I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but there are some creature types that automatically get tagged as the villains as soon as they appear. This is true in D&D, in Pathfinder, in a superhero game, a pulp / horror game – you name it. These are ‘the obvious villains’ and today’s article is all about what they have in common, how to take advantage of the phenomenon, and things that you can do to put a fresh coat of paint on a concept that’s just a little too obvious or old-hat.

Who are the obvious villains?

I think the place to start is with a non-exhaustive list of the creatures that populate the classification of ‘obvious villains’. I’ve listed eleven (including a couple of ring-ins), but I’m sure there are more – I haven’t listed Demons, Devils, or Dark Gods, for example, (too obvious!) but they absolutely belong in this category.

1. Vampires & Necromancers

We all survive by consuming the lives of other life-forms, be they animal or vegetable, but there is something so much more direct about the way Vampires consume the lives of their victims that it feels more evil. This automatically elevates them to “the villain’ whenever they appear in a plotline – even when they aren’t.

Robert Asprin, in “Myth-ing Persons”, the 5th in the “Another Fine Myth” series, played on this expectation in the person of Vilhelm, the “Dispatcher Of Nightmares”.

But, unless you are very careful and creative, their natures as a vampire can overwhelm all sense of individuality about them, leaving them all feeling very much alike.

Closely allied to the perceptions of Vampires are the way players look at the presence of a Necromancer in an adventure. Like Vampires, these use the lives of others to empower themselves, which is frequently seen as inherently evil..

2. Liches

Liches are – conceptually – Vampires who have done away with the need to feed at all, subsisting directly on evil energies, and gaining still greater powers in the process. These changes do not make the sense of ‘evil’ more remote; these are always manipulative and evil, so opposed to the natural cycle of life that they have abandoned all humanity to preserve their existences.

As soon as a Lich or DemiLich is even hinted at in a plot, they are automatically elevated to ‘the bad guy’ of the plotline. Usage of this creature type usually falls into two categories, however – an evil plan of some sort, and some clever twist on where and how they have hidden and protected the phylactery that preserves their existence, and the lack of variety can become a detraction if they are over-used.

3. Other Sentient Undead including Ghosts & Mummies

These are all studies in obsession – so consumed with a desire of some kind that not even death can bring it to an end. In contrast to Vampires and Liches, there is something at least a little romantic in that notion that weakens the horrific edge that these creatures carry.

Even in The Mummy (Brendan Fraser version), there is that little edge of sympathy for the doomed lover who will do anything to bring back the lost love of his life.

Similarly, a ghost who yearns for Justice for some past misdeed perpetrated upon them carries a level of sympathy and understanding with them.

But it isn’t enough for these ‘creatures’ (using the term loosely) to achieve their goals, no matter how honorable, commendable, understandable, or sympathetic they may be; they have to be the instruments by which these goals are achieved, and will let nothing stand in their way. Their humanity has been sacrificed to their obsession.

It’s not quite so automatic to consider such beings to be the obvious villains of a plotline; it’s necessary for them to have some intermediate goals that reveal their villainy and capacity to influence events. In The Mummy, it is the way the titular mummy sacrifices others in order to restore itself and achieve its ends.

This is a natural outgrowth of their obsession, but the GM/writer still has to engineer an opportunity to put it on display. Doing so immediately elevates these creatures to enemies of the living, and the villains of the plot.

Often, the initial villain is not the obsessed Undead creature, it is the high priest who brings about the Undead creature’s return / escape; but obsession in no way permit such creatures to accept a secondary role; the roles between the two are soon reversed, and the servant becomes the master. The smartest such agents of resurrection recognize this inevitability and that – having brought the Undead back into the world – they have (plot-wise) served their purpose; conceding authority to the creature they have ‘created’ tends to preserve their existences a little further.

But there is always something appropriate in a Summoner who is so obsessed with achieving his goals that they sacrifice their own lives to unleash the monster, as was the case in the Dr Who two-parter “The End Of Time“, because this plays so directly into the themes of obsession.

As soon as it is established that the ‘monster’ will do whatever it has to in order to satisfy its obsession, and cannot permit anyone to do so on its behalf even if that amounts to self-sabotage, they are immediately elevated to the role of master villain in the adventure.

4. ‘Dark’ Dragons

Evil Dragons are so rarely handled in such a way as to make them the objects of awe and fear that they should be that I almost didn’t include them in the list at all. For a palpable example of how they should be perceived, read the “A Coming Storm” and “Scorched Earth” chapters of “The Bag Wars Saga” from Kenzerco / KODT..

There are essentially two different approaches to the characterization of ‘Dark’ Dragons: either these are so overwhelmingly physically powerful that they are used to simply overpowering opposition (which makes them a menace but not a Villain), or they are very well aware that their perceived natures makes them an existential threat to lesser beings, and use intelligence and wisdom to supplement and apply their raw power is clever and subtle ways.

In fantasy fiction, the latter is generally the only model that is acceptable.

And that model of ‘Dark Dragon’ can very definitely be the Villain. As soon as it is established that you are using that model, or as soon as you get a reputation amongst your players for doing so, the first hint of Dark Dragon elevates them to the status of Presumed Villain.

I should take a moment to address the nomenclature. In D&D, ‘Chromatic’ dragons – those named for colors (Red, Black, White, Blue, Green) are ‘evil’ and those named for Metals (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Brass) are ‘Good’ (‘Neutral’ Dragons are frequently named for Gems). Other campaigns and Game systems operate with different classification systems, or even treat this schema as a vast oversimplification.

Hence, i have used the generic term ‘Dark’ to refer to hostile dragons off whatever hue or texture.

5. Mind Flayers / Psychic Vampires / Parasites

Some interpretations would add ‘Doppelgangers’ and/or ‘Fey’ to this sub-category, whose members all subsist on, digest, or otherwise consume the self-identity of the individual.

(Refer to Pieces Of Creation: The Hidden Truth Of Dopplegangers for an interpretation of Doppelgangers, complete with misspelling in the title, which supports this perception, and The glass is half-Something: two variations on Fey for the equivalent treatment of Fey).
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In many cases, they also add the knowledge and/or skills of their prey to their own. Even when this is not known to be the case, folklore usually suggests to players (regardless of canon) that this is at least possible.

To keep players’ paranoia active, many GMs have local populaces also buy into this conjecture. Regardless, they are manipulative, and capable of worming underneath the hardiest of physical defensive capabilities and attacking a ‘soft underbelly’ that most characters don’t even consider and couldn’t protect even if they did.

Smart, manipulative, deceptive – it should come as no surprise that these qualities put these creatures on the ‘suspected villain’ list immediately they are encountered.

6. Drow

Speaking of which, Drow (a.k.a. Dark Elves) are another favorite of whom players will naturally assume the worst. This is two-fold – first, they serve / worship Lolth, who is evil, manipulative, clever, subtle and never inclined to take a back seat to anyone; and second, the Drow themselves aspire to be like her in both their internal social relationships, their politics, and their relationship with other species (especially those of the surface world).

Every D&D campaign that I’ve ever run has featured a different ‘take’ on Drow, it’s one of my ‘fingerprints’. And they are always Villains of one sort or another – even in those game worlds where the Schism between Elves and Drow has yet to occur.

7. Orcs

In a lot of low-level campaigns, Orcs are the source of the early villains. They are quite ubiquitous. As campaigns age, it is common for Orcs to be revealed as cats-paws for more serious villains, degrading them in respect of making them obvious villains; but this ignores the societal and cultural propensities that allow them to be so easily manipulated. It’s relatively rare for campaigns to explore that aspect of the setting at all.

Part of the problem is that relatively few GMs actually put any thought into Orcish societies, treating them as generic primitives in a gang-like social structure. This was something that I set out to specifically explore in the Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire campaign; I deliberately set out to map out a society for Orcs that contained elements of which Orcs could be justifiable proud. There had to be positives as well as negatives.

I refer readers to Not Like My Tribe – Sophisticated Primitives, Part 1 and Part 2;

… to the four-part Distilled Cultural Essence series;

… to Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3 (and to the Orcs & Elves series more generally),

… and to Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Orcish Mythology specifically..

8. Trolls

Strictly speaking, Trolls shouldn’t be here in this listing, because (once again) there is really no propensity to take them seriously except as Menaces in most campaigns. But the concept of Trolls has changed somewhat with the advent of modern communications (especially social media) and – somewhat generalized – the identification of “troublemakers” as Trolls has breathed new life into the concept.

Most GMs have not conflated the two definitions of Troll, but doing so immediately adds new life, richness, and depth to the traditional Troll.

I would argue that as soon as a demagogue shows up in a campaign, an ‘internet troll’ (with or without the internet existing as a platform), they get automatically tagged as a villain, and hence that they belong in this list; conflating ‘fantasy trolls’ with these agents provocateur spreads the joy (and the relevance).

Besides, doing so gives me the opportunity (a little later in the article) to share a fun encounter from the Zenith-3 campaign that literally left the players gob-smacked.

9. Goblin Hordes

How respectable are Goblins in your campaign? Many seem to treat them as ‘lesser Orcs’. In some of my campaigns, I introduced ‘Strategic Feats’ specifically for Goblin Hordes; these are feats that only work for characters in a group. In some cases, all members of the group have to have the feat, in some cases only one feat holder is necessary. Part of the inspiration was a discussion of overbearing rules, but I no longer remember where that discussion was located.

I’ve mentioned these feats before, and was sure that I had actually written them up, but a careful search of Campaign Mastery’s archives have failed to turn them up. An example might be +1 to archery-based attack rolls for each member of a group who had the feat – so a Goblin Horde with 200 members trained in this feat could add +200 to their attack rolls. This would translate to 10 automatic successes against any target attacked by the horde, each combat round according to the feat (as I remember it). But even a small unit of 5 goblins, all of whom get +5 on their ranged combat rolls from this feat, each combat round, suddenly make that unit a lot more terrifying. There were restrictions and limitations – the ‘horde’ had to outnumber the targets, for example, in terms of total character levels or Hit Dice.

This article is not about those feats, specifically, but the effects of those feats were sufficiently profound that Goblin Hordes were immediately elevated from Menace to Villains when they were encountered.

10. Sorcerers

I don’t know why, but it’s an observed phenomenon: people don’t trust Sorcerers, and by people, I mean ‘players’. At best, they are received with suspicion and paranoia. Mages can be good or bad, and get assessed on their personalities; but for some reason people seem to think the worst of Sorcerers from the word go.

11. Politicians

Finally, as soon as a politician who acts like a politician on the campaign trail turns up in a campaign, players are immediately suspicious of them. And the harder they work at ‘looking good’, the more untrustworthy they seem.

Taking Advantage Of Obvious Villains

The appearance of an obvious villain automatically makes players suspect attempts to distract them or manipulate them. There is an assumption of a master plan (whether there is one or not) and many events that don’t fit that master plan are easily dismissed as attempts to conceal or distract from that plan by the villain. How the villain achieved this is irrelevant.

In other words, as soon as an Obvious Villain is encountered, the presumptions about the role in the adventure of that Obvious Villain begin shaping the perceptions, assumptions, and thought processes of the players and their characters.

The thing is that, in most cases, there is no need to establish the villain’s credentials as a villain, or even the villain. That makes them much easier for GMs to work with, and that’s part of the reason why the groups listed earlier have the associated perceptions that they do – these tend to be the villains that new GMs reach for.

Using Obvious Villains as Misdirection and Smokescreens

As GMs become more experienced and sophisticated, they will usually stop being content to let the players’ assumptions do all the work, and will start trying to introduce less obvious villains or obfuscate the involvement of the obvious villain.

It isn’t long before they start looking for something more original and unusual to do with Obvious Villains.

Pretty much the first thing that they do is to use an Obvious Villain to occupy the spotlight and take the blame while the true Villain lurks in the shadows. The Obvious Villain is, essentially, a flunky who provides a public face to intimidate and obfuscate.

More subtle approaches are soon devised. Having the real villain make themselves appear to be an Obvious Villain so that their enemies target vulnerabilities that don’t actually exist – I once had a Halfling Illusionist create the deliberate impression that they were a Human Vampire, for example. Such misdirection not only bestows a level of threat that the true identity of the villain might not, but they work well as a defensive measure and can keep players guessing for quite some time. This derivative clearly smacks of The Wizard Of Oz.

A related trick is to have the Villain of a plot appear to be one type of Obvious Villain when, in reality, they are another – a Doppelganger posing as a Necromancer, for example.

The other thing that tends to happen fairly quickly is that the plots put in motion by villains, obvious or otherwise, tend to become more subtle and sophisticated, and part of that is the defensive measure of making themselves look like a traditional representative of their type while the villain has some secret abilities that enhance their prowess or capabilities.

And, of course, there is usually good value (if you can make it convincing) in having the Obvious Enemy turn out to be an ally (possible reluctant). In some cases, though, this has been done to death – Drizzt has ruined the concept of “Good Dark Elf” for many a campaign.

Repudiating Expectations

it’s a short step from these developments to devising ways to play against type. ‘A Vampire who is also a Paladin’ became the central concept of an order of Knights Templar early in the Adventurer’s Club (pulp) Campaign, for example.

These also tend to become more subtle and sophisticated with GMing experience. As an example, below is an encounter with a Troll from the Zenith-3 campaign:

117 Parkdale

Background

The PCs have split into two teams traveling through Texas and Arkansas (with a side-trip into Mississippi) in search of a base of operations. The “117” means that this is the 17th location to be scouted on Day 2 by Team 1.

Location

Information given to the players from a ‘Guidebook’ on the towns and locations of Arkansas (in reality, equal parts research and fictionalizing)

Twelve minutes after departing Hamburg, you approach Parkdale, a city of 412 people occupying 158 households in a 1.02 sqr mile area. The racial makeup of the city is 29% White 67% Black 2% Hispanic / Latino. Median income is half that of some communities in the state.

Perched at an elevation of 36 meters (118 feet above sea level), which is high ground relative to its surroundings, Parkdale (originally known as Poplar Bluff) is one of the oldest unincorporated communities in the county. A store was built at the present location in 1857, and several farmers were already working the land in the vicinity. The owner’s son worked as a clerk in his father’s store and later opened his own store. A Methodist church had also been built sometime in the 1850s, and it was joined by a Baptist church and a Masonic Lodge in 1857. The central point of the community was a steamboat landing. Key parts of the community were burned by Union soldiers during the Civil War, but after the war, the damaged operations were rebuilt and even expanded.

A railroad through the then Poplar Bluff was completed in the early 1890s. Because the railroad also served the larger city of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, railroad officials named the depot Parkdale. The name of the post office and of the city followed suit. In 1902, Parkdale was reincorporated as a second-class city. The Bank of Parkdale was established by 1905. Stores near the depot included a pharmacy, several mercantile establishments, and an auction house. A bridge was built across the bayou in 1908, costing $8,000 in Ashley County funds and an additional $1,500 in local funds. A telephone exchange was operating by 1912. The Baptist congregation, which had declined in size, was revitalized by a revival service in 1909.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Parkdale became notorious for violent crimes, including murders. Historian Y. W. Ethridge described Parkdale as a “boisterous community” due to the railroad, sawmills, and saloons. One citizen later said, “Parkdale was terrible. There were a bunch of outlaws. It was a shoot-up town. There was a rough and rowdy white element here. It was wild.” One of the most unusual crimes in Parkdale was the lynching of Ernest Williams, an African-American man, in June 1908, by a group of African-American women who had organized a league to enforce better moral conduct, and whose standards Williams had evidently fallen foul of. Consequently, they seized him one evening, dragged him to a telegraph pole on the outskirts of town, and hanged him. His body was not discovered by local authorities until the next morning, and no one was ever charged with the crime.

Parkdale is home to the Overflow National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1980 to protect one of the remaining bottom-land hardwood forests considered vital for maintaining mallard, wood duck, and other waterfowl populations. 17,000 acres including a seasonally-flooded wetland complex and a narrow strip of escarpment on the western boundary.

As late as 1939, Parkdale’s cotton gins led the county in cotton production. A fire in 1940 destroyed part of the city, but buildings were rebuilt, and the city continued to flourish beyond the middle of the twentieth century. Although several had struck in the vicinity over the years, one disaster that seemed to avoid the town were tornadoes, so there was some good news.

After 1970, when the cotton price collapsed, stores began to close, and many buildings were abandoned. Several more collapsed in the snows of early Ragnarok, including some which were still inhabited at the time. There are no longer any commercial operations situated in Parkdale other than the Post Office. The nearest restaurant, service station, and supermarket are all 5 miles to the South along Highway 165 in the town of Wilmot.

When the fimbulwinter snows topped two meters, a stranger came who seemed able to melt them with a touch. Without him, the locals feel they would not have survived. When the heat came, though, he vanished into the night. A statue in an empty lot in the center of town is dedicated to the helpful stranger.

Four properties in Parkdale are listed on the National Register of Historic Places: the Baptist church built in 1910, the Methodist church built in 1926, the house of Dr. M. C. Hawkins built in 1912, and the house of Dr. Robert George Williams built in 1903.

Lawyer and judge Turner Butler was born in Parkdale when it was called Poplar Bluff. John Caldwell was a well-known banker and community leader in Parkdale whose art career took off late in life when he became widely known for his award-winning wood engravings and woodblock prints.

Encounter

Things immediately take a turn for the interesting when you approach the western edge of town, and the bridge over the Batholomew Bayou. The paved road continues straight ahead to the historic bridge, which seems to have caught fire at some point and is officially out of service. A rough gravel dogleg leads to a very rough new bridge with a very rough and unusually large stone hut situated at the side of the road. (25-117a, 25-117b).

“25-117a” & “25-117b” refer to illustrations. “25” is a sequential code used to put entries into playable sequence so that I can switch back and forth from team one to team two; the “117” is the team and location code again, and the “a” and “b” indicate the first two photos / illustrations for that location.

25-117a Wooden Bridge
Image Source: Wikipedia, “wooden bridge over tarang river” (actually located in Thailand), released into the public domain by the author; cropped with ‘windscreen tinting’ added.

 

25-117b The Hut
Image Source: Uncertain, but it matches a smaller image from Pinterest, described as an Irish Cottage with a thatched roof. The same hut from slightly different perspectives appears on several commercial clip art sites such as Alamy.com and dreamstime.com, and on a number of travel sites. Some of these identify the location as Ennis, or County Claire. I have vague memories of painting out a watermark in the lower right corner.

Encounter Content:

A stout tree has been trimmed of it’s branches and lies across the entrance to the bridge next to a sign which reads, “Pay Toll”. From the hut, a huge man-like figure, 10′ tall, emerges and stomps over to your car window. Greenish skin, a brown loincloth, long and greasy green hair short legs and arms that reach almost to the ground, sharp white teeth and long, savage claws complete the picture. (25-117c)

’25-117c’ is the D&D5e representation of a Troll. Not reproduced for copyright reasons even though the image appears on a number of RPG-related sites such as RPG Museum (hosted by Fandom.com), Critical Role Wiki (also hosted by Fandom.com), and Enworld. Click on any of these links to view the image, especially the last. I seem to remember cropping and tweaking the background.

Carefully, it reaches up and taps on the window [if the PC hasn’t already rolled it down]. “Toll. Eat Lunch and Speak News or green money in each basket” it says in a rough, crackled voice like that of Louis Armstrong on a bad day, as it waves it’s other arm at four baskets placed beside the road.

While you could pay the toll, it will cost you $27 based on the notes that you have at the moment – two ones, a five, and a twenty.

IF THE TEAM ATE BREAKFAST EARLY (they didn’t): Breakfast was a good five hours ago, and even though you aren’t due to stop for another half hour or so, the notion of an early lunch and providing the creature with news and some company for a few minutes is undoubtedly attractive. Besides, if the locals are used to his presence, perhaps even accept it as continuing the trend of the helpful stranger, they might accept some strange new arrivals like the team. So this could be quite a significant conversation to have.

IF THE TEAM ATE BREAKFAST LATER (they did): It’s about 3 hours since you had breakfast and you aren’t due to stop for lunch for almost an hour. But it might be better, and would certainly be cheaper, to accept the invitation and stop for an early meal and provide the creature with news and company for a short time. Besides, if the locals are used to his presence, perhaps even accept it as continuing the trend of the helpful stranger, they might accept some strange new arrivals like the team. So this could be quite a significant conversation to have.

If the team decide to stop for lunch, the huge figure will point at a spot beside the hut and say “Me Grobhan. My Kind you call Troll, I call Darenwu [Pronounced “Darnwoo”]. Put car.” Anyone who knows Mandarin will be able to translate Darenwu as “Big Shot” – assuming that his language actually is Mandarin, and this isn’t a coincidence!

“Mandarin” is based on, and related to, the Chinese language – but with 10,000 years of additional evolution.

When you have parked, he leads you into his hut and points at a round table of normal height, about 10′ in diameter. Your host could easily reach from one side of the table to the other while seated. He turns a knob on a large stove and runs his fingernails down a slab of stone of some kind, generating a shower of sparks, one of which ignites the gas. He then places a large copper-bottomed pot with a spout on one side, capable of holding a good twenty liters or more of water, onto the stove. The sound it makes clearly shows that it is reasonably full of some liquid. A shake from a packet tosses a handful of dried leaves into it, and the figure turns to a cupboard full of crockery both oversized and human-scale. “You will have tea,” he announces. “And deer-meat pie. And seed-cake.”

A deliberate inversion of the “Don’t feed a troll” meme / advice, which relates to the ‘internet’ troll variety.

You notice that the far end of the tree blocking the road projects through a hole in the wall. Every couple of minutes, the sound of an engine arriving at the toll bridge can be heard, and Grobhan bellows out the window, “Pay Toll. One green money in each basket. Or go away.” Most pay, a few turn around after eyeing the size of the tree-trunk. One yells back, “My wife is ill and I must buy medicine. I don’t have money to pay a toll.” Grobhan bellows back – “I smell your car, I know its name. Do good thing for stranger, help wife get well.” As he does when someone pays, he then uses the wall as the fulcrum of a lever and raises the tree by pushing against the protruding end. His strength might not be at Blackwing standard, but it’s not inconsiderable – at least 50 times human, and probably more.

When the foodstuffs are presented – sliced by one of his nails – they look strangely like fairly standard supermarket manufacture, right down to plastic wrapping – Grobhan sits down on a creaking wooden chair and begins to eat. “Eat, and Speak Of World and News,” he instructs you.

After about 20 minutes, the food is consumed, and Grobhan has eaten as much as the rest of you put together. You kept trying to steer the conversation toward him and the town, and each time he gave a succinct answer and then redirected the conversation back to news of the outside world, in the process showing that he was a lot smarter than his appearance or conversational English would suggest. At the end of the meal, you have learned that:

He came from a vast city (probably Mandarin’s Capital), where he worked as a stonemason and carpenter. He was welcomed here but treated with some suspicion until a roof started to collapse as he was walking by. Running into the building, he held the roof up while the family escaped. He then drew plans in the dirt showing how to repair the collapsed roof and reinforce it in the shortest possible time, taking advantage of his strength.

After that, he was considered one of the locals. They asked him to rebuild the bridge. He told them he could not afford to do so, he needed to find work for food. They agreed to let him charge a toll to use his repaired bridge. There are four baskets because one goes to the town, one goes to the family who buy him food from the market in Wilmot every week – they get to keep whatever’s left but have to pay anything more – one goes to improve and maintain the bridge, and one provides him with spending money for other things.

He built the cottage himself. The bridge took about a month to construct, but he had a temporary thing for humans to walk across in a day or two. It then took him another month to create the one-room cottage.

A quick round of introductions:

Blackwing was the superhero identity of one of the PCs when he was transformed into a gargoyle by the mystic armor that gave him super-strength, amongst other abilities including shape-changing.

Basalt is a new superhero ‘secret identity’ for the character formerly known as Blackwing. Using his shape-change, he transforms into a 10′ tall figure of Rock (permitting him to use his super-strength openly). The new (and completely fake) civilian identity that goes with ‘Basalt’ is Frank Hudson, a man-hunter.

Specter is a new superhero ‘secret identity’ for Runeweaver, the team’s mage, who uses magic and tech to appear to be a revolutionary-war-era ghost. When not in super-identity, his new and completely fake civilian identity is Isaiah Lucas, a ski instructor and competition Woodlogger.

Zantar is a new superhero identity for the Kzin Martial Artist member of the team, who usually operates under the nom-de-plum “Defender”. His new civilian identity is Brust, a Kzin tourist and inveterate explorer. Since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Earth and Kzin, there are plenty of ‘tourists’ running around – they seem to regard the political [situation] currently being experienced as a curiosity of human society to be ignored whenever it’s inconvenient. In this identity, he has foregone the clan markings (stripes) on his arms and (while undercover ) is wearing “typical Kzin tourist apparel”, not too inappropriate for the season, consisting of Sunglasses, baseball cap, singlet, shorts, flip-flops (called ‘thongs’ in Australia), and a large gold earring.

The PCs and Zantar are currently in their ‘civilian’ cover identities.

Mandarin is a former enemy of the team’s parent group who was permitted to conquer a neighboring alternate-history world in which that was adjudged to be the lesser of two evils. He used his magic to accelerate time in that dimension and established a multicultural Galactic Empire based around magic instead of technology, slowly becoming an ally to his former enemies. That space-time was destroyed in Ragnarok, but many of his subjects were saved by ‘seeding’ planets throughout the Milky Way with refugees. One of the more profound discoveries made by the PCs is that there were a LOT more of these refugees on Earth than they thought, mostly keeping themselves out of the public eye and dismissed as myths and legends. Some have begun to assimilate into the local culture, however.

Basalt notices, in the course of the meal, that the stones have actually been shaped more perfectly and exactly than would be possible with unmodified natural resources. Conclusion: there’s more to Grobhan than meets the eye. What’s more, you haven’t seen any stones of this type anywhere in the region – you couldn’t prove that Grobhan manufactured them himself, but it’s far from out of the question!

Specter, you notice that Grobhan is radiating a low level of magic – not enough for him to be a significant spellcaster, but enough that he could be a low-level mage or some sort of more expert but specialist mage. Which makes a certain amount of sense: in an Empire the scale of Mandarin’s, you would need to be something exceptional to be allowed to migrate to the capital. You suspect that this particular Darenwu is a trained stone-mage, and maybe a wood-mage as well, and that he may well have magical devices hidden away to enhance his arts.

Zantar is quite certain that Grobhan isn’t as thick as he looks, not by half. He is probably a trained Imperial Master Artisan, specializing in Wood and Stone-crafting, and trained to utilize magic the way human carpenters, masons, and builders might employ apprentices and subcontractors. He could just as easily have planted a medieval castle with a drawbridge as he did a simple tree-trunk, he thinks, but he went simple so that he would better fit in, locally.

IF THE PCs PAY THE TOLL (they did): They will barely get across the bridge before their car will have a blowout in it’s left rear tyre, possibly punctured on the bridge. Grobhan will emerge from his hut, walk across the bridge (which sways alarmingly) and assist by holding the car level like a jack while you change the tyre. As a result, the wheel is changed in about 10 minutes – but you will need to stop somewhere and get the spare repaired or replaced, which will take more time.

I seem to have been so confident that they would do so that I did not spell out what would happen if they refused. In retrospect, I can see that there were too many possible outcomes to have done so, anyway; it would have to be improvised and exactly what was said and done would have a material impact on the course of developments.

This was also a complete inversion of the mythic trope of the Troll “living under the bridge”. It was a completely unexpected encounter but one that made perfect sense to the players in hindsight.

Stating The Obvious

Using an Obvious Villain creates certain expectations in the minds of players, and these can then be manipulated by the GM to lend color, drama, and/or distinctiveness to a plotline.

Sabotage assumptions, or play into them. Throw surprises and plot twists into the plot. So long as you make sure that everything makes sense in the end, the end result is a game word that is richer and more complex than the overt simplicity created by the Obviousness of the Villain.

Even if you decide to play with a straight bat, with no significant twists in the plot, the expectations can blind-side you if you don’t take them into account.

For some reason, that reminds me of the Cybernetic Eco-terrorist Druid from the far future that I dropped into one of my fantasy campaigns at one point, complete with his robotic dogs… No-one expects a Druid to be the bad guy, never mind one of the most dangerous that had been encountered to date!

Dialogue: Essential Techniques

There are three basic approaches to writing dialogue.

1. Canned Dialogue

This involves writing the central dialogue in advance, making assumptions about the conversational cues that the players will provide.

There are obvious advantages to this approach; you can take as much time as you need to polish and nuance the words, building in layers of depth and meaning, incorporating technical accuracy where it is appropriate, and generally making it possible for the conversation to be more immersive.

The primary price is interactivity; what you prepare are really a series of monologues that will only deliver the full impact desired if your assumptions are correct. As soon as the players go off your pre-determined script, you have to scramble to rewrite on the fly or extemporize to steer the conversation back to the course you have engineered.

This immediately detracts from that sense of immersion.

Ultimately, canned dialogue can be easier on the GM in many respects, and that’s why it’s a common first resort.

2. Extemporized Dialogue

The most commonly considered alternative is the exact opposite and involves the GM making up the NPCs dialogue on the spot, something that is called extemporizing. This is a LOT harder than simply reading prepared dialogue, even when the course of the planned dialogue goes off the rails.

Quite often, technical accuracy and nuance and even characterization is sacrificed to the god of Interactivity, and it’s at least twice as likely that the plot will go off the rails in the course of the dialogue.

To extemporize properly, the GM has to keep several factors in mind at the same time, a juggling act that is never simple.

□ The Personality of the speaker;
□ How to manifest that personality in expressions and figures of speech;
□ Giving each character a distinctive ‘voice’ and being consistent in doing so;
□ Making the character’s communication clear and comprehensible;
□ The ambitions, motives, and desires of the speaker;
□ … and how those will influence what they say and how they will say it;
□ The relationship (if any) between the speaker and the PC;
□ … and how that will impact on the conversational content and delivery;
□ The technical information to be imparted (if any);
□ The big picture, i.e. how this conversation relates to the adventure as a whole;
□ The local picture, i.e. how this conversation connects to and propels forward the immediate plot;
□ How to manipulate the content of the conversation to achieve those purposes both local ad big-picture;
□ The pacing and desired drama of the dialogue.



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That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air at once. any GM who can manage it regularly and reliably is entitled to feel at the top of their game. More frequently, some form of compromise is needed – something has to be sacrificed.

The big picture is usually the first to go, followed by pacing considerations, then the interpersonal dynamics and finally either technical accuracy or compromised individuality.

And any GM who doesn’t think the players pick up on the cues and clues that these compromises produce, and use to assess the reliability of the information imparted, has rocks in their head. A better way to think of it is that you have only one thing that you can impart clearly – personality or technical accuracy – and players WILL judge which one they can rely based on your manner of presentation.

Even attempting this technique can be incredibly hard work and extremely stressful. Many GMs try it once and immediately retreat to canned dialogue.

3. The Hybrid Model

Quite often, GMs will not retreat all the way from full Extemporization, instead adopting some form of hybrid model. Prepared paragraphs containing just the technical information, for example, letting the GM read the important bits while giving them freedom of expression outside of the technical dialogue.

This will frequently result in having a half-dozen or more prepared responses to anticipated comments and questions, and that introduces a new problem: the GM has to be able to find, almost instantly, the correct response, and also has to make sure that any critical information gets imparted even if the players don’t steer the conversation in the right direction.

I’ve often found it useful to summarize the plot purposes of any conversation as GM reference at the start of any planned dialogue, especially if that dialogue is to be extemporized in part or whole.

It can also be useful to list pertinent personality and relationship details and how they might impact on the style or demonstrated attitude of the character prior to the conversation.

The danger here is that the GM needs time to read and digest these notes without interrupting his gameplay to any noticeable degree. That means that they have to be specific, very brief, and easy to use.

