A guest post by Bobby.Catdragon

1. An orphan, the character only knows his powers came from somewhere. However, coincidental circumstances seem to point to something demonic or diabolical. Should the character find out why? And what happens when he does discover the truth?
2. One day the character’s father disappears. The next day the character’s powers manifest for the first time. Is it a coincidence, or is something else going on?
3. The local King issues a challenge to all magical beings in the country: bring me a golden rose to win my daughter’s (son’s) hand in marriage.
4. A life-long rival, a wizard, has been spreading rumors about the character. He must be found and stopped, one way or another.
5. When the character was a child he suffered an accident that left him bleeding out. A passing stranger, a leech or cleric, saved the child by replacing his blood with something else. (The cleric’s blood? A demon’s blood? An animal’s blood?) Now, whenever the character invokes his sorcerer magic, a burning spreads through his body. What is happening to him?
6. The character finds an old chest. Inside is a wand that seems to pull forth the character’s inner magic. The character, with the aid of the wand, masters his magic. Then one day the wand is stolen. The character can cast spells but its harder. Who has his wand?
7. Visited by a celestial being at birth, the character has always been told that he is a champion of good and law.
8. Visited by a demonic/devilish being at birth, the character has always been told he will be the catalyst that will betray and destroy a church of good reputation.
9. Attacked by assassins, the character survives. Who sent the assassins and why?
10. The King’s royal mage falls in love with the character and seeks to test the PC with tests and quests.
11. A talking opossum finds the character and teaches him how to use his magic.
12. The character finds an old bronze lamp. Upon polishing the lamp a genie appears, smiles, and teleports the character elsewhere without the lamp or the genie. How does he get back home?
13. Once the apprentice to a master mage, the character washed out unable to learn the magic of a wizard. Now that he has discovered his sorcerous powers the character wants to show his old master his powers.
14. A strange birthmark appears on the character’s arm.
15. A dragon (big or small) comes to visit the character “just to talk.” However, the dragon only appears when the character is alone.
16. Cursed with the sorcerous powers, the character wishes to get rid of them. But whatever he does ends up with him having to use the powers.
17. The character’s mother is kidnapped by a Big Bad Evil Guy.
18. The character’s mother is the Big Bad Evil Guy.
19. Whenever the character casts a spell, some random feature of his changes: his hair changes color, his eyes change, or his skin darkens or lightens.
20. A curse has been laid on the character’s village. The character is the only one who can lift it, but how?
21. Seeking to find his fortune in the city, the character is taken advantage of, mugged, and left with only the shirt on his back in the slums of the city.
22. When the character touches gold, it changes to silver.
23. The character has talons on his feet instead of toes. That wouldn’t be so bad except boots and shoes never fit.
24. The character can talk to fish but all the fish want to talk about is the water and other fish.
25. When the character was a child he followed a rainbow to its end. The leprechaun there blessed the child with the sorcerous powers he now has.
26. The character has found a legendary treasure map.
27. The character has a masterwork dagger. Where it came from the character has no idea; it was just there one morning when he woke up.
28. The character must have a focus of some sort to cast his spells.
29. The character is hunted buy an evil cult that believes the character sacrifice will bring back their exiled patron/raise the evil hierophant/bring an apocalypse.
30. Hunted by a group of paladins, the paladins just want to protect the character. By protection, the good guys mean “locked in a room deep under their fortress forever.”
31. Seen as an aberrant freak of nature, wizards seek to strip the character of his powers or kill him.
32. The character overhears a bard plotting to assassinate the emperor. Now the assassin/bard seeks the character to ensure the secret he heard is kept.
33. No matter where he is, a calico cat always shows up and sleeps with the character.
34. A stranger appears on the character’s doorstep entreating his help. Otherwise, the stranger has amnesia.
35. As a young person, the character discovered an artifact in the fields he was plowing. What is it, what does it do, and why do people want it?
36. The character’s master was recently assassinated by magical means. Now the assassin is after the character.
37. The kingdom needs a new sorcerer royal. Does the PC have what it takes?
38. The character has a good friend who was bitten by a werewolf. Luckily, the friend is imprisoned/cared for by a peaceful order of monks. Can the character find his friend’s cure?
39. Whenever the character casts a spell, a blue light appears. Why?
40. The character is color-blind. He can see the color green and only the color green.
41. The character must sing to use his powers.
42. The character is afraid of fire. Why, the character doesn’t know.
43. One day the character awoke. He has no memory of anything before that. His only clue is a red and gold tattoo of a rose on his shoulder.
44. Horses do not like the character, though donkeys follow the character around like lovesick puppies.
45. Raised in a monastery, the character was disrobed and thrown out when his sorcerous powers manifested.
46. The character’s own family wishes to kill the character because of his sorcerous powers.
47. A devil has taken a personal interest in the character.
48. The character can talk to trees but they never talk back.
49. Once a street urchin, the character is now an adventuring sorcerer. However, his old buddies on the street are trying to catch up with him for “one last heist” and they are the type that won’t take no for an answer.
50. Once the third son of a third son of a minor noble family, the character became an adventurer. Due to unexpected events, the sorcerer is now the heir apparent. People want to cloister the character, while others would rather see the character six feet under.
51. The character has a sea shell necklace given to him by a favorite aunt. He can use his powers when he wears the necklace but not when he isn’t wearing it.
52. The character’s brother or sister disappears.
53. The bank forecloses on the character’s family’s farm and his parents are homeless.
54. A lone shark shows up with an IOU for a ridiculous sum of money. The IOU is signed by the character.

Thanks for the great hooks, Bobby! – Johnn & Mike

The second technique of character development that I call apon when stumped for ideas is something that I call The Inversion Principle. Some parts of this I had worked out many years ago, but it was when I read an interview with John deLancie (“Q” in Star Trek The Next Generation) that the final pieces of the puzzle fell into place. That interview was so enlightening that I even excerpted part of it and sent it to Roleplaying Tips as a Reader’s Tip – you can read it in the archived issue here.

The basic concept relies heavily on a knack that I have for reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable in character concepts. This is a skill that I have taught to many others who have picked it up readily, so I hope to be able to impart the technique in the course of the article. In essence, the idea is “Play Against Expectations”, Justify required positions, Reconcile the resulting character traits into a coherant concept, and Fill the character background with Bridging Elements that unify the concept with the character’s circumstances.

This method works exceptionally well when developing recurring antagonists or NPCs that will be part of the campaign “furniture” for some time to come. I also use it occasionally when generating new PCs for an existing campaign (when I’m a player), if the GM is someone who I expect will give me the roleplaying “elbow room” to explore the concept – though I have to admit that I’ve been dissappointed more often than not in that respect.

On one occasion, I generated a 101-page character background and history, replete with interesting villains, allies both trustworthy and deceptive, and the origin of the universe. The campaign lasted about 9 months, at the end of which the GM admitted to never having read it. As a result, the character remains a source of frustration and unrealised expectations. I would have imported the character into my own superhero campaign, but the backgrounds don’t match.

But that’s getting off-topic, so let’s return to the focus of this article – the methodology that I used to design this particular character.

1. Prep

This technique requires a sheet of paper divided into two equal rows along the long axis, into (4) equal columns along the short axis, which are labelled “Relationship”, “Type”, “Expectations” and “Connections” across the top, like this:

You’ll also need a pencil or pen and possibly an erasor.

2. Playing Against Relationships

The first column requires you to pick the one character (usually a PC) on the other side of the GM-screen with whom the new character will predominantly interact. In the bottom row, list as many adjectives as you can think of that are appropriate to describe that character, then rank them in order of prominance. Once that’s done, in order of prominance, you write the exact opposite term in the upper panel.

Example: Let’s work on the same NPC that was used to illustrate the technique in the previous installment of this series. I’ll further assume that the character with whom he will most strongly interact will be the leader of the PCs party, Tajik. Tajik is pious, messy, loyal, of average intelligence, relatively free of prejudice, honest, honourable, respectful, driven, and unambitious. He is also insecure, and resentful or fretful at times. He is an Orcish Priest, after all – which also makes him a respected figure within his culture. He is also male, young, and experienced a “childhood” that was both sheltered and abusive. (Yes, all those traits, however contradictory, do make sense in light of the character’s background). Listing those in the lower panel and ranking them by prominance gives:

1. pious,
2. loyal,
3. unprejudiced,
4. honourable,
5. abusive childhood,
6. insecure,
7. unambitious,
8. respectful,
9. honest,
10. fretful at times,
11. sheltered childhood,
12. messy,
13. driven,
14. male,
15. of average intelligence,
16. resentful at times,
17. respected;

and that, in turn, gives us “opposites” in the top panel of “1. impious/aethiestic, 2. disloyal, 3. prejudiced, 4. dishonourable, 5. spoilt as a child, 6. self-confident/self-reliant, 7. ambitious, 8. disrespectful, 9. dishonest, 10. imperturbable, 11. adventurous childhood, 12. organised, 13. lazy/casual, 14. female, 15. intelligent or dumb, 16. cool, and 17. disrespected”.

These are the brew of ingredients that might go into constructing our NPC. Already a picture emerges, when dealing with them in isolation, of a coldly calculating person who believes in nothing but themselves and would set out to conquer the world with complete confidence in her ability to do so – if she weren’t too lazy to look beyond her own comforts.

While that’s a perfectly viable character concept, it’s not one to use for this particular role. While some of the listed ingredients will make their way into the design of the NPC, this represents the perfect “foil” or arch-enemy of Tajik; drawing all the ingredients from this one source effectively wastes all our ammunition on a one-shot non-recurring NPC. Furthermore, introducing new material means that the characterisation of this NPC can and will be different from the characterisation of the next NPC who is designed primarily to interact with Tajik.

Since I would not expect to use all the elements in actual usage of this system, I would not have been as exhaustive in listing Tajik’s traits; the top half-dozen or so would have been more than enough, and the resulting list of potential NPC traits would have been reduced to “1. impious/aethiestic, 2. disloyal, 3. prejudiced, 4. dishonourable, 5. spoilt as a child, 6. self-confident/self-reliant” – a far less defined and focussed characterisation.

That’s where the other columns come into play.

3. Playing Against Type

This column can only have an impact on the character design when you already have some notion of the role that the character is going to occupy within the game. That will be true more often than not, but there will be exceptions – which I’ll address at the end of the article.

In this case, we know that the character is supposed to be a merchant, in an empire ruled by undead, in which the living lead lives of luxury which are “paid for” after their deaths – and in which social rank post-death is determined by the level of civil or public service performed voluntarily while living. We also have the image of a middle-eastern bazaar as the manner of trade. At the top of the lower row, in the second column, I summarise these points as succinctly as possible. Underneath these, I then list the most obvious characteristics that are usually associated with this “type” of character – “life of luxury”, “works for the afterlife”, “haggler”, “greedy”, “sharp trader”, “shady” – all the cliches – and rank them in order of how cliched they are, taking into account how often that type of character has actually appeared within the campaign.

This last is an important point to note. A cliche earns that categorization through overuse – if there was no allowance for how often a cliche had appeared in the campaign, all the characters of a given type would be the exact opposite of the normal expectation, and become just as dull and predictable as the original cliches. You need some greedy merchants just so that the generous ones stand out!

Example continued:
In this case, the last merchants that the party dealt with were generous, selfless, and eager to please (because the PCs were national heroes to them), but very sharp traders, missing no opportunity to offer the PCs a product that might be useful – so many of the “usual” cliches are weakened in terms of predictability. Instead of

4. life of luxury,
5. works for the afterlife,
1. haggler,
2. greedy,
6. sharp trader,
3. shady

I would assess the ranking as

2. life of luxury,
3. works for the afterlife,
4. haggler,
5. greedy,
1. sharp trader,
6. shady.

In the top half of the column, where we are collecting personal traits for our actual NPC, I will copy in the summary of the “type” and follow this with the opposites for the most cliched half of the characteristics listed below. The other half would be copied in as they are.

This populates the characteristics of our NPC as “Merchant (bazaare)”, “1. poor trader”, “2. life of poverty”, “3. works for the here and now”, “4. haggler”, “5. greedy”, “6. shady”.

Once again, not all of these might be used in the final concept, so the “cliches” of the campaign will constantly be evolving.

4. Playing against Expectations

If ‘playing against type’ was all about the character’s role in the game setting, this section is all about the character’s expected role in events. What is he there to do, and what are the top four-to-six characteristics that would normally be associated with that sort of action? I summarise the first as succinctly as possible, then list the characteristics, ranking them by strength of association.

In the upper section, I copy the summary and then list the inversions of the most-strongly-associated characteristics, followed by the unchanged second half of that list unchanged – the same technique as used in “playing against type”.

Example continued:
So, the bottom half of this column might read “Get two PCs captured”, “4. observant”, “5. deductive”, “1. loyal to Empire”, “2. upstanding citizen”, “3. wants reward”.

“Observant”, because he has to recognise that the PCs are not Imperial Citizens, “Deductive” because he has to associate them with the ‘Wanted’ signs that have been erected throughout the Empire, and the other characteristics which describe motivations for capturing the party members and turning them over to the authorities.

The upper half of this column would then read, “Get two PCs captured”, “1. disloyalty to Empire”, “2. disreputable citizen”, “3. wants reward”, “4. observant”, “5. deductive”.

5. Connections

With the three primary columns now filled, it’s time to turn our attention to the last one, “connections”. The content of this column stems from three sources: the relationships between items in the other columns, especially any intermediate links that tie them together; any implications from the combination of items; and any other ideas suggested by the other answers that are novel or interesting or shed light on some aspect of the setting or background that hasn’t otherwise come out. In other words, it’s for inspiration and filling in the blanks with Bridging Elements!

The best approach to filling this box is to answer five questions:

1. What do the characteristics in the “Relationship” box suggest or imply about the other two boxes (the character’s intended role within the setting, and within the campaign, respectively)?
2. What do the characteristics in the “Type” box suggest or imply about the other two boxes (the character’s primary relationship with the PCs and their intended story function, respectively)?
3. What do the characteristics in the “Expectations” box suggest or implu about the other two boxes (the character’s primary relationship with the PCs and their intended role within the campaign setting, respectively?
4. Are there any other interesting ideas suggested by any of the other answers (even the rejected ones in the bottom row)?
5. Are there any contradictory entries in any of the upper boxes, and if so, what can be done to resolve the contradiction?

Example, continued:
So, let’s look at those five questions for our example merchant. The first question is from the “Relationship box”, where we have the attributes “1. impious/aethiestic, 2. disloyal, 3. prejudiced, 4. dishonourable, 5. spoilt as a child, 6. self-confident/self-reliant”. What do these say about the character’s position as a merchant? What do they say about the character’s actions in causing two members of the party to be captured? Well, #1, plus #2 and #4, all suggest that he may have once held a more responsible position, but has fallen from grace – and #6 suggests that he has landed on his feet. So we have an implication of a social or political failure of some sort.

