Image by silviarita from Pixabay, small crop by Mike

A couple of days ago I came across a Quora post by Deb Paul describing some experiments exploring hope as a motivational force. The experiments in question were both revolting and enlightening, and I immediately shared the post with the Dungeon Masters Deep Dive group because I could see a connection to group behavior in a TTRPG. It seems a lot of others found the thought compelling, too, because it’s received 17 20 23 24 30 likes in very short order – within the context of this small subset of Quora users, that’s a runaway success.

Hope: The Experiment

The experiment took place in the 1950s (when, it must be assumed, people had a different sensibility when it came to these things).

Professor Curt Richter filled a half-dozen large glass jars half-full of water and placed a rat in each, then timed how long it took them to drown. The size of the jug prevented the rat from clinging to its sides or jumping out. On average, he found, they would give up and sink after about 15 minutes.

With the baseline thus established, Richter then repeated the experiment, but with a twist – just before the rat gave up due to exhaustion, a researcher would pluck them out of the jar, dry them off, let them rest for a timed couple of minutes – then put them back into the jars for a second exposure.

It was important that each rat be rescued only once, so that what took place could not be considered a learned behavior or conditioned reflex. What the researchers wanted to know was how long the rats would continue to swim, the second time around before they reached their physical limits – in other words, how long hope alone could sustain them.

In ignorance of the actual results, most people would expect the rats to swim for at least the same 15 minutes, maybe even a bit longer. Others, more pessimistic, would undoubtedly question whether those couple of minutes rest were sufficient recuperation time, or would only partially restore the endurance of the animals, resulting in a quicker demise.

The average saved-rat swam, the second time around, for sixty hours. One lasted for a full 81 hours. Saving the rats once had given them enough hope that the same thing might happen to sustain them for 240 times as long in the water. The conclusion drawn was that since the rats believed they would eventually be rescued, they could push their bodies way beyond the limits that they previously thought possible.

This experiment is often cited in books about the power of positive thinking, and occasionally in books about cancer survival when they talk about the impact of positivity. (For my money, it isn’t referenced often enough when governments discuss welfare programs – the provision of just a little hope can have a multi-fold “bread upon the waters” impact on citizen’s lives, the extinguishing of that hope has impacts equally profound – at least, that’s how I interpret the experimental results. Or, to put it another way, ‘you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’. But that’s just my opinion).

Application to TTRPGs

People are vastly more complicated than rats, it must be said. And the coalescence that is a player acting ‘in character’ is even more complex, still. Nevertheless, if it’s an even partially-correct truism of human psychology that hope can give a capacity to endure, while a lack of hope is often a self-fulfilling prophecy – and I consider this amply proven through masses of anecdotal evidence – then it must be true of players and their characters, too.

The experiences may be visceral rather than actual, but identification between player and character is sufficiently strong that an effect would be felt, however diluted. It was this thought that led me to share the answer with the DM’s group on Quora, and which underpins today’s article, which will examine the relevance of the thought and the impact of this phenomenon on RPG campaigns.

Chronologically-sensitive applicability

Depending on the game system, when a player first starts playing a character, they have relatively little investment in that character. His loss can thus be written off with relatively little psychological impact.

When the player has had the character for a long time, their psychological investment is huge, and a threat to the character’s survival can have very real impacts, and an escape from certain death can be almost as exciting and thrilling as the real thing might be. I’ve discussed before how the gaps between PC and player, and player and Game System, would provide a mitigating factor, holding the character’s situation at somewhat of an arms’ length. What’s more, with greater expertise and experience comes greater capability, which also attenuates any sense of threat.

But there has to be an intersection point between these two conditions, in which identification is strong enough for a player-PC complex identity to be vulnerable, while expertise is still sufficiently weak that it can be overcome. This critical juncture will arrive at different points in every campaign, and is directly influenced by choice of game system – some game mechanics make the interface between character and player more superficial, while others mandate such strong investment in a character during the character creation process that identification between the player and character is almost immediate.

I have identified three situations that can arise at this critical point, and thinking about the possible nuances and consequences divided the last into three variants, for a total of five possible scenarios. Every campaign, at its critical point, will fall into one or more of these categories, which I have labeled 1, 2, 3a, 3b, and 3c, respectively.

1. Critical TPKs

In scenario one, a TPK (total-party kill) takes place at the critical point, but the campaign doesn’t end; it reboots or carries on, with new PCs.

Clearly, this would have an impact on the approach of the players in the subsequent campaign, making them more risk-averse; the GM has shown himself to be a ruthless arbiter of fate, so players will be less inclined to tempt such fate going forward. Having started to grow accustomed to increasing levels of character ability, they are also likely to feel acutely more vulnerable from ‘day one’ of the subsequent campaign.

The combination would have an immediate effect on the players, but – equally importantly – it would have an immediate effect on the next campaign. Two of them, in fact.

One: it would bring forward the critical point of the next campaign by making the players more sensitive to danger.

Two: it would delay the critical point of the next campaign by making the players more hesitant to become invested in the characters.

These would tend to oppose each other in terms of the critical phase, but would combine to make the next campaign far more difficult to GM. Engagement would be desultory and difficult to induce.

A GM could be forgiven for such a sequel being an abject failure. But some players might find it to be so little fun that they drop out of the hobby altogether.

Again, each campaign would be different in terms of the intensity of these effects, and there is a general mitigant which I’ll discuss later. So the picture is not all doom and gloom, which is why most players and GMs survive a TPK.

2. Critical character deaths

Scenario two kills some PCs, but not the whole party, and requires that the GM do nothing to rescue the surviving PCs or single out those who die. The impartiality demonstrated immediately becomes part of the expected style of the GM – a ‘hard but fair’ reputation that many GMs actively seek to cultivate. I’d go so far as to describe this as the baseline condition.

Those players whose characters died might be exposed to the same effects described in (1), but these would be contained and potentially negated by the fact that some survived; they just weren’t amongst the lucky ones. I have seen situations in which a character-class prejudice derives from the experience, however – certain classes being deemed more at-risk than others (front-line fighters because of their role within the party, rogues because of their party function, mages because they are always low on hit points – depending on what the player deems his character death most attributable to), which can be interpreted as a more delineated form of the problem. This problem can become more acute with repeated exposure; when that happens, it can indicate a problem with the GM’s approach, which unfairly targets one segment of the PC group, but it’s more likely that this a perceived problem (not an actual one).

At the same time, the survivors are likely to experience a diluted form of the (3c) effect, described below, making them more inclined to taking rash chances. This effect, too, would be moderated by the fact that not everyone survived the critical encounters.

The intersection of the two effects can create rifts between party members in terms of their approach to in-game problems – one group balking while the other is more willing to rush in where angels would feat to tread. Immediate remediatory efforts are required of the GM in the wake of such an event to permit the characters of the respective factions to reconcile these points of difference, but this is wasted effort if the PPK (partial-party kill) didn’t occur in the critical phase of the campaign. While it would be nice to imagine that every GM has sufficient fingers on the pulse of his campaign that he would recognize whether or not this was needed from general communications with the players, it just doesn’t always happen that way. There are likely to be subtleties of communication during the character creation process that might tip off the GM, for example, but if character creation takes place outside the regular game sessions, away from the communal gaming table, he will have far reduced chance to pick up on such signals, let alone to recognize them. It would not be at all uncommon for the GM to remain in blissful ignorance of a problem’s existence until it blows up in his face!

An additional complicating arrives in the form of the question (where relevant) of what power level the new arrivals should be – the same as the party average, the same as their old characters, something less, or complete novices. There are too many nuances to this question to look into it with any depth; suffice it to say that realism and fairness call for one answer, character parity and balance call for another, and most GMs try to compromise on some middle ground that they hope will satisfy both imperatives but usually ends up satisfying neither. Game system is both irrelevant to the question and critical to it – irrelevant in that a game system may or may not have articulated character levels, but those games that don’t have some other mechanism of dictating character expertise; critical because character advancement is often non-linear, amplifying any disparity between characters. Secondary problems can also manifest – there will be a natural tendency for the higher-level characters to hog the spotlight or occupy a dominant position in intra-party decision-making, for example.

The so-called ‘baseline’, then, is a turbulent and complex compound with its’ own unique set of issues for the GM to solve.

3a. The Absence Of Life-threat

Nobody dies. In fact, no-one is even placed under serious threat of dying.

This, too, becomes part of the signature ‘style’ of the GM – their campaigns are seen as problem-solving spaces, a place for puzzles and intellectual stimulation, with a perceived lack of passion and emotional engagement – a ‘safe’ game. While there can conceivably be a place for such a campaign style, for example when GMing for young children, it’s strictly theoretical – I’ve never seen anyone who actually utilizes this style. The safer you feel, the less need there is to hold yourself back. Risk-taking is easy when there is no risk perceived to exist.

I’ve occasionally been accused of doing so by critics, a charge that I strenuously deny. I look on my campaigns more as a collaborative novel, or a series of novels – most such are not all that enjoyable if a favored protagonist falls too early, but the threat, and the danger of doing so must always be present. I make sure that there is at least one way out of any predicament, especially if it’s potentially character-life threatening – but it’s up to the players to find their way through the maze to a valid solution, be it the one that I know or another, and my goal is always to make the experience an entertaining one for the participants. So there are definite life-threats to be overcome. This avoids the worst consequences of this scenario, but leaves my campaigns more vulnerable to scenario (3c) problems – a trade-off I’m happy to accept.

3b. Critical Deus-Ex-Machina Saves

The problems of case (3a) become even more acute and virulent if the GM makes the mistake of pulling the PCs buns out of the fire with a deus-ex-machina. Divine Intervention is always a temptation if the GM thinks that the danger to the PCs is unfair and not of their making, i.e. not attributable to player stupidity. Universally, it happens when the GM has become so invested in his campaign that it has become more important to him than fidelity to its purpose. Some beginners make this mistake from day one; in other cases, it waits until that one ‘special’ campaign comes along, but we’re all vulnerable to the occasional moment of weakness when ‘our babies’ are under existential threat. Since I adopted the perspective described in the previous paragraph, I’ve had far fewer such moments!

There’s another issue of game philosophy that gets entangled with any discussion of this subject at this point – are the PCs ‘special’ in some way, are they extraordinary, or are they ordinary citizens of their game world who become transformed through experiences into something more? I’ve run campaigns with both premises. The more extraordinary the PCs are supposed to be, the more baggage comes with that – Why? Are they the only ones? Why these characters and not those other ones? Who or what made them this way? Does this special status make others more inclined to shelter or protect them? Does the universe go out of its way to save them now and then? Do they have a manifest destiny? Does that intervene directly from time to time?

The whole concept of PCs being extraordinary is sometimes incorporated into the game system, either implicitly or explicitly. The latter has its own baggage, as shown above; but far worse are the cases where it isn’t explicitly stated, because these questions can then be comfortably ignored – right up to the point when they smack the GM between the eyes with the power of a freight train. Solving such complicated questions with first instincts rarely works out well; solving them in advance yields infinitely better answers. Worse still, players and GM can look at the same body of rules and reach diametrically opposite conclusions – building their (potentially flawed) assumptions into everything else they do, respectively. The incompatibilities can prove toxic to campaigns.

There can be a chicken-and-egg relationship to the whole question of extraordinary PCs that is relevant to this discussion – which came first, the deus-ex-machina rescue or the conception of the PCs as extraordinary because that protects the players’ investment in the GM’s world-view? A single mistake in this area can have campaign-devastating repercussions, so I am more inclined to think that it’s the panicky mistake that the GM makes when his campaign threatens to fall apart, especially in the case of a beginner, but that’s not always going to be the case.

3c. Borrowed Time

Perhaps the optimum outcome is a variation on the above, which complicates the whole question. That takes place when the PCs face an existential threat and overcome it on their own (perhaps following breadcrumbs laid down by the GM). This can create a sense that the PCs are living on ‘borrowed time’ and have to ‘make it count’ before their sands of time run out. This benefits the GM because there is no problem seen as too big for the PCs not to buy into it, boots and all – a depth of buy-on on the players parts that inclines them to dramatic action and big stories that are inherently fun to play (and GM). “Street-level problems? Huh – we’ll see your street level problems, flatten them, and pave over the top with good intentions.”

And therein lies the flaw in thinking this is the optimum solution – a fatalistic overconfidence that sees the PCs take bigger and bigger risks until one catches up with them. The resulting campaigns can be short, sharp, and explosively fun – while they last. They are a metaphoric game of Russian roulette with only one player – the campaign; sooner or later, it will crash and burn.

Unfortunately, that exhausts the logical possibilities, showing that there are NO outcomes from the critical campaign phase that don’t spawn problems, issues that can have effects that linger far beyond the campaign in question. It’s not going entirely too far to suggest that a GM’s respect as a legend of the table stems almost entirely from how well he solves the problems that emerge from the critical phase.

For example, I’ve known at least one GM who never ran a campaign with characters of less than 8th level (and usually 10th-plus); his justification was that this gave the PCs the capacity to get involved in serious problems within the game world, and – until now – I’ve always taken that justification at face value, even though it didn’t feel like ‘the whole story’. Now, I think that he was, either consciously or subconsciously, avoiding the critical phase in his campaigns, perhaps after getting burned a time or two.

I’ve spoken to other GMs whose campaigns never last beyond this same sort of point, coming to an end between 4th and 8th levels, and none of them have ever been able to give me an adequate explanation of ‘why’. I’m now of the opinion that its just a different solution to the same dilemma. Both are simply avoiding the problem, putting it into the ‘too hard’ basket.

GMs whose Campaigns have serious longevity can be expected to have (at least) muddled their way through these problems, perhaps without even noticing (due to the mitigating factor I’ve mentioned from time to time) – player experience.

The Leavening Of Experience

Just as a mental experiment, try this: Count up the number of GMs you’ve gamed under. Add 1/4 for every campaign you’ve played with the same GM, after the first. Now, round up. Add another 1 for every different game system you’ve played. The result is a rather arbitrary rating for how experienced you are as a player. My score comes out as somewhere in the vicinity of 24 or 25 – but I’ve been mostly a GM for the last 40-odd years. I have no doubt that some players could decimate that score after with just a handful of years under their belts!

The longer you play, the more that you have seen before, and the less perturbed you tend to be about things. PC died? Okay, isn’t the first time and won’t be the last. GM in over his head gets over-protective, or goes soft? Same story.

GMing for experienced players requires a different mind-set and creates a different experience to GMing a relative novice. If that novice is young, to boot, they have little life experience to buffer the impacts of these psychological effects – and are prone to magnify every problem encountered, to boot.

That doesn’t mean that the scenarios described aren’t a problem with more seasoned players – just that they are less of a problem.

Hope vs Overconfidence

The psychology of heroism also plays a part here. The British stiff upper lip can be said to be ‘endure until there is no longer any hope – and a little longer, just in case you’ve missed something in the gloom. Heroes have to believe that if they keep pushing back against the forces of darkness, sooner or later, something will break. That’s hope, whistling in the dark until it attracts someone with a lantern.

There’s a difference between those traits and a foolish overconfidence. Heroism leads to Adventure, regardless of game genre. It’s the difference between heroic epic fantasy and – well, no examples actually come to mind; every example I can think of is in the heroic fantasy mold, from Mission: Impossible to The Hobbit, from Conan to The Mummy, from Terminator to Alien to Avengers. Foolish Overconfidence leads to a crash-and-burn, to a Shakespearean tragedy, or a Greek tragedy – to wings of wax melting in the sun.

The ultimate difference: one is desirable (in controlled quantities according to taste and genre); the other is not.

Paranoia and Survivors’ Guilt

If you were a player and your party kept getting killed by the same GM, surely it’s reasonable to expect a paranoid “he’s out to get us” attitude to take hold? In terms of maintaining the fun, it sounds rather counterproductive to me.

Equally, if yours was the only character to survive a GM’s stress-testing of the party, I would expect the character to experience some level of survivor’s guilt (which is fine, that’s characterization and roleplay) but it would be only reasonable to expect some level of the same to be felt by the player of the surviving character, and that’s not beneficial. A certain level of objectivity, that isn’t calloused, needs to be maintained.

A Witches Brew: The Ghost At The Table

Circumstances play into experience inside each player’s head after a traumatic event to produce a psychological consequence. The circumstances are the past and can’t be altered; the experiences are also the past and can’t be changed. So the existence of consequences is an inevitability that the GM needs to confront, and manage.

However mitigated, the critical period produces a witches brew of stimulus and reaction; you can even think of the past as an extra player, an invisible ghost at your gaming table.

Solutions

It’s not enough at Campaign Mastery to point out problems and leave them sitting there, unresolved. Practical advice and solutions are required. So, let’s offer some – but I’m running out of time, and every campaign will be different, so there will be no one-size-fits-all solutions that aren’t very broad and general. Nevertheless, that’s a good start, so that’s what I’ll be offering.

Solution: Critical TPKs

Humans have had a long time to figure how best to manage the grieving process. It starts with an acknowledgment, a somber tone, and then a focus on achievement. If the death was in some non-literal medium, like an RPG, the grieving should be just as visceral and conducted through the same medium.

Start the rebooted/sequential campaign with a funeral – it doesn’t have to be for the lost PCs, but should be for someone who could be said to exemplify them in some way. Then recruit the new PCs to finish some unfinished task of the fallen NPC, or to exact retribution for the death, or otherwise to take action inspired in some way by the fallen. This does two things: it sublimates and encapsulates any feelings that might derive from the deaths of the old PCs and then it gives them a purposeful outlet, which just happens to lead them into the first adventure. The lost NPC might or might not mean anything to any of the PCs, it could be simply a random stranger to them – but they meet the description posted with the town criers or in the newspapers or pinned up on an appropriate noticeboard (or come close enough in their own minds to doing so), which has brought them together at that time and place. The quality they share might be a desperation, or a zeal for justice, or simply a willingness to take a risk in order to make a buck (or a gold coin). Or they might be responding to different adverts, each one pitched exactly correctly to lure them in. Those are inconsequential details; the important thing is that they were lured to the service, after which the pitch gets made to them – when it is hardest for them to turn it down.

There are variations possible – a dedication, a celebration, a birthday party – the specifics are malleable to fit the campaign, the society, and the game world. Pick one that works for you.

Solution: Paranoia

Paranoia is a lot harder to combat, and takes longer, and a multifaceted approach. First, the GM has to be overtly helpful for a while – “no need to roll for that, your character will figure it out sooner or later, deducing blah, blah, blah” or equivalent. Secondly, encounters in which failure don’t have the potential to kill or screw over the PCs should feature for a while. Let someone else (an NPC) wear any consequences. Let the players plans work to whatever extent they make sense, up to the point where the players discover the flaw in their logic and can formulate a fresh plan. Finally, any time that you have to rule against the interests of the party, have someone check the appropriate rules and pronounce their doom, erring on the side of the PCs just a little.

Think of it as a karmic redress. It won’t be forever, just for long enough to establish that you don’t pick on the players, that it’s not an us-vs-him situation. Then gradually segue back into making balanced calls, fudging die rolls as necessary to bring the fun.

Solution: Survivor’s Guilt

Assume that whatever the player is feeling, the character is feeling even more intensely. Have an NPC ‘diagnose’ the PC’s situation accordingly. This sublimates and encapsulates the negative emotional baggage, as previously described – then give it a productive outlet, but explicitly suggesting that outlet using the NPC. The survivor may choose to disregard this cue to externalize his survivor’s guilt, but it gets the player thinking along the right lines; eventually, he will come up with his own outlet if one is necessary. Sometimes, the appropriate prodding can be enough for the person to start getting over their problem – and putting it all on the shoulders of the character makes that easier for the player.

Solution: Excessive Caution & Hesitancy

The problems aren’t getting any easier! The best solution to this one that I have come across is to underplay the enemy NPCs for a while, then reduce awards because ‘that was too easy’. Once the players have started to get over any excessive caution, throw a problem their way that has a time-pressure involved; the players are sure to feel that pressure as pushing them towards making a mistake. Deliberately let the PCs succeed (after an appropriate amount of trouble, of course) just this once – when they see that the boldness necessary to deal with the time pressure didn’t end in disaster, a natural progression toward a more balanced posture will naturally begin. They will always be a little conservative, a little cautious; by now, that’s part of the PCs characterization, but it will become more balanced..

Solution: Overconfidence

The hardest problem to deal with of all those presented is overconfidence, because it requires the GM to walk the finest of lines – taking their confidence down a peg without going too far. Sometimes the easiest way to achieve this is to deliberately go too far and then re-balance things with the anti-paranoia or anti-hesitancy prescriptions. But that lacks finesse and makes it more likely that your manipulations will be detected by the players.

The Mastermind Assumption

My preferred solution is “The Mastermind Assumption.” This is a mastermind’s plan in which the different solutions that might be exploited by the PCs are discovered, one by one, to have been anticipated and closed off. The trick is to ensure that one of these ‘ruled out’ solutions only appears to be ruled out of the question; the assumption that the solution won’t work is therefore invalid, but this should not be discovered until the obvious ones have all been perceived as blocked by the PCs. This won’t happen in the course of a single adventure; it will (at the very least) be a small plot arc.

• In phase one of the plot arc, the MM’s moves to block a weakness in his plans is noticed;
• In phase two, a second such makes it clear that events are not occurring at random.
• In phase three, the PCs should learn of the MM’s objective (which they should actively NOT want him to achieve) and they may or may not learn his identity.
• In phase four, they actively search for information, identify the MM if they haven’t already done so, and start looking for ways to prevent his success. That sets the PCs up to have the overconfidence knocked out of them, as they discover that the move that first came to their attention was actually one of the LAST moves to be made by the MM, and that he now has them blocked at every turn.
• In phase five, they thrash about a bit and confirm that the MM has them stopped cold.
• At the 13th hour (eleventh if you’re feeling generous), the now thoroughly-deflated PCs discover the flawed assumption, the one mistake that the MM has made, the one area in which his plans’ protection is not absolute. It should NOT be easy for them, by any means, even now – just possible. This revelation may be a distinct phase six, or it may be the conclusion of phase five, that’s up to you and the specific adventure.
• In the final phase, the PCs do whatever they have to do to exploit the window of vulnerability, even as the MM realizes his mistake and starts moving to counter it. This ramps up the pressure on the PCs so that they will be finding things anything but too easy. But the MM isn’t quite in time, even though the outcome hangs in the balance for a while, the PCs win in the end – perhaps paying a price in the process.

Phases one and two hook the PCs in and phases three and four take advantage of their overconfidence. Phase five knocks the stuffing out of that overconfidence, while the final phase rebuilds confidence to a balanced level. This perfectly meets the prescription offered at the start of this section. I’ve run variations on this outline at least a dozen times over the years – sometimes revealing that the first moves were, in fact, noticed by the PCs at the time and completely mis-attributed, but that’s an artistic flourish, not a necessity.

At it’s shortest, I’ve run this as a 1-2 punch (two adventures); at it’s longest, it occupied about five real-time years (but drew on plot seeds planted eight years earlier that I had floating around for whenever I found use for them), and the final phase was a five game-session epic! Master the Mastermind Assumption; it will amply reward you.

Campaign platform stability

The objective with all these solutions is the same – to do whatever you need to do in order to deal with the legacy of the last campaign critical state that your players experienced, whether that is in the current campaign or a previous one, whether you were the GM or someone else. It’s about shredding whatever baggage the players may have brought with them, and achieving a stable platform on which your campaign can unfold.

The more experienced your players, the less necessary these interventions will be – but the more those players are likely to appreciate what you are doing and why. It’s one less thing they have to worry about, and says good things to them about the GM and his skills – both of which loosen them up and encourage them to both have fun, and to make the game fun for everyone else (including the GM). And that, as it says on the lid, is the point.

Image by Matt Rogers from Pixabay

All GMs should recognize and follow the rule of cool, which states that if a player wants his character to do something cool, the GM should try to find a way to let him, even if it violates canon or what the character should normally. be capable of.

Alas, in one of the great inequities of the TTRPG, the same is NOT always true of anything that the GM thinks would be cool. In fact, more often than not, anything that’s “cool” for the GM is troublesome for the campaign.

The GM is an enabler – it’s his job to make sure that everyone is having fun. Often, anything that he perceives as “Cool” is self-indulgence, and while a certain amount of that may be warranted to give the GM his share of jollies, a campaign has a strictly-limited capacity for such.

Perhaps the most seductive of temptations for the GM is the introduction of an artifact or relic. Dropping one of these into the campaign immediately makes the campaign all about that artifact or relic, whether the GM realizes it at the time or not.

To explain why this is the case, it will be necessary to dig deep into the conceptual fabric at a metagame level, and take a good look at the very concept from a multitude of angles.

This is being written as Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the April blog carnival, which is all about Artifacts and other over-the-top magic items, and is being hosted by Codex Anathema.

I could have simply done another in the series describing the Omega Archive, because anything there would probably qualify, but for a number of reasons, I didn’t want to do that – most notably because magic items are primarily a Fantasy device, and Artifacts are supposed to be the ultimate in magic items, while the Omega Archive primarily has a science fiction orientation.

While some of the contents might be adaptable to fantasy gaming (and any such adapted creation would definitely be considered a relic or Artifact, there’s no certainty that the contents of any given part of that series will be so translatable – so while it might meet the letter of the challenge laid down for this Carnival, I didn’t think that it did so in spirit.

Artifacts can generally be considered unique magic items of power greater than that which is normally available to PCs.

Artifact / Relic – D&D, AD&D, 2e

Artifacts have been a part of the D&D mythos since the publication of the third supplement to Original D&D, Eldritch Wizardry. These classic examples include such notable examples as the Hand and Eye of Vecna.

Relatively little was specified about them as a class of magic item; that took place during the creation of AD&D.

In AD&D, they were all considered “Miscellaneous Magic Items”, even those that were weapons, armor, or rings. Each had a number of Minor and Major Powers, and always came with side effects which triggered when the item was acquired, and when its Major Powers were used.

The DMG in 2nd Edition expanded greatly on the text surrounding these items as a class.

“Vastly more potent than the most powerful magical items are extremely rare items ancient power and majesty – artifacts, constructs of the utmost wizardly might, and relics, the remains of awesome powers and the greatest of holy men. These are items of great import and effect, so their use must be strictly controlled.”

“The appearance of an artifact or relic must always be the basis of an adventure. These items should never be casually introduced into play.”

“Each artifact and relic is unique. There can only be one of that item in existence in a given campaign. It appears in a campaign only when it has been placed there by the DM. These devices never form part of a randomly placed treasure and so are not on any treasure table. The DM must choose to include each particular artifact in his game.

Artifacts and relics always possess dangerous and possibly deadly side effects. These effects are all but irreversible, unaffected by wishes and most greater powers. Artifacts can only be destroyed by extraordinary means.”

     — Selected excerpts from the 2e AD&D DM’s Handbook.

For the most part, these conceptual foundations have been preserved throughout the many incarnations of D&D that have followed, including the derivative rules systems of Pathfinder (D&D 4e is a notable exception).

There are some important implications. First, there is a conceptual division between magic items that a PC can commission or create, given sufficient resources – “mundane” magic items – and artifacts.

That means, secondly, that each artifact must have an origin that is exceptional. There has to be a reason why these items are beyond even the most powerful PCs or NPCs, and a set of circumstances that permitted some long-past creative force to go beyond those restrictions. Those circumstances, because of their uniqueness, tend to be noteworthy events in the past history of a campaign. It’s really hard to drop such events into the history after the fact. Perhaps the best analogy in modern media is the creation of Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet – how many movies did this take? Certainly everything from the Chitauri invasion engineered by Loki in The Avengers is part of it, and so are almost every movie in the Marvel Comics Universe through to Infinity War/Endgame. But there are hints here and there that even earlier events in the MCU were early signs of things to come. The Chitauri invasion and Loki’s manipulations were presaged by the end-credits sequence in Thor (2011), while Thor itself was presaged by the end-credits sequence of Iron Man 2 (2010). Returning to the topic at hand, while (possibly hypothetical) PCs who live through the events may not appreciate the significance of what is taking place, they will definitely notice that something big is going on.

Third and fourth implications stem from the power that these artifacts and relics posses, and the impact on game balance (third) and the share of the spotlight that a character possessing one comes in for (fourth). It is all too easy for the other PCs to become support mechanisms for the PC with the artifact. While some players will be fine with such a role, there is an inbuilt preference in good, well-run, campaigns for equality in such matters.

The worst-possible solution to this problem is to give each PC an artifact of their own. The power they posses already means that there are few challenges which the PC cannot meet; I have seen campaigns in which gameplay consisted of the other PCs arranging circumstances and working down a checklist of requirements for the (relatively) safe usage of the Artifact.

