection for the warden to gloat over or decorate as he sees fit.
7	Symbol of Death. Cast Permanency, place the symbol so its 60 foot radius crosses the only entrance. Cast Curse on the prisoner to lower their saving throw. This still gives the prisoner a chance at a saving throw, so you will want to target those with naturally poor Fortitude, and this is better as a deterrent than a cell because the desperate will take their unknown-but-poor chances of surviving, sometimes. Substitute other Symbols to create other defenses in the prison.
8	Wall of Force. The perfect barrier combined with Permanency assuming the other surfaces of the cell are secure. Put a curtain across when you get tired of watching the prisoner make rude gestures at you.
9	Trap the Soul. Put the prisoner into a gem. Break the gem when the sentence finishes. Note the gem must have a value based on how powerful the prisoner is, but the type and shape of the gem remains up to you. Perhaps those glowing red gems in the horned demon statue’s eyes have more than just good market value….
10	Feeblemind. The prisoner not only gets reduced to animal-level intelligence, he is also barely conscious.

(Thanks to Colin Walmsley for spell punishment ideas.)

It’s time for another of my occasional Lessons From The West Wing. This draws heavily on concepts put forward in a single episode, Episode 16 of Season 2, “Somebody’s Going To Emergency, Somebody’s Going To Jail”.

Some people have decried the episode as one of the weakest in the West Wing’s repetoir, others found it illuminating. As it happened, it was the first episode that I actually watched on free-to-air TV, and it hooked me pretty solidly.

The A-plot of the episode connected an act of infidelity with revelations of a Soviet Spy from the WWII era. That’s an OK plot but not brilliant. The B-plot involves world trade protestors, and that’s a lot more interesting in a lot of ways, and the summation of the principles of Oratory is also useful. But it was the C-plot that hooked me – a plot thread that doesn’t even rate a mention in the Official Companion to the series, much to my annoyance.

That C-plot revolves around a proposal by the “Organization of Cartographers For Social Equality” – a fictional organisation so far as I know – to replace the familiar Mercator-projection map with an inverted version of the Gall-Peters Projection Map – something like the one used to illustrate this article. You can find out more about this map at the Wikipedia Page and you can purchase copies of these and other unusual ways of viewing the world from ODT.

But while the map itself was fascinating, what really grabbed me were the arguements proposed for the impact of the traditional Mercator projection map on social attitudes.

Stretching A Globe to fit a square page

The problems with the Mercator Projection are shown by the illustration above, where three identical yellow rectangles are positioned, two at the top and one directly south of the first.

The second picture shows these rectangles arranged on the section of the globe indicated by the first picture, and the third shows the effects of Mercator Projection.

• Errors Of Scale: The top-left rectangle appears much larger than the bottome left one, even though they are the same size.
• Errors Of Location: The scale problem means that the distances between the two top rectangles are also exaggerated.
• Errors Of Relative Position: And the distortion affects the aparrant relative position of the left-hand rectangles, as well. In fact, they don’t appear to be due south of each other any more!

Any map has one latitudinal line where the scales are perfect. Anything closer to the equator will be shrunken to fit, anything closer to the poles is stretched. There’s no way to accurately map a globe in every respect except with a scale model, ie a Globe.

Mercator Projection was first produced in 1569 works by maintaining straight lines of constant bearing for longitude and latitude at regular spacings. This makes the map especially useful for Ocean Navigation, the purpose for which it was designed. For just about any other purpose, it is deceptive.

Germany appears in the middle of the map – the central point chosen by Mercator (who was German) – when in fact it’s in the Northernmost quarter. The Zero-error line chosen by Mercator runs right through Germany, in other words, and stretches Europe to fill the top half of the map, while shrinking the Southern Hemisphere. So Mercator’s projection doesn’t just distort horizontally, it also distorts vertical size.

The Peters projection works by preserving the true relative sizes of the continents. That makes it useless for navigation purposes, as it has to distort the map in a different way to achieve this, and consequently a “straight line course” from point A to point B would actually be shown as a curve on the map – but in many other ways, it’s an improvement, at least according to the proposal aired on The West Wing.

Size Equals Importance

…at least in the mind of the beholder. Or so runs the arguement from the West Wing, at least, which argues that the distortions of the Mercator Map play on that subconscious association to distort social perceptions of the non-European nations. The specific examples cited are:

• Greenland appears to be the same size as Africa, and Greenland is not very important, so people think of Africa as also not very important. Africa is actually 14 times the size of Greenland.
• Europe is shown on the Mercator Map as being considerably larger than South America, when the latter is almost double the size of the former. Consequently, according to the theory, South America is diminished in importance.
• Alaska appears three times the size of Mexico, but Mexixo is actually a fraction (100,000 square miles) bigger. So Mexico is percieved as having the importance of a single US State.

Of course there are many more, but that’s enough to go by.

It was while pondering this that I started to think about the way most GMs produce Maps.

Maps In RPGs

More to the point, we don’t do them in the ways that were common in the Middle Ages, even for our Fantasy campaigns. Instead, we go for satellite photo land-use style area maps, similar to those we would encounter in a modern atlas, simply because we havn’t thought about it.

Why do it that way? Surely the “as the crow flies” distance and absolute position of locations is not the most important thing about them?

For Fumanor, the maps that I created when setting up my original campaign are NOT topographically perfect. Instead of using an absolute distance as my guideline for drawing the maps, I used a relative travel time. I also deliberately enlarged areas that were supposedly important and shrunk areas that were not considered important.

The PCs have never figured this out.

Whenever a map comes up in the game – like the one above – they have assumed that it was an “accurate” map, and that the hexes referred to a fixed distance. They even calculated that distance as 50 miles per small hex, and had me mark that on the maps as I produced them within the game.

In fact, each small hex represents Two Days’ March, or one day’s Forced March. Or, roughly a week of casual travel, or travel by wagon. A horse can cover two hexes in a day – but after a week of this, the horse will be exhausted and need a week’s rest. If you change horses regularly, you can fly across the map.

The Elvish Forest is shown to be roughly the same size as the Orcish Domain to the Northeast and the Trollheim to the Southeast – in fact, the Elves home is about 1/4 the size, end to end, or about 1/16th the area, of these two domains.

Terrain plays a big factor. The mountains on the left look huge – but they aren’t, it’s just that it takes a considerable amount of time, even following the trails that exist, to cross them. They aren’t 1500 miles across – they are barely 150 miles across – but they have been distorted in size because the terrain makes them slow going.

Once you already have a map, it’s hard to convert it to work in this way. The secret is to draw it like you would any other map, and then assume that what it is showing is the relative positions and distances and not the true positions.

A step farther

But why not go a step farther? Make marks on a map to show the relative size or importance of a town or city, as usual – but have them equally spaced apart, with a straight line for any roads or other means of transport, and – if you have to – you can show a travel time in days next to the line.

This is a far more compact and abstract map – but one that can be extremely useful. Here’s a small example:

This shows a small Kingdom with sea to the East, wastelands to the northeast, swamp to the south, and a ring of impenetrable mountains to the north and west. There’s also a forest, roads, rivers, and towns – assume that a real map of this type would show town names, as well. I could also have drawn dark heavy outlines around areas that are fortified, or not done so if I preferred. But that’s all – there’s virtually nothing about the terrain, the distances, the sights, the climate – which means that whatever needs to be dropped in, can be. The result is highly abstract and purely functional.

You can even develop such a map as a “strip” as the party travel – you indicate each road that they don’t follow, and where it goes, and anything of interest that they find along the way. Use a scale of half a cm or 1/4 of an inch for each day’s travel. This then forms the backbone for future explorations by the characters – they can branch off at any point to follow a new path. The result is something like the transport maps that became popular a few years back, like the example above (which shows the Madrid rail system).

