Image by Karl Frey from Pixabay

(originally titled ‘Flowing Mana and other arcane concepts’)

Today, I thought I would share with you a few concepts from my superhero campaign that relate to the “science” of how magic works. I’ve addressed the circumstances under which these were presented in-play in an earlier post; this is more about delivering the high-concept ideas themselves for public consumption.

Context

I’ve always advocated looking at the Big Questions when creating campaigns, as a way of generating plotlines that are fundamental to that campaign – see, for example, this early campaign mastery post: A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs.

These concepts grew out of an evolving set of rules, and may need to be implemented in the form of House Rules to be adapted to any other campaign. However, they should work in any campaign in which magic use (or an equivalent, like The Force) is an element – that’s Cthulhu, D&D, Pathfinder, Pulp, Star Wars, etc.

Parts of this article have appeared in-game as a couple of quick tutorials on the way magic works by a graduate and lecturer at the Academy Of Magic (which no longer exists). At one point he prefaces the second part of his lecture with a wry complaint about teaching without a lesson plan meaning that important things are always left out.

That’s the context within which these concepts should be read – as off-the-cuff simplifications of a more complex and interactive process. They hit the highlights of the story but do not contain everything, and may not be anything better than a broad approximation when you dig into any aspect of them – a starting point, nothing more.

Heck, in your world, they might be entirely incorrect and yet describe the state of the art in Arcane Theory.

What you do with them is up to you.

Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay

Mana

Mana is an energy field generated by, well, everything – one that conventional instruments cannot detect. It has been described as the binding energy that maintains the continuity of things being what they are, and that is not entirely inaccurate, but misses the major point.

Life

Mana seems inextricably bound up in what makes the living alive.. In the absence of Mana, life withers and dies, often with no discernible cause, or through succumbing to some pre-existing condition.

Mana powers spells, and the consumption of life is a powerful fuel for such activities.

Organisms can be biologically ordered in terms of evolutionary complexity. They can also be ordered in terms of “Mana carrying capacity”, and – surprisingly – the two systems of classification accord fairly closely.

There are some organisms that evolve, in mana-rich environments, to depend on Mana as a source of biological fuel, and – in time – evolve extraordinary abilities deriving from those Mana potentials.



Image by Noupload from Pixabay

Sentience & Spellcasting

Most sentient beings are completely unaware of the Mana within them.

A few seem to have a mana-derived “Sixth Sense” but are unable to do anything more with it.

Some learn to collect additional mana within their beings, almost instinctively, and may even create spontaneous magical effects upon themselves or their locality without knowing the reasons these things occur. There are any number of psychological influences on these impacts; it is believed that lycanthropy is one material manifestation of this phenomenon, but research is difficult and often inconclusive.

A few learn to both collect mana and express it in the form of uncontrolled or ‘wild’ magic. Such amateur mages usually learn discipline or self-destruct in the relatively near-term.

Any such ‘wild mage’ or ‘natural mage’ has the potential to become a true student of the arcane; again, the psychology of the individual has a paramount effect on the outcome of such education. If you do not want to learn, you will not make sufficient effort to do so, and your education and understanding is fundamental to how much of your potential you can access.

There have been reported cases of third parties functioning as intermediaries, providing the restraint and discipline required to restrict a ‘wild mage’ to (relatively) safe functions. There have also been cases where the belief in higher-order beings has been sufficient to serve this function. Both phenomena are little understood.

A formal educational process is by far the most effective method of mastering an arcane talent. Furthermore, since there is often little time to respond to unexpected developments – spellcasting is always a somewhat chaotic process – constant practice is needed to develop instincts and the correct spontaneous reactions to untoward developments.

There are several such educational frameworks, some better than others. Fundamentally, they all have general similarity of features when closely examined. The framework described and assumed below is not the only one, but it possesses all those common features and has a proven effectiveness.

Geographic Features

Singular geographic features are known to be extraordinarily large sinks of Mana. Mountains, Deserts, Lakes, Oceans, etc. The size is almost irrelevent.

It is generally thought that Mana flows from the polar regions to the equator and then loops back around – but no-one has ever verified this conclusively.as a universal constant. It may be that it is only true of Earth.



Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay

Cosmology

Similarly, Celestial Bodies and entire planes of existence posses Mana; it binds reality together.

Overall, any given plane of existence has a specific planar potential of Mana, which may be higher or lower relative to another such plane. The higher the potential, the greater the likelihood that the populace will include more residents capable of using Magic, and the greater the number of singular and noteworthy features.

Image by Genty from Pixabay

Mana Flow

The above completely misrepresents Mana in one critical aspect: the picture it paints is one of static potential, of a resource that can be depleted. But Mana is not gold or pixie dust; it is a dynamic phenomenon. Mana is constantly leaving whatever holds it, and being replaced with more from the surrounding environment. It is thus more correct to say that mana flows through everything, constantly.

The rate of mana flow is unrelated to the mana capacity of the object, location, or mage, but can also be improved or increased by those who have trained themselves to retain a greater capacity, or who have such a greater capacity naturally. Thus the two – greater capacity and greater mana flow – tend to be convergent aspects of reality in sentient beings and manipulated environments.

Mana streams repel each other, as a general principle, unless a mana stream is sufficiently strong to overcome that resistance and forcibly merge with the surrounding streams.

However, it is also possible for such a strong mana flow to spontaneously re-divide into smaller streams, a process called Mana Scission. It is believed by some that the repulsive effect is a chaotic expression of some underlying process that occasionally manifests in repelling forces of sufficient magnitude to overcome the binding force. Others believe that the organization of mana streams into larger flows, the binding of the streams together, ‘consumes’ some of the mana of the flow, weakening it’s capacity to resist the repulsive force. It is possible that both are correct, or partially correct.

It is also true that areas of low mana potential tend to diffuse or spread strong mana flows that enter them. “Nature,” it is said, “abhors a vacuum” – a flawed statement as the effect does not require a vacuum in which to operate, merely a differential potential of sufficient magnitude.

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Mana flows are constantly changing, as people, animals, clouds, etc, move, go about their business, live, birth young, and die. Similarly, geological processes have an impact – usually small, but occasionally dramatic, such as a volcanic eruption or explosion. Mana flows are inconstant, with a stability inherently tied to the lifespan of the source of the outflow. What seems like a permanent flow of stable character can slowly drift or change, or abruptly destabilize. Such effects have ripple impacts throughout the locale. A mountain may provide a steady mana flow for thousands of years – but when the mountain erodes away, the organization of the flow will vanish, replaced by another; to all intents and purposes, the mana flow ceases to be concentrated by the mountain when it no longer exists.

Note that there is no net reduction in Mana; there is a reduction in Mana structure and organization, nothing more. But that can nevertheless be critical on any creatures or processes that depend on that concentrated mana flow.

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

Portals and Planar flows

Quite obviously, if one plane is at a higher mana potential relative to another, and a portal is opened between them, there will be a mana flow through the portal from the first to the second. Applied correctly, this can be used to stabilize the portal, transforming it into a semi-permanent rift between realities.

As a general rule, the larger the reality in terms of contents, the more diffuse the mana flow will be throughout it; pockets of reality are more likely to have higher concentrations of Mana even though their total Mana potential is lower.

There have been cases of explorers from low-mana environments spontaneously transforming into other biological forms when entering a highly concentrated-mana environment. These transformations may or may not reverse when the explorer returns to his native environment, or may only partially reverse. One documented case describes a human who spontaneously became a centaur and then “reverted” to being a horse on his return, because that form was more like that of his transformed self.

It is therefore incorrect to regard any mana flow or system as existing in isolation. Such descriptions are valuable as theoretical simplifications and educational tools only.

Image by PhotoVision from Pixabay

Fundamental Spellcasting

A mage uses the accumulated mana within his body to initiate and shape a mana flow such that a particular spell effect manifests. Many parameters must be controlled by the mage or they will manifest in random determinants. The more tightly controlled and predictable a spell is, the more difficult it is to cast.

This use of the mage’s mana produces a “relative vacuum” within him that bends nearby mana streams toward him, and this recharges the mana consumed by the spellcasting process. But there are many details that this simple description glosses over.

Mana Burn

There is almost certainly going to be an inequality between the mana ‘consumed’ (i.e. disbursed from the mage’s internal store) by the spellcasting process and the amount which ‘arrives’ to replenish it. Each mage has a limit to the amount of mana that they can retain, and a higher limit that they can retain only temporarily. Exceeding either of these limits results in a phenomenon known as “Mana Burn” in which the mage’s physical well-being is diminished and his capacity for the successful casting of spells is cauterized. The mage may recover from these effects in time, if they are sufficiently mild, but permanent damage is also possible.

Advanced arcane training provides a number of techniques and tools for the relief of such excess in-flows, but none of them are without their limitations. These include the storage of mana within external objects, the dispersal of the excess into recharging ongoing spell effects and so-called ‘permanent’ magic items, draining the excess into a spell of measured inefficiency, creating and maintaining a spirit-self semi-independent of the physical body (which can therefore go places and do things that the physical body cannot), or directly manipulating the local mana flow.

At a larger scale than the individual, these effects are self-correcting – mana intensifies and then disperses back to a ‘natural’ level. Neighboring mana flows are disturbed, ‘pushed away’ by a sufficiently large concentration of mana within the mage, diminishing the inflow. At the individual scale, however, this holds little consolation, as the mage effectively immolates himself, or suffers some permanent change in form, or the permanent “burning out” of his arcane abilities, or some combination thereof.

At their hear, all spells are exercises in controlling energy flows and shapes. It has been said that the purpose and arrangement of electrical components within a device does the same for the flow of electricity; if the flow of lightning through the device could be affected directly, the components would be unnecessary. This is, of course, not entirely true; many of the components serve to alter the nature and properties of the electrical flow, but it is nevertheless an instructive analogy; a spell is the equivalent of a self-powered ad-hoc television receiver, with the mage substituting words, motions, psychology, and material components for the components within.

Schools Of Magic

Mages are not equally adept at all magics. Through education, need, and predisposition, some forms of magical effect will come more naturally, or more fundamentally, to the individual.

The structure normally used to describe the relationship between these ‘similar spells’ are “Schools of magic”, a slightly misleading term that derives from specialist educational facilities that teach a single topic from basics through to more advanced forms. But this implies that such formal definitions are the only structure possible, and that is misleading; the individual’s classification structure, the definition of his personal ‘schools’, are a personal thing and not subject to such artificial restriction.

Such institutions can nevertheless provide a coherent and well-defined view of a specific specialty that fits the precepts of many prospective mages, perpetuating the self-referential definition of that ‘school’ of magic.

One mage may have “weather magic” as a school; another may have “comfortable travel” as a school; and, until advanced spells are learned by one or both, the spells in these very different schools may be completely identical.

In general, the school from which a mage first manifests a successful spell is known as his Primary School, the one that provides a central definition of the mage. A “Fire Mage” may have other schools like “Ice Magic” and “Aquatic Magic” that are (superficially) completely opposed to their Primary school – but they will nevertheless still be known as a “Fire Mage” first and foremost.

There are many reasons for this: the mage can generally stock his Primary School with more powerful spells, a greater variety of spells, and a greater number of spells. He or she will generally find it easier to cast spells from that school, and it’s characteristics will have the most profound influence on his personality and mental processes, his view of the world, and his instincts. So the Primary School is defining of the mage, but this definition is not an inclusive restriction.

Spells

Arcane ability defines not only the number of schools that a Mage can posses, but the number of spells that they can ‘learn’ within that school. The spells that a mage has learned from within a particular school are known as the mage’s Spell List from that school.

It is possible to learn more spells within a school than the indicated limit, but only at the cost of an arcane school that the mage may have developed at a later time.

For example, a mages’ Primary School may have a limit of 7 spells, so his secondary schools will have limits of 5, 3, and 1 spells, respectively. Or perhaps his school provides less intensive focus, and the secondary schools have limits of 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1, respectively – for three additional schools.

The greater the focus on the Primary School, the greater the advantages that the mage derives from that school, but the less scope he has for variety.

Let us say that a specific mage has developed only three schools in total, and now wishes to add further spells to his primary school. In the first case, that manifests in the ‘loss’ of the 1-spell school and adds that 1 spell, plus one for the lost school, to his Primary spell list – giving him 9, 5, and 3 as his limits.

In the second case, he would lose the 4-spell school (the next to be developed) and add 4 (plus 1) to the primary school’s capacity: 12, 6, 5, 3, 2, 1 is the resulting capacity.

It is possible to add some or all of these gains to a school other than the primary school, but no secondary school can ever have a longer spell list than the primary. So, if the second mage decided to add the 5 spells from the loss of his 4th school to his second school, he would get 7, 11, 5, 3, 2, 1 – but that violates this rule. So he needs to divert some of the 5 to his Primary school – two of them, actually – to be able to ‘fit’ the remaining three into the secondary school: 9, 9, 5, 3, 2, 1.

As a general rule of thumb, each school grants an increased ability to attempt to do various things like adding spells, casting spells, etc. The larger this focus, the faster the capacity for additional schools and hence additional spells declines outside of the primary school.

The further down the mage’s spell list that a spell is, within a school, the greater the difficulty in successfully casting it.

All mages eventually reach their spell limit; the only way to increase it is to advance their knowledge of the Arcane, increasing their Arcane Talent.

Ad-hoc Spells

Mages are not constrained to merely casting the spells on their list; all mages can ‘invent’ spells on the spot, something known as Ad-hoc Spellcasting. The difficulties and costs involved are much larger, the time required can be substantially greater (minutes or even hours, depending on the spell), and the construction is a one-off; the spell must be re-designed each time it is to be cast. It is often the case that making these spells “affordable” (i.e. within the mage’s capacity),

Rituals

Another solution is to cast a Ritual. These have several advantages – they are in a spell book, not in the mage’s head, and so ignore the usual restrictions; additional mages can contribute to the mana costs and buffer the group leader from the effects of Mana Burn; and rituals use time and symbolic components to substantially lower the difficulty of casting a spell.



Image by Peter Pang from Pixabay

Spell Crafting

Spells can be acquired in one of two ways – you can learn them from someone else, or you can craft an original spell yourself. This is akin to the process of creating an ad-hoc spell but with careful documentation of the parameters involved, which takes time, and often must proceed in small steps- Remember that any uncontrolled parameters will effectively be randomized – at the start, you might not even know how many parameters will be involved.

It is quite commonplace for a mage to start with a spell that is not quite what he wants (which may or may not already be in his spell list) and adjust it to his requirements.

Arcane theory can take the place of some of these castings, but not all. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way, even by the most accomplished of mages.

Some mages have a knack for spell design that has led to their handiwork being spread far and wide, effectively becoming a standard.

The end result is a spell that is sufficiently stable to be appended to the mage’s spell list, either within an existing school or as the first spell in a new school.

Spell Refinement

Mages can also take a spell that’s already on their list, refine it to more closely match their needs, or make it more efficient, or easier to cast, and then replace the original with this Refined version. Again, this process takes time, and improving one aspect of a spell often involves reducing effectiveness in another, or even losing control of that other aspect altogether.

Image by Anja?#helpinghands #solidarity#stays healthy? from Pixabay

Spell Detection and Identification

There are two methods of detecting spells – observing or sensing turbulence in the mana flow (usually only tells you that a spell of significant power levels has been cast), or using a spell that traces disturbances in the mana flow back to their source and gives the caster impressions of the cause of the disturbance.

Since there are many possible causes of mana flow discord, the latter is by far the more productive approach, but many mages employ a more instinctive initial approach to tell them when casting such a detection spell is more appropriate.

Such a spell can also detect mana stored in an object, give a sense of the level of mana within another mage or a creature, hint at the physical health and superiority of a non-magical creature, and locate enchanted items.

Once a spell or magical effect has been detected, a mage may cast an identification spell to gain some understanding of the intended effect of the spell. Duration is very important to such spells, as it takes time for the sentient mind to interpret the details of what they perceive.

• The first round of observation gives an impression of the level at which the spell is cast.
• The second round of observation gives an impression of the basic effect of the spell and the school of magic from which it derives.
• The third round of observation gives an approximation of the total mana cost of the spell.
• The fourth round of observation gives an approximation of the total spell effect in some appropriate numeric scale.
• The fifth round of observation identifies the first of any special triggers or conditions or parameters of the spell.
• Sixth and subsequent rounds of observation identify other special triggers or conditions or parameters. These follow in (fibonnaci sequence) rounds apart, starting with the sixth, then eighth, eleventh, sixteenth, then twenty-fourth, rounds of observation. The mage may not break concentration to do anything else, or the process restarts. Note that spells cannot be studied after they conclude, only while they are still operational.

To clarify that sequence:
1+0 = 1; +5 = 6.
1+1 = 2; 6+2= 8.
1+2=3; 8+3 = 11.
2+3=5; 11+5 = 16.
3+5=8; 16+8 = 24.
5+8=13; 24+13=37.
8+13=21; 37+21=58.
13+21=34; 58+34=92.
and so on.

Imprints

All objects contain mana – even Cold Iron (see below). Significant events in the ‘lifetime’ of an object in its current form leave an imprint on the object that can be read by certain spells or naturally-gifted individuals, a process called Psychometry.

Such spells may reveal mental visions of those events, conjure actual images of the events, or imbue the object with the capacity to tell its story. Each of these methods has its own shortcomings and limitations.

Mental Images distort specifics of the events to allegorically match experiences in the past of the caster. If it was given to a child as a gift, for example, the vision will be of the caster receiving a gift which is recognizable as the object. These visions are often disjointed and need careful interpretation.

Actual images show the events occurring but with no sound and no context. Sequence may be recent back, beginning forward, or random, depending on the spell. Those viewing the image may speculate on the context, even observing details that help the plausibility and accuracy of such speculations – but at the end of the day, they are still speculations, at-best, informed ones.

“No problem,” think many beginning mages – I’ll cast actual images and then mental images to give me context behind the events.” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple – reading an imprint generally disrupts that imprint. You can have context, or specific events, but not both.

As a result, many mages turn to the third alternative, which offers a compromise between both that is often more informative, giving the object an otherworldly voice and the sentience (temporarily) to use it, permitting the object to tell its story in its own words – the bits that it judges to be important, anyway. The caster’s opinion often differs.

Another trap for the unwary: like all constant spells, these ones require a fresh endowment of mana every round in order to continue functioning. With most such spells, the caster can choose when to stop “feeding the beast”, ending the spell; with such psychometric reading spells, however, the mage cedes control of the spell to the object, which will continue it’s display / recitation until finished, draining mana each round from the mage. And the reading can never be repeated – so if you miss something, that’s bad luck!

Curdles Of Mana (Stealth Casting)

Moving a hand in a circular motion and investing one or more points of stored mana creates a Curdle of Mana, also known as a Mana “Knuckle”.

There are a number of consequences to this action. Mana flows around the disturbance in the flow, at least for a while, so the Mage only has access to his remaining internal store to power any spell; this creates a zone up-flow where Mana is especially low, called a Mana Void; life-forms in a Mana Void acquire greater protection against the spell being cast and any resulting side-effects; spells are more difficult to cast because of the turbulence; and mana flows may be sufficiently distorted to force two flows to cross or combine, however temporarily, creating what is known as a Mana Flare, a point of wild magic in which random effects manifest.

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So why would you do such a thing? Because spells cast within a Mana Curdle are up to an order of magnitude harder to detect and identify. The more Mana invested in creating the curdle, the greater this effect.

The amount of mana invested in the curdle must be more than the cost of casting the spell, and the mana within the curdle leaks back to the mage (replenishing his reserves) at a rate that is less than the mana cost of the spell.

A Mana curdle plus an inefficient spell can be an excellent way of dispersing an excess of stored mana before it results in Mana Burn.

Casting Exhaustion

If the combination of Knuckle and Spell result in the total loss of stored Mana within the mage, he or she begins to die from what is named “Casting Exhaustion”. Even if this effect is mitigated a round later by an influx of mana from the knuckle, this still reduces the mage’s physical health, consciousness, and endurance. The amount is roughly double the percentage of the mage’s total current capability represented by a single mana point or by the spell cost, rounded up. So a mage with 20 mana capacity, currently containing twelve who casts a 4-point spell and an 8-point knuckle, completely emptying his mana reserves. 4+8=12, and 4 is 1/3 of 12, so surviving the Casting Exhaustion costs the mage 1/3 of his physical capacity, round up. The next round, he gets three Mana inflow from the knuckle, which diminishes to 5 points as a result, so the maximum spell power he can muster is three points – and consuming all of it in a second spell costs him 100% of his remaining health, advancing the process of dying considerably.

The mage can still be saved at this point; basic sustaining procedures (CPR etc) will prevent the onset of death. But without such intervention, the mage is certain to die.

When the knuckle dissipates, the mana streams begin to push back into the straightforward normal flow, pushing the Mana Void downstream – to exactly where the Mage is. As noted earlier, Mana Flows abhor a vacuum; in effect, as the void passes, the mage gets in one hit all the mana that he would have received from normal inflow during the time the Mana Knuckle was distorting the flow.

In the case of the example, the mage gets 3, 3, and 2 from the knuckle; plus perhaps 3, 7, and 9 from the resumption of the normal mana flow (three rounds worth). That’s a total of 28, more than the mage’s 20 capacity, but probably within his temporary limits; he needs to find a way to bleed off the excess quickly. Unfortunately, he’s probably still comatose at this point…

Mana ‘Knuckles’ are easy to create unintentionally. All mages are thus taught about them early in their formal educations, because the consequences can be so dire.

Suspended Castings

It is possible to partially cast a spell and then suspend the casting by placing it within a receptive object. Some such castings need only a command word to activate them, others a specific gesture, and still others simply require an influx of mana. The majority can be completed by the Mage simply completing the spell.

To suspend the casting, the mage must provide the mana required to cast the spell, plus an additional amount. Each extra point extends the ‘casting time’ by two orders of magnitude or one unit of measurement, whichever is lesser. So, seconds to minutes to hours to days to weeks to months to years to decades to centuries to millennia to tens of millennia to hundreds of millennia to millions of years – effectively, permanent.

This is the basis of virtually all magical equipment.

Some items are designed to be capable of multiple charge-ups, making them a multi-use tool. Others are designed to have a permanent effect whenever activated, drawing mana from the outside environment. Both are trickier to design and create than a straightforward one-shot item.

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

Mana Tags

A Mage may store a point of mana within a mundane item or person, with a particular “tag” or Mark, by virtue of which, the mage can track the item or person, and by which any other mage can identify that the target has been ‘tagged’. There are various ways of obscuring or removing such tags – chiefly, dumping in more mana than was used in the tag – that makes these unreliable when used on another mage or his property. But despite the limitations, this is still a handy trick to know.

Elementary Summoning (Tagged Items)

An even handier trick is to use the tag to target a summoning spell, bringing the object or individual to the mage for a specific period of time, and perhaps forcing them to obey the mage’s instructions. In general, this permits a relationship to be formed between the mage and the target (if it is capable of such) – for example, summoning a mount or wild creature and then spending part of the summoning time in feeding, petting, and grooming the target will begin the process of taming it, a process that can be deepened and extended with additional summonings.

Summoning an untagged creature means that the mage will receive a random creature that meets the specified parameters. Such summonings are far more difficult, often requiring the mage to forgo or generalize his parameters to make the spell practical. One of the first things to “go” is often the capacity to force the target to obey the summoner. You can bring a horse to water, but if it’s untagged, you may not be able to make it drink.

Once the creature is in the mage’s presence, of course, he can tag it and begin establishing a relationship with it, as described. Such relationships decay in the natural way if not maintained; there are mages out there who spend their every spare moment summoning their ‘pets’ and ‘companions’ just to maintain the bond between themselves and the summoned creature.

Principles of Advanced Summoning (The Bargain)

The difficulty ramps up considerably when the creature to be summoned is sentient, even more if it is capable of spell use itself, and even more again if it is inherently magical. Most difficult of all are creatures that tick all three boxes, such as some Dragons.

Forced obedience is the first thing to go. Magic-users and up may even be able to prevent or delay their being summoned by force of will or magical counter-spell.

Either way, mundane negotiations are involved in getting the summoned creature to do whatever the mage wants them to do. What the demands are, and what may be offered by the mage, depend on what service is required and what the risks are.

There are also some creatures who are more susceptible to the power of command when in the physical presence of the summoner, and know it, so that if they accept the summoning, they have less resistance to instruction, but will drive a harder bargain at the outset.

Some creatures are able to cast spells upon the caster of the summons through the link – these may be benign, assessing the intent, honorability and honesty of the summoner; others may be more malevolent if the summoned creature resents the inconvenience of dropping whatever it is doing at the time to join the summoner.

Note that protracted negotiations may exceed the duration of the spell, requiring it draw a second ‘batch’ of mana from the mage before his mana recovery takes place, or even a third. Casting Exhaustion can occur before terms are agreed, if the mage is not careful.

Mana Combustion & Quick Recharges

Mana can be imbued within objects, the amount being a function of the nature and size of the object. Gems and Sygils and Talismans are common choices. Noble metals have a greater capacity than mundane ones. Once-living objects and objects created from once-living tissue, like bone carvings, also work well. Iron and Steel are poor choices – see “Cold Iron” below.

These objects come in two forms – Consumable and Permanent. Permanent items are harder to make and harder to recharge, but do not have to be destroyed in order to relinquish the mana stored within. They also tend to have greater capacities than a Consumable storage device, though the amount of Mana they can release in a single burst is likely to be smaller.

Consumable mana storage devices don’t hold as much as a Permanent device, but are quicker and easier to create/charge, and release their entire contents when destroyed. Mages must be cautious not to select storage devices that contain more Mana than they can handle, or Mana Burn can be induced by the act of recharging.

The final “quick recharge” method is the most dangerous – casting a “spell” whose sole purpose is to temporarily redirect local mana flows toward a target (usually yourself). This produces an acute Mana Flare and a single larger mana stream where once there was two – and the balance of the sum of the two streams plus the binding energy that held one of them together floods into the mage.

