“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.”

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

(1) A powerful magic item that enhances the prowess of all who swear fealty to the Enemy Of Life (3).

(2) Drow will be actively interfering in party progress from the start of the next part of the adventure (4).

(3)The Enemy Of Life – believed to be a fallen (and resentful) Deity, the Big Bad of the campaign arc.

(4) Implication is that at least one House of Drow have sworn loyalty to the Enemy Of Life (5)

(5) Big Picture: Drow Civil War beginning, one faction loyal to Lolth, the other to the Enemy Of Life.

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:

• PCs enter dungeon.
• Goblins (adventurers welcome, toll, escorts).

… and so on,

become

1. Outside the dungeon – recap, health check
2. external description – set the tone.
3. PCs enter dungeon – initial impressions.
4. Initial Rooms – no valuable loot, no significant encounters, signs they have been looted many times.
    
5. Long tunnel, crudely sealed with clay bricks, lit by oil lanterns on the walls which would need regular refills of lamp oil.
6. A large cavern, ceiling cloaked in a miasma of thick dark clouds, reasonably well lit by more lanterns. Path inclines downward to the cavern floor 50′ below. PCs are just below the chocking fog caused by regularly burning coal in an enclosed space.
7. A sign at the foot of the cavern next to the path, crudely lettered, reads “Adventurers Welcome. Come to Central Tower.
8. Adobe and clay brick dwellings, round with arched ceilings, rooftop lichen and mushroom gardens. Windows are in the doors, not the walls. Walls are slightly thicker at the base than at the ceiling.
9. Brass core structure (visible in one hut that is half-built. Central Hearth for coal-fire. Homes divided into two equal rooms, presume one for sleeping, one for everything else.
   Communal bathing and sewer arrangements can be inferred. (Strong Success: That often means that other social attributes like police and military are also communal).
   There is one building that stands out, three stories tall and with a spire on top. It mounts the symbol of the Goddess Of Peace, who has been known to incinerate any who attack those taken under her wing.
10. Pass a square full of Goblins engaged in synchronized weapons practice under the instruction of the oldest Goblin you’ve ever seen- frizzy white hair and ear-hair the length of a Dwarven Beard. There’s something almost dance-like in their moves, and they seem extraordinarily well-drilled. If they coordinate like that in battle, they might be a handful far beyond what numbers alone might suggest. One of the militia-in-training has a pouch with a baby in it draped across one shoulder; it doesn’t seem to be slowing her down. Another is half the size of the rest, and clearly a child. Although his movements are clumsier than the others, he is evidently taking the practice very seriously and trying hard.
11. Reach The Tower. Social practices and mercantile activity continue as the PCs pass. Some goblins wear hats; those that do lift them briefly to acknowledge your presence but otherwise ignore you unless you threaten them. Those without make a gesture as though tipping a hat. If the PCs speak to any of them, the response will be “Have you been to the Tower? You should go to the Tower first.” or variations.
12. Meet the Governor of the community of Thatch (which means ‘Welcome’ in Goblinoid), ArSuuk. Warm, flowery greetings, prominent name-drop of Lithis, Goddess Of Peace.
13. Governor regrets that wear-and-tear from past small-minded petty adventuring parties mandates a toll to recompense the community for expenditures on repairs. “One GP per head, 25% off if you have more than one head, ha ha.”
14. Governor offers the run of the city, food, drink, accommodations, healing on demand, prices as follows… Stay for a week, and the toll will be waived.
15. Big Burly Goblin (relative terms) arrives, sporting large blade mounted on a 3′ iron shaft which has been bent wildly many times and crudely straightened. “Rules: No fighting. No violence. No booze. Be polite. Be welcome (the last with a grimace).”
16. Governor’s Aide (small, wiry, spectacles but no lenses) waves a sheet of parchment under the Governor’s Nose. Governor: “Oh yes, we also have a small amount of equipment we can offer, forfeited by those small-minded petty adventuring parties who couldn’t follow the rules.”
17. Governor concludes by advising that whenever the adventurers wanted to move on, just tell anyone in the settlement and an escort to the edge of Thatch will be provided. After that, they are on their own.
18. Big Burly Goblin holds out his hand and grunts, “Toll.”
19. Once the toll is paid, the PCs are now free to go anywhere they want, stay anywhere they want, talk to anyone they want, so long as they don’t break the rules.

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):

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

What are good ways of writing a character (say, an Ancient Golden Dragon) to seem incredibly knowledgeable in a pen-and-paper RPG setting?

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?

Why is “Dungeons & Dragons” used synonymously with “Pen & Paper RPG”? I am never sure if a question is specifically about D&D or not.

Is there a good physics books that cover everything we know, but that’s intended towards filmmakers and novel authors?

How can I write a compelling villain with a motive based in philosophy that is understandable?

I feel so bad when I spend hours writing my blog-post and when I share it on FB only a few people react. Should I stop blogging?

Will the author of a blog know I am reading their blog?

What are different ways to remove text from an image?

Is 5,000 words a day a reasonable goal for a writer?

Can having a lot of interests be a bad thing?

As a science fiction writer, how do you decide how the aliens will look and the name that is given them if you choose to include them in your story? Do the choices come easy for you, or is a huge process involved?

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.

Do non-serious fiction novels usually do worse than serious fiction novels? I am thinking of writing one, but it is supposed to be a light read which doesn’t require much thought to enjoy.

How would I go about making a D&D character who is based around plants? Her motivation for adventuring is gathering rare specimens and such, and she knows all about plants. What class should I choose?

Is it a good idea to just improvise a several session long campaign for D&D 5E?

How do I improve the image quality for webtoons? I have made a canvas of about 2000 x 10000 but crop each one individually and resize it for the requirements. When I try to draw in the required 800 x 1280, it’s too pixelated.

What is a good amount of time to play D&D? We play 16 hours usually.

What’s the most interesting D&D world you made or played in?

How would you run a game of D&D with only 3 people?

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?

How would you go about writing and describing a fight sequence in a fiction novel (any genre) that resembles those seen in The Matrix films? Have you read any novels that attempted something similar? If so, did they work?

If life could form on the surface of a star, what would it be like?

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?

How can I fix this (D&D), “Players are only motivated by gold and have way too much of it”?

How can I keep my D&D campaign on track when my players talk their way out of every problem?

What’s the best way to reward players in D&D?

How do you play an RPG character who is anxious and cautious but not a buzzkill (I’m about to start a D&D game and I’ve made a very nervous character, but I’m worried that she’ll make the plot of the game move slowly or just be super annoying.)?

How late can we discover a long period comet in the worst scenario (which is about to hit us)?

In D&D I wanna make an Artificer Alchemist who is a bit insane. I wanna make her creepy but cheerful at the same time. Any tips how I could do this?

How do you manage a kingdom in Dungeons and Dragons?

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!

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!

This article started in my mind when I was thinking about the Covid-19 situation here in Australia (and elsewhere where the virus has been close to eliminated) but I’ve since broadened and generalized it to some extent.

It began with my imagining a set of random tables to describe someone’s interaction with Covid-19. Such-and-such a chance of catching the disease, modified for various factors. Such and such a chance of mild symptoms, or severe symptoms – with the same modifier as the previous table, and a few more. How to set the values so that they modeled the real-world clusters that emerge, flourish, and burn out – if confronted with appropriate countermeasures to prevent the spread to the next generation of hosts, even if only somewhat effective. That got me thinking about cases in groups, not individually, because its in dealing with groups that statistical analysis thrives. And that’s when things started getting interesting, from the point of view of having something worth sharing in a Campaign Mastery article.

Basics

Above a critical number of cases, all possible outcomes are going to be represented. Below that critical number, RPGs use die rolls to determine which, if any, outcomes are not represented. With me so far?

You would commonly assume that if you had a d100 table, that it would take 100 cases to represent the totality of the possible interpretations or events. And, if the input is a non-random value, sequentially rising by 1 each time, you would be correct; every possible outcome, even a !% chance, would be covered, and covered in direct proportion to the chance of its occurrence.

Reality is a little messier, because the inputs are random – chaotic, not systematic. The reality is that achieving the critical case number simply makes it less likely that there won’t be an unrepresented outcome.

If there is a 1%-likely outcome, the absolute minimum critical number is 100 cases – but even if you had 100 cases to test, distribution of outcomes will be just a little uneven, and so there remains a measurable chance that the low-probability case will be unrepresented.

If the number of cases is 200, it’s a lot less likely that there won’t be one of them in the low probability category. At 300, it’s smaller still. You can actually perform statistical analysis of the statistical analysis.

Chasing A Statistical Tail

If there are 100 rolls, for example, there are 100 chances of the same number to come up on the dice – a 1% per previous roll risk. So, on the first roll, it’s 0% because there’s nothing to compare it to, on the second, it’s 1%, on the third, there are two previous results to compare to, so it’s two percent, and so on. But it’s a complicated situation, because as soon as there IS a match, the number of available rolls for future matches reduces by one thereafter. Add up all those percentages and you can conclude that there is a many-times-higher-than-100% chance of a duplicate result. But the low-percent chances of a match aren’t all that relevant compared to the high-percent chances – even if we don’t know what they are.

You can prove this by contemplating the sum of the three smallest and three biggest chances. Three smallest: 0%, 1%, and 2%, which sums to 3%. Three highest: 99% + 98% + 97% = 294%.

In fact, it’s easy to work out the total:

• Start with 100 results;
• taken 2 at a time, that’s 50 pairs.
• When we pair them, always pair the highest with the lowest, then next highest and next lowest, and so on. 0+99=99. 1+98=99. 2+97=99. 3+96=99. Starting to see a pattern here?
• The big X-factor is what happens around our 50th result, because we can’t have the same chance twice. So let’s start with 48, and work the pattern backwards to get the matching compliment: 99-48=51. So that pair is 48+51=99.
• And the next one is 49+50=99. And that’s all 100 possible values paired up.
• The total of all the chances is 50 pairs x 99 = 4950%.

That’s a meaningless number. Probabilities like this don’t actually sum – instead, you reduce the uncertainty. Probabilities are always a measure of the ignorance of the actual outcome.

Let’s work this out again, doing it properly this time, with ten actual random numbers. I rolled 15, 51, 99, 59, 29, 46, 04, 89, 21, and 05 – so let’s see what happened when I did so.

• With one number rolled, there’s a 1% chance that the second one will be the same thing, and a 99% chance that it won’t.
• As would be expected, the next number is different. With two numbers rolled, there’s now a 2% chance that the third number will match one of the first two, and a 98% chance that it won’t.
• Once again, it doesn’t. And so on, through the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and – in this case – tenth numbers.

Okay, so another simple pattern. It’s when I go beyond those ten random results and studying the effects of additional outcomes as though I had rolled them that we get to the interesting answers:

• When it comes to rolling the 11th number, there are ten possible matches out of 100 – a ten percent chance of a match, a 90% chance that there won’t be one. But let’s say that on the 11th roll, we beat the odds and get another 29. This uses up one of our 100 rolls but doesn’t increase the number of possible matches – so, come the twelfth roll, the odds are still 10% chance of a match, and 90% chance of no match.
• Let’s assume that we roll another twenty numbers without another match occurring – the chance of a match goes up by the end of that run by 20 to 30%, or almost one in three, while the chance of no match drops to 70%, not quite two in three.
• That means that by now, one in every three rolls should yield a number that we already have on our list. In fact, we should have had another match by now, statistically speaking.
• Let’s balance things out a bit, and say that of the twenty rolls after that, between 1/2 and 1/3 of them are matches – that’s 6-10, so let’s pick a value in the middle and say 8 of them match.
• That’s eight less chances of getting a unique result, so our chance of a match is now up to 30+(20-8)=42%, and our chance of no match is down to 58%.
• Eight rolls later, if there are no matches, it will be 50-50 – but the odds are that there will be three or four matches, so it won’t quite happen that quickly.
• When it does, the chances of getting a match on the remaining rolls will be more than 50% starting with the next roll to be made – and the chances of not getting a match will be less.
• By the time we get to our last roll out of 100, which the simple model said should have a 99% chance of a match, the actual chance of a match will be 99 minus the number of previous matches, percent. If we’ve had 30 matches, that’s 69% – a big difference.

If 1/3 of our 100 rolls are a match for one of the other 67, that’s 33% of the possible outcomes that are unrepresented. But that number of matches would not happen all that often.

That becomes really significant when it comes to a low-probability result – a 1-in-100 outcome, say. Our ignorance of those 33 possible outcomes dwarfs the likelihood that this one low-probability outcome is numbered amongst the possible results. There’s at least a 1-in-33 chance that our 1% outcome is one of the 33 numbers that weren’t rolled. If anything, intuitively, it seems like that number should be higher – like, 33%..

So, let’s say that we keep rolling until we get to 1% unrepresented. As we rack up the additional rolls, most of them will be duplicates of numbers we already have. Each time we roll another number that we didn’t already have, the chances of the next number being a match for something go up, so it will take longer and longer to scratch those final stubborn numbers off our list. And to get that last number off our list, where there’s a 99% chance of a match, and 1% chance of hitting the target, it could take 99 rolls or more before that one specific number comes up.

Still, the fact remains that at a big enough list of results, every possible outcome will have at least one matching case. With less than that number of cases, we need some sort of discriminating mechanism – our dice – to determine the outcome; but above it, we can simply say that there’s at least one of every class of outcomes.

If there are that critical number of cases to be considered, we can treat the table as though it were the outcomes; the more cases there are, the more closely one will look like the other. That can be an incredibly useful tool for the GM, because it means that we can ignore the chances part of the table and treat it as a list of all the outcomes. We can analyze in generalities and narratives (which we tend to be good at), instead of mathematics (which some of us are not so good at, and which all of us get wrong every now and then).

The chances of a Lich finding a Ring Of Regeneration may be one in 100 – but if there are 600 liches, it is fairly likely that it will happen at least once. So we can ignore the improbability and simply start detailing that particular Lich.

The Size Of The Sample

It’s thus really important to be able to determine the size of that critical number – the point at which individual outcomes are subsumed by the whole, and everything that can possibly happen, does. Unfortunately, this can require really complicated math.

But there are some shortcuts that GMs can use to get their heads around these probabilities and so assess what it most likely to happen, and these can be lifesavers.

If, for example, there are 300 rolls, then (on average) you would expect three rolls of each possible result – which means that you wouldn’t be at all surprised to see two, or four, rolls of any given result, and not all that surprised to see some with five, or six, and some with one – but you are now reaching the point where you would hope to see no result having no cases. If you found that result taking place, though, you would only be disappointed.

When you think about that distribution, you soon realize that you are talking about our familiar old friend, a dumbbell-shaped curve. Flat on top, dropping suddenly through the second and fifth bands of 1/6th results, and fairly flat again at the outer limits.

Given that the end points are always ‘anchored’ at zero, what we need is for the lower-probability ends of the fast-change zones to be higher than one. That means that there is very little risk that a 1%-likely outcome will not be represented with at least one result.

It also means that you can actually treat a subset of the results as a statistical representation of the whole. The larger that subset, the greater the certainty and reliability of the outcome measurements. But if you took the results of any six neighboring results, or any six evenly-numbered results, or – in fact – any six results at all – the outcome-counts in those specific results should map onto that dumbbell-curve.

In fact, this is how political opinion polls and television ratings work – they sample a certain number of opinions and from that, extrapolate to get some idea of the whole. Of course, they can only get a perfect representation if they poll every single viewer / voter – and if the responses are all truthful.

In practice, I don’t think that six is an adequate sample.

Imagine that your dumbbell curve is made of Lego blocks viewed end-on. A count of the number of Lego blocks gives you a measure of the reliability of your analysis of the whole – the more blocks that you have, the more representative the ultimate shape of the curve is.

One block doesn’t do a very good job on its own.

With three blocks, at least we get an indication of sloping walls.

With seven blocks, the shape of the curve begins to be reflected in the arrangement.

Eleven blocks is better again – but there’s still a large void on either side at the top.

With sixteen blocks, we reach a critical point: there’s almost enough space in the voids relative to the size of the bricks that the ‘stack’ can move from the top to a central row. Almost – but not quite.

At 23 blocks, there is ample space to begin reflecting the shape of the top of the curve.

From that point on, the correlation between curve and the shape created by the blocks will only get better, as this 31-block example shows.

The ratio of non-sampled to sampled results appears to give a reliability indicator. If we’re talking 100 results, and a sample of 10, that gives a 100/10=10 unreliability – the same as a sample of 100 from 1000 results.

But uncertainty tends to be assumed to be evenly distributed over the results excluded from the sample, so this isn’t actually correct, and the sample size can be relatively small. A sample of 5000 is quite reasonable to a prediction of 100,000 results, provided that the 5000 is a ‘fair sample’. That’s where the design of political polls becomes an art as much as a science – you have to actually look at the demographics of the samples and adjust them in various ways to correct the match between sample and total results, and try to separate out true trends from statistical anomalies.

Lets put that in terms of the TV ratings, which are (generally) far less controversial – if there’s a survey of 100 households, and all 100 happen to be big fans of golf, the survey will show golf rating its socks off, while other sports languish. But this is a very obvious failure – it’s a lot harder to pick up samples in which only a couple of categories are slightly over-sampled. I would tend to be an outlier on almost every survey – I’m more analytic than most, a deeper planner than most, have interests and hobbies that are usually fairly uncommon, read more, research more – the list goes on and on. I’m more – ‘distinctive’, I think is the best term – and that means that I hardly ever agree with the TV ratings, which hardly ever correspond to what I’m actually watching (I actually think that my particular segment of the audience is under-represented in the surveys, but that’s not the point).

So, getting back to our Lego bricks, a sample of one-in-ten might be perfectly adequate for a set of 200 results, is probably going to be reasonably accurate for a set of 100 results, or 400 results, is not going to be all that good for a set of 50 results (not enough excluded results to carry the weight of the distributed uncertainty) or for a set of 800 results (too many possible results for the sample to be representative). Hey – wait a minute, that’s another dumbbell curve! But this time, the scale on one axis is an exponential one, halving in one direction each step and doubling in the other.

Which brings me to the subject of logarithms. One mathematical trick that I have found very useful in the past is log(a^b) = b x log (a). Another is log-base-c(d) = log (d)/log(c). You can put these together to understand how the uncertainty changes on the dumbbell curve as a result of increasing a sample size relative to the number of results.

But that’s too technical for most people (including me) – and we don’t care, anyway. We can use a simpler approach.

Take a look back at those Lego-block curves. Count the number of rows up to the bottom of the quick-rise part of the curve. We need this to be at least one. The overall number of rows in that curve, divided by the number of rows to the reference point of the curve, tells us the average number of any given result that we need within our sample. And that, multiplied by the number of possible results, gives us the total number of results that we need in order to be sure of getting that 1% – using rough rules of thumb.

By my count, the target gets met with a pattern of 1, 3, 5, 9, a total of 18 samples, and 400 results. So if we have that many or more results, we would expect every possible outcome to be represented, even with the noisy variations in individual results that would normally be seen.