They also suggest that the characters may have gotten them impression that he would be sympathetic because he is atypical of Imperial Citizens in many ways – and that they were dissappointed for some reason.

“1. Fall from grace/authority”
“2. Past Social or Political failure”
“3. Trusted by characters? Betrayal?”

Question Two deals with the traits “Merchant (bazaare)”, “1. poor trader”, “2. life of poverty”, “3. works for the here and now”, “4. haggler”, “5. greedy”, “6. shady”. What do these imply about the character, and what do they have to say about his capture of the PCs? #1 and #2 suggest that the character is living in poverty and isn’t all that good at his occupation, but #3, #4, and #5 all suggest that this isn’t true – he may appear unsuccessful, but that’s because he’s spending his money on something else – something immediate that is not obviously aparrant from these character traits.

It was while typing that last sentence that I realised that I was once again referring to the merchant as “he”, despite the indication that I noted earlier that the character was female.

In part, that may have been because the trait “female” would have been number 14 of the “relationship inversions” panel (upper left), and only the first six items on that list were retained, but in large part this was also a subconscious decision on my part – that I was thinking of the merchant character as a male and not a female.

You can ignore subconscious cues like this one, but the characters never seem to ring quite as true when roleplayed if you do. When that happens, it’s time to change the attribute in question – in this case, from female to male. But it’s also important to retain the inverted characteristic as an important element in the character concept, because it is part of what was intended to make the character unique, even if that inverted concept was culled from the source list, as it was in this case.

So, by adding the term “male” to the answers in the “Connections” panel, we also have to add “significant female(s)” to the list, even though we don’t know how they will relate to the final concept yet.

“4. Appears unprosperous”
“5. Spends earnings in unusual way”
“6. Male”
“7. Significant Females”

Question Three gave us the character traits “1. disloyalty to Empire”, “2. disreputable citizen”, “3. wants reward”, “4. observant”, “5. deductive”. How do these play into the personality of the character? The implications are that the person is smart, unscrupulous, and has their own goals or agenda. So we can add those traits to the connections panel.

“8. Smart”
“9. Unscrupulous”
“10. Own goals or agenda”

Finally, Question Four is all about inspiration – ideas that may have been suggested or implied by earlier responses that present an opportunity to help bring the society or campaign world or something to the attention of the players. Characters who (in passing) shed new light on a hidden facet of a campaign are hugely beneficial in keeping the campaign ‘tangible’ for the players, just as subtexts are in a novel, or sidebars can be, in a rulebook.

One idea leapt out at me while listing the (unused) characteristics in “playing against relationships” – that there has never been any mention of how the Golden Empire treats its children. This idea was strongly reinforced by the addition of “Significant Females,” number seven on the “Connections” list, because my immediate reaction to the entry was an interpretation of “daughters”.

Furthermore, the PCs have all had very different childhoods, ranging from being the equivalent backwoods royalty all the way through to abusive, with both bullies and the victims of bullying represented. Since these facets of the characters have rarely been touched on, never mind explored, making the treatment of children significant to the campaign’s development also gives the PCs the chance to make these elements of their own characters relevant.

And so, trait #7 is amended, and item 11 is added as the concluding element on our list:

“7. Significant Females Daughters”
…
“11. How are children treated in the Golden Empire?”

Coherance

That leaves blank only the panel on the bottom right. The function of this box is to render a coherant concept for the character, by describing in three short paragraphs, the character. The first describes the personality and history of the character; the second is for the circumstances of the character at the time of the encounter; and the third contains a summary of what the character is going to do, and why.

Note that the nature of the relationship with the primary NPC is NOT spelt out. Using the traits suggested under “Relationship” ensures that there will be areas in which the character will engage their primary relationship – things they agree on, and things they vehemently disagree apon – but it’s not up to the GM to decide how the PC will react to these points of difference, and without knowing those reactions, the direction in which the relationship will evolve can’t be forecast (and GMs shouldn’t try). Define the NPC and his actions, and let the relationship of that NPC to the PCs take care of itself.

The idea is to design a character with something interesting to say or do or that will further advance the overall plotline in some way. Once he’s “in play”, he becomes simply another campaign element to act and react according to events and circumstances. Well, that’s the theory, anyway: Create circumstances, not plot trains!

Example, continued:
Which brings us back to our merchant. We have identified 28 traits as the ideas to be built into our concept, but before we can begin, we need an answer to the final question in the “Connections” box; it’s not a question that I had pondered, previously.

Children In The Golden Empire

The philosophy and religious beliefs of the Golden Empire are known as “Beneck Wu”, which translates to “The Way”. One of the central tenets of Beneck Wu is that a life of luxury is earned after the fact by an undeath of service to the state. The greater the civil contribution of the individual during his or her lifetime (when they need to make none at all if they don’t want to), the higher the rank they are given in undeath – from military command through to civil administration.

As a consequence, actually working for a living is something that is done only by undead, and by those who wish to advance beyond menial work in undeath. Such menial work is undertaken by mindless forms of undead – Zombies and Skeletons – while authority is given to more aware undead types – mummies and liches. Vampires are rare because there is nothing for them to feed apon.

It follows that most children, like our merchant, were spoilt rotten as children, their every need and desire satisfied. Only in one area would there be any imposition of responsibility – religious education and participation would be manditory from an early age.

As a child grew older, and became capable of working if they wanted to, additional opportunities for service would have been made available, first in the form of activities and hobbies and state-sponsored education, and later in voluntary apprenticeships.

Perhaps there would also be organisations that are the equivalent of the boy and girl scouts which teach practical skills that prepare children to care for themselves to whatever extent they wish to relieve society of that burdon.

In summary, then, children would be spoilt; despite this, childhood would be relatively “normal” in many respects, to a perhaps surprising extent. As a child matures, they would be presented with greater opportunities to “opt out” of working life, until the day adulthood is officially reached and the only responsibilities which remain are those which are voluntarily undertaken.

The closest analagy that I can think of is that of the children of famous and wealthy parents in the modern world. An army of servants see to their every need and comfort, they want for nothing, and can have anything that they want merely by expressing the desire.

This insight offers a new subtext for the entire concept of the Golden Empire, one that is even (unintentionally) reflected in the name of the society. “90210” and “Melrose Place” grown to comsume an entire society.

Example, Continued:
With this information at hand, our list of Bridging Elements is complete. To remind you, they are: “1. Fall from grace/authority, 2. Past Social or Political failure, 3. Trusted by characters? Betrayal?, 4. Appears unprosperous, 5. Spends earnings in unusual way, 6. Male, 7. Significant Daughters, 8. Smart, 9. Unscrupulous, 10. Own goals or agenda, and 11. How are children treated in the Golden Empire?”

To start with, it’s clear that our merchant has gone beyond merely working for a future prominance when he enters the ranks of the undead; #4 states that he is actively avoiding the conspicuous life of consumptive luxury that is his for the asking. #8 suggests that this is smart of him; #1, #2, and #9 all suggest that what he is actually doing is considered subversive by the Empire (but no so much that he has been obviously punished, so it’s immoral, not illegal); and #7 hints that this is for the benefit of his daughters, somehow.

The key to achieving a moment of inspiration is often as simple as making the correct association between two seemingly-unrelated facts. In this case, the facts in are the #1-2-9 combination and the answer to #11 (the treatment of children in the Golden Empire, given above). He is raising his daughters in an unsual way, and that is the reason for his aparrant lack of prosperity. Instead of raising them to be conspicuous consumers, they are being turned into – well, ‘misers’ is probably too strong a term. Let’s say that he’s teaching them to be frugal.

This is so contrary to the fundamental assumptions of the Empire that he would be massively unpopular within the community and within society in general; he is undermining the philosophical foundations of their entire society.

He not only has his ‘income’ from his trade, he is also accumulating ‘unspent birthright’, both his own and that of his daughters, which he can convert into additional goods for sale, further boosting both his success as a merchant, and increasing the civic value of his service when he is eventually Judged.

There are two ways to assess the impact of these actions: fear of death – he might even not have a debt to be repayed through service under the tenets of Beneck Wu, in which case he would be left to rest in peace; or power-hungry – when he is Judged, his service will so massively outstrip his debt to the Empire that he will be elevated several social ranks, perhaps even becoming governer of a province. For doing all the ‘wrong things’, and manipulating the tenets of society for his own ends. It’s easy to see why these activities would be unpopular with the authorities!

Looking over the answers given in the other categories, the second is clearly the correct answer in this case. We have ‘impious’ and ‘working for the afterlife’ and ‘dishonourable’ in the Relationship traits, and this certainly fits those personality traits. At the same time, it would be easy for the party members to misinterpret the frugality as an attempt to give his daughters a more balanced childhood (a positive thing), especially given their own childhoods. They might easily have thought he was someone on the outs with Imperial society, and therefore a potential ally – which ties this concept back into Connection #3.

The picture that is emerging of the NPC is consistant with the initial ‘antithesis of Tajik’ character, but the character is far more subtle and less comic-bookish. The plan is positively sinister from Tajik’s perspective – potentially placing him in the uncomfortable position of empathising with the position of his mortal enemies, who he’s here to destroy!

From this point, writing the three paragraphs that define the character will be easy.

Conclusion

The example shows the advantages of this system. Rich and complex characters result, which are designed to interact with the campaign in a number of ways, and who can shed fresh light on aspects of the campaign world that have not previously been noticed. They extend and enhance the campaign with their presence – and that’s a nice side-benefit.

Martial Power 2 for Dungeons Dragons 4E

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Why are mysteries so hard?

Campaign Mastery was asked, I’m making a Hero System 5.5 campaign for some of my friends. I wanted to do a non-power game that was mystery based. First session went off fine, and I had some good hooks and an o.k. story. Now I find myself looking to plan another session and I’m completely blocked for ideas. The setting is 1990’s, so tech and the internet aren’t as advanced as they are today and the characters are in an east coast city. Where can I look for good mysteries that I can tie into my campaign?

Mike’s Answer:

I would normally start by pointing our enquiring GM towards the obvious sources: 40 years of Crime shows on TV, and the last 70 years or so of crime and suspense fiction. But these don’t always translate too well into the gaming genre.

Mysteries are the hardest things to get right, as I found out when I tried to adapt “The President’s Plane Is Missing” by Robert J. Serling for my superhero campaign. It was a story that fitted perfectly with the technology and the campaign setting. The setup for the situation carried over perfectly, but from the moment the PCs started investigating, the plot went off the rails; after the fact, I realised that the mystery relied on the investigators making certain assumptions and accepting the seemingly obvious at face value. When the PCs didn’t, things quickly went horribly awry. Although I was ultimately able to scramble my way to a reasonably satisfactory resolution, it lacked the jaw-dropping shock created by the twists and turns of the original plot.

Add to that the risk your players may have seen or read the source material, and the potential value goes way down.

What’s more, all too often such mysteries can be shattered by the players asking the wrong question (or, more accurately, the right question), just as happened to my adaption of “The President’s Plane Is Missing.”

The next most obvious source is to take scenarios and modules that were written in the past for different game systems such as Top Secret and adapt them. But these may not have compatible backgrounds. Some will adapt easily, others may be all-but unusable.

That leaves only the hardest solution of them all: writing your own.

The attributes of a mystery are:

• A crime is committed or an unusual event occurs;
• the criminal/perpetrator tries to give himself an alibi;
• the criminal/perpetrator tries to throw suspicion on someone else;
• the criminal/perpetrator tries to throw monkey wrenches into the investigation;
• the investigators find a flaw in the obfuscations;
• one revelation leads to another until the criminal/perpetrator is revealed.

Any one of these can be novel in nature, from the nature of the crime to the means used to obtain an alibi to the means by which the flaw is discovered. Often, this is not enough to make the mystery difficult to solve, which is why police shows often revolve around the need to get evidence that will stand up in court – hamstringing the investigators to operating within the law. PCs can and often do evade or ignore such restrictions, which only makes it harder for the GM to create an adequate puzzle.

So, here’s my secret recipe for creating a mystery:

1. Create a crime in which multiple perpetrators might be guilty.
2. Create an alibi for each.
3. Create reasons for each to obstruct the investigation.
4. Create different versions of the scenario (only one or two paragraphs long) in each of which one of the perpetrators has covered up their guilt.
5. Let the players investigate to their heart’s content.
6. When they come up with a favourite theory, and try to prove it, throw monkey wrenches into the works and let them discover evidence disproving the theory.
7. Cross out each alternative version of the scenario as they clear the person it claims is responsible.
8. When only one is left, that’s the real solution to the mystery.

Unless, of course, they come up with an idea that you hadn’t considered and that you like so much that you rewrite your scenario on the fly to make correct!

Hope that helps!

Johnn’s Answer:

Danny East posted some great mystery gaming tips in Roleplaying Tips Issue #400. Be sure to check those out.

I have GM’d only a small number of mysteries. Some went well. Some went poorly. In the ones that went well I focused most of my planning attention on NPC development. I covered motives, personalities, skills. This gave me a lot of mileage during games when I needed to improvise and roleplay numerous interactions with the PCs.

In the games that went poorly, I focused too much on the details. I tried to put together complicated twists, turns and events. In the heat of play I got a few details wrong and suddenly my whole pattern of logic blew up.

The last time I GM’d a mystery I created a timeline spreadsheet. Key NPCs were each given a column. The far left column was for the time. The second column was for the events of the mystery. The NPC columns contained details of actions and locations along the timeline. It worked well, and I’d use the same tool again next mystery I run. It helped me keep important details straight without convoluted documentation or memorization of all threads.

As for sources, Mike mentioned the best ones. If you do use an external source for the plotting though, be meticulous in detailing events, timeline, NPC actions and NPC relationships. Also be thorough in detailing the truth – the critical path – of the story. That’ll be your backbone. This will require parsing through the source, possibly several times, to tease out the 5 Ws of the story.

I vote with Mike to just use external sources as inspiration and then design the adventure yourself. This opens up additional source possibilities, because you won’t need all the information provided – you’ll just be taking a seed and creating the rest.

Some additional sources of inspiration:

• Newspapers – crime features big in news and each story is a potentially great mystery
• Tabloids – for weird and outlandish seeds, or for great NPC inspiration
• Google crime listings for inspiration on different types of crimes
• Documentaries – real life stories help inspire your design

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This is technique number 1 for getting inside your character’s heads. It’s something I was taught in a Graphic Design course that I completed back in 1992 – so here we are 18 years later, and it’s still fresh in memory. That speaks volumes of its usefulness!

