I thought I’d talk a bit about Drama vs Melodrama and how the two function in an RPG. This subject came to mind when reading “Hooked” by Les Edgerton, a book which I would not recommend for most aspiring authors because the author defines “good writing” as something suitable only for general fiction and posessing certain characteristics. Not only do I disagree with the content on a number of issues, the advice that he offers is of absolutely no value to the writing of Scenarios, and Scenes, and so on, in a gaming context (which is why I’m not providing a link to the Amazon product page). But one of his main points early on in the book is about the difference between the two and his assertion that Drama is Good and Melodrama Bad – to oversimplify his point outrageously.

Drama

Drama can be described as “Meaningful interaction between two or more characters with intimate personal significance for at least one of the characters.” Drama doesn’t have to mean battle, or conflict, or even arguement.

There are a number of loaded assertions in that description that are worth clarifying.

• “Meaningful interaction” means that what one character is saying or doing or emoting affects the character feeling the significance – for now, let’s call him the protagonist – affects the protagonist in some way that he cares about. Drama is not a discussion about a lunch menu, or the latest football scores; it’s not trivial, it Matters, it’s Meaningful.
• “two or more characters” …it’s normal for a scene to revolve around just two characters, with the others more or less along for the ride, but groups can be involved in a drama, either as the source, or as individuals who are all personally affected by the events / dialogue / action in some way (and not necessarily all in the same way). If the drama source tells the group of PCs that one of their friends has been found dead, or is missing, that’s dramatic for the entire group, though past histories and individual relationships with the missing character will mean that they will each react just a little differently (or a lot differently) to the news. One way or another, though, it will matter to the group.
• “intimate personal significance” verges on tautology but conveys that the dramatic event is important to the individual protagonists and not merely to the group as a whole, and that this importance is a function of the personality (-ies) of the protagonist(s). Or to rephrase into an RPG vernacular, the drama requires the character to roleplay some sort of emotional nuance or reaction as well as responding with dialogue. A good actor would choke up while delivering his dialogue in reply; an average actor might clear his throat or announce that he is feeling ‘choked up’ or ’emotional’ or ‘worried’ or whatever before deliving his dialogue; a poor actor will simply deliver the reply in a monotone manner. A great actor can convey the emotional overtones without detracting from the clarity of the dialogue. The same is true of roleplayers.

Put all of these elements together and you have a scene which conveys some sort of reaction from the protagonists, whether there is one of one hundred of them.

Drama by Proxy A quick “sidebar”: the source of drama can be something impersonal, provided that it is a means of communications. A woman crumpling bonelessly to the ground in a dead faint after opening a telegram is dramatic. A clearly-depressed man crumpling his tax return forms in one hand while drinking from an open whiskey bottle in the other is dramatic. In both cases, the source of the drama isn’t actually the prop in question; the prop is just a vehicle for the drama, functioning by proxy as the “character” who is the source of the drama.

Melodrama – Dissection of a definition

There are multiple definitions of ‘Melodrama’ out there. My dictionary talks about ‘crude appeals to emotion’. The Edgerton book talks about Melodrama being the firing of a gun, or an explosion, and tries to imply that in ‘good writing,’ melodrama is only acceptable when it is the inevitable outgrowth of previous drama. The example to which the author returns, time and time again, is Thelma & Louise, which – to go by the gushing praise lavished on it – must have been the best-written movie ever made.

It is only towards the end of the book, where the author is lamenting the shrinking market for “General Fiction” and relative growth of what he describes as “Genre Fiction” at his local bookstore that I percieved the necessary context in which to interpret his statements about melodrama – to wit, the books that were selling like dinosaurs were those which accepted his definition of melodrama, while those that were crowding them off the shelves (and out of the cash registers) were those which routinely utilised what he would term melodrama.

An Alternative

So I reject his definition as both self-serving and unhelpful. We’re talking about an RPG, which by definition includes stylised representations of some form of violent conflict, usually protracted – and within which, such activity is not only acceptable, it is gosh-darn-it necessary.