Like the creation of a Mana Knuckle, this is not really a “spell” in the conventional sense; it’s more akin to sticking your hands directly into the mana streams in question – or sticking your fingers into an electrical socket. This is known as “Mana Combustion” because measurements show that the system has less mana in total after the event than it did previously – the difference being that ‘binding energy’.

The resulting single mana stream is relatively unstable and prone to Scission.

Cold Iron

All iron and steel are “cold” to some extent. To enchant these, they need to be alloyed with some other substance which can contain the enchantment. The big trick is choose something that won’t weaken the material.

It might seem that Coal, being once-living, would be the perfect choice, but while adding carbon to steel makes the metal stronger, the carbon itself is destroyed as a coherent entity within the metal in the process, so there is nothing for the ‘spell’ to latch onto. The materials most conducive to magic, silver, gold, and platinum, do not alloy with steel very well or very easily.

Exotic materials are thus the best choices – but these are hard to obtain and harder to work successfully. Titanium, Cobalt, Rare Earth metals, Aluminum, and Mithral are the most common choices (Copper tends to weaken the metal too much and make it brittle).

Modern composite materials like Kevlar and Carbon Fiber are a completely different story, as the Carbon remains intact, though an integral component of the material.

“Cold Iron” is capable of cutting through Mana streams, and can penetrate spells and arcane defenses with relative ease. Mages sense its presence as a nauseating sensation, and many claim that it inhibits the casting of spells – others claim that this is a psychological effect and not a ‘real’ one.

Knowledgeable mages hate and fear the stuff.

Image by Lothar Dieterich from Pixabay

Greater Voids

Casting too powerful a spell can overwhelm the fundamental channels of reality along which Mana flows (no, no-one knows what they are). This inhibits the entry of mana into the area, kills everything too close to the spell, and creates a dead zone around which mana will flow without penetration.

These Greater Voids will slowly dissipate, but will last for years or centuries. Any living thing entering a Greater Void experiences a slower form of Caster Exhaustion as the mana slowly leeches from their essences. Mages are especially susceptible to this effect.

These are a frequent consequence when Rituals misfire or are miscast. For this reason, it is never a good idea to hurry a Ritual.

Dimensional Fissures

Sometimes, if the boundaries are sufficiently weakened by travelers or other disruptions, a Mana Void can spontaneously metastasize into a Dimensional Fissure, an uncontrolled portal into a higher-mana reality. This “punctures” the Mana Void, drawing Mana in from the higher-mana reality, and leaves a passage that may or may not be visible from one reality into another.

These fissures can be very hard to close, because they potentially have access to the whole mana flow intercepting the surface of the interface between realities in the higher-mana environment to use in maintaining its existence; that mana flow needs to be redirected from the Fissure and the accumulated mana within leeched out before it can be closed.

Nevertheless, most mages “drop everything” to do so, because in an expanding zone on both sides of such fissures, the nature of reality and natural laws begin to mix, often in wildly unpredictable ways.

Left open, eventually the two realities will coalesce – an end that some consider desirable, and so they attempt to induce the effect deliberately.

Mana Flares

I’ve mentioned Mana Flares a couple of times already. Mana Flares are places where uncontrolled or”wild” magical manifestations can spontaneously occur. Some theoreticians suggest that when a Mage suffers Mana Burn, it is because he has taken in more Mana than he can control, resulting in multiple internal mana flares.

Certainly, casting a spell on a mage who is also casting a spell is less likely to result in Mana Burn in the target mage. Two mages acting in concert are therefore more powerful, and more capable, than the sum of their individual capabilities. Fortunately, such concerted casting is much harder than it seems.

Magic Circles

You may have wondered at the differences between a Mana Knuckle and a Magic Circle.

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A magic circle is a closed circle around the mage. The mage then imbues that circle – which must have some physical reality, even if it is simply a line drawn in the earth or with chalk – with a spell and a point of additional Mana. The spell protects the mage against spells cast by other mages, but the mage must remain inside the circle. The larger the circle, the more people can shelter within it and be protected, but the more mana must be invested in activating the circle. As a rule of thumb, the number of arms-lengths radius, multiplied by itself, is the requirement. So one mana can protect 1 person, 2 mana can protect three people (i.e. 1 plus 2), 3 mana can protect six (i.e. 3 plus 3), 4 can protect 10 (i.e. 6 plus 4),, 5 can protect 15, and so on.

The spell of protection is powered by the Mage’s mana. Mana impacting the magic circle is focused inward toward the Mage – so his risks of Mana Burn may be seriously increased. Once the protection spell is cast, the mage is free to cast some other spell, the cost of which should always be at least equal to the expected influx plus any capacity that the mage wishes to retain. In other words, any excess has to be expelled before it causes deleterious effects.

Part of the influx must be spent replacing the extra Mana required by the Circle, because the old mana investment is continually leaking out as the protection spell degrades. This creates a zone of Mana Turbulence, in which spellcasting is much harder than usual, and in which vast numbers of mana flares can occur.

Eventually, the protection spell will expire. Since it is the vehicle for the extra mana emplaced into the circle, it too ceases to have any effect. There are many consequences of this reality.

First, the Mana Turbulence flows slowly ‘downstream’ with the normal Mana flow, gradually smoothing out and becoming less disrupted, once the spell ends.

Second, in practice, any mage seeking to cast a spell upon another who is within a Mana Circle must expend additional Mana upon his spell greater than that of the circle before their spell can reach the target, and must also overcome the protection conferred by the spell of the mage within the circle. A single mage, concentrating on defense, may be able to withstand attack by two, three, even half-a-dozen, more powerful mages – for a while.

Third, any mage who is in between another and the inflow of mana to that second mage has a substantial advantage if they emplace a magic circle around themselves due to the turbulence in the Mana flow. Casting difficulties may as much as double or triple. For this reason, experienced Mages naturally place themselves to one side or another of the mana flow being used by the protected mage. Of course, if the latter has positioned himself to intercept the most powerful Mana flow, this also confers a disadvantage on the attacking mage.

Fourth, as you can see, duels between mages are often won and lost before the first spell is cast. Tactical preparations and strategic spell usage and hidden allies are essential to surviving such. Treat any such situation that may arise as life-and-death. Arcane-oriented societies frequently have rules regarding duels that MUST be observed for the civil good. Failure to do so will generally result in any passing mage joining with the participant in the right, regardless of other considerations.

Pentagrams

Finally, we come to the exact opposite of a Magic Circle – a Pentagram. This is a complex arcane structure that takes considerable time and effort to prepare.

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The mage stands outside the Pentagram and summons some creature, who is forced by the Summoning spell to appear within it. Observe the mana flow. It starts with the Mage, who invests all the mana he can spare into the Pentagram, reserving only what it will cost to cast the Summoning. New Mana then rushes into the mage from the Mana Flow to replace it, as usual.

The invested Mana courses around the points of the pentagram. To facilitate this, the mage should always position himself between the source of the Mana Flow and the head of the pentagram, which should point toward him. As with a magic circle, mana continually leaks from the pentagram and must be replaced by the Mage; it creates intense Mana Turbulence, and many Mana Flares downstream. This, in turn, affects the surrounding mana flows, which Sensitives can detect; it might not be known who or what has been summoned, but it will be known that something or someone has been.

In order to cross the Pentagram, either physically or with a spell, a mage confined within must not only overcome the Mana placed into the Pentagram by the caster, they must contend with the internal turbulence – tripling the cost of any spell cast AND the difficulty of successfully casting the spell.

On top of that, the Pentagram leeches its next load of replacement Mana from any spell so cast, permitting the caster to replenish his own reserves, and reducing the effectiveness of the spell so cast accordingly, and as much again will be reflected back onto the imprisoned mage. A one-point pentagram has little effect; a 10-point pentagram is a serious problem.

Consider a spell costing 20 mana being cast within a 6-point pentagram. Six points of the spell will be absorbed by the pentagram, renewing it, leaving 14. Six more will be reflected back at the caster, and Six will be lost to the internal Turbulence. That leaves just 2 to affect the caster of the pentagram – so the spell will only have 2/20ths of its normal effectiveness. And that’s before any defenses are taken into account.

The caster is not invulnerable, but is very well-protected. A pentagram does not guarantee that a summoned creature will remain within, but it is as certain a protection and a restraint as has ever been devised. Especially if the caster is also within a magic circle.

Final Word

Magic is a rich and complex tapestry, with many areas ripe for customization. Devising fundamental principles permits consistency and believability across many such customization instances. You don’t have to understand why something works the way it does – just define that it does, and then look at the ramifications as thoroughly as possible.

You could take the ones that I’ve outlined above (where a lot of the ramifications have been spelled out for you) and adapt it to your needs, or use it as inspiration, or simply use it as a list of the many areas that you can tinker with to make your world your own.

Once you have a description of how things work, rules are relatively easy to write/adapt to reflect that description. And that’s all it takes.

All illustrations are taken from the Jordenheim press pack unless otherwise noted, reproduced with permission from WRKS games.

It has always been my opinion that of all the pantheons, the Norse are the most suited to application within a superhero campaign. The Greek deities are too whimsical, the Romans too arrogant; the Norse are the most level-headed in many respects. What’s more, the Vikings had a sense of the rule of law that the others lack, and while any modern lawyer might find the forms unfamiliar, they would recognize the principles. The same is true of the government, in many respects.

On top of that, you had the established rivalry between Thor and Loki which naturally lends itself to larger-than-life situations, tailor-made for a superhero context.

When first I brought the Norse into my superhero campaign, I had a number of sources to draw upon.

• First, but by no means foremost, were the Marvel Comics. While some inspiration came from that source, it was by no means my primary reference.
• Second, and a far stronger reference, was the first story in “The Incompleat Enchanter” by L Sprague DeCamp and Fletcher Pratt. In particular, I liked the relationship displayed between Thor and Loki in that story.
• Third, and a more visual reference, was a DC comics story which featured a villain pretending to be Thor. The hero of the story was the relatively little-known Sandman (and Sandy, the Golden Boy), and the art was by the Legendary Jack Kirby. I drew on this for the look of my Thor, after throwing in clothing a bit closer to the Marvel style.
• Fourth, and a large source of inspiration, was “To Reign In Hell” by Stephen Brust. To paraphrase and redirect the tagline of that book, “The Norse know the prophecies of Ragnarok, in which Loki betrays them and is killed. Loki is no idiot. There is a discrepancy here that needs to be explained.” The answers that I found to that discrepancy lay in the characterization from the first source.
• The final resource on which my initial view was drawn was the original AD&D Deities & Demigods. The look of my Thor in particular was the “Thor” of the DC comics dressed in the Armor shown in this volume.

As the campaign progressed, I added more resources, which subtly revised the initial creations.

• The “Asgard Saga”, a two-part story spread through the X-men and New Mutants annuals one year, which delved a little deeper into the mythology and provided key visual reference for Asgard itself.
• A translation of the original Norse myths into a single epic story in modern English prose, “Myths Of The Norsemen” by Roger Lancelyn Green.
• A science-fiction novel, “Project: Millennium“, in which genetically-engineered replicas of the Norse Gods (with high-tech analogues of the mythological Norse arms and equipment) are pressed into battle against a vast human army based on the military forces of Richard III for the entertainment of aliens.

(All the above links are to copies of the books in question for sale on Amazon).

Over the years, Asgard and it’s fate have loomed as an ever more-central element of the campaign, and with each such deepening, I have invested more and more effort into gathering resources and enlarging my understanding of the foundations of both mythology and the people who believed it, the Vikings.

It was against this background that I reviewed “Journey To Ragnarok”, a series of 5e adventures built around Norse Mythology (reviewed in Goody and Project Roundup April 2017: Ten Goodies To Back or Buy) and “Yrisia’s Nightmare”, an adventure for Pathfinder and 5e D&D (in Yrisa’s Nightmare and other goodies) a couple of years earlier.

From which you may surmise that I’m always on the lookout for a good RPG interpretation of Norse mythology. Today, I’m going to tell you about another one, Jordenheim by WRKS games. This is a game system and setting, and revolves around the rise of a new religion, Khristianity, which threatens the supremacy of the Elder Gods. Jordenheim consists of four major regions, Norge, Suomi, Danmark, and Sverige, each with its own history, thriving cities, rich culture, customs, and trade. These regions co-exist with the Shroud, a realm created but abandoned by the Elder Gods, filled with magic, mythical beasts, and adventure.

I’ve had a copy of the core rulebook and press pack waiting for review for some time now – delayed first, because it wasn’t yet available to the general public, and second, by my desire to do as good a job as it looked like it deserved.

Between these two reasons, I’ve been waiting for three months to tell you about it! So let’s get started, before the Fimbulwinter takes us all…

Metaconcept & Background

Jordenheim started as a game universe by Kosala Ubayasekara to underpin the development of computer games by WRKS Games, but “Kos” loved the results so much that it was decided to import it into his other love, Tabletop RPG Gaming.

That meant that he either had to adapt it to a published game system like D&D or to find a bespoke solution. In researching their options, he came across one by a long-time friend, Dan Cross. The result is a simple but subtle RPG designed for 2–5 players plus a GM. While there are some gaming groups larger than this out there, that profile should match the majority of groups.

Metastructure

The Core Rules is the first volume in a planned 3-volume set, but is designed to be a standalone product. There’s very little information on the other two volumes and their intended content, but that’s worth bearing in mind if something seems inadequately covered.

Without more detailed information on the other volumes, this review will focus only on the Core Rules as a standalone product.

Structure

The 141-page PDF consists of six chapters plus 2 appendices:

• World Primer – history, calendar, creation, the power of faith, culture, geography, ‘The Shroud’
• Character Creation – backgrounds, character classes, advantages and disadvantages, combat prep, equipment, gender & age
• Abilities & Feats – traits, skills, feat list (instant & maintainable feats plus feats by class)
• Combat system – basics, time structure, initiative, action order, surprise, movement, standard attacks (blades, magic, archery, brawling, etc), defense pools, saving throws, combat options
• Magical Powers – the origins of magic, anomalies, sources of magical power, the Pantheon, spell casting, spell structure, spells by deity, elder spell powers lists, Khristian Miracles
• Game Mastering – character advancement, rewards, opponent & NPC development, magic, ‘full-fledged NPCs’, equipment & magic items
• Appendix 1 – GM’s guide & combat example
• Appendix 2 – Jordenheim pronunciation

Unlike some PDFs (and this is a bigger trick than it might seem at first), the page numbers in the contents list (from which the above summary was derived) match the page numbers within the PDF. The chapters and major sections are also bookmarked, but there are subsections which are not – for example, you can’t locate or go directly to the introduction from this built-in index. Instead, this matches the breakup stated in the table of contents.

Most of the time, this won’t be a problem, but it does mean that there’s more to Jordenheim than meets the eye of those descriptions alone. For example, scattered through the book are a number of tips for those brand-new to TTRPGs – and that makes this an excellent primer for those new to the hobby. I’ll have more to say on that in a later section.

Art

Art is by Florian Herold and Dominik Derrow with contributions from Cornelia Booysen. It generally isn’t framed off, placing the illustrations inline. To some extent, that limits the utility of this as a source of illustrations. However, it contributes to the sense of unity between illustrations and content to a far greater extent than might be expected; you often get the (quite deliberate) impression that the art has been painted directly onto the “page” that you are looking at, with the page “texture” underlying the image.

In addition to the art provided in the press kit, I’m including a partial screen capture from the high-res version of the Core Rules to show you what I mean:

This isn’t always the case, however; some art has a squared off background in a more traditional manner, rather than bleeding into the page. It is the presence of these examples that reveals the power of the more-frequently utilized approach; they are almost jarring in comparison.

That said, the press-kit has standalone versions of many pieces of the art, so the prospect of an “art pack” being made available if enough people request it is definitely non-negligible. Or one of those “later volumes” might be an art-book. Or WRKS may add a fourth volume.

The art itself has a soft, almost watercolor feel to it, fairly reminiscent of the art in Ysira’s Nightmare, but some of the techniques are strongly indicative of oil paint – and both might be the result of skilled digital artwork! This gives it a very atmospheric flavor that contributes to a “storybook” feeling.

I’ve scattered a number of representative pieces of eye candy through this review, but these are all smaller in size than the versions in the book, or cropped to fit the layout used by Campaign Mastery. Either way, what you are seeing here is only a hint of the content within the book.

Setting

At first glance, Jordenheim will look familiar as a location to most people and especially to Europeans. Okay, to most gamers – we tend to be more aware of other countries than the run-of-the-mill citizen. But that’s a whole other matter; let’s not get side-tracked. This is, however, not quite the Scandinavia of our world. Here, the Norse Mythology is closer to the truth, the gods are real, magic is real, and the monsters of the Norse Myths are real – and all of this has a profound effect on the history of the region.

Beside this text, I’ve presented a massively-reduced version of the Jordenheim map and a 75% scale extract from that map to provide both an overview and a sense of the style.

In Jordenheim’s cosmology, the universe is divided into two principle realms that co-exist spatially – the mortal world of Jordenheim itself, and the Shroud, more properly titled “The Shrouded Realm”, a place of magic and myth where the Gods and Alfar dwell.

This is not explained until the 36th page of the core book, even though it is really hard to make any sense of the repeated references to the Shroud in earlier sections without understanding it.

The mortal realms

Jordenheim is divided into four principle regions: Norge, Suomi, Danmark, and Sverige. Each is presented in ample detail to give them verisimilitude, with detailed geography, climate, ecology, culture, principle cities, economies, and histories. At the same time, there’s a lot of blank space around the edges of these pre-defined locales for the GM to make each region his own.

None of the choices made give a sense of being capricious; the geography influences the other aspects of each region in believable ways, the ecology influences culture and commerce, and so on. Together, they provide a believable foundation upon which to build.

The Shroud

The Shroud is as significant a place as the mortal realms in total within this game setting. The geography in parts mirrors that of the world “below”, as though the Shroud were a superimposed reality coexistent with the normal world – and this is the authors’ intent. In some parts of the world, the connection to the Shroud is more tenuous than in others, a function of belief in the underlying cosmology on the part of the residents.

Flora and Fauna also mirror those of the mortal realm, though the mirror is that of a fun-house – creatures of the Shroud can be larger and stronger, and may have abilities that their lesser representatives lack.

Elsewhere, there is less similarity between the two worlds. In essence, eight of the nine worlds of Norse Myth are condensed into this one existence, existing as regions or as sub-dimensions of the Shroud.

This simplifies a number of the mythological elements structurally, and defines a more concrete relationship between the traditional cosmological elements that is frequently absent in the source material. At the same time, it permits the Supernatural elements of the game to be distinct in each of the human regions, adding to the distinctiveness of those realms. From a superficial review I immediately had a number of ideas of how to incorporate this material into my own version of the Nine worlds!

I might argue that the structure of this part of the game-book might have been better served defining the Shroud at the start, and then incorporating each of the sections on its’ properties into the specifics of that region – so that “The Shroud in Sverige” becomes part of the “Sverige” entry – but there is also utility in this arrangement in that it highlights the differences between the two planes of existence. There is a certain majesty conferred upon the Shroud as a result that might be worth the price of the initial confusion that results from a direct reading of the content. But 30-odd pages is a long time to wait for an explanation of something fundamental to the setting.

Overall Impressions

I could drench this section in superlatives quite easily, but such things, if over-used, lose their impact. Suffice it to say that a superficial review conjured up ideas for at least half-a-dozen adventures with no effort whatsoever – and that’s before the machinations and troubles of the Gods and their enemies are taken into account.

One factor that might weigh heavily against this as a game setting in the eyes of many is that PCs are expected to be human (though other races do exist and half-bloods are possible).

A note on the mythology

Jordenheim draws heavily on parts of Norse myth that are often sanitized or ignored by other gaming sources, for example the origins of the Gods (which bear some resemblance to the origins in Greco-Roman mythology of their deities – just substitute “Giants” for “Titans” and the commonalities are impossible to ignore). That should be regarded as an added bonus to anyone valuing this as Norse-related source material, and is worth special mention.

At the same time, this is material of a more mature nature than that usually presented in RPGs – modern teens should have no problems with it, but it might not be entirely suitable for children (which is the reason for that sanitizing in the first place, i suspect). So that’s something else to bear in mind.

Game System

Characters are constructed using a points-buy system. The basis of a human character is 30 points. A cultural package based on the region from which a character derives costs 8-12 of these points, while a character class will cost 10-12 more. That leaves 6-12 points which can be spent improving abilities conferred by these packages or adding additional capabilities to the character. To spend more than this (and most characters will want to do so), a character can take disadvantages which provide additional construction points. There is an initial cap of 4 character points in disadvantages, so this provides only a small scope for added enhancements. Furthermore, disadvantages “acquired” in the course of play, or worsened, earn the character no points.

It takes a while before you notice that there are no stats at all in the usual sense. The system clearly operates on the premise that ability enhancement from better characteristics is indistinguishable from enhancements from skill and training, so why bother differentiating between the two?

This pattern of simplification is a constant theme throughout the character construction section, more frequently implied than overt.

Many of the abilities have costs higher than a character is likely to be able to afford at character creation, which immediately informs that experience rewards take the form of both monetary gain and additional construction costs.

The game system employs a full suite of dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12 – at least) – with the die size used for a particular check a function of the number of ranks in the class ability in question. The implication is that this is a “roll a target or higher to succeed” game system. For any task of fixed difficulty, the chance of failure therefore declines with each additional level in a noteworthy fashion.

For example, let’s say a 4 is needed for success. 1 rank (d4) has a 25% chance of success; 2 ranks (d6) has a 50% chance of success; 3 ranks (d8) has a 62.5% chance of success; 4 ranks (d10) has 70%; and 5 ranks (d12) has 75% chance.

Notice that the increase from one rank to the next earns a progressively smaller improvement, if these assumptions are correct. Balancing that is that at each rank, you gain access to the potential for success at more difficult tasks – if a target number is 7, then one- and two-rank character need not apply; they cannot possibly get a result that high. Success only becomes possible with three ranks or more – possible magical assistance excepted.

Class abilities are structured into skill or trait ‘trees’, with a primary ability defined as the ‘trunk’ of the tree. This is not a superficiality; the availability of some class abilities is determined by the chosen primary ability. The more ranks you have in branches of your unique tree, the greater your character’s overall effectiveness – determined by adding together the maximum possible result on the relevant die roll. 1 rank = d4 = +4 to the total; 2 ranks = d6 = +6 to the total; and so on. Spending character points outside the tree thus increases a character’s breadth, but there is an automatic imperative to refocus on the core aspects of the character’s class.

A lot of the game system appears to function in this way, burying important game mechanics where they aren’t immediately obvious. This keeps the game mechanics relatively straightforward (though you still need to read them closely), but it also means that it would be really easy for game mechanics tweaks to have unintended and possibly game-breaking consequences.

That said, there are a number of very interesting and innovative approaches in these game rules. Even if you can’t translate them directly to another game system, studying them will definitely further your understanding of game mechanics.

Layout Issues

It was while reading through the early sections of the character creation chapter that layout issues within the core rulebook became a problem for the first time. To illustrate the problem, here’s another screen capture, one that shows the presentation of specifics of the first three ability ranks:

It’s really hard to see where one passage of text ends and the next starts – it’s a wall of text that is hard to interpret.

This isn’t usually a problem with Jordenheim, but in this particular section they have dropped the ball just a little bit. It would have been relatively easy to fix:

All I’ve done is broken the sections up with a little space in between them and done a quick-and-easy bolding of the identifying text of each section. This makes it immediately obvious what relates to what – and what doesn’t.

But this is a relatively minor quibble.

Overall, the game mechanics appear to have a subtlety and richness that is buried beneath a relatively simple surface and should make for good game-play – once you get used to the rules. But the character construction system would need to be read very closely before any attempt is made to run the system – this isn’t one of those cases where you can figure things out on the run, not very effectively, anyway.

That in turn should deliver on the promise of a “fast-paced rule set”.

Paper background by Mike

Combat

The concept of the ability tree doesn’t show it’s real importance until you start working on the combat capabilities of a character. When you get to step 4 of the character construction process, you find that the total of the maximum values of the abilities within your ‘tree’ is your hit points.

Defense comes in two varieties – passive and active. Active is accessed with actions like parrying, dodging, and so on, while passive is always there. Armor and shields offer straight damage reduction.

That means that a character who is trying to defend himself is better protected than an identical character who is not, but no matter how skilled the character may be, his protection will eventually run out if attacked for long enough. It’s easy to see combat between near-equals taking the standard strategic form of “defend until your attacker misses, then attack until you miss, repeat until one of you goes down”.

When you actually get to the combat section of the mechanics, however, you find that the mechanics are actually more sophisticated than this makes them seem.

There is no “to hit” roll in this game system; instead, the attacker rolls dice to determine a potential for damage to be inflicted and compares that directly with the value of the defense raised by the target. If the total is higher than the defense, then the armor’s damage reduction value is deducted from the remaining attack total; if there’s anything left, then both the active and passive defense pools employed by the target are reduced. If they get down to 0, the target is rendered unconscious; if it falls to a negative value based on the class level of the character (4, +4 per class level). So higher level characters are harder to kill, but in a completely separate way from their combat capabilities.

This avoids the compounding of combat effects that makes D&D level gains such a non-linear power progression, while still making a 3rd level character better than a 2nd level character.

Overall, the combat system is more complex than it initially appears, but – like the rest of the game system – has a deceptively simple surface.

The Magic System

The rulebook definitely scores some bonus points from me in this area. Characters gain very few spells in comparison with other systems, but there are a wealth of useful ones available – and those are different for each source. On top of that, there is another tier of spells that can only be obtained through adventuring. The result is that every mage is a different proposition, and no mage can be so universally powerful or skilled that they make other character archetypes redundant.