Top And Bottom

Another arguement made in the course of the West Wing – which fell on rather less friendly ears – was that people subconsciously impose a superior capability to countries that appear on the top of a map. This arguement, if it held water, would indicate that Canada is percieved as more powerful and globally significant than the US, that Finland is seen as more important than France, which in turn is seen as more important than Spain – it doesn’t wash.

Nevetheless, it’s a fact that the most powerful nations, with a history of contributing to global civilization, generally lie in the Northern Hemisphere, while much of the third world does not.

So perhaps there is something too this, but it is easily overridden when we know better from other sources of information.

What, then, is the result if we – or more specifically, the PCs – don’t know any better? No matter how much you’ve heard about a place, it’s mever real until you go there and see it first hand. Until the characters interact with it, all a new country is to them is a splodge of colour om a map. Under such circumstances, it’s entirely possible that these ‘impressions of importance’ actually occur. In which case, GMs can deliberately play to the stereotype, or choose to invert it.

Or you can choose to avoid the question altogether by changing the directions of the map. Again, this is something that I chose to do in Fumanor, where the principle direction that orients the top of all maps is “Sunrise” and it’s opposite is “Sunset”. If you face the Sunset, then “Dexter” is to your right, while “Sinister” (named because that’s where all the trouble seems to come from) is to your left. The world has no compass or equivalent; those directions are all that they’ve got.

Even the fact that it gets hotter as one travels to the Dexter and colder towards the Sinister is explained by the fact that there are Deserts in the former direction, and tall, snow-capped mountain ranges in the latter.

In this environment, it’s not that stars move across the night sky; it’s more important that they rise and set.

So exercise a little thought in advance and look for an alternative to the obvious North-South arrangement, and you will alter your characters’ thinking.

Like Neighbourhoods

Another assumption that a lot of people make is that one country will tend to be very much like their neighbours – that the climate will be similar, and the behaviour of the people will be similar, and so on. People have a tendancy to generalise by region.

This is a fact that GMs can take advantage of, with a little thought. Putting two nations that are socially and superficially very similar can be a great way of disguising the key differences until they catch the PCs off-guard. Placing two nations far apart that are superficially very different, but are very similar when you get down to the bottom line, is another technique that can be useful.

There are, of course, good reasons why the similarity between neighbours is often a fairly reasonable assumption. Not only would they be likely to experience similar climates, as already noted, but what affects one (eg an invasion by a third, or a shortage of some particular raw material) will probably also affect the other. They are likely to trade with each other, which is a great way of subtly signposting the differences, but that brings with it an exchange of ideas and techniques that makes one seem to resemble the other more closely. They may originally have been a single nation, giving them a shared heritage, common language, and so on.

I don’t tend to think too deeply about this when designing worlds for my games, and it’s something that I think I should pay closer attention to.

Maps reflect the thinking of their makers

In the middle ages, many European maps placed the religious centre of their ‘world’ in the centre of the map. In some cases, that was Constantinople, in others it was Rome, and so on. The farther away from the centre of authority the map went, the ‘fuzzier’ it was likely to be in terms of accuracy and detail. Some mapmakers went so far as to flesh out these extremely distant regions with dogma and superstition.

Maps that were wildly inaccurate have a tendancy not to be easy to track down in modern times; we tend to ignore them, they aren’t readily accessable over the internet, and so on. There were maps that tried to reconcile Columbus’ discovery of The New World with his mistaken belief that this was a distant region of India, for example, but these are hard to find referances to.

Whenever you produce a map for the players to digest, always take a moment to consider the question of who supposedly drew the map, what mistakes did they make, and what dogam and superstition did they incorporate?

A lot of people draw their maps early in the world-building process, and use the geography to guide them in the writing of their campaign history, the defining of national boundaries, and so on. This approach certainly makes it quicker and easier to do so, but these development maps should get thrown away afterwards and fresh maps created from the descriptions and history that you have compiled. These should make no attempt to be accurate to the development maps, but should instead be accurate exclusively to the history – and the GM should have no qualms while creating that history about ignoring any inconvenient “realities” on the development maps.

Maps affect the thinking of the viewers

The final point to be made is this: what’s shown on a map has a big effect on the thinking of those who view it. They help define the relationships between nations, the geographic boundaries that divide and the geographic connections that unite.

I once came up with an idea for a campaign that I never got to play (and I’ve long since thrown away the notes, so I can’t post it – or I would). A central element of the campaign was a continent-wide conspiracy, and the first manifestation of that conspiracy was going to be the existance in each nation of that continent a small town named Jel’tvech (some spelling variations – Jelveck, Chelech, etc). These words would all mean different things within the dominant language of the nation in which they were located, often things that would not naturally occur to people as inspriration for a town name. I can only remember a couple of the literal translations now – there was “City of Shadows”, “Passionblood”, “Usurper’s Refuge”, “Crown of Eggs”… about two dozen, in all. These were all that remained of the mythic tale of the founding of the kingdoms, when they were all provinces of an Empire ruled by Lovecraftian Horrors, and of the overthrow and exile of those Horrors. But now, they were coming back…

The map that I had created – a sheet of A4 paper with a coastline in blue pen, some forests in Green, some cities in red, some mountains in black, and some political boundaries in pencil – wasn’t just a map of the area, it was to be a map of the entire campaign, of the plotlines and narrative that were going to unite the adventures of the PCs into a single structure – in other words, it was a map of the metaplot.

I never finished it; the map and notes got set aside because I saw no prospect at the time of ever using them in play (I had no D&D players at the time) and later, they were ruined when an accidentally-left-open window let the rain in.

But the general principle remains. When you draw a map, think about the residents of each city and nation that you place on it, and ask yourself how they would percieve their place in the world according to the map you have drawn?

Which reminds me of another undeveloped idea that’s relevant. Once each PC had chosen which nation of several that they were going to derive from, I was going to draw maps for them of their homelands using vector art software, then subtly change each. No one player’s map would show the political boundaries in exactly the same places; some of them would have dates that indicated that they were out-of-date, others would reflect disputed borders, and still others would be drawn by foreigners who got some of the details wrong for whatever reason. This was to be a way of bringing the background of the proposed campaign into the lives of each of the PCs in a different way. I would then generate an adventure based around each of the differences, which would establish the camapign in a way that was interactive for the players. Again, this was an idea that I never got around to developing because I would never have had the time to run it.

A map is more than a representation of the geography of an area. Take advantage of that fact.

Wise words for game masters. Authors are advised to always show, never tell. So too it is with gameplay, where more fun comes from playing things out than listening to a GM drone on.

Next time you are about to start a monologue, stop and put the game back in player hands. Do this by setting a scene and giving them a choice or asking what actions the character take.

Parley offers a great alternative. Want to tell your group the history of the world? Unless players need this information right now, plan instead a series of encounters with sages, historians, old elves, libraries, treasure books, gossip and rumors to get across over time the key people, places and things in a history. Provide contradictory information to make things even more interesting.

In conflict with this advice, you need a minimum of description to play the game. Combat results, encounter introductions, and actions of NPCs all need describing. That is why the title of this post says action *trumps* description – it does not completely replace it.

Use this advice to change your mental stance during the game. Whenever you are about to describe something, ask instead how you can stir action to get your key messages across. Look for ways to trim description a little bit and replace it with something interactive.

Another takeaway hidden in this tip is to make descriptions shorter, even if there is no action to replace the dropped parts. Practice making every word count. Instead of a one minute summary of an overland trip, shorten it to a single sentence of highlights. If players ask for more detail, that is great as it shows they are engaged.

When players do ask questions that require descriptive responses from you, try giving them answers that match the generality of the question. Get specific (where the good details always are) if the players ask for specifics. You are not trying to screw your group over here, like it was a wish spell or legal contract. Instead, you are rewarding them for paying attention, imagining the scene, and seeing the game through characters’ eyes. You are also giving them an opportunity to jump in and interact by thinking up what questions to ask.

