I agree with Uncle Bear that New Years is an opportunity to make goals, not wishes, for another 12 months. The Christmas holidays provide downtime and renewal time to clear your head of the daily treadmill and get back to values and priorities. In addition, the calendar year provides a convenient crucible for measuring progress.

Last year I wanted to game more often and to try out several different systems. I overreached. This year I’m setting moderate goals that still fulfill my value of game play as part of a balanced life (which is different than game play as part of a balanced breakfast). Here are my RPG goals for 2009:

DM my D&D campaign every other week

Last year my group missed many sessions due to the DM not being available or ready. It’s in my control to change that, so I will. 52 weeks minus December, July and August leaves 40 . Allow for 2 other bad weeks and that leaves 38. So, my goal is to DM 19 D&D sessions this year. Hey, that’s a potential 19 TPKs. Life is good.

Run a sci-fi game a few times

I gotta keep trying new things in RPGland. This year I want to focus on learning a new game system and GMing a genre I have little experience in – sci-fi.

I’ve polled readers of Roleplaying Tips for game ideas and I’ve got a shortlist now, including one entry that surprised me. Once the D&D campaign gets into a rhythm again I’ll start work on death by laser.

Build a world

It’s been over a decade since I last created a fantasy game world. It’s time to dust off the brain and create. The world will be crafted mid-campaign, so some retrofitting will be required, but my players are cool about whimsical DMing.

Blog and E-zine

Roleplaying Tips turns 10 in November. It’s a lot of fun putting each issue together and benefitting from the wisdom of its readers. I look forward to another year of game mastering tips and learning to be a better GM along with subscribers.

In 2009 I’ll be posting to this blog as well. I like the conversations I see taking place on other RPG blogs, and I want to be able to comment and ponder in my sandbox with Mike Bourke here. Some posts will see their way into the e-zine as well.

Fun? What is this fun you speak of?

Finally, having more fun at every game is always my goal, regardless of what year it is.

How about you?

So, what do you see is in store for you and RPGs in 2009?

The DMG II for D&D 3.5 defines Prestige Classes as representing organisations; Taking a prestige class is synonymous with joining the organisation that the Prestige Class represents. At least, that was the original theory. The fact is that it was only ever partially true in D&D 3.5, and D&D 4 has a completely different paradigm in place.

Be that as it may, it’s also a rather extreme perspective. Not every assemblage of like-thinking folk is worthy of a Prestige Class – the Garbageman’s Union, for example. In any game, there is an entire spectrum of organisations that runs from the Chess Club (show up and play) to the Professional Organisation With An Agenda (Prestige Class or equivalent). But there’s no real way of simulating these in game mechanics, leaving the poor DM to cobble something together for each different group each time the situation arises – a solution that yields little-to-no consistency, and leaves the DM with lots of work and little-to-no ongoing control. Whereas a proper solution would do both these things and offer the opportunity for scenarios and subplots to boot!

My collaborator on this blog was asking about this very subject earlier today. He had only vague ideas of what he wanted, just that it be a simple game mechanic that addressed interaction between character and organisation. I’m pretty good at working up house rules on the fly, so I thought I’d rush in where sensible GMs fear to tread, and see what I could come up with. Hence this blog post, even though another isn’t due for a few days.

Organisation Type

Organisations need to be characterised in some fashion. The most obvious characteristic lies in the type and level of obligation of a member to the organisation, so let’s give that a try and see how we go:

Type Description

1. Just show up if and when you want to
2. Periodic or one-off membership fee or other obligation
3. Ongoing Tithes or Dues, Restricted Membership
4. Substantial Ongoing Tithes or Dues, + other obligations, Restricted Membership

Type 1 represents the “chess clubs”. Type 2 represents most political parties, more organised and expensive social clubs, and so on. It can also cover most types of professional employment! Type 3 covers most Trade Guilds and Professional Societies. Type 4 covers the most exclusive bodies, including Church Affiliations, Feudal Nobility, Thieves and Assassins Guilds, Secret Societies, and the like. It could also include Orders of Paladins and Knights. For the record, “Substantial” is usually 25% of what you get, or more.

Obligations

Every month, game time, a d6 roll can check for an obligation deriving from membership in the Organisation. If you roll the Organisation Type or less, you have an obligation. What they are is up to the DM, based on the type and description of the organisation. If the character carries out the obligation, he is rewarded with a Privilege Point (I’ll get to them in a minute).

Additional Services

If the DM feels that the character has contributed something noteworthy to achieving the goals of the organisation, he should also reward the member with a Privilege Point.

Personal Attributes

If the character has in some way displayed loyalty to the organisation throughout the month, or has been an iconic representation of the archetypical club member for the month, the character may roll a die. This may be a d6, d8, d10, or d12, depending on the degree of political affiliation or definition of an ideal archetype for members. The larger the die size, the less well-connected the organisation is and the more rigid the membership requirements. The size of die will be the same every month for any given organisation. If the player rolls less than or equal to the organisation type, he earns a Privilege Point. Otherwise, his behaviour has simply gone unnoticed that month; bad luck.