There are other nuances – spells don’t automatically last more than a single round, but can be maintained with a roll – one that is more difficult with increasing spell power. There is also a maximum extent to this extension of duration according to the character’s rank in the core ability of mages, “Devotion”, which comes from the character’s class level.

All told, the system is simpler than that of D&D or Pathfinder, but no less sophisticated, and avoids all the pitfalls that seem inherent to the magic systems within those games.

It’s when you look at the list of spells associated with each Deity that the same layout issues arise as discussed earlier, though in slightly lesser form. In a nutshell, there isn’t enough distinction between the name of a spell and the name of the deity that grants that spell. Sure, you can figure it out in a second or two – but it looks like one long list, not multiple shorter lists.

Publisher

WRKS games aims to be a publisher for independent game producers, a platform for publication, as they describe it. Their business model is to take a small flat fee from each copy sold, currently £1. If you’re interested, visit www.wrks-games.com.

They are London based, friendly, generous with their time, and professional. Exactly what an independent “studio” should look for in a publishing partner.

I get the impression that their primary focus is still on computer games, so this basic business model may vary with respect to RPGs – you can sell 100 computer games to every copy of an RPG supplement and the latter will still be considered a success relative to the former, and that changes the dynamics and viability of the business model.

If they care enough about a product, this may not make a difference to them, but don’t take the low flat fee as sustainable outside the computer game market, and don’t assume that it will apply if you pitch an RPG product to them.

Click the cover to buy Jordenheim

Physical Reality

Jordenheim comes as a PDF in two formats – a low-res version for digital use and a high-res version for printing. Both contain 141 pages, not counting a front cover (separate digital art in the review version).

How useful is it?

Now, we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty. There are five ways to measure this, each with a different standard to meet.

As a standalone product

I would rate Jordenheim as good-to-excellent in these terms. It has a unique flavor and sufficient depth that – as a self-contained product – it would certainly justify purchase – if you are at all interested in what it offers.

As an introduction to RPGs

The superficial simplicity of the mechanics make it a good choice, and the richness of the mechanics under the surface mean that it would be playable by a wide range of ages. But I have to deduct points in this category because the background material is hard to separate out of the product and demands a level of maturity that leaves it a less-suitable for children.

For ages 13-adult, I would consider it excellent for this purpose, with enough depth that players can explore it for quite some time. For those younger, depending on the individuals, it might be poor-to-good.

In terms of mechanics, it would be a lot easier than D&D or Pathfinder.

As a game setting

This basically ignores half the product, and some of the depth as a game setting comes from the character differentiation produced by the game mechanics. So detrimental would this deficit be that as a game setting alone, without the mechanics, I would rate it as mediocre but inspirational.

Replacing the mechanics would be possible, but would not be true to the flavor of the setting. The two strands of content supplement and enhance each other; the game setting is far stronger with the game mechanics than without them.

If I restore the mechanics to consideration, even if they are to be translated into some other game system, the value of the core rules as a game setting rises to excellent – if you are interested in doing something with Norse Mythology.

As a game system

It would certainly be possible to rip out the incorporated game setting and just use the game system, though it would be a lot of work because the two are so tightly integrated. You would need to generate a lot of material for your chosen game setting using the material provided as a template.

That said, I like the mechanics – a lot – and it might be worth the effort. I can see a swashbuckling Robin Hood campaign, or an Arthurian campaign, working well with this game system – if you’re willing to do the campaign prep to make them viable. Heck, a Barsoom campaign would probably work, too, as would a Middle-Earth campaign. Or an Arrakis campaign. Or… well, I think you get the point.

So many of the answers to the standard design questions relating to RPG mechanics that are employed in Jordenheim are different to those I’ve seen anywhere else that if you’re into game mechanics at all, this is a product that you have to check out.

As a gaming resource

Finally, as a resource / supplement to add to others, Jordenheim is excellent. The focus on elements of the Norse Mythology that are skimmed over or ignored completely by other products makes this a useful building block with no substitute.

Value For Money?

I’ve been building up to the most difficult questions of all: is Jordenheim value for money?

£24.99, the asking price, is roughly AU$44 or US$32. As usual, the Canadian Dollar is very similar in buying power to the Australian Dollar.

A typical game supplement costs about AU$75 for a hardcover of about 200-240 pages. This is shorter, so a proportionate decrease in that price-tag gives a comparison value of AU$48.

In other words, the cost is roughly comparable to what you would pay for a physical game supplement of comparable size.

Of course, not all costs scale to page count in a linear fashion – there are all sorts of overheads that are all-or-nothing, and all sorts of other variables. What’s more, the costs involved in the production of an electronic-only product are completely different to those of a physical product – see my 2012 article, Value for money and the pricing of RPG materials (Part 1, Part 2).

My Gut reaction is that if the specific content is of interest to you – a different magic system, differentiated spell lists by deity, differentiated feats and abilities by archetype/character class, a different game setting, a different combat system, or Norse Mythos reference material – then the quality of the work makes the price-tag acceptable, if not attractive. That takes in a very large swathe of the RPG community, so overall the answer is probably “Yes, this is value for money – just barely”. The more of those boxes that Jordenheim ticks for you, the more confident you can be in that answer.

Buying Jordenheim

You can buy the Jordenheim RPG Core Book for £24.99 from the WRKS online store.

More Information

Still need more convincing? Well, you can find out more about the Jordenheim Core Book at the Jordenheim page of the WRKS website.

Jordenheim has a distinct flavor all it’s own, and the more you read from it, the more that flavor sucks you into its world. Do yourself a favor and put it on your Christmas wish list – or decide that you just can’t wait that long.

Campaign Mastery’s turn as host of the Blog Carnival has now passed into the dusty pages of history, and the baton has passed to Gonz at Codex Anathema, whose topic is “Whose Relic Is It Anyway?”

That means that it’s time for a roundup of the submissions in response to our round of hosting – as usual, I’ve waited an extra week in case of late entries.
 

• What We Need in the Zenith-3 Campaign Is: More Pace – Campaign Mastery – As part of the anchor post, I looked at the most pressing need in my Zenith-3 campaign, which is for the plot to start accelerating. As is usually the case, that acceleration will start small and then grow. We’ve had one game session since, and it constitutes most of that “small start”; if all goes according to plan, starting next session, things should ramp up considerably!
   
• Simulated Unreality: Game Physics Tribulations – Campaign Mastery – I followed that up by looking at what had been the most pressing need in the campaign until the game session played just before the Carnival, of adjusting the game physics to more closely attune with (and justify/support) the game mechanics. There will be a follow-up post to this actually specifying how magic works in the campaign (now) in a week or two – I’m trying to decide whether or not I can justify it as a submission to the current Blog Carnival!
   
• What we need is… more focus – The Expanding Frontier – Tom hadn’t intended to write a submission to this carnival, but found the question posed bubbling away in the background of his mental processes until it hit the right spot and the answers came spilling out. His problem is, n a nutshell, overcommitment – as someone who has experienced that myself a time or two, I can sympathize! But if you ever feel like you’ve got a lot on your plate, check out his review of all the irons he has in the fire at the moment. And if you ever find yourself in the same situation, check it out (especially the comments) for some direction on solving the problem. Step one is always recognizing that there is a problem… I couldn’t help but observe the similarities between his situation, and the more confined issue of too much game prep to do and too little time to do it all, so there’s wisdom there to unpack for all of us who GM.
   
• What A DM Needs More – Codex Anathema – For his contribution, Gonz found himself ruminating on the balance of the “three pillars of D&D in it’s 5e form” – combat, exploration, and [in-game] social interaction – and finding that they are hugely out of whack. His solution was a greater emphasis on making non-combat challenges extraordinary and more interactive. In response, I reminisced in the comments of the anchor post for the carnival (the first link in this list) about some tweaks to the basic TORG skill resolution system that I was working on back when that was my primary campaign, and which had a similar sound to Gonz’s propositions, offered for whatever they were worth.
   

…And that’s it. But even if it didn’t result in a carnival entry, I can at least hope that I caused every potential participant to think about their campaigns in a different way for a while – which can only improve those campaigns.

Fame – and followers – always comes at a cost.
Image by Ivana Divišová from Pixabay, crop by Mike

Henchmen, Henchmen, Henchmen! – The Beginning

The time when a blog carnival roundup could amount to a full Campaign Mastery -scale article are long past – or, at least, haven’t prevailed for the last few years. But in his Facebook Group, The Okay Grognard Show, Mark Clover asked “How much do you subvert expectations when you create Henchmen as followers of PCs or Villains? Do all of the henchmen have to be goons?!?”

I intended to write a quick one-line answer, focusing on the villain side of the question, but felt the need to comment on the approach contained in that answer. And that grew a bit, and then a bit more. And immediately that I hit “post,” started realizing that I really wanted to expand on the answer – and to at least look at the other part of the question, PC followers. So that’s how I’m going to ‘bulk out’ this post.

Henchmen, Henchmen, Henchmen!

For me, the question of who a villain’s henchmen are always comes back to the psychology of the recruiter – but not the psychology now, the psychology then.

Any villain who needs to recruit a henchman has to find a balance between competing interests – ability, ambition, loyalty, and security. The first and last of these are undoubtedly the most important.
 

• Ability – First and foremost, the henchman must be capable of doing what the boss wants him to do. To some extent, the capabilities of the henchman will shape the plans of his employer, but to some extent, those plans will impact on the initial selection of a henchman to be recruited.
  

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• Ambition – The more broadly-capable the prospective henchman is, the more justification he has for grand ambitions – and while that can be a lever for the recruiter to manipulate, it can also cause problems at inconvenient times. The combination of ability and no personal ambition is rare and prized!
  

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• Loyalty Bosses inclined towards anarchy and chaos might enjoy the wild and sometimes manic actions of a henchman of like character, but they would have greater trust in solid and demonstrable reliability and loyalty. Everybody loves a Lawful subordinate! This quality opposes and inhibits Ambition, and vice-versa.
  

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• Security – Henchmen, by definition, are less capable than the master villain in at least some respects – even if those are only a willingness and capability of exploiting others. That means that every recruit poses a security risk, opens another vector for the leaking of critical information. That could be as small a risk as being followed, or bragging too much, or name-dropping, or as large a danger as turning state’s evidence if caught. But it also carries a second implication – since nothing is ever the employer’s fault, blame for failures must be attributed to the shortcomings of lesser mortals, and those would be uppermost in the villains’ mind in the recruitment of replacements.
  

It’s the combination of security, and the need for specialized skills / knowledge / abilities, that leads to the selection of non-standard henchmen – i.e., subverting the goon tropes.

So I start by deciding (in relative terms) when the henchman was first recruited, and what the villain was planning at the time. I take into consideration where he can recruit from at the time, and who he is likely to find there.

As time moves forward, his plans may change, his priorities may change, his plans may change, he may gain access to a broader population base, and what he can offer will certainly change. So the more recent recruits will be markedly different to the early recruits. Once PCs start meddling, that it likely to introduce a third change – the villain may even start recruiting a set of operatives specifically to prevent the interference.

I once hit my PCs with a villain who was completely in over his head and struggling to cope. In the course of blocking his most recent scheme, they learned that this was his 34th attempt at achieving anything noteworthy, and the first to ever get this far – his previous plot collapsing when his critically-emplaced minion died of a heart attack mere days before the moment was due. By the time the villain finished his soliloquy, the PCs were so moved that they seriously thought about letting him get away with things, just for a little while! (The whole thing was inspired by a Road Runner – Coyote cartoon, and a Bugs Bunny ‘toon in which a guilt trip is laid on Bugs which makes him (momentarily) turn into a shoe’s heel).

There’s an element of opportunism to be taken into consideration, too. Sometimes a ripe plum will simply fall into the hands of a villain, so that can’t be ignored.

So let’s break it down:
 

• Vague ambitions, Preliminary plans
  • ⇒ Generic Flunkies from the pool of available potential recruits

• Early attempts
  • ⇒ early failures
    • ⇒ recruits who do not suffer the flaws blamed for the failures

• Middle-period attempts
  • ⇒ amended ambitions (perhaps grander, certainly more specific)
    • ⇒ better planning and a modicum of experience
      • ⇒ modest or preliminary successes
        • ⇒ a broader pool of potential recruits resulting in more capable henchmen

• Unexpected opportunism
  • ⇒ henchmen who break the mold
    • ⇒ revised plans and broader or altered ambitions to take advantage of the unexpected windfall.

• Firm plans now in progress
  • ⇒ henchmen recruited for specific purposes and abilities
  • ⇒ henchmen who probably don’t fit the “goon” mold
  • May include specific anti-PC task force once the PCs have meddled or acquired a reputation

But GM’s should not neglect the potential for working backwards from henchmen to villain – a random henchman can fill in a number of blanks in the villain’s past, simply by looking at the answers to:

1. Why was this henchman recruited?
2. Where was this henchman recruited?
3. What was he doing there?
4. What does his nature, and that of the villain, imply about the villain’s plans and ambitions at the time?
5. And what does that tell you about the villain’s origins, past, and psychology?

Tropes are unimportant. If it’s logical for the villain to recruit goons, given his ambitions and plans at the time, then he will recruit goons. The more grandiose the ambitions, the less likely it is that ordinary goons will suffice – but they may still be necessary as a stepping stone. The later in a villain’s career that recruitment occurs, the more likely it is that a henchman will be atypical, either because they were recruited for specific purposes or because they were an opportune pick-up once the villain was in a position to attract broader ‘support’.

Followers, Followers, Followers!

The story of followers of PCs turns the above on its head, because these are not necessarily people that the PCs would have chosen. So the answer to this side of the question rests on the issue of exactly why the follower is a follower of the PC?

I was actually contemplating this issue the other day, without realizing it; I recently bought a boxed set of the singles by the Bay City Rollers (3 CDs and a booklet), and was musing on the fact that they were only moderately supported within my school year, and mostly on a song-by-song basis, but were embraced far more strongly by my sister’s classmates, a year younger – and, so far as I recall, were supported even more weakly by those a year ahead of me in schooling, who generally saw them as a “tartan gimmick”.

I suspect that the answer to the question posed above is going to be different in the case of each different follower, that each will have some itch or need that the PCs do (or might be expected to) scratch or provide.

Some will be cases of the NPCs looking for what the PCs are providing to their followers; some will be cases of the NPC hoping or expecting to use the PCs for their own ends, and some of these expectations will be reasonable and some not.

Some will be followers because they admire or respect something about one or more of the PCs. Others may be followers because someone they like or respect is a supporter – though they may not go so far as to be a follower.

You would have to have been living under a rock for the last 40 years or so not to be aware of the potential price of celebrity. Whether they want to, or not, famous people find themselves in the center of a cult of personality, and the resulting echo chamber of endorsement and approval generally has two effects: either the resulting ego-boost goes to the person’s head, or they try so hard to live up to the hype that the pressure gets to them and they crash and burn – or both. The younger the celebrity, the less protection they generally have against these forces and pressures.

That said, the more one has grown up in a modern setting and seen these influences act upon others who came before you, the better armed you are to resist them yourself. Equipping the modern generation to cope with fame is built into the fabric of modern society. The real victims were those who were young and famous when the phenomenon was real.

With that foundation, let’s look at some specifics.

For every NPC that I create, or use within a plot, I ask a couple of questions:

1. What desire / need might support for the PC(s) satisfy?
2. What desire / need might antipathy for the PC(s) satisfy?
3. How extreme is the NPC likely to be in their support / antipathy?
4. Does this attitude impact the plot?
5. Is that impact beneficial or harmful?
6. Should I keep this NPC as written or replace them?
7. If I keep them, how should this attitude on the part of the NPC be expressed? Clothes, iconery, verbally, mannerisms, actions?

All of this means that every follower is unique, not cut from the same cloth. Some may represent popular tropes, because those tropes represent or codify a truth about relationships or societies; others will subvert or ignore those tropes and be atypical.

Four examples come to mind – and I am sure that the players will all remember the first vividly even though it was 18 years ago, by my estimation, maybe more:
 

• The PCs are summoned to the local police station where they encounter a middle-aged woman wearing a dotted shower curtain as a cape and nothing else, who is sure that she has what it takes to be a member of their group and that the group needs her. This encounter signaled to the players that their characters fame, at least locally, had reached the point where unwanted effects of celebrity would be occurring. The setting was an alternate 1960s, with Joe McCarthy as President.
   
• The same campaign is now in a different alternate timeline in which it is the 2050s and the British Empire never fell (though it did evolve). They are required to host regular tours through “public areas’ (including the tourist shop) of their headquarters because if they didn’t, the fans would get in, anyway and they need the extra revenue, anyway – their facility is very expensive to maintain!
   
• At one point I created an NPC whose hobby was killing dogs because one had once intruded on the shadow of a PC with whom he was obsessed. During the writing of the adventure, I decided that this sideshow would distract from the main plot too much and redid the character to someone who thought the PCs were all hype and no substance, and hence was mildly antagonistic, but who would do their job (in this case, provide the PC with necessary information). The results were entertaining without derailing the plotline.
   
• There have, of course, also been various con-men with forged endorsements and people trying to make deals in their name and otherwise insinuate themselves into the PCs lives for their own purposes.
  

The Wrap-up

There you have it – Blog Carnival, Henchmen, and Followers. Since the latter two also revolve around needs, and their satisfaction, they are thematically consistent with the first – at least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it like an obsessed follower!

Sometimes, you just have to let the world get into trouble without you…
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Yesterday, I took the day off (actually, this was back in April 2018 – this post has sat around unfinished for quite a while, I’;m probably due to do it again!)

This morning (April 2018 again), I was reflecting on how much I enjoyed setting aside the stresses and strains of daily life and just enjoying myself, and how rejuvenating it had been, and how much I had needed it without having realized it.

And then, as is my wont, I thought about those notions in the context of an RPG.

When was the last time that you built a day off into your character’s lives?

The Day Off

The Sabbath used to be about religion. People were excused from work to attend religious services – and some of those lasted all day. What leisure time existed was reserved for the rich and politically affluent.

The rise of the middle class in the 19th century England required better-educated citizens in many occupations, creating heightened literacy and wealth, and the concept of leisure time began to spread downwards through the social strata. Greater ease of travel and a heightened sense of community created things to do, and the nine-hour workday became increasingly common; the 1874 Factory Act limited the working week to 56 1/2 hours, and began integrating a system of annual vacations into the working lives of citizens, starting with white-collar workers and spreading into the working classes. Hundreds of seaside resorts emerged through the combination of affordable accommodations and inexpensive railway fares.

At the same time, religious prohibitions against secular activities on Sundays began to fade in stridance.

By the late Victorian era, a leisure industry existed in all British cities, and the pattern was being copied across Western Europe and North America, providing regularly-scheduled entertainment of suitable length and convenient locations at inexpensive prices, including sporting events, music halls, and popular theater.

The roots of everything we consider ‘normal life’ can be traced back to these developments. As these activities became an integrated element of the economy, it caused irreversible social changes. First, it created an industry that profited from giving the citizens more leisure time, and that would lobby government. Second, it created a demand for greater wages at all levels of society, and a recognition that an improved standard of living was both achievable and attainable. This also created a demand for upward social mobility. And third, it became possible for the government to shift to a broader-based taxation system and increase both the funds available for public expenditure and the disposable income of its subjects.

Half-day Saturdays

In the US, this social transition took place over the years 1894 to 1915, though antecedents in the upper classes and white-collar workers extended back to the middle of the century. Employers began, voluntarily or otherwise, to reduce the working hours required of the workforce, in particular instituting half-day Saturdays. This gave both mid-level supervisors and the workers increased leisure time. Other types of workplaces were forced to follow suit. Vacations became regularly offered, though these were usually unpaid.

Some historians suggest that the increased monotony of factory work (as compared to the never-ending list of different chores associated with a more rural existence) also created or enhanced a deeper need and desire for time away from the workplace; they suggest that productivity improved with a happier workforce, benefiting both business and workers.

I can’t argue with the “deeper need,” because that is a commonly-recognized phenomenon even today, but my personal impression is that every such change had to be forced on the business world, and any such associated benefits were only recognized after the fact.

Other factors were undoubtedly at play, and contributing to the social movement – electrification made the streets safer at night, while improved health made leisure activities more accessible.

Public Holidays

In 1871, the Bank Holiday Act gave English workers a few paid holidays each year, but even at the end of the 19th century, most people had no paid holidays except bank holidays, and not everyone got those days. Nevertheless, the principle was established.

But there were a few other antecedents of note. The founding of modern Australia is commemorated every year on January 26, and this date was made a public holiday within the state of New South Wales (the original colony) as early as 1836. The country itself didn’t exist until Federation in 1901, after 34 years of negotiation between the independent settlements.

Independence Day in the US (July 4th) became an (unpaid until 1938) Federal Holiday in 1870. It had been recognized as a State Holiday in Massachusetts since 1781. The same Act of Congress also recognized New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day; in 1880, George Washington’s Birthday was added.

From these beginnings, the granting of public holidays has become widespread, as has the practice of these being paid days for non-casual staff. These days, public holidays are almost considered a “civil right” by most people.

The 40-hour week

Following World War 2, the US became the social leader of the world in many respects; policies were enacted there before anywhere else and began to spread globally as an international standard, though there remained some national differences.

In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which granted overtime to all employees who worked more than 44 hours in a calendar week. Two years later, the Act was amended to reduce the working week to 40 hours.

Demand for an 8-hour working day was a catalyzing force in labor movements throughout the western world even before the War. It’s fair to describe the US as simply the first domino; with each country that adopted the standard, the pressure on the others to follow suit only increased. The Commonwealth Arbitration Court approved the 40-hour week in Australia beginning January 1, 1948, after decades of union agitation on the subject (and on working conditions generally), for example. (It is worth noting that skilled workers of various types had won themselves the 40-hour week in Australia and New Zealand in the 1840s and 1850s)!

The working week has been reduced to 38 hours in many countries since; in some professions, the 36-hour week is now the standard. However, some of these reductions exclude lunch breaks, whereas the 38- and 40- hour weeks usually incorporate a fixed time-frame for lunch.

Rostered Days Off and Flex-time

In the 1970s, the concept of the Rostered Day Off became important. This permits an employee to work additional hours over their minimum requirement and accumulate the extra time over a standard period (usually 4 weeks) to recoup as paid days off. Because employers needed to be sure that critical work functions were carried out, these days off needed to be controlled by a roster, and there were occasionally other restrictions – some employers resisted RDOs after public holidays, for example, and there was often a restriction on the number of RDOs that an employee could accumulate. Other employers were more generous.

Flex-time, or Flexible hours, was an evolution of the RDO industrial conditions that gave the employee additional flexibility in their working hours, dividing the working day into core hours, when all employees had to be present, and non-core hours to either side of that daily requirement; the employee, to meet their required working hours, had to work some of these, but could choose to work late, work early, or split the required non-core hours on both sides.

In some cases, employers offered one of these as part of the pay-and-conditions entitlements, in some cases they offered both, and in some cases they offered neither. Quite often, reductions or caps in overtime pay were traded in industrial award negotiations for these entitlements.

Work Harder, Get Ahead

In the 80s and 90s, Japanese Management Techniques began to infiltrate western work places, often against strong resistance by industrial unions. The concept that working harder and longer gave you a competitive advantage when the time came for promotions and pay rises was a key attribute of these management techniques, if often unstated. At the same time, “stress” was becoming a key word in workplaces across the western world. In time, the term began to fade in favor of a broader one, “Work-Life Balance”.

But It’s An Adventure, It’s Exciting

While military forces may be on-call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (and such calls are more likely to occur when the unit is deployed or in a training cycle), the concept of down-time existed during the American Civil War. Soldiers have time to read and write letters, read books, participate in group recreations like watching films or live entertainment, and so on.

In many ways, the military life is representative of the circumstances of adventurers in an RPG. The adventure could start at any time, and is no respecter of time off; instead, an adventure is like a mission, with “time off” occurring after one “mission” and before the next.

Nevertheless, the psychological benefits of down-time are a well-established principle within the military.

But They’re Adventurers, They’d get used to it

To disprove this notion, the easiest approach is to look at the Ambulance Service, and especially at Burnout and suicide/depression rates. Nearly 90% of emergency service staff have experienced stress, low mood, or some form of mental distress. The same occurs in other emergency services such as firemen and police, medical dispatchers and emergency line operators, and so on.

That number will only have risen with the additional demands placed on them by the global pandemic.

Symptoms that arise with distressing frequency are PTSD-related, cardiac episodes, overeating & obesity, sleep disorders, and emotional dysfunction. On the job, fatigue and a reduced capacity for decision-making are common – which we often characterize as burnout.

61% of male ambulance personnel will be eligible for medical retirement below the age of 40, and 39% more will experience this by the age of 44, seventeen percent more again by the age of 49. Interestingly, women seem far more resilient in this respect (or find medical retirement less accessible) by a factor of 10.

Despite bring eligible, there is a great tendency for such workers to soldier on. Statistics show that none of those eligible claimed such retirement at less than 40, and only 2, 4, and 16% in the subsequent age bands.

There is a distinct peak of forced early retirement on medical grounds at 10-14 years of service, and 15-19 years is almost as high. If you get through that nine-year span still within the profession, your chances of avoiding forced retirement improve substantially.

Emergency personnel report having suicidal thoughts twice as often as other professions. Some of that differential may be due to a greater awareness of the dangers of such thoughts and hence a greater willingness to report them, and a reduction of the resulting stigma, but most of it has to actually derive from a higher incidence of mental and emotional disorders.

Despite these numbers, Health Care Practitioners in general are only 15th on the list of suicide rates, and Health Care Support staff are 17th, according to one major study by the CDC – 12.5 and 11.9 cases per 100,000 workers. Number one on this list are construction and mineral extraction workers, at 52.1 cases per 100,000. At least part of the reason has to be that these have ready access to the means, but a far greater part must be a willingness to admit a problem and seek help on the part of the medical profession.