Step 1: Prep

Get a couple of pencils and a sheet of A4 paper. Divide the paper into rough squares – 4 down the short side, 8 along the long side. (It can be helpful to have a couple of them on hand in case you get really inspired and run out of room). You’ll also need some sort of stopwatch that makes a sound at the end of a countdown – either software, or a kitchen timer, and some lined paper for notes. Two different colours of pen can also be useful.

Complete your preperations by listing, in one coloured ink, on the note paper, all the things you already know about the character.

Step 2: Relax

Spend a full minute calming yourself, and relaxing. Try to keep in mind anything you know about the character already, but don’t fret if you can’t think of anything or find your mind drifting. Breathe deeply and slowly.

Talking to the subconscious is like listening to a whisper; the activity of the conscious mind is like a noisy party in comparison. The subconscious is easily drowned out; to hear what it has to say, you have to turn down the volume at the party.

Some people suggest two minutes, and some even suggest a full five minutes, but in my experience, one is usually enough.

Step 3: Skim

At the end of the minute, and taking care not to disturb the state of relaxation, skim through that list of known information and then set it aside. Read it once only, and then turn it face down so that it can’t distract you while you work.

Step 4: Thumbnail

Take the sheet of paper that you’ve divided into squares and start drawing or writing the first thing that comes into your head in the first box, and then the second thing in the second box, and so on. Spend no more than 5-10 seconds on each box, but don’t try and time yourself.

It doesn’t matter if your artistic skill is nil, or worse. It doesn’t matter if what you scribble has no aparrant relevance to the character, or in fact to anything at all. These thumbnails are quick and dirty expressions of ideas, and you don’t have time to render a masterpiece even if you have the skills.

When you’ve gone about 30 seconds with nothing occurring to you, stop drawing thumbnails, and number the boxes.

With 8×4 panels to a page, that’s roughly 3-5 minutes to fill a page.

Step 5: Translation

Turn to a fresh sheet of the notepaper, and using a different coloured pen to that of step one, write a “1”. Then list all the one-word descriptions of what you’ve drawn in box 1 – not just what you meant to draw (if you know what it was) but what you actually did draw. If you don’t think one word is precise enough, use two, but no more. Do the same for all the thumbnails – but you aren’t allowed to repeat a word. If two different thumbnails suggest the same word, put a star next to it. That usually means that you’ll get faster as you go, because there’ll be less writing.

Don’t spend more than about 20 seconds per box. With 8×4 panels to work on, that’s roughly 5-10 minutes – but since you’ll spend less time (in general) on the later results, the real average is going to be toward the lower end of this scale.

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Step 6: Interpretation

So here’s the fun part. Everything you’ve written is potentially relevant to the character you’re trying to define. It may be literal, or metaphoric. It may relate to how the character relates to the subject of another word from either the current box or the ones immediatly before and after it. It may relate to his appearance, or personality, or personal history, or motivation. The more stars something has, the more likely it is to be relevant.

This step is about converting that list of descriptive terms into ideas for the character’s personality. Don’t bother to try and vet them at this point, that will come next. Abbreviate as necessary, but try to generate as many descriptive sentences as you can. I will often spend 5-15 minutes on this step. Don’t be afraid to go back and add an idea you missed the first time around, quite often a later idea will suggest some other interpretation of a preceeding item.

The goal is to get somewhere between as many lines as you had boxes filled in, and twice that number. With 32 panels to a page, that should be 32-64 ideas, or about a page-and-a-half.

Step 7: Connection

Next, I will go through the list of sentences and try to connect them. I do this by numbering them as I write them, then writing the number of any ideas that connect to them afterwards.

These connections should jump out at you quickly – I’ll only spend a minute or so doing this.

Step 8: Analysis

We’re on the home stretch at this point. The next step is to start picking and choosing from amongst the ideas that have been generated and finalising the relevance to this particular character, interpreting their relevance, and transferring them to the main page describing the things that are known about the character.

I start by looking for anything that seems particularly connected to what is already known about the character. I then write a relevant interpretation of the statement, and any connected statements, onto the list of things known about the character. I’ll then do the same thing for the statements that seemed to connect in some way to that idea.

When I’ve finished with statements developing the known, or if there weren’t very many known facts to start with, then I’ll move on to the second tier of priority: ideas that particularly appeal to me.

Then I’ll do a third pass through the list focussing on ideas that derive from heavily-starred interpretations of thumbnails.

This step can be very quick, or it can take a while; it’s hard to judge except on a case-by-case basis.

If you do this work in a word processor instead of with pen-and-paper, it’s easy to copy and paste and drag and drop.

Step 9: Fill & Polish

When I’ve finished the Analysis stage, between 1/4 and 1/2 the ideas will have been transferred to the character concept writeup. A large number of pieces of the character jigsaw have just been identified. The next step is to rewrite what is known about the character into sections like description, history, personality, motivations, and objectives.

it’s at this stage that this ill-digested morass is reconciled into a consistant picture. Every choice in the character’s history should be justified by a personality trait; every even in the character’s history should make it’s mark on the personality; motivations should logically lead to objectives, and vice-versa, and both should be consistant with the personality.

Ideally, I will be able to boil all this down to a single paragraph with no need for further research or idea generation, but if more is needed, at least there is a lot more foundation that’s been completed apon which to base that further development.

A small example

So here we have a quick example. Because it’s purely for illustrative purposes, I’ve only used a 3×4 grid, giving 12 thumbnails, rather than the full 32 I would normally use. These were sketched using a paint program so that I could include the graphic here, and the first thing you’ll notice is the crudity of the thumbnails (I’m a better artist than this when using pencil and paper, or taking a little more time)!

Prep:

This was prepared for a Merchant who is going to appear in my next Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire scenario. So it’s for D&D campaign, in a pseudo-Asian setting, and a vendor of some sort who is located in a small town. He is somehow going to arrest, or lead to the arrest, of two NPC members of the party, and is going to accuse them of theft. That’s all I know about him at this point. What does he sell? What’s his personality? What’s his motivation? What does he look like? Given that he’s a member of a population of mixed Living and Undead, which is he? Lots of questions without answers, a situation tailor-made for this technique.

Translation:

I managed an average of about 5 meanings to every panel, giving me 60 interpretations to pick from. Because there were fewer panels than usual, there is also less redundancy and fewer starred entries as a result.

Interpretation & Connection:

That’s a lot of ideas, but some of them clearly don’t fit the setting, at least not literally. Some of them seem dull and unimaginative, while others seem somewhat cliched. One thing my subconscious was clearly telling me was that this merchant might actually be a disguised agent or policeman, but that doesn’t seem logical unless there are secret police everywhere – and that doesn’t fit the game setting. While there’s a lot to dislike and mistrust about the Golden Empire, there are also some notable and laudable qualities about the place, and a near-total absence of crime is one of them. (Notice that the exercise is already sharpening my mental image of the merchant).

So, ignoring my own instructions (because I can), the following list will omit any literal interpretations that don’t fit.

To save repeating the list twice, I’ve also incorporated the results of the following step, Connection.

The NPC:

1. is not what he seems
2. is a Vampire
3. appears to be a vampire (1)
4. has dark eyes
5. is moody
6. always wears a Hat
7. sells hats
8. always wears a Fez (6)
9. is Middle Eastern (8)
10. sells in a Bazaar
11. is bizarre
12. has a prominant Moustache
13. sells timber
14. is branching out
15. is still growing
16. NPC’s business is growing
17. is untrustworthy
18. appears untrustworthy (1)
19. is Oily or Greasy (9)
20. wants money
21. is wealthy (14)
22. appears wealthy (1),(14)
23. leans forward
24. looks forward (14)
25. is methodolical (24)
26. is a coinchanger
27. counts every penny (20),(21)
28. is greedy (18),(20),(21),(22),(27)
29. appears greedy(1),(18),(20),(21),(22),(27)
30. sells produce
31. sells potions or poisons or perfumes
32. sells luxuries
33. feels the cold
34. is hot-tempered
35. is always sweaty (1),(18),(19)
36. fears fire
37. sells fire or flammables
38. is a hard worker
39. performs manual labour
40. is violent
41. is abusive
42. has hair that’s always messy
43. is somebody’s right hand
44. is furtive (17),(18)
45. appears furtive (1),(17)(18)
46. is secretive (17),(18)
47. gives backhanded compliments
48. lives poorly or cheaply (1),(27),(28),(29)
49. sells from a run-down store (1),(27),(28),(29)
50. has fallen on hard times (1),(27),(28),(29)
51. is insecure
52. appears insecure (1)
53. is very secure
54. appears very secure (1)
55. makes safe choices (25)
56. is protected
57. is a solid citizen
58. is popular
59. appears popular (1)
60. is a loner
61. appears to be a loner (1)
62. has a family
63. wants a family
64. sells birds
65. likes girls
66. wants freedom
67. feels free
68. appears free (1)
69. is peaceful
70. appears to be at peace with the world (1)
71. is peace-loving
72. appears peace-loving (1),(34),(40)
73. is noble
74. is nobility
75. has dark skin (9)
76. has dark hair (9)
77. likes the night (3)
78. is messy
79. is disorganised
80. appears disorganised (1)
81. feels caged
82. comes from the city
83. is energetic
84. is a quick talker
85. is fast-moving
86. is energetic
87. strikes without warning (25),(34)
88. moves too fast
89. is overweight

What a jumble! Full of contradictions, and (1) doesn’t help (though it may permit the reconciliation of some of those contradictions). But, like looking through a kalaidescope and seeing the patterns change, I can now vaguely see 3 or 4 different directions for this character to go; some elements are common to all, others are not.

The first direction is a typically greedy merchant, very much a stock figure, who appears to be kind and generous but would sell his mother for the right price. He captures the NPCs and turns them in for a reward. This is very much the direction I was initially heading in, I now realise.

The second is a good citizen doing what is right, a succesful merchant dealing in a variety of smallgoods, who might even be a potential ally to the PCs. This is an option that didn’t occur to me when first concieving of the scenario. This alternative brings a touch of irony and of tragedy to the situation.

The third permits the character to be played for light relief. This notion is not incompatable with either of the other broad notions. Perhaps the character has a fear of the undead? That would be amusing – left a good job in the city because there were too many dead people around.

To be honest, I have a mild-to-rabid dislike of stereotypes, so the combination of the latter two ideas has a solid appeal to me. Even without undertaking the final step, the key pieces of the puzzle have now become clear. What has also become clear is that the scenario itself will have to change slightly to ensure that the personality of the merchant plays a more central role; from being merely a facilitator, a justification for the PCs to get into a jailbreak scenario, he has now graduated to a central figure of the scenario.

Analysis, Fill, and Polish: Abdul el-Kasigama

Abdul el-Kasigama (a completely invented name combining middle-eastern and asian elements) is a merchant in the small village of Tang-Pek (another name off the top of my head) within the inner fringes of the outer Golden Empire.

Abdul has dusky skin and dark eyes and hair. His face is dominated by a drooping moustache. Other than this pristinely-maintained moustache, his hair is permanently disorganised, always looking like a bird was trying to nest in it. Extremely overweight, he is always sweaty and his hair is naturally greasy. He wears a simply but richly-decorated silk robe with voluminous sleeves and a red fez. He dislikes bright light and during the day his eyes are narrowed and perpetually shifting back and forth; when combined with a grin that’s a little too toothy and artificial, he presents an extremely untrustworthy appearance.

When bargaining, he leans forward intently, but his expression never wavers. You can never tell what he’s thinking. His movements are sudden, very quick, and precise, giving the impression of a snake striking. These traits, in conjunction with a reputation for greed, have not made him very popular or trusted by the locals. Abdul gives no indication that he cares what they think, he appears in every way to be at peace with the world and with his public persona.

He is always respectful, even submissive, in dealing with the Imperial authorities and is even believed by some of his peers to be an Imperial Agent placed in their midst as a spy. He obeys every law, custom, and tradition, of the empire to the fullest extent within his power, and appears in every way to be the “perfect” Imperial citizen.

el-Kasigama is not actually the solid citizen that he appears. The grandson of the former rulers of a Kingdom which surrendered to the Empire in an earlier phase of it’s expansion rather than fight against overwhelming odds, his father (the former Prince) attempted to lead an uprising aimed at freeing his former Kingdom from the imperial yoke. When the coup was crushed, Abdul was exiled by the authorities within the former capital of the Kingdom as untrustworthy even though there were no evidence he was in any way connected with the plot. In fact, up to this point, youthful rebelliousness had made him solidly pro-Empire in his opinions. Since his exile, he has changed his position, but his family remain in the former capital as hostages to his good behaviour. It is under these circumstances that he has endured for the last 20 years, and that has dictated his public persona into middle age.

Abdul lives very poorly and cheaply, counting every penny. He sends the bulk of his profits to support his wife and family. His stall in the bazaar appears run-down and disorganised, a permanent state of confusion, but he knows precisely where everything is within it. Despite this seeming lack of prosperity, his neighbours have seen the steady stream of customers to buy the exotic luxuries and smallgoods that are his stock-in-trade and know that he is by far the wealthiest merchant amongst them; resentment and jealousy have only heightened his unpopularity and the perception of greed, and speculation is rife as to where Abdul hides his fortune. Abdul seems (to them) to have an uncanny knack for knowing what the next trend in fashion will be, and is always ready to meet the needs of the wealthy land-holders of the region.

In fact, there is no great insight required; Abdul is intelligent and methodolical, and his wife keeps him apprised of the latest trends and styles within the city. By the time these social patterns spread to the outlying region in which he resides, Abdul has had ample time to stock the necessary items to accommodate the needs of his customers. So familiar has this pattern become to the inhabitants of the region that whenever Abdul begins to stock a new line of goods, the automatic assumption is that these represent the latest fashions. Abduls neighbours and rivals may dislike, mistrust, and resent him, but their wives and daughters all purchase from him. Poisons, perfumes, fashions, and exotica may all be found under his roof.

The Encounter

Abdul will recognise Arron as one of the individuals being hunted for subversion by the Imperial authorities and assume Leif is another of them. He will have no choice but to alert the local garrison, because if he does not do so and is found out, his family will be punished or killed. However, he is secretly in sympathy with the PCs alleged cause, and so he will fabricate a false charge of robbery, which will lead to their confinement being in the local jail instead of their being whisked away by the Imperial Garrison to more secure holdings.

In so doing, he will reinforce the perception of his neighbours that he is a plant amongst them and their resentment, and is smart enough to know this. On the alert, he will keep a lookout for other members of the wanted group and seek them out to warn them. Since they will be paranoid after the betrayal of Chrin (which I described in Campaign Update: Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire), they will probably also distrust him. All of which should set the stage for a comedy of errors.