That means that we need an alternative, one that distinguishes and defines Melodrama as distinct from ‘Hyper-drama’, which is acceptable or even essential, under certain conditions, which form part of the definition. So here it is:

Melodrama is action which has been unjustifiably escalated in excess of the game’s story needs. Anything else is acceptable.

Once again, a definition full of loaded assertions.

• “unjustifiably” implies that any action that the GM can justify in terms of substituting for exposition is acceptable. In other words, instead of telling the players that the region they are entering is populated with dinosaurs, a minor combat encounter with small ‘saurs is a better approach – and should put the characters into the right frame of mind for a later encounter with a T-Rex or whatever. A wandering monster should never be a meaningless random selection from a table – unless that table is specific to the region or environment, in which case it can serve as reminder, or new exposition. Whenever the dice indicate a wandering monster, the GM should view it as an opportunity for the players to discover something new about the world – even if that’s only that it’s even more dangerous than they thought!
• “escalated” and “in excess” suggest that there is some less violent way of resolving the situation; this is the crux of the ‘official’ definition. It means that you shouldn’t have a mild-mannered reporter whip out a 44-magnum in the middle of an arguement with his editor, because it’s out of character. The reaction is too strong for the character and circumstance that’s been established. It means that the bad guys don’t perform acts of superfluous violence just to show that they’re evil – they should always arise out of some need or desire of the character, and hence inform the audiance (the players, in this case) of the character’s personality, even if they don’t have the context (yet) to understand them. And the level of violence should always be the minimum that is appropriate to the situation.
• “the game’s story needs” – there are those GMs who treat themselves as authors, and the PCs as his literary monkeys. I’m not one of them; I consider a game to be a collaboration, in which the GM puts the PCs into an interesting situation, lets them find their own way out of it, then uses the ramifications, implications, and consequences to generate a new interesting situation. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a story; it just means that the players are co-contributors, and that the ‘protagonists’ have a ‘life’ of their own. There is a marvellous quote in the the Commentary (I think) to the Fellowship Of The Ring from Fran Walsh, in which she states “We found that it wasn’t necessary to tell the audiance about Dwarves; you simply hire John Rhys-Davies and he’ll show you what Dwarves are all about” (or words to that effect). That’s the position of the players – experts brought in to bring life to a central character beyond what the GM could do on his own.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

Well, we’ve established that a game consists of drama, ‘acceptable’ melodrama, and filler – the latter including trivia, ephemera, background, narrative, and exposition (naturally, you want the bare minimum of filler to connect one dramatic scene to another). We’ve established what Drama is, in an RPG context, and what ‘acceptable’ melodrama is – and, by implication, what is not acceptable. Sounds to me like we’ve covered the topic…

Divine ways are not meant for mortal minds

In the first post about gods and the Cypher Gate in my upcoming Riddleport campaign several readers supplied great ideas. Thanks to that feedback, I have a better picture of how things are in the pirate city. The secrets of the Cypher Gate as it is in my game, with reader feedback interwoven, are now revealed.

If you are a player in my campaign, please stop reading, as spoilers await thee.

A massive stone arch that spans Riddleport’s harbour. It seems to be indestructible, though it is a bit weathered, revealing unfathomable lengths of time or other forces could wear the gate down.

Three wagons can travel abreast over the arch, and locals say it is 3000 paces long. Measurements reveal the arch is twelve cubits tall at both ends, which appear to be buried miles deep into the bedrock of the world itself, and 8 cubits tall at the peak.

It does not radiate magic, though true relics never do.

Strange glyphs, the height of a man in his prime, span the arch on both sides. The glyphs seemingly have been carved out of the arch. They are interspersed unevenly, with gaps of varying distances between them, making some think runes exist out there that will fit into the spaces, while others think the arch awaits new carvings.