Like adventurers, these professions involve acute stress and life-or-death decisions on a regular basis. In many ways, EMT personnel are directly comparable to adventurers – but we also have to factor in the military-like factors, which would only amplify the effects.

So The Characters Need A Day Off. What’s The Big Deal?

There are two problems to be solved: (1) simulating the need for a day off without interfering with the players freedom to play their characters, and (2) writing a day-off adventure that is nevertheless interesting, because the whole concept runs counter to what many players desire from their games.

Problem 1: Simulating The Need

The Solution is two-fold: one, placing the challenge before the player; and two, tonal nuancing.

Placing The Challenge

Simply tell the player that it’s been a long time since [character] had a break (it’s better if you can be specific) and perhaps they are starting to feel a little shopworn – and then let the player choose how to incorporate that into the way they play the character.

Tonal Nuancing

At the same time, you want to give the player something that he can play off of in expressing the weariness of the character. So ramp up the irritation level (from a character point of view) of the encounters and situations that you’re throwing at them. The notion being that things that they would normally take in their stride loom larger when you don’t have the energy to respond.

Problem 2: Writing A Day-Off Adventure

Everyone has a different idea of what a day off entails. For some characters, it might be relaxing with a good scroll (or with a naughty one!); for others it might be a day without deep moral and philosophical questions to worry about, when they can simply go completely hog-wild. Some play sports, some sleep in, some exercise, others laze and sub-bake. This is something that you will need to determine for each PC in consultation with the player.

Once you know what the “requirements” are, you can build encounters around them. Take our would-be reader: He decides to take the day off over breakfast (interacting with the waitress), comes across a book that he would enjoy reading, bargains for it, buys it, sets up a comfortable chair in a sunny spot, reads all morning save when he is interrupted by someone who wants to know what he’s reading, and so on. You can fill a day without once mentioning what’s actually in the book, content-wise!

Sometimes, you have an expectation of one type of leisure activity only for circumstances to dragoon you into another. You intend to go shopping, encounter a rather arrogant chess-player, decide to take him down a peg or two, and end up playing chess with the guy all day. That’s the equivalent of intending to read a book but getting caught up watching something on TV that you either didn’t know was on, or that you didn’t expect to find interesting.

Leisure-oriented plots may be a qualitatively-different type of roleplaying activity, and it might take you a while to wrap your head around them and what you can do to make them interesting, but you will get the hang of them.

And then something surprising will happen: you will find that your other encounters and plots improve as well. You’ve stretched your literary “muscles” in a new direction, but that direction has aspects and attributes in common with other types of encounters – and strengthening those “muscles” enhances your capabilities in those common areas.

Sometimes, the characters in your games need to let their hair down a little, too.

This montage is based on a storm image by Artur Pawlak, with lightning strikes from an image by skeeze and another from an image by AIAC Interactive Agency. Editing and color effects added by Mike. The button is from a set by 538778. All the images were sourced from Pixabay.

I Spent much of the weekend a few weeks ago performing my regular data backup.

Everyone in IT has horror stories resulting from inadequacy of backups. Even IT professionals and past professionals like myself – who know how essential backups are – have lost irreplaceable material to inadequacy of backups. That’s because there are two parts to the backup equation and people focus so intently on the first that they tend to ignore the second.

The first part:
     data → backup process → storage

The second part
     storage archive → restore process → restored data

When my old computer’s hard drive was failing (about 10 years ago), I very carefully backed up everything that I considered essential. Much of the most irreplaceable data went to a DVD-ROM that I had burned. This was a backup performed under considerable time pressure; the PC could fail completely at any moment because the Operating System itself was being rapidly corrupted. As a result, all my focus was on the first process.

Swapping the old hard disc into a new computer wasn’t an option; the cause of the Operating System corruption was impending hard disk failure – or so it seemed at the time.

Thus, there was total reliance on the backups to preserve my data.

I had a low level of confidence that everything could be saved, but I had to try.

This pessimism turned out to be Justified: the DVD-ROM could not be read by the drive in the new PC. I still don’t know why.

I persevered, having little other option. I was able to recover about 75% through other archives. Eventually, on a third machine, I managed to find a settings tweak that enabled recovery of the archived file from the failing Hard Disk – only to discover that the low-level program used to compile the archive would not function under my new operating system. It was Windows 3.1 software, and Windows 7 didn’t want to know about it. Nor does Windows 10, for that matter. But it worked perfectly with XP.

Essentially, it was a hundreds-of-Gb locked filing cabinet – with misplaced keys.

The remaining information was lost.

My documents and web links were saved. Everything CM-related was saved. Some artworks were lost, and some corrupted. Some material relating to old and unplayed campaigns was lost, but everything relating to the then ongoing campaigns was preserved. Some of my carefully-curated music files were lost – my Rolling Stones collection, for example – but a lot was preserved through other archives, too. And I still had the original CDs for a lot of what was lost. Lost and irreplaceable were all my original musical compositions with only a few exceptions. That includes the half-mixed MP3 versions that I was planning to put out as my first CD.

Even if the best-case scenario had prevailed, and all the data had been restored, or at least recovered, there would still have been some losses. A Backup is a snapshot of the way things were at the moment of the backup; at best, you can return to that moment in time. It’s a bit like reloading a saved game when computer-gaming – anything done (for good or ill) since the last save never happened.

But I’m not actually here to talk about the vagaries of computer dependence. Suffice it to say that lessons have been learned and the current backup protocols are unlikely to yield the same outcome should the worst occur!

I was preparing for this particular backup the day after my superhero campaign had resumed after a lengthy Covid-19 -induced hiatus, and the two thoughts connected to raise an interesting question: Backup and restore of a campaign? How?

Two processes

It’s clear that we’re talking about two processes – focusing on the first will get you nowhere unless you have already solved the second. The lessons of the computer world are directly applicable.

The first is making preparations for a potential future disaster. What prep-work is required will depend on the solution to the problem, and has to be specified as part of the description of any solution. Let’s call it the “backup process”.

The second is rebooting the campaign using that prep. This process will vary according to the prep process, which should have been designed with this usage in mind.

It’s not enough to be able to back up the campaign, in other words – you need to be able to use that backup to press the great reset button in the sky.

Different Emergencies, Different Protocols

What may not be as clear at first glance is that different problems will require different solutions. Specifically, there are two different types of problem and a host of different circumstances under which each can apply.

Problem #1: The PCs are about to make a mistake of campaign-killing proportions. This may or may not result in a total party kill (TPK). The GM can see it coming, and has hinted as broadly as he dares, but they aren’t taking any notice. A train-wreck is inevitable.

Problem #2: The PCs are killed. All of them, a TPK. This might be at the hands of the main antagonist (better) or in a random encounter (worse). They may have been unlucky, or may have made a mistake, or it might be the DM who has made the mistake. The train-wreck is either in progress or is complete.

Seven Solutions

I have seven solutions to offer, some better suited to one of these problems than the other. With some solutions, it will be necessary in the case of Problem #1 to let the disaster play out – at least to the point where the players can see that defeat/failure is inevitable – before the reset button can be pushed.

I have to admit to hating some of these solutions with a passion – but not so much that if it was the only way out, I wouldn’t use it; I would just try to impart some clever and original spin on it.

It only makes sense to me not to rely on any one or two solutions to the crisis. Between the two subtly-different problems and the range of possible circumstances, any one of them might be “the best answer” or “the right answer”.

That mandates that they all be low-impact low-prep sustainable solutions, so that it’s practical to have them all on standby. So that’s an additional factor to be taken into consideration.

The solutions I’ll be looking at are:

1. The Nightmare Is Ended
2. Dystopian Recovery
3. New PCs, Same Old Problems
4. Back In Time
5. The Jailbreak Adventure
6. Temporus Interruptus
7. The Great Reset Button In The Sky

1. The Nightmare Is Ended

One of the solutions to the problem that I especially despise is “it was all a dream”. Nevertheless, this can be a vital escape clause, and times when – because what took place wasn’t a single catastrophic error but an accumulation of smaller mistakes over a longer period of time – when this is the best answer.

One example is where the players have completely misinterpreted something the GM has said. If you notice this discrepancy at the time, you can correct the problem – but are then fighting Confirmation Bias, which is often a losing fight. The article to which I have linked offers possible solutions to the problem, but they generally require game time to implement – and that’s a luxury you might not have. So there are times when this is the best answer.

Prep Component

Prep consists of three things:

• keeping your campaign well-documented;
• selecting points within the game play that will be suitable platforms for a restart;
• having, on tap, some sort of original twist on the “it was all a dream”. This may in fact be a full adventure in its’ own right or a single scene.

The first item you should be doing already.

The second is a little trickier to offer advice on; it has to be before the “critical mistake” was made or the situation became irrecoverable, but there are a host of other considerations – what the PCs were doing at the time, what the state of the campaign was, and so on. There are so many variables that the decision will be half-instinctive. Ideally, you would like to be able to sum up the PC’s situation, and the current state of the campaign, in a single paragraph of no more than half-a-dozen lines, but that’s rare. Lulls in the emotional intensity are also preferable to moments of high intensity, because the restart will inevitably be such a lull. Ultimately, each GM will have to assess his own campaign as it proceeds to locate the most recent ‘reset point’, and such determinations will be as much instinctive as they are logically justifiable.

The third item is probably the most difficult. In a sci-fi or superhero campaign, you could have “glitches” in the artificial reality around the PCs start to show up in an adventure following the train-wreck. It gets harder in a fantasy campaign, or in one more tightly rooted in reality. Even a pulp campaign would struggle with plausibility with such a plot device despite the weird science element of the genre.

That’s not to say that it can’t be done – a divinely-sourced “cautionary tale” works in a fantasy context, for example, or a “tortuous nightmare” from a demon or devil. Such a revelation might be achieved by simply starting another adventure (after the party have ‘died’) in which they are all killed, and then another – with the deaths seeming increasingly improbable, or the enemies they face increasingly overpowered (Vorpel Bunnies?)

So there are ways of doing it in virtually every campaign – the literal “it was a bad dream” (‘What did you put in those beans last night?’) is the worst choice but is always there if nothing else will serve.

Without such a twist, I would prefer any of the other solutions to this one.

Implementation

Implementation is comparatively simple – everything after point “X” in the campaign didn’t happen – but the PCs get to keep experience and objects acquired since, and anything consumed is gone. The PCs, in other words, are healthy versions of the characters as they are, despite everything else being reset.

This compromise with reality is necessary to make the option palatable to players, and because any alternative risks desynchronization of characters, which occurs when PC#1 resets to a point X game sessions previous, PC#2 resets to a different point in the campaign, (because those are when their backup copies derive from), while PC#3 doesn’t reset at all (no backup copies). Since that’s obviously unfair to some, the only solution is to keep the characters as they are.

2. Dystopian Recovery

The second solution is to let the campaign die the resulting death, and start a sequel campaign in which the bad guys have won, and the new PCs have to find a way to undo it or overthrow them – in other words, to recover from the consequent dystopia.

Prep Component

This requires you to always know what the antagonists are trying to achieve, which is something that I’ve been recommending as good practice for a decade or more.

It also requires some awareness of the significance of the PCs within your campaign. There’s a whole article to be written on that question, but for the moment, suffice it to say that some campaigns treat the PCs as extraordinary, or in privileged positions by happenstance or opportunity or fate.

Another question that often feeds into the status of the PCs is how the campaign treats prophecies and ‘destinies’. Do they have an underlying reality, or are they the products of arrogance and wishful thinking?

Many GMs won’t be able to answer those questions, because they haven’t considered them important – until now, when they manifest in tangibly different outcomes. If the PCs weren’t unique, their loss won’t end opposition to the antagonists. If they were in a privileged position but were otherwise normal representatives of their societies, such opposition becomes a lot more easily discounted. And if they were exceptional by virtue of being PCs, then such opposition becomes irrelevant.

The answers don’t have to be the same from one campaign to another; but there will be manifest differences in campaigns resulting from the answers. Sometimes, these differences are more noticeable than other times, is all.

The prep required is, therefore, to know and understand your campaign – not just what has happened, but why it has happened, and why it has happened to these specific characters.

Implementation

It may be tempting to start the new campaign at the moment (approximately) that the old one ended, and to actually have the antagonists success occurring in “real time” within the new campaign. This means that most of your campaign notes, maps, etc, will apply 100% to the new campaign.

Charting the course of a war that you already know will be successful can be a lot of work, however, and risks a premature confrontation between the new PCs and the old enemies – which would bring the “rebooted” campaign to another train-wreck moment. There can also be a problem with the players knowing more about what’s going on than their characters should.

All these problems are avoided – at the cost of more prep work – by setting the new campaign some time after the first. That means that all those campaign notes will need to be updated at once (instead of piecemeal as the campaign unfolds) but offers the opportunity for what the players know to become “common knowledge”. Any logical failings within the conduct of the conquest can be written off as history being fogged, distorted, or lost after the fact. As the winners, the antagonists will surely have rewritten history to their tastes and perceptions!

A big factor is how much time you have to complete this work, because your campaign is shut down until it’s done! Experience tells me that the shortest such interval that’s realistic is two or three months, and possibly longer.

That’s a shutdown that’s avoided by an immediate restart. So the situation is not as black-and-white as it might at first appear.

3. New PCs, Same Old Problems

Which gives rise to the next solution: new characters, at the same experience level and capabilities achieved by the old ones, who simply take over the problems faced by the old PCs. This can provide an opportunity to revisit those “big picture” decisions embedded in the old campaign – perhaps the old PCs failed because they weren’t the ones “predestined” to confront the antagonists, no matter what they thought, but the new ones are.

The big advantage that this brings to the table is that little or no prep is required (other than the generation of new characters and their backstories). What’s more, it keeps “Dystopian Recovery” in your back pocket should this group of PCs also fail to stop the antagonists.

The players, knowing more about the antagonists than they probably should, can actively design their characters to face the challenge – which fits in nicely with the concept of a “predestiny”.

Prep Component

There is still a little prep to be done – aside from the generation of new characters. If these PCs are to be predestined to confront the antagonists that wiped out the previous crop, do they know it? What do they know about it? Are they to have specific roles to play in overcoming the adversaries? The answers will influence the design and creation of the new PCs. (Another key question: why hadn’t the old PCs heard of these New ones?)

But that’s about it. Everything else is normal adventure prep.

Implementation

The assumption would probably have to be made that this group of new PCs came together at some point historically. The new campaign should probably start with the confrontation with the antagonists and will need to be written specifically for the new characters. Do they get to witness the defeat of their old characters? Or do they arrive some short time after that has happened? Did the old PCs have any gear that was essential to overcoming the antagonists? These are decisions that can be taken quickly – while the players are generating their new characters, in other words – but are probably better taken with some deeper thought. It depends on how much of the old campaign was pre-planned, and how much was improvised.

4. Back In Time

Another variant on the same theme is to actually go back into the campaign’s history and roleplay the development of the new PCs from their first meeting / first adventure. If the problem arose because the GM was overwhelmed by the complexities of the more powerful PCs, this might be the right choice.

Prep Component

Most campaigns evolve over time. History gets added and fleshed out and supplemented. All that canon needs to be integrated into a new campaign background. If you’ve been maintaining good records electronically, this can be largely a cut-and-paste operation; anything else is more work.

You can get away without contemplating the big questions posed in “New PCs, Same Old Problems”, but you might be better off taking the time, anyway. It will help guide you in answering the biggest headaches that are sure to arise: the new PCs not liking the way something turned out in their old PCs past experience and deciding to do something about it.

Ultimately, this is a time-travel campaign, with all the attendant problems – even if the PCs are unaware of it.

Can the new PCs change the history of the old campaign? If not, what stops them? What are the consequences, either way? If not, what does that do to player/character freedom of will? If the PCs have a destiny, who else has one? Will it inevitably happen in some fashion, or do the PCs have to embrace it first – and what does that entail? What if they decide to leave the antagonists alone? What if they decided to do the equivalent of killing Hitler’s mother?

The more the new PCs change the game world experienced by the old PCs, the less value and relevance their ‘inherited’ player-knowledge will have. The less that they are free to change it, the more value and relevance it will have – and the more the new PCs may be able to take advantage of that.

Big decisions. Big problems. Answer them in advance or be caught out by them.

I know of some GMs who require all players to generate a “backup character” in case the primary falls – it’s not an idea that I really approve of, because it also brings behavioral problems with the players, such as deliberately suiciding a character to get to the backup.

I also know of some GMs who run two different groups of PCs in the same game world at the same time with the same players, just so that if one falls, the other group can take ownership of the more significant issues belonging to the first group. If you can make this work, more power to you – the potential for problems is extraordinary, and the list of such problems far too extensive to go into here! Suffice it to say that they all stem from character interaction (overt, covert, or metagame).

Implementation

Implementation of this situation is relatively straightforward, especially if you’ve done the prep before you need it. You just tell the players, “your characters are all dead. Get out your backup characters / roll up some new ones. Here’s what you need to know…”

5. The Jailbreak Adventure

The name of this solution will make a lot more sense when I tell you that the “Jail” is imminent death. Without warning, the PCs (still alive) find themselves somewhere else – it might be the afterlife they are expecting, or not. Wherever it is, they have to “break out” and get back to their mortal bodies with the means to refresh / rejuvenate them.

This could be done as a shared delusion, with no real healing/rejuvenation – the characters simply went above and beyond what mortals are supposed to be able to do, winning a victory for the ages – and then succumbing to the wounds they have received.

It could also be done as an objective reality – the healing / rejuvenation is real, but the opportunity to draw on this reality is constrained in some way and will not be granted a second time.

This really is a “get out of jail” for the campaign, but the PCs have to earn it ‘the hard way’ – hence the title.

Prep Component

This is, essentially, a mini-adventure that you are dropping whole into the old one to give the PCs a way out That could be with the cooperation or opposition of whoever runs this place. There may or may not be a price to pay, but it should definitely NOT be a freebie.

You may be tempted to make the price tag something to be paid in the future – I’ve tried this and it doesn’t work very well; it smacks of being exactly what it is, an escape hatch being dropped in to save the PCs. Verisimilitude is lost, Suspension of Disbelief is broken, and your Credibility is shot to pieces, in one fell swoop.

Avoiding those three undesirable outcomes – which can happen even if you don’t make the ‘deferred payment’ mistake – has to be the number one design consideration of your adventure. The more ‘tacked on’ it feels, the more you flirt with one or more of them.

Sow the seeds of plausibility early, and water them with attention in the campaign from time to time. This is ultimately a limited Divine Intervention, whether you label it as such or not – prepare accordingly. Do whatever you can to avoid this being perceived as a dues-ex-machina.

The place to start is with the “big questions” posed above. From the answers, you can determine who has intervened, and what the price will be. If this IS the afterlife, then the intervention has occurred post-mortum – but people have been brought back from the dead, before.

In some old-school gaming, the long lives of the Elves was bought at the price of them not being subject to resurrections. Thinking about this situation became a cornerstone of my Rings Of Time campaign, in which the PCs goal was nothing less than Ascension. The path to that for the Elven character was for him to die and be “rescued” from the Elven Afterlife by his Dwarven companion (the other PC).

You need this stand-by drop-in adventure ready to go at a moment’s notice – so make sure to update it / review it anytime that it might become necessary.

Implementation

Implementation is nothing more than the PCs waking up somewhere else, feeling fine, as you pull out your adventure notes from wherever you store them.

But implementation is also learning to live with the consequences – and whatever you decide in terms of those ‘big questions’ will have consequences. If you aren’t prepared to pay that price, put this solution back on the shelf.

6. Temporus Interruptus

This is a variation on the above. “I have intervened a instant before you perish from your mortal existence because no-one will notice your absence. Agree to my terms or I shall return you hence, in condition unchanged from that you experienced previously. Do a “small” task for me, and it might be that when you return, it will be in markedly better condition, with what you need to have a chance of avoiding the downfall that was so imminent.”.

Prep Component

The credibility of the rescue depends on two things: convincing the players that their characters were dead and gone from the moment battle was joined (even if it wasn’t), and making the NPC making the offer, and the offer itself, as credible as possible. That means that whatever the “task” is, it has to be difficult but within the players’ capabilities, and yet it has to be something that the being who has interceded cannot do himself. Get these things right, and it will seem like this was always your intention.

That often means starting your ‘sales pitch’ before the PCs have even fallen – the flavor text that you use to heighten the drama of the conflict can do that job, especially if you save the really good stuff for such life-and-death battles.

Adding those components to the requirements listed under item 5, “The Jailbreak Adventure,” completes the recipe.

Implementation

This solution bypasses most of the credibility issues described in “The Jailbreak Adventure” by crystallizing them into the specifics described above. As I said, do it right, and it will look like this was always what you expected to happen – a hidden extra chapter between the confrontation and the victory.

You are giving the PCs their lives, and a victory to boot – make sure that the price demanded is commensurate.

7. The Great Reset Button In The Sky

This is the most analogous to the computer-based inspiration for this entire article, and is the only solution to the problem that I haven’t seen written up somewhere in some form over the years – which is why I have lent it’s name to the title of the article as a whole.

Prep comes in three parts: “Checkpoint Adventures,” “Character Backups,” and Synchronization of the Backups with the Adventures. The latter is how the problems described in earlier solutions are avoided.

Implementation is simple: “It is X days/weeks/months ago. Your characters are as they were. Nothing from this date forward is set in stone, so don’t rely too heavily on what happened last time after the point. Your characters are currently….”

Checkpoint Adventures

A checkpoint adventure is one that is designed to be a good platform for a campaign reset. That means that all the ongoing plotlines at this point have to be in a stable position at the end of the adventure – not resolved, necessarily, but ‘on hold’ for a period of in-game time, literally “a problem for another day”. Ideally, the checkpoint adventure will touch base with each of those plot threads in some fashion, so that your notes for the adventure will function as a player briefing on the state of the campaign.

Furthermore, the adventure’s primary plotline should come to a concrete and definitive conclusion. For this reason, Christmas-themed adventures seem particularly suited to the purpose. “Peace on earth and goodwill to all” – at least temporarily. “No Boom Today. Boom Tomorrow. There’s always Boom Tomorrow,” to quote Ivanova from Babylon-5.

Another good time is at the end of a major plotline, for obvious reasons.

None of this will happen by accident, or at least, should happen by accident.

Character Backups

Players have to be told that the purpose of the adventure is to provide a “Checkpoint” to which the campaign can revert if things fall apart before the next checkpoint is reached. Before you next play, you need a copy of their character sheet, dated – because that’s what they will be required to revert to in the event of a catastrophic disruption of the campaign.

These are easily produced using ‘copy file’ and ‘rename file’ if they are electronic in nature, but in most cases, will require a photocopy.

Make sure that players know that if you have to reset the campaign, they WILL reset to the last backup version provided – even if that’s the one you made when the campaign first started – so it’s in the player’s interest to ensure such provision in a timely fashion.

…Synchronized with the Checkpoints

It’s obviously vital for the character backups to synchronize with the end of the Checkpoint adventure fairly closely if not perfectly.

It can also be useful getting players to synopsize what’s happened to their character since the last checkpoint and where they want to go in the near future with their characters. No matter how succinct they may be, these will help the players recapture their character’s frame of mind at the time of the backup. This isn’t essential, but it can be useful.

The Do-overs

That caution offered regarding relying on player knowledge needs to be more than an idle threat, and should become apparent with the first post-reboot adventure. NPCs who have not already been established should be different, their functions within the plot should be different, the plot itself should be different… you may end up getting to the same point in the campaign that caused the reset, but you should get there by a different path.

Don’t forget that you, as GM, can (and should) also be capable of learning from the past experience of running the subsequent adventures and be making an attempt to do them better this next time around. “Don’t do it the same, do it better” should be your mantra.

Play On! (With Twists)

Of course, that’s good advice that can be applied (to some extent) to all the offered reset buttons.

Make no mistake – the less experience you have as a GM, the more prep work will be required to prepare for the worst, but the more likely you are to need that prep. But even seasoned campaigners like myself get caught out from time to time.

I have the advantage that I not only like to think about “the big questions” in advance, but that I formalize the answers and even implement changes to the game mechanics (if necessary) to implement those decisions and their consequences. That, plus a willingness to improv if I have to (especially if I’ve prepared in advance for it) put most of these solutions at my fingertips, should I need them.

GMs, do your homework – you never know when you’ll be called to the front of the class!

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

I originally started writing this as a contribution to the May 2020 Blog Carnival, hosted by Moebius Adventures, but when I wasn’t able to finish it in time, I set it aside for later completion. It is now “later”…

Travel

The theme of the May carnival was “Are we there yet”, and the subject matter was the journey.

Travel is all about three things: time, space (usually a distance and direction), and things observed or encountered along the way.

There’s a hierarchy to these elements as most GMs and game systems apply them. Time is subordinated to Space and Events – or, more precisely, the potential for events – is subordinated to time.

“It takes so long to get to here” subordinates the time element to the spacial element – the destination to be reached, relative to where you are, defines the time that the journey takes.

Most systems then assign a flat percentage chance of an encounter transpiring to the passage of time – one, two, four (or whatever) chances per day of travel. More sophisticated systems may amend the chance according to the terrain, or to the total elapsed time since the last encounter.

This implicitly defines “departure” and “arrival at destination” as encounters – which is fair enough; I will frequently employ “last sight of where you were” as a psychological full-stop to whatever transpired where the PCs were, and “first glimpse of destination” as a prelude to whatever is going to happen at that destination.

It also implies that a change of terrain is, in itself, an “encounter”.

All well and good; that all makes a certain level of common sense. But it’s all been written about before; I started to wonder if there were other approaches or perspectives that might enable journeys to be elevated to “the next level,” and immediately made an association with a couple of philosophical musings that have occupied my mind from time to time over the last couple of years.