Once you go above that number of outcomes, you can actually treat the statistics of prediction as the statistics of outcome, within a small amount of unreliability.

Generations and Iterations Of Headache – back to Viruses

It’s when we start looking at recurring instances of an event that things get complicated. That’s where, at least some of the results don’t preclude a repeat event a day later, or a week later, or a month later.

Let’s assume that we have a situation in which the possible outcomes are, respectively, 1, 5, 10, 35, and 49% likely. With 400 cases, those are result counts of 4, 20, 40, 140, and 196, plus-or-minus about 50% – so the “10%” column probably contains about 40 results. It might be as low as 20 or as high as 60 – but it probably isn’t; it’s far more likely to be plus-or-minus 4, because some of the ‘errors’ will cancel out. In fact, most of them will, because there are 10 possible chances for them to do so. It’s at the low-probability end where there isn’t enough range of results, within a given outcome, to make that a big enough factor, where the greatest error occurs – to the point where, in the 1% case, the potential variation is plus-or-minus 75%, or from 1-to-7. We know that because we defined the number of results to give us that result.

The least-likely outcome is that you get the 1% outcome twice in a row – that will only happen in 1% of 1% of cases, or 0.01%. The most likely outcome is only 49% of 49% – or 24.01% of cases. And, where we had 5 possible outcomes, we may now have as many as 25. One generation on, that’s 125, then 625, and so on.

At first glance, to get representation of all possible cases, we need to increase the number of cases 400-fold, to 160,000 cases. That means that we get back to the 1-7 results in that 1% of 1% category. But, in fact, we don’t – because 7 results is more than enough opportunity for that error-cancellation. Half that number is probably enough – 80,000 cases.

Ah, if only things were always that simple. What if the 35% case meant that you didn’t have to take part in the next iteration? What if the 5% meant the same thing? And the 1%? But that the 10% meant that the number of cases in the next generation doubles?

Now the makeup of the second generation is defined (in part) by the first.

• We start with 100,000 cases for convenience.
• 49% is 49,000 cases – so that’s 49,000 in the next generation.
• 35% is 35,000 cases – so the next generation stays at 49,000 cases.
• 10% is 10,000 cases – so the next generation doubles – so far, that will be 98,000 cases, plus another 20,000, for 118,000.
• 5% is 5000 cases – so the next generation stays at 118,000 cases.
• 1% is 1000 cases – so the next generation stays at 118,000 cases.

All told, this hypothetical eliminates 35,000 + 5,000 + 1,000 = 41,000 potential cases – but replaces them with 59,000 more.

Things get even more complicated if human behavior is a factor. That 1% outcome of about 1000 might be enough to increase the 49% to 69%, at the expense of 2 of the 10%, 4 of the 5%, and the rest from the 35%. That means that our second generation would have completely different percentage breakdown.

• We start with 118,000 cases, not so convenient.
• 69% is 81,420 cases – so that’s 81,420 in the next generation.
• 21% is 24,780 cases – so the next generation stays at 81,420 cases.
• 8% is 9,440 cases – so the next generation doubles. 81.420 + 9,440 = 90,860 – and double that gets 181,720.
• 1% is 1180 cases – so the next generation stays at 181,720 cases.
• 1% is 1180 cases – so the next generation stays at 181,720 cases.

If the greatest-likelihood outcome is that someone exposed does not fall ill, but remains susceptible, then this is what could happen when people do the right thing because they are scared – things get worse. What if the 10%-means-doubling rule is also affected – what if it becomes, say 1.1x?

This is easy to determine – 1.1×98,800 = 108,680 cases in our third generation.

And that’s down, just a little bit, showing how hard it can be to contain a disease of this hypothetical magnitude. Not even the Coronavirus is this infectious, thank goodness!

There are a huge number of assumptions built into this multi-generational model; change one, and you get very different results in the fourth or fifth generation. Not to mention the third – or the 50th.

If we take a 10-day average (which is about right for Coronavirus) to a generation, the world is now in the 39th or 40th generation in most places – in China it might be the 44th or more.

But the key point here is that by looking at a generation-by-generation model, we don’t need even those 80,000 cases – so long as 1% yields 1 or 2 cases, that’s enough. Maybe 1600 cases in total to create a representative statistical universe – 3200 for statistical rigor.

And, of course, human behavior changes. If the change described above includes taking precautionary measures and lockdowns, after a while, people get complacent (reversing some of the changes), and lockdowns get lifted, and we’re back to the original percentages. That’s how you get multiple waves taking place – and each time, it gets harder to respond with the same effectiveness and determination. And that means that the second wave is bigger and the responses, less effective.

At the back of my mind, when I first started thinking about this, was the thought that it only takes one asymptomatic case to restart the whole thing even in a country where the virus is seemingly under control – and that if it’s possible, and the number of cases is above the critical number, then there will be such an asymptomatic case out there, somewhere. Two generations without a confirmed case is generally considered to be elimination – using a 14-day generation for a comfort margin. But two generations clear won’t be enough to eliminate such asymptomatic spread. Four generations will probably be enough – but even that’s uncertain. Because the total number of cases in this context is the number of people exposed, not the number of people who have tested positive.

Each generation without known transmission increases the likelihood that elimination has taken place, but it doesn’t guarantee it. As soon as the critical number exceeds the population base, we’re out of the realm where the statistics can be treated as a list of outcomes that will take place, and into the realm of uncertainty. And you can roll 00 five times in a row.

One More Example

I feel like I should offer one more example of why this matters to the GM. Fortunately, I have a simple one readily to hand.

Last week, I explained how the PCs in my superhero campaign were shortly to begin a trek through the wilds of Arkansas in search of a new place to call home-when-we’re-in-disguise. So far, my notes cover the entire first game days’ travels for both teams, with 28 targeted stops and 33 drive-through locations. This is roughly 1/3 of the total for the state, and there are 4 other states to follow – though an NPC has proposed that they think about abbreviating Kansas and skipping Nebraska altogether, since some of the team are from tropical climes.

But let’s say that doesn’t happen.

28×3×4 = 336
33×3×4 = 396

Those numbers are both high enough that I can treat the chance of something happening as the fact of something happening – at some point in their trip. Rather than 700-odd rolls to see if “X” happens here, though, I can simply roll for when “X” happens – a d12 rolled a few times will handle this nicely – and schedule the event accordingly. This will be a major prep-time saving, as I start to accelerate the pace of the adventure.

If there are enough cases being tested, everything happens – and within the scope of the entirety of the opportunity, it all happens at once. It’s a useful principle when it comes to bulk… well, bulk anything.

PS: I should probably add that this is the fundamental principle upon which my series on handling large armies is based (like, 10,000 Orcs / Helm’s Deep large) – part one of six here, if anyone’s interested.

This article is likely to ramble a bit. There will be times when I have to talk around the subject so as not to give away any surprises to my players, or to provide a proper foundation for the point of discussion. That’s an unfortunate reality for life as an RPG Blogger; the only alternative is to wait until secrecy is no longer an issue – by which time the inspirational juices needed for a good article may have run cold. Every blogger pays his money and takes his (or her) chances; sometimes, I’ve voted one way, and sometimes the other.

In this particular case, the subject matter is complex, so I want to at least have a stab at getting a coherent narrative down before I get distracted – so I’m going for the publish-quickly-with-secrecy-and-caveats approach.

The Magician’s Force

When I was about eight, I started studying stage magic. I got reasonably mediocre at it, too, which was quite an achievement for a shy kid.

One of the lessons that I learned, which has stood me in good stead as a GM on a number of occasions (and in life) was about something called The Magician’s Force.

That’s where the magician appears to give the audience a choice, while actually getting them to choose the option that they wanted selected in the first place.

A really crude example: The magician writes the name of a card – the Jack Of Spades, say – on a piece of paper and seals that paper in an envelope, which he gives to a member of the audience to hold for him (so that he can’t tamper with it).

He then takes a deck of cards and fans them out so that the audience can see that there are no obvious gaps. He then shuffles them, every now and then fanning them out (face side down) for the audience’s benefit (while saying things like “you can see that all the cards are still here”). In reality, when he does so, he’s looking in a concealed mirror to see which end of the deck his chosen card has ended up.

He then splits the deck roughly into two and has a member of the audience pick one of the piles. If the chosen stack has his target card in it, then that is the deck that has been chosen; if not, then that is the deck that the audience have chosen to discard.

Repeat this three more times. Make sure you have an engaging patter to keep the audience distracted – it can even be good to interrupt to show off another trick. I also got good mileage from deliberately messing a trick up at this point, which makes the audience feel smugly superior, and sure that if the magician does anything he shouldn’t, they will catch him.

So you’ve gone from 52 to 26 to 13 to 6 to 3 cards. The mirror will easily show which of the three is your chosen card – lay all three down on the table in front of you. Then perform some psychic mumbo-jumbo and push the ‘chosen’ card forward. Get the audience member to open the envelope and read what’s written there. Flip the chosen card over, triumphantly.

Now, the audience may well have caught on to what you were doing with the magician’s force – it’s fairly obvious when done this overtly. So, now for the real trick.

In a self-confessing tone of voice, admit “I wasn’t entirely sure which card you would pick.” (flip over the other two cards) “So, just in case, here’s one I prepared earlier,” and from a pocket, produce another envelope – with the name of one of the other two cards on it. “and here’s another,” and from somewhere else, produce a third envelope – with the name of the third card on it. Those who were so sure they knew how the trick worked are amazed and dazzled and everyone forgets that the only envelope the audience had control over was the one that you obviously steered them to.

How do you do it? A magician’s not supposed to reveal his secrets, but just this once: I prepare multiple sets of envelopes and hide them in different places. Four suites, so eight sets is optimal, but six can be managed. 13 cards in each suit, less the one chosen as ‘the fall guy’, so six stacks will have about 8 envelopes with the names of cards, each. Memorize which ones are where VERY carefully, and be very careful about the order you put them in, too – and make sure that they can’t be seen. It’s an easy thing while you’re making your patter and turning the face-down cards over at the apparent end of the trick to count through the seven or eight cards with your fingertips and carefully only draw out the exact envelope that you want. A little talcum powder rubbed onto the envelope helps ensure that they won’t stick together.

So far as the audience knows, there are only three envelopes. And they have the impression during the trick that it’s all about the cards. It’s not, it’s about the envelopes.

The GM’s Force

It doesn’t matter what the players choose if all choices are equally good from the GM’s point of view.

Read that again, and let it soak in.

It’s that simple.

Of course, like all good ideas, the execution can be messier and more complicated in reality than this theory makes it sound.

I have two examples to offer, real-world ones from my superhero campaign, but the source doesn’t matter – the rule applies to all genres and all campaigns.

A Choice Of Horses

I’ve mentioned a time or two that I did extensive prep for the PCs upcoming choice of vehicles. Two used car lots, a total of 163 specific vehicles, about 120 data points for each, all in a sortable spreadsheet, plus a text file with history and vehicle extras, from the used-car salesman’s point of view.

I was then able to present the players with a set of 13 small cards that I had made up, each of which listed a criteria that the PCs might use to make their choices.

Some of the cards had sub-options for the PCs to choose between. This was a trick that one of my university buddies had shown me a long time ago for simplifying complicated choices. All I had to do was suggest that someone had shown the trick to a PC, and we were off to the races.

Step one: pick the three least important criteria and discard those cards.

Step two: from the cards that remain, pick the most important single card and the least important. If there are sub-options, pick the one that’s most important. If you want two sub-options, use a blank card for the second one – but that requires you to discard another of the cards in front of you.

Repeat step two until all ten of your chosen cards are in priority order.

Now normally, you would simply compile the results as a reminder of what was more important, but because this is an RPG, theater of the mind, and because I had that spreadsheet, i could go further.

I sorted the spreadsheet in sequence of the 10th most important parameter, then ranked the cars from 1 to 22 (that was just how it worked out). Cars with the same score in that parameter got the same rating. If the next-worst car was not very different to the one just ranked, I incremented the ranking by 0.1; if a bit more, by 0.2, or 0.3; if substantially different, by 0.5 or even by a full 1.

Repeat for each of the other parameters, using the same scale of 1-22. A low ranking should always be better than a high one.

Now I applied a bias, to reflect the sequence of importance. Scores in the tenth-most important parameter was multiplied by 0.1, scores in the ninth by 0.2, then 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, and so on. These were then totaled.

I also calculated the minimum total and the maximum.

I subtracted the minimum from the Score, and divided by the difference between minimum and maximum. Multiplying the result by 999, and adding one, gave each car a score from 1 to 1000.

Using so many parameters, and giving them different weights, meant that no two cars got exactly the same score, but that cars that were almost as good got almost the same score.

I was then able to do exactly what the PCs would have been doing, picking the best combination within their budget according to the criteria.

Unsurprisingly, certain makes and models floated to the top, because they were very similar from generational year to generational year. To ensure a bit of variety, I cheated and had some of the obvious bargains sold before the PCs could close the deal. My objective is to offer the PCs a choice of combinations that met their demands and let them make the final choice from there.

Combination #1 is all about Car A, which chews up most of their budget. Car B, the other half of the combination, is simply the best of what’s left that is within the total budget.

Because Car B is more likely to be sold than Car A, Combinations 2 and 3 are Cars A and C, and Cars A and D, chosen in exactly the same way.

Combination 4 splits the resource pie more evenly, with cars E and F. Combinations 5 and 6 replace either of those with car G or car H, respectively (so they are really combinations 5, 6, 7, and 8). And, if they need it, the next best choice is to replace either car with car B, (combos 9 and 10), then car C (combos 11 and 12), then car D (combos 13 and 14).

Then you get to the more complicated compound options – replacing car E with car G and then replacing car F with the first available of Cars H, B, C, or D, or vice-versa (combos 15 and 16).

So I’m giving the players plenty of choice, while narrowing the field from a HUGE number of choices to a cherry-picked short list.

I’ve even written up a nice bit of narrative explaining the options to them.

But here’s the thing: I don’t care which of these combinations the players choose. I didn’t care which of the parameters they chose to prioritize. I made sure that all the choices were interesting choices, with their own stories to tell, just by doing some basic research into the history of the most popular cars of the era.

That makes this whole exercise a GM’s Force. Totally NOT railroading the PCs in any way – I have acted as their humble servant, filtering the many-fold possibilities as they would have me do, loading in some realism (cars sold from a busy car yard should not be a surprise; cars not being sold at such a car yard should be). But every choice leads to some interesting narrative, and some interesting roleplay.

I am treating these cars as though they were NPCs in their own right, with their own personalities and quirks and flaws and strengths.

For the record (in case you ever want to do something like it for yourselves), the criteria offered (with sub-options), in the sequence selected by the players runs (I’ve indicated players sub-option choices in bold):

1. Economy
   • Urban or Highway
   • Current or After Tune-up
2. Overall Condition (a poor condition impacts on price, horsepower, economy, top speed, cruising range, and braking distance).
3. Highway (Cruising) Range
4. Original Condition, or Current, or After Tune-up
5. Low Urban Range (how far will you get on a tank in stop-start city traffic)
   • Original Condition, or Current, or After Tune-up
6. Rust (calculated as the Rust rating plus 1/10th of any % value lost due to rust)
7. Size (a highly artificial measure based on interior space, length, width, and body shape, but it ranks each car numerically from 1 to 7.5, with low being tiny and high being enormous. Busses and the like would be 8-10 on the scale).
8. Height There’s nothing worse when you’re doing a lot of driving than not having enough head room. Surprisingly, this almost certainly varies a minuscule amount from model year to model year even if nothing else but trim details change – possibly just so the manufacturers can claim that it’s not the same car as last year).
9. Price
   • Sticker Price or Estimated Bargain (the latter is how much you can hope to save through sharp negotiating and is based on the dealer’s willingness to do a deal on that particular car, which in turn reflects customer demand and condition and rarity and original quality, which in turn reflect a whole bunch of other things – but ultimately, the better bargains float to the top with this parameter)
10. Top Speed
    • Original Condition, or Current, or After Tune-up
11. Horsepower
    • Original Condition, or Current, or After Tune-up
12. (rejected parameter) Acceleration
    • Original Condition, or Current, or After Tune-up
13. (rejected parameter) Age
    • Maximum Age, Minimum Age, or Current Age
14. (rejected parameter) Gearbox/Drive-train
    • Manual or Automatic,
    • 3-, 4-, or 5- gears, or don’t care
    • Exclude front-wheel-drive or Exclude nothing

What’s more, if they had really wanted it, I could easily have dropped in some other parameter like engine size, or fuel tank size, or the price to refill a tank. I would have had more trouble with some of the other parameters like ride height simply because the manufacturers didn’t always make that information available. But I chose the ones that I expected them to find the most meaningful, and got no complaints.

If someone really wants me to, I’ll insert at this point a full list of the spreadsheet’s parameters and where the information came from – in some cases, it’s random, as described in How Good Is That Rust-bucket In The Showroom Window?; in some cases, it’s research; and in some cases, it’s calculated).

—- INSERT (IF ANY) GOES HERE —-

A choice of Bases

The reason the team need the cars is because they are in deep cover and scouting for a new Base Of Operations (BOps) from which to occasionally carry out missions that would be politically unacceptable if their true identities and affiliations were recognized – an occasional side-campaign within a campaign.

Their step-parent organization (a complicated relationship!) has recommended choosing a location in Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, or Nebraska. They know that they will eventually meet their contact for a detailed briefing on the current emergency in Oklahoma City, and were told that they should get out of Texas ASAP – from which they have inferred that the plot that they have to unravel will be centered in southern Oklahoma or Northern Texas, and possibly more West than East.

So, they are planning a road trip.

Which means that I am planning a road trip. A BIG one.

Three-to-four days in each state, to be spent visiting as many communities as they can in search of a place to sometimes call home.

They intend to split up, so as to cover more ground.

What I have done so far is to gather a selection of links about each state, in particular on the pros and cons of living there, and to the Wikipedia pages of greatest relevance. For the first state, I have translated that into a summary. I have arranged for them to get their information from (mostly fictitious) guidebooks as they travel because the alternative was to make decisions based on about 18 seconds of research per location, based on the time allotted by them and the scale of the job.

I have compiled maps at a fairly detailed scale into enormous maps that I can make (digital) notes on, show routes, track how far they’ve come, etc.

Using those maps and a logical search pattern, I have laid out a course for each group to follow over their three days. At the end of it all, I want each team to have a little less than a handful of possible options, which the players will then collectively get down to the best three.

Then they will do the next state, add another half-dozen or so possibilities, and then whittle those down to the best three or four.

Repeat for half the next state, and half of Nebraska, the final state. Why? Because, while choosing one of the four recommended states might be convenient for the current mission, they have no idea where the mission after that will take them – but it’s about one in fifty at best that it will be where they are based. That means that it’s worth them contemplating a few choices outside the box, like Detroit, or Chicago or St Louis. Transport hubs where they can come and go without too many questions being asked.

At the end of it all, they will be left with their top three or four picks.

