I received a box of Campaign Coins for review and they are fun, high quality game props. They must be great because the box packaging has no less than six exclamation marks in the text. :)

Each box contains 121 detailed coins depicting four metal types in 1, 10, 100, and 1000 denominations and 1 random 500 denomination collectible coin.

• Copper: 10×1, 10×10, 5×100, 5×1000
• Silver: 10×1, 10×10, 5×100, 5×1000
• Gold: 10×1, 10×10, 5×100, 5×1000
• Platinum: 10×1, 10×10, 5×100, 5×1000
• One random 500 piece

The coins look and feel like metal, and they have a wonderful weight to them. They also have awesome designs that will add atmosphere to your games. Reviewers before me have gone into great detail about this game master prop, so I won’t cover old ground. They get a thumbs-up from me. For more information, check out the reviews below.

Reviews

• Gamer Bling review
• Paizo user reviews
• Forum thread at The RPG Site (pics)
• Treasure Tables

7 Gamey Uses

So you’ve purchased a box of Campaign Coins, and maybe an expansion pack or two. What can you do with them other than the obvious pile of coins on the table treasure use? Here are several ideas to help you get more long-term value out of them as you game master.

1. Gamefull Props

Add an element of gameplay to the standard use as a treasure prop to make these coins even more entertaining.

• Improve presentation by putting the coins in an interesting container. Use a dice bag as an NPC’s coin purse and toss it to a player when it’s been found. Get a cheap jewelry box and place coins in the “chest.” Bury a coin in a plate of spaghetti and ask a searching player to put their hand into the “monster guts” to see what their character finds.
• Create several coin purses with different total coin values in them. Put the purses on the table and have players pick the one their PCs find. Do they pick the small purse with few coins in it, the large one that jingles merrily, and that weird small box? Put notes inside purses for special events, such as trap or magic effects. Add glass beads to act as gems. Add dollhouse miniatures and toys to depict magic items or interesting clues.
• Make them cursed coins, ala Pirates of the Caribbean. Use pennies, bottle caps, or poker chips to supply lots of coins, and save the Campaign Coins as a special, cursed set of legend. Perhaps the coins have a compelling boon, which makes the decision to keep or toss them difficult. Perhaps whoever touches a coin first cannot get rid of it no matter what they do, and the coin attracts monsters or brings bad luck. For additional fun, try to hide coins on player to trap them with the curse. For example, sneak them into their dice bags, knapsacks, cell phone holders, or jacket pockets.

Here’s a tip from Djoc via the Paizo message boards:

“Here’s how I use them: I combine them with item cards in small pouches, and give them to my players when they search a room or monster. With denominations, I can easily produce treasures that have very big amounts of some coins, without having to buy a truckload of coins of each metal. With the 120 coins provided in this product and a couple item cards packs, I can prepare a whole dungeon’s treasures. And since I let my players count the money, they actually count for a minute or two, not for an hour, if there are 1387 gp and 3253 cp in the box they open….”

2. Use Them For Quests

Make the coins objects of a quest. Can the PCs collect them all? Maybe they need to find the collectible 500 one that comes in the Campaign Coins box? Or perhaps they have to collect all the platinum ones.

Here’s an example quest. The Coins of Avandra have been sprinkled throughout the kingdom by the god of luck. They are in forgotten dungeons, buried in nobles’ vaults, and lost in old collections. The coins have magic properties that manifest when they are “spent” by flicking them into the air with your thumb. Better magic effects are possible by spending several coins at once. It’s up to the PCs (and their rivals) to collect the coins and decide when to cash them in for desired effect.

Possible coin effects might be:

• 1 coin = +1 luck
• 5 coins = magic healing
• 10 coins = roll on a random table like that for Wand of Wonder or Deck of Many Things
• 50 coins grants the big spender an audience with the god of luck

Another way to build that chart above is to use total value spent instead of the number of coins. This gives you more options to mix and match coin placement. For example, instead of 10 coins getting a roll on a special effect table, the PCs must spend 5,000 gp value of coins.

The coins disappear after use, and they actually return to the god of luck who then hides them again in a hundred years or so elsewhere in the kingdom for rediscovery.

3. Create a Backstory

The coins have various art and graphics on them. These icons and symbols are perfect for storytelling. Use them to reveal the history of your world or a cool portion of an adventure backstory. Perhaps gameplay requires PCs to have to show the rights coins to the right NPCs to get the whole picture for a grand clue. Or maybe all the symbols create a gate-opening password.

On a more mundane level, ask why did the coinmaker craft the coins with this specific art? Who commissioned the coins? Are they currently in circulation or are they from a past age? What information can be gleaned, and what story elements can the PCs link together, when you hand each coin type out for playerinspection?

4. Clues

The coins are worth more as clues than as exact currency in your campaign. While the total value of coins in a box is considerable, making exact change might be difficult and time consuming. For example, a treasurehorde of 121 coins would knock out your whole supply, including the collectible coin.

Instead, use the coins as clues for your encounters and adventures. Perhaps the coins discovered in treasure piles or on bodies tie eventually to an NPC. Perhaps the coins are of a foreign mint, providing a clue of origin for whatever context in which the coins were found. Perhaps the coins are the call sign of a villain the PCs are after, and the NPC delights in leading the PCs alonginto a trail of challenges and traps.

5. Markers

On a meta-game level, the coins are big enough to serve as excellent markers during combat. Coins can be used as minis, or with minis to mark effects or statuses.

In my campaigns we use pocket points. Campaign Coins would make excellent pocket point markers. Some game systems have action points or player points. These coins would be great for tracking those as well.

6. In-Game Games

If you have gambling games or betting games in your campaigns, such as poker or casinos, these coins make excellent player props that will add atmosphere as characters ante into the pot or play the slots.

7. Real Player Pick Pocketing

Campaign Coins make a satisfying clinking sound because they actually are metal. Next time a character picks a pocket, try a real life player challenge. Put a dice bag with a few coins in it in a coat pocket, slightly sticking out. If the group hears any clinking as the player tries to remove the bag from the pocket, then either the attempt fails or the following dice roll for the actual attempt gets a penalty. If the player succeeds, then either his character succeeds or he gets a +5 on the roll.

Don’t miss any game master tips and advice. Subscribe to our blog via RSS feed or signup for free Campaign Mastery email update alerts.

This is the third part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; the second identified four ways of communicating the uniqueness of the result to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots, and examined the first two, Expression and Behavior more closely. This part will deal with two more communications channels: Reactions and Appearance, and the fourth will detail methods of extending the cultural description into other areas of society.

3. Reactions

People from a unique culture will react to what the PCs say, and do, and to what they DON’T say and do, and often in ways the PCs were not expecting. It’s always both entertaining and realistic to have a variety of reactions that conflict with each other, in front of the PCs. This immediately raises the value that they will place on getting to know the culture, as they will usually want to pick their fights rather than being blindsided by them!

For example, let’s say that the PCs emerge from the tent in which they have been bartering for some knick-knacks to give away to people in other locations as “exotic gifts”, or meeting the civic leader, or whatever. The GM describes a religious procession taking place as they reach the streets. The women in the crowd of bystanders are covering their faces and looking downcast, while the men all turn to face the sunset and drop their headgear to the ground at their feet. The PCs have a choice; they can either do as the locals do, or not. If they do as the locals do, some zealot can take offense at the mockery they are making of a sacred rite, while another defends them as attempting to show respect. If they don’t, they can be accused of disrespect and sacrilege by a hothead, and defended by one as being barbarians who can’t be expected to know better. Either one sucks them into a deeper relationship with the society – and ensures that the PCs will make the other choice the next time!