Time

To start with, I thought about the nature of time as it would be observed by PCs. Instead of the relentless simplicity of marking time by the clock – a device that commoners didn’t really have access to until the latter parts of the 19th century – time would be marked by a succession of mundane but implicitly variable events – first light, dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, sunset, twilight, night.

On top of that, there may be the completely independent but also variable events of moon-rise and moon-set. If your environment has multiple moons, or a binary star, all this may become more complicated.

But the time that these events transpire doesn’t matter. Instead, these are simply markers that are used to label “when” something did or will (perhaps “should” is better) occur.

In reality, Time is the period of existence between significant events – milestones, if you will.

This is both the physical reality and the subjective reality of the PCs, when you think about it. All our clever timepieces transform some change into a measure of time by means of defining a degree of such change as a specific time interval. We use hours, minutes, and seconds for those intervals. This is obviously true of such things as water-clocks, where a fixed quantity of water can drip from a container in a given period of time, so that the quantity of water remaining provides a ‘reading’ on the time interval since the ‘clock’ was last filled; it is equally obviously true of sundials, which uses shadows and the motion of the sun through the sky to mark time. It doesn’t matter if it’s the flow of electricity from a battery in an electrical clock, or from an external supply, or the mechanical release of energy from a pendulum’s swing, or the release of energy contained in the contraction of a wound-up spring – all objective measurements of time operate on this fundamental principle. The only difference between these measurements and the subjective reality observed by PCs would be in the definition of “significant”.

So, let’s start by discarding the ‘regularity’ of modern time-keeping devices, at least in terms of the fantasy milieu. Steampunk and modern and sci-fi campaigns are a completely different kettle of fish due to the ubiquity of timepieces and the psychological and social impact of being able to keep a precise schedule.

Rainwater coverage

Bear with me, it’s time for the conversation to take a left-field turn.

I was watching the first drops of rain fall on one of my windows at one point…

Assume a surface of area A. This surface starts dry but one raindrop after another falls until total coverage is achieved. It’s informative to break this process down and look at the events between these two milestones.

To simplify, let’s divide the span into tenths, and assume constant rainfall in both number and size of droplets. Let’s also assume that in each of these tenths, twenty droplets fall.

At the 0.1 mark, 20 droplets fall, covering an unknown percentage of the surface. Call this unknown percentage A1, and the total area that is wet at this point, W1. Obviously, W1 = A1 × A / 100.

At the 0.2 mark, 20 more droplets fall, covering another unknown percentage of the surface – but there is a chance that some of these will land on part of the surface that is already wet. This chance – assuming even distribution overall – is going to be 100 × A1 / A (%). So A2 = A1 × (1 – [A1 / A]), and W2 = A1 + A2.

At each successive time mark, the chance of a droplet falling onto a dry part of the surface diminishes. By the 9th time mark, there is far less than A1 still dry, but most of the droplets will land on an area that’s already wet.

Even at the 10th time mark, there is (in theory) still a small part of the surface that is still dry, but that part is so small that it has fallen below the threshold of detection; to all intents and purposes, the surface is completely wet.

Some people may find all this easier to visualize if each time period makes a simple percentage of the surface wet – say, 25%, or 1/4.

At time mark 0.1, that would mean 1/4 of the window was wet and 3/4 was not.

At time mark 0.2, 1/4 of the raindrops fall on already-wet surface, leaving 3/4 to add to the total that is wet: 3/4 of 1/4 is 3/16ths. So the total that’s wet is now 7/16ths.

At time mark 0.3, 7/16ths of the raindrops fall on the wet surface, so 9/16ths do not. 9/16ths of 1/4 is 9/64ths, so that’s how much more surface becomes wet. 28/64ths is already wet, so the total is now 37/64ths. More than half the surface is now wet.

At time mark 0.4, 37/64ths will land on the wet surface, leaving 27/64ths. That means 27/64ths of 1/4 get added to the wet area, or 27/264ths. The area that’s already wet is 37/64ths, or (37 × 4) 264ths, so the wet area is now 148/264th – so the wet area grows to (148+27) = 175/264ths. About now, it become easier to work with decimals than fractions: 0.66288 is wet, 0.33712 is dry.

At time mark 0.5, the rainfall is divided 0.66288 (wasted) to 0.33712 (useful), so 0.08428 lands on the dry surface (1/4 × 0.33712) – so the wet area increases by 0.08428 to 0.74716, leaving 0.25284 dry.

At time mark 0.6, the rainfall is divided into 0.74716 waste and 0.25284 useful, so there is a 0.06321 increase in the wet area, to 0.81037 – in other words, 81% of the surface is now wet. The dry part is now 0.18963, or 18.963%.

Enough rain has fallen at this point to cover the entire surface one-and-a-half times over, but almost one-fifth of the surface is still dry!

Time mark 0.7: 81% of the fall is wasted, 18.963% is not. The wet area increases by 0.0474075 to 0.8577775, so 14.22225% is still dry.

Time mark 0.8: Increase in wet area 0.035555625, wet total is 0.893333125, so dry remaining is 0.106666875, just over 10%.

Time mark 0.9: Increase in wet area 0.02666671875, wet total is 0.91999984375 (close enough to 0.92), and 8% (or 0.08) of the surface is still dry.

Time mark 1 (final): increase in wet area is 0.02, total wet is 0.94, and 6% of the surface is dry. Which shows that by our time definitions, 25% coverage isn’t quite enough. The actual number needed doesn’t matter; what matters is the progression – each time the dry area decreases, more of the raindrops are wasted, and the increase of wet area gets smaller.

Generated using fooplot.com

This is an example of Xeno’s Paradox – which we have avoided with the concept of a threshold of detection, and the assumption that if we can’t detect anything above that limit, the amount is actually zero.

The mathematical expression that describes this is y = 1 – (1 / x), and if you graph that, you get the graph to the left/right:

My Coffee’s Gone Cold

Another practical problem that I’ve thought about from time to time is this: my kettle is essentially a cylinder of water surrounded at the base and sides by plastic, and with a capacity of a bit under four liters (7 pints in American terms). If I boil the water, will it cool faster as coffee in a mug that is a smaller cylinder 2.5″ tall and 3″ across, or am I better off leaving the hot water in one big mass until ready to drink the coffee? (Of course, I could simply measure it, but where’s the fun in that?)

Heat is list to a mass of boiling water in two significant ways. The first is by evaporation – the carriage of kinetic energy by water molecules as steam away from the central mass. Because all the other sides are enclosed, the top is the only part of the mass where this can occur – so the smaller that horizontal surface is, the slower the water will cool. Since the diameter of the coffee mug is half that of the kettle, the surface area of the mug is 1/4 that of the kettle. Which argues strongly that I should make my coffee as soon as the water is hot.

The other method is convection cooling the container, which in turn cools the water inside. The most significant factor here is exposure to the air, so the area of the top and the sides dictates, in relative terms, which container is more effective at retaining heat. We already know that the coffee-cup is at a significant advantage in terms of the surface area of the top, but the surface of the sides of the jug is certain to be many times as large as that of the mug. In the case of the mug, 47.124 square inches to the side and 7.07 sq in at the top. The kettle is taller, too; about 10 inches or so. That gives it’s sides a surface area of 377 square inches and the top an area of 28.274 sq in. The totals are, mug 54.194 sq in and kettle 405.274 sq in.

It doesn’t really matter how significant one method is, relative to the other; in both cases, the mug wins, easily. Or does it?

There’s one other factor to contemplate. Because it is a much larger mass of boiling water, the kettle has a lot more energy to lose. This is a question (essentially) of the VOLUME of the two shapes. The kettle holds ten cups worth – so it has ten times the energy stored within the water. Is the kettle ten times larger in either measure? In terms of the convection, the ratio is close to that (405.274 / 47.124 = 8.600) but close doesn’t cut it; it’s not ten times. And for the method that I consider likely to be the more significant, evaporation, the kettle is only 4 times the mug, which isn’t even close to a factor of 10.

Conclusion: I’m better off leaving the hot water in the kettle until the time comes to use it – it will retain more heat for longer.

But that gets you thinking about the evaporation process. The time when there is the most energy to be carried off by steam is when the water is hottest. If you divide the passage of time up, and measure the heat loss through evaporation alone, the greatest amount of loss will be at the start, when the water is hottest, and the least will be at the end, when the water has cooled somewhat.

Already, the parallels between the rainfall question and this phenomenon are clear. In the former, the largest loss of dry area was in the first time interval (0.25+something); by the tenth time interval, the loss wasn’t even 1/10th of this. The numbers might vary, but the same mathematical principle applies.

Fixed Effect Milestone, Relative Time Intervals

What if, instead of marking how much took place in a specific time-frame, we divided the total change into intervals and measured how long it took for each such % change?

Obviously, the shortest such intervals would occur at the start of the process, while the longest would be at the end of it, by a significant margin. Each milepost would be a constant multiple of the temporal ‘distance’ from the preceding milepost. Again, it doesn’t matter what the actual numbers are.

Let’s illustrate this with a 20% gain:

1
1.2
1.44
1.728
2.0736
2.48832
2.985984
3.5831808
4.29981696
5.159780352

That’s ten intervals worth. The numbers grow even more spectacularly with greater gains, as shown by a 50% gain:

1
1.5
2.25
3.375
5.0625
7.59375
11.390625
17.0859375
25.62890625
38.443359375

Again, ten intervals worth. This is an exponential relationship (n to the power of x).

If we add those together to get the total time-span in “units”, we get 113.33 and a fraction. So, if the total is complete at the tenth interval, the first time measurement is 1/113.33, and the last is 38.44359375/113.33 – or 0.88% from the start and 33.92% from the end, respectively.

But let’s go back to those 1.2 factor results, which aren’t so extreme, and convert them to percentages of the total (trust me, there’s a good reason):

1 + 1.2 + 1.44 + 1.728 + 2.0736 + 2.48832 + 2.985984 + 3.5831808 + 4.29981696 + 5.159780352 = 25.958682112

100 × 1 / 25.958682112 = 3.85%
× 1.2 = 4.623%
× 1.2 = 5.547%
× 1.2 = 6.657%
× 1.2 = 7.988%
× 1.2 = 9.5857%
× 1.2 = 11.503%
× 1.2 = 13.803%
× 1.2 = 16.564%
× 1.2 = 19.877%

We can test the accuracy of these numbers by adding them up and seeing how close the total comes to the ideal 100%. For reasons that will become clear, I’m going to show each subtotal along the way:

3.85%
+ 4.623% = 8.473%
+ 5.547% = 14.02%
+ 6.657% = 20.677%
+ 7.988% = 27.334%
+ 9.5857% = 36.9197%
+ 11.503% = 48.4227%
+ 13.803% = 62.2257%
+ 16.564% = 78.7897%
+ 19.877% = 98.6667%

That’s pretty close. In fact, let’s round those off (and tweak them just a little) to something a little more convenient:

5%
10%
15%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
80%
100%

Those are the intervals of the total time that approximate milestones in the progression.

Travel

Any trip can be divided up into intervals and will therefore follow these approximate milestones.

The most significant in terms of what has happened previously and reactions to it will be when it is freshest, i.e. close to departure. The gap between these minor milestones is therefore going to be an exponential relationship.

Which means that if we look at the total distance to the destination, or the total traveling time in hours not spent camping, we can use the percentages derived above to get the intervals between the events – 5%, 10%, and so on.

What’s more, as a general rule, the more immediately-significant an event is, the sooner it is likely to occur – so we can rank these events in relative immediate significance as 100%, 80%, 60%, and so on. Of course, events are rarely so predictable, so there would be some random noise to that assessment – maybe plus-or-minus 10% or 20% or whatever.

This also does not factor in some agency deliberately waiting until a threshold of time or distance is achieved – waiting until characters are far enough out of town for an ambush, for example. So there are going to be limits.

Nevertheless, there is a ruthless kind of usefulness to this sequencing – especially if you also add in a little randomness to these approximate times.

Travel. II

Things get flipped around if the relevance is to the destination. The intervals are from the destination – so 4% away, 8.5% away, and so on – while the significance is 100%, 78.8%, 62.25%, and so on.

Sometimes, all you need is to give an impression. Image by Dzoko Stach from Pixabay

Today I’m going to discuss the art and utilization of the Synopsis.

While I might omit these from time to time in my campaigns, notably at the start of a new adventure, or even position a “big-picture status update” after an opening action / dramatic sequence, they are routinely part of my mid-adventure structure.

This examination has been driven by my preparations for the next game session, and inspired by a number of television shows’ usage of the “Previously on [x]…” mechanism.

The Principle

According to LiteraryTerms.net, a synopsis is “a brief summary that gives audiences an idea of what a composition is about. It provides an overview of the storyline or main points and other defining factors of the work, which may include style, genre, persons or characters of note, setting, and so on.”

Many usages of synopses (that’s the plural of the term) refer to the presentation of a novel or work to a prospective publisher, and the purpose of the synopsis clearly has an impact on the content.

Usage of a synopsis in an RPG adventure far more closely accords with the usage in television series, in which the story is not yet complete and the purpose is to prepare the groundwork for the plotline to continue by refreshing recollections of recent events, though there are some TV shows that also use a synopsis as a teaser and introduction of recurring characters and situations that have not been prominent in recent episodes.

Most RPG usages would omit such applications in favor of a reminder of past interactions at the time a character is reintroduced, as would be the case in a serial work of literary fiction.

Nuanced applications are also possible, if appropriate. The presentation of different perspectives, the retroactive correction of plot errors and holes, and the provision or highlighting of information that was overlooked or not available at the time, are four ways in which a synopsis can form an active part of the plot. Skipping over periods of inactivity or plot segments which are likely to be dull to actually play through is another, and one that is actually demonstrated within the example below.

The red content is a reminder of past adventures that orients and places this adventure into bigger-picture context. To that, each game session played adds to the synopsis, causing it to inflate; such growth is usually not quite in proportion to the playing time, because it focuses on significant elements and discards or compacts details, so the contribution will sometimes be less and sometimes more. The second set of bars shows a more aggressive compaction strategy.

Full Narrative

There are two basic types of synopsis: Full narrative, and compressed narrative. There are also a number of variations between these two extremes.

A synopsis, by it’s nature, is a compact summary of the story so far. It enables the highlighting of past events, a reminder of significant developments that unfolded in a more narrative form, and the placing of events into a larger context.

Arguably, what you leave out or condense is as important as what you leave in. Dialogue is rarely sufficiently quotable as to include in an RPG synopsis (while it is the dominant form of synopsis used in television), for example.

With greater distance from events, there should be greater condensation; more recent events should usually be presented in greater detail than those of several game sessions earlier, for several reasons: helping recapture the mood and thought processes of the characters as they were, most recently being the most prominent of them, in other words, recent events are of more immediate significance.

It is natural, even with this condensation, for synopses to grow in length as adventures proceed, and this is illustrated by the first of the sets of bar charts. Note that in writing the synopsis for adventure 5, the GM has tried not to let the synopsis grow any larger, compressing earlier material almost enough to ‘make room’ for the new material to be added.

Until now, this is also the pattern that describes the synopses that have appeared in the current Zenith-3 adventure. But for the next adventure, I’m looking at employing a more aggressive approach, because the current phase of the adventure is heading for a conclusion, and the phase to follow will involve the characters resetting their circumstances. Much of what they went through to get to that point will then have limited significance in comparison to the fact that they are there. In fact, information conveyed in the first game session – the briefing – will arguably bear a greater reprise in the future. Much of it has been irrelevant (beyond justifying it) during their journey, so it has been barely mentioned.

The synopsis provided at the start of each day’s play has therefore been responsive not only to the content of previous days’ play, but also of the immediate plot needs.

An example

All very good in theory, but you might like a practical example.

Below is the synopsis from the most recent game session. It omits a lot of the context and background that I would normally provide readers because the players in the campaign already have it. However, I have broken it up by game session, each in a separate panel, so that you can get a sense of how much compression has taken place.

When you see something like “(15-6-1-01)” that indicates showing the players a picture – “Adventure #15, Act VI, Scene 1, Picture 01” to be precise. These may be subject to copyright, so I can’t share them here.

It should also be noted that the early parts of the synopsis are much fuller than I would normally employ, because Covid-19 restrictions meant that this was our first game session in six months, and memories may have grown distant in that time. A refresher was indicated.

The Russian Government, after six years of War with the 4th Reich, are beginning to struggle financially, and are resorting to desperate measures. Like selling some of their obsolete nuclear weapons to arms dealers.

UNTIL got wind of just such a sale to an alliance of Domestic US terrorists. Normally they would have simply passed the information on to THUNDER, but there were some indications that the North American version of UNTIL were compromised.

This put UNTIL in a bit of a bind; it was only a few months away from a critical Federal election that would determine how the US would reintegrate with the rest of the world. The balance was delicately poised, and being seen to pursue any sort of potentially political objective on US soil would, if discovered, tip it disastrously.

Their solution: bring in agents capable of dealing with any problem and give them the cover identities they would need to form a mythical superhero team, Team Shadow, who could operate with impunity on American Soil. Of course, this might not be the last time such operatives were needed, and if a thing was worth doing, it was worth doing well, so the plan was to create a resource that could be parachuted in to solve such ‘problems’ long-term. In short, bring in Zenith-3, show them some new ways to use their powers, and disguise them as completely different heroes.

• Blackwing became Basalt (15-6-1-01), a man transformed into rock.
• Runeweaver became Spectre (15-6-1-02), a ghost from the Revolutionary War.
• Mr Image was recast as Union Jack (15-6-1-03), an identity and look that he likes so much that he thinks he’ll keep using it when he returns to Earth Regency.
• Defender became Zantar (15-6-1-04), a Kzin tourist rescued by the team who joined up to repay the debt of honor.
• St Barbara assumed the identity of Nightshade, a Ninja-like character (15-6-1-05), using her powers to perform impossibly-acrobatic maneuvers and throw Shuriken of ‘Shadow Energy’, and
• Vala became Zeitgeist (15-6-1-06), a character who seems mostly normal and very human.

Team Shadow were to be inserted into the US using contacts UNTIL had within the 5th Reich, which turned out to be nothing like the team’s expectations. This was an environment in which everyone knew who all the other spies were, and conducted elaborate games with each other, where favors and obligations were better than money as an item of trade-craft. Dr Muerte, for all his supervillainish personal inclinations and fascist leanings, turned out to be a very effective administrator.

The team made landfall in Guatemala and began their Mexican tour. Post-Ragnarok, the nations of Central America and Mexico had collapsed into a number of much smaller Kingdoms based on the old state lines. The farther south that you looked, the more primitive these societies were – and Team Shadow were starting so far south that they weren’t even in Mexico yet.

A short distance inland, they met the guide and ‘Diplomatic Escort’ from Demon House Aries that Muerte’s Intelligence Officer had arranged for them, Maynor Estuado Morales (15-6-1-07). Again, he wasn’t quite what they expected; he quickly proved to be urbane and witty, and possessed of a warm charm. The team already knew that House Aries was a little different from the other Houses of Demon, anyway, after they had helped liberate Blackwing from the curse of his Amour, which was slowly taking over his mind and body.

Maynor explained en route that in return for permission to continue traveling through their respective territories, the rulers of the local Kingdoms would expect the team to perform some service.

These services were usually something minor, but the urgency with which these arrangements had been made was enough that even the thickest, most brutish of the local rulers- Heif Zubal – could tell that Team Shadow were something extraordinary. So far, they have included recovering “Lost Jewels”..,

…hunting “Monsters”..,

…and chasing down a Bandit operating with seeming impunity (15-6-1-08).

Along the way, you have come to trust Maynor quite a lot, and have confessed your roles as ‘UNTIL agents’ with paranormal abilities to him, and dropped a few leading hints about your mission’s importance to him. He has agreed to assist in their mission as far as possible, without compromising his or their political neutrality.

They also reached a treaty with the alien Rheezok for the mutual defense of the Earth against the Ice Queen (15-6-1-09) or any other threat; the PCs intend that the Rheezok’s presence be officially sanctioned on humanitarian grounds as they are refugees, but the PCs will have to work with the more progressive elements of the UN to have the emergent nation recognized officially.

Despite the delays that these ‘services’ represent, the team has, since coming ashore, covered 2,275 km, climbing to over 1800m altitude and descending again six times in the process – in 2 days, 8 hours total – and that’s with several hours worth of delays along the way as you undertook these side-quests.

Since you have been told by your guide that the whole trip should take 2-3 days, you think you’re a behind schedule, but Specter and Nightshade have a plan to use a little time-travel when you leave your guide behind. So long as you cross the border before Noon of July 4, when UNTIL believes the Nukes are to be detonated, you should be able to give yourself a couple of days to investigate AFTER a week or so spent resting, establishing your new cover identities, and setting up a base of operations deep in the Redneck Heartland.

It is now 3:15 AM, Friday, July 4, so time is beginning to become an issue.

Just over an hour ago, the ultra-pious King Maneul de Vasquez Jalihandre Nevados, Ruler of Leon, tasked you with an hour of your time spent assisting in the reconstruction of a church here in Tampico that has lain in ruins since Ragnarok.

Normally, you would have waited until morning, but because of the press of time, you decided to go to work immediately. Maynor had warned that Magic would be used to determine whether or not each was sincerely working as hard as they could, so the cover of Darkness would enable you to use your full abilities (within the guises of Team Shadow) with relatively low risk of detection.

It worked out well. Nightshade and Zeitgeist cleared rubble from the site while Maynor and Specter dug new foundations, and Union Jack & Zantar poured concrete between the stone slabs carried into place by Basalt. Maynor and Specter took it in turns to speed up the curing of the concrete, so construction took only about half an hour (instead of the months probably expected).

The group then turned their attention to the interior, Maynor, Basalt, and Nightshade producing wooden panels, polishing and varnishing them, then mounting them, while Specter put his new woodworking skills to good use carving pews, Zantar hung silken curtains, and Zeitgeist laid tiles.

By the time you had finished, the Church was ready for decoration with appropriate religious iconography; as soon as that was complete, it would be ready to hold Services, and would look something like this: 15-6-1-10, -11.

At the end of the appointed time, one of the local priests inspected the work, and seemed to approve, unable to say much more than “It’s a miracle,” repeatedly.

The last block is significant because it represents play that didn’t happen “in real life”; past experience has shown that the players have trouble and derive little enjoyment from “mundane” applications of their powers. While I would have let them play through this if it had been at the end of the session and I needed some filler, I thought it more useful to skip over it and get to the more interesting bits.

This is a judgment call that would vary from campaign to campaign as different player mixes would react differently.

Compressed Narrative

So let’s compare that with the synopsis that I’m preparing for the next game session:

Russia sold nukes to an arms merchant.

Intelligence reports that they were purchased by an alliance of US Domestic Terrorists to be used to make a ‘grand statement’ as part of the 4th Of July festivities.

To prevent this, Zenith-3 have assumed new identities and are preparing to enter the US having traveled through Guatemala and Mexico.

At each step, they have needed to perform a task for the local ‘King’ to earn permission to continue through his territory.

They have prevented the resurrection of a Mayan deity, hunted a T-Rex and been hunted by Raptors, concluded a pact with the alien Rheezok, and rebuilt a christian church that has lain in ruins since Ragnarok, six years ago.

Maynor Estuado Morales, your ‘diplomatic escort’ and guide from DEMON House Aries, has become a trusted ally, though the full details of your mission have not been revealed to him, nor your specific true identities. But he has recognized Specter as a fellow mage, self-schooled for the most part, and given him a crash-course in Arcane Theory that filled in a lot of blanks for the mage.

At Monterrey, the capital of the Kingdom of Coahuita, they have just exited the Elemental-powered steam train that has conveyed them and gotten their first glimpse of the City Of Arcane Steam. One ruler, and one task, awaits them, and then they can cross the border and begin their real mission…

This is practically in bullet-points. The most recent day’s play gets a whole two paragraphs; the preceding six game sessions are dealt with in 5 sentences.

Shifting Focus

The degree of compression has two significant effects. First, the focus of the adventure is clearly about to shift. So far, it’s all been a road movie; soon, it will be about recuperating, establishing roots and their new cover identities, and beginning the final part of the adventure: finding and capturing the nukes before they get used somewhere.

The more you emphasize what was in your synopsis, the more you root the day’s play in a logical outgrowth of those events. The less emphasis you place on the past, the more you signal a shift in focus for the adventure.

Impact on Pacing

In terms of pacing, the adventure is heading for a false crescendo. Time is running out for the PCs – it’s already July 4th, and most parades will be starting or at their height by Noon. The rules of time travel mean that it will be much harder to prevent the act of terrorism once detonation has actually taken place. By the time the sun is overhead, they want to be crossing the US border. That gives them just hours, and still several hours traveling to do. I want the players to feel the pressure of time, and a leisurely synopsis sets the wrong tone for that.

Afterwards, it will enter a lull, before rocketing toward a climax (by way of a plot twist or two). There will be time in that lull for a fuller recap of the intelligence received in the first part of the adventure.

My intent is for this next game session to include the false crescendo and most of the lull that follows. The subsequent game session in September will begin with the end of the lull as the players are pitched into investigating the mystery of the nukes – who has them and what to they want to do with them?

Mid-adventure Usage: Travel Vignettes

But that’s not the only way to use synopses. Space is time, when you are traveling; compress one, and you also compress the other.

I have been using synopses to compact time and space when the PCs travel, giving the players to a sense of how big Mexico is, and how quickly the PCs were traveling. The adventure’s scenes are full of notes like this:

♦El Ciebo → Gracias de Dios → El Coba → Tenosique → La Pita → Rio Final → Batancan → La Libertad Chapas → Entre Hermanos → Januta → Frontera → El Bellotte → Paraiso → Comalcalco → Cardenas → Huimanguillo → Bellos Horizontas → Los Choapas → Nanchual → Coatzacealcos ★

Key:
   ♦indicates an encounter of significance.
   → means “to”.
   ★ Indicates the capital of one of the Mexican “Kingdoms” (they aren’t all called that, and they aren’t all Monarchies).