GMs may wish to define some key personality attribute that is considered fundamental to the organisation – Honour, Loyalty, Reputation, Wealth, Social Standing, whatever – to use as the determining factor as to whether or not the character gets a die roll each month, or he can leave it loose; that’s up to him.

Privilige Points

These are the foundation of this game mechanic. Each represents doing something for the organisation that it considers exemplary AND having it noticed by the organisation. The lower the organisation type, the easier it is to claim membership – and the fewer the privilege points you get for it, each month. These can be redeemed for various benefits of membership, as described below – again, in general, the lower the organisation type, the less you will get for a privilege point. Privilege Points don’t last forever. They expire a year after you earn them, if they have not been redeemed.

Expending Privilege Points

Each organisation will have various rewards that can be bestowed in exchange for privilege points. What these are is up to the DM, and should be described as part of the writeup of any organisation, but the following are suggestions that should be considered:

1. +1 on all interpersonal skill rolls with fellow members for a month
2. 5% discount on goods or services offered by the organisation or a brother group
3. 1 favour
4. 1 service on the member’s behalf by the organisation
5. +1 on an appropriate interpersonal skill roll with a non-member, once only
6. +1 on another type of skill roll related to organisation activities, once only
7. a month’s wages

Example#1: Weekly Chess Club: Category 1. A member gets a privilege point for hosting the club one week, or perhaps by winning a game against a famous opponent. He may use this for a 5% discount on a new chess set, or a +1 in all chess games (the members go easy on the host), or +1 in a chess game with a non-member (the benefits of recent practice), or a favour from a fellow member, or first choice of opponent.

Example#2: Duelling Club: Category 2. Members earn privilege points for paying their monthly dues, Winning outside duels, Enforcing moral behaviour, etc. Points may be redeemed for social or political favours, discounts on equipment, healing services, personal reputation (+1 to an appropriate roll), etc.

Example#3: Church Sect: Category 3. Members earn privilege points for tithing 50% of their income, for making the Church more socially acceptable, for public acknowledgement by a leading political or social figure, for defending the faith from attack, for sustained personal piety, etc. Points may be redeemed to get an appointment/audience with an otherwise inaccessible person, for a spell cast on his behalf by another member (1 point per spell level), for a 5% discount on goods purchased from a parishioner, for +1 on a knowledge (religion) check, for +1 on an interpersonal skill roll with a non-member of the parish (church’s reputation), etc.

Potential Flaws

Particularly anal players may hoard their points in case they need them until the last possible minute before they expire before redeeming them. If this starts happening, the DM should first warn the players and then become more ‘flexible’ regarding the expiry date of privilige points.

Scenarios

Privilege Points give players an additional incentive to do things appropriate to the organisations of which they are a member, and may even be reason enough to perform certain actions. Members of an organisation may redeem their privilege points to get a ‘favour’ from the character. The organisation may require the character to do something on its behalf, whether he wants to or not. Opposed and rival organisations may target the character. The character may fall victim to “Tall Poppy Syndrome’ if he accrues too many privilege points. The DM can set a price in privilege points from specific organisation(s) for achieving something (getting a corrupt official replaced, earning a Title Of Nobility, Persuading the Exchequer to lower taxes or repair the roads) etc etc; this tells the players what they have to do in broad terms, but leaves the specifics up to them.

Other impacts

Players will be less cautious about taking on big jobs if they have privilege points to help them over the rough patches. Games will become a little more swashbuckling in style as a result, but the characters will be harder to reign in with difficult skill rolls.

One final suggestion

Making chits out of heavy cardboard for privilige points lets you write the expiry date on them.

A couple of years ago, I was approached by a player who was considering getting back into roleplaying after an extended hiatus from the activity. It transpired that he had dropped out because he found himself objecting to the concept of magic on religious grounds – the idea itself was blasphemous to him, and he had been wrestling with his moral objections for an extremely long time following a particular bad experience that had left deep psychological and moral/ethical scars. He didn’t give any details about the incident, just its effects on him.

I don’t intend to discuss the rightness or wrongness of his beliefs or his attitude. I respect that HE believes in his faith, and neither saw nor see any need to debate it. He was an extremely intelligent and creative, and we had a long discussion about philosophy and ethics and morality and religion. He made a number of contributions to the campaign in question that will shape it for years to come. I was really looking forward to his participation.

Ultimately, he decided that his faith would make him too uncomfortable if he were to play, to the point of hindering his potential enjoyment of the game. And that’s what this particular blog is all about.

