With a big holiday imminent, today’s post is themed on how to create adventure-filled holidays for your campaigns. It’s one thing to have a date picked in your game world calendar, and another to have a holiday become a living, interactive game element that helps you do some of the legwork for session planning and world building.

The following is an excerpt from my book, GM Mastery: Holiday Essentials. Decide what you need the holiday for and pick the corresponding template to make design faster and more effective.

Creating Holidays

You only have so much time. There are many things to prepare before next game session. That’s why holidays are such a valuable GMing tool. If you design them for adventure, you’ll get a lot of mileage from crafting just one campaign element.

Use the following design templates so you avoid wasting time from over-designing or getting yourself in trouble at the game table by under-designing.

Type #1: Background Flavor

Sometimes you need to sketch out a holiday to get a good grasp of it and its consequences. In these cases, you want to outline a few things, nail down specific elements, and leave the rest for when you have the time and inclination.
Some example cases for Background Flavor design:

• You enjoy world design. Crafting holidays is its own hobby.
• Other game elements are dependent on the holiday. For example, the holiday might be in a PC’s backstory, or it might be an important part of the adventuring region’s history.
• You need inspiration for adventure or location design.

For holidays that provide Background Flavor, document the following:

• Holiday name
• Brief summary: A one to three paragraph overview.
• Mood: Pick a specific mood with an understanding of why that mood prevails during the holiday to help provide consistency and fuel future design.
• Who the Holiday is For: Who abides by the holiday and why? Develop an understanding of the holiday’s potential impact on other campaign elements.
• Significance: Have a general grasp of the holiday’s importance so the holiday can feed other game design and future GM preparation.
• Timeline: If players know when the holiday occurs, or if other campaign elements have a strict dependency on the date, then document this. Otherwise, just have a general idea of when the holiday occurs and how long it lasts.
• Working Or Non-Working: Note whether folks get time off work.
• Costume And Dress: Decide if there is special costuming. If so, make sure it reflects the holiday mood and significance, and whom the holiday is for. Use backstory to inspire this holiday element. Lots of detail is not needed.
• Food and Drink: Decide if there is any special food and drink, and if so, make sure it reflects the holiday mood and significance, and whom the holiday is for. Use backstory to inspire this holiday element. Lots of detail is not needed.
• Decoration: Decide if there are decorations. Have them reflect the holiday mood and significance, and whom the holiday is for. Use backstory to inspire this holiday element. Lots of detail is not needed.
• Backstory: Outline the basic history. Use this to inspire other aspects of your campaign. One to three paragraphs is sufficient, though feel free to write as much as you like if time permits.
• Significance: Have a basic grasp of the holiday’s significance and why. Use this to help craft the backstory and who the holiday is for, or vice versa.

Type #2: Encounter Foundation

Holidays are excellent design tools. The best-case scenario is that your holiday design funnels down into several potential encounters so you get good in-game value from your efforts.
On the flip side, you might have a specific encounter in mind and want to use a holiday as its foundation or reason for being. Alternatively, you might be desperate and use a holiday to justify the encounter or some aspect of it.

For example, the PCs have been journeying for weeks in the evil realms of the drow, often running for their lives and coming close to death several times. The next phase of the adventure hinges on the characters infiltrating a drow city, but experience has shown you the PCs don’t have the tactical skills or power to get in without a total party kill. However, you are reluctant to decrease challenge ratings of guards and defenses because that would be inconsistent, unrealistic, and break immersion.

The solution? You craft a drow holiday to serve as a huge distraction so the PCs can slip in with much less risk and difficulty. This approach helps the players enjoy the campaign better, and it adds depth to your drow society. It is a plausible reason for easier entry without crippling your design, and gives you several new ideas for interesting encounters while the PCs are skulking around.

For holidays that are the backbone of one or more encounters, document the following:

• Holiday name
• Brief summary: Craft a solid overview, one to three paragraphs, of what you’ve designed for the holiday to help keep the encounter consistent.
• Mood: Pick a specific mood for the holiday and document the reasons for this.
• Hook: Give the holiday at least one strong hook to increase the likelihood of PCs triggering the encounter and to give the holiday a good presence within the encounter.
• Who the Holiday is For: Have a general idea of the holiday audience as that might influence how you populate the encounter.
• Significance: Have a good grasp of the holiday’s significance to help you design and roleplay the encounter.
• Timeline: The holiday will get firmly established in the campaign timeline, so document the date and length of holiday for future consistency.
• Working Or Non-Working: Know whether this is a working or non-working holiday as that might influence how you populate the encounter.
• Costume And Dress: If the PCs will be directly interacting with celebrants, then you’ll want to know if special attire is in effect. In addition, if the PCs are participants in holiday events, they might need to know about costume requirements for disguise, roleplaying, and planning.
• Food and Drink: If you think the menu will be a factor in the encounter, then know whether there is any special food and drink associated with the holiday.
• Decoration: If the encounter is within the holiday area, you’ll need to know what decorations there are, if any.
• Backstory: If backstory or an element from it is integral to the encounter, flesh out the holiday’s history. If backstory won’t come into play, then having a general idea of the holiday’s background will help you roleplay and GM with confidence. A short summary is all that is required. If the encounter is dependent on a specific backstory element, then feel free to add more details to that in the backstory while leaving other details vague.
• Significance: As with backstory, detailing significance is only necessary if it’s integral to the encounter. Otherwise, just craft a general idea of how important the holiday is to society and why.
• Encounters: The notion behind holiday encounter design is to bring the holiday to the game table level via top-down design, and to inspire you to create in-game content. While the Encounter Foundation holiday role requires an encounter, it doesn’t have to be one derived from holiday design. Therefore, this is optional.

Type #3: Adventure Foundation

Holidays are great for inspiring encounters. They can spawn and support whole adventures as well. One possible approach is to have a need for an adventure and then decide to use a holiday as the foundation.

For example, the PCs are finished clearing a dungeon and you cast your gaze forward in time to ponder what the next adventure will be. As you’ve just finished a grueling location-based adventure, you think it will be refreshing to have a colorful blend of small locations and urban-based events. Aha! A week long holiday with a bit of intrigue would fit these requirements quite well.

Another possible approach is to have a holiday in mind with enough depth to support several sessions of gaming. Starting with a holiday concept, use the top-down method to hammer out a plot line, events and encounters, using the process of holiday design to fuel crafting of conflicts, factions, locations, and rewards.

For holidays that are the foundation of an adventure, fully design these elements:

• Holiday name
• Brief summary: Once finished holiday design, write a summary of what you’ve created for future reference, as a test to ensure your holiday makes sense and is complete for your purposes. Three or so paragraphs should do it.
• Mood: Determine if your holiday has a positive or negative mood, and then pick a specific mood that aptly describes how PCs will perceive the holiday overall. Use this to help you roleplay and craft events and encounters.
• Hook: Give your holiday one or more strong hooks to draw the PCs into your adventure and game world.
• Who the Holiday is For: Determine who celebrates the holiday and why to help you craft a relevant cast of NPCs for general, conflict, and encounter design.
• Significance: Establish what significance the holiday plays in the campaign and the world region to help mold your plot arc and encounters.
• Timeline: Clearly understand when the holiday takes place in your game calendar and how long it lasts to ensure complete consistency and to give you an idea of the overall adventure timeline parameters.
• Working Or Non-Working: Figure how much leisure time celebrants and adherents will have to inform your environment and encounter design.
• Events: Events are the grist of adventure design. Good event design spawns many encounter design opportunities in such a way that they are integral to the holiday and your plot without feeling like they’ve been grafted on.
• Costume And Dress: Design special dress related to the holiday to flesh out encounter scenes and inspire other aspects of holiday design.
• Food and Drink: Figuring out what, if any, special foods and drinks are required can spawn event and encounter ideas, flesh out your holiday, and deepen immersion.
• Decoration: Decorations can spawn event and encounter ideas, flesh out your holiday, and deepen immersion.
• Travel: Travel requirements are a potent method for plot and encounter development.
• Backstory: Use backstory to drive the design of other holiday elements, as your starting point for fleshing out your holiday or plot, or as a way to cure writer’s block you might have with other holiday elements.
• Encounters: Bring the adventure to the players and unfold your plot line through encounters inspired or derived from all the stuff you’ve built for your holiday. While several encounters might be unrelated to the holiday, the key points of the story should involve holiday-related events, conflicts, and encounters.

In many respects, it’s easier being a player than a GM. Since the player determines the personality of the character, as well as what the character says and does, there is in fact no ‘right way’ or ‘wrong way’ to roleplay any given character – only ‘better’ or ‘worse’. It’s a bit like being able to set the exam questions yourself; no-one should be surprised that you get a decent mark!

Being a GM, on the other hand, means reviews of your work and its internal coherance and cohesion by others – the players, if no-one else. Being a GM can require a certain measure of courage and self-confidance. If your players can’t understand what you’re on about, it will soon become obvious to all. If your decisions are arbitrary or biased in any way – deliberately or otherwise – that too will quickly become aparrant.

The first time I set out to referee, I had experienced only a few examples as a player to guide me, but already I had found that there were things that I liked and disliked about the approaches taken by those GMs, which would result in nuances of style behind the GM screen that have stayed with me ever since.

In part one of this two-part article, I boiled the tutelage I recieved from a friend named Chris Mount in ‘how to roleplay’ into a small number of concrete tutorials, a ‘lesson plan’ if you will. Chris wasn’t able to help me as much when I began planning the Deeps campaign, because he was not a GM; he’d tried it once and it wasn’t his forte. And yet, in many respects, he was the perfect GM Mentor as a result. These are a summary of the lessons that I learned.

Avoid making rules For Rules’ Sake

I had started out by looking at the various character classes in D&D and tweaking each to ‘improve’ the game balance and desireability of the more unpopular classes. Some seemed weak and less desireable to a player, especially at lower levels, while others seemed too dominant. At higher levels, the resulting heirachy can completely invert.

I don’t remember all of the changes, but I do remember giving Monks an extra hit die, and giving Thieves the ability to dodge weapon strikes that would otherwise hit, and boosting the hit-point-die for Wizards at lower levels (while mandating that they cast spells using their own hit points, 1 HP per level of spell; each time they gained a spell level, the cost dropped toward zero for lower-level spells). I also remember spending a lot of time thinking about the impact of different weapon types – slashing vs crushing, etc – and tailoring the damage that weapons did against different armour types, a giving various races an extra die of stats if they chose a favoured class of the race, or if they used a favoured weapon.

I also spent a lot of time doing probability assessments for characteristic rolls – I remember that one stat could be rolled on 5 dice, pick the best 3, another on 4 & pick the best three, two more on 3d6+3, one on 2d6+6, and one on 2d6+1; the choices had to be made and assigned to specific stats before you rolled. There was also an option to let you add one die to any stat if you took it from the 2d6+6 allocation, so you could choose to weaken your least-important stat and boost one that was more important.

When I talked to Chris about what I was planning, his approach on both this occasion and others to come was always to look at things from the perspective of an objective player, and his first question was always “Why do that?”

My first response was usually delivered from a metagame perspective – “it enables players to always be able to qualify for the class they want without giving them too much” in response to the stat-generation system, for example – and he would always counter by asking the question in character terms. The characteristic requirements of each class, from his perspective, were not game mechanic limits, but character requirements imposed by the requirements of each character class. You needed a certain amount of intelligence to cast spells properly; you needed a certain level of nimbleness to be a thief, and so on. Viewed globally, the characteristics of a whole bunch of characters should average out to that of the overall population; individual variations were a career-sorting mechanism.

He never tried to talk me out of anything, but he always made me look at the implications to the game from three different perspectives: the ramifications for the game world, the ramifications for a player generating a character, and the ramifications on game balance. His motto was to always have an objective reason for every change that was made to the rules and be able to articulate that reason on demand; the change might not achieve the goals set out for it, the reason itself might not stand up to scrutinity, but those were always interesting and valid subjects for debate and discussion. He felt that no house-rule was ‘official’ until it had been tried and discussed – a point-of-view that I would do well to remember more often!

But he was most severely critical of rules for rule’s sake; he wanted general principles and concrete examples of their application, and then get on with the game. He argued that you could never think of everything in advance, and the more you tried, the more the rules became like the tax code: full of exploitable loopholes. This is still a lesson that I struggle with from time to time, as my players would be the first to point out!

Some of my ideas survived these discussions, most didn’t – the racial bonuses died unused, for example.

He never raised the issue of game playability, though we did discuss the issue in abstract terms. From his perspective, playability of rules was a moving target, and the optimum balance was individual from one game-table to another; things that were found to be practical would be accepted, things that were not would soon be forgotten or ignored (even by the GM), and the middle ground would be reassessed by virtue of out-of-game discussion, from which a better way could emerge.

First World – start small & simple

My first campaign concept, on Chris’ advice, started small – a Half-elven kingdom (which was apallingly human-medieval in retrospect), the King pays the PCs to clear out a newly-discovered dungeon. That was the entire campaign background, verbatum!

The dungeon itself was huge: an inverted step pyramid (one step per level), 15,000 feet to a side on the upper level, fifteen levels. Maps and level keys took up over 100 handwritten pages in a lecture book dedicated to the purpose. There was no real concept of ecology, no justification or rationale for things being where they were, no real concept of politics or society, either within the dungeon or in the world beyond.

The second-cleverest thing about the design was that – following Chris’ advice – I started small and simple (I know it doesn’t sound that way). I drew up plans for only two levels of the dungeon, leaving the other 13 alone until I had a bit more experience of what worked (and what didn’t) under my belt. Of the top level, I designated six different areas that were controlled by different factions and seperated them with no-mans-lands where a persistant power struggle could take place between them. Of level 2, I only labelled those areas where an already-defined faction could reach, and either specified a function that those areas played within the (simple) society of the owning faction, or specified that there was something so nasty down there that they had walled off the descent.

When the players finally reached the second level, I had enjoyed plenty of time to design both it and the third – assisted because the first was so large, but containing so many similar elements that it had been easy to construct. By the time they got to level three, I had completed the first five levels, and had started compiling ideas for the rest. By the time they had explored those five levels, I had twelve of the 15 levels planned, and so on.

It worked a treat. I always had enough prepared to play regardless of which direction the PCs went, with minimal wasted time; and the more difficult and confined the area was, the longer I had to polish it.

Don’t do today what can wait until tomorrow

The cleverest thing that I did was to start each session with a flashback to the past life of one or more of the PCs, as I learned to develop more of the world and its internal architecture – the politics and economics and social infrastructure and so on. This kept the design requirements under manageable limits and permitted the players to slowly flesh out their characters.

What made these flashbacks so valuable was that I specified that players were not permitted to do anything within them to alter the relationships that were in evidence between the PCs at the start of play, though the context was entirely up for grabs. This allowed me to take my time learning the ropes and developing the aspects of the game world that interested the players while keeping the primary game as a straightforward dungeon-bash. I didn’t have to explain everything immediatly, I didn’t have to spend time exploring all the ramifications in advance, and I could leave certain aspects of the world to the inspired creativity of my players.

You see, they assumed that I was being far more clever than I necessarily was, and developed their own theories as to the relationship between various background threads. In effect, it took their experience and put it to work for my benefit (while most of the players had years of experience as players, some were also experienced GMs).

If I made a mistake and dropped contradictory plot elements into the background – and it did happen from time to time – the players assumed that there was a way of reconciling the contradiction and started theorising amongst themselves. All I had to do was sit there and smile indulgantly while taking notes furiously.

After about 6 months of fortnightly play, I dropped the flashbacks as each PC now had a satisfactory backstory and I had sufficient self-confidence, expertise, and time, to be able to completely redo the surface world with concept twists and refinements – nothing that invalidated what had emerged in the course of play, but enough to ensure that the big finish I had planned (where the King who had sent them on this mission in the first place was revealed to be, not a half-elf, but a half-drow, who had imprisoned and replaced the real king before setting about subverting the surface world. He had used Drow Prophecies to identify the individuals most able to interfere with his plans and sent them into the dungeon from which he had emerged after 1,000 years in suspended animation to be killed. At the bottom-most level of the dungeon was a gate to a demonic realm, a passageway from whence the dungeon had been populated and was artificially sustained (solving some of those pesky ecological issues). What’s more, one of the PCs was revealed to be the only surviving heir to the throne, the descendant of a bastard by-blow resulting from a casual affair of the true King’s great-grandfather.