I don’t care what they pick. Why? The GM’s Force. I have a list of 31 types of location (some may recur more than once), and any of them would make an interesting and fun location. Each time they pass through a town that sounds like an interesting place to put one, and that has a reasonably unique name, I seed it with a contender.

It doesn’t matter what they choose – my ends (interesting location to serve as the foundation for this side-campaign) will be served.

I have also amassed a list of 21 encounters (and counting) to take place along the way – plus the guidebooks and touring the places themselves, and the synchronicity of two teams effectively leapfrogging each other for the campaign spotlight, plus the potential for the memberships of each of the two groups to vary from state to state, allowing differences of focused interaction to occur between the PCs. And, on top of all that, some of the places the PCs will visit may have the potential to raise interesting questions for the PCs to discuss in-character. And – this being a superhero campaign – there may even be the occasional Close Encounter Of The Villainous Kind.

The reality is that it will probably take 2-3 game sessions per complete US state to explore it all and deal with the fun and games along the way. There will likely be 1/2 a session left in Texas before they get underway, and 1/2 a session traveling to their split-up point, where they will camp for the night – Dalby Springs (which they don’t realize is a ghost town). Whether or not I’ll do anything with that fact remains to be seen! But, at the very least, it should set things off on ‘the right foot’ so far as plot is concerned.

So that’s 1 session to get them to the point of entering Arkansas, 2-3 sessions in Arkansas, 2-3 sessions in neighboring Missouri, 2-3 sessions in Eastern Kansas and Eastern Nebraska, and one session exploring wild cars, 1 session setting up their new homes, 1-2 sessions establishing their cover identities and getting them some superhero PR the best way they know how (taking down some bad guys somewhere, in full view of the Press), then they can meet their contact and the real Adventure can start – and will probably last two Game sessions, maybe three.

Add those up: 1 + 2-3 + 2-3 + 2-3 + 1 + 1-2 + 2-3 = 11-16 game sessions. We get 11 game sessions a year. Best case scenario, this adventure will see out the current gaming year. Worst-case scenario, it will also fill half of next year.

Here’s the thing: with so many variables, as with multiple dice, the likelihood of the average goes way up. That’s not the whole story of course, but the average is 13.5 and we have 10 game sessions left this year – which would mean that their final act for the year would be choosing from amongst the many alternatives I have put before them.

But that’s fine, because this part of the adventure isn’t about the end, it’s about the road to the end. This is a superhero road movie – not something that comes along every day.

What’s more, as soon as it starts to get boring for anybody, i can start hand-waving time (and I expect to do so) with increasing frequency past the first game session or two. Establish a pattern then skip to the interesting bits, in other words. Like a side-trip to this Mississippi towns of Hot Coffee and Coffeeville (one of the PCs is a coffee addict). I’m not sure I can squeeze in both side-trips, but I should be able to get one in – it all depends on which location will be the most interesting in terms of interaction with this particular PC.

Another thing that I want to build in is something specifically targeted at each of the characters, to give them a chance to show off a side of themselves that doesn’t get displayed very often, or that will otherwise be interesting/fun – like that side-trip. Between them, that will soak up a game session – but I expect hand-waving to clear four or five game sessions. So 13.5 + 1 – 4.5 = 10. Remember how many game sessions I said were left in the year?

I’ll be trying hard to clear SIX sessions, not four, with hand-waving – simply because that will give me a game session in hand, and mean that the year won’t end with the conclusion of this adventure but with the start of the next, which will re-establish the regular campaign.

A Road-trip Concordance

It’s not relevant to the subject of today’s article, but – for the benefit of anyone else who’s ever confronted by a similar challenge – I thought I would spend a bit of time spelling out just how I go about marrying up the different aspects of the road trip.

Note that if the PCs decide stop anywhere that’s not on my schedule, that’s fine – I will just adjust the relative times given on-the-fly for a little while and then have something delay the other group for just the right amount of time to get things back into sync. I guess in that respect, this is just another example of a GM’s force!

The Route Plan

So, at the moment, I have a route plan that looks something like this:

109. Crossett -> North to Fountain Hill, NW then West to Johnsville, North
110. Warren -> NW via New Edinburg
111. Fordyce -> North via Ivan
112. Sheridan -> NE then East through Center Grove, ESE through White Hall, SE
113. Pine Bluff -> South then East
114. Star City

Each of these is a ‘Leg” and contains routing instructions to the next target destination, that being a location where the PCs might find a potential BOps. The “1” in front of the Target Location signifies that this is the route being followed by Group 1.

At the same time, I have a second route for the other group (whose locations start, strangely enough, with a two):

209. Center Point -> Highway 278 NNW
210. Dierks -> Highway 76 NNE to Highway 278 (exit on the left), NNW then NE then NNW
211. Umpire -> continue on Highway 278 West
212. Wickers -> NNW then NE on Highway 88 via Hatton, Vandervoort, Cove, Hatfield, Potter Junction
213. Mena

Note that these start where I am up to in my research / prep – I’ll be taking notes in this post’s draft as I actually do the work. You can also see how my ‘best practice’ evolved as I went along – the first groups’ routes have directions and way-points, the second groups adds Highway numbers. For the sake of clarity, I am referring to all Arkansas Highways as “Route #” even though it’s not strictly accurate.

The Notepad

I also have a notepad. On it, I track time – group one on the left, and group two on the right.

Leg 108 for Group one was from El Dorado to Crossett via Strong. The entry on the pad for this leg reads:

• +6 +7 -> 108 *El Dorado* = 5+41
  • +14 +24 = 6+19 -> Strong

And the next line (the first line for the next target) reads:

• +28 -> 109 *Crossett* = 6+47

Let me walk you through this, because it packs a lot into a very compressed format:

“+6” – it took the team an estimated six minutes to evaluate location 107, Smackover, Arkansas.

“+7” – it then took the team seven minutes to travel to location 108, El Dorado. Which means that they got there 5 hours 41 minutes after departure at the start of the day.

“+14” – the team spent an estimated 14 minutes evaluating El Dorado – which probably means that either the place is very big, or that they found a possible BOps, or both.

“+24” – it then took them 24 minutes to drive to Strong. Strong is what is going to be referred to as a “Drive-through Evaluation”, for towns where they don’t expect to find any potential BOps to consider (but they’ll look as they pass through town, anyway – and sometimes that will bear fruit).

“= 6+19” – if you add 14 minutes to 5 hrs 41 mins, and then add 24 minutes to the result, you get 6 hours 19 mins.

“-> Strong” – means that at time-hack 6+19, Group 1 reach the outskirts of the community named “Strong” on the map.

“+28 ->” – The presence of only one time interval – twenty-eight minutes in this case – means that no time was spent exploring Strong, that there was nothing there of interest to the PCs.

“109 *Crossett* = 6+47” if you add 28 minutes to the previous time check of 6+19, you get 6 hrs 47 mins – so that is the time when this group reaches the outskirts of Crossett.

Told you there was a lot packed into just a few lines!

The other side of the list deal with group two, who have a most recent time-check of 6+0 at location 209, Center Point.

I also bear in mind that overall, group one are supposed to ‘hit’ 45 stops with a roughly-estimated 14.8 hours of inspection time, or about 20 minutes per target, and a total driving distance of 928 miles; group two have a distance of 1132 miles to cover, 9.7 hours (estimated) to inspect targets, and 69 targets to inspect in that time.

Step One: Google Maps

If you type a location into google maps, and then ” to ” and follow that with another location, Google maps will show you routes from A to B, with the distance (and the driving time under current conditions, which is not very useful in this application). You also have to option to add more destinations to the chain – but there is a limit.

So the first step is to break the route up into segments on different roads, using the Driving Directions if necessary to get distances to turns. I also adjust both the starting point to somewhere in town if time was spent exploring it, and the ending point of the trip to the outskirts of the next town.

I have set a speed limit of 60 mph on the interstates (in theory), 55 on the Highways, and whatever-you-feel-safe-at on anything else – but I am making notes on what speeds feel or are unsafe on each road. Speed through towns is usually 35, sometimes 25, and occasionally there’s no posted limit.

Applying the appropriate speeds gets me a time-to-landmark from the distance-to-landmark data. I can vary the ‘safe’ speeds as I see fit (remembering that this game universe experienced a cataclysm six years ago, game time, from which it is still recovering).

Add those up, and one of two things will happen: you’ll either get the time interval to the next Location or to the next Drive-through Evaluation.

Advance whichever time-check is earliest until you overtake the later time-check.

In this case, with Group 1 at 6+47 and Group 2 at 6+0, I have 47 minutes of Group 2’s time to fill in before I catch up.

Almost certainly, location 210 will precede location 109 – and quite possibly 211 and 212 as well.

Steps Two and Three: The Research

Locations are described in my research in sequential order. I use a nested layout for the details.

So far, I have compiled 19,100 words. I got a bit ahead of myself and have partial work done on targets 109-116, in addition to full details of 100-108 and 201-209. So part of what I do is to integrate work done with new research, compiling the two into a blow-by-blow narrative.

The first part of the research derives from “The Guidebook”. This starts with information on the community from Wikipedia, but that’s often not enough, so I will follow up with a Google Search, which usually leads me to more information. “The Arkansas Encyclopedia” has been especially helpful, but there are several other sites that provide snippets of information. I’m very much just hitting the highlights, the same way that someone skimming through the interesting parts of a guidebook would.

Occasionally, all these sources will fail me, in which event I resort to the GM’s prerogative – I make something up.

I try to estimate the population level as it was in 1986, based on the censuses of 1980 and 1990, and any causes of change described. I also factor in the differences between real-world history and campaign-world history – a massive physical catastrophe impacted the entire planet about six-and-a-half years ago, and it caused an economic crisis almost as deep as the Great Depression. As an indicator of severity, Japan sunk (most of the population were saved by transforming them into mer-people) – so no Japanese industry, and limited infiltration of the American Markets by small cars (and most of those are European). But they have retooled their industrial capability, and are soon to make a big re-entry into the world economy!

I’m lazy enough that I take most of the demographics unchanged from the 2010 census, and only modify if I have to. I note median age, and the number who live below the poverty line, and a very broad racial breakdown. I document any physical features described by Wikipedia (often not many except when it comes to the largest communities), and any social features of relevance, and I sequence it all into a readable narrative. I often have to look elsewhere (as described) for the history, which I synopsize heavily.

Steps Four and Five: Images and Getting A Feel For The Place

The “guidebook material” then segues (often in a very blurred fashion) into what the PCs see and any impressions they get when they drive into town. I write this material as original narrative, based purely on the most relevant images that a DuckDuckGo Image Search offers me. If I don’t get enough good stuff to get a distinctive flavor, I may also hit Google Images. As I find and open images in new tabs, I try and sequence them into a narrative, which then becomes the basis for my text. Above all, I’m looking for the answers to the key questions that the PCs would be asking – “What’s this place like,” “What would it be like to live here,” “Are there any obvious possible BOps depicted,” and so on.

Sometimes, a town or city won’t leave a strong impression – which means that it’s worthless for my adventure purposes. Sometimes, there may be obvious reasons for saying no to somewhere – the PCs don’t have any dark-skinned members but one is posing as a Hollywood Talent Scout (and Danish Expat), another is a Kzin Tourist, and a third is British and proud of it (and, supposedly a prospector) – any of which might trigger the locals. The nondescript French Heiress, the West-Coast Bounty hunter, and the Norwegian Ski Instructor and Championship Woodlogger are less likely to arouse the locals.

I save those images that support the narrative.

Step Six: EVALUATION & VERDICT

I then write the narrative text that has been inspired by the image search under the subheading “EVALUATION” (in all caps so that it stands out even in a plain-text document).

If there location has enough character to be distinctive or interesting, or if the image search turned up a viable BOps, I write that up under the sub-heading “VERDICT”, and then add any information on how the group located it under the “EVALUATION” sub-heading.

If it seemed likely that there would be somewhere from the research, but nothing came up, I decide if the location is interesting enough to delve into my list of quirky BOps location ideas. If so, I perform a more specific image search for whatever I need to illustrate it.

I want to provide just enough information that the team can make a decision on whether or not it goes on the short-list at the end of this state’s road-trip. If it does, that’s when I’ll generate a lot more information about it for use in the final evaluation – all information that the PCs supposedly gathered during their evaluation.

Step Seven: Encounters/Events

If there’s no potential BOps, I consider whether or not the location is interesting enough to merit one of my list of “On-The-Road Encounters”. I have, as I said earlier, 22 of these and counting – and some may occur more than once. With three game days traveling through each of a pair of states, and another three game days through another pair of states, and any travel to curve-ball locations after that (another three game days), and then travel from the new BOps to Oklahoma City, I have to spread these over ten or 11 game days – so that’s one per car per game day, and more as I come up with new ideas. If I only have one shot at each traveling group per game day, I want to make it count, so – so far – there haven’t been any dropped in, but I did spend some time on Lunch.

Most of these won’t happen in an actual community, they are going to be out on the open road (but there are some exceptions, like the house on fire, or a driver getting lost). In all cases, it will be up to the PCs what they make of the situation – they can choose to do nothing, or try to lend a covert hand, or make a public debut. You can lead a PC to plot, but you can’t make him Adventure!

If there is to be an event or encounter, I make appropriate notes either in the description of the route after the target location or in the target location description itself under an appropriate sub-heading.

Step Eight: More Encounters/Events

After I had written most of this article, an important afterthought came to me.

During the cataclysm 6.5 game years ago, which took the form of a variant on the Norse Ragnarok, a neighboring dimension was reduced to primal energy which was used to reshape the reality, internal physics, and history of our universe – but before that happened, the ruler of most of their Milky Way Galaxy equivalent used the resources of his government and society to relocate most of the population to other worlds in the primary space-time of the campaign. While some of these relocations have been overt (there are dinosaurs in Central America), and some are globally known because of their immediate impact (the saving of California from a massive shift in the San Andreas fault, the sinking of Japan and salvation of the population through a transformation into mermen), others have been more subtle. A lot of humans simply settled into communities of survivors and became part of their new communities, which has become a driving force in American politics. In some countries, these newcomers used arcane abilities to become warlords. China put up what has become known as The Bamboo Curtain – no news comes out of there, these days, and no-one knows what is happening. Some uninhabited worlds were terraformed/altered to make them compatible with non-human species – there are human-sized sentient ants on Mars, for example.

A few such imports were more covert – the PCs recently met an alien octopoid race that were saved in this process who have been very quietly living in southern Mexico, and negotiated the precursor to an eventual treaty with them for mutual coexistence. And a lot of other obviously non-human species and individuals quietly began lives for themselves in various wildernesses.

The PCs are going to be driving through a couple of such wildernesses. Where are those encounters?

This thought started with the idea of a troll who has felled a tree across the road, charging a toll (payable in consumables, not cash) to lift the tree long enough for vehicles to pass – which was conceived of as simply another road encounter, to be added to the list. Reflecting on it overnight, though, I realized that this was actually just the first example of a whole new class of encounters, most of which would be more likely to transpire when the PCs were camping at night and not whizzing past at XX or XXX miles per hour.

It took less than an hour this morning to add another 22 ideas to this second encounter list, most of them one-offs, but a few of which could recur. Many have two forms – drive-by encounters (spotting something exotic) and more substantial at-rest encounters. That’s enough for one or two per game-day. There’s also some scope for these encounters to interact with some of the ones listed in Step 7 in interesting ways – it’s one thing to see a hitch-hiker raising a thumb for a ride, and another to do so after seeing evidence of giant spiders in the vicinity. If the PCs are traveling in the right direction, that just makes it a lot more likely that they’ll stop and interact with the hitch-hiker. Things become more difficult if the hitch-hiker is trying to go the other way.

The reason this becomes critically important right now is that in the work that has already been done (and which is described below), I’ve already described the passage of the PCs through a number of these low-population areas that would be havens for ‘strange imports’ – and not only has nothing been described, but no time has been allowed for the resolution of such encounters. Neither seem all that reasonable.

So I’m going to have to go back through the work that I thought had been done, seed in a couple of these encounters, estimate how much time the encounter will probably take (even if the PCs just slow down to gawk, or stop to take a look / a photo, there will inevitably be some delay), and then adjust all the subsequent time-checks to include that time-loss. That will mean redoing my note-pad’s contents and ‘re-synchronizing’ events.

Which brings me to what used be Step Eight….

Step Eight Nine: The Timing

It’s important to carefully translate the EVALUATION/VERDICT material into a time frame that describes how long it took. What’s the game-time interval between one image and the next, in other words. I do this in minutes and then add them up, and bear in mind the evaluation time-frame – but the first time an evaluation goes over-time (and I deliberately let one do so), I let the PCs explore two different philosophic responses to the situation and then choose how each team will deal with those situations. In a nutshell, they can try to make up time by cutting other evaluations short, or they can eat into the allocated personal time or their next meal-time. It’s another GM’s Force in that whatever they choose works for me, I can feed it into my narrative..

I also estimate how long any encounter is likely to take to resolve.

Next comes calculating the distances and routes – or rather, this is where I put the information that I calculated earlier, under the sub-heading Directions (usually not fully capitalized because I started doing it the other way when I got ahead of myself and decided that consistency was more important). This is the final word on a target – how to get out of town and where to go once you do.

And then it’s time to move on to the next stop.

Drive-through Evaluations

As a general rule, there’s less information about these, and so shorter text and a more casual narrative, but the process is pretty much the same – but with lowered expectations. They are indented so that they stand out.

I also give them the “location number” of the preceding Location – so “Louann” is considered part of Target 106, Camden, but actually gets visited after 206, Horatio, and 207, De Queen.

Directions stay with the main location, but a copy gets appended to the end of the Drive Through Evaluation as a reminder. The original is “this is what your plan calls for”, the subsequent entry is “this is where you go from here.”

Step Nine: The Notepad

The final step is to take the timing data from Step Eight and add another entry to the concordance notepad, so that I can see which route will next reach somewhere notable.

Destinations Done So Far

Here’s a list of the locations described so far in my notes, just because people might be interested: If you aren’t, skip down to the next section.

• [Texas]
  • 100 Dalby Springs, Texas
  • 100 Simms, Texas
  • 200 Texarkana, Texas
  • 100 Corley, Texas
  • 100 Maud, Texas
  • 100 Redwater, Texas
• 201 Homan
• 100 Texarkana
• 202 Hope
• 101 Bradley
  • 202 Columbus
  • 202 Saratoga
  • 101 Lewisville
  • 202 Tollette
  • 101 Stamps
• 203 Mineral Springs
• 102 Waldo
• 203 Ben Lomond
• 203 Wilton
• 204 Ashdown
• 104 Mount Holly
• 105 Stephens
• 205 Foreman
• 106 Camden
• 206 Horatio
• 207 De Queen
  • 106 Louann
• 208 Lockesburg
• 107 Smackover
• 108 El Dorado
• 209 Center Point

And the ones that have been partially done. Some of these places may even no longer technically exist! Talk about a road to nowhere…! “Partial” means that I’ve looked the location up on Wikipedia and made notes accordingly.