For all its depth, its capacity to inspire and to motivate people to educate themselves on a vast array of subjects, its capability to examine deep issues of morality and philosophy, ultimately an RPG is a GAME first and foremost, and the reason you play a game is for enjoyment. If you happen to find such debates and explorations entertaining, that’s fine; but you always have to afford people the right to believe what THEY believe, regardless of your own opinion on the subject.

That means that some subjects should always be taboo within your game, and that these restrictions will change with every player that comes and goes. The minute that you transgress against one of them, at least one person at your table will stop having fun. And if they stop having fun for too long, they will find something else to do that is more satisfying to them, which damages not only your game, but every game that the affected player might have participated in for decades to come.

I’m not angry or upset that this particular person chose not to play; while it’s my personal belief that we would both have benefitted from his participation, the choice was his, and it was his right to make it as he saw fit. What’s more, I believe that if one person at the table is not having fun, the ‘wet blanket’ factor drags down everyone else just a little. Sometimes, that’s necessary in order to keep others satisfied, but it’s still something to avoid when possible.

No, my ire is for a person whose identity I don’t know – the person who so transgressed apon this player’s personal beliefs that they drove him out of gaming for a decade. Whenever I think of this subject, even tangentally, I mourn the lost contributions that this player could have made. So think about that the next time you decide that it would be fun to push the your player’s boundaries, and make sure that you aren’t pushing too far or too hard.

Oh, as a postscript: It’s my understanding that the player in question has found himself a game elsewhere and is enjoying himself greatly, having made his peace with the moral qualms that prevented him from joining my campaign at the time. More power to him!

And so 2009 begins, and with it the countdown to the third most popular date in Science Fiction (behind 2000 and 2001). Funny, it doesn’t look all that different to the tail end of 2008.

That shouldn’t be surpising, since it takes the passage of several years and quite a bit of hindsight to be able to characterise a given decade.

Again, this is not surprising; decades are accidental groupings of years dictated by our calander, it should be no surprise that it takes a substantial period of time before the human habit of recognising patterns (and imposing them if there aren’t any) can isolate a common theme in a particular random grouping of years.

In some ways, it used to be easier. The pace of technological change was slower, and that meant that a single technology could be isolated and identified as characteristic of the era. The 1990s have to be characterised as the “internet boom”, as a related series of technologies came together to forge a social tsunami that affected almost every aspect of the human condition. Perhaps the 2000s can be characterised as the “Blog Era”, or the “YouTube era”, or even “The Hubble Era” – but my preferance is “The Google Era”, in which information became easier to find then ever before. But they are all artificial summations of an artificially-defined period of time.

And yet, in many respects, I can’t help feeling just a little cheated. The future those science-fiction writers promised us simply hasn’t materialised. The Concorde has gone, we still don’t have commercial space flights, flying cars and personal rocket packs don’t exist, we can’t debate philosophy with sentient computers, and where are the Lunar Colonies?

In 2000, this feeling was everywhere. We were entering the “age of tomorrow” but it looked just the same as what had come immediately before. The news just seemed so trivial and mundane in comparison to our hopes and expectations. Even giving reality an extra decade to get its act together hasn’t helped – the sense of wonder just isn’t there.

It strikes me that this expectation is one last, lurking, perspective of the Victorian Era. They must have held similar perspectives on the turn of the century in 1900, but their hopes of a new era were perverted into the First World War. Nevertheless, the 20th century was an age of wonders. Mass Transportation, Air Travel, Space Flight, Instant Communications, Atomic Energy, Thinking Machines, even Mobile Telephones, the list of wonders goes on and on and on. Have we become jaded?

A DM experiences similar feelings whenever an RPG comes to a premature demise. There is a sense of unfulfilled potential; the plot threads carefully cultured and grafted by the DM will never bloom to reveal the beauty and wonder as everything comes together into a big finish, as the hidden secrets are revealed.

In 1998, I ran an asteroids-exploration camapaign which quite deliberately had an Indiana-Jones-ish pulp rollercoaster feel to it. The campaign background was made up on the spur of the moment, as was the rules system. The first session brought the PCs together on earth, filled in a fairly colourless political background lifted largely from Alien, as it might have looked in the 2050s, and got the PCs as far as the Lunar Base from which they were supposed to get their ship. The context flavour was very Twilight Zone meets the X-files, full of misunderstood phenomena that were not “officially recognised”. Originally intended to be a fill-in campaign that would last only for the day, the players were full of enthusiasm and insisted that it continue – after all, they hadn’t even reached the Asteroids yet!

And so the game went to a second session, in which the PCs discovered that aliens had inflitrated the Lunar Base, emerging from great eggs that had been brought back by a previous asteroid mining expedition. Meanwhile, rumblings in the Middle East were slowly escelating towards Nuclear War; with officialdom having more urgent concerns, the PCs couldn’t interest anyone in “luridly paranoid fantasies”. In desperation, they managed to set the self-destruct on the Lunar Base (or, more to the point, cobbled one together), took the best of the asteroid mining ships on the launchpad and got the heck out of there.