This big finish was so successful that the players persuaded me to keep the campaign running for another three years even though it had (in theory) ended with the overthrow of the Drow King and reinstatement of the true ruler, complete with his new Heir. (To extend the campaign, I started by deciding that the tortures the King had experienced had unhinged him, mentally; people are willing to accept behaviour in a monarch, especially one that had been so mistreated, that they wouldn’t tolerate in anyone else – until it was almost too late…)

Be prepared to make mistakes

Another of Chris’ lessons was to accept that both I and my players were human and would make mistakes from time to time, and that part of setting up a game was to establish a mechanism to cope with these mistakes, and correct them after the fact.

The mechanism I used then (but have not used since) was based on the concept of a verdict being the judgement of one’s peers. If someone wanted to challenge one of my rulings, they had to put up, as a bond, a percentage of the XP value of their current level (a very D&D game mechanism, deigned to discourage frivolous challenges) and lodge a written protest against my ruling.

When that happened, two non-involved players, at least one with previous experience as a GM, were selected by lot (by die roll, actually) to be Judges of the issue. Both myself and the protesting player had an opportunity to make our cases to the Judges, who then each took a copy of the rulebooks and used them, independant of each other, to determine the verdict. They were NOT permitted to confer with each other.

This produces three possible verdicts:

• They could both refute the protest, costing the player the XP he had put up to make his challenge – though I could waive that fee if I felt the player was sincere or had good reason for his protest.
• They could render a split verdict, in which case my decision stood, but the player was not charged the xp cost of the protest.
• Or they could uphold the protest, in which case I had to negotiate a restitution or a correction to the player concerned with the two Judges.

I could override the entire system if it was a situation in which I knew something that the player had not taken into account and did not want to disclose – in which case I had to place XP equal to what the player had put at risk “in escrow”, to be divided amongst the party when that hidden knowledge was revealed.

Oh, yes – the protest had to be lodged within half an hour of my making the decision that was to be protested, I almost forgot that!

The advantages of this system were that it deferred these resolutions until after play for the day was complete, discouraged frivolous protests, while ensuring that I wasn’t just fair, I was seen to be fair. The disadvantage was that if players conspired to always find against me, the system could be rorted and corrupted; another group attempted to do just that, which is why it was abandoned. I’ve since learned better ways of handling the problem, but for a novice GM, with fair players, it was a workable solution.

Establish A GMing philosophy – then stand by it

This is often thought of in terms of disputed calls, but the context in which Chris used the idea had a broader application, which is why I’ve deliberately placed it both after and independant of the section dealing with those.

One possible GMing philosophy is to stick to the rulebooks, religiously. Another is to decide that the primary objective is for the GM furnish an outlet for all the participant’s creativity. A third is to decide that the goal is for everyone to have fun, and hang any rules or constraints that get in the way of that. There are, literally, dozens of others (or more!).

I’ll write a blog some other time about what my personal GM Philosophy is – it would take up far too much space here – but it comes down to deciding four things: Why do you game? How do you game? What is acceptable, and what is not? And How do you interpret these three answers in concrete terms?

I wonder how many people reading this can articulate their own GMing philosophy?

Why Did They Do That?

Another of Chris’ important lessons was to look at all the things that you didn’t like other GMs doing when you were a player, and ask yourself (as objectively as possible) “Why Did They Do That?”

If you were unable to arrive at a satisfactory answer, talk it over with other GMs and players; and if they also came up empty, make sure that you do the exact opposite when you are behind the screen, at least 99% of the time.

I hadn’t played much, but I already had a number of pet peeves about the style of the GMs that I had played under. Chris forced me to put each under the microscope; I found that some were just the denial of the incipient longings to power-game that almost every player discovers in themselves shortly after they first start out (and that some never seem to grow out of), while others – dividing one’s attention amongst the players in proportion to their character level, for example – were simply bad GMing in my opinion, however natural the tendancy to do so might be.

From time to time, someone suggests doing satisfaction surveys of players. I always find these problematic in terms of getting any practical solutions; instead, I simply encourage my players to come to me with any beefs they might have. And berate them for not doing so if I discover them bitching behind my back – I can’t improve as a GM if all the feedback I get is positive!

I’ve never seen the one survey suggested that I think might have real benefit: getting players to list, and rank in order, their ten biggest playing peeves, whether they are in your campaign or in someone else’s, whether they are committed by a GM or a player or both, while the GMs list their ten biggest peeves about players. Give both sides something to think about, and something to talk about, and maybe both sets of annoyances can be avoided, or at least minimised.

Like most people, I don’t make an unrealistic demand for perfection on the part of GMs and Players that I game with; I do expect them to at least TRY.

Look from the players’ perspective

There was a whole lot of other advice that Chris gave me, stemming from his playing philosophy and the things that had annoyed him as a player in other games, bad habits that he wanted me to try and avoid. Some of those came naturally to me, others I still struggle with from time to time.

But they can all be summed up “Look at [x] from the Player’s Perspective”. [X] could be a piece of campaign background, it could be monkeying with the foundation concepts of a race, it could be a proposed house rule, it could be the description of an encounter – it was anything and everything you did. And not just any players who were directly affected – how might other players feel about it?

I don’t think I’ve ever found a more valuable and profound lesson. You can come up with the greatest plotline in the history of gaming, but if it will confuse your players, don’t use it. You can write the most poetic description of a scene, full of vivid and unforgettable imagry and resounding prose – if your players have to dig out the important facts, they won’t listen. If a rule makes more work for the players, it will have to be pretty darned useful before it will gain acceptance amongst them. If both you and your players keep forgetting to apply a particular rule, your game is probably better off without that rule.

The list of valid interpretations and applications of this golden rule just continue to grow.

A Good GM must also be a good Player

Before you can effectively run two, or three, or twenty-three NPCs at the same time, you have to be able to play one effectively. Sure, it might be necessary to shortcut or economise your NPC’s character development; but never compromise the effort that you expend as a GM unless forced to by outside circumstances of higher priority.

Try to do for every NPC everything that you would do if it were your PC. You won’t be able to do so, but if you must compromise, do so in areas that can’t be seen by the Players: use a random character generator – but work on a personality to match. Heck, use a random personality generator if you have to – but work on ways of expressing that personality to the players.

Learn to write speeches, and narrative, and newspaper headlines. Learn the tricks of acting in a radio play. Learn how to make effective maps and diagrams – even if they aren’t pretty! Learn history, and science, and maths, and geography, and anything else that you might have to describe or draw inspiration from or interpret – even if you only read a primer on the subject.

Go to a university open day and make a list of all the first-year introductory textbooks. Acquire them, one by one, second-hand if you have to, and study them – or at least skim them. Start with high-school texts and subject summaries if you have to. Philosophy, Psychology, Biology, Anatomy, Art, First Aid, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering – they will all be helpful someday.

And having the referances available, five or ten years later, can be invaluable.

Enjoy what you do – or do Something Else

This was Chris’ final piece of direct advice to me, and it’s something that I’m reminded of every time I see the motto of Roleplaying Tips (“Have more fun”). It’s also something that comes to mind every time I read or write something about Burnout, which is (essentially) when it stops being fun and starts becoming hard work.

At the end of my one year of University, Chris and I went seperate ways. I had bombed out in my studies for personal reasons having nothing to do with gaming (if anything, I credit gaming with permitting an escape from the problems that interfered with my education) and wound up working for Australia’s largest bank, some 200+ miles from my gaming group (I still got down to game regularly, thanks to RDOs and holidays and long weekends – a 10-hour trip by train, each way). Chris, meanwhile, had returned to Tasmania to continue his education, having passed the courses that he could not study at home. But every couple of weeks or so, I would take $5 or $10 in coins down to the phone booth and spend hours chatting with him over the phone, about movies, or music, or gaming, or whatever; answering my questions, squashing silly ideas without dampening my enthusiasm, and enjoying vicariously the most recent misadventures of the PCs in my campaign. When I lost that job, and moved back to Sydney, we lost touch; but his memory still lingers.

In recognition of Chris’ contributions to my games and my ability to GM, I am presenting the lessons he gave me to everyone else out there; and encouraging all of you who are reading this to draw on these lessons the next time you encounter a new player, or would-be GM. Don’t treat them as ignorant or as a potential rival; teach them how to be a player that you will welcome into your campaign, and to be a GM whose campaigns you can enjoy.

That’s my gift to all of you out there in this season of goodwill and giving. Merry Christmas-or-it’s-appropriate-cultural-equivalent to you all.

I’d like to start this blog with a shout-out to an old buddy of mine named Chris Mount, for reasons that will become obvious as it proceeds. When I first discovered roleplaying, Chris was the guy who taught me how to play. Without his guidance, I would never have amassed sufficient expertise and experience to be writing this article today…

When I look back on my first experience with RPGs, it’s a minor miracle that I didn’t drop the whole hobby like a lead weight.

I generated a first level thief (AD&D), having never read any of the rule books, and having no idea of what I was doing; the other players had characters ranging from 4th to 7th level, so my character was incompetant and inadequate in comparison right from the start; the GM ushered the party into the dungeon with absolutely no roleplay – we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a cavern complex with no rhyme or reason; and our first wandering monster (a stirge, ie a giant mosquito) surprised my character and killed him before I got to do a thing. Hardly an auspicious beginning – so much so that I can no longer remember who was even the GM!

The venue was a gathering of the University Of New South Wales Science Fiction Society (UNSW SFS), which I had hooked up with due to a love of the genre, at the invitation of a fellow member and classmate (Chris). Most of the SFS’ time was then being spent planning and preparing for a convention to be held in the middle of the year, at which Larry Niven was to be Guest of Honour; but, on this particular April afternoon, that business was dealt with in two bangs of a metaphoric gavel, and we moved on to the business at hand, which was a session of AD&D.

The whole concept of such a game attracted me from the very beginning. I couldn’t see how it could possibly work, and was itching to find out; and it was probably only that pre-game enthusiasm that salvaged the situation after such a memorable first encounter.

It was Chris, after the game, who nurtured that initial interest, explaining not only the way the rules worked, but awakening my awareness of how they worked, and giving me my first insights into how to get into the head of a character. (He also introduced me to Pink Floyd, Progressive Rock, and to CDs, and was a big Genesis fan. Read into that, what you will.)

Another of the attendees, Andrew J., mentioned that there was another group on campus that roleplayed on Saturday afternoons in a Student Union facility called the Blue Room, from about noon to about whenever (usually 2 or 3 AM) Sunday morning. (I’ve been friends with Andrew ever since; and while he has been forced by the burdons of Real Life to set aside his roleplaying for over a decade, he still dreams occasionally of being able to get back into the saddle). I also remember that some of the other players at the SFS game were snidely dismissive, even arrogant, about this group; since I was not especially enamoured of the attitude they had shown toward my participation, this only encouraged me to seek them out).

The following weekend, I attended my first game at the Blue Room and met people that I still game with to this day, more than 28 years later.

But most of my growing pains as a player were hidden from public view; Chris and I would talk for hours about roleplaying. It was thanks to the leg-up that he gave me, and the encouragement that he offered, that after only four or five game sessions as a player, I started designing my first dungeon and planning my first campaign, something that I’ll discuss further in part two of this article.

There is a point to all this nostalgia: as I have learned since, there is little (as a player) that is more satisfying than successfully teaching someone else how to play; you share vicariously every thrill, every secret giggle and chortle and belly-laugh. I’m not sure what it was that reminded me of Chris recently, but something did, and remembering him always brings back the memory of those early discussions and the lessons he imparted.

Which brings me to the thrust of this particular blog. For a change, it’s not directed at GMs, but at Players. I want to encourage others to do for newcomers to the hobby what Chris did for me, and to codify that advice into a number of bite-sized lessons. This, in turn, will lead to part two of the article, in which I’ll talk about the lessons Chris taught me about how to be a GM.

So what is a “Player Peer”?

A “Player Peer” acts as a “big brother” to a novice player, encouraging and educating and stimulating; mentor and teacher and confidant and co-conspirator and buddy, all rolled into one.

A mile in someone else’s shoes

The first lesson is about explaining the basics of roleplaying. Chris started by having me imagine that I was a character in a favorite novel or TV show or movie; what would it feel like to actually be able to do those things? What would it look like? Once the character was firmly in mind, he would suggest simple situations – confronted by robbers, watching the sun come up over a city you had never been to before, and so on – and get me to imagine what that character would feel like, and what they would do, and what they might say, under those circumstances.

That’s the heart of roleplaying, in many ways – the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and determine how they would react to whatever the current situation is.

Interaction requires definition

The second lesson he taught me was that, while it was possible to play a game with nothing more than imagination, as soon as another person becomes involved, you need a common language, and you need rules to define objectively what one character could do and what he could not.

The “common language” is the rules, which provide a framework for the acts of imagination to be interpreted into actions, reactions, choices, and consequences. For a player, the rules that matter most are those that define one character as different to another, and the starting place for all rules is therefore those that describe character stats.

So the second lesson explained what the different characteristics are, and what the numbers attached to them mean. What is average? What is normal? What is superior, and how superior can you get?

He then had me roll up random characters – as quickly and simply as possible – and practice interpreting their stats into personality traits and occupations and behaviour and personal styles. Since we were working from AD&D, the genre of these examples was generic fantasy, but the same technique (generate characters from random rolls and construct a personality) works for ANY game system, only the size and number of dice vary.

Once he felt I had a handle on that, he switched up a gear on me. Using the same stat rolls, and the same definitions of stats, he pulled out the first of the characters I had generated and suggested that he was a character in a cop show. And then, that the second was a sailor on a submarine. And that the third was in Star Trek (the original series). And so on, through them all, with him pulling campaign settings and genres off the top of his head and me interpreting character stats into characters appropriate to the setting.

The rules of doing things

At the start of the next lesson, he explained the idea of trying to perform some action, like hunting or fishing, and using game mechanics to determine the chances of success. Then he took out the appropriate dice (3d6 for AD&D) and walked me through each of the possible outcomes, turning the dice from three one’s up through the entire gamut of possible results.

This was followed by a brief discussion of fundamental probability, ie, “When you graph the possible results of 3d6, you get a bell curve, which looks like this, and means that these middle-of-the-road results are more likely to occur; the more dice, the steeper and more pronounced the curve is; this is a d10 (this was in the era before d20s were available), and it gives a flat chance of each result,” and so on. He then showed me how a dumbell curve meant that there was a critical threshold at which success became far more likely to occur than failure, and vice-versa – in other words, that a single point of improvement in the target number to be achieved could make a big difference to the likelyhood of success.

He then asked a profound question which led me to new depths of characterisation: “What effect, does having some notion of how likely a character is to succeed or fail in a given task, have on the mindset of the character?”

The rules of battle

The fourth lesson he gave me was in how the combat system worked, applying everything that I had learned so far to determining the character’s preferred style of combat – what weapons he would prefer, based on the rules and the character’s stats, etc, and how he would use them. He rang in variations on the basic character – how would those decisions change if he had 18 strength instead of 8, and so on.

By the time this lesson was concluded, I was no longer choosing the most effective weapon my character could use under the game mechanics, I was choosing the weapon that best suited the combat style that best expressed the character’s abilities and mindset. Since this is one of the lessons that many modern players, coming to the hobby from a background of computer games like Diablo, have the greatest trouble with, it deserves even more care and attention in modern times.

Class & Special abilities

Lesson number five introduced these more complex choices, but used the principles learnt in the previous lesson as a guide. What occupation best expressed the personality I had come up with? What did the additional game mechanics that came with that choice do to other choices like combat style?

So many players these days get educated on the questions of class choice, and special abilities, from a mechanical perspective which then informs personality. For me, this is always putting the cart before the horse – the basic personality should come first, and the choice of special abilities should follow as a consequence of that personality. The first leads to stereotypes, unless the player makes extraordinary efforts, or is very experienced; the second makes the whole process much easier.

These days, with additional complicating factors like Feats in d20, the number of options open to players has mushroomed, to the point where the tail can well and truly wag the dog, and where a character’s class and feats dictate the personality and not vice-versa. If there was just one lesson that I would wish players to take away from this blog, this would be it.

Ambition and Motivation

With the foundations of how to roleplay now established to the point where I could carry forward on my own, Chris then moved on to working with me on a new character that I was preparing for actual play. When I started to describe his personality (and the reasons for it) that I had derived from our earlier lessons, he stopped me cold. Instead, he wanted me to look behind the curtain of game mechanics and talk about all the things that the character wanted to do and why.

He started by having me imagine that my character was applying for a job, or for entry into some training course that would represent a step towards his ambitions; Chris took on the role of the interviewer, demanding (without recourse to stats or numbers) that I explain why my character wanted to get in, what he would do with their training, what made him think he was qualified for entry, and so on. All answers were required to be in the first person.

He followed that by getting me, in the guise of my character, to describe the action on TV at the time as though he were a witness to it, and what my character would do if he saw some analagous situation within the game.