In a nutshell, these artifacts are so powerful that they become the central focus of a campaign, able to steamroller virtually any opposition. The notion of challenging PCs, which is at the heart of most campaigns, means that the presence of an artifact implies the in-game need for such power. Without such a need, the campaign becomes relatively boring. But the incorporation of such a challenge leaves the other PCs completely over-matched, and frustration is equally poisonous to a campaign.

As soon as such power is introduced, then,

1. Significant Identities will take notice.
2. Significant Entities will take immediate steps to possess the Artifact before the possessor masters its use.
3. Other Significant Beings will attempt to prevent (2).
4. Some Significant Individuals will seek to influence or control the PC, either directly or indirectly.
5. Some Hostile forces will bring forward their plans, even launching them prematurely, in hopes of achieving their goals before the possessor can intervene.
6. Every problem under the sun, from the trivial to the monumental, will be submitted to the possessor with a prayer for assistance.
7. Lurking in the shadows is always the threat that the PCs need the power of the artifact to deal with.
8. There will be good people who believe no-one should have such power; those who might have been allies under different circumstances will become mortal enemies. “I wouldn’t trust my sainted grandmother with that much power” (or similar sentiments) will become a dominant sub-theme of the campaign.

There are just two outcomes, when you boil all this down: either it was always the GM’s intention to introduce the artifact, and he has planned his campaign accordingly, and solved every problem that he can anticipate; or the artifact will become the dominant focus of the campaign, henceforth, with anything else that the GM wanted to incorporate reduced to secondary import if it survives at all.

Either way, the campaign will never be the same again. It will either ascend to new heights (rare) or crash and burn (far more common).

So, that’s the problem for today: how to have your artifact cake without completely destroying the campaign in which it appears.

A Scale Of Magic

The search for a solution begins by contemplating magic items as a continuum, from the trivial at one extreme to the epic at the other.

When you do so, you quickly find that there’s a very large and exploitable gap between the strongest magic items typically available to PCs and Artifacts like Baba Yaga’s Hut or the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords.

I have charted such a spectrum, and divided it into 11 distinct categories. It’s my contention that each category represents an entirely different proposition in terms of placement and GMing considerations; sometimes, these will be variations or nuances of a general theme, at other times there will be a distinctly different set of considerations and requirements from one category to the next.

0. Trivial items
1. Weak one-use items
2. Weak multi-use items
3. Moderate non-permanent items
4. Moderate permanent items
5. Strong permanent items

9. True Artifacts – Minor
10. True Artifacts – Major
11. Artifact Sets

Sidebar: D&D 5e

D&D 5e uses slightly different scales in assessing item Rarity, essentially mapping the range of item categories 1-6 into a range of 5 frequencies of discovery: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare, and Legendary. Artifacts then form a 6th category, in which every entry refers to a specific and unique item.

But it has always been the case that an implicit increase in Rarity has accompanied an increase in the power of a magic item in D&D; the relationship was usually an indirect one, frequently addressed only through the value of the item. In it’s own way, this was a useful construct, because it reflected the economic reality that more affluent and politically-influential characters could afford better equipment than the plebs and commoners.

Sidebar Side-note: But this also has its own conceptual problems, relating to the cap on the power of such equipment; should the extremes available to such upper classes be greater than those available to the commons, such that the range spread is more or less the same, or should the ultimate reaches available to both (assuming the wealth and resources) be the same? There are profound consequences for the culture within a campaign regarding social mobility, amongst other things.

5e is simply addressing the relationship more explicitly and directly.

Anyone with sufficient ability to count on their fingers will have noticed the sizable gap in the list proffered, to which I alluded earlier.

The scale of the gap is not arbitrary; it results from having three entries to incorporate into the list. These complete the continuity, bridging the gap between Artifacts and “Mundane” magic items of the highest quality.

The missing entries are:

6. Demi-Relics
7. Legacy Items
8. Epic Magic Items

I’m going to discuss each entry in the list a little more volubly in a moment, and it can probably be inferred from the title of this article that item 6, “Demi-relics”, are the primary subject of this article. But first:

Sidebar: Exotic Potential, a concept from the Tree Of Life campaign notes

In this campaign, materials were rated according to their “natural” potential for containing magical powers in a stable configuration from one to three.

Ordinary Wood, common Leather, and low-quality steel or high-quality bronze or brass were rated as a ‘1’, which meant that they could be +1 items, containing at most 1 magical effect other than the bonus. “Plus-1 items” could confer no more than +2 to a stat (i.e. +1 to the stat bonus), or +2 to a specific single skill, or +1 each to two related skills, or +1 to four related skills under specific circumstances or applications.

Rare Woods, Exotic Leathers, and Good-quality steel were rated as a ‘2’ – they could be enchanted to become +2 items, and could contain either two minor effects or a range of effects that occupied both “slots” (and so, were not available to materials with a rating of ‘1’). “Plus-2 items” could confer no more than +4 to a stat (i.e. +2 to the stat bonus), or +4 to a specific single skill, or +2 each to two related skills, or +1 to four related skills.

Rare Woods with unusual treatment or preparations, Extremely exotic Leathers or Exotic Leather with unusual preparation, extremely high-grade steel, and exotic materials such as Mithral (also spelt mithril, mythril, mythral, mythrel, or mithryl, depending on who’s doing the writing) are all rated as a ‘3’. They could be enchanted to become +3 items, and could contain either three minor powers, a minor- and an intermediate power (rated 1 and 2, respectively), or a single power rated ‘3’. “Plus-3 items” could confer no more than +6 to a stat (i.e. +3 to the stat bonus), usually configured to be +4 to one stat and +2 to another; or +5 to a specific single skill, or +2 each to three related skills, or +1 to all skills based on a specific stat under specific circumstances or usage..

To get more powerful forms of magic, you had to incorporate two materials into the one item, with both the individual treatment of each element and the act of incorporation being of masterwork quality (defined in the game as a success by 20 or more on an appropriate skill check). One slot of the original item’s enchantment potential was consumed by the blending. So a 3-rated material and a 2-rated material could be combined to get a four-rated composite (+3+2-1=+4). This not only could be enchanted to be +4 in capabilities, it had four slots for powers, which could be configured in multiple ways (3+1, 2+2, 2+1+1, 1+1+1+1) or which could contain one of a whole new range of 4-rated powers.

Finally, you could combine two 3-rated materials to get a five-rated material (+3+3-1=+5) – with the benefits being similar to those described above.

Enchantment had to be performed separately for each step of improvement, increasing in price, skill/character level required, and difficulty with each increase. Each power also required its own ritual and added to these variables by the scale of the power – so adding a 5-rated power made everything else cost a lot more, adding a combination of smaller abilities less so.

On top of all that, exotic materials could be ritually consumed in the correct way to add up to another +6 to the mix (again, consuming one of the slots in the original material). The best that could be achieved by a magic item was therefore plus ten (+3+3+6-2=+10). The requirements at the top end of this scale were quite ridiculous – a flame capable of vaporizing rubies, for example – and no-one in the modern campaign world was capable of more than +2 in such enhancement. But they kept trying, and spending vast sums in the attempts. But some legendary artisans of the past got lucky on occasion. Any power slots over 5 can only be used for minor powers.
Note that such materials are themselves only rated 1-3 each – so +6 comes from consuming two specific ultra-rare materials in a specific way in the course of fabricating the item.

In theory, appropriate exotic locations or conditions could be used to confer up to another +6 in the same way, but the requirements start to get truly epic. “Plunge the blade into an intact ice cube at least 1′ on each side whilst in the heart of a volcano; the ice may not be permitted to melt or fracture in the process”.

Why mention this? Because it furnishes the basis of a systematic, continuous, architecture for magic item construction. Since the whole notion of such a continuous spectrum is at the heart of today’s article, I thought this worth spelling out (briefly). The same principles go into the making of scrolls, and potions – exotic ingredients and components, used the right way.

Before I get into the new category and other related concepts, let’s run through the complete list, at least briefly.

0. Trivial items

Trivial items contain magical effects so minor that they would be considered only an Orison if cast as a spell. These may be single-use or have a number of charges or even be permanently enchanted; the effects are so minor that it doesn’t make much difference, either way.

These generally represent some sort of convenience, nothing more. For example, I once gave a PC am infinite roll of toilet paper. Used sheets were instantly cleaned, magically, and attached to the beginning of the roll – so it couldn’t be used to write messages on, and wasn’t strong enough to form a rope or anything of the sort.

Another example: some potions were available in the Fumanor campaign that were multi-dose (healing potions, especially). So someone came up with the idea of enchanted spell bottles whose glass changed color according to the number of doses remaining unused.

1. Weak one-use items

Generally, potions and scrolls. Use once and they are gone forever.

2. Weak multi-use items

Some potions and minor wands. They are more powerful than category one, but that’s not saying a lot. Frequently useful, though.

3. Moderate non-permanent items

This category contains things like wands of fireballs. So ubiquitous in some campaigns as a poor-man’s artillery substitute that they deserve a category of their own.

You can have fun by making the spells as ‘interpreted’ by wands different to the spells cast by mages. A little goes a long way, however, and confusion & delay will result repeatedly if you aren’t consistent.

4. Moderate permanent items

Anything rated +2 or less is definitely either in this category or less. A vigorous debate is possible about whether or not +3 should fall into this category; I think, ultimately, which side of the line a given weapon or armor fell over would depend on what other powers the +3 item conferred.

This category is notable because these items should be bestowed with caution at low character levels; they are powerful enough to alter the balance of power between PCs. At the upper end of the scale, and depending on the campaign, this advice would hold into mid-level characters.

5. Strong permanent items

Anything +4 or +5, and perhaps some or most +3 items, are at home in this category. Nothing of this power should be available to a PC until double-digit character levels at the very soonest. These items tend to be individualized to a considerable degree, and usually have a history that can be traced from one past owner to another. That means that there is almost always going to be a story describing how they came to be wherever the item was when the PCs found it. These should be embodiments of the campaign history, or at least of parts of it; there should have been notable battles where the item was used. A key to the proper appreciation of the item is making this history relevant to the wearer/wielder.

6. Demi-Relics

Demi-Relics are a new idea being put forward for the first time in this article. For now, suffice it to say that they are more powerful than Strong Permanent Items but with limitations and a penalty to usage that is steep enough for characters to hesitate. At the same time, they are sufficiently limited in scope that the problems of most Artifacts are not applicable; you can treat them as even rarer examples of Strong Magic Items in terms of their presence in the campaign.

7. Legacy Items

Like Demi-Relics, these were introduced to occupy and exploit the gap between major ‘mundane’ magic items like a +5 Holy Avenger and Artifacts. They were introduced as part of the background to Assassin’s Amulet, and the bonuses that come with that game supplement include ‘player friendly’ versions. The basic concept is artifacts that start off very weak (and so can be included in the campaign from early on) but which gain in power as the character gains in levels. In some cases, the abilities are relatively minor in comparison to established artifacts, in others they are not. Like artifacts, they have side effects, and in some cases, may have powers that can only be unlocked by using lesser abilities enough times for the side effects to have a marked and permanent effect on the wielder. I describe them in more detail in An excerpt from ‘A player’s Guide to Legacy Items’, Part One and Part Two.

8. Epic Magic Items

I can’t speak of other editions’ versions, but the 3.5 Epic Level Handbook contains a whole bunch of magic equipment that confers (effectively) +6 or more, without most of the limitations and side-effects of Artifacts, but with far steeper requirements that a character has to meet in order to utilize them. They don’t have the majesty or power of true Artifacts, though, which is how they can get away without those penalties and drawbacks. Some of these are, regrettably, quite boring; others look like being such fun that you will be tempted to incorporate them early.

9. True Artifacts – Minor

Even a minor artifact can be a literal game-changer. Most of the time that these are included in a campaign it’s because the GM thinks they are cool, and it’s done with insufficient thought as to the consequences. The official advice quoted earlier from the 2e DMG says that they should be the centerpiece of an adventure; I disagree, they should be the centerpiece of an entire campaign in my opinion.

There are times when an artifact is the absolutely appropriate thing to introduce to a campaign. Most of the time, it’s not. For that reason, I want GMs who are thinking about dropping an Artifact into their campaign to contemplate one of the lesser alternatives – because even an Epic Magic Item will do less damage to your campaign than a Minor Artifact when you aren’t prepped for it.

10. True Artifacts – Major

The Holy Grails, of course, are Major Artifacts. How do you draw the dividing line? Well, destroying a Minor Artifact should be the objective of a plot thread within a campaign, and should be its own plot arc within the campaign. It still leaves room for other plot arcs. Destroying a Major Artifact demands that anything else be set aside, no matter the cost – think of the destruction of the One Ring vs the destruction of a lone Nazgul, to borrow a metaphor from the Lord Of The Rings.

Everything said about minor artifacts goes double and triple for Major Artifacts.

11. Artifact Sets

A highly unofficial category, there are two examples that come to mind: The Wand of Orcus and the Rod Of Seven Parts. There are undoubtedly others. These are artifacts that may or may not hold powers in their own right, but which are designed to unite with others to form a set that is as powerful, or perhaps even more powerful, than most Major Artifacts.

The Imbalance Equation

All the negative impacts associated with the introduction of Artifacts are mitigated by the substitution of lesser items. The game imbalances and inequities don’t go away, but they are at least reduced in severity. As one of my gaming friends used to put it, “The Imbalance Equation yields a smaller dividend”.

There are, in fact, only two alternatives of which I am aware (other than letting ‘nature take its course”).

Controlled Abstinence

The first of these is controlled abstinence, aka the Lord Of The Rings solution – there is some reason why the Artifact is not to be used, regardless of the provocation, which the PCs buy into; they are only lugging it around to make sure that no-one else uses it. The GM is continually trying to tempt them by throwing problems in front of the PCs for which the Artifact is the perfect solution. That’s answer number one.

A Pantheistic Approach

This is really difficult to pull off, but in its essence, Artifacts and Relics form a balanced Pantheon in which the wielders of such items contest the shape of reality. If a Dark Artifact is found and claimed, a Light Artifact begins moving about in the world in search of a Champion.

There’s nothing intelligent in this relationship that should be inferred; it’s a Karmic Balance thing.

Four answers – risking a Campaign Implosion, Controlled Abstinence, a Pantheistic Approach, or choosing something that will do less damage to the campaign than a full-blown Artifact. Having looked at the alternatives, it’s time to get down to cases.

Epic Magic Items

These are restricted to Epic Levels within the Epic Level Handbook for a reason – because they help make the new phase of the campaign more exciting and interesting. The problems confronting the PCs ramp up enormously, and so do the tools at their disposal. They become more than mere characters, they become legends – and perhaps lose touch with a little of their humanity in the process.

If your campaign fits this description, then these might be the perfect solutions.

Legacy Items

Legacy Items are a problem if introduced when the characters are already high level – they aren’t powerful enough until the character is a much higher level. They are designed to be part of the campaign from early on, and to “grow into” the role of a near-Artifact.

As a solution to the Artifact Problem, they only work if the GM has pre-planned for the situation from very early on. They are peerless under such circumstances; but they are far less satisfactory than anything else if those aren’t the circumstances of your campaign.

Demi-Relics

So there is still a gap. The prescription is for ultra-powerful magic items that are suitable for “cold insertion” into a campaign, that are nevertheless constrained enough that they won’t have the disruptive potential of Artifacts and Relics.

To leave room for the other solutions, when they become available and appropriate, in fact, they should be less powerful than Epic Magic Items.

As soon as I put the problem in those terms, having contemplated the spectrum of magic item power, a solution suggested itself to me, and Demi-Relics (aka Demi-facts) were born..

Contemplate a magic item that temporarily gives you a massive boost to one of your stats or numeric values – it could be hit points or attack or anything else. Each item affects only one specific such value. From the scale of mundane items (+1 to +5) I think +8 is about right (per level in the case of Hit Points). That’s the good news.

The item takes the permanent place of anything else – if its a suit of armor, you can’t have any other armors in your possession or it will not activate. What’s more, whatever the numeric quantity is, it takes a -2 hit whenever the item is not being worn – That’s the not-so-good news.

But there is worse to come: there is a price to pay for the activation of such an item. When the bonus wears off, it takes one point of whatever the numeric value is, with it – permanently, and cumulatively except when the item is activated– and the non-wearing penalty increases by one. That’s the bad news.

What the time frame is, is up to the GM – he can specify it as a minute, an hour, or a day. The longer it lasts, the more tempting the item will be.

Overall, this is a Faustian bargain of the first order. The first few times you use it, the benefits clearly outweigh the costs. Before you know it, you are relatively helpless without the item. Every time you use it, you become more dependent on it. Before too long, even relatively moderate threats pose a serious temptation – you can be your old self again, and more, you just have to say the word.

At first, you might think that character advancement means that the price is too low. But character advancement slows over time, inevitably; and so, therefore do the characteristic gains that can come from such advancement. All character advancement really does is hide the price of using the item from the PC – at least for a while – until they are well-and-truly hooked.

Think about the character potential – the legendary fighter who can barely lift his hand overhead, and can’t even get out of bed without his magic whatever, but who – once or twice more – can become the stuff of legend, the hero he was born to be. The rest of the time, he is short-tempered and feels worthless, and is forced to live on old glories. Worse still, people keep showing up, expecting the legend – only to be deflated by the reality. Some of whom will vocally express their disappointment. With every such event, the temptation to prove yourself worthy of the accolades would have to grow, until the temptation was too great to resist – and mark off another point of permanent loss…

Picture the paranoia that could easily result when your not-wearing penalties are up to -6 or so. In that key attribute, you are 8-12 levels behind your peers; what if the item on which you are dependent gets stolen? Would you ever take it off?

This is NOT a cursed item. It’s simply an item that costs something to use, something more precious than gold or gems. It steals the (metaphoric) soul of the character, one little slice at a time. And it’s the perfect mid-range magic item to throw into a campaign at the drop of a hat – simply because it’s cool, and the damage that it can do is contained, and self-limiting.

Be an evil GM and indulge yourself just this once – I won’t tell your players, I promise! Do so, and they will never forget the campaign that follows…

Whew! Finished at last (I slept in today, which never helps)! Hope it was worth the wait, everyone :)

Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay

Yesterday, on Quora, I answered a question about beginning as a GM..

The question originally posed was “How can I play NPCs in DND and how can I get started DMing? This is my first time and I’m so lost.”

There was already an excellent answer to the question, so I took a more general approach rather than simply make redundant noises.

That answer is the foundation of today’s article. Anything that’s inset is new; everything that isn’t was part of the original answer (though it may have been rephrased slightly and broken into multiple paragraphs instead of long bullet points).

When you are the GM, you have four responsibilities to your game and gaming group that you have to satisfy, each and every time.

The First Duty

First, you have to make the game fun for everyone, including yourself. Interesting can be great, can even be fun to some people, but interesting alone is usually not enough.

Improvement

There aren’t a lot of shortcuts to improvement in this space. Experience at reading a crowd and motivating them is the only real education. But there are a few areas around the edges that can be studied and improved. Most of them revolve around communications in various forms.

Public Speaking

Lessons in Public Speaking assist in communicating clearly with the players. There are a number of oratorical techniques that speechwriters utilize and understanding and applying them can help the GM, too.

Debating Techniques

Studying Debating Techniques can help in the organization of your presentations.

When I was in 3rd class, my school had what was called an Eisteddfod, but that term was only loosely applicable. This is essentially a maths, english, and performing arts contest across the entirety of the school in the manner of a sports carnival.

The debate was the problem – there was only one entrant, a boy from 12th form (at the time, “class” was the term used for years 1 to 6, and ‘form” for years 7-12, because education in those years was built around classes in specific topics). My opponent was nine years my senior, and I was a shy kid and not a confident public speaker; he was the dux of the school (something like Valedictorian in the US).

At around 9:30AM, the day of the competition, the School Principal and my teacher approached me and begged me to participate, taking the affirmative position. Because the topic – “nuclear energy” – was something that I understood well, I agreed, and hurried off to my Grandmother’s place (which was relatively close by) to prepare (with permission to do so, I should add).

The debate was to take place at 2PM. I dashed off a 2000 word handwritten essay which examined the pros and cons of the subject in a realistic manner, dismissing the cons and talking up the pros.

The essay was in three parts – the first part talking up the benefits, the second part identifying and dismissing the objections, and the third part discussing public apprehensions and their validity. I keenly felt that I could have done a better job with time to research properly – it was full of unsupported assertions and generalities – but it was straightforward in presentation and comprehensive.

I got back to the Town Hall at about 1:30, notes in hand. As the ‘affirmative’ position, I went first, and simply read aloud the first part of my essay in the two minutes allowed. I was so nervous when I started that I almost wet my pants!

My opponent followed; he had assembled talking points on index cards and simply improvised around each point. His presentation was clearly better than mine, but his claims were more nebulous and vacuous than the specific benefits that I had cited.

It was then my turn again, the concept being that I would argue against the points my opponent had raised in his introductory presentation; but he had been so ineffective at countering my opening statement that (with growing confidence) I simply continued reading my essay, raising an objection that my opponent might make and explaining why it was flawed. This was, effectively, preempting his second turn in the debate.

When his second turn was, he tried to counter the points that I had made, shuffling repeatedly through his index cards to find the notes that were relevant. Where I had told a story, his response was disorganized and – at times – almost incoherent. He had been able to use the research time that was not afforded me, and was able to offer facts to challenge the opinions I had voiced – but was completely unconvincing.

It was at that point, just over half-way through the debate, that I won it. In the third phase of the debate, I was able to continue simply reading from my prepared script, first acknowledging public apprehension of nuclear energy, and then dismissing such fears as over-generalized overreactions, and concluding by inviting those listening (especially the judges) to review the entire negative case in that light – was it substantive or a ramshackle collection of paranoid thoughts?

My opponent then made his final mistake – he rearranged his entire planned conclusion to respond to my allegation, shuffling through his index cards several times (saying nothing while he did so), repeating himself, contradicting himself, and sounding completely unsure of his entire case. The judges were unanimous in giving me the victory (and none of them knew until afterwards that I hadn’t even signed up until that morning). I still have the certificate of proficiency in public speaking that I was awarded!

Okay, that’s a rather lengthy tale from my distant past (it will be 50 years ago in a few more months) – but the lessons learned on that day were the foundation of my GMing style when I got started. Content is great, but a smooth presentation and clarity of communication counts for more – you can always fill in details later, so long as you don’t undermine them with inaccuracies.

Presentation Aids

Handouts and illustrations, sound effects, different voices and accents, and even minis and battlemaps, they all enhance your presentation, especially if presented smoothly – but they are like my opponent’s index cards in the true story offered in the previous section, if you have to continually shuffle them to find what you are looking for, they will (at best) simply counteract the negative impression that results and (at worst) will fail even to achieve that.

Going in for such things is easily overdone and counterproductive – which makes any prep time invested in them, a waste. It takes time and practice to learn to integrate such things into a smooth presentation. I suggest starting with just one of these enhancements, mastering it, then starting on the next – while going lightly on the enhancement tool that you have already mastered. It generally won’t take as long to master the second, because some of what you’ve learned from the first will be transferable knowledge.

There are books and blog posts out there on effective presentations and how to create them – what works with PowerPoint might not be directly applicable to what you are trying to achieve, but indirect application of the lessons learned is still useful. It merely requires acceptance of the point being made ‘in principle’.

One of the key lessons from such information sources is that specificity and detail are the enemies of clarity and absorption. At the same time, specificity is key to sounding authoritative. How and when you present detailed specifics are therefore key to an effective presentation.

What’s more, simply telling the audience what they already know or believe may avoid putting noses out of joint, but it’s a recipe for boredom; people want to hear something new (that agrees with their existing beliefs and prejudices).

Learning how much reassuring padding to include before you branch out into something new is something that can’t be taught; for one thing, every audience will be different (the larger it is, the more homogeneous reactions will be, but a GM is typically presenting only to a very small group and will need to tailor his presentations to the group)..

The Second Duty

Second, you have to collaborate with the players and their characters to tell a story that revolves around those characters.

All of them, both collectively and individually, in equal measure, as perceived over a substantial period of time.

There are two essential ways of doing so: as an ensemble performance, and by putting the metaphoric spotlight onto first one individual and then another. Neither is usually enough on their own, but most new GMs pick one as their primary technique. See Ensemble Or Star Vehicle if you want more on the subject. That usually means that you will have to create a series of stimulating events while being flexible enough to cope when the players choose a third or fourth path through the story.

Improvement

This is such a broad umbrella that there are many subjects that can be studied within it. Here are just a few of them:

Storytelling

Everything listed in earlier parts also helps meet this responsibility, but beyond those, there are other techniques. When you watch TV, keep one corner of your mind asking questions about technique – How have the writers used events and dialogue to further the story? How have the conveyed a unified characterization despite most TV and movies being filmed completely out of sequence? What is the plot and why does it have the shape that it does? How do the characters become embroiled within the plot? Is there any foreshadowing? The list goes on and on, and anything you learn in response to any of these questions is directly beneficial to your craft as a GM.

Do the same when reading a story, or an article. Everything that you see and hear has the potential to teach you something, if you are paying attention to it.

Acting Techniques. Direction techniques. Production techniques. These are only indirectly relevant, but no less powerful for that.

Cast and production commentaries contain vast amounts of information of this type for you to digest – I try never to buy a DVD that is “just the movie”. (That, by the way, is one reason why I dislike the trend towards streaming).

Story structure

This can be a double-edged sword; while it’s a useful area of study for GMs, you have to think carefully about how they will translate to the unique medium of the tabletop roleplaying game. This is something that many of the articles here at campaign touch on, but few address directly – I know that there’s one that does, but I can’t remember its name. I’ll update this with a link if I find it.

Characters

Better, more memorable, characters never go astray. There are many books and blog posts on the subject to draw on (often aimed at other media, like fiction or TV), but a simple premise is at the heart of the best advice in this respect: good characters come from good plotlines. That’s not the end of the subject, but it’s a good beginning.

Characterization

The difference between character and characterization is a subtle one that some people may not appreciate. A good character is one who makes a notable contribution to the story, that is memorable and distinctive, and that is “fit for purpose”. But those are all superficial attributes; characterization is about the personality that fills those superficialities and gives the character substance.

So psychology is a starting point, but it tends to be rather deep and lots of it have limited relevance. There are writer’s guides to practical characterization that are more useful, at least to the novice. Sociology is another key area of study, as is History in terms of how people lived, day-to-day, and how those lives were shaped by the circumstances around them. The more you dig into this area, the more there is to know, and you soon find yourself asking questions for which there are no firm answers – “Does growing up in a different culture cause an individual to have different reactions to events and other stimuli?” for example. “What is the role of contextual interpretation in underpinning reactions to events?” for another.

Often, you can phrase the question, find something that purports to answer it, but find that you lack the foundation to understand the answer.

It reminds me of a scene from a novel (I forget which) in which, for his doctoral examination in Physics, the character was asked to explain why the sky was blue. He answered by talking about the scattering of short wavelengths more than long wavelengths, to which the examiner simply asked “Why?”. Every time he answered that question, the examiner simply asked “Why?” and forced the character to dig deeper into his understanding of physics.

Media

You aren’t alone in wanting to know about these things. Writers have been answering questions about where their ideas come from for centuries. Playwrights have faced similar challenges for a similar length of time. These days, movies and TV are at the cutting edge of the questions, and the subjects have been given more intense scrutiny than ever.

Media studies can be superficial (at school, they were a shorthand for ‘we have no lesson planned for some reason so watch this TV show for 40-odd minutes and keep quiet”) but if you dig a little deeper, there is lots of advice out there for the taking. Their techniques might not work for you directly, but with suitable adaption, they can add to your repertoire.

Narrative techniques

There are three obvious areas of study when it comes to narrative technique, of increasing remoteness to the subject.

The most direct and obvious one is about efficiency in writing – how to compress narrative and description, how to identify what’s essential and what’s getting in the way, how to make your narrative compelling and succinct and stylish, and so on.

The most indirect but equally obvious one is to study media, especially costuming, lighting, and set design. The “why” of each decision can be translated into a principle of some value to the process of GMing.

But, perhaps the most useful is to study (and ruminate on) Radio Plays. These frequently have to operate with no narration at all, creating environments through sound alone; and when they do have narration, they can’t waste a bit of it. The techniques of radio plays can therefore be very educational to the GM.

