Have you ever watched a repeat of a show that you once enjoyed and thought, “this hasn’t aged well?”

Have you ever re-read a book that you enjoyed in your youth, only to discover that the magic just wasn’t there any more?

When you listen to old favorites on the radio, do they ever sound passe, because they just can’t conjure up the excitement and enthusiasm that they once did?

Do old movies take you back to a simpler time – or are they just slower and duller than today’s blockbusters?

Why do we think RPGs don’t suffer from the same fate?

Today, I want to talk about campaign aging – first, because I have campaigns that are old enough to experience the symptoms; second, because I routinely future-proof my campaigns to permit longevity if everyone wants them to continue; and third, because this preparation actually improves a campaign in the short- to-medium-term, making these useful techniques to implement, even if your campaigns never last more than a few months.

And the place to start, obviously, is with human biology.

Human Aging

From a biochemical standpoint, life consists of a myriad of chemical processes, all of which come and go with lightning speed. Of these, one of the most significant is the creation of new cells to replace worn-out ones according to the DNA blueprint. This happens constantly, and more quickly than most people imagine.

There are 50-75 Trillion cells in the human body, and over a 7-10 year span, every last one of them (with one or two exceptions) will be replaced. Some cells don’t even last that long – Red blood cells live for about four months, tops, while white blood cells live on average a little more than a year. Skin cells live about two or three weeks. Colon cells have it rough: they die off after about four days. Sperm cells have a life span of only about three days, according to LiveScience.com.

The exceptions I mentioned: brain cells aren’t replaced when they wear out, and it’s possible that the same is true of damaged nerve cells, especially those in the spinal chord. There are clearly limits to the process, too – if an organ, digit, or limb are removed, they don’t grow back.

Human aging is die to a number of complex processes. One of these is believed to be the accumulation of errors during DNA replication, a necessary stage in the creation of replacement cells. This is certainly one of the primary causes of cancer. In addition to direct damage to the function of the organ that has a cell replaced with a defective copy, there may also be secondary effects that compound with that damage.

For the last 200 years or so, medical science has concentrated on one principle aim: avoiding the onset of death. Diseased limbs and organs are removed and replaced if possible, and if not, a replacement part is manufactured. We have learned how to transplant organs from one body to another. We’ve learned about blood interactions and diet and toxicity and the way poisons work, and a whole host of other notable achievements. Every time we’ve advanced the point of onset of death, new conditions have been exposed, and treatments devised.

I have been prescribed medications not because there was anything dangerously wrong, medically, but because my blood pressure was just a little bit high and my heart rate a little too fast. These are preventative measures aimed at avoiding a cardiac event, not at actually treating one. I also take a number of medications because there are some conditions that increase the risk of serious problems – so I lower my cholesterol and my blood sugar, and infuse my body with specific nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, that I seem to find it difficult to absorb as part of my regular diet.

In one episode of The West Wing, it was stated that overwhelmingly, the first symptom of cardiac failure is death. Well, that’s no longer true – not completely, anyway. But most people don’t get tested, because the tests are time-consuming and expensive, and the expertise needed to interpret them is rare and even more expensive.

Such care is designed to help me live to a ripe old age by avoiding death, and controlling conditions that can (and have, in past eras) led to death. Very few of the medications that I consume daily are aimed at improving quality of life, but there are a few of those, too, designed to mitigate the symptoms of aging.

That’s what medical science aims to do: to prevent death and crippling conditions, and to prevent symptoms and injuries from impacting quality of life more than they have to.

RPG Geriatrics

With that as a framework, a guiding metaphor, lets consider an RPG campaign.

Ongoing gaming processes are the equivalent of ‘life’ – so long as players turn up, make decisions in response to the situations described by the GM, and inject random numbers through dice when necessary to measure the effectiveness of an action resulting from such a decision, the campaign can be said to have a pulse – to be alive. More important are the equivalent of higher brain functions – those ongoing routine functions might be the equivalent of a pulse, but it’s the stories and adventures that they facilitate that constitute a meaningful life.