For example, “What does the NPC look like?” should garner a response along the lines of, “he appears to be a warrior and not too happy seeing you.” Nice and short without missing something important that would change the group’s approach to the encounter.

If players respond with, “What weapons and armour does he have?” or “Do we see scars or signs of battles on his equipment?” you can give them those specific details.

You are still providing description, but it becomes an interactive process. It gives players options and decisions to make. It requires more involvement than just receiving information passively from the GM.

So, as you plan and run games, look for every opportunity to facilitate action where you would otherwise just provide static description.

This article deals in subjects that are sensitive issues to a lot of people. Everything contained within is written from a roleplaying context and no judgements are intended regarding the validity of any individual perspective on theology or on any social issues that may be referred to; no offence is intended. It’s just a game, people.

Deus-Ex-Machina is a term describing the sudden appearance of an unexpected way out of a difficult situation – literally, Divine Intervention. The term is latin in origin, but actually derives from Greek Drama in which a God would appear from off-stage to resolve the plot. In game terminance, it generally refers to an NPC appearing from nowhere to solve the problem and save the PCs bacon.

I chose the title for this week’s article very carefully. I’m not going to spend a lot of time going into the many reasons why Deus-Ex-Machinas are bad for a campaign; suffice it to say that they are damaging to a campaign in all manner of ways, from harming the plausibility of the campaign to minimising the significance of the PCs, and that this damage persists long after the actual event is history, slowly poisoning the campaign. Any reader who is not convinced as to this statement being true need only look at the list of “other benefits” that conclude this article and consider the alternative.

It follows that any monkey wrench thrown into the apparatus of divine meddling is a good thing. The more Impotent any Omnipotence can be rendered, the more protected from the use and abuse of such authority the campaign is.

As a general rule of thumb, there are only two real ways of limiting Divine Omnipotence: Keeping the Gods at arm’s length, or restricting the power that they can wield.

The first keeps the Gods as an abstract presence that cannot interact with the campaign and never could; this works, but only by sacrificing some of the flavour of the fantastic within the campaign. There are times and campaigns when that is appropriate and the best choice; in general, the more gritty and realistic the setting, the more appropriate this option becomes. This is the better choice for Pulp campaigns, Cyberpunk campaigns, hard sci-fi campaigns, most wild-west campaigns, superspy campaigns, and even low-level superhero and fantasy campaigns.

This is not an appropriate choice for campaigns in which that flavour of the fantastic is to be a central element; the price is too high. Most Fantasy Campaigns, High-power Superhero Campaigns, Horror Campaigns, even the occasional wild-west campaign or superspy campaigns can’t keep the Gods at arm’s length, and that means restricting the power that they can wield becomes necessary to avoid the damage caused by those pesky Deus-Ex-Machinas (pedantic side-note: technically, the plural is Dei-Ex-Machina. Observe it closely if you’re fussy because it’s the last time I’ll be using it).

Can’t think of a wild west campaign or superspy campaign where up-close-and-personal divine manisfestations would be appropriate? Here are three suggestions, plus a Hard-SF/Cyberpunk one, for your consideration:

Wild West Genre: a campaign in which the Native American Gods are real and active in opposing the invasion by white men. In a left-wing/humanist version, the PCs would be Indians, and the Gods would be good. In a right-wing/funadamentalist christian vesion, the ‘Gods’ might be devils and demons sent to lead the Indians astray, and the PCs would play White Men. In a balanced and more interesting version (from my perspective), both would be right from their point of view – the missionaries and educated white men would be doing what they think is the right thing, and the Indians and their Gods would also be right from their point of view, and there would be room for the whole panoply of human flaws on both sides, and no easy answers.

Superspies Genre I: Those notions lead naturally to the first Superspy Genre idea: The PCs come from a “Divine” Intelligence agency like Opus Dei and are constantly engaged in a battle with spies and intelligence agents of a Demonic bent.

Superspies Genre II: You could also have a less theologically-insensitive version by doing a superspies subgenre within a typical fantasy campaign setting. In such a campaign, you can either use a Fantasy Genre set of rules like D&D and provide house rules for the ‘superspies’ componant, or use a Spy Genre set of rules like Top Secret, and house-rule fantasy rules into the mix. The latter subordinates the campaign style to the genre, the latter subordinates the game setting to the intended campaign style but would be more work to set up.

Hard-SF/Cyberpunk Genres: A great way to bring virtual reality “to life” in a campaign is to run it as an independant game setting, possibly even with a completely different set of game rules. Integrating them can be tricky, but if you can manage that, it really does make simulated reality feel different. In this context, Gods would be SysOps and Hackers.

Okay, so assuming that you are on-board with the need to restrict Divine Power, lets get to the meat of this article: practical methods of doing so.

Limited Knowledge

You can only meddle in a situation if you know it’s happening. An extremely effective means of limiting Divine Omnipotence in your games is to restrict the Gods’ knowledge of events.

No Omniscience

If the Gods know no more than they see with their own two eyes, and any activities they otherwise involve themselves in, the problem of Omniscience is definitlly solved. Effectively, this reduces the Gods to nothing more than powerful mortals. But this is a fairly extreme solution, and might not always be the most appropriate for a campaign as a result.

One use I have for the Gods in my fantasy is to make narration interactive with the Players. They give me an avenue for bringing aspects of a situation to the PCs attention that they appear to have neglected to consider and providing a broader perspective to events in the game – usually after the fact, but sometimes I’ll use them to impose additional difficulties to a situation that would otherwise be too simply resolved. Instead of me preaching to or lecturing the players, this moves the interaction to a character-level mode, which is inherantly more interesting to them because they get to roleplay it.

A complete absence of Omniscience severely curtails the viability of this Divine Meta-game Function, so this is too extreme a solution for most of my campaigns.

Limited Omniscience

So, if Omniscience is to be present, but limited, it then becomes necessary to define one or more restrictions placed apon it. In reality, even in games where the Gods are considered Omniscient, there is usually at least one limitation placed on them: they don’t know what the “opposition” are doing.

The balance of this section of the article will examine ways of restricting Omniscience to managable limits.

Can’t Be Everywhere

The most basic restriction – the Gods can be anywhere, see anything – but only one thing, and one place, at a time. This is only a slightly broader solution than the total lack of Omniscience, but it works; it is essentially the omniscience restriction imposed on Sauron in The Lord Of The Rings, though that also implies that there are areas into which the Eye cannot see. Thus, while Sauron could monitor the comings and goings from Rivendell or Lothlorien, he could not ‘listen in’ on (or lipread) the discussion at the Council Of Elrond.

The Eyes Of The Faithful

Perhaps the Gods can only “see” through the eyes of the Faithful. Of course, they have millennia of experience apon which to draw in interpreting what they have seen, and they would automatically integrate this knowledge into a “bigger picture” perspective. They would, logically, also be restricted by their Intelligence in their ability to deduce implications and forecast consequences. This restriction means that the Gods are as capable of surprise as Mortals, and offers one solution to the question of why Gods need followers at all.

Shortsightedness

Perhaps the Gods can only see into the here-and-now, and are incapable of looking into the future or past. That forces them to make judgements based on the immediate problem, and let tomorrow’s problems be tomorrow’s tasks.

This invalidates or renders dubious some of the standard spells in D&D. A less constrictive version of this moderates the clarity of past and present perception – the farther away from the here-and-now, the greater the fog of uncertainty. Although it never came out in the course of play, this was one of the restrictions I placed on the Gods in my Rings Of Time campaign.

Actually, in that campaign, I went one step further, and permitted the Gods to have greater levels of perception when it came to their own domains – so the Goddess Of Life could see a birth many years after the fact, but could not see the intervening maturation of the individual, unless she had ‘looked in’ on that person from time to time along the way. And there is only so much time available for doing that – at one person a second, if a God does nothing else, they can monitor 86,400 people, less if they have to sleep, much less if they want to actually DO something in the course of the day. At a minute per person, the total drops to 1,440 – again, less if they have to sleep.