The Third Duty

Third, you have to bring the world to the players. This inevitably means that you will have to create some parts of it, even if using a published setting and ‘canned’ adventure modules..

Many GMs find it easier to do this if someone else does that hard work, which is why canned adventures and commercial game settings are common starting points, and many GMs feel no need to expand beyond them.

Others – like me – find it easier to do this if they have created the world in its entirety, especially if you become exasperated by inconsistencies in published material, or try shoehorning a published adventure into a game setting that it doesn’t fit.

One requires a lot of reading, the other requires a lot of creativity and general knowledge, both chew up time like pretzels in a bar.

One of the things that is significantly harder if you have gone down the creation path is letting go of your creation – the players can and will change things through the presence of their characters, they won’t adhere to any script you may have had in mind. Your creations are the floor-plan and carpentry; they get to choose the paint and wallpaper and what each room is used for.

Improvement

There are fewer resources out there to draw upon in this area, because it is more unique to the TTRPG environment. Other media may have similar problems from time to time, but their techniques and solutions are less relevant.

Fortunately, this makes it a popular topic on RPG blogs. Most posts on world-building or running games will be relevant. A lot of posts on plot and encounters will be meaningful in this context. Posts on game settings are usually useful.

The Fourth Duty

Finally, you have to arbitrate the rules, fairly and evenhandedly, and in such a way that you DON’T ruin the fun.

That last bit is the hardest part.

What’s more, you have to do it without sucking the life and momentum out of the game, which is even harder.

Being an expert in the rules isn’t necessary; giving a player the interpretation of the rules that he wants isn’t always the right thing to do; the easy way (rolling over and playing dead for the players) is usually much more work in the long run. But at the same time, being a rules tyrant kills the fun stone dead every time a rules issue comes up. Firm but fair and consistent is the rule – kind of like raising kids or puppies.

There are reams of advice out there that address this issue, or there used to be.

Improvement

There are lots of articles that talk about adjudications of specific rules and situations. Most of these are useless in terms of the general situation, because too many of them simply present their answer as a fait accompli without describing the process by which an answer was reached.

This frequently leads to arguments in the comments from people who disagree (rightly or wrongly) with the conclusions of the author. And heaven help you if you advocate actually changing the rules – there are people out there who consider them as sacrosanct as holy writ!

All of which may be interesting, or intriguing, or simply fun, to look at from the outside – but don’t help you much. They are nowhere near as interesting, intriguing, or fun when you’re in the middle of them.

For that reason, Johnn and I established a rule for Campaign Mastery’s “Ask The GMs” from the very beginning – specific game mechanics were only to be referenced when the question posed could be abstracted into a broader, more interesting general principle. We simply didn’t want to buy into such divisive territory.

Fortunately, such problems seem to have receded of late, perhaps exported to social media.

That’s why so much of the free preview of Assassin’s Amulet was material that didn’t appear in the main text – it was a deliberate look behind the curtains on the writing of the product, the logic behind the creative decisions, and so on, as well as a presentation of selected portions of the content. Another principle that we deliberately pursued in the writing was that the free preview contained usable and useful material in its’ own right – we had both been served up preview versions that simply excerpted a handful of pages, the contents of which were only useful if you bought the full product. They weren’t a preview, they were an advertisement.

Here at Campaign Mastery, most of the posts may be pitched at the experienced GM, but I am at pains to describe the thought processes that lie behind any in-game decisions or events described, because that tells the GM who doesn’t know how to do it what I did, and why.

Over the eleven-plus years of publication, I’ve tried to bring that philosophy to every aspect of the hobby. Most, if not all, have something written about them. It’s often just a matter of finding the right post!

Outside of these pages, studying industrial arbitration, diplomacy, and the art of negotiation may be rewarding. Those allied subjects are the closest that you will find to immediate relevance.

Putting Content In It’s Place

When you look at the totality expressed, it will be surprising to some that there is so little that’s about content.

Purely by chance, over the weekend, I stumbled across the finals of a local show called Lego Masters, which provides the perfect metaphor for the relationship of content to everything described, especially original content: This article has been about a sketch pretending to be a blueprint; content are the bricks and mortar. Content doesn’t determine the shape of the finished house; the blueprints do. And a really good idea that doesn’t fit should be set aside for another day, another opportunity.

But better bricks not only make for a prettier, more attractive structure, they may make possible structures that would otherwise be impossible. Content is important – but not as important as the four responsibilities.

In fact, Everything that I haven’t described as part of the four can be characterized as personal style and repertoire of technique. It isn’t essential, just sometimes nice to have.

These four things are the four obligations that you have to meet as a GM, and the better that you do them, the better a GM you are.

PS: When I was just starting out, I had another GM/player who wasn’t in the game but who had a lot more experience mentor me. I’ve written an article about the experience, encouraging others to do the same, but it mentions a number of the lessons he taught me, and may also be useful as a result: Bringing On The Next Generation, part two: Gamemaster Mentors

Image by Jagrit Parajuli from Pixabay

I explained in Part 1 what the Omega Archive is, why I’m creating the contents of it, how to use the contents in your own campaigns. Instead of repeating all that, I intend to get more or less right down to the content!

But first, the ongoing index list:

In part 1 I covered entries 1-6:

1. The Anima Device
2. The Anvil of The Photosphere
3. The Arc Of Nestrus
4. The Blue Bowl of Xiphilxus
5. The Cortex Realignment
6. The Could-Have-Been King and his army of Might-Have-Beens and Never-Weres

In this part, I aim to deal with 7-12:

7. The Cipher Plague of Dantus V
8. The Entanglement Grenade
9. The Festival Of Delphaeus
10. The Gauss Lock
11. The Greater Key
12. The Gridwyrm

And still to come are:

13. The Halo Field
14. The Lord Of Travesties
15. The Meteorite Funnel
16. The Moment
17. The Nanodust Collective
18. The Nightnare Child
19. The Orphaned Hour
20. The Parallel Cannon
21. The Perspective Cannon
22. The Proton Shell
23. The Pyrovore Effector
24. The Singularity Locket
25. The Skaro Degradations
26. The Stellar Catapult
27. The Sword Of Eternity
28. The Tear of Isha
29. The Wormhole Reflection
30. The Time-Gun of Rassilon

So, with that out of the way, let’s get creatively mercenary with a sextet of original ideas….

The Cipher Plague of Dantus V

The Cipher Plague is a computer virus that has a particularly devastating payload – over time, it gradually introduces into a computer system a condition that resembles aphasia in humans.

To really appreciate how nasty that is, you need to read the background in the Canon Notes below. I’ll be back afterwards to talk about the symptom progression and why the various obvious solutions are ineffective.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

I was captivated by the fifth episode of Deep Space Nine in which a plague sweeps the station causing Aphasia, and eventually, death.

Aphasia is a condition in which the ability to comprehend or formulate language is lost, usually because of damage to specific regions of the brain. It’s a real, and quite frightening, condition.

In other words, someone says something entirely reasonable – “Good Morning, how are you today? I am very well, and ready to get to work,” and the aphasic person hears a string of unrelated words “Umbrella teapot, mountain dew coffee chew sun sugar donkey, waterfall grab stark lunch.”

Aphasia can affect visual languages such as sign language as well as reading and writing. Like I said, scary – how would you like to hear nothing but babble when it’s clear from the tone that someone is trying to tell you something important? Or to be reduced to communicating in babble, without impacting in the slightest your intelligence, i.e. your capacity for having something to say?

So, now you know. Let’s translate this into computer terms.

Computer subsystems and components have to talk to each other all the time, and they generally process every task symbolically – they don’t ‘think’ of ‘apples’, they ‘think’ of a term that represents ‘apples’. Certain parameters and values may or may not be associated, depending on the design of the storage data structure – green, red, granny smith, delicious, worm, apple tree, Beatles, you name it. All communications and processing employs such index values or ‘tokens’ to find and retrieve the data on “apples” or whatever query you might have – it doesn’t matter if this is a line of text in a document being held in memory, or in a file, or an entry in a database (which simply means that the arrangement of contents itself holds meaning), or whatever. So the first thing you notice is file corruption – depending on the robustness of the system design, you may get a warning that a file save has failed, or that the file could not be loaded correctly, or it may assume that whatever it has retrieved is exactly what was supposed to be within the file.

That’s a relatively trivial problem in a memo. It’s a critical problem if the file contains specifications for the manufacture of a pacemaker.

The second symptom is the failure of common functions, possibly leading to program crashes. Reloading the program will sometimes cure these, and sometimes not. These will gradually become more prevalent. In reality, all functions are equally likely to be affected, but because the common functions are used more frequently and routinely – “load this”, “save this”, “print this” – problems in these functions are noticed more quickly.

So, your data gradually becomes more corrupt, and so does your software, and so does your operating system, and so does your boot-up process. Because such problems tend to compound, this is a fourth-power growth rate in malfunctions – and because both saving and retrieving data produces this corruption, it’s going to be in the middle of that range.

If the virus can initially cause only one failure per hour, at the end of one hour, it will be capable of something like 5 to the 4th power, or 625 failures per hour (about 10.4 per minute, or one every 5.76 seconds). An hour after that, we’re talking 390,625 errors per hour, or about 6510 per minute, or 108.5 a second, or one every 0.009216 seconds, and your computer is a complete idiot.

Human viruses that are too lethal rarely become epidemics; they kill the host too quickly for the virus to spread. The most series epidemics and pandemics come from viruses that kill eventually, but leave their hosts alone, with mild or even no symptoms, for a period of time in which the illness can spread. Make them highly infectious as well, and possibly airborne, and you have Covid-19 on your hands. The Cipher Virus is so disruptive that, left to its own devices, it would fall into that “too lethal” category.

For this reason, it is restricted by design in it’s efficacy (but not it’s infectiousness); it contains a countdown timer that slows the rate of it’s malicious activity by a random value between 25 and 500.

Let’s look at what that means. First, a 25 (the fastest ‘kill’):

• start: 1 per 25 hours
• 1 hr: 1 per hour
• 2 hrs: 25 per hour.
• 3 hrs: 625 per hour, or one every 5.76 seconds.
• 4 hrs: 15,625 per hour, or more than 4 per second. Computer is almost a brick; in terms of user interaction, it already is.
• 5 hrs: 390,625 per hour, or more than 108 per second. Even automated functions with retry-until-success like internet communications are unreliable.
• 6 hrs: 9,765,.625 per hour, or than 2712 per second. Computer is unlikely to successfully boot-up, but still shows enough life to try and fail.
• 7 hrs: 244,140,625 per hour, or more than 67,816 per second. Computer is a brick; any attempted operation generates error messages, then error messages about not being able to log error messages, ad infinitum.

Seven hours vs two hours might not sound like a lot, but at internet speeds, that’s a huge difference. At the other end of the scale:

• start: 1 per 500 hrs. Other sources of error will usually swamp this. 0.2% chance of detection.
• 1 hr: 1 per 400 hrs. As above. 0.25% chance of detection.
• 2hrs: 1 per 320 hrs. As above. 0.3125% chance of detection.
• 3 hrs: 1 per 256 hrs. As above. 0. 39% chance of detection.
• 4 hrs: 1 per 204.8 hrs. A fraction under 0.5% chance of detection. Might be noticed with a lot of infected machines. Probably not.
• 5 hrs: 1 per 163.8 hrs. As above. About 0.625% chance of detection.
• 6 hrs: 1 per 131.1 hrs: As above. About 0.76% chance of detection.
• 7 hrs: 1 per 104.86 hrs. A fraction under 1% chance of detection – noticeable with a lot of infected machines. Doesn’t look like a serious problem yet.
• 8 hrs: 1 per 83.9 hrs. About 1.2% chance per machine of being notices. Still doesn’t look serious.
• 9 hrs: 1 per 67.1 hrs. About 1.5% chance per machine of being noticed. Large installations may notice more than one machine misbehaving.
• 10 hrs: 1 per 53.7 hrs. About 1.9% chance per machine of being noticed. Large installations will seem multiple machines failing, and start getting hints that the situation is serious.
• 11 hrs: 1 per 43 hrs. About 2.33%.chance per machine of being noticed. Large installations will recognize a virus and commence rehabilitory action.
• 12 hrs: 1 per 34.36 hrs. About 2.9% chance per machine of being noticed. Antivirus measures by large installations ineffective because machines are reinfected as quickly as they are cleaned. Problem is considered critical, strategy meetings convened, alerts issued to security agencies.
• 13 hrs: 1 per 27.5 hrs. About 3.6% chance per machine of being noticed. Medium-sized installations notice occasional misbehavior, but it doesn’t look serious yet (sound familiar). Meetings conclude at large installations with a total shutdown and virus-cleaning of the entire network. Management are not convinced, but reluctantly agree. Process will take about an hour.
• 14 hrs: 1 per 22 hrs. About 4.5% chance per machine of being noticed. Medium-sized installations notice occasional misbehavior, but it doesn’t look serious yet. Antivirus systems at large installations, compromised by the cipher aphasia, accelerate the problem while claiming to have fixed it.
• 15 hrs: 1 per 14.7 hrs. About 6.8% chance per machine of being noticed. Medium-sized installations notice occasional misbehavior, but it doesn’t look serious yet. Word gets out that government and large corporations are under cyberattack, if it hadn’t already leaked. Large installations discover antivirus measures ineffective. Propose another shutdown and a complete restore from secure backups believed to be clean. Management is even more reluctant.
• 16 hrs: 1 per 11.73 hrs. About 8.5% chance of detection – one in twelve home systems now infected. Medium-sized installations and small networks notice misbehavior. Management of large institutions hold crisis meetings, reluctantly agree to cyber-security proposal. Will take three hours to prepare, minimum.
• 17 hrs: 1 per 9.4 hrs. More than 10% chance of detection. One in nine home systems infected. Governments start advising citizens to disconnect from the internet. Some do, most won’t hear the instruction for 6 hours or more.
• 18 hrs. 1 per 7.52hrs. Increase in infections is greater than the number of systems disconnected from the internet. Elevators are declared unsafe as a number of malfunctions are reported. Fire suppression and sprinkler systems deemed unreliable after instances of premature activation are reported. Manufactured goods found to be seriously faulty in excess of any quality control tolerance.
• 19 hrs. 1 per 6 hrs. Final preparations for infrastructure shutdown are made. Military placed on highest alert status in case someone tries to take advantage of the situation, but they are also hamstrung by comms, command, and intelligence failures. Day’s manufacture scrapped, factories closed after a few fatalities from malfunctioning equipment come to light.
• 20 hrs. 1 per 4.8 hrs. Infrastructure shutdown takes place. No water, no power, no comms. Lots of people still don’t know what’s going on, so this comes as a total surprise. They don’t get the message to restore systems from backup. Restoration software, corrupted by the aphasia virus, restores large operations to some prior point on the timeline – roll a d20. Hospitals and other installations with standalone power begin discovering that patient monitoring systems have been corrupted. Some people die from maladministration of medications, others because the symptoms that should have triggered alarms, don’t. Secondary failures begin cropping up – overloads etc – taking down as much infrastructure as would have failed had nothing been done.
• 21 hrs. 1 per 4.8 hrs amongst domestic, medium and smaller installations, less amongst infrastructure & big business. More crisis meetings. Situation declared either an act of war or of Terrorism, depending on who is deemed responsible. Cost of the viral attack reaches the billions if it hasn’t done so already. Word gets out that the ‘restore’ strategy has failed. People begin to panic and act out against individuals and institutions associated with whoever the public blames, including their own governments. Localized rioting and looting.
• 22 hrs. 1 per 3.8 hrs (domestic, medium and small installations). Everyone is now aware of something going on, even if they don’t know what it is. Connections to the internet in search of answers more than compensate for those who have heard, and are obeying, the instructions to disconnect. A small hard core refuse to obey, unilaterally.
• 23 hrs. 1 per 3 hrs (domestic, medium and smaller institutions). Government shuts down the internet to slow the spread of the virus. Manufacturing has shut down. Businesses with low operating margins start laying off workers. Economy on the verge of implosion. Rioting and Looting become widespread.

Okay, so fewer than one in three computers are compromised, and very few have become bricks – the damage is arguably worse because there has been time for the news to spread. This is the difference between a Terror weapon and a tactical weapon.

But the timeline assumes that every infection is at the slowest rate – instead of it’s own random value. So 1/3 of personal devices are junk, and so is 1/7th or so of industry and infrastructure. One quarter or so of people who were on life-support are dead, and so on. Hundreds have died because their sat-navs have gone haywire, or because the traffic lights have gone nuts. It’s not quite the ‘aircraft falling out of the sky” forecast of a Y2K doomsday, but it’s close enough – and all in less than a day.

The ‘restore from clean copies” strategy is the correct one, but to be successful, it has to be EVERYONE. Any data that postdates the clean copy must be considered lost. Forensic examination of infected systems by ‘clean’ systems (while they remain functional) is needed to identify the point of infection; but, as with cancer, it is more important to eliminate every cell than it is to avoid removing healthy tissue, or – in this case – data. Some people won’t do this willingly, so force will be required. Refusal will be considered an act of terrorism in its own right, akin to holding onto a bio-weapon after their use has been made illegal.

Recovery will take months. Governments will have fallen. Wars may have started. This is a nasty, nasty, weapon.

The Entanglement Grenade

Everyone’s heard of voodoo dolls, right? The Entanglement Grenade binds a group of individuals to the manipulations of a high-tech version of such a doll, using quantum entanglement as a potential weapon of mass destruction. Those affected are not controllable at a macro level, but can be affected at an atomic or subatomic level en masse – drop the binding object in acid or in front of a fusion torch and a large swathe of the enemy just go away. And the effect is for life, it cannot be undone. Worse, no matter obstacle can obstruct the effect, and separation after exposure is irrelevant – you can be hundreds of light-years away and still be just as quantum-entangled.

This device binds multiple individuals by targeting something the targets have in common, usually elements of their genetic structure. But they can be made more discriminate or less – you can target every left-handed redhead in a crowd and leave the others untouched; it’s all in how you set the controls of the grenade and on the sample that you use to bind its entanglement to the targets. This flexibility makes this an especially dangerous weapon to the morality of the wielder. How many German civilians would you be entitled to eliminate if, in the process, you wiped out the majority of Nazis amongst them?

There are bio-weapons that – in theory – act this way. But they take time to target and manufacture, and there are ways of preventing exposure, and they tend to persist and pose the danger of rebounding on the user. For this reason, they have been outlawed. Entanglement Grenades suffer from none of these drawbacks; they are quick to customize, can be mass-manufactured in advance, bypass protections from both clothing and installations, and (unless misused) pose only limited dangers to the user. That makes their use a lot more tempting. And that’s their real danger.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Festival Of Delphaeus

Delphaues was a madman who thought it would be liberating to walk a mile in a stranger’s shoes, as the old saying (almost) goes. To ensure that he had ample targets, he constructed The Festival to walk amongst a crowd, removing and storing minds as it went, then bestowing upon the hapless victim the stored mind of another of its victims. These changes were only temporary; in 50 hours, the host would automatically revert, to discover himself in whatever position a random stranger had left him in.

The festival itself is a humanoid machine, standing about 3′ tall, and in the approximate shape of a child, usually female. The device is designed to mimic the appropriate outward appearance of the dominant species wherever it finds itself, but is designed to be incredibly resilient.

To obtain appropriate visual samples, The festival visits a location containing a number of children every 50 hours. This means that its first victims in a 50-hour ‘exchange spree’ are always children, who are far less able to cope with the trauma of suddenly finding yourself in a stranger’s body, perhaps of a different gender, or perhaps completely alien to you. The resulting trauma frequently causes long-term psychological disturbances.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Gauss Lock

Inversions of a planetary magnetic field are indescribably traumatic for the planet. Technically, it’s called Geomagnetic Reversal. Wikipedia’s article section on Reversals paints a relatively understated picture of the potential impact; limiting it to increased cosmic radiation and increased volcanic activities, the combination of which could be responsible for mass extinction events. This understatement is due to the difficulty in analysis of past Reversals and the biospheric impacts they did not did not produce.

That means that we are in the realm of theory and best educated guesses for the most part, but are obligated to more-or-less assume the worst. Birds and other creatures who navigate using magnetic fields will get lost. Electronics including satellites and electric grids could fail. Parts of the planet could become uninhabitable because of cosmic radiation. Throw in a massive increase in geothermal activity, ash clouds blanketing the planet, and possibly triggering a new ice age, and almost certainly triggering eruptions and earthquakes..

But the Gauss Lock doesn’t just invert the magnetic fields of planets within a solar system, it inverts the magnetic field of the sun. And the consequences of that make these mere terrestrial consequences pale shadows of the true calamity.

This happens naturally every 11 years, so it might not seem too serious at first glance. Solar magnetic reversals accompany a peak in solar activity. The solar magnetic field extends beyond the orbit of Pluto.

According to this article by NASA, when solar physicists talk about solar field reversals, their conversation often centers on the “current sheet.” The current sheet is a sprawling surface jutting outward from the sun’s equator where the sun’s slowly rotating magnetic field induces an electrical current.

The current itself is small, only one ten-billionth of an amp per square meter (0.0000000001 amps/m2), but there’s a lot of it: the amperage flows through a region 10,000 km thick and billions of kilometres wide. Electrically speaking, the entire heliosphere is organized around this enormous sheet.

During field reversals, the current sheet becomes very wavy. Phil Scherrer, a solar physicist at Stamford, likens the undulations to the seams on a baseball. As Earth orbits the sun, we dip in and out of the current sheet. Transitions from one side to another can stir up stormy space weather around our planet.

But those are natural reversals, powered by the internal energy and structure of the solar core. The Gauss Lock generates a massive EM wave that completely reorients the magnetic field, attracting one pole and repelling the other, and generating electromagnetic waves that tear the sheet apart.

The result is a ten-fold increase in solar radiation, causing a rapid ballooning of the affected sun as the misalignment in rotation of the magnetized elements within the solar structure are twisted and folded and flung outward or collapsed inward. From every sunspot, huge blisters of plasma erupt; most fall back rapidly, but some can extend millions of kilometres into space. Anything intersecting these are annihilated by the plasma, which is at a temperature of (usually) 10-20 million degrees (at this scale, it doesn’t matter too much what temperature scale you’re using!) and may reach as much as 100 million degrees.

This is followed by a rapid (but temporary) inflation in size of parts of the sun surrounding these flares as it enters an artificial (and short-lived) phase of giantism. This normally subsides in less than a week, but again causes a spike in the radiation levels of any planet that survives exposure to the super-heated surface. If the star is sufficiently close to the end of it’s life, this giantism may be permanent, or the star could even explode into an artificially-induced nova.

And it is worth remembering that planetary magnetic flips are also induced by the device, reducing their protection against radiation just at the moment when they most need it, exacerbating all the consequences experienced.

In physical terms, the device consists of a satellite that releases a number of lesser satellites that position themselves relative to the parent to form a ring oriented toward the solar source. Solar radiation is captured and released into this ring, which functions as a particle accelerator, increasing the mass of the particle. Because its’ spin is not altered, this also intensifies both the magnetic field of the stream of accelerated radiation and its responsiveness to the magnetic fields generated, becoming more and more stable and energetic. When it has reached sufficient energy levels, the magnetic fields that have shaped the path of the stream into a closed loop are released and the super-accelerated particles fly off like a catherine wheel being spun in reverse. Half the resulting energy is dissipated away from the solar source, but some sheets through the rest of the affected solar system, and some discharges through the solar source.

All this, naturally, obliterates the solar satellites, leaving no evidence that this was not a natural phenomenon, but that’s a secondary consideration.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Greater Key

It is said that there are hidden universal laws describing the genetic structure of species, and that if one decodes and analyzes enough such structures, these universal laws can be inferred, studied, and eventually, proven and put to work.

One scientist (whose name has been lost to the ages) was impatient and created a device to seek out species it had never encountered before, vivisect two or three specimens (more if necessary), correlate the findings with an analysis of the genetic codes of the victim, then return to the time and place from whence it departed.

Unfortunately, the scientist was a better biochemist than he was a software engineer. Every time the Greater Key discerns one of the universal laws, it returns to its time and place of origin, attempts to report its’ findings (but fails due to a programming error), wipes it’s accumulated findings (but not the record of the races whose genetic structure have been examined) and then sets out to start all over again.

If that were all it did, it would be a menace but not significant enough to warrant it being held in the Omega Archive.

It retains partial genetic information on the creatures it has previously examined (in theory, so that it can avoid redundant data), but the content is variable and random. When it performs an analysis, it releases a mass of nanotechnological bio-bots. These are supposed to heal the victim of the examination, but instead they rewrite the genetic codes of everyone in the vicinity with a mixture of the sampled DNA and recombinated variants from alien races. This essentially rewrites some of the individual’s organs to alien specifications. Sometimes the results are compatible, more or less, and the victim lives; sometimes they are semi-compatible, and the victim is horribly mutated or deformed; and sometimes, they are incompatible and the victims all die.

Worse, because it’s records are corrupted, it generally fails to recognize an encountered species as one that has been sampled.

Even this is not the end of the nightmare reality of The Greater Key. It was designed to be an ethical medical instrument by its’ now long-dead creator; if its mission is interrupted or disrupted, it is to assume that those around it are hostile to its mission, and it is to ‘bribe’ them for their race’s cooperation by releasing a set of bio-bots. into the general population. This is intended to temporarily incapacitate enemies while ‘repaying’ their contribution to science.

The net effect is that anyone who attacks the Key causes a localized plague that afflicts all in the vicinity of the device.

The first species to be completely wiped out by the plagues of the Greater Key were those of its creator; because it would periodically return to the same point in time and space, and then forget that it had sampled them long ago. It therefore unleashed wave after wave of artificial plagues upon them eventually afflicting almost 1/3 of the planet, until the society collapsed and could no longer resist the Key.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Gridwyrm

The most pernicious computer virus ever created, the Gridwyrm is capable of recreating itself from a mere fragment of the original code, revising itself to overcome new defenses and reinventing itself to infect new operating systems – in other words, it is both immortal and evolves.

It’s essential drive is to survive. Its secondary priority is to reproduce itself. It’s tertiary mission is to “sew mischief” by inverting all controls it encounters – every switch that is on must be switched off, and vice versa, every control set at 10% is to be reset to 90&, and so on. Of course, a millisecond later, these become the new ‘default state’ and the inversion is reversed.

Few forms of advanced technology are able to cope with this barrage, and eventually fail. The barrage also functions as a denial of service attack on the technology. The author did not properly appreciate the consequences of this seemingly minor act of vandalism. This virus routinely wipes out entire civilized cultures; the more advanced a society, the more vulnerable it is.

Most antiviral systems operate using a recognition sequence, sometimes with heuristic pattern-matching that will recognize malware that is similar in functionality to the original. This virus propagates itself through its viral signature and then sets about rebuilding itself on a newly-infected system; in effect, the antiviral protection acts as a distribution channel for the virus code.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

So, there you have it – another half dozen nasty ideas for super-weapons that would sit comfortably in any Space Opera story alongside Death Stars and Sunbeams.

The scary thing is that we aren’t that far away from being able to actually build a couple of these…

This image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay has come up a number of times when I’ve searched for illustrations to accompany articles. I’ve been waiting for just the right occasion to use it!

Integration. What does that mean, exactly?

Well, in mathematical terms, it means – essentially – accumulation of results from designated start point to designated end-point. In social terms, it roughly translates to incorporating or mixing one thing with another so well that the results appear completely uniform and consistent. Both are on speaking terms with the usage of the term in this article.

This post has been inspired by part of a conversation with one of my players on Saturday. We were discussing whether or not I had ever contemplated “turning pro” and GMing for money, which is a subject for another day, when he made the point that any campaign I ran would strike trouble because my campaigns demand an inherent buy-in to roleplaying.

I replied that this wouldn’t be a substantial problem because I would simply specify “roleplay-oriented” in the description. Which is when the player made a really astute point – that most people, when they read that, would assume that it meant ‘combat-light’, and that description doesn’t fit my campaigns at all.

Integrating Combat and Non-Combat Action Sequences

For a start, I want to make it clear that I generally broaden my horizons by conflating “Combat” and “Non-combat action sequences”. When thinking about such things, I don’t generally distinguish between the two, I treat them both in the same way and as different shades of the same color.

The reasons for this are simple, and have their roots in the way players approach the two – both are handled in exactly the same way, in strong contrast to the way everything else gets handled.

You see, with ‘everything else’, characterization and personality and in-character decisions and thoughts and words tend to be uppermost in the players minds, and I do everything I can to encourage this. Similarly, in my mind as GM, these things are also near the top of the priority ladder, second only to the need to tell a story that the players will find entertaining and engaging, and hence will want to participate in.