The brightest and wisest and most knowledgeable of Golarion have studied the arch over the centuries without the slightest idea of why it exists.

A guild of mages dedicated to unraveling the Cypher Gate’s secrets has formed in the city that lies in the arch’s shadow. Known as the Order of Cyphers, it welcomes new members who seek to study the phenomenon for themselves. A huge bounty is offered to anyone who can glean any insight into the gate’s existence or purpose. The guild jealously guards access to the gate, however, and all who might take a close examination must be granted the privilege by the guild’s strange leader, Syzzinar.

The truth

The Cypher Gate is actually constructed of the immortal remains of the Primals, explaining its near invulnerability, and its weathering, as the Primals are imperfect beings.

The arch is a member of a series of arches that litter the planes of existence. It and its brethren were crafted by the Primals as a mechanism for elevating mortals to divinity. The arches form a primordial switchboard, allowing Ascended to draw power from their plane to maintain their exalted status and powers.

Each Ascended is attuned to the arch of their home plane. And each plane has its own gate, often buried and lost in time and memory, though the Divine and Ascended never forget the gate they are attuned to.

The glyphs are created at the time a mortal Ascends. A rune is carved out of the archway through the blind power of the Primals, and this becomes the attuned shard of the Ascended. With a small expense of power, an Ascended can change the physical properties of their shard to better hide, carry or wield it. As the shard is part of the arch relic, it does not radiate magic either.

The glyphs are free morphemes of the Divine language. This language is power unto itself and drives the structure and state of the universe. Mortals can never understand this language, and to just glimpse the partial meaning of a single character is enough to drive a mortal insane.

The Ascended draw power from the shards, which are safely regulated and downgraded to a controllable level by their associated arch. Distance does not diminish the link between shard and Ascended, though a shard cannot leave the plane of its gate, with one notable exception.

An Ascended can transport their shard to their Divine patron’s plane by expending ongoing power. As divine power is costly to recoup, few do this, and when they do it is only for an hour, day or week at most.

The Cypher Gate is aligned to the cardinal points, though not the cardinals of its plane but to the universe itself. A rune’s location on the gate signifies an Ascended’s immutable orientation:

Law – East
Chaos – West
Good – North
Evil – South

As the arch has finite dimensions, which implies limitations on the number of Ascended a plane can support, and the portfolio mix of alignments is fixed.

The Ascended know they must protect the gate at all costs (even though it is seemingly invulnerable) because if it goes, they all go. Divine or Primal power could be spent to damage or destroy a gate, but that has never been successfully accomplished.

If an Ascended is slain, their shard returns to the arch and the glyph disappears, ready for another similarly-aligned mortal to Ascend. For the arch on Golarion, this has not happened in centuries, though it was witnessed by a few whose journals (in various forms) have been lost through the ages.

The Divine connection

Embedded in each glyph is a representation of the affiliated Divine. This connects the Divine with his agents. For mortals it facilitates direct communication, domains and spell imbuements. For Ascended it allows at-will travel between their home plane and the plane of their Divine, bequeathment of Divine power points, and telepathic communication between Ascended servant and Divine master.

Any Divine can attune themselves to any Cypher Gate and use it as a portal to enter the plane. Divine also draw Primal granted powers, power points and other boons via any gate except those that are diametrically opposed to their alignment.

Few know that Ascended can be killed by mortals. Fewer know that each Divine has a unique weakness that can be exploited by mortals (such knowledge is usually accompanied by a Divine hunt, some sport and then a long and painful death).

And even fewer throughout the planes know that, with proper ceremony, a glyph on a gate can be turned into a scrying portal using its associated shard. A mortal must hold the shard of an Ascended to its glyph on the arch. This will reveal the true name of its linked Divine (the meaning of the glyph). Speaking the true name will gain the mortal speaker instant knowledge of the Divine’s Achilles heel. Unfortunately, the Divine is instantly alerted to this and can use the arch to determine the identity of the blasphemer.