And then came the third session. One of the eggs was discovered on-board – one that had hatched. A game of hide-and-seek ensued, as the alien sought to sabotage the ship and rebuild its systems to suit itself in response to a ‘homing call’ that only it could feel (grafted in from John Carpentier’s “The Thing”). NPCs were killed off, one by one, and the PCs had a couple of close calls; in at least one case, was seemingly killed (but could have been rescued) – the player had to leave early. Everything was proceeding splendidly. And then one of the PCs blew up the ship.

I did my best – I rewrote the operating principles of the ship on-the-fly to change an immediate explosion into a countdown to disaster. I managed to get one PC into a space-suit and headed towards the engines while the others played games with ET. Tension mounted as he reached the engineering compartment, only to discover that there wasn’t one alien, there were two – and he wasn’t alone. Combat ensued, as the clock continued its relentless countdown. Finally, he reached the controls – and turned them the wrong way. Assuming that he had misunderstood how these things (theoretically) worked, I went over it with him again, slowly, and then asked again if he was sure this was what he wanted to do. I had the other PCs get the radio working to enable them all to contribute. I gave him skill rolls to figure out what “didn’t seem right”. I dropped hint after hint.

The Player proved impervious to it all, and stubbornly insisted on taking his action as he described it. I even gave him a DEX roll to set the controls “incorrectly”, but he had decided it was better to blow up the ship and everyone on board than to take the chance of these things getting loose, and that is exactly what he did.

And so the campaign came to a premature conclusion. The PCs never discovered that the ETs were actually survivors from Minerva (a world that had been blown up to create the Asteroids) who had colonised a Jovian Moon, and Phobos & Deimos, had a primitive star drive, had been using earthly cattle as breeding stock for centuries (cattle mutilations), had a ship shot down at Roswell, had experiemented with Humans for decades to determine whether or not a more effective hybrid could be developed, that those hybrids were behind the nuclear war that was about to begin and sputter out, and so on and on and on. As the PCs learned to fight back, they would have exposed the aliens and ultimately driven them from the planet.

All I can do now, over a decade after the fact, is look back and mourn the missed opportunity. It’s one thing for a game to be terminated through mutual consent because no-one’s having fun any more; it’s quite another for a game being enjoyed by all to come to a crashing halt because one player decided to be “noble” and “self-sacrificing”. What do you do when this happens?

You dust yourself off and start another campaign, that’s what. And for some time to come, you ask yourself if there was something more that you should have done or could have done.

Which brings us back to the beginning of 2009. In many ways, it feels like 2008 has finished prematurely. Too many of the problems of the last year have not been resolved – we have conflict in the Middle East, we’re still entangled in Iraq, we still have an economic crisis to manage, oil supplies continue to shrink because we havn’t started exploiting the pools of petrochemicals in the Jovian Atmosphere. But all we can do is dust ourselves off and tackle the new year, with its’ new opportunites and hopes and dreams. Happy New Year, everyone.

The eyes are the window to the soul

What exactly is the soul? No, I’m not getting all existential and metaphysical on you, I’m asking the question objectively and literally. You see, one of my D&D campaigns has this question of the nature of the soul as one of its key themes. More, it states that the answer is different for each race, and that this is the fundamental distinction between Elves and Humans and Dwarves and the other sentient species that inhabit the game world.

The question is one that’s always implicit – and usually ignored – in D&D. There are a number of spells that let you speak with the dead, there are ghosts and undead and other such creatures, and so on. That’s the very reason why I made this theme such a prominant element of the “Seeds Of Empire” campaign.

The campaign premise – so far as the PCs were concerned at the start – was fairly straightforward. The previous campaign set in this Game World established that there had been a mass killing off of the Gods at the hands of their enemies (a cross between the Greek Titans and Cthulhu’s Old Ones, called the Chaos Powers). That previous campaign dealt with the process of Divine damage control, in which the mortal races (personified by the PCs) were ‘invited’ to step up and seize the reigns of their destiny. They got to reassign Divine portfolios, alter the way that magic interacted with the world, and tweak various other aspects of the campaign world. Some of their choices were aimed at the big picture (with little thought as to what the short- and medium-term effects would be), and some were aimed specifically at establishing a new status quo in the here-and-now, with scant consideration of the long-term consequences of the decision – and none at all on how these various secondary and tertiary effects would interact with each other. Ostensibly, the second half of that campaign was about the transition and immediate consequences – only at the grand finale did it emerge that it was actually about how things got to this point in the first place (the PCs thought they knew, but didn’t). So, when the sequel campaigns started (and there are two of them running concurrently), the central concept was to explore the consequences of the decisions made by the previous generation of PCs.