Ignorance is no excuse

The point about the outsiders being considered ignorant barbarians who don’t know how to behave deserves recapitulation. This is something that explorers in strange cultures had better get used to, because it’s near-universal; at least some members of any given crowd will think that way, no matter where the visitors are from.

The strongest reactions will stem from the things that the culture most cares about. Smart PCs will learn to identify these so that they can use them as levers to persuade people to do what the PCs want them to do, and to get the PCs out of trouble.

The Yokel Factor

The other factor to be always borne in mind when describing incidents and reactions is what I call “the yokel factor”. PCs tend to use logic and attempt to argue their way out of situations, taking advantage of their arm’s length remove from the action of the game instead of reacting with emotion; to the local yokels, any arguments that are over their heads are just a load of bullsh*t, and will arouse anger, if anything. If the PCs attack something that the locals feel strongly about, they won’t often react with logic or argument – they will usually consider the words to be a trap, attempting to seduce them over to “The Dark Side”. A crowd of Yokels can turn into a mob at a moment’s notice, and a mob’s behavior is dictated by it’s least-stable members!

Are the GMs in the audiance having fun yet?

An example from the Seeds Of Empire campaign

In one of my campaigns some years ago, the PCs were captured and locked up by the priests of the local religious movement by being overconfident. Knowing virtually nothing about the society in question, they attempted to use logic on their guard, who was being played as a guest character by a player who could not attend regularly. The player made the mistake of being persuaded by the PCs words when they attempted to undermine his religious beliefs,
and those of his society – a temple guard should never be so willing to betray his faith, but the player was off his game that day! Nevertheless, he ended up joining the party and helping them escape, saddling me with an NPC that was never intended to be there. Even the players said afterwards that they didn’t expect their tactic to work!

As soon as I took over the resulting NPC for the following sessions, he began actively but surreptitiously working against the party. He was giving the party enough rope in the hopes that they would lead him to other heretics, while secretly carrying an item that would enable the military to track him, all the while doing his best to appear a loyal and convinced member of the party. All that the PCs had succeeded in doing, as I reinterpreted events after the fact, was convincing him that the PCs were too dangerous to merely execute; less-devout members of the society might be swayed to heresy by their evil arguments.

This worked because the PCs only ever saw and reacted to his behavior, not what was actually going on in his head. His Behavior did not change – only the motivation and purpose behind it.

Naturally, there were small hints and clues in that behavior – the occasional slight hesitation while he thought of the correct way to respond to a PCs statement or question, for example, or the occasional misplaced expression. Over time, the PCs began having second thoughts about trusting the turncoat – not that they were ever fully convinced to start with! Much later, it was discovered by all of them that the religious practices of his society were eroding the boundaries between dimensions. The NPC was convinced by this startling revelation, delivered by a Celestial messenger from the Gods, came clean, and redoubled his efforts to be a valued member of the party, working toward their goal with all his strength and ability and knowledge.

In reality, he had cottoned on to their feelings about his loyalty, and their intention to betray him when he was most vulnerable. By throwing them into just a little confusion about where his loyalties now lay, he had distracted them into making a tactical mistake – the energy pseudo-plane where he was most vulnerable was now behind them, and the energy pseudo-plane where he was strengthened and reinforced was now approaching. They were quite surprised when he attacked from behind! In his dying declaration (I try to give one to all PCs and ex-PCs, and to significant NPCs), he told them that their words were clever, and plausible enough to be dangerous, but no matter what his head told him, this was a question of Faith; he had seen through the deceptions and past their lies, and had given his life in the service of his people.

The character was originally conceived as a religious zealot, a Temple Guard and Junior Priest – and that’s what he remained until the end. But his reactions were never quite what the PCs were expecting: philosophy and treason (against his people) and heresy (from the point of view of what he had been raised to believe) when in a position of dominance, honesty and self-sacrifice and loyalty (to the party) when he was most expected to betray them, and most vulnerable to attack – a form of moral judo that has kept the players guessing until the end.

4. Appearance

…of characters

You can tell a lot with someone’s appearance through the principles of symbolism and iconography. Making the people’s costumes representative of some aspect of their cultural foundations permits the description of the character to do double-duty: not only describing the individual, but ‘sneaking in’ bits of the culture. Take a close look at the DVD extras on the Lord Of The Rings concerning subjects like designing the costumes and weapons for the Riders Of Rohan, and the Elves, and so on, and you will catch on very quickly.

…of objects and architecture

But it’s not just the characters whose appearance can inform the players. ANYTHING of the culture can be designed into a clue from the information generated when creating the culture, from the shape of the candlesticks to the architecture. There is a BBC series called Time Team about a group of archaeologists that travel to a different archaeological site with each episode and investigate it over a three-day period; the reconstructive methods and detective work that they demonstrate in interpreting what they find is a masterclass on this aspect of informative description. Sadly, the series has never been released as a DVD boxed set – I would buy it in a heartbeat. But there are a couple of DVDs out there featuring selected episodes, and these are a strongly recommended investment. It’s quite amazing how much can be determined from so little; if it didn’t happen right before your eyes, you would not not believe it. The same principle can inform and educate your players, without you ever needing to lecture them.

A source of scenarios

You can create a detective-style subplot, with spot rolls and knowledge rolls as appropriate, and let the PCs draw conclusions from the snippets of description that you provide. This is generally a purely role-playing scenario, and not enough to stand alone, but integrating it with a more general plotline is fairly easy. The outsider who is the only person everyone trusts (or mistrusts equally) to solve a politically-sensitive crime is an obvious example. Something strange going on down in the sewers is a tried-and-true classic. Having an enemy creature present as a diplomat, protected by the word of honor of the local chief, busy running around stirring up trouble, is an entertaining choice that I’ve used in the past; before the PCs can begin undoing the problems he or she is causing, they have to get to grips with what is acceptable behavior and why. This is especially effective if the troublemaker has spent some time in the culture and learned what ‘levers’ to pull – the players can actually see knowledge of the society working against them!

Benefits to players

The culture itself becomes a source of inspiration, enriching the campaign both directly and indirectly. By creating scenarios that directly derive from the campaign setting, the entire campaign becomes more tangible to the players. Further, by showing that the outcomes of those scenarios will become the building blocks upon which future scenarios can derive, it gives the players a sense of ownership of the campaign and a deeper level of involvement.

Benefits to GMs

On the other side of the GM Screen, having a culture defined this solidly makes it far less work during play to bring it to life. It shortcuts some of the creative processes for the future by simplifying cultural descriptions into root causes and practical ramifications, while sustaining and concentrating the uniqueness’s that distinguish this society, and this campaign, from any other run using exactly the same rules set. And, as free bonus, it helps bring scenarios to life and offers opportunities and suggestions for new ones!

This article will conclude in part 4, to be published here soon. Subscribe now if you want them delivered straight to your inbox!

Pakistani man praying

This is the second part of a four-part article. The first part gave a relatively straightforward technique for creating a unique society; this part and the next (which were originally intended to be the whole article) gives some techniques for conveying the uniqueness of the resulting culture to the players, selling them on its credibility, and exploiting it for scenarios and subplots. The fourth discusses how to extend the technique and results into other areas.