Perhaps one of the locals will approach the PCs and warn them not to trust Abdul as he is a spy for the Imperial Authorities.

Conclusion

The example of Abdul el-Kasigama shows how the various ideas generated can be linked together to form an interesting character that fits the needs of the encounter. Reading over the final description, it can be clearly seen how the list of ideas have linked together to form a cohesive and coordinated whole, with only a few additional tweaks here and there. Going over it, you should be able to identify each item in the final description of el-Kasigama with the number of the item or items that has inspired it.

Afterword – reconceptualising existing characters

One of the consequences of running campaigns that run for a long time is that shallow characters can quickly run out of depth. For that reason, my Superheros campaign places a heavy emphasis on character design, development, and coherant concept. When a character “runs out of depth” it means that every aspect of the character has played a part in at least one scenario, all the “hidden truths” have been revealed, and the character is a completely known and predictable quantity. Either the referee has to repeat himself (Lois Lane needs rescuing by Superman – Again), or there needs to be some effort placed into reconceptualising the character.

A good character is the sum of it’s parts, plus connections that bind those parts together with an internal logic and cohesion. Character-based scenarios explore those connections, either revealing them, or detailing an unexpected consequence of them. While some of these connections are fairly obvious or even spelt out in the character background, it’s often the case that they are founded on basic assumptions.

Reconcptualising a character involves challenging those assumptions and finding something deeper.

Ichigo: An example

The character Ichigo was the result of a cult summoning an alien that they thought was a demon, and forcing it to mate with the daughter of the cult leader, using black sorcery to produce a viable offspring. The pregnant teen escaped and fled the country, hiding her daughter in a cloak of anonymity, before resuming her flight as though she had never stopped, knowing that her father (the cult leader) had the resources and will to track her down if she ever stopped. The child, a born telepath, grew up amongst an adopted family and eventually became a superhero.

Obvious scenarios revolve around the fate of the mother, confronting the cult, the relationship with and history of the adopted family, and the nature and destiny of the “demon”. Once these are resolved, this part of the character’s background has no further direct contribution to make to the campaign. Sure, you can trot out the occasional childhood friend in trouble, or have the cult resurface somewhere, but unless these developments are part of a bigger picture, there won’t be a lot of impact on the character – who will simply stop developing and begin to stagnate.

While the player of such a character may continue to enjoy running it for a while once this has taken place, this enjoyment is largely a nostalgic legacy of past experiences when the character was fully immersed in campaign events. As the character lingers without such depth of involvement, the enjoyment will pall; the character will become progressively less interesting to play as it becomes less involved. The thrill will be gone.

When a character reaches this point there are three choices: put up with a declining character (ie, do nothing); retire the character and start a new one; or reconceptualise the character, reinvigorating it and providing fresh opportunities for involvement within the game.

By the time Ichigo became an NPC, the character had been in a state of decline for some time. I suspected that there was a lot of depth left to explore, but the links to connect the character to scenarios were not part of the existing characterisation. And so, I applied thumbnail technique, boiling the existing background and established facts down to simple sentences and avoiding all the assumptions I could about how they connected.

The results contained some new ideas on why it was that the extra-dimensional gate opened by the cult just “happened” to reach the dimension of these particular aliens, but the real meat of new development focussed on the character’s reaction to being adopted, and how it impacted her ambitions, self-respect, romantic aspirations, and psychology; how her being a telepath compounded and complicated those aspects of the character; and how her alien heritage could biologically, mentally, and psychologically impact on her.

Some of these have acted to completely revitalise her relationships within the campaign, leading her to abandon everything that she had spent the last decade working to achieve as a member of the hero team in order to persue an impossible romance with the one person she had encountered that was completely and willingly open to her and completely comfortable with her being a telepath; this has led to her being a central NPC in the spin-off Warcry campaign. Others have yet to play out.

These possibilities were always inherant in the character, but were being hidden beneath the established persona and the assumptions of the character background.

Eventually, these will also be exhausted as a source of material, and it will be necessary to again reconceptualise the character – a task that becomes more difficult each time. But the results so far has extended its life as a prominant factor in the campaign by decades, so even if I come up dry next time, I will have been richly rewarded for the effort invested.

What are the essential skills of a GM?

Loz is a frequent contributor to the comments here at CM. So when he submitted a question to Ask The GMs, we were inclined to pay close attention. Here’s what he had to say. “Here’s a deceptively simple question: What are the essential Game Master skills? (Full disclosure: I am currently creating a gaming product to help GMs acquire or polish their skills)”

Mike’s Answer

I gave Loz’s question quite a bit of thought, and soon reached the conclusion that the obvious skills that I could list were not only boringly self-evident, but are either not all that essential, or are specifically relevant to just one game system, or they are easily learned by playing. But, over a bit of time, a few more fundamental skills suggested themselves, abilities for which there is no real substitute. So here they are, a Baker’s Dozen (plus one) things that a GM has to know how to do, in no particular order…

1. Find Information Without an Index
The uninitiated might think that I was being facetious, or trivial. Anyone who has been GMing for a while will know that’s not the case! RPG products are notoriously badly indexed, and so it’s vital for a GM to be able to remember where to find something he dimly remembers reading several years earlier, and to be able to find it again quickly.

2. Make Good Snap Decisions
Some people are good at making snap decisions, others have to think things over. GMing requires the ability to react to a die roll or a stated action by a Player with a decision as to what happens as a result. You don’t have the time to ponder deeply, the response has to be immediate.

3. Plan a Story
Some people might think the ability to construct a game world is vital, but there are a number of game settings out there you can use or adapt. A more essential skill is the ability to read something – anything – and construct a story idea from it.

That means more than just coming up with an idea, it’s structuring the players’ interactions with that idea in such a way that they will find entertaining (it has become something of an ongoing joke amongst my friends that I can find a scenario in just about anything)!

You need to structure an entry point to get your players involved in the storyline, a development path for the PCs to follow, setbacks, difficulties, plot twists, and a resolution; and while part of that is in the hands of your players and what they decide to do, the GM is the person who has to provide them with the opportunities.

4. Play Two Characters at the Same Time
One of the big differences between being a GM and being a player is that you have a cast of thousands at your fingertips, and will have to frequently play more than one of them at the same time, even when they are in opposition. You need to be able to wall off what one character knows from what another knows from what you know as GM, so that you can make appropriate decisions for these characters. It doesn’t matter how great you are at playing one character, if you can’t play two.

5. Play Politics
In many aspects, DMing is about compromise. You have to compromise your vision of the plotline with what the players actually have their characters do, you have to compromise your rulings and game philosophy with your player’s desires, you have to compromise in all sorts of areas. While the GM is always right, there’s no game without the players.

6. Time Management
Being a GM involves a lot of work, and the only way to be really good at it is to invest the necessary time into your campaign. How much time is required depends on a multiplicity of factors, but being able to manage your time is essential to getting the maximum done in whatever time you have available. Part of this skill is the ability to prioritise, and part is the ability to delegate what work you can (be it to a player or to your computer or even to your spouse, if he/she is willing). And part of it is efficiency, and still another part is knowing how to find those extra minutes here and there, and accumulate them.

7. Extrapolate From the Known
This skill shows itself in many facets of Game Mastering; from being able to expand or extend a character’s core concept into a broader characterisation, to being able to expand upon a basic rule to cover situations that the game mechanics don’t explicitly address.

8. Think Outside the Box
If the previous skill is all about extending the known to cover the known, this skill concerns the ability to recognise how far you can push things – rules, characters, situations – and finding ways to go beyond those limits.

9. Public Speaking
Speaking in front of an audience is often rated as one of the acts people find most terrifying in psychological surveys. As a GM, you must be able to orate both efficiently and effectively to communicate to players the things they have to know. In fact, you have to be able to do this so effectively that you can pretend to an ordinary person’s difficulty in public speaking while maintaining your own self-control.

10. Sound Convincing
A GM has to be a salesman. If you have not mastered this skill, your players may pretend to go along with whatever you tell them ‘for the good of the game’, but their characters won’t act in exactly the same way as they would if they believed what they had been told, and they will be fighting to suspend disbelief instead of putting their hearts and souls into what they are supposed to be doing.

11. Memorise Trivia
It’s not really necessary for a GM to be an expert in History, or Architecture, or any of a hundred other areas of knowledge; but they do have to have enough facts relating to those subjects at their fingertips that they can integrate little pieces of reality into their game settings. I’ve lost count of the number of times trivia has become essential in different campaigns.

12. Perform Simple Mental Arithmetic
There’s a lot of simple math involved in resolving basic actions at the gaming table – from working out whether or not a skill roll is needed to whether or not a blow hits. Reaching for a calculator – or even a pad and pencil – breaks the narrative flow.

13. Reconcile the Seemingly Irreconcilable
Games are full of contradictions, owing to the simple fact that no simulation of reality can ever be as rich and diverse as reality is. With different standards of abstraction applied to every single facet of a simulated reality, contradictions are inevitable – and that’s without adding in the ability to go beyond what is normally possible, by way of magic, or technology that doesn’t exist yet, or superpowers, or psionics.

If you can’t make sense of the dual propositions that “The Gods are Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient” and “Free Will is beyond the control of The Gods”, you can’t be a priest – or a GM.

14. Entertain Others
Last, but perhaps most important of all, the GM has to be able to entertain. If the game is not fun, sooner or later your players will find something else to do that IS.

So those are my fourteen essential GMing skills. Everything else you can fake, or learn on the job, or import from someone else.

And now it’s over to Johnn, for those things that I have inevitably overlooked…

Johnn’s Answer:

Thanks Mike. There are many skills involved in GMing. I have a shelf full of books dedicated just to the craft of running great games. That’s the part I find so appealing about being GM. Other games fade over time for me as they pale to the dimensions of being a game master.

Loz quests for an essential list. And Mike, you’ve got an excellent group of core skills. So I’m going to name my Top 3 Essential GM Skills.

I have not made such a list before, and I spent the week pondering it. Turns out the top skills I think you need to be a great GM are not technical in nature but are more leadership type qualities.

15. Make Game Sessions Happen

Playing the game is the best activity in the GM’s toolbox. It’s the end goal of all the planning, creating, reading, studying and thinking. Without game sessions actually occurring, all your efforts are moot.

Sessions are also the best way to learn. Experience is the best teacher. The more you plan, prepare and run games, the better you will get. All skills slowly improve each session. Skills in which you have talent or great interest will improve even faster. GM more = better GM.

Real life is against you. Tricky schedules, other priorities, logistics, player issues, personal energy levels and many other factors conspire to create a fractured gaming calendar. A goal every January is to stick to our game schedule for the year and make as many of those game sessions happen as possible.

Unless you have a like-minded player who is willing to make games happen, it’s up to you to cleave through any obstacles preventing gameplay.

A GM who can handle all the details of finding players to form a group, organizing game dates and session details, and doing whatever level of preparation that’s desired is going to make 50% of sessions happen.

The GM who can negotiate all the crises that afflict the gaming calendar, such as absent players, last-minute emergencies, and time- and energy-sucking events at work, home or school is going to make 90% of sessions happen.

16. Communicate Well

Good communicators make sessions fun. The GM has many required interactions with his gaming group. Here are a few examples:

• Game and session expectations – yours and the players’
• Player relationships with the GM and with other players
• Session organization
• Encounter details and management
• Character actions and results
• Rules refereeing
• Roleplaying
• Combat management

If any of these standard interactions go wrong often, the game is in jeopardy. If things go wrong once at special times, such as during player conflicts or tricky game moments, the game is in jeopardy.

Communication clears up misunderstandings. It encourages participation. It gets people staked into games. It helps everyone have more fun.

Communication is not just about getting your point across. It’s not about compromise. It’s not about announcing dice roll numbers.

A game master who communicates well will listen – and encourage listening amongst all group members, usually by being a good example – not just talk. He’ll take the time to consider more points of view than his own. He’ll explain the thought process behind his decisions. He’ll describe scenes with flair. He’ll coax shy players to not just participate but to express their opinions and ask for what they want at the appropriate times.

A good communicator might occasionally smooth over ruffled feathers, but they prefer to get to the heart of interpersonal conflicts to solve them permanently. They get communication happening before small things grow into big monsters.

Communicators also help players feel welcome, valued and respected. Key ingredients for great gaming.

17. Desire to Do Your Best

Give it your best shot every session. Do this and you will not have any regrets.

You might not feel 100%, but do your best under any circumstances. Sometimes you’ll only manage 50% or 70%, but that’s great. Outcomes will take care of themselves over the long haul. Just focus on applying yourself each moment you GM. It’s the struggle to learn more, be better, do well that’ll get you better and better results. The journey shapes the great GM, not the destination.

Make a list of why you like GMing. Go out and read more about these topics. Have a desire to improve even more in these areas.

Make a short list of critical shortcomings. Shore up these with study and practice. Do not make a list of all your GMing faults – just ones causing game session problems. Fix those. Do not try to be the best at these skills, just get good enough so the serious problems are gone. Then keep focusing on the areas where your talents and passions lie to make those soar.

I can tell a GM who wants to improve their craft from one who just shows up, basically killing time. Your players can too.

Do your best. If you’re unwell, be the best unwell GM you can. If you’re unprepared, be the best unprepared GM you can. If you have a group of piranhas for players, cheat just focus on yourself and what’s in your control and do your best.

I look forward to everyone else’s thoughts on what makes a great GM. What are the skills and traits you’ve noticed great GMs in your life possess? What skills do you possess that you think makes games better?

Ask The GMs is a service to you offered by Campaign Mastery. Check out what’s coming next, or ask us a question you have about GMing. Ask The GMs >

Developing a characterisation is like a jigsaw puzzle. You solve the bit around the edges first – the most obvious characteristics – and then try and fill in the middle a bit at a time until the whole picture presents itself.

There is usually one critical “piece” of the puzzle, which – when ‘solved’ – connects several more, like dominos falling one after another. In most cases, that critical piece will be a question of motivation – why does the character want what they want? Why are they going to act the way they are?

Psychology – especially in the form of
The Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Dr Linda N Edelstein – can help (if you want to consider purchasing a copy, just click on the cover thumbnail). The guy I co-GM the Adventurer’s Club campaign with and I were so impressed by this volume that we gave all our players copies as extra christmas presents.

But sometimes it’s not enough, or you have absolutely no idea of the shape of that critical first piece. When that’s the case, there are a number of techniques that can be applied. Anything from random lists of personality traits to the visual appearance of the character to the character’s name can get you started.