The mixed mode

My approach is to employ a different compromise each and every time – if there is minimal backstory, full extemporization with a couple of brief notes on plot and personality; if there is more complex history, a hybrid model; and if there is considerable technical detail or sufficient plot importance to justify it, something more fully approaching the ‘canned dialogue’ technique.

In particular, interactions with any NPC who is unlikely to ever appear in-game again tends to favor the extemporized approach; the more likely it is that the NPC will appear again, the more important consistency becomes, and that is built on notes that can be referenced on the occasion of future appearances.

In general, the more you can adopt the principle of only doing work once, the better off you will be in the long run..

This ‘mixed mode’ approach lets me decide which set of compromises is better suited to a specific conversation, and which set of strengths will be more important to that particular interaction between PCs and NPC.

This is not a different approach to the other three (which is why it is not numbered ‘4’); it’s picking and choosing between the techniques to suit the needs of the moment, as much as available prep time will allow.

Dialogue Considerations

Dialogue has to carry a lot of baggage in both fiction and RPGs. There are only two real sources of information about what is occurring in an adventure – what the character observes and what they are told in conversations. Characters have to digest the information they acquire from these sources, develop theories as to what is taking place, and try to devise ways of testing and verifying those theories. They may have to make decisions based on the assumption that the theories are correct, or may have the luxury of deferring those decisions until after the theories are verified.

Everything that a character (and their player) learns during play that is not directly observed should come from conversations. In real life, there are no omniscient voice-overs, and because they can undercut PC agency within a campaign, I discourage their use in RPGs.

That said, in real life you can have multiple conversations with multiple people and progress can be nine parts tedium to one part interesting. That won’t work in fiction, and it won’t wash at the game table, either. Some means of compression is therefore necessary to get the tedium down to an irreducible minimum, and then to make the communication more interesting.

One technique for doing so is the omniscient narrator. Another is to coalesce many conversations into one, and to composite many sources into a single character. This sort of thing goes on in films, TV shows, and even documentaries all the time.

This solves one problem, only by increasing the importance and workload of the dialogue that remains.

I have assembled a list of no less than nine critical tasks that dialogue must (ideally) achieve.

1. Natural Speech

It’s vital that what an NPC says sounds natural, as though the character would say it, and say it that way, if they really existed. The more you can achieve this, the more immersive and believable the game world will be.

2. Lecturing

The dominant aspect of lectures that every GM should take away from this article and take into account forevermore is that they are inherently boring. This is because they are almost completely non-interactive monologues, of necessity. Some GMs avoid lectures by always extemporizing, but I think that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

There are times when it is necessary that an NPC deliver a briefing or a lecture. Recognize the inevitability and actively work on developing techniques to combat the liability of boredom that comes with the territory.



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Subdivide and Conquer

There are three techniques to handling this problem that I particularly want to call to reader’s attention.

Illustrations and Presentations

Of course, lecturers have known of this problem for decades if not longer. For a long time, there wasn’t much that they could do about it – but then PowerPoint came along and livened things up. I stole that basic idea and used it to prepare a couple of ‘illustrated lectures’ in my Zenith-3 campaign – it was a while back, now, but it still seems fresh and clear to me as a result.

I detailed the first of these in a dedicated post at Campaign Mastery because I thought it might be useful / interesting to readers and GMs in its own right – The Meta-Physics Of Magic.

The second was less likely to be of universal interest and dealt with some of the nuances and complications of time travel within the campaign, presented at a point where that was about to become important to the PCs. This was embedded in part three of another series here at Campaign mastery, “A Long Road”. I’ve linked below to both the series as a whole and to the specific post concerned.

□ A Long Road – Zenith-3 Synopsis & Notes
□ A Long Road – Zenith-3 Notes for all Pt 3

As noted in the latter, both of these were sprinkled liberally with what were supposed to be snapshots excerpted from a dynamic display supposedly being generated interactively within the game as illusions by a skilled mage.

Key to the success was providing a copy of the illustrations to a player with another PC so that the illustrations could be seen at the same time as I was reading aloud the carefully-prepped canned dialogue. At the end of the adventure, I also provided the player with an excerpted copy of the ‘lecture’ to accompany the diagrams for their future reference.

The key to the success of this technique is making the illustrations compelling enough to hold attention. Plain text on a screen – frequently seen in PowerPoint presentations – won’t cut it. Not unless it tells a joke, and a good one, anyway.

The next time I need this technique, I intend to try and make the ‘lecture’ even more interactive by presenting the illustration and getting the PCs to interpret it before the lecturer expands on their understanding. When that will happen, I have no idea…



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Illustrated Documents provided in advance

The final technique is one that I have employed both in the Zenith=3 and Adventurer’s Club campaigns. It basically involves preparing documents and giving them to players in advance of their characters acquiring them, relying on them to read them and then not to use knowledge that their characters don’t have yet. My players are pretty good at the second, and (in some cases) not quite so good at the first, but still better than average.

The Adventurer’s Club examples came from the “Prison Of Jade” adventure, and were provided in-game as handouts, rather than in advance. This is not necessarily the best approach, especially to anything longer than, say, 4 pages or so. These were excerpted and incorporated into the text of Pieces Of Creation: Lon Than, Kalika, and the Prison Of Jade – the first starts with “The Mystic Properties Of Jade” and the second, “Kali and Kalika”. Both are without the illustrations that accompanied them when provided to the players, unfortunately, as explained in the ‘behind the curtain’ notes that are interspersed within the article.

Since the subject has come up, there are a couple of other posts here at Campaign Mastery that specifically address Handouts and the problems that can come with them that I should bring to the attention of readers.

□ Beyond the Game I: Handouts and Props

□ A Helping Handout

□ Ask The GMs: The Great Handouts Question

□ The latter parts of the ‘New Beginnings’ series also discuss handouts for campaign background and rules extensively.


The other major example that I can point to is the background for the current Zenith-3 campaign – much of which was presented here at Campaign Mastery in the 12-part ‘Imperial History Of Earth-Regency’ series – noting that when the original version was provided through my campaign newsletter, it was even more lavishly illustrated because I was not concerned with the image source. The Campaign Mastery version does contain corrections, expansions, revisions, and additional details than the original, however.

3. Interactivity

When a PC says something to an NPC, that NPC should be able to respond to what is said in a natural and normal way. The dialogue content is thus an interaction between the player and GM as much as between the characters that they then embody.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? At the heart of it lies a very straightforward proposition: How would this character respond to what they have just heard? – but in practice, it’s not that easy.

Achieving interaction requires Extemporization, i.e. inventing dialogue off the cuff, and that requires that long list of considerations that I discussed earlier. On top of that, there are those who will take the ‘plot function’ of dialogue too far and turn the discussion into railroad tracks on which the plot rolls along. This is, pretty much by definition, the exact opposite of genuine interactivity.



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4. Informative

Often, the primary purpose of dialogue is to impart information to the PC or PCs who are present. Such information has to be both clear and concise, and yet has to reflect the persona of the NPC delivering it – and those requirements are frequently incompatible if not completely contradictory.

5. Big-Picture

It’s never helpful to lose touch with the big picture. Some of my most creative work was the result of doing so and then having to rescue the adventure or even the whole campaign from my own creative instincts.

6. Motivation & Purpose

These don’t refer to your intentions and desires for the conversation, but to the NPC’s motivations and what purpose they want the conversation to achieve.

One of the most fun things that you can do is to have an NPC react to whatever the PC says as though it was the greatest reward they can imagine – or a declaration of a blood feud – even though what the PC said was neither.

     [NPC]: “Good afternoon, Sir Gently.”
     [PC]: “Chancellor Extrak. Enjoying the festivities?”
     [NPC]: “Quite a distinctive visual display. Quite skilled, I suppose. But I haven’t been able to pay them enough attention to really appreciate them. Busy, busy, busy.”
     [PC]: “I watched some of them from the balcony, earlier. An excellent vantage point, i thought.”
     [NPC]: So long as the weather stays fair. But I must be going, now.
      “Thank you for the… conversation.”

That last statement is critical – depending on how it is phrased and delivered, the interpretation of the conversation from the NPCs point of view is delivered. Smug and condescending, or casual and friendly, or with barely-controlled fury, or the icy manner of someone forced to be polite despite taking extreme offense. Only the “casual and friendly” response is in any way reasonable, given the content of the small talk.

Which means that if the tone indicates one of the other reactions, the PC (and player) should be left scratching their head and asking “what just happened?” – it is clear that the NPC got far more from the conversation than met the eye.

The GM’s fun can last all the way up to the point where they have to provide some sensible explanation for the reaction. If you didn’t have a strong reason at the time, though, that can be when the fun stops and the scrambling starts.



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7. Omissions, Errors, Blind Spots, Prejudices and Malice

Given that ‘errors’ are listed explicitly, the implication is that ‘omissions’ are deliberate acts on the part of the NPC. It’s my experience that most GMs don’t spend enough time thinking about these five items that should contaminate most conversations in some way.

□ What will the NPC deliberately avoid mentioning, and why?

□ What does the NPC misunderstand about the situation? What is the source of that misunderstanding? And what is the NPCs inaccurate understanding?

□ What is the NPC unable to see about the situation?

□ What prejudices on the part of the NPC will color his or her interpretation of events and actions – past, present, and future?

□ Does the NPC have some reason to deliberately lie to the PC?

All too often, unless they are known to be the villain or in service to the villain, the GM will ignore these questions; if an NPC is asked a question, or given some information (by a PC or another NPC), it will be honest, open, and reliable. That’s not the case in real life, so why should it be the case in an RPG?

There can be exceptions – in a Pulp campaign, morality is far more binary, more black-and-white, and that means that NPCs will not overtly lie and mislead (unless they are villains, of course, and usually not even then). Bur in general, the truth is that most NPCs are unreasonably honest.

8. Plot Impetus & Direction

There are two basic approaches to populating an adventure with NPCs. The first is to roleplay every encounter, because the players should not know which ones are important; the second is to only roleplay those conversations that are significant to the plot. Conversations that are not important get described in passing by omniscient narration or completely ignored.

[GM]: “You quickly arrange lodgings and a meal with the tavern-keeper, who shows you to your rooms, advising that a bell will sound when the evening meal is ready to be served in the common room.”

Actually playing through introductions, negotiations, etc, could easily take five or ten minutes. If the NPC is to be important to the plot in some way, is to provide some crucial information or something, by all means, take that time; but, if nor, a GM should at least consider not doing so, under the precepts of the second approach.

If I were playing the one campaign weekly or even fortnightly, I would tend to incline toward the first approach, because it gives the game world greater verisimilitude; if play is less frequent, or constrained in hours in some other respect, I incline towards hand-waving trivial encounters.

Note also that ‘imparting verisimilitude’ is an entirely reasonable plot function for an NPC or an encounter to have, one that on its own is sufficient to justify playing it out – if that sense of believability, of suspension of disbelief, needs some reinforcement at that point in the adventure.

The final factor that plays into this type of decision is the desired pacing of the adventure. If the big climax is approaching, hand-waving this sort of empty dialogue is far more desirable than is the case early in an adventure.

If, however, I wanted to deflate the pace of the adventure – to get a climax to coincide with the end of play for the day, for example, or because I wanted time to ratchet the tension up a notch or two higher, empty conversations like this one are a great way of doing so.

9. Characterization

The last critical ingredient is characterization of the NPC.

You can deliver some of it through descriptions of them and of their workplace (assuming that they have some measure of control over it) or home (same assumption).

You can even prepare the ground by having others express an opinion of the NPC in advance of the meeting.

But the real meat of the characterization comes from what they say and how they say it.

Focusing on the holes

This article was actually inspired by some TV advertising for British-made crime dramas on one of the television networks here in Australia, and by some additional thoughts that the advertising triggered.

In a nutshell:

• Everybody Lies
• Everybody makes untested and unverified assumptions without stating them directly
• Everybody has prejudices and opinions that leak into their observations and interpretations.

It is well known that eyewitness testimony is unreliable. First, if people are distracted, they can miss the blindingly obvious, something that I have described a number of times.

• In Blind Spots and False Illusions: How much can you really see?, in the section, “The focus of inattention”, for example.
• The Power Of Blur: Blog Carnival June ’21 gives the Basketball Gorilla Illusion it’s own dedicated subsection, towards the end of the article – look for “The Basketball Gorilla”. It also contains a link to a book by the creators of the experiment, if you’re interested.
• A Trick Of The Mind: Aides de Memoire also discusses the Basketball Gorilla, in the section “The Junk File”, along with several other sorts of information that the brain discards.

Second, humans are hardwired mentally to ‘fill in the blanks’, something that optical illusions are known to exploit. I discussed this in Blind Spots and False Illusions: How much can you really see? (again), in the section, “The Relevance Of Illusion”.

If you put a bunch of eyewitness together, an opinion expressed forcibly enough can actually overwrite witness memories, changing what someone was wearing or what they looked like. It’s called witness contamination. I describe it in The Other Side Of The Camera: Depth in RPGs, in the section “The Camera Of Implication: A witness statement” (it’s early in the post).

Eyewitness Testimony and Memory Biases, from theNOBA Project, explores the subject in more detail.

Finally, in the post The Jar Of Jam and The Wounded Monarch: Two Mystery Examples, in the section “6. Eyewitnesses & Confusion”, I discuss the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in a more general way, with links to a couple of specific articles on the subject.

I know I have recommend it to readers before, but I can’t not mention Wikipedia’s page on Eyewitness Testimony, which makes fascinating reading. They also have an even longer page on Eyewitness Memory which is worth reader’s time.

There is a personal anecdote that I should mention at this point. At one point, one of the duties required by my employer of the time was to assist in the counting of takings from another of the employer’s businesses, completion of deposit information, and walking the takings (all bundled into individual days’ takings) to the bank. On one occasion, it became clear that others had observed the routine; I got robbed at knife-point. Simply by refusing to let go of the plastic bag containing the bundles, and using them as a shield against the guy with the knife, I was able to save two days’ takings from the long weekend that had just passed.

Although the weapon clearly held some of my attention, and the struggle some more of it, I can still clearly remember the shirt that the offender was wearing – blue and white horizontal stripes about an inch-and-a-half wide. I had a clear memory of the faces of the perpetrator and his knife-wielding compatriot. As a result, I was taken to the police station to look at mug books – and that was where the investigation went off the rails, because they had not obtained a full description before this process commenced. About half and hour later, after looking at more than 500 mugshots, I could not have picked the criminals our of a lineup if my life depended on it; my memory had been contaminated. The bigger guy was about 6 inches taller than me, and grabbed the bag; the smaller one was about 5’8” and waved the knife around, but that’s all the description that I can give of them.

Anyway, the advertisement goes on to suggest that it takes a trained investigator to separate fact from fancy and truth from fiction.

But, what I really took away from this advert was the principle of leaving stuff out, and that was because it connected with another thought that was already at the back of my mind.

Many Turns Of Expression

When it comes to technical information, there may be only one clear way of expressing it. Should the topic of conversation be anything else, however, there may be dozens of choices if not more.

When it comes to literary writers, the usual advice is to keep it succinct – cut out any waffle, any unnecessary words, and get on with the story. But people don’t usually speak in bullet-points. So I started to wonder how valid that advice, that general principle, really was – at least when it came to RPGs.

That was what led me to the analysis of conversational content that comprises the bulk of this article, in an attempt to derive a truism that could be applied. To my surprise, my answer seems to me to apply to fiction, too – completely replacing the ‘usual advice’ listed above so far as I’m concerned:

The best way of phrasing any statement within a conversation, or characterizing a conversation in general terms, is Whatever best expresses the personality of the speaker and is compatible with all other indicated purposes of the conversation.

In other words,.if there are multiple possible ways of phrasing something that are of equal value in all other respects, you should choose the alternative that most clearly expresses the personality of the character speaking.

Of course, it’s rarely that simple. Different modes of expression can rarely be characterized as absolutes in any respect, only as effective or ineffective given the context. Beyond that, you’re into gray fuzziness.

One option may better impart technical information at the expense of characterization. Another may make the choice of action clearer to those hearing it than either – but that’s not necessarily a good thing. While the GM, through NPCs, can advise, the players should make the decisions for their characters. Expression of personality is one component of a complex evaluation with many criteria.

What the general statement makes clearer is that within each of these subgroups, the option that should float to the surface is the one that most clearly expresses the speaker’s personality.

A methodology

This in turn is suggestive of a method of approaching the whole question, one that works almost as well when extemporizing as it does when utilizing a canned dialogue or hybrid approach.

1. Select the most important function of the conversation other than expression of personality.
2. Draft a response that addresses that need.
3. Assess that draft response with respect to all the other functions and criteria except (again) expression of personality. If it’s adequate, proceed, otherwise, modify the draft to be at least acceptable in that metric, then proceed.
4. Rephrase the draft to embed as much expression of personality as possible without compromising the primary function chosen in step 1.

This brings three important considerations to the fore.

• It means that instead of having to keep the whole list of considerations in mind all the time, they can be treated as either background information for the GM or as a checklist of qualities that need to be rated as ‘satisfactory’, lightening the GM’s workload massively.
• It subordinates everything other than the one most important consideration to the expression of personality while mandating that any given expression must achieve a minimum standard of success in all other considerations.
• It’s not quite as fast as saying the first thing that comes into your head, but it’s not all that much slower – snap decisions make the selection of phrases quick and relatively easy.

Of course, having prep time dedicated to polish and nuance is always going to deliver a better result when precision is necessary. But, most of the time, you can simply list what the substance and purpose of the communication is going to be, and the personality of the speaker, and extemporize from that foundation.

A little context on the tail

It has been said that it’s easy to catch a bird – you just need to get close enough to sprinkle a little salt onto its tail.

Meaningful phrasing and rhetoric in an RPG are exactly the same – getting close enough is the tricky part, once you are in the vicinity of ‘good enough’, that’s all you need – move on.

It can actually get easier to create that meaningful phrasing and rhetoric, because statements do not have to be definitive; each creates a context for the next things to be said, and those ‘next things’ can refine and modify the interpretation of the first statement.

This means that ‘close enough’ is not a fixed standard – it can start fairly lax and be refined as you ‘get down to business’. The implication is that initial statements and social niceties can actually be used to set the stage for the meaningful dialogue. And, since these have virtually no semantic content within the conversation, you can dedicate them entirely to an initial expression of personality.

Flawless technical language can be bracketed by expressive non-technical foundations that provide context and shape to the whole communication.

You can offer the best of advice to a PC while ensuring that they are unlikely to take it simply by implying that this is what someone they don’t like or trust would want them to do.

Nuance and depth get created as ‘illusions’ – just as a couple of lines can become a railroad track, or an empty space can become a white triangle (see some of the linked articles listed earlier if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

Conversations don’t have to be hard. Good conversations are not much harder than Bad dialogue. The secret is to choose an approach that suits the needs of the conversation and its purpose within the game, then apply a methodology that takes most of the work and stress out of the task.

One final piece of advice

It’s almost impossible to overact when GMing an RPG (but don’t take that as a challenge). Chew the furniture, inhabit the role as though it were one that you were born to play – you will not only be more expressive, and more on-point, but you will have more fun, and make the game more fun for your players.

It can be hard to let yourself go when you have so much on your mind – that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the attempt.

This is not the article that I intended to post today (that’s still somewhere in the pipeline). Real-world events have overtaken my planning and this post is in response to those events.

Some of the language may be provocative or even incendiary; I make no apologies for that – this is a subject that has a lot of people very angry and unhappy, and this emotional landscape is reflected in the things that they are saying and writing.

The middle part of this article quotes, in full, a Quora answer by Edward Conway, which he has graciously permitted me to quote in full. It’s the most complete summary of events up to the date of its original publication that I have seen, anywhere, bringing together a lot of material and opinions that I had encountered in bits and pieces elsewhere.

After that quoted text, I’ll be back to offer my 20¢ worth on the subject.

First, though, a preamble to describe the state of mind in which I think these events should be interpreted.

Bad Decisions 1

On December 6, 2000, the music industry declared war on file sharing, especially targeting Napster, through the courts. Fair enough – I may disagree with their motivations, but have to concede their right to do so. But this led them to view the consumers who paid for their product as criminals until proven otherwise, because Napster was far from the only peer-to-peer file-sharing service, and the lawsuits were ineffective in achieving the stated goals as a result.

Legal academic Lawrence Lessig wrote, in his 2004 book Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, “When Napster told the district court that it had developed a technology to block the transfer of 99.4 percent of identified infringing material, the district court told counsel for Napster 99.4 percent was not good enough. Napster had to push the infringements ‘down to zero.'” Since Napster were unable to do so, the record companies through the RIAA targeted the (potential) users of these services, i.e. their own customers.

The Rootkit Scandal

In 2005, this led Sony BMG to incorporate copy protection on the CDs that they published, and if that was as far as they had gone, it might have been seen as a reasonable measure. But it wasn’t; they also incorporated a rootkit, software that actively probed and modified any computer through which an attempt to play the CD was made. Even worse, the rootkit undertook active measures to obfuscate what it was doing – it was a deliberate malware infection of those computer systems, and it opened points of vulnerability that other malware was able to target.

The resulting public outcry, government investigations, and class-action lawsuits led to a rescinding of the policy in 2007 and a recall of about 10% of he affected CDs. But it took relations between the recording industry and their customers to a new low, and caused many who had been neutral or even supportive of the industry’s active pursuit of copyright infringers to turn against the industry.

See Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal for more information.

RIAA Lawsuits vs Individuals

Studies in more recent times have attempted to quantify the scale of the losses to file-sharing, with estimates ranging from negligible to moderate. Nevertheless, the Association began taking legal action against individuals who they alleged were destroying the industry. Amongst those targeted by these lawsuits were college students, parents of file-sharing children, a deceased grandmother, an elderly computer novice, and (allegedly) a family with no computer at all (see RIAA efforts against file sharing.

Winning the battles, losing the war

The RIAA and broader recording industry as a whole won virtually every battle in their war on file sharing, but paid a terrible price in customer relations. The war was never fought to a conclusion; iTunes and legal downloads rendering the conflict largely moot. The recording industry was already imploding by this time, as shown by the number of gold, platinum, and diamond records that have been certified each year.

At first glance, such a list (sourced from here) seems to disprove the argument. But if you look more closely, you’ll find that the list includes both singles and albums. Sorting it by year of release and then release type separates the two. The date of certification is also important; in more recent times, digital downloads, streams and even youTube plays count, before 2016, it was sales alone. This change caused The Eagles Greatest Hits to jump from somewhere around the 26 million mark to 38 million (I’d be more specific, but I lost the link to the source, so I’m working from memory).

I especially want to call attention to Visualizing 40 years of Music Industry Sales by Nick Routley and the graph that heads the article. They grant the right to use the graphic so long as it isn’t resized, but I can’t fit it onto Campaign Mastery’s page size without doing so – the best I can do is link to it.

It shows, graphically, how music sales dipped catastrophically for years, dropping from a peak of 21.5 Billion US$ in the late 1990s to 6.9 Billion US$ in 2015, a 17-year decline. Part of this is no doubt due to increasing competition for retail dollars, part of it is due the loss of the marketing channels (and loss of relevance of those that remain) when MTV switched from music videos to reality TV, and part is due to the various sources of ill-will caused by the war on the consumer from 2000 to 2008.

As an exercise in shooting yourself in the foot, at least in terms of Public Relations, the 2000-2008 period was a bell-ringer.

Bad Decisions 2

There are a lot of parallels with a more recent series of catastrophic decisions – I am, of course, referring to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Musk offered three times what the platform was worth, tried to back out of the deal, but was forced by the courts to go through with the purchase. In order to pay the interest on the loans taken out to fund the purchase, he needed annual revenues of 2.2 Billion US$ – from a service whose best year was a profit of 1 Billion US$ and is usually significantly less.

In an attempt to boost profits, Musk sought to relax moderation in an attempt to lure back the more populist and egregious users who had been evicted from the platform under the previous ownership. He described this as supporting Free Speech (I’m trying to be as politically agnostic as I can here).

He also fired more than half of the employees who kept the service running, and imposed working conditions so draconian that any who weren’t fired would have immediately started looking for employment elsewhere. The really good people would have found it; ultimately more than 90% of the staff left. And the only reason the total is that low is because Musk was forced to hire back a number of critical staff. This wasn’t just cost-cutting, it was cutting off your nose to spite your face, and a direct consequence of not understanding how the business worked and what these people actually did for the company.

The loss of public confidence that these measures raised was only compounded by a hypocritical attitude towards Free Speech when Musk began banning members of the press and public who were critical of his management decisions. This led one of the largest advertisers on the platform to ask questions of him that were quite neutral in tone; Musk banned them, too.

Its reported that revenue has fallen by 21/22nds as a result. Advertisers are deserting in droves, according to some sources. Meanwhile, users are also defecting, some driven away by a lack of confidence in the platform, some by the absence of adequate moderation, some by the rush of extremists (mostly from the right wing of politics) returning to the site. Even more are retaining their accounts (so as not to lose touch with their friends and contacts) but are no longer active on the service. This only worsened when Musk attempted to make mentioning any other form of social media account a banning offense.

There are now so many ways in which the entire operation can now fall apart that there are long odds against it surviving the next year.

In terms of public relations, this is a long string of bad decisions, and it has run Twitter into the ground. Whether or not it can recover from this position remains to be seen.

And that brings me to the terms of the new Open Gaming License from Paizo/WOTC…

What are the ramifications of the leaked draft language of Wizards of the Coast’s upcoming new version of D&D’s Open Gaming License? How would the new license’s terms change D&D gaming and content creation? What existing content would be effected?

Answer by Edward Conway,
Reproduced with permission from the Author
Originally posted January 6, 2023, Updated January 9

Wizards just declared war on Pathfinder, Critical Role, Roll20, and every other entity outside of Wizards that creates or sells D&D content. And yes, that includes DMs and homebrew content.

In the year 2000, D&D makers Wizards of the Coast granted 3rd parties and individuals the right to create and sell content using parts of the D&D ruleset, without payment to Wizards, free from the threat of legal action as long as they abided by the terms of the OGL 1.0.

They are attempting to revoke that right, for all D&D content: past, present, and future.

(image creator Patrick Correia, details in footnote[1] )

The new OGL license states that it goes into effect Jan 13, 2023, and that the old licenses are no longer valid.

The original OGL allowed content creators to create content based off of a portion of the D&D rules of 3rd Edition and 5th Edition known as the SRD. As long as this content abided by the rules, content creators could make and sell their content without having to fear being sued by Wizards.

The resulting multi-million dollar content creation industry has led to greater popularity of D&D and has vastly increased the number of players and DMs. The primary reason that 3rd and 5th editions became so much more popular than other editions was the increased freedom of players and DMs to create new content for their games, and to do so without the threat of being sued.

That is ending.

The new OGL states that the old license is no longer authorized.

No where in the terms of the OGL is it stated that Wizards can de-authorize a license. The official statement by Wizards on its page explaining the terms specifically states that Wizards cannot remove the ability to use an existing license:

7. Can’t Wizards of the Coast change the License in a way that I wouldn’t like?

Yes, it could. However, the License already defines what will happen to content that has been previously distributed using an earlier version, in Section 9. As a result, even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there’s no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway. [2]

Note that Wizards deleted this from its website shortly before releasing the new terms, to hide its tracks.

Then Vice President of Wizards Ryan Dancey, the man who created the original OGL, has stated clearly that Wizards and Hasbro does not have the power to de-authorize a license:

Yeah my public opinion is that Hasbro does not have the power to de-authorize a version of the OGL. If that had been a power that we wanted to reserve for Hasbro, we would have enumerated it in the license. I am on record numerous places in email and blogs and interviews saying that the license could never be revoked. [3]

There is no grandfather clause in the new license text, on the contrary, the new OGL states that all creators who created and sold under the original license must now switch to the new license.

This directly contradicts the terms of the original license:

9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License. [4]

The meaning of this becomes clear when you examine how the license has changed:

1. OGL 1.0 covered 3rd edition content.
2. GSL (a different license) covered 4th edition content.
3. OGL 1.0a covered 5th edition content.

All of these licenses have been established as valid and authorized by Wizards. Wizards has not taken any action to de-authorize any license over the 22 years OGL has been in force, until this month. The contract language does not grant Wizards the power to de-authorize an existing license. The contract specifies the process Wizards must follow if there is a contract violation: notification, 30 days period to rectify the violation, followed by termination of only that license holder’s contract, not the license as a whole.

Wizards has failed to follow the terms of its own contract.

Under contract law, parties to the contract can only change the terms in ways spelled out in the contract. Wizards of the Coast, in its attempt to unilaterally de-authorize existing licenses, is potentially in breach of its contractual obligations under those licenses.

The action this month by Wizards goes against the terms of its contract, the statements it made about that contract to licensees, and the stated intent of the creator of that contract. If you take nothing else from this answer, understand this: Wizards of the Coast is attempting to change a binding contract it drafted, signed, and has supported for 22 years, without the permission of license holders and in possibly violation of the law.

Beyond that:

1. The new OGL states that Wizards of the Coast can modify the terms of the license at any time, for any reason, and the sole requirement is to give 30 days notice by posting the changes to their website.
2. The new OGL states that Wizards can revoke any creator or company’s permission to create, sell, and distribute content for any reason, and that the sole requirement is to give 30 days notice.
3. The new OGL states that if a company has their license revoked, they must, within 30 days, delete and destroy any and all material that uses D&D content. Yes, you read that right: this gives Wizards the power to order Critical Role to delete all videos, books, etc., if they choose. This gives Wizards the power to order Netflix to take down Stranger Things. This gives Wizards the power to order Paizo to destroy all Pathfinder books, and to remove all Pathfinder games from Steam[5].
4. The new OGL lays out the requirements to register with Wizards (along with how often you have to report your income to Wizards), and states that Wizards shall have a right to publish, sell, and distribute, any and all content created, without paying anything to the content creator. This license is stated to be perpetual, unlike the new OGL license to use D&D content. Yes, Wizards is copying one of the core mistakes of the Warcraft 3: Reforged[6] debacle by Blizzard: anything you create, they can sell without paying you a penny.
5. The new OGL lays out the royalties content creators must pay Wizards for the right to sell their content, based on platform, type of content, revenue, etc. It details the special deal Wizards negotiated with Kickstarter to reduce the royalties cut Wizards will demand from all Kickstarter funded D&D projects[7] . In the linked article, Kickstarter states that it did not receive any payments as part of this deal.
6. The new license forbids lawsuits and requires binding arbitration to settle any disputes.

Will there be lawsuits?

Hell Yes. I am not a lawyer, but based on the analysis and commentary of at least one lawyer who is also an avid gamer[8], the new OGL terms, if enforced successfully, would shutdown most tabletop roleplaying companies.

Edit: There have been some great additions posted in the comments section [of the original answer], including responses from Pathfinder publisher Paizo and the creator of the original OGL, and videos with further legal commentary. Big shout out to Maya Deva Kniese for the updates.

Royalties are not the issue: paying royalties is commonplace. The core issue is three-fold:

1. Wizards can shut down any company within 30 days, without any requirement for cause, and with limited to no right to appeal.
2. Wizards can order any company or creator to delete or destroy all copies of their products, again, with no requirement for cause or meaningful route to appeal.
3. Wizards can change the terms at any time, in any way, and the new terms will apply, with no right to sue to force Wizards to abide by the terms originally agreed to.

No company in the world would agree to such an unbalanced contract.

Doing business requires a degree of certainty and stability, and this license provides neither.

Netflix has sunk millions into Stranger Things. Critical Role has sunk tens of millions into its videos and products. Paizo, makers of Pathfinder, which surpassed 4th Edition D&D in popularity, makes approximately 12 million a year.

On January 13th, the perpetual and irrevocable license Wizards issued will end, jeopardizing 22 years of D&D content creation and sales.

There will be lawsuits.

While I am not a lawyer (I would welcome commentary and answers by those who are), even I know that attempting to unilaterally change the terms of a 22 year old agreement that a multi-million dollar industry depends on will result in lawsuits.