• (108 Strong – partial)
• (109 Crossett – partial)
  • (109 Fountain Hill – partial)
  • (109 Johnsville – partial)
• (110 Warren – partial)
  • (110 New Edinburg – partial)
• (111 Fordyce – partial)
  • (111 Ivan – partial)
• (112 Sheridan – partial)
  • (112 Center Grove – no data on Wikipedia)
  • (112 White Hall – partial)
• (113 Pine Bluff – partial)
• (114 Star City – partial)
  • (114 Relf’s Bluff – no data on Wikipedia)
  • (114 Montongo – partial)
• (115 Monticello – partial)
  • (115 Lacey – partial)
  • (115 Fountain Hall – no data on Wikipedia)
• (116 Hamburg – partial)

Sample complete entries

I waited until I got a set of good ones, then copied the work that I had done as a way to wrap up this article – bearing in mind that it’s already twice the usual Campaign Mastery length before this inclusion! (I’ve also formatted it a lot more than I get to do with the plain-text editor that I use to write with).

I should start by apologizing to anyone who lives in any of these communities who is offended by my generalizing and interpreting and projecting of various assumptions onto their communities. Remember, the goal is to create an exciting and interesting game, not necessarily an accurate one!

109 Crossett

GUIDEBOOK/NARRATIVE

Crosset has a population of 6,500 occupying 5.79 square miles of land, making it one of the largest communities that you’ve visited in Arkansas; it’s actually large enough to have suburbs. It’s taken almost half an hour to drive here from Strong. What’s more, the city is about 7 miles wide (E-W) and 3½ miles deep (N-S) – exploring it fully will consume quite a lot of the advantage that you had built up since just crossing it once from NW to SE will take about 15 minutes. Realistically, 45 minutes to an hour can be consumed poking around just the key points of a city this size – which forewarns you of what it will be like when you have to evaluate Little Rock on Day 3. And that’s before you spend any time considering possible contenders, and you are sure that there will BE some in a city of this size. Still, that’s what the saved time is there for!

There are four properties on Main Street in Crossett listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as well as the Crossett Experimental Forest, located 7 mi (11 km) south.

60% of the population are White, 39% Black, and 1% Hispanic/Latino. The median age is 38 years and there are 83 adult men for every 100 adult women. 17% of the population are below the poverty line and 30% of the children, both notable lower than many other places within the state. Politically, the city only leans conservative, making it one of the most progressive locations in Arkansas outside of Little Rock. This attitude is the legacy of the founders of the city who forged an official relationship with the School of Forestry at Yale University in 1912, and the lumber companies in the region became the leading employer of Yale-trained forestry graduates, which resulted in improved manufacturing and farming practices. It was the Yale influence that led to the creation in 1934 of the Crossett Experimental Forest.

As calamities unfolded in the first half of the 20th century, Crossett seemed to dance between them, untouched; the Roaring Twenties, Great Depression, two World Wars and even the Civil Rights upheavals of the 50s came and went without major disturbance to the community. Following the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision in 1954, leaders in both the black and white communities engaged in talks which finally resulted in the integration of the Crossett schools in 1968 without incident.

The climate is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters. October, May and April are the most pleasant months in Crossett, while July and August are the least comfortable months. It is located just nine miles north of the Louisiana border.

The major employer in the town is the Georgia-Pacific paper mill and allied industries make up a substantial portion of what’s left.

Property is very expensive here, with some homes priced at more than $500,000. Most homes in the city are priced below $79,000.
However, the cost of living is almost 30% lower than the USNA average.

The city is large enough to have a zoo and a first class airport, capable of handling small corporate jets on its 5,000 foot runway.

EVALUATION:

The welcome sign is, appropriately, beside a pine nursery and a stand of old-growth forest preserved from exploitation. (0 mins) (11-109a)

The main shopping center is neat and modern, and there are very few empty storefronts. (Ignore the too-modern cars). (5 mins) (11-109b)

The public library is reassuringly large and well-maintained – in fact, you’ve seen smaller county administrations. (10 mins) (11-109c)

While the edges of the roads have an ‘unfinished’ and untidy look to them, and most are unmarked with center-lines (and sometimes narrow), the verges are very green and shady, and homes are well-separated. Large blocks of land appear to be the norm. As with other towns you’ve looked through in this part of Arkansas, there don’t appear to be very many fences between properties, creating a stronger sense of a local community – that might be problematic for the keeping of secrets. (15 mins) (11-109d)

The Post Office still manages to retain a ‘municipal building’ feeling to it – the locals’ progressiveness appears to have its limits. Bonus points for incorporating the town logo into the sign, however. (20 mins) (11-109e)

Rather more modern and not far away is the Biedenharn Museum & Gardens. This is a city which thinks there’s more to culture than country AND western. (25 mins) (11-109f)

Some houses are small and designed to use the size of the blocks of land to create greater privacy. (35 mins) (11-109g)

CONTENDER #1:

Many take advantage of the space available to accommodate 5, 6, 7, or even 8 bedrooms. Some are clearly built on double-blocks. This plain and unassuming brick dwelling is a 7-bedroom and on the market for $612K (40 mins) (11-109h)

CONTENDER #2:

This looks like a 4-bedroom until you notice the extra rooms on the second floor. A very unpretentious 7-bedroom house, then – again on a double-block, to have such a vast lawn. It would set you back $605K. (45 mins) (11-109i)

CONTENDER #3:

There are two properties that are even larger, and in danger of becoming excessively run-down; both need renovating to at least some degree. The first is the Old Rose Inn, which was damaged during Ragnarok and never reopened after the subsequent death of the owner. It’s $725K, and would probably need $125K in repairs before it could function as anything more than a private residence. But it seems a shame for it to go to waste, it still has hints of past greatness about it. With 28 rooms per level, and some extras on the third level, even if you removed every second wall to open the rooms out into private suites, there is still more than enough capacity for the team. (52 mins) (11-109j)

CONTENDER #4:

A little smaller and quite a lot creepier, but with even greater hints of former glory is the Hotel Crossett. Now quite dilapidated, it would cost $600K to acquire it’s 23 rooms and probably another $4-500K to refurbish. It does occur to you that you could hire an army of workmen to restore these places and have a perfectly-obvious justification for not being around while the repairs are carried out. This place is probably old enough to be on the national register of historic landmarks but its condition seems to have precluded that. Restoring it would erase some of the historic value but preserve what’s left. Although the building looks to be in rough condition, closer inspection shows much of the damage to be cosmetic, but not all. Probably 1/2 of the building is still structurally sound, quite enough for you to use as temporary accommodations. Alternatively, you could buy it and leave it like this for a while until ‘the blueprints are finalized’. (70 mins)

VERDICT:

There are four contenders here with varying shades of appeal. #1 is only just big enough but it is modern and new. Perhaps a 3½ out of 5.

#2 is slightly bigger in capacity but the rooms are smaller; it is modern and new, and traditional at the same time. Same score, but for different reasons.

#3 is a lot of work but more than big enough to house the team in luxury and deserves to be saved. Probably a 4 out of 5, maybe even nudging toward 4½.

All of which goes double for #4. It’s so good that it even generates its own cover stories! If it had already been refurbished, it might be a 5 – but as it stands, it’s only a 4-to-4½.

Directions: North on Route 133 to North Crossett then Route 133 to a right turn onto route 8 to Fountain Hill, highway 425 into Fountain Hill, then NW then West on Route 160 then Route 8 to Johnsville, North on Route 8 to Highway 63 to Warren.

• 4.3 miles in Crossett, to North Crossett @ 25 mph = 10 mins
          Subtotal to North Crossett 10 mins
   
• 12.6 miles through North Crossett on Route 133 @ 95 = 8 mins
• Turn right onto Route 8, 3.8 miles @ 75 = 3 mins
• Turn left onto highway 425
          Subtotal to Fountain Hill = 11 mins
   
• 0.8 miles through Fountain Hill @ 25 mph = 2 mins
• Turn right onto Route 160, 10.7 miles @ 75 on Route 160 to Johnsville = 9 mins
          Subtotal to Johnsville = 11 mins
   
• Stay on route 160 to drive through Johnsville and then turn back to the NE through back streets to join Route 8. 0.3 miles @ 25 mph = 1 min
• 13.2 miles on Route 8 @ 80 mph = 10 mins
• Right turn onto Highway 63
• 2.5 miles on Highway 63 to Warren @ 55 = 3 mins
          Subtotal to Warren = 14 mins
   

212 Cove

GUIDEBOOK/NARRATIVE

5 minutes after Vandervoort, and just as Team 1 reach the Crossett shopping center, Team Two drive into the community of Cove.
.
360 people in 1.6 square miles – which actually is an extremely low density for a town. 95% of the population are White, 4% Native American, and 1% Hispanic or Latino. Which leaves the Black population lost in rounding errors, it is that low. Median age is 32, and there is something close to equality in gender.

14% of homes have someone over 65 living there.

Per Capita income is $4000 less than the typical level even in these small towns, and 29% of the population are below the poverty line.

Cove is located at 1000ft above sea level in the hills of the Ouachita Mountains. May, September and October are the most pleasant months in Cove, while July and January are the least comfortable months.

A post office was established in 1897. For about a year, it was known as Venice, but the name Cove Station was chosen in 1898 (‘Leroy’ was also considered). The name was eventually shortened, and applied to the business communities that had sprung up around the railroad station, which was a mile from the previously-existing settlement; this is now known unofficially as “Old Cove” and as a result, Cove juts a finger almost all the way to the Oklahoma border. Cove now contains two grocery chain stores, a convenience store, a Mexican restaurant, a bank, a hardware store, and two automotive care businesses. The post office, a popular series of hiking trails, and a Baptist church also continue to operate.

VERDICT

If it weren’t for it’s proximity to Zone Red, this community would deserve a far closer look than it is going to get under current circumstances – but an insular community “Old Cove” sounds like the perfect place to find what you’re looking for. But, under the circumstances, it doesn’t merit much of a first glance, never mind a second – you already have much better choices on your short list. (No Pics)

212 Hatfield

GUIDEBOOK/NARRATIVE

Hatfield is just 5 minutes past Cove. The name immediately conjures up images of the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, but you have no idea if the two are in any way connected. The population of this Hatfield is 410 and seems fairly stagnant and unlikely to change from what you are reading. It’s another 96% White town, and that in combination with the size and the proximity to Zone Red makes worthwhile targets unlikely.

The town is contained within 1.3 sq miles at typical small-town population densities. The headquarters of the Christian Motorcyclists Association is located here, which is an interesting blend of conservative and radical – but suggests that less desirable blends of those traits might also find a home here.

VERDICT

Unwilling to waste time on so unlikely a prospect, you blow straight through town without stopping, just as Team one are looking at the Crossett Public Library.. (No Pics)

212 Potter Junction

GUIDEBOOK/NARRATIVE

It takes an enormous 11 minutes to reach Potter Junction, which is where the road from the nearby town of Potter joins the highway. It is also known as Old Potter, and that name gives the history of the place – the railroad must have passed near here but not through here, and so the nearest railway station became the center of a new town, with everything that was here migrating to there. So that becomes Potter, and this, Old Potter – technically part of the same settlement, but in practice, it’s own unincorporated community. Located at 1030 feet above sea level, part of the hills of the Ouachita Mountains.

You slow for the speed limit through town even as Team one are busy driving around Crossett, looking for landmarks, contenders, and just getting a feel for the place.

Potter, according to your guidebook, has almost 900 citizens; so far as you can tell, Old Potter would struggle to hold a tenth of that.

But that doesn’t really matter, because from this point onward as you approach the more substantial community of Mena, the highway contains one roadside business after another. Eventually, Old Potter will become the Mena City Limits. But this is a conservative part of the world, so that might take a few decades. They are technically considered to be separate communities some five miles apart, but human nature and opportunism is no respecter of lines on a map.

First there’s the Fish Net Lodge, before you even get to Old Potter. Then the Creative Touch Florist, which is followed by the Loaves & Fishes Christian Book Shop, the Outback Barn (a barn construction company that is housed, appropriately enough, in a large barn), the Humane Society of the Ouachitas, Copelin Motors, Mena Feed & Supplies, The Pleasant Hills Animal Clinic, and then the official Mena city limits sign.

That is followed by the South 71 Church Of Christ, A&J Offroad Rentals, the Polk City Fairgrounds (visible in the distance), the Southside General Store, Architectural Salvage by Ri-Jo, and the Ozark Inn, all before you see any substantive difference between Old Potter and the city of Mena, all 200-400m apart.

Certainly, there was no change in the speed limit from the time you entered Old Potter until the time you officially entered Mena – and no prospective contenders, either.. (No Pics)

213 Mena

GUIDEBOOK/NARRATIVE

Mena’s shape is roughly circular, approx 1.5 miles in radius, with four extensions – one along route 88 to the east, one along route 8, one alongside Polk Road 76 which runs parallel to route 88 north, and one, of course, along Highway 75. That means it takes about 7 minutes to traverse it – and it has a lot of streets to traverse in its official area of just under 7 square miles (18 square km)!

Looking at a map of Mena and Surrounds, it’s obvious that there have been two phases of construction – the heart of the town is on a NW/SE orientation, while the outskirts and surrounding roads are on a north-south orientation. (11-213a)

Of course, you’ve been in Mena unofficially for about 5 miles before you even reach this point – that’ so far to the SW that it won’t even fit on that map.

Mena is the county seat of Polk County, and is surrounded by the Ouachita National Forest; it serves as the gateway to some of the most visited tourist attractions in Arkansas. It was founded by Arthur Edward Stilwell during the building of the Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad (now the Kansas City Southern), which stretched from Kansas City, Missouri to Port Arthur, Texas. Train service to Mena began in 1896.

Like Vandervoort to the south, this was named for the wife of Jan De Goeijen, a friend of Stillwell, or more exactly, for Stillwell’s nickname for Folmina Margaretha Janssen-De Goeijen. Janssen Park in the center of town is also named for her.

It took less than a year for Mena to become incorporated as a second-class city, and a year later, the Bank of Mena was founded. A year after that, the county seat was moved from nearby Dallas to Mena. Two years later, the population was 3,423. In contrast, Dallas has never grown larger than an unincorporated community.

A black community called Little Africa developed on Board Camp Creek east of Mena. The community was small, with a population of 152 in 1900. In 1901, a black man, Peter Berryman, was lynched after an alleged altercation with a white girl. No one was arrested. Several other instances of racially motivated hate and violence toward the Black community had been noted; this, combined with declining job prospects, drove most Blacks to leave; by 1910, only 16 remained. Ten years after that, the Mena Star was advertising the town as “100% white”. A local chapter of the KKK was organized in 1922. Five years later, the commercial club created advertising which used “No Negroes” as a selling point. Even today, the city has far less than 0.5% Black residents.

In the 1950s, a government program to stockpile manganese led to the reopening of local mines closed since the 1890s. The program ended in 1959, and the mines again closed.

In the early 1980s, drug smuggler Barry Seal moved his operations to the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport, where he owned and operated many planes and helicopters, as well as advanced radar equipment. He was taken down last year by the Crusaders, their third visit to the city. In 1985, they ripped apart a White Pride gathering, demolishing the town convention center in the process, and in 1984, they attacked the fourth of July parade after a neo-nazi affiliated group, the Freedom Brigade, were granted permission to march. 87 were hospitalized, about 1/3 of whom were not part of the Freedom Brigade. While the first two actions won them few friends in the region, greater forgiveness was shown after the third. Not that there’s any evidence that they care.

In 1911, a damaging tornado struck the town. It typically snows 5 months of the year, though in three of those months the average amount is 0.2 inches. In the summer months, the average temperature is in the low 90s(F) (33C).

There are currently about 5250 citizens. With such a large population base, broader statistical determinants wash out much demographic individuality; median age is a little high (41 years) but otherwise the population is right on the state statistical medium.

An estimated 1.2 million visitors a year come to Mena to enjoy its nearby natural features which include a scenic drive and state park. Camp Pioneer is a 163-acre Boy Scout camp east of Mena, and Camp High Point is a Girl Scout camp also located in the area.

Population density is relatively low, about midway between a small town and a densely-packed city like Texarkana.

The only indication that you’re entering Mena is that the speed limit drops from 55 to 45 mph. (11-213b)

EVALUATION:

The problem with vital, active communities is that available properties get snapped up fairly quickly. In effect, they are all desirable real estate, only the degree of desirability varying. And there are locals with the money to snap up anything desirable. Combine that with the proximity of Zone Red, and it would be easy to vacillate between abject pessimism and wild-eyed optimism. Still, it wouldn’t be fair to either yourselves or the city of Mena not to give it a thorough evaluation. As usual, you start downtown, getting a feel for the prosperity of the location – and eyeballing the windows of every real estate agency you pass. Mena looks fairly unremarkable at first. (3 mins) (11-213c)

It’s only when you discover two antique shops side-by-side that you begin to appreciate that Mena has qualities unlike everywhere else you’ve looked. (5 mins) (11-213d)

Mena appears to have an upper class who are seriously interested in the finer things in life. The Arts shop just down the road would be remarkable in any city for its size, but when you put still another antiques dealer right next door, it establishes a pattern. (6 mins) (11-213e)

The first church that you come across is tidy and unspectacular, suggesting that the community are more secular than most. (8 mins) (11-213f)

But the next one is far more lavish in scale and decoration – (11 mins) (11-213g)

And the third one is positively opulent, even architecturally grand, more deserving of the title “Temple” than mere “Church”. (15 mins) (11-213h)

Still, this fits the pattern that you have begun to detect – there are people with money here, and they aren’t afraid to show it – but at the same time, utility is not something they willingly sacrifice for appearances. The County Court House is neat, tidy, utilitarian, but with a couple of almost understated artistic flourishes, like the band around the second story ceiling. (17 mins) (11-213i)

It’s a similar story when you come across the National Guard Armory – the more time you spend looking at it, the more expensive it begins to seem as stylish design flourishes begin to accumulate. (20 mins) (11-213j)

.It is into this context that you start your search for potential Bases. Some of the houses on the outskirts, where you hoped land would be cheap enough that someone would build big, are rustic cabins (but the vehicles on display still hint at wealth). (24 mins) (11-213k)

But most are neat and tidy, if small – and way too small for your purposes. (27 mins) (11-213L)

Even when you find a bigger house, closer inspection inevitably shows that this simply means that the bedrooms are bigger, not that there are more of them. (32 mins) (11-213m)

Some carry even this trend to extremes like this one-bedroom offering. (37 mins) (11-213n)

There are a few larger buildings, but they are not available. For example, the Elks Lodge, which was lent to the community to serve as the local hospital between 1935 and 1951, but was then handed back to the local chapter of the Elks. (41 mins) (11-213o)

For those who don’t know, the Elks started as a social club in 1868 for minstrel show performers, and borrowed rites and practices from Freemasonry, including racial and gender restrictions on membership. The former lasted until 1973, the latter continues to this day. Over time, they became the socially-acceptable face of ultra-patriotism. They have participated in a number of national programs of civic benefit over the years, in a similar fashion to the Rotary Club. Presidents Harding, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Ford were all Elks members, as were General Douglas MacArthur, General Frederick Funston, General Patton, and General Pershing. Other famous Elks include Lawrence Welk, Will Rogers, Jack Benny, Clint Eastwood, Gene Autry, William F Cody (Buffalo Bill), Buster Keaton, Vince Lombardi, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, and Irving Berlin. Also not available are this magnificent Victorian home, recently restored – (46 mins) (11-213p)

…and this more modern offering…. (50 mins) (11-213q)

…or this privately-owned mansion. (53 mins) (11-213r)

VERDICT:

Ultimately, Mena was another dry well, but it helped crystallize in your minds the observation that there was a demographic ‘sweet spot’ that optimized the prospects of both a location of sufficient size having been built, and being on the market, and of sufficiently-recent maintenance and circumstances that it would be a viable choice. Every one of those failures just underlined that the right place IS out there, waiting to be found. If it hasn’t been, already! Besides, there is always the proximity of Zone Red and the activities of the Crusaders to consider – that alone is enough to put even a perfect choice onto shaky ground.