And sometimes they can’t. There will be times when you have no idea what you want, when those random lists just seem uninspired or nothing on them seems to fit.

That usually means that your subconscious knows what it wants – you just have to find some way to reach through the fog of uncertainty to extract that critical piece.

There will also be occasions when the critical chain you are following runs dry before enough of the puzzle is complete.

When that’s the case, I have two techniques that I use. One is something I was taught in Graphic Design, as The Thumbnail Method; the other is to work from the known and apply The Inversion Principle, which I also occasonally refer to as “The Perversion Principle”. But I’ve just thought of a third one, which I’ll call the Window Shopping technique. This series of posts will detail all three techniques.

It’s also worth noting that these techniques work equally for NPCs and PCs, GMs and Players.

Win a copy of Underdark

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Entering is easy and you have two options:

Option 1. Leave a comment below telling us you’d like to enter the contest.

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How to win

We will compile all the entries from Twitter and this blog and select one at random. I’ll then contact the winner for mailing details so Gator Games can ship you your brand new D&D hardcover book.

Thanks very much to Gator Games for sponsoring this contest. Gator Games is a great source of older, vintage RPG stuff. Take a few minutes to sample their site if you are on the hunt for great deals on out of print and used RPG materials.

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By D.L. Campbell

One of the first posts I ever read at Campaign Mastery was the amazing 50 Barbarian Hooks. I instantly thought, ‘I hope there will be more of those!’ followed by ‘I wanna try that!’

Another list has joined the party (though I’m still greedy for more – hint, hint everybody) and I finally produced one, too. I settled on paladins because while the requirements of the class can be demanding, there are still a variety of ways they can play a role in a game.

50 Paladin Hooks

1. Reestablishing law and order in the wake of a societal upheaval
2. Asked by his king to begin diplomatic relations with a newly encountered people
3. Stay with a trapped unit of soldiers to heal and assist them until reinforcements can arrive
4. Performing tasks to earn a dragon’s respect so it will agree to be her mount
5. Wants to clear out the ruins of an ancient library and restore access to its knowledge
6. Start a crusade against elementals terrorizing peaceful settlers
7. Having returned from years of battle, tries to convince church hierarchy the crusade is costing too many lives; they should find another way
8. Establish a hospital in a remote area and train other healers
9. Must clear the name of her church after it has been accused of a heinous crime
10. Hunt down avengers of enemy deities
11. A dangerously powerful artifact was stolen from his church; he must track it down and return it
12. After a spiritual crisis, traveling the world looking for signs to restore their faith in their deity
13. Seek the perfect site for a new cathedral
14. Her kingdom needs her to help stimulate commerce by establishing a trade caravan between two neighboring cities
15. Find out why his holy symbol is losing its powers
16. Determined to crush the cult he fell prey to before finding the true path of his current faith
17. Escort and protect dignitaries who visit the capital city
18. In Sehanine’s name, helping two lovers find a way to lift the curse keeping them apart
19. Seek justice for the death of a hero
20. Go into a lich’s lair after a party that invaded it weeks ago; neither the party nor the lich have been seen since
21. Inspire a band of allies to join in her sacred mission
22. Dreams of performing enough great deeds to earn a place as an exarch upon her death
23. Bodyguard an eladrin prince or princess as they explore the world outside the Feywild
24. Serve Ioun by guiding a group of students as they study magic
25. Quest for the pieces of a magical suit of armor; it was taken and scattered by enemies when the last wearer of it was defeated
26. Became an adventurer to develop the skills to become a slayer of a particular monster
27. Must elude pursuers from his faith because he has cast aside his honor in pursuit of vengeance against an enemy
28. Select, train and lead a town militia
29. Work as an investigator of strange religious happenings
30. Patrol and maintain the graveyard for a huge city – its graveyard is the size of a small town
31. Assist her church in setting up its rulership of a nation
32. Guide a growing city in learning to execute the law with authority and compassion
33. Provide aid and security to a region devastated by natural disaster
34. Entrusted with the guardianship of her people’s ancestral burial grounds
35. Called by Melora to protect the last few of a species decimated by disease until they can recover their numbers
36. Act as advisor/enforcer for prisoners due to be released; rehabilitates those that wish to reform, polices those that can’t or won’t
37. Work with a wizard to gather the skills and knowledge to create an artifact
38. Recruited to clear a Feywild mountain pass of evil creatures
39. Find and join a legendary secret society dedicated to fighting demons
40. Try to convert a captured, conflicted minion to her side
41. Itching to raid the treasure hoard of an enemy dragon
42. Follow the clues in a prophecy, search for a magic blade and the one who can wield it – he is destined to lead the kingdom into a new era
43. Desperately trying to figure out if the voice he hears is his deity calling him, or a sign he’s going crazy
44. Atone for having previously served an evil deity
45. Has adopted a belief that makes her a heretic of her faith – driven to convince others of the true way
46. Had a lifelong quest he was unable to complete because he grew too old for combat; acting as guru to a new party trying to complete the task
47. The Raven Queen requires her to defeat a villain who is blackmailing nations for protection money with an artifact that allows him to create winter weather
48. Armed with a charter from their queen, he intends to carve a settlement out of the wilderness and rule it
49. Start a mercenary company that will only accept honorable jobs
50. The church of Avandra has given its paladins one year to perform great deeds of exploration; at the end of the year, they will gather to tell their tales and one journey will be judged the best, with the prize being a holy avenger

D.L. Campbell has been playing roleplaying games for 15+ years – and has the extensive dice and book collections to show for it.

I often come up with ideas for new campaigns. Some of these are rubbish and discarded almost immediatly; some get saved, stored up for when I might need them; but most often they just get thrown away because I have no hope of ever using the idea. One such concept came to me recently, and rather than throw it away, I decided that I would give it away to you, our readers here at Campaign Mastery…

NB: Most of what is written below (except for the initial chain of logic in sections 1, 2, 3, and 4) came to me in one singular moment of inspiration. A little has been added in retrospect. And I apologise if the premise seems politically incorrect. It’s just a game, guys!

1. Global Warming

No-one can deny a global trend towards higher average annual temperatures, a phenomenon known as Global Warming. What is not so certain in my mind at this point in time is the extent to which the phenomenon is attributable to human activity and the extent to which it is caused by Geologic evolution.

The range of annual average temperatures that appear to be “normal” according to the geologic record are more than wide enough to accommodate the variations that have been documented thus far.

It was while pondering the potential alternative causes that the concept for this new scifi campaign arose, due in part to a confluance of this notion and other sources of inspiration.

2. Magnetic Polarity

It is well known that from time to time, the polarity of the earth’s magnetic field flips. As I understand it, this is because the the molten core of the planet is not some amorphous evenly-combined mixture, but is differentiated in various ways into “rivers” of different temperature and density – and magnetic characteristics. These are spun by the rotation of the earth, generating the magnetic field in a similar manner to the coils rotating in a motor. Solar radiation, which includes tremendous electromagnetic energies, interacts with the magnetic field of the earth to produce the Auroras Borealis and Australis.

But I havn’t read much of energy flows in the other direction and their possible effects. It seems awfully convenient to assume that ALL the energy of the solar radiation is consumed in putting on a pretty light show, and that no energy from the planet’s electromagnetic field is consumed, AND that no energy makes it’s way back into the rotational characteristics of the planetary core.

In fact, it’s my understanding that some energy DOES flow back into the rotation, either speeding it up or slowing it down, and changing its rotational vectors with respect to the axis of planetary rotation, and that this is the cause of magnetic polar inversions.

3. Terrestrial Climatic Impacts

But the earth rotates in more than one way. In addition to the rotation about it’s axis that gives us day followed by night, there is the 23.5° axial tilt that defines the severity of the seasons, and the energy of earth’s orbit around the sun. Is it so unlikely that neither of these can be affected – even just a little – by this solar energy transduction?

Statistics says that over time, such effects – if purely bi-directional and random in nature – will average out; but also that there will be occasional long runs of results trending in one direction or another.

What we have here is a mechanism that says that sometimes the earth orbits just a little closer to the sun, and sometimes just a little further away. And sometimes the seasons are just a little more extreme because of a slight variation in the axial tilt, and sometimes, are just a little milder.

In the real world, I havn’t applied the mathematical treatments necessary to analyse these factors and effects and determine just how big a role they might play. This is science-fiction, and it’s a plausible-sounding theory – that’s good enough for a game.

4. Systems In Equilibrium

So many of the physical systems which come together to form the world we see around us exist an equilibrium state between two competing influances of some form or another, it can easily be seen that even a small-but-temporarily-consistant sustained variation could add up to pronounced climatic changes, changes in ecosystems, and so on.

This campaign premise will accept that this is in fact the cause of Global Warming, and that the current trend lasted for about 30 years before abruptly reversing and going to the other extreme, producing a new Ice Age – simply because it’s more effective for creating a dramatic setting for the campaign.

5. The Habitable Belt

That was about 40 years ago – a time chosen so that the very elderly will remember the world before the Global Warming scare, the middle aged (ie the authorities) will have grown up in the Hot Years and been in junior management positions at the time of the Collapse, and only the young, including the PCs, have truly acclimatised to the new conditions of Ice and Snow. This puts an inherant generational conflict in place to divide and distinguish all three age groups from each other. To any given situation, there will be three different interpretations and three different social perspectives.

They will need somewhere to live. While a few tens of thousands might survive in underground cities beneath the snow and ice, the majority of survivors will be found in a ‘habitable belt’ around the equator, where conditions will remain temperate. There hasn’t been enough time for the ecosystems to adapt, they will still be in a state of profound shock. Animals that are not native to these ecosystems will have invaded them, driven by the freezing temperatures; entire species face competition on an unprecedented scale. If it lives, its place in the ecosystem is under threat from a new rival.

It is a truism that behaviour changes far more quickly than biology. Some formerly tame creatures have become wild and savage, while others have found that food and mates are more accessable if they become more passive, mild, and cooperative. Those who cannot change will either die out or become dominant in their ecological niches – or change evolutionary directions in a hurry.

The exception, it would appear, is the human race – an exception we’ll come back to, later.

6. The needs of survival

Human society has also evolved, and will metamorphose amongst the survivors in response to the obvious needs of it’s members. Of course, everyone agrees on what the best answer is… no? Not likely!

Everything from medieval peasantry to extreme capitalism would arise. Dictatorships are always popular (amongst the dictators) in such times. Society would have fragmented, but the most extreme results have since been overthrown – or are unstable, political dynamite waiting to explode. Internal political instability would be rife, even if the overall political structure has been settled and become established; it would not be a question of whether or not any given group is at war at any given moment – it would be “who are we fighting this week?”

Against this backdrop of anarchy, the same old needs have to be met: Food, water, energy, shelter, and protection.

What this means is that something new, politically, is always coming out of the woodwork, that everything old is new again somewhere, and that whatever role the PCs are going to occupy in the campaign should be chosen to take advantage of this political instability.

In turn, that means that at the start of play, we will only need to fully define the society and political structure to which the PCs belong, but that others will be needed in the course of the game – and that the consequences and infrastructure of each political system will need to be analysed in terms of how they meet those needs. This in turn will define the current internal status of the society in question – what its needs are, its strengths and weaknesses, and its vulnerabilities.

Since we will want the opportunity for the PCs to lead active lives, and still get involved in the delicate political relations in question, the best genre for a campaign would be some sort of super-spy agency, tasked with the protection the PC’s society and the advancement of its political agenda.

Whether or not this “agency” reflects the dystopian surroundings, or contasts with it, remains to be determined. I like the notion of contrast, because it provides more scope for conflcts with the world beyond, as well as with the very government which the agency protects, but actually making this decision final is premature at this point in time. On the other hand, a ruthless, dystopian agency, willing to do whatever is necessary, would make for a very different flavour of campaign.

Of course, such a ruthless agency (or even a hidden branch of the agency which employs the PCs) would make a great source of rivals/enemies for the good guys…

7. A technological paradigm shift

Modern industrial society is increasingly built apon the principle of dispose-and-replace. During the Hot Years, this would have been somewhat replaced with recycle-and-replace, but the general principle of “disposable techology” would have remained. This pattern is currently replicated from top-to-bottom throughout the manufacturing process; the tools, and even the workers, are treated as a replaceable commodity.

The Collapse which accompanied the onset of the Ice Age would have changed all that. The new design imperatives would have been endurance and reliability, not disposability, because there was no longer sufficient infrastructure to treat componants and tools with such a cavalier attitude. The modern trend toward smaller and flimsier devices would have quickly vanished, replaced by more modular designs; if something breaks, you replace the damaged componant and return it for repairs, or even repair it in situ – in many respects, a step back to the 1970s and even the 1950s.

Hmmm… this is beginning to sound more and more like a psuedo-pulp setting – big tech, not small, and reliable/repairable, not disposable. Call it 1950s sci-fi. That’s a definite clue to the game system that will best translate the campaign concept – the more space-opera-ish, the better.

8. Biotech: the new cutting edge

That’s not to suggest that knowledge would have been abandoned – the technology may retreat in portability and gain in reliability, but functionality would have been the last thing to be sacrificed.

The approach of the glacial cold – and the glaciers themselves would not have advanced very far as yet, not in only 40 years – would have seen urgent efforts to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of arctic conditions over the most arable land of most major countries. New standards of crop density would have required, and the technology of genetic manipulation would have led the charge toward solutions. Cold-resistant crops; bovines designed to consume vegetable matter other than grasses; greater crop yields with less-intensive technologies (many of which are already being researched in places like India); agriculture would have been radically transformed.

If it comes right down to it, biotechnology in general would offer tremendous advantages in terms of reliability simply because it is self-maintaining. Instead of a Massey-Ferguson tractor, a Massey-Ferguson Tractor-Beast might be used to plow fields, plant crops, and gather the harvest.

Not everything would have gone according to plan. And some of these failed experiments would inevitably escape into the wild, under such extreme conditions and urgency. There will be strange beasties lurking in the wilderness! – which is in keeping with the “pulpish” flavour identified earlier. There would definitly be some crazed creatures and unnatural mutations inhabiting the forests, jungles, and swamps.

Would the human being himself be ignored? Maybe in some places, but certainly not everywhere – humans with specialised limbs, even (perhaps) cybernetic enhancements – these devlopments would not be all that unexpected within 70 years, even given the dramatic change in conditions.

9. The Deep Spacers

I can’t see the human race retreating from space, especially under these circumstances, which would make certain developments like microwave power transmission from space both more practical and more useful. The military and intelligence applications alone would mandate a continued presence ‘out there’, and it would not long escape people that space can provide resources that are increasingly hard to extract from a frigid earth.