And then he wrapped up by placing my new PC on a metaphoric psychiatrist’s couch, probing for attitudes and sore spots and why the character thought the way he did. My simple answers were always followed by “Why do you think that?” or some variation, and very quickly, I was floundering.

This was my introduction to the concepts of character ambitions outside the rules, and character motivations for his behaviour. From time to time in the interrogations, Chris would break off the discussion and begin chatting about something entirely unrelated. At the end, he asked me to think back and try and find the one thought or idea that I could articulate which had best enabled me to immediatly step back into character.

Years later, Peter Jurassic used a similar technique to get himself into character for playing Londo Mullari in Babylon-5 – all he had to do was say to himself, in the faux-Hungarian accent that he had adopted for the character, “Mister Garabaldi,” and he would immediatly click into his role.

Character Background

This was pretty much the final lesson on how-to-roleplay that Chris imparted to me. Together, we went through the campaign background and concept, such as it was (sparce doesn’t come close to describing it), and helped me work out my new character’s past history and background – the events that had led him to become who he was today. (He was to start at 8th level, or 4th/4th multiclassed; I had chosen the latter). There were about half-a-dozen seminal events in the character’s life by the time we were finished.

We then worked through that history and determined goals and ambitions that the character would have had as a result. Adding in the fulfillment of some of those, and the character’s failed attempts at some others, reinvested the character’s attention into his own personal story, and gave the character some additional objectives and motivations to achieve in the future. This took us up to about 15 key moments in the character’s history.

Then we analyzed the consequences of the choices and actions we had determined for the character, and which might turn around and bite him afterwards. Again, some of these we marked as having already occurred – some positive, and some negative – while others we marked as problems that the GM could inflict apon the character in the future. Our notes were now about two dozen one-line sentences.

A fourth pass through the character background notes dealt with the character’s reactions to the setbacks, and how he exploited the positives, and took our notes up to almost a page-and-a-half of one-line entries.

Finally, we went looking for what wasn’t there, based on my own life – What was his hometown like? What were his parents and grandparents like? Brothers and sisters? Extended family? Who did the character get along with, and who did he dislike, and why? And what had happened to all these people and places? Who had touched his soft side? Questions like these fleshed out the story.

These activities showed me how to draw apon my earlier lessons to build a background that supported the raw characterisation that I had created, and how to refine that characterisation to take into account the additional details.

After the fact

Chris never wanted to hear about a character’s stats ever again, but he was more than willing to talk about events within the game, and my character’s choices and past exploits, and to help work out what the character would do next to further his ambitions. As it happened, that campaign ran for only two sessions, at which point my attention shifted to preparing my own campaign, but it was still long enough to show the power of the techniques that Chris had led me to master.

It was as though the other players were stumbling around and making it all up as they went along, vaguely second-guessing at a persona, while my character was solidly-defined, with concrete ambitions, and plans to achieve them. Even when he “didn’t know what he wanted,” he was more real as a personality than anyone else playing – and this was going up against people who had been playing for five years or more, experienced players who (in theory) knew what they were doing. Only afterwards did I realise that, while a comparative novice in many respects, I had stepped right over these players in terms of my capacity to roleplay.

It was one of those players, a guy named John (who only occasionally dabbled in roleplaying) who uttered those fateful words at the end of two days’ intensive play: “You ought to GM your own game…”

Characters in my Riddleport campaign will be constructed just from the Pathfinder Core Rules and two regional supplements the group bought for Paizo’s world of Golarion. This is a nice break from the splat book inflation previous D&D 3.5 campaigns of mine have suffered.

Further, I’m ruling that exotic arms, armour and equipment will be rare in the pirate city. Characters may start with anything they can afford from the rule book. Once the game starts though, merchants and craftsmen will not have exotic items in stock. Fortunately, Riddleport is named after the thriving sea trade that seeks haven in the lawless city, and you never know what might come off the docks.

This ruling has a few implications.

Exotic rarity creates a flavour tweak

First, all default NPCs will bear non-exotic items, which means this type of equipment will be considered the norm in encounters and loot. This is good to know when I’m building NPCs and whatnot. It’s a decision that affects flavour and will help me highlight notable NPCs, which I’ll get into a bit further on.

The economics of exotic equipment

Second, exotic equipment costs twice as much as listed in the rule book, if a merchant has it in stock at all. This is just for Riddleport. In other areas of Golarion, the pricing might be different. Higher costs will only impact poor and low level PCs, but that’s ok.

For the rest of the populace, this situation creates a negative feedback loop. Only a few can afford exotic equipment, which reduces demand, when means lower stock, which keeps prices high. Further, rarity means few will take the time to bother learning how to use the equipment, which limits the skills and feat choices of your average Riddleport citizen, resulting in even lower demand.

All this is a setup for PCs who use exotic weapons. If I know my players, mayhem will result quickly in an urban campaign. That’s why I selected Riddleport, where might makes right, not a justice system. Therefore, the PCs should be able to operate in a theatre of factions and alliances, rather than always having to dodge the law, which opens up a lot more gameplay opportunities.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found running-from-the-law games stifling after awhile, and it forces PCs to move around a lot. I want my players happy to stay put in Riddleport where I’m spending a lot of design time in.

So, back to the setup. In a tough and gritty urban campaign, a key survival tactic includes stealth. You want to be safe when you wish, unnoticed when desired, and able to move throughout the city without complication.

The first gotcha the PCs will find is when they travel in a group. Six mercenaries going anywhere together will stick out like a sore thumb. They enter any establishment and all eyes will be on them. Depending on the reputation they build, when they walk down the street others will give a wide berth, hurl insults, ask for help, or be reported on to important people who live in fortified demesnes. This means more party split-ups, but I’ve got plans to handle that.

The second gotcha is exotic equipment. Any PC brandishing a strange weapon, wearing unusual armour or flashing exotic equipment is going to get noticed and talked about. Go ahead and choose that double orc axe, I say. You’ll soon be tagged as the orc axe guy, and it might even be whispered the PC is in cahoots with orcs….

While I’m on the topic of reputation, if the PCs do things in a pack then they’ll become known as a gang or group. Thus, one character’s actions will be reflected on the whole group. That is, unless they take precautions. If they don’t, then exotic equipment with taint them all in terms of trying to be stealthy, whether it’s physical or social stealth they’re after in any given situation.

Exotic equipment means exotic NPCs

Third, and most important to me, with exotic stuff being rare I have a new tool to make NPCs and monsters special.

The normal NPCs will be using non-exotic items. Any NPC who uses something exotic will therefore stand out from society. The NPC will be special. This is great for building personality, differentiation and encounter seeds with.

I’ll put extra flair in descriptions and actions for any NPC using an exotic weapon or fighting in exotic armour. In most cases this is a signal the NPC is important to the game world or campaign, which helps gameplay and communicating such things to players without resorting to out-of-character chatter.

For monsters, I can brand them according to the strange weapons and armour they use. One tribe of orcs might use serrated double orc axes, known as butter knives to the locals, and another orc tribe uses black painted double orc axes, which the locals call black kisses. Where possible, I’ll do this for each monster group in encounters and in the setting.

Lots of choices

Fourth, I have inspiration for new encounter seeds.

The group agreed to stick with just the core rule book for character creation, plus the two supplements. I let my players know that NPCs and monsters will not be under such restrictions, and they were fine with that. This means I have all my D20 books to tap for bringing in unusual equipment!

Not only can I enhance NPCs with exotic items, but I can also make loot and picking pockets special by occasionally dropping something exotic into the mix.

It will be up to the PCs to figure out how to use strange items found. This should create some good roleplaying and gameplay from trial and error activity plus puzzle solving.

Hopefully, unwanted items from the PCs will also make it into merchant hands and a few gambling game pots, so the strange items begin to pass hands and spread.

This opens up new encounter seeds. If some items give the user a new ability or advantage in a fight, then this will be noticed by the powers that be. Where are these items coming from? Where can I get more? How can I stop my enemy from getting their hands on these?

How will the PCs react when a friend is robbed of the strange new tool the PCs gave him? What will the PCs do if they fail to keep their exotic inventory a secret? How will they react each time they discover their rooms ransacked or defenses triggered by would-be thieves?

Throttled to start

My aim is not to make exotic equipment the focus of the campaign. As the main treasure distributor, I can throttle up or down the amount of exotics offered. Tribes and clans and factions will be out of the box, though, once they are encountered. If the PCs wish to go back and target specific foes for their equipment, then they will be free to do so. So, I need to be careful who I give the very good stuff too and in what quantities.

Prophecies and prophetic visions are a staple of just about every game genre (even in Western Campaigns, the Indian Medicine Men might have them).

GMs like using prophecies for a number of reasons:

• They impart a sense of wonder to the campaign
• They confer the impression of a wider universe around the PCs
• They show the players that the GM has been doing his homework
• They can drive plots forward and act as a binding agent, tying seemingly unrelated plots together into a bigger picture
• They can be used to manipulate the PCs and mess with the player’s headspace, as famously spoofed a while back in KODT [issue 81]
• They give the players clues as to the direction in which the GM is driving the campaign
• Players can use them to develop new lines of investigation/action when they are stumped by the immediate problem
• And, done properly, they can be a lot of fun.

But there are some serious downsides. And the biggest is the players feeling that once a prophecy is articulated, the GM will twist events and outcomes to ensure that the prophecy comes true, or seems to be about to come true – in other words, to lay the tracks for a plot locomotive that threatens to railroad the game.

If attempts to thwart a prophecy always fail, it can engender frustration and dissatisfaction.

This article is intended to offer alternative means of handling prophecies and prophetic visions that are not so damaging to the campaign.

Know Thine Campaign

Often, the best start you can make to the whole business of prophecies is to avoid making them up out of whole cloth. Base them on the campaign that’s already in place, and the trends and directions that it is already going. Then redress them in slightly vague and flowery language.

And don’t make the mistake of making all your prophecies about the campaign to come – a fair percentage will be old prophecies that may have already have come to pass. If you are going to use prophecies in your campaign at all (or even if you just want the players to thing you’re going to use them!), take advantage of them to add some extra colour and depth to your campaign background.

When it comes to your prophecies, a slightly more advanced technique is to write the prophecy from the perspective of a historical culture in the campaign world, stressing the things that were important to that culture; this expands the campaign background’s foundations and makes them relevant. Unwary players can fail to make proper allowance for the bias or “spin” that the ancient culture put on the prophecy, but more switched-on players will eventually use these to inform themselves about both the prophecy and the culture that made it.

What Might Be, not What Will Me

Prophecy immediatly brings into sharp relief the whole question of free will vs destiny. Before I let a prophecy loose in the campaign, I always get my players to jot down a quick note on where their PC stands on the issue, which I have found to be very helpful as a guide to roleplaying.

Of course, if you wait until you’re about to spring a prophecy on the characters, this telegraphs your move rather badly. A better approach is to ask the question (and get the answer) LONG before a prophecy rears it’s ugly head. I have gotten some mileage from time to time by roleplaying a campfire arguement between two NPCs on the subject and then lobbing the question at one of the PCs. Whatever the PC responds, one of the NPCs can then disagree without changing their perspective, permitting them to prod another of the PCs; maintaining this tactic, you can draw out each PC’s opinions entirely in-character.

From the metagame perspective of allowing the PCs to have free will, you have but two alternatives: either you incorporate some reason within the campaign for the PCs being the only individuals with free will (one of the unique attributes that collectively comprise the difference between a PC and an NPC), or you take a philosophical cue from Babylon-5 and determine that within the campaign, a prophecy is what might be, not what will be. “A vision may be prophecy or it may be metaphor. A metaphor is just a prophecy that doesn’t come true.”

In other words, a prophecy is a forecast of what Might be, not what Will be.

The Nostrodamus Approach

Nostrodamus’ prophecies are famous – first, because there are so many of them, so vaguelly worded and using poetic allusions rather than actual names. Some have been accounted to have come true on three seperate occasions, depending on how you interpret the language.

One of the reasons for this vagueness is that he wrote them in his native language, translated them into another language in which he was only semi-literate, translated that into code, and then randomly broke them up and changed their order. By the time you combine the poetic allusions factor, this imbues the meaning with so much vagueness that the prophecies have no practical value, but can still be considered “fair warning” to the players.

The big downside to this approach is that to make it work properly, you need to create dozens of prophecies – most of which you intend to ignore. The corrosponding upside is that you can wait until the PCs decide what they want to do and then pick a prophecy that can be hammered and filed to fit, making them story seeds and sources of inspiration. Using prophecies in this way means that they start being completely meaningless, and have whatever meaning you want assigned as opportunity permits.

The “Meanwhile…” Alternative

One of the best ways to avoid the railroading problem is to use prophecy to articulate what NPC villains are already doing within the campaign. Just cloak them in a bit of flowery language, obscure the meaning a little, and hey presto! You have an instant prophecy that has already come true. This technique can help the players place the events that they are experiencing into the broader campaign context.

A Long Long Time From Now

Another technique for avoiding the issue is the deliberately intend the prophecies to be fulfilled after the campaign concludes. This makes them a bit of colour that can otherwise be ignored. However, I personally don’t recommend this technique; it implies that whatever the PCs do is not important enough in the long run to be the subject of prophecy, because if this was not the case, then someone else would have made prophecies regarding their actions.

The only way in which this solution can work without deflating the campaign over the long term is something I call “The Wild Card Approach”.

The Wild Card Approach

For some reason – time and place of birth, the aspect of the moon, an ancient gypsy blessing, whatever – the PCs are Wild Cards, not subject to the vagarities and limitations of prophecy. If they are in the right place at the right time, and work hard enough, they can change the outcome of any prophecy, because their actions cannot be foretold, and hence cannot be allowed for.

This is one of my favorite techniques – even though it’s a variation on an approach that (as I’ve already stated) I don’t recommend – because it gives the campaign the best of all possible worlds. The only caveat is that you need some plausible reason for the PCs being Wild Cards, and that this reason should (in contrast to the flippancy I used when introducing the technique) should be central to the campaign concept. The entire plausibility of the campaign rests on this justification, so it’s essential that you get it right. That also means carefully integrating the uniqueness of the characters into their personal backgrounds, so the GM will also need to work closely with the players during character creation. When and How was their uniqueness discovered? How did it affect their upbrining? Does each think that he’s the only one? Might there be a Wild Card amongst the PCs enemies? These are vital questions, and the GM needs to think carefully about the answers and implications.

The Mundane and Trivial – significance by implication

Another technique that can be very useful is to show scenes of mundane and trivial events, where it is an element of the background that is more significant, and not the action itself.

This technique is more appropriate for prophetic visions than for full-blown prophecies.

There’s always a strong temptation to focus on the melodramatic when dealing with such prophecies, but it can often be more rewarding to undersell the drama. The first hypes the forthcoming events like a used-car salesman extoling the virtues of last year’s model, but it releases the drama of the scene in the same breath, leading to anticlimax; the second builds tension and drama because it saves the best action for actual play, when the PCs can be participants, not onlookers.

A vision of a King trimming his toenails, a stack of signed royal warrants on the desk before him, and a row of gibbets as long as the eye can see visible through the window behind him, is both more easily conveyed and more evocative than showing the hangings themselves, or the scene in which the same king pronounces death for high treason against an assembled throng. The very mundanity of the scene highlights a sense of callousness that may or may not be warranted – the king may or may not be justified in his actions, the seer cannot tell, as the all-important context is missing.

Duelling Prophecies

Another favorite of mine is duelling prophecies – not so much in the sense of the Belgariad by David Eddings (which were really complimentary prophecies in many respects) but in the sense that only one of the two can come true. Until they get used to the idea, players will invest a lot of effort into trying to reconcile the irreconcileable, providing great entertainment to all concerned and a slightly different background flavour to that which would exist without this additional context.

Allow for this historical impact of prophecies

I’ve touched on this already, but it’s important enough to bring to the centre of discussion for a moment or two. In a world in which prophecies are real and can be used as a guide to future events, they would and should have been used for this purpose in the past. If prophecies always come true (NOT reccomended), there should be stories of characters railing against the inevitable, akin to those of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. If prophecies do NOT always come true, there will be epic sagas showing the lengths that one has to go to in order to avoid the future that was foretold, and perhaps a cautionary tale or two of misjudgements and pyrrhic victories. All this should be brought front and centre to the player’s consciousness prior to the start of play (if possible) but later is better than never.

The Last Word

Prophecies and prophetic visions are so much a part of the context and landscape of virtually every genre – whether by computer simulation and development of tactical responses to scenarios, or by mystic visions of some sort, or simply drug-induced fantasies – that deciding how much truth is in them and how they will be handled is practically manditory, but is often overlooked nevertheless because it can be a lot of prep work.