EVALUATION REDUX:

But Mena has one more surprise to spring. Just after crossing the city limits…. (54 mins) (11-213s)

…you find this former sawmill, which has been fully converted into a large home, ten upstairs bedrooms and several big rooms – a kitchen, a dining room, a sunken open-plan living room, a spa, four bathrooms. Fully furnished, and on offer for just $880,000, it’s a few miles out of Mena, and extremely isolated – maybe even isolated enough that you could ignore all the Zone Red down-checks. (60 mins) (11-213t)

VERDICT REDUX:

It’s not quite perfect, for that reason, but it’s at least the equal of anything else you’ve seen, even with the prominent negatives that come with the location. And one final thought: In their real superhero identities, the team are well known to have inclinations toward small-l liberalism; while this set of identities have yet to establish a reputation, this is quite possibly the LAST place on earth that one would expect to find a pro-liberal superhero team. It’s just one more layer of protection for your assumed identities. And that might just be worth the risk of the Crusaders coming back to town. A 5 out of 5 – if the Crusaders Question is disregarded. And where there’s one, there is almost certain to be others to find – perhaps without that drawback! You still have several more states, and more than half, of this one to explore!

Directions: Route 88 East then Highway 71 North to Acorn (total 5.4 miles), then Highway 270 East, North, WNW, NE (15.3 miles) to Y City. The road skirts through a valley between two mountain ranges of the Ouachitas.

• 0.4 miles exit Mena @ 25 mph = 1 minute
• 5.4 miles to Acorn @ 55 mph = 6 mins
          Acorn Subtotal = 7 mins
   
• 0.5 miles through Acorn @ 25 mph = 1 min
• 15.2 miles to Mill Creek Township @ 55mph = 17 min
          Mill Creek Subtotal = 18 mins
   
• Turn right onto Highway 270, 0.1 miles to Y City @ 30 mph = 12 seconds
          Y City Subtotal = 12 seconds

Commentary on the example

Okay, let me talk for a few minutes about these examples.

To start with, I’ve given you two principle evaluations and a number of drive-through minor evaluations so that you can see the difference in how they are handled. The latter are literally driving through town and keeping your eyes open! But I especially want to call attention to the way I have combined research results from multiple sites, then blended those results with fiction of my own creation. Sometimes, it’s abbreviating the truth, or obfuscating it; sometimes it’s inserting game history impacts, especially the impact of Ragnarok; and sometimes it’s inserting something new made from whole cloth. But I would expect even locals from the places used as examples to be a little unsure where the lines are blurred.

Second, I wish I could enrich the article with the illustrations that the players will see at the time. Their absence greatly diminishes the text, which is designed to operate in tandem with the visuals. But copyright violation is something I take seriously.

Next, it’s my intention to have an NPC in each car, at least at the start of these investigations – which means that there will be two PCs in each car to interact. Since the two female characters will stay together, that goes a long way to defining the personnel breakdown – without going all the way of dictating to the players. If they insist on the two NPCs sharing a car, well, Okay then. The key point in terms of the adventure is this: the ratings and verdicts offered are the opinion of the NPC that is assumed to be in the car. If there’s no NPC in the car, those opinions will be withheld, forcing the players to make up their own minds. The relevant point in terms of this article is that this is a GM’s Force – I don’t care what they pick, I can build interesting adventures around any of the contenders that are on offer. I separate the chaff from the wheat (or the fish from the squid, the Kzin equivalent) by restricting the possibilities that come up for consideration in the first place.

Fourth, this extraction comes at an important point in the overall structure of the adventure. Early drive-throughs weren’t “No Pics”, they were illustrated, even if there was just one image. But as these searches continue, the intention is for more and more of the uninteresting stuff to be hand-waved. By this point, the pattern will have become ingrained, so this is where that hand-waving starts; it will only get more prominent from here. I can fully imagine that a later Drive-through appraisal might read “60 residents, nothing interesting.”

The GM’s Force. It doesn’t matter what the players choose if all choices are equally good from the GM’s point of view.

Remember it, because it will be useful.

I generated two images to accompany this article (actually, I generated 10, but these were the two that made the cut) – and could not pick between them; they both reflected the content and title in equally-compelling but distinctly-different ways. So I’m using both of them. The second image will appear a bit later.

While this is being offered as a second entry in the current Blog Carnival on Characters and Characterization hosted by Plastic Polyhedra, it’s something that happens to be at the top of my to-do list anyway. I’ll explain why a little later (save me doing it twice).

It contains a series of thought-streams that collectively define an NPC in terms of how they will interact in-play with plot, narrative, dialogue, and relationships – in other words, with other characters, especially PCs. The technique described is optimized for modern-day play but works with any genre. Let’s dive right in…

First Thought: Foundation

When I create an NPC, even an off-the-cuff one, the first question I always ask is “what is this character’s purpose?” What do I want the character to do – within the plotline, within the immediate campaign, within the long-term campaign.

I may not have an answer for all these, and in most cases, that won’t matter – the odds are good that I will have an answer to one of them, and that gives me a starting point for the character.

Foundation purposes can be anything from “giving the PCs factual information” to “enabling the PCs to do X” to “selling something that the PCs want to buy” to “being an obstacle that the PCs have to overcome”. They span the gamut from things that are helpful to the PCs to outright opposition that has to be overcome for some approach to a problem to succeed.

A completely valid purpose is “keep the PCs attention while X is happening somewhere else.”

You may have noticed that most of these are defined at the plot level. That’s because of the way ‘purpose’ has been defined, which is in plot terms.

But not all purposes are so narrow in scope. A perfectly-valid answer is “to compliment the PCs abilities”. Or “to be a romantic love-interest.” These are also plot-related, but there is a layer of interpretation in between the plot and the purpose, like a Vaseline-smear on a lens (sometimes called ‘soft focus’). Those are perfectly valid, too.

One of the Key NPCs in my superhero campaign is a Kzin. He is a member of the team because he needs to repay a debt of honor, having been indoctrinated into a variant of the samurai code. Two of the PCs have abilities that are mutually incompatible according to the rules, and this also impacts their perspectives; the PCs purpose is not the plot-internal circumstance described, that’s just his motivation; it’s to bridge the gap and facilitate the PCs using their powers and abilities in concert to achieve things that either would find difficult or impossible on their own. This permits unbeatable enemies to bedevil the team until the right combination unlocks a weakness that the team can’t otherwise exploit. In other words, his purpose is to help the PCs achieve their potential.

That’s not all that plot-oriented, not directly – instead, it’s about adding to the tool-kit that the players have at their disposal for engaging with the plot.

The character has a secondary purpose, of providing an alien perspective, an “outsider’s view” which enables me to use him as a mouthpiece for interpretations of events and circumstances that the players haven’t thought of.

The other NPC who is a full member of the team is relatively weak, with no real super-powers of his own (at least, not yet). He’s a skilled agent, a former member of the SAS, an expert problem-solver slash fix-it man, with connections to the highest levels of political and social authority, and an expert on bureaucracy and structured planning – areas in which the PCs are weak. His purpose is similar to that of the Kzin, in that he is there to articulate a certain perspective that the PCs lack, and to take some of the boring bits of the PCs lives into the background so that I can focus gameplay more on the things that aren’t dull. He will also provide a gateway into, or out of, some adventures, at least in the medium-term.

So purposes can be emotional, or functional, or plot-oriented, or any number of other things. They can facilitate, enhance, constrain, or oppose. It’s a very broad field.

Second Thought: Imperfection

No-one is both completely believable as a character AND perfect at doing whatever it is that they are there to do. So my second thought is about what weakness, flaw, or imperfection might stand in the character’s way in terms of fulfilling this function. This doesn’t have to be internal; it could be an external circumstance or situation. Either the character or the PCs, or the two in cooperation, have to overcome this imperfection in order for the character to fulfill their basic function.

The term “imperfection” was not chosen casually; all the alternatives that come to mind have specific meanings in one or more RPG systems, but (to the best of my knowledge) this is a term that means the right thing and hasn’t been claimed by anyone.

Imperfections can be internal (‘doesn’t trust authority”) or external (‘the computer system is fried, they’re working on it”), personal (“doesn’t like people like you”) or impersonal (“die-hard environmentalist”). Their can be political, economic, social or even criminal complications or motivations.

They can be self-contained, or can simply be the tip of an iceberg (“character is being blackmailed into opposing what the PCs are trying to do and WILL NOT COOPERATE.” – which implies a conspiracy, and a very well-informed or carefully-planned one.)

Quite often (depending on the character’s purpose) the imperfection is something that is to be overcome, with or without the cooperation of the NPC. Quite often, it’s simplest to define the imperfection in terms of what you need to do to overcome it – “get a search warrant”, “show your authority”, “flatter them”, “agree with them”, “accept an invitation to dinner”, “show the importance of the outcome”.

“Scatterbrain” is a perfectly valid imperfection!

I pick and choose the imperfection at the same time as I am contemplating whether or not I want it to be overcome – and that’s thought process number three.

Third Thought: Through-story

Next, I need some idea of just how the imperfection could be, or will be, overcome. Or if it won’t be, or at least not yet.

Lots of possibilities there, so let’s break them down.

• Could Be – If the NPC is not to cooperate, if for any reason they might not want to fulfill their function, there is a roll involved. Specify the roll, and the requirements, and you’re ready to move on.
• Will be- If it’s their job to fulfill their purpose, for example to convey requested information to anyone who both wants it and is entitled to have it (including the PCs), then overcoming the imperfection should be straight narrative sequence or role-playing sequence / conversation, with no roll required. Map out the gist of the narrative/conversation, and (if necessary) the broad strokes of what the NPC is going to say, and you’re ready to move on.
• Won’t Be- There are many reasons why I might want to block the character from fulfilling their function when the PCs ask them to do so. It might be too direct or simple a solution, i.e. not enough fun; it might be that I want some other PC to solve it; it might be that I’m trying to set up circumstances for some larger plotline. The reasons don’t particularly matter, the end result is that I want to block off this particular road forwards for the PCs. The question then becomes one of preventing the PCs from overcoming the imperfection without the cooperation of the NPC. This can be especially effective if the NPC gives every indication that they want to cooperate but are unable to do so. Once I have what I need in terms of the roadblock to this avenue of approach to the story, I can move on.
• At least not yet- There are times when the background needs time to marinate, when a plot needs time to mature into a threat of sufficient magnitude or difficulty that it will pose an interesting challenge to the players, and the NPC overcoming their limitations eventually can furnish a gateway into the heart of that situation. That means that while I want them to fulfill their ultimate purpose eventually, I don’t want them to do so yet. For the time being, I need to stonewall the PCs as already described – but there has to be an imperfection within the imperfection that will enable it to be overcome when the time is right. Yes, this is metagaming from the GMs perspective – he’s having the NPC do things or not do things purely for reasons that the NPC would know nothing about – and it’s one of the reasons why I contend that not all metagaming is evil.

Fourth Thought: Distinctiveness

Every NPC should stand out in some way, however minor. Some are designed to be memorable (because they look like being fun to play – an example would be the lady who runs the New Orleans Historical Society in my superhero campaign world, who might or might not recur). Others are only to be present once, but need to make an impact. Others have to help sell the ‘reality’ of the situation the characters are in, or a particular mood or tone. I’ve had NPCs whose sole function was to exude competence at their jobs!

Distinctiveness often has a relationship with cliche – avoiding it, acknowledging it, embracing it, or even negating it. There are even times when you can explore a more complex relationship with cliche, adding terms like ‘exploiting it’ or ‘redefining it’ or ‘subordinating it” to the list of possibilities. I have an example later in the article that demonstrates the latter.

Fifth Thought: Manifestations

I’ve now got a handle on the character’s fundamentals in terms of how they will interact with the plot and/or the campaign. The next question is how all of the things that have been decided thus far will manifest in terms of interaction with the narrative or conversation. They can’t just sit there as concepts, there needs to be some tangible manifestation in order to express and define the character and their interactions with the purpose for which they have been incorporated into the adventure.

It can be verbal – a statement of some sort, or line of conversation – or descriptive, or lie in something that someone else says to the NPC (another NPC, whose sole purpose is to deliver that defining line). The more of a unique individual with a personal life and their own problems and demons that this manifestation can project onto the character when they are in the presence of one or more PCs, the better. It’s rare for a single manifestation to be able to accomplish all that, and equally unrealistic for every character encountered to be living their own personal soap opera, so this is an important subject.

The right manifestation is always the one that facilitates or delivers the PC to the interaction with the imperfection, either running up against it, or discovering the road through or past it. It can be as much about what not to say as anything else. The amount of individuality and uniqueness that it confers is an important but secondary consideration – which means that any of the list of qualities given in the previous paragraph that the manifestation doesn’t deliver can be a positive asset, too. But you need to know what the manifestation is, and how much of the NPCs life it reveals (and how much it doesn’t) so that you know the areas in which you may have to get on-the-spur creative and how to integrate any such character elements with the whole.

Sixth Thought: Implications

So far, your NPC exists in splendid isolation, for the most part. It’s a tree, part of an ill-defined forest. The sixth thing to think about is how the character reflects and influences the overall shape of that particular stand of trees to which they belong. This can be something that’s already been defined in general overarching terms within the campaign (“the civil service are uncooperative bureaucrats”) or it can be a blank slate.

Having at least some broad thoughts about the shape of the forest and the NPCs relationship to that shape is always useful, because if you don’t think about it, it can take you by surprise at a later date.

There are usually political and social considerations. There may be prejudices, either wide-spread and general or narrow and personal, involved. Outside perceptions of the PC, and of people like the PC, will always be a factor. This can be about assumptions made by someone – either the PC or the NPC or someone else in authority. It can involve or create conflict, internal or external. It can generate a standalone sub-plot or be over with in a single flash of sound and fury, denoting nothing significant – or having worlds of meaning. It can be about reputations, real or false, and about supporting, extending, continuing, undermining or deliberately opposing them.

You don’t have to focus too much on specifics; this NPC can always be an exception to a general rule when imperfect and messy sentient beings are involved. But you should always give it some thought, however fleeting.

Seventh Thought: Shadows

Train of thought number seven is all about the shadows, where some or all of what you’ve already decided will lurk, undiscovered. So far, everything has stemmed from what needs to be made obvious; this is about what you want to hide.

The great advantage of putting things into the shadows is that it gives you something that can be brought to light. “Why is character X being uncooperative?” – “You remind him of the jock his wife is having an affair with.”

The even greater advantage is that if something hasn’t come to light, it can be changed, or expanded, or extended, or reduced, or confined.

People aren’t the same, day after day. There are perpetual nuances and variations on a theme. Some days are good, and some days are not. Personality is a huge factor in defining how many of each there are, from the character’s perspective – and personality is (at least in part) an emergent property of all the decisions made to date. It might have been broadly defined, or left completely undefined at this point.

Shadows come in three forms: hard, fuzzy, and deep.

• Hard Shadows exploit the fact that you can define something by implication from the shadows that it casts – aftereffects, side effects, indirect manifestations, reactions from others, even knowing glances. The absence of something that shouldn’t be in plain sight but still manifests in some overt way creates a hard shadow, and huge gains in the realism of a character. But it can be easily over-used; not everyone will have a shadow of this type on display.
• Fuzzy Shadows are more general and undefined; they are generally used to contain character elements that don’t matter, and this is recognized by players subconsciously if not consciously, which means that it’s a great place to hide things that do matter. A character who gives off vibes of being a cool professional is hiding what it is that they are passionate about. This might be collecting Beatles records, or woodcarving, or stealing jewels, or membership in a white supremacy cult. But the latter two, being unusual, are not things that the PC would go looking for, and so would be completely taken by surprise when they are (eventually) revealed. And if the PC should somehow discover such, it puts them in an even more difficult and interesting situation – denounce the NPC and they lose the benefit that the NPC was there to provide and end any hope of cooperation. Silence can, however, be tantamount to complicity. Whatever the PC chooses, they have made their lives more complicated (and may have made new enemies).
• Deep Shadows Deep shadows contain things that the GM, for metagame reasons, does not what revealed. It’s not quite a matter of “whatever it takes” – having an asteroid crash to earth downstairs might be a bit extreme as a distraction – but every deep shadow should have some planned distraction or deflection associated with it, to be used only if the PC gets too close. The cop who is secretly undercover in a paramilitary terrorist organization who is secretly a recruit of an even more extreme satanic cult – or maybe he’s become a hidden true believer, or always was – and if the PC starts digging too deep, throw the bone of the undercover assignment to them. 99 times out of a hundred, that’s all there will be, so they should stop looking at that point, before they blow the cop’s cover, leaving the real deep-shadow content undisturbed.

No character is complete without a shadow – but you may not have decided on any specifics that happen to be there.

Part of the goal in NPC creation is always to avoid spending time on anything that you don’t need, unless there is the potential need at some future time, and it will be more efficient to create it while you have the character in mind. The first won’t happen that often, because (by definition) it’s outside the scope of the character’s purpose – but there will be times when you need to redefine that purpose, so I’ll get to that in detail a little later. The second will happen almost every time the first gets invoked – but if it will consume prep time that you don’t have, it’s not something that you can afford right now, and that makes it definitively less-efficient to do more than vaguely note the presence of something in the shadows and the general nature of the content..

Eighth Thought: Circumstances

You’ve dealt already with any significant circumstances within the character’s life, but its’ always helpful to have given passing thought to the more mundane aspects of that life. Throwaway narrative or conversational content can impart this and a greater plausibility to the character’s existence in a heartbeat.

“As you reach the counter, the attendant stops scribbling on a shopping list and asks if she can help you.”

or,

“The mechanic fiddles idly with a wedding ring as though he were unused to it’s presence on his hand.”

Job done. These no-name specific-purpose NPCs are suddenly real people.