Beyond that, this breaks the social contract of Dungeons and Dragons.

For 22 years, we players, DMs, and content creators have been free to add to the hobby, creating new classes, races, spells, abilities, and settings.

This freedom built D&D, literally: the vast majority of content in the official rules started out as player and DM created homebrew. Paladins, Monks, Bards, Skill Proficiencies, Feats: all of these were created by players and DMs, shared within the community, and later incorporated into the official rules.

Dragonlance began as a homegame, and grew into a published series with 190 novels published[9] . All because of a homegame.

Critical Role has launch massive online streamed campaigns that have been adapted by Amazon Prime Video (thank you to Colin Byrne for correctly my Nat 1 Perception check) after a Kickstarter raised $4.3 million on the first day, raising $11.4 million during the whole campaign. This started as a homegame.

Stranger Things, at 4 seasons in, is still the most popular show on Netflix, and it is about a D&D homegame.

Under the new terms, none of this will be possible in the future, and everything that has been created can be destroyed by Wizards at anytime.

Wizards of the Coast, with the new license, is attempting to kill the D&D community’s ability to run homegames, to create and sell content for homegames, and to celebrate our homegames.

That breaks the foundational social contract of D&D: that players are DMs should be free to create, modify, and add to the game, and share what they add with the community.

This is a declaration of war against the D&D community, and it should be treated as such.

Footnotes

[1] File:Book burning.jpg – Wikimedia Commons
[2] Open Game License: Frequently Asked Questions
[3] Ryan Dancey — Hasbro Cannot De-authorize OGL
[4] Open Game License v1.0a
[5] D&D’s stricter licensing rules might impact some beloved RPGs
[6] “Warcraft 3: Reforged” Is A Disaster — Here’s Why Fans Are So Upset
[7] Dungeons & Dragons’ New License Tightens Its Grip on Competition
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPV7-NCmWBQ
[9] List of Dragonlance novels – Wikipedia

Further Developments & Opinions

The first lawsuit?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/10496c9/a_letter_sent_by_a_genuine_lawyer_to_wizards/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

John McKnight

John McKnight, in a comment to the original article, wrote,

I know several people who are already committing to not give Wizards any more money, for any products. Players ready to give up MtG [Magic The Gathering] , even. Because of this announcement.

He also provided a link containing “more information. Including copies of WotC’s earlier statements regarding potential OGL changes:” D&D: WotC’s OGL 1.1 Leaks Get More Confirmation, Creators React

Hahn Ackles

Also in a comment on the article, Hahn Ackles points out:

The worst part is that unlike the original OGL, the new license specifies that when it comes to digital content it can only be used for “static digital products”, such as PDFs.

Which sounds semi-reasonable until you realize that means interactive character sheets and character building apps, which are super f***ing popular, are no longer allowed.

(My censorship).

In a separate comment, he suggests that all the goodwill that WOTC had generated with their apology and open playtest leading up to 5e have just evaporated, a point with which I concur.

In fact, having lost and then regained that goodwill and now having lost it again, it will be ten times as difficult to regain it, in my opinion.

Greg Hunt

Greg wrote an extensive comment in response to the article, pointing out that this is a scorched-earth policy; there is no way back for Wizards. Once public trust in an institution is lost, it’s lost for a VERY long time.

That means that players, creators, and game companies that have supported D&D under the aegis of the original OGL will depart and will not come back.

William Tait MacDonald

William wrote about the legal requirements that have to be met for a contract to be binding, pointing out that the proposed license fails to meet those criteria.

In particular, agreement to the license has to be uncoerced. Applying new terms retroactively, which is what this license seeks to do, and using intimidation and threats toward anyone who does not agree to apply those terms retroactively, is overt and clear intimidation.

He also points out that this is an attempt to “re-copyright” material that the copyright owners (Wizards) renounced rights to and placed in the public domain under certain usage conditions spelled out in the original OGL – but copyright doesn’t work like that. Once you give up rights under copyright, you can’t take them back again.

More Resources

Edward himself offered a link to a Reddit thread that can be considered a hub for analysis and commentary on the subject.

The Paizo Response

On Friday, the day that the new license was to take effect, Paizo issued a press release announcing their own system-neutral open license:

PAIZO ANNOUNCES SYSTEM-NEUTRAL OPEN RPG LICENSE
Industry-leading Independent Publishers Seek Return to Open Gaming

[REDMOND, WA, January 12, 2023] – In response to rumors that an upcoming revision of the Open Gaming License (OGL) by Wizards of the Coast would “de-authorize” this keystone of the modern tabletop roleplaying industry, Paizo has begun work on a new open, perpetual, and irrevocable Open RPG Creative License (ORC).

Since 2000, the OGL has improved the community, incubated creativity, and grown the business of not only the licensees but the licensor. A stated goal of a perpetual and irrevocable OGL was to ensure the establishment and longevity of gaming networks and to drive sales to both. Recent reinterpretation notwithstanding, it succeeded. Many companies including Wizards of the Coast have benefited from that growth.

The Open RPG Creative License (ORC) will be built system agnostic for independent game publishers under the legal guidance of Azora Law, an intellectual property law firm that represents Paizo and several other game publishers. Multiple leading publishers have already signed on to the effort to create a new and truly open license that allows all games to provide their own unique open rules reference documents that open up their individual game systems to the world.

Complete details may be found on Paizo’s blog.

It’s not ready yet – but it’s coming. Even if Wizards were to rescind the new license, so much trust has already been lost that, when offered an alternative, people will jump ship.

My 20¢ Worth

This was a PR disaster from start to finish. There has been immediate fallout – which shows how thin the layer of accrued trustworthiness actually was.

This is not surprising; for every positive step they take, WotC shoot themselves in the foot and fall back a step. It’s happened before, with the GSL, as others have pointed out. And it happened when it became known that Wizards ignored play-testers’ feedback in the development of 4e.

The consequences are many-fold and even if the eventually-released form of the license is without the many, many nasties described, not all of them will be – can be – undone.

Immediate Impacts

I’ve broken my analysis of these consequences into to major categories – immediate (those that have already happened) and rumored/potential future consequences, assuming that Wizards stand firm.

Public Opinion

Ryan S Dance has a petition asking Hasbro and WotC to “make a clear statement that the #ogl v1.0a cannot be de-authorized or revoked” that has now accrued over 15 thousand signatures. This is indicative of the breadth of the public response to the proposed OGL, and backs up the opinions quoted above.

Subscriptions to D&DBeyond

A number of people claim to have canceled their subscriptions (but there are no hard figures available on how many have actually done so). Nevertheless, indications are that a significant percentage have ended their support.

What’s more, several of them have announced a decision to stop purchasing ANY WotC products immediately. A few have gone further and made it all Hasbro products. Again, I don’t know what percentage of their customer base this represents, but any loss of these die-hard supporters is bad news.

Unverified reports have started to emerge of WotC charging subscription renewals for those who have canceled their subscriptions. It’s possible that this is a simple error – anyone can make a mistake. It’s also possible that their systems are so overwhelmed by the number of cancellations of subscriptions that the part of their system that bills for renewals billed the credit cards of the subscribers before the cancellation could be processed – it would be poor systems design, but that’s still quite believable. But finally, it’s possible that someone has decided to charge subscribers who have canceled anyway, because many people don’t check their statements or might think, ‘well, I’ve already paid for it, so I might as well use it’.

Why does all this matter? Because there is evidence (of unproven provenance) that WotC are using D&DBeyond subscriptions as a way to measure public opinion in response to the OGL. What gives this credibility is that the message makes certain claims (for example that roll-out of the new OGL has been delayed because of the backlash) that have since been proven accurate.

Pathfinder

Were Paizo still selling Pathfinder 1.0, they might well have been vulnerable to the problems described in Edward’s post. However, it’s my understanding that one of the primary objectives of the rewrite that became Pathfinder 2.0 was to remove all SRD content – if true, then Pathfinder would have been immune to legal action by Wizards except through concatenation, a much harder debate to have.

Yet, this flies in the face of the reported ‘first lawsuit’ mentioned above, so perhaps Paizo themselves were not all that confident.

Successful past Kickstarter campaigns

Picture this: you’ve had a successful Kickstarter campaign, have written the text and sourced the art, and the whole thing is about to head off to the printers, who have a signed contract to provide you with the hardcopies to fulfill the orders of your backers, when the license under which your product is to be published is retroactively revoked.

Either you don’t have the money to rewrite the product, leading to the cancellation of the whole project and ill-will all round, or you do, but it means that you make no profit (or less profit) on what has been months of work. RPGs are generally published on a shoestring, and any unexpected major expense or delay can be fatal.

Either way, a loss of confidence on the part of your backers is likely to result, no matter how understanding they may be about the circumstances.

Lawsuit? Maybe. Certainly, you could establish a financial loss as a consequence of the change of license.

Current Kickstarter campaigns

That loss of confidence would also be felt by any fundraising campaigns currently underway. The threat alone could be enough to cause several projects to be canceled, possibly with the intent of rebooting them once the dust settled.

Retail Sales

If customers won’t buy a producer’s merchandise because of something that producer has done, the retail outlets will often simply return the unsold (and unsalable) product and demand a refund. There were rumors that this effect alone was going to cost WotC millions of dollars in the month of February.

Publishers of existing product

Fat Goblin Games bundled up their entire catalog of OGL material and offered them for sale at a ridiculous discount. They called it their ‘F*CK WotC Bundle’ (but were persuaded to rename it by DrivethruRPG. The implication of the language used in the announcement is that once the new license comes into effect, sales of these products will stop.

In the same announcement, they offered:

“A lot of you are looking for other, non-OGL games to check out because screw supporting corporations only interested in $$$. And I totally get that, so I talked to a bunch of my friends and associates and we put together this amazing bundle of games for you. These games are all core books or complete books, cover an assortment of genres, and vary in complexity and rules systems.

TRY THIS RPG [BUNDLE]

Nearly 30 games are made available for you to check out and at a great price. Give it a try, let me see what you think, and maybe you’ll have a new favorite publisher! Available for the next week, but act fast!

Maximilian Hart of d20 Digest mentioned the whole kerfuffle when announcing that his new adventure was now available through DrivethruRPG

But with the way the winds are blowing, I thought it best to release under 1.0 instead of 1.1 – and if that makes no sense, just search the Internet for “D&D OGL” and “mess” and “on fire” and you’ll catch the drift quickly enough!

(The adventure is “Pearly Prison Of The Crocodile Queen“, available through the link provided).

Dungeon Master’s Workshop issued a statement over Twitter about their future with D&D. In part, it reads:

“Dungeon Master’s Workshop will not sign the new Open Game License (OGL) 1.1. We categorically reject Wizards of the Coast’s ability to de-authorize OGL 1.0a, which has allowed for mutually productive partnerships for the last 20 years. Their attempts to pull the rug out from under the creators – who have supported the brand and grown D&D into the world’s greater roleplaying game – are wrong, in bad faith, and almost certainly illegal.

We also categorically reject their demands that we pay royalties to use what we have already been allowed to use royalty-free in perpetuity, or to hand over our rights to control our intellectual property and allow WotC to use and sell what we create without permission, compensation, or even credit. These are demands that no creator could accept, and WotC is wrong to make them.”

They also state, “Several major 3PPs (third-party publishers) have already announced their intentions to create an entirely new system, including Kobold Press and MCDM”. Other creators have joined with DMW to create a “non-OGL and non-WotC version of an SRD that can be used commercially, royalty-free, forever.”

Publishers of future product

Also last Friday, Beyond The Horizon Games sent out a newsletter which announced their decision not to accept the terms of the new license. They have two products for 5e already in development which they intend to complete under the terms of the old OGL, in other words relying on Wizards intent to apply the new license retroactively as a legal overreach that will not stand.

Beyond those two products, they will be looking to support other game systems – they have yet to decide which ones.

Rumored / Potential Future Impacts

It may be getting ahead of myself in the story, but these impacts are unlikely to now proceed, for reasons described at the end of the article. In essence, Wizards have capitulated in all the areas that mattered to gamers. If they had stuck to their guns, however, these are the impacts that I foresaw.

Lawsuits

If there’s one message to take away from Edward’s post and the comments that it engendered, it’s that there would have been lawsuits. But very few companies are big enough to take on Wizards directly, let alone Hasbro; for that reason,, I suspect that most lawsuits would quickly coalesce.

Class-Action Lawsuits

….into one or two much bigger class action lawsuits. Preparations for at least one were rumored to be underway as of Friday. Quite often, the first one becomes a lodestone for all the smaller legal actions, and also teases out of the woods other parties who were not initially willing to risk legal action against so big an opponent..

Restraint Of Trade

Although it might look like any third-party publisher who had produced, or was intending to produce, 5e-compatable product could make a prima facae case against Wizards on the grounds of restraint of trade, several lawyers have publicly discussed this and concluded that for technical reasons (mainly that Wizards would not be preventing them from publishing something), such an action would be unlikely to succeed.

However, you can never be 100% sure of what a court of law will do, and the claim could have been used as a foundation to establish other grounds for legal remedy. So the notion would not have been completely set aside.

Retail Quagmire

No retailer likes stocking products from producers who are on the nose. At least some of them are likely to have boycotted Wizards products. The biggest retailer that this might have applied to is Amazon. The result would have been disastrous on Wizard’s bottom line, putting it into a financial position similar to that of TSR at the time of its’ collapse and acquisition.

New Product

Third-party producers have already started pulling away from D&D as a result, as described earlier. If Wizards had maintained a hard-line approach to the new OGL, this would have accelerated. This has an impact on the long-term viability of the product, inevitably, and this in turn would have turned some people off running the game. Something else would have been newer and shinier.

Nothing Has Happened – Yet

The new license came into effect on January 13th, or at least, it was supposed to. As suggested earlier, it has been delayed (this was going to be a much larger section of the article, but then this happened):

The Last Word (maybe)

After a week or so of all of the above hitting the fan (and the internet), came an official statement from WotC on the status of the OGL.

It spells out what they claim their motives and intent were with the update – and those sound entirely reasonable.

It alleges that the ‘leaked’ OGL was actually a draft that was deliberately intended to open public discussion on the subject. If true, it has to be the most inept such roll-out in the history of mass communications.

But it also admits that the language used in the agreement was a total and unmitigated disaster, implying and capable of being interpreted in all the nasty, nasty ways described in Edward’s Quora post. The claim is made that these interpretations were complete surprises to WotC – if true, either they failed to consult their lawyers (improbable) or they should fire those lawyers.

There’s a problem, though. Quoting a date effective of Jan 13 for a ‘proposed’ policy change that was being offered ‘for review and discussion’? Nope, that simply doesn’t wash. So at least part of the official statement is an attempt to rewrite history, to save face.

It’s also a bit rich to expect to announce something on the same date as it is to take effect and still expect debate and discussion on any rational basis to result. To me it seems far more likely that they really did intend to try and sneak one past the gaming community and got caught – badly. But that’s just my opinion.

The rest of the announcement is essentially a mea culpa, walking back, one item after another, all the things that people have raised such vehement objection to, and begging for the chance to ‘make this right’.

You can read it for yourself at this link.

Unfortunately, the clumsiness with which this has all taken place (if innocently meant, as WotC claim) has burned bridges. All that goodwill has gone ‘poof’. This is an unqualified PR disaster.

Many are holding their breath and waiting to see what terms the actual final document actually contains, but many business decisions have already been made on the assumption that the leaked document was going to be implemented as written, and those have a momentum of their own – some will be irrevocable. The official response is too little, too late.

The time to make such a public announcement – even if it was less complete and comprehensive – was the day after WotC realized that it had leaked, not more than a week after the fact.

They failed to get ahead of the story, and so the story has gone beyond their ability to control the consequences. And that’s true regardless of what WotC’s actual intent was.

No matter how you slice it, this has been a PR disaster for WotC, and one of the moist significant events of the past 22 years for the Tabletop RPG industry.

Have Wizards done enough to stop the hemorrhaging Time will tell, but I suspect that they have simply slowed it, and it will only stop when a ‘clean’ OGL is publicly released. And maybe not even then. Trust is sometimes a precious and rare commodity, and Wizards have very little of it on tap to draw upon.

Welcome to 2023: A status update

So here we are in 2023! Funny, but it feels a lot like 2022 to me. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year and are all revved up for the year to come.

My holiday period was great, meeting new relatives and catching up with others that I haven’t seen in too long. The only dampener was an unwanted groin strain which has made mobility difficult from midway between the two festive occasions. But I am recovering from that, doing a little better each day, so I don’t expect it to hold me back for very long.

It was great to actually take a break from CM for a couple of weeks – I don’t take many days off from writing this blog, as long-time readers know, and that gets wearing after a while, no matter how much you enjoy doing something.

Today’s subject is intended to be a gentle reintroduction to the routine, normally something that I would not consider big enough to justify a standalone article. Nevertheless, I hope it’s thought-provoking and beneficial.

The Eyes Of A Player

Something that occasionally bugs me is a player focusing more on their laptop or phone or an unrelated sourcebook than on the game. I have one player who regularly uses his laptop in-game, but I don’t have a problem with that, because that’s where he keeps his character. It’s even been something that I can take advantage of, from time to time – showing his character a different vision (via a USB) than that displayed to the other PCs, for example.

I have another player who is also a GM, and who sometimes has to do last-minute game prep at the same time as playing in my games. While I’m not happy with that situation when it happens, I understand and try to make allowances. But there are other times when he’s clearly not paying attention and distracted by his device or whatever he’s doing, and I have to pause the game and wait for him to lift his head, and that’s when the behavior grates just a bit. Sooner or later, on a bad day, that might lead to a snapped temper, but so far it hasn’t come to that.

I was musing on my recollections of this behavior over the Christmas break, for no particular reason, and a number of thoughts seemed pertinent to other GMs.

A question of relevance?

First, the obvious point to make in this player’s defense is that the focus of attention was on other PCs at the time, at least most of the time. His character wasn’t directly involved, so he felt safe to focus his attention elsewhere.

But that’s not necessarily the case; I think very carefully about narrative structure when designing my adventures, and if I think it important that a player not know about what’s happening to another PC, I will take somebody aside for a brief period of private GMing. If I don’t do that, it means that I expect the not-involved PCs to learn of what’s happening eventually and trust the players not to use knowledge their character’s don’t have in the meantime.

This means that a story can unfold in a far more natural progression, focusing on what matters rather than being interrupted by recapitulations that are often inaccurate or incomplete. It means that I can play one narrative thread off of another to amplify and add nuance and depth to both. One day, perhaps, a distracted player will miss the key narrative points and not understand what is going on in the adventure, and all this will come to a head – but so far, it hasn’t happened, mostly because when I am embodying the plot and addressing it to the players, I make sure they each make that connection.

So it matters when a player isn’t paying attention, even if their character isn’t directly involved – at least sometimes. And the primary tool that I use when that’s the case is the eyes of the player.

Look at their eyes

What is the player looking at? Do they have a problem making eye contact (indicative of a guilty conscience, even when the person has only been a ‘little bit naughty’)? I don’t expect them to look at me when they are rolling dice, or consulting their character sheets; but when I’m talking to them, that’s a different story.

If they aren’t engaging at such times, it can only mean that the plot isn’t engaging enough for them or that they are distracted by something more vital – like their own game prep. The latter I understand and tolerate, as I explained earlier; and sometimes, the former is something that I can anticipate and even tolerate because that particular player (and/or his character) isn’t the intended focus of the adventure.

For example, another of my players isn’t a fan of universe-bending high-concept cosmic adventures. But others in my group do enjoy them, myself included – so I try to balance both competing perspectives, and even occasionally use that player to bridge the gap between high-concept and practical application in the “real world” of the PCs.

The eyes of the players at your table are sending you all sorts of messages as you play. Try to reserve a skerrick of your attention to pick up on them. You may not be able to change course within the current adventure; you may be willing to tolerate certain forms of behavior, even if they irritate; but in the long run, it will pay you to be aware of the subliminal messages that your players may not say out loud. Especially if such communications are telling you something that you’re not expecting.

The Eyes Of The GM

Such communications can, of course, be a two-way street, but the GM has a much harder job communicating in this way. First, you often have to direct your eyes to reference material or adventure notes or whatever, and that has to take priority. The few times I’ve tried to do things without looking at what I was doing have all been disasters.

Second, you have to split your attention between several different players. You may need to keep your attention on a battlemap much of the time, as well.

Third, you already have several layers of communications to manage. There’s the in-game plot narrative, there’s the activity and personality of any NPCs and anything that they have to say (I’ll have more on that in a future article, maybe next week), and there are the interactions with the game mechanics to manage. Adding a fifth layer to this melange can be beyond the capacities of some; no shame should accrue from that limitation, it’s just a reality that those GMs have to accommodate and work around.

The fifth channel

Some, however, have at least a partial ability to handle that fifth channel, using their eyes and eye movements to convey subliminal impressions to the players, even if only for the occasional overt statement (and it should be noted that these messages are rarely as obvious as the GM thinks they are).

For example, rapid eye movement from side to side when an NPC is speaking can be suggestive of fear, paranoia, or deceptiveness. Forcing yourself to stare without blinking can hint at obsession, or other intense feelings. Usually the combination of what the NPC is actually saying and the context will make it clear which of these interpretations is correct.

Using contradiction

If your dialogue communicates the same thing effectively, then this becomes reinforcement that elevates your performance as a GM; but if your dialogue is saying one thing, you can also use this technique (sparingly) to communicate an entirely different subtext or context.

The key is to try to think of how a great actor would convey everything without explanation to the audience, then try to ‘be’ that actor for long enough to do likewise.

‘Casting’ NPCs

One trick that I have found helpful is to try ‘casting’ the ‘movie’ with different actors in the specific roles. Applied consistently over multiple game sessions, these can help you distinguish one NPC from another in the eyes of the players, without them even being aware of what you are doing.

Is Tom Cruise the perfect actor to cast as Nathaniel West? Is Vincent Price the very embodiment of the impression you want Inspector Raschuas to convey? Do you want Laura Whiste to be more like Sarah Michelle Geller or Halley Berry?

Sometimes, a performance by such an actor can be so iconic that it stands apart from the remainder of their body of work, leading you to prefer to associate that role with the NPC rather than the character in question. “Doctor Phibes” is quite different from Vincent Price’s performance as the hero in “The Bat”.

Casting a broader net

Don’t neglect the possibility of casting people beyond actors if that’s appropriate – I’ve used everything from animated characters to newsreaders to sportsmen as ‘subjects’, with variable success – but enough success to establish that the failures were shortcomings of applied technique and not flaws in the concept itself.

I try to make these associations in advance, as part of my adventure writing / game prep, because sometimes it can be hard to capture the right flavor within the dialogue. Saying that you want an NPC to recall Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive is one thing; actually channeling the ‘outhouse, hen-house, dog house’ speech can be quite another.

Once I have made the ‘casting direction’, therefore, I review and revise the dialogue to assist me in conveying that personality.

Deceptive Measures

A couple of tricks that you can occasionally use to up the ante in this regard are channeling a player and channeling yourself.

Channeling a player

Channeling a player is the equivalent of mirroring a person’s actions, sitting the way they do, and so on. This conveys a sense of trust at a subliminal level, but it’s also fairly overt – and doesn’t have immediate effect (you can tell you have achieved such a ‘bond’ when you do something – reach for a die or a pen – and the person you are targeting mirrors your action. You started off by mirroring them, then usurp control over the link between you). Using speech patterns alone is more subtle.

But it also permits more complex characterization. If an NPC is interacting with the PC controlled by Player 1, and I ‘mimic’ the way that I think Player 2 would ‘play’ that NPC if it were their character, any established relationship between the in-game characters of Players 1 and 2 will ‘color’ player 2’s perception of the NPC usually without them even noticing it.

Channeling yourself

By the same token, consciously attempting to mimic the way you would play a character conveys a sense of falsity, of a character attempting to pretend to be something he’s not. This can be really difficult to achieve convincingly in any other way, so it’s worth adding to your repertoire.

Compounding these impressions with a minor mannerism can convey volumes. Deliberately winking quickly with one eye, for example, carries an Anthony Zerbe ‘crazy’ impression. Wringing your hands whenever a particular NPC is speaking suggests timidity and fear, no matter how confident their dialogue might be. Mixed signals of this type are always suggestive of duplicity. (Note that a GM screen can get in the way – one of the reasons I rarely use one).

You don’t have to be a great actor (it helps if you are, I guess – but I’m not one, so ‘guess’ all I can do). But if you pay attention to performances you see on your TV / movie screens, even those you come across accidentally or in passing, you’ll be astonished at how much it will help you to GM.

The Eyes Have It

Ultimately, GMing is as much about communications as it is anything else. The more aware of communications and communication techniques, the better a GM you will be. Hopefully, some of these techniques will enhance your abilities, or at least give you awareness of some that you didn’t have previously.

The allied subjects of Kinesthetics (‘body language’), Acting, and Speech-writing are far too complex to summarize in any single article, and I’m not an expert in any of them. But they are all worthy of your study as a GM. And a lot of it can be done simply by paying attention to the sounds and images that waft across your television screen – enough to get you started, at least!

If this subject has intrigued you, you might also find this article to be of value: The Heirarchy Of Deceipt: How and when to lie to your players.

Concluding Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the December Blog Carnival hosted by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“.

In Part 1, I looked at why we roll dice for various things in RPGs and what these die rolls are attempting to simulate in game-world terms.

In a nutshell, the dice represent all the random factors that can contribute to or determine success or failure under normal conditions.

GMs usually apply a modifier, either to the roll or to the target (depending on the game system) to bias the influence of these random factors so as to incorporate abnormal or unusual conditions.

Why Not Roll?

First, let’s establish that there are occasions when you don’t want to demand a die roll.

1. The PCs enter a room. They have only to walk across to the far side and open the door; there are no obstacles and the door is not locked. The floor is softly carpeted and provides plenty of grip with no risk of tripping. Do you really want the PCs to roll?
2. A PC is looking through a filing cabinet in search of a specific file. The files are clearly labeled, he filing cabinet is not locked. The PC speaks the language used in the labels, knows how to read,has plenty of light, and there’s nothing wrong with his eyesight. Do you really want to make the player roll?

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3. A character with the equivalent of a Master’s Degree in Mathematics needs to add 2 and 2. Do you really want the player to roll to get the answer, “4”?

These are trivial demonstrations of ability. Demanding a die roll in such situations incurs all the negatives that come with a die roll – disruption of the narrative flow, delays in progressing the game – for absolutely no benefit, and raises the question of how you can plausibly interpret the outcome if the player contrives to fail the roll.

There are other occasions and reasons for not requiring a die roll, but these examples are enough to establish the general principle that demanding a die roll for everything is not necessary.

What It Means Not To Roll

In a nutshell, it means that you are satisfied that none of the random factors concerned will be enough to override a specific outcome. Success or failure are inevitable, no matter what the PC says or does. The third example offered above is particularly significant, because it establishes that what may be difficult, or require a die roll, from one character can be so obvious and simple that a more skilled character should have no chance of failure. So it’s not a general question, it’s a specific one relating to a specific character in specific circumstances.

Automatic Skill Checks

If a character has a certain level of expertise, it can generally be assumed that they have a certain level of fundamental understanding of the subject, and some questions are just so obvious that no roll should be needed.

This implies that the mere fact of having a particular skill can be enough – give the player any obvious information that they need to make future decisions and simply move on.

Beyond this obvious application of the theory of dicelessness, there is a gray area that GMs should be cognizant of. As stated earlier, there is an inherent cost to interrupting play while a player makes a die roll, as the mechanics drag them out of their state of being immersed in play. The pace of the game slows, the emotional intensity fades, and the game world is made to feel more artificial and less real. Almost always, these effects are neutral or negative in nature, and so to be avoided unless necessary.

On top of all that, there is a positive impact on the perceived reality of using the mere presence of a skill of sufficient ranks as a decision point within the logical structure of an adventure – essentially providing a concrete manifestation of the characters being a part of the game world.

And, finally, taking the randomness out of a skill check can simplify the plot structure, making the whole adventure simpler and easier to prep.

Automatic Stat Checks

The same logic applies to stats above a certain value. Consider a heavy weight that has to be lifted – you can either demand that players roll a stat roll and total the amount by which they succeed, which is a lot of palaver for a simple situation, or you could assume that people know how to use their strength to lift and simply mandate that they need a total strength between them. The latter choice has the advantage of permitting the simple use of ratios to calculate the effects of a lever, should the PCs decide to employ that approach to the problem.

There are similar situations with respect to virtually every stat, although some of them are a bit more tenuous in justification. A PCs charisma is 20 and the NPC with whom he is bargaining has only 8? While you could employ opposed rolls if the negotiation is serious, but if it’s routine, assume average rolls in advance, precalculate the outcome, and simply announce the results; don’t let the game get bogged down in minutia.

Automatic Detections

Whenever players make perception checks (a.k.a. ‘Spot’ checks in some game systems), they describe them as ‘spot the painfully obvious’ checks, and there’s a lot of truth in that description, or at least there used to be. These days, I try to make something that’s ‘painfully obvious’ evident to the players without a roll – though I will sometimes use a die roll to determine how long it will be before the character observes the ‘painfully obvious’ fact if that’s relevant.

Most of the time, though, I will only make the player roll if there is some subtle nuance that might not get noticed.

If there’s a sound in the forest but no-one makes their perception check, is the sound really there at all?

A blind spot in most game systems revolves around an implementation of non-visual senses that ranges from the incomplete to the inadequate.

So your rules have both ‘Listen’ and ‘spot’ mechanics? That’s great, now tell me how you determine how adequately a character can find a gas leak, or a bottle that has been tainted with something creating the odor of rotten eggs? Tell me how good the character is at determining that the recipe contains a typo in the amount of Turmeric to be added? But a lot of game systems don’t even go that far.

Using automatic detections can solve a lot of these problems, especially if you rule that such a detection only becomes automatic after a certain amount of time and if the character is actively trying to locate the source of whatever they are perceiving.

Auto-Saves

If a character is able to take cover, throwing themselves flat, should they still have to make a Reflex Save in D&D? Some GMs will say yes, because it’s all about how well they execute that maneuver. Others may say no, because so much of the randomness has been taken out of the question.

But the significance goes deeper; a ‘no’ answer means that clever tactics can result in an automatic success, while a ‘yes’ answer says that tactics are secondary to how well you roll. Those are powerful statements to make within a game; one enhances player agency, while the other promotes blind luck to a superior position over such agency. The choice is between encouraging players to invest more deeply in the campaign or telling them that paying attention and making good decisions doesn’t matter, discouraging player participation.

FORT saves

Consider, then, the FORT save, sometimes a Health check or even a Disease Resistance roll – the mechanics are essentially the same, even if the names and details change. Here, once again, there is a profound implication to the simple choice – if you permit a saving throw when a character has a very high stat basis for that saving throw, it says that immunity is a matter of luck more than of resistance, and sufficient exposure eventually results in failure. No roll, perhaps accompanied by a temporary negative modifier to some tasks and activities, bypasses the resulting myriad of rolls; you are either healthy enough to cope with the disease, or you are not.

An alternative is to choose the no-save option but permit saves after a period of rest to throw off the illness, or reduce the negative impact. This combines the best of both choices, o it deserves serious consideration. With serious illnesses, perhaps the choice is between the disease getting worse or getting better – escalation or recovery.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to PCs and disease. The first is that these are PCs, heroes all – they should not be subject to mundane illnesses, only to magical or super-diseases. The second is that these are people first, and it is more heroic to overcome adversity, so they should still be subject to mundane diseases but these should handicap, not incapacitate.

Personally, I can never consider the question without remembering an early issue of spider-man in which he had to save the day whilst suffering from a serious flu, or maybe it was a head cold, and that it made the challenges of being a super-hero even more difficult. That memory puts me squarely into the second group.