Writing prophecies down before play starts, drawing on any and every source of stimulation of the imagination available to you, and then ignoring most, is by far the best approach. After all, some have already come true, some will relate to events long after the campaign ends, some may have failed, and some may be distortions or lies (whether the originator knows this or not); that doesn’t leave much room left for those that are both relevant and true.

Most important is to ensure that the probitive value of prophecy as a guide to actions is established within the campaign background, or (at the very least) in the form of folk tales that can be reiterated to the PCs the first time they encounter a prophecy “in the field”.

Some GMs fear the power of prophecies to wreak havoc on their campaigns, others revel in them (to the frustration of the players). Neither is the most productive approach; prophecies can add awe and wonder, and don’t have to be a straightjacket – if they are used correctly. There are multiple middle grounds; choose the one that best suits you and your campaign, and let’s blow a few player’s minds with some deep, DEEP, philosophy – with larger-than-life ramifications.

While I’m using Golarion as the world for my upcoming Pathfinder campaign, I’m making changes to the powers-that-be in a move that is the ultimate change in top-down planning.

Spoiler warning: players in my campaign please read no further.

A big dynamic in my upcoming Riddleport campaign will be the Ascended – a group of near-gods who become ensnared by scheming over the Cyphergate. You will know the Ascended by name: Lloth, Demogorgon, Tiamat, Baphamut and Asmodeus, to name a few.

Borrowing from the excellent Malazan series, Primal Order and D&D 3E edition of Deities & Demigods, there are three types of higher powers in my version of Golarion: the Ascended, the Divine and the Primals.

The Primals

The first gods. Only the most knowledgeable sages and some of the Divine know of the existence of these creatures. Primals are thought to be non-sentient and responsible for the structure of the universe, including those forces that drive physics, magic and emotions.

These creatures are raw energy. In the past they have spawned Cthulhuesque nightmares to
perform inscrutable quests, giving unfortunate worlds and generations apocalyptic endings or crippling transformations.

Examples of Primals are Death, Chaos, Magic, Passion and Atrophy.

I do not expect Primals to come into gameplay, but they might make interesting trivia for PCs as they gain high levels. Some players also like having a mental framework for their fantasy worlds, and this information can help cap off the top end for them.

The Divine

Traditional gods. The first were birthed an unknown period of time after the Primals; all others have come from the Ascended.

The Divine channel the raw energy of the Primals, whether they know it or not. Each Divine is attuned to one or more Primals, making the energy of the affinity Primals easier to tap. In turn, the energy the Divine draws also transforms them so they embody their source Primals more so over time.

Only a Divine can kill another Divine being, with one exception: Divine can be killed by mortals in a specific way that is unique to each Divine. Knowledge of each Divine’s mortal weakness is jealously guarded – and highly valuable.

The Divine rarely confront foes due to their achilles heel, so the Ascended have become their foot soldiers in an eternal holy war.

The Ascended

Upon reaching epic level, a creature can beseech their parton divinity to give them a divine spark. If granted, the creature Ascends, which confers various benefits, some of which are universal to Ascended and some of which are unique to the Divine who shared the spark.

Ascending a follower weakens a Divine somewhat, so it is rarely done, yet many mortals pursue this path. And the Divine do need to replace dead, insubordinate or incompetent Ascended followers ongoing.

Ascended are mortal

A key difference between Ascended and Divine is Ascended can be killed by mortals, albeit with much difficulty. Divine assignments can therefore put them in great danger.

Like all middle managers, Ascended are in constant peril:

• Some Divine reward their followers with Ascendency if they kill an Ascended of the enemy. Thus Ascended are hunted.
• Great magicks can be woven using Ascended as components. This makes them targets of bold questers.
• Ascended are attuned to two planes. The first is their home plane, the second their patron’s. Every being with a divine spark has a shard that must remain on their home plane. This shard is similar to a lich’s phylactery, and has weaknesses of its own. Destroy the shard and you destroy the Ascended. (The Divine are just banished to their home plane in a weakened state until they expend more costly power to spin out a new shard.)Shards can never leave their affinity plane, though Ascended can. While every being with a shard protects it to the best of their ability – some build mega dungeons with their shard at the heart just for that purpose – circumstances will require they leave their shard behind while travelling to other planes or tangling with others.Thus shards are often the object of epic quests of enemies and rivals.
• Fellow Ascended seeking Divine favour and Elevation (the process where an Ascended becomes a Divine) create fierce levels of competition within a Divine’s ranks. Keep your enemies close and your friends closer.

The names will change

At this point I’m still noodling over the connection between the Cyphergate in Riddleport and the group of Ascended enemies who vie for control and advantage in the pirate city.

Most Ascended will fight by proxy using trusted minions. These minions are the foes the PCs will face most of the time, though an Ascended might make a personal visit if conditions warrant it.

My vision is the PCs will peel away the layers of various stage bosses to eventually confront one or more crime lords of Riddleport directly. At that time they will discover the crime lords are but puppets of the Ascended in an epic power struggle involving the Cypergate.

The Ascended will be known by other names than their monster manual entries. For example, Asmodeus is known as The Angel, and Lloth the Night Queen. The names Asmodeus and Lloth will never be uttered by an NPC – Divine or mortal – during the campaign.

Here’s the rub

More campaign plotting to come in future blogs. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your reactions and ideas, especially about what the link is between the Ascended and the Cyphergate.

A problem that sticks out to me is why the Ascended should pay such attention to the little city of Riddleport. Of all Golarion, why fight on this city’s streets? It seems a bit unbelievable that Ascended would take such risks, albeit mostly through minions, and give such focus to this small region.

One potential answer is the Cyphergate. It could be worth all the confrontation, resources and risks. And that begs the question of why the Cyphergate is important to the Ascended. I have a couple ideas, one which involves the shards of the Ascended, but they’re just ideas for now.

What do you think? Why does a group of Ascended enemies happen to be playing in the same sandbox as the PCs?

This month’s RPG blog carnival hosted at The Bone Scroll asks us to revisit our 2009 goals and deliver a status report. Time to eat some humble pie.

Goal #1: DM my D&D campaign every other week

This was a resounding success. We missed only three or four sessions this year. This campaign now nears its conclusion, a milestone my current gaming group has not achieved before.

Over 20 sessions in 2009 the PCs gained seven levels and suffered three PC deaths.

Goal #2: Run a sci-fi game a few times

Fail. I picked my system and universe, GURPS Transhuman space, and got a few sci-fi novels read as well, but did not manage to go far enough in my learning of the rules and game planning to run a session.

Last week I ordered Traveller from Mongoose. My sci-fi interests have wandered into galactic proportions, and I feel a bit limited in my Sol-based Transhuman setting.

I also picked up the excellent 3:16 RPG: Carnage Amongst the Stars in September and pawed through the rules. It looks like a fun game!

Next year I must get my sci-fi fix in, whether it’s Transhuman, Traveller, Carnage, or option D.

Goal #3: Build a world

I started, paused and quit. In that order. Just too much going on. When I realized what I wanted to build and how I wanted to build it, I had to apply some Godin Dip thinking. In the end, I realized there is not enough hours in the day to tackle this project in 2009…or 2010.

Goal #4: Blog and E-zine

Success. Roleplaying Tips had 0 unscheduled missed weeks in 2009, which is awesome. That has not happened in a number of years. Thanks to Hannah Lipsky and Steven Bollenbough for helping me keep the trains running.

I did miss some weeks this year on Campaign Mastery that Mike had to cover. Thanks Mike! Next year I hope to have the same record for Roleplaying Tips and Campaign Mastery.

Overall though, goal achieved.

Goal #5: Have more fun

I had a ton of fun this year. Not only did we keep truckin with the regular game group, but we managed to get a marathon 30 hour D&D session played on an August weekend, plus several board game nights.

As for having more fun at each game, as I recently posted I need to focus on being more in the moment and less worried about what’s going to happen next. That is definitely a fun dampener.

Despite that trend, goal achieved.

Personal goals

For my personal goals, which I did not blog about in January, I did lose 10 pounds, I did eat better (with lots of exceptions), and I did launch Gamer-Lifestyle.com with Yax from DungeonMastering.com. I did not get an ebook self-published this year. I only managed to fly out to visit my parents once. I did get a financial consultant. Overall, I’m building momentum in the health and personal energy department, but there’s lots of room left for improvement. I am also not close to where I’m at with my home-based RPG business, but significant steps were made towards that goal in 2009.

Based on 4d6 and toss the lowest, I’d say I earned a B+ on making and keeping goals in 2009. In 2010, I need to be more specific so I can measure things more precisely. Stay tuned for a 2010 goals post in the next month or so.

I know I’ve written about this before (An Epic Confusion, Or How To Stage A Blockbuster Finish), but I’ve been thinking some more about big finishes to campaigns, prompted by the fact that my superhero campaign is currently in what I hope turns out to be an epic conclusion. As I developed this final scenario, I tried to keep track of the different elements that I wanted to incorporate and why I wanted them to be an element in the big finish; the goal was to attempt to further define the ways in which the final scenario should differ from any run-of-the-mill scenario. This post is the result.

Theme Incarnate

Every campaign has one or more themes that inform the scenarios that have taken place, how they relate to each other, and how one leads to the next. Sometimes these are deliberately placed and made clear to all participants from the start; other times they emerge from the choices of the players, the backgrounds and aspirations of the characters, and the scenarios that the GM has created to explore those backgrounds and choices and their ramifications and consequences, and to satisfy those aspirations, and may not be obvious except in hindsight.

The final scenario should be the ultimate expression of those themes, even revealing them for the first time if they were not made clear earlier in the campaign. That means that the starting point in designing the final scenario should be a retrospective review of everything that’s happened in the past of the campaign. Without recapitulating actual play, summarise the campaign in one sentence, and the style of adventures in one sentence, and so on.

Everything’s Been Leading To This

Something else that I like to do is to touch on as many of the campaign’s past scenarios as I can. That doesn’t mean bringing back every enemy that the PCs have ever faced; but there should be a strong element of taking the next step in every past plotline. So far, in the superhero campaign’s big finish, we’ve had mention of past PCs and what they are now doing, mentions of past NPCs of significance, events relating to the construction of their base, mentions of old enemies, and reminders of past victories, and even of past mistakes. And it’s only just getting started. In fact, of over 150 scenarios, only eight don’t form part of the tapestry that I’ve woven for the PCs.

Look How Far We’ve Come

Another essential ingrediant that I’ve identified are a number of nostalgic elements that signpost just how much the PCs have come since those early, hesitant, steps. Problems that would have once seemed insuperable should come… well, not easily, but without great difficulty.

In a D&D campaign, I often note down the specifics of the first encounter that puts the characters into genuine difficulty; then, as a minor side-encounter, I arrange a rematch for the final scenario, in which the loser has brought friends.

In the last game session of the superhero game, the players spent slmost half an hour listing and discussing technical experts that they could call apon to help them solve the problem confronting them (the transformation of the artificial armour-plating a previous member lined their base with into almost-invulnerable Replicators threatening the lives of everyone living in central Boston), while two of their members who were in the process of becoming the First Lady and White House Chief Of Staff, respectively were busy in Washington and unable to contribute more than ideas and theories. Ultimately, the three remaining ‘active’ team members were able to solve the problem on their own.

The purpose of touching on so much of the Campaign’s past history is to create the impression that this is the culmination of everything that’s happened in the past, that it has all been leading to this. This is especially important when the players can already identify major elements of the big finish. My players know who the big enemy is going to be at the end, they know what he’s capable of, they know why they oppose him and vice-versa. In the past, they have been mortal enemies, political adversaries, and reluctant allies. When the campaign started, this enemy seemed impossible to overcome; over time, they have whittled his power base down to the point where, while they aren’t expecting him to be a pushover, they now feel like the final battle is a foregone conclusion.

I intend to confound those expectations, using the campaign’s past history to even the odds…

No Loose Ends

The third ingredient that I want to mention is the wrapping up of loose ends. As these link to the main plotline, and the dominos begin to fall, this becomes just another of the ways in which “everything’s been leading to this”. I want there to be surprises (both pleasant and unwelcome) and for all the remaining loose plot threads to get tied up along the way.

It’s Always Darkest…

Another must-have in a big finish is the most devestating, cataclysmic threat the PCs have ever overcome. That doesn’t necessarily mean the most epic, or the most cosmic; it might be intensely personal. But it does mean that that the threat has to feel more intense, the danger more imminant. The final throw of the dice should always be double-or-nothing against the odds!

Everyone Plays A Part

If it’s important for every PC to have a role in any ordinary scenario, it is essential that each has an essential contribution to make in the big finish. In fact, I’ll go further and state that as much as possible, every unique major aspect of the character should have a special relevance; if a character is both the only elf and the only mage in the party, then that character should have two vital roles to play. You want the characters to feel like they had to bring everything they had to bear on the final problem in order to achieve a solution.

That usually means building in subsidiary and intermediate challenges – so it’s a good thing that you have all those loose ends to wrap up and all those past plotlines to touch on, because that’s the best place to find those subsidiary and intermediate challenges.

Satisfaction

Here’s the biggest hurdle of them all: the finish has to feel emotionally satisfying to both the Players and the GM. Achieving that can mean that some of the techniques that you might have employed in lesser encounters are off the table – no fudging die rolls to get the PCs past final hurdles. But, in general, what it usually requires is making sure that the endings are fitting to the history. The bad guys have to go out with a bang, to suffer in proportion to the crimes; the good guys have to overcome tremendous odds to snatch a memorable victory from the jaws of defeat.

For the GM, this should be the payoff for everything that he has done, every hour he has invested in the campaign. Half-measures won’t get the job done, the way you might be able to get away with in a lesser scenario; props, sound effects, prepared dialogue, accents, descriptions, encounters, personalities – they all have to be better than you’ve ever done before. This should be the performance that earns get you multiple Oscar nominations in the eyes of you’re players; there IS no tomorrow, so this is the time to give it all you’ve got! If that means a sleepless night doing extra prep, then that’s what you do.

But it’s even better to have started work on the scenario far enough in advance that you can get a good night’s rest the night before. I’ve been planning the big-finish scenario in detail for more than 6 months, and parts of it have been on the drawing board for more than two years. Plot threads have been deliberately left dangling for resolution in the final scenario for more than 5 years, and the earliest notes on the content were written immediatly after the first scenario of the Campaign.

To The Victors Go The Spoils

Here’s another point to think about: because there is no game after the final scenario, experience awards and other rewards issued after the fact generally don’t mean as much as they usually do. The implication is that rewards should be made in the course of play, even if that means that they take a form other than those that you usually hand out. That, in turn, means that extra care is needed to ensure that these rewards do not unbalance the final encounter.

The final scenario should mean that the players know (or at least they think they know) the rest of the story.

A sense of finality

Another difficult requirement is that the final scenario should feel like it’s the final scenario. Relationships should change, and things should never be the same again when the smoke clears. To some extent, this can be achieved by the tying up of loose ends, but it’s too important to leave to the side-effects.

In part, this can also be achieved by generating a sense of occasion. In the past, I’ve made arrangements for a double-length session, and a 3-day marathon finish, and for guest GMs to share the workload, and for guest players to take over their roles. I once even called in a tactical expert who never plays RPGs to run the tactics for the army opposing the PCs.
On another occasion I started the final scenario with a TPK and then let the PC’s ghosts get summoned and restored to (temporary) vitality for the final stand – nothing makes a player feel like a scenario is all-or-nothing than having them KNOW that they are going to die at the end, win or lose!

Genesis and Rebirth

Having said that, history usually doesn’t end with the campaign. Throughout the final scenario, there should be an undercurrent subplot of someone else coming forward to pick up the reins and take up the fight where this generation of PCs left off.

In the Zenith-3 campaign, the team have been responsible for the downfall of both Republican and Democratic Parties through the revelation and prosecution of internal corruption. They have emptied the Supreme Court of all but one Justice. They have put the Dons of organised crime who were responsible for the corruption of those politicians behind bars. Their allies formed the nucleus of one new Political Party (hence the new positions of two of the team members) while their Ultimate Enemy was the central figure of the opposition party during the recent (in the campaign) Presidential Elections. All victories of note, but they will all have consequences for the future. A large part of the final scenario is making the team members who are ‘retiring’ into political life aware of the problems that will need to be faced by someone else once this campaign is over. These are problems that the PCs don’t have to solve – they are merely shadows on the horizon at the end of the campaign.

The finale should sow the seeds of a future campaign (even if that campaign is not going to actually be played). The continuation of the world afterwards maintains the plausibility and credibility of the situations and encounters within the finale.