Ninth Thought: History

Everyone has baggage. That baggage usually doesn’t matter in any given interaction or encounter – but there are times when you have the opportunity to bring a little bit of it into the light, and times when something makes the PC do a more thorough profile of the NPCs life. Again, you’ve already focused on anything that has immediate importance, so these are (by definition) things that don’t – but they can also be exploited, just like circumstances, to give a character additional light.

“Next week is my daughter’s formal debut. I remember my formal, it wasn’t like it is these days – not very formal at all, now, in my opinion! Sign here. I remember Rex Charters in his daddy’s pick-up, dressed in his late uncle’s wedding suit, looking so nervous that he almost ran us off the road when I touched his hand on the way to the dance. Initial here. Those were good times, don’t you think? Better times than these days, for sure. That will be Twelve dollars fifty, pay the cashier when she calls your name,” she concludes as she puts your paperwork in a basket on a moving conveyor belt.

Baggage. History. Everyone has it. Sometimes, you can use it, as in the above example, to make a dull process seem more real AND more interesting, to make a player feel like their character is really there, even if – as in this case – there is limited interaction required.

And notice how much personality the NPC has exuded as a byproduct of filling the gaps in the (presumed) process with conversation.

Here’s the same scene, done a different way:

The attendant holds out her hand for your paperwork. Flipping through it, she fills out various parts of the form. You attempt to engage her in polite conversation, but she immediately responds, ‘Ssh’ and returns to checking the validity of your request. On the fourth page, she holds out the form and a pen, and points to a space. ‘Sign,’ she announces in a grumpy tone. After you’ve done so, she takes a stamp pad and stamp and presses firmly on the form to add an additional term to the paperwork. Again holding the form out, she points to the added clause and grunts, ‘Initial’ in a who-cares tone. She then places the form in a tray on a moving conveyor belt and and announces, “Twelve-fifty, pay the cashier when called. NEXT!”

This example focuses on the LACK of engagement to achieve the same ends. The character is employed as a mindless servant of a process. She doesn’t care why the PC wants something, or who they are, or what they want, just whether or not she is supposed to make it happen. Having grudgingly conceded that she is, she completes her role in the process and passes the request on to someone else to satisfy. And again, oozes personality – with not a word of description or interaction. In fact, she shuts down any attempt at interaction with the character, she only cares about her interaction with the process.

Tenth Thought: Specifics

This is where a lot of people start, when they are generating characters – with the specifics, especially the stats. And sometimes that can be useful – for example, any biases or preferences on the GM’s side can be sidelined by basing the character’s choices of profession on what they are suited for, which is determined randomly. But, in general, stat blocks are designed to describe PCs, with far broader scope for interaction with the game world – they need to cover everything because they can’t predict what they will need.

A couple of past articles here have pointed out the time savings that can be achieved by only generating as much NPC as you need – see Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep, for example.

Again, always to avoid spending time on anything that you don’t need – except for when the caveats listed earlier apply.

Aborting The Process

Which brings me to this point: this process can be aborted at any time when you have enough. Several of the examples offered so far are of this kind. Stop when you have enough to meet your needs. Skip steps and processes if that’s useful, too. This sequence is a servant and tool, not a checklist or instruction manual; though there is a clear logical sequence to the steps. The twin examples under “History” demonstrate how you can skip directly to what you want or need, if you know what that is.

The more experience you have, the more skillfully you will be able to short-circuit the process in this way. Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be taught, you have to learn it by practice.

Timing The Processes

You might get the impression from the length of description of the ten steps that substantial time needs to be taken. In general, that’s not the case – we’re talking a handful of seconds. Some would say that it takes longer to remember the logical sequence and make sure that you haven’t missed a step, but I think that might be going too far, especially since you don’t need to memorize the sequence, just write it down or look it up or reconstruct it, or change it to suit yourself!

That’s not to say that deeper thought and more sophisticated constructions can’t be rewarding – they can be. The key is getting what you need. If you get to the end and what you have doesn’t contain enough depth, then more time and effort are needed.

I still wouldn’t spend more than minutes, though, because these aren’t about giving you the construction elements of the NPC, they are about giving you a playable image of the sum of those elements. As I said earlier, personality is an emergent property of the results of this process, and so is the guideline used to construct specifics, which is why that’s the last of the ten steps.

For an ad-hoc NPC, a meaningless (in terms of the big picture) encounter, five seconds a step, maybe ten – tops. One or two, more frequently (but part of that is experience, and I can’t say how much – so I’m being conservative).

Back to my point: You can only spend so long thinking about thinking about constructing a character before it becomes tail-chasing. Once you have an outline, you have to get your hands dirty.

But, if you do want more conceptual depth, rather than spending a lot of time on one thought process, it’s usually more effective to skip through the list repeatedly until your subconscious gets a nibble. Using the list helps keep you focused and your thoughts, directed.

Resuming The Process

Inevitably, there will be times when you underestimate what you need. You’ve prepared an NPC for a brief conversation and the PC wants to discuss things in more detail, or have some greater involvement with the character for some reason. That reason may or may not be spurious – for example, the player may have decided that the NPC is a possible suspect in something, or have some scheme to take advantage of them, or be matchmaking, or simply find the character you’ve created so enthralling that they want more – there are hundreds of possibilities.

Whatever the reason, you now have to restart the process to add depth to the character, and possibly in a hurry.

There are two approaches to doing so. The more difficult one is to start where you left off, and I generally don’t find the practice of doing so to be worth the time savings involved. The alternative, which I do recommend, is to restart with the implications stage.

Two reasons: (1) it’s unusual not to have gotten that far in your first pass; and (2), starting by expanding on the implications of what you’ve already decided not only gets you back into the swing of the creative process, it helps ensure consistency with what you have already established, which has to have at least some relationship with the real story. Yes, the NPC may have lied about something, but that requires a good reason for doing so – something that is implied by the fact of the deception.

Beyond that, follow the advice given above in ‘Timing The Processes’.

Restarting The Process

If you’ve pretty thoroughly explored everything that’s in the current characterization, and still need more – and it happens – then you need to dig deeper and approach the problem from left-field; and then, start the process from scratch.

I’ve offered my preferred techniques for doing so, quite a long time ago, in The Characterization Puzzle series.

Once you’ve worked your way through whichever of the three processes discussed in that series (start with the last part, The First Decision, which helps pick between the three), you can use this technique to start translating the results into characterization.

First example: A Double Act

This example starts with two images – one, a cliche of a used car salesman, the other a flamboyant guy in a white suit in front of a used-car lot. The purpose of these two characters is to sell the PCs a couple of second-hand cars, hence those two images of the owners of two different used-car lots.

I also decided that the two would need different sales techniques. I knew that one yard would be bigger than the other; I decided that the larger yard would employ a fast-turnover volume turnover while the other would not. Which one would use which technique had not yet been finalized, and in fact I was half-way through writing up the encounter before those details crystallized (and I had to rename the respective owners the other way around to make everything fit).

From those beginnings, here’s the write-up, exactly as it appeared in the most recent game session:

The two car lots are almost opposite each other on Dunkley Street (15-8-03-01).

(“15-8-03-01” identifies an image to be showed – Adventure 15, Act 8, Scene 3, Image 1).

Wormwood Motors is a second-hand GM (and related brands) dealership (15-8-03-02) owned and operated by Sal Wormwood (15-8-03-03).

Al’s Used Cars handles second-hand Fords (and related brands). It is owned and operated by Al ‘Six-Shooter’ Dunning, who appears to be filming a TV commercial as you arrive (15-8-03-04).

“So c’mon down to Al’s place to lasso yourself a bargain! If’n one of our hosses ain’t jest whut the sawbones ordered fer yuh, why, ah’ll shoot it! Yihaa!!” he exclaims as he points a six-shooter skywards without looking and pulls the trigger with a quiet click. He then turns to look at the revolver with a disgusted expression.

“CUT, cut, cut, cuuuut!” yells the director.

“Darn, Bob, the dadblasted peashooter done went all lame on me agin!” rumbles the salesman.

“Don’t you worry none ’bout it now, Al. We-all’ll jest dub us in an itty-bitty sound effect and no-one’ll ever know no diff’ent. Makes the goldarned sound levels easier ta balance out, anyways.”

“Really-truly, Bobby-boy? Y’all don’t say! Well, if that don’t jest beat all!”

“That was the last shot we done need from yuh, Al. You kin get selfless outta that there monkey-suit anytime you want – but ah jest had myself an idee, here. Whut say if y’all are wand’rin’ round the lot, like, checkin’ out the cars, see, in the background of the shots we take of the specials, hey?”

“Gol-darn, Bob, if’n that ain’t the best thing I’ve heard in a whole passel a time. If’n ah gotta wear this here angel-magilla, ah wanna squeeze ev’ry last skerrick-a value outta her. Less do it!”

From across the road, Sal yells in a loud voice, “Everythin’ all right there, pardner?” with a wave.

“Doin’ jess fine, thankee kindly, Mis-ter Wormwood. You’all take care-a yesself now!” replies the white-clad cowboy before heading back into the lot, followed by the camera crew and producer.

Blackwing/Basalt/Frank [The PC], how confident are you that your normal-person face will never slip, especially if you’re concentrating on something else? If you’re completely confident, then it would be best for you to wear some face other than any of the ones you’ve used so far and take Al’s yard – that way, it won’t matter if your face shows up in a TV ad. If not, then it would be better for Union Jack, as Roger, to take it, and for you to cross the road to see what Sal Wormwood can offer – someone you wouldn’t trust with used chewing-gum.

Wormwood Motors holds about 60 cars and is considerably smaller than his rival across the road, which has at least half-again as many. Glancing over the two, you can see distinctive differences in the way the two owners operate. Sal Wormwood is the more traditional in approach; he prices more consistently and is more content to let cars sit until someone makes an offer he can live with.

‘Six-shooter Al’ adds a much thicker profit margin, but is far more willing to do a deal; if he makes a small loss, he will make it up on the next sale, and either way, he frees up space in his lot for another car, another chance to sell. Overall, he probably makes more money per sale than Sal.

But his approach is even more psychologically-beneficial than this first glance suggests – customers are more likely to buy if they think they are getting a deal that may not be there, tomorrow. By making more room to dicker, he makes it more likely that he gets a sale, and by inflating the asking price, he not only gets to look more generous, he makes it more likely that the price he eventually gets is still enough that he turns a small profit. So he makes more per sale, sells more frequently, and hence is prospering. He might look ridiculous in his white cowboy three-piece suit, but he definitely has more going on under his hat than just his hair. At the same time, Sal’s approach lets him look more generous, with lower prices across the lot – so he probably makes more sales than he otherwise would, too.

This situation actually holds some benefits for the customers, too, you realize. Sal doesn’t have a profit margin that can both afford unhappy customers AND let him be relatively stiff-necked on prices – he has to be as honest as used-car salesmen get. And Al’s whole modus operandi is based on volume, on making sale after sale after sale- and any whiff of unscrupulousness would put that at risk. He, too, has to be as honest as they come in his line of work. Just count all the tyres before you try and drive off the lot.

An interesting thought comes to you as you start working through your chosen used-car lot, starting in one corner and working along the rows of cars systematically – what if the pair of them are secretly in cahoots? It’s so perfect a dynamic that they have set up between them that, while it would not be impossible for it to be a lucky coincidence, it’s also just as possible that both of them are a great deal sharper than they look. Something to bear in mind as you’re bargaining!

There are other differences. Wormwood has more big cars and fewer trucks, and is more haphazard in its layout. If there’s an organizing principle, it isn’t obvious.
This results in people wandering all over the place – but also means that you can come to look at a low-cost Chrysler and fall in love with the big Cadillac parked beside it.

Al has more small cars and more trucks and less in-between, and is far more systematic – small cars here, then medium, then the big iron, while the back of the lot has trucks and vans organized the same way but in the other direction – small stuff near the big cars, big trucks and prime movers near the small family cars. He seems to think about his potential market, his customer base, in a more coherent fashion than Sal.

Al has more variety in models, but more of the same model – row after row of Escorts, for example – while Sal has more makes and fewer of any particular one.

So it’s decision time – which used car lot are you picking?

That’s a LOT of juice to extract from those starting points. Remember, the primary purpose here is to sell the PCs two cars – and it’s up to them which cars they buy, and who from. All I’m doing here is framing the interaction for after they make their choices.

I also want to especially point out how much of Sal’s personality gets conveyed – given that he has a grand total contribution of five words of dialogue. But those five words, plus a wave, plus a reply from his rival, establish the character quite succinctly! (In fact, by contrasting him in this way with Al, everything that defines that cowboy also throws light on his opposite – and the entire purpose of the director’s presence is to be a vehicle for exposing Al’s character to scrutiny).

Second example: A complimentary Companion

The second example that I have is a character that I’ve written about before – the Companion character from the new Dr Who campaign. We’re actually going to do character generation (and start the first adventure) next week.

This character has a very different purpose – he is to serve as a compliment to the one-and-only PC of the campaign. So it becomes really hard to design him before the character construction of the PC takes place.

But there are some general principles. The PC is to be an ‘action-oriented’ character, fairly ‘boots-and-all’ ‘gung-ho’ in approach, even ‘where angels fear to tread’. He will have a very high empathy. he will be a Time Lord, and hence very knowledgeable – but that knowledge won’t necessarily spring to his fingertips.

What’s the opposite of those qualities? Someone who can’t undertake any ‘action’ at all. Someone who has difficulty understanding emotions, or who has a very low empathy for others. Someone who is mortal. Someone who doesn’t know a lot of useful things, but who is very adept at applying what he knows.

At the same time, a character who needs to appeal to the Doctor in some way – the intelligence is a start, but not enough; they need more common ground. So let’s ditch the low empathy and make the character an alien, someone whose emotions, and emotional understanding, is simply different.

And also at the same time, having a completely helpless character won’t cut it – so he needs to be able to do some things at least as well as, if not better than, the protagonist; it’s just that those things will be of secondary importance within the adventures that comprise the campaign.

Those traits led me to the Hoovaloo (I think I have the spelling right) from The Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, a super-intelligent shade of the color blue. But this wasn’t to be an exact copy of Douglas Adams’ creation, so I gave the race a new name – and then stole that name for the character itself, I liked it so much.

This is a character who is completely immaterial – but solid enough that he can’t pass through solid walls or even doors without them being opened for him (he may be able to limbo under one if it doesn’t seal tight). He can interface directly with control and command computers, including those that are aboard the protagonist’s vessel, getting it to do things and cooperate in ways that not even the owner can manage. He can’t physically attack anyone – but may be able to stun susceptible types for a few minutes, creating a gap in their awareness that they won’t even notice. He will be young, and enthusiastic, and relatively naive about the universe and ‘the evil that men [and aliens] do’, which always appeals to this particular protagonist, he’s a big fan of innocence. So he fills in some of the gaps within the protagonist, and enables the protagonist to achieve more of his potential (sound familiar?). He’s useful enough to have around, but won’t steal the character’s thunder, he’ll supplement it.

Note that many of these thoughts were already embedded within the character from its early write-ups, as readers (except my player!) can see in Vortex Of War: A Dr Who campaign construction diary though they were not as fully fleshed-out as the statement above – my thinking has crystallized on the subject.

So, what’s my next step?

I will start, because he’s a non-human character, as I usually do – with the process described in Creating Alien Characters. Once I have that, I’ll be able to perform the sequence of conceptual development stages described in this article (and which is the reason why it was at the top of my to-do list). That will let me proceed to the game mechanics for an actual character creation – in this case, described in The Sixes System Part 7, Characters. And at the end of that process, I will have a fully-functional fully-detailed NPC, ready for play. A more extensive character than many of those described in this article, because it is to sustain interest and interactivity with the protagonist for the entire campaign – even to have a central role in some of them, as readers may know already.

Right now, to translate the character concept described into the structure of this article, I have the Fundamental Purpose, and I have the general imperfections (but may be incomplete), and I have parts of the through-story (but need a great deal more). I have distinctiveness, but it’s insufficiently defined. Before I can really dig into manifestations and implications and shadows, I need to finish defining those parts of the character that are incomplete, or I won’t have a comprehensive-enough ‘picture’ of the character.

Endgame Recap

So let’s sum up: there are ten streams of thought that can be used to define an NPC, regardless of genre or system. They don’t construct a character or a personality, they construct how those things will manifest in actual play – but they can be used as a mold to create those things.

It’s better to cover one stream of thought quickly and move on until inspiration strikes than it is to get obsessively into any one of them – you can always come back again.

The general principle is to never create more character than you need – given a couple of specific caveats about future appearances.

The ten streams of thought are:

1. Foundation Purpose
2. Imperfection
3. Through-story
4. Distinctiveness
5. Manifestations
6. Implications
7. Shadows – Hard, Fuzzy, and Deep
8. Circumstances
9. History
10. Specifics

The approach described works for everything from throwaway characters to NPC co-stars. You can input the product of other conceptual generators such the ones I’ve provided in the past.

This approach creates characters to fulfill story and plot functions, sometimes well enough that this is all you need – and it can take a fraction of a minute to have a character ready for play, if their involvement and engagement is to be specific and limited. This is about fast NPCs that are fit-for-purpose.

In particular, it’s about not handing things to the PCs on a silver platter, but instead defining what the PCs need to do to gain those things – anything from ‘sit there and listen’ to ‘rescue the kidnapped relative’. And it’s all about generating fun AND believability / realism at the gaming table – with virtually no effort.

That makes it a tool that everyone should know about, and know how to use, at least in my book!

Just to prove that the recent two-and-a-half-part article RPGs In Technicolor (part 1,part 2, part 2a) weren’t the last word on the subject, I thought of this topic of discussion.

Picture a room in which your character is located. A partially-closed door leads to a corridor beyond. Somewhere down that corridor, something is glowing in the night, casting beams of light through the crack at the bottom of the door.

The color and behavior of the glow will play a pivotal role in interpreting this situation. And the genre/time period of the setting will also make a big difference.

Here’s a quick list of contender – they aren’t the only choices, but they are a good start:

• Red Glow, ebbing and flowing
• Red Glow, steady
• Yellow Glow, ebbing and flowing
• Yellow Glow, steady
• Blue or Blue-white glow, ebbing and flowing
• Blue Glow, steady
• Green Glow, ebbing and flowing
• Green glow, steady
• Purple Glow, ebbing and flowing
• Purple Glow, steady
• White Glow, ebbing and flowing
• White Glow, steady
• Black Glow, ebbing and flowing
• Black Glow, steady

Combustion

The first one is fairly universally associated with fire. And yet, when you look at the light a fire gives off, it’s more yellow-white than anything else. Sure, some really intense fires have sheets of flame that are red – I’m having flashbacks to the movie Backdraft.

But it should also be well-known to anyone who has done high-school chemistry that different substances burn with different colors. The bright blue of a Sulfur fire, for example, can be mesmerizing – until you smell the chemical product! Natural Gas has a blue color to it’s flame. Sugar burns a slightly green color. This principle is sometimes used in mixing additional compounds into candles to change the color of their light, and is used all the time in creating fireworks.