Finally, the descendants of the Servants of the Primal are still around as aberrations and the like. Some work (ala the Serpent Priests in Raymond E Feist’s novels) to release their masters from their confinement, while others work to maintain their current state of independence. This puts the Cypher Gates in jeopardy from time to time as a cult successfully learns how to tap into the power of an arch and turn it back on itself, usually through imprisonment and abuse of an Ascended as the key.

Plot ideas

My Riddleport campaign does not yet have a plot. I’m still crafting the major pieces, such as figuring out the Cypher Gates and defining a few factions. However, here is a list of potential gate-related plots I could draw from, either as epic campaign threads or short term developments. If you have any ideas, please leave a comment and I’ll add to this list.

• As Mike pointed out, there is irony that arcane casters control and study a divine relic. Should the divine nature of the arch be gleaned, the temples and mage’s guild would conflict. The Order of Cyphers depends on the gate, as discussed, [https://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/mage-guild-mastermind-survives-pirate-haven/]. Plus, it’s unlikely the arcanists would allow the balance of power to shift to the current balkanized temple factions.
• False shards. Information about a false shard could pop up at anytime. It could just be another relic, a magic item or a piece of junk. Either way, it will be wrestled over, experimented with, studied. Rumours will abound and a spotlight will be cast upon the gate in the game.
• Someone has a glimpse of understanding of what a rune means and goes insane. Can the PCs help decipher the madman’s ramblings/drawings/prophecies? Perhaps the NPC leads them to several adventure sites or encounters of conflict within the city.
• A journal of someone who spotted a glyph being created or destroyed is recovered but it’s cryptic. Another fight over an item and information, drawing the PCs into conflict. Likely they are the ones who discover the journal, but they might be hired to steal it or examine it as well, regardless of the owner’s intentions.
• An NPC in Riddleport is coming close to becoming an Ascended. While they consolidate their power, other Ascended are concerned such an event would remind Golarion what the Cypher Gate does, and jeopardize the balance of power they currently hold on the plane. Meantime, the would-be Ascended has yet to choose a patron diety, and several Ascended have been instructed to convince the NPC using any methods possible.
• A mad god and his Ascended seek to destroy the gate. An aberrant cult comes to town and stirs up all sorts of crazy.

Thanks to C. Rader, Robert and Mike for the ideas and feedback.

This will be an unusually brief post, inspired by Johnn’s reprise of his hits-and-misses when it came to his 2009 resolutions, which you can read here, and by the fact that this post will appear on New Year’s Eve, 2009.

It all revolves around some thoughts I had while pondering the question:

Why do people make the same New Year’s Resolutions year after year?

Reasons for failure

There are many possible reasons for the failure to fulfill a Resolution, leading to it being listed again and again on someone’s “to do” list.

• Some are meant frivolously, and are treated that way by the people making them.
• Others fail because priorities change in response to outside events.
• I’m sure that people lose interest in them sometimes, and that can also be a valid reason for the failure.
• Sometimes, fulfilling another Resolution takes so much time and effort that something we had previously achieved goes by the wayside, so it has to be listed to do all over again.
• And it’s not all that uncommon for resolutions to depend on outside factors that the maker has no control over, or for a resolution to be completely impractical.

It’s when we get to resolutions that the person is both serious about, and capable of achieving, that things get more interesting.

• Sometimes, what we’re talking about are low-priority tasks that don’t get fulfilled because other (more interesting) activities distract the person making the resolution.
• Sometimes, the unexpected forces a deferment of the fulfillment, but when that happens repeatedly, we have to start looking at the previous answer with suspicion.
• Sometimes, the person making the resolution severely underestimates the difficulty or inconvenience that’s involved in keeping the resolution.
• And sometimes, the person simply has no willpower for the keeping of the resolution – they make it as a promise to themselves because they think it’s expected of them, with every intention of actually fulfilling it, but they don’t really want to do whatever it is.