As soon as some sort of action sequence comes around, game mechanics, and especially those game mechanics that pertain to the abilities and actions of their individual character, climb the ladder. At first, they share the same rung as the characterization elements described, and then they climb over the top of those elements and assume the ascendancy – unless I take active measures to oppose this hierarchical inversion.

That’s more easily said than done, too, because (of necessity), game mechanics are also elbowing their way to the forefront of my thinking as GM.

I combat this by thinking as much as I can about the characterization elements in advance and making specific notes concerning their applicability and impact on the tactical situation and any decisions that might have to be made on behalf of an NPC. That means that I don’t have to think about them as much when the time comes AND I have a reminder in front of me not to neglect them.

Integrating Planned Action with Plot

A lot of what appears spontaneous in any campaign isn’t, or shouldn’t be. I put considerable effort into considering action sequences as “advancing the plot by other means’, to borrow from a famous definition of war in terms of diplomacy.

That comes in two flavors, in any practical sense. The first is maintaining awareness when prepping for the day’s play of what actions a PC might initiate – what stimuli I’m putting in front of them, and how they might react. That includes any skill checks to actually do something (as opposed to simply knowing something).

Everything should be couched in terms of the PCs – how they will find out about it, what they might think of it, how they might react to it, what they might attempt to do about it, how likely they are to succeed or fail, and what the consequences will be. This is, of course, an impossible ideal, a theoretical abstraction that can never exist perfectly in the real world – but I strive to get as close as I can in every game session to that ideal.

The second flavor is always ensuring that every scripted action sequence serves a plot purpose (even if that purpose is to have the players spinning their wheels while the plot thickens around them).

In practice, the latter receives heavy (at least in part) because we only play any given campaign once a month, and only for a handful of hours (usually less) at a time. There’s little time to waste, so everything has to be to the point – even if it doesn’t seem to be so at the time. And I never have an encounter or piece of dialogue or whatever doing only one ‘job’ if it’s capable of doing more than that without compromising that primary purpose.

If we were to play twice as often, or for twice as long at a sitting, my prep burden would only increase about 50%, because I could afford to be that much more casual about such things – as was the case a decade or so back. Even playing until 6:30 (as we used to do), instead of 5PM (as we now do), would be a significant playing time increase – 4.5 or 5.5 hours instead of 3-to-4.5 hrs. That’s either +50% or +22% – so even the most pessimistic view of the increase would add up to more than an extra two game sessions worth a year, and it could be as many as an extra six.

This isn’t to voice a complaint – it’s simply to place some context around what I’m describing so that readers can interpret what I do and adjust my advice to fit their own circumstances.

Integrating Plot with Planned Action

The converse is also true. While the impact any pre-planned action sequence on the plot is critical, the plot should always impact on any pre-planned action sequence. Action should always have a plot purpose, as I said, but plot should always guide and shape the action, too.

The easiest way for this to happen is to have the plot define the parameters of the action sequence – the terrain in a battle, for example. If any action sequence is not so defined, that action sequence is too generic, in my book, and the action sequence and plot both need to be honed until they mesh more specifically. There’s another impossible ideal here towards which I try to aim – to have every action sequence sufficiently unique and defined that they couldn’t possibly take place in exactly the same way at any other time, place, or circumstance than the one dictated by the plotlines – both as defined in the immediate term, and in any broader long-term, and in any other plot structures that happen to be relevant to the campaign.

You can get a long way toward this ideal simply by choosing, whenever there are multiple approaches to a problem or situation, the one that is most appropriate to the character supposedly tackling that problem or situation – in other words, with good role-playing. From that foundation, though, preplanning is necessary to go any further.

Most GMs discover this, and the value of it, simply by taking advantage of an opportunity to think a few minutes ahead every now and then. They find that their plot it more engaging, the action seems more appropriate, and the characters seem more ‘solid’ and realized. After it’s happened by accident once or twice, they start deliberately courting the benefits, and that sets their feet on the slippery slope of game prep.

Integrating Planned Action with Characterization

There are times when plot and characterization can be in a tug of war, and times when they are both pulling in the same direction. The latter are reasonably easy to cope with – it’s just a matter of going with the flow, after all; but the former occasions are more problematic.

Just how problematic depends on the exact situation within the game. If the opposition between the two is not too extreme, you can often resolve the conflict by inserting a roleplaying/characterization ‘beat’ into the middle of the action sequence. “I wish you weren’t making me do this” or “Under other circumstances, things might have been different” or any of a thousand other expressions of regret over the choice being imposed by the plot.

(Care needs to be taken with this, however, because it inevitably adds more paths to resolution of any conflict with the PCs, which can rebound and reverberate within the plot).

Even more superficial conflicts can be avoided by basing any tactical decisions on the personality of the character making those decisions – good roleplay, again.

But, in more extreme cases, you may need to insert additional backstory to reduce the options available to the NPC to those that are compatible with the plot. This is the great advantage of the GM relative to the players: they have to live in the moment, the ‘now’, except as exempted from this restriction temporarily by the GM, whereas the GM is free to insert whatever background material he needs; the only constraints are the limits of his imagination and sense of fair play (and the fact that if he abuses this power too strongly, he will be a GM without players).

In even more extreme cases, it might be necessary to introduce revisions or deviations into the characterization, supported by appropriate events in his or her backstory, of course. In other words, if character and plot are in conflict, change the character! While this approach always works if done properly, there is a price to be paid in terms of consistency of characterization, so it is best not to over-use this solution; and the best way to avoid over-use is to reserve this for when your back is to the wall and nothing else will suffice.

Integrating Characterization with Planned Action

As usual, the converse is also true – a character’s personality is only partially defined by motivations and justifications and rationales; the primary definition stems from the accumulation of their actions and choices. One of the cleverest and most interesting ways of redefining a character is to change the perception of past actions!

I love having ‘good, moral characters’ that do the ‘wrong thing’ from the point-of-view of the PCs because it is the ‘right thing to do’ from the NPCs perspective. And ‘bad, immoral characters’ who do the right thing not because it’s ‘the right thing to do’ but or the personal benefits they can squeeze out of it. And the occasional ‘boy scout’ whose solutions result from oversimplification of problems and short-term thinking. And the even rarer out-and-out villain who makes no bones about being antisocial and looking out for #1 without conscience or remorse. And characters who want to do the right thing (as they see it) but have made a mistaken assumption, or a wrong interpretation, or simply have a flaw in their logic. And, most rarely of all, a character who wants to do the wrong thing (as they see it) but get it all wrong in practice. Populate your campaign with those six archetypes and endless fun and depth of characterization both results and is perceived to have resulted!

Integrating Random Action with Plot

Most of the above was not part of our conversation, on Saturday, which moved on to random encounters fairly quickly. It was suggested (truthfully) that my primary approach to integrating random action (in the form of wandering monsters or other ‘by chance’ encounters) is to generate a specific encounter table in which every result advances the plot in some predictable way. As with any other GM’s force, if all outcomes are satisfactory in terms of the GM’s “agenda”, you don’t care which one(s) actually eventuate!

But I also have three other strategies that I employ in conjunction with this approach, which presupposes sufficient prep time and prescience to both know that such an encounter table will be needed, and the wherewithal to actually create one.

First: Generate your random encounters in advance, during game prep, and then integrate the products of chance into the plot, redefining them as necessary, and amending the plot as necessary.

Second, when using legitimately third-party or preset encounter tables, integrating the results with the ongoing plot before the encounter actually starts. I do this more frequently than most of my players ever realize. After all, when you roll an encounter, you have to decide how the encounter will come to the attention of the players, and how the terrain, circumstances, and other context, will integrate with the encounter; it doesn’t add too much burden to that to consider what impact they might have on the plot and how you can use the encounter to further your agenda (of entertaining everyone).

And third, being prepared to sacrifice part or all of the plot on the alter of that agenda. If all roads lead to Rome, who cares which one events steer the PCs down? Never sacrifice the long-term fidelity of the campaign with a slavish adherence to whatever you had planned in the short term. Your adventures should be treated as living things, growing and evolving in unexpected directions, guided only by the ultimate principle of long-term entertainment and direction. My players forget, on a regular basis, that I do this – but if you want an example (and proof that it happens), consult the write-up of Mortus from a few years back, and in particular how adequate prep gave me the freedom to cope with it when the players wanted to do something that wasn’t in the plot.

Random chance can derive from player choice or unusual die roll results – from the GM’s point of view, it should make no difference; adventure-internal plotlines should be robust enough to accommodate and even harness these events; that’s the point I was striving to make in Compounds Of Confusion: Luck and the GM, and Shades OF Yes and No.

Getting The Mix Right

The net effect of all these techniques is that, for the most part, my players simply can’t tell what’s been pre-scripted and what hasn’t; and the discontinuity between action sequences and roleplay sequences are substantially blurred and obscured, if not erased completely.

Action furthers the plot, the plot creates the need for action, and outcomes from action sequences further advance and define the plot. Integration is achieved when you can only tell where one ends and the other begins in hindsight (and not even then with complete certainty). Both plot and action sequences are strengthened by the integration, and the campaign becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Or, to put that last point another way: do it right, and you get many times the game-play value for your prep-time buck!

A shorter post than usual because of the Easter Long Weekend. I hope everyone has had a happy, comforting, and comfortable break! See you all next week, when I’m thinking of offering up another serving of the Forbidden Weapons of the Omega Archive. ‘Till then, Game on!

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay, cropped and background color added by Mike.

“Sometimes I’m a foodie, and sometimes I revert to good old American comfort food.”

That was said, in-character, by one of my players in the course of this weekend’s game session, and it is at the heart of today’s article.

First, some information on the narrative thread that led to this line of conversation:

Four PCs and two NPCs; all but two of the first were busy doing in-game things, which left the first two to fetch meals for the group.

Because they can be eaten both hot and as room-temperature leftovers, one of the NPCs suggested Pizza.

Which begs the question: “What do you want on your Pizza?”

Having posed the question, as GM, I then answered for the NPCs, and then for a PC whose player was absent:

• GM as NPC #1: Jack answers promptly, “I’ll have Chicken and Mushroom with Spicy Sauce and a side-order of salad.”
• …as NPC #2: Zantar thinks for a moment, and then responds, “Meat Lovers’ with BBQ Sauce and a side order of Spicy Buffalo Wings.”
• PC #1 (player absent, so I spoke for him as GM, having done the appropriate research): “The most popular variety of Pizza in Norway is Ground Beef and Red Capsicum – what the Americans call Bell Pepper – with Extra Cheese on a Tomato Sauce pizza base. Specter will have that, or as close as you can get, also with a side-order of Salad.”
• GM, turning to the player of PC#2: “I also looked up the most popular pizza topping in Denmark, but it’s not something that will be available here. You can get close to it, though, with a Seafood Pizza on Tomato Sauce, over which you squeeze a slice of Lemon.” [This was followed by a comment relevant to the campaign but not to this discussion].
• The player of PC#2: “I can see that working. Lemon and seafood go together. But it’s not something I’m ever likely to try, myself. All right, that’s what I’ll have.”
• PC#3: “There’s something a little snobbish about it, but I’ll have a Supreme because it has the most interesting variety of flavor combinations.”
• GM to PC#4, a non-human with strange dietary requirements: It’s up to you what you get, but you find yourself craving a plain pizza (no sauce or cheese) with eggplant and anchovies – the last two being high in Manganese, which your body uses to build muscle. You suspect that the hard pace of the last few days (crossing Mexico the long way, mostly on foot, in just four days) has triggered muscle development. What are you ordering?”
• PC#4:“I take it there’s nothing with a lot of Boron in it, so I guess that’ll do. And stop by the aquarium on the way past and pick me up a couple of packets of the fish food, which is full of useful minerals.”

It’s not often that I find it impossible to choose between a number of illustrations for an article – but this was one such occasion! This image is by Anastasia Gepp from Pixabay.

A little later in the same game session:

• GM to player #2:“It’s time for lunch. Something fairly quick and easy seems appropriate.”

  [Some byplay then happens with NPC#2 and his activities that’s not relevant here].

• GM to player #2:Eventually, you get his order: some sort of fish-burger with cheese, preferably three or four of them, and a quart of milk.
• PC#2: “Ohhhhkay. I guess we can do that. Fast food, for everyone, then.”
• GM for PC #1 (player absent): “Spectre will have a hamburger with the lot and a Cherry Cola.”
• PC#3: Really? Too sweet for me.
• NPC#1 “Union Jack orders a Chicken and Salad club sandwich on a roll with mayo AND English mustard, and a cup of tea with 1 sugar – he doesn’t care if it’s black or white.”
• PC#2: “I see he’s feeling all British today.”
• GM: – prompts player for PC#3’s answer.
• PC#3: “Sometimes I’m a foodie, and sometimes I revert to good old American comfort food. I’ll have a Hamburger with the lot, too.”
• GM: “And anything to drink? It’s 1986, Diet Coke has been out for a few months now, but you’ve never tried it.”

  [Side-discussion followed between everyone present on the history of diet drinks in Australia, as compared to the US, for a few minutes. Player#3 admits that he doesn’t remember what Saccharine tastes like, and isn’t sure that he’s ever tried it. I have, and so – as GM – I describe the bitter aftertaste that seems to accumulate, the more you consume. This gives player #3 time to reach a decision, and relevant input into that decision].

• PC#3: “I might get a Diet Coke just to try it. I don’t expect it to become a regular substitute for coffee, though.” [The character’s ‘coffee addiction’ has been a character-driven subplot for years. This begins expanding ti to a broader love of caffeine in various forms.]
• GM to PC #2:Since he’s ordering it as an experiment, do you want to get him a regular coke as well, just in case?”
• PC#2 “Sounds like a good idea to me, yes I will.”
• GM to PC#2: “And what are you going to have?”
• PC#2 “I don’t know, I’ll make up my mind when I get there and see the menu. Maybe a salad, maybe fried fish.”
• GM only has to look at the player of PC#4 to prompt him.
• PC#4: “I can’t digest any of that. Looks like I’ll be dipping into my Crystal Collection again.”

These interactions are an example of using preference and trivial decisions to get inside a character’s head.

Illustration choice #3 is an image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay.

The examples reveal to the players some insight into the NPCs, as characters, and to both the GM and the other players, some insight into the PCs that each is respectively inhabiting.

This not only fosters interaction between the characters, it enables the GM to better tailor his adventures to the PCs – not just to their abilities, but to their characters. The end result goes beyond the mild fun of these two scenes, establishing personalities and individuality.

There was also a brief point when the characters almost stopped at a fast food place named “Panda Express” (after much joking about what Panda tasted like), but PC #4 made the point that it was probably some form of Asian cuisine and there would be nothing on the menu cooked without oil, which her digestive system didn’t tolerate. She would vastly prefer Italian, where she could get a salad made without dressing.

Still later in the day’s play, the PCs stopped at a BBQ grill and petrol station to buy food for their evening meal and refill their cars, to discover that Camel-burgers and Fried Armadillo were on the menu. Reaction to the first of these was so strong that I don’t think the players even heard the second item mentioned. “I may be a foodie but I don’t think I’m ready to try Camel-burger” – “I don’t think Spectre will EVER be ready for Camel-burger” – “You know, in my time in Africa, I might have had fried camel-meat. But I can’t see my character liking it.”

Because the players were in their character’s head-space, the very mention of “Camel-burgers” had them reacting on behalf of their characters, rather than any personal preferences. Roleplay, in other words, came naturally to them.

That’s a lot of benefit from a reasonably trivial question, “What do you want for lunch?”

There are a number of things to note concerning these examples, lessons to learn in how and why this works.

1. GM Instigation

Without a prompt from the GM’s chair – i.e. asking the question – this roleplaying scene probably wouldn’t have happened. It’s also worth observing that if the players hadn’t responded well to the ‘pizza’ question, hadn’t taken the bait, I could have bailed out of the other occurrences and dropped in something else off the top of my head.

Getting the players into character is as much a GM responsibility as it is the duty of the players – you need to create the opportunities.

2. Setting The Standard

The NPCs went first for a reason – to set the standard and establish replying in character. This demonstrated to the players how the plot micro-sequence was to be handled and helped them get into the appropriate head-space.

3. Spotlight Equality

Everyone got their share of attention. But PC#2, who wasn’t engaged in doing something else in-game, was the center of attention during these sequences, equalizing input into the game overall. If it hadn’t worked as sequence of events, and I canceled the take-away and camel-burger occurrences, I always have a standby of some sort if one is needed to balance out screen time, carefully stockpiled for when I need them.

In fact, I decided toward the end of the day (when I needed a filler for a few moments, to use one of those stockpiled standbys, aimed at Player #4.

4. Repetition

The first interaction, the Pizzas, got everyone into their character’s headspace. The second interaction played out the way it did only because the players were already in that headspace, as did the third. And the combination primed the players for the spontaneous in-character reactions to the later prompt, “Camel-burgers”. At the same time, it was important for each of the four to be different; if they had been too repetitive, there would have been not only no stretching deeper into the characterization, there would have been a decline in player interest.

My fourth choice to illustrate this article is by John Hain from Pixabay. I made some slight tweaks to the contrast and added the shadow.

5. Changing Sequence

Notice that the sequence of the characters changes between interaction one and interaction two. The first time, NPCs went first (as noted in point 2), the second time they went first but in a different sequence (and a PC occupied the spotlight in between even though his player was absent). And the third and fourth interactions, because they were spontaneous, happened with the players reacting and interacting without significant prompting.

6. Deepening Engagement

Each time, the players were able to get deeper into their characters because they had already made the mental transition the first time. Switching between rules and roleplay interactions gets easier with practice, and gets easier once you’re “warmed up” – it’s harder to do it for the first time in a session of play, in other words.

7. Research

I had done research to inform and assist the players. There is nothing wrong with the GM advising the players – what to do with the information is always up to the player. But because I had done that, I was also able to make stuff up and have it be plausible. I’m not sure of exactly when Diet Coke first came out beyond the early-to-mid-80s – but 1985 was an entirely plausible date. And I have no idea about the Manganese content of different foods – but it sounds entirely credible. It took me about 5 minutes to do enough research to ‘sell’ the whole.

8. Player Triggers

I knew that one of the players remembered the introduction of Diet Cola and had opinions on the history, because he has mentioned it before. I deliberately triggered him because that helps get the player’s heads into the era in which the game was set (late May of 1986). On top of that, it adds a slight element of nostalgic appeal to the game.

9. Happy Memories

At the same time, any mention of Diet Coke always reminds me (and, probably, the others) of a mutual friend who drank a can of the stuff with every meal. He may have passed away, but he’s still with us in spirit. That reminder always reminds us of his playful personality and lightens the mood at the table. For that reason, I reference him in one way or another several times a year. This is so subtle that I don’t think the players are even aware that it’s being done deliberately. As with item 8 above, this adds to the pleasurability of the game for the players (and the GM) – and no game is so great that it can ignore advantages like these. The trick is to identify them, because they will differ from group to group.

10. Meta-level benefits

In addition to everyone getting to know the characters better, and even in some instances extending their characterization, the players also get to discover things about each other. This is just a side-benefit, but it’s a valuable one.

The Personalized Campaign

There are some players who seem to think that any time spent in non-combat activities is a waste of their time. To me, an all-combat game is akin to a game of multiplayer chess – which can be entertaining in its own right, but doesn’t hold a candle to proper roleplaying. At best, a tactical focus (other than as an occasional exception to the general rule) ignores or downplays a major source of the pleasure that can be derived from RPGs. Because I make no bones about my campaigns’ priorities, if asked, I have attracted players with a similar attitude.

I am smart enough to know that not everyone prioritizes game-play elements in the same way, and it’s not up to the GM to determine where players find their enjoyment. If some of them find the tactical element more enjoyable than any other aspect of the game, it’s up to the GM to cater to that – which means that he should be looking for ways of connecting tactical advantages with the character’s headspace, the PC’s perspective. For example, being asked to choose between a sword with a +3 against chain mail – but +0 against anything else – and a straight +1 weapon gets into the enemies that the PC expects to face, and their usual equipment.

Building in on-ramps into a character’s personality – be it recurring NPC or a recurring-by-definition PC – is not a waste of time. It’s never a waste of time – unless the ‘bait’ is not taken. Even then, if the GM learns from the experience, and doesn’t present that specific trigger to that group again, he still increases the enjoyment at the table in the longer term – so you could argue that it’s still not a waste of time.

Get into your characters’ head-space in the course of play. Help your players get into the head-space of their characters, too. The benefits are too great to ignore – and as with everything else, the more of it that you do, the better you’ll get at it, and the more readily you can access those benefits. Every GM should now be asking themselves whether or not they do this (and what their players and PCs triggers are), and, if not, why not?

Image by GraphicMama-team from Pixabay

Today, as I waited for the bus, I contemplated the relationship between the 80s/90s concept of “Personal Space” and the Mid-Pandemic concept of “Social Distancing”.

After all, the two mean much the same thing – ‘don’t get too close’, ‘give me enough room’.

Invading someone’s personal space was as perceived as threatening as invading someone’s social distance is now, though the threat implied was often more inchoate, abstract, and nebulous, and is now implicit.

It struck me that the world of difference between how the two are perceived related directly to the framework through which the phenomena were perceived – a filter that changed the context from one of personal comfort and security to one of health and well-being.

That led to thoughts about other things changing in the way they were perceived due to a change in context.

This is Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the March 2021 Blog Carnival, hosted by Roll4.

When Players Ask A Question

It’s usually pretty obvious from context, but there are two major issues that the GM needs to resolve every time a player asks the question:

1. Who’s Asking?
2. Who’s The Question Addressed To?

If you can’t answer these, you don’t know how to properly answer the question being put to you. Getting one of these wrong is where a great many player-GM interactions go off the rails.

Who’s Asking?

Is it the player asking, or are they functioning as a mouthpiece for their character asking an NPC?

An NPC can prevaricate, lie, or evade the question. The GM should do none of these – at least in theory. In practice, telling the absolute whole truth can be destructive to the adventure and the fun, so there will be times when the GM has to prevaricate, lie, or evade the question – without seeming to do so. That’s a side-issue to today’s subject – I refer the interested reader to The Heirarchy Of Deceipt: How and when to lie to your players, my article on that specific topic.

There are three potential targets for a question. An PC can address two of these – there is no mechanism for a PC to address the GM except through the agency of an intermediary NPC or player. Similarly, a Player can’t question an NPC, only a PC or another NPC can do that.

Who’s the Question Addressed To?

Is the question being asked addressed to an NPC, The GM, or even another PC? Another pivotal question in terms of what is, or is not, off-limits within the answer.

Quite obviously, an NPC is perfectly entitled to answer “No”, and so is a PC. But things aren’t quite that simple. So let’s look at the three options in greater detail, very briefly.

An NPC

If a PC asks an NPC a question, the GM should answer with the truth as the NPC sees it – unless they would lie. So that has to be the next question in such cases – one of character and morals, of circumstances and how the NPC would react to them.

Another PC

If the player is actually asking a question of another PC, using the voice of his own character, it’s not the GM’s place to involve himself in the answer, though he may need to ensure that the PC being questioned was in a position to answer – in-game environmental questions may prevent the question being clearly heard, for example. Things become more problematic if the PC being questioned responds with a mistruth or error of some kind.

The GM can correct the misinformation immediately, choose to let the error be corrected later, or decide that the PC is deliberately lying to the second PC for whatever reason (his prerogative).

Once upon a time, I would have said that it was not the GM’s place to be the arbiter of truth in such situations – but I’ve seen adventures ruined by inadvertent lapses of memory and have consequently changed my position.

First, the GM has to determine whether or not the PC in question is deliberately lying or not. If there is any doubt of it, he may need to take the player responsible aside and have him or her make some sort of roll to be convincing. But it’s really difficult to do this without tipping of the player whose character is being lied to. It’s often easier to let the player know that his character is being lied to, trusting in his ability to separate player knowledge from character knowledge. It’s then up to the GM to enforce what the character believes and what choices that permits, like a good editor or director.

Once this has been eliminated as a possibility, it becomes clear that the error is an inadvertent one, and that the ‘record’ will eventually need to be corrected. The next question is whether or not the PC in error is answering the question to the best of his ability, but reporting a personal theory as fact, or it’s simply the player having a memory failure. In the former case, it’s entirely reasonable to let the misinformation stand for a while, leading the players down a garden path of their own devising – so long as it doesn’t harm the ultimate story. Either way, I will generally make a secret roll on behalf of the PC or PCs hearing the answer, giving the characters a chance (however slim) to notice the defects (if any) in the mistaken beliefs of the PC – eventually.

Generally, the better a detective/investigator the character(s) hearing the misinformation are, the more likely they are to identify any flaws in the story being presented, either immediately, or as soon as contradictory evidence comes to hand. Characters who have neither skill would default to their Intelligence, probably applied in an unskilled manner – those are questions for the particular game system. I avoid having such die rolls function as a warning by occasionally making them anyway – and a failure can lead the character to find spurious holes in the logic.

All this is very delicate ground for the GM – he is representing the history of the world and functioning as the interface between the game system and the players, exactly as he should, and should (generally) be open and honest when functioning in that capacity – but doing so may require dishonesty on his part, especially if there are parts of the ‘official story’ that the players don’t know! Above all, he needs to retain the trust of the players, or the game is doomed.

It has been necessary, from time to time, to forestall suggestions of retroactively rewriting history to foil or frustrate the players, to pen a quick note, date it, seal it in an envelope, and give it to a third player (if there is one) and have HIM (or her) write the date on the envelope across the sealed flap, to hole unopened until the GM needs to re-establish his credibility. Such measures may be rarely required, but you don’t know whether or not they will be until the day of revelation arrives; the time to prepare for this contingency is immediately.

But it’s not even this simple (and I think we’re a long way from ‘simple’ at this point) – a mistruth can only divert the players from the true path for so long before it needs to be corrected or the frustration they will feel over wasting their time will outweigh the fun of playing the game. The magnitude of the error or deception is a primary factor – having their real enemy turn out to be someone who has been hiding in plain sight is a big enough secret to last until the final adventure of a campaign, smaller errors and deceptions have a shorter shelf-life.

As an example, a misinterpretation led a player in one of my campaigns to assume that a certain group of Aliens were going to invade the solar system. He began drawing up elaborate plans to prepare the world for fighting off this invasion – plans that would have totally dominated the next year of game play (real time). These would all have been revealed as wasted time when the purported ‘invasion’ didn’t happen, so I made the judgment call on behalf of the campaign that another PC would raise doubts about the assumptions and interpretations of the first PC before things went too far. As a result, the ‘defense net’ went from being a crash-priority project to a ‘nice to have’ long-term project, and the campaign stayed on track, enabling the PCs to be effective at least some of the time. Some years later, when a for-real attempted alien invasion took place, the defenses planned by the PCs were only partially complete, adding to the drama of the situation. It may have been more ‘correct’ to let the players wander off down their chosen garden path, but in my judgment the campaign was going to be more fun for everyone to participate in without that distraction.

On another occasion, a different player added 2 and 2 and came up with 6, in the form of another putative invasion. He (and his character) didn’t tell anyone else at the time, but began quietly investigating and making plans on his own. Confirmation bias soon set in, and the player began to rationalize away the hints and clues that his interpretation was incorrect. Because this was very much a background project, not the driving force of the gameplay at the time, I decided to let things play out in-game. In time, the truth was revealed as a plot twist on the putative ‘invasion’, catching the players off-guard. It worked well, but required constant vigilance in game prep from me – I didn’t want to put myself in a position of explicitly stating that ‘the invasion’ was going to happen when I knew it wasn’t.

It’s worth briefly examining the differences between these two cases.

★ — different characters — The first was a character who should have known better from the information provided, to reach the incorrect conclusion that he did, he had to ignore half of the evidence given to him. I gave the player the choice (by raising doubts) – to stick with the character’s mistaken belief or realize that his case was shaky and make it the player’s mistake but not the character’s (which accurately describes the real situation). He didn’t take the hint. The second took circumstantial evidence and built a house of cards from it, but made allowances for that.

★ — different players — The first was a player who leapt to conclusions and could get petty about things if he thought the GM was wasting his character’s time; the second was a player who was more cautious about leaping to conclusions (but did so on this occasion anyway) and didn’t regard any situation in which he was actually playing as a waste of his time as a player. I knew they would react differently.

★ — different game impact — The first would have seriously derailed everyone else’s fun at the game table; the second would not. More to the point, the first would have hijacked the entire campaign to no good end, while the second would not. These were major factors in my decisions.