Factoring into these questions is the simplicity of cure spells in some game systems, and the potential in the future for people to be immunized against illnesses like the common cold, or right now, for the flu. The latter argues that the GM should feel more free to inflict illness on the PCs because it is so easily overcome; the second is more about how ill victims become, as everyone should know after all the pandemic education we have received over the last few years.

WILL saves

These are some of the most poorly defined saves or checks in most game systems. I’ve seen them used for concentration checks, for determination, for focus (i.e. setting aside distractions), for innate resistance to external influences or against mental control specifically. Although these are undoubtedly similar, they are emphatically not the same.

Autosaves in this department essentially create a threshold for the character; below the threshold, there is so little risk of effect that you might as well not roll, avoiding the negative consequences of interrupting game flow; exceed it, and you are in danger. Dealing with those dangers in narrative form gives the GM more control over then, but at the expense of players feeling like the GM is manipulating a character that doesn’t belong to them. And that can be exceptionally problematic.

A hybrid approach seems to offer the benefits of both with the liabilities of neither – a threshold, which – if exceeded – gives way to a traditional saving throw.

But there’s another side of the coin to consider.

Back when I was just a player in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, my character was Paulo Lumierre, a master hypnotist. Because I had designed the character carefully, under most conditions in which the character had a moment to prepare, he had 24d6 of mind control to utilize. The way this power works in the Hero system is that you roll the indicated number of dice and compare the total to the Will score of the opposition; if the result is greater than or equal to the Will, you have some effect, if double it, you have more, triple equals more again, and four times gives maximum effect.

So, 24 dice at an average of 3.5 each gives an average result of 84. Most normal people had a will of 10, most villains and PCs had 20 or less. An exceptionally strong-willed target might go as high as 25 Will. On an average result, then, I would get maximum result almost every time, and even against the ultra-strong-willed, an average roll would get me three levels of success. Since the character was designed to be as effective as he was supposed to get with just one or two levels of success, there was virtually no need to roll at all.

To get less than those two levels, I would need to roll a total of 50 or less, even against the most strong-willed of opponents; this works out to being so close to 100% chance that Anydice can’t measure the gap; 53 or more is a 99.99% likelihood of occurring. For less strong-willed characters, the chances of success were even closer to 100%.

This level of success was not an accident – at 23 dice, the shift from virtually 100% to 99.99% takes place at a total of 51; the extra dice simply gave me a little extra cushion (to achieve this level of success on an average roll, 50 / 3.5 = just 14.28 dice, but I was also factoring in the possibility that some targets might have defenses against mind control / hypnotism that would have to be overcome).

Why bother rolling? All I had to do was roleplay and stay in character.

So thresholds can and perhaps should run both ways. Beyond a certain threshold of effectiveness, there is essentially no chance of failure, and requiring a roll is all downside and no advantage. In such cases, I think it important for at least a couple of rolls to be made just to establish the reality in the mind of the players – whether it’s a PC or an NPC who is being so dominant – but then, go to a threshold and automatic success or failure when that is warranted.

Automatic Attacks

Just as Skill checks made the basic situation with Stat checks obvious, which in turn clarified automatic Saves, so Autosaves shed light on Automatic Attacks.

By all means, if there is any measure of doubt about the success or failure of an attack, die rolls should be used; but when no such doubt exists, why bother?

There is the need for a special caveat to that general principle when it comes to game mechanics like those of D&D / Pathfinder. When a critical success is needed to hit, or a critical failure to miss, my normal practice is to say that simply hitting the target is all the ‘extra’ that you are reasonably entitled to – but what if you are so far removed from potential success that this is your ONLY chance of success? And what of the situation in between?

My approach is:

• If you need a 2/- to hit (or a 19+), roll as usual.
• If you need a 1/- to hit (or a 20+), ‘critical’ effects are off the table, but roll as usual otherwise.
• If you need 0/- to hit, or 21+, (but will still hit on a critical), ‘critical’ effects are not only ruled out, but a successful hit will do minimum damage – once. After that, automatic miss.
• If you need 1 worse than that (minus 1 or less or 22 or more), even that single success is excluded, and automatic misses are the rule.
• A similar regime (with maximum normal damage instead of minimum) applies to attacks at the other end of the spectrum.

This prevents improbable rolls from wasting playing time, while still permitting ‘hail mary’ passes. Since a fundamental principle at my table is ‘sauce for the goose is good for the gander’ – in other words, a rule that applies to PCs also applies to NPCs and vice-versa – my players tend to tolerate (if not accept) this approach because it is equally fair and binding to both sides. YMMV.

Fixed Damage

The variability of damage is much broader than that of attack rolls in most game systems, even if it doesn’t appear to be the case. It doesn’t matter whether or not your chance of hitting are 3 or less or 17 or less or 14 or more, excluding the effects in some game systems of critical hits, the damage done remains variable to exactly the same degree.

There are three basic models when it comes to fixed damage: the minor, the catastrophic, and the average.

In the minor model, the actual damage inflicted is trivial, little more than a metaphoric scratch, and when coupled with an automatic hit, signifies overwhelming numbers that are fairly helpless to be anything more than an annoyance. This is therefore an excellent means of simulating large numbers of weak opponents, especially within an ‘aggregate time’ combat concept (refer to part 1 if you don’t know what that means).

In the catastrophic damage model, the damage inflicted is close to the maximum possible for the attack form, and reflects a superior enemy who is unable to focus on one target exclusively. This interpretation holds true with both the aggregate time and instant time approaches.

The average damage model is the hardest to justify, in many ways; it falls in between and implies that there is something mechanically repetitious and precise about the nature of the attack that eliminates most of the variability. I have found it effective in situations in which the combat is being faked but made to ‘look good’ in order to persuade a third party, but those situations don’t come along very often.

But, when there’s going to be recurring damage round after round due to the environment, instead of rolling separately for each character each round, it can make a lot more sense from a practicality and playability standpoint to assume that the variability will cancel out and simply apply an average damage result right from the start. This is convenience and playability overcoming strict simulation considerations. So the average damage model has its virtues, too.

Fixed damage is probably most useful when it comes to damage inflicted by mechanical devices and other physical realities, because these naturally take out most of the variables, anyway. The other situation in which I would seriously consider fixed damage is for describing damage caused directly by the environment, because there’s not much that the character can do to avoid or vary that short of some sort of complete protection.

Constant Effects

These are a lot more common, or should be, than people expect. Any effect that is created by a device (magical or technological) is arguably more appropriately simulated with a constant effect value – so much so that variability really needs to be explicitly justified.

Again, devices and contrivances reduce the number of variables significantly, and that logically should impact on the variability.

There’s no blanket justification for removing dice from game-play (save, perhaps, replacing them with some other variable-generating mechanism like cards or coins). But there are a whole heap of specific circumstances that can justify taking specific rolls ‘diceless’.

Life In The Twilight

It’s possible to adopt a half-way house in between these two extremes, i.e. rolls with less variability than is usual. This is often even more realistic than not rolling at all, but it’s generally more effort than it’s worth, so I have chosen not to explore it in this article..

There will be no posts over the holiday season. So it only remains to wish everyone all the best for the holiday season. I’ll see you all early in the New Year!

— Mike

Background Image by Petra from Pixabay, Text created using CoolText.com, compositing and photo-editing by Mike.

The December Blog Carnival by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. This is the beginning of Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the subject.

There are times when it can be useful to the GM and his simulation of reality not to require a roll for something. This article is going to explore the conditions under which that seems worth considering, and what the resulting game mechanics mean in terms of that reality.

The Basic Approach

Just to be explicitly clear on what this article is going to propose, I thought it would be useful to set a baseline describing the usual process and what the rolling of dice normally represents in terms of underlying internal game physics.

While I can’t state that these interpretations will be correct for all game systems that use die rolls, I’m going to keep this at a level such that it will apply to the vast majority of game systems. To achieve that, I’m going to make sure that the interpretations provided are valid for the Hero System and GURPS, for D&D and Pathfinder, and for both my Doctor Who campaign (which uses The Sixes System and my now-completed Zener Gate campaign (which uses its own bespoke rules system. .

These systems are so different in their mechanics that the results should apply broadly to almost every RPG out there, with the occasional exception.

In particular, for each stage of the conceptual framework, I’m going to look at seven specific circumstances:

• Skill Checks
• Stat Checks
• Perception / Sensory Checks
• Saving Throws
• Attack Rolls
• Damage Rolls
• Rolls for effect

You’ll note that I’m explicitly including Saving Throws even though not every game system uses them; when a game system doesn’t, it usually substitutes some sort of stat check for the save mechanics, but the interpretations and implications can be quite different.

It might grow complicated at times, because some of these interact. For example, rolled attacks but not rolled damage, or vice-versa. I’m going to try to avoid this as much as possible, but there will be some of these fringe questions along the way.

Rolling Skill Checks

There are two basic kinds of skill check – knowledge checks and ability checks. Knowledge checks can include how to do something with a practical skill.

• Does the character know the answer to the question being posed? Can he solve the problem, or at least get a step closer to a solution? Can he devise a theory, and a way to test that theory? Can he spot the flaws in a plan or in someone else’s theory?
• Does the character recognize this architectural style? Can he determine which columns are load-bearing and which could be hollow?
• Can the character successfully attempt to do something, like repair a net, or patch a boat hull? How long does he think it will take to forge that sword?
• How much will it cost? What does the character consider a fair price for his services? If an NPC is to do the work, does the character think the price is reasonable?
• How good is the character at working with the tools available – and can he improvise his way around the lack of such tools if he has to?

These are all skill checks. The basic concept embedded in most RPGs is that there are all sorts of variable factors and an element of random chance in most of these tasks, and simulating those factors is the job of the die roll in such a check.

Rolling Stat Checks

Stat checks are very similar, but they deal with the more elemental raw abilities. In many game systems, if you don’t have an appropriate skill to fall back on, you can default to the raw stat check, the innate capacity to work in the field – sometimes with a penalty to you chances of success.

But there are also occasions when no skill is as relevant as those innate capacities. Holding your breath, for example, or running over broken ground, or holding onto something slippery.

If you assume that the stat value provides and defines the unskilled capability of performing such an action, then the die roll takes into account all the variable factors, just as it does for skill checks.

The other function of stat rolls in most game systems are opposed rolls. A tug-of-war is a typical example, in which each participant attempts to apply their strength more successfully than the other. But the same concept applies to attempts to persuade someone – assuming you don’t have a skill that applies, and to all sorts of other interactions, like bartering.

The rolls don’t have to be like against like, either. One stat might represent that character’s natural ability to sneak, while the opposing stat would be that character’s ability to perceive hidden objects.

Again, the stat represents the innate potential of the character, the die roll integrates that potential with the circumstances and variable factors to determine how well the character is able to apply that potential.

Attention and Awareness

‘Make a perception roll” – or it might be a Spot Roll, or a Listen check, or any number of alternatives. But they are all sensory checks, when you get to the bottom line. I could spend an entire column on this subject, but that would take us way off the point.

So here is the very-abbreviated version. When something happens, there is usually a visual change in the environment, or an audible change, or an odor, or – sometimes – a particular taste in the mouth. But for that change to impact on the character’s awareness, they first have to notice the change and then to correctly interpret it, and then recognize the significance. And none of that is as easy as it sounds.

Confirmation Bias, Ideation & Fixation, Malleable Memory, Illusions, Deceptions, and at least half-a-dozen other phenomena are all able to get in the way. Spend too much time looking into, for example, the reliability of witnesses, and you’ll find yourself starting to wonder if any of us ever really see anything clearly.

One truism is that the more attention we pay to something, the better we remember it, and the more details about that something we will typically notice. This usually comes at the expense of awareness of anything outside the scope of that something, and in extreme cases, complete obliviousness to even attention-getting phenomena like alarms and sirens and what other people are saying to us. That’s called fixation, and it’s one of the items on that list above.

Another factor is the state of mind of the witness, which can rewrite perceptions or cause them to be wildly misinterpreted.

In terms of the game mechanics that usually apply, not only do we have to be paying attention to the right thing in the world around us, our awareness has to navigate that whole litany of perceptual errors to bring it to our attention. All of which gets collected into a big conceptual pot called a die roll.

If you fail a perception check, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there was something to see and your didn’t notice it, in fact that’s going to be the case no more than 25-50% of the time. The rest of the time, one of those perceptual or cognitive traps intercepts the awareness and misinterprets it.

So you can interpret a perception check as a means of overcoming these deficiencies, and that would be as valid as any other interpretation..

Rolling Saving Throws

     “A whistling sound fills the air as a spark leaps from the spell-caster’s outstretched hand, flies up to a few dozen yards in height, and begins to fall toward you.”
     “I throw myself to the ground and search for any sort of cover I can find!”

That’s the usual interpretation of a Reflex save. Some GMs may omit all of the above and simply have the player make a Reflex save to throw themselves flat on sheer instinct, as – in fact – a reflex action.

The other kinds of saving throws that are common also derive from D&D: Fortitude saves to resist various things that could distract or incapacitate a character, and Will saves to resist various things that could influence or control their minds.

But, even though this iconic trio stem directly from D&D, most game systems have some sort of equivalents. Sometimes, these are run as stat checks like any other; that is especially common in game systems that don’t have the artificial construct of ‘character levels’. In fact, it’s fair to say that the only reason these checks are semi-divorced from stat scores is to permit the character level input to be the dominant factor.

Is it enough? Is it done in time? Do random factors – like what you had for breakfast – work in your favor? All such considerations are encompassed by the die roll component of a Saving Throw.

What about Modifiers?

If the random die roll is supposed to take all the ‘wild variables’ into account, what, then, is the role of Modifiers to these rolls? Before I move on to attack rolls, I thought it worth taking a moment to discuss modifiers and what they should be considered to represent in the game reality created by the rules system.

Most saving throws and stat checks can be assumed to incorporate those random variables into the die roll, assuming typical circumstances and an even positive-negative influence.

When either of these is not the case, modifiers should be used to reflect that. Effectively, they bias the die roll to take into account unusual circumstances, abnormal difficulties, and other forms of strangeness.

I use bonuses to reflect things like distractions, confusing environments, deceptions and ruses, distance, minuteness of pertinent details, the adequacy or inadequacy of the tools available (if such are necessary), and so on.

I also use them to compare the difficulty of the challenge / question relative to a character of similar skill to that of the character – because a character with a reasonably good skill level should be able to answer basic questions at least 9 times out of 10. Similarly, some problems are going to be harder for anyone but an expert to solve.

The latter is less relevant to game systems like D&D in which a certain natural result on the die always succeeds. because this overrides the consequences of the bias. In the Zenith-3 game system, there are no automatic successes, but there are critical results; “00” is read as “oh-oh” (checks are on d%), and means that something has gone wrong, any failure will be worsened and any success minimized or nullified outright. In fact, it usually signals a reverse of some sort. “01”, in comparison, is read as “Oh, Wow” and means that successes are enhanced, failures are diminished, and so on.

The Plotting Value of Bias Metagaming

Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? This simply means deciding what you want the chance of success to be in a given situation, determining what bias is necessary to translate the character’s normal roll into that probability of success, and then ‘delivering’ the circumstances needed to justify or create that bias.

Or to put it another way, you determine how difficult progress should be for the PC(s) in question and introduce plot elements to achieve that metagame outcome.

When you do this, you always need a ‘Plan B’ for the players to follow, even if they don’t know what it is; where there is one solution, there are probably several. Such metagame roadblocks exist to steer the adventure in the direction of more fun; there should be no malice involved.

The goal is for everyone to have fun. But that doesn’t mean letting the players always have their own way; it does mean rewarding them with success when that’s justified.

The Gods Are Watching

One more sidebar before returning to the main text. This is also metagaming, but in a positive way. Sometimes, especially in temples and the like, the Gods are watching, and may choose to help or hinder; instead of a random die roll to determine this, and then translating that result into a bias on the actual check, I assume the Gods have been watching and judging the characters as they approached this point.

If the Gods would have a good impression, that translates into a positive bias that the character can’t explain; if not, a negative one. And I do take into account how well the character was being roleplayed. Do that well enough, and even an enemy might develop a grudging respect for you – enough to stay their hand when they would be normally inclined to bias things towards trouble for you.

Attack Rolls

Attack Mechanics tend to work in one of two ways: the instant and aggregate time.

D&D and related systems are ‘aggregate time’ mechanics. Each ‘attack’ combines several thrusts, parries, swings, bobs, weaves, and dodges, all probing for an opening in the defenses of the target while keeping yourself clear of enemy attacks. But GMs rarely describe combat that way, and even less frequently, think about it that way.

Superhero games, in particular, tend to be have ‘instant time’ mechanic, in which each move and countermove is determined individually. That’s a reflection of the expected impact on the combat setting; even a single missed attack can have major repercussions.

Other game systems can use either of these interpretations, often without ever spelling out the assumptions that underpin their simulation of ‘in-genre reality’.

The difference is important, because the meaning of the die roll component of an attempted attack is different in both cases.

In ‘aggregate time’, it’s the conflict between maneuvering your opponent into a misstep while presenting minimal opportunities yourself, compounded with your capacity to exploit such mistakes. The die roll is a direct reflection of your success at doing this.

In ‘instant time’, such maneuvering is no longer treated as a collective series of events, and is therefore under the direct control of whoever is running the character. There is no luring of an opponent into a mistake; instead, it’s all about how effective an attack is at penetrating or bypassing the target’s resistance to that attack. In some ways, this can make the combat more interactive and hence more exciting; in others, it can slow it down enormously. There are vastly more variables and parameters that get aggregated into an ‘attack roll’, things that the ‘aggregate time’ perspective simply glosses over. If more of these random factors align in your favor, you are successful; if not, you are not. So that’s what the die roll component represents in such systems.

Many of these systems (especially the hero games system) use 3d6 for attack rolls. Any system that uses multiple dice for such rolls is mapping probabilities to a familiar pattern, the bell curve. The reality of such curves is that they can be viewed as being all about the deviation from the mean – a singularly appropriate perspective, under the circumstances.

Damage Rolls

Most game systems have a separate roll for damage, meaning that the attack roll does not represent the quality of success of the strike, only that it has been successful. The damage roll therefore represents the effectiveness of the attack.

In some game systems, this is the net effect; in others, this is a preliminary value that is then reduced by other game mechanics. The difference is a logical consequence of the differences in attack roll interpretation, i.e. ‘aggregate time’ vs ‘instant time’.

In ‘aggregate time’, the attack roll incorporates a host of modifiers to determine the overall consequences of multiple attempted attacks. This logically includes all the target’s defenses; hence there is no need to account for these in the damage roll, so the damage rolled is a net value.

One of the frequent complaints heard in the early days of AD&D was that this was unrealistic, and reduced the value of defenses more than should be the case, especially since attacks improved with rising character levels but defenses did not, and I have to concede the validity of the last point, at least. Character defenses were, as a result, one of the most common house rules offered – most of them missing at least one key point.

Rather than modifying the amount of damage done by having defenses increase with character levels, these game systems increase the capacity to absorb damage with character levels. In effect, the results make the damage done, as a percentage of the total to be endured by the character, smaller with increasing character levels. The significance of this was often not appreciated in the debates mentioned above, which formed a second nexus of debate because character classes did not increase in capacity equally.

It’s not the place of this article to try to resolve these debates, or even assess whether or not they remain relevant. My scope here is simply to provide understanding of what the variable element, i.e. die rolls, are simulating in such game systems.

When the game system uses ‘instant attack’ resolution, the same compromises are neither possible nor all that desirable, and that permits more realistic damage handling systems – including defenses that modify the amount of damage done.

Rolls for Effect

The final category covers rolls for effect. These are usually from spells or paranormal powers. In ‘instant time’ game systems, they tend to be relatively fixed in value, only increasing as a result of specific decisions in ongoing character development.

In ‘aggregate time’ systems, they tend to increase with character levels, with some exceptions for character class levels that are deemed to follow a different character track. That’s the difference between ‘Caster Level’ and ‘Character Level’ in such systems.

This lay at the center of a third nexus of debates amongst AD&D GMs and players, largely because they didn’t appreciate what the increase in character hit points was supposed to simulate. The reason relevant spells increase in effectiveness with caster level is not to make them more powerful, it is to maintain an approximate parity with rising hit point levels in targets with increasing character levels.

Because this context was not understood, the increase in the number of dice rolled for effects was not understood, either, and that led to a number of half-baked house rules at the time. The only consolation is that there were fewer of these house rules that made it into the game magazines, acquiring some level of semi-official plausibility in the process.

The biggest problem with most of these house rules was that they weren’t comprehensive and holistic; they focused on one specific element of the system without considering the big picture or how the elements of the game mechanics were supposed to integrate, and as a result, they tended to miss the mark.

Be that as it may – most effect determinations involve some sort of die roll, usually on multiple dice.

And when you are talking about multiple dice, you are talking about bell probability curves – the more dice, the more results will tend to cluster around the average result. For another article some time back, I produced the diagram below to illustrate this point.



Just to be complete about illustrating the ‘shape’ of effect rolls, below is a set of images from the series describing the sixes system that addresses the impact of rising numbers of d6:



The middle set of graphs shows the same thing as the stacking of d6 graphed above this trio but in less detail.

So, what does all this variability represent?

I have to admit this is the hardest thing to get your head around. Superficially, it looks like the only reason is to insert unpredictability into the system.

To really understand, you have to make a deep dive into the actual consequences of increasing effect dice in a numeric sense. There are consequences of note:

1. Minimum possible results increase by one per die added to the roll.
2. Maximum possible results increase by the die size per die added to the roll.
3. The probability range clusters more tightly around the average result.

The last one is the hardest for people to understand in a quantitative sense; it’s relatively easy to get a handle on the concept, but much harder to get a ‘feel’ for how significant it is.

To try and deliver an appreciation for the impact of the clustering, I’ve considered a number of different die rolls below, using Anydice, which was also employed for the graphs above.

I’m setting the technical details of the graph into this sidebar as they won’t matter much to most people.

Starting with the result or results of greatest probability, I totaled the probabilities, spreading out to either side. This enabled me to determine the range of results that equated to a given likelihood, and the results were then compiled into the table that follows the curve.



That’s useful in an illustrative way, but not helpful beyond that. The analysis is more revealing.
 

% of results	Number Of Dice
	2d6	3d6	4d6	5d6	6d6	12d6	18d6	24d6	30d6	40d6
3%										140
4%									105
5%							63	84
7%						42
9%					21
10%				14					104-106	139-141
15%	7						62-64	83-85		138-142
25%		10-11			20-22		61-65	82-86		137-143
30%			13-15			40-44		81-87	102-108	136-144
35%							60-66		101-109
40%	6-8	9-12		16-19	19-23	39-45		80-88		135-145
45%							59-67		100-110	134-146
50%			12-16					79-89	99-111	133-147
55%				15-20	18-24	38-46	58-68	78-90	98-112	132-148
60%							57-69	77-91		131-149
65%						37-47			97-113	130-150
66.67%	5-9	8-13	11-17
70%				14-21	17-25	36-48	56-70	76-92	96-114	129-151
75%							55-71	75-93	95-115	128-152
80%	4-10	7-14	10-18	13-22	16-26	35-49	54-72	74-94	93-117	127-153
85%					15-27	34-50	53-73	72-96	92-118	125-155
90%	3-11	6-15	9-19	12-23	14-28	33-51	51-75	71-97	90-120	122-158
95%			8-20	10-25	13-29	31-53	49-77	68-100	87-123	117-163
97.5%										100-180
98%							47-79		84-126
98.5%				9-26	12-30	28-56	46-80		83-127
99%					11-31	27-57	45-81	63-105	82-128
100%	2-12	3-18	4-24	5-30	6-36	12-72	18-108	24-144	30-180	40-240

 

The color bands divide the table up into 1/3 of the results, 2/3 of the results, and more than 90% of the results. And, at the last minute, I threw in a row for 100%, just to be pedantic.

The table shows that on 3d6, two-thirds of your results will typically be from 8 to 13. On 12d6, 70% of your rolls will result in results between from a low of 36 to a high of 48. And, on 24d6, 90% of your rolls will have a result from 71 to 97.

If you look again at the graph, you’ll note that a lot of results have virtually zero change of occurring. Never quite zero, if they are within the theoretical range – you can still roll a 34 on 30d6 – but it’s exceptionally unlikely.

This shows the real impact of the narrowing of the bell probability curve relative to a lower-dice curve. One third of results on 40d6 will fall within a span of 11 numbers – 135 to 145. More than two thirds will fall within a range of 23 numbers – from 129 to 151. 95% of the time, 40d6 will yield a result somewhere between 116 and 164, a span of just 46 results – and a far cry from the full 40-240 range.

I doubt that many game designers performed such calculations, at least in the early days – there was too much spit and baling wire in the rules-creation process back then, too much seat-of-the-pants and ‘that looks about right”.

But the ultimate goal remained – raising the minimum and maximum effect and making a ‘reasonable’ result more likely, relative to the rising hit points of enemies as they went up in terms of the challenge that they posed..

Still a long way to go in this article, but I’m right out of time, so I’m going to have to split it into at least two, and possibly three, parts. Come back next week to get the next installment!

So November has come and gone, and with it, Campaign Mastery’s bonus hosting of the Blog Carnival. Those who got inspired by the topic did a stellar job with some very interesting contributions, which I’ll summarize later in this wrap-up post.

Sadly, there weren’t really enough participants for that to fill this article. Possibly, misunderstanding the closure of the RPGBA, though that announcement seems clear enough to me – see Scot’s announcement – or perhaps potential participants were disheartened by the announcement.

Whatever the cause, what’s done is done and now history.

But, since it leaves this round-up short of content, I’ve decided to re-task a subject that has been sitting around for a while because it also was not substantial enough, and use the blending to create one last entry into the November carnival.

Context

So let’s start by being clear what I’m talking about when I refer to Context, since it’s something that I’ve been banging on about in these posts for absolute ages.

Context is content that implies, infers, or imparts additional meaning or interpretation to another element of content when the latter is considered in light of the Contextual content.

Clear? Or Clear as mud?

Text-to-text context

Sightings of shadowy figures haunting the old cemetery obviously mean something in isolation.

When the PCs discover a body drained of blood some time after hearing of those sightings, that information can also be taken at face value. Or the players can calculate 2 plus 2 equals 4, and put the two facts together, evaluating the reports of the sightings in the context of the later discovery.

2 + 2 = 4, or – in this case – equals Vampires in the Graveyard (or someone who wants the public to think that).

This is an example of one piece of text providing context for a second, conveying additional meaning that is not explicitly stated in either one of the individual pieces of text. It’s a narrative technique that GMs use to create adventures all the time, even if they didn’t recognize it at the time.

Context for Visuals

When using an image, it’s quite common to need to supplement the visual with a description of the significance.

That’s quite normal. Some GMs, when illustrating some element of the experienced ‘reality’ of a campaign, supplement that description or even replace it entirely (if the content’s meaning is sufficiently obvious) with some text that places the image, or some part of the image into a new context that adds meaning to the illustration.

The primary image chosen to illustrate this article, for example, was chosen because it contained two specific elements: distant mountains and sunrise or sunset. Those are not normally interchangeable, because they happen at different compass points, but for the purposes of this example, either would work. There’s a thumbnail version above, just to remind you.

Next, some text.

“The next morning’s dawn promises another day of fair weather and steady progress. In the distance, for the first time, you can see the mountains that stand between you and your destination.”

This text doesn’t give any additional meaning to the image, and the image doesn’t give any further meaning to the text; so neither of them are providing context for the others, this is simple narration accompanied by an illustration.

That’s great for imparting a sense of the environment, but doesn’t hold much importance beyond that. But, if I then add:

“This time tomorrow, you expect to be standing in their foothills,”

then there is an immediate context placed on the image – a sense of scale. If, instead of that addition, I had said

“This time next week, you expect to be standing in their foothills,”

that scale changes quite dramatically. It is clearly adding information that places what you can “see” into context, binding distance and time, and implying how large these mountains truly are.

If they are a day away, they are quite small and not likely to pose a significant challenge to cross. If they are a week away, they are that much more significant (and then some). Views of distant mountains during Tour-de-Fance coverage tells me that three days distance would equate such a view with the Alps or Pyrenees; double that must put the mountains on a scale closer to the Himalayas.

NSW Inland Exploration

Beware of the false equivalence, though you can use it to trap your PCs. Smaller mountains don’t necessarily equate to ‘easier to cross’, a fact that is drummed into residents of my state of New South Wales. When the colony of Sydney was first settled, the focus was on developing the Sydney region. As the colony grew, the presence of the Great Dividing Range (and specifically the local part of that Range, the Blue Mountains) began to impose constraints on growth.

Several expeditions were mounted to try and find a way through the mountains, because arable land was believed to lie beyond, but all failed. They all attempted to follow the rivers and watercourses and valleys, believing that the terrain would be more conducive to passage, but all attempts dead-ended at stone cliff-faces.

This forced the colony to expand along the coast, and to this day, the bulk of the Australian population can be found within about 50km of the coast.

More than 98% of the Australian Population are found in the yellow zones.
Original Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, released under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, where it is available in much higher resolution; color tweak (sea) by Mike.

Click this link to view licensing information and gain access to a glorious 3200×1780 version of the image. The lighter-colored areas are freshly-exposed rock, subject to erosion.

It was only when three explorers – Wentworth, Blaxland, and Lawson – attempted the more difficult passage from peak to peak along the ridges that a passage through the mountains was found. Using the same strategy, a few other paths were later found, such as the Bell line of road.

You can get some idea of the terrain in question in this image of the Three Sisters mountain formation at Katoomba, originally presented as part of The Diversity Of Seasons Pt 1: Winter, shown to the right.

Context from Visuals

Visual media can also be used to illustrate or lend context to narration, comveying information visually so that you don’t have to waste words doing so. After all, it can take several minutes to convey what a player can garner in just a few seconds examination of an image.

It can sometimes be hard to tell whether it’s the image providing context for the words or vice-versa. Both are at their most powerful when there is a synergy between the two.

But sometimes, you have to answer the question “what am I looking at,” and the relationship is clear – the words are there to explain the visual and give it meaning, i.e. to place it into context.

This is the meaning of the term when it is applied to seeking inspiration from an image. Without context to give it direction, you are simply free-associating with the image.

The Other Side‘s Contribution

Timothy S Brannon offered up The Witch Babylon: Daughter of Eros, Mother of Harlots, inspired by a full-page panel from a Born-Again Christian comic (art by Al Hartley) that featured the Whore Of Babylon. So he re-envisaged her as a Witch and a leader of a cult/faction called the Daughters Of Eros. There’s a lot more meat on his creation so delve further through the link provided if this is something that would be useful in your campaign. Some conversion may be required, of course.

Beyond The Horizon‘s Contributions

Kim Frandsen offered up a multipart creation of a “Lost World” inhabited by Dinosaurs who have been (essentially) conquered / enslaved / semi-domesticated by a city of Duegar.

The first couple of times that I read it, I conflated the “Dragon Philosophers” with the Dinosaur survivors, as though the Dragons had saved their lives but regressed socially into a massive dark age following the meteor strike that wiped out their brethren still on the surface. Kim’s story was that the Dragons saved some Dinosaurs who survived underground and evolved to fit their new environment but were largely unchanged from their original forms through lack of competition.

This is a union of a pulp staple (The Lost World / Hollow Earth) with a D&D setting that holds plenty of story potential. This review has barely scratched the surface.

Part 1 of the two-part article details the early thoughts and the search for an appropriate image. It also has links to a Starfinder monster created in the same fashion, inspired by artwork.

The second part of the two-part article executes the creative process based on the chosen image.

Between them, the two provide a comprehensive overview of the process employed, so there is lots of useful material there.