Three Types of Resolution

To my mind, there are three types of resolution. These are the ought-to-do’s, the self-improvement, and activity resolutions.

Ought-to-do’s are Resolutions that are something the person thinks they ought-to-do, or ought-to-want-to-do. These are trivial and meaningless because they are never backed by serious intent.

Self-improvement Resolutions are a statement of intent to change something about yourself or your habits. It might be to lose weight, or learn to speak publicly, or whatever.

And Activity Resolutions are a statement of intent to do something more often, or do something less often, or begin or complete or at least further some particular activity or objective. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is to eat fewer peanuts or write the Great American Novel, but it’s some concrete and objective task whose progress can be monitored. It might take minutes or all year long to achieve.

Note the difference between the latter two types – the objective might be to lose weight (by whatever methods are necessary) or they might be a specific goal (eat less cake) whose health benefits are a side issue.

Character’s Resolutions

At this time of year, I’m often tempted to ask players what their Character’s “New Year’s Resolutions” are – and, equally importantly, if they fail, which of the above will be the reason they expect to put forward, if speaking honestly.

Like all such questions, the actual answers don’t matter a whole lot (though GMs can use the information as a resource in planning scenarios during the year); the real value comes from having another tool to get inside the head of a character.

The question applies equally to NPCs, of course.

The Virtues Of The Question

In fact, it serves a quadruple benefit to whoever answers it; not only does the question itself define an objective of the character, and offers an insight into the character’s thinking, it helps to define what the character considers important, and – by implication – describes what the character percieves as a fault or flaw in themselves or their lives at the current time. In an NPC, being able to key all of that to the answers to two simple questions makes it enormously quicker and easier to define the NPCs personality succinctly.

That’s a lot of soup to get from such bare and simple bones.

But why stop there? Every organisation has plans and objectives – “New Years’ Resolutions”, if you will – that they want to achieve. Some realistic, some pie-in-the-sky, some with detailed action plans already in hand, and some waiting for an opportunity to present itself.

I know some players and GMs don’t take such questions seriously, and that’s fine; but if that’s the case, why not try it sometime and see if it rewards you?

Have a safe, prosperous, and happy 2010, everyone.

A campaign killer is falling behind on planning and preparation, especially once a campaign starts. You soon lag and feel unready to GM. Then stress builds, fun flees and sessions get cancelled.

This post is inspired by tips on beating procrastination over at RPG Atheneum. Alric discusses four procrastination motivators and a few tips to overcome putting things off.

I’d like to build on those tips with some additional techniques I’ve used to overcome putting off campaign planning, preparation and maintenance. While I don’t get into specific methods of campaign prep here, as there are ways to plan less so you can play more, I will provide great methods to keep planning momentum going so you feel confident about GMing.

Short bursts regularly

Make your planning sessions short. Having to carve out multi-hour planning periods is nigh impossible in busy schedules. Short sessions can be squeezed into your life much easier.

If you are not in the mood for campaign prep, having a lengthy planning session ahead of you adds even more pain and makes it less likely you’ll start. You will always be able to find a reason to not do your GM planning. Something can always be prioritized higher, be made more urgent, or seem more interesting. That will never change. This is true for any activity you procrastinate on.

Instead, short bursts can often get you to your computer or notebook or binder to do a little planning. Some authors say the most difficult part of writing is geting the courage to begin each writting session. Once they start, things go well. But the build-up, anticipation and growing dread causes them to skip many hours of productive writing even though they always enjoy the act of writing whenever they get through the start-up barrier.

Prepping in short bursts is effective because it increases your chances of starting. Once you start and get into the flow, you’ll find short sessions sometimes become long ones – at your option. The key is doing whatever you can to just start the activity.

Be like snow

Watching it snow one day as a child I could not understand how one fine snow flake could shut a whole city down. A flake is so small, it melts in your hand in an instant, it’s so light you can’t feel it. Yet, once it starts snowing, you can do something for awhile and then look outside and see how the ground is covered and the snow is piling up.