This restriction can be TOO confining; if that’s the case, consider permitting the God to have a restricted number of Avatars, but permitting each Avatar to act independantly, so that the God can do multiple things at the same time (within limits). But that opens a whole can of worms – what’s to stop multiple Avatars from forming a “Hit Squad” to achieve some end? Well, perhaps there can only be one present at any given place at once – but that then raises the questions of “how close is too close?” and “what happens if one gets too close to another?”.

Divine Fallability

One limitation that is really overdue for discussion in this article is the notion of Divine Fallability. This can come in either of two forms:

• The Gods cannot act effectively until it becomes impossible for them to make a mistake, relying on mortals to create the opportunity for them to act; hence, they are impotent do-nothings most of the time, occasionally emerging as glory-grabbing over-the-top scene stealers, certain to provoke resentment in all but their Devoted Faithful. Grim and Dark, a campaign moulded on this premise might be entertaining for a while but might not have a lot of longevity – but would definitely appeal to some subcultures within the ranks of gamers.
• The Gods are fallable and can make mistakes – errors of judgement, of interpretation, of execution. A cynic might add that they have become adept at Spinning these failures to retain the trust of the Faithful, though I prefer a more honest approach in which they reveal the truth to selected followers and servants.

If the gods never/rarely act because they are afraid of the consequences of error, they are effectively restricted, no matter how omnipotent they might be. The less Omnipotent they are made in the GM’s campaign, the more active – and interactive – they have scope to become. That’s an important general principle for GMs to bear in mind when creating their campaigns.

Omniscient Hindsight

Another approach that can be taken to the restriction of Omniscience is the granting of Omniscient Hindsight to the Gods. This alternative is the ultimate distillation of the concept of Divine Narration that I described earlier.

It becomes even more interesting if the Gods are completely incapable of forecasting the future at all – they then become completely dependant on mortals, who prognosticate all the time. Of course, give two different people the same set of circumstances and let them make their own assumptions, and you will usually get two entirely different forecasts, and two entirely different plans of action stemming from those forecasts. The more obvious a future circumstance is, the more the Gods can act regarding it – but most of those obvious forecasts relate to relatively trivial matters.

The more diverse the opinions, even if the Gods can choose apon which they act, the more likely they are to restrict how they react. This concept really subordinates the Gods to Mortals, and hence to the PCs; they become akin to a hair-trigger pit bull, who can be unleashed on command but usually shouldn’t be, a trump card that can be dangerous if misplayed – a six-year-old with his fingers on the Nuclear Trigger. A campaign modelled on this concept would quickly evolve into a narrative on power weilded clumsily, with characters continually scrambling to limit the unwanted consequences of the last meddling by the Gods. While this might be amusing, even diverting, for a time, I suspect that it would grow frustrating and then annoying after a while.

Alternatively, it might be that the Gods simply become more hesitant and diffident with increasing uncertainty. This avoids all the hair-trigger calamities of the previous paragraph, but it means that the more critical the situation, the more the Gods will leave it to mortals (read: the PCs) to resolve. I’ve never used this particular solution, but it holds a lot of obvious appeal; the Gods can intervene to fix a broken bootlace or resolve any other trivial inconvenience, but the whole point of empowering mortals is so that they can deal with the important decisions – and their consequences.

Limited Power

The last section has drifted the discussion from restrictions of omniscience to restrictions of Omnipotence, so let’s continue down that path.

Where do the Gods get their power?

Way back in December 2008 I posted an article dealing with the value of asking Big Questions in RPGs, prompted by the fact that I had been ruminating on the question “What is the Soul?” for one of my campaigns – you can read that article here: A Quality Of Spirit. This is an article that I have often referred readers to in subsequent posts, because these metaphysical questions frame the objective reality within a campaign, and hence the subjective experience of players participating in that campaign.

So here we have another of those Big Questions, and the answers will have a substantial impact on the campaign. There are, in essence, four different answers.

Sources Of Divine Power: The Faith Of The Living

I’ll address this one first, because it’s one that Johnn touched on in his comments for the “Big Questions” article.

If souls are the currency of the Gods, the Gods are empowered by Faith. There are two variations on this concept: one in which it is the Faith of the living that grants Divine power, and one in which it is the faith of the Dead that grants Divine Power.

The first is hardly a new concept: I first heard it expressed in the early 80s by Mike Welles, a sometimes-GM and frequent player in D&D games, and who was a player in my first D&D campaigns and one of the founding players of my Superhero campaign. His point at the time was that this explained why Missionaries and Conversions from one faith to another mattered, and why Heresies were so despised – a Heretic is denying the God the Power. From this perspective, the only reason the Gods grant Clerics power is to enable them to protect the existing followers of that God and to persuade new Converts.

A simple one-to-one relationship between the number of living worshippers and the number of XP that the god posesses is possible: one Faithful = 1 xp. This defines immediatly what power level a deity can access – and makes certain deities extremely powerful. Goblin Hordes equal great power for the Goblin Deity – and there is a certain intellectual and perverse pleasure in such an inversion of the usual power heirarchy within an RPG.

Another variation on this concept that is more faithful to the standard structure is to key the relationship to the Wisdom of the Followers – which explains why the Wisest characters get tapped to be clerics and priests and paladins; in effect, the god is bribing them with power to remain loyal.

And a third postulates a new characteristic, Fanaticism – capped at 40-minus-INT or something like that – to which this relationship is keyed. This works especially well for Moorcock-styled campaigns in which cults worshipping Mad Gods empower those Gods sufficiently to compensate for the greater numbers of more moderate Faithful of the mainstream, while still retaining the connection between the Elite Faithful and the Gods that empower them.

Ultimately, these are all Generator analagies – the Faithful acting as Generators of Divine Power that can be tapped by the God.

Sources Of Divine Power: The Faith Of The Dead and Dying

The alternative is for Souls to be, more literally, the currency of the Gods. At the moment of death, a God claims the power of a specific soul based on the fidelity of worship of the mortal at the moment of death.

I’ve heard this proposal used to explain the power of Necromancy in games, and a measure of the power that a soul generates under this paradygm is the power of Liches and Vampires (okay, so the latter have been reportedly wussified in 4e, but you get the idea). When lesser undead are created, part of the power goes into reviving the dead, but most of it can be drawn off and used by the creating agency – and all of it is (effectively) being stolen from the God who should have recieved it.

Adopting a chemical battery analogy yields this solution, which is also frequently combined with the first Faith-as-power proposal. Another couple of GMs of my acquantance, in another of the bull sessions that don’t seem to happen as frequently these days (possibly because it takes a lot longer to write something than it does to toss an idea out verbally), mooted that interesting consequences result if the souls are actually consumed by the process. This actually draws apon Ancient Egyptian theology, which divides the Soul up into multiple parts – one of which goes on to the afterlife, and others which do not (and which can therefore be used for other purposes).

I’ve employed this specific solution in my Shards Of Divinity campaign; in order to utilise their powers, the Gods have to consume some of their stockpiles of power, and if they don’t have enough, they have to kill off some more of their worshippers to make up the shortfall. (I also use an attenuated version of the Faith Of The Living power source). But that’s an Evil campaign, the concept doesn’t work so well in normal campaigns.

Sources Of Divine Power: Prayer & Sacrifice

This can actually be considered an indirect version of the first set of Faith-of-the-living solutions offered above. Each Prayer, Sacrifice, or other appropriate Act of devotion empowers the God in some manner. The God then repays some of these by granting the prayers, to keep the power coming – the chance of which is obviously enhanced by devotions that are at least proportionate to the request.

This brings up new questions for consideration – can this power be stored, or must it be used immediately or lost? If it can be stored, can this be done at 100% efficiency – or is there a loss? What can the power be stored in? Can stored power be used by others? Can it be stolen? As it has a Spiritual context, can it be contaminated or twisted? What happens if it is?