That’s my recipe…

So that’s my recipe for a big finish to the current Zenith-3 campaign. After an interrim period, a blend of the existing characters and some new ones will form the core of a new incarnation of the Zenith-3 team, in a new paralell world named “Dimension Regency”, while Zenith-2 will take the places of the existing team and continue to deal with the problems of the world in which the last 15 years of scenarios have taken place.

As one final tidbit, which I have revealed to the players, here is the makeup of the final scenario:

“The Light Of Morning” is the name of the overall scenario. It has been written in five parts:

• Part I: Elements Of Perpetuity
• Part II: Elements Of Conclusion
• Part III: Elements Of Transition
• Part IV: Elements Of Resolution
• Part V: Elements Of Regeneration

So far, we’ve played through most of Part I. Each of these 5 parts is as large as a normal scenario; the overall final scenario will take months to complete. All it has to do now is live up to its full potential…

This is always a controversial subject, and one that I was already contemplating a blog post discussing, when Johnn added the following to last week’s Roleplaying Tips:

RPT reader Brock writes:

I enjoy good role-play and developing my character’s personality. To me, that is still the primary reason I play RPGs.

On the other hand, I understand the perspective of the “ROLL-playing” gamers. I still want a “game” in the role-playing game, with some rules I can comprehend and try to leverage to succeed at tasks. I even enjoy the bit of random chance that the dice rolls add to the role-playing. Nothing like a good critical hit to give you an opportunity for good role-play!

So, I am both a ROLE-playing gamer and a ROLL-playing gamer.

Maybe an article discussing the different types of satisfaction different types of gamers get out of RPGs might make for an interesting tip?

There are two aspects to this question, and I intend this article to tackle both sides of the equation.

Putting The Role into Rollplay

This is the aspect that most GMs think of when they are discussing the subject, as they want to know how to get their roll-players to role-play. The often-unstated implication is that there is something lacking in the gameplay of those who don’t speak in character; this implication is unfairly perjoritive in my opinion. Over the years, I’ve found that players who find it difficult to communicate “in character” and resort to using third-person perspective to describe their character’s actions can be just as immersed in the game as those to whom the first person comes more naturally.

It can even be argued that these third-person “roll-players” are more deeply involved in the game as the “roleplayers” are cosntantly distracted by the need to live in their character’s heads – characters which were often designed and constructed before play began.

Instead of looking apon players whose natural inclination is less demonstrative, the GM should treat them as an asset! A game is at its strongest when you have a combination of both types of player.

Characterise Non-immersive techniques

The real problems arise out of conflict between these gaming styles and the expectations of others. The best method of avoiding such conflicts is to help the “role-player” to develop personalities for his characters that turn this emotional distancing into an aspect of the PC’s personality. The question is always, ‘why does this hesitate to push his personal perspective to the forefront’? Is he extremely cool and analytic? Is he shy? Is he humble? Does he disdain the revelation of weaknesses and personal foibles? Is he insecure? Any of these can work as explanations for a character who subordinates his personality into a greater awareness of the (game) world around them.

That solves the immediate problem of conflicting playing styles; the rest of the task is to harness the strengths of both player types to make the game better for all participants. The balance of this article will concern itself with techniques for achieving this objective.

Colourful interpretations of die rolls

The most obvious technique is for the GM to make colourful interpretations of die rolls. We all do so to some extent anyway, especially when it comes to combat; this simply expands on the use of artistic licence. When doing so, the GM should start by doing so equally for all players and for the NPCs, but the more roleplay-oriented a player is, the more they will pick up on this and provide their own colour, relieving the GM of the burdon. Encourage narrative descriptions of actions; it may slow play down a bit, but everyone will have more fun in the process.

One word of warning: it’s easy to go too far. The GM has to constantly monitor the balance between narrative interpretation and forward progress.

One technique that I’ve used successfully from time to time is to have each player make twenty or thirty die rolls in advance of their being needed. The GM then keeps these lists and works through them from first to last. This gives him a little advance warning of a spectacular success and permits him to adjust the narrative flow accordingly. Players often don’y like the technque because it is subject to abuse by the GM, who can expend the better results on trivialities, leaving only mediocre and poor results for the things that matter; but if you don’t employ the technique consistantly, instead using it just to get yourself into practice or educate the players in what you would like them to contribute in narrative when they make a die roll, it can be tolerated.

In general, I’ll only use this pre-rolling technique on occasions when I know that a particularly strong narrative element will be needed.

Results are not the whole story

In the non-combat arena, a skill check should not be a case of the player announcing his use of the skill and his die roll, and being rewarded by the results; instead, the GM should think about how long it will take for the character to achieve the outcome indicated by the die roll and describe the activities that lead to the outcome.

For a short time, the GM may get complaints that he is usurping the player’s prerogatives, but provided that it is still the player who is making the decisions and putting the words into the character’s mouth, this won’t last. After a few occasions of doing so, the GM can then select the most role-play inclined of his players and give them the time to fill: “It will take 5 minutes to achieve that result – describe what your character is doing to get the answer.”

Some players (the true roll-players) will be more comfortable leaving this to the GM; other players will quickly pick up on the opportunity and take the burdon from the GM’s shoulders. Once they start doing so, the GM can take the next step of permitting the description to take place before the roll, and awarding bonuses to the roll for excellance (and penalties for a poor performance). If a player chooses not to do so, the GM can interpret after the fact as described.

The penalties are important; without them, the GM can be justifiably accused of favouring one player over another. By keeping the risks and rewards balanced, those who are not naturally inclined towards narrative description are not disadvantaged.

Be flexible in the timing

How long does it take for a character to perform an action, or recall some pertinent knowledge? Going straight from action to result is rarely realistic, and neglects an avenue for the GM to manipulate the players in a more-or-less legitimate fashion.

The most realistic approach uses some (often instinctive) combination of the degree of difficulty and the margin of success to determine how long to keep the players hanging. My players are so used to this that they have learned to be able to aproximate the difficulty I’ve applied by how much flavour text I insert. Over time, I’ve gradually reduced the amount of such inconsequential narrative, which gives the players a genuine sense that their characters are getting better – not only can they achieve results that would have been beyond them in the past, but these results seem to come more easily.

By varying the timing, I can use this as a tool to subtly manipulate the players. Important results can be downplayed by making the difficulty appear lower than it really is, or can be played up by extending the procrastination between die roll and result, using the player’s sense of anticipation to make them appreciate the genuine revelations as significant all the more.

This is not as easy or simple as it seems; it takes practice to get it right. But the benefits are worth the effort.

Conversations with Roll-played PCs

Pidgeonholing anything as complex as player behaviour almost always involves oversimplification. Nothing shows this to be true as an in-game conversation between a PC and an NPC. While the most proficient “roleplayers” will immerse themselves in the personality of their character and handle the conversation as though they were their character, and the most severe “roll-players” will describe what and how their character is saying in the third person with no attempt to pretend to be the character that they represent, most players will fall somewhere between the two extremes.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of giving the “roleplayers” more screen time during conversations simply because adopting the persona of the NPC is fun for the referee as well. To avoid this potential problem, I deliberately use a greater level of third-party description of the NPCs conversation when interacting with “roleplayers” at my table than I do with “rollplayers”. This restores a level of equality to the overall treatment of the encounter.

The “roleplayers” absorb the nuance of the NPCs conversational style by listening when I’m speaking in character to the “rollplayers”, when they aren’t distracted by being “in character” themselves, while the “rollplayers” are better able to get into their character’s heads in ways other than speaking “in character” without being given an unfair advantage by being permitted to hold their end of the conversation at arm’s length. Over time, the “roleplayers” moderate their use of first person and the “rollplayers” pick up on the technique of speaking in first person, and eventually everybody finds a happy compromise that they satisfies them.

Handling Rewards

I like to hand out little extra rewards for roleplaying. It has been suggested to me, on occasion, that this is unfair to the players who aren’t especially good at it – the proverbial “rollplayers”, in other words. I employ two mechanisms to ensure that this accusation is unfounded.

The first is to also reward ideas (whether correct or not) based on their entertainment and insight values. These are more likely to come from the roll-players because they are thinking about the plot and the problems at hand and the bigger picture while the roleplayers are busy acting in character.

The second is to ensure that the “rollplayers” achieve their goals more quickly, and hence are rewarded more rapidly. While this is counter-intuitive, it means that the extra rewards for roleplaying are balanced by the extra time that the players take to earn them, maintaining an aproximate equity between the two.

I have sometimes left it to the players themselves to determine which player made the greatest contribution. A simple secret ballot with each player and the GM writing the names of the two or three characters (PC or NPC) they felt most earned a little something extra, add up the total votes and divide the bonus xp pool by the result – then multiply each character’s vote tally by the result to get their bonus.

Construct Characters from Backgrounds: I

A big key to the GMs capacity for interpreting roll-played behaviour as role-played behaviour is to have a solid character construction. Knowing the character’s personality, and how he thinks, and what he cares about, and what his ambitions are, and why he has made the choices in his past that he has, all provide a context for the interpretation of rolls.

Putting Rolls into Roleplay

Once your players have grown accustomed to at least contributing to the narrative, as described above, it’s time to add an additional carrot, a series of incentives for players to continue to improve.

Bonuses for Vernacular

When players describe what their characters are doing in specifics and appopriate vernacular, I allow them a bonus to the chance of success of the resulting skill roll. Roleplayers appreciate this as a reward for their efforts, while “rollplayers” will recognise it as conferring a tactical bonus to success.

Bonuses for Immersion

Similarly, when players indulge in in-character dialogue, I use the natural flow of the conversation in place of a die roll in determining any change of attitudes. This permits more sophisticated relationships to develop than are permitted under most game mechanics.

Rewards for Character-driven Choices

In a way, it can be said that characterisation only really matters when the personality of the character shapes and influances the choices that the character makes, and that these are only distinguishable from choices the character would make if they run counter to the character’s immediate or long-term interests.

That’s a potent thought. It’s also an extremist interpretation, but that does not alter the validity of the conclusion: the ultimate expression of personality is a choice that might otherwise be questionable.

The obvious implication is that good roleplay results in periodic setbacks to the character’s medium- and long-term ambitions, and that characters are punished as a result by the forfeiture of the experience that they would earn for working toward those objectives.

In other words, if you want good roleplay, you need to compensate your players for it by providing bonus rewards, proportional to the degree of sacrifice of advantage that the player commits.

Penalties for the easy road

If you are going to reward good roleplay, then it seems only fair to penalise bad roleplay. The easy road is the pathway to the Dark Side! Making choices not because they are the most appropriate response of the personality being roleplayed but because they are the most expediant path to success is bad roleplay.

Unless, of course, the personality is described as ‘practical’, ‘straight-line thinker’, ‘the ends justify the means’, or something similar…. which leads to the last point to be made in this discussion:

Construct Characters from Backgrounds: II

The preceeding paragraphs make it clear that the most important aspects of defining a character are in the imposition of limits and restrictions – in other words, defining the things that the character will do only reluctantly, and the things that they will not willingly do under any circumstance. These restrictions should emerge from knowing what the character values, and (most especially) what they are willing to risk their life for; what the character believes, in other words. This is a form of applied psychology that has a direct relevance to the roleplaying of the character.

There are many books on characterisation for movies, television, authors, and playwrights, and these can assist in developing a character definition that is of immediate and practical value from the background events of the character’s life; or, if you have a personality attribute in mind, in developing a personal background that fits this persona.

One of the very best and most useful of these that I have encountered is Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Dr Linda N Edelstein. If you want to consider purchasing a copy, just click on the cover thumbnail above.

Conclusion

Players are not truly roleplayers or rollplayers; we all have a little of both in us, and a campaign can be the stronger for having both – if they are properly harnessed. Hopefully this article will have set the reader on a path to achieving that goal, while improving the ways in which both interact with your campaigns.

No one likes a sore loser

I like games and I enjoy competing. Years ago, after getting riled up during one too many board games, I realized my competitive emotions were ruining the fun for me and others at the game table. I reflected for quite awhile on this as I took a break from board gaming. Suddenly a solution came to mind, and board games have been fun and pain-free again ever since (with just a couple of setbacks over the years). I’ll tell you my solution in a minute.

I have recently realized the solution also needs to apply to my GMing on a couple levels (pun intended!).

First, I am about to end one campaign and start another. The PCs are reaching the climactic conclusion of a 14 month long, 29 session-and-counting D&D 4E game. I cannot wait to start the new campaign, and that is making me impatient to get the old campaign done with. You know – something new and shiny is always more exciting. Plus, I am keen to try out the Pathfinder rules.

The problem is I am sacrificing game quality with my impatience. I joked a few sessions ago we should roll a d20. If the result is 10 or higher, the PCs win the campaign.

I want to finish the current campaign well, though, and my board game solution will work here.

Second, while I am GMing I constantly live a few minutes in the future. What’s the next encounter? What do the PCs’ current actions mean to my session plans? How will NPCs in the region react to the current encounter? What are my upcoming hooks?

These are important thoughts, but they have their proper time and place. And that is not during the current encounter! I get to the end of sessions and wonder where all the time went. I failed to stop and celebrate the moments.

Constant thinking three moves in advance creates a lot of needless stress too. Because I’m never 100% engaged in what’s happening now, as part of my brain is always angling to arrange the future, I’m often slightly distracted, which comes at a cost of added stress.

The solution: create the perfect turn

I realized a decade ago my board game problems stemmed from too much investment in the outcome. If I lost I took that personally. Therefore, if I was losing I would take that personally as well.

This caused me a lot of frustration during down cycles during games, to be grouchy, and to be a sore loser. Not fun!

Once I noticed my emotions hinged on victory status, I sought to redirect my competitive energies:

1. I figured out that a key to victory is to make no mistakes.
2. I have no control over luck (except in risk management). Therefore, I cannot get upset over what I cannot control, including the roll of the dice.
3. Other players are often better than me, and I definitely cannot control them. So I should let respect replace anger if they play well.

Putting this all together, I created a new gaming philosophy for myself: the perfect turn. Each turn I would play to the best of my ability and focus on optimizing everything under my control. What I could not control I would enjoy, because there is no longer shame or regret or self-judgement when you are doing your best.

I entered every new turn fresh, like I was just starting a new game. Previous turns just gave me a start that was in media res. A trick of the mind, perhaps, but not untrue. So I could not be upset over what had happened previously; it was all just feeding the starting conditions each turn.

Future turns were completely out of my control. I could try to set myself up for positive future situations and positioning right now, but with so many other variables out of my control doing my best meant gaming the current turn as well as I could without worrying about the future.

This detachment from future expectations meant I no longer cared about victory. I only cared about making the best possible choices each turn.

Making the perfect turn – one with no mistakes, every option considered, and best strategy and tactics applied – became my goal.

The effect was nearly instant. It was amazing. I immediately had more fun every game. Regardless of the results of my turns and the turns of others, I enjoyed how games played out. I enjoyed the challenge of making the perfect turn each time, though I did not achieve that goal often. Rather than getting upset at results, I now saw them as learning opportunities for my next stab at a perfect turn.

I have no idea if I won more games after that. I stopped counting. It was no longer important. Instead, I kept a mental record during games of mistakes to weigh next turn, and then watched the actions of others so I could learn from their mistakes and successes too.

I remember playing games with one player in particular who would make it his turn’s purpose – each and every turn – to counter me or weaken my position in the game. It didn’t matter what board game we were playing. And he’d do this without any attempt to win games himself. This used to bug me a lot. After my change in gameplay style, I thought this was funny. It was just another variable. I no longer took it personally. At that point, when I stopped getting upset when someone was deliberately trying to push my buttons, I realized this was the best way to play games for me.

The perfect turn for GMs

So, it is time to apply this philosophy to my GMing. I’ve got a campaign running right now. Forget the next one, I need to make the perfect turns now and end this campaign with a bang. Hopefully, a total party kill! Haha, just kidding. Maybe.

In addition, I need to sit back while in the game and just enjoy the moment. I need to think less about five minutes in the future and instead focus 100% on what’s happening now. The perfect turn requires the best roleplaying, tactics, refereeing and imagination in each moment.

To get ahead a little bit on mid-session reactions and planning, I’ll call more 2 minute breaks. While in a break I’ll think ahead.

Otherwise, the perfect turn for me is enjoying the company of friends and what’s happening in the game right now, not 3 rounds or 3 turns from now.

What is your perfect turn?

I hear from GMs periodically by email who have difficulty with certain players in their group. Some of the time I believe part of the issue rests with the GMs themselves. It takes two to tango well. Perhaps this perfect turn philosophy might help in those situations.

I’m also thinking this style might help GMs who feel overwhelmed or harried during games because there is too much going on. Maybe a solution for you is to stop living in the future and just live in the current moment?