Campaign Mastery: The Anchor Post

Campaign Mastery’s anchor post not only contained a dozen or so inspirational images for readers to use, but a bunch of ideas of what could be done with them, plus a few bonus hints on the side.
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But to round out this post, and to illustrate the importance of context, I’m going to go further, and derive a bunch of different interpretations for some of the images from the anchor post.

Galatea Of The Spheres by Salvador Dali

I’m going to interpret this image in four different ways, each of which lends it a different context, and hence a different meaning: NPCs, Physical Reality, Metaphor, and Social Reality. In some cases, the results will be literal, in others, they will be abstract or symbolic.

NPCs

The image could be symbolic or representative of how a character suffering from a Multiple Personality Disorder sees the world. It is fragmented, with some aspects open to any to appreciate, while others trigger a change in persona, the better to deal with a stressful situation.

MPD can be thought of as a small crowd of people. Most of the time, they are content to let one or two take the lead, and simply watch from the shadows; but each will have some specific circumstance in which they will elbow their way to the front and take control.

Each will have its own relationship with the other personas – they may be jealous, angry, spiteful, resentful, supportive, protective, or anything else you can imaging. Some personalities will be aware that the others are mere aspects of the core person, others will not realize that they are not the exclusive owners of the body, and may concoct elaborate fantasies or delusions to explain why things happen that they can’t remember.

It is only by uniting these fragmented perspectives that a full appreciation of the total personality can be achieved. If you were to ask one of the personalities who was aware of the others hosted by the shared body, they might well represent it in this way.

That makes this a useful tool for the GM attempting to portray such an individual, a way of getting them into the correct frame of mind for the role.

Physical Reality

What if this were literally true, what might a character be observing? Two possibilities, both related, come to mind: either an Explosion of parallel worlds, or the collision of alternate timelines, either viewed from some sort of privileged super-position. Cosmic!

It’s also possible, if a little less literal, to depict migrating or traveling from one world to an alternate reality – a panoply of worlds opening before the character, and the selection of the destination.

Metaphor

If I were to take this image as a metaphor, it would be of confusion, of a character at a crossroads with multiple directions to choose from. I’m talking a decision of the irrevocable, life-altering kind. If the character was a PC, this is the sort of decision that I might devote multiple adventures to; if an NPC, it would all be over and done with in one or two adventures.

When the PCs had to choose a 12th deity in the original Fumanor campaign, it was a decision of this magnitude. It’s indicative of the depth of the preparations they had experienced leading up to that decision that their ultimate selection was the individual that they had originally ruled out of consideration, no discussion necessary!

This image would serve as a metaphoric summary of that entire adventure, and even to large parts of the campaign. Contemplating it would have served as a valuable reminder of what I was intending to achieve, from a plot perspective, something that helped get my into the right headspace to work on the campaign.

Social Reality

Finally, this image could also be a metaphor for the social reality of a large organization. While that organization would present one unified face to the public, the reality is that it consists of a collection of individuals with different strengths, weaknesses, and personalities.

These would not represent the full gamut of possibilities; the recruitment process and performance reviews would function as a means of selection, winnowing out those most significantly at odds with that unified face. But there would still be significant levels of diversity.

I try very hard to make those NPCs representing an entire organization in one of my adventures individuals who fit – to a greater or lesser extent – the overall generic representative mold. I actively look for ‘acceptable’ ways for them to express their individuality – or, if they are the type that would push the limits, perhaps even an ‘unacceptable’ way.

I never want any character to be ‘just’ what he or she appears to be. They should all have at least a little more substance than that!

Old Man In An Armchair (possibly a portrait of Jan Amos Comenius 1665), by Rembrandt

For this image, I have five different contexts in which to interpret it: Literal Reality, Psychological Reality, Medical Reality, Intellect or Wisdom, and Wealth or Authority.

Literal Reality

Quite simply, this is what a particular character actually looks like. This is by far the most obvious interpretation. Anything else that is known about the character thereby becomes context for the interpretation of the image, while the image itself is context for anything the character says or does.

Psychological Reality

Things become more interesting if this is not the physical reality of the character, but how they see themselves. The contrast with the reality therefore defines what the context of this image is.

In the Lord Of The Rings, Saruman (and his spy, Wormtongue) take the relatively young and vital King Rohan and instill this sort of decrepit self-image in him, as revealed in The Two Towers.

But that helpless interpretation is not the only one. What if the character is physically or mentally disabled (or both), but views himself as being an ordinary person suffering from the effects of premature aging?

They are as capable (in their own minds) as anyone of comparable self-perceived age. That means that any personality that is valid for a figure of the depicted age would be appropriate to the character – from ‘crotchety old man’ to ‘overactive retiree’ and all points in between.

This is a profile that I would never have occurred to me without this stimulus, despite the known truism that the elderly often get on well with children because the two are closely matched in abilities.

Medical Reality

When my back was really bad, several years back, my doctor of the time described me as having the mobility, and associated impacts on my health, of a 101-year old. I could barely walk half a city-block without needing to rest; could not spend more than about 5 minutes in a bus, or about half an hour in a suburban train. Being in the back seat of a car was not much better than the latter, but I did better in the front seat, where I could stretch out a little more.

Should I exceed these limits, I spent weeks or months in pain with even more greatly reduced capacity – walking in a slow shuffle, for example.

By very carefully learning what I could and could not do, and building my lifestyle around those limitations, my health gradually improved, and my tolerance for these activities slowly increased. I can now walk two or even three city blocks without ill-effect, for example. It’s as though I were banking capacity for when I needed it.

I still can’t exceed whatever my current limits are without doing semi-permanent damage; but those limits continue to rise ever-so-slowly. The degree of excess is also a factor in how long it takes me to recover, and in what my limitations will be after such recovery.

I can never look at an image such as this one without being reminded of this medical realty. It took me a long time to learn these limits, because I still felt as capable as ever until going too far. Then, it was like flipping a switch; I went from capable to incapacitated at a stroke.

Intellect or Wisdom

If I were looking to represent a character of intellect or wisdom, this image would be perfectly suitable, simply because we often associate those achievements with age.

Wealth or Authority

You get completely different implied personalities for characters of Wealth or Authority if you choose an image like this than if you choose one of a younger individual. This is largely a matter of stereotyping, but there are times when that’s acceptable; as I have said before, there are usually good reasons for a stereotype being perceived as valid.

A useful tip, however, is to view all members of a stereotype as part of an organization – refer to what I’ve written about “Social Reality” and the Dali image.

The Scream, Edvard Munch

I’m starting to run short of time, so I will only offer three different contexts in which this image can be used for inspiration: External Reality, Altered Perceptions, and Paranoia.

External Reality

if this image is a literal reality, or representative of same, it implies that the featured character depicted has some reason to scream in fear or pain, or thinks they do.

This is a circumstance in which reactions and behavior will dominate or even over-rule personality to at least some extent. There are only a few reactions to acute distress of this type – the rational, the curl-into-a-ball, and the headless chicken, with the first one in the distinct minority.

Altered Perceptions

In general, however, i think this image is more useful to the GM as representative of an altered perception of reality. Such altered perspectives are commonly associated with Undead in D&D, and “Fear” spells are difficult to convey; there is always the question of whether or not such Fear is total (and better described as a “Panic” spell), or if it merely impacts on decision-making processes. Again, there are only the handful of expressions of such intensity.

But this also always reminds me of descriptions of some comatose patients, so psychologically damaged by an experience that they run from the world mentally since they can’t do so physically.

As a representation of an induced state of mind, this speaks directly to the way the GM wants the affected character to be played. It’s then up to the player and GM collectively to determine how this mindset will be reflected in the character’s behavior.

Finally, as a depiction of how a character might be feeling on the inside, this would be a useful stimulus for characters being subjected to extreme forms of blackmail, so fixated on their fear of exposure (or whatever) that all other considerations become wispy and ephemeral.

Paranoia

Finally, we have the question of unreasonable fear. Everything I’ve offered up so far for The Scream takes the perspective that the fear is reasonable (even if induced or externally amplified by circumstance). What if it’s not? Look at the two smaller figures who may or may not be pursuing the main character.

If the fear is in response to them, you have to wonder what they have done to inspire it – they certainly don’t look to be doing anything particularly menacing!

Two possibilities suggest themselves – either their faces are so horrifying, so terrifying, that their mere presence is sufficient to put the witness into such a state, or the witness is imbuing them with such menace. And that’s paranoia – and far more likely than the alternative.

As the clinician’s guiding aphorism states, “When you hear hooves, think Horses, Not Zebras”. Mundane explanations are always more probable than exotic ones – an expression of Occam’s Razor.

Of course, sometimes “Zebra” is the right answer. But that should never be assumed until their is some evidence that contradicts “Horse” being the right answer.

Matching context to image

Create the examples offered earlier in this article was done by starting with the image and free associating – not for interpretations, but for categories of interpretation.

It’s actually far more common to do things that other way around – to have a context in mind and simply scan collections of images looking for one that sparks an idea. You can then either accept that idea or continue searching.

Try not to overthink the initial phase of the process. Get yourself into the right frame of mind and then employ your instincts. Once you have the right image is the right time to analyze it intellectually, with the advantage of knowing that your subconscious has selected it as an appropriate ‘answer’ to the question posed.

So, that’s a wrap to the November 2022 Blog Carnival, which has now moved on to Rising Phoenix Games and the topic of No Dice – I Hope host Rodney gets some interesting responses! I have an idea for one, myself, but that will have to until another day…

This article had the working title of “The Penumbra of Personality Traits”, but when it came to actually write it, I decided that readers might find the meaning a little opaque (and yes, that’s a pun, as some will immediately recognize).

A penumbra is also a solid metaphor (another pun) for the personality construction technique that I am going to share with readers today, building on last week’s post about character relationships.

Another relevant metaphor as the article unfolds that I would ask readers to keep in mind is that of a spiderweb.

Foundations

This construction technique is built around the Zenith-3 variation on the standard Hero System rules, but that’s just a starting point. While those rules (both base and variant) determine character construction points, those are not relevant to this technique.

In fact, that’s the only reason this can be encapsulated in a single article; if it included the actual rules, it would not only be far too lengthy to be practical as a single article, it would fall foul of the copyright restrictions that Hero Games have mandated for home-brew rules. The latter consideration would require it to be split up into 15 or 16 smaller posts, and I suspect that there isn’t enough interest to sustain such a series – not in a general GMing blog, anyway.

Instead, this post describes the technique that I use to assign such disadvantages, limitations, and definitions to a character, completely ignoring the specific game system interpretations of those into game mechanics.

That makes this a universal system, or fairly close to it, something of as much value to sci-fi and fantasy GMs as it is to Superheroic Genre and Pulp GMs. In fact, it should also be of some use to those creating characters for fiction, as well.

Construction Elements

Before I can tell you how I select the personality construction elements that I use in constructing characters, I really need to define them. There are no less than thirty categories (not all of them recognized in game mechanics) of them.

As usual, it might be best to first present these in list format to serve as something of a table of contents for the rest of this section.

1. Motivations
2. Desires
3. Ambitions
4. Dislikes
5. Hobbies
6. Interests
7. Fascinations
8. Obsessions
9. Mysteries
10. Curiosities
11. Mistakes
12. Inhibitions
13. Habits
14. Targets
15. Enemies
16. Recurring Cast
17. Beliefs & Superstitions
18. Memberships
19. Identities – Public, Secret
20. Needs & Dependencies
21. Susceptibilities
22. Vulnerabilities
23. Fortune
24. Enraged
25. Berserk
26. Distinctive Features
27. Physical Limitations
28. Social Limitations
29. Other Traits
30. Curios & Treasured Possessions

My, but that’s a long list!

Some of these will be recognized to anyone familiar with the Hero System, some of them are grouped in the relevant game mechanics into entries in a broader category, but the more explicit listing is of greater value in personality construction, so…

Also in the relevant game mechanics is an overall rule – if a limitation doesn’t limit a character, it’s not to be listed – that this process explicitly ignores.

1. Motivations

Why does the character do whatever it is that they do? What is the motivation that drives them? What motivations drove them in the past?

2. Desires

What does the character desire? These need not be material objects; they can be an abstract category of object, or something more general again, or even something metaphysical – “World Peace” is a valid desire. However, to qualify for this category, it has to be something that the character does not expect to personally achieve or attain.

3. Ambitions

That’s because those are explicitly served by their own category, as you can see. Ambitions don’t have to be something that the character expects to achieve, but they are something the character is deliberately going to do something about trying to achieve. So if your character is a regular ecology protester, ‘ecological awareness’ or ‘ecological issues’ would be a perfectly valid choice.

4. Dislikes

This category is seemingly obvious, but this is the converse of Ambitions – these are things that the character dislikes enough to actually do something about. ‘Dislikes Pollution’ and ‘Dislikes Corporate Greed’ would both be valid choices for our Eco-warrior, for example.

5. Hobbies

Similarly, a hobby is something that the character is interested in that requires them to actually do something. It could be a craft like woodcarving, or it could be an activity like mountain climbing or hiking or wilderness camping or deep-sea fishing.

6. Interests

Things that the character is interested in learning about, but not participating in, go into this category. But some things that might be expected to fall into this group should more accurately be placed in the next.

7. Fascinations

There may be some subjects or types of event that absolutely transfix the character that he cannot turn aside from until complete save by an act of will. These are fascinations. I think most people have one or two, though many never discover what they are (or fail to recognize them when they do experience them).

8. Obsessions

One step more extreme again are obsessions. These are experiences that the character feels compelled to join into or take part in, or ambitions that the character will make drastic sacrifices to achieve.

9. Mysteries

There are three types of mysteries – but any mysteries that the character is merely curious about, without making any attempt to solve on their own, are merely an interest. That leaves the remaining two types – those that the character has an intellectual interest in solving, and those that hold some personal significance. The difference lies in the lengths that the character is typically willing to go to in search of a solution. In order to distinguish between these, the first are listed as ‘curiosities’ and the more definitive term is reserved for those puzzles that hold deep personal significance.

For some characters, this can include religious experiences, or para-physical ones. Near-death experiences and brain tumors can also be transformative. So this category can be a little broader than it might at first appear.

Because characters in RPGs are prone to the dramatic, it’s fair to say that they have more than their fair share of Mysteries; most ordinary people will have one or two at most, and often none at all. I frequently use this as a distinguishing point between ‘feature characters’ and ‘wallpaper characters’. The latter are also sometimes referred to as ‘stock characters’, ‘background characters’, or ‘extras’; they generally do not have significant speaking roles in an adventure or work of fiction.

In some cases, they are a compilation that is representative of many diverse individuals, grouped into a melange for convenience and focus while minimizing the attention that needs to be given them in character development.

10. Curiosities

The term used to refer to those mysteries that the character has a purely intellectual interest in seeing resolved, but which they do not feel compelled to solve because of personal impact. Sometimes, these subjects of which the character is curious can wax or wane; in ages past, I have been curious about the true identity of Jack The Ripper, for example, but that itch seems to have left me, at least for now. Usually, it takes only one tantalizing hint or revelation to reawaken the interest, however.

11. Mistakes

There are three types of mistake – those that the character doesn’t acknowledge as a mistake, those that the character accepts having made and has moved on from, and those that the character still deeply regrets. The latter are arguably the most significant now, because the memory will continue to drive future behavior, but the others deal with the road that the character has taken to get to this point, and that is usually also significant within the character’s history.

A potential fourth category would be choices that the character thinks were mistakes, but which actually were not – but that’s getting a little subtle, and most characters will have nothing of the sort in their makeup.

12. Inhibitions

There are two subtypes of inhibition – things the character doesn’t want to do (including phobias and paranoias) and lines that the character will only crossed if forced. Sometimes I consider separating the two, but every time I do so, I realize that anything from the first category can easily erupt into the second; it’s merely a matter of sensitivity.

13. Habits

Most people have habits, and they can be the very devil to break. More often than not, they need to be sublimated into some other form that is less corrosive to the spirit or the health of the individual. That’s the big secret to AA, in my opinion – confession and probity replacing the consumption of alcohol, and enabling the individual to withstand their desires for such consumption.

But the fact is that those who have a habit of sufficient intensity as to potentially pose problems for them (of whatever variety) do not think the same way as people who do not.

This is something that I’ve been aware of for a very long time; there are those who live for the sense of release of inhibitions that comes from alcohol, who feel ten feet tall and made of iron when they drink. They can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to feel that way. (I heard a very similar statement in the dialogue of Leo McGarry on The West Wing when he was attempting to explain his addiction to someone who didn’t share it).

Others drink, not to forget, but to become numb to some source of personal pain. This never really works very well, but eventually you become so inebriated that you don’t care any more; I guess that’s a form of pseudo-numbness.

But, in my case (aside from a couple of particular binges at one specific point in time), I could never stand the loss of self-control that comes with even mild inebriation. While I could (and did) drink socially, I almost always drew the line just short of that limit. And, on the few occasions when I did cross that line, I hated the way I would tell my body to do something and it would do something else.

Did that make me immune to addiction? Absolutely not; just to that particular addiction. But this isn’t about me; they are offered here in support and explanation of the statement offered, that addicts think differently.

14. Targets

There are often people and organizations that the character wants to take down or rehabilitate (by force if necessary). Sometimes the identity of the target is not known to the character, only what they have done; this implies an ongoing investigation aimed at obtaining that identification, but sometimes it can also produce actions aimed at a wider front that will include the target even without knowing explicitly who they are.

15. Enemies

Not necessarily the same groups or individuals, these are people/agencies who are actively seeking to do harm of some sort to the character. That harm could be a restraint of liberty, the capture/collection of some object in the character’s possession, or a public embarrassment of some kind. Again, not at all enemies will know who their target is, as an individual; they may oppose all members of a particular group or who participate in specific activities that they oppose.

16. Recurring Cast

Who does the character know and see regularly? Whose troubles is the character regularly drawn into? Who is likely to get drawn into the character’s troubles?

This can frequently be a far wider collection of individuals than it first seems. For me, the first step is always to identify a social circle or general category of supporting cast, then to identify discrete individuals from within each group; I retain the general group as well, representing everyone who has not been singled out.

For example: I went to school (schoolmates, teachers). I grew up in a particular small town (family, locals). I spent one memorable year in a boarding school (different group of schoolmates, a couple of teachers). I went to university (classmates), joined the Science Fiction Society (friends), joined the ‘wargaming’ group (actually playing TTRPGs) (friends). I lived at a particular place overlooking Bondi Beach (neighbors, landlord, local shopkeepers). I worked at a number of different jobs (fellow employees, bosses, associates), and so on. That’s 15 social circles (some overlapping) – and that’s with just one employer and one residential location in the picture; I’ve had many over the last 42 years. In fact, this only carries me through 1982!

In total, there have been 9 employers of note, and 12 – no, 13 – residences, over the years (not counting the ones already listed). With three social circles for each of those, that’s another 66 social circles, bringing my total to 81!

I’m fully prepared to accept that my experiences are more diverse than most people my age; and hence this is a more extreme example than is normal. That’s not especially relevant. From each of those groups, there will be a few standouts who I still remember (no idea if they would remember me!) – anywhere from 1 or 2 to a dozen or so, weighted toward the lower end. Median would probably be around 4. So those 81 social circles are represented by 324 individuals – which are not the totality of those in the social circles, but are just the individuals that I could name and of whom I have strong memories. But one (family) has to be separated out from that – mine is unusually large and relatively closely-knit, with more than 100 specific individuals with whom I have some sort of personal relationship because they are family. So that’s more than 400 memorable individuals.

Any of those could be the vector for an adventure to reach me, were I a character in an RPG. Or a social complication, or social event.

Now, this is not going to be true of most characters (it’s too much work!). They might have four or five social circles, with 2-3 individuals drawn from each, and a catch-all (“other people [character x] has known”) for everyone else. Most of those individuals will be nothing more than a name until they rise to prominence in a particular plotline, though there may be a few exceptions to that. And that’s for a feature character; less significant characters will have even less definition.

17. Beliefs & Superstitions

Beliefs and superstitions can be minor influences on character behavior or can be defining behavioral factors. Like curiosities, they can wax and wane, and come and go. Some people seem to shed their superstitions as they age, others seem to collect additional ones.

18. Memberships

What organizations is the character a past member of? What organizations is he or she a current member of?

19. Identities – Public, Secret

By what names is the character known (public identities)? What names has he or she used to conceal her true identity?

20. Needs & Dependencies

These are comparatively unusual, since addictions have already been dealt with. These are something that the character actually needs to maintain health, either physical, social, or mental. For example, I make no secret of the fact that I am diabetic; in fact, I have no less than 12 medications that I have to consume regularly (blood sugar, cholesterol, fast heartbeat, arthritis, and some vitamin deficiencies). if I were to stop taking these, not only would medical complications arise relatively quickly, but these would eventually prove crippling or even fatal.

These are something whose absence causes damage of some sort, either short-term or persistent and cumulative.

21. Susceptibilities

A susceptibility is something that has greater effect on the character than is normal. These are relatively uncommon, but all the more noteworthy for that. Special note should be made of any that the character doesn’t know he or she is susceptible to.

For example, as a writer, I am susceptible to accusations of plagiarism. Even the unfounded accusation is corrosive to my credibility and hence to my ability to earn money from my writing. While most people would suffer some social or professional harm from such an accusation, I would experience disproportionate harm from one. Some occupations are susceptible to allegations of child abuse, others to corruption.

22. Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities are more extreme again, but also more common. These are things that are generally harmless or even beneficial but that cause harm to the character. Such harm can be anything from discomfort to death. Kryptonite is a vulnerability for Superman. Penicillin is a vulnerability to me, I’m allergic to it. Some people are allergic to peanuts, or seafood, or pollen. Such harm can require ingestion, or contact, or even its mere presence may be enough.

23. Fortune

At first glance, a character can either have good luck or bad luck, and this is thus an entirely singular category – you either have one, or you don’t. That overlooks the real power of this liability, in terms of characterization.

First, you can specify that the character has bad luck or good luck in a specific situation – ‘bad luck while dating,’ ‘good luck when selling door-to-door’, ‘bad luck with men’ [or women, depending on character gender and orientation], ‘good luck when climbing’, ‘bad luck when engaging in outdoors activities’, ‘bad luck around [a particular person]’ – the list is endless. There is also a third option that is often overlooked, “karmic balance”.

Second, you can specify the form that this bad luck takes when it manifests – clumsiness, stammering, klutz, accident-prone, attacked by nature, tongue-tied, experiences reverses, or whatever.

Third, you can confine the manifestation of the luck, if that’s appropriate.

Put all those together, and you can end up with:

• Bad Luck: ‘Comedy of errors when dating’. Or ‘Accident-prone when camping outdoors’. Or ‘Stammers when talking to Claire [character’s girlfriend] about his feelings’;
• Good Luck: ‘Lucky at Poker’, ‘Always wins a minor prize in lotteries (but never the big prize)’, ‘Good luck at sports when Charlie [character’s friend] is on the opposing team’;
• Mixed: ‘Karmic Balance when Christmas shopping’, ‘Karmic balance when looking for parking spots’, ‘Karmic balance with traffic’.

Even so, for most characters, you won’t want too many of these, or they lose their impact, unless they specifically designed to integrate into a greater whole. For example:

• ‘Good Luck (always in the right place) in sports except when playing a Boston team’, plus
• ‘Makes clumsy mistakes when winning against a Boston team or player’.

This describes a character who is a naturally-gifted sportsman, but for some reason (probably psychological), he becomes a klutz when his team is winning but only when playing teams from a particular location. It doesn’t matter what the sport is – it could be baseball, basketball, football, whatever.

One of my favorite combinations is “Good luck when losing, bad luck when winning”.

24. Enraged

Some things tick us off enough that we have to make willpower rolls not to attack them or otherwise act when we encounter them. You can think about these as more intense but more intermittent forms of obsession. For me, it’s nagging that sets me off (I don’t know why), and sometimes — when I’m GMing, not being listened to or being interrupted. With the latter events, there is usually a singular explosion of temper and then I regain equilibrium; with the latter, it’s more persistent, and more prone to be re-triggered after an event. If pushed, it can even make me turn violent, something I’m not particularly proud of (bring up something once, and there’s no problem; bring it up again and again and you’re in for it).

I have known people who became outraged at perceived miscarriages of justice – some of them regained equilibrium after venting for a while, some needed to write a letter (or email) to the newspaper, and some immediately began organizing marches and protests.

A Narcissist will ‘do something dramatic for attention when he feels ignored or sidelined, even if that is not in his best interest.’

25. Berserk

Most of us don’t have these, thank goodness. They are triggers that cause us to lash out, indiscriminately.

But there are a couple of more common variations.

• Some people who are enraged can become indiscriminate when someone attempts to deflect them or intercede on behalf of the target of their anger, even attacking friends and allies.
• Some people have a chip on their shoulder that causes them to explode when triggered.

As with Fortunes, you can also specify the form in which this manifests; most people tend to think of it as ‘physically attack’, but it could be ‘Screams uncontrollably”, or ‘Emotionally embittered by’, or even ‘Becomes cruel and heartless’.

So there’s a lot more scope in this category than first meets the eye.

26. Distinctive Features

This includes scars and tattoos, and inhuman beauty, and even perfect symmetry of features. It includes missing limbs and missing digits. It can include extras of something, too – “Six fingers” for example, or “prehensile tail” (if that’s unusual). I’ve even known a couple of people whose eyes seemed to change color under certain circumstances – I’m not sure how that worked, physiologically, but I’ve seen it first-hand at close range.

Scars are especially significant, because they always stem from a particular incident and that in turn connects them with some other part of their personal makeup. For example, since the mid-80s, I’ve had extensive scarring on my right wrist and chin – I got mugged on a train, and physically thrown off it as it was pulling into a station, sliding 60m along the platform and narrowly missing steel girders acting as support columns. The scars elsewhere from this incident (which took off almost 1/4 of my skin) have faded, but those seem to persist. This caused me to have a ‘berserk when being mugged’ that, on a later occasion, caused me to break a solid oak walking stick on the hand of a would-be mugger (and breaking several bones in his hand, causing him to drop the knife that he was wielding in the process).

But the responses / reactions / connections don’t have to be so dramatic. I have a scar over one eye from an outdoors rock festival in the later 80s – I got up during one act’s set to use the facilities because I wasn’t a particular fan of the band, and one of their fans took a drunken swing at me, driving my eyeglasses back into the eye socket. That connects to my love of music, which is what led me to be in attendance (and hence in a position to be attacked), but there has been no other psychological impact from the event that I can detect. Okay. maybe this reinforced slightly my already-strong resistance to drunkenness – but even that I’m not sure of.

27. Physical Limitations

Missing eyes, missing limbs, missing digits, deafness in one ear – there are a number of possibilities here, but most of them won’t apply to most characters. Some of them will also be distinctive features, some of them may not – an eye-patch is obvious, a glass eye far less so.

But there are some less obvious ones that should be pointed out – things like “vertigo at heights or without solid footing”. Some allergies also belong in this category, even though they may be listed elsewhere in addition – “Hay Fever” is an obvious one. There was a time when I had to be especially wary of infected cuts and the like, because I’m allergic to Penicillin, and that was the treatment of first resort to such (thankfully, Penicillin-resistant diseases caused the adoption of other medications with which I have no problems, so this problem has become progressively less significant over the years – but I still have to bear in mind the fact that sensitivity to one medication can imply sensitivity to other, related, compounds).

28. Social Limitations

As a child, i was very introverted, which conferred a number of social limitations, for example a fear of public speaking – even though I was fairly good at it when forced into it. It was, in fact, RPGs that ‘brought me out of my shell’ – during the ‘Moral Panic’ of the 1980s, I was even able to appear on a radio program to defend the hobby, and I had a letter of protest over the one-sided report on the subject by 60 minutes quoted on-air. I once spent a month as a door-to-door salesman selling vacuum cleaners, and was described by my boss in the job as ‘a master of the soft sell’. Unfortunately, this was a job that principally paid by commission, and reached the point where I could not afford to continue, just as that boss thought I had grown skilled enough to achieve success in the role, so I had to give it away. But the gap from introvert with a fear of public speaking to door-to-door salesman shows just how far I had come!

29. Other Traits

I think that I’ve covered just about everything, but there’s always room for something I haven’t contemplated. So this category exists as an ‘anything else you can think of’ catch-all.

30. Curios & Treasured Possessions

But there’s one final category. Objects listed in this category can be specific (Babe-Ruth signed baseball bat) or general (collection of basketball memorabilia), or even metaphysical (memories of Paris). They can serve two noteworthy functions – first, the fact that the character values them tells you something about the character; and second, they can be used as a physical manifestation of some personality attribute that is otherwise obscure or inobvious, making them a key to ‘unlocking’ the personality by an observer.

For example, if the PCs are to have a meeting with the representative of a company – it could be anything from an insurance company to a manufacturer of some sort – and he has a bookshelf full of books about Conservative politics, including biographies of US Presidents from the Republican Party, that immediately ‘unlocks’ a part of the personality of the individual, creating context and implications and expectations. That one character trait becomes the focal point of so many others that half the work of detailing the personality can be assumed, saving the GM generating the character (or the writer describing the character) masses of time and effort, especially if none of these factors actually plays any active role in the ensuing meeting.

This can be so useful that I will invest a disproportionate amount of time contemplating the individual’s impact on their surroundings.

You can also convey an entirely different personality at a stroke – if I were to add to the description of the bookshelf, “but there is no evidence of any of the books ever having been opened,” you get an entirely different interpretation than if I had described them as “dog-eared and clearly frequently studied”.

Even then, there are still multiple opposing possibilities – the books might be well-read because the character is an active supporter of that side of politics, or because their job requires them to be persuasive to people who are aligned in that direction, politically. One phrase from the NPCs lips when they notice the PC noticing the bookshelf is enough to convey that shift – for example,

“Know your enemy,” she says with a smile.

This also implies that the NPC is adept enough at reading people to have discerned that the PC or PCs are antagonistic toward that branch of politics.

Don’t neglect the value that Curios and Treasured Possessions can have in communicating and defining a personality!

Okay, now that we have the construction elements defined, I can get to the real meat of this article – how to use them. Note that in order to use this technique, you have to have a clear understanding of what these categories contain, without the need to look them up. Until you have that, it’s a good idea to skim through them each time you sit down for an NPC generation session. Eventually, if you do this often enough, you will reach the point where you can use the initial list as sufficient mnemonic to bring them to mind, and can skip over the entire indented section of this article.

Step One: Root Cause

Always start with the one item from anywhere on the list that you consider the most definitive of the character. This is the “Root Cause” (you’ll see why in a moment).

Example

When this article was conceived, it came with the concept of an example that was actually instrumental in structuring it. That example is an NPC with the Root Cause, “Vigilante”.

Step Two: Consequences

A lot of players and GMs using the Hero System stop to calculate the points value of each Disadvantage as it is determined. I want to take this opportunity to actively advocate against this practice, as it results in a stop-start process that restricts the imagination.

The methodology that I am recommending in this article is to accelerate the process of coming up with relevant entries as much as possible, then cleaning up with the game mechanics later. This results in a more free-flowing process in which the imagination of the character’s creator is given free reign.

This step of the process consists of working your way through the list of categories and listing as many ideas in each that are conceptual consequences of the “root cause” (hence the term). “Consequences” lists every type of impact on the character of the root cause that the creator can identify.

Because the “root” in question is conceptual in nature, these “Consequences” can actually be the causes of, or justifications for, the Root Cause.