One of the Deities that were killed off was the deity of Death. As a result, there was no-one to judge the dead, or to transport the souls of the dead to their final reward or punishment. It became, as a consequence, far easier to rise again as an undead. This was something that the players overlooked when rearranging the campaign mythos; they established the entire mechanism necessary for dealing with the newly-dead, but overlooked those caught in transit, who fell through the cracks.

At the time the Gods were being killed, they stopped answering prayers (the survivors were too busy surviving). The fringes of the Empire that was around at the time included an oriental society that had been partially converted, who believed in reincarnation. When the God of death was lost, their priests immediately discovered that the spirits of the dead were not ascending to judgement the way they should have been; and, in order to preserve the souls of their dead citizens, they began ‘storing’ them as undead.

Other groups did not have the same perspective, and reactions to the circumstances varied. Some went nuts, some tried to establish their own empires, some despaired. The kingdom of the undead were forced to call apon the resiliance of their undead to defend themselves. Having become adept at ‘returning’ people as undead, they then reanimated the bodies of their defeated foes for use as shock troops to protect their own, infinitely more valuable, undead.

Fast-forward a century to the current time of the campaign. Their faith has become corrupted by the ease of conquest with undead armies. I did an analysis of the impact on a medieval economy and society of having a vast number of workers who do not need to eat, who do not need to be paid, who can work for 24 hours a day, and who retain the mind and spirit of the original spirits, and (even allowing for reduced effectiveness) calculated it conservatively as making the resulting society equivalent to one of ten times the productive area, with 100 times the manpower to draw apon. The living now lead lives of absolute luxury, with no need to perform work of any kind; once they die, they begin earning the sybaritic life that they have enjoyed. Their society has evolved to consider what began as temporary measure as normality.

Enter the PCs, whose homelands have now come under threat from this incredibly powerful Empire. They have to defeat an enemy that cannot be overcome by force or arcane skill, and are now in the process of discovering what tools they have at their disposal for doing so. Success or failure will depend on their ability to argue with the Empire on the Empire’s terms – they will have to understand the religious and social philosophy that has made the Empire what it is today, and what those things were, and how the latter evolved into the former. Only by proving that the Empire has lost its way can they hope to undermine it internally to the point of collapse, and that is their only hope of victory.

Which brings me back to the question that was posed at the start of this essay. Before the Players can attempt to even dimly grope toward an answer, I – as DM – have to have gone before them, to pave the road with clues and an internally-consistant concept of the Empire and its theology that their characters can observe and interact with.

GMs should never be afraid of exploring the big questions in their games – but they have to first explore those questions in their own minds, both in terms of their personal philosophy (and what they are comfortable with in terms of game play – a subject I’ll discuss more fully another time), and in terms of what is inherantly implied by the game system and setting that they have already established. You can look to the rulebooks for the questions, but they are lacking (and sometimes contradictory) when it comes to the answers.

It’s these big-issue choices that ultimately distinguish one campaign setting from another, both directly and through the implications and consequences and trickle-down effects on smaller, day-to-day issues. Questions like “What is the soul?” and “How does magic work?” and “Does modern physics apply?” and “What is the nature of time?” and “How was the universe/multiverse created?” and “Are there other planes / other dimensions, and if so where did they come from and what keeps them apart?”. Collectively, these can be considered the Cosmology of the campaign, although what is usually considered a cosmology is only a small part of the scope of these questions.

These are the questions that natural philosophers (and the curious and learned) will grapple with, within the campaign. They may not get the right answers – they may not even find the right questions to ask – but their questions and discoveries will inform the rest of the society within the campaign, either directly or indirectly. Five minutes spent deciding these can provide the GM with years worth of adventure as the consequences and implications are explored.

PCs, by the nature, tend to be superior specimens. Why can’t the reason for that (in the long run) be a greater understanding of the way the world really works? It’s at least as good an answer as any other that I’ve found. So don’t be afraid to ask yourself the Big Questions; your game will be the better for it.

Fur and a heavy beard in 100° heat - that's Christmas down under

As I write this, the Holiday Season is fast approaching. Johnn, my collaborator on this blog (and vice-versa) has written an excellent book on holidays in rpgs, but I thought it worth exploring some of the options for drawing inspiration from real holidays. (Obviously, since many are religious in nature, some people may be offended. I apologise in advance if you are one of them).

The first and most obvious option is to insert an equivalent holiday into your campaign. The denizens of your fictitious world might not celebrate Christmnas, but they might well have a celebration of the winter solstice (which is what Christmas started out as). Or they might have a Holiday in which everyone exchanges gifts. The more you know about the history and origins of a particular festival, the more source material you have to draw apon. Most nations celebrate the date of their independance, or the birthday of their monarch, or both. Most have some equivalent of Remembrance Day, and some have two – my native Australia celebrates Anzac Day on April 25th each year, but also commemorates Remembrance Day (the 11th day of the 11th month) with a minute’s silence at 11AM. And so on. None of this is treading waters too far removed from Johnn’s book.