A different society makes itself apparent to the PCs without a lot of briefing material in 4 ways: What the locals say, How the locals behave, How the locals react, and What the locals and locale look like.

In other words, through Expression, Behavior, Reaction, and Appearance.

1. Expression:

A brief snippet of dialogue in another language, no matter how poorly rendered by the GM, helps to cement in the player’s minds that this IS a different culture. Translating key nouns and names into appropriate language enables them to be inserted into normal speech and acts as a constant reminder, and as a spice to encounters and scenes.

The best approach is to select an appropriate human tongue and find an online translator, then render the result back into something more-or-less phonetic. Thirty minutes spent compiling a list of terms and names and place names, and translating them, is time well-spent. Instead of describing something as a sword, referring to it constantly as a Tetsashi (an invented pseudo-oriental term I came up with on the spot) not only serves as a constant reminder that it is not a sword, but that these are not your feudal Europeans. It SELLS the difference to the PCs.

It also provides a slight accent to your voice that also helps in making the new society real. “Tetsashi komo ka buku sa” is gibberish, but it SOUNDS very impressive, and repeating it to yourself each time one of these people goes to say something will bring a distinctive lilt to your voice. To get in character with the Pseudo-Hungarian accent that he used in Babylon-5 as Londo Mullari, Peter Jurassic had only to say to himself “Mister Garabaldi” in the unique manner of Londo to be able to deliver pages of dialogue in character, with accent.

Dealing with Tongue-twisters

If the phrasing doesn’t skip off the tongue easily – and sometimes it won’t – work with the result, extending the vowel sounds to fill the gap until you can get your tongue around the next consonent. One of the characteristics of the language might be that it is slow to speak!

Or you can introduce an easily-pronounced one- or two-syllable extra phrase into the language that you insert whenever your tongue starts twisting, Baroom-ba-doom! This should be part of the Key phrase already, or appended to the phrase following a comma or dash. It should feel like part of the key phrase – the “baroom-ba-doom” wouldn’t fit with the “Tetsahi” example phrase, but something like “Ka”, which is present in the middle of the existing phrase already, would.

A useful tool In-Play:

I like to create an index card with the key phrase on it, or to put it in the page headers when writing a scenario based around the society. That way, I always have it at my fingertips.

2. Behaviour:

The generation method for new societies focused on perceivable differences and the social imperatives, history, and pressures, that had created them. The whole point of this approach was to determine how the behavior of this unique society could be made obviously, visibly, different to the PCs.

The result should be a number of different behaviors that can be simply described – without explanation – to the PCs each time they hit the streets. There will obviously be some aspects of the behavioral uniqueness that will be better saved for private conversations, so pick and choose from amongst the consequences you’ve identified.

Emotional Responses to Stimuli

It has been pointed out by philosophers a number of times that we can never know exactly what is going on in someone else’s mind; the best that we can do is to observe behavior and reactions, equate them with our own experiences, and by inference and association, make assumptions about what the other person is feeling. If you see a character’s nostrils flaring, his eyebrows lowered, eyes tightly focused in an unblinking stare, teeth gritted, and cheeks flushed, we can infer that they are angry. But even then, the human tendency to seek self-control gives rise to a number of opposites. Some people become ice-cold and rigidly controlled in anger, others have no self-restraint at all and immediately act on their rage. It is often quicker and easier for the GM to simply state “He’s angry,” but for the players to be able to really feel the anger, the full list of expressions has to be recited.

That said, over-use weakens the effects. A good compromise is to use just one of the expressions each time (a different one), and to do the rest with tone of voice, either by description or by the GM’s performance. Reserve the full list for when it really matters, or when the reaction will be unexpected.

Non-Western Cultures

But the preceding paragraph is all about creatures that are basically human, and western in cultural orientation. Most RPGs feature characters that do not fall into those categories, either constantly or occasionally. Many Asian cultures express anger with increased calm and emotionless; their sentences become shorter and more declarative, and their phrasing and manner less emotional, but those are the only outward signs of anger. They may be seething inside, but do not show it lest an enemy gain advantage (perhaps the most perceptive PC might notice the slightest hint of narrowing of the eyes, or something similar).

Non-Human Cultures

And that’s still within the range of ‘human’ – how do Elves express anger? Biologically, they are NOT human. How about Orcs? These differences should, as much as possible, be extensions of the fundamental concepts of the races – so Orcs, who are prone to violence, might express anger by becoming restless, shifting from foot to foot, ready to charge.

Player Contributions

Some of this work does not have to be done by the DM; if a player is running an Elven character, a pleasant evening (or a long email correspondence) can be spent discussing how the Elves will express different emotional states. This then becomes part of the ‘Bible” for that race in this particular campaign, to be used as the basis for other elves.

Show, Don’t Tell

But we have wandered slightly off-topic, so let’s get back on track. The PCs, through the GMs description of NPC behavior, observe activities and reactions that are – in their experience – abnormal or unusual. They can ask their local guide (if they have one) why certain things are being done, or a bystander – but often few of them will know the answer, and even if they do, they may struggle to articulate it. At best, the PCs should be able to discern the subject matter of the cause.

When they meet someone who is better educated on the relevant subject, they can ask them – but a better education usually brings with it a personal perspective on the world and a personal agenda to go with it, either or both of which can, and usually will, color the response.

On the other hand, the PCs can ignore the behavior – which can create problems for them when they expect people to react in certain ways and don’t get the expected reactions. A character attempts to start a fight by insulting an NPC, only for the NPC to respond in kind, laughing harder and harder the whole time. Or perhaps a joke is a mortal insult to a grim and humorless populace.

Orcs: An example

The slightest difference can have a huge impact: Orcs are often portrayed as violent, hardy, resistant to disease, and – by human standards – disgusting. They are also often viewed as poor, living in wastelands where life is a constant struggle (and where no others could survive). That implies that food is hard to come by, and that waste would be a huge affront. Perhaps, like the Inuit, they would use everything and waste nothing. A rabbit would be dressed, and the intestines used for crossbow strings or laces or glove fingers; the fur would be used for clothing; everything edible would be consumed, then the bones used in a soup, then they would be dried and bleached and carved into bone needles and small daggers and jewelry and cups, and heaven knows what else. Perhaps the use of a metal sewing needle is perceived by Orcs as a rejection of the bounty of the earth? But more importantly, how does the concept of “waste nothing” and the characteristic of “resistance to disease” impact funerary habits? I would submit that it might well be accepted and acceptable practice to consume the bodies of their own dead, and that a social custom would rise around this. Since this practice would enable the tribe to survive otherwise impossible times, it would be a time of celebration, a feast commemorating the dead and thanking them for the magnificent gift of fresh meat, bone, and worldly possessions. The practice would also have religious overtones – the death might be viewed as a gift of the Gods, a noble sacrifice made to strengthen the tribe.

If the PCs were to rock up announcing the death of the Chief’s son, “but we gave him a decent burial”, they would hardly be expecting a warm welcome, but would probably be enormously surprised when every Orc tribe in the vicinity swore blood feud against them and their species for ‘desecrating the dead’. Or, if they were on a diplomatic mission, they might find themselves in a very awkward position on being invited to a feast!

The more the GM understands the behavior of different cultures in his game, the more scenarios will emerge naturally from in-game events. This gives a campaign a foundation and depth that money cannot buy!

This article will continue in parts 3 & 4, to be published here soon. Subscribe now if you want them delivered straight to your inbox!