Example

Okay, so let’s work through the list of construction elements:

• Motivation: Lover of Justice
• Motivation: Righter Of Wrongs
• Desire: End injustice
• Desire: End inequality
• Desire: Expose Corruption
• Ambition: Identify and Expose the Jambala Killer
• Ambition: Expose Judge Prentice Shaw as corrupt
• Ambition: Investigate possible corruption in the Dallas District Attorney’s department
• Ambition: Investigate possible corruption in the Dallas Police Department
• Dislikes: Injustice
• Dislikes: Corruption
• Dislikes: Wrongful Convictions
• Dislikes: Mysteries
• Hobbies: none (yet)
• Interest: Legal Processes
• Interest: Legal Ethics
• Interest: Legal Theory and Practical Application
• Interest: Political History
• Interest: Daughter’s Welfare (restricted by court order from a more active role)
• Fascination: Stories of Karmic Revenge
• Fascination: Stories of Sherlock Holmes
• Fascination: Stories of American Pulp Heroes
• Fascination: Unsolved Crimes
• Fascination: Forensic Medicine
• Obsession: Exoneration
• Obsession: Ex-wife
• Obsession: Serial Killers
• Mystery: The Jambala Killer
• Curiosity: Jack the Ripper
• Mistake: Chose ineffectual counsel (Jambala Killer Trial)
• Mistake: Chose ineffectual counsel (Divorce)
• Mistake: Stalking Daughter (refer Interest, above)
• Inhibition; Illegal activities
• Inhibition; Daughter’s personal life
• Habit: Gambling (mild)
• Habit: Alcohol (mild)
• Target: The Jambala Killer
• Target: Judge Prentice Shaw
• Target: The Millford Manufacturing Company
• Enemy: Ex-Wife
• Enemy: Detective Zachery Benson
• Enemy: District Attorney Miles Galruth
• Enemy: Wilson Dent (convicted murderer)
• Recurring Cast: Mrs Shalhoub (landlady)
• Recurring Cast: Jake Prescott (friend / mechanic)
• Beliefs & Superstitions: Instruments of Karma
• Membership: Ex-cop
• Membership: Mystery Writers of America
• Public Identity: Nathan Johns, ex-cop
• Public Identity: Nathan Johns, ex-con
• Secret Identity: Karmon Tracy, mystery author
• Secret Identity: The Pivot (masked vigilante)
• Needs & Dependencies: none
• Susceptibilities: none
• Vulnerabilities: none
• Fortune: Bad luck (distractions arise) when investigating the Jambala Killer
• Fortune: Good luck (discover vital leads) when investigating other crimes
• Fortune: Bad luck (always loses) when gambling on horses and football
• Fortune: Good luck (wins more than he loses) when gambling on baseball
• Fortune: Bad luck (serious life complications) when intoxicated
• Enraged: Blatant injustice
• Enraged: Overt Corruption
• Berserk: If/When Daughter Threatened
• Distinctive Features: One blue eye, one gray
• Distinctive Features: Scar above left eye (barely noticeable)
• Distinctive Features: Tattoo (broken chain) on left wrist
• Physical Limitations: none
• Social Limitations: ex-convict
• Social Limitations: ex-cop
• Social Limitations: restraining order (ex-wife and daughter)
• Other Traits: none
• Curios & Treasured Possessions: Service Revolver

There were a number of decisions made on the fly in the above listing. I had a general outline of the character concept – a cop wrongfully imprisoned as a murderer, leading to his wife divorcing him and cutting his daughter out of his life – but that was all. My original thought was that he would be a private eye, but the mystery writer angle came to me as I was making out the list.

A couple of notes:

• The character (Nathan Johns) writes his fiction under a pseudonym, a legacy of the fact that his first novel was written while he was incarcerated.
• He clearly blames the Judge, Prentice Shaw, for his conviction, aided and abetted by the incompetence of his chosen attorney, but he is unsure of who else may have been involved.
• He served an unknown number of years of his sentence before proving his innocence, but the lead detective, Zachery Benson, is unconvinced.
• The District Attorney is opposed to Vigilantes on general principle and not to “The Pivot” specifically.
• Instruments of Karma: a blending of the concept of Karma and the principle of ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves’, he believes that certain individuals are motivated and empowered to bring Karmic Balance to the world around them. This also relates to his chosen vigilante non-du-plum, “The Pivot” – he sees himself as the linchpin around which the scales of justice pivot. This concept also led to the “bad luck when intoxicated” entry – an expression of his personal Karma biting him on the ass when he neglects his “mission”.
• I’ve deliberately made this a slightly-flawed human being, one who means well but who has been hardened by his experiences. Although it is not listed as a mistake, it’s entirely possible that his chosen approach (vigilante) is the wrong road to take. Or maybe it’s the perfect response to his situation.

I trust you can now see the relevance of the spiderweb metaphor mentioned earlier. Each of these personality traits were derived from the basic concept of a vigilante good-guy, an almost-antihero who walks the fine line between justice and retribution for his own wrongful imprisonment.

Step Three: Penumbras

For each of the above items, do a really fast skim through the list looking for tertiary connections, and anything that leaps out as having been overlooked. This works on the principle that Step two has greatly refined the character as you proceeded, and so the character was better defined at the end of it than when you started. That opens the door for things to have been overlooked.

In particular (and this is where Penumbras come into the picture), this is where consequences of consequences and other questions around the fringes come into play. For example, he might have a superstition about the number 3 being unlucky – so he never bets on horses with that number, or on the third race.

Rather than continuing the example process at this point (time is becoming a factor), though, I’ll leave it at this point.

Step Four: Ripple Effects

Once you have filled in any blanks and any afterthoughts, it’s time to look at a more directed range of consequences. First, put together a narrative summary of the character background, similar to the one provided in the example after Step Two. Use that to put together a simple timeline of his personal history.

Now go through it, looking for anywhere that you can insert a plot hook or define a consequence that hasn’t already been enumerated.

The example character was in prison. And an ex-cop. That will have earned him enemies, and will have mandated his being present when some typical events went down. His reactions and actions in response may well have earned him still more enemies. And if there’s some sort of question about the honesty or brutality of the guards – there are likely to be some of both – that also needs to be spelled out.

The other thing to look for are consequences that impact events ‘down-time’ from the event. How does being an ex-cop impact his mystery writing? How does his being and ex-convict? Does his ex-wife share the view that he’s guilty, or does she have some other reason for her attitude toward the character, getting a restraining order to separate him from his Daughter’s life?

In general, this is looking through everything created thus far looking for the remaining gaps in the character concept, and filling them in.

Step Five: Prior Causes

Prior Causes looks further back than the earliest event listed, and asks where each of the items already listed came from. This character became a cop? Why? Who was his Instructor? Who were his partners? Where and in what part of his life did he meet his wife? When were they married?

Each such question does at least one of two things: Adds another influence over the events and traits already listed that now needs to be taken into account, and adds a further prior cause that should have its own set of consequences and ripple effects.

Consider the diagram to the right::

Each step back in time creates the conditions that lead to the decisions that produce the root cause, either directly or indirectly, and also have their own consequences.

With each step back, these generally become more insignificant. You might characterize them as adulthood, education, and childhood/family, respectively, for example.

Clearly, adulthood creates the conditions that lead to the root cause, the point at which the character’s life took an unexpected turn. In the case of our example, we’ve already backtracked to the point of our character being a cop, and married – so the next step back needs to explain how those two things came about, and the consequences and flow-on effects of events back then. Perhaps we could maintain our theme with a corrupt partner?

So that gets us back to the point where the character joins the police force. The layer behind that deals with his education and other career options, the teachers and home-town individuals that led to this particular choice being considered. Was it his first choice, his second, or somewhere a long way down the list? Did he, for example, always want to be a writer – but was dissuaded because they don’t earn much money?

Before that, we have family and childhood friends. These generally violate the “gets weaker’ rule, or can do so – unless there’s some estrangement.

If the character had a more complex history – perhaps there was a period of military service in between his becoming a cop and his leaving school – then you may end up with more than four layers, or you may decide that one is rendered so insignificant by this that it can be merged with another.

How the back-steps are broken up is up to you; just make sure there’s an obvious logic to it, and all will work out..

Inversions & Convolutions

There are two conceptual patterns that always lead to richer characters, and that I want to single out; you won’t always want to use them, but that’s always better as an educated and deliberate choice.

Inversions are represented by the example that I’ve been using – a cop who became a con, and who has now become the closest thing that he can to a cop once again. Religious characters who have gone through a crisis of faith, or who experienced some sort of religious revelation that transformed them, would be another example. In general, Characters who go from being one thing to being the opposite – wealthy to poor (or poor to wealthy) or whatever.

Some inversions are more difficult to arrange than others – going from educated to ignorant, for example (though there have been recent examples that suggest that it’s possible).

Convolutions are the other one. This is where a character’s life seems always to have been leading them to whatever they are, right now – but they have discovered along the way that their original vision of their position or role in society was oversimplified, even naive. As their world-view has become more complex, so has their perception of their role – not necessarily in ways that are too their liking. Frequently, they find that people they worshiped have feet of clay.

So common is disappointment as a them in Convolution Stories that I sometimes think that a character who experiences the opposite, discovering idealism, might be fun – but I’ve never come up with a credible character concept for achieving that. Not yet, anyway.

So, that’s the process. I think the example probably does more to sell it than any accolades I can offer about it at this point, so I’ll leave things as they stand, and wish readers success in adding to their repertoires!

That brings this article to a close, but before I go, I have some other news to impart.

Seven years ago or thereabouts, I was inspired by the Kickstarter campaign for an RPG rules system named Fortune’s Wheel to write an article on Prophecy in RPGs: The Breakdown of Intersecting Prophecies. Unfortunately, that Kickstarter didn’t reach its target, and the author, Peter Hollinghurst, had to drop out of developing it for a while with personal problems.

With those problems now resolved (in part by migrating from England to Canada), he’s back with a new offering, the Edinburgh Horrors, an adventure which uses the Fortunes Wheel system (tarot-card based instead of dice-based) as its foundation.

The adventure is set up so that players can control / influence some of the NPCs their characters encounter to achieve different outcomes, and a methodology for the players to create their own side stories using the card system if they want to enrich the gaming experience provided by the adventure

Interestingly, the plan is to use DriveThroughRPG’s print-on-demand service to deal with those who might want to purchase hard copies.

I don’t have time to get into a full review, so instead I’ll just share the link to the Kickstarter and let you do your own investigations: The Edinburgh Horrors – Long Dead Ink.

As I write, it’s closing in on meeting its goals, so – with 22 days remaining in the fundraising campaign as I write this – I have every expectation that it will achieve its quite modest targets, and even move on to stretch goals.

It certainly sounds interesting enough:

Click on the graphic to visit the Kickstarter page for The Edinburgh Horrors

…and the game mechanics might make it useful for GMs of other genres, (as might the ‘Haunted Edinburgh’ game supplement), so do yourself a favor and check it out!

Click the thumbnail to buy the complete Season One DVD set from Amazon (I will get a small commission).

I steal inspiration and technique from anywhere that I can find it, but I’m always careful to credit my sources (especially when the application is a bit left-of-field). In the past that has given me articles such as Growing The Perfect Family Tree (Part 1, Part 2), The Ashes: Understanding Brit and Aussie Characters, and Lessons From The West Wing V: Bilateral Political Incorrectness for RPGs, amongst many others.

Miraculous: Tales Of Ladybug & Cat Noir is an animated superhero TV series aimed at teens but with enough cleverness of plot and richness of canon that it’s quite watchable for adults, too. I find it quite reminiscent of early issues of Spider-man in some respects.

In particular, the approach take to relationships between characters is noteworthy for GMs.

An Introduction to the Premise & Canon of M:ToLaCN*

* the full title is quite a mouthful, and abbreviating it doesn’t help much, so from here on, I’ll simply call it Ladybug & Cat Noir, okay?

The title characters of Ladybug & Cat Noir are superheros who get their powers from pieces of jewelry called a “Miraculous”. Cat Noir’s is a ring, while Ladybug’s is a pair of earrings. These jewels become empowered through a magical being called a Kwami – they each have one.

The enemy who they continually battle is initially named Hawkmoth. He also has a Miraculous with a Kwami who is forced to obey his instructions because he wears the Miraculous. Hawkmoth’s power is to transform people experiencing strong negative emotions into super-villains by means of moths infused with dark energy of some sort; this process is called “Akumatizing” them.

In season 2, Hawkmoth is joined by “Mayura,” who uses a damaged Miraculous – that of the peacock – to create ‘sentimonsters’, strange life-forms that have to obey whoever their creator assigns them to, and which function as assistants, enhancers, and/or protectors of the villains created by Hawkmoth. Because the Miraculous is damaged, it slowly damages the user. In season four, Hawkmoth repairs the damaged Miraculous and gains both sets of powers, renaming himself Shadowmoth.

Hawkmoth/Shadowmoth stays in the shadows, creating super-villains and monsters to bedevil Paris, demanding that his creations capture the Miraculous of Ladybug and Cat Noir. Ladybug’s is the power of creation, while Cat Noir’s is the power of destruction; if one person ever holds both, they can be used to reshape reality, but at a cost equal to the change made.

To prevent this, Ladybug and Cat Noir can never know each other’s secret identities, so that if one is captured, they cannot be forced to put the other in danger.

There are other Miraculous and other Kwamis; from time to time, starting in Season 2, Ladybug uses them to create allies. At the end of Season 3, Ladybug becomes the new Guardian of the Miracle Box, which contains the Miraculous and is the extra-dimensional residence of the Kwamis.

The Core

The relationships of the central characters are the pivot around which everything revolves.

• Cat Noir falls in love with Ladybug.
• Ladybug considers Cat Noir a slightly-annoying friend and ally, nothing more.
• Cat Noir’s true identity is Adrien Agreste, a teenaged fashion model.
• Ladybug’s true identity is Marionette Dupain-Cheng (pronounced ‘du Penchain’), who falls in love with Adrien, not knowing that he is Cat Noir. She is in the process of becoming a fashion/art designer of note.
• Adrien considers Marionette a friend, nothing more.

This love quadrangle is at the heart of the series, and fuels plenty of teen angst – which is the element that reminds me so much of those early issues of Spider-man.

Surrounding this core is a second layer of characters:

• Tikki and Plagg are the Kwamis of Ladybug and Cat Noir, respectively. These are characters that can only interact with the holders of the Miraculous when they are not transformed into their superhero identities.
• Unknown to both Marionette and Adrien, Hawkmoth’s true identity is Adrien’s father, Gabriel Agreste. Nor does Hawkmoth/Shadowmoth know who Ladybug and Cat Noir really are.
• Emilie (Agreste) is Gabriel’s wife. She is comatose or dead, preserved in some sort of life-support container, and so never interacts with the other characters. It is not stated outright, but the clear implication of Season II is that she died from using the damaged Peacock Miraculous. Gabriel wants the Miraculouses of Creation and Destruction to rewrite history and return her to life, not knowing or caring that this means that someone else will have to die to achieve this (and possibly someone of equal significance to Gabriel, i.e. Adrien. As such, her ‘absence’ is an ever-present shadow cast over the Series.
• Gabriel’s assistant is Nathalie Sancoeur (I don’t remember her surname ever being used in the show, however), who uses the damaged peacock Miraculous to become Mayura, and becomes bedridden as the damage takes hold. Gabriel seems to genuinely care for Nathalie, and she practically worships him in an obvious case of unrequited love.
• “The Gorilla” (a nickname bestowed on him by Adrien’s friends) is Adrien’s bodyguard. He rarely speaks beyond grunts and gestures, but is a regular presence in the series and seems to genuinely care for his protectee, even to the point of going against the wishes of his employer (Gabriel) to give Adrien some respite from Gabriel’s domineering emotional abuse.
• Marionette’s father and mother are Tom Duplain and Sabine Cheng, respectively. Tom is the best Patisserie in Paris, assisted by Sabine. The two are emotional supports for Marionette and the gateway to Marionette’s other relatives, but their role in the series is relatively limited.

Surrounding these are a group of school-friends of both Adrien and Marionette. These are frequently involved in one of three ways: Akumatized into villains, lent a Miraculous to enable them to serve as superhero assistants to Ladybug and Cat Noir, or simply participating in the daily life of the two principle characters. Significantly, each has a defined relationship with the other classmates, and these evolve over time.

Some of these characters are more significant than others – in fact, some of them are more significant than Marionette’s parents, for all that those parents are more frequent participants than any one member of the social circle save, perhaps, Alya.

Members of this circle include:

• Alya Cesaire – Marionette’s best friend and (eventually) Ladybug’s chief assistant and confidante, who joins the cast in episode 1 of season 1.
• Non Lahiffe – Adrien’s best friend and (eventually) Alya’s boyfriend and superheroic partner.
• Chloe Bourgeois – “selfish, overzealous, and spoiled” according to Wikipedia, but that understates all three elements. Sometimes a hero (despite these character flaws), sometimes a villain, and frequently a catalyst, causing the negative emotions in her classmates that permit them to be akumatized.
• Lila Rossi – deliberately created to be spiteful and unlovable, she is evil where Chloe is simply malicious and selfish. A superlative liar who delights in manipulating others.
• Kagami Tsurugi – A Japanese girl who joins Adrien’s fencing class and becomes friends with Marionette. Sheltered by an overprotective and dominating mother, she briefly sets her sights on Adrien romantically, but the relationship fails.
• Luka Couffaine – brother of another of the classmates and a musician like his parents, Luka loves Marionette but is content to simply be her friend if it enables her to pursue her own happiness.
• Kim Ature, Max Kante, Mylene Haprele, Ivan Bruel, Sabrina Raincomprix, Julia Couffaine, Rose Lavillant, Aurore Beureal, Nathaniel Kurtzberg, Mac Anciel and Zoe Lee – other classmates of Marionette and Adrien.

And, outside this ring are other relatives of some of these characters and other recurring characters, such as Mayor Bourgeois, staff at the school attended by Marionette and Adrien, and so on.

If you were to map these relationships topographically, it would appear as a cluster of characters surrounding the principle roles, some linked with one of them and some with the other, with a set of further clusters, some linked with one of the two and some linked with both. And each of the members of a cluster is often at the center of a small cluster of their own.

Introductions

Characters are generally introduced one at a time, though they may be present in a number of episodes before we learn who they are. Quite often, when a character is introduced, he or she becomes the akumatized victim of Hawkmoth/Shadowmoth for that episode, but this is not always the case.

The structure of the character relationships is such that normal interactions between characters permits their surrounding cluster to be introduced organically. Usually, we are talking about the parents or siblings of one of the inner cluster of classmates or relatives. Sometimes, these characters make only a single appearance, on other occasions they may recur a number of times, or simply be present in the background when those more centrally-connected to Marionette / Adrien are interacted with.

Featured Relationship

Only one relationship is generally featured in a given episode, though others may be present in the background. This keeps the complexities of this vast supporting cast from overwhelming the viewer.

Relationship Evolution

No character is featured without their relationship with someone in the cast evolving or advancing in some way. Quite often, the other partner in this relationship is one of the title characters, but this is not always the case, as when Alya and Nino become boyfriend/girlfriend despite initially disliking each other.

If the relationship with the principle character does not directly advance/evolve, there are almost always ripple effects to these relationship developments that do impact on one of the principle characters.

In addition, those ripple effects can also affect the relationship between the principle characters. For example, Cat Noir can sometimes exhibit mild jealousy when Ladybug calls upon another of her allies to solve the problem of the episode, but he is also aware of this and tries to overcome it, usually successfully. He often attempts to charm other heroines when they appear, but this is mostly an act, and an attempt to create jealousy on the part of Ladybug; he desists when it is obviously not succeeding..

In RPGs – the minimalist approach

Obviously, it is desirable in most campaigns to have a similarly rich and interactive supporting cast of NPCs. This is often more easily said than done, however.

As a result, most GMs tend to establish relationships with those supporting cast and then leave them static and unchanging unless the change is clearly mandated by the NPCs presence within the events of the adventure.

For most campaigns, this approach is at least adequate, and it is relatively easy to manage. All you need is a list of the NPCs which describes who they are and any noteworthy relationships they may have; if this is a text document on a computer, it becomes searchable and can be updated as necessary.

Hardcopy versions may be more accessible, and easier to read or skim, but lose these benefits.

This is the approach generally used in the Adventurer’s Club campaign because the campaign and it’s major NPCs were created by my Co-GM.

The Hero System approach

In the hero system, characters get to list Dependent NPCs, Enemies and so on, and get character points for these. The problem is that this doesn’t just fix those relationships in place, it freezes them solid, and any changes can require wholesale changes to the PC and to any NPC connected to the one being changed.

What’s more, unless the NPC happens to fit one of those predetermined categories, there is no system for tracking them. For almost as long as I have been GMing Champions (since 1982, in fact), I’ve been trying to formulate a broader approach.

In RPGs – failed evolving approaches

Those attempts have been less than resounding successes, I’m the first to admit. The problem is that the various methods attempted have been too paperwork-intensive, and this has led to them being neglected, letting them slowly become out-of-date, and eventually leading to them being ignored or abandoned.

The most successful of these approaches (in the Zenith-3 campaign) was a contact list in which NPCs were assigned a positive or negative value which was added or subtracted from the XP award for an adventure when the NPC played a significant role. The more helpful the NPC was, the more it reduced the points payout earned in the course of the adventure.

In and of itself, this was not a bad concept; it meant that PCs did their best to solve problems on their own, only calling for assistance when it was really necessary. This kept the spotlight where it belonged, on the PCs. My previous attempt had failed to achieve this, which is one reason it was replaced.

But the resulting mechanics became onerous – the calculation of point values, the assessment of how helpful characters could expect to be, and so on – and this led to the relationships being even more rigidly fixed, and the sub-system being ignored more often than it was referenced.

I tried simplifying it by having a master list of relationships with the team instead of requiring each individual to list every NPC encountered, but this wasn’t enough.

The Ideal Solution

I’ve long realized that the best solution would be to design and implement a simple relational database for each campaign. The structure of this database would have a hierarchy something like this:

• Everything is indexed by character number.
  • Information about the character.
  • For each character, there is a secondary record for all other characters in the database, and a link to their database entry that extracts their name..
    • Each secondary record has a tertiary record that contains a record of each time they have appeared in an adventure and what their relationship is to the primary character after that appearance.

For example, we might have:

• 01
  • Dr Murko
  • Somewhat-deranged scientist, his experiments have a tendency to blow up in his face
  • To understand the source and parameters of Zed-Zero Energy
  • Won’t willingly break the law to achieve goals but often does so through thoughtlessness
  • 02 Lady Sage
    • Appearance 1
    • Creator of experimental subject on the run
  • 03 Blaster
    • Appearance 1
    • Creator of experimental subject, released to hunt Lady Sage
• 02
  • Lady Sage
  • Experimental subject of Dr Murko who has escaped
  • Wants to avoid recapture
  • Can’t resist helping / protecting others
  • 01 Dr Murko
    • Appearance 1
    • Obsessed scientist whose experiments pose a threat to himself and others
  • 03 Blaster
    • Appearance 1
    • Creation of Dr Murko sent to hunt down Lady Sage but who let her escape, recognizing her as kindred

…. and so on.

This example is a small database of just three entries – two NPCs and a PC. The first character, Dr Murko, is an NPC; he was testing Zed-Zero energy, giving his test subject (Lady Sage) paranormal abilities, which she used to escape. He then created a second subject, Blaster, to hunt her down and recapture her before his (illegal?) experiments were revealed. Blaster found and confronted Lady Sage but recognized that they were alike, and let her escape; but returned to Dr Murko in hopes that Murko would undo what he had done to him.

Clearly, there is a complicated relationship between Blaster and Lady Sage that is likely to evolve with every appearance of the character.

If I were running this as a campaign, the second adventure would have nothing to do with Dr Murko or Blaster, it would introduce some new characters to Lady Sage’s new life, giving her a place to live/hide and establishing her personality beyond a mere drive for survival and liberty.

Why this is impractical

There are three reasons why I consider this solution theoretically ideal, to be impractical.

1. Most Relational Database software is complicated and/or expensive.
2. The number of records would grow geometrically with each new character.
3. After a little while, maintaining the database would be a full-time job.

Consider the situation with 3 PCs and 20 NPCs, who have appeared an average of three times each in a campaign, eliminating all redundant records (no ‘self’ secondary record, for example) and all relationships over which the GM has no control (those between PCs):

23 primary records, three of which have 20 secondary records and 20 of which have 19 secondary records, each of which has an average of 3 tertiary records: 23 + 4 × (3×20 + 20×19) = 23 + 4 × (60 + 380) = 23 + 4 × (440) = 23 + 1760 = 1783 records.

Adding another NPC:= 1783 + 1 + 3 + 20 + 1 = 1808 records after just a single appearance.

The main driver of record count is (NPCs) × (NPCs -1). 2 NPCs = 2 records per appearance. 3 NPCs = 6 records per appearance. 20 NPCs = 380 records per appearance. 31 NPCs = 930 records per appearance…

Not practical.

Simplification

The easiest and most obvious method of simplifying this structure is to restrict the documentation to recording relationships between PCs and NPCs, ignoring relationships between NPCs, except possibly for notes regarding specific relationships of significance.

The next step of simplification would be to take the tertiary records away completely, and simply include a growing list of appearances and relationships in the secondary records. This actually complicates the internal structure of the database, because the records can no longer be fixed-length, but that’s a headache for the designer of the software, not you, and is generally a solved issue.

The total number of records thereby becomes # PCs × # NPCs.

This would also reduce the functionality of the resulting database, but it would be a lot more practical.

Practical Implementation

In fact, it’s so practical that it could easily be implemented as a single text file – no database required at all.

Create a section in your document for the group, and then a section for each PC. Each NPC gets a line to describe the relationship – all you need is the name.

You then have two choices: either over-typing the existing line when the relationship evolves, or inserting a new line for the new entry.

The first keeps the document instantly relevant, and makes it easier to find the current information that you need for the NPCs next appearance, the latter preserves a history that can be vital in identifying trends in the relationships. Both have their advantages and limitations, so this is very much a personal choice for the GM – which set of shortcomings is he willing to live with?

Evolving A Relationship

Each game session, one NPC should be selected as the feature relationship. The GM decides how he would like the relationship to progress – it could go forward, backward, or sideways – and then inserts into the planned gameplay of the day events that will prompt that change in the relationship.

Complications arise in multi-PC groups where you have to be careful not to develop one PCs relationships more frequently than others – this is akin to a spotlight-sharing problem, so it should be amenable to similar solutions.

Depending on how many PCs you have, you might be able to advance one relationship per PC, for example. Note that introducing a new NPC with a particular relationship to a specific PC counts! If you have too many PCs, this might consume too much game time on a ‘per game session’ schedule, but a ‘per adventure’ schedule would remain practical for much larger groups.

Above maybe half-a-dozen PCs, even this might begin to feel forced, or might consume so much game time that you don’t get to the main adventure for a whole game session; neither is desirable. It then becomes necessary to subdivide the group for this purpose and alternate between divisions, or introduce a rotating schedule of some kind.

Either will work, and with groups of this size, this is likely to be the very least of your problems!

Evolutionary Anatomy

So what does evolution of a relationship look like?

In general, it can be divided into:

1. Event
2. Engagement
3. Reaction
4. Action
5. Response
6. Checkpoint

1. Event

Something happens that involves or invokes the relationship between the characters. This could be a social occasion, a professional engagement, or even a chance encounter. It may or may not involve a third party. The first of the characters that it happens to (PC or NPC) is considered the primary participant.

2. Engagement

The primary participant decides how they will respond to the event. This may or may not directly involve the other participant in the relationship (the secondary participant).

3. Reaction

The secondary participant learns of the engagement (if they did not know already), and reacts to the combination of event and engagement. The primary participant may or may not know of the reaction.

4. Action

One or both participants undertake an action in response to the event, as directed by the engagement and/or reaction..

5. Response

The primary participant responds to the actions or reaction of the secondary participant, while the secondary participant responds to the actions or engagement of the primary participant. This completes the narrative elements of the development.

6. Checkpoint

Any lingering consequences on the relationship, and how it will impact on the characters in the future, need to be documented before the GM’s work is done, however.

So, let’s look at an example:

Sally decides to act to further her claim to superiority over Louanne by inviting Peter but not Louanne to her birthday party. (the event)

Peter, being clueless about such things, accepts, and even mentions the invitation to Louanne. (the engagement)

Louanne, who considers Peter a friend, suspects that Sally is simply using him to get at her (a correct assessment). She is angry at Sally as a result. (the reaction)

Louanne decides to take action, telling Peter what she suspects Sally is doing. (Action)

Peter decides to attend the party anyway, but is forewarned by Louanne, who he trusts more than he does Sally. At the party, Sally all but ignores Peter but spends a lot of time running Louanne down in his hearing. Peter tells her off and leaves the party very publicly, humiliating Sally. (The Response)

Peter misinterprets Louanne’s involvement, deciding that maybe she cares more for him than she has admitted and than he has hitherto suspected. Sally will remain angry at both Peter (and Louanne, who she correctly blames) until she finds an opportunity for revenge. (The Checkpoint)

There are three relationships affected by this development, and all three of them change somewhat as a result.

• Sally is more openly hostile toward Louanne and will treat Peter as an enemy for the first time.
• Peter will have to decide how to respond to Louanne’s ‘advances’, creating awkwardness between them, and will be cold toward Sally until she apologizes.
• Louanne is blissfully ignorant of the changed relationship with Peter, and may well make things worse by feeding into his misinterpretation. She will be even more wary of Sally in future.

Where might this go in the future? The obvious development would be for Peter to ask Louanne out, or try to force Sally to apologize to Louanne, or both. But a more subtle, and interesting, development might be for some unrelated event to impact all three of their lives. Some tangible manifestation of the rivalry between Sally and Louanne, perhaps, or something that forces them to work together.

Conclusion

The same process can be used to evolve any relationship. In a D&D campaign, a hidden antagonist might approach one of the retainers of the PCs and blackmail them into spying for him, or baiting a trap for the PCs, or otherwise betraying the PCs.

Any relationship, any event, it works.

Not only does this stimulate the GM into creating subplots that have meaning for the PCs, and hence engagement for the Players, but – little by little – it makes the campaign world a richer place for the PCs to adventure within. Evolving relationships is easy – once you’re aware of the need to do so, and a way to make it happen that’s practical.

And for that, you can thank Ladybug & Cat Noir.

Miraculous!

I have said before that you can never have too many approaches to determining the characterization of an NPC up your sleeve. Today’s article offers a new one, and a systematic way of looking at simpler approaches that can also be useful.

Let’s start by setting a baseline for comparison…

0. Going Nowhere: The Null State (for Comparison)

I once knew a GM with several bad habits to go with his undoubted ability to create interesting puzzles (his Sphinxes were deadly dangerous). But creating and naming NPCs was not his strong suit.

Unless he had lots of prep time to focus on a specific character of importance, they were pretty much cookie-cutter derivatives of the AD&D character class to which they belonged. His Paladins were all Noble, his Clerics were all Pious, and so on.

And he was even worse at naming them. Regardless of race and language, the first NPC encountered was always named “Dave”, the second one was “Sam”, and the third one was “Phil”.

Frankly, I always thought that he should team up with another GM, someone who was good in a literary sense; as combination, they would have been killer!

The problem with only being good at one aspect of the GM’s craft is that players sit at your table (assuming they have a choice) for that one aspect. A single dry spell (and we all have them from time to time) and your one hold over the audience goes up in smoke. End of campaign.

And, if you should happen to believe in the quality of that campaign, and if it is in fact clearly full of potential, that can be so disheartening that you give up the GMs screen, and shortly thereafter, the entire hobby. Which is an overreaction. but it’s hard to be objective when you’re hurting.

So that is the default worst-case example of technique. If, no matter how poor you consider your skills in this area, you are better than this, then you have plenty of reason to hold your head (reasonably) high. And to pay close attention to articles like this one that offer the chance to improve.

1. The Monotrait Road

Technique one is to make the character all about a single personality trait. Everything is assessed in this context – his or her relationships, profession, attitudes, reactions, everything.

This is an especially useful technique when combined with the principle of the partial NPC for throwaway characters who are not going to make repeat appearances.

It does take some practice to use well, so it’s not quite as simple a solution as it initially seems.