Have more fun at every game!

In part one of this series, we presented a guest article by Garry Stahl, “The Conundrum Of Alignment”. Part two discussed the justification for alignment being part of the rules, looked at the arguement against oversimplified moral arguements, and concluded that the real problem with alignment was misuse attributable to the judgemental and morally-extremist labels that had been used. Part three offered a counterpoint to those arguements before returning to the central statement of Garry’s article and reexamining whether or not alignment really should be part of the game. It then described an alternative use of the Game Mechanics of Alignment that satisfies both sides of the question. In parts 4 and 5, I’m going to offer some practical examples from my own campaigns of ways to use these techniques to enhance your games, and generate the kind of complex moralities that Garry contended were not possible using Alignment.

Flavours Of Neutral

One of the subtexts of The Lord Of The Rings examines the conflict between a naturalistic world, in harmony with nature, and an industrialised world. This is very much a debate of our time; concerns over global warming are shaping policy decisions at the highest level (rightly or wrongly); industrial pollution has been a popular issue for activists since the 1970s (and can be viewed as a lasting outgrowth of the hippy subculture from the late 60s, if you care to); and we have been subject to repeated environmental scare campaigns of various sorts (overpopulation; the world running out of oil; the ecosystem in danger of collapse through loss of species; the ecosystem in danger of collapse from the destruction of the brazillian rainforest; the world running out of oil (again); the hole in the ozone layer; and so on and so forth) for so long that environmentalists have passed the point of being chicken little and now threaten to become the boy who cried ‘wolf’.

These issues could not be better-suited to being a source of friction and plotlines in an RPG if they were tailor-made for the purpose. There are so many possible perspectives to adopt that make for excellent sources of conflict and drama, it’s hard to know where to start; in fact, there are so many that it would be easy to go too far and overuse the theme.

In my “Fumanor: One Faith” campaign, like most D&D campaigns, questions of nature are the province of Druids, which are defined as being Neutral of alignment. Simplistic campaigns interpret this as meaning that they are colourless, with no strong opinions on anything, and are largely interchangeable in personality as a result. It was my contention that, like any organisation, the Druids would have a variety of perspectives on the great issues of the day, that they would have a variety of perspectives on the specific questions that fall within their province, and that they would have a variety of senses of urgancy about resolving those questions; as a result, they would have as many factions and unique perspectives as any other group or elected body. Those of similar perspective would tend to ally with each other, and you would get robust internal politics in the same way that you do in any Government.

In order to define those factions, and their common perspectives and plans of action and points of both agreement and conflict, I needed to be have a systematic means of examining the points of view on the subjects. For the solution, I turned to the mechanics of Alignment.

Some Backstory

In order to understand some of the differences between factions, you will need to appreciate a little of the campaign backstory.

In the “Fumanor: The Last Deity” campaign that preceeded “One Faith”, one of the PCs was a druid named Ceriseth, who was deeply concerned that the trend toward industrialisation would result in untold harm to nature. Ceriseth sought to turn aside the trend towards a confrontation between the Guardians Of Nature and human civilisation, before it turned violent; attempting through education and political reform to defuse the issues before antagonism became conflict. In the course of the campaign, he was responsible for releasing a diffusion of inteligence, awakening many semi-sentient species and giving those on the lower levels of awareness (like goblins) a step up relative to Elves, Humans, and Dwarves, the dominant species of the world. He also came into posession of an ancient artifact, the Helm Of Oak, which enabled any stand of trees (of specified minimum size) to serve as an extension of his personal Grove, animating and obeying his instructions, and allowing near-instantanious transport from one to another, abilities that proved critical in the epic conclusion to that campaign. As a reward for his service to the throne, his personal Grove was deemed to be a religious sanctuary, in effect a noble’s private estate.

In the interrim between campaigns, Ceriseth was killed under mysterious circumstances and his apprentice, a Verdonne (a more intelligent, more humanoid, type of Treant) named Briteoak, claimed the Helm Of Oak. Where Ceriseth had been a diplomat and conciliator, Briteoak was an impassioned zealot who led attacks on trading caravans and isolated farmsteads and villagers and became, effectively, an eco-terrorist. This was largely in response to a move by the government to end the tax-exempt status of the church, forgetting that the Druids were now covered by the same umbrella. Since Druids don’t take up collections, don’t ‘own’ businesses etc, they had no prospect of ever being able to pay the taxes that were imposed; what was to an organised religion merely an inconvenience was percieved as a direct attack on the Druidic Orders and their way of life.

There are a number of other threats and problems for the PCs to interact with – Church Corruption, an invading Empire Of Undead, Elvish Dragonriders (now that they have taken up the worship of Lolth), assimilation of Orcs, Ogres, and Drow into a society that was thier sworn enemies not so long ago, and the continuing conflict between the Chaos Powers and the Gods. The Goblins, meanwhile, have employed their greater intelligence to become a serious threat, mastering coordinated military actions to a far greater degree than any other sentient species. Recently, they have also begun mastering Arcane Magic – to a degree that’s impossible without tuition from someone who already knows it. The PCs have discovered that the Goblins are “collecting” Dragon Eggs for the Elves, and there is almost certainly an alliance of sorts between the two forces. These, and their implications, are the major plot threads running at this time in the campaign world.

== Campaign Side-note: In the Fumanor campaigns, every species has one knack at which they are naturally better than anyone else of equal intelligence. For Humans, its farming, which supports a greater population; for Elves, it’s a natural rapport with Life; for Drow, political intrigue; for Dwarves, mining; Orcs, survival; Halflings, handicrafts; Ogres, seige weaponry. Giving the Goblins a natural gift for military field tactics elevated the level of threat they posed and fitted with their past appearances in the Campaign, while being consistant with a naturally warlike tendancy.==

I should also explain that everything presented below was needed because the PCs, who are investigating the death Of Ceriseth, would be ‘unofficially’ present at a gathering of the Druidic Orders and would overhear the debate, and certain revelations of who had been doing what to whom – tying many campaign plot threads together. The PCs were of the opinion that the Druidic problem is a minor distraction – what they will learn in the course of the debates is that many of their bigger problems are of the size and scope that they are, because of Druidic involvement.

Definition Of Attitudes

I started the process of generating the different factions by looking at the range of issues that would matter to Druids as a whole, given the campaign world and its history. Since I knew that I was going to be applying the Mechanics of Alignment, I defined these in terms of the extremes of the perspectives.

Primary Attitudes: Pacifists Vs Militants

• Pacifist: favour negotiation, consider humans to be a part of nature. Identify with plants.
• Militant: favour violent destruction of humans; consider humans to have forfeighted any place in nature. Identify with animals.

Primary Attitudes: Populists Vs Elitists

• Populist: believe action must be achieved by targetting the ordinary citizen. Identify with grasses and herd animals.
• Elitist: believe action must be achieved by targetting the politically and socially affluant. Identify with Vines, Creepers, and Carnivores.

Primary Attitudes: Centrists

As always, two extremely divergant perspectives imply a middle ground, which I labelled “Centrists” after examining what the middle ground between these extreme primary attitudes looked like:

• Centrist: believe that it is not the place of the Druidic Orders to enforce Nature; nature will tend to it’s own. Identify with trees and other long-lived creatures.

Secondary Attitudes: Trendors vs Accusers

The dominant theological issue of the campaign; even within an alignment of neutrality, this would divide the Druidic Orders.

• Trendors: believe that the supplantation of the Chaos Powers by the Gods was a part of the natural cycle, and should not be resisted, but also believe that the Gods have been or should be supplanted in turn. Also tend to believe that the ends justify the means.
• Accusers: believe that the supplantation of the Chaos Powers by the Gods was a violation of the natural order, and the direct inspiration for the human willingness to violate the natural order. Also tend to believe that the ends can never justify the means.

Secondary Attitudes: Dominators vs Anarchists

Another divisive issue would be the role that the Druidic Orders should have – what they are, fundamentally.

• Dominators: believe that the Orders are the Stewards of nature, and are entitled to control and dominate it and its creatures. Consider the “Natural Order” to be an abstract theory.
• Anarchists: believe that the Orders are the Guardians of nature, and are required to destroy anything that seeks to harm it, however regretfully. Consider the “Natural Order” to be a manifest reality.

Secondary Attidudes: Philosophers

Once again, there is a middle ground between these extremes.

• Philosophers: believe that the Orders are the Spokesmen of nature, and are required only to enunciate and educate and advise. Consider the “Natural Order” to be an Abstract concept made manifest.

81 Flavours Of Neutral

Putting these together on a pair of familiar alignment charts gave 9 combinations of primary attitudes and 9 of secondary attitudes. By combining the descriptions of each attitude, an overall description of the ‘alignment’ resulted. Nine primary attitudes and nine secondary attitudes give 81 combinations – so the result was 81 ‘flavours of neutral’ within the Druidic Orders.

For example, for “Pacifist Populist Trendor Philosophers” I had: Believe action must be achieved by targetting the ordinary citizen. Identify with grasses and herd animals.favour negotiation, consider humans to be a part of nature. Identify with plants. believe that the supplantation of the Chaos Powers by the Gods was a part of the natural cycle, and should not be resisted, but also believe that the Gods have been or should be supplanted in turn. Also tend to believe that the ends justify the means. believe that the Orders are the Spokesmen of nature, and are required only to enunciate and educate and advise. Consider the “Natural Order” to be an Abstract concept made manifest.

This is as sophisticated a definition of a political position as you will find anywhere. More, because all possible attitudes within the target questions were considered, every possible result is listed – a systematic approach that yields comprehensive results.

Factions Analysis

Of course, the results were not very practical for use; they needed to be individually analysed and rationalised and rendered into coherant factions within the internal Politics of the Druidic Orders. More, because the questions represented by the different ‘alignment’ axes are not entirely unrelated, it was likely that some of the combinations would be incompatable.

I needed to look at what each faction would do about their beliefs, at what they might already have done, at how each faction would contribute to the debate, and so on. I wanted coalitions to come together organically from the different flavours of Neutral that I had defined.

I was greatly helped in that I knew that Ceriseth had formed the centre of a pro-diplomacy faction, while Briteoak was at the heart of a more activist faction, and I had some idea of what the members of that faction had already done within the campaign – I just needed to find the right ‘justification’ for those decisions. I also knew that for a significant change of direction such as had occurred, I needed a group of moderates holding the balance of power who could be swayed one way or the other.

As I analysed each ‘flavour of neutral’, I first tried to synthesize a coherant and consistant philosophy from the attitudes, then I looked for who they would agree with. The factions quickly took shape. Below are the results.

Factions Within The Druidic Orders of Fumanor

The Alliance Of Oak:

Patient, coalition builders. Want to reform humanity, which they believe worth saving. The Alliance Of Oak comprises 5 Druidic Orders.

• The Order Of The Scythe – Nature decreed that the Gods supplanting of the Chaos Powers was part of the natural cycle, and that the Gods will in turn be supplanted. As such, Nature is superior to the Gods, and Druids are her spokesmen. They favour negotiating with the authorities for the right to educate the common citizens in this philosophy in the same way that the Churches educate in the nature of the Divine, and believe that any means used to drive negotiations to a positive result are justified. (Pacifist Populist Trendor Philosophers)
• The Order of Honeysuckle – agree with the Scythes on every point save one: the specifically want to educate the elite, believing that meaningful change in human society can only come from the top down. While they occasionally lose patience with the Scythes, who are more patient and deliberate, the two are strong allies. (Pacifist Elitist Trendor Philosophers)
• The Order Of Oaks – also part of the Scythe/Honeysuckle coalition, they are moderates and believe that no plan that only targets one level of society can be successful; they favour a more complex approach in which a grassroots ‘revolution’ empowers selected nobles who have been specifically chosen as spokesmen within the inner circles. They also serve as the peacemakers between the other members of the Alliance. Ceriseth was an Oak. (Pacifist Centrist Trendor Philosophers)
• The Order Of The Sparrow – Agree with the Oaks but like to pretend to an independance. Oaks tolerate this because ‘persuading’ the Sparrows permits them to expound and pontificate their points repeatedly. (True Populist Trendor Philosophers)
• The Order Of The Willow – Agree with the coalition in general, but feel that no action is necessary; nature will tend to its own. The role of the orders (in their view) is to understand nature, and to preserve the truth of nature, passing it on to all who wish to learn. Swing votes within the Alliance Of Oak, these will support the more moderate Hawks if convinced that the Orders themselves are under direct threat, or that inaction is no longer a viable option, but only to the point of restoring the previous status quo – short-term engagements with defined and practical objectives. Swinging this Order into agreement with the Hawks is amongs the primary goals of Briteoak’s Moot. If he succeeds, they may even split from the Alliance Of Oak and realign – temporarily – with the Hawk Faction. (Populist Centrist Trendor Philosophers)

The Hawk Coalition

The Hawk Coalition are Impatient, sometimes impetuous, and fairly independant. They will persue their own agenda regardless of the outcome of the Moot, but want a consensus in order to gain the support of the Orders in escelating their campaign. There are eight large Orders within the Coalition at this time.

• The Order Of The Hawk – Agree with just about everything in the Oaken Coalition’s perspective, the one exception being what should be done about it. The Hawks favor an aggressive policy of containment and eventual extermination of humans, believing that it is too late for them to be saved; they have started over by educating and nurturing a favoured race to supplant humans, the Goblins, and have forged an alliance with the Elves under Lolth, who agree with this philosophy. Responsible for persuading the Goblins to aggressively target human leaders and political targets, and want the remaining orders to stay out of their way. (Militant Populist Trendor Philosophers, Militant Elitist High Philosophers, and Militant Centrist High Philosophers)
• The Order Of The Wolverine – Agree with the Hawks, but maintain a semblance of independance to serve the same function within the Coalition as the Sparrows do for the Oaken Alliance. Occasionally oppose the Hawks to maintain this ‘independance’, usually on matters on which the Hawk Coalition have sufficient consensus that their votes are unneccessary. (Militant Populist Trendor Anarchist)
• The Order Of Ivy – Agree with the Hawks. They want to persuade the moot to attack humans openly and directly so that their Goblin Tribes are not forced down the path of trying to compete with Humans in military strength, which can only lead to the spread of the “human contamination” into the Goblin culture. The leaders of the Coalition, despite the name. They especially want to target the Churches, believing that if they can be forced into line, both the Gods (by virtue of their natures) and the human political leaders will have no choice but to follow. (Militant Elitist Trendor Philosophers, Militant Elitist Philosopher Dominators)
• The Order Of The Thistle – Agree with the Hawks and Ivys, but believe that a direct threat to leading humans is not going to be enough to achieve the Coalition’s goals; they favour coordinated strikes against both the human leaders and the agricultural and natural resources that give those leaders their power. Briteoak is a Thistle. (Militant Centrist Trendor Philosophers)
• The “Baby Hawks” (Populist Elitist Trendor Philosophers) – these are incompatable beliefs. Subsumed into Hawks & Ivys, but are less prone to violent reactions within those factions. Believe in action tomorrow, not today. Known deprecatingly as the “Baby Hawks”, because they back the Hawks until the time comes to do something, then procrastinate and waver.
• The Order Of The Bear – consists predominantly of non-humans. Most rabid members of the Hawk Coalition, they favour an even more agressive all-out-war of conquest against humans. Only when humans are completely dominated by the Druidic Orders can they be rendered impotent to interfere. Responsible for directing Goblin attacks on trade routes, farmsteads, and isolated villages.
  • Militant Elitist Trendor Dominators – mostly elves, some Ogre Magi. Favour a bottom-to-top approach to the human problem, focussing on the farmsteads and villages.
  • Militant Elitist Accuser Dominators – mostly elves, some Ogre Magi. Favour a top-down approach to the human problem, focussing on the trade routes.
  • Militant Elitist Trendor Anarchists – even more extremist sub-order who don’t want to stop with conquest, the demand total annihilation of the human race. Gnolls, Bugbears, Some traditionalist/hardline Drow, some Elves.
  • Militant Centrist Accuser Anarchist – Minotaurs, Halflings & Gnomes.
• The Order Of The Wildfire – Agree with the Crickets and Wasps (below) about the Heavenly Rebellion and its relationship to the human attitude. They favour the violent destruction of humans by using their own weapons against them, finding ways to concentrate the consequences of their “unnatural perversions” apon the common citizens so that crops will not grow, and the corrupters cannot breathe, so that humans alone will suffer the consequences of their actions; want to wall off the rest of nature against them. Many Goblin druids populate this faction. Close allies of the Bears, they tend to be heard carefully as their goals are more specific and less abstract than the Bears, who are less focussed and more indiscriminate in their violent opposition to humans. (Militant Populist Accuser Dominators, Militant Centrist Accuser Dominators, True Populist Accuser Dominators, Populist Centrist Accuser Dominators, and Militant Centrist Philosopher Dominators).
• The Order Of The Cougar – A splinter faction of the order of the Wildcat, formerly members of the Arbitrationalists, they believe that Ceriseth’s envoy to human society represented the one chance that humans are entitled to, and that their betrayal of the agreements with him means that they have failed to heed the message; they have had their last chance, and to have forfeighted any place within nature and should now be crushed. Now close allies with the Order Of The Bear. (Militant Populist Accuser Anarchist, Militant Elitist Accuser Anarchist, True Populist Accuser Anarchist).