Matter of fact, if you want to research this aspect of the subject more deeply than I have done, the chemistry of fireworks is probably your easiest entry point.

Readers may also find this Wikipedia page on Colored Fire to be of value.

In digging up that link, Google also presented me with a quotation from the Wikipedia page on Flame: “The colder part of a diffusion (incomplete combustion) flame will be red, transitioning to orange, yellow, and white as the temperature increases as evidenced by changes in the black-body radiation spectrum. For a given flame’s region, the closer to white on this scale, the hotter that section of the flame is.”

Right, so that scratches several items off our list (or, perhaps better, ticks several items). If your character saw those down the corridor, he’s probably going to think Fire. Depending on the setting, it might be a Fire Elemental or a Demon, but he’ll assume something is burning.

Electrical Phenomena

Blue and Blue-white are also associated with electricity, and especially to electrical sparks. This association comes from the biggest sparks of them all, Lightning bolts.

For some reason, children always seem to think that lightning is yellow – an odd thought that just came to mind. Maybe in your world, there’s something to that, some deep racial memory that observation leads the rest of us to set aside?

In general, electrical phenomena are steady or momentary. The steady ‘burn’ of a light-bulb, for example. Quite often, when such are not steady, that’s indicative of a problem of some kind – anything from a neon tube that’s about to burn out, all the way up to electrical arcing.

Characters would obviously interpret this accordingly, and use it as a basis for action. But it’s not the only source of Blue Glows that we might want to consider.

Radioactive Decay

Okay, now things are getting serious. This is a steady bluish green glow, and relatively dim, and it’s called Cherenkov Radiation (sometimes spelt Cerenkov Radiation). It can also look like a bluish purple.

Cherenkov radiation is, according to Wikipedia, “electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wave in a medium) of light in that medium.”

So… take water and add a radiation source. But (and a lot of people don’t realize this), light in air is 89,911 meters per second slower than in vacuum – and so Cherenkov Radiation can also occur in air.

Something radioactive this way comes? That’s either cause for concern, or cause for Really Major Worry, depending on genre.

Other colors are possible. Radium glow is generally thought to be green, and this is the basis of a myth that everything radioactive glows a steady greenish color: Where Did the Myth That Radiation Glows Green Come From – Mental Floss – “When mixed with phosphorescent copper-doped zinc sulfide, radium emits a characteristic greenish-blue glow,” says the article.

Most modern glow-in-the-dark items don’t use radioactivity, they use photo-luminescence, in which sunlight drives an electrochemical reaction which ‘charges up’ the glow, which is then released in the absence of light (i.e. darkness) to make the object glow a specific frequency (dependent on the compound). These are often a very similar color to ‘radium green’, but I’ve also seen everything from lime green to bright yellow.

Anyway, without the phosphor (the added chemicals that glow), radium excites the nitrogen in the air enough that the radium glows – a pale blue, similar to that of an electric arc.

But this would be a far steadier glow than any electrical arcing, which characteristically seeks out the path of least resistance, which varies constantly, and so dances around all over the place.

But we’re still not done with blue. Or with electricity.

Neon Lighting

One of the most common sources of colored light in the 20th century is neon lighting – in which the gases within the glass tube (usually neon, hence the term, but not always) glows in different colors. Another way is to put neon into a tube made of colored glass.

The resulting effect is a stock image in Noir formats. Pools of colored light, shadows in light, characters silhouetted by colored light – the list goes on and on.

Neon lighting isn’t dramatic or threatening in and of itself – it’s all in what you do with it.

Sci-Fi Lighting

Time for a drop-in section, I haven’t done one of those for a while! While searching for the image that heads this article, I came across the picture below. The careful use of illuminated elements – neon or otherwise – can be a great establisher of a sci-fi environment.

And I don’t know anyone who doesn’t react when a bank of green LEDs suddenly turn red, or worse still, flashing red!

Spectral Phenomena

Ghosts, Specters, and other sorts of spectral phenomena are frequently described or depicted as having a blue-white glow. Quite where this comes from, I’m not sure. Neither is anyone else, I don’t think.

It’s certainly a more common phenomenon in modern depictions, but that comes from two associations: first, we’re more familiar with, and accustomed to, glowing phenomena; and second, thought is electrical (well actually, it’s electrochemical) and electricity is blue-white. Frankenstein’s monster was given life by lightning, and there are the experiments with frog legs and electricity conducted in the early days of electrical experimentation that inspired Mary Shelley. So at least part of the story will be the association with electricity.

Part of it will be that artists typically want some means of showing that this is a non-corporeal being, and one successful metaphor for doing so has caught on. Since the number of artists and the number of subjects being depicted has increased exponentially since the 19th century, there has been more of everything produced – and so examples abound, and a popular zeitgeist has been established. Closely-related to this thought is that the spectral glow is dramatic and contrasts strongly with a darkened scene – it could almost be described as melodrama in art – and this also encourages this depiction.

So powerful is this association that the term “ghostly glow” is still in use today. It is, perhaps, noteworthy that many depictions of Death also show him glowing…

Someone once suggested that it was because ghosts should only show up in moonlight, but I reject that premise – moonlight is more bone yellow-white in color, and is rarely strong enough to show any color at all (we see black-and-white in the absence of sufficiently strong light, or perhaps that should be black-and-gray!)

Magic

Now we’re getting down to the creatively-interesting stuff!

In many campaigns (perhaps inspired by Octarine, Terry Pratchett’s literary creation) give a distinctive color to magic in its various forms.

In particular, one GM caused great hilarity at his table when he decided that “Detect Magic” caused magic items to glow with Cherenkov Radiation. The players immediately decided that much of their booty was radioactive and had to be safely disposed of… more than twenty years later, he still dines out occasionally on that story (which continues on for quite some time).

Personally, I think Pratchett may have been inspired by the Troxler Effect optical illusion that I featured in A Sharp Lookout: How Much Can You Adventure?, in which an afterimage creates a color that doesn’t really exist. In the example shown there, the absence of a purple causes a yellowish-green spot to appear when you stare at the cross for a few seconds. Part of the appeal of this theory, I must add, is due to the hilarity of the notion of would-be Wizards looking at everything cross-eyed, something that I feel would probably have appealed to Terry!

Just to be distinctive, and because there don’t seem to be very many natural phenomena staking out the space, I frequently use violet/purple glows as the color of magic.

Clerical Magic gets a white, gray/green or black glow according to the alignment of the caster or his power source.

But I am just as capable of saying that there’s no visible aura or radiance and someone who appears to be using somatic gestures in the casting of a spell might just be waving his arms around.

(I had some players really going for a while with this and a gifted actor wearing a ring of permanent Unseen Servant once. They decided that he must be the most skilled practitioner of Telekinesis (the spell) ever. I don’t recall them ever discovering the truth – that he was a con-man taking them for a ride. Might have happened, it was a long time ago, but I don’t remember it.)

The glows achieved several things by implication. They implied that there was some commonality between the mechanisms (because every spellcaster had a glow). They implied that there were differences, because the glows were all different in color. They implied that there was an absolute morality that was reflected in the casting of clerical magic, but that there was something special about Druids and Rangers (who got Green), while Wizards sort of skated above the whole Absolute Morality issue – implying that it didn’t apply to everyone. In fact, as I recall, this was a world in which the Gods could do anything, except break the strictures of their inherent morality. They were absolutes and primal forces. But whenever they did something, this always led to them going too far and causing all sorts of unwanted side-effects – so they had to work through mortal intermediaries to impose constraints on their divine power. This was also a world in which the gods were children (because nothing could really make them grow up) who were doing their best to pretend to be the grownups in the room – they were in awe of Wisdom, which is why they tied access to their powers to that stat – that, and the fact that it meant that their followers would use their powers Wisely, at least most of the time – the one thing that the Gods couldn’t do themselves.

In the end, though, all this comes back to “Detect Magic”. Back in the AD&D days, when I started playing, it was a “Universal” Divination spell that permitted the caster to become aware of what was magical and what was not. Details were limited, as though it were obvious what was meant.

Endless hours could (and were) spent deliberating on the significance, impact, and specifics that weren’t covered. “I cast an illusion spell on Harry, does he now detect as Magical?” sort of thing.

Later editions cleaned things up quite a bit, but locked users into one specific interpretation. That’s quite common, and one of the driving forces behind “Old School Gaming” – in which the GM’s/Players preferred meta-framework doesn’t match the one used by the writers of Edition X. If there are only a few differences that you can’t live with, you can House Rule your way around the problem; if they are more substantial and numerous, you may need to retreat to an earlier edition (perhaps importing some parts of the later edition that you did like.

On its surface, this presents a continuity between D&D (1st Ed) and all subsequent generations of the rules, as though they were arrayed on an arc around it, each generation bound to both the original source material and to the edition that preceded it. The reality is a little more complicated, but let’s go with that. Campaigns and preferences can fall anywhere within the resulting field. Your game might be mostly 3.x, with a little 5e (ignoring 4e, rightly or wrongly) and a little 2e thrown in, and a slightly old-school attitude. This would be positioned somewhere near the higher side of the 3.x arc (the one closest to 4e, which is blacked out because this GM is ignoring it), and hence to 5e, and about 1/3 of the way towards the hub, where lives original D&D.

You can complicate this simple metaphor in all sorts of ways, but that’s good enough for this purpose, which is simply to state, there are no wrong answers. At least, not inherently wrong. They are all sorts of wrong answers on a playing group by playing group basis, according to personal preferences. A similar selection – a set of acceptable answers – describes GM-by-GM preferences – what a given GM finds acceptable and what he doesn’t. Where the two sets overlap (and there is no certainty that they will) is the right place to locate a campaign for that specific GM and that specific playing group. There may be (and usually are) multiple such overlaps, or there may be just one. That doesn’t matter.

Nor are there any absolutes here – if the GM is skilled enough, if his game is entertaining enough, players will stick with it even if it is not their preferred genre, sub-genre, rules interpretation, or color of the week. Skill and talent can overcome any such difference – only the heights that have to be scaled, vary.

Another of the oft-debated questions was “If I cast Detect Magic on a Magic Shield, does Phil (playing another Wizard) also see the glow? Does Harvey (playing a Cleric)? Does Walter (playing a fighter)?”

The answer to this question has big implications – if it’s a ‘yes’ all round, either the GM is being lazy or economical (because such things as differences of perception always slow things down), or the spell has had some temporarily-transformative effect on the magic of the item. If the answer is ‘no’ to any one of those questions, then limitations on perceptions begin to play a role. And if the answer is ‘no’ to all of them, then the spell has affected the caster’s perceptions and not the item at all – in which case, the caster should be able to look at other items and discern them as magical, something that does not happen if it’s the target that is somehow transformed. “Yes” answers all round remove one restriction on the spell but impose another. It’s a personal choice, but can be a simple way of differentiating one campaign from another – and it can be fun exploring the implications!

Televised Aberrations

Anyway, getting back to the main topic of discussion, what does that leave? Not much. But most of the processes described have referred to natural phenomena that vary in intensity from moment to moment, causing flickering. One could argue that the magic glows may be steady, but I’ve always preferred to think that the glows were strongest at the fingertips or from the palms of the hands – which means that if those hands are waving around, the light will appear to flicker when it is cast upon a surface and not perceived directly.

I have good reason for this preference: it gives me more license for description. With a steady glow, once you’ve mentioned the fact and added the color (if that’s significant), that’s the end of it. Getting more specific gives me more description that I can use.

But I haven’t yet mentioned one source of flickering light that I see almost every day – a television in another room. The light is usually flickering white – but it’s very dependent on the images on the screen. Something underwater is predominantly blue, for example.

A very mundane explanation for a glow, in stark contrast to the reasons for alarm suggested earlier.

Televisions make colors – or at least, they used to – with arrays of dots of different colors. That may have changed with newer technologies – but our eyes haven’t changed, so the general principles still seem to apply.

So, have you ever seen a color TV in which something has gone bung and the screen is suddenly monochrome? All green, or blue, or red? I certainly have, and while it doesn’t happen often, it can be a source of monochrome glow – it can even flicker!

But a more likely explanation is some sort of screen saver. These have fallen out of favor lately, because modern screens are not as susceptible to burn-in damage, but there was a time when they were ubiquitous.

UFOs & Aliens

A lot of these are supposed to glow. Sometimes different colors.

One of the most memorable uses of light on a cinema screen comes in the classic Close Encounters Of The Third Kind – a strong moving light or lights behind a venetian blind in the abduction scene.

Glows That Tease

And that brings me to the ultimate value of a glow – it teases without showing a thread directly. This can be a lot scarier, a lot more dramatic, and a lot more exciting. It’s akin to hearing a scraping sound from the wall beyond your room, as though someone were trying to claw their way through (or out). But a glow implies that the source of the glow has access to you, whenever it wants, and so can be more threatening. Other senses can also be used, but far less effectively a lot of the time – witness the Original-series Star Trek episode Obsession, in which Kirk becomes obsessed with destroying a cloud-like hostile entity which he recognizes by a ‘sickening, honey-sweet’ scent. Unfortunately, while that is a reasonable signature of sorts, it isn’t particularly threatening – but nothing is made of that subterfuge.

But scent can be threatening – I don’t remember the reference, but the phrase “the stink of a charnel house” lives with me. Attempting to attribute it, a google search found this story about an Ohio ghost with the smell of blood and decay that the term conjures up from the website Haunted Ohio.

But even more threatening than the scent alone would be, would be to establish the connection between an apparition and the scent of death. This would tend to hyper-sensitize even the staunchest of military men, triggering them every time they were exposed to the scent – whether it was from the kitchens, or a dog’s feeding ground. If subtle enough, they might even be triggered to full alert without even recognizing the cause.

A formidable narrative weapon. And one that proves, once and for all, that there’s more to glows than meets the eye. What do glows of different color mean in your world?

Glows will always be threatening until proven otherwise. Don’t neglect them and don’t ignore them! There’s a glow coming from the alleyway you are approaching, and a chill wind in the air…

I try very hard to provide balance in my coverage of different genres here at Campaign Mastery, guided by the relative popularity. Out of every 15 posts, 6 should be Fantasy oriented, 4 should be sci-fi oriented, 2 should be ‘realistic’ (Modern-day or Pulp, hence the inverted commas), 2 should be Superhero/Secret Agent oriented, and one should be about something else.

Of course, these are just guidelines, and if there’s one or two too many of anything, it doesn’t matter too much – this is all just my way of attempting to ensure that as many readers as possible find something relevant getting posted each week.

Nevertheless, I have been known to ‘bump’ an article a week or more if there have been too many from that genre lately.

I’m helped a lot in achieving these targets by post subjects and treatments that can apply to a range of genres. This is always something that I aspire to, because it means that I’m potentially helping the greatest number of readers.

For example, take last week’s article, which mused on the impact that the Covid-19 Pandemic should have on the characters that we create. While it is obviously directly relevant to modern-day campaigns (box ticked), there is also relevance to the Spanish Flu epidemic of a century ago (Pulp – but that box is already ticked), and to any fantasy game in which a plague breaks out (box ticked), and bio-terrorism and bio-warfare are always going to be relevant to Sci-fi and superheros and secret agents (tick, tick, tick – hey, that’s every genre on my list!). I could even argue that epidemics may occur on a smaller scale in Western games, but the notion of a whole town getting sick because of contaminated water or whatever is pure genre, and the relative isolation means that the whole Pandemic reaction is the same, just scaled to the isolated population. So this even ticked the ‘something else’ box.

I’m not sure what it was, but something this week led me to ponder just what the differences were between these different genres. And I soon realized that the distinctions were a little different in tabletop gaming (or should be) than they were in the worlds of Fiction and Media.

My thoughts started with the distinction between Sci-Fi and Fantasy…

The Fantastic in Sci-Fi and Fantasy

I quickly reached the conclusion (because I had been there before) that the big difference between the two was how the Fantastic was treated in these two genres, the core of TTRPGs – I would bet that 70% of all games would be one or the other in some shape or form.

In Fantasy, anything can happen. The imagination is unfettered. There are no limits. If you want a talking caterpillar reclining on a toadstool and smoking a hookah, you can have the PCs encounter one.

In Science Fiction, there are strict rules imposed by reality. We call these Physics and Chemistry and Biology. The theory is that only what is possible within the reality around us is acceptable within the bounds of Sci-Fi.

Those definitions are both way too black and white, especially when it comes to Fantasy Gaming. But my thoughts along those lines actually started with Sci-Fi.

You see, most of the participants (if not all) are not science experts. In general, they may have a Popular Mechanics appreciation for Science, and beyond that, they apply Clarke’s Third Law.

Clarke’s Three Laws

‘Clarke” is distinguished science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, undoubtedly most famous for writing The Monolith, which became the foundation for the movies 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

A 1962 Essay, published in Profiles Of The Future, quoted the first law, and implied the second; others quickly imparted the status of “a law” to it. The third had been suggested by others with no-one quite managing to capture its entire essence in a single statement until Clarke did so in a 1963 revision to his essay.

The three laws are:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It’s fair to say that it’s the third law that has most captured the imaginations of writers and thinkers the world over, ever since. The Wikipedia article on Clarke’s Three Laws has a long list of corollaries and one expansion. There are three that I’m particularly drawn to:

• Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice (Grey’s Law);
• Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. (Gehm’s corollary); and,
• “Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it.” (from the Webcomic Freefall).

…though I’m more prone to using the first in the form, “Never underestimate the power of human stupidity”, a pessimistic statement by Robert A Heinlein that forms the cornerstone of many of the developments in my RPG campaigns. (I’m also fond of another Heinlein quote, “Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done” – though I don’t consider it to be quite as universal as it purports to be.

The implications are that the ‘rules of reality’ aren’t quite the straitjacket that the description of Sci-Fi suggested that they were. This was explicitly stated by Gene Roddenberry in pitching Star Trek to various studios back in the day – “Anything is possible” – to which I would append, “so long as is it’s plausible”.

Fantasy Constrained

So, we’re left with Science Fiction being constrained by the plausible, while Fantasy enjoys an open field in which anything goes, right?

Not so fast! If ‘anything’ really ‘went’, players wouldn’t play in a game and readers wouldn’t read the story. Dueling deux-ex-machinas would populate every narrative and it would be very little fun for anyone, especially when one party (the GM) has the authority to deny the imaginings of the others (the players).

It’s quite rightly considered very bad GMing to drop in menaces simply because the players are getting too close to success (they call them Grudge Monsters in KODT).

So there have to be some guidelines and principles applied to constrain Fantasy – and ultimately, they boil down to whatever is plausible, given the established ground rules within the environment and context of the imaginary situation.

Plausible. There’s that word again.

But what about Magic? Isn’t it, by it’s nature, an upheaval in the environment and/or context, changing what is plausible and what is not? Does this not restore the Fantastic to a position of primacy within the Fantasy genre?

Well, yes and no.