Uru Island, South America

This post is being simultaneously posted here and as the feature article in Roleplaying Tips issue #433. Subscribe to the e-zine here if you haven’t already, and check out some of the GMing Articles (including three by yours truly: ‘Dragon Characters For Eberron’, ‘Putting The Fear Back Into Disease’, and ‘On Feats’) while you’re there.

It’s relatively easy to create a new culture for your game. Creating one that makes sense is more work, but also more worthwhile. Expressing the difference is a lot more work, and apt to be boring as hell unless you enjoy lecturing our players and they are in love with the sound of your voice. Bringing the culture to life in your player’s minds WITHOUT droning on or giving your players all the answers from the back of the book is harder still – unless you know how to cheat! That’s where this blog series comes in.

Step 1: Point Of Distinction

The first step is to create the new culture. In order to do that, you have to pick a point of substantial difference between this culture and the usual one within your game. Write it down at the top of a very long list, which you’ll spend some time adding to. Put a big “1” next to it.

Step 2: Causation

The second step is somewhat trickier: explain WHY the culture is the way it is, in a new paragraph labelled “2”. If the difference is a form of behavior, explain how and when and why this behavior arose. If the difference is a philosophical one, who first articulated the difference in philosophy, what events in his life equipped him to conceive of it, how did this philosophy become dominant in society, what did it replace, are there those who still follow the old ways, and so on and so forth.

Step 3: Consequence

The third step is more difficult still: with one numbered sentence each (from “3” to “whatever”) to explain the difference, identify as many areas of everyday life as you can in which the difference in culture makes a difference to the manner in which the ordinary action is carried out. What are the ordinary things that happen to ordinary people on an ordinary day? They rise, they bathe, they dress, they eat, they travel, they work, they purchase goods and services, they play games, they come of age, they marry, they bear children, they raise children, they celebrate, they mourn, they show respect, they show disrespect, they argue, they are arrested, they are tried, they are convicted, they are punished. One or all of these may be affected by the change in society. Once you’ve finished, you can put a tick next to “1” and “2”.

Step 4: Ramifications

The fourth step is even more arduous: identify the ripple effects. Each of the sentences numbered “3” and higher might itself affect one or more of the others. So for each one, go through this list again, looking for secondary effects. Number these “something-A” “-B” or whatever, where “something” is the original sentence number. When you’ve finished with a sentence, put a tick next to it (so that you can always tell where you are up to). If the ripple effect stems from sentence four on your list, the first of the ripple sentences will be “4a”, the second one will be “4b” and so on. DON’T REPEAT SOMETHING THAT’S ALREADY ON THE LIST. You will find that there are far less of these than there were original sentences. You’ll also discover that your concept of the new culture is ‘gelling’ in your mind as you go.

Repeat step 4 until every sentence on your list has a tick next to it. Don’t neglect the original topic, either: one difference in the way the members of this society eat may inspire a different one on the same subject. don’t be afraid to add to the list either – “they dress” implies laundering of clothes, and clothes for different occasions, and the farming of whatever the clothes are made from, and so on.

You may also discover the need for extraordinary capabilities, or perhaps that was the initial difference that you came up with. A society in which guilt or innocence is automatically and infallibly recognized in its members through some form of mental link would be very different from anything else out there.

Step 5: Compilation

Step 5 is to take all of these notes and rewrite them, forming a paragraph on each of the ordinary activities (and any extraordinary abilities). By numbering the sentences in the way that you have, you will find that all the “Threes” relate to a single topic, all the “fours” naturally group together, etc. In essence, you are using these notes as guides and reminders to help you articulate what you have in your head as briefly and succinctly as possible.

Along the way, you will often find that you identify a different “key difference” as the one responsible for everything, or may add further differences to explain and justify it. Make a note of these, highlight them, but don’t start over! These really are the key – starting from these core concepts, you should be able to recreate the society even if all the other notes you have made get lost. Reading these back to yourself should be enough for you to ‘place’ yourself, mentally, within the new society – a handy trick when the time comes to GM them!

Step 6: First Reactions

Step 6 is append a key paragraph describing how this culture reacts to strangers of different types and reputations. In other words, to the PCs. This has been left to the very end of the process because that’s when the new culture is clearest in your mind.

Step 7: GMs Primer Notes

Finally, step 7 is to take the highlighted sentences and write a one-paragraph introduction/summary of the society that you’ve created. This is your primer, designed to remind you of the ideas behind the society, so that when something comes up that you havn’t translated into the cultural idiom of that society, you will have the tools you need in order to do so.

This article will continue in parts 2, 3 and 4.

GullSide City - for game use - thanks to Cartographers Guild

I never understood mindmapping until I read one of Tony Buzan’s books, saw numerous examples, and clued-in. For game planning and tracking, mindmapping is now one of my essential tools.

My mindmapping tool of choice is FreeMind, a free application you can download for Windows, Mac, and Unix. It’s a natural fit for documenting relationships. For example, locations > NPCs > personalities; session notes > open loops, consequences, ideas > campaign elements.

FreeMind for RPGs Introduction

Go read the FreeMind for Roleplayers article by TheLemming for an overview. You might also want to check out epic preparation – p7 – politics by the same author for more mindmapping examples.

The beauty of FreeMind versus paper is you can brainstorm or document, and then change the structure – move things around – as you write. When I plan for game sessions, I’ll leap from one idea to the next, in no particular order once I get going. Sure, I could use a list or spreadsheet, but FreeMind lets me drag ideas around and connect them to other ideas, like one of those free form-word fridge magnet sets. After a bit of reorganization when I’m catching a breath or done with ideas mode, I can clearly follow relationships, which makes ongoing reference easy, even during game sessions. In addition, any new ideas or developments are quick to append or insert.

FreeMind Tips

TheLemming has covered some great instructions and tips for using FreeMind. Here are a few more gleaned from use:

• Use the direction keys (or ESDF) to move around. You could mouse around, and maybe I’m old school, but my vote is don’t make my hands leave the keyboard until necessary. ESC key takes you to the root node.
• Use INSERT key to create a child node. Use ENTER to create a peer node. Fast and easy. Don’t let mousing slow your flow of ideas. Just keep creating new nodes as required and then organize them later. Capture those thoughts.
• Use the Notes feature. There’s no shortcut for this unfortunately. Go to Insert > Note. Paste or write all the details you want here.
• Use node background colours to communicate more at a glance. For example, give NPCs red, blue, and yellow bg colours for evil, good, and neutral alignments. This simplifies your mindmap (one less node for each NPC, one less word per NPC). It also creates a neat metric: what is the balance of alignments in your cast of NPCs. I found with my Carnus campaign that I had more blue than yellow, more yellow than red. I need more bad guys in my game.
• Get friendly with Export. A great method is to export your maps to HTML for posting on your blog, website, or wiki. Other options include image maps, JPG, SVG, and PDF!
• Link like crazy. Use the linking feature to hook two related nodes together (click on one and get taken to the other – great for huge maps), link to files, link to your campaign website, link to DDI and other online references, and so on.
• Toggle nodes on and off (open / close) to make the view simpler to look at and digest. For example, only open the node you are working in and leave the others closed. Use SPACE to toggle nodes on and off quick.
• Change selection method preference to By Click. FreeMind installed by default for me with node selection via mouseover. I found it difficult to work this way and prefer, when not using the keyboard, to select nodes with a mouse click. As maps grew I found I had to weave in and out with my mouse carefully or accidentally select nodes, but choosing By Click fixed this. Go to Preferences > Behavior > Selection Method.