The key I realized that day was consistence and persistence. Even though there was so much space between the flakes, and flakes seemed to be falling in slow motion, the snow kept coming. Seconds became minutes, minutes became hours, and unrelenting snowfall built up into a half foot of the stuff. Amazing.

When it comes to campaign planning and maintenance, be like snow. Put in consistent and persistent effort. Plan daily. Plan in short bursts if that works for you, and make those bursts happen every day or at least several times a week.

If you don’t know what to do next, pick anything. Just keep at it. My default when I get lost with the weight of my to do list, or get stuck on what to prioritize, is to make an NPC or short encounter. Even if I don’t get to something with higher priority, I at least got a new game element I can use next session.

Imagine doing a 15 minute planning burst every day. In a week that’s a little under two hours planning accomplished. In a month, that’s about seven hours accomplished. In a year, that’s over 90 hours of campaign prep! Each little 15 minute snow flake eventually builds up into a deep carpet of campaign planning. Err, you know what I mean.

Getting started is a skill

A little secret of the daily short bursts method of beating procrastination is you eventually build up a skill at getting started on the task at hand. You figure out how to sweep aside the tricks your brain plays. You learn to recognize all the excuses and reasons why you manage to avoid the task. You build up muscle when it comes to getting over fear or false feelings of pain.

Getting started is a skill. Start often to learn how to become better at it.

Schedule your time

If you wake up each day not knowing when and if you’ll do some campaign planinng, chances are it won’t happen. You might have a vague idea or desire, but that is part of the reason why it won’t actually get done.

“Ok, tonight after work I’ll get out the books and do some prep.” Then the work day ends and you feel too tired to get into it, so you put it off for a couple hours. Then when that time comes you feel unmotivated. After that, your favourite TV show is on. Before you know it, it’s time for sleep. “I’ll get to it tomorrow night.” Repeat ad infinitum.

Get yourself out of this trap by scheduling exactly when you will do your campaign prep. Perhaps you set aside Saturdays from 10am till noon. Maybe you can get some done every lunch hour. You might have great success by getting some done first thing in the morning.

That last one is my choice. How great is life when you can get up and work on your RPG campaign for awhile? Can’t make it happen? Why?

I solved it by not doing email. The 30 minutes it used to take to check my email each morning was a time sink. Only rarely was some hot issue burning that came to my attention thanks to an email check in the morn. Instead, 99% of the time I’d do a “quick check” that became a half hour or longer email session because I couldn’t resist making a few replies to trivial correspondance or clicking on a link to something interesting (that could have waited until later) that lead to another click and another.

When I get up now, I make a quick skim of my inbox. Emergencies I’ll tackle right away, but they are so rare that I don’t mind the lost planinng time. Everything else waits until I’ve got my D&D campaign planning and other daily routines done.

Prepare for planning

You’ve carved out the time and found the courage and willpower to sit up at the table to do some planning. What now?

First, create a default. If you ever get paralyzed, immediately perform your default planning action. Some examples of great defaults:

1. Create an NPC
2. Layout a skeleton for an encounter
3. Write out notes from last session
4. Organize next session – scheduling, notifications and other logistics
5. Create a location
6. Create an interest reward: a mundane or magical item, or a cool social reward

Still can’t decide? Roll 1d6 at the start of your planning session and refer to the chart above. :)

It’s important to have a planning system in place. How do you prefer to organize your notes and game materials?  How do you prefer to take something from an idea stage to session-ready stage? How do you prefer to record all your ideas as they come to you?

Get your planning systems in place first if you find yourself consistently at a loss of what to do and how to do it.

A nice way to end a planning session is to setup your next planning session so you can jump in right away tomorrow. Make a couple notes of what to do next time so you can act immediately.

Those are my ways of beating procrastination. What do you do?

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…