The answers to these questions will affect the behaviour of the Gods, the behaviour they demand of their worshippers, and hence the nature of theology-related adventures that the PCs have.

Sources Of Divine Power: Internal

The next most obvious source of Divine Power is that the Gods generate it themselves – they can do whatever they want with it once they have done so, but are limited by the fact that consumption is faster than generation. A God can do a lot of little things, or can store up his powers for big flashy shows, or can adopt a middle course.

This model assumes that the God is somehow still tied to his worshippers, still dependant on them in some respect, and hence has to occasionally do something to keep them faithful. The form of this link then becomes a vital element in the relationship between Flock and Faith.

While there are a number of possible answers to this need, the best I’ve found is that the God stores his internally-generated power within the faithful by the process of their worship, and also within the structures and artifacts of the faith. He can generate it internally, but can’t store it up himself – he needs his worshippers for that.

While there is no need to do so, it is possible to extrapolate on this premise to make a campaign built on this concept more unique by speculating on what being so “charged up” does for a character – or what having the charge consumed by the deity does, depending apon which state is considered the “baseline” described by the character sheet. The first confers some extra ability or advantage on almost everyone some of the time, the latter imposes some extra penalty at times.

As a GM who strives to keep his games balanced, the latter holds greater appeal to me, but I suspect that it would cause problems with players unless clearly explained in advance to them (and possibly even then). The latter, on the other hand, can be managed by altering the duration described by the phrase “some of the time”. But you may have more tolerant players.

Sources Of Divine Power: External

The final source of Divine Power, logically, is something else external to the God. Frankly, this alternative combines many of the worst aspects of several of the above alternatives; it doesn’t connect the Gods with their Worshippers, it doesn’t explain any particular aspect of the campaign universe like Clericism or Necromancy, it leaves the Power of the Gods restricted in some fairly inchoate and abstract ways instead of offering menaingful limits… it’s not my preferred answer. (It works great for Mages, though).

Nevertheless, it’s a viable answer to the need to restrict Omnipotence, which is the primary objective; every shortcoming listed in the previous paragraph is just the absence of an ‘extra’ that comes free with the other solutions.

An Alternative: The Limited Conveyance Of Power

So far, the alternatives considered have all been direct limits on the amount of power available to the Gods, simply because that bears the most direct relationship to the capabilitied that we wish to restrict. But that is not the only constraining mechanism that can be used to achieve our goals, so -having disposed of the obvious – it is now time to turn our attention to more esoteric constraints.

If divine power all stems from a single external source, perhaps an electrical metaphor is inappropriate. A better analagy might be that of a hose of fixed volume and current; the more this is divided up amongst a number of gods, the less power each has, but if there are too few, the hose experiences excessive pressure, triggering a ‘relief valve’ that elevates someone else to divine power levels – as depicted in the illustration.

This concept produces a generational model amongst the Gods in which they are constantly fighting amongst themselves for a greater share of the available power, diminishing their numbers, while new gods periodically arise to challenge the old. If there are too many Gods – if someone persuades the current generation to ‘give peace a chance’ – individual Gods will be too weak to overcome their enemies. Picture the Greaco-Roman gods with anger management issues (okay, with more extreme anger-management issues) and you will get the idea. Actually, in many ways, this model is also appropriate for the Ancient Egyptian mythos, where alliances are temporary and (in general) it was every God for him- or herself.

This is a restriction on the dispersal of Divine Power, and it would probably be paralelled by a similar restriction in terms of the number of Clerics each deity could or would maintain. You could have a lot of relatively low power priests etc – with a few specimens getting additional boosts – or you could have a relatively small number of very high-powered priests. A single temple can be harder to take down, under this model, than a hundred temples scattered here and there – so Dark Gods might linger in hiding until long after their temples are thought destroyed, only to resurface once again to trouble more mainstream society.

As you can see, this model is rife with adventure possibilities.

An Alternative – A Long Long Way From Home

But this is not the only alternative, either. Perhaps Divine power is more like AM-band Radio Transmission; the gods have powered amplifiers, and are able to pick up at least some signal most of the time, while their followers are like crystal radio sets, able to pick up the transmission only when conditions are exactly right – unless the Gods re-broadcast the signal.

Just as there are a whole range of phenomena that can interrupt, distort, or interfere with such radio signals, so there would be phenomena that would block the Gods and their followers from receiving the ‘power’ being ‘broadcast’.

This model introduces an uncertainty into the Divine Equation – the Gods can never be sure of exactly how much power they are going to have. A smart deity will stack the odds in their favour by recruiting self-powered mortal backups.

I havn’t devoted much thought to this model, but it shows some interesting potential.

The Divine Vessel Overflowing

Some of the earlier proposals yielded a result in which Divine Power rose with the number of active Worshippers. In some respects, that seems like getting two benefits for the price of one, so (some years ago) I set out to envisage a form of divine limitation in which the opposite was true.

What I came up with looked something like this: The more followers a Deity has, the more of his power is consumed by attending to the needs of those worshippers. Instead of a limit on just the one element of the theological relationship, power is distributed amongst the faithful, enabling the Deity to be in many places at the same time – in severely attenuated form. Thus, you can have a deity who can’t do very much (and hence tends to lose worshippers to brasher and flashier gods) or one with few adherants who can do truly spectacular party-tricks (who tends to attract new worshippers every time they do so). Cosmic power thus tends to oscillate about a mean value:

The priests are continually seeking to cultivate and attract new worshippers for their own temporal power and security, but if they are too successful, the Deity lacks the power to protect the population in what is a dangerous world.

The logical development of these circumstances is for many deities to gather into a pantheon, which shares the Worshippers amongst all the participants. The more broadly-based the pantheon, the more followers they attract, but any excess can be passed from one deity to another like a game of pass the parcel. When combined with the jurisdictional portfolio concept, which is common to pantheons, and with events that affect their worshippers, this has some interesting ramifications.

A God of War has plenty of power to start a conflict, but once one does, many worshippers flock to his banner, leaving him relatively powerless. Only when the populace tires of war, and begin praying for peace, does he gain sufficient power to be able to bring about the crushing victories by one side or the other that resolve the conflict. He is the God Of War because he starts and ends wars – but is relatively helpless to alter the course of events in between, which falls to other deities – luck, agriculture, crafts, knowledge, etc.

A Goddess of the Harvest has the least power to intervene when the climate turns harsh, and everyone is praying for relief – and the most power in times of plenty.

In comparison to normal theological structures, the tail is wagging the dog, and the concept takes a little getting used to before it can be used instinctively; but, by limiting the power of the Gods when that power is most in demand, this construct fulfills the brief – while leaving the Gods powerful enough to stir up mischief the rest of the time.

Limits through Anthropomorphis

A completely different solution to the need to limit Omnipotence is to distinguish between the conceptual existance of the God and the metaphysical manifestations of the Deity. This approach works well with the “Can’t Be Everywhere” limitation to Omniscience. The principle is that the God himself is omnipotent, but can only manifest that power through avatars, who are inherantly less-powerful than the real thing. The more avatars that the god manifests, the less powerful each individual example becomes. The effective power level of any individual deity thus becomes a compromise between ubiquitousness and utility, and an expression of the divine personality.

This has direct effects on the independance of the Organisations of worshippers. The less direct supervision the Deity gives to his Worshippers, the more capable they are of independant action in his name, and the more powerful his avatars are when he puts in a rare personal appearance. This opens the door to secular ambition and corruption, and the occasional purge of the impure when they go too far. The more he keeps his ‘message’ pure, the less power he has to do anything else with, and the more reliant on his mortal Worshippers he becomes to do his work.

Manifestations Of A Primal Principle

Most deities in an RPG represent some portfolio, a primal principle of some kind – “God Of Storms”, “God Of The Sun”, and so on, and are considered to have limited powers outside of that jurisdiction. One reasonably effective way of limiting Omnipotence is to take this concept a step further and have the Gods become completely helpless – mere mortals in effect – outside of their jurisdiction. “I can’t break down that door, I’m just a Storm God. I can level the entire castle with a hurricane, if that would help” – but this is a rescue mission, and in any event, a hurricane would cause collatoral damage, and impede the PCs just as much as the door.