What about you? Do you use mindmapping? Have any FreeMind tips?

Don’t miss any game master tips and advice. Subscribe to our blog via RSS feed or signup for free Campaign Mastery email update alerts.

“We can make it better than it was before – better, stronger, faster.”

(Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad)

Well, it’s done. Almost 6½ hours of effort.

That’s what it took to completely remove and replace every category and tag, and then reassign them according to a new and comprehensive scheme of organisation that Johnn & I have been working on for over a month. The Categories should now be more consistant and – for the first time – have actually been defined in terms of the content they will contain. The tags have been re-organised, and often re-named, to make them – and the tag cloud they generate – more user-freindly both to the flesh-and-blood readers of this blog posts (AIs can take care of themselves!) and to the categorisation schemes of other blog networks.

Hopefilly, all this effort has been worthwhile, that our readers find the blog a more user-friendly environment, and that no-one in our readership has been inconvenienced in any way. (If they have, I apologise on behalf of us both). Normal service has now been resumed!

“Don’t Bore Us, Get To The Chorus”— conventional wisdom in the popular music industry, also used as the title of Roxette’s Greatest Hits compilation album.

I’ve blogged before about my Seeds Of Empire campaign. Following our last session over the New Year’s holiday, a problem arose that I had not had to deal with before, in all my 25+ years as a DM. I obviously gave the issue a lot of thought over the next few days, as I had only a couple of weeks to resolve it and get ready for our next session.

Over the last two years (we normally only play once a month), the PCs had been running through what was effectively a dungeon in which each of the levels was based on impure derivatives of the different elemental planes (and the last two on the negative and positive energy planes, respectively). While these had been revealed to be significant to the overall campaign, the players took a lot longer to get through them than I (or they) expected. The idea was excellent and quite original, emphasising different challenges throughout; and I thought that I had anticipated the need for an acceleration, with the longest time being allocated to the early levels (air, earth), getting progressively quicker. The last two levels (positive energy and prime material planes) took only 6 and 5 hours of play, respectively, to complete; the one before it, only 2 eight-hour sessions; and the one before that, only 3 eight-hour sessions. And, while there was some frustration over the pace of progress, that was now in the past, forgotten (at the time) as that significance – shedding light on the backgrounds of some key NPCs and evolving the relationships between them and the PCs – came to light and a lot of seekingly-unconnected plot threads started coming together to form a bigger picture.

In the final scenario, all these microplanes were united to form a new Prime Material plane alongside the original. The next stage of the campaign was to involve a tour through this new plane, discovering what was there and how the populations of the microplane had emerged from the most singular act of creation ever experienced by the PCs, and how they had adapted to their new reality. (Sorry if the language is a bit florid, I’ve just been watching a DVD of The West Wing. It rubs off after a while!)

So here’s the problem. The original concept was great, the encounters (all original, never-before-encountered lifeforms) were entertaining and challenging, and the resolution of the “dungeon tour” had been interesting and even Worth The Wait (according to the players themselves) – but they were all micro-planed out, I could tell. (That’s an essential skill in a GM’s repetoire, the ability to read his players). They needed a change of pace, and instead, they were to be confronted by the biggest planar exploration mission of them all. The ideas had sounded terrific when I first drafted them, but had persisted for too long.

This was not the result of anything I had done, or done wrongly, but because new players had dropped into the campaign, with new PCs and promises to stick around for the long term, had stayed just long enough for the campaign to be expanded to introduce and include them and give their characters their own plot arcs within the overall scheme of things, and had then dropped out (or were dropped out, in one case). No matter how good the idea had been to start with, it had overstayed its welcome as a result.

The issue at hand was how to compress and compact this New World into something that could be dealt with in only a couple of game sessions, and yet still captured all the themes and subthemes that it was supposed to contain, and still conveyed the sense of wonder that the PCs should experience when travelling within it. Originally intended to be four sessions of play, the PCs would only tolerate one or two, in my estimation. How do you do that?

Being a GM involves a lot of different disciplines. There are rules, interpersonal skills, ethics, genre knowledge, simulation dynamics, tactics & strategy, mapmaking, illustration & graphic art, politics, science, history, story structure, narrative composition, and the list just keeps on growing from there. But one of the most fundamental arts to the DMs craft is Communications. The players in a game occupy a unique position in a campaign as both participants and audiance, and it’s easy for the latter role to overshadow the first with bad refereeing, leading to plot trains and other abuses – so much so that these problems are considered a sure sign of bad GMing. But oftentimes, DMs are so busy shying away from any suggestion of a trend towards the problem that the role of the players as audiance is ignored, or forgotten altogether.

It was in this Communications discipline that the solution could be found to my problem, or so it seemed to me. Writers for TV have been developing ways of compressing information to fit stories into arbitrary but fixed parameters ever since the medium began – and that’s an exact parallel with the situation that needs a solution. Most (if not all) of the tenets of media writing adapt readily to a gaming context, one way or another, and a number of them provided the essential tools to solve the problem.

Before you can communicate something, you first have to know what you want to communicate – that’s simple common sense. So, before I could look at how to apply these tools to solve my problem, I had to work out what the information actually WAS that I needed to convey.

1. A sense of scale
2. A sense of wonder and grandeur
3. A seemingly untouched world – a paradise
4. A sense of how the nature of the world changed during the merge
5. Show that the new world is derivative of the planes absorbed in its creation
6. Show how the transition has affected the inhabitants of the microplanes
7. Explore the Political, Social, Religious, and Scientific ramifications
8. Show that the new world is still a dangerous place
9. Clarify the role of the new world in the divine Master Plan

In addition to all of these, I knew that I had certain fixed scenes that were already “written in” to occur, either because they were logically necessary, or because the party were already intending to do them:

a. Entry to the new world
b. Consecrate the world to the gods (erect a temple)
c. Meet the inhabitants / reunite the party
d. First Corruption / First sin
e. Departure, closing the portal

With the problem now defined in specifics, I could get to work on a solution by considering how to apply the tools of communications:

• condensation – make each scene serve more than one purpose.
• illustration – a picture is worth a thousand words. A photograph of some natural wilderness from my collection of clip art, perhaps photoshopped to include some features that the PCs will recognise, will confer 1, 2, 3, and 5. This should be part of scene (a).
• example – one combat, carefully chosen, can make item 5 even clearer and demonstrate 8 at the same time. This could be in any of the scenes, but it makes the most sense if it occurs during the first extended travel – so in between scenes (b) and (c) is the most logical point.
• narration & scene transitions – fade in, fade out, etc – if, immediatly after that one combat, I use narrative to describe the rest of the trip and simply mention other battles briefly, I can describe the entire trip in a paragraph or so of narrative. I can then ‘fade in’ on the next significant scene. The players won’t object if they still get the XP that they would have recieved from those otherwise meaningless battles, in fact they’ll appreciate the brevity. That one combat, if well chosen, can represent a half-dozen encounters. This is therefore part of the introduction to scene (c).
• narrative flashbacks – when the party reach the populated centre (scene c), one of the locals can describe what they experienced during and after the coalescance. That deals with 4, 6, and (partially), 7. But since scene (c) already has a lot of work to do, rolling it into scene (d) makes even better sense.
• analagy, symbolism & metaphor – these are all forms of shorthand to include additional meaning, layered on top of more overt statements. Using these, I can hint at more of 7, and at 9; the former in scene (c), and the latter in scenes (b), (d), and (e).