It’s also important to note that some traits will lead the NPC to be helpful to the PCs, while others will turn the character into roadblocks. You do not want your players to be able to accuse you of always fielding NPCs that do nothing but say “No” to them, so it’s important to balance these pro- and anti- traits.

That can make plotting an adventure more challenging, too. Again, it’s not quite as simple as it seems.

2. The Linear Road

A linear approach is also based around a single character trait, but uses other character traits to carve out exceptions and circumstances within which, no compromise can be countenanced by the NPC – either weakening or reinforcing that primary trait, in other words.

It should be obvious that the results are inevitably richer and more complex than Monotrait characters, but they are not much more complicated to generate.

In fact, for my TORG campaign, I wrote an NPC generator (software) that generated characters by the hundreds (I have mentioned it in the past). Part of that program was a subroutine to generate personalities. I don’t know exactly where that personality generator is, these days; I’ve long intended, the next time I come across it, to present it here at Campaign Mastery.

But the basic process was:

1. A d% roll to determine the number of personality traits;
2. A d20 roll for the primary trait that selected one of twenty lists of personality traits;
3. A d20 roll for the primary trait that selected the trait from that list of twenty;
4. repeat steps 2 & 3 for any other traits indicated by step 1.

A few of the traits had sub-rolls associated with them, but most did not. For example, for several traits, there was a 4-in-6 chance that it was a trait of the character, but there was a 2-in-6 chance that it was something that the character looked for in others (for some reason).

And, if there was any contradiction, the order of generation was the sequence of strength of trait, first to last being high to low.

Finally, the primary generation program used a single d% value to estimate “competence” (even though that isn’t an official stat in the game system; that was used for various other determinations, like skill level in the primary professional skill of the character. But it was also used, subtracted from 100, to estimate the severity of the primary trait; is it an obsession, a preference, or something in between?

This system still left quite a lot of interpretation up to the GM, which meant that there was scope to smooth over any rough spots. I had seen similar systems in magazines, but they all lacked that scope and the variety of having 400 different traits to select from, and that showed in the results, which often felt forced and wooden. My design intentionally sought to overcome this problem.

Linear characters are an order of magnitude more complex than Monotrait characters.

3. The Rich Road

Seeking a more complicated characterization seems rather pointless, even counter-productive. That’s why the approach I have labeled “The Rich Road” doesn’t try to create more complex characters, it creates more structured and coherent characters.

I rough out a quick backstory for the NPC, then divide it into logical segments. Sometimes, these will be short but having a profound impact on the character, sometimes longer and less intense. However, even a small change can accumulate into a significant total effect if it persists long enough.

The first such period is then used to allocate the primary trait. No, make that “a” primary trait; under this technique, a character can have more than one. The second period adds a second trait; if it contradicts the first, it creates an exception or limitation to the first primary trait, if not then it creates a second primary trait, one that is second only to the first primary trait.

And so on, each phase in the life story of the NPC adding to the richness of the personality. The traits are not chosen blindly or at random; they always have some bearing on the events experienced by the character.

If the selected trait is complimentary to the second primary trait but not the first, it not only carves out an exception to the first, it elevates the second to primacy.

I then throw away that backstory – well, treat it as a first draft – and craft a new one that more strongly emphasizes the enrichment of the personality that occurred. The new trait acquired could be the result of a negative or a positive experience. But at the same time, now that I have some idea of the finished personality, I can reflect other aspects of the character that had not yet emerged from his experiences.

This also helps to refine the personality; you are describing the history of the character as perceived by that character. That’s all of that character, not just the parts that were discovered during a particular phase of the character’s life.

Even if the character’s backstory is never to be revealed to the players (because it’s irrelevant to the encounter with the NPC), this helps to make the character a cohesive and coherent whole. The backstory can then get thrown away; if I know in advance that this is what’s going to happen, I can limit the amount of effort and polish that I put into it.

In a nutshell, this process binds the personality together into an Identity that has been designed explicitly to fulfill the plot needs of the moment, but which has enough depth and coherence that it can support multiple repeat appearances. Especially if the personality is treated as a dynamic phenomenon that will evolve with in-game experiences.

This technique is suitable for PCs and recurring NPCs, and – until a couple of years ago – it was my go-to approach for such characters.

4. The Narrative Road

So, what happened a couple of years ago? Answer: I came up with a new technique, one that I have dubbed the Narrative Technique – or, using the metaphor employed in this article, the Narrative Road.

The central concept of this approach is that every word of description, every word they utter in dialogue, and (almost) everything that is written or said describing the environment around them, all tell you something more about the character. Or they should, anyway.

This concept results in a similar process of step-wise refinement as the “Rich” approach, but this time the source is not a throwaway, it’s everything that you have generated to pass on to the players.

In other words, you start with a broad characterization – Linear, or even Monotrait – and enrich it throughout the character’s planned appearance in the adventure. Then you go back to the start of that appearance and revise the narrative and dialogue to reflect the more detailed personality and to communicate it to those listening, i.e. the players.

With any subsequent appearance, you can further expand on and refine the personality until you deem it sufficiently defined. Where you stop is up to you.

But there is a complication that you should keep in mind; with this first iteration of the character, you (like the players) are absorbing the personality one piece at a time. In subsequent appearances, you won’t have that luxury. This restricts how complex you can make the character, or it should – and everyone reading this will have a different threshold.

The solution is to describe the personality, within your notes, in the same fashion, then condense it as much as possible so that there is less to read and absorb. Bear in mind, too, that when you have to do this in play, it will be extremely unlikely that you will be able to concentrate fully on it; you will be busy and distracted by everything else that a GM has to do.

Of course, there is a solution to this problem, or at least, a test to tell you whether or not you have gone too far. All you need to do is wait a couple of days and then go through your planned adventure; each time you come to a new NPC, try to remember the personality you assigned to it. Take notes, then compare them to the actual character.

The theory is that the fading of memory will simulate the distractions of being the GM. Since you wrote the personality up just a couple of days earlier, though, you should still be able to recall most of it. If you lose too much of it, if there is too much difference between the recalled version and the actual one, it tells you that the personality is too complicated; you should either simplify it or look for a touchstone.

A Touchstone?

Sometimes, there is a central concept or a key that sums up the whole personality, at least as a starting point. It could be a phrase, an image, a statement in accent, or an extremely high-level summary of the personality.

If I describe a character as “Bugs Bunny to his boss’s Elmer Fudd”, I bring to mind everything that I have ‘on tap’ regarding those characters and their relationship. I don’t mean this description literally, of course, but that one phrase is quite enough to make sense of the description that I have attached to the character write-up.

Here’s a hint, too: such a phrase is a great starting point for the personality to be generated.

A Narrative Road example, Repeated

The process has been refined somewhat in the time since, but the basics remain unchanged from when I first thought up this approach to characterization.

But I’ve used the first case of it as an example before, I find. Hence, the ‘repeated’ in the section title. This will, however, be the first time that the actual narrative from the adventure will be excerpted.

And note that the process itself was not fully formed at the time. In fact, you can see the concept forming, if you read between the lines!

From the adventure “Cold Cases”, as written

The New Orleans Historical Society was founded in 1835 as the Louisiana Historical Society. It was officially chartered by the state of Louisiana in 1836, and has been rechartered several times over the decades since. Following the devastation of hurricane Katrina in late August of 2005 the LHS set up a dedicated sub-unit to protect, preserve, and – where necessary – restore the history and historical buildings of the city. In 2015, the original charter for the NOHS expired, and the LHS sought to discontinue funding since the project had consumed all of the state organization’s funding for the last decade. Heroic efforts and last-minute political maneuverings rescued it at the 11th hour, but the next decade saw repeated skirmishes between those advocating state priorities and those focused on the city.

Eventually, in 2023, the LHS did a deal to separate the NOHS from its operations and charter it as an ‘affiliated organization’. In theory,. by separating the funding, the LHS would stop the financial drain into the state capital. What they had not factored into consideration was that New Orleans generated the bulk of the operating capital that they were used to receiving. The LHS bled most of its funding and resources into the newly-constituted New Orleans Society, ending up with even less than they had enjoyed previously. They responded by issuing an invoice to NOHS for the funding provided in the disputed decade plus interest, on the principle that it was an internal loan that had been assumed by the splinter organization on separation from the main body. That was when the divorce turned nasty.

After a couple of years and tens of thousands of dollars spent on lawyers, and with both organizations facing bankruptcy, a compromise was reached under which a percentage of the funding raised by the NOHS was paid to the LHS each year for services in providing ‘Historical Context’ to the city of New Orleans. That arrangement lasted for twelve years before a new generation of leaders in both Societies got together and began amalgamation talks – with the better resourced and much larger NOHS as the leading partner.

These days, they occupy, wholly or in part, 21 city blocks of Central New Orleans (almost one quarter of the old city center), including 6 hotels (who lease space from the NOHS), the Louisiana Supreme Court building, three museums, and 13 restaurants and cafes, and are the largest single employer in New Orleans outside the various levels of government. It has become standard practice for the NOHS to buy any properties that they wish to conserve or restore and then lease the space back to the current tenants/occupants, usually at a discounted rate. Because the NOHS is placed in a protected tax bracket by the City and State, this generally provides a small windfall for the original owners and generates the fees needed for building maintenance and restoration. And it also gives them the financial clout to negotiate bank loans for whatever they need.

Their headquarters are located in the Williams Building at 410 Cartres Street. (Map 012j1 – Williams Building relative to Knightly Building; Map 012j2 from the Hyatt to the Williams Building, small map; Map 012j3 ditto, large map also showing New Orleans City Hall; Pic 012j4, exterior of the Williams Building; Pic 012j5 inside the New Orleans Historical Society.)

Inside, you meet receptionist Gennifer-with-a-G Patriskilopopodos (Patris-kilo-popo-dos). “Mah goodness, ah youh truhlay intuhrested in Histry, Saint Buhbura?” [Reply]

* A *

“I guss it takes uhl kinds, mah dear. I shuld have known yuh would nut be he-uh fuh frivuhlus reasons. How can I help one the most recent legend to base themselves in owuh wunduful City?”
[Pause for reply]

* B *

“Mah gudness! Uv co-ahse ah wull hulp in aneh whay ah can. Yuh have come tuh the raght place, Hon-ahy!

“In 2023, thuh city was menaced by Hurricane Inguh, but thuh levee banks held, though it wuz a close thing fo-ah a while. It wuz then that thuh society realized thut today is the history of tumorrah, und that we needed to conserve whut wuz around us, raht now. We partnered with Ghugle to examine and catalog everuh building, everuh fixtuh. Und we made shoah to preserve ut least wun uv everahthing. Let muh just consult our-uh datuhbase…”

*** Pretend to type on a keyboard for ‘datuhbase’ x2

“Ah, here we are. The lighting in that part uf town wuz supplied bah Cunsoluhdated Uhlectrucal Dustributahs. They are one of the biggest suppliers of ulectrical lighting in the world, with ullmost 6000 offices world wide. For that part of town they built LED lamps that looked like old-fashuned gas lamps, with coluhed effects in thuh bulbs and a built-in flickuhring effect. Those wuh populah fuh a time in Nuh Oleans but fell out of favuh aftuh Hurricane Landauh. They wuh veruh atmospheric but not veruh practical. There is one street left with those lights – Wilkunnson Street, about two blocks from heauh (Pic 12j6). Weuh have a pictuhe heah (Pic 12j7).
[Pause for reply]

* C *

“Ah don’t think weuh quite done yet, Miss Sahnt Baburuh. Ah see heuh that one of the lights whaz damuged in a ve-hic-el accident a few yeahs back, and weuh needed to source a replacemunt as they weuh no longer being made bah Cunsoluhdated Uhlectrucal. So weuh bought full technucal schematucs from them, und sent technishuns aht to measure how thuh actual lights had changed in perfawmence ovuh tha yeahs. Give me yoah email address and ah’ll send the full info raht ovuh to you.”
[Pause for reply]

Notice anything missing? I didn’t, when I was writing the adventure and doing game prep.

There is not one word of description of this NPC. There’s a name, and there’s an occupation and a workplace, and a history of that workplace – but no descriptions.

In game prep, I had located a building (which may or may not really be located in New Orleans, and may or may not really be located at the address stated above, I don’t remember any more).

I had an image of the building, so I needed little description there – show the image and move on. I also had an image of a library with at least two levels, a spiral staircase, and a reception desk with relatively young woman seated behind the counter, again reducing the need for any descriptions. And I had various maps showing where the place was located (at least in my campaign version of New Orleans).

I had, as you can tell from the phonetic writing (which gives my spell-checker fits), equipped the young woman with an extremely thick southern accent – much broader than usual for the location. That gave her a personality head-start, as you can tell from the script, but at the last possible second I recognized my oversight and further realized, in a flash, the possibility that this NPC might recur at some future point in the campaign.

This required a far more substantial character than the very Monotrait “Helpful Southerner” I had written up.

As I described in Interaction Flows – A Planning Tool and Function With Style: 10 thoughts for NPC Creation (Blog Carnival Jan 2021) (I have used this character as an example before!), I decided that she needed to be a social activist and a Star Trek fan. The PC could also be considered a social activist, but not the type to attend protest rallies, so this gave them a point of common ground AND a point of distinction from each other. The “Trekkie” idea I borrowed from The West Wing.

From the West Wing fandom wiki, abridged

In the episode “Arctic Radar“, in Act I, Josh and Donna are walking through the West Wing when Josh tells Donna that he’s spotted a temporary employee wearing a “Star Trek” pin and he needs Donna to tell her to take it off.

In Act II, Josh comments that he [has] noticed [that] the temp employee has removed the pin – but Donna comments that she is upset about having to take it off. Josh attempts to talk to the employee, Janice (played by Audrey Wasilewski), but is rebuffed and he walks away.

The Fandom Wiki doesn’t describe the rest of this plot sequence. So I’ve had to turn to a second source, a different West Wing wiki that gives a transcript of the script.

From The West Wing Wiki:

Link to source: westwingwiki.com

I’ll pick it up in the middle of the scene described above, as Janice tells Josh that she is going to appeal his decision with her supervisor.

JANICE: “Okay, well, you got the cards but Star Trek and the entire Starfleet series is about honor and loyalty and civic duty and the fact that you don’t think that those are characteristics that should be displayed inside the White House is sad. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand those kinds of things. Anything else?”

JOSH: No.

Josh walks away from Janice.

This subplot plays no part in Act III. In Act IV, Josh is passing Janice’s desk when she comments,

JANICE: “I’m not obsessed. I’m just a fan, and I care.”

JOSH: “What’s your name again?”

JANICE: “Janice.”

JOSH: “I’m a fan. I’m a sports fan, I’m a music fan and I’m a Star Trek fan. All of them. But here’s what I don’t do. Tell me if any of this sounds familiar: “Let’s list our ten favorite episodes. Let’s list our least favorite episodes. Let’s list our favorite galaxies. Let’s make a chart to see how often our favorite galaxies appear in our favorite episodes. What Romulan would you most like to see coupled with a Cardassian and why? Let’s spend a weekend talking about Romulans falling in love with Cardassians and then let’s do it again.” That’s not being a fan. That’s having a fetish. And I don’t have a problem with that, except you can’t bring your hobbies in to work, okay?”

JANICE: “Got it.”

JOSH: “Except on Star Trek holidays.” [walks away]

JANICE: “There’s no such thing as a Star Trek holiday.”

JOSH: “Well, work hard around here. We’ll make one.”

Josh walks off, and Janice smiles.

Now, I had a problem with this episode in that the behavior Josh describes is appropriate for those who would generally be described as “Trekkies” but most fans are not obsessed in that fashion, and distance themselves from this behavior by labeling themselves “Trekkers”. This is extremely widely documented and if you have done enough research to name-drop Cardassians, you can’t help but know it.

I would have given Janice another line, something along the lines of “Those are the traits of obsessed Trekkies. I’m a trekker.“, instead of “Got it”.

Josh would then have replied “Maybe so, but this place is about Perceptions as much as reality, and we can’t have our credibility undermined by any suggestion that we are obsessed – with anything.”

Janice: “Got It” – and the rest plays out as above.

Of course, it’s always possible that all this (or something similar) was in the original script and got cut for running time – that’s very common with TV dramas.

So, back to the NPC:

I decided that she was not directly supervised in her role, and as such, could choose to wear a Star Trek pin. Perhaps she had been challenged on it in the past, but the differences between her position and that of a staffer (temporary or otherwise) in the West Wing meant that she would probably have gotten away with it – perhaps with a compromise.

I then rejigged this concept to make it a coffee mug with a Federation logo, something I had seen offered for sale multiple times. I gave her a Save The Whales pin, a rainbow pin, and one that read “It’s the Environment, Stupid” (referencing the famous political aphorism about the economy offered by Bill Clinton advisor, James Carville).

Throw in a khaki t-shirt with women’s lib symbol and blonde dreadlocks tied with a scrunchy sporting a peace symbol, and the description was complete. Oh, and note the very Greek name and the not-Greek-at-all Speech Pattern, which immediately tells a story about the character’s ancestry.

Now that I had something to deliver, I had to figure out how to deliver it. I decided to insert little descriptive blocks in between the passages of dialogue that I had scripted, feeding into the replies by the PC being roleplayed. These have been marked in the excerpt above as “* A *” etc.

If the PC then referenced or responded to one of these cues, I could improvise some additional NPC dialogue that would permit the NPC to show off a further personality facet, be it Idealism, or Activism, or Respect, or Environmental Passion, or whatever.

The player picked up on each cue, and as a result, with each exchange, a little more of the NPC’s personality could be first, created, and second, showcased – all still under the umbrella of the Helpful Southerner (unless the PC was foolish enough to push one of the NPC’s many ‘buttons’).

This is a clear example of the Narrative Road to character in that every piece of description or dialogue expanded and expounded the personality of the NPC.

A Second Example

I thought that I would round this discussion out with a second example from earlier in the same adventure, one delivered in two parts.

The first part takes place in the New Orleans Council Offices. St Barbara is the PC:

St Barbara encounters a similar lack of assistance at the Council Offices, but this comes as less of a surprise. The Knightly Building was originally supposed to be used to replace the existing council building in a move that had been planned for months, but the Crown Prince turned the entire council on its head at the last second by arbitrarily giving the building to the Champions via IMAGE*. She is met by Road Safety Commissioner Jorg Ingram (Pic 012f7), and told that the records in question were lost during the flooding caused by Hurricane Landau in 2042.
*** Roleplay ***

She is in the middle of reacting to that news when Jorg adds that “some of the information may be available through the council’s website, but finding anything in that electronic rabbit warren can be quite challenging because of the archaic systems architecture used. For example, has she seen this?

He then shows her his hand-held computer’s display which has the message “Meet me in the coffee shop across the road in fifteen minutes. Be inconspicuous.” He then continues with his apologetic total non-cooperation, “You see what I mean? It would be impossible for anyone to find that information unless they knew exactly where to look for it.”
*** Roleplay ***

After turning the spotlight to the other PCs (see last week’s post, Spotlights In Focus: Plot Structure Impacts for a short period, Part two of this encounter then took place at The Borgne Cafe, Hyatt Regency, New Orleans, after the PC had disguised herself just enough that she might plausibly be someone else, but not so much that she would not be recognized instantly if you were expecting her to be there.:

Meanwhile, St Barbara is waiting in the Borgne Cafe (Pic 012h1) of the Hyatt Regency of New Orleans for the Road Safety Commissioner to arrive. The Cafe is considered one of the best and most Romantic in the French Quarter of New Orleans, serving Creole-style seafood. It doesn’t seem to surprise the waiter when St Barbara waves away the menu and simply orders a coffee. How do you have it, St B?
[Await Response]

The coffee, when it arrives, is absolutely delicious, though slightly stronger-flavored than St Barbara was expecting, and with faint overtones of chicory and cinnamon. [Despite the interruptions] she is almost finished it and wistfully contemplating another when Jorg Ingram arrives. Seeing that the cafe is packed, and most patrons are having a meal, he asks, “Excuse me ma’am, may I share your table? Like you, I have only stopped in for a quick coffee. Then I have to get back to work. Busy, busy, busy.
*** Roleplay. ***

“Do you know, the strangest thing happened today. I received a telephone call from a very prominent local Congressman telling me that were certain publicly-available information to be released to an even more prominent local personage of the superheroic persuasion, federal funding of the levee banks that protect New Orleans during hurricane season would be reviewed – unfavorably. That’s a very serious threat, don’t you think?”
[Pause for reply]

“Well, it’s their prerogative to decide how they are going to disburse Federal Funds, I have to admit. So, unfortunately, when the same august personage that the caller had referred to actually showed up, requesting that very information, I had to tell her that it had been destroyed in the Hurricane of ’42, even though we can’t be sure of that because no attempt had been made to locate the information in question in the first place.”
[Pause for reply]

“Now, I’m a good, honest, Democrat, and I don’t take kindly to threats from Republicans that prevent me from doing my job, especially when it involves helping someone who does a lot of good in my city. But there wasn’t much that I could do about it. I couldn’t even tell her that the New Orleans Historical Society will have all the information she needs.”
[Pause for reply]

“It’s a good thing the next election’s only a few months away. Maybe that blowhard won’t make it back into office this time. Are you registered to vote? Unlike many states, we permit any permanent residents to register, so if you live around these parts, you should give it some consideration. Anyway, nice talking to you, but I have to go.”
[Pause for reply]

*** Roleplay as he collects his takeaway coffee-cup and heads for the door with a jaunty wave.***

This is a Narrative characterization that consists of two opposing Linear characterizations – one, unhelpful but with hidden limits to that uncooperative nature; and the other, helpful, but with hidden limits to that cooperative nature. He is resentful of being told what to do by a member of the opposite political persuasion, but is (effectively) blackmailed into accepting the instructions. So he obeys, but uses his wits to subvert the instructions – which in turn holds implications about the intelligence of the politician who issued those instructions.

Because of this resentment, he has shifted from a neutral stance to one that actively opposes the source of the resentment, which in turn predisposes him to be as helpful as he can be without risking either his job or the city.

All this information unfolds as a subtext to the encounter, one line of dialogue at a time, and that’s what makes this a Narrative characterization.

He clearly suspected or knew that the conversation might be overheard and was at pains to make it sound natural. The player picked up on this and started looking around for people shadowing her informant, spotted a pair of them splitting up – one to continue following him and one to follow her for a while.

This last part is NOT mentioned anywhere in the write-up, but was implied by his paranoia or circumspection; once the player had noticed and played into the possibility, it fell into the general direction to “Roleplay”.

This resulted in her capturing a tablet containing the instructions issued by the politician – circumstantial evidence that he was complicit in the historical crime that the PCs were investigation at the time. It wasn’t enough to get him booted from public office – unfortunate from the perspective of the PC – but it put the politician on their radar, and eventually they nailed him for corruption.

This example is more fully-formed than the first, but is also more limited; there is very little chance of this character recurring so long as he retains his current position. But his quick wit earmarks him as a character who is going places; and if he gets promoted / recruited into some other department or agency, who knows?

It also shows how simple the building blocks of a complex characterization can be. And that’s a very noteworthy point on which to end this discussion.

Sidebar: *** Roleplay *** vs [Pause For Reply]

It could be interpreted that the latter means that the PC(s) with whom I am interacting in this encounter are not expected to be roleplaying. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

[Pause for reply]
means that I expect the player to reply with a statement made in character.

*** Roleplay ***
means that the player can decide how the character reacts – they might go somewhere, or talk to someone else, or use a skill, or whatever. They are, of course, free to do so at any point in the dialogue, but it’s not generally expected by me that they will do so.

If there is any risk of that happening, I will put directions in the square brackets:
[Pause for reply. If {name of PC} does X, refer to paragraph Y below.]

You may also have noted [Await response] – this means that the action / dialogue will not proceed until the character responds or reacts in some way. [Pause for reply] generally (but not quite always) means that after a short pause, if the PC hasn’t said something as part of the conversation, I will move on. It may be necessary to improvise dialogue if what is ‘pre-programmed’ doesn’t match the circumstances.

For example, at one point, an NPC asks a question – “How can I help” or words to that effect, followed by the [Pause for response] cue. If the player chooses not to have the PC respond to that question, then obviously the next dialogue sequence, in which the NPC reacts to what the PC was expected to say, needs to be deferred or revised.

Oh, and note the use of stage directions in
*** Roleplay as he collects his takeaway coffee-cup and heads for the door with a jaunty wave.***
– these are clearly directing what the NPC will do unless the PCs actions make it impossible or incorrect. If the PC had put her arm through the NPC’s and said, “Tell me more,” the action is clearly inappropriate, and some sort of reaction would be called for.

Just thought I should clarify all that.

My co-GM and I have almost finished designing the next adventure in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, entitled “Lucifer Rising”. This will be the 33rd adventure in the main continuity (which doesn’t count a half-dozen of fill-in adventures along the way).

This adventure is notable for having a slightly different structure to most of them, and the differences have given me a fresh perspective on game spotlights for PCs and being the focal point of an adventure or part thereof. (I’m going to be extra-careful not to give anything important away, so our players are welcome to read this article without hesitation).

At the same time, though, the structure is clearly very similar to our usual style; this is an evolution, not a revolution. And that means that the past posts on the subject remain relevant and the starting point for this discussion:
 

• The Wandering Spotlight Part One of Two: Plot Prologues
   
• The Wandering Spotlight Part Two of Tow: Shared Stories
   
• Engagement vs Involvement: The forgotten balance
   
• Campaign Incapability: The distant side of the coin
   
• Occupying A PC’s Shadow
   
• Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which Is Your RPG Campaign?
   

There may be others, but that group provides a solid foundation for today’s discussion, I think.

Normalities In Structure

A normal adventure is divided into Acts, in each of which there is a major change of direction and fortunes for the PCs. That’s the essential definition used by discussions of story structure like the Three-Act structure, the Four-Act structure, and so on.

Each act is divided into a number of scenes. Whenever the location in which the action is set, or a significant NPC enters or exits the plot, or there is a deliberate change in tone, that signals a new scene. An act can have anywhere from one scene to many scenes – in fact, to as many scenes as necessary.

Sometimes, a change of PC spotlight focus can also trigger a change of scene, sometimes not. You really need to adopt an adventure structure that specifically suits the particular adventure, evolving the way you structure scenes to best communicate what you need to tell the players, and to share the spotlight around as evenly and equally as possible.

It is not abnormal for one or two PCs to be more central to a plotline than others; at the campaign level, it’s also important to monitor the resulting spotlight focus to ensure that one particular PC doesn’t dominate (unless that’s by deliberate campaign design, of course; in the Dr Who campaign, the fact that there’s only one player and one PC makes disproportionate spotlighting inevitable, for example).

That usually doesn’t impact scene-to-scene spotlight focus within the adventure; it simply means that some scenes are more central to the importance of the plot, not that they are more frequent or receive more or less attention.

Abnormalities In Structure

So, “Lucifer Rising” starts, as many of our adventures do, with the four PCs in different places, doing different things, and generally, just living their lives. Unlike most such plots, many of these individual plot threads will become relevant to the main plotline.

Normally, there would only be three or four of these before everybody comes together and the adventure structure changes as a consequence. Sometimes, there are only one or two – and on at least one occasion, we pitched the PCs directly into the main plot. But this time around, there were many more than usual, at least for one PC – call them ‘A’.

And, while characters ‘B’ and ‘C’ each had their own plotlines, it seemed inevitable (for content reasons) that ‘C’ would find themselves entangled in B’s plotline repeatedly.

In terms of adventure-wide focus, this shifts – it starts with A, then shifts to the B+C combination, then returns to A, and then finally shifts to D! Everyone gets their own share of the dominant position within the plotline, and everyone will have crucial contributions to make to a successful outcome.

This led us to settle on a radically different structure to the normal, and the change is rooted in the principle of sharing the spotlight.

Abnormal Composition

To rotate the spotlight, and ensure an equitable distribution of the focus, we decided that each Act would consist of 3 or 4 scenes – an A, a D, and either a B+C or a B and a C, in terms of which PC(s) would be targeted by the spotlight.

These would not occur in the same sequence in each Act; in fact, the only rules were that whoever went last in the previous act would not go first in the next, and the same character should not feature in the same position within one act as in the one prior to it. The spotlight would shift from one act to the next.

But it wasn’t long before we started to get hung up on nomenclature, using the same term – Act – in both its traditional sense and in this revised approach and occasionally talking at cross purposes as a result. So we defined a new term, Sequence, for these ‘groups’ of scenes.

The consequences of these decisions were that the number of Sequences would be determined by the number of scenes to be experienced by the PC with the most engagement (A), and that additional content would need to be created to ‘pad out’ the sequence.

So the structure of the adventure became:
 

• Plot, divided into several Acts;
  • Each Act is divided into a number of Sequences;
    • Each Sequence is split into a group of Scenes;
      • Each Scene advances the narrative from the perspective of a single PC or a group of PCs who have coalesced in consequence of a prior Scene.

Act 1 would have the PCs following 4 individual plot threads that would eventually begin coalescing. It would end when the PCs reunited as a group, a reunion explicitly resulting from developments within individual plot threads. In fact, the natural flow of action would first unite two pairs (A and D, B and C) as an interim step. In terms of dominant contributions to the main plot, there is a natural flow – A, B, C, A.

Act 2 would follow the PCs as they crossed a wilderness after reuniting, having a number of encounters, until they reached the location of the third Act. This is all about overcoming the natural challenges of the circumstances and environment while racing the clock. For most of this act, B is dominant, followed by C. A and D are relatively minor contributors in comparison.

Act 3 delivers the PCs to a particularly challenging confrontation, and just as it looks like things are headed toward a resolution, we up the Ante by dealing the PCs a serious Reverse. D is dominant, but everyone has vital contributions to make.

Finally, Act 4 will resolve the various conflicts, and may or may not lead to an Epilog – this is what we are writing at the current time, so that decision has yet to be made. Personally, I think an Epilog is likely, but we haven’t even discussed this yet. All four PCs have essential contributions to make, but D is slightly dominant.

Ultimately, this is an adventure that starts out as an A story and morphs into a D story with vital contributions by B and C along the way.

The Rotating Focus

While it might seem that the rotating focus from one scene to another within a Sequence is random and anarchic, in reality, these are very tightly controlled. A lot of factors come into play – overt significance, emotional intensity, even player preferences – but ultimately it comes down to when do you break one scene into two?

This question obviously becomes critically important when one string of encounters is setting the pace for the whole Act, as is the case with Lucifer Rising.

Ultimately, our approach is expository; we break a scene when it’s logical to do so, when the story progresses. That sets a standard, and creates a guideline for use on those occasions when there is no natural break point, but the scene is too long to remain whole.

Complications

There is a fine degree of nuance that becomes possible. You can shift a moment of introspection from one scene to another, move a moment of revelation from the start of a scene to the end of the featured character’s previous scene (or vice-versa), and so on, purely to trim and equalize length and other parameters between scenes.

There are also knock-on effects that sometimes have to be considered, relating to the psychological impact of information.

Let’s say that the sequence of scenes at one point is A12, B12, C12, D12, B13, A13.

If a particular moment of revelation takes place at the end of A12, then B12, D12, C13, and B13 all occur after the players have heard this revelation, even if their characters don’t know of it. This can shape context and interpretation.

If that moment of revelation gets shifted to the start of A13, those scenes no longer take place in the “shadow” of the revelation. This may or may not be a good thing; the specifics will differ from one example to another. It might be that making this change may force some of these other scenes to also be amended.

The sequencing of scenes and their content is a continual juggling act where the ultimate basis of judgment is the story that you are creating and sharing. Is that story better served by shifting the moment of resolution, prolonging the mystery? Or does the revelation become an anticlimax? Does having it at the start of the scene make for a stronger connection between circumstances and a player decision about what to do next?

There are too many variables for there to be any hard-and-fast rules. But the rule of thumb is that there is a lot more flexibility than there might seem.