But there are a number of alternative approaches to this source material, plus a combination, which can combine to produce a completely different holiday festival. For example, you can invert the mood, then interpret the holiday history accordingly. Take Easter, for example: A four-day holiday which brings fear, dread, and superstition (when the mood is inverted, that’s all about the dead rising. So for four days every year, the dead are permitted to rise from their graves in an effort to complete unfinished business. Homes would be locked, stores laid in, and no-one would go out if they had any choice in the matter. Where people had a choice, they might try to be so far away from the locale of their birth that the undead could not reach them in time. Others might believe that performing an act of atonement on the first day or night would protect them. From this springboard, many ideas can flow.

You can also invert the meaning of the holiday, as necessary. Instead of commemorating independance, why not a national day of mourning for the day they were conquered – but a ‘holiday’ with an undefined undercurrent of hope, as each year that passes brings them one year closer to their eventual overthrow of the conquerers. This might then persist as a festival of Hope (that appears to be anything but) long after the population has been liberated.

Another example derives from the gift-giving at Christmas time. Perhaps an annual moratorium on charging criminals with theft imposed by some past nobleman who believed in sharing the wealth, or perhaps in response to some noble being unjustly accused of theft years earlier?

Seek out the meaning and history behind what’s going on around you whenever you can – it will always prove beneficial to your game sooner or later. And it gives you something non-gaming to talk about at parties!

I’m in a strange sort of mood as I write this. I don’t feel like doing anything in particular, but can’t stand to do nothing; I can’t work up any sort of enthusiasm even for the things that I enjoy doing, and nothing in my video/dvd/cd collection holds any appeal. And the only thing that I can point towards as being the cause of this particular lassitude – which many would (incorrectly) describe as burnout – is the fact that I havn’t had my gaming fix lately. Over the last couple of weeks, my regular games havn’t happened for one reason or another – one-off anomalies, road bumps on the street of life. And without the vicarious thrill of interacting with my friends, without the stimulation that they provide (and which is one of the many reasons I Gamemaster more than I play), I’m feeling rather adrift at the moment.

There are all sorts of things I could be doing, and any number of things that I could be doing, but instead I’m just sort of…. drifting.

I likened this state to burnout a few moments ago, which implies that others might also make the same mistake. So what do I do when I get into this sort of mood?

I watch something that replicates the feeling and mood of GMing. It might be a courtroom drama (The Firm, A Few Good Men, etc), or a heist movie (Ocean’s Eleven, The Sting, The Italian Job), or even one of the Bud Spenser / Terrance Hill classic comedies. Something that has enough detail to capture my attention, with being so demanding of my concentration that it feels like work – and something with an exuberant attitude. And I usually find that the right stimulation fixes the problem and gears me up for whatever comes next, even if I didn’t particularly feel like watching it when I started. Something that someone else out there might find useful.

I had my spring cleaning just the other day (living in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are the reverse of what most readers would consider normal), and it reminded me of something that should be an annual tradition with gamers – spring cleaning of their games.

For Players, that means looking at any long-standing character goals and assessing whether they have moved any closer to achieving them in the past year, or have discarded them in favor of other, more immediate objectives. Are there any mysteries that have been presented on which the events since the last spring cleaning can shed any light? Have new questions been raised, and how do they relate to the old ones? Are you still playing the character with the same personality that he had a year ago, or have you slipped away from the purity of concept that you once had – and is the result an improvement? Have you told the GM what you like about the campaign he’s running? Is there something you would like to see more of? (I assume that if there was some cause of unhappiness that this would be communicated).

For GMs, its time to look at the loose plot threads – are there any that have been forgotten, or neglected? How about the NPCs, do they still have realistic goals and reasons for staying with the party, or are they due to strike out on their own at the first (in)convenient opportunity? Have the villains done anything to advance their own agendas? Has there been political and economic evolution within the campaign, or has it slipped into a perpetually-stagnant never-never land?

When should Spring Cleaning take place in a campaign? I would vote for the anniversary of commencement, that’s the date that I usually use…

How does each race in your game make a difference? Put another way, if any of race disappeared, how would the setting be different? How would gameplay be different?

• Remaining races might venture into unexpected niches, creating interesting twists. Elven smiths, orcish druids, gnomish sailors.
• The world might be poorer because no race or culture has filled the void left by the missing race. Perhaps metal is scarce, so armour and weapons remain primitve. Maybe medicine has not advanced, and the Heal skill is unavailable or the DCs are increased.
• Wars might be fought for reasons different than the norm, such as over unusual scarcities or rivalries.

Even though your game rules or settings supply races, give their descriptions a read over, and make tweaks so each race has a noticeable footprint in the world.