Using the tools of communication and script-writing, nine plot objectives had now been rolled into 6 scenes, of which 5 were already scheduled to be played through anyway. Each scene now had a set job to do, which would guide me in crafting content for the scene. They were still loose enough that there was no suggestion of a plot train. The sequence is driven by logic, the only possible variation being whether (b) follows (a) or (c) – that’s up to the PCs, but it’s my expectation that it will be early on. So long as I was flexible on that point, everything else was straightforward roleplay.

It was now completely clear exactly what needed to be done in prep work before the next session of play. And all the things that had been giving me major headaches – the need to integrate six seperate geographies, each with their own ecologies and physical laws – had gone away. The scenario had gone from being a mountain of work to being the labour of just one evening.

Never forget the dual roles of the players in a game. They are participants, yes – of equal measure to the DM – but they are also an audiance, and sometimes it can be in the game’s best interests to treat them like one. So long as you don’t pre-empt a decision by them, it can be more rewarding.

For more information on the tricks of the trade when it comes to writing for television, check out DVD extras that feature writers and producers (“The Lord Of The Rings” commentaries and “Babylon 5” commentaries are excellent), read books on the “making of” TV series and movies (there’s a lot of stuff on Star Trek in this regard, for example), and so on.

I started to write this as a comment to Johnn’s post “Undead Are Taking Over. What Happens?”, but realised that my comments were so extensive as to require a post of their own. Note that this is an extra post, my usual blog entry for the week will follow in a day or two. Here’s my analysis of the situation in Johnn’s Carnus campaign:

This is now the Defining Event of the campaign. It will affect everything and everyone in some way. Many of the suggestions other readers have made are excellent, but present an incomplete picture. In terms of the populace, there are 4 different relationships with the event, between them defining many sub-populations, each with its own reactions to the event.

1. Religious orientation:

Individuals of strong religious orientations will react in one of four ways: offensively, defensively, altruistically, and corruptly.

• Offensively: Religious bodies that are so inclined will ignore the upheaval generated by the arrival of the undead and strike at the heart of the problem – the undead themselves, and the Shadowfell opening that is spewing them forth. On the other side of the equation, there will be the occasional undead of greater ability and sentience and evil that has his own plans – be they for revenge, or conquest, or even redemption!

• Defensively: Others will seek to strengthen protections against evil in general. That includes blessing a lot of city walls, and preparing seige-engine sized vats of Holy Water to rain down on approaching undead, and so on. But human nature has always been a little dark at times like this; some will blame the PCs (quite rightly), some will blame their patron (who was fool enough to trust a mission of this importance to such imbeciles), some will blame adventurers in general, but most importantly, some will blame whoever they already have an axe to grind against. Witch-hunts will be commonplace, and puritans and holier-than-thou religious zealots will be coming out of the woodwork. It is quite likely that Wizards and strangers will be amongst the first to be singled out, followed by the old and infirm, the diseased, the criminal, the morally ambigious, and only then, the evil and corrupt. All in total sincerity, of course! These include C Rader’s marvellous Death Cults.

• Altruistically: A third subgroup will want to protect and shelter and rescue the victims and those displaced by the on-rushing hordes. There will be safe corridors set up and maintained, way-houses, checkpoints, etc.

• Corruptly: And then there will be those who will seek to take advantage of the situation – to settle old scores, to elevate their personal power, to drive people back to the church, to fleece the flock, and so on. Johnn’s Con Men also fall into this category. I can also foresee a number of Devils and Demons popping into local throne rooms promising to protect the city or Kingdom in exchange for a tythe of souls – a trifling one in four… (whether they can or not!) And a bunch of lesser devils and demons offering personal protection. Especially with so many of the religion-oriented heavyweights who would normally oppose them being busy elsewhere.

2. Political orientation:

Individuals of strong political orientations will react in one of four ways: offensively, defensively, altruistically, and corruptly. This group includes traders and professionals of all kinds, who are usually bound together in guilds (ie political bodies), and other special interest groups. Of course, at least initially, ignorance and disbelief will be the order of the day. Then, there will be considerable debate amongst the advisors and members of each political body about how to react. Coordinated efforts will arise only slowly, and probably long after the magnitude of the disaster becomes fully aparrant (more on this later). At least one kingdom/barony/whatever will probably declare war against another that has been overrun, thinking that the flood of refugees constitutes an invading army.

Mundane authority reactions will parallel those of the religious types. Laws will be passed. Armies will be moved into strategic positions to redirect the flow of undead into an enemy nation just as a dam can redirect the flow of a river. Defensive civil works will suddenly become top priority, just as everyone gets conscripted to build walls of sandbags when a town is threatened by floods. Unproductive labour will be banned. Minor criminal offenses will result in the equivalent of being sent to ‘the russian front’. At the same time, some kingdoms will prepare shelters to protect their leading citizens – the equivalent reactions from all those “something from space is coming” movies, from Armageddon to Independance Day – they are all analagous to the situation.

More militant kingdoms might mandate a state religion, or attempt to nationalise the churches (and churchMEN). Long-forgotten treaties will be reactivated, and negotiations will commence aimed at forging new ones, even with old enemies. All the old power balances will be disrupted.

At the same time, you can consider the flood of refugees as something akin to a horde of locusts. Some kingdoms will open their borders, some will close them. At least one will probably be more generous than they can afford to be and will experience mass starvation from drastic and sudden overpopulation. At least one will turn away all but the able-bodied and will build itself an army the likes of which no-one has ever seen before, ready to emerge once everyone else has exhausted themselves, but ultimately won the day against the undead. A major war of conquest will inevitably follow victory in the Undead Wars.

Ultimately, you will have the same four operative reactions as the church. All four will be given some weight, but each will be a different priority in different locations. Strategic position relative to the undead horde will be a decisive factor here.

3. The general public:

Individuals who do not fit either of the previous groups will react in one of four ways: heroically, fearfully, fervently, and dispassionately.

• Heroism: Natural disasters bring out extraordinary heroes and heroism in the most unlikely places, and this is pretty much the ultimate natural disaster! Ordinary people will be placed in extraordinary circumstances, and some will rise to the challenge. At the same time, adventurers – those accustomed to heroic action – will flock to the challenge, probably underestimating the difficulties to be faced. As a result, characters like the PCs will abruptly decline in number, giving the GM licence to involve them in just about everything else that is going on. “You’re Fifth Level!? We are saved, a hero has come to rescue us!” (Everyone looks at the PC expectantly)…

• Fearfully: At the same time, there will be wholesale fear. People will panic – a la HG Well’s War Of The Worlds. Rumours will be enough to depopulate whole villages. Mobs will form spontaniously, creating civil disruptions on top of everything else.

• Fervently: The churches will experience a wave of newly devout citizens. At the same time, some will feel that the established religions have failed them, and will turn to heresies and form strange cults (this explains how the Devils and Demons get involved).

• Dispassionately: Finally, there will be a few who will keep their heads where others lose them. These will tend to attract supporters and followers. In some Kingdoms, the ruler will be amongst the panickers, and there will be an abrupt change of leadership soon afterwards. Banana Republics will have stable political systems in comparison – at least one area should experience 15 coups in only a fourty weeks!