Constraining the ideological power of the Gods in this way makes them utterly dependant on those more rounded, more flexible and adaptable, mortal servants.

Divine Mortality

One of the big questions to be posed concerning the Gods is the matter of Immortality. Throughout history, very few civilizations have percieved the Gods as being truly immortal, though most give them a limited form of that characteristic. The Norse gods certainly weren’t immortal, for example.

For game purposes, Immortality is generally a bad thing because it permits the Gods to be unaffected by whatever is going on. Making them mortal – even if it is only to another deity – gives a personal stake to whatever is going on, and gives a reason for them to hesitate, equivate, and risk mortals instead of themselves.

But this raises other questions, as explained in the Blog post that I referred to earlier (A Quality Of Spirit) – such as, what happens when a God dies? Their domain goes untended? Their clerics lose their power? Can another God fill in? Can a God be ressurrected? Even if one can’t, would that stop mortals from trying anyway?

There are all sorts of possibilities, each of which can become one of the central pivots around which a campaign can be built.

The Word Is Truth

One of the foundations of most theology is that the Gods define their own doctrine, and that mortal religion is a process of discovering the nature of the God. The Word Of God defines the theology.

My Fumanor campaigns deliberately inverted this relationship. The Gods were defined by, and constrained by, the theology imposed on them by Human Priests – something they discovered the hard way. If the priesthood decides that Thor has the head of a bull, and makes that canon within the Church, Thor will wake up tomorrow in the shape of a Minotaur. If the priesthood decrees that Thor creates storms but does not end them, Thor can only create storms, he cannot end them. If the priesthood decrees that Thor only rides storms, and that storms are natural phenomena, Thor gets to use thunderclouds as chariots – but can no longer create storms. And, if they decide that a personal conflict has arisen between Odin and his Son, the two will find themselves in a bad mood whenever they are in the same vicinity as each other – and soon enough, there will be a conflict between them. Only when there is a significant plurality of opinion does the Deity have a choice as to his nature; the rest of the time, he can simply choose what to do about it.

Much of the backstory of the Campaigns that have been set in that Game Universe have been explorations of this concept, and its ramifications, and more is to follow. But here are a few highlights.

The Dangers Of Heresies

Heretical Beliefs immediatly become the bane of a Deity’s existance. Especially if these heresies become widespread. Gross heresies are easily countered by a conservative theological administration, but more subtle heresies and misconceptions can become common belief without opposition. Any aspect of a deity’s personal mythology that is not fixed in place by the church is up for grabs – from what they prefer for breakfast to how they treat their wife, or even who they are attracted to. Hence Zues finds himself lusting at various times over anything that moves, while Athena becomes a jealous wife, and all because someone thought a Swan looked pretty.

The enemies of the Gods sought to actively use this against their opposition in a pre-campaign era of the background. Impersonating priests, they started spreading all sorts of stories that sounded good at the time, and eroded the purity of concept and purpose of the Gods.

The Limits Of Mortal Imagination

Some people have very active imaginations, others do not. Most people have limits to their imaginations – I would say “all people” but I can’t prove that! It’s also human nature to be skeptical except in certain circumstances, such as when a lie is wrapped around a good and plausible story. There’s no such thing as a God of Gravity because no-one ever imagined one and convinced people that he existed. The Gods can only manipulate time in very limited ways because people have trouble imagining and believing anything else – time just IS.

The bigger the concept, the harder it is to make the belief in the concept to be widespread. Some people still think the moon landings were a Hoax, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there were still people who think the earth is flat. Personally, I think the moon landings were real, and that the Earth is an imperfect oblate spheroid – and so do most people. That doesn’t make either of us right or wrong, for that you need evidence and facts.

While the collective human imagination is able to dream up some pretty wild things, convincing a majority of people that they are real is another trick altogether. The astonishing thing is that it happens from time to time!

The Hazards Of Mortal Corruption

Clearly, if mortals grow corrupt – and it happens – they can corrupt the message to their own benefit. Wealth can be spent on beautifying temples and granting priests lives of luxury “for the greater glory of our God” in place of actually performing the Deity’s work. Divine favour can be withheld from the poor, or the impure, or even simply the racially or culturally different. Greed, Racism, Lust for Power, Ideology – these can all contaminate the pure “word of god”, and constrain the God’s ability to use what power he has.

Something that has yet to emerge – largely because I’ve not yet decided whether to take ‘the next logical step’, or if it is one step too far – is the possibility that since moral corruption breeds moral corruption, that this sort of behaviour can corrupt the morals of the Gods themselves. While a logical possibility, I’m not sure that this would not violate the history of the campaign (because I didn’t think of it at the time) – it might be a little too late at this point.

The Devestating Impact Of Trade

Given this central premise, the ramifications keep coming. What happens when two different population groups start to trade? Ideas get exchanged, ideologies blend together, and concepts hybridise. Parts of one language get absorbed by the other, and vice-versa. And theologians attempt to reconcile the things they thought they knew with foreign notions and experiences and mythologies.

Normally a positive outcome, prompting social and philosophical growth, when beliefs dictate the nature and limits of the Gods instead of the Gods dictating the Theology, the consequences can be unexpected and undesirable.

Consider the consequences of a blending of Roman and Norse mythology, for example. Both contain a Deity whose trademark characteristic is the Hammer, but one of them is the Lame Hephaestus, master of the forge, and the other is a God Of Thunder. Combining those characteristics produces a Deity who is lame, weilds a hammer, is a smith, and who creates thunder and lightning whenever his hammer strikes his Anvil. One deity takes on the characteristics of both, and the other is left an empty shell. Further, in Norse mythology, the master smiths are the Dwarves – so perhaps Thor is suddenly a Dwarf, or half-Dwarf. Invent a little dalliance in the past between Odin and a Dwarf Princess to explain this and before you know it, the entire Mythos and Pantheon has been redefined.

When Civilizations Fall

With the Gods having active and evil opposition from outside their number, collatoral damage from the conflicts between the two will ensure that mortal civilizations will rise and fall, and each time this happens, Holy Books get lost or damaged, legends are forgotten and new myths written to take their place. Invented material replaces theological foundation, and the Gods are as changed by the calamity as are the Mortal Societies that are affected.

If a culture is wiped out by a great storm, how likely is it that a storm god will emerge as a villain in the next civilization to emerge? If a tidal wave devestates a culture, what odds that a placid god of Fishing will be cast as wrathful and angry unless appeased?

Chinese Whispers Through The Ages

And finally, there is the simple failure of clear communications. Tales get misinterpreted, parables are taken as factual event and vice-versa. Names get exchanged in stories, responsibilities get misplaced. No-one with any experience of the childhood game would entrust any significant information to the Chinese Whispers mode of communications – but that is exactly what happens when reading and writing is not universal and people are educated through spoken narrative and rote.

Interpretations naturally change and evolve over time, and not always for the better.

The Impact On Cosmology

Limiting Omnipotence has a substantial effect on a campaign’s Cosmology; certainly, the origins of the universe would need to change (unless the act of creation is what consumed so much Divine Power that it is the cause of restricted Omnipotence, of course).

While it is more frequently the case that a change in the nature of Divinity will prompt a change in the Cosmology of the campaign, it can occasionally be inspiring to reverse this process. What if the Astral Plane is the place of Nightmares, a location in which these monstrosities are real and actual? How might the Mythology of the campaign be altered by this premise, which requires the Gods to battle their way through these horrors in order to affect the Material world? Perhaps the Soul, on death, has to fight it’s way through these terrors in order to reach the afterlife? Perhaps there are bridges, safe passages, that are protected by the Gods?