There would undoubtedly be an increasing subpopulation that intended or expected to remained in space for their entire lives. Space Miners, Strategists, Weathermen, and Intelligence analysts would be the front wave – but entire ruling elites would recognise that life aboard a (reliable, self-contained and safe) space habitat would be far superior to an cramped, insecure, vulnerable existance under the ice and snow.

Nor would it take all that long for those living and working in space to realise that many of the authorities on Earth were becoming completely dependant on their labours. The inevitable result has been portrayed in SF many times – from Larry Niven’s Belters in the Known Space series to Robert Heinlein’s convict labourers in “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”.

Many of those dictators and would-be dictators that I discussed in section 6 would no doubt construct “palaces in the sky”. In a way that it has never been, previously (despite the rhetoric of many world leaders of the past), space would be “The High Ground” – and this would not be lost on any military leader, strategist, politician – or Intelligence Agency.

The likelyhood of trouble coming from space would be greater than anywhere else in the entire solar system. Whole new branches of existing agencies would be set up to monitor and control the situation – another referance to check out, in this context, is “Circuit” by Melinda M Snodgrass.

10. Visitors From Space

The timing of a first-contact situation couldn’t be better. Or couldn’t be worse, depending on your point of view. Which makes it the most interesting possible timing for one, in a game context! Who are they? What do they say they want? What do they really want? Are they responsible for the climatic shift? Can we afford to turn down any assistance they offer, regardless of the terms? Can we afford not to?

If these “Strange Visitors From Another Planet” simply show up one day and start extracting rusty girders and refined metals from abandoned cities now buried under fifty feet of snow and ice, how would we react?

It retrospect, it might be better to establish the campaign first – and have this be a significant plot development a year or two in (with hints and warnings ahead of time).

Where to from here?

This is just a campaign premise. It’s nowhere near ready to run yet. Factions and Politics and Societies need to be spelt out. The nature of the organisation that the PCs represent needs to be settled, as does it’s name. A more detailed history is required. A game system must be chosen, and key NPCs created. Maps would not go astray.

With those things in hand, a briefing package for the players can be compiled, and the opening scenarios written. That’s when you have a campaign.

So there it is – a scifi campaign concept rife with possibilties that’s a little bit spies/action-adventure, and a little bit pulp, and a little bit Aftermath – with a touch of paranoia and cyberpunk thrown in for good measure. Feel free to use it for whatever purpose you see fit…

In a previous blog, I’ve written about my Superhero campaign currently facing a big finish (A Grand Conclusion: thinking about a big finish). This post will be a sequel of sorts, because any big finish naturally invites the question, “what’s next?”

In this case, “next” is a sequel campaign. Many of the preceeding characters will make the transition, but two of my players are taking advantage of the natural discontinuity to introduce new characters.

So the campaign parameters are pretty well established, and I’ve been feeding my players the campaign background in dribs and drabs for the last 8 years or so. I’ve also been starting a number of subplots in the current campaign that will only bloom in the next one, and otherwise making various moves aimed at positioning established NPCs where I want them to be in the new campaign. All that means that campaign planning is pretty advanced.

There’s an art to the next stage of Campaign Development that I’m still trying to master, even after all these years. That next stage is:

• planning the campaign,
• breaking that plan into discrete scenarios, and
• sequencing those in a way that is both flexible and entertaining and logical.

There are so many competing factors to take into account, and so many ways of accomplishing any given goal. And, while there is lots of help out there in various sources and places, both wood-pulp and electronic, for getting this far, information on the best way to approach this next stage is in relatively short supply.

Player Characters & Key NPCs

It’s simply not possible to write this article without introducing the characters who will occupy the centre stage of the next campaign. I know – I’ve tried three times to do it, and every time, it ran aground like a rudderless yacht. So here goes:

• St Barbara: Team leader and most experienced member. Flight + Energy Projection + Force Fields. Danish porn star in her teens who lost her dreams of representing her country at the Olympics as a result; later became a UN field worker in Africa where she became caught up in a number of bloody insurrections and revolutions. Naturally charismatic, level-headed, and uninhibited, she never wanted to be in charge but was thrust into command by her teammates and has proven good at the job. Being a hero is her personal validation. Character created & Played by Blair Ramage.
• Blackwing: Team strongman. A dimensional boundary controlled by the mind of the person who he thought he really was, giving him immense resiliance, strength, and shape-changing powers. Suffered a massive fall from grace in the current campaign, from which he is slowly rehabilitating himself and coming to terms with the fact that he became everything he hated, and his own worst enemy. Character created by Nick Deane, reconcieved by Jonathon Windybank, and revised by his current player, Saxon Brenton. Being a hero is his path to redemption and the source of his temptations.
• Runeweaver: Mage and new Field Commander. A member of an elite paramilitary force assembled to fight Ragnerok, questing for Asgard, which was cut adrift and lost at the height of that cataclysm. Currently suffering from a growing addiction to mana-boosting events. Character created & Played by Nick Deane. Being a hero is a reflection of his quest for a purpose.
• Vala: New character created by Ian Gray for the campaign. Non-human Psionic. (Many, many details withheld to ensure the other PCs are surprised).
• Unknown: New character to be created by Steve Beekon. No details known at this time.
• Defender: A Kzin Martial Artist who hates the team (and all humans) but who’s planet was saved by them, and who feels the need to repay the debt. Defender is a new NPC who will be joining the team, having been trained by one of the team’s ex-members, Dragon’s Claw. Being a hero is a debt of honour.
• The Bright Cutter: Starship and AI, existing NPC. The Bright Cutter’s personality is somewhat happy-go-lucky and has been slowly developing from an initially very naive, child-genius state. Notable as the only character that every team member, past and present, have gotten along with. Being a hero adds excitement to logic.
• The Knightly Building: The team’s new base also has an AI, one whose external interface can be customised to suit the individual residents, but whose personality core remains the same. Being a hero creates an intolerable degree of chaos but he will simply have to live with it, because that’s what he was created to do.
• Karlos Green: A mid-level administrator in an organisation called IMAGE, who will be posted to the position of liason to the team, seconded from the Office Of Eccentric Affairs (a department within IMAGE). Practical, efficient, dispassionate. Being a hero means projecting hope and idealism into an atmosphere of cynicism and despair – it complicates his life immensely, but someone’s got to do the paperwork.

I have a long list of scenario ideas, comprising:

• fifty standalone scenario outlines (usually just 1-2 lines) that are just plain interesting ideas;
• 30 new villains to feature in various (unwritten) new scenarios;
• a number of established villains who will be making return appearances because they are so much fun;
• a plot arc* to resolve Runeweaver’s Mana-boost addiction;
• a plot arc* to complete Blackwing’s Rehabilitation;
• a series of small plot arcs* focussing on St Barbara;
• a plot arc* to focus on Vala’s problems with the theological authorities;
• a plot arc* to deal with Vala’s origins;
• a plot arc* to resolve Hevth’s animosity;
• a plot arc* to develop Bright Cutter’s Personality;
• a plot arc* to stabalise relations between the team and Karlos Green;
• a major plot arc* to deal with an anti-royal conspiracy within the Civil Service;
• a plot arc* to resolve the search for Asgard;
• another major plot arc* entitled “The Apocalypse”; and,
• aproximatly 30 plotlines that have been left unfinished until I get a good idea for the resolution.

All told, that should add up to around 150-200 scenarios, each lasting an average of 2.5 playing sessions, which (at a rate of one per month) should be enough for around 36 years of play – by which point I will be in my early 80s (and one of my players would be approaching a century of age).

Clearly, no-one in their right minds would plan on such a scale, and neither have I.

* A “plot arc” comprises a number of episodes of subplot which may eventually lead to one or more full scenarios. Small plot arcs might be nothing more than a subplot played out within 2-4 other scenarios, standard plot arcs provide subplots for 6-10 scenarios and then culminate in 0-2 scenarios in which they are the featured plot, and a major plot arc comprises episodes of subplot lasting 10-20 game sessions and may provide the central focus for at least three full scenarios.

Each represents one journey of transition or development for a character; some are designed to bring the character full circle, having no direct lasting impact, while others are designed with the cooperation of the player to make some lasting change to the circumstances, psychology, or personality of the character at the heart of the plotline. Most of the plot arcs listed above are of the latter type, and I’m not going to specify which ones aren’t in case my players are reading.

Overlaps and Cuttings

There are several reasons why such a mammoth scenario list is practical. First, I expect that not every idea will work out; in fact, probably 1 in 5 will not make the finish. In the current campaign, I had a major villain organisation set up called “The Deathmurken” (Deathmark, in German) – the name sounds cool, and I had an interesting backstory for them – and never thought up a decent scenario in which to use them. Result: they are still sitting on the shelf.

Then there’s the question of overlaps. Counting each item sequentially the way I did for that estimate is not all that accurate; there will be a LOT of overlapping. That should drop the number of scenarios that I get from the list by another 20% or so.

A third factor is that characters change, players come and go, and what seems like a brilliant idea right now might seem passe or downright idiotic by the time we get to it. Add to that the fact that the players will determine the outcome of scenarios and can derail the best-laid plans through brilliance or abject stupidity or simply wanting to get involved in something else. That should kill off 10% of the remainder – and it would be higher if the players weren’t active participants in much of my planning (sometimes without knowing it).

Pacing is another consideration. You don’t want your big scenarios to be an anticlimax, and you don’t want them to be predictable. Some ideas will get cut because they will impart just such a negative effect on a scenario that is more important to the overall campaign. Since I can’t always shuffle the order of events to salvage the idea, or incorporate it in another scenario, the result will inevitably be another 10% culling.

Finally, there’s the fact that in a lot of cases, what’s been counted as “a scenario” in the first tally will in fact be nothing more than a subplot within another scenario. As much as 70% of the total will not have enough depth or substance to comprise a full scenario on it’s own.

36 years times 80% times 80% times 90% times 90% times 30% gives about 6.2 years worth.

There are also a few considerations to go in the other direction. I almost always underestimate the number of game sessions a scenario will involve – by about 50%. There will be sequels to a number of scenarios – one of the new villains turning up more than once, for example – which should be another 20% increase. And finally, it’s a sure bet that I’ll think up more scenario ideas in the meantime, even though I’m not trying to – so add another 10% for that.

6.2 years times 150% times 120% times 110% gives a bit over 12 years worth of play, once a month, in the new campaign. That’s about what I was expecting, and what I was aiming for.

So I have about the right number of ideas on file for the new campaign.

Which brings me to the question that is at the heart of this post. What I don’t have yet is any sort of plan or structure for how these are all going to fit together, what order they will happen in, and where I can build in the flexibility for the campaign to grow and evolve in it’s own direction. That’s what this post is all about: how I go about resolving that lack.

Enumerating The Ideas

I start by enumerating the ideas – scenario 1, 2, 3, and so on. When it comes to plot arcs, I count tbe number of major scenarios that are involved and assign each of the preceeding subplots a lowercase alphabetic subdivision – so a given plot arc might have scenarios 4 and 5, and preceeding subplots 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 5a, and 5b. I’ll also enumerate anything that is clearly missing from the campaign plans – for example, I have no idea as to Steve Beekon’s new character, but I’ll want at least one plot arc involving that character.

Next, I’ll rate each idea for a number of factors – emotional intensity, action, ‘cosmic’ content, scifi content, fantasy content, and mood or tone. Some of these factors are standards, employed every time, some are unique to this campaign. I usually use a 1-5 scale, but in some cases a 1-3 scale might be more useful. This permits me to ensure that the campaign never becomes too monotone. The final factors are rated on a scale of 0-9 – and they are Priority (how important it is that the scenario happen early in the campaign) and Importance (how important it is that the scenario happens at all). I will sometimes assign a negative value to Priority if it’s important that the scenario come at the end of the campaign.

I’ll then add to the list of numbered scenarios by looking for establishing requirements. If a scenario involves the Lunar Colonies (one does) then I may want a preceeding scenario or subplot to establish them – depending on whether or not the existing idea already leaves time enough for the characters to get used to them. Adventure settings, key NPCs, important themes – these may all need to be established in advance. The ratings previously assigned will be a major factor in these decisions; if a scenario is slow-moving, the last thing it needs is establishing requirements to further slow it down, but if it has a lot of action, then some slower material to give the characters a chance to catch their breaths can be useful – if it fits the internal logic of the scenario that the characters can TAKE that time.

Skeletal Outline

The next step is to construct a sleletal outline of the campaign, by listing the scenarios in a particular order. The order in which they are scheduled to occur is dictated by the priority, and the order in which they are placed on the list is dictated by the importance rating – first, all the scenarios rated 9, then the ones rated 8, and then the ones rated 7. That’s where I will stop. I’ll also juggle these as necessary to ensure a logical flow – if there’s a risk of the Lunar Colonies being destroyed in a scenario, I’ll want to schedule that scenario after any other scenarios that I know will be set there!

I’ll then look at the other ratings for these scenarios and determine how many intervening scenarios I think are necessary to seperate those which are too similar in the other ratings. This step is so important that I’m going to go into more detail on the subject for each of the ratings.

Emotional Intensity (1-5 rating)

I use a rule of thumb in scheduling these: The number of scenarios on either side of a high-rated scenario on this scale should be (at least) equal to the rating minus 0 at the start of the campaign, minus 1 in the middle, and minus 3 at the end.

That means that for scenarios rated a ‘3’ on this scale, there should be at least three scenarios rated 1 or 2 before and after each, at the start of the campaign, at least two in the middle of the campaign, and I don’t need any gap at the end.

For scenarios rated a ‘4’ on this scale, there should be at least four scenarios rated 1 or 2 on this scale on either side at the start of the campaign, at least three with a low rating in the middle of the campaign, and at least 1 low-rated scenario at the end of the campaign.

For scenarios rated a ‘5’ on this scale, there should be at least five low-emotion scenarios on either side at the start of the campaign, at least four in the middle, and at least two at the end.

Level Of Action (1-5 rating)

The only rule that I follow here is that there must be at least a gap of 2 or more in rating sequential scenarios. At most, then, to seperate high-action scenarios, I’ll need one low-action scenario. I’m also more willing to ignore this rule at the end of a campaign if necessary.

“Cosmic” Content (1-3 rating)

While most of my players don’t have a real problem with large-scale epic scenarios, at least one has a noted dislike for them. To accommodate him, I space these out in a similar manner to that employed for emotional intensity. In fact, I usually double the rating and then apply exactly the same rule of thumb.

“Fantasy” Content (1-3 rating)

Okay, so what exactly do I mean by “Fantasy” in this context? I mean, “High Fantasy” would normally be covered by “Cosmic” content!