(I’ve added the key for the benefit of readers).

Fully describing each location would be tiresome and boring, because nothing of significance happens there. Simply listing the names, or even skipping to the next important location (Coatzacealcos in this example) is quick and painless – but fails to convey the bone-weariness that such a trip would cause. The PCs have literally been going at full pelt for three days now, and have only just been able to get their second lot of 2 hours sleep in that time.

Giving an impression of each locale, and any geographic transitions in between, has a cumulative effect. Turning the above transition into a single paragraph that “hits the high points” of the journey, while not necessarily naming all those towns and villages specifically, conveys the travel and its extent without going too far. This technique works in any game setting, any genre.

It makes the travel seem “real” in a way that simply hand-waving it and transitioning directly to the destination doesn’t – though if the dramatic circumstances are right, I would simply have the PCs arrive; it’s all about the dramatic needs of the plot and the pacing required.

Complex adventure structures

Contemplate two adventurers having separate adventures that don’t take place concurrently, but that are being played concurrently. That means that the outcome of Adventure #1 (still in progress) would be known to the starring character of Adventure #2, even though the players and GM concerned do NOT know that outcome.

Now expand the complexity with a third adventure, which partially overlaps both, and a fifth, and you get the ‘concurrent play’ approach that Blair and I use for the “solo chapters” of the Adventurer’s Club campaign. Sometimes, all or several of these plot threads will come together to reveal the main (all PCs) adventure, sometimes only one will, and sometimes, none of them do, they simply frame the circumstances of what the PCs are doing when the call comes and the adventure proper gets underway.

This is a complex adventure structure.

Synopses play a critical role in connecting one of these plot threads to another. We may not know how the PC will solve the situation we put before him (or even if he will make any attempt to do so); our job is to make their lives interesting, not predestined. Using a synopsis (without the punch-line of the outcome) gives us a way to refer to a solo plot-thread within another such plot thread while not preempting the outcome. This enables us to run each of these solo stories simultaneously at the gaming table as though they were one big adventure.

There’s a lot more utility and complexity to synopses than is shown by the simple definition given at the start of the article. Use them improperly, and they can steal from that potential, putting players into the wrong mindset; used wisely, and you create more room for better play.

Image by Susan Cipriano from Pixabay

RPGs have a lot of genre elements that do not exist in the real world.

Magic, Divine visitations, strange creatures, non-human races with exotic capabilities, exotic potions and arcane enchantments of all kinds, and that’s just the fantasy genre!

On top of that, there’s the look-and-feel of the environment, and that means that certain actions sometimes have disproportionate or unrealistic consequences.

Style & Narrative

Some of these are a matter of style; others can be communicated through a richer palette of narrative.

Stylistic elements often require tweaks of the rules – critical hits and fumbles, for example. Some can be achieved by amending the GM’s palette of options to include things that would not be present under a more ‘normal’ reality, or by excluding more normal things from that palette.

Narrative elements simply require the use of appropriate descriptive text by the GM to get players into the “mood” and into the mindset that their characters should possess by virtue of deriving from the genre environment in question. That’s true for all genres – whether exploring caves on the frozen moons of Jupiter, unraveling the latest scheme of Diabolico, Having Firewire-7 ports installed into your cyberware, or playing escort to a traveling caravan through Troll Country.

That leaves a few genre elements which need to be explicitly catered for within the rules. Game and campaign designers often approach these elements from a game mechanics perspective. And that’s a problem, because the hierarchy of dominance in an RPG puts these game mechanics at the very bottom of the pile, at least so far as I’m concerned.

I originally presented a hierarchy of genre elements as part of the discussion of the Pulp Genre in Blat! Zot! Pow! The Rules Of Genre In RPGs (Jan 2011) and revisited the subject in The Blind Enforcer: The Reflex Application Of Rules (April 2014). I expanded it slightly and clarified it in The Language Of Magic: A Sense of Wonder for the Feb 2019 Blog Carnival (Feb 2019, obviously); the hierarchy arose again, most recently, a month later, in Into Each Chaos, A Little Order Must Fall: Coping With Randomness, which is where the diagram to the right comes from.

This is a tool that has multiple significances, and can be used in many different ways, but they all come down to (1) the playing of a game; (2) the uniqueness of the setting; (3) the needs of the adventure; (4) the influence of the genre; and (5) the game (meta-) physics and game mechanics provided by the rules system, and the relationship between them.

For example, in the article from which the diagram is drawn, I employ it to generate a series of questions to be used as prompts for GM decision-making when a PC does something completely unexpected:

This is frequently the result of a player announcing an unanticipated course of action … and the GM insisting on a die check to see whether or not the action is successful (regardless of whether or not it will have the desired effect). Sometimes it’s the result of the GM forgetting a character capability, and sometimes it’s a consequence of the player applying an ability in a way that the GM hasn’t thought of – “I cast Blade Barrier down the purple worm’s throat – what happens?” (an actual example from the latter days of the Fumanor: The Last Deity II campaign).

It’s at times like this that I fall back on the hierarchy pyramid…

• What do the official rules say (if anything) about any similar situation?
• What do the house rules say (if anything) about any similar situation?
• What seems the most “realistic” given the base assumptions of the campaign world?
• What seems the most appropriate interpretation given the genre of the game?
• What is the interpretation that works best in terms of the adventure plot?
• What is the interpretation that works best in terms of the health of the campaign?
• Are there any practicality considerations that should be taken into account?
• What is the interpretation that will produce the maximum fun?

Remember that any subsequent answer overrules one that’s already in place – the house rules trump the official rules, “realism” trumps the house rules when they are inadequate, genre trumps “realism”, plot needs trump Genre, campaign needs trump the needs of any one plot, practicality of implementation trumps everything else, and fun trumps all.

It’s worth briefly revisiting the different layers of the hierarchy to look at what they contain and how they relate to the practice of playing an RPG.

1. Official Rules: – The official rules that come in the game system are the foundations at the bottom of the pyramid.
2. House Rules: – Because house rules explicitly supersede official game rules, they have to sit above that foundation in the pyramid.
3. Simulation: – This is the level of Game Physics within the game world, and the subject of today’s discussion. Because the rules (house and official) are an imperfect codification of the game physics, if there is ever a conflict between what the rules say should happen and what the principles that have been established say should happen, it’s the official rules that get overruled – so the Simulation layer has to sit above the rules layers. This is what makes it possible to translate a campaign from one game system into another. The game physics is a metagame level of in-game ‘reality’ – the characters might understand them in a completely different way to the comprehension of the GM and players, especially in a ‘hyper-realistic’ genre.
4. Genre: – There are several different places in the hierarchy where Genre can fit, and that’s at the heart of today’s subject, too. But because the one set of rules can be a broad church providing for multiple genres, the specifics of one particular genre override generic rules and even game physics.
5. Plot: – plot refers to the decisions made in-game by PCs and NPCs within the current adventure; it’s the story of that adventure. Since an adventure can contain out-of-genre elements and influences, this level dominates the genre if a ruling can be justified in terms of the needs of the current adventure.
6. Campaign: – This level contains anything that persists beyond this one adventure. That includes characters and characterizations (as exemplified by the PCs, quite specifically) and any narrative that defines or displays the way the game world works – the style and look-and-feel of the game environment. There are some who would argue that the Plot layer should supersede the Campaign layer.
7. Gameplay & Practicality: – The uppermost level of the pyramid recognizes that a rule can be technically correct but unplayable – see, for example, My Biggest Mistakes: The Woes Of Piety & Magic for concrete proof of this fact. No matter what anything else says, the needs of practical gameplay are the ultimate censor and trump card. At least, according to the official pyramid.
8. Fun: – GMs are in the business of entertaining through creativity, narrative, plot, and stimulated interaction between characters and the players who “voice” them. Fun isn’t given a level of the pyramid because it functions like the walls and capstone. If you have two equally-balanced choices, the most ‘fun’ choice should always win. If you have a technically-correct and/or practical answer to any question that is boring as heck, it should lose to a less correct, less-practical answer that happens to be more fun. For example, I’ve seen any number of proposals over the years for reducing the number of dice rolled for damage in RPGs, because that would make the math easier. Consider if all HP were divided by 4 in a D&D campaign, and weapon damage was divided by 5 – so a weapon that did 1d6 would do one point 4 times in 6 and two points the other 2 times. A weapon that does 1d4 would simply do 1 point every time, no roll needed. But there is a vicarious thrill in rolling dice, and an inherent drama in the GM rolling lots of dice (especially without explanation). More dice therefore equates to more fun, at least in some respects. Ease of math has no hope, in the face of that reality.

Is Genre The Birthplace Of Game Physics?

To some extent, the obvious answer is ‘yes’; part of the genre definition is that characters are able to do “X”, something that violates the basics of real-world physics as simulated by the core game mechanics. “X” could be anything from wielding a “particle pistol” to generic superhuman feats to spellcasting – and that means that “X” is part of the “observed universe” of the characters and analytic types will have invested effort in trying to understand how it works.

This, in turn, is usually expressed as a pseudo-scientific narrative that vaguely outlines the “principles” upon which “X” is founded – a campaign level synopsis of what is therefore presumed to be in the game physics layer (I don’t know anyone who actually goes to the trouble of writing up their game physics in terms of actual equations).

That means that there are multiple layers of translation and interpretation that lie in between the actual “in-game” physics and the genre-related functions that the physics is intended to perform for the game – a looseness that can both benefit and harm.

Genre to Game Mechanics

Most game designers take a different approach to writing the game rules. Having identified “X” as something that the genre demands, they will adopt a “practical” approach by trying to use some existing mechanics as a means of interpreting “X” within the game system. Sometimes that is all that’s needed, sometimes it only provides part of the answers, and additional specific rules are needed. For example, Fireballs in D&D use many of the same damage-handling game mechanics as an attack with a sword, but the rules concerning the number of fireballs the mage can cast, it’s range, and several other mechanics, are entirely separate. There is absolutely no reason why characters couldn’t have an additional stat to describe their resilience to magic, which is used instead of hit points – but from the first, the additional rules required have either never been considered or have been rejected as unnecessary or inefficient.

And yet – one of the major ongoing problems with D&D has always been the relative power levels of magic and more physical mayhem; separating the damage handling subsystems would seem an obvious way of tweaking them in isolation from each other. So it certainly can’t be argued that such proposals would be without merit on their face!

Basing the handling of a genre element on existing game mechanics is always dangerous, potentially compromising the implementation of an important genre element with the simulation provided by the game mechanics. For that reason, such game mechanics are popular targets for house rules, representing attempts by a particular GM to more accurately simulate the genre element as they see it within the campaign.

Never The Twain Shall Meet

So, now, we have two different paths to the implementation of Genre Element “X”:

• Genre → Campaign → Simulation
• Genre → Practicality → Game Mechanics ( → House Rules)

Both paths are completely independent of each other. That means that the in-game interpretation of “reality” can be completely different to the “reality” simulated by the game mechanics.

The conflict becomes acute when two additional interpretive steps are inscribed into the second sequence:

• Genre → Campaign → Simulation
• Genre → Practicality → Game Mechanics ( → House Rules) → Simulation → Campaign

Where now does the Campaign draw it’s narrative from? Taking it from the explicit “underlying in-game theory” of the first progression means that the actions taken, and their outcomes, may make no sense in terms of action-and-reaction encompassed by the narrative. “Of course, the area was magic-rich, so of course I drew my dagger.” The character is attempting to use the game physics to explain a decision made according to the game mechanics when the two are in contradiction.

Taking it from the game mechanics – equation two – means that actions and consequences may make no sense in terms of the character being able to justify their choices with their understanding of the world. “I suspected the creature was susceptible to fire, so I hit it with a fireball even though we were standing in puddles of flammable incendiary oil. Magic Fire goes out the instant it burns the target, so it was perfectly safe.” Here, the character is trying to offer game-physics reasons (and quite possibly making them up out of whole cloth) to explain his character’s game-mechanics decision. At the very least, he is almost certainly adding to that game physics; at worst, he is flatly contradicting something in the official explanation. The odds that the game rules would explicitly state or even imply that you can cast a fireball in perfect safety while standing in a pool of flammable matter are remote!

The examples are deliberately extreme, and employ fictional game mechanics to illustrate the point, which is that neither of these approaches is all that satisfactory, always entailing a risk of contradiction.

A third path to complicate the mess

Quite often, people will try to base the game physics for Genre Element “X” on real-world physics, using the real thing as analogy. This gives the following pathway:

• Real World Physics → Simulated Unreality → Campaign → Game Mechanics

For example, do Laser Pistols suffer from the inverse-square law, i.e. do 1/16th the damage to a target 4 times farther away? On the face of it, this sounds entirely plausible and immediately makes “Laser Pistols” sound more realistic.

Problems come when the game mechanics don’t actually employ the inverse square law anywhere, instead giving a flat range and damage level for Laser Pistols. But if the in-game physics described in the flavor text do suggest this, the likely result is a House Rule.

Perhaps the GM decides that the quoted damage values are for an “optimum range” that is 1/10th of the stated range; he then provides a set of tables that convert the stated damage according to the multiple of this “optimum” range. Now, weapons range in most game systems is a function of accuracy, so the next step would be to set your own “optimum range” value, permitting simplicity and practicality of interpretation.

With a third pathway, the chances of confusion and frustration obviously increase markedly. By putting a differential between the actions that a character can reasonably take according to his understanding of the world, and the optimum choice of actions based on the game mechanics, the verisimilitude of the whole campaign suffers.

In terms of the Hierarchy

If you look at these processes in terms of progression through the different layers of the pyramid, you can easily see that they are a mess, skipping layers in both directions higgeldy-piggeldy It’s no wonder, then, that the results are a dogs’ breakfast; the disrespect of the logical hierarchy is not the cause of the problems, but it is indicative.

Game Physics ↔ Game Mechanics

I always feel that the compromises inherent in making game mechanics playable mean that the simulation layer, in which the pseudo-scientific principles are formulated and contained, should be dominant over the game mechanics as an initial principle, but recently had a bit of a revelation in this respect.

If you are forced to compromise your simulation as expressed by the game mechanics, and you are quite certain that the fundamental aspects of those mechanics will remain constant into the future bar a little tweaking, then those simulation content should then be amended to incorporate the compromises.

That means that you can quite happily draw inspiration from your imagination, from real-world physics, and from your game mechanics design, in equal measure. What’s more, you can bounce back and forth between the two (almost) adjacent layers repeatedly, so that the game mechanics are a closer reflection of the conceptual creations and vice-versa.

What’s more, this permits the embedding of narrative language into the campaign layer that matches both – the incongruities vanish.

If this were the only problem, we could mark it solved and bring the article to a successful conclusion. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Roleplay or Rule-play

Ideally, your game mechanics, as used in play, should not only reflect the genre conventions and elements, but should reinforce them during play. I’m constantly reminded that my co-GM is an expert (in relative terms) on the Pulp Genre; I’m more of an expert in RPG story construction and gameplay. Some of the players in our co-GM’d Pulp Campaign are even less au fay with the genre conventions than I am.

In a perfect world, you could simply hand the rules to a complete novice and come back in an hour or two to discover them playing a perfectly acceptable representation of the genre. But that’s a big ask, and few game systems can pull it off.

And that presents an immediate problem:

Genre → Rules → Pseudoscience → Roleplay – or Rule-play?

If the rules are an imperfect reflection of the Genre, then players can follow the rules when the GM is interpreting the game situation from the perspective of the simulated reality, or vice-versa.

The inevitable result is frustration and dispute, with one side saying “but the rules say…”

This is exactly the sort of problem that the hierarchy pyramid was created to solve. According to the pyramid, if there is a conflict between what the Rules say happens, and what the metagame physics says happens, the metagame physics wins.

In other words, we start with the “science” of the Genre, i.e. with an abstract or meta-level interpretation of both the Genre conventions and how they are to manifest within the campaign; this is then used to generate modifications to the rules, which can then be used to add to the richness of the pseudoscience. This in turn then gets reflected in the Genre description as a section on “Genre Interpretation,” which is used as the narrative engine and interpretation framework for play.

• Genre → Pseudoscience → Rules → Pseudoscience → Genre Interpretation → play

If you track these through the layers of the pyramid, you get:

• 4 → 3 → (2 →) 1 → 3 → 4 → 5, 6, 7

This is a clear progression, nowhere near as messy as the previously-described approaches. Because both GM’s interpretations and players’ interpretations are framed by the metagame rules of the Simulation of in-game “Reality”, with the GM creating house rules or interpretations of the standard rules accordingly, there is no conflict or contradiction; everything is stemming from common ground. A player may disagree with the actual changes the GM is making, but not the purpose or motivation behind them. And if they actually have a better rules solution to the specific problem, most GMs will be happy to listen – after the day’s play, of course.

Side-Benefits

I think we can all agree that this is a worthwhile end, in and of itself, but on its own, it may not be enough to justify overturning an established rule. There is an argument that the more you customize the rules, the more you lose common ground with other campaigns, the more work you have to go to when integrating new source material, and the more you create uncertainty in the players and a lack of confidence in knowing how their players work.

The published and standard rules are a common ground between players and GM – never mind with everyone else who uses the same game system.

That said, I’ve always regarded a willingness to adjust the rules when there is a problem perceived as being a positive trait in a GM. It’s a commitment to doing whatever extra work is required to support the campaign – and a sign of how much the GM values what the players are contributing to that campaign (or are expected to contribute).

Fortunately, there are a number of side-benefits to the approach described.

Meta-level differentiation of campaigns from one another

By varying the interpretation of the Genre’s standard elements, introducing new Genre Elements and Optional Genre components & influences, you make each campaign distinct from all others.

A long time ago, I was speaking with one of my players (no names) about another GM’s campaign. They were describing how that GM fumbled interpreting the rules to cope with the in-game situation with which he was presented. Another player, overhearing the story, interjected, “That’s just [GM’s] way, he always does that.”

Another example that may help provide a little clarity – one of the GMs that I have known for almost 40 years now (a little under a year to reach that milestone) has always opposed the Vancian magic system of D&D because his meta-level signature is that all magic is psionic in nature but misunderstood by the practitioners. For some readers, that statement says everything that needs to be said; others may be saying to themselves, “Vancian? What’s that mean?”. For the benefit of the latter, then:

In Howard Jeff’s 2014 “Game Magic: A Designer’s Guide To Magic Systems In Theory And Practice” (Link is to Amazon.com; limited copies remain. The hardcover is quite expensive – but you CAN get it as an e-book. Yes, I get a small commission.), he described the salient distinction as:

“In the Vancian model of magic, magic users must memorize all the spells which they wish to cast. When they cast a given spell, it disappears from memory and must be memorized again if the magic user so desires.”

The idea of spell memorization was inspired by the way magic works in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories. Gary Gygax was very clear about the reasons for the choice, writing in 1976,

“If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D&D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly… It is the opinion of this writer that the most desirable game is one in which the various character types are able to compete with each other as relative equals, for that will maintain freshness in the campaign.”

But others have described it as an imperfect way to produce an artificial equality between spell-casters and more martial character classes.

Different formulations of the Pseudo-science behind how and why magic – a staple element of the Fantasy Genre – works yield different restrictions (I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t agree that magic in an RPG needs some restraints on it if the other characters are to do anything more than become meat shields for the protection of the Spellcaster). For example, a non-Vancian approach might be to reduce the number of spells substantially, and have spells of any given Spell Level usable at full force only a limited number of times a day, thereafter halving in effect with subsequent castings. With four hours of rest per halving, plus four hours, the clock is reset.

This example shows quite clearly how this approach permits the consistent customization of campaigns, regardless of core rules system.

Bonus Verisimilitude

This side-benefit derives from the increased internal consistency that results. It doesn’t need anywhere near as much explanation as the previous one! The more internally consistent and harmonious you can make the rules structure and metagame concepts that the rules are intended to reflect, the more you permit characters to engage with the campaign at a conceptual and character-driven level, rather than at a game mechanics level. And that makes the whole campaign feel more “real” to the players.

Better Roleplay

Inevitably, this side-benefit manifests as a consequence of the preceding one. The more you can keep players “in character”, the better they will roleplay those characters. There are rare exceptions, just as there are some actors who can drop into character on cue – but they tend to be noteworthy. It’s far common for actors (and players) to have to put their character on, like a cloak, every time they break it.

Even simply engaging the game mechanics can be considered a partial break – often, it’s easier to step back into character if the disruption is not protracted – but this is very much a best-case scenario. Only the best players are still firmly “in their character’s heads” at the end of a major combat sequence, for example.

The more paths back into verisimilitude that you can provide, the more easily the players will be able to roleplay their characters, and that makes it easier to drop back into character after a disruption.

Better Game Mechanics

Another way at looking at the whole issue discussed by this article is to describe the genre conventions and elements as “intentions” – they are guidelines to what the GM “intends” to achieve within the game setting and mechanics, which in turn makes the adventures that he has in mind a better stylistic “fit”.

The term “better” is always a subjective one, but by making the game mechanics more responsive to those intentions, you make them more fit-for-purpose – and (provided that there is no “hit” to playability), that makes them “better” by at least one objective criterion.

Meta-interpretations of outcomes = Better Narrative

Understanding conceptually how the more fantastic elements of gameplay would be expected to function if the game world were a reality makes narrative descriptions of that environment easier to write and more accurate to the intention, too. Again, “better” is both a subjective and relative term, but if one of the purposes of the narrative is to bring the world to life for the players, I would argue that any change that makes the narrative more fit for that purpose makes it “better”.

What’s more, the internal consistency means that narrative communications are more likely to be clearly and correctly understood and interpreted by the players – and that makes the narrative “better” in a second, major, respect.

And finally, the verisimilitude makes the subject of the narrative more believable, making it easier to suspend disbelief in the otherwise impossible. That makes narrative “better” in still a third respect.

Unification of function and purpose

The last side-benefit is the most abstract and abstruse. You could describe it as making the campaign more robust by better-embedding the central genre elements and their distinctive interpretations within the components of the campaign at several different levels, so that they can mutually reinforce and support each other.

Okay, surely now the article can come to an end, right?

Note quite yet. I haven’t yet explained where this article came from – a real world example of everything that’s been discussed here.

The Woes Of Piety & Magic, Part II

The section title is a direct reference to my 2009 contribution to the Blog Carnival (one of many, that month, because Campaign Mastery was hosting it, as we are right now), My Biggest Mistakes: The Woes Of Piety & Magic – well, to part of it. This article can be considered a sequel to that discussion, at least indirectly.

In the 2009 article, I discussed the failure of my first attempt at codifying a magic system for use within the Champions game system (now known as the Hero System):

The Hero system doesn’t do AD&D-style spellcasting any favors. It’s designed for characters who have only a few abilities, not a vast repertoire of spells. Designing a magic subsystem for my superhero game was high on my list of things to do after exhausting most of the possibilities offered in the 4th Ed rules.

I wanted a system where each spell was designed like a formula – plug in values for range, character points of effect, etc, multiply them all together, and what pumped out the end was a cost in “Mana” – effectively a points pool of available magic, similar to Endurance; look that value up on a table and you got the skill roll needed to successfully cast the spell. The virtue of this approach was that if you wanted to double the range, you could double the mana cost, or halve the number of dice of effect, or halve the area of effect, or whatever, and the rest was unchanged – it was universally flexible while remaining balanced.

In theory, it worked brilliantly. In private testing, the few spells I tried out also worked exquisitely well. In practice:

I’m at home working with formulas and mathematics. Others are not, and found the design subsystem for spells to be very difficult to follow, and the casting system for spells to be impossible to use in play. So much so that the first player to try the system ended up as a mage who refused to cast spells – when the ultimate design objective was a system that permitted a mage to use magic casually (Want the coffee from across the room? Cast a spell to fetch it).

And the second player to try the system became obsessed with the penalties for spell failure, which were modeled on the “side effects” rules, to the point where, once again, the character also refused to cast spells.

It needed to be replaced, and so it was, by a system modeled in part on early Elemental Controls, and which is far closer to the standard powers description. It’s actually less flexible and less elegant from my perspective, requiring more work in designing spells; but it makes designing spells and casting spells easier for every player who’s tried it, and they are the final arbiters. If anything, the revised system was [is] too powerful and too flexible, requiring a number of additional tweaks and restrictions on ad-hoc spellcasting to maintain game balance; but these have been (relatively) minor adjustments; on the whole, the system works.

The problem with that write-up, which wasn’t obvious at the time, was that what works at one power level may not scale all that well. Come the big finale of that campaign and its evolution into the current one in 2011-2012, the spell caster was able to take advantage of a number of temporary boosts and system flaws to start lobbing 5,000 dice spells around.

Yes, you read that right. On a scale where 5d6 is roughly a stick of dynamite, a pound of C4, a car-bomb, etc. What’s more, every additional 2 dice (roughly) doubles the amount of firepower – so 21 dice is roughly a ton of high explosives (20 dice is roughly a tonne), 41 dice is roughly a kiloton, 61 is roughly a megaton, and so on. 72 dice is roughly the size of the largest nuke ever created by man, the Russian “Tsar” bomb. The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs had an impact the equivalent of 112 dice. At 130 dice, you get the average output of the sun – per second. 176 dice is the size of the typical nova, while the typical supernova clocks in at 210 dice. The biggest explosion ever witnessed by man was an exploding galaxy some 40,000 light years away, and it works out to be 310 dice in size. The Big Bang has been calculated as producing the energy equivalent of 402 dice.

Which really puts that 5,000 dice into perspective, doesn’t it? 3.1×10^728 times as powerful as the Big Bang.

To make sense of the nonsense, I was forced to assume that the ratio of increase didn’t hold true – that it might be for every additional 2 dice for a while (the useful part of the scale, up to say a Mt), then it becomes a doubling for every 10 dice for a while (up to the largest nuke, say), then a doubling every 20 dice until you get to the sun’s output per second, then a doubling every 100 dice until you get to a nova, then doubling every 200 dice until you get to a supernova, then doubling every 1,000 dice thereafter.