Look for ways to make the precence of each race felt during game sessions, such as roleplaying, architecture, mannerisms, fashion, conflict types and sources, art, and community quirks.

When mapping, I tend to just focus on the corridors, rooms, streets, caverns, and buildings. However, every map has more than just these areas; each has three zones in your design control. Next map you build, think of these zones and how you can change things up to be fun and interesting for your gaming.

Zone 1: The Lines

Most of the time, the lines represent walls and boundaries, and these things have shapes and textures. Lines are often hastily sketched on battlemaps and player maps, and then overlooked during descriptions. GMs draft their lines without much thought for mapping in-game.

Beef Up Description

When drawling map lines in dungeons and civilized areas, take a moment to think about what the lines represent, what the PCs would see and touch. Make notes about this directly on maps, with arrows, for easy reference. Use these notes to feed your descriptions of these areas.

Players groove off extra details like these to become immersed, and the little bit of time taken for this counteracts some of the hyper-efficiency of some game systems where it seems like you just get whisked from one battle to the next without much breathing room – without much living.

Use Evocative Materials

Notice how it gets boring telling the players the same descriptions over and over? “You are in a 10’x10′ inn room. It has the usual furnishings.”

Don’t give up. Instead, get creative. Fantasy offers so many options, thanks to strange materials, magic, slavery, potentially infinite project lives, divinity, and esoteric knowledge. Get yourself out of modern, scarcity-based thinking. Think big. Think wild.

• Gems
• Precious metals
• Magically hardened wood
• Strangely transparent – wood, stone, metal
• Alive
• Evil, demonic, or cursed
• Liquid
• Gaseous

Check out this rock and mineral directory for more ideas. Bend anything from this web page to your imagination.

The Lines Are A Lie

Lines narrow vision and creativity. They trick you into thinking there is less in a location than there actually is. During games, I become too focused on the path,  direction, and distance. The lines are a lie. There’s more to any space than just its boundaries. More on this in part 2 of this series.

Faster Mapping

Cavern maps in modules are a pet peeve of mine. So is sloppy battle-mapping. Both involve such sins as partial squares, lines you can’t possibly recreate on player maps, and useless spaces.

Avoid Partial Spaces

If your game system has rules for partial battlemap squares, then this is not an issue. For my game of choice, though, you are screwed. What is the movement cost of half a square? Third? Eighth? Can a PC fit into such spaces? Can a large creature use those spaces?

If your game system rules only support full squares, then just map with full squares. Otherwise, it’s confusing and problematic.

Some designs might require partial squares. Ok. I support this. If you want to create rooms with interesting shapes, or decide builders would have used the shortest, straightest paths for connector spaces, ok.

Be prepared for interaction in these spaces though. Whip up some house rules, perhaps, or talk over general guidelines with players. One player thinking those spaces are just for show, while another uses them for advantage, creates group friction.

Take your average cavern map, for example. A tiny creature can fit into almost all the folds and creases, as can various rewards and other game elements. Just not the PCs. Unless they reach in. Are they allowed? I’ve played and GM’d games where it’s assumed those spaces were of no consequence.

Make Mapping Easier

Draw lines that are quick and easy to reproduce during sessions for players or by players, for battlemaps or progress maps.

For example, cavern maps are killers to reproduce. So, what ends up happening is the player map or the battlemap just gets rounded off. Fancy, curly walls and passages become straight or jagged lines. Who has the time and patience to turn an 8.5″ x 11″ map into a huge map for minis by hand during a session?

If the players aren’t going to see the benefit of complex lines and maps, then do yourself a favour and make your lines simple to recreate during sessions.

Same goes with weird shapes and complex areas on maps. Anything you can do to make in-game mapping faster and easier on you, the better. Keep maps simple, make descriptions and encounters rich.

What Goes On The Lines?

The lines themselves aren’t empty. They have strange inhabitants often overlooked during design. These inhabitants get quickly added on or neglected.

Entrances and Exits

Entrances and exits sometimes have strategic value. They restrict movement or enhance it. Do you want a villain to escape easily? It would be a shame that an ill-placed portal traps an important NPC.

Dead ends eliminate choices and stop progress. Plan exits with pacing and exploration in mind.

Notice how the area around a door needs to be kept clear? This can carve up your game space in undesirable ways. For example, placing a door in a narrow, end part of a room makes that area unsuitable for furnishings and interactive bits. Or, placing a door in the middle of a line might split a space into two, limiting other design and encounter decisions.

Strategic exit and entrance placement helps guide trap and hazard placement. For example, a defile determines movement, and traps can be more precise with better triggering success. Traps in high traffic areas are hazards to the locals, though, so consider hidden entrances for them to use, or use traps that have better precision. A pit in front of the kitchen door means all the orcs go hungry.