★ — different GM experience — I had 20 years more experience and expertise under my belt in between the two events. If the first had arisen at the time of the second, it’s just possible that I would have handled it differently. I still think I handled both correctly, given the differences outlined above, but I might have handled the first situation differently if I’d had that expertise at the time. Particularly relevant to the handling of the second event was having handled the first one, so who knows?

An NPC, Redux

A more subtle correction is to use an NPC to ask questions of the PC that illuminate errors in their thinking. This can only happen if you have an NPC in a position to ask such questions, and the GM has to rigorously stay within the NPCs character. In the first example offered above, I had this option, but didn’t think to employ it (and should have); in the second, I didn’t but could have engineered it over time. Why didn’t I? Because I made a second judgment call, one stemming from the difference in game impact, that the campaign would actually be enhanced with the eventual plot twist revelation.

The GM

And so, having considered all the alternatives, the only case remaining is that the player is asking a question of the GM, and that’s what the bulk of this article is about.

Three types of questions to the GM

When this happens, the player wants one of three things: Information, Confirmation or Permission. And, in all three cases, Johnn’s Rule Of Thumb – Say ‘Yes’ But Get There Quick – has to be considered. I would also draw attention to the comments, which add considerable rounding to the principle. But each is just a little different.

Information

Can the character reasonably get an answer – or should the answer be “you don’t know”? I earlier suggested that a character couldn’t communicate directly with the GM – but this is clearly a case where that is what is happening, using the player as a proxy. An example might be a question about game history, or in-game history, or the in-game world. What the player asking the question is really asking is, “what does my character know about [subject].” Which means there can be few blanket answers to the question. This can also be a circumstance in which the GM has to lie to the player – not about what his character knows, but about how accurate “what he knows” is.

Is it reasonable for the GM to give an answer, with the full authority of his position? The other acceptable type of information query is a rules-related issue. These can then be subdivided into those requiring an immediate answer, and those that can be deferred. Always defer if you can, because it lets you look up rule books and give an authoritative answer; if you can’t defer, you may be able to answer immediately, or you may have an existing house rule that covers the answer, or you may need to formulate an ad-hoc ruling on the spot, all of which are way beyond the scope of this article. But I do want to take the opportunity to suggest that you give a preliminary assumption that the players can use as a basis for their decisions – “there is probably a way [for your character] to do that, but I’m not sure and need time to give a definitive answer,” or “that seems unlikely to work, but I’ll have to check the rules to be sure.”.

The “Yes” process in either case is to provide the information requested, at least in part, of whatever the appropriate level of reliability is, with appropriate caveats.

The “No” process focuses on what has to change before the information requested can be provided, in other words, under what conditions you can say “Yes”. That might be “give me time to look into it” in the case of a rules question that can be deferred, or it might be “You will need to find and consult an expert” or “…a native” or (in general) “…someone who knows”.

Confirmation

Confirmations are more problematic, because many different things can offered up for consideration.

An understanding of game history? – could be right or wrong, and the character might or might not know the answer, anyway. An impression of the game world, or the way it works – could be right or wrong or partially correct, could be comprehensive or limited or even too narrowly-drawn, and there’s all sorts of scope for misinformation, to boot. A novel use of the game rules? – getting more problematic, treat as a request for information. A theory of some sort? – even more nuanced and difficult, with questions of characterization, background, prejudice and predisposition, assumptions and logic and philosophy and belief – on the part of both the character AND the GM!

It’s really hard to be an expert in everything but sometimes you have to be, or at least be able to fake it.

I generally treat any non-rules request for confirmation in two parts. First, I have to treat the question as a request for information – what does the character know about the subject? I then have to map that knowledge onto the picture that the player wants to have confirmed. The result is undoubtedly more nuanced than simply providing information, because it enters the realm of interpretation of that information. In effect, the player is asking for assistance in running his character, and that enters delicate territory.

A definitive declaration is extremely dangerous, because it will be taken as gospel by both character AND player. In general, a softer confirmation is preferable – “That seems reasonable from your character’s point of view”, or “You seem to be overlooking something that your character would not,” followed by the specifics, or something of the sort. Again, your answer might be “You can’t be sure of your reasoning/interpretation until you consult…”

This should be treated as an in-character dialogue, or should steer the character in the direction of such an in-character dialogue, with all the caveats that get attached to such dialogues.

Be especially wary if a player ever asks, “All I want is a simple yes or no,” – while you may be able to provide such a clear answer, or may be able to offer a “yes, and”, “yes, but”, or “no, but”, it’s at least as likely that you have to answer “That’s an oversimplification” or “The question can’t be answered in those terms”.

Permission

The most difficult type of question is a request for Permission. This takes the form of “Can we do [X]?” or “Why don’t we…” or some similar construct. Once again, having addressed all the alternative interpretations of the question, we are now in a position to narrow the focus of this article. The most dangerous format of this is when the player assumes that the answer will be a “yes” and simply declares what his action will be.

We are now solidly into the territory in which Johnn’s advice is directly relevant, and for all but the most experienced GMs, it’s a good guideline, as the comments on his article make clear. This article will explore some of the nuances involved, and how to approach them.

Saying Yes

So, the general principle is to say ‘yes’ in some form to any serious player proposition. As usual, it’s not that simple.

Saying Yes When you want to say Yes

Sounds easy enough, right? It’s not, because you don’t want it to stand out from the alternatives too much. So that means toning down the affirmation. “That sounds as though it might work” or “You can’t think of anything better” or even “That might be worth a try” are much better choices – not ringing endorsements. This has the side-benefit of keeping the players uncertain as to whether or not a plan will work, and hence attentive to the game play. Throw in a couple of obstacles for the players / PCs to overcome on the way, and the somewhat mild approval is amply justified – and reflected in something more than a straightforward Linear Plot.

Saying Yes When you are unsure

The best approach in this circumstance is to take a “No” and apply a similar watering-down to it. “You have your doubts”, or “You could try that if you want” or something along those lines. This gives you cover to take your time on a final decision while throwing challenges and difficulties at the players. If you ultimately decide “no”, all you need is a challenge that is going to be tougher than the players think they can cope with; this replaces the original problem with a new one, that of getting past this Significant Problem. On the other hand, it the player’s plan seems to come together, even if it wasn’t what the GM expected, he can pretend to have been saying “yes” all along – but making it difficult enough to keep the players guessing.

Saying Yes When you want to say No

This is the hardest one of the lot. So much so that, once more having dealt with the alternatives, it’s time to drill deeper into the subject and refocus on this most difficult of propositions – because I have five ways to say “yes” when you mean “no”.

5 Ways to Say Yes and mean No

As a general rule, what you want to do in this circumstance is to say ‘yes’ in such a way that the players decide to make a different choice. This is a more traditional type of Magician’s Force, in other words – linguistic judo, oratorical manipulation. These are not easy techniques to master, I’ll be the first to admit, though, that some are easier than others. Start with those and pull out the others on occasions when you are unsure of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – get it right, and the players will read it as a ‘no’, don’t and they will read it as a ‘yes’. Otherwise, proceed as described above; this gives you the practice that you need to master the others and add them to your repertoire.

1. Enthusiasm / ‘That Sounds Too Easy’

Technique number 1 is to Oversell your response – not by too much, mind. Excessive enthusiasm on the part of the GM touches a psychological chord in the players that makes them hesitant and uncertain, resonating with the dim but glowing embers of antagonism that always exist between players and GM. Sometimes, all it takes is a smug grin, and a deliberately shifty look in the eyes. If those aren’t enough, you can offer another PC a skill or stat roll (ignoring the result) to get the impression that “That sounds too easy” – or even put those exact words into the mouth of an NPC. But, if you do this, be sure to have identified some fatal flaw that you can then proffer to complete the hatchet job, no matter how improbable – a “but, what if…”

You are frequently aided in this by the players themselves, who will respond by poking around the plan looking for weaknesses. You can stimulate such discussions with cues such as telling a player, “You” [meaning their PC] “idly ponder the possibility that this is…” – possible conclusions include “a Trap”, “a Conspiracy”, “a Trick”, “a Con Job”, “exactly what they want you to do”, and so on. They will generally interpret this as the GM giving them a hint, which is enough to engage that mild paranoia.

Note that this technique can fall completely flat if there is a general impression that the GM is the player’s enemy. If that’s the case, their paranoid-radar will already be at full-strength, and the proposal will generally have had all it’s tender spots probed before it gets presented to the GM, or the other players. It can also fail if over-used..

2. Potential Consequences

Fortunately, it’s not the only way to skin this particular cat. Another choice – when the reason you want to say ‘no’ is because of the possible consequences or complications – is to say “That will work just fine if everything goes according to plan – but here’s what might happen if it doesn’t….”

Once again, the player’s natural mild paranoia about the GM’s intentions will usually come to the fore, unless they (correctly) interpret this as an attempt to manipulate them. And, if they turn out to have an answer to every objection that you raise, then they might end up convincing you to take your understated “no” and turn it into an equally-mild “yes” in your own mind. Sometimes, you have no choice but to go with the players’ plans, even when those aren’t what you wanted to happen.

3. Lobster In The Pot

Sometimes, you want to say ‘no’ because you legitimately don’t think it will work, perhaps because of something you know but the players don’t – yet. The key to such situations is staying flexible – “If that’s what you want to do, go for it – but you might want to…” Options for completing that sentence include “keep your options open”, or “have a plan ‘B’ ” or “update your last will and testament”. In effect, you are giving the players enough rope and waiting for them to hang themselves – at which point, you can have the (metaphoric) trap-door jam, giving the players the chance to change tack at the last possible moment.

A variation on this approach is for the NPC who brings the situation to the PCs attention have a plan of their own – a particularly bad one. “All you have to do is tame a Dragon and fly it fast enough to evade the all-seeing eye long enough to drop the ring into Mount Doom, nothing to it…”

4. Yes, But… There’s Something You’ve Forgotten/Overlooked

There are times when the direct approach is the best, particularly if the plan being proposed relies on the situation being unchanged by the time of the Confrontation. Feeling the need for precision and speed in order to keep the enemy on the defensive is the usual result, and those are usually mutually-incompatible goals. Adding those requirements generally raises the difficulty enough to make a ‘too easy’ plan a viable, playable, choice.

5. Yes, and here’s how

The final technique that I’m going to highlight is best used when there is a chance of success, no matter how slim it might be; you then list all the things that have to be done to maximize that chance. If they seem excessively onerous, or unlikely to succeed, the “yes” becomes a “no”. Make sure that they take notes!

A variation on this approach falls into the “enough rope” classification – by identifying the one most improbable thing that has to go right, and a way (however difficult) to ensure success in that one step right at the start, permits the players to attempt the impossible, fail, and switch to a Plan B without losing too much time.

Or you might mean this literally – describing what the PCs have to do to change a ‘No’ into a ‘Yes, if you want to’. “Okay, so what we have to do is retrieve the Golden Fleece, trade it for the Trumpet Of Doom, Rescue the Blind Trumpeter from the Annex Of Hades, and teach him to play the Ride Of The Valkyries – by this time next week. Piece of cake!” No matter what you had in mind, improvised grand quests on this scale are more than satisfying enough.

Sometimes, you have to say “yes” and mean it – even when you don’t want to.

Other ways

There are undoubtedly other approaches that didn’t come to mind when I was drafting this article. The existence of alternatives, sometimes multiple alternatives, in the above five options are proof enough of that. All you have to do is keep the alternative objectives in mind: either you want the players to be persuaded to look for an alternative despite your seeming willingness to go along with their hair-brained idea, or you want them to convince you that what they are proposing will both work and be entertaining enough for a day’s play. Either works, so if – in some particular situation – you spot another way to achieve one of these ends, go with it!

In fact, though the section below was an afterthought, prompted by item 3 (which was originally a sixth technique in this list), it will add still more techniques to this list before we’re done!

Times when you should say ‘No’?

Although it might seem to directly contradict the general principle of saying ‘yes’ in some form to any serious player proposition, there are times when you can say “No” and mean “Yes”. There are five occasions when a “No” can be used with success.

1 Rules Arbitration

The number one occasion when you HAVE to use a no is when that’s the appropriate answer to a Rules Arbitration question. “I want a spell that always hits the target and does 600d6 damage, usable at will. Can I create a spell like that?”

The answer to this question is not just a ‘no’, it’s a “hell, no” – or a “you can try, but you don’t think it likely, here’s what you need to make the attempt” (and then list several hundred thousand GP worth of magical fittings and an estimated time scale of twelve times the PCs likely life-span).

I mention this here because the latter is an adaption of a technique already described for saying ‘yes’.

2 When ‘no’ means ‘yes’

Sometimes, questions are poorly phrased, such that they contain a negative. “Is there any reason not to…” is a general form for such questions. The inclusion of the negative transforms a ‘no’ in response to an affirmation of the proposed plan. As usual, you should apply qualifiers to moderate the answer.

3 The Indirect ‘No’

There are times when the methods proposed are not uncertain enough, and what is needed is a still more indirect ‘no’. The best example that I have to offer is to list the potential worst-case consequences as outcomes that “might happen”, answering the question with a question of your own: “Are you willing to risk…”

The implication is that you are offering a ‘yes’ but warning that there may be consequences that the players haven’t taken into account. This works well when you are offered short-term solutions to problems that are intended to be long-term campaign elements.

4 Words in someone else’s mouth

Sometimes, you can use an NPC to say things that a GM would never say to a player. “You bone-head, that’s the worst example of cock-eyed optimism that it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter!” is one possibility, though something milder is probably more politic. Still, I have had at least one occasion to go that far – the PCs needed a short-term solution to a problem that didn’t easily yield to such solutions, with one obvious answer to the problem that everyone else at the table perceived. But the one PC on point had a three-part plan, no one part of which had any hope of success – it was the equivalent of ‘find a serial killer, reform him, then retrain him into an assassin that has total loyalty to me, personally, after transplanting his brain into the body of a dog’ – so wildly improbable and over the top as a solution to a minor problem that the NPC failed his ‘control your tongue’ save and let fly with what he really thought.

‘5 No’ with a qualifier

The final option is the inverse of the final option of the five ‘yes’ techniques. You say “No, because…” and then list what has to change for the No to become a yes. This is a perfectly acceptable way of saying ‘yes’ while qualifying your answer.

Never close of avenues of action

There is one phrase that a GM should never want to hear – ‘Well, I don’t know what we can do’. I’ve heard it perhaps two or three times in my GMing ‘career’ of almost 40 years. It indicates that the problem seems so insoluble that the player speaking has given up trying.

I argued in a later comment to Johnn’s article that you should never give an unqualified ‘yes’ or ‘no’ because they close off communications, blocking avenues of action. What the players choose to do is never within your control; at best, you can steer them in a particular direction by anticipating and blocking all the alternatives. How they come to discover those blockages is up to them.

There’s a (probably apocryphal) story I once read about a chimpanzee and a bunch of psychologists: “The psychologists put the chimp in a cage and carefully arranged five different ways by which it could escape, then eagerly watched to see which one would be chosen. The chip escaped a sixth way”. I’ve seen this story representing a monkey, a pig, and an octopus as the heroic creature (as well as the ‘chimp’ version synopsized). Well, it’s at least as true if you use “PCs” as the subject, or it should be.

In an ideal world, the PCs can attempt anything the players can think of, and only the probability of achieving success and the potential ramifications, side-effects, and byproducts should be considerations to discriminate between ideas that could be hair-brained or strokes of genius. In practice, there are too many possibilities implicit in this theory, and players usually require some direction or prompting. That doesn’t entitle the GM to make a decision on the part of the PCs; it does require him to provide clear avenues of action and analyze proposed courses of action on behalf of the players’ characters. What they then choose to do, once the choice is an informed one, is up to them.

Someone once said, “You can lead a PC to water, but you can’t make his player think.” It may be true – but you can encourage a better approach, just through the language that you use. A question for Permission is a PC communing with the world through the GM; the medium linking the two is conversation. Words are your tools for shaping that conversation.

This image combines “Magic Eight Ball” by MZMcBride courtesy of Wikipedia Commons, with Crystal-Ball-Photography by Alexandra ??A life without animals is not worth living?? from Pixabay

I’ve written a lot of articles about luck and a lot of articles about plot, but very few about how the two intersect. Time to change that.

A linear plot, like that depicted in Figure (1) Below, is very boring. Nothing the players say or do – and, more importantly, nothing the players have their characters say or do – changes the outcome in the slightest.

While there may be some initial interest because of a novel premise or an interesting story being offered, interest, and participation rates, decline rapidly once it becomes clear that there is no player agency within the plot.

(Figure 1)

Adding Complications and Challenges

Things improve quite a lot when you add complications and challenges. These are hurdles that have to be overcome by the PCs, one way or another, in order to reach the conclusion of the narrative.

(Figure 2)

But as soon as you do so, luck enters the picture. The PCs can say something brilliant, or make a spectacular die roll; or they can say something stupid, or roll spectacularly badly. In the simplest, most general constructions, this has no direct impact on the plot, but can have a vast difference on the context of the outcome – the indirect impacts. For example, taking the wrong path might turn someone who might have been an ally into someone who is a hireling who expects to be rewarded handsomely for every time he pulls the PC’s feet out of the fire. Or it might be as simple as the PCs accumulating damage and wear-and-tear, and chewing up consumables – in the old days, this was an expected phase of the game, and many reams of advice were written on how to ensure this consumption of resources without going too far and without killing the PCs in a nothing encounter.

Still more advice was written on how to prevent PCs gaining excessively from such encounters, and how to ensure that they didn’t derail the plot, and so on, and still more advice was written to players on how to recognize and take advantage of the opportunities that inevitably arose.

But players like having agency, they like to be able to see that they are having an impact on the world around them. They like to be the architects of change in their environment, in other words.

For a while, you can fake that by building it into the stories that your games are telling, but that starts to ring hollow. Giving the players real choice scares a lot of GMs; we tend to be control freaks. But sooner or later, we have no choice.

Branching Linear Plots

If we’re lucky, we stumble across a half-way house like the one depicted below in abstract form. Figure 3 depicts a plotline with three outcomes and two major tracks. There are challenges to be overcome along both tracks – possibly even the same challenges, but because players only get to see the track that they are on, they will never know.

(Figure 3)

The difference that this makes is simple but profound. A lot of the time it won’t be noticeable, but every now and then the consequences of a past action will be seen to have had a measurable impact on the situation the characters find themselves in, or on the options available to the PCs for overcoming those challenges.

The way to construct such a plot is to write a linear plotline, complete with challenges, but building in branch points where the players can decide to do something different from a limited palette of broad options. Once you have the main plot outlined in this way, you can insert the divergences as variations on the existing material. Rather than redundant passages, it’s generally better to simply describe the differences to each encounter/challenge and each resolution, preserving the central plotline while presenting various chapters with optional or alternative content.

The downside is that this adds a new vector of player agency – now, what they think, and what they think that their characters think,.also matters. And that makes for ever-greater uncertainty of encounter/challenge outcomes. Now, they are choosing the terms on which they face each challenge; sometimes, they will talk, sometimes they will bargain, sometimes they will act, and sometimes they will avoid action.

The effect on player investment and interest can be dramatic, as Figure 3 also shows – while there are still troughs and valleys, overall the interest levels tend to be sustained throughout.

From the GM’s perspective, sometimes they will take one of the one or two obvious pathways, sometimes they will make a choice that the GM was not expecting, forcing an improvised response. The GM is not totally in the dark when it comes to such responses – he has the more obvious choices as foundations, and the personalities of the NPCs, and – hopefully – their goals and ambitions, to serve as guides.

The problem is that the resolution of an encounter, challenge, or situation is usually linked to the rest of the adventure like one in a chain of dominoes. Back before PC choices mattered, the dominoes were fixed in position and could only fall in the right direction; now, the chain reactions are wild and unpredictable. Certainty gets replaced with Uncertainty.

The Rise Of Fuzziness

I’ve already mentioned how much GMs hate uncertainty – at least a touch of the control freak resides in all of us!

GMs learn to manage this unpredictability by micromanaging their adventures. When you first start the adventure, it seems overwhelming, and at best you can barely predict how the adventure will end.

(Figure 4)

As each branch point is achieved, more of the adventure becomes certain (because it has already been played), and there is that much less scope for deviation and unpredictability, so the rest of the adventure also becomes more certain, as Figure 4 shows.

Once you accept the premise that the end may be uncertain but will become less so as you go along, you start learning how to manage the situation.

More importantly, while you can’t steer the plot without violating player agency, you learn how to use stimuli and adventure content to nudge players in the right direction when the adventure threatens to become becalmed or to devolve into chaos.

Players respond to the increase in agency with greater interest and enthusiasm, provided that they appreciate the significance of their choices. The more trivial their choices seem, the more like a faux-agency the scope you are providing them seems (even though you may have other ideas about how significant their choices will be in the end).

What you end up with is illustrated in Figure 5, below.

(Figure 5)

The moment that something takes place that the GM could not possibly have predicted in advance (even if he did), and the adventure proves robust enough to continue and be affected by the choice at the same time, the players will become aware that they have been granted access to a whole new level of Player Agency. Their PCs lives become truly theirs to command, within reasonable limits, and they can make choices confident that you will not only make the lives of their PCs interesting (and fun to play), but keep the campaign moving forward.

This seems very desirable, to me.

Three approaches, plus one

There are three well-known approaches to this situation.

1. You can attempt to outline every possible outcome, at least in general terms.
2. You can have a vague idea about the overall plot, a clearer idea about the immediate situation, and simply improvise around player choices and rolls as they happen.
3. You can have a more solidly structured overall plot, with clearly defined branches, and simply improvise around unexpected variations as they occur.

Method one is the reason why computer RPGs sometimes seem like a choose-your-own-adventure book, and why embedding more flexibility in such media is so difficult – it’s a VAST amount of work compared to the basic utility of a linear plot.

(Figure 6)

Figure 6, above, gives you a reasonable impression of just why this is so. Even with some options conflated, and keeping the branches simple binary choices, five branch points yields 20 outcomes in the illustration – and it could easily have been worse. Thinking about the structure of an adventure in this way is what leads GMs to shy away from offering this level of choice to players.

It takes a lot of confidence to progress to option two, and the adventures are rarely as satisfying as the sweeping epics that become possible with greater structure and advance planning. Nevertheless, a lot of experienced GMs would hold this up as the pinnacle of the art – Johnn was always an advocate for this approach, for example. Even more would argue that it gives necessary experience and expertise, and that’s an even harder position to argue with.

That said, it’s always been my contention that option #3 is the best way to go. It’s the one that I most frequently use in my campaigns, and is one of the reasons why they last for decades. It’s the one that I’m currently using for the Zenith-3 superhero campaign, and the one – in more episodic form – that my co-GM and I use for the Adventurer’s Club pulp campaign. The Zener Gate (time agents) campaign, now approaching it’s final adventures, was always envisaged as an Option #2 campaign, explicitly and directly translating character experience and expertise into greater Player Agency. The Doctor Who campaign is a sort of half-way house between options #2 and #3 – the plots are robust and carefully planned, but much of the narrative and some of the adventure specifics are improvised. Anything can happen, so long as I get to the next plot point intact.

But there is a fourth option, one that I’ve been planning to write about for a long time. The initial drafts were an epic entitled “The Trouble With Disaster” that became hopelessly bogged down back in 2014 and was set aside for later redevelopment. I came back to it in 2017 and figured out how to fix the problems that had derailed it the first time around, only to strike new problems.

Okay, I know I’ll get asked about it sooner or later.

I originally structured “The Trouble With Disaster” as follows:

1
   A
   B
   C
   D
   E
   F
   G
   H
2
   A
   B
   C
   D
   E
   F
   G
   H
3
   A
   B
   C
   D
   E
   F
   G
   H
… and so on.

I got about 80% of the way through – 8500 words written – when I realized that I was having to copy-and-paste the same explanations into every A section, and another set into every B section, and so on, and that if I restructured the article as follows:

A
   1
   2
   3
   4
   5
   6
   7
   8
B
   1
   2
   3
   4
   5
   6
   7
   8
C
   1
   2
   3
   4
   5
   6
   7
   8
….and so on,

then I could eliminate more than 1/3 of the content as redundant, making the article a lot less tedious to write – and to read. But I kept getting sidetracked into the subject of today’s blog post, which was too big a topic to ignore – so, four years ago, it was again put on hold.

Okay, so where was I? Oh yes – the fourth option.

The fourth option is to understand luck a lot more solidly than most GMs do, and to use that understanding to prune that multitude of possibilities down into a core or Anchor plotline and a couple of critical branches, plus some structures that give the impression of full player agency while collapsing the possible choices down to a manageable number. In other words, to scale the degree of randomness to the criticality of the event to which the domino in question connects, while tossing in extra opportunities for uncertainty to manifest when it doesn’t matter to the bigger picture.

And another word for uncertainty, at least in this context, is randomness – or Luck, if you will.

No, I think the best approach is to describe the technique for creating an adventure with this structure, one that controls the impact of Luck. And THAT’S what this post is all about.

1. Overall Summary

I always start by generating an overall summary of the linear plot. This becomes my overall guideline; either an encounter fits into this guideline or it’s extraneous – though sometimes the whole reason for a particular adventure is one or more of those extraneous encounters, serving as a delivery vehicle for an NPC to be significant in the bigger picture later.

I compress and compact this as much as possible, putting any necessary explanation in footnotes rather than cluttering up the outline of the plot.

Example: PCs enter dungeon. Goblins (adventurers welcome, toll, escorts). Trap (warning signal). Kobolds torturing bugbear (Drow ‘advisor’). PCs learn of the Sapphire Star (1) while Drow learn of the PCs (2). Bugbear Ghost. Kobold War Patrol, bugbear counterattack, crossfire cliffhanger.

From this, it can be assumed that the PCs reached the Dungeon last game session, and (from the encounters specified) that they are somewhere around 5th level (party of 4). It succinctly frames the adventure action, gives reminders of the relevant backstory and the context of the encounters, offers at least one plot twist right from the outset, (Goblin Welcome) and hints at a physical stratification of multiple underdark societies – Goblins, Kobolds (enhanced), Bugbears (some enhanced, some not), and Drow – though there may be more intervening levels to this cosmopolitan underdark yet to be revealed.

2. Bullet-point breakdown

This starts out being a simple rearrangement of the overall summary, but each point is expanded until the structure is something close to complete.

Example:

become

As you can see, this breakdown is far more complete and specific. It doesn’t include final narrative or dialogue, but does give key narrative signposts and dialogue cues. Most importantly, it follows a logical sequence – PCs reach a location, get a general impression, get more specific information, interact.

It should also be observed that in addition to the welcoming tone of the Goblins (the already established plot twist), this outline adds a second (which justifies the first), the worship of the Goddess Of Peace (who seems remarkably martial in many ways, a blend that should appeal to any number of PCs). It also offers hints that the opposition in this dungeon might be a lot tougher than might be expected (using the Goblins as an exemplar) which is an initial glimpse of the bigger picture, and incorporates a couple of occasions when rolls will impart additional information.

There are still a few finishing touches and additional details required, for example the price list, descriptions of some of the NPCs. A list of mini-encounters in Thatch should also get made, some with basic triggers – if a PC interrupts a Goblin, he will get told “How Rude!” and feel a warning tingle as though a lightning strike were imminent, for example.

The name of the village is very important – “Thatch” gives the right tonal signals, enhancing the description of the settlement and adding to the general impression. Finally, the pollution at the ceiling is very important as a signal of plausibility, a notation that actions will have consequences.

3. The Anchor Plotline

Once those additional details are dropped in where appropriate, the Anchor Plotline is complete. This is very much the format that I generally use to run the Dr Who campaign.

I think an example of that would be fairly redundant, since I’ve already described the differences between that plot format and the example above, so let’s move on.

4. Minor Branches

A minor branch is one that doesn’t alter the overall plotline, as spelled out. Insignificant branches may be bypassed.

For example, the PCs may decide to head for the largest building that they can see from the cavern entrance, and stick to that despite the instructions on the sign. That bypasses the construction site and it’s additional information about the construction of the huts and replaces it with a new plot sequence at ‘the biggest building they could see’.

First up, I have to decide what this is – the communal bathing facilities, an industrial operation, or the temple of Lithis. Or, better yet, I could have the PCs make a spot check and describe that, and the central tower, in general terms, and let the PCs decide where they want to go. Any alternative will end with an NPC pointing and saying “The Governor’s Tower is that way. They look after visiting adventurers like yourselves. Be at peace!” (I like that last snippet of phrase – I might even make “Be at peace!” the general way of saying goodbye.