That gives the following:

• 1 stick of dynamite etc = 5 d6
• a tonne of high explosives = 20 d6
• a ton of high explosives = 21 d6
• a kiloton = 41 d6
• a Megaton = 61 d6
• Largest Nuke ever detonated = 116 d6
• Dinosaur-killing Asteroid Impact = 671 d6
• Average output of the sun, per second = 1,251 d6
• Typical Nova = 3,551 d6
• Typical Supernova = 6,951 d6
• Largest Explosion Ever Witnessed = 56,951 d6
• Big Bang = 152,951 d6

So the spells were roughly the power of a “baby” supernova. This was enough that I could get through to the end of the campaign, and various adjustments were already planned that I thought would deal with the problem on a more lasting basis.

About 40% of the way through Adventure Structure: My Standard Formatting, I describe the plot of the big finale in question in a boxed-off area as an example, for anyone who’s interested – it’s not especially relevant to this discussion.

It then took me about 3 months to get all my ducks in a row for the start of the next campaign (with mostly the same characters).

I have to pause at this moment in the story to mention Ian Gray. A bit more than 25 years ago, Ian made the biggest mistake of his life when he offered to help update the Rules. Large parts of the essential game mechanics existed as amendments to some typewritten pages with virtually no explanation. Other parts of the system were quite detailed. 25 years on (and counting), and we still haven’t finished – even though we’ve been using this iteration of the game system for 23 of those 25 years.

Anyway, Ian had decided that the rules for Magic were over the top and needed paring back. So he wrote up a whole new magic system a couple of years ago (without telling me), based on an analogue of the second law of thermodynamics. He also drew on in-game experience of the metaphysics of how Magic was supposed to work, which in turn had been based on the old and expunged game mechanics. He had explained the new rules to the mage player, gotten his sign-off, and even converted the character over to the new mechanics.

All along, then, there has been step-wise evolution as the rules reached their current status. The mage is now capable – if he really pushes himself – of getting up to maybe one or two hundred dice. Most of the time, he’s dealing with 10-20 dice of effect – on a par with every other PC. And, so far as I’m concerned, we’re back on the universal doubling-every-2-dice, which is MUCH simpler.

During the Covid-19 shutdown of the campaign, which lasted 5 months, I had time to review those rules beyond simply skimming them, and to tweak the existing metagame simulation concepts to match. In our first adventure back underway, a couple of weekends ago, the opportunity presented itself (in the guise of a more educated mage) to explain the ‘reality’ of magic to the PC mage, along with some of the more interesting metagame consequences that were not yet encompassed within the rules.

Because of the understanding of the revised metagame concepts that I had, all I needed to run this segment of the game was some bullet-points and my portable whiteboard – sometime in the next month or so, I intend to write them up (with more permanent illustrations) for presentation here at Campaign Mastery as a change of pace.

For the last year, the concept of magic and how it worked had been at odds with the game mechanics in place within the campaign. The result was all those negative impacts described earlier in this article. All those melted away, to be replaced by all the positive impacts mentioned, in the course of about 45 minutes of roleplay, which had all the other players kibitzing and following along, fascinated, as their world grew in richness around them.

Of course, at the time, i was unaware of everything else that I’ve described in this article; it was after the players had left for the day that the contents came to me while reflecting on the day’s play. I started outlining this article immediately – because if the impacts of a contradiction between game mechanics and conceptual mechanics weren’t obvious to me, even with all my experience and expertise, I didn’t think very many others would be aware of them, either.

I usually put this sort of preamble at the start of an article, but in this instance, I thought it would distract from the points I was trying to make, and sound too much like I was trying to sell the reader on the problems and fixes to them that I was proposing. I wanted the analysis and solutions to justify their own presence – but thought that this context, as a real-world example of the things I had identified ‘in theory’ was too important to leave out.

So that’s how you came to be reading these words instead of something else!

What we used to need in the Zenith-3 Campaign was greater synergy between the game mechanics and metagame pseudo-science – but I fixed that, last week. You can, too. Because if there’s one lesson from this story, it’s that it’s never too late.

Campaign Mastery is hosting the August 2020 Blog Carnival, and the topic that I’ve come up with is “What We Need Is/Are….”

What does your campaign need more of? What does your campaign world need more of? What do you need more of in your adventures? In you characters? In your players? What does gaming in general need more of?

Or, you can take the opposing perspective. What does your campaign have too much of? What element is over-represented in your game world? What do you need less of in your adventures? In your NPCs? In your PCs? In your players? What does gaming in general need less of?

Of course, everything that can be phrased one way can be rephrased into its opposing variant.

“What we need is less time wasted in meaningless combat” can be re-formulated as “What we need is more meaningful combat”, for example.

What does your current game not have enough of, and how can you correct that? One answer per campaign, please – unless you’re identifying a deficiency in your GMing that you notice is present across multiple campaigns! Answers can be serious, or lighthearted; literal or….. well, not.

Possible examples:

• What we need are more mice.
• What we need is more plot.
• What we need are more treasure tables.
• What we need are more Goblins.
• What we need are more elephants.
• What we need is more Magic.
• What we need are more players.
• What we need is more tapioca. And salsa. And corn chips. And Dip.
• What we need is more social interaction.
• What we need is faster combat resolution.

Covid-19 restrictions give us all the opportunity to be a little introspective. So I’d be a little disappointed by general answers such as “What I need is more prep time” or something along those lines. “What we need are more game sessions” is also of dubious value in the current social climate – but it might be valid if it was true before the Coronavirus came along.

This post will serve as the anchor post for the Carnival, so drop me a line in the comments with a link to your submissions. In an attempt to boost the participation rate (and I haven’t cleared this with Scot, the overall admin for the Carnival, so I hope he’s on-board), I will also happily accept links to any podcast in which this is a topic of conversation or anything similar. Of course, I also welcome all blogger participation, whether that be from newcomers or old hands!

Image by SeppH from Pixabay, crop by Mike

What We Need in the Zenith-3 Campaign Is: More Pace

I always like to ensure that my anchor posts contain inherent value for readers. In this case, that’s easily provided by picking one of my campaigns and putting some aspect under the microscope.

The Zenith-3 campaign was shut down in February due to Covid-19 restrictions and reopened this weekend, picking up just where it left off, in mid-adventure. I have a couple of observations about that process later in this article, but the real relevance in this title stems from before the shutdown.

In Bridging The Plot Divide: A ‘Writer’s Block’ Bonus Breakthrough, I wrote about a writer’s block situation in my plotting for this campaign. Specifically, I had established a scary situation in which Domestic Terrorists had bought a couple of Nuclear Weapons from an arms dealer who, in turn, was dealing with a Russia in serious economic distress after 6 years of war in which neither side had made great gains.

The problem was, what were they going to do with these weapons? To create time pressure on the PCs, and for the symbolic value, the plot was to transpire on the 4th of July in the current campaign year of 1986. But all the plots I was coming up with were horribly tired and cliched, and nowhere near challenging enough for the PCs. I needed more mystery, more engagement, and more complexity – in a nutshell, the plot needed to be richer.

The article linked to above deals with the process of getting through that writer’s block, and the requirements that made it more challenging. In this submission, I want to focus on the impact that it had on the campaign’s pacing.

The Pacing Problem

This problem had been existing for several months prior to the Covid-19 shutdown. Because I knew that I didn’t have anything planned, I instituted stall tactics – some conscious, and some subconscious. These padded out the plotline, slowing it down just when any rational assessment of plot dynamics suggested that it should be accelerating. But I needed to buy time to come up with a solution.

I’m normally pretty good at this sort of thing – I’ve lost count of the number of times someone on Twitter has described a plot hole and I’ve been able to immediately throw something their way. Anyone who has used that social media platform with lots of followers knows that tweets are immediate – you either respond now or lose the opportunity. Yes, you can ‘like’ a tweet to keep it, or re-tweet it so that it appears in your timeline; either will let you come back to it if there’s something on the tip of your tongue but it isn’t leaping up and down in front of your mind’s eye. But 99% of responses will be spontaneous.

So I only expected to need to stall for a short period of time.

Plot synopses became longer and more detailed – not because they had to be, but because I needed to fill time. And I began implementing stall tactics to try and delay the PCs getting to the point where my planning had run aground.

Stall Tactics

Negotiations with the alien Rheezok (and their backstory) were expanded from a (relatively) brief and decisive encounter to almost a full session, and instead of one or two PCs being involved, were expanded to include all PCs as active participants. This gained me about half a game session.

The following session, what should have been an incidental toss-off (buying a meal in a street market) was expanded into a full-blown shopping expedition, gaining another 3/4 of a game session.

You can see the trend. A (relatively) simple task – chasing down a bandit – that should have been child’s play for the PCs, over in an hour, became an entire session’s play and the exposure of corruption within the local regime and ongoing treason against that regime by a trusted relative of the leader.

Fortunately, I was able to delve more deeply into the world-building prep that I had engaged in, so none of these delays was actually wasted game time. But the more you slow the plot down, the harder it becomes to involve everyone. Variety gives more hooks on which to hang contributions by each individual.

This image combines “ability-2672659.png” by BedexpStock and “abstract beam blast” by Kevin Sanderson, both from Pixabay.

Solution

I didn’t find my way through the plot hole until June. It is possible that the breakthrough would have been stimulated into existence by the ongoing press of time had we continued playing; it was easy to turn the shutdown (and corresponding absence of time pressure) into procrastination.

With that additional spur, I would have come up with something in time for the April game session (we play once a month), which would have been the last-minute, or close to it. Whether or not it would have been as satisfying as the solution achieved, I don’t know.

The impact on pacing

In the most recent game session, the first since the solution to my plot problem was devised, there was an immediate impact that I think everyone noticed.

I actually started writing a lengthy synopsis, in part because of the long shutdown, and scrapped two pages of it, delivering a far more compressed version that mentioned a number of past events only in passing.

We then skipped over what would have otherwise been almost the entire game session in a few paragraphs of narrative. This material would not have drawn significantly on the world-building, and would have contributed nothing – it was necessary, but still filler.

When plotting it, I was mindful of trying to strike a balance between the pace that the adventure should be cracking along with at this point, and the more stately pace of the previous game sessions, factoring in the long shutdown. The speed of the introduction, which led directly into that passage of narrative-instead-of-boring-stuff was just the injection of pace needed to get the game moving again.

In fact, I underestimated the amount of material I would need to have prepped – as had several of the previous game sessions, the day’s play ended a little early, and my thoughts were already turning to what I will need for the next session.

Lingering Impacts

I actually found myself fighting my own instincts in those ruminations. The instincts that I had been developing as a result of the stall tactics were to make the next step in the campaign an emergency or a threat that would force the PCs to take action, in opposition to the in-game environment and world-building that I had been engaged in.

Since this would have taken playing time, it was the undoubted path that I would have chosen were I still needing to stall. There remains a lethargy in the plotting that I now have to actively work at avoiding. But I’m aware of the problem, and the need to confront it; at the same time, I have to be careful not to go too far in the other direction.

As always, game pacing is a delicate balancing act.

There is a passage of play coming up which has the potential to drag significantly, and which I can’t really liven up with encounters or emergencies. The need to keep up the momentum of the story means that I’m going to want to hand-wave as much of that time as the players will permit me to get away with.

There will still be a bit of a slow-down, but that’s appropriate since part of what they are intending to do in that period is to rest. The in-game situation has given them only about 4 1/2 hours rest in the last 76 or 77 hours, plus some half-dozing while mounted on riding dinosaurs.

The plan is to accelerate the preceding game-play as much as possible while maintaining verisimilitude, so that the slow-down feels like the characters are resting, enabling me to skip through that slowed passage as quickly as possible. This will be challenging simply because the players will be driving a lot of it; I can’t make decisions in advance, but have to respond to their inputs.

For example, they will want to rent a House. I know some of the criteria that will be involved; they need five or six bedrooms, to take possession immediately, they need a great deal of privacy, and they have a limited budget. Those don’t grow on trees! But I don’t even know what city or town or US state they will choose for this base of operations, which makes things trickier!

I will probably employ a magician’s force, preparing two or three options and having those same two or three options present wherever they choose to settle. That will enable me to incorporate the levels of detail and color that are appropriate to a location that will be revisited a number of times as the campaign proceeds.

What the Zenith-3 campaign needs, at this point, is greater pace. I’ve already started delivering on that need, but with the next couple of sessions, I want to double-down on that delivery.

Some takeaways

I want to call out a couple of key lessons from the situation described.

1. Stall Tactics are perfectly satisfactory when necessary – but you need sufficient depth of material that you can fill those dead spaces.
2. It’s possible to build passages of plot where you can speed things up or slow them down in order to manipulate the pacing of the campaign.
3. You should always think about what’s going to happen next, and what its pacing demands will be, when planning a passage of play.
4. Plot problems can be opportunities.
5. Plan your pacing targets before you write – and review what you’ve written to be sure that you’re meeting those targets.
6. No problem is impossible to solve – but different solutions can have different price tags and consequences. Exercise care when choosing.

So, now it’s over to the other bloggers out there. What do your games/campaigns need more of?

Puppies are cute I
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

It’s a classic television trope: the message story (sometimes called the Aesop). But there are some serious problems that you’ll encounter adapting the concept to an RPG adventure. Fortunately, they aren’t insuperable.

The Problems

There are four issues that frequently present themselves in creating message stories:

1. There needs to be a script
2. Players won’t follow the script
3. Players may disagree with the message or dislike message stories generally.
4. Players may dislike the fact that there is a script.

There needs to be a script

In order to convey the message, you need the plot to follow a particular direction. If it doesn’t, the message doesn’t come through. It’s all well and good to have two societies at war because one side is black on the left, and the other, on the right; but if the PCs simply side with one, the message that you hoped to convey falls to earth with a deathly thud.

But that smacks of railroading the game, and that’s never a good thing.

Players won’t follow the script

Even if you avoid that trap – and there are ways of doing so, a couple of which are especially useful in this context, which I’ll cover in the ‘solutions’ part of the article – no plot survives contact with the PCs unscathed.

Sometimes they will be correct in stating that their PCs wouldn’t want to get mixed up in whatever you’re leaving on their doorsteps. Sometimes they will be contrary just because it sounds like fun, or fits their prejudices (the players, not the characters), sometimes because they are ideologically opposed to railroading and anything that smacks of it, and sometimes just to be contrary.

I’ve even seen occasions when the players deliberately chose an unorthodox path through an adventure simply because they thought the GM was getting too confident or cocky.

And sometimes, the PCs will be taken down a different road simply because in trying to hide or avoid a railroading situation, you haven’t given the players enough information to recognize the path forward. A solution that is obvious to you may not be at all obvious to the players when the time comes.

You need a script that not only won’t generate resistance, but which is protected and buffered against willful interference.

Players may disagree with the message or dislike message stories generally

This continues with the themes raised in the previous point. For example, let’s talk for a minute about that black-and-white vs white-and-black conflict that I mentioned a moment ago. This, of course, is a famous allegory from a Star Trek episode (the original series). Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.

Perhaps you want your PCs to encounter a similar situation and discover that the reason for the unique half-and-half appearance is that this was engineered into the race’s genetics a long time ago to end a terrible war between the blacks and whites. The message is that superficial solutions solve nothing, and meaningful solutions require the addressing of the deeper and less obvious real problems, perhaps because you think that the PCs have been employing band-aid solutions while avoiding the real problems that you’ve been putting in front of them.

That’s a legitimate message, both in the campaign meta-context and in broader terms. But there can be alternative perspectives, and counter-arguments, for example “Solve the immediate problem today and worry about the rest tomorrow”, which presumes that those deeper root issues may well be insoluble but that doesn’t matter so long as they are kept from boiling over, one day at a time.

Anyone who subscribes to that more pragmatic approach is likely to object to a plot designed to force-feed a message with which they disagree.

On top of that, some people have problems with message stories in general, because they are perceived as heavy-handed moralizing and tokenistic back-handed support of an important issue.

My earliest awareness of this was discussion of Lt. Uhura’s role in the original Star Trek, where she was perceived by some as a token Black Woman, present to do nothing but signal the diversity of the cast, and by extension, of the future. The problem wasn’t that she was there, it was that they never gave her anything significant to contribute. This almost led to her leaving the show after the second season, but she was persuaded not to be Reverend Martin Luther King. Just ‘being there’ made her a role model and inspiration, something she had not fully appreciated previously.

George Takai has made similar comments about his casting as a token Asian and his efforts to break out of the ‘racial bubble’ that came with it, for example the assumption that his character would know martial arts because he was Asian – instead, he suggested that his character employ fencing for that plot sequence, which created a memorable impression on cast, crew, and audience and broke the stereotype.

A lot of TV shows are very happy to break stereotypes when they think about them by making the stereotype central to the plot, but their support of the issue is only skin deep and makes no lasting change.

The heavy-handedness has manifested in characters being given flaws that have never been observed in their makeup before, for no other reason than conveying the message about those who suffer from that flaw, to cite just one example.

The cumulative weight of bad message shows has been enough for some people to have decided that they simply don’t like message shows – and that same attitude would extend to RPG adventures.

Players may dislike the fact that there is a script.

Again, I’ve telegraphed this item in my previous commentary. Some players hate railroading with a passion, others only mildly loathe it. A few may go along for the sake of the campaign, or because they trust the GMs – under protest.

That’s a prejudicial hump that any message adventure has to surmount, and it’s not always easy to do so.

The Solutions

So, let’s talk about the solutions to these problems. There’s no one magic bullet; instead, there are a group of techniques that, when applied collectively, make the message adventure more palatable.

1. Gift-wrap the message

Most people know to do this, anyway. Don’t address the issue directly, because you may hit on a raw nerve; instead, gift-wrap it in an allegory or a metaphor.

An Allegory is the use of a character, place, or event in a narrative to deliver a message, frequently through employing symbolic representations or personifications.

“The story of the apple falling onto Isaac Newton’s head is another famous allegory. It simplified the idea of gravity by depicting a simple way it was supposedly discovered. It also made the scientific revelation well known by condensing the theory into a short tale.” – an example offered by Wikipedia.

A Metaphor is the indirect referencing of a subject by directly referencing a situation, person, or object that can be seen to have qualities that are representative of the original subject.

From Wikipedia:

One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature comes from the “All the world’s a stage” monologue from As You Like It:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances …
     – William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7

This quotation expresses a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage. By asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses points of comparison between the world and a stage to convey an understanding about the mechanics of the world and the behavior of the people within it.



Puppies are cute II
Image by Elena Rogulina from Pixabay

The following web pages may be useful. Allegory:

• What Is Allegory? Types of Allegory in Writing And 5 Tips on Using Allegory in Writing
• Literary Techniques: Allegory
• Save the Allegory!
  (covers the differences between allegory and metaphor)

…and Metaphor:

• Literary Techniques: Metaphor
• 7 Tips For Creating (Poignant) Poetic Metaphors
• What’s the Difference Between Metaphor, Simile, and Analogy?
• How to Use Metaphor to Deepen Characterization

Not all messages are created equal

‘Puppies are cute,’ as a message, won’t elicit the same response as something more controversial. The more intense the feelings or opinions that your story is to engage, the more strongly your players will either agree or disagree. This will color their character choices; I’ve even seen a player quit a campaign because the background required his character to adopt a stance that the player strongly disagreed with. Choose your message with care.

Know your targets

Why are you doing a message story? Who are you trying to communicate the message to?

You should know very clearly why you are presenting this message to the players, and make sure that this purpose stacks up in terms of entertaining them.

• If the goal is to educate them about part of the campaign background, that’s legitimate.
• If the goal is just to educate them, unless you’re a teacher in a classroom setting, that’s NOT an appropriate justification.
• If the goal is to lecture them or convert them to your point of view on something, that’s a LONG way removed from an appropriate justification.

There are legitimate reasons to tell message stories in an RPG every now and then. Make sure that your motivation is one of them.

There is also a subtle but profound difference between pitching a message at the characters and not at the players. If there is only one right answer, if you are forcing the characters to act in a certain way or think a certain way, that generally means that you are pitching your message at the players, because you are dictating the reactions of the characters. If the characters are free to react as they see fit, and all possible reactions are catered for (see below), then what ensues may be a challenge to the players’ roleplaying abilities, but if the story is good and internally coherent, they will find it to be fun, anyway.

Agreeing with your players

If you know that your players have a strong opinion on something, DON’T try to send a contradictory message. We play games for fun, not for social commentary or to be lectured at.

I know I’ve made that point a couple of times already, but it bears repeating. I really want to drive it home. If you take nothing else away from this article, I want this advice to stick.

I should also make the point that pretending to agree with your players when you don’t is much harder than most types of falsehood in an RPG and more likely to generate ill-will than most. They may feel like you are trying to sucker them, telling them what they want to hear.

Searching the soul of the characters

Perhaps the best reason to do a “message” story is because it will force the players to consider their character’s positions on a subject that doesn’t often come up in conversation and that isn’t obviously black and white.

The critical thing is for you to be a completely neutral arbiter in such situations regardless of your personal feelings or opinions. That starts by accepting that the opposite side of the fence on any issue may just have a valid point or two to make. Two past articles at Campaign Mastery address this problem directly:

• The Olympian Perspective: Personal Opinions, Fake News, and the GM

  and, more specifically,

• Lessons From The West Wing V: Bilateral Political Incorrectness for RPGs


Puppies are cute III
Image by Diego Hernando Otálora Barrero from Pixabay

The Binary Script

The Binary script is a plot outline that is written two ways, depending on whether or not the players choose to agree with the message or disagree with the message.

It’s one thing to pitch a problem or moral conundrum at the characters and let them choose how to react. This means that you are couching your message in the form of events or characters within the game world, and not relying on a particular response by the players or characters to deliver your message, or to make it relevant.

You may find this article to be helpful: Rainbows Of Neon Gray: Moral Topology – even though it’s only indirectly relevant.

The Trinary Script

Even better than a Binary Script is a Trinary Script. This adventure structure adds a third option in which the players may choose to consider both options extreme, and seek to chart a middle course or compromise.

This is particularly relevant if it is possible to devise a process that will deliver the deeper reform that your message is advocating in incremental stages, no matter how long they may take; a long term solution but one that will be of little value without dealing with the immediate brush-fire.

The unfinished Script

Don’t pre-script the ending of a message adventure. Script the situation that delivers the message, draft the alternative courses that the plot might then follow (Binary or Trinary scripts), but let the actual outcome be free floating; take things up to the point of a plot twist (there should always be a plot twist!) and let the players have total freedom from that point.

Heavy-handed NPCs

It’s always better to have the players perceive an NPC as a heavy-handed moralizer, especially if they are occasionally in error or flawed, than to have them think that about the GM (you) or your adventure.

A point that I’ve made before is that players will accept all sorts of things if they can point to an NPC who is to blame that they would never tolerate if they seemed to be coming from the GM. That usually requires establishing the NPC in advance, so that whatever antisocial behavior you seek to attribute to him or her or it can be seen as a logical outgrowth of that personality.

Divine Heavy-handedness

A number of my games have contained the presumption that divine might can only be used clumsily because a Deity never needs to learn finesse. Those with finesse, in contrast, tend to have relatively little Divine Might, so they learn to use it as a lever to get what they want.

That doesn’t mean that Thor or Odin are thick as posts; it just means that they tend to be very heavy-handed when they intervene.

If you are going to restrict the courses of action open to your PCs, it’s far better to do it using an NPC established within the campaign for that purpose than to try and do it as the GM.

Too Many Messages Sink The Ship

If you follow the advice given, you should be able to craft the occasional “message” adventure with perfect impunity. More importantly, you should be able to add them to your campaign toolkit, something to be used for the enhancement and betterment and exploration of the campaign by taking the PCs into areas they wouldn’t usually inhabit.

But Message Adventures are like a strong spice; they can easily overwhelm. Too many such stories in too short a time blunts the appetite for more; it’s easy to grow sick of them.

Multiple messages in the same adventure are definitely too many for most players to cope with, even if each is targeted at a different PC.

Used sparingly, Message Adventures can spice up a campaign and take it into rarely-trodden byways; they can be vehicles for atypical levels of action (much more or creating far more introspection); they can be a positive asset to a campaign. But be careful not to over-use them.

Message Ends :)

The Blog Carnival for July 2020 is on the subject of “What Would You Like To Know?“, and is being hosted by Of Dice And Dragons.

I actually find it easier to come up with topics for Carnivals than I do to answer this question. If I had to provide an answer to the question, it would be along the lines of “Information that I can’t easily find elsewhere” – which I don’t consider very satisfactory, as an answer.

In an attempt to discern a more satisfactory answer, I did a bit of navel-gazing on past topics and their relative success, especially those that Campaign Mastery has hosted.

Let’s run through them (links are to the the wrap-up post for each topic, and the number in [square brackets] is the number of entries received, divided into those from outside contributors and those from CM shown after a ‘+’ sign):

• September 2009: “Mistakes – ones you’ve made in the past and how you got past them, ones you’re making now and don’t know how to solve” [6+7]
• June 2010: “What non-game media have most inspired your games and how?” [18+1]
• March 2011: “Life & Death in RPGs” [22+4]
• October 2011: “Making The Loot Part Of The Plot” [37+8+ an extra link in the comments]
• September 2013: “Location! Location! Location!” [18+10]
• December 2014: “With A Twist” [11+6]
• November 2015: “The Unexpected” [6+6]
• November 2016: “Ordinary Life” [8+5]
• November 2017: “The Past Revisited: Pick A Post (your own or someone else’s)” [9+7]
• June 2018: “For the Love of RPGs” (Why do you love GMing?) [5+1]
• March 2019: “Echoes of Yesteryear” [1+1]
• September 2019: Visions Of Exotic Reality” [0+1]

The decline of the Blog Carnival is clear to see from the statistics shown. There were extraordinary reasons for the low turnout in November 2015, so the decline in participation seems to have started in 2018. The changing home location of the carnival would not have helped matters, because not everyone would have received the notification; for a long time, before Scot over at Of Dice And Dragons put his hand up, it looked like the whole thing was going to fold. 2010-2014 seemed to be the highlight years.