“Fantasy” in this context means a lot of things. If prophecies, or dream sequences, or the supernatural, or anything similar play a key role in the scenario, it will get a high rating. If the scenario is about sorcery, or horrors from the unimaginable depths of time and/or space, it will get a high rating. If the featured character is a mage, it will at least get a moderate rating and more often than not, it will get a high rating. And if there are major elements from mythology, I will give it a high rating.

In general, I prefer to space these out. To achieve this, I’ll determine the gap using the same rule as for “Level Of Action” and then double the interval.

Mood / Tone (1-5 rating)

I generally use this to rate the grimness or seriousness of a scenario – high means life-or-death, high drama, and deadly seriousness. Low means lighthearted, a scenario in which liberties can be taken if they are entertaining enough. (I once ran a scenario in which the PCs were trapped in a deadly snack dispenser! But a “Light” scenario could be an ordinary bank robbery or other routine superhero outing. Or it might have little or no combat. Another scenario from the current campaign was about the lengths that some students would go to in order to cheat on a critical exam; another was all about character’s secret identities.)

I follow a completely different set of rules in scheduling these. There can never be two scenarios in a row with exactly the same rating (exceptions grudgingly made for the end of the campaign), and there can never be a jump of more than two between the ratings of any scenarios in a sequence. That said, I tend to prefer keeping scenarios in tonal “groups”, with 3 being the dividing line. So a 1-3-2-3-2-4-3-5-4-5-4-3-1 pattern would be acceptable – the campaign would be relatively light-hearted for a while, then become more serious for a while, and then go back to being relatively light-hearted again.

The reason for this arrangement is that too big a jump creates a discontinuity in the campaign feeling like it’s all one big story, while having identically-rated scenarios side-by-side creates a monotony. At the moment, the PCs have just moved from a fairly grim and serious scenario involving alien nanotechnology gone feral and eating people into a medium-serious scenario involving a baby with the powers of Black Bolt).

Constructing The Skeleton

A word processor is perfect for this, because inserting a gap is simply a matter of positioning the cursor and hitting the “enter” key. However, later steps become a lot easier if I use tabs to create a new column in which I specify what has to be IN the gap.

I use codes of “L” for “Low” (1-3 out of 5, 1 out of 3), “M” for “Medium” (2-4 out of 5, 2 out of 3), and “H” for “High” (3-5 out of 5, 3 out of 3). A Dash indicates that no specific value is required.

Here’s what it might look like:

NB: I would not normally spell it out and space it nicely and tidily like this, I would be far rough-and-ready, and it would look more like this:

This example shows three scenarios – numbers 21, 14, and 45 – with gaps inserted that would be appropriate for the middle of the campaign. As you can see, pacing these according to my rules of thumb defines another 16 scenarios around them to at least some extent.

Emotional Content

Scenario 21 has a high emotional content, ie it’s very important to at least one of the characters. That means that the four scenarios on either side of it should have low emotional significance.

Scenario 14 has a medium emotional importance, so it only needs a couple of intervening scenarios. In fact, it’s the other two scenarios that are dictate the gap, because they want to be farther away from any high-emoition scenarios.

Action Level

In terms of action, Scenario 14 is a high-octane action-adventure scenario of some sort, while the others fall into the low or medium range. This sets up an alternating high-low repeating pattern.

Notice that because Scenario 45 is intermediate in this respect, it breaks this pattern – the scenario that follows it could be either High-action or Low-action, and this would start a new sequence of high-lows. Similarly, if any of the blanks were assigned a scenario with an action level of 3 out of 5, it would disrupt the chain that follows, all the way down to scenario 45.

Level Of Cosmic

“Cosmic” is a big thing for scenario 45, but because scenario 14 is low it doesn’t force an increased gap between the two. It does dictate that scenario 14 be preceeded by a “low-cosmic” scenario, and extends the number of scenarios to follow scenario number 45 by two more than the emotional content required.

Level Of Fantasy

This only really mandates the values for a couple of entries on either side of scenario 45.

Tone

Finally, it can be seen that this phase of the campaign starts off very grim and serious, lightens up a bit after scenario 21, lightens up considerably more after scenario 14, and then starts to get serious again.

Plot Arc Scheduling

The next step is plot arc scheduling. This starts with any of the scenarios listed in the skeleton that are part of a plot arc – let’s say that scenario 21, with it’s strong emotional involvement, is just such a scenario. The first thing that has to be done is to add any preceeding whole scenarios from that plot arc, and the skeleton has to be extended accordingly.

There are two key questions to consider. The first is the length of interval that seems appropriate in between the two (or more) major scenarios within the plot arc. In some plot arcs, the two should be virtually immediate, one after the other – often signifying cause and effect. In others, some time may have to pass between the two in order for the consequences of the earlier scenario to plausibly result in the second scenario of the plot arc.

The other factor is the rating of the scenario to be implanted into the schedule. Unless it would violate the interval established by the preceeding question, the new scenario should fit the “requirements” – assuming that this is scenario 20, and it has a rating of 21315xx, then it might fit immediatly prior to scenario 21 or two scenarios before that, both of which have a requirements code of LH–H. Or it might have to be even earlier in the schedule, if the two-scenario gap doesn’t seem to be enough. I like to actually group all elements of a plot arc in their own columns, because it makes life easier later on.

When a scenario is placed, the requirements for the surrounding scenarios are reassessed, and the campaign becomes more precisely structured.

Once the major scenarios of the plot arc are in place, it’s time to schedule the subplots leading up to those events. Again, the question of how much interval to leave comes up; all that can be stated in general terms is that they will happen prior to the scenario that they lead into.

A “plus sign” in front indicates that the subplot is to be a factor added to some other scenario, the absence of that sign indicates that a standalone scene in the middle of an unrelated scenario is called for.

Assuming we place scenario 20 in this way, and have both scenarios 20, and 21, and subplots 20a, 20b, and 20c in place accordingly, the top of the skeleton section might now look like this:

Note that this is a LOT faster buildup and resolution of a plot arc than I would usually use in real life!

It’s also worth observing that one scenario can have multiple subplots from different campaign plot arcs, but it’s important that the two not conflict. In general, it’s ideal to have a development in SOME character’s plot arc in every scenario, and to spread them out fairly evenly. But sometimes that’s not possible, and sometimes there aren’t enough subplots for them to come that thick and fast.

Filling Out The Skeleton

Once all the important scenarios and the plot arcs are in place, it’s time to fill as many of those empty spots as possible.

That’s done by looking at all the unscheduled scenarios, in order of importance. Starting at the top of the skeleton, I locate the first one into the first empty slot that matches its characteristics. There are a couple of caveats to bear in mind: the scenario has to fit any subplot that’s scheduled for that scenario; if it doesn’t, for whatever reason, then that slot is rejected for that scenario and I move on to the next slot that matches and try again to place it.

Eventually, all the scenarios will be placed, but there will still usually be gaps.

Completing the population

That’s where I will unlimber the technique I described a little while back (Vocabulary Hijinx: Using random word pairings for inspiration).

I can generate scenario ideas using it and match them to the criteria for a given vacant slot. If no ideas work out, I can always skip an empty slot and insert any subplots into the next scenario to take place, even if the fit isn’t quite right, but I will leave the space open until the last possible minute.

Sometimes, those vacant slots can also be filled with return visits from characters that were fun the last time around. On such recurring villain is named Jamison Riddle – sort of “The Joker” with Cosmic Powers – who is always fun, and whose name my players will recognise immediatly.

I will usually use an extra column to specify these just in case something better occurs to me at a later date.

A logical and comprehensive campaign structure

The result is a campaign plan that’s organised logically, that has sufficient contrasts in style and content to keep everyone happy without being jarring, that establishes important locations and characters before they become significant, but that is flexible enough for additional encounters to be inserted as good ideas present themselves.

This approach uses the tools of narrative and fiction writing to strengthen the campaign in ways that are otherwise a LOT more work. You can sneak clues to later scenarios into the early stages of a campaign, foreshadow important developments, and keep your supporting cast growing in realistic ways in response to events.

The system is far from perfect – in fact, it’s downright fuzzy in some respects – but it’s the best solution that I’ve been able to come up with, in terms of organisation. It’s also surprisingly fast and flexible.

But the biggest advantage that it provides is that by mapping out the key beats and turning points, I can give the players complete freedom and still hit those important events that keep the campaign going somewhere specific.

How do you choose the right game system?

The Ask the GMs questions here at CM never seem to stop, which is great, because they never fail to inspire new discussion topics. This one’s been sitting on the backburner for a while because we had so many already cued up, so we’re pleased to finally have the chance to answer it. Here’s what our inquiring GM had to say: My question is probably a simple one, but a very critical one. How do you choose a system to GM? There are so many systems out there, and many new additions of old rules, but how do you discern the best system to get into, particularly if you only want to pick one system and stick with it?

Mike’s Answer:

It’s a great question, with answers that seem superficially simple but become more profound as you probe deeper. My approach, as it is with most questions I ponder, is highly analytical.

The simple solution is, in the same way as with any other decision, you establish the field of possible answers, establish criteria on which to base choices from amongst those possible answers, and continue to refine your list until you end up with the one best answer.

But that’s an oversimplification. The sequence in which you apply these criteria can be just as important as the criteria themselves. It is my philosophy that the game system affects the style and tone of the campaign as much as the players, their characters, and the GM’s design; and that house rules should be employed to custom-fit the standard rules to the campaign style, genre, and concept you want to employ.

The logical implication is that house rules can modify the fit of a rules system to the criterion currently being considered, and therefore there are three possible assessments that can result from such criterion – yes (game system stays in consideration), no (game system eliminated from further consideration), and maybe (game system, with house rules, stays in consideration).

As a general rule of thumb, I like to answer such questions in two groups – those in which House Rules have no impact on the answer, in the order from most restrictive to least restrictive, in the first group, and those in which House Rules can apply, changing the suitability of a game system to the campaign. In other words, one group that give hard yes/no answers, and a second where value judgments of relative merits come into play.

That’s the process that lies at the heart of my system of choosing a game system. With that out of the way in the absolute minimum of space, I’m now free to move on to the real meat of my answer to our inquiring GM’s question: the criteria that I consider, and the general order in which I consider them.

Questions Of Availability & Desire

1. Do my players and I have access to at least two copies of the core rules?
The dead minimum for play, so far as I’m concerned, is two copies of the rules – one to be shared amongst the players, and one for me to use for campaign and session prep. We don’t need to have both copies on hand immediately, but someone has to be able to afford a second set fairly quickly. My campaigns delayed switching from D&D 3.0 to 3.5 for more than a year because of this criterion.

2. If a specific expansion or supplement is needed, do we have access to it?
If we were talking about a Pulp Campaign, “Pulp Hero” is a lot more suitable than the standard Hero System, but it’s not a cheap supplement. In general, only one copy of any such supplement is needed, but more are always welcome, just as more copies of the Core Rules are always handy.

If we’re talking 7th Sea, or Eberron, there are a whole heap of supplements that are necessary unless the GM intends to severely restrict the scope of the campaign and the choices available to players.

GURPS had a phenomenal number of genre- and setting-specific supplements, exceeded only by the total number of 3.x supplements – I don’t think that there are enough official WOTC releases to beat the output of Steve Jackson Games, I think you have to drag in 3rd party publishers – but again, not all will be needed for any given GURPS campaign.

3. Am I interested in refereeing the game system?
This is an integral question that is often overlooked. To make a campaign last, the GM has to be interested in using the rules system! If there are parts of the system that he considers clunky, or fiddly, or too much work, or that he simply doesn’t like, or if he’s tired of the system, or for any one of a dozen different reasons, things can quite quickly get crossed off the list at this point.

It’s also possible that a system that failed to make the cut in the previous two criteria might make a re-entry at this point purely because the GM is interested in the system – though it’s been a long time since any new RPG excited me that much.

4. Can I be sufficiently knowledgeable about the rules to referee the game system in the time available?
This question is all about the time-pressures that mastering the game system to an adequate degree bring, and it’s double-barreled: the first question has to be what the GM (and his players) will consider adequate; when you’re all just starting out, it’s fine for everyone to learn together.

As soon as one experienced player enters the picture, however, the standards of expertise required of a GM shoot way up, and rocket even higher if that experienced player is already familiar with the Game System.

Novice players are more likely to look to the rulebooks and game system to tell them what they can and cannot do in play, growing beyond those limits at a pace the GM can keep up with (even if he is also a novice); an experienced player is more likely to push the GM into new territory, and can take advantage of a GM’s limited experience. I have seen prospective GMs completely shattered and disillusioned by such treatment (which I consider unacceptable player behaviour), some so humiliated they have dropped out of the hobby completely.

The second part of the question is whether or not the GM can commit enough time to the rules system to master it, if there is some difference between his current level of expertise and the minimum identified in the first part of the question. At a dead minimum, I want to read the rulebooks from cover to cover at least twice if I don’t already know the system; that will take a certain amount of time on top of campaign prep, possibly too much so, depending on other time commitments. (What am I saying – I’m always squeezed for time!)

5. Are my players interested in using the game system?
This is the other side of the coin, and is just as often overlooked. Sometimes you might have to ask your players about their interest levels, sometimes you know their level of interest from general discussion.

I could probably round up players for a Pathfinder campaign in the blink of an eye, but would have trouble getting players for a D&D 4th ed campaign. I could easily gather players for Ars Magica, but would be lucky to get three for TORG.

I’ve had players signed up for a Babylon-5 campaign for 5 years (they even have their character concepts worked out!), and even have the campaign mapped out – but have had no budget to buy the rules, and had no time to read them even if I could afford them.

6. Am I interested in the core genre that the rules are supposed to represent?
The very best game systems integrate their core genre at their heart, using rules that imbue every aspect of game activity with the flavour of the genre. The next best is for the game mechanics not to actively disrupt genre flavouring. Most don’t even rise to that standard, having some game mechanics that interfere for reasons of practicality or realism with the immersion in the genre, while having other rules that are specific to the genre being simulated under the rules.

As a rule of thumb, you have to assume that the intended genre has informed the design of every aspect of the rules, with some compromises for practicality. That, in turn, means the genre the rules represent will leak through into what the rules do well and what they do poorly.

If you aren’t interested in the core genre the rules are supposed to represent, you can’t take advantage of the strengths within the rules, even when the campaign you propose falls outside that genre. You give away too much of the potential of the premise-plus-rules combination and weaken the foundations of the campaign. Hence this question, which asks whether or not the rules genre is of interest, even if that is different to the proposed campaign genre.

And, since this question has us thinking about the subject already, and is the last of the “Questions of Availability & Desire”, it forms a natural transition to the next group of questions. We should now have a shortlist of candidates, and so it’s time for the more subjective questions.