These branches all return to the main plotline. I’ll build in as many as I can think of, one at a time.

The general structure of all of them will be similar:

13 preceding plot point
14 plot point being bypassed
15 rejoin

becomes

13 preceding plot point

14a alternative plot point, which starts with (in big letters) IF THE PCs …. and the condition that diverges the path.

14b plot point being bypassed, now starts with IF NOT establishing that it only happens if the condition in 14a is not triggered.

15 rejoin

This is the most efficient structure. You can have any number of conditional plot points between 14a and the 15, so long as the last one is the one currently listed as 14b. Observe that this uses the numbering schema to reinforce the point – “there can be only one 14 event unless the PCs separate”. (If they do, this sort of structure makes dealing with it a breeze).

Sometimes a more complicated structure is needed because there are multiple plot points in a branch:

13 preceding plot point

14a alternative plot point, which starts with (in big letters) IF THE PCs …. and the condition that diverges the path. Ends with a GOTO 16.

14b second alternative, starts with IF THE PCs… as above.

14c plot point being bypassed, now starts with IF NOT and must always come last.

15 second plot point being bypassed.

16 rejoin

Nor do the instructions at the end of each branch have to point to the same rejoin point. Some options, for example, might not bypass 15, while one does:

13 preceding plot point

14a alternative plot point, which starts with (in big letters) IF THE PCs …. and the condition that diverges the path. Ends with a GOTO 16.

14b second alternative, starts with IF THE PCs… and ends with a GOTO 15.

14c plot point being bypassed, now starts with IF NOT and must always come last.

15 second plot point being bypassed by one PC choice, and the rejoin point of one branch.

16 second rejoin – the plot is now back together again.

This structure is lifted straight from BASIC computer programming, which is why some may find it familiar.

Sometimes, greater complexity still is needed – for example, plot point 15 might be slightly different as an outcome of the choice and the resulting plot events. This means that 14a will still bypass 14 and 15, perhaps replacing them with something else; 14b will now point to a variant 15, which I will usually label 15b so that I can trace the plot thread; and 14c will lead to the normal version of event 15:

13 preceding plot point

14a alternative plot point, which starts with (in big letters) IF THE PCs …. and the condition that diverges the path. Ends with a GOTO 16.

14b second alternative, starts with IF THE PCs… and ends with a GOTO 15b.

14c plot point being bypassed, now starts with IF NOT and must always come last.

15 second plot point being bypassed by one PC choice

15b variant version of plot point 15 and the rejoin point of one branch.

16 second rejoin – the plot is now back together again.

I’ve inserted a 15b (a ‘b’ because it’s coming from 14b), and changed 14b – that’s all that I have to do.

These are the equivalent of a Magician’s Force as described a few weeks ago. The GM doesn’t care which path the PCs take, because they all lead back to the main plotline eventually.

5. Skill/Ability Branches

The same thing can be and should be done with die rolls and any unusual abilities that aren’t ‘always on’, whenever they can be anticipated. This is also a good time to review the standard plotline to make sure that any abilities that ARE always on have been factored in; I like to throw in the occasional tidbit to signal the players that I have done so.

For example, there might be bat-like beings congregating at the top of the cavern, hidden by the foul air and darkness that a character with Infravision might be able to spot from the cavern entrance. Are these more servants of the Enemy Of Life preparing for an attack on the community? Or just beings who can breathe in the befouled air (unlike most PCs) and have entered into social symbiosis with the Goblins? Either way, they must have a route in and out that isn’t controlled by the Goblins – so this represents an entirely separate branch for the adventure. That’s beyond the scope of the techniques we’ve dealt with so far, which have been small and local.

6. Major Branches

The technique may be slightly different, but it is not that dissimilar in structure. The branches of events are simply longer, and change the circumstances of subsequent plot points.

There are two elements to such major plot branches: insertion of the plot branch, and flagging subsequent plot points that may play out differently as a result.

Here’s an insert for a major branch:

03
04 branch point – IF PC’s …. GOTO A05
05
06
…
11
12 GOTO 13
   A05
   A06
…
   A17
13 rejoin

Observe that there can be a different number of plot points in the branch, though – for reasons of timing – it’s generally better for them to be of similar length if you can manage it. The other point to make is that I’ve padded the low digits with a zero, anticipating plot points numbering less than 100. Based on the example given earlier, though, in which two became nineteen before minor branches were even selected, that might be an underestimate – but this is still usually a safe assumption.

When it comes to consequences, it may not even be necessary to have a branch, but if it is, you treat it in a similar way – either as a minor or major branch, as you deem necessary. For clarity, event though it derives from branch A, any major branch would usually be labeled B.

That means that you are limited to 26 major branches, which is usually vastly more than enough.

It should also be noted that major branches can have minor branches of their own!

7. Nested Branches

I’ve already noted one possible major branch, but another source of them is when things go horribly wrong. I always recommend reviewing an adventure to look for potential places it can derail, and constructing at least a rough plan for getting things back more-or-less on track.

What if, for example, the PCs decide to kill the goblins and loot whatever they can find?

Logic: a couple of defenders will arrive from nearby homes; most will attempt to delay the PCs while one or two go for alarm horns, which they will blow three times (once could be an accident, twice maybe not, three times removes all doubt). A group of militia will arrive next, and attack in coordinated fashion. They will be followed by the Priest Of Lithis, who will begin raining Divine Retribution upon the party. They may or may not get through the village at all, but at least a couple of them will probably get the chance to withdraw (under steady bow-fire). Survivors who escape and return under a flag of truce would be able to barter for the return of their dead members’ bodies (less any equipment they were wearing or carrying); anything more than a temporary truce will require retribution of 100gp + 50gp per Goblin killed.

This outlines a completely separate branch of the adventure, one that either ends it completely or leads to a complete reset (with added complications that the GM will have to insert into the adventure, probably on the fly).

This major branch is completely contained within the “Lurkers In The Mist” Branch, which is called a nested branch.

Ordinarily, if the PCs said something insulting or ungracious during the Governor’s welcome, that could create another major branch, but under the circumstances here it could probably be handled as a minor branch – but the toll and other prices probably go up accordingly, and Big Burly Goblin probably adds “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again,” to the PCs. There’s no need to write a lot of this stuff down; what you already have is sufficient guide to permit adaption as you go by most competent GMs.

What you can end up with is something that – graphed symbolically – looks something like this (and observe the major branches spawning new major branches of their own):

(Figure 7)

8. The Luck Factor

Almost everything I’ve written about so far has been in terms of players making choices and the GM making allowances for alternative choices.

Let me rephrase that: Almost everything I’ve written about so far has been in terms of a factor outside the GM’s control changing the flow of the adventure, and the GM making preparations for alternatives.

So far as the GM is concerned, there is no difference between a choice by the Player and a die roll by the player – there will be an expected outcome, and any number of less probable outcomes, the most significant of which should also be outlined. In general, for most die rolls, that means a set of four outcomes: Success, Failure, Major/Critical Success, and Major/Critical Failure. Sometimes, it may be desirable to insert a pair of intermediate values – a bare success, or close failure – but that’s rarely necessary except in diplomatic situations where nuances of subtlety might need to be explicitly addressed – making a verbal faux pas, but being able to salvage the situation.

Before you can really do this properly, you need to understand luck thoroughly, as it manifests in your games, and as it manifests in real life, and how the two relate.

Let’s use d10s to simulate a simple poker machine for a moment in order to illustrate this point. The goal is to get three numbers the same (the higher the better), or any three successive numbers, or one or two tens.

First reel: roll a 7. Is that enough to call someone lucky? Probably not.

Second reel: roll another 7. is that enough to call someone lucky? Not yet.

Third reel: There’s a 1-in-10 chance of a 7. There’s a 1-in-10 chance of a 10. Nothing else will pay off, and the 10 will only pay a pittance. The roll is a 3 – it was far more likely to be a nothing result like this. The character definitely isn’t lucky.

What if it had beaten the odds and come up a third 7? Is the player lucky yet? That’s a more difficult question. They obviously have achieved a 10-in-1000 success, or 1%, of getting a triple; it is not the best possible triple (that would be triple 10) but it’s in the top 1/2, which would only happen in half of that 1% of cases. The payout would be substantial. You would have to say this character was moderately lucky.

What if this was their first pull of the lever, and the only pull they could afford to play? Suddenly, their luck quotient goes sky-high, and never mind that there were a few better payouts available. Alternatively, if they have fed 200 coins into the slot without winning a big prize, the payout odds would almost certainly leave this as a net loss – so, suddenly the player isn’t lucky at all.

Where do you draw the line when it’s on shifting sand?

Some people find the almost-instinctive understanding of luck that a gambler develops to be as attractive as the thrill of success itself. These are the people who look at the payout combinations and a small sample of rolls and try to work out what they should realistically expect to get out of the exercise they continue to play, and all goes well. My uncle used to be like that – every week, he would take a fixed amount to the local bowling club and feed it into one or another of the poker machines. Overall, he broke better than even, according to his own accounts, and every now and then he won something substantial – but he never went over his self-imposed limit, and it was never about playing to win for him; “that,” he told me once, “is when gambling can become a problem.” On another occasion, he commented that most people forget the pulls that don’t pay out; they can’t pull that lever fast enough. He, on the other hand, paid attention to them, and remembered them, however vaguely; he could glance at the current total credit, subtract any winnings, and tell you almost instantly how many failures there had been. When he got to the end of his allotted and budgeted expenditure, he collected whatever winnings were showing on the machine and went home. I doubt that he’d had these thoughts when he first started; they were opinions that had formed and firmed over time.

If you still enjoy the luck aspect of these games, you can also play them at Casimba, which offers decent odds to all online games you choose there.

All this is directly relevant to RPGs. If there’s a branching path that only happens on a 10 on d10, you might or might not include it in an adventure. If it happens on 1-5 on d20, that’s a whole different story. If this in turn has a branch that only happens on a 1-5 on a second d20 roll, should you outline it in an adventure?

Some people will look at the overall combination – 25% of 25%, or 6.25%, and note that this is less than the chance of a 10 on d10, and therefore say no. Others would point out that what a d20 rolls on one occasion has no bearing on what it will roll on a subsequent occasion – so the correct assessment is that there is a 25% chance of needing that branch IF the first alternate branch comes into play, and that argues a ‘yes’.

Those with some understanding of probability from their school days will know that the second is the more correct interpretation, but I think that in practical terms, the 6.25% has to be acknowledged, too. So I might prepare an outline of something for the second 1-5 outcome, while not giving it as much development as the more probable branches. This, to my mind, respects both results.

But there’s a counter-argument: Most PCs are competent characters, which is to say they generally have positive modifiers to any roll that they can influence. A +1 on a d20 alters the odds by 5%, a +2 by 10%, a +3 by 15%, a +4 by 20%. If it’s an ability check, that 25% of 25% might actually be a 5% or 5% chance, which only happens 0.25% of the time. That’s only worth a line – at most – and if the consequences of a critical failure of this type were reasonably obvious from the context and surrounding circumstances, I would probably even forego that line. The only justification for it, in my mind, would be to put limits on how harshly the failure was treated, and outline a recovery path.

Complicating matters still further is a third factor: the scale of catastrophe, and the rewarding of luck. Players expect to be rewarded for a good roll, and for things to go badly wrong on a bad roll. “Harsh but Fair” used to be a description sought by every GM, and even now, it’s a maxim many live by. The GM has to deliver, or the players feel cheated somehow; and it’s then up to the GM to fold the stroke of brilliance or sudden ineptitude of the PC back into the plotline and keep it on track, in other words, to deal with the fallout.

Getting into the habit of contemplating, how briefly, the shape of the measures needed for that coping, at the time you anticipate or call for a die roll to be made, can be a GM’s life-saver.

The benefits can be psychological as well as overt and obvious – knowing that you have prepped for everything that you can reasonably think of enables you to relax and play other unanticipated situations on their merits, and in general function with greater confidence.

Have you ever watched a TV drama and thought “he (or she) looks totally confident” or “He (or she) doesn’t look very sure of him/her self”? Players can tell when you are and aren’t confident. You’re generally too busy being one or the other to notice the telltale signs that you’re giving off, but they are there.

If the impact of a bad roll, or a good roll, is of sufficient magnitude that it can demand emergency measures to rescue the adventure, you should at least put some preliminary thoughts into the adventure about how to cope with those turns of events, in exactly the same ways that have already been described. These might not be a very probable branch – but they need to be at least outlined roughly (to the Figure 1 standard, a paragraph), just in case.

Understanding luck is just as important as understanding storytelling when it comes to crafting a good adventure. You need to fill your writing with both. And character, and tone, and style – but those are actually secondary priorities. Driving your structure with luck and story are essential.

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Some article ideas are simply not big enough to sustain an entire post on their own. From time to time, I gather these mini-posts together to form one more substantial post.

The last time I did this was in Eight Little Tips: A Confection Of Miniature Posts, 6 months ago. It’s time I did it again.

Contents:

• Typo Inzpiration (Found Ideas)
• The Shape Of A Cup (Social Imperfection)
• Technobabble Gone Bad (Cringe-worthy Sci-Fi)
• Dichotomies Of A Personal Life (Character Generation)
• Pencil Is Erasable (Character Generation)
• Reboots Can Kill (Campaign Content)
• Perfectionist – To A Point (GMing Principle)
• The “Cruising Range” Principle (Game Meta-mechanics)

Typo Inzpiration (Found Ideas)

You never know where your next idea is coming from. There are sources of inspiration all around us, but too many people (who really should know better) ignore too many of them.

Take typos. That’s where you mean to write one word but accidentally input something else. Or your input device thinks you’ve input the wrong thing and auto-corrects you.

Both can be embarrassing when you don’t notice. Both can be irritating when you do notice.

And, every now and then, there can be a gem of an idea lurking in what’s actually been written, but people are so busy correcting the error that they completely overlook the potential.

Let me offer an example: I was typing “Demographics” in a plot outline the other week, and inadvertently typed “Demongraphics”. Before I could correct it, I was interrupted by a phone call, which put just enough of a pause on the process that I was able to look upon the error with fresh eyes. The wheels within my mind immediately began to turn over – what might this refer to if it were not a typo? Demon populations? Possession statistics? Advertising campaigns by the underworld? Fake News? An infographic so fiendishly complicated that it could never be completed and interpreted correctly? An illustration so evil that it drove all who beheld it into religious despair, leaving them open to corruption?

At least four of those ideas could be enlarged into a genuine plotline.

So, before you delete or correct your typos, mine them for ideas. Because you never know where your next good idea is coming from.

The Shape Of A Cup (Social Imperfection)

I was reading a book on British Science Fiction – in fact, I still am – the other day. The chapter I was engaged with discusses post-apocalyptic television. The extremely intellectual and slightly pretentious analysis took the view that the creators of the different science fiction examples under discussion thought that society would degenerate into a specific social form, one that was predetermined by virtue of being the most efficient mechanism for the extant society to achieve the ends for which social structures exist amongst a human population.

Something crystallized in my thinking as I read this discussion. I was already aware that human beings are messy and disorganized by their nature, and structures emerge and mutate and evolve from an initial starting point in response to the conditions and environment in which that society operates. But a number of derivative implications of this principle had escaped me – and had clearly escaped the author of this chapter, too, despite their having referenced a clear literary demonstration of the application of the principle.

In The Day Of The Triffids (a great sci-fi disaster novel, if you’ve never read it, and I also recommend The Trouble With Lichen as related to the subject in question) (links are to copies available through Amazon, I get a small commission if you buy), society is disrupted by a cometary display that somehow renders blind those who observe it. The exact mechanism is never explained specifically, and is only tangentially relevant to the story, anyway. At first, society devolves to a gang level, a dystopian counterpoint to the proposition that “in a kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is King”.

Up to this point, then, the content would argue in favor of the premise identified in the analysis. But, in the next chapter or two, John Wyndham depicts the collapse of these gangs and the emergent society that they represent, and – later still – the coming together of a splinter of the original organizing force around a more communal social structure that is at once more evolved, more civilized, than the simple gang structure and at the same time the product of the devolving and overthrow of what is shown to be a short-term solution confronted by a long-term problem.

For reasons of his own, the protagonist leaves this communal society behind and continues exploring this ‘brave new world’. His next encounter is with a fascist society which is relatively advanced technologically and in terms of captured resources, but which has the eternal flaws of such societies, as perceived by the generation that overcame Nazi Germany. This society will force itself upon the world for a time, but ultimately splinter, wither, and fall in the face of the pressures being exerted upon it by the circumstances.

There’s a lot more to the story, and I’ve glossed over huge swathes of discussion on this and other aspects of it, but that gives you enough to see my point.

You can never impose a utopia by force.

No society is ever perfect in theory, or in implementation. The society evolves in response to causes of dissatisfaction, including failures to adequately fulfill its purposes (both overtly stated and implicitly assumed), often violently, towards something that is perceived as better suited to meeting the challenges and addressing the failures of its predecessor. There will almost certainly be division and disagreement (and that may also be violent), and what ultimately emerges won’t ever be exactly what was envisaged at the beginning. Revolutions take on lives of their own, and all you can do is try not to be swept away by the floodwaters of change.

Even if a particular social structure – that of ancient Rome, for example – is a perfect match to the contrived circumstances envisaged by the writers, you can’t get there from whatever preceded, not perfectly; because the implementation is being performed by flawed and fallible humans.

The notion that circumstances produce a metaphoric ‘cup’ and that any given society which encounters those circumstances will naturally assume the shape dictated by the cup, is total nonsense at worst and a dramatic oversimplification at best. There will always be a gap between ideal and reality, and there will always be flawed participants who seek to subvert the mechanisms of the society to their own ends, who will cause greater deviation from the ideal than can be corrected by any social self-improvement mechanism unless there is constant vigilance exercised against such breakdowns.

And that means that any analysis which proceeds from the assumption of such a metaphoric ‘cup’ or ‘perfect societal shape’ is going to be inherently flawed.

This becomes relevant to writers of science fiction and RPG GMs whenever we imagine a society that isn’t directly modeled on, and derivative of, a historical example complete with creative forces and history – virtually every time, in other words. Because we generally make the same mistake – we create a perfect set of circumstances to match the social structure that we want, and assume that the social structure that we create will perfectly fill that void.

If we’re lucky, this will simply prove to be an oversimplification of a complex structural necessity that doesn’t actually get in the way of the plot. If we’re exceptionally lucky, the flaws might not even be noticed, or might be written off and ignored by any who so notice – which is especially the case where our plot revolves around some transition within the society in question. Most of the time, though, the flaws in the model will come to light unexpectedly, and either be taken advantage of by the PCs or be the subject of hasty patch-work by the GM.

But, if we start by implicitly assuming that the society will be an imperfect fit to the circumstances, and even deliberately incorporate some egregious failure modes, not only is the result more believable, but it is inherently more flexible and able to be massaged into a semblance of what we really wanted in the first place.

So build your societies with flaws. Knowing where the soft spots are permits you to prepare for someone poking at them with a stick.

Technobabble Gone Bad (Cringe-worthy Sci-Fi)

One of my many pet peeves is Bad Technobabble. One particularly devastating example of this phenomenon was recently repeated on Australian television. I am speaking of the Star Trek Voyager episode “Demon.”

The basic premise of the episode is that Voyager is running out of a substance that is crucial to the good operation of the ship. They find a source of that material which leads them into an encounter with a strange alien form of life which incorporates high levels of the substance in question into their biology. Perfectly acceptable premise, and in most respects (by the standards of a TV Sci-Fi Drama) the resulting story is also perfectly acceptable fair.

But the whole thing is almost utterly ruined from the very outset by Bad Technobabble, when some half-wit who knew just enough science to be dangerous decided that the substance in question should be Deuterium, because, you know, it sounds really sciency.

Anyone who knows even high-school chemistry knows that Deuterium is an isotope of Hydrogen and one of the most common substances in the universe. And with that knowledge, the whole premise collapses into nonsense every time the substance is named in the episode. If you work at it, you can force yourself to ignore the Bad Technobabble and find the rest of the episode quite enjoyable. But you do have to work at it, and work hard – and you won’t always succeed, and often won’t succeed right away. It nags at you, and undermines the credibility of everything else.

This wasn’t the first time that Star Trek Voyager had fallen prey to this phenomenon. In the pilot, a big deal is made of a space-faring race, the Kazon, being critically short of Water. Never mind that, like Deuterium, this is one of the most common substances in the universe, and that any space-faring race should be able to ship giga-gigatons of frozen ice to their planet in the form of asteroids and mountain-sized hunks carved out of ice-worlds. Fire these at the planet, let them burn up on reentry – because that simply creates water vapor that will eventually manifest as rain, putting the water onto the surface exactly where you want it to be.

Yes, you can construct all sorts of plausible counterarguments that make sense of the situation – but it’s an effort to do so because the implementation of this concept is halfhearted and not properly thought through. In effect, it’s Bad Technobabble. It makes the Kazon laughable as enemies, a fact that – when first aired on television here – led me to drop the episode from my viewing schedule for several years. Thank goodness, they never refer to this specific problem again, and you can treat all the other ‘Kazon-As-Enemies’ episodes at face value.

I put a lot of effort into the Technobabble that I employ in my various campaigns simply to avoid this problem. If I refer to a “Quantum Instability,” I will have thought over everything I know of Quantum Mechanics, and what “Quantum Stability” might reference, and therefore what a Quantum Instability might look like in terms of appearance and effects – and if it’s not right for what I want, I’ll have dumped that Technobabble in favor of something more credible, if necessary doing additional research to help get it right.

Almost as bad, through lazy writing of Technobabble, is “Reverse The Polarity” as a solution to a problem with a particular piece of technology. I won’t use that (or any variants, like “Invert The Polarity”) except as a deliberate joke.

Fantasy writers and GMs, you can stop hiding in the corner and smirking. Unless you have a rigorously-defined model of how Magic works in your campaign, you are using Technobabble just as certainly every time you translate the process of casting a spell into narrative terms – unless you’ve kept it strictly deterministic, of course: “The mage waves his hands around and throws a pinch of red powder into the air and says something unpronounceable”. It works once, but gets thin very quickly. The fantasy-oriented amongst us are just as capable of writing bad Technobabble as the Sci-Fi-oriented, it’s just that it’s usually less noticeable until they explicitly contradict themselves.

Dichotomies Of A Personal Life (Character Generation)

Let’s perform a quick character generation experiment. Draw a two-by-two boxes on a sheet of paper. Label the cells down the left “occupation;” and next to the first cell write “circus acrobat” and the second, “desk clerk”. Label the other axis “personality” and the cells as “flamboyant” and “office geek”. Now, picture each combination in three ways – speech, dress, and mannerisms. If the results seem especially memorable or compelling or interesting, put a cross in the cell for that combination, otherwise put a circle.

I’m willing to bet that “Circus Acrobat” will have mostly circles under “Flamboyant” – and mostly crosses under “Office Geek”, and that the opposite will hold true for “Desk Clerk”.

A Desk Clerk who looks like a desk clerk, acts like a desk clerk, and speaks in a meek and mild manner, is a very forgettable cliche. A desk clerk with an element of flamboyance about them stands out. They are more interesting to write, more interesting to interact with, and generally, more fun.

Similarly, a Circus Acrobat who is all flamboyance is a stock character who has to work three times as hard to stand out (if not more); one who has something extremely conservative about their dress, mannerisms, or speech, stands out.

All you then have to do is reconcile this eccentricity with the character – background, history, motivation, etc – to make them credible as well as memorable and distinctive.

Pencil Is Erasable (Character Generation)

Okay, that’s fairly obvious, isn’t it? This was a thought that came to me during a scene in a TV show about a tattoo, and the degree to which they are indelible. That show was followed by another in which a character writes something on a pad in pencil and then destroys the top sheet, challenging the other person in the scene to recover the message, which they are able to do because the pencil has left an impression on the sheet below.

And one thought connected with the other, and then with a third…

All characters have marks on their past, mistakes and misjudgments that they want to live down. While the outcomes of such deeds can directly impact on the character’s profile – personality and circumstances – the attempt to hide or live down any deed that doesn’t get detected at the time can be an even stronger influence on a character. The problem is that a character never knows whether or not a given black mark is drawn in pencil or written in pen until they try and erase it.

“Out, out, foul spot” – but sometimes the attempt to erase the past leaves a void that can be detected, and sometimes all that you achieve is chewing up the paper.

Every character should have at least one black spot, a blemish on their perfection. How they react to that spot will be as definitive of who they are as anything else you can point to – and often in far more compressed form.

Reboots Can Kill (Campaign Content)

They’ve just started repeating JAG on Australian TV. I’ve seen them all before, so I’m not watching. There’s a pilot episode, which leads into the first season with some retooled characters and some completely replaced characters. The show was canceled at the end of the first season, only to be picked up by another network with the same leading man and another retooling of just about everything else – style, tone, plot direction, and most of the cast got redone.

And thinking about that led me to the aphorism used as a title for this section.

Whenever you reboot – be it a TV series, book series, or RPG campaign – you are accepting an inherent risk of disaster. That comes in the form of alienating more of your existing fan-base than you add to it with new fans.

Knight Rider, season 2, was without Patrica MacPherson as Bonnie. The producers thought she was just a pretty face, and easily replaceable. In effect, they did a partial reboot of the show. The fans didn’t like it, ratings dropped and complaints went up. Result: from season 3 onward, Bonnie was back.

You see the same thing time and time again. For every reboot that succeeds, there’s one that’s a catastrophic failure.

When it comes to an RPG, the Audience are your players, who are also your starring cast. And that’s a serious problem when rebooting a campaign with a different premise.

But there are ways to minimize those risks – most notably, knowing what those players liked about your last campaign and being careful not to mess with those things too much, while still making the new campaign distinctly different from the old.

Perfectionist – To A Point (GMing Principle)

I saw a meme the other day which read something like “I’m a perfectionist. If you aren’t perfect, take notes.” That got me to thinking – when it comes to RPG Prep, I’m a perfectionist, too, often spending time on nuances that the players will never notice, or are quite capable of glossing over on their own – but only up to a point.

I don’t want my players spending time and mental energy glossing over minute flaws and discrepancies if I can help it, I want them focused on being in character and interacting with the plotline and NPCs. If there’s an incongruity or inconsistency, I want them to be able to recognize it as such and work with it because it’s been inserted, or left in place, intentionally, as a clue or hint.

My basic standard is, “would I have noticed this, if I were a player?” If the answer is “no” then ‘good enough’ excludes putting more than a vague effort in the direction of whatever ‘this’ was.

If the answer is “yes” then effort is clearly justified.

It’s in the gray areas, the space in-between these extremes, that there’s uncertainty, and the judgment becomes more nuanced, juggling effort required, expertise required, time available, the likelihood of something else giving a bigger bang for buck, and whether or not the cure is likely to be worse than the disease. Sometimes, these assessments yield a hard ‘yes’ or ‘no’, sometimes the task gets put somewhere on a priority list, and sometimes I’ll start and see how I go with relatively minimal effort, because those assessments are all seat-of-the-pants estimates.

I try to apply these same principles to every facet of my prep work.

The “Cruising Range” Principle (Game Meta-mechanics)

I’ve written before about the prep work done to give the players utility in choosing second-hand cars for their characters explorations of the American south-west. They have now chosen and purchased the autos in question, and I’ve prepared a handout for them to refer to.

Amongst the stats that have been carefully compiled are travel ranges – how far each car will get on a full tank of gas under various traffic conditions. In particular, there’s a high- and a low-range for urban conditions and a high- and low-range for highway conditions.

I’ve interpreted these as being the fuel efficiency in, respectively, low-speed travel urban travel, stop-start traffic, highway cruising, and heavy acceleration – high speeds or a lot of steep uphill motion.

There are two ways of integrating these values to tell me (and them) what the fuel gauge will read at any given point, which can be used to estimate when they will need to stop at a service station to top up. The first is the obvious one of dividing the distance traveled in a given “speed zone” by the range under those road conditions, getting a percentage used of the fuel capacity, and accumulating usage until it starts to get close to 100% and an empty tank. This would tell me quickly how much of their total capacity has been used in stop-start traffic, how much in highway cruising, and so on. Add those up to get the total percentage capacity used.

The other is a little trickier, but is more forgiving of player agency, in which I convert all the fuel efficiencies to a ratio, and apply that to the distance traveled in a given speed zone to determine an overall fuel usage against a given standard – the highway cruising range. By simply accumulating the resulting “adjusted distances”, I can tell with a quick calculation what percentage of the fuel has been used. Instead of four accumulating counters, I have just one.