I’ve written before about Asimov’s rules for science-fiction mysteries – about half-way through The Butler Did It, I quote selected passages from Isaac Asimov’s foreword to Asimov’s Mysteries in which he discusses the union of Mysteries and Science Fiction, and the perceived impossibility of uniting the genres. His number one rule that he invoked to solve this (and several other plot problems, I’m sure) was to play fair with the reader.

To him, that meant not using a technology without explaining it, and it’s limitations, well in advance, in every pertinent detail.

And, at the time, I followed those quotes with, “Magic and the other trappings of Fantasy are just as problematic, because (by definition) they contravene what we know as physical laws. If they exist, they make possible the otherwise impossible. But the same solution holds – understand how it works, what its limitations are, and how it affects cause-and-effect, and make sure that any relevant information is provided to the PCs…”

Magic has to have limits and rules in order to function within a game or it’s just a license for the GM to ad hoc and de facto anything that he wants to have happen. He has to play fair with the ‘reader’ – in this case, the player.

The rules of the game provide some constraint on the degree of reality alteration, anyway. If a PC knows only specific spells, he knows of only those specific ways and degrees with which to alter reality – which means that they can be anticipated and prepared for.

The upshot of all this is that you can’t have “just anything” happen in a Fantasy Game. The Fantastic is just as constrained in that genre as it is in Science Fiction. In some shape, almost anything that is relevant to one genre will be relevant to the other.

Take an article on Doppelgangers (complete with prominent misspelling). That’s pretty specific to the Fantasy genre, and to the D&D/Pathfinder sub-genres at that. And yet – have there never been science fiction plots in which a shape-changer has taken the place of a member of the crew? Well, yes there have. So, by seeking to maximize the plausibility within the Fantasy genre, what I have actually done is apply a little Science Fiction to the concept, then relabeled it Fantasy.

Technology In Science Fiction RPGs

At the same time, the rules limit the Fantastic within Science Fiction at least as stridently, also in a bid to ‘play fair’. There are proscribed limits to what a lightsaber can do in the various Star Wars RPGs, for example – because if you don’t have those, they device can become a crutch for weak play, a too-easy solution to a problem that’s supposed to be difficult.

This is sometimes stated as technology not being ‘a magic wand’ – at least in the real world – but in the context of gaming, I submit that a more accurate description would be technology us a magic wand – complete with restrictions and rules that define how and what and how often it can do things.

Fantasy and Sci-Fi may take the low road and high road, respectively, but both end up in the same place (when it comes to gaming) – different ends of the same uber-genre.

SF with outdated Science

There are a couple of alleyways of related thought to the above chain of thought that are worth exploring.

The first is a personal bugbear that causes affront to me whenever someone gets too picky about the ‘science’ in science-fiction not stacking up. What happens when a book is perfectly valid science fiction – until the understanding of the science underneath it changes? Does the book stop being science fiction? Does it become Fantasy? Or some strange hybrid of the two genres?

My personal definition is that if the science in a story was plausible enough at the time of writing, the book is still Sci-Fi – but I know a lot of Sci-Fi fans who disagree, sometimes vehemently. That’s alright – they can use their own more sterile definitions all they want. Just don’t expect me to change mine to accommodate you.

What’s more, it’s fairly easy to tie these purists up in logical knots by showing that by their own definitions, nothing is genuine science fiction.

It takes months to get a finished manuscript through the printing and proofing process. The pace of human development is such that by the time it is printed and available to read, the science upon which any given work is founded will have changed, the book will be out of date in some particulars at least (if not completely undone). Hence, by the purist’s definition, any book published in the modern era is no longer valid as Science Fiction – and they have already excluded everything not of the modern era. Which leaves them with an empty set – something that’s pointless, given the context. This usually forces the most strident but reasonable hard-liner to acknowledge that like absolute zero, perfection is unobtainable.

I therefore suggest to them that they are simply setting a higher threshold test for plausibility than most, and usually get a (sometimes grudging) acceptance of that proposal. But this introduces the concept of subjectivity into the discussion, and acceptance that others can have different thresholds and views that are just as valid as the hard-liner. It puts us on common ground – perhaps at different ends of it, but common ground nevertheless.

The logical next step is rarely taken to avoid re-inflaming prejudices already tweaked in the course of the discussion – which is to suggest that Fantasy and Science Fiction simply have different standards of scientific plausibility incorporated into them, and are simply points on a spectrum of possibility. A few have taken that step on their own, reclassifying both as simply “imaginative fiction”, and been the richer (in literary terms) for it.

Clearly, this particular alleyway loops back to the same meeting-point as the main discussion. So let’s move on to another.

Space Opera and Science Fantasy

Space Opera is perhaps best described as Science Fiction Hyperbole. Big dramatic space battles, epic confrontations between sides A and B, larger-than-life heroes and villains, greater willingness to hand-wave what is possible and what technology can do – a branch of science fiction that tends to the spectacular. Sounds like a lot of successful movies from the last 40 years or so, in fact!

One could argue about whether or not Star Trek (the original series) was Space Opera. Star Wars definitely was, and so was the original Battlestar Galactica (the reboot was more introspective and psychological and sociological and just plain deeper than most Space Opera goes).

Space Opera, with its greater willingness to hand-wave science, is clearly some distance closer to Fantasy than most science fiction – but it clearly belongs on the same continuity between the two extremes.

Science Fantasy is science fiction that deliberately violates the ‘science’ in the interests of a better story. There are those who argue that any science fiction with an FTL Drive (other than one failing to ever function) belongs in the Science Fantasy category – usually those purists I talked about earlier.

But this exposes the reason for my hostility toward the purist attitude: it’s inherent narrow-mindedness, the arrogance of assuming that you know what is possible and what is not despite not knowing all of science. That’s something that I would not say to such a purist, not unless they had gotten me well-and-truly fired up beforehand. But it’s still implicit in the purist definition of science fiction, whether said aloud or not.

Thankfully, the proposed Fantasy-SciFi genre bridge solves the problem of Science Fantasy, too. It’s somewhere in between regular Fantasy and Space Opera – and certain technologies are granted hall passes if the in-context theory of how they operate is sufficiently convincing. So some FTL drives are Science Fiction, and some are Science Fantasy – and there would be a whole bunch of them that are at different points in between.

There are some critics who have suggested that Fantasy and Science Fantasy and Space Opera are “bad” science fiction. I think that this argument confuses plausibility with literary accessibility.

I’m a big fan of a lot of the Star Trek original novels. There are some fantastic science fiction stories and ideas amongst them. Some are, alas, unmitigated rubbish, with wooden characters and hollow plots. But some are as good as you’ll find – not only exploring the complex interpersonal dynamics of the leading characters, but developing new subsidiary characters and personalities, and offering intriguing plots and entertaining resolutions. Clearly, ‘literary merit’ is comprised of a host of possible sins.

To me, a good Franchise novel is both easier and harder to write than an original story – easier, in that you have a lot of the creative work done for you, harder in that in addition to all the other parameters within the heading of ‘literary merit’, you have ‘fidelity of characters and concepts’ added to the requirements – and that can sometimes be the hardest one of the lot to live up to. Those books that I described as “absolute rubbish” in the previous paragraph? They almost all fail this test, too.

So, if a genre novel is as difficult to write well as a completely original one, you can see why snobbish attitudes towards original fiction on the part of some self-appointed critics would get up my nose. But that’s not relevant; what IS relevant is that “Literary merit” (or dramatic merit, in the case of a movie or TV show) lies on a completely separate axis of appreciation to the one under discussion. Together, they form a landscape, a two-dimensional plane.

(Yes, before anyone asks, the disrespect with which the Academy Awards treat Science Fiction also qualifies as being worthy of disdain, at least in my book).

I’m perfectly content to let others debate the shape of the landscape. Is Space Opera inherently biased away from the edge-zone of “high literary quality”? Perhaps, yes. Some of it was not especially well-written – but that doesn’t put it all the way over to the “bad fiction” side of the landscape, because there are examples that were not, at least in some respects.

Fairy Stories

Anyway, moving on to fairy stories: these are tales that we tend to read, or get told, as children. They are the last true bastions of ‘anything goes’. There is a continual temptation to build an RPG around them, aimed specifically at those of a much younger age bracket than are typically served by RPGs like D&D.

But then I realize that it’s not necessary – as soon as a child is old enough to understand cheating and why it’s bad (and not to do it, and to expect others not to do it), they are ready to play an RPG. It might not be one as complicated as Pathfinder – but my experience (described in Gaming With The Family – Lessons from yesteryear) are that if you (and any other players) make appropriate allowances, children much younger than the recommended ages of such games are perfectly capable – and the concept of building a bridge between the world of their imaginations and the world of rules which we call “the real world” has a major appeal to them.

Fairy stories, then, lie somewhere on the far end of Fantasy of all the Science Fiction sub-genres. To be a satisfying story, they still need enough credibility and literary merit to stand up – they still have to make sense in context – but beyond that, anything goes.

My bottom-line test is always how much enjoyment can I wring out of what I’m reading. That enjoyment can be grappling with new ideas, or a new interpretation of an old idea, or interesting characters, or a thrilling plot, or some combination of all of the above. “Dull is death” should be tattooed on my anatomy somewhere! or maybe, “Be interesting or be gone!”

Hard Science Fiction and Technobabble

When it comes to a discussion of science fiction, it isn’t long before someone brings up the classification of “Hard Science Fiction” (verses, I guess, “Soft” Science Fiction).

Hard science fiction prioritizes scientific accuracy and logic. The term was first used in print by P. Schuyler Miller in a 1957 review of John W Campbell’s Islands Of Space in Astounding Science Fiction. The complimentary term, “Soft Science Fiction” first appeared in the 1970s.

An early example is Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea from 1870, often cited as an example by later writers within the sub-genre, though Verne himself denied writing as a scientist or seriously attempting to predict the technology of the future.

There’s nothing wrong with Hard Science Fiction. i don’t start having problems until the search for fidelity to the Science starts getting in the way of other elements of literary merit. I have a much stronger reaction to extremist fans of the sub-genre who have the attitude that “the only good science fiction is hard science fiction,” as is probably fairly predictable from what I’ve already written.

To me, Hard Science Fiction defines one edge of the landscape, just as Fairy Stories define the other. But it’s still part of the landscape.

Technobabble is anathema to Hard SF purists. It is the use of terminology in lieu of explanation – some would say, in lieu of plausible foundation. It shifts the supposed ‘science’ of science fiction towards the fantasy end of the spectrum.

I don’t have that big a problem with technobabble if it’s well-written, semi-plausible technobabble, that is applied consistently through a conceptual framework that is as rigorous as any real science or engineering would be.

“Reverse the polarity of” whatever is the sort of thing that sets my teeth on edge – something that the purists and I can probably agree on. That’s definitely using terminology in lieu of plausible explanation.

Using “pattern buffers” to “enhance a transporter”, on the other hand, is just fine. It’s worth understanding why.

First, the “transporter” has been well-established within Star Trek (TNG this time), dating back to the original series. In particular, it’s been found and demonstrated that the technology has limitations, and that it’s very much an all-or-nothing – a failed transport means you stay where you are (if you’re lucky) or are having a very VERY bad day (if you’re not). In essence, it’s a teleportation device that utilizes a destructive “read” process to guide a “reconstruction” of the object being teleported, accurate to a subatomic level. Setting aside the technological difficulties in processing that much data, much less receiving it in any timely fashion, the transfer of information from source to destination is clearly at the heart of the technology. So far, fair enough ‘not-so-hard’ science fiction, then. Which brings me to the “pattern buffers” – having some sort of ‘holding area’ in which a redundant copy of the information can be held for repeated attempts at retrieval makes perfect sense to anyone who’s had to deal with data corruption over a dodgy internet connection. It implies being able to retry a download until you get it right – it might take multiple attempts, but you will get there in the end. So that makes perfect sense in terms of the function of the ‘transporter’ as an enhancement. It’s quite likely that there are some commensurate downsides – like the ‘held pattern’ being vulnerable to disruption – that explains why they can’t be used all the time.

This is technobabble that implies a reasonable pseudo-scientific explanation without interrupting the story long enough to deliver a lecture on the technology – to me, that’s science fiction at its best. But it’s definitely not “hard” science fiction.

This establishes an important point, though, by implying that literary quality and the rigor of plausibility are not complete exclusive and unrelated variables.

This point is easily demonstrated. We have a character – a good family man, who has worked all his life as a baker, mastering the art of the pastry, who lives his day though a set routine ruled by the clock. A good, dramatic story could be told about this routine being disrupted by some extraordinary event in his life (and has been, I’m sure). And so have a lot of bad fiction examples, where completely out of the blue he runs away to join a circus (abandoning his wife and children), or some such nonsense. One shows consistency of character and explores the consequences of a change in the social landscape that defines his life; the other shows a complete inconsistency of character as that character has been defined, and is bad writing, plain and simple. To make it… better writing (term chosen carefully), you need to define the character in such a way that this out-of-the-blue decision makes sense, has some internal logic. “Bob lived his days by the clock, every day the same endless routine, grinding away at his soul, and hating it. One day, he could tolerate the mindless mundania of his nuclear family life no more, and threw caution to the winds; abandoning his jailers, he ran away in search of his dreams.” Suddenly, we have a stable platform on which to build a narrative. Perhaps Bob will find that the grass isn’t always greener, or that dreams are not a reflection of reality, or that there were aspects of his former existence that had value, and will find his way back to his family, a slightly-changed man for the experience. There are several variations on the basic story implied by the character definition that could be told.

Clearly, credibility and plausibility are critical elements of good literary practice and technique. What defines the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy are the credibility and plausibility of their approach to the fantastic – which implies that they must contain some elements that meet that definition.

The Fantastic in Superhero Games

What else can be fitted onto this continuity of genre? Well, lets talk about superheroes. These often have an origin story and fundamental concept that plays fast and loose with the ‘science’ of the environment, but (generally) once the ground rules have been established, good practice in superhero stories is to establish solid credibility in a flashy, spectacular, way.

Superhero stories are simply space opera with offshoots in different directions. One is into gritty realism; another lurches past Science Fantasy into the realms of fantasy and magic; and a third gropes its way toward real, even hard, science fiction.

Technically, superhero stories are actually Science Fantasy, I suppose. They need to have a logical consistency, but the underpinning assumptions about reality are fantastic and not realistic.

That’s one of the reasons I love the genre – it can be all things to all people. I can go from a fantasy oriented situation to a space romp to a knock-em-down brawl to a gritty social satire – sometimes within the scope of a single adventure!

It can be argued that there is even more of the Fantastic about superhero adventures than is the case in most Science Fiction and Fantasy, and I would find that difficult to argue with.

But that implies a third axis on our continuity of genre: integration of the fantastic. And clearly, the less Fantastic there is, the less importance would be attached to the plausibility of that little, so our structure of genres is not a cube, but a triangle with a depth extension.

The Fantastic in Pulp, Horror & Western Games

Which brings me to the next trio of genres that I’m going to discuss: Pulp, Horror, and Western Games.

These can all be differentiated by their treatment of the Fantastic.

In a Pulp campaign, there are occasional touches of the fantastic, but in general, what we are talking about is exaggerated reality. At the same time, pulp stories can have a gritty flavor, a fantasy flavor, or a science-fictional flavor. So the genre is superheroes with more tightly controlled smaller doses of the fantastic.

A Horror campaign frequently has even more fantastic content than a Pulp campaign, but in more concentrated doses. It should also be noted that a Pulp adventure can also have a horror flavor!

But there’s a big difference between Friday The 13th or Nightmare On Elm Street as an RPG and Call Of Cthulhu, and Hellraiser is even more extreme. Of those four examples, you would have to put CoC down as the least fantastic, certainly less so than Pulp, which can have frequent low-level doses of fantastic content. You would also have to agree that they lean more towards the Fantasy end of the continuity than the hard science, no matter how much science may be used to shroud and explain the situation. But there are clear exceptions like The Fly and Alien, and the Dr Phibes movies, and even Frankenstein. In fact, I would suggest that Horror exists in two bands – one to each side of the Pulp mid-point – and that both extend tendrils down to the more Fantastic.

Most realistic of all are Western Games. These tend a little more towards the science side, but can occasionally have a little touch of the Fantastic about them – in particular when it comes to Native American Medicine Men! But these are exceptions. Western Games are clearly, in RPG terms, the pinnacle of UnFantastic – until someone puts out a soap opera RPG (what, they’ve done that?

• Pasion de las Pasiones, a Telenovela RPG, and
• SOAP: The Game Of Soap Opera Mayhem from Wingnut Games which is more of a board game, but still…
• … and then there was Dallas, The Roleplaying Game (I kid you not!) but it wasn’t what you’d call a success.

…I guess they have. And most of these, if not all of them, would have a lot less of the Fantastic about them than even Western Games, thanks to those occasional Medicine Men again).

The Fantastic in Pirate Games

There was a time when the Pirate Genre was not unlike the Western – it was all about the Swashbuckling. And then came Pirates Of The Caribbean, and the Pirate genre would never be the same again. These days, it’s lurking somewhere to the Fantastic side of Western Games, and only because the Fantastic is relatively tightly controlled for game balance reasons does it avoid diving all the way to the Fantasy realm below.

The Fantastic in Spy & Modern Games

Finally, we have two more genres in which the Fantastic is tightly controlled. Most games set in the modern day either belong to one of the genres already discussed or to the spy genre, but there are also oddballs that might fit here – military RPGs and the like. These have no room for the fantastic, or very very little.

But the super-spy genre does – usually restricted to villainous plans and gadget capabilities, and fairly strictly controlled within those limits.

It’s probably not going too far to consider super-spies to be an offshoot of Pulp that happens to be set in the modern day. But there is less scope for the Fantastic than in Pulp – you can’t have a horror-themed super-spy adventure without deliberately shifting the genre towards the Fantasy-Horror or Sci-Fi Horror nexuses, nor can you have a fantasy-themed adventure without shifting the genre. That plants it between Pulp and the apex of our pyramid.

The Rules Of Good Writing

As a general rule, the techniques and restrictions that work in one genre will translate readily to another. Where good writers sometimes struggle is in the specialized content that they have to deliver, not the method of delivery – bad writers will just expound for page after page, with little or no interaction until the lecture is over.

That means that as a general rule, each of the genres and sub-genres represent a cylindrical form running back from “Good Quality Writing” to “Bad Quality Writing”. But if we take this as read, and assume that these cylinders have a consistent thickness throughout, we could posit a triangular map of the genres.

I’m not sure entirely what value such a map would have. It lacks context. But it could be done.

More important, I think, to have some appreciation for how Genre can be defined by two key attributes: the degree of Fantastic typically infused into the (sub-) genre, and the level of plausibility demanded within the (sub-) genre.

Once you understand those two key parameters, and how they pertain to the genre of your game or campaign, everything else is down to the literary merit of your writing. Interesting, well-defined characters; clear and confounding plots; interesting situations and challenges; accessible narrative; communicative dialogue; and satisfying resolutions – these things never go out of style.

And add one more to the mixture: the ability to generate entertainment. It’s a subtle quality, hard to define – but essential to any creative effort.