Questions Of Genre

7. How well does the overall game system suit the genre of campaign contemplated?
Different game systems do specific genres better than others. I would choose Call Of Cthulhu for a horror campaign over GURPS Horror, simply because I feel it captures the flavour of the genre better. At the same time, careful choice of game system can imbue a uniqueness to a campaign, simply by virtue of all the additional rules and game infrastructure that they bring to the table.

If I’m thinking that a James-Bond styled superspy campaign would be fun, then I have identified the campaign genre. The resulting campaigns would be very different if run using the Hero System (traditional superspies) as compared to, say, D&D (superspies in a high fantasy setting), or Call Of Cthulhu (superspies vs cultist conspiracies), or Babylon-5 (superspies in deep space and alien societies).

On the other side of the coin, a poor choice of system can work at cross purposes to the style of game you want. The mixture of superspies and the Toon game system, for example, would be problematic. The genre would combine with Dawg the roleplaying game, or with a wild-west game like Aces & Eights, only with difficulty.

That’s not to say that these combinations can’t work, just that the two genres don’t dovetail in any obvious way, and hence would make a campaign built on the combination much more work; as proof, consider “Wild Wild West”, which was a TV series that was Spy Genre in a Western Setting. Would a Western rules system be better than an espionage rules system for a “Wild Wild West” campaign?

8. Does the flavour and pace of the combat system suit the genre of campaign contemplated?
There are very few campaigns that don’t incorporate some sort of combat. It is so ubiquitous that the tone and style of the combats must match the genre reasonably well or it will be a perpetual millstone around the campaign’s neck.

Where the previous question was general, this is more specific. How long does it take to resolve combat? How quickly can the variations in combat action be resolved? Is a simple combat resolution system preferable to a comprehensive and detailed approach?

9. Can I devise or design an interesting campaign within the genre?
Finally, the ultimate genre question: does the combination of game and campaign genres yield an interesting idea for the campaign? Does it inspire you?

And, just as the last question of the “availability” section led logically to considerations of genre, so the last question of genre leads to….

Questions Of Campaign

10. What is the underlying premise of the proposed campaign?
So what is the campaign going to be all about? What is the most interesting, entertaining idea you can come up with? Remember that you aren’t committed to anything yet, and by the time you’ve finished designing the campaign these ideas might be as dead as the dodo, so you don’t have to have a rigorously-designed, completely-fleshed out concept.

This is just a starting point, and its only purpose is to help you pick the most suitable game system to build a game around. Once you have a rules package selected and you start campaign development, these ideas can be tossed aside if better ones arrive, and once real PCs enter the picture, all your planning is revealed to be a straw house in a hurricane zone anyway!

But the players will (in theory) be inspired by what you are putting on the table right now, so these initial thoughts remain essential.

11. Do the underlying assumptions of the rules suit the proposed campaign?
Every game system contains rules built on assumptions that may or may not be relevant. I would never attempt to run a high-fantasy campaign using Aces and Eights – or Empire Of The Petal Throne!

The more experienced you are as a GM, in a variety of systems, the more skilled you become at identifying these underlying assumptions (often subconsciously). For example, key assumptions from D&D are that magic works, something godlike can empower its followers, supernatural beings and powers are real, and that society is medieval in technology and scientific understanding. Time travel and Deep Space Exploration form no part of the assumptions in the D&D system, and if those concepts are important to your campaign idea, D&D – and d20 Modern – should not be on your shortlist, or (at the very least) they should be near the bottom.

Of course, house rules can be written to cover these needs, but I would only consider using them if everything else about a rules system fitted. It’s one thing to modify or reinterpret an existing underlying assumption – “all supposed magic is actually psionics” – and quite another to add a new one. You can’t do it haphazardly without courting disaster, and house rules are always relatively fragile (inherent from the lack of playtesting) and add substantially to the DM’s workload.

That said, tailoring and tweaking the core rules to better suit the final campaign is an activity I always consider worth the effort required.

12. Does the implied background of the rules suit the proposed campaign?
Many game systems have implied background elements. The D&D rules give a very different perception of Elves to that of The Lord Of The Rings RPG, which may well be different again to the idea of Elves that you have for your campaign.

Politics, Sociology, Economics – just about every mechanism of interaction in the real world are touched in some aspect by these implied backgrounds. The goal is to have to make as little change to the core rules as possible.

But beyond that, you want elements in the implied, inherent, and implicit background that will inspire you. Anything that doesn’t should be ignored at best, and discarded at worst.

13. Do the rules permit the characters to interact in the ways most important to the proposed campaign?
If you’re playing a campaign with a lot of gambling – James Bond again – then the rules system should make it easy to do so. A simple die roll may be good enough to resolve the action of a card game, hand-on-hand, but the flavour is lost.

If you have the choice, you should choose a rules system that assists and supports the character-interaction modes that will be most important to the proposed campaign instead of one that detracts from them.

14. Do the combat rules suit the most prevalent style of combat expected in the proposed campaign?
This is a similar issue. A Western genre rules setting will have some rules for knife-fighting and maybe even for dueling with sabres or epee, but longswords against chainmail are outside the comfort zone.

Anything the rules don’t cover by default will mean a house rule, and if the combat mode required is going to be a recurring feature of your campaign, you might be better off looking elsewhere, or integrating a whole slab of rules from a different system.

15. Do the skill handling rules suit the most prevalent needs expected in the proposed campaign?
In the course of any campaign, the characters will want to do things, and there are lots of different ways of handling the resolution of attempts to do so. Sometimes, these will be just fine for the campaign you want to run, and at other times they won’t really suit.

Are there rules for Starship Navigation, or will the GM need to handwave that? How about Nuclear Engineering? Psionic Surgery? Whatever tasks you expect the PCs to want to attempt to perform, you will need skill handling rules that cover them. And if the rules don’t provide them, you’ll have to.

16. Do the specialist rules suit the proposed campaign?
D&D has rules for magic item construction. If the campaign premise is all about Mecha in conflict, magic item rules aren’t likely to be all that desirable, and Battletech would probably be a better choice. Every game system has specialist rules – the campaign should take advantage of them.

17. Does the character advancement subsystem suit the proposed campaign?
Another mark of distinction amongst fundamentally different systems; there are essentially four approaches so far as I am aware:

• Incremental, points-based;
• Incremental, usage-based;
• Stepped, Level-based;
• Fixed.

One of the big problems that occurred in a friend’s previous 7th Sea campaign is the campaign’s incremental system relies on the concept of “one session, one adventure” and not the continuity-heavy campaign that is actually being played, which played hob with the development of the PCs. Prior to encountering these problems, I would not have considered this to be as important as its place in this article suggests.

Questions Of Inspiration

18. Does the campaign premise plus rules combination excite and interest me?
Now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty. By this point, there should be no more than 2 or at most 3 game systems still on the table, and one or more campaign concepts around which they are to be fitted.

So here are 2 Questions of Inspiration, 5 Questions of Style, and 2 Questions of Capacity, that I consider before making the final selection from that shortlist.

The first of these is the question above, and there’s not a lot more to be said about it. You would have to pay me – and pay me well – to get me to GM a campaign where the answer to this question isn’t yes.

19. Does the campaign premise plus rules combination excite and interest my players?
This is equally straightforward. I’m in a slightly privileged position compared with most gamers, in that I play at a club where there are several different campaigns operating concurrently, and if a player isn’t interested in a proposed campaign, they might be happy to simply sign up to one of the others. So, I actually rephrase this question to “Does the campaign premise plus rules combination excite and interest enough of my players?”

Not everyone has that luxury. What’s more, the whole question requires yet another subjective judgment – how many players are “enough”? It depends on the campaign concept and the rules and the GM’s preferences. (As an aside, we have an Ask the GMs coming up on single-player gaming.)

Personally, I prefer 2-5 players, can cope with just one, or with six, and struggle with more. I have once refereed a game with 12 players, but I wouldn’t want to do it again. There have been circumstances where I have recruited an extra five players for a one-off event where they were to be in opposition to the usual players (and an extra pair of GMs to assist). That experiment went well enough that I might have been persuaded to make it a recurring – if not regular – event. So this is a circumstantial thing.

Questions Of Style

20. Does the campaign premise suit my GMing style?
The final major category is all about GMing style, and this is something that is never easy to assess. I like systems where I don’t have to think terribly hard about the game mechanics, permitting me to focus on roleplay and the game action and the players and the plot and the narrative.

But other GMs have been quite successful while discarding any pretense at plot, simply permitting the players to go wherever they find interesting, and leaving the game action to sort itself out as it unfolds, so they can do quite well with a more intrusive game system that happens to better fit their campaign premise.

Just as different actors have a different range of characters they can portray convincingly, so different GMing styles have strengths and weaknesses, and some ideas suit a GM better than others.

This specific question demands an assessment of the suitability of the GMing style with respect to the Campaign Premise. I once thought up a campaign for use with the Rolemaster system set in early 19th century Florence, which I called “The Age Of Romance.”

I got halfway into trying to convert the premise into an actual campaign and ground to a halt; the campaign premise simply didn’t suit my style at all. More recently, I took on the task of co-GMing a Pulp campaign. Pulp is not really my Genre, and I would never have tried setting up such a campaign, but by bringing my strengths – plot and character and knowledge of the game system – to the gaming table, I was able to shore up the weaknesses of the campaign’s creator in a way that has proven very satisfactory to us both.

21. Do the combat rules suit my GMing style?
This is more important than it first appears. Some people have trouble with the action sequence chart of the Hero System, for example, finding the system very slow to resolve battles.

Me, I had problems with the “phase 12, everybody acts” feature of the system, so I developed an alternative that spreads things around a bit more and suits my style better. Rolemaster is another system that I liked a lot on paper, but could never quite get my head around in actual play. So this is an important consideration.

22. Do the skill handling rules suit my GMing style?
And here’s another aspect of the same question. For many players, the rules can actually be broken into just two significant parts – the combat system and the skill resolution system. The requirements and foundations of those two systems, in turn, define the character construction system. That all means these are the two parts of the rules that most frequently are called upon in actual play.

Most skill handling systems, so far as GMs are concerned, are pretty much the same; the key is how easily the GM can determine what a reasonable target number is in relation to the perceived difficulty of the task a character is attempting.

With some systems, this is easy; with others, there can be trouble. It requires a nearly-instinctive feeling for the range of possible results, so it’s vital for these rules to suit the GMing style. That’s not to say a GM can’t use a system that doesn’t really suit him, but it’s an added handicap that a game has to overcome.

23. Do the specialist rules suit my GMing style?
I’ve talked previously in this article about the specialist rules and why they are important. But even when the specialist rules suit the genre and the planned campaign, they may not fit the GM’s style. Again, this is something that can be overcome, but you would generally favour not having to do so.

24. Does the character advancement subsystem suit my GMing style?
This is the final question of style that I ponder, and perhaps it’s the most important in some respects (and least important in others). Some level-based systems require characters to train before they can advance to the next level, for example, and that can impose additional requirements on the GM’s scenario designs.

You can always ignore any such requirement (and I usually do) but that has it’s own implications, removing a cap on the amount of XP that can be earned between training opportunities, and potentially permitting character levels to escalate out of control.

Questions of Capacity

25. How much work will the campaign be to set up?
With the last 7 questions being rated on a scale of 1-10 (10 being great, 1 being abysmal), I have a score out of 70 for each combination of rules and campaign concept. I may well be assessing three different campaign ideas, one for each of three different rules systems, all at the same time.

So, the final factors are issues of practicality. Since the campaign only has to be set up once, I’m generally more forgiving of necessary setup time than I perhaps should be, getting caught out at times with overcommitment.

26. How much work will the campaign be to maintain?
This is the final consideration in deciding what game to run, and it’s so important that I score it out of twenty instead of out of ten. It’s so easy to underestimate the commitment that an additional campaign requires (especially when you’re already running several), and the time when additional demands seem most likely to crop up are the occasions when you’re already time-crunched – just ask Johnn!

Again, this is an issue in which my circumstances are quite different to others, so this might need to be reassessed in light of your circumstances. As a matter of general principle learned through harsh experience, GMs ALWAYS underestimate the amount of maintenance time you’re going to need to run a campaign; the wiser ones make allowance for it.

Final Determination

So that’s the process – I winnow the number of game systems down to a manageable few, cut the number of campaign ideas down to a few that interest me, try to marry the two lists into a sufficiently small number of combinations for intelligent assessment, then rate them according to considerations of style and work required. If you add up all the ratings from the final nine questions, you get a score out of 100, which makes comparisons easy.

Much of this process I carry out subconsciously – one of the benefits of experience. The first 8, for example, I wouldn’t spend more than three seconds thinking about. Questions 9 and 10 I’ll spend a bit of time on, but questions 11 to 17 don’t take much longer to answer than 1 through 8 did. Questions 18 to 24 take a little more time, especially 18 and 19, but the questions I most focus on are 25 and 26 (your priorities may be different).

Hope that answers our inquiring GM’s Question!

Johnn’s answer:

Mike, you’ve answered the question admirably. I have only a few additional comments.

My first consideration would be genre. Then I’d make a shortlist of potential game systems that do that genre well.

My second consideration would be complexity. What degree of realism, depth of rules, and rules-based options do you want. D&D vs. FUDGE, for example, gives you different game experiences though the roleplaying parts can play out the same.

Next, I’d decide if I needed a lot of supplements and community support, or if I would be ok with creating my own setting, campaign and adventures. If you are fine with do-it-yourself, then you can look at a wider array of game system options.

I’d then create a final list of desired systems and pitch the games to my players to get their opinions. A clear winner might emerge, or you might have a small list, or perhaps you end up with a larger list because of player suggestions.

Regardless of how I came up with my list of candidate game rules, I’d then go out and search the internet for “actual play” reports from GMs using the systems.

I’d also try to run one-shot game sessions to give candidates a try before investing time or money. Many games offer free lite versions, and many games are 100% free. If trying to learn several game systems is too much (it would be for me) then I’d just run a couple combats with one or two willing players to try what’s usually the most complex part of the game out.

If a player knows the rules for a candidate game then you might ask them to run a one-shot for you and maybe the other players. It’s always good to have someone who knows the rules of a game step you through – it’s often better than trying to figure things out yourself from just reading.

Finally, I’d take the winning game system and run a trial adventure of two to five sessions. I’ve found that some games get very good once a group passes further along the learning curve, so it’s worth persevering for a few sessions with a rules set before deciding against it. The trial period sets expectations properly, so everyone knows a game switch might be coming up if things don’t turn out well.

Good luck with your game selection. Please let us know what game you finally choose.

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