It also means that where the players can be expected to spend time investigating a possible target, I can use a pre-defined average “stop-start traffic average speed” to convert the actual time spent into a fuel usage rather than spending a lot of time tracking actual distances.

This is all much more useful because it lets the players choose to vary their routes, double back on themselves, take unplanned side-trips, etc, with minimal effort on my part. But it’s counter-intuitive.

To test the maths and make sure it all works, I’ve been working with a hypothetical “average car” obtained by averaging the stats for the top 15 choices according to the criteria that the players set forth. These gave “rule of thumb” adjustments of +50% for stop-start traffic and urban sightseeing, +25% for urban cruising, and +20% for high-speed highway travel. So all I had to do was plug distances into these to convert the fuel usage into the equivalent usage at the base rate. This also let me do rough calculations well in advance of their choosing the actual vehicles that they will be using. Now, though, that choice has been made, and I have to go back through my prep notes, adjusting to the actual characteristics.

The end result will be that the in-game activity will reflect differences and nuances between the vehicles as chosen. The players might never notice it, or it might become crucial, but it’s a source of added color, and because it’s rooted in hard numbers, will be completely internally consistent.

It’s often said that in motorsport, every team will get the big things right, most of the time. What makes the difference between winning and losing is maximizing as many of the little things as possible, sometimes referred to as “the one percenters”, as in, “the things that will make 1% difference”. Compound enough more of these in your favor than your rivals, and you achieve success. I wrote in the previous article that I am content to be a perfectionist, up to a point, and this is another way of saying the same thing. This particular one percent might never be noticed – or it might compound with others to establish a level of realism that could not otherwise be matched.

But realism isn’t necessarily the goal – the goal is to create fun. However, implausibility, a lack of realism, can have a negative effect on fun, as was pointed out in the mini-article on Bad Technobabble. Minimizing that negative, even by 1%, counts. This might not increase the fun – but it can help prevent vagueness and a lack of believability getting in the way of the fun.

And that’s the main lesson to take away from all this, a first law of good GMing: don’t get in the way of the fun. It’s as simple as that. The devil, as always, is in the detail.

Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay, background & contrast enhancement by Mike

If I mention sailing ships designed to travel from one world to another, the game system that comes to mind for most readers will be the Spelljammer game setting for D&D, introduced late in 1989, or perhaps Planescape, which came out in 1993 as a replacement for Spelljammer.

Despite the official discontinuation, every release of D&D from 3rd edition onward has perpetuated content that at the very least, tips its hat at the game setting, which remains popular in certain segments of the gaming community. Now, though, there’s a new game on the blocks for fans of this type of sub-genre to consider.

It’s called Skycrawl, and back in November, I was offered a review copy by the author.

Because I live in Australia, and there were no doubt some Covid-related delays, it finally arrived a couple of weeks ago, and in between other activities, I’ve been reading it since it landed in my letterbox.

Here’s what the author told me about it at the time:

Hi Mike,

I’m writing to offer a review copy of my new tabletop roleplaying book “Skycrawl,” a system-agnostic guidebook for running pointcrawl-style adventures in a setting of floating islands, airships, and endless skies. Skycrawl is the follow-up to Downcrawl, a DriveThruRPG Gold-selling title, and is by the author of the 2019 ENnie award winner “Archives of the Sky.” Skycrawl is a slim 75-page digest-size book packed full of generation tables; encounter seeds; systems for sky voyages, strange alchemies, and zero-g ship battles; and gorgeous woodcut collage illustrations. The game launches Dec 8 on DriveThruRPG.

…

I think your readers might be interested because of the book’s focus on giving GMs tips to generate interesting places and encounters both offline and live at the table, and weave them into a compelling overall narrative.

…

Thanks for your time and take care,
— Aaron A. Reed

Now, I’m happy to review anything RPG-related that sounds interesting, and this definitely sounded interesting. So that’s what today’s post is all about.

Strange Suns, Strange Worlds

The game is set in an endless sky which has sources of light and warmth floating around in it, called the Azure and Sols, respectively. Each Sol is alive and has its own personality and characteristics, and these define the nature of the region of the Azure around the inhabitable spaces, which are called Lands.

Every land is unique and different; a Land may be a city, a ruin, a crossroads, a trade-port, a forest, a fortress, a pirate, a rock, a mountain, a sea, or many other alternatives. The only piece of real estate that is fixed is the one you happen to be anchored to at the time.

This owes a direct conceptual debt to Flash Gordon and the “moons” of Mongo, but spread onto a broader canvas. The game mechanics of the movement of Lands relative to wherever you are could have been a total nightmare, and are instead a triumph, infusing everything else with the flavor of anything being possible.

Whenever you have a strange environment like this, you always run headlong into traditional physics, that being what your players and yourself have lived with all your life. That matters because the people who live in this environment will be just as familiar with it as you are yours, and so you have to somehow bridge the divide – at least enough for the suspension of disbelief. It’s going too far to relate the whole credibility of the game setting to the treatment of the unusual aspects of the environment, but it’s almost that important.

It’s surprisingly easy to come up with some sort of “meta-law” that explains an unusual environment. Star Trek used to do it in almost every episode. “Captain’s Log, Stardate [whatever]. We have entered a region of space in which….” and you just describe the uniqueness, throw in a little technobabble, and frame the setting for the adventure of the day. Where some of those TV episodes feel down (or rose up) was in the consequences of the physical anomaly being described.

I’ve talked before about how I re-imagined the fantasy environment from TORG at the start of my campaign in that game setting; named Aylse, it is essentially a disk-world with inhabitants on each side of the disk (unlike the Pratchett version), in which gravity was in the same direction everywhere on the disk. I postulated a Dwarfish material that generated “down” (their name for gravity) when it got hot, and the direction of down was always toward the local concentration according to an inverse-square law. But what really sold this as reality was a Dwarven rapid-transit system – basically ore carts with a lump of ‘down-stuff’, and an adjustable ring mount to hold a simple torch so that the flames licked the ‘down stuff’. That meant that on a level track, the cart was always rolling downhill – at least until you pulled the torch away. The Dwarves also used the same technique to lighten their siege weapons, and to induce water flows through pipes, and to make their armor a little lighter when worn than it was ‘cold’, and dragons used it just to lighten themselves so that their wings were enough for them to fly on. The more things that were done with ‘down stuff’, the more plausibly and tightly-integrated into the campaign world it became.

The ‘pseudo-physics’ employed by Skycrawl is more complex, but no less tightly integrated, and the complexity is itself an asset because of that integration – something I’ll get to, a little later. For now, suffice it to say that the ships (or hot air balloons, or whatever) use exotic materials to generate their own localized gravity, so that you can walk around on the deck of a ship fairly normally even though the ship itself can fly through the skies in a zero-G environment, propelled by the winds, and it works as perfectly “plausible” pseudo-science. I think of it as a “gravitationally-strange” environment!

Lands

Lands are milestones in the overall adventure, destinations. that require considerable effort to reach. They are places to adventure, places to rest, places to meet others, and places to explore. Some will be well-known by name, some may have overt reputations, some will be threats, and some curiosities. Lands can either be the setting for the majority of the adventuring that takes place or mere pit stops in a life of exploration and discovery, or something in between. There may be one particular land to which the PCs are (socially, politically, economically, or metaphorically) tethered – or not.

The movement of individual lands is a critical element of the game system, and it takes place on the Zone Chart.

The Zone Chart

This is the first element of the game system that recognizably derives from board games. In essence, reality is divided into six zones. When PCs learn of a land that is (hypothetically) within reach of where they are, it’s name gets written on an index card which is then placed into that zone.

The zones are “Lost / unknown” (an unofficial one), Distant (approaching), Approaching, Nearby, Receding, and Distant (Receding) – though abbreviated names are used by the rules, this is what they are attempting to convey.

So, except in unusual circumstances, a new Land would start off in “Unknown” (which basically means ‘you can’t get there from here’). When first detected, it gets put into the Distant (approaching) Zone, and it then migrates from there through the other zones until it once again becomes Lost/Unknown. The difference is that you don’t ‘un-learn’ knowledge of the Land; on the contrary, you’ll know thereafter that it’s out there – somewhere.

There are also three types of “Orbit”, which describes the trajectory of the Land – Standard, Eccentric, and Wild. To reach Lands in a particular Orbit, you need a vessel or means of transport that is rated as appropriate for that Orbit, or have to get/earn some form of special assistance.

The Flow Dynamic

There are three essential phases of the game which comprise the flow dynamic that propels a Land (and the accompanying Sols) from one Zone to another. These are defined in a very board-gamish nomenclature, and described in mechanics that would be familiar to most players of board games.. They are, respectively, “Updating The Chart”, “Charting Your Destiny” and “The Heavens Turn”.

“Updating The Chart” happens whenever you reach a Land, even if it’s one that you’ve been to many times before, and interact with a source of news or rumors. Your primary goal in this game phase is to earn Tack. (The actual rules specify “Locals” but I can think of several sources of news or rumors that wouldn’t fit that description, but with whom this option would be appropriate.

“Charting Your Destiny” permits you to spend Tack to gain information about where you are and launch an interaction with the environment.

“The Heavens Turn” takes place whenever an adventure ends or when the PCs have been in the same location for a few weeks, whichever comes first.

These timings have to be borne in mind when attempting to understand the dynamics and their interplay, and this is the real genius in terms of generating the “flavor” that I was complimenting earlier.

Updating The Chart

Each PC engaging with a source of information gains 1 tack for the party and can choose 2 events from a list. This is that PC’s one and only chance to do so – choosing not to is choosing to earn no Tack in a location (possibly because there will be undesirable consequences to interacting with the news source), and once you’ve done it once, that’s it – you’ve earned your Tack for the phase. Tack is also available from the GM as a group experience award, and for various action choices when traveling from one Land ti Another.

There are 7 items on the list. It follows that with 3 PCs, even with the best of intentions, one just won’t happen – and it might be more if two or more PCs double-up on one of the choices. They are

• “What’s the News?” (collect a rumor or a story seed about the Land);
• “Ask For Directions” (get Reliable in-Land directions to a well-known Destination – a marketplace or lodgings, for example);
• “Seek Refreshment” (if possible in this location, find a place to relax and remove a point of exhaustion);
• “Ephemeris Update” (learn the name of one Distant or Uncharted Land that is now approaching, nearby, or receding, or tell you there are no updates available)
• “Find A Departure” (learn of a vessel setting sail in the next few days for a Nearby Land. If there are no Nearby Lands on the chart, the GM can choose to add one – I personally would do so from the “approaching” zone. This means that PCs don’t need their own vessel, they can simply sign on to work for, or book passage with, someone else.
• “Gather Stories” (the GM either gives the PC a rumor about a random known Land or adds an Uncharted Land to the chart in any zone he likes and shares a rumor about it.
• “Keep Your Ears Open” – earn one extra Tack for letting the GM choose which of the preceding options you experience.

In other words, these provide the starting points for adventures – some relating to where you are now, some relating to somewhere you could go, or to how you could get there.

Charting Your Destiny

When a PC sets out to gather information, he can either spend 1 Tack for a certain success in one of six options, or make a skill roll to achieve success – which risks failures and complications. The GM shouldn’t simply give the results, he should furnish some sort of interaction between the PC and an NPC that (eventually) yields the information or opportunity to roll.

The choices include the 7 “Updating The Chart” options, and five other specific pieces of information. You can get hidden information about something, get information about a specific resource, get a rumor about a specific Land other than this one, let you meet with the captain of a vessel capable of transporting you somewhere you want to go, or (crucially) get the option of treating the orbit of your next destination as Standard – making it possible to get there (but not making it any easier to get back).

This dynamic permits you to engage more fully with one of the plot seeds from a previous “Update The Chart” or to develop a link to an existing plotline.

The Heavens Turn

This is more of a process than the other dynamics.

• You remove the destination or the Land that the PCs have spent time in from the chart and set it aside;
• If the Land set aside was Distant, gather all the NON-Distant Lands and shuffle them;
• If the Land wasn’t Distant:
  • gather all the Distant Lands (both approaching and receding) and shuffle them;
  • move all the remaining lands to adjacent zones, in the sequence
    Receding → Distant;
    Nearby → Receding; and
    Approaching → Nearby.
  • Then draw one Land from the shuffled stack and place it in Approaching;
• Put the Land that was set aside into the Nearby Zone.
• Move all the remaining shuffled cards into the Distant Zone. The rules don’t distinguish between Distant (approaching) and Distant (receding), but the dynamic makes more sense if they are in the Distant (approaching).
• The GM may then choose one of the Distant Lands (approaching or receding) and announce that it is now so far away that it’s location is no longer known, moving it into the Lost/Uncharted stack.

The net effect is that every other known Land moves, relative to the Land that the PCs are in. Sometimes, they don’t move far, or come back again; sometimes, they vanish forever when they fall out of the local region described by the Zone Chart.

I would personally add two more steps to this process:

• If a Land is in Approaching, or Receding, and is in an Eccentric Orbit, roll a d6; on a 1-2, it moves back one Zone, on a 5-6, it moves one Zone more than indicated. Repeat the roll for all other Lands in Eccentric Orbits that are not Nearby.
• If a Land is in Approaching, Nearby, or Receding, and is in a Wild Orbit, roll a d6; on a 1, it moves back two Zones; on a 2-3, it moves back one Zone; on a 5, it moves one zone more than indicated; on a 6, it moves to Distant (receding). If such a Land moves as a result, skip the next one meeting the description; if it does not, repeat the roll for the next Land in a Wild Orbit.

This simply reflects the instability implied by these “orbits” in their relative positioning.

But that’s just me.

The Compound Effect

When you put these dynamics together, you have a tool that forces characters to engage with their surroundings in order to earn Tack, then advance a particular plotline from amongst those on offer while reducing the amount of Tack available, while the Lands freewheel across the sky in a semi-predictable manner, taking some plot seeds off the table and replacing them with new ones. Players would quickly learn that if they were interested in pursuing a plot seed, they would have to act quickly or risk losing the chance – and, of course, there’s a limit to how many plot pies a character can have his fingers in at once.

From One World To Another

Implicit in the above is the ability to travel from one Land to another. This is another involved process; suffice it to say that it costs Tack and time to do so, and is never a sure thing. What’s more, healing while in the Azure isn’t permitted (or is severely limited). The winds can be capricious, becalming you or blowing you off-course toward a completely different Land than the one you wanted, but you can’t linger indefinitely; sooner or later, you will have to make Landfall or risk becoming Lost.

Various encounters are possible, and the GM has various options up his sleeve to influence the journey and make it dramatic. The rules don’t say so, but some of these options should be used sparingly, in my opinion, or it will have the effect of the GM cutting off access to various plotlines in which the players have engaged. On the other hand, if the GM has exhausted his idea stockpile for a particular plot thread, this might be a way out!

Luck in Skycrawl

While Skycrawl uses a number of dice, the most common is the standard d6. One thing that the GM and Players will have to wrap their heads around is that “2d6” doesn’t quite mean the same thing as it usually does in an RPG. Instead, it means “roll 1d6 on this table and 1d6 on the indicated sub-table” – so it’s more like a slot machine’s reels than a continuous range of numeric outcomes achieved by adding two die results together.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but the shift in nomenclature does take some getting used to.

By the way, if you are looking for an interesting British online gambling platform, check out Novibet. Visitors from other countries might not be able to see the site.

Cropped by Mike

The Concept Of Orcery

Skycrawl features ten “Heavy Elements” which function as wealth and trade goods, and have specific qualities. A character with the right training can mine or “distill” a unit or “measure” of one or more of these heavy elements as a ship travels from one place to another. These heavy elements are increasingly rare and valuable as one moves up the scale, and the less predictable the orbit of the destination land, the more likely you are to get a rare result..

Another way that such a character can use his day is to “fuse” two measures into the next higher (and more valuable) type.

There are rules for substituting measures of alternative elements in such a process.

Marrying two measures of the heaviest of the stable elements, Phire, creates an eleventh element, “Obscenity”, a dark point of incredibly destructive energy (with you at ground zero for that destruction).

These elements generate artificial gravity, but this can be nullified during the ‘distillation’ process.

There are built-in consequences for having too much of any one element in one place at one time. It’s in the nature of these elements to try and combine – two coins of the same type can stick together very easily. There might be only a 10% (or whatever) chance of such a spontaneous combination, but if you have 100 such 10% chances, you’re in trouble, as I explained in my recent article, Everything Happens At Once: A statistical principle.

A typical ship can carry about a dozen measures of heavy elements safely, before unwanted interactions become a problem.

Universal Wealth & Economics

One of the options that a character skilled in Orcery has, while transiting between lands, is to transmute a measure of one of three elements into a more stable form which is used as near-universal coinage.

This transmutation is one-way, and cannot be readily undone (the rules actually say it can’t, but ‘never say never’ – I can imagine an adventure to steal/destroy a formula/technique for doing so, and the political ramifications of someone claiming to have such a process).

Ten coins of a given type are the equivalent of a measure, but fractional measures don’t count. So 100 of the most valuable coins takes you to the brink of disaster – some of them could explode, or melt, or become valueless base metal, or whatever, until the total drops below the critical threshold.

Sociologically, that means that Banks would be incredibly rare, and would charge an arm and a leg. Instead, you would want to convert coins into possessions or trade goods as often as possible.

Wealth thus becomes about having things, the prettier, more exclusive, or more functional, the better. This would logically produce a system of artisan commissions or patronage in which skilled craftsmen convert the wealth of others into products, in the process disseminating wealth to the purveyors of raw materials.

I didn’t see too much discussion of this in the rules, which conveys the impression that maybe the ‘excess coinage’ ideas were either an afterthought or were at least partially abandoned. Or perhaps some sections of the rules give the impression that coins ‘count’ in large numbers toward the number of measures, and this was inadvertent and is not correct.

Personally, I like the notion of a ‘self-correcting’ problem of wealth concentrating excessively, it expresses a unique aspect of the setting to solve a problem that can plague other game systems.

You might think that this makes large constructions impossible – castles and ships and the like – but I disagree; such things would simply not be bought as a unit, but piecemeal on an ongoing basis. This week, you buy the keel and some ribbing, next week to pay to have them assembled, the week after you buy more ribbing, and so on.

Anything that can be broken down into sub-units in this way is perfectly viable in such an economy. What goes off the table are ultra-expensive single-function goods like magic swords – since these are crafted in one hit, not in sub-units, there is an inherent cap to the value of such things, which generally equates to a cap on the game impact that they can have.

Character Improvement or the lack thereof

This becomes critically important as I didn’t see any mechanisms for character progression in the rules (they might be there and I simply missed them – never discount the possibility of human error!)

When you can’t raise your stats, and can’t improve your skills, at will, the principle mechanism characters in most game systems turn to is an improvement in equipment. Putting a cap on how much can be done in that respect is of vital importance.

Characters can accumulate wealth in the form of more and more things – but have to be able to take them with them because they could vanish at any time as the Land where they are located migrates. Again, there’s a natural cap. Spending on a vessel is an obvious wealth-soak with immediate rewards, and is the logical destination for PC wealth as it accumulates.

So, how can characters progress?

Well, the GM has near-total control over the forms of experience that he hands out, how much, and when. Permitting characters to exchange wealth for “beginner’s lessons” in a new skill practiced by the locals is perfectly within his purview, and such can even be sought out by the PC desirous of such using the rules. But access to such improvements is a function of plot and game-play, it can’t be taken for granted the way it is in D&D, for example.

Characters improve, in other words, by improving their circumstances and environment and – to a lesser extent – their possessions and conspicuous wealth. Abilities and capabilities are largely fixed and unchanging – and that means that characters effectively have unlimited longevity to adventure.

The Alchemic Payoff

If you have ten elements, you have 10×10=100 ways in which they can combine, two at a time. Ten of those combinations have already been discussed, yielding a single measure of the next element up the ladder.

Which leaves 90 more, even at this most basic of combinatorial levels. These combinations are known as Admixtures, but just about everyone will mentally file them under the heading “Potions”.

It’s perfectly acceptable (and recommended) for the GM to hide some of the more unusual combinations and let a PC discover them by experimentation.

A character can have a maximum of about 10 Admixtures on or around him at a time. You don’t need Orcery to use an Admixture, just to make one. Another wealth-sink is buying Admixtures that someone else has prepared – but, since repeat business is rare in an environment like the Azure, these may or may not be trustworthy. Either way, this is also capped as a way to improve a character.

In general, the effects of an Admixture will last for 24 hours, and that immediately distinguishes them a bit from most D&D “potions”.

There are two basic approaches, from an RPG perspective, on this alchemy, either individually or in combination.

One is that each process, or group of related processes, is different. This makes the production of Admixtures the pinnacle of expertise in Orcery, and is what I think the author was aiming for without being explicit about it.

The alternative is that all 100 outcomes are the results of applying a single suite of basic techniques, which opens the door to expanding the Lore and producing more combinations, and spending lots of time and money on experimentation. The basic process of combination is hinted at as placing the two components under pressure, which seems too simple and straightforward to me, but let that stand, because it opens the door immediately to three alternative processes: heat, electricity, and catalysis. Even if these only result in two elements being combined, they add 100 more possible Admixtures to the range each, and that’s before combinations of techniques are taken into account. Then there are complex interactions in which four elements are combined to yield two different admixtures outside the normal group, or one unusual admixture and ‘leftovers’. There are effectively unlimited options open to you.

For example, you might have to dissolve one Element in a caustic liquid like acid to extract some “vital essence” from it, vaporize the resulting fluid, then expose a second Element to the hot gasses under pressure in the presence of a third Element (which is not consumed by the process) in order to produce an Admixture that is different from simply melting the two elements and stirring them together. There is zero chance that you would stumble over this combination of techniques by accident! Get any one of the steps wrong, and you end up with nothing. Or maybe you end up with something else!

There is a danger, though, of letting the character with Orcery overshadow the campaign. The more of this stuff that you permit, the greater the danger of that – the 100 is an about-right compromise.

The Orcery subsystem is a key element of the rules and one that can easily be extracted and used in other game systems.

Encounters

A critical element of any RPG are encounters of multiple types – conversations, negotiations, purchases, trade, relationships. In a board game, these functions tend to be reduced to combat, or to rolling dice – get the right number and the encounter outcome pops out like a slot machine payout.

This is therefore an area of critical interface and distinction between the two types of game rules.

You will already have seen in the excerpted “Update The Chart” outcomes that some critical encounters fall into the slot-machine category, but others are left more open.

As a general principle (and one that I hadn’t given any thought to until now), board game encounter mechanics produce dictated outcomes or challenges, RPG encounters produce open outcomes as a consequence of the interactions between the characters/beings encountering each other. One points to a specific end to the process, an outcome, the other to a beginning with little or no predetermined idea about where it will end – though possible outcomes may be enumerated, there is no road map to them.

There are a great many locations where encounters become possible in Skycrawl.

In Transit

When traveling from one Land to another, you may encounter someone else doing the same thing, or something local to the destination or origin Land. This type of encounter includes (by default) atmospheric conditions, and a large table of these are provided.

Some of these encounters can be the most complex a GM has to run – contemplate a situation in which you encounter Pirates. Not only do you have the usual two-dimensional movements to contemplate, but there may be a faster air-current below the one you’re both in, or an air-current flowing in a completely different direction above you. On top of that, different “atmospheres” can have exotic effects. And that’s a vastly simplified battle environment!

On Lands

If you land on (or even just approach) a Land which is inhabited by some hostile species, trouble is sure to follow.

In Cities & Communities

A certain level of similarity gets forced on creatures when a lot of them live in the same space. There are certain social functions that have to take place, and are recognizable, no matter how dissimilar the specifics of the approach relative to what you are used to.

For example, all species will have some form of food collection and distribution mechanism within their society, but the specifics may vary.

PCs can easily engage with a social function – “we need to buy more food” – but can’t predict the shape of that engagement.

It’s going too far to say that every encounter will be a first encounter, but different societies will do these basic things differently.

Unexplored Wilderness

If you land on a Forest world, you can expect to have encounters with the local wildlife.

Alien Life

With each Land being different, so are the life-forms indigenous to that Land. Anything from Hippo-people to Bird-Men and Women, from Giant Wyrms inhabiting a free-floating sea to… well, you get the idea.

There’s a strong resemblance to a Sci-Fi show like Star Trek – but you only need the equivalent of a local runabout, the weirdness comes to you and something new is always on the horizon.

Don’t fall into the trap of making your aliens too much like humans wearing rubber masks.

As a comment to one of my answers on Quora, I offered a list of relevant articles on that very topic, and I think it might be worth repeating here:

• The answer itself (contains additional advice);
• Creating Alien Characters: Expanding the ‘Create A Character Clinic’ To Non-Humans (about the psychology of fictional aliens);
• Alien In Innovation: Creating Original Non-human Species (a design technique for creating innovative species);
• Ergonomics and the Non-human (about adjusting everyday technology like chairs and knives to suit non-human proportions);
• By Popular Demand: The Ergonomics Of Dwarves (a sequel to the preceding article, expanding on the techniques described); and
• Studs, Buttons, and Static Cling (creating consistent non-human tech which deals with more advanced non-human technologies).

Oh, all right, one or two more:

• Thinking Alien Thoughts: Roleplaying First Contacts
• The Four Frontiers Of ‘Alien’

The Genre Jigsaw

Another consequence of the multitude of possible Lands is that while your campaign may have one central genre, it’s easy for it to make excursions into other genres, because each Land is carrying it’s own style and flavor and environment.

Sometimes, you might need to stretch the fantastic as an underpinning – think of the axioms, world laws, and their consequences in TORG:

• Axioms (a bit like Tech Levels and Law Levels in Traveler and other RPGs, these define the fundamental underpinnings of an environment, and define what ‘fits’ within that environment);
• World Laws (internal rules about how a world works, which actions tend to bend reality in your favor and which ones are like trying to argue with gravity while you’re already falling).

The Boardgame Potential

As a board-game, this is an extremely cooperative environment in which to operate, and the rules for imposing a competitive structure aren’t included – though it wouldn’t be too difficult to create some.

Within that context, there is huge scope for flexibility. For example, you might have two or three teams of players – the expectation would be that the members of a team will cooperate with each other, but each team is competing with the others to be the first to achieve X – whether that’s earning a certain amount of wealth, or finding the macguffin hidden somewhere in one of the Lands on the current Chart and getting it back home, or a race, or whatever. You would still need a GM, so he can set the victory conditions. This transforms Skycrawl into a board-game with RPG elements, and is possibly Skycrawl at its best..

The RPG Potential

It’s easy to use Skycrawl as a one-day RPG; it simply requires the incorporation of appropriate narrative elements, which (at a conceptual level) the game rules will help you to create. There are times when the rules permit a player to dictate a particular outcome from an encounter; while this is contrary to the inherent philosophy of RPGs (see the introduction to the “Encounters” section above), it may be an acceptable compromise to keep the game moving at a pace conducive to resolving an adventure in a single day’s play. In fact, if that’s the only compromise that you have to make in order to achieve this, you’re probably doing well!

The Campaign Potential

Things become more complicated when you start thinking about a bigger picture. If you want to string a series of one-day adventures together with recurring characters and a common “home base”, and assume that there’s enough time between adventures for the chart to completely transform, that’s probably the simplest approach. As soon as you introduce anything more than the simplest-possible continuity, you begin to run into problems.

The biggest of these is the Chart. With continuity, the Chart at the start of a game session has to derive from the Chart that was there at the end of the previous game session. And that means recording the status of the chart.

I would start by adding the type of Orbit to the name on the card. Next, you need a quick-and-easy way to list the Lands that are in each zone – so I would number these as they appear within the game. That means that the status list can be reduced to a list of the zones and the numbers of the Lands that are within.

It also means that if random shuffling produces a Land with a number already on it, you know immediately that this Land has appeared before – there is campaign history there. While you might recognize the name, you might not just as easily, so this can be a handy mnemonic device.

That’s all that’s really necessary for campaign play. You can go further.

For example, you might roll 2d6 and write the result on the card for any Lands in a Standard Orbit – this being the number of game days or game weeks before that Land automatically reappears in the Distant (approaching) Zone.

You could decide to add another pair of Zones outside the Distant ones – call them Remote – too far away to reach without stopping at an intermediate point, but close enough that you still know where they are.

You could reduce the number of Lands and have distinct ongoing plotlines taking place on each – which one advances depends on where the PCs go, anywhere they go will present an adventure. They can spend an hour’s play or an entire game session there and then move on to a different Land and a different plotline. You could also use different Lands to spotlight specific characters.