How would these changes affect various spells? The nature and purpose of Demons and Devils? The nature and cause of Evil?

Any of the methods of limiting divine power that have been suggesed will have an impact on the behaviour of the Gods, on the structure and (possibly mythic) origins of the universe, on the behaviour and role of the church, and so on. A campaign does not have to be a high-magic cosmic quest through the planes of existance for these changes to have a real and observable impact on the society surrounding PCs and to shape the adventures that are open to them.

Other Benefits OF Divine Limits

We’re nearing the end of this exploration of constrained omnipotence. But, before I wrap the subject up and put it to bed, I wanted to take a moment to look at some of the other benefits that derive from limiting the power of Gods in a D&D game. These are advantages that I didn’t consider necessary to justify the concept, but that come along for the ride, as it were – fringe benefits that should convince just about everyone that this is a good idea.

The Impact On Opposition

If the Gods are less powerful, so can be the enemies they face – which brings them within range of PCs who need something to get their teeth into. Or the Gods can be seriously outmatched, requiring the PCs to get clever in finding ways to even the match between the two. Either way, Divine Enemies become viable opposition for high-level PCs.

Differential Divinity

Deities who are not much more powerful than high-levelPCs, or are perhaps even less powerful (but have different constraints) means that Divine Ascension becomes a viable objective for an ambitious character. In fact, there can be all manner of intermediate stages between Greater Gods and 1st-level characters, offering progressive ambitions – which means that instead of one big payoff, the GM can permit characters some success along the way.

Playability

Making the Gods fallable and limited makes them a lot more playable in many respects. “Deity” becomes little more than a powerful race with few members, and the appearance of these individuals within a game no longer stretches credibility to the breaking point. In practical terms, the strength and number of abilities that they can bring to bear is clearly reduced, and this makes them manageable even in combat conditions.

The Expression of Personality

There’s not a lot of scope for the expression of personality if everything can be resolved with a wave of the Divine Hand. Limiting the Gods means that characters can interact with them as they would with any other NPC – they might be powerful, respected, even revered, but they don’t take over the campaign with their mere presence.

Spotlight On The PCs

If the spotlight is no longer being hogged by the Gods in any interaction with the PCs, that means that there is more scope for the PCs to figure prominantly. The more that the players can take their character’s destinies into their own hands, the better off the campaign is. What’s more, removing the Gods as a ‘cheat mode’ puts the pressure to succeed back where it belongs, on the characters that are supposed to be the stars of the campaign.

Fallability and the Mortal Backstop

The less the Gods can solve the big problems on their own, the more scope there is for the PCs to be called in to solve them – in other words, to have an adventure. Ironically, making the Gods smaller makes the Campaign potential bigger.

The Gods Help Those Who Help Themselves

In a metagame context, this is referring to the ability of limited Divinities to help the GM create a memorable and lasting campaign. I mean, seriously – there are just too many up-sides not to seriously consider weakening the Gods in any campaign you run.

That’s not to say they should be walkovers – just that if they are mountains, top-level PCs should at least be foothills, able to see the peaks and heights to which they might aspire. As always, there is a perfect balance that will be different in every campaign and for every combination of players and GM. But that balance is often to be found a lot lower than most GMs set the bar.

In my article about how to be a confident game master, I mentioned I have encounter seeds ready during games that I categorise as break down the door. Campaign Mastery reader Will asked to see what these were, so here they are. Thanks for the request, Will!

If gameplay slows, or if I get stuck for an idea when the NPCs do something, I draw from my encounter seeds list. These are proto-encounters not yet fleshed out, waiting for circumstances to crystallise before they can be brought into play. A subcategory in my list of seeds is break down the door. These are pure action scenes that will inject energy and excitement into the game through some good old-fashioned combat.

Break Down The Door #1: Gather Information

The PCs have many smart enemies who will not sacrifice important minions without knowing more about the characters’ abilities. So, foes throw a group of flunkies against the PCs and observe. Then they return to their evil lairs and plot more potent challenges.

A player of mine said his GM in another campaign ran monsters like they all had Bluetooth headsets on. Monsters have perfect coordination, exact countermeasures in place tuned to the PCs’ abilities, and the perfect tactics in place against the party. He says it stretches his belief that his foes are always so well-informed, organised and intelligent.

Foes in my campaigns start with knowing nothing about the PCs. If the characters become a thorn in their sides, then they will start with a gather information campaign. Their minions will go out and make Gather Info checks. But this only tells them so much. Eventually they need to tackle the PCs head-on to learn what they are made of.

Here are a few things foes look for when observing these battles:

• Character classes. It pays to know who the spellcasters are, if any, who the tough guys are and who the sneaky guys are, in the party. From this information can be deduced possible special abilities to defend against, weaknesses to exploit, and tactics to strategize around.
• Best spell. You also want to know what each spellcaster’s power level, typical spell selections and best spells are.
• Key buffs. What kind of defences does the party put in place? Any offensive buffs?
• Special abilities and feats. You do not want be caught off guard when your foe throws a special, twisty punch at you.
• Monster types. Some foes employ minions of a certain type, such as undead, outsiders, aquatic and so on. Before pitching the minions they have invested the most in against the PCs, you want to first learn how they handle creatures of a similar nature.
• Magic items. This is the most interesting category. Villains want to know what magic items the characters have, what those items’ properties are, plus any command words or activation rituals. Magic items might also become treasure, so it pays to know everything you can from the people who know how to use them.

A Gather Information type encounter needs flunkies, which I just pick out of the Beastiary on-the-fly according to what the villain has at his disposal from the ranks of his minions, prisoners, slaves or mercenaries.

The encounter also needs at least one observer. Perceptive enemies tend to get spotted, so some redundancy is ideal. The observer should be a minion intelligent enough to understand and assess the characters.

Break Down The Door #2: False Alarm

The PCs are attacked out of the blue for the wrong reason. This lets me attack them with anything, at anytime, anywhere. I will sort out the details between sessions as to who ordered the attack and why.

A potential twist involves the attack actually being targeted correctly. The attackers are tricked into attacking the PCs, but cannot divulge any important details if defeated, captured or parleyed with. Alternatively, the PCs are purposefully misinformed or setup so as to trigger the attack.

For example, Klash is a gang leader who curries favour with the neighbourhood villain, but the PCs have made him lose face recently and have also identified themselves as a potential threat to his plans. It is simple enough for Klash to find someone in the neighbourhood, or even outside the neighbourhood, to trick into attacking the PCs. A jilted lover gets told the party’s paladin was the other man. Somebody just robbed receives information that the PCs did it. A rival gang learns the PCs are apparently trash-talking them.

Break Down The Door #3: Is That A Banjo I Hear?

One of the themes in my campaign involves storms and nature gone awry. There is a backstory to this, and it is one of the central conflicts of the campaign. If the PCs get involved, then they will learn a group of mighty villains fight against each other in the ways they best know how to gain an epic prize. If the characters ignore the ongoing hooks, then a series of background events are scheduled to occur to make their lives, and the lives of everyone in Riddleport, interesting.

One the events is something called Blood Rain. Actual blood falls from the sky. When enough has fallen and gathered into pools, blood elementals coalesce and attack anything nearby.

There are different sub-types of blood elementals, giving me the option of kicking down the door at different challenge levels depending on what I need at the time.

The aberrations are mindless, twisted and warped beings. They have no treasure or clues to help the PCs. However, ongoing news and rumours about these creatures appearing and attacking during various occurrences of blood rain give me dramatic options and serve as an ongoing hook into my storm plot, should the characters ever get curious about why this dangerous rain is occurring and how.

Break Down The Door #4: Send A Message

If certain villains could talk to the PCs they would have a lot to say. The thing is, some bad guys in my campaign are not too articulate. So instead of parley, they send minions to whack the characters to send a message of a different type: beware, quit interfering, I am too dangerous to mess with.