Two things seemed to do really well back in the early days: subjects upon which people were opinionated, and subjects that provided drop-in content that people could employ in their own campaigns.

I always try to include at least one article on the subject with the anchor post. As you can see, that was the only contribution to the most recent blog carnival hosted here. The question that lingers is whether that was due to external factors or is the result of the topic I chose.

The challenge that it posed was “Describe a scene observed around you as it’s equivalent somewhere or somewhen else, ready to be dropped into a campaign.” – explicitly an attempt to capture drop-in content, the second of those “popular” categories that I noted above.

Analyzing the site traffic for the week in question shows NO traffic heading for a specific page (which is where potential participants would have been led), with a fairly normal level of traffic to the site overall. So it doesn’t seem to have been a problem with contributors deciding that the topic was too hard; rather, a shortage of contributors interested in the blog carnival at all.

For comparison, I opened up a couple of more recent Carnival – “Are We There Yet”, hosted by Fitz at Moebius Adventures was the first. He seemed to get a grand total of four contributions (for the record, I started an entry and didn’t get it finished in time – but I haven’t thrown it away, and will eventually finish it). Last Month’s Carnival, provided by The Expanding Frontier was on “Organizations” and received a grand total of 3 entries plus two from the host.

Hardly earthshaking numbers, and far removed from those experienced in the heyday of the Carnival.

It’s my impression that too few bloggers are reading each other’s content these days. I used to be grateful for the bloggers who aggregated and reviewed blog content each month; not only did I often gain insight into the subjects that I had written about, and site traffic, but often discovered other articles of interest. There have been several of these over the years, but they seemed to have been killed or died out, one by one.

Perhaps the rise of podcasts and video-blogs is part of the problem. With a web page, it’s easy to link to something, or to skip to a specific paragraph; that’s a lot harder with a podcast, you have to make your own notes. Sure, the result is more immediate, but it’s also more ephemeral and short-lived. And it means that there are fewer people writing blogs out there. As for including a link to someone else’s content, there are obvious problems! By definition, then, these are insular and less community-oriented.

Another issue that has undoubtedly had an impact is the fragmentation of the RPG community. Social scandals and a seeming unwillingness to make an effort to repurpose content to your own setting or game system have caused a number of GMs to become more insular, interested in content that’s directly relevant to them and not so much anything that isn’t. This contrasts sharply with the way RPGs were, as recently as a decade ago. Many people no longer see RPGs as a wider community, they see RPGs as a collection or assemblage of smaller, more isolated communities.

You have to wonder about the impact of Covid-19, too. On the one hand, being stuck at home would give bloggers more time to write, with fewer outside distractions; on the other, not only are there fewer active games taking place due to restrictions on social gatherings, and hence less inspiration (and less need), but there’s also the problem of screen overload – simply put, if people are working at home by computer all day, they are less inclined to using that same device for their recreation.

Nevertheless, I remain convinced that the right topic will reawaken the sleeping beast. With that in mind, I thought that a quick analysis of the different types of subject that could be chosen might lead back to an answer to the original question posed.

A continuum from specific to general

Topics can range from the very specific to the very broad and general. The more specific a topic is, the more it will attract bloggers who find that subject to be relevant to their gaming. The more general, a subject, the broader the umbrella that it offers for contributions, but the less motivational it is.

In olden days, the broader and more general a topic within the Blog Carnival, the more responses you got. I’m not sure that’s still the case. The last three carnivals hosted here at Campaign Mastery, and both of the recent carnivals that I checked out earlier could be considered quite broad.

What’s the alternative, though? A subject that appeals to a small niche group may be more likely to attract contributions from those who are part of that niche (if they even know that the blog carnival exists), but those contributions are less likely to be of any interest to anyone outside that niche. And every blogger seeks to write to their audience, whether they realize it or not, intentionally or otherwise. So this would seem to be a dead-end.

But it does raise an issue that is directly related to this month’s topic, and to my whole analysis: is the number of contributions a valid metric of the success or failure of a subject? Should the question be what the Blog Authors would like to read more of, or what subjects would most interest their readers?

There’s an assumption that we all make, that the two are one and the same. Sometimes, it’s correct. But it should be borne in mind, for those times when it is not.

To some extent, this is diffused by frequency of posts and breadth of readership. When Campaign Mastery could publish twice a week, I had more than twice as many readers as I typically do now. That meant that a subject could appeal to a specific subgroup of readers and the rest would probably be served by the second post of the week. For any given subject, there were enough readers to make it a viable subject. I have to choose my subjects more judiciously now.

Courting Controversy

GMs are an opinionated lot – we have to be, because part of the skill-set is the ability to appraise situations and formulate a response quickly. There are certain subjects that everyone has an opinion on, and these hot-button topics would probably generate a lot of submissions – and each would generate a lot of controversy. The current hot-button is racism in RPGs; before that it was Sexism in the RPG industry. Making either of those the subjects would undoubtedly attract a lot of content – but it would be very polarizing, and divisive, and – in the long run – I’m not convinced that these would be healthy subjects for the carnival. They are too reminiscent of the Edition Wars.

Nevertheless, there is a touchstone there – a good topic should call on bloggers to crystallize their thinking on a ubiquitous subject, and should be something on which everyone has an opinion. What is to be avoided are topics which are unduly polarizing, in which disagreement with whatever is posted leads to judgments of the author.

Seasonal Topics

At least 7 of the last 8 October blog carnivals have been related themed around Halloween. as though that were the only thing that happened that month. The problem is that most bloggers have only so many articles that fall under that umbrella, and once they’ve been written, that author is no longer a contributor to that carnival. If there was always fresh blood arriving in the parent organization, that’s all right; fresh blood brings new ideas, after all.

If you have a new slant to offer, a seasonal topic can be a great idea. But seasonal topics require a bit more effort than other topics, or you will end up with people simply rolling their eyes and saying “not again” to themselves.

The Communication of Knowledge

Something that rarely seems to arise in the Blog Carnival are factually-oriented subjects. In fact, they seem to be rare in RPG blogging, generally. Yet, these are subjects that would be of use to a lot of GMs out there. What do you know about that I don’t, and how would that knowledge be useful in representing characters who know about the subject in an RPG? It could be leather-working, or how armor is fitted, or the basics of medieval defenses, or how long it takes to clear land, or dig holes, or any one of a vast number of topics. What traits to architects have in common, generally? What’s the social life of a beekeeper? The working week of a blacksmith, or a computer programmer? You may know about such things because you’ve done them in real life, but I haven’t, and so don’t know what you know. Heck, I don’t even know that I don’t know.

That’s why I visit sites like Quora regularly – I never know what I’ll learn next. That’s why I watch professionals – plumbers, electricians, etc – closely, whenever they enter my domestic orbit; I don’t know their profession, and the more I learn about it, the more realistically I can portray them in games.

An article on the history or candle-making, or how prospectors identify mineral deposits, might be absolutely fascinating.

What I want to read more of

Hmm – it seems that I’ve found my way to answers to the question posed by Scot as the subject of this month’s carnival, as I had hoped.

• Drop-in content
• Social subcultures
• Reference & Educational material
• Stimulating subjects

Heck, I’d love to see “Pick a past host of the Blog Carnival (not your own site) and write a review of a past month’s content when they weren’t hosting the blog carnival”. We could introduce each other to each other – and to our readers.

Of course, it would be poor form for me not to point out a vested interest in the entire subject – Campaign Mastery is the host of Next month’s Blog Carnival. The subject will be “What we need is/are more…”

What does your current game not have enough of, and how can you correct that? One answer per campaign, please! Answers can be serious, or lighthearted; literal or, well, not.

Possible examples: “What we need are more mice. What we need is more plot. What we need are more treasure tables. What we need are more Goblins. What we need are more elephants. What we need is more Magic. What we need are more players. What we need is more tapioca. And salsa. And corn chips. And Dip.”

Of course, I’ll be posting a proper anchor post a little closer to the commencement date… consider this a sneak preview. But there’s a relevance to the current subject of discussion that can’t be ignored, either.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Last time I outlined the first half (roughly) of a process for the introduction of a system of organization for plotting to an existing campaign.

I hope everyone’s already familiar with what was in Webs Of Gossamer: Retrofitting For Plot Pt I because I don’t have time to do much of a recap.

Instead, I’m going to dive right in (there may be a few nibbles as we proceed)…

10. Identify cross-links and cross-purposes

At this point you have half a dozen plotlines broken down in detail but sitting in splendid isolation. The next step is to start looking for cross-links, places where one plotline can complicate another.

For example, one point in our plot spine consists of the following two events:

• When the PCs return to Tribwich and confront Konrad, he will claim to have been extorted into deceiving them by the leader of the Mercenaries. He will know nothing about the people who were following the PCs and trying to get them killed, but promises to look into it when he can; he dislikes not knowing things.
• PCs Vs The Mercenaries Of Tribwich plotline.PCs drive the mercenaries away after forging a secret alliance with Konrad.

We already have an external plotline indicated there, a side-plot hanging off the main plot thread, and an indication of what it’s supposed to be about. It’s probably a fairly straightforward “Find the Mercenaries, Attack the Mercenaries, Rout the Mercenaries” kind of thing. There should be some sort of setback – “Discover that the Mercenaries have a ‘secret weapon’ or ‘hidden ally’ “ sort of thing, which will contemplate the Routing, as well.

Just as the PCs are about to achieve said rout, we could complicate their lives and the current situation by bringing in an element from another plotline that both PCs and Mercenaries have to work together to solve:

The “Rake The Embers” plotline
A refugee arrives from the Elemental Plane of Fire and begs for protection from the PCs and Mercenaries, not recognizing that they are in the middle of settling their differences. She is being pursued by a pair of powerful Elementals because she wants to warn of a plot to set the Prime Material Plane ablaze as a replacement for their home, which is (mysteriously) going out.

This plotline adds more moving pieces to the aggregate plotline of the campaign. You could start it anywhere, and only the relative strength of the forces involved would need to change. But starting it “now” has some big advantages – because it’s remote to the main setting of the spine, plot developments can be sprinkled throughout the campaign from this point forward in relative isolation, and simply fester and bubble away in the background the rest of the time; and at this point in the campaign, the problem is way beyond the PCs capabilities.

Your goal is to drop future developments from all your plotlines into the main spine of the campaign. Note that since none of them ARE the main spine of the campaign, they should all be resolved completely before the PCs have their final confrontation of that spinal plotline.

11. Resolve complications, preliminary timeline

The easiest way of doing all this is to (1) make copies of your plotlines, and (2) cut-and-paste into the copy of the spine. This enables you to merge all the plotlines into one multi-threaded document. Keeping separate copies that isolate each plotline makes them easier to comprehend; the preliminary timeline that results from the merger is an index to when, in relative terms, the plotline will advance.

The preliminary timeline will have complications that you need to resolve – times when you need the PCs to be distracted by something else to give events time to mature. The best solution: drop in additional standalone plots at such times, little mini-adventures that do nothing important but take up time that the PCs would otherwise use to derail whatever the “master plan” wants to have happened.

Sometimes you will notice that a plotline implicitly gives the PCs a resource or capability that will complicate (there’s that word again!) a later stage of a different plotline – or a later stage assumes that the PCs will have a capability that you haven’t explicitly “baked in” like a contact or an ally. The answer, once again, is to drop in a mini-adventure that gives the required capability or that denies them the use of it at the critical moment.

So your next step is to go through your preliminary timeline looking for these exact issues, and inserting mini-adventures to resolve them. You don’t need to figure out the content of these adventures at this point; you simply need to flag the need for them, and the meta-purpose that they are intended to achieve.

12. A plotline (or two) for each PC

Once you have done that, it’s time to take a second look at your starring cast. Each of your PCs should have at least one plotline that focuses on them as an individual. You may even have a couple – one on their home life, one on their professional life, and one that leads to them having the chance to achieve whatever the ‘one big thing’ was that each wanted to do with their lives, or at least getting a step closer to that being done.

You need to create these plotlines, based on what your players have provided in terms of the background of their characters, and on the results of your discussions with the players.

To illustrate this: one of the personal plotlines for a DMPC (“Dungeon Master’s PC”) in my Champions Campaign revolves around one of their enemies, who has a very strong sense of honor, joining the team to repay the debt of honor that he has decided he owes them for saving his people from a civil war. He simply showed up and announced that he was joining the team in the first adventure of the campaign. Slowly, the PCs have begun to trust and respect him, and slowly, he has begun to trust and respect them. A major step in the “rehabilitation” of this character will come when he tells them his real name – to date, he has simply used his non-de-gurre of “Defender”. This is one step in a plot thread that radically shifts the DMPC’s point of view and reshapes the fortunes and destiny of his people (if all goes according to plan).

That particular plot event could happen almost anytime – but I want it to be in a relatively quiet moment, in terms of the campaign, so that I can take the time to make it feel significant to the players, because it will offer further insights into his species’ culture and society, laying the groundwork for a future visit to his home-world.

13. Integrate into the timeline

Once you have a plotline (or more) for each of the PCs and DMPCs, these need to be integrated into the timeline, the master plan, in exactly the same way as has already been discussed. In some cases, these can provide the mini-adventures you have already identified the need for; in others, they need to be standalone items added in to a master list.

One point that should have been made earlier, but that I don’t think was, is that this integration is a two-way deal; you shouldn’t merely update the master timeline to contain the elements of each plot thread, you should update the description and breakdown of each plotline to mention the context and circumstances within which the plot event occurs.

14. Create the blanks, fill in the blanks

Having pruned back your list of required mini-adventures by using PC-centric plotlines to fill some of the requirements that you’ve identified in the main timeline, it’s time to create empty files for each of the remainder and populate each with ideas. This essentially sets each up as another plot thread (a very short one) that is dealt with in exactly the same manner as the larger ones.

15. Finalize the timeline, divide into adventures

Finalizing the timeline is a simple process – you just go over it again, looking for anything that you’ve missed.

Dividing the content of your master timeline into adventures is – at best – a preliminary breakdown.

One adventure may comprise events from several plot threads as well as the main action of that plotline. I often look for a theme that I can make common to several of these events and use that as a logical grouping. That theme often also provides the title of the adventure (you do name your adventures, right? You should – Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1) and Part 2 will both help and explain why.

You’ll also find some advice and technique in Yrisa’s Nightmare and other goodies and The Surprising Value of Clickbait to a GM, which is why they are also connected to the “A Good Name” series.

Crafting an Adventure

Congratulations! Your campaign is now a loosely-knitted interweaving of multiple plot threads that interact and conflate into a bigger picture.

Now it’s time to look at how you use it.

This is a fairly simple process:

1. Create a document to hold the new adventure;
2. Copy in the various elements that comprise that adventure from the master plan;
3. Review the ‘big picture’ of what each of the events means in terms of advancing the specific plot thread that they are part of;
4. Sequence the events within the adventure;
5. Start expanding on the details, making lists of the NPCs that you need, updating any NPCs involved that you already have, writing narrative passages, and (in general) turning a checklist of content into an episode of the campaign.

I’ve actually described this process in some detail; it’s essentially the same as the one discussed in Tips for and from RPG Campaign Geriatrics – look for the diagram about 3/5ths of the way down the page, then scroll up to the “Plot”, “Structure”, and “Planning” sections (which continue beyond both that diagram and another big one) some distance later.

Integrating new plotlines

You can’t run a campaign for any length of time without two three four things happening: (1) you come up with a brilliant new idea that you want to incorporate into the master plan; (2) you decide that a plotline that seemed brilliant at the time is actually a bit stale and passe; (3) the players want to move in a different direction for a while; and (4) you fail to have an adventure ready in time.

Brilliant New Ideas

It’s relatively easy to incorporate a new plotline – you simply repeat the process given above. However, every new idea runs the risk of destabilizing another plotline that you had underway by introducing contradictions or complications that you haven’t factored in. So long as you are aware of the dangers, that can usually be managed.

Your “Campaign Master Plan” is not a blueprint, to be followed slavishly; it’s a collection of ideas for the advancement of the various plotlines that comprise the campaign, a starting point. Don’t fall into the trap of setting yours in stone.

Refreshing Stale Ideas

No-one is brilliant all the time. Some of your ideas will just suck. That’s all right, some of mine do, too. The time to recognize that is when you are writing the adventure, but we all get distracted by our own brilliance at times, too; confirmation bias is just as large a cognitive problem for GMs as it is for anyone else (see “I know what’s happening!” – Confirmation Bias and RPGs).

Sometimes, too, your pacing is off for one reason or another and a plotline is simply taking too long to get to the point – you can tell that everyone’s getting tired of waiting for it.

When that happens, you have two choices: junk what you’ve got planned for that adventure and start planning it from wherever it had gotten up to, or compress the plotline, as described in When Good Ideas Linger Too Long: Compacting plotlines.

Again, nothing is set in stone. The key point to remember is to examine cross-connections to your other plotlines, because changing whatever you had in mind produces an adventure that may not achieve the same metaplot functions that the original did.

I’ve learned over the years that it’s often better to keep plot descriptions short and bullet-pointed and only expand them into full adventures when the time of play is imminent. I’ve offered a number of campaign examples in this format; one of the best (in terms of an example) is Control-Alt-Delete – A Modern-day SciFi Campaign.

A Change Of Tack

Sometimes the players Zig when you wanted or expected them to Zag. Campaign Mastery tackled this problem quite a long time ago, in Ask The GMs: Giving Players The Power To Choose Their Own Adventures, and more recently in Giving PCs Choice And Having Your Plot, Too. The bottom line is that at the end of the day, so long as the players have fun and the metaplot functions that you needed the intended adventure to serve are satisfied, how you get there doesn’t matter.

It’s important, therefore, to know what the meta-goals for any adventure are (the big picture) and to be prepared to throw everything else away if the players want to do something else instead.

Sometimes, you don’t have to be that extreme, because once the players deal with whatever side-excursion they have in mind, they will be happy to follow the path that you expected them to take in the first case; you need to bear in mind what it was that the players want their characters to achieve with this excursion.

There are other occasions when the divergence is more serious – the players may want to resolve a plotline now, rather than waiting for the time when you wanted to resolve it. Again, the short answer is to let them try. If they fail, your original plans simply have added context; if they succeed, you can draw upon those later plans to improvise the adventure. Having your campaign planned actually makes it easier to (successfully) diverge from that plan – something that the GM can take advantage of, when they need to.

The Dreaded Deadline Doom

Every now and then, we all get bitten by this. Your options are simple: abandon the game session, run your unfinished adventure (improvising the parts that aren’t yet done), or drop in a fill-in adventure.

The first choice, in my opinion, is a last resort; too many missed game sessions and you won’t have a campaign any more; people will find other things to occupy their time. Choosing between the others is a question of the adventure in question and how much of it you have finished.

You can improvise settings and locations.

You can improvise characters.

You can improvise narrative.

None of these will have significant long-term impact on the campaign if everything follows the plot that you’ve outlined, but there is a greater potential for conflict between plot and the characters who are supposed to be driving it. In general, if the adventure has reached the point where the players know everything that they need to know to resolve the plotline, I would go with the planned adventure and improv whatever I had to; if they don’t, then a drop-in self=contained adventure would be preferable.

These situations are inherently unpredictable in their timing. Something my co-GM and I have taken to doing for the Adventurer’s Club campaign is preparing a fill-in adventure in advance, ready to go. When a critical player is absent, or other circumstances mandate it, we wheel it out.

Recommendation: An Ideas File

I strongly advocate that GMs keep another document: a file in which new ideas can accumulate until you need one to flesh out an adventure, or to be the kernel of a drop-in adventure.

By the time the first Zenith-3 campaign had run it’s course, I had so many ideas for plotlines for the next one that they form a distinctive pair of plot “threads” within the campaign plan – and I was fairly certain the well was dry, making this my last superhero campaign for the foreseeable future. But I’ve since come up with a handful of ideas, which I will keep on standby as fill-ins should I need them!

Complicating The Picture

When I outlined this article, one of the last steps involved in planning it was to review the information I had been given by the person requesting the assistance to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. This is something that you should do when creating adventures, too – a quick review of the big picture in case there’s something important that has been overlooked.

There’s an implication in what I was told that I hadn’t picked up on – a suggestion that the GM actually had four different groups adventuring in the same campaign world at the same time. Everything I’ve written about assumes a single group in a campaign environment.

Lacking a term for this sort of multi-ply campaign, I’ve coined “Megacampaign” to describe them.

This adds a new level of complexity, and your planning has to take it into account. This section is how to do that, using the principles and approach already provided.

Megacampaign Plans & Timeline

In a nutshell: create separate master plans, as described, for each campaign, and then integrate them into a Master Plan / Timeline for the overall campaign. This enables you to have the effects of what Group 1 do show up in the background of adventures by Group 2, and so on.

In general, it’s that simple. But I have some additional advice for such situations, some additional planning elements that will help.

Isolationism

First of all, do your best to keep the different adventuring groups separate and distinct. If one group is based in the capital city of the central Kingdom, the others should be somewhere else. If a second group moves to that capital city temporarily, as happened in the example campaign that I concocted in the first part of this article, then the master plan should move the first group away from there for as long as necessary. This helps keep the campaign plot threads isolated and prevents one group getting in the way of a second.

Checkpoints

An ongoing problem will be synchronization. between the campaigns. Assuming that they play with the same frequency can help, but won’t be enough; some adventures will take a single game session, some will take two or three or four or eight or whatever.

Whenever something major is planned to occur in one timeline, something that will have knock-on effects in the other campaigns, that creates a Checkpoint. These should be highlighted in your campaign planning to make sure that each campaign is ‘ready’ for the event.

In other words, you want to keep the campaign date roughly the same in all the campaigns.

Checkpoints won’t occur in every adventure (they will probably become more frequent as the campaign draws to a conclusion)..



Consider the diagram (done in some haste, so not as neat as I intended, but it will serve). You can clearly see a Megacampaign consisting of three separate concurrent campaigns. Each contains adventures of different lengths in in-game days.

At the bottom of the diagram, you can see a Checkpoint – an event in Campaign #2 that will have repercussions felt within the other campaigns. In Campaign #3, the impact is slight, it’s just an event in the background (at least for now), but in Campaign#1, the repercussions will trigger a significant new adventure.

The problem: there’s a substantial gap in time at three points in two campaigns before the date in question is reached – Campaigns #1 and #3 are ready for the event to take place before Campaign #2 actually delivers the event.

Some of that gap can be accommodated, if you anticipate the need, with a couple of days spacing between adventures – your introduction to the adventure simply starts off, “a couple of days after….” and proceeds from there. That won’t work with every adventure; some are too tightly connected with the adventure that precedes or follows.

But if that’s not enough, then you will need Filler.

Filler

Filler is another word for a standalone small adventure whose sole meta-purpose is to chew up time, giving PCs that are in a campaign waiting around for a checkpoint to be reached something to do while they wait. Of course, the PCs don’t know that they are waiting for timelines to sync up – and you don’t know how long (in game-days) the filler has to be; you have to wait for the actual event to occur in Campaign #2.

That makes Filler more complicated, because it has two separate time dimensions to be accommodated – game-time and game sessions. This can usually be managed, if you know about the problem in advance, but it’s something that you have to keep in mind.

This is where the ideas file can be a lifesaver, because it gives you something you can drop into a campaign as “filler”.

Because organizing a campaign into a system helps you keep track of the Big Picture, it actually makes the campaign more flexible and responsive. Prep and campaign management become much easier.

It might be easier to create a campaign in a structured and systematic way in the first place, but it’s by no means too late when you start finding yourself drowning; it just means that there’s a little additional work involved in making sure that the major plot threads already underway are documented and integrated into a comprehensive master plan.

The two parts of this article show how it can be done; the rest is up to you.

Further Reading

Although I’ve touched on some of the articles that I’ve written or co-written on campaign structures in the text as they became relevant, there are a lot more that were omitted for various reasons, mostly a lack of direct relevance to the problem at hand. They contain a lot of advice that can be integrated into the structure created by the process in this two-part article or otherwise be helpful, especially in the longer term.

When asked the question that sparked this article, I responded with that list of relevant reading as preliminary reading. I thought it germane to include it (with a few additions) here as a footnote to the main content. The sequence has been selected with some care, so tackle them in the order shown if you’re interested. There will be some redundancy with articles referenced in the article body.

• Tips for and from RPG Campaign Geriatrics
• Ask The GMs: In it for the long haul
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Part 11: Campaigns
• Like sand through the fingers: Time waste and Campaign Prep
• Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign?
• Directed Plots, Undirected Narrative, and Stuff That Just Happens
• Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow
• Ask The GMs: Giving Players The Power To Choose Their Own Adventures
• Ask The GMs: Pacing Your Campaign
• Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 1
• Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 2
• Pacing and the value of the Pause
• Anatomy Of An Interruption – Endpoints
• Status Interruptus: Types Of Pause
• Compound Interruptions: Manipulating Pauses
• Amazon Nazis On The Moon: Campaign Planning Revisited
• Been There, Done That, Doing It Again – The Sequel Campaign Part Two of Two: Sprouts and Saplings
• Ask The GMs: Iceberg Plotlines: Massive Plot Arcs in RPGs
• Ask The GMs: “Let’s Split Up.” – “Good Idea, we can do more damage that way!”

This list is not exhaustive; it’s very much a cherry-pick from amongst the hundreds of articles on the subject of campaigns. In addition, you may find other articles of value indexed on these pages (and you should find a summary of most of the above as well, so that you know what to look for within them):

• The Blogdex Campaigns Page, especially the sections on organization and prep management; and
• The Blogdex Campaign Plotting Page, especially the general articles and section on plot sequencing.