Doorknobs

Be prepared for the doorknob question. This trips me up often. Can the entrance be locked? If so, how? From what direction? Check out this sequence of DMing mishap:

DM: You come before a door. It has glowing runes on it.

Group: What is the door made out of?

DM: Wood with bands of metal for reinforcement.

Group: How does the door open? Can it be locked?

DM: The door has hinges, and there is no keyhole. It’s probably barred. [Looks at map. Realizes it has to be barred from the players’ side to make sense.]

DM: There is a length of wood nearby, resting against the wall.

Group: Great! We bar the door and camp out here for the night.

DM: Damn you dirty apes!

Yeah. That’s happened to me. Many times, in many configurations. Logic traps for everything from door location to door material to locking mechanism. One giant DM hazard if you’re not careful.

Light Fixtures

Light fixtures are another interesting element. Their regular placement might create a pattern that you can interrupt as a clue, perhaps to point out a secret door or important furnishing.

How are the lanterns, torches, or other light source fixed to the wall? If you are planning to use darkness for effect, be wary of placing portable light sources without thought. If you have cunning space-based challenges, such as chasms or traps, be wary of fixtures that grant advantage, such as rope tie-off spots (better yet, place these with intention as potential solutions to such puzzles).

Got writer’s block? Draw a map. This is one of the best ways to get focus, organize your thoughts, and get moving again on your campaign preparation.

Mapping out Writer's Block

Sometimes I’ll stare at a blank computer screen with a game session only a couple days away and wonder if I’ll have anything designed in time. What always works for me is to grab graph paper, pencil, and eraser and draw a map.

Best Maps to Draw

• Small maps. Drawing a huge map, such as a continent, to get your planning going again is going to open up too many options and create too much downstream work.Draw a small map instead. They are fast to create and have minimal footprint in the game so you don’t waste time and effort. You can add to the map if your idea takes off. If you are struggling for ideas, however, then you don’t commit to a big map until you’ve got something you’re happy to extend.
• Draw for encounters. I find encounter maps work best. Encounters are the building blocks of sessions. If you get no planning done other than a few encounters you can drop into next session, then you are covered.Encounter maps are small by nature, keeping inline with the tip above. You might even try drawing a five room dungeon.In addition, I find encounters inspiring to build. They are fast, and once I get one or more built, ideas for the rest of the session, world, or campaign start to return again.
• Regions. Small gameplay regions often give exactly what you need to get unblocked and creative again. With a space in the game world defined, you can start adding regional points of interest. Note ideas down at they come to you for each of these points.If the exercise is fruitful, then once you’ve got a few items added to the region, start to flesh out those items. If you get blocked on this, then draw maps for those items.

Example Mapping Session

It’s two days before game night and preparation feels uninspired. You take out a piece of paper and draw a triangular region bordered by a river, mountains, and monstrous territory. Within the region you locate a few villages, lairs, historical sites, and a couple of long-forgotten dungeon and ruin locations.

Next, you pick one village called Styrge, break out a new piece of paper, and map it. You add a few buildings, a road, some paths, and a few points of local interest inside the village and in the nearby area.

You are still not feeling creative yet. So, you crank out another map. You pick one of the stores and draw it out on another sheet of paper. It’s three storeys and has a cellar. You even add a secret room – what would the shopkeep want to hide in there?

Still stumped, you copy the store map and build an encounter in the basement. Subterranean creatures have dug into the basement and set-up a lair there. The PCs might here noise while passing by and investigate, the shopkeep might hire or beg the PCs for help, or kids might be overheard daring each other to go into the “haunted” cellar.

You are still blocked though. It occurs to you that the tunnels from the creatures might have touched upon an interesting location, such as a cavern or small dungeon a couple hundred meters underground. You draw a map for this and place a few hazards and encounters.

Blocked again. Back to the village looking for encounter opportunities. Maybe those kids know about other things going on in the village. If they have a mean streak they’d try to pull a prank on the PCs. Perhaps a boy has fallen into the well and floats unconscious. Just as a PC makes his way down the slippery well wall to the water, the boy opens is eyes and yells gotcha! Surprise might turn to pain as the yelling wakes the creature who calls the well its home….

You are still not feeling the ideas flow, so you turn to mapping out the tavern. Perhaps a tavern brawl might be a fun encounter. Another might be a ghost story told by the oldest living man in the village who sits by the fireplace each evening. Maybe his story is true. Sounds like you need another map.

A couple hours have gone by and you put down your pencil. DM block has won again because you still feel uninspired. Or has it? It seems like you have a region built, and one of its villages is mapped out along with some NPCs, and you have a session’s worth of encounters ready to drop in. Hey, you didn’t be too badly at all.

Many authors advise new writers to write all the time, even when they don’t feel like it. I think that’s why this mapping technique works so well. Even when you don’t feel inspired, you still get the work done, one map at a time. If you do get into the mood after drawing a map or three, then that’s a wonderful – success either way!