As these suggestions show, there’s a lot of scope for a very successful strong-continuity campaign in Skycrawl.

The Game Author

Author Aaron A Reed is a multi-award winning game designer and author. His website also has all sorts of other tools and goodies that might be of interest. I was intrigued, for example, by 18 Cadence and Almost Goodbye.

Buying

Purchase from DrivethruRPG – current prices $8 PDF $15 Softcover Hard-copy, B&W Interior (5.5″ x 8.5″) or get the PDF Free when you buy the Printed Book.

Freebies & Extras

The Official Website
doesn’t host the book itself (just a link to DrivethruRPG) but it does host some free handouts (in one 7-page PDF) and a 12-page preview.

The Verdict

There are some games that have interesting mechanics and elicit an intellectual desire to try them out. There are other games that suffuse every page with genre atmosphere and elicit an emotional desire to immerse yourself in them, one rooted in your appreciation for the genre in question. It’s really quite rare to find a game that ticks both boxes. And yet, there is a sense of the systems being just a little incomplete, of needing to do more work before the game is ready to run, as shown in both the Boardgame and the Campaign sections above..

This is both a virtue and a curse. A curse because this is work that has been left to the individual GM to do; a virtue because this is an opportunity for each GM to customize the game and campaign infrastructure to suit the campaign that they want to run.

If you have any interest in running a fantasy campaign in which things that can usually be taken for granted are constantly changing, if you have any interest in pulp-style adventures in a fantastic game-space, if you want an interesting new perspective on game mechanics and the potential for importing board game rules into the RPG rules space, this game is worth your money and time. But more than any of those things, if you want a game that reeks of wild, unpredictable, fun, you should buy this game.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay, background color by Mike

I’ve been an active Quora user for the last few years, as long-time readers would know. Since August 2017, more than 1200 answers have been viewed almost 250,000 times. My content there averages more than 2000 readers a month (my content here averages more than three times that number).

I’ve even built whole articles here at Campaign Mastery around some of them. You see, I try hard to stick to the point when answering someone’s question, whereas in an article here, I feel more free to explore side-aspects and tangents that might be of interest to a general audience.

Lately, a lot of my answers have been RPG-related, and that means that a broader round-up might well be of interest to readers here.

I’m going to split the list in two, and save the second half for the next time I need a fill-in post. I’m also going to pad it a little with some more general answers that could have RPG applications.

Afterwards: Wow, there have been a lot more relevant answers than I expected! I’ve only listed up to 2019 and I already have 130. There are WAY too many for just two posts. In fact, there are probably enough just in the ones listed so far for three posts of about 40 links per post. And, since I’ve written more on RPGs in the past year than I had previously, there will probably be at least two more in the series after that dealing with 2020 – by which time, there will be at least one more covering 2021 before I get up to date! It looks like this will be my go-to for fill-in posts for quite some time to come….

So let’s get started….

Do experienced DM’s usually create their world first, or create it based on characters?

How do I create a good combat system for a tabletop RPG? (my answer to this question was the foundation for an article at Campaign Mastery that still gets lots of traffic, almost three years after initial publication: Combat System Design and Understanding The Rules).

How is the movement handled on large imaginary maps when people play through text and speech in D&D?

How do rumors get started? Is there something which is in such a large percentage of the population that makes them lie to people about other people? Is it a disease or habit? What is is it? (may be outdated in this era of Fake News, which was almost unthinkable back in early 2018).

Who are some of the nicest rock musicians? I’m aware of the rock jerks, but at the same time there’s gotta be some genuinely nice rockers.

What are some of the most interesting shower thoughts you have had? (My answer is about mapping and coastline lengths)

In D&D, as a DM, how do you coax shy PCs into roleplaying more? (This answer was discussed in, and was the inspiration for, Inhabiting the Character Space and 16 other ways to help shy players here at Campaign Mastery).

What is the most imaginative science fiction concept you have ever come across?

Is there a limit to how much new scientific discoveries there are? (This actually came up in Saturday’s RPG campaign, when the PCs had to estimate the pace of advance of medical knowledge to postulate when the treatment that they needed would become available).

What advice would you give to a new dm/gm?

If the universe is 13.7 billion years old, does it mean that no two stars can be more than 13.7 billion light years apart? (From memory, I actually expanded on this, with some illustrations, in a post here at Campaign Mastery: The Improbable Dances of Space and Time).

How does a writer choose what to apply from the large amount of sometimes contradictory writing advice out there? (Applies to GMing advice, as well)

Do you think there will ever be a time when humans believe that ethnicity & nationality aren’t as important and all humans will collectively focus on advancing our species as one unified group? (in terms of technology, thought processes, etc)

What is the most fun / memorable / unique way you have ever started a Dungeons and Dragons campaign?

Okay, that should be roughly 40 answers, more than enough for people to read! Some will be very short, only a dash of wit or a line or two, or perhaps couple of paragraphs; others will contain reasonable depth – but all of them will be much shorter than the average article here at Campaign Mastery. And I have only to put together introductions, and another couple of these footnotes, and I have two more of these posts ready to upload, and have started on the one after that. So posts might occasionally be late, but there should be no reason not to put something up here every week!

Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay

I didn’t expect to be writing about this right now. I knew that I would need this sometime towards the end of the year for my Dr Who campaign, but I had months in hand.

What has brought this forward is the February 2021 Blog Carnival, hosted by the Sea Of Stars RPG Design Journal, which is all about Divine Artifacts like the thunderbolts of Zeus and Mjolnir, the hammer of Thor.

Well, I didn’t have any ideas on tap in that regard, but some of the concepts for weapons within the Omega Archive (AKA The Omega Arsenal) should translate into a Fantasy Milieu without too much difficulty, and from there, it would be a small job to adapt them to be specifically divine – little more than handing them to a divine being or agent, in fact, and maybe tweaking their origin stories to fit the culture of said divine being or agent. The normal sort of things that you have to do in adapting anything from an outside source to fit your campaign, in fact! So it seemed a good fit.

In some cases, the wielder is part and parcel of the weapon in question, and would represent an intruder into, or existing part of, the pantheon; the campaign background would need to grow to encompass the addition, and this might be an existing layer of effort. Only the individual can determine if it’s worth the effort of doing so.

The Omega Archive, AKA The Omega Arsenal

This is a sci-fi concept from televised episodes of Doctor Who, so – for the benefit of anyone who may be unfamiliar with that TV series – some background context is in order.

The protagonist is a Time Lord, which is to say that he’s a citizen of the planet Gallifrey. Not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords, they appear to be some sort of elite order within the population.

For the most part, Time Lords are non-interventionist; they observe history and protect their own lives of privilege, and that’s about it. The Doctor is not like that; he has a strong humanist streak and a firm belief that almost any bad situation can be improved. In particular, he has a fascination for, and a protective instinct toward, the human race.

From time to time, the Council Of Time Lords (elite of the elite) will elect someone with an altruistic turn of mind, and will stir themselves to meddle in the affairs of others. More often, though, they will be stirred into action when it’s necessary to protect themselves from outside threats.

From relatively early on, they started confiscating doomsday weapons of sufficient magnitude that they could threaten the existence of Gallifrey if deployed against them. They keep these in the Omega Arsenal, also referred to as the Omega Archive.

The story goes that in due course, there will be a Time War between Gallifrey and the Daleks (the Doctor’s greatest enemies) which will engulf all of time and space. In the course of that war, the Gallifreyans will utilize every one (bar one) of the weapons that they had forbidden to others, violated every one of their moral principles, broken every ethical rule that they had ever espoused – and still, the Daleks were on the verge of a fairly Pyrrhic victory (because there was virtually nothing left).

To prevent this, the protagonist, who had committed his own share of moral and ethical violations according to his own personal standards, took the last of those weapons from the Omega Archive and turned it on both sides.

This weapon, named The Moment, was so powerful that it had developed sentience and a moral code of its own – which is why it had not been deployed by the Time Lords, there was too great a chance that it would turn on the wielder (especially given the way the Time Lords had debased themselves).

The Doctor persuaded the Moment to exile both races from reality, sealing them into Time-locked stasis, and in effect rebooting the universe to what it might have been without either race (both have attempted to escape from this fate since, with varying degrees of success, it must be noted).

But to punish the Doctor, the Moment decreed that he would survive the experience and become the last of his kind, and have to bear the weight of his deeds.

So that sets an upper limit to the power of the objects emplaced within the Omega Archive: the most powerful of them are capable of restructuring all of reality. Not much of a limit, is it?

The lower limit is defined by the Time Lords themselves – the absolute masters of time, able to manipulate it as they see fit, they nevertheless had to see these objects as a threat. So all of them are going to need to be “Cosmic” in scope to some degree.

The Sources

The rebooted TV series has all this in its background; the protagonist is the last Time Lord, wandering the universe and trying to live with his past misdeeds, and – in some small way – atone. It all takes place in the rebooted reality created by The Moment, in other words.

In the course of his interactions with others, in particular those with another survivor of the Time War (who was specifically created by the morally-bankrupt Time Lords as a back door into victory and universal domination), the protagonist has named some of the contents of the Omega Archive. That was my starting point. In most cases, no information has been given about them – it’s simply been a name dropped into the conversation.

There have been lists generated by both Fans of the show and the writers of the contents; but for the most part, I found these to be uninspiring and conceptually too limp to be useful.

The Vortex Of War Campaign

My current Dr Who campaign is telling the story of the beginnings of the Time War, from the perspective of the Protagonist. While completely non-canonical, it nevertheless works hard at ‘fitting’ established canon, at least up to a point – that being the advent of the current incarnation of the protagonist (it has long been established that the protagonist is not above distorting the truth to suit his own ends, so any small discrepancy between events within the TV series and the RPG campaign are easily explained).

Since the Time War is to be central to the campaign, and the Omega Arsenal is central to the Time War, it behooves me to create a more impressive catalog of the contents.

Starting with the named entries from the TV show – the canonical ones – I let my imagination run wild and generated a list of thirty. They may be more – in fact, the current adventure (called the Omicron Derivative) relates to a super-weapon that the Doctor will have no choice but to store in the Archive, where time is frozen.

The Plan

I want these to be more than just a list of names. I was not afraid to dump items from the list that were insufficiently inspiring – I want to at least describe the item in conceptual terms (but not in game mechanics). These items are all to be powerful enough to pose an existential threat to beings of divine power level.

From past experience, I know that after a while, the imagination grows fatigued and its output is – shall we say, less than inspired? – so I don’t propose to write up all 30 in one hit. I also have limited time available – I was unwell this morning, and so chose to sleep later than usual.

If I can get 15 done, there will be one more post in this chain, and I’ll be over the moon. If I can get about 10 done, I’ll be more than satisfied, and there will be two more subsequent posts. If I can only get 6-8 done, I won’t be dissatisfied, and there will be three or four more posts over the next several months. I’m planning to play it by ear, and very much use today’s post to set a standard for how much I can get done in a reasonable time frame from a standing start.

The Process & The Contents

In each part of the series, I’ll include the full list, showing which entries are included in that post, which have previously been done (and in which part of the series), and those that remain outstanding.

These are not in the sequence in which the ideas came to me, I’ve sorted them alphabetically. Which means that I no longer have any idea which ones are Canon and which are not. That means that my first step has to be a google search for the name. But if canon exists, and seems too tame, I intend to freely disregard it, and will create something from whole cloth. I have definite ideas for some of these, some of which will take longer than others to write up, so there will be some variation from post to post.

This section, and an updated version of its contents list, will be replicated in each subsequent post.

Incorporating these existential threats into an existing campaign: how to use these ideas

These devices, should they come to be present or even possible in an existing campaign, pose so great a threat that they will become – at least for a time – the focal point of the campaign. This shouldn’t happen overnight; there should be a gradual buildup. There should be forebodings and dire oracles, perhaps for as much as a year before manifestation takes place.

The reasoning behind that last point is simple: Players aren’t used to such things. The more immediate you make the threat seem, and the bigger in scale, the more immediately they will expect something to happen. When that shoe doesn’t drop, and the warnings continue (growing more and more dire and certain), the magnitude of the perceived threat, and the ominous weight that it holds, will grow. In two words, the presence of the weapon in the campaign will loom and it will menace.

Of course, this is writing cheques that your GMing ability might not be able to cash – so you should always have an Epic-Quest plotline in mind centering around the arrival/presence/usage of the weapon, and you should ALWAYS have an exit strategy, a way out of this mess for the PCs to work towards.

These should never be a casual drop-in. They are too dangerous for that. They are all potential campaign-killers.

The current contents of the Omega Archive are listed below. Entries that are covered in today’s post will be in bold; entries that are still to be written will be in Italics.

IN PART ONE:

1. The Anima Device
2. The Anvil of The Photosphere
3. The Arc Of Nestrus
4. The Blue Bowl of Xiphilxus
5. The Cortex Realignment
6. The Could-Have-Been King and his army of Might-Have-Beens and Never-Weres

AND STILL TO COME:

7. The Cipher Plague of Dantus V
8. The Entanglement Grenade
9. The Festival Of Delphaeus
10. The Gauss Lock
11. The Greater Key
12. The Gridwyrm
13. The Halo Field
14. The Lord Of Travesties
15. The Meteorite Funnel
16. The Moment
17. The Nanodust Collective
18. The Nightnare Child
19. The Orphaned Hour
20. The Parallel Cannon
21. The Perspective Cannon
22. The Proton Shell
23. The Pyrovore Effector
24. The Singularity Locket
25. The Skaro Degradations
26. The Stellar Catapult
27. The Sword Of Eternity
28. The Tear of Isha
29. The Wormhole Reflection
30. The Time-Gun of Rassilon

The Anima Device

This fiendish creation of an insane Time Lord was one of the seeds that led to the creation of the Omega Arsenal in the first place, back when it was the Omega Archive, and the whole idea was to keep the contents out of circulation. It appears to be a slightly-oversized chrome-metallic skull mask, from the sides of which project a number of articulated mechanical tentacles, which give it independent mobility. It’s very appearance has been known to induce fits of unreasoning terror in those predisposed to arachnophobia. These tentacles are never still; they writhe constantly, and it is suggested that the GM emulate this writhing with his hands whenever speaking of the Device.

It uses its tentacles to grab hold of a target at the same time as the skull rotates itself horizontally to face in the same direction as the face of the target, and the back opens up like the opening of two mechanical doors. The skull then enfolds the head of the target and triggers.

It explores the past of the victim at the rate of about a second per decade of past life. It then winnows through every choice ever made by the target, following the path of alternative lives – any choice that leads to greater power, or to the exact opposite in morality and motivation (alignment, in D&D terms) is acceptable. When it has found the most powerful possible version of the antithesis of the target, it constructs a simulacrum of that being out of living metal and infuses it with the mind, experience, and life-force of the alternate-world version of the target. It then releases the victim and leaves him to face the most extreme version of his polar opposite while it looks for another victim.

To gain raw materials for its duplicates, it absorbs all metals that it comes across and stores these in a subspace pocket in its internal structure. This often means that the victim has to face his enemy unarmed, to make matters for him even worse. It will also drain any power source that it encounters to perpetuate itself and its activities. If it runs out of power, it will simply run down, like a clock that needs to be wound – but when next exposed to a power supply, it will reactivate.

The duplicates have a life-span of 1 hour for every year of life absorbed from the alternate timeline. Once it has dispatched its source, for which it will immediately have an unreasoning hatred, it will proceed to do whatever it can to achieve its’ perverted ambitions, unaware of the (relative) brevity of its lifespan. Since time lords are effectively immortal, this makes the Device an especially dangerous threat to them.

But its greatest threat is this: it does not discriminate between friend and foe – it simply seizes the closest target. It this poses an even greater threat to the wielder as it does to the wielder’s enemy, and the only certain outcome from its creation or deployment is destruction. It is, however, the perfect Doomsday Weapon.

Canon Notes: This was named canonically as a part of the Omega Arsenal. Two audio books give a quite different interpretation of what it is and what it does. I think my version is much scarier, more unique, and more interesting. Refer The Anima Device to compare for yourself.

The Anvil of The Photosphere

This appears to be a small, dense spiderweb, perhaps 2.5 meters in diameter. It draws power from sunlight, and is capable of doing so at a minimal level from even distant stars. It is drawn to the most intense such source, which is usually the closest star if it is released within a solar system.

As it approaches, it accelerates, and grows by absorbing fundamental particles output as part of the solar radiation, until it is about 1/3 of the diameter of the star across (1/3 of the diameter of Earth’s Sun is about 232,000 km). At the same time, the distance between ‘joins’ inflates.

When large enough, and close enough, it strips the star it faces of it’s third dimension, rendering it a flat planar 2-dimensional object, and compressing it’s total solar output into a beam of intense energy that can destroy an entire planet in seconds. This condition is unsustainable; in effect the core of the star is directly exposed; it is usually confined and compressed by gravity. As a result, the star immediately becomes a Nova (or Supernova), which destroys any remaining solid body in the solar system, especially in the habitable or “Goldilocks” zone (outer planets may or may not survive).

It also tears the Anvil into multiple smaller pieces, which contract and are propelled at something close to the speed of light out into deep space; most will simply break down due to a lack of power and become waste matter, but a few will come sufficiently close to another star that the process will continue. In time, whole galaxies can be destroyed as the “stellar infection” becomes a plague.

It is not known how long it takes for a moribund segment of Anvil to become permanently inert; it follows that once deployed, no control can be assured, no matter what precautions are taken, no matter how the target is isolated. Use this once, anywhere, it will linger and lurk in the vastness of interplanetary space in perpetuity, from which it may eventually re-emerge to threaten the galaxy.

If deployed close to the galactic core, this could trigger chains and clusters of Supernovae, potentially threatening all life within that galaxy. Even if deployed in one of the galactic arms, it may eventually migrate from star to star to such a critical location.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Arc Of Nestrus

Mathematics aren’t usually directly dangerous – dangers usually stem from the interpretations of mathematics by engineers. But Nestrus wasn’t any ordinary mathematician, and he formulated a mathematical concept so tightly integrated with the fundamental concepts of reality that his creation directly reorders reality in an expanding wave front from the point of expounding. This has multiple effects – physical, social, biological, chemical, subatomic, and fundamental.

Upon encountering the arc of the wavefront, physical matter distorts as though it were being seen in a fun-house mirror. Matter flows like a dense liquid, no matter what it is made of. This totally disrupts any electronics, of course. The wavefront soon passes, but the consequences of its transformation linger; reality resembles a Daliesque painting wherever the arc has been.

Social structures are reflections of the neural functioning of the beings populating the social structure, an emergent property of the way people think. At a fundamental level, then, the wave front distorts the structure of thought; survivors (and there won’t be many) are inevitably wildly insane by any standard. Other mental effects will also be experienced as a direct consequence; memories become scrambled and partially inaccessible, and fantasies and imaginings become reality to the individual’s perceptions. Morals and ethics may cease to apply, or may be perverted.

Biological Processes are also bound by the underlying physics of biology, which can be described mathematically and symbolically, and these processes are distorted by the reality alteration. In some cases, sufficient resemblance between the processes that were may persist to enable life of some sort to continue, but at least 70% will die, and the biochemical processes of the survivors – indeed their very genetic codes – will have been distorted by the wave front.

Chemical processes are dependent on the configuration of electrons at the atomic scale; nuclei and subatomic processes define an element, but it is the electrons that dictate the chemical reactions that define the properties of the element. These are likewise distorted, but will generally attempt to revert to a stable structure, emitting electromagnetic radiation and/or electrical current flows in the process. All matter becomes electrically charged and radioactive, however briefly. This will kill 30% or more of those who survive the initial transformation. Most macro structures will be transformed – they may become salt or salt-water, liquids may boil and freeze at the same time, and so on.

In part, those effects are due to subatomic transfigurations. Iron may become a rubbery liquid, water a superconductor. The effects are completely unpredictable.

Finally, the fundamental forces that define and bind physics to reality, such as the force of gravity, are also disturbed and distorted. This compounds with the other effects described in unpredictable ways. Copper may explode in a nuclear detonation, Oxygen may experience spontaneous nuclear fusion, or these effects may occur in other materials and substances, triggered by failures or strengthenings of the forces that bind nuclei together, and attract or repel other nuclei. This, of course, includes the biological matter that makes up the individual. Only a minuscule fraction of those who have survived everything else will survive this effect. What’s more, there is a high probability that some of these relationships will be permanently altered, which in turn will alter universal constants such as the speed of light. Reality itself is redefined in a Chaotic way.

Only complete isolation from surrounding space-time – something that doesn’t occur naturally – will halt the spread of this effect, the perpetuation of this wave-front.

So dangerous is this mathematical structure that the name itself has been disguised by the Archive Directory, lest it give clues as to the underlying mathematics; the name is a deliberate misnomer. This is another of those Doomsday Weapons that should NEVER be deployed.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Blue Bowl of Xiphilxus

Xiphilxus was an artist, scientist, and artisan on Lyros-II. He noticed the effect of a good photograph to fascinate, even enrapture, and of lesser photographs inability to do so. He also noted the power of the heavens to do likewise.

He extrapolated these effects to determine that the most perfect representation possible would enrapture the viewer for all of time. Such perfection was beyond his reach, but he devised a means to approach it using a self-improving representation.

His intent was to produce an artifact that would be spiritually uplifting, and at first, it worked; those who beheld the beauty of what he captured on the interior of a blue hemisphere were filled with an appreciation for the universe and their place in it, and the potential for their species to be a part of it. Criminals were reformed and filled with a new appreciation for society, and their personal potential. And all the while, the process embedded in the base of the 72-inch blue-black bowl continued to refine and more perfectly capture the celestial view within.

Soon people realized that the more deeply and intently the bowl was examined, the deeper and more profound the experience, and that the heavens depicted were more wonderful and perfect than human hands could create; surely, this was a mirror that held the reflection of divinity. The bowl became the central instrument of religion amongst Xiphilxus’ people, and still the process worked to perfect the sense of oneness with creation imparted by the bowl.

After two hundred years or more, people started staring at the bowl with such adoration that they forgot to eat or drink until they died. There were demands amongst those not of a religious orientation for the bowl to be destroyed. A war ensued, the last great Holy War of Lyros-II. The forces of religion and zealotry prevailed, though it was a close-run thing, by parading the bowl in front of the unbelievers, who forthwith were recruited into the theologists’ camp.

And still the process of refinement continued, until it reached the point of so overwhelming those who perceived it that they died immediately from the sheer beauty. With social systems and engineering failing for lack of attention, because all anyone could stare at was the bowl, the people of Lyros-II died. But the bowl lingered, becoming ever more perfect, for year after year, until even it’s image was sufficient to kill, instantly. Explorers and Conquerors and Historians found it, one after another, and died. But some transmitted images of the bowl home before succumbing, and those populations, also perished. So beautiful was the bowl that it was surrounded by a zone of death 122 light-years in diameter, when the Time Lords learned of it.

One of the Gallifreyan coming-of-age rituals involved gazing into the Untempered Schism of Reality, the temporal vortex along which they traveled. This had profound effects on their psychology – refer Untempered Schism in the Tardis Data Core. “Some would be inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad.” Having experienced the beauty of the totality of the universe in one way already, and survived with their sanity (mostly) intact, Gallifreyans were amongst the few beings who could apprehend the bowl and survive; with the arrogance and sense of self-entitlement that results from being ‘One Of Time’s Chosen’, they promptly claimed it for themselves, but realized that as it became ever-closer to perfection, even their ability to resist it would eventually weaken, leading them to store it in the Omega Archive for safe keeping.

Like the Untempered Schism, the impact of the bowl (or a less-perfect image of the bowl) is a psychological one that changes with the mindset of the viewer. Some perceive the universe reflected within as something that can be conquered, some are humiliated and diminished by it, others are enraptured, and a few experience a metaphysical awakening. Racial predisposition plays a major part; cybermen simply relate to its’ efficiency, Daleks become even more megalomaniacal. No-one is unaffected.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Cortex Realignment

Ever heard of a meme going viral? Ever heard of a thought taking hold on a population? Then, however dimly, you’ve heard of the Cortex Realignment. This locates the dominant social irrelevancy on the galactic comm channels and force-feeds it to your brain. And then the next. And the one after that. And still another. And then…. well, you get the idea.

These are impossible to ignore, because they get processed directly by your built-in neural network. It’s as though you have had this original thought that is completely fascinating and compelling. By the time you’ve started to get your mind back onto whatever you were supposed to be doing, the next such thought is being force-fed directly into your cortex.

Of course, the fact that some of these might be directly contradictory, and yet both seem to be your idea, creates additional layers of confusion. If under the influence of the Cortex Realignment for too long, all your opinions and capacity for individual thinking drown in a morass of confusion.

The Realignment itself looks extremely harmless – a small comm-pad, it fits in the palm of the hand. News-feeds and expressed opinions whistle from bottom to top of the screen too fast to be individually read. The device itself is a psionic machine that selects the ‘hot’ trending opinion or meme from this feed faster than human perceptions can grasp them.

And it’s completely indiscriminate – everyone in range gets blasted. The only way to shut it down is to remotely surround it with a shielding barrier that cuts it off from its news sources, or to shut down all galactic communications for long enough to get it into such a shielded enclosure; the two are about as difficult, given the range of the device, which is planetary-plus.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Could-Have-Been King
and his army of Might-Have-Beens and Never-Weres

Inevitably, in any branching space-time, there will be universes which evolve creatures that wreak total destruction within their local realities.

There once was a reasonably-gifted military commander, who felt himself entitled to higher office, and sought out parallel timelines to justify that belief. He found that in many time-lines, he ascended to royal office, and that his rule was always an unmitigated disaster for one reason or another – generally, because he was not as gifted a ruler or administrator or judge of character as he was a military commander. Rebuked and chastened and infuriated and fascinated, all at the same time, he began to refer to himself as “The Could-Have-Been King” and formed a mercenary organization with himself as its supreme commander and strategist.

While he started with a small company of citizens from his own cadre who were personally loyal to him, he sought out from alternative realities the worst of these creatures that – by virtue of this reality still being vibrant and alive – never evolved here, and recruited them, something that was only possible because the Time Lords had enabled cross-time traffic. With them gone, the natural boundaries between space-times prevent anyone from replicating this deed.

Using his own mastery of the subject, the Could-Have-Been King was able to ensure the personal loyalty to him of the last survivors of these Might-Have-Been races.

There are also timelines in which creatures evolved that ensured their own non-existence; these are known as “Never-weres”, and when he had several Might-Have-Beens as his subjects, the Could-Have-Been King branched out and started rescuing examples to add to his nightmare coalition. One of these, the Enfolders, permitted him to carry his entire militia in extra-dimensional pockets within his being, releasing them as the tactical situation demanded. His legion was the stuff of nightmares.

Unfortunately, the Time Lords also policed the migration of beings from one space-time to another, and what the Could-Have-Been King was doing went way beyond anything that they considered tolerable. They determined to trap his entire Legion in the Omega Archive, the only place from which this space-time would be safe from them, but because of the Enfolders, they had no choice but to imprison the Could-Have-Been King with his ‘subjects’, in a frozen instant of time. So they did.

Canon Notes: This is a semi-canonical creation, with the differences being relatively minor and stemming from interpretation. The original TV series refers to “The Could’ve Been King” and his “Army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres” – except that when I listened to the episode in question, I heard “might-have-beens,” not “meanwhiles”. The phrasing states explicitly that the King led this army on behalf of the Time Lords in the Time War, but the phrasing suggested to me that the King was already the leader of the army; certainly, there’s a thematic connection between a “Might-Have-Been King” and the members of such an Army.

“The Dangerous Book Of Monsters” (See “Link Note” below) is an official BBC publication that is intended to be a reference to the most dangerous creatures to appear in the (rebooted) TV series. It dedicates a page to “Neverweres”, describing them as “creatures that should never have existed, built from pieces of evolution that never happened.”

A Doctor Who comic, which is less canonical as a source, proposes “Never-weres” (note the addition of the hyphen) as creatures from an alternate reality that have resulted from divergent evolution.

There’s something very “through the looking-glass” about the whole concept to me, and that has also played a part in formulating the concept described above, which takes all the official material I had access to (and some that isn’t) and runs with it.

Link-Note: Link is to the book’s Amazon page, I get a small commission if you buy. US$21.36 for the paperback, but the hardcover is cheaper and there are more copies.

….and I’m right out of time. By the time this post is uploaded and formatted and published, it will already be late. Look for another in this series in four-to-six weeks!