The Arbitrationalist Coalition:

Favour forcing humans into negotiation. Swing voters who have supported the Hawks in recent times. Four Orders make up this faction, which is very much a marraige of convenience.

• The Order Of The Badger – Agree with the Hawk Coalition to a limited extent, in that they believe in forcing Humans to the negotiating table by targetting the source of their livelyhoods. They desire equal status with the Churches, right up to and including an Advisor to the Court. They believe that the “Natural Order” is an artificially-imposed heirarchy, and that all nature is equal. Swing votes that currently side with the Hawk Coalition but can join with the “Baby Hawks” at any time to bring an end to the violence. Keeping the Badgers on-side is an ongoing effort for the Hawk Coalition, and much of Briteoak’s address will be directed at them. (Pacifist Populist Trendor Dominators, Pacifist Centrist Trendor Anarchist, Pacifist Populist High Philosophers, Pacifist Populist Philosopher Dominators, True Populist Philosopher Dominators; also
  Militant Populist Trendor Dominators, who have incompatable beliefs and have been subsumed into the Badgers, where they form the most vitriolic supporters of Briteoak within the Coalition).
• The Order Of The Bee – Agree with the Badgers, but want to target the elite directly. Less likely to waver until Briteoak achieves equality with the Church – which, to their minds, includes a Druidic Grove, sponsored by the Crown, in every community where there is a church, chapel, shrine, or temple. This objective is completely impractical and unrealistic. (Pacifist Elitist Trendor Dominators, Pacifist Elitist High Philosophers, and Pacifist Elitist Philosopher Dominators).
• The Order Of The Wildcat – blame the troubles on the superior position of the Gods over nature in human society, and believe the Orders should be the Guardians of nature, charged with pruning those that seek to harm it. While they favour forced negotiations like the other Arbitrationalists, they also consider this to be humanaity’s only chance; unless progress is achieved quickly, they will drift further toward the Hawks in allegiance. Briteoak’s revelations during the moot will prompt an attempted resolution to issue an ultimatum; if negotiations do not begin immediatly, they will ally with the Wildfires and demand immediate action. There are two significant subfactions within the Order: Pacifist Elitist Accuser Anarchist and Pacifist Elitist Anarchist Philosophers want to specifically target the nobles and then negotiate with the commons from a position of dominance, while the Pacifist Centrist Accuser Anarchists want to target all levels of human society, no second chances.
• The Order Of The Goat – Agree with the objectives of the Bees and with the Badgers about everything else, which makes them more practical in objectives. If they were to merge with the Bees, they would bring that Order some much-needed perspective, but they find the constant drone of arguement in favour of something they consider unrealistic, unfeasable, and quite ridiculous, to be quite irritating. The friction between these two groups ensure that the Arbitrationalists are actually one of the most arguementative and fractious factions. (Pacifist Centrist Trendor Dominators, Pacifist Elitist Trendor Anarchists, Pacifist Centrist Philosopher Dominators)

The Humanitarian Accord:

A loose alliance of pro-human orders, currently form a voting bloc with the Alliance Of Oak with whom several member orders have close associations. Most humans would be surprised and a little disturbed by the opinions of their strongest advocates.

• The Order Of The Sky – Believe that the Druidic Orders should replace the Church, and that since Humans and their Gods will never accept this, they must be destroyed before they do incalculable harm to the natural world. Extremist Hard-line Environmentalists. However, they also believe that this can never be achieved until the Gods have destroyed (or at least dominate utterly) the Chaos Powers, so these are currently pro-human pro-church. Allied with the Order of Honeysuckle in particular, and are utterly reliable members of that alliance. They are amongst the most fervant opposition to the Hawk Coalition, and (politically) are used as attack dogs when the two major coalitions collide. (Militant Centrist Trendor Dominators and Populist Centrist Trendor Dominators).
• The Order Of Earth – Agree with the Sky Order in most respects, but believe that the Gods can never succeed in destroying the Chaos powers while they are constrained by the human church.. They want to tear down the churches and ‘free’ the gods to follow their natures. As such, they are considered unreliable by the Coalition of Oak. (True Populist Trendor Dominators).
• The Order Of The Cricket – A very large group within the Accord, this Order believes that the supplantation of the Chaos Powers by the Gods was a violation of the natural order, and the direct inspiration for the human willingness to violate nature. Pacifists, they believe that the ends can never justify the means. The Orders should the Spokesmen of nature, and are required only to enunciate and educate and advise, and want to proselytise the ordinary citizen relentlessly, with or without the permission of the human authorities. (Pacifist Populist Accuser Philosophers, True Populist Accuser Philosophers, Populist Centrist Accuser Philosophers, Militant Populist High Philosophers, True Populist High Philosophers, and Populist Centrist Philosopher Dominators)
• The Order Of The Cicada – Agree with the Crickets but believe that the political and social elite will not permit the common citizens to listen or act unless they are convinced first. Favour negotiations to obtain formal permission and an immediate cessation of all hostilities. Aurella’s Brother is a Cicada. (Pacifist Elitist Accuser Philosophers, Pacifist Centrist Accuser Philosophers, and Pacifist Centrist High Philosophers).
• The Order Of The Ant – The Ants believe that it was the act of rebellion against the chaos powers by the Gods that is responsible for human society’s rebellion against a harmony with nature, a very similar perspective to that of the Sky Order. They feel that it is not too late for the Human Race, but they can only be saved if they are released from the domination of the Gods and their church. They want the Orders to be the stewards of Nature, but fear that a direct confrontation with the Gods over the primacy of Nature will corrupt the Orders to such an extent that they will no longer be worthy of their lofty position, as the ends do not justify the means; their solution is to assist the Chaos Powers in their battle against the Gods to a limited and sharply-defined victory, and that the best way to achieve this is to enlighten the common citizens of the cause of ‘all their problems’. Responsible for establishing more pro-Chaos cults than any other single organisation. The Ants will be energised by Briteoak’s revelations which they consider tangible evidence of the ‘corruption’ of the Druidic Orders that they fear, and will blame the Hawks and their ill-advised campaign of agression for the results; their opposition to the Hawks will stiffen as a result. (Pacifist Populist Accuser Dominators)
• The Order Of The Mammoth – agree with the Ants on virtually everything but see the ‘enlightenment’ of the common citizen by the ants as just a stepping-stone to enacting “true reform” – a Chaos Cult within the ranks of the nobility. (Pacifist Elitist Accuser Dominators)
• The Order of the Reed – agree with the Sky Order about just about everything but believe that the hard-liners are impatient; time, and nature itself, will achieve these ends. Do-nothing moderates, they block most calls for action on the part of the Sky Order. While Briteoak hopes that his revelations at the moot will force this order to reappraise their stance and realign them with the Hawks, they will instead seize on his revelations as proof that they were right all along, and the battle will continue. However, they will strengthen their ties with the Ants as a result of the revelations. (Pacifist Elitist Accuser Dominators, Populist Centrist Accuser Anarchist, and Populist Centrist High Philosophers).

The Independant Orders:

A hodge-podge of Druidic Orders who currently belong to no particular faction. Swinging voters.

• The Order Of The Basilisk – believe that the conflict between Gods and Chaos powers is a reflection of the conflict of fang and claw, and a part of nature. As such, they want two things: For the chaos powers to have their own, officially-sanctioned churches and church hierarchy, and for both church organisations to be subordinate to the Druidic Orders. Former members of the Arbitrationalists, with whom they generally agree, but who also support Briteoak’s current campaign of human subjugation. They tend to ignore agreements and understandings and do what they want; it was for breaking ranks with the other Arbitrationalists that they were expelled. Fervently opposed to any level of ‘deification’ of Ceriseth, who they consider to have been biased and unworthy of his place in history. (Pacifist Populist Trendor Anarchist)
• The Order Of The Scorpion – Former members of the Hawk Coalition who were expelled for arguing their point of view in Moot after the Coalition had heard all member Orders privately and negotiated a united front. Believe that the supplantation of the Chaos Powers by the Gods was a part of the natural cycle, and should not be resisted, but also believe that the Gods will be supplanted in turn by the Druidic Orders; the Orders are the Guardians of nature, and are required to destroy anything that seeks to harm it, however regretfully; the ends justify ANY means. The scorpions favour the violent destruction of humans; consider humans to have forfeighted any place in nature. However, they also believe that humans could not have caused so much trouble without the implicit blessings of the Gods, and it is they who the Scorpions hold ultimately responsible. It is their contention that the Gods oppose the Chaos Powers because the Gods want to deny the Chaos Powers their fundamental natures and make them ‘just like them’, and it is this conflict with reality that has engendered the “perverse abberations fostered by humans.” The Scorpions choose vitriolic but erudite speakers to represent them, who will rail against anyone who disagrees with the Scorpion Philosophy. They don’t expect converts, they do expect their views to be given equal time to that of any Faction. Usually vote with the Hawks because the Hawks favour aggressive action against ‘the perversions of humans’. The order is divided into three subfactions: Populist Elitist Trendor Anarchists, who want to start with the common citizens as it’s they who are doing the damage; True Populist Trendor Anarchists, who want to start with the common citizens and believe that will be enough; and Militant Centrist Trendor Anarchists – who don’t care but want to start now!
• The Order Of the Wasp – Agree with the Crickets about the Chaos Powers vs Gods conflict and its relationship to the human attitude. However, they want to proselytise every human and immediatly destroy any who do not reform then and there. This makes their agenda too extreme for the Humanitarians and too radical for the Oaks and Arbitrationalists. The Hawks think the Wasp’s plan to be naive and simplistic. Since no-one takes their proposal or point of view seriously, they tend to sit around in a huff and glower. (Militant Populist Accuser Philosophers, Populist Elitist Accuser Philosophers, and Militant Elitist Accuser Philosophers – the latter want to target the social and political elite, who should already know better, and that the nobles will force the commons to follow.)

Not represented:

There are a number of philosophies that are utterly incompatable and irreconcilable. No Orders subscribe to these attitudes, though lone (and confused) Druids may do so:
Populist Elitist Trendor Dominators, Populist Centrist Trendor Anarchist, Militant Centrist Accuser Philosophers, Populist Elitist Accuser Dominators, Pacifist Populist Accuser Anarchist, Populist Elitist Accuser Anarchist, Populist Elitist High Philosophers, Populist Elitist Philosopher Dominators, Pacifist Populist Anarchist Philosophers, Pacifist Centrist Anarchist Philosophers, Militant Populist Anarchist Philosophers, Militant Elitist Anarchist Philosophers, Militant Centrist Anarchist Philosophers, Populist Elitist Anarchist Philosophers, True Populist Anarchist Philosophers, and Populist Centrist Anarchist Philosophers.

Wider Politics

It can be argued that any political question can be simplified down to two opposing extreme perspectives, around which factions coalesce, whose members may disagree vehemently on lesser issues. When these primary political questions cease to be dominant or relevant, political alliances break up, discover new central questions, and recombine to form new political factions.

The alignment mechanism is an ideal way to comprehensively analyse party positions to guage the constituants of any political faction and contrast them with their opposition. But it works equally well in reverse – to generate political factions and opinions on the most vexing issues of the day. It might be that existing political factions appear too entrenched to divide and recombine into new parties, but it could happen at any time. All you need is an issue so divisive as to split both parties, and a weakening of their differences in other areas.

In the final part of the series, I will offer an opposing perspective to the traditional D&D labels in “Dark Shadows”.

This post is the end of a long road! It started with a guest article by Garry Stahl, “The Conundrum Of Alignment”. Parts two and three highlighted what I believe to be the causes of the problems Garry identified, and provided an alternative perspective on Alignment that turned it into one of the most useful and powerful tools at the GM’s disposal, while eliminating those problems at the same time. In part four, I offered an example of the use of this technique for the generation of a complex political structure within a single “old school” alignment, an all-neutral association of Druidic Orders. In this final part, I’m going to talk about the interpretation of alignment in my Shards Of Divinity campaign.

Dark Shadows

What is an “Evil Campaign”? Is it a campaign in which the PCs are all dark and sinister bad guys, but the rest of the world has a traditional moral focus? Is it a campaign in which the dominant powers are evil and the characters have no choice in their starting morality? Is it a campaign set in a dystopia in which the bad guys usually win instead of the “good guys always win” that we’re more accustomed to? Or is it a campaign in which the normal alignments are viewed from a twisted, cynical perspective which gives characters of any moral fibre licence to be as rotten as they want?

Most of these options can provide a good campaign premise, but when I started prepping my Shards Of Divinity campaign, and promised my players an “evil campaign”, the latter is what I had in mind. Throughout the campaign background, selfish self-interest overwhelmed everything from honesty, duty, fealty, and honour, all the way through to the parent-child bond itself.

That alone is enough to make the world ruthless, and scheming, and merciless, and selfish, and darkly cynical, but it wasn’t enough to make it truly Evil. To achieve that, I had to twist the very concepts of morality to make these acts not only ever-present and successful, but to make them moral.

In order to ensure that the players got the point, I decided to deliberately use the standard labels for alignment, and merely change the definitions. The contrast between the way in which these were usually percieved and the way I would describe them would explain the innately evil perspective of the world far more clearly than anything else could.

I must emphasise that these were not intended to be the way these alignments were percieved, as though the philosophies behind them had simply been misinterpreted; these were to be the true definitions, as expounded by the holy books of the world, as accurate a definition of the morality of the Gods as the usual descriptions are in a standard D&D campaign.

The Introduction

What follows is the introduction to the section on alignment in the House Rules for the Shards Of Divinity campaign, edited slightly for clarity. It is followed, as it was in those House Rules, by the definitions of the alignments themselves, and by discussions of various other aspects of alignment which the players needed to know about.

I must pay tribute where it is due – one of the key supplements apon which the Shards Of Divinity campaign was founded is “Evil” by AEG, and SOME of what is presented below derives from that book. As I wrote when I included it in my top-20 3.x supplements, For anyone who contemplates a campaign with evil PCs, this supplement is essential reading. It’s only slightly less useful and important for anyone who merely wants to have NPCs to throw at their players. Hey, what do you know – that’s just about everyone. Even if you aren’t using 3.x; even if your campaign isn’t fantasy, it’s Sci-Fi or Wild West or whatever; even if you’re playing a choose-your-own-adventure (!), this is still recommended reading.

The nature of an Evil campaign

Read any supplement on running an Evil Character or an Evil Campaign and you will soon discover that they all assume that being “Good” is the natural default state of sentients, and that some reason or event is responsible for pushing the character towards “The Dark Side”.

What poppycock! The Shards Of Divinity campaign takes place in a world in which the natural order is Neutral Evil, with slight lawful tendancies. It’s normal to place your own needs at the top of the heap. People unite into national bodies and other affilliations through mutual self-interest (enlightened or otherwise). If a ruler places the welfare of his people ahead of his own immediate needs, it is because that is sometimes the price that must be paid in order for him to continue receiving the perqs and fringe benefits that go with the job in the long term. The only difference lies in whether or not he accepts a reduction in immediate material gratification over other, less tangible, forms of gratification.

The World, in one sense, is pessimistic – everyone assumes that everyone else is going to put themeselves first. Some people are willing to suffer a lack of gratification now in exchange for an eternity of gratification in the afterlife, and that’s a fair-enough position to take – but thats STILL looking out for #1. And some people are foolish – there’s a sucker born every minute.

Organisations bribe (there’s no other word for it) their members with benefits for assisting the Organisation, either by amassing power and authority that can be wielded, when necessary, on the member’s behalf, or with some other reward.

The problem with attributing some need or cause to a character’s “Turn To Evil” is the question of what happens if and when that need is fulfilled. In this context, reading the “Evil” supplement by AEG makes it clear that some clarification of Alignments is necessary, given that the context assumed is so different from that which is generally accepted. By avoiding the whole concept of “Turning to evil”, that problem (which could derail the entire campaign) is avoided.