Of course, the ultimate level of dispassion will be reserved for the dead, and the undead. Don’t forget that they don’t have to rest – they may or may not have to hide during the day, but come sunset, they will be on the move…

Final Advice

If I were running Johnn’s campaign, I would try to map each of these reactions onto a timeline. That in itself gives the foundations for what is happening at any given time; the PCs can then be sent on “tour” as it were, always finding themselves in an appropriate position to be in the middle of an appropriate reaction.

To bring home the full scope of the disaster, nothing beats a completely displaced population. The percieved threat is proportionate to the capabilities of the population that has been overrun. Turning an entire kingdom Halflings or Gnomes into vagabonds might arouse sympathies, but doesn’t really scare anyone. Doing the same to Dwarves is more threatening, but less likely to arouse sympathy. Driving the entire Elvish Race from their forests, on the other hand, is closer to the mark. Follow it up by disposessing the Drow from their tunnels, and not only do you elevate the political problem of refugees to new heights, but you should strike terror into the hearts of anyone with two brain cells to rub together!

Of course, it goes without saying that closing the portal should be WAY beyond the PCs current abilities, and anyone elses, for that matter. That should be reserved for the big finish to the campaign. To be followed, of course, by a sequel campaign dealing with the aftermath…

Help! In my Carnus D&D 4E campaign the PCs failed to stop a permanent rift to the Shadowfell opening. Now undead are pouring out like hallelujahs at a Pelor rave. So, what are the consequences? Got any ideas?

Here are a few I’ve thought of:

• Wildlife flee in the path of undead. Most animals will sense the danger and make haste. They won’t migrate or permanently move out though. Not yet, at least. This means I can use fleeing flocks, herds, and swarms to add creepy drama, create sudden danger, or warn the PCs that something nasty is coming.
• Shake up the ecosystem. The new danger will dislodge powerful creatures from their lairs and territories. This gives me a good way to bump the PCs up against critters too powerful for them. If the characters choose wisely they can avoid conflict. I’ll leave it up to them.
• Disease. Where the undead travel or congregate I can introduce interesting diseases to the region and to afflict PCs with.
• Patches of mist and darkness and magical evil. The rift might be warping reality a bit, which is slowly spreading. This is an opportunity to make combats interesting with various hazards.
• Villages are freaking out. Garlic and silver sells out at the markets. Churches fill up. Con men start selling false blessings and protections.

So, have any other ideas?

Continent - click for large version - courtesy of Cartographers Guild

Ryder asks in my previous post about level of readiness in your campaign planning how I find time to work on my campaign between game sessions. My current recipe is very successful, based on years of trial and error and from facing a ton of time theft from other parts of my life.

Bi-Weekly Game Sessions

We play every other Thursday night, from 6:30 until 10:30. My players have families, jobs, friends, and other hobbies, so gaming every 14 days is a great compromise. I say compromise because I could game master every day, if given the opportunity.) GMing daily would actually reduce my preparation needs!

Game mastering every other week lets me split my planning time into two phases: gathering ideas and thoughts, and design.

Week 1: Gathering Ideas and Thoughts

The first week involves mulling over previous session events, NPCs, plots, the campaign arc, and the game world.

Unless the entire session was spent in a small cardboard box at the bottom of a lake, there will be consequences to character actions from the last session and earlier sessions. Even if, for some weird reason, the whole game was spent hacking wandering monsters, that activity at the least would change the ecosystem in the region, providing fodder for new encounter and plot ideas.

Did the PCs change the attitude or behaviour of any important NPCs? (Let’s say death is a form of behaviour change, lol.) Did they knock out the top layer of the food chain, the bottom layer, or any important layer in between? Did something new get introduced into the mix, such as a disease, powerful magic item, or important knowledge?

For a week I’ll noodle over what the PCs have done and how that makes an impact. This is a great opportunity to do blue sky thinking about consequences, unshackled with having to make decisions or designs at this stage. This is a great time to introduce new elements just so they can react to the PCs, or to loop in old elements for a surprise, or to connect two elements to stir things up. By element, I mean NPC, plot, location, treasure – any noun in your game.

What author said the most important part of writing fiction is the question What if? Was it Ray Bradbury? I can’t remember. For anything that comes to mind about any aspect of the campaign while I’m driving, or watching TV, or doing email, I’ll ask What if? Why? So what?

This interrogation is a great way to chew on ideas to see what sticks, what reveals holes, what needs more noodling. For a whole week, without any pressure, I’ll just think and imagine the campaign, adventure, and game world, letting everything slowly circle the bowl until week two comes around.

Week 2: Design

By the time week two arrives I’ll have several leading ideas. I will have thoughts burning away and many ideas jotted out on paper or in my Getting Things Done RPG email organization system. It’s time to create stuff for consumption in the next game session.

Design is one of my favourite parts of game mastering but it’s easy to procrastinate. I’ll get busy with other priority stuff or I’ll come home tired and not feeling creative. I’ll have an e-zine to publish, or a family thing, or….a thousand excuses.

It’s rare now that I get a large block of time that I can either devote to design or last the entire way through without interruption or distraction.

My solution is to craft an encounter a day. Seven days, seven encounters. Sessions, on average, consume four or five encounters. This gives me a buffer of two. Sometimes I won’t make seven, so I need to draw on my buffer. Sometimes I’ll take an old, outdated, and unused encounter and update it for current campaign power level and situation. During game sessions, the PCs will do something unexpected, and an unused encounter is perfect to stall with or to drop in and make new game progress.

Mike Bourke made a comment about just writing 1-3 lines for game elements until they are needed, and then he’ll flesh them out in greater detail. This is an excellent tip. I’ll have several encounter seeds like this written down by the end of week 2 as well. These will be for ideas whose time has not come, for encounters currently relevant but I’ve run out of design time, or they were given low priority because they weren’t likely to trigger.

As for world design, that’s trickier and I’m behind the curve on that right now. My top priority is prepping encounters for use next game. That usually leaves me few cycles to do world creation. However, I’m always thinking about the game world, and it’s being fleshed out in the ol ‘noggin. Soon I’ll have enough of an encounter buffer from extra designs or from dropping in one of the published modules I’d like to try out in my current campaign – or a session will be cancelled – and I can spend a couple weeks on world design and documentation instead of session prep.

You Gotta Enjoy Campaign Design

A final word on this is you need to enjoy creating stuff for your campaign. This is different than feeling lassitude or being too busy or frazzled to get into the right frame of mind for creation. If designing stuff is not your thing then this approach will not work for you. The second week will be hell and full of avoidance, guilt, and bad feelings because you are avoiding something you set out for yourself to do. That path leads to burnout and eventual departure from game mastering. Look for other preparation methods, game systems, or game master styles to make up for a role that traditionally has required a lot of design work.

That’s my campaign planning cycle. What’s yours?

Don’t miss any game master tips and advice. Subscribe to our blog via RSS feed or signup for free Campaign Mastery email update alerts.

The Google Problem

Has anyone noticed Google becoming less user-friendly lately? It started with the heavy domination of blogs in search results, and worsened with the loss of numbered results recently. It worsened further when Google started failing to find results that you KNOW are there because you had found the pages searching Google for other terms. At the same time, Google’s image search changed from searching for images with the search term in the description or name to showing a subset of images from any web page which contains the search term, and the image results bar changed in structure to occupy more of the screen real estate. (NB: I detected these changes and imperfections because Google is still my first choice search engine, so take the criticism with a grain of salt; I’m not saying it’s hopeless, just worse than it was).