Balancing within a Sequence

One of the primary reasons for shifting material from one Sequence to another is to balance the spotlight focus within the Sequence. This isn’t always possible, it depends on the content of the scene, but it’s always worth trying to achieve.

The example offered above can be even more illuminating, in this context; say, for example, that scene C13 contains its own revelation that places the A12 revelation under an entirely different light. That would make it important that the A12 revelation stay where it is, even if that makes the A12 scene slightly larger or more important than the A13.

This is not as unbalanced as it might appear; the significance to the A plotline of the C13 revelation means that a small part of the significance of the C13 scene can be considered to be transferred to the next A scene, A13, and illustrates how complex these considerations can sometimes become.

Padding A Plot Thread

Another way of thinking about all this is to consider all the “A” plotlines as forming a singular plot thread, all the “B” plotlines as forming a second, and so on. The Act/Sequence/Scene structure thereby becomes a way of interweaving and interleaving those plot threads.

This perspective can be extremely useful when it comes to padding such a plot thread to make it ‘bulk’ the same amount of screen time, or close to it, as each of the other plot threads.

‘Lucifer Rising’ is fairly typical in terms of the challenge this creates for the GM. I forget exactly how many ‘A’ scenes we had in the first act, one to a sequence, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s say that it was 10.

We also had 3 B scenes, two C scenes, and 3 B/C scenes, a shortfall of 2. Or is it a shortfall of 4 B scenes and 5 C scenes? The latter seems more correct, because otherwise we have the question of what B is doing during the C scenes, and vice-versa.

And, finally, we had 4 D scenes, a shortfall of 6.

Filling The Gaps

All these gaps need to be plugged, and that means additional content within those plot threads. Complications, setbacks, conversations, plot twists – and anything else you can think of – have to be used to expand the scope of the plot threads into a more significant and substantial narrative, just to keep it in lockstep with the ‘A’ plot.

But it is also true that each of these additional scenes adds to the complexity of both the plot thread and the overall plotline, and represents an additional opportunity for both to get seriously messed up. And that doesn’t even address one of the biggest dangers – that of miscounting, and ending up one scene short of, or one scene over, requirements.

This happens more often than I would care to admit.

Compounding this problem is that the default assumption is that all scenes will be of a similar size – whether you measure it by the word, by the line, or by the minute – and this assumption is more often wrong than it is right.

Solutions

If you break the plot thread down into bullet points, one to a scene, you can generally avoid the worst of the latter problem – by introducing a heightened risk of the first.

It was to get around that issue that we started labeling the scenes in Act I “A1, A2, A3” and so on. The presence of a numeric index (the “1, 2, 3” part) makes it more obvious how many holes have to be filled.

Signposts

Some of the scenes are signposted, i.e. fixed in place by another scene. If, in scene A7, character A sends a message to B and C, the B / C scene(s) in which those messages are received should follow scene A7. They don’t have to be B7 and/or C7 – B8 or whatever would be perfectly acceptable – but B6 would be a problem.

The signposts define both the length of the inserted plot points and where in the adventure they have to take place. this in turn restricts the content that will ‘fit’, and that in turn means that the ‘shape’ of that content is defined by the signposts.

It’s no good inserting a three-scene complication if you only have two empty scene-slots to fill. And even if that weren’t a problem, it will often be the case that the empty slots are non-consecutive in sequence.

Sometimes you have to add an ‘A’ scene or two just to make enough space to properly pad out the B, C, and D plot threads. That’s certainly what happened in the course of plotting Lucifer Rising.

The Hand-wave

However, there are times when you can eliminate an empty slot just by hand-waving a particular scene out of existence. Three scenes will certainly fit into two slots if you can hand-wave the middle one. Or perhaps an entire set of shortfalls can be eliminated by hand-waving one of the “A” scenes.

Some scenes should never be hand-waved – any scene in which a PC has to make a decision, for example. It’s far more acceptable to hand-wave the consequences of a decision, employing alternate forms of a scene and its content that reflect the choice made – insofar as the possible options are not too many in number.

There’s often a lot of playing around before balance is achieved.

Linearity vs Granularity

There are two fundamental approaches to crafting material to fit the shape of the plot threads indicated by the signposts. The Linear approach is to break down each thread, playing around with it until you get the right number of scenes within the thread. The Granular approach is to deal with all the “3” scenes, then move on to all the “4” scenes, and so on. This is the sequence in which they will take place when the adventure is actually played.

Neither approach, we have found, is entirely satisfactory or complete; a combination is often the most useful answer. We usually break the basic plot thread down using the linear approach and then fill out the content – narrative blocks, conversations, etc – in the granular fashion. This enables tone and pacing to be matched up within a particular Sequence – which in turn helps to balance the spotlight distribution.

This can provide additional tonal information that helps to define the content of any signposted ‘gaps’, which is why the approach is more useful, while placing strong emphasis on the coherent flow of action through each thread.

It’s more useful for the content of an inserted scene to contrast with the defined content that accompanies it in a given sequence. You don’t want all the plot threads encountering setbacks at the same time; you want thread A to encounter a setback and resolve it just as thread B is encountering a setback, and so on.

Emotional Roller-coasters

It’s sometimes helpful to consider these plot threads to be emotional roller-coasters that are in simultaneous operation – you don’t want them all to peak at the same time, or none of them will stand out.

The emotional intensity of a scene is also a factor in judging the balance of spotlight distribution, and is something that hasn’t really been mentioned so far. This perspective helps take that into account.

It also produces a natural ebb and flow both within a single Sequence and across several Sequences, in which one plot thread will briefly dominate before yielding the spotlight to another.

In the long run, the spotlight focus will even out, but in the shorter term, variation can be tolerated, even welcomed, because it elevates each plot thread (and the PC who is the focus of that plot thread) in prominence, one at a time, giving each the chance to shine.

Balancing across multiple Sequences

This process of balancing with a tolerance for drift from the ideal over multiple sequences naturally balances on the larger scale to a satisfactory standard; this is because it will be clear to the players that the deviations are story-derived, and that everyone has a share of that story that is reasonable for that specific story.

Balancing within an Act – group sequences

But this technique only works when the party are separated and pursuing individual objectives and plot threads. It needs modification to serve once a group has assembled in furtherance of some common objective.

An initial balance, and a critical one, is to ensure that each character has some specific contribution to make to the achievement of those shared goals. In some stories, this alone is enough to achieve a satisfactory balance. In some cases, though, such as Lucifer Rising, this is not enough because there is no direct contribution from one or more of the PCs.

The problem character in this case is the C character; as noted earlier, the others have significant parts to play in resolving the plotline.

When this occurs, there are two additional steps that are needed – the first is to ensure spotlight balance at the campaign level (see below), and the second is to ensure that the character in question has more instances of being a supporting character within the plotline than any of the others, using quantity of contributions to overcome the deficit in primary focus.

Sometimes we have achieved this by making the character in question – and it’s not the same character on every occasion – a communications hub. Sometimes, we achieve it by making them a conduit for essential information. Sometimes we use an NPC with whom that character will particularly relate or connect. And sometimes – relatively rarely – we are able to make the character’s non-involvement a central plot point.

That last requires some further explanation, I think. If you have a character who is an expert in something – let’s assume they are an expert in the supernatural, for example – and there is an event with multiple possible explanations, once of which is supernatural in nature, then a negative finding by that expert regarding the event can state more about what the event is not than any number of positive contributions by others.

In it’s own way, then, sometimes the lack of a direct contribution to the solution is as useful to the group as a whole as any other contribution.

Wider Interactions

The same technique can also be used on a smaller scale to balance temporary shortfalls in spotlight share.

It only stands to reason that every NPC encountered should relate to one PC more than the others, just by virtue of their particular circumstances, identity, or personality; recognizing this and harnessing it gives you another tool to employ for evening out spotlight share.

This sometimes requires fine-tuning or expansion of the characterization of NPCs. Often, you can hang such interactions on the smallest of details – the character may have spent a brief time in a place that was formative for the PC, and so have come to become a supporter of the same football team as the PC, for example. Or they may share a social issue, or a political opinion, or a love of the same specific foodstuff or cuisine. Or a form of music that the NPC and the PC have in common. Or any of a dozen other pieces of trivia.

What’s that? Your players haven’t generated such trivia?

No problem. Most players won’t have any objection to your adding such color to their characters, especially if it ‘fits’ with the decisions they have already made. For example, if a PC has a preference for supporting underdogs, it should not take much research to pick a team in an appropriate sport that are perennial under-achievers, whose fans live for the day when it ‘all comes good’.

For a long time here in Australia, the AFL team of St Kilda would have fit this description – and I know that, despite knowing almost nothing about the sport. (Actually, my co-GM is a fan of the sport, so I’ve picked up a little more than ‘almost nothing’ over the last 20 years or so, but my awareness of this fact predates this heightened knowledge by decades).

Who put their hand up to state that they can’t simply look things like that up because their game is set in a fantasy world, and they don’t even know what the sports are that are played there?

What an excuse to get creative!

The most important thing to do is to be aware of which characters need a little extra spotlight for a little while and create whatever background material you need to make that happen.

When possible, you can even let the player come up with the material you need – you simply ask the question (in advance of needing the answer) without telling them why, and make notes of the answers.

For example, we once got all our PCs to decide which newspapers they read regularly so that we could insert a story relevant to the current plotline in one of them – again, making that character a conduit for information that the PCs otherwise would not have had. That specific method won’t work in a fantasy campaign, but there are others that are the equivalent.

“What Temple do you routinely visit?” – and then you have an NPC with the information that you want the PCs to have attend the same Temple even if they don’t do so regularly,, have them bump into the PC and start to gossip/chat. Let them impart three or four partial stories – one of which happens to be the relevant information.

Balancing within a Campaign

We’re always aware of who the dominant drivers of a plotline are going to be within an overall plotline. In the case of Lucifer Rising, as I explained earlier, it starts as an A plotline and morphs into a D plotline with major contributions by B and C in the middle.

The current adventure – if I were to use the same coding scheme – starts out being fairly evenly spread amongst A, B, C, and D, but becomes a strongly C-oriented plotline without much warning.

We keep adventure synopses on index cards so that we can shuffle them around as necessary. These summaries include the PCs that we expect to dominate. According to those cards, the plotline planned to follow Lucifer Rising is “The Temple Of Nitrocris” – but I think we will reshuffle them, because that is another C-focused plotline, and I think we need a “B”-focused plotline first.

Equitable balancing of the distribution of the spotlight never happens by accident, but – used properly – the need can be a spur to creativity, and can unlock a richer and more diverse continuity. These are all good attributes to have within a campaign!

Non-exclusion

I wanted to particularly emphasize, in closing, that making a plotline, or a group scene, or an encounter, or an Act, or a Sequence, dominated by a particular PC does not mean that the other PCs are excluded. This approach either gives them their own narrative thread – even if that’s a “b”-plot – or gives them a role to play in the primary plotline, even if that isn’t as central a role as the featured character.

The spotlight is a tool, a constructed perspective that assists in creating inclusiveness for all your PCs. It’s just that it’s an incredibly useful one if nuanced correctly.

Campaign Mastery has already hosted the Blog Carnival once this year, but when Scot (who runs the Carnival for us) asked me to fill an empty slot, how could I say no? Especially when I already had a list of carnival subjects to draw on?

So, this is Art-spiration. Pick a painting or drawing and get inspired by it.

It’s that simple.

You could use your chosen image as a metaphor and create a character for your game world to reflect it, or a location, or an adventure. Or you could take the image more literally. Or anything in between.

To help, I have provided 21 images below, many by some the greatest artists of history – but you don’t have to use any of them, you can use this as an excuse to go exploring somewhere like DeviantArt or Pinterest, or an appropriate reference book like the one to the left, on the Brothers Hildebrandt (not many copies left, so shop quickly if interested) — and find your own.

It’s completely up to you.

So, on with the 21 images – most of them in no particular order.
 

Galatea Of The Spheres by Salvadore Dali:

Dali painted this image of his wife as a series of spheres in a three-dimensional lattice – a literal representation of the notion that she was his world. But this image also depicts atomic theory through the prism of renaissance art, according to the artist himself – and who better to describe his source of inspiration?

According to Wikipedia, Dali wanted the painting to be displayed on an easel that had been owned by French painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Messonier, in a suite of three rooms called the Palace Of The Winds in the Dali Museum in Figueres; his wishes were fulfilled, and it remains on display there to this day, though it has at least once been transported to another location (the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia) for display for a limited time.

The name Galatea usually refers to a Sea Nymph of classical mythology who was renowned for her virtue, but other interpretations have been offered.

Dali, of course, is the most renowned member of the surrealist art movement, and many have drawn inspiration from his most famous works, especially the melting clocks of The Persistence Of Memory. He died on January 23, 1989, so his work will be under copyright restrictions until 2073. In addition to sculptures, 3-dimensional objects, designs, and sketches, he is credited with the creation of more than 1600 paintings.

I thought seriously about offering up the melting clocks, but decided that the image was so ubiquitous – it’s practically synonymous with the term “Surreal” – that people might already have wrung as much inspiration from it as they could, and so a different choice might be more useful.
 

Old Man In An Armchair (possibly a portrait of Jan Amos Comenius 1665), by Rembrandt

Rembrandt van Rijn is so famous as an artist that many people will know the name and the occupation of its famous owner without having the faintest idea of his nationality. For the record, he was Dutch, and is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art. Rembrandt died in 1669 at the age of 63.

Rembrandt’s works include landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, biblical and mythological themes, and animal studies – but he is best known for his portraits, both of others and of himself. In fact, the latter are considered a form of autobiography, constantly reflecting his changing circumstances and moods.

It is now accepted that he produced more than 300 paintings, almost 400 etchings, and around 2000 drawings. Some have attributed more than 600 paintings to him. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that he often had his students copy his works, especially his self-portraits, as part of their education in art. Eliminating as many of these as possible has reduced the number of self-portraits accepted as being by the artist himself from about 90 to 40-odd.

This portrait, presented here in a cropped close-up form, is housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. It’s reasonable to expect that it was originally brighter and richer in detail, but it is now partially obscured by varnish that has darkened with age. There are slight differences in the attribution date for the creation of the painting, but it was either 1660 or thereabouts.

His most famous work is The Night Watch, also known as The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, and I almost chose that as my ‘inspirational offering’, but opted for an image whose subject could be from just about any era – but which is full of personality.
 

The Scream, Edvard Munch

If ever a painting needed no introduction, it’s this one – though there are several images that I have selected that probably fall within that classification! The artist, Edvard Munch, is considered one of the pioneers or forerunners of the expressionist art movement, which needs no further explanation after you’ve seen the painting.

The sensational story of its theft and recovery made headlines around the world a few years back.

The Scream has completely overshadowed every other work by the Norwegian Artist, and is one of a handful of images that have extensively infiltrated western cultural awareness (like Dali’s The Persistence Of Memory, mentioned earlier). Three cultural references stand out as evidence of the extent of this recognition: The mask in the Scream movie series was inspired by The Scream, as were (in part) the appearance of “The Silence” in Dr Who, and the emoji for ‘screaming in fear’ is a representation of the principal figure in the painting.
 

Salvator Mundi (cropped closeup) by Leonardo Da Vinci

I was tempted to use Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which is another of those iconic images; I was not tempted at all to offer up Da Vinci’s most famous paintings, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, because they seemed too narrow in focus to be capable of sufficient breadth of interpretation.

Ultimately, I selected this image of Jesus, “Salvator Mundi” is Latin for “Savior Of The World”, because it was sufficiently closely-cropped that it became a generic face, capable of being interpreted in many different ways. In fact, the close-up suggests an entirely different emotional flavor / personality to that of the portrait as a whole.

The painting was thought to be a copy of an original for many years, which had been subjected to overpainting at some point in its history, disguising it’s legitimacy. “Overpainting” is the process of adding layers of paint to “improve” or “repair” a damaged painting. Eventually, it’s nature was discovered and it was restored, but there are still a few who question it’s provenance.

it was sold at auction by Christie’s, New York, in 2017 for US$450.3 million, making it the most expensive painting ever sold. You can see the complete image at this link.
 

Dawning – the ‘Queen of the Clippers’ by Montague Dawson

Montague Dawson was a British artist famed for his maritime artworks; his most famous painting depict sailing ships, especially clipper ships and warships of the 18th and 19th centuries. He died in 1973. he is noted for the strict accuracy of the nautical details in his works.

I chose this image because I wanted to include a sailing ship under sail in the range, and this was one of the most expressive. Despite the title, to my eye, the sea itself is the star focal point of the work; the ship is the second most important, but it is dwarfed by the immensity of wind and wave. Others would disagree with this assessment.

There are two different attitudes toward ships by sailors – one is that the ship is more important than the medium through which it sails, and the other is that the medium is more important and the vessel is merely the necessary means of safe immersion within the medium. Which is to say that some sailors love the ship, and others love the sea more.

These attitudes are often reflected in the attitudes of people in sci-fi movies and novels toward space, especially deep space or interstellar space; I see no reason why they would not also apply to those who explore planar spaces and cosmology. For some, the planes would be fascinating in and of themselves, while for others, they are just places, and it’s what you can do there that is more interesting or significant.

For that matter, I can see this being replicated by merchants in a trade caravan – for some, the caravan is just a means to an end, for others it is the mercantile activity that exists only to make it possible for them to live a vagabond life that most would nevertheless consider respectable.

The dichotomy between these perspectives seems perfectly and profoundly represented by this image, and that’s what earns it a place in this collection.
 

The Grove – Monhegan by George Bellows

George Bellows was an American painter with a realist style, best known for his depictions of urban life in New York City. Monhegan is an island in the Gulf of Maine, about 12 nautical miles (22 km) off the mainland. In the mid-19th century, an Artist Colony was founded and by 1890, was well-established. Summer visitors from the New York School Of Art and Pennsylvania Academy Of The Fine Arts regularly visited and found inspiration there, including Bellows; this 1911 painting is one result.

There’s a phenomenon in art that is familiar to every painter and anyone else who appreciates the craft: what you see up close is NOT the same as what you see when you view a painting from a distance.

The splashes of color and light blend together to form a photo-realistic impression that vanishes when you get up close and can see how the painting is actually put together. This painting is a great example of this phenomenon, which didn’t really enter art until the impressionists of the 19th century. The ‘old masters’ had a far more realistic style with smooth gradations of tone and color, as shown by the closeup of the Da Vinci earlier.

The big advantages that the more modern style permits is speed, enabling the capture of an impression or the suggestion of motion, in contrast to the almost forced stillness of the older works. The qualities of light are another aspect of reality that is often better expressed through the style of the impressionists, and their successors.

This work was chosen because I thought it important that a landscape be one of the images offered, from a thumbnail of roughly the size of the smaller image; it was only when I saw the larger version that it became clear that this effect was being exhibited.

That means that in addition to its content, this image can be considered symbolic of false appearances and deception in all its guises. A serendipitous bonus that amply justifies it’s presence in this collection of inspirational works.
 

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

Friedrich was a German painter in the 19th-century Romantic Landscape movement, and is generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. According to Wikipedia, he is ‘best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures standing before night skies, morning mists, barren trees, or gothic ruins’.

All of which should be fertile sources of inspiration for fantasy GMs!

Painted around 1817 after Friedrich experienced a hike in the Saxon Switzerland, this is one of Friedrich’s most famous works; I could easily have chosen any of a half-dozen other paintings but there were two compelling reasons for selecting this one.

First, the figure and the landscape are of equal prominence in this painting, which is not always the case in Freidrich’s works; this permits greater variety of inspirations to derive from it. And second, the silhouetted figure is such that with a little imagination, this could almost be a figure in mail, be it chain or plate. The staff or walking stick by the figures side could be a scabbarded sword.
 

Wivenhoe Park, Essex by John Constable

When it comes to bucolic English landscapes, John Constable is the iconic artist. Wikipedia, in describing this painting, offers: ‘Constable’s art is always penetrated by longing, melancholy and a yearning for the simple, natural life, for a bucolic, pastoral idyll, to rural subjects and aspects of life in the countryside, a “golden age” when people lived together in harmony with nature, a world on its way of disappearing when he painted his landscapes thanks to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution’.

In terms of landscapes, there are three dominant sources of inspiration for Fantasy authors and GMs – Medieval France, Medieval England, and the forests and mountains of Medieval Germany. Quite often, these form a melange of impressions in which none of the sources are truly represented. Make no mistake, these are quite different in the fine details, but these nuances are often lost to anyone who doesn’t look closely at the historical references.

I looked for a Constable quite deliberately to offer a contrast to all of these sources, but still an image that is not inappropriate to parts of the typical fantasy environment. Farmland and herds of domesticated livestock – cows and sheep and horses – are going to be fairly ubiquitous in fantasy settings, but are often not strongly represented in the images that GMs use for inspiration (though that may be less true of English GMs who have grown up with Constable).

This painting was commissioned by the owner of Wivenhoe Park, Major General Francis Slater-Rebow, who was among the artist’s first patrons. Wivenhoe Park is 200 acres (81 ha) of parkland, purchased by the Rebow family before 1734. The seven-year-old daughter of the Major General is depicted in a donkey cart to the left. The completion of this work earned Constable enough money to marry his long-time love, Mary Bicknell. That adds an extra layer of meaning to it that can be drawn upon for inspiration, making it symbolic of the price that we’re willing to pay for love.
 

Excerpt from The School Of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

The School of Athens is a fresco in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. It depicts a congregation of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists from Ancient Greece.

The list of famous figures (some mythological) who appear in the full fresco include Pythagoras, Socrates, Alexander The Great, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, Apollo, Minerva, Diogenes of Sinope, Raphael, Zoroaster, and Frederico Il Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua. Note that most of these were not contemporaries!

Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo are also featured, as Plato and Heraclitus (who few will have heard of before), respectively. The cropped version shown focuses on Plato and Aristotle.

Setting aside the combination of brown and blue, often considered a fashion faux pas in modern times, the textual difference between the red cotton robes of the Plato figure (on the left) and the silken folds of blue worn by Aristotle (on the right) immediately caught my attention; this is a level of subtlety and detail that is often overlooked by casual viewing.

Rafael (full name Rafael Sanzio da Urbino) is one of the foremost Italian painters to have ever lived, and is part of the High Renaissance. Although died very young, a mere 37 years of age, he was enormously productive during his lifetime, resulting in his leaving behind a large body of work.

I strongly desired to include an image of either the Roman Empire or the Ancient Greek that preceded it, but the art of both was relatively primitive by modern standards, and not representative of how we envisage those cultures, thanks to movies and TV (unlike their sculptures). But in searching a usable image, I found this cropped excerpt from The School Of Athens,. which neatly ticks the Imperial boxes.
 

Deutsch: Le Chemin creux by Georges Seurat

Seurat is a little more obscure than many of the artists represented so far. He was a French Post-Impressionist who developed the painting techniques known as chormoluminarism (the separation of colors into individual dots or patches that interact optically) and pointilism (using small and distinct dots of color which are applied in patterns to form an image).

I’ve previously talked about Pointilism in two articles:

• Let’s Twist Again – Eleven types of Plot Twist for RPGs pt 2, which features it in Twist Eight, and
   
• Writing to the limits of longevity, which uses it in a sidebar about half-way through the article (without ever naming the style).

 
Like newspaper photographs from last century (boy, that makes me feel old), Pointilism relies on a form of optical illusion to create what we perceive to be an image with variable tonal qualities, and I’ve always been fascinated by optical illusions of all kinds..For that matter, inkjet and laser printers work in exactly the same way!

So I knew that I definitely wanted an example of Pointilism within this list, and Seurat was the most famous exponent of that style; but his most famous works – Bathers at Asnières and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte contained subjects that were too linked in time and place to Seurat’s era and to Paris.

Le Chemin creux suffers from neither of these drawbacks. It depicts a downhill track through a field that is surrounded by trees; and there seems to be some sort of building up ahead but that is so vaguely defined that it’s hard to make out; it could be a cottage or a mansion or anything in-between, a barn or a boat-house, a trading post or a timber mill. And there appear to be mountains in the distance (personally, I think it could use a touch more contrast, but that’s a purely personal opinion). This could be just about anywhere in Europe and anytime in the last 800 or more years.
 

American Gothic by Grant DeVolson Wood

Another iconic image. Wood was inspired to paint it by the house in the background, adding figures that he ‘fancied should live in [such a] house’ – a farmer standing beside his daughter (often mistakenly assumed to be his wife). The models for the painting were Wood’s real-life sister and their family dentist.

It has been widely parodied over the years, in everything from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to The Simpsons and Green Acres, not to mention Mad Magazine, Desperate Housewives, and Sponge bob Squarepants (!), amongst many others. I also seem to remember it showing up in an episode of Scooby-Doo, but could be wrong!

Painted in 1930, it was sold to the Art Institute of Chicago in the same year, now part of the ‘Friends of American Art’ Collection.
 

Boreas by John WIlliam Waterhouse

Waterhouse was an English artist noted for depicting women from both Ancient Greek Mythology and Arthurian Legend in his works. Boreas was the Greek Goddess of the North Wind, and the painting depicts a young girl being buffeted by the wind in a spring landscape.

The painting was somewhat-famously lost for 90 years before being rediscovered and put up for sale in the 1990s, achieving a record price for works by this artist at the time of US$1,294,000.

The style of clothing could be from just about any era, and anywhere in southern or central Europe. The girl could be anyone from a princess to a gypsy.
 

Sci-fi 3D characters by LosBionicos

I very much wanted to include some images of a more directly sci-fi / fantasy orientation, and this – despite the name – could be either. I’m not sure if that’s another character on the nose of the frog, or if the name is a misnomer.

While it’s clearly more photo-realistic, there is nevertheless something about this work that reminds me of Studio Ghibly – maybe it’s the smile, reminiscent of the cat-bus in My Neighbor Tortoro, I’m not sure!

But that smile could easily be seen as a more sinister one, so this character study could offer many possibilities.
 

Fyrtårn for Storebælt by Anton Melbye

The English translation of the title is “Lighthouse at Stora Balt”, and that presents a problem, because this is actually the lighthouse at Eddystone. The artist (full name Daniel Herman Anton Melbye) clearly employed artistic license in more ways than is usual!

He was a Danish artist and photographer who specialized in maritime scenes. I very much wanted a seascape to be one of the images offered in this collection, and the earlier image of the clipper ship did not quite fit the bill. This image of the Lighthouse in pounding surf and inclement weather scratched that itch.

Like most GMs, Anton strove for both realism and drama, enhancing his subjects with dramatic lighting and weather effects, especially of storms. It’s for that reason that this was the work chosen (from several candidates) for inclusion here.
 

hd-wallpaper-4291517 (trees-path-stars-galaxy-starry_sky) by Darkmoon Art

For most of the more modern images that I wanted to include, I turned to my usual clip art provider, Pixabay. This is another image that blurs the lines between fantasy and science-fiction, depicting a stone or wooden park bench in a forest beneath a tunnel through space. Since no-one is visible, it suggests that this is an incoming portal – or a permanent fixture of the location. Where might it lead, and who made it?
 

Richard Westall Landscape Art by David Mark

Okay, so the name is a little confusing – is the artist Richard Westall or David Mark or are they both the same person? If they aren’t, did David Mark have the authority to publicly post Richard Westall’s work, or is this a stolen image? — or it might all be completely innocent, one of the names being a psedonym for the other that is no longer in use, but lingers through past usage.

Who knows?

I have to give all concerned the benefit of the doubt, because I could not go past this dark and dangerous forest with busy little stream emerging from it.

While this could be a sci-fi pic, it has a far stronger fantasy flavor to it.
 

hd-wallpaper-3077928 (fantasy-beautiful-dawn-sunset-sky) by Peter Pyw

Ah, a good old flying city! And a woman in white! Unquestionably fantasy in orientation, but is the focal point the woman, the city, or the relationship between the two?

The city is tethered to the ground using chains. Or are they very distant staircases viewed side-on? And what if the city isn’t flying at all, but an illusion built into the terrain makes it look as though it is, as a defensive disguise? Maybe it’s not a city after all – just the residence of a high-level illusionist and his support staff. So many possibilities, so little time…
 

Warrior-4458063 by Mark Frost, a.k.a. BlackDog1966

A question-begging image. But in place of any lengthy exposition, I thought readers might be better served by a closeup of the right-hand-side. So:

Why is the warrior crying? What has she just had to do, or is she about to have to do that would make her so upset? I sense an epic tale coming on!
 

castle-7003230 by Enqique Meseguer, a.k.a. darksouls1

Is there any more iconic fantasy image than that of a Castle? Disney clearly didn’t think so, that’s why Sleeping Beauty’s castle is the centerpiece of their theme parks! This one is a little unusual, in fantasy terms, in having square towers; although those happened in real history, they are not so common in fantasy art

Square towers are easier to build, but comparatively weak unless an enemy is foolish enough to attack one of the corners, at least compared to round towers, where bricks are arranged in layers of rings; strike the latter, and all he other bricks in the ring try to hold the one struck in place, whereas if you strike the flat surface of the square tower, virtually the whole force goes through the immediate surface.

To compensate for this, square towers can have walls that are up to three times as thick as those of a round tower. But that either severely restricts the space inside the tower, or forces that strength and resilience to be compromised.

The design thus tells you something about the people who designed and built the castle. And that makes them inspiring.
 

Robot Woman 3010309 by 0fjd125gk87.

The penultimate image in this set, this robotic woman is supposedly crying – but I’ve never seen tears travel in discrete droplets like that. One tear, yes – several, no. So perhaps they aren’t tears at all – they could be tattoos, or assembly screws. Not that they are going to be very visible at the scale I am restricted to.

So, let’s confound that restriction and again look at a closeup:

 

The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

The Starry Night (often abbreviated to just ‘Starry Night’) was painted in June 1889 by the Dutch painter, Van Gogh, and depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village.

I’ve left this image until last because it’s the one that inspired me to offer up an example of the sort of creativity that this whole collection is in furtherance of.

Specifically,. I was think of this painting and how it uses streaks of color in the same way that pointilism uses dots, and trying to imagine what it would look like if the starts really looked like this image. And then I thought –

What if the streaks were actually Elementals streaking through the sky? What would you call it? Planet of the Elementals has a nice ring to it….
 

So, 21 sources of inspiration, and these (of course) merely scratch the surface. So pick an image that inspires you, and make something of it :)

Don’t forget to drop me a line here in the comments section so that I know to include you in the end-of-month round-up – sometimes backlinks work, sometimes they don’t.

And most importantly of all, have fun!
 

BONUS CONTENT:

My original notes on this topic included a few examples of a slightly different take on the challenge. While not strictly applicable to the blog carnival challenge as described above, I thought they might still be of value to readers, so I’m including them here as an extra bonus.

• eg: Pointilism = hyperspace shock – everything breaks apart into tiny clusters of color, good for general impressions and viewing at a distance, useless at reading things like, oh, instruments and targetting sensors and warning displays…
   
• eg: Cubism = the way everything looks when you force yourself to occupy the “fourth dimension”.
   
• eg: Munch’s The Scream – a woman (or a man?) afflicted with brain-eating worms crosses a bridge, screaming in agony, only to collapse at the feet of the party Cleric – who discovers (to his horror) that these creations of [insert name of favorite evil demon or devil here] cannot be cured with clerical magic, being purely infernal in nature. So begins a quest that the Temples cannot put off any longer, to eradicate the [Demonic/Devilish] curse once and for all…
   
• eg: Sea storm-scene – a sea voyage, complete with pirates, storms, giant calamari, rum, and buried treasure! And, just for fun, let’s make the giant sea-life in question naturally armored…
   
• Bonus points for merging something utterly modern like Warhol’s soup cans with D&D! Maybe a wall display containing hundreds of empty vials arranged in precise lines with exacting spacing, labeled “Healing Potions I Have Known’?

  No? Then let’s see what you can come up with!