Chaotic Good

Chaotic characters think they know better. Their unifying concept tends to be ‘look out for the little guy’. They are convinced that (in general) Bureacracies are inherantly vulnerable to corruption, and hence can never fulfill their mandate of ensuring that everyone gets “their fair share”. However, smaller bureacracies can keep corruption manageable far better than the massive, bloated institutions preferred by those of Lawful Alignment. They never make plans that will take more than a year or so to come to fruition, and prefer to live one day at a time. Chaotic Characters tend to have “Fear Of The Big Guy” as their unifying factor.

They also believe that bureacracies are inflexible, and can’t keep up with a changing world, no matter how beneficial they may be in the short term, and that the ends can never justify the means, because circumstances will have rendered those ends meaningless by the time you get there.

Each CG character has a personal philosophy that they live by (whether they can articulate it or not) and tend to think that if everyone simply adopted that philosophy, the world would be a better place. No two if these personal philosophies are ever the same.

Neutral Good

NG Characters believe that some level of Bureacracy is necessary, but too much is just as bad as not enough. They often justify the satisfaction of ambition in terms of what they will be able to achieve after the victory. They think that Lawful characters get carried away with their grand plans and lose track of the practicalities of the situation, but that some level of detailed planning is necessary.

NG characters will make plans for periods of 5 to 10 years, and will tend to include strategies for early exits from plans that aren’t working out. They avoid committing themselves irrevocably to anything.

Lawful Good

LG is beauracratic. The LG character wants to ensure that everyone gets ‘Their Fair Share”. They can be generous in exchange for promised rewards in the afterlife. Usually, they consider the price, and the danger, of disobeying the law to be disproportionate to the benefits received – at least in the long term.

Lawful characters are planners, and tend to look at the big picture. They often make plans that may not be complete in their lifetime, convinced that someone else will see the project through – they are often idealists & dreamers. Good characters generally try to be popular. IT IS LAWFUL GOOD FOR A PALADIN TO REFUSE TO LAY HANDS ON A MEMBER OF THE UNFAITHFUL.

Lawful Good characters can quite happily serve an evil master, convinced that they are thus in a position to moderate more extreme villainy, or that the ultimate ends justify the means. They also believe that an unjust law is preferable to no law at all. At it’s simplest, LG characters act noble because the resulting adoration strokes their egos.

Chaotic Neutral

Chaotics tend to do what they want when they want it, doing whatever seemed like a good idea at the time.

Chaotic Neutrals are prone to consider themselves to be ‘one of the boys’ or the equivalent, neither foolish enough to waste their lives in altruism or greedy enough to put themselves ahead of the common man. They tend to ignore laws they don’t feel like following, unless seriously concerned about getting caught, and don’t believe in planning for the future, or in rehashing the past; they consider themselves to be too practical for such nonsense.

True Neutral

The True Neutral has rules – but interprets them flexibly. They care little for the welfare of the common herd, and usually have a broadly-defined social group or other collection of creatures whose interests they place in the ascendancy.

Druids, for example, are usually either floracentric or faunacentric; the first contructs a grove as a haven for plants and takes in animals as defenders of the grove; the second constructs a grove as a santuary for animals and takes in plants for the shade, shelter, and food that they provide.

The less tolerant of endless debate about philosophy a character is, the more neutral they tend to be, lacking a strong passion for any specific perspective.

Lawful Neutral

LN Characters believe that rules are paramount above all. The ability to make and enforce rules is what seperates the sentient from the beasts. It is when most tempted to break the rules that it is most necessary to adhere to them.

Lawful Neutrals do not make plans, they make procedures for developing plans – and follow the outcomes religiously. But procedures are utterly dependant on the assumptions on which they are founded, and tend to flounder when presented with a new situation, fumbling around in search of an analogy apon which to base a procedure that will generate a plan – which hopefully will solve the problem.

For example, if the application of a law is biased against the poor – for whatever reason – and the laws are founded on the premise that all are equal before them, the Lawful Neutral is lost, or worse yet, tries to add a clause to ‘even the scales’ which usually just provides another loophole for the rich to crawl through.

Lawful Neutrals are at their best coping with effects, not causes. Some have a personal code which they will employ as the guiding principle of everything they do, and which they will impose on others if given the chance, no matter how poorly it may apply. Nevertheless, if they give their word, they will honour it in both word and spirit; this just makes them more cautious about giving that word. Lawful Neutrals are often referred to as Judges, beacuse they judge everything around them according to an inflexible standard – their own, or one that they have accepted as their own.

Chaotic Evil

The unifying factor that binds Chaotic Evil characters together with others is not a foolish idealism or mediocre conformity, it’s ‘fear of the big guy’. Chaotic Evil has a reputation for being the “evilest evil” because big red dragons and “unspeakable demons from hell” were chaotic evil. There is in fact a connection, but it is actually in the other direction: Big Red isn’t powerful because he’s chaotic evil, he’s chaotic evil because he’s powerful (when you win almost any arguement by saying, “Tell it to the Breath Weapon” there’s not a lot of incentive to be reasonable or organised).

Chaotic Evil is Lazy Evil; it gets things done in the simplest and most direct way, without worrying about consequences. Chaotic Evil can also be considered “Efficiency” by its adherants. Want your neighbour’s house? Conk him on the head and move in (posession is nine-tenths of the law, or so it is said). Don’t like big, brawny do-gooders creeping into your house at night? Waste ’em. Then park the bodies where they’ll never resurface. Nothing troubling you at the moment? Take a nap, or better yet, a night off for celebration.

Chaotic Evil types tend to hang out together because they understand one another. One will quickly establish himself as the pack leader and then it’s on with the fun – and no sense of responsibility dragging you down. These groups don’t have a lot of rules or formal structures; the boss is the boss because he gets things done and busts any heads that disagree. The underlings want to be the boss, and sooner or later one will get too ambitious – if the leader doesn’t crush him like a bug first – but in the meantime…

Chaotic Evil groups are akin to bikie gangs in old 1950s horror movies – tough, mean, and unpredictable, they ride in and take what they want and then ride out – because there’s no reason to stay; they’re off to the next town ripe for the picking.

Individually, Chaotic Evil types tend to be tougher and more resourceful when cornered because they’re more likely to do crazy things like fight to the death, or meet a massed charge with one of their own. Their tactics tend to be built around mobility, surprise, and overwhelming force. But because they burn twice as bright, they last only half as long.

Chaotic Evil characters hate to back down from an open fight. They are macho, bravura, the fastest gun, the meanest dog with the toughest fleas. They would rather go down fighting than lose face.

Lawful Evil

If Chaotic Evil is the motorcycle gang who kick down your door, steal your stuff, then burn the house down for kicks, Lawful Evil is the faceless bureacracy that seizes your house through eminant domain laws, confiscates your property with a court-ordered foreclosure, puts your pet down because he wasn’t registered, and then offers to rent your old house back to you at a ‘reasonable rate’. Lawful Evil is organised, methodolical, and insidious.

Violence is the last resort, resorted to only if blackmail, bribery, threats, intimidation, and devious backroom political manouverings have failed – and then at the hands of some lackey who can take the fall if necessary.

Lawful Evil hates open fights only a little more than they hate any sort of fighting; it would much rather sneak into your bedroom, cast a sleep spell to male sure you’re really out, then put a pillow over your face. SO much tidier.

Lawful evil is all about obedience, order, and deferring gratification. Where chaotic evil wants it now, lawful evil wants it all, and if it has to wait ten years to wear you down, it will – the sacrifice will make the victory all the sweeter.

Lawful evil organisations might have a few noteworthy individuals who serve as champions and leaders, but for the most part they produce cogs in a machinery of oppression – break one and another pops out of the military academy (or equivalent) to take their place, and the machine rolls on.

They are masterminds and plotters – they will have a plan, and then a contingancy plan if the first doesn’t work. And if they are smart enough, jumping off points and plausible deniability and a backup contingancy plan and at least three hidden exits and two patsies.

If Lawful Evil has a flaw, it is that it has trouble coping with surprises and the unexpected; if they do not have a plan for whatever occurs, they will tend to flounder and make mistakes. They seek to avoid this uncomfortable situation by planning for as many contingancies as possible.

Neutral Evil

Neutral Evil people are sometimes described as Chaotic Evil with a modicum of impulse control. They both respect laws (for other people) and try to find a way around those laws for themselves.

There may be a social structure around them, but it is loosely created and even less adhered to. The ideal position for a neutral evil is one in which they opposition have been convinced to play by the rules – while the neutral evil breaks those rules at every opportunity. They are hypocrites and two-faced liers.

Their goal is not to amass wealth or power, they simply want whatever is at hand for the taking – and once they have finished with it, they will drop it in a ditch and move on. A Neutral Evil character will go to any lengths to obtain their satisfaction – patience, diplomacy, bartering, or even working with a ‘good’ group.

Where you can trust Chaotic Evil to rampage, and Lawful Evil to tyrannize, you just can’t trust Neutral Evil to do anything; they even break their own rules when they find it convenient to do so. They have no problems with impluse control, they can machinate with the best of them – but it usually sounds too much like work; it’s much better to have some flunky in the background doing all the boring stuff and simply keep that flunky intimidated, or well paid, or both.

Neutral Evils like to insinuate themselves into an existing society and abuse it for their own gain while maintaining an air of innocence.

An Evil Party

For an Evil Party to work, every member must have his own reasons for being there. The overall party will take on the characteristics of the strongest member – if he is Chaotic Evil, then so will be the party. The roles within the party dynamic will adapt to reflect this style; the Lawful Evil will carefully manipulate the leader, or try to; other Chaotic Evil types will seek to challenge the leader at the first sign of weakness; and the Neutral Evils will do whatever they want anyway – behind the leader’s back, and if they think they can get away with it.

When another character becomes dominant, these roles and relationships will change, and the party will disintigrate quickly – unless the new leader can satisfy the other members of the party quickly, giving the Chaotics the chance to get rowdy, the Nuetrals the chance for immediate gain, and the Lawfuls the chance to advance their own plots (or be convinced that the new leader’s plots mean more for everyone).

Other Alignments in an Evil Party

The definitions given above should make it clear that there is NO barrier to characters of ANY alignment working with an Evil Party, even on a medium- to long-term basis. However, there will be obvious frictions every now and then between such characters and the Evil master of the party.

Chaotic Evil characters can deal with such frictions the same way they would any other challenge to their authority – by putting the moralising scum in their place. But that is only deferring the problem. A better solution is some simple blackmail.

Neutral Evil characters, in general, don’t care – they can publicly support the ‘foreign’ perspective while doing what they want to do anyway; it’s just a question of how duplicitous they have to be.

Lawful Evil characters can cope best with other alignments in the party, and other alignments can better cope with their presence. Just as they know that they will have to provide a certain degree of opportunity for looting and pillaging to keep the chaotic evils happy, the lawful evils will know that they have to give lawful good followers the chance to occasionally do a good deed, or talk them out of some evil scheme (usually one set up for no other purpose). Letting Chaotic Good characters perform the occasional random act of kindness – in your name – helps insulate you against your true nature. So long as he has hopes of eventually achieving a greater good, the most pure Paladin can serve the vilest black-hearted fiend. And to maintain their power base and keep the support of their henchmen, the vilest black-hearted fiend can permit the occasional act of charity or generosity – it’s for their own benefit in the long run.

Players should not let the ‘darker’ nature of the Shards Of Divinity campaign, or the fact of an Evil Party Alignment, dictate your character’s alignment. It might be more challenging – and more fun – to play a Lawful Good character in the service of such a party.

INTELLIGENCE AND EVIL

Intelligent Evil

First impressions might suggest that intelligent characters would favour Lawful Evil alignments. This is not necessarily the case, though the applicability of intelligence is clearly more obvious with the Lawful Evil alignment. Chaotic Evil characters need to think quickly since they aren’t the type to plan ahead; while Lawful Evil characters can get away with less intelligence applied systematically. It can even be argued that Chaotic Evil needs to be more intelligent! Neutral Evil faces similar demands, where the challenge is to identify what they most want and hatch a short-term plot to achieve it. Since the number of personal gains outnumbers the number of potential group gains, it can also be argued that they are the most intelligent.

While intelligence can be more obviously applied to Lawful Evil, never make the mistake of underestimating the other alignments!

Stupid Evil

Once again, first impressions are that Chaotic Evil is more suited to those of lower intellectual capabilities, but this is not necessarily the case.

It is often suggested, only half-humerously, that criminal masterminds all need a 6-year-old child ‘on staff’ to spot the holes in their overcomplicated plots; a less intelligent but more diligent Lawful Evil character is better able to dispense with this. Their plots might lack some of the sophistication of their more intelligent counterparts, but the very simplicity of their plans makes them more likely to succeed.

It can be argued, therefore, that lower intelligence is more beneficial for Lawful Evil characters than Chaotic Evil ones! Neutral Evil characters rarely rely exclusively on their intelligence anyway, substituting equal measures of chutzpah and personal charm. They also derive the same benefits as Lawful Evil characters of less intelligence – being less likely to become overwhelmed by their own intelligence, they tend to be more direct and more effective. The moral: don’t let an INT score dictate your alignment; let your alignment dictate how you use your INT.

WISE EVIL

Wisdom denotes willpower, common sense, perception, and intuition, according to the PHB. This is a definition of only limited utility; Perception is divided by the system into Spot and Search, and only one of these is based on Wisdom. Common Sense is fine – until you run into a character who knows folk wisdom inside and out but has less ability to apply it appropriately than a wooden stump. If Wisdom were common sense then a mob of peasants would have a higher wisdom score than the sum of their parts – but a mob earns its name through a lack of wisdom, not its opposite. That leaves intuition and willpower – which can be rephrased, ‘the character’s ability to guess’ and ‘stubborness’, respectively. But the system uses unskilled die rolls for the ability to guess, and stubbornness is considered an aspect of personality more than a game mechanic.

Certainly, Wisdom can be interpreted as willpower, and the specific value then interpreted in different ways to suit the character, as was done above for Intelligence and the different Evil alignments. But Wisdom needs to be more than just Willpower.

Because Wisdom is the dominant game characteristic of Clerics, some attempt has been made, from time to time, to define it in terms of the characters ability to understand the Will Of The Gods and The Nature Of Divinity and so on. But where does that leave Athiests? Even extending this definition to cover the more philosophic perspective of Druids seems a stretch.

Others have attempted to look over the list of skills that are based on Wisdom in order to discern a common pattern. Heal, Listen, Profession, Sense Motive, Spot, and Survival: what does this collection suggest? The common element seems to be the capacity to interact with the world as it really is without intellectual analysis.

But, while that is a quite servicable definition in most campaigns, even covering the reasons why it should be the dominant characteristic of Clerics in a world where the Gods are real, it doesn’t quite fit Shards Of Divinity, where the majority don’t worship the Gods.

Hold up – there’s a difference between Worship,/em> and Believe In. If the Gods are defined as natural phenomena, no more to be worshipped than the sunrise or a storm at sea, then our definition still fits.

Wisdom is defined in Shards Of Divinity as the ability to react and interact with natural phenomena without intellectual analysis.

It has been suggested on various bulletin boards that a Wise character would never be of Evil Alignment, because cooperation gets better results (and is therefore a wiser course of action); and because Wise characters would know that the Gods oppose the Evil of Demons and Devils, and usually win. Unless you come from a world where good doesn’t always win, or is (at best) less clear-cut than the usual definitions, and where the Gods are not considered Divine, just Powerful, by a significant proportion of the population. Hey – that describes the Shared Kingdoms to a ‘T’!

The Shared Kingdoms is the political authority within the campaign. Nominally a democracy. But that’s a whole other discussion for some other time and place.

Wisdom is therefore no barrier to playing an Evil Character.

Article Conclusion

So that’s my basic recipe for an “Evil” campaign. It’s not a very pleasant place, and you can often feel like donating to charity to cleanse yourself after GMing it for a while. But there are some serious philosophical questions lurking in the tall grass, questions that (in due course, and if all goes according to plan) will eventually smack the PCs around the head and demand to be answered – choices of action, in other words. There won’t be any right answers or wrong answers, of course – just consequences for the characters.

Series Conclusion

I hope that this Focus On Alignment has given you the raw materials to ponder the role of alignment in your campaigns; there is nothing wrong, per se, with Garry’s answer. Or with my techniques of relabelling and/or redefining. Or even, if it’s so inherantly bound to your campaign, for staying with the existing and default system.

A simple alignment structure doesn’t have to imply a simple moral or ethical structure. The absence of an alignment structure doesn’t necessarily enhance a moral or ethical structure. Make the choice that’s right for your game – but don’t just choose what’s in the books because it’s what is in the books. Think about the question, and the implications, and Then decide.