Sometime during or around these changes, Google’s ‘about us’ pages were redesigned or restructured to remove any capacity for feedback direct to the company – the best you can do is post to a number of google groups that are about google, and which may or may not receive any attention from the company itself. [I’m told that the staff do monitor at least some of these fairly closely, but their website makes no guarantees in that regard].

Google has begin to look like just another faceless corporation, keeping its customers at something greater than arm’s length. I guess that’s the bad news. The good news is that if you are searching for blog content, you have a high chance of finding something relevant; and if you are searching for a particular image, you have a fair chance of finding something interesting that has little or nothing to do with the original subject of your inquiry.

Not all the changes have been bad, either – the ability to view a subset of the images found by size can be very useful, though that had been around for a while – it’s simply expanded from three size categories to four.

I would have been far happier if you could turn search result numbering on or off in your preferances, and if you could include or exclude blog results with the click of a radio button, and if your image search could be restricted to a literal search (the way it used to be) by the click of another radio button. And if it still found everything!

The effect of these changes is that it is far harder for DMs – or the general public – to use Google as a resource to find what you are looking for. You have to know the operations of the search engine to a degree that was never previously the case. Trying to find what you want is more and more a question of wading through mountains of irrellevancy and bloat – with less to visibly differentiate one screenfull of links from the next.

The RPG Problem

The same thing often happens with rule systems. When the core rules come out, it’s relatively easy to find most of the things you are looking for (though something is usually placed in a strange position somewhere!) The indexes are usually less than helpful, but that’s not surprising – I know from experience that an index takes at least as long to generate as the text being indexed did to write, and if I have to choose between an auther spending time compiling a perfect index and the author polishing content until the last possible second, I’ll pick the second choice every time.

But as new expansions and supplements come out, both official and third-party, it gets harder and harder to know where to find what you want. I have six D&D supplements on planes, planar travel, planar gates, etc – I have to go through them all each time I’m looking for something in particular within the subject. And since they are by at least three different publishers, their indexing schemas are all different, as well.

By the time you factor in hundreds of mini-supplements downloaded from various websites, and saved web pages and extracts from web pages, and my own writings on any given subject, and the content of webzines like Roleplaying Tips, and my various magazine collections of relevance, there may as well not be an index. The best you can hope for when searching by keyword – the desktop equivalent of an internet search – is that you’ll find something vaguely related to the specific subject you are looking for.

Just like Google.

I can see no reason why there can’t be a solution to the rules indexing problem, though – or in fact to compiling a complete index to all printed works in anyone’s collection. I can even envisage the design of such a solution.

The RPG Solution?

It starts with each publisher compiling the indexes to their various rules supplements into a single, downloadable, database, and making that download free from their website. This is not as difficult as it sounds: most indexes are generated by “tagging” key words and phrases as ‘index entries’ within the document while it is being written; these then automatically generate the page number that the referance appears on in the index, updating it when content is moved or rearranged. Adding an option to export the index – or coming up with an additional piece of software to extract them – would not be a major headache. These would need to be in some industry-wide fixed format.

That’s so that a dedicated piece of software can read in all the index entries for all the supplements that the user has indicated in the software’s settings that they own, compile them all into a single BIG index, sort it alphabetically, and generate a virtual index – one that can be printed out if that’s what’s desired, or saved as an ordinary document file. It would give the title of the source document and the page number.

A second piece of software could be used to generate index entries for the thousands of files on the computer that have been downloaded from places like RPGNow. The software only has to ignore certain common words like “a” and “the”, and to have a list of other words that need to be associated with another word to form a complete term – so that “silver” is not an index entry, but the software adds the next word to get “silver shield”, “silver bullet”, and so on. If the next word is one of the first group of common words, then “silver” stands alone as a meaningful index entry. Search engines – like Google – have been able to do this for ten years now. The result is an index of all the content on the user’s hard disk in the same format as the official indexes provided by the Game Publishers, and which can be read in by the first piece of software just like any other index.

Why might the game companies do this? Perhaps because it can be set up to generate sales. If you can compile an index of ALL the rpg supplements out there, then you can query that index, telling the software to ignore the supplements you already own – and quickly discover which volumes from which publishers you should add to your collection to get information on “Fey weapons” or “The Dreamtime” or “Moon Rockets” or whatever it is that you are looking for. It’s a new service, and a new form of advertising at the same time.

This software would not be all that difficult to create. Rudimentary database and programming skills would be enough. If my understanding of it is correct, there’s even a piece of software already in existance – Tablesmith – that could be used to perform most of these tasks, given the input databases.

Will it ever happen? It’s not out of the question – but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Maybe some gamer could write it as freeware…. Wouldn’t it be great?

The Correlation Gap

I once read that human knowledge is expanding at ten times the rate at which information can be compiled and correlated and indexed, and that the sum total of human knowledge is still doubling every five years, something that it’s been doing since the 1990s [that’s the amount of information that there is for anyone TO know, not the amount that they DO know). I’ve also read that the internet is expanding at roughly twice the speed that search engines like Google can find and index the pages – and that was about ten years ago, before the whole Blogging phenomenon exploded, and before Myspace and Youtube. To solve this Correlation Gap, we need new and better tools for associating multiple sources of information with their content and relating multiple sources of information to each other, generating concordances as we need them.

In the meantime, it’s just going to get harder to find the information you need, as it is perpetually drowned out by an increasing overhead of semi-related and claims-to-be-relevent information. It used to be that the hardest taks was in filtering out results that were unreliable, but that’s no longer the case. It’s in trying to cut out the irrelevant that Google has come unstuck; it’s a difficult problem with no easy solutions, but they’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

What good is information if you can’t find it?

City of Meerzicht - courtesy of Cartographers Guild, click for full size.

Imagine a spectrum of planning effort. On one end you have every possible detail worked out, including complete world development, all the adventures until campaign end, a complete cast of NPCs, everything. Let’s call this end 10.

On the other end of the spectrum you have nothing planned. You show up to the table and ask the players what they want to play. Hopefully you have the game rules players picked on hand. You have no plot, villains, setting, or campaign climax in mind. Further, as each session passes you still don’t plan ahead. Facts and details get nailed down as you play. Let’s call this end 1.

What’s Your Campaign Prep Sweet Spot?

1. Where are you on this spectrum for most of your campaigns?
2. Think back on your best campaigns. Where were you on the spectrum for those?
3. What about your worst campaigns, from 1-10?

7 is Just Right

I find I do best on a 7. I like to know my world first before layering on my adventures. I also like to have two or three adventures lined up before play starts. If the character deviate from my plans that’s ok. However, knowing a lot of details about the setting, villains, NPCs, adventure sites, and upcoming encounters often lets me shift things to suit changes in the situation.

Some might call this railroading. However, I find all this preparation beforehand gives me more freedom to have the world react to the PCs as well as act upon the PCs.

My current campaign suffers from a lack of preparation right now. I’m slowly catching up, but right now I’m at 4 out of 10. It’s tempting to switch from world building and adventure crafting to pure published fare, but I’ve been running published stuff for past two campaigns and I’m eager to design as well as run game sessions.

What about you? In addition to your answers to the questions above, where is your current campaign in terms of preparation level?

Don’t miss any game master tips and advice. Subscribe to our blog via RSS feed or signup for free Campaign Mastery email update alerts.