Cunning villains will add additional messages and pitfalls their unwitting minions can deliver, such as:

• Booby-trapped items (scroll cases, small boxes and even clothing work well)
• Notes that mislead and misinform (physical notes, tattoos or even verbal messages the minions have to memorise and deliver on their initiative)
• Cursed items
• False maps (that lead the PCs to a false home base with enough traps and defences and tricks to kill 100 characters)
• Ransom note (true or a setup)

For these encounters, I send foes that would realistically be minions of the villains, or hirable mercenaries. I can’t just open the Beastiary and randomly launch a critter. The encounter needs to involve foes that not only fit the parameters of the Riddleport setting, but could also be encountered at other times depending on the characters’ actions. A closed population loop, if you will.

Mind you, the city is a pirate port. Technically anything could be brought ashore….

Break Down The Door #5: Showing The Bling

The game setting is a small city with eyes and ears always open for the opportunity for a bit of larceny. The PCs are sometimes not careful about hiding their wealth, especially magic items. As word spreads, the group will attract treasure hunters looking to whack characters and take their stuff.

Divide and conquer works best, if foes are cunning. The group splits up often to take care of errands or avoid attracting attention. The PCs have already learned walking around as a group six members strong guarantees being perceived as a gang and being attacked by others protecting their territory. So, it is often possible to attempt an ambush of one or two PCs at a time.

Stupid foes will attack the group at the PCs’ home base or during the few times the party walks around as a group.

This gives me the option to engage the whole group or just certain PCs, depending on who I want to keep busy at the game table. For example, while the wizard is at his guild doing various transactions, and the priest is at his church gathering intel, four players are left spinning dice on their character sheets to see who has can spin the longest. Great, I got the message, roll initiative.

Details Shmetails

Each of these encounter seeds leave many detail decisions for game time. This minimises my planning and gives me maximum flexibility for how and when I want to trigger the encounters. I do have factions, villains and minions fleshed out to a certain degree already. So I am drawing on more details available to me than just at the encounter level.

Whenever possible I try to link encounters to my plots or current character threads. Too many open loops and loose ends gets me confused and dilutes the campaign. Even though the characters are making most of the calls in this campaign, I want to make encounters circle back to something meaningful that moves the plot forward.

Resources

Roleplaying Quests

Wilderness Encounter Ideas

150 Benign Urban Encounters

120 Benign Wilderness Encounters

Okay, so for the first time since we started this online magazine/blog, one of us has missed getting a post up. Johnn struck problems with his planned post at the last possible moment, and then tried to rewrite it but missed the deadline; thought that he would be able to get it up a day late, but struck problems again. Each day that followed, he thought he was on the verge of getting it done, but like xeno’s paradox, he never quite seemed to get there. Rest assured, he will be back next week, and we’ll both be working doubly hard to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

For those who don’t know, Australia is currently in the middle of the lead-up to a Federal Election in which both candidates achieved their office by ousting the person who previosuly held office – one by party room ballot and the other by strongarm numbers politics from a dominant faction within their political party. It was quite surprising that the former politician, the Leader of the Australian Opposition, tried to make a big deal about the way his opponant came to power within her party, given that it was not all that different to his own story.

And that got me to thinking about societies in RPGs, and how their rulers were selected.

All too often, it seems that the model is divine right by birth, or seizing power through conquest or skullduggery, or the rulers are simply “there”. Those are far from the only options, so here are a few others to think about.

Appointment By Merit

Perhaps the ruler is appointed because he seems to be the best person for the job. There has been some historical precedent for this. The key question then becomes, “who decides?”. By using different methods of locating and selecting between candidates, quite different social models are achieved.

Perhaps only those who achieve a certain scholastic ability may be considered; what happens then if no candidates meet those criteria? Or perhaps military success is essential – the achievement of a certain ranking, or victory in a war – which means that the society in question must have these wars regularly, just to produce people qualified to lead them! Perhaps all the interested candidates have to fight it out in an arena for the position, and it goes to the last man standing, or have to win a poetry composition contest. All of these imply quite distinctive and unusual societies.

In my Fumanor campaign, prior to their conquest by Lolth, the Elves elected their Royal Family as the most charismatic amongst them (the human democratic model) but gave him absolutely no power except to be their policy mouthpiece. Of course, as my players know full well, that didn’t work out too well for the elves!

Election by Vote

In an era without mass communications, direct election by popular vote is not a viable alternative for a large population. A republican model is the only practical choice for a citizen-based decision within such a society, where the locals elect a local representative, and the local representatives then get together to choose one of their number to serve as a regional representatives; and these then get together and choose one of their number to serve at the next level up the heirarchy, and so on until you reach the very top of the power structure.

In any popular electoral system, the defining parameters of the society are the questions of who has the right to stand for election, and who has the right to vote. In Australia, there is no restriction on the first, and everyone not only has the right to vote, it is manditory. That in turn means that our voting happens on a Saturday. In the US, convicted riminals cannot stand for election, voting is not compulsory, many groups aren’t permitted to vote even if they want to, and voting is held on a weekday. Instead of a situation in which voting is percieved as both a right and a duty, like paying your taxes, the US has a situation in which it is a privilige – one that the system seems to make as inconvenient to exercise as possible, as though they were deliberately trying to covet the votes only of those with strong opinions.

Once again, these are not the only models. What if the right to vote is a privilige that must be purchased from the government at a set rate, and one can buy the right to vote multiple times to get multiple votes, for example – is that a plutocracy, or is it a democracy, or is it something in between?

Or perhaps voting is restricted, or weighted, according to Intelligence?

Or perhaps only those who have served in a military organisation are permitted to vote – the “Stsrship Troopers” model of government.

Election by achievement

Still another, often-overlooked choice, is the old “sword from the stone” standby, and any analagous patterns the GM may concieve. Perhaps, in a culture of hunters, one can only vote once one has a successful kill in a hunt, and there is a ranking of creatures hunted that determines the weighting of that vote?

Perhaps whosever can wear a certain ring is the rightful ruler, and to all others it grows white hot?

Perhaps a ruler must have a certain skill, such as healing? Or must befriend a wild dragon?

The most obvious election by achievement is conquest, of course.

Ruling by Divine Right: A fantasy variation

Even if the “Divine Right” of Rule is the system, we may be talking about a fantasy game in which the Gods are real, tangible, beings. Perhaps instead of rule being inherited from one’s father, all the sons and daughters of noble birth are gathered together and the actual Gods choose which of them shall be King or Queen?

The impact on characters

Consider that, whatever may be required in order to gain office, the current holders of that office must have done those things, met those requirements. Modern politicians live and die by the sound byte. In the recent past, it was a candidate’s ability to Orate that brought office, and there is still an element of that in modern times. In the future, it may be skill in utilizing internet-based social networking that makes the difference.

In earlier days, when politicians and public servants were poorly paid, only those who were independantly wealthy could afford to stand for public office; these days, the position pays so much that only those who already have connections to a political machine can reasonably hope to be elected, save by some wild fluke. Once elected, though, these wild cards tend to stay in office for quite a while, at least in Australia – where even 22 years after his departure from public office, a substantial slice of the community can still tell you who Ted Mack was. (If you don’t know, the page linked to above is worth spending a couple of minutes glancing over – politicians who act with integrity, and are seen to act with integrity, are rare enough that they should be celebrated).

The nature of the government, and how one achieves a position within that government, dictates broadly what sort of people will be attracted to that office and what sort of skills they must have cultivated in order to achieve it. This is not mere abstract information; this constitutes a thread of personal nature common to all representatives of that government, their abilities and personalities. And that in turn speaks to their general level of competance, and morality, within the leaders of the society.

There are so many options available, this article is only capable of scratching the surface, intended only to get you to think about the subject the next time you create a society for an RPG. Spare a little thought for how the officials of that society gain office; if you ensure that this methodology reflects the attitudes and values you want the fictional society to have, it will give you a foundation on which to base everything else in that society.