Extending the ‘life’ of a campaign simply means avoiding premature campaign death and sustaining the quality of the ‘life’ experienced by the participants. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Let’s set aside the questions of ‘quality of life’ for a moment and focus on the needs of sheer survival. Exactly what kills campaigns, and what can be done about it?

Avoiding Campaign Death

So, what kills campaigns? Aside from a number of traumatic events that can put an end to a campaign overnight – the equivalent of a massive stroke or coronary or accident – what we’re talking about, more than anything else, is simply age.

Campaigns age the way people do – through the accumulation of plot and personal errors, compounded with the side effects of these errors. These rarely disrupt the ongoing ‘heartbeat’ (though badly mismanaged house rules and relationships can do so); no, they make it harder and harder to produce coherent plots that aren’t cookie-cutter repeats of something you’ve already done.

There comes a time when the GM has run every interesting plot, employed every plot twist, plumbed the depths of all the significant characters, and is just going through the motions. When that happens, the campaign is doomed – it’s only a question of how quickly the axe will fall. While it more frequently occurs gradually, the well can run dry very suddenly, so let’s add ‘the loss of GM interest’ to the list of traumatic events.

Quite often, the players will reach the point of giving up before the GM even gets that far, simply because there’s a narcissistic thread in all of us that encourages us to love our own creations that little bit longer and harder. If you run an RPG and no-one shows up, repeatedly, that campaign is (usually) dead, some extraordinary coincidence notwithstanding. While it’s not universally true, it is generally too close to truth for comfort that any given player is only really interested in his character. He will tolerate the plumbing of the depths within another character, but only if he gets his fair share of the spotlight along the way. Or maybe the plots or the GMing style are just a little too familiar to the player, or simply focus on things that the player isn’t interested in.

It doesn’t have to be as extreme enough that the player gets bored, either – you just need enough disinterest that other activities and opportunities take priority in the players’ mind. If offered a choice, they don’t choose your game.

Real life can kill campaigns, too – losing key players or key characters with minimal or no warning due to circumstances. Have you ever had a player announce, totally out of the blue, “I’m moving to [country X, thousands of miles away] next week to become a stand-up comedian?” I have!

How about “I’m getting married and my wife doesn’t like me playing RPGs?” That’s yes again, in my case. Or “I’m moving to another city because it will be a healthier environment for my unborn child?” Or “I’ve gotten a job in another city and have to leave next weekend?” Or “[Player Name] has passed away from a sudden heart attack?” I’ve had all those, too.

Without players, there is no campaign. These are definitely traumas that can kill campaigns, too.

But it’s not enough to simply avoid campaign traumas. Old age gets us all in the end, if nothing beats it to the punch.

There are all sorts of metaphors that could be employed at this point. ‘Campaign Errors are like cholesterol, blocking the campaign’s arteries’ is one. ‘Campaign errors are like DNA replication errors; some are benign, but others are malignant, breeding still more complications and errors, until the Campaign is overwhelmed,’ is another.

But make no mistake; errors in an adventure can kill a campaign quickly or slowly, or they can simply linger until something else commits the deed.

Traumatic Events

Before looking at slow deaths, let’s deal with the more traumatic sudden-death syndromes that can occur and how to treat these problems.

The loss of a key player

Most of the campaigns in which Stephen Tunnicliff was a player have continued, one way or another. There are three that have not. One is simply on hiatus, waiting to resume when everyone has the time available. The other two were terminal cases.

In the Rings Of Time campaign, Stephen was one of only two players, and the entire campaign was geared toward the ultimate objective shared by those two. Take him away and the campaign would be like a chair with one leg missing – you could stay upright on it for a while, with an effort, but the collapse is inevitable.

The other victim was the Shards Of Divinity campaign. Stephen was not the only player, and not even the focal player of the campaign; so it was thought that it could continue. But Stephen was the “life of the party” within the campaign; enthusiasm (both mine as GM and that of the players, equally) simply waned until it died.

Death is not the only reason a campaign can lose a key player. All those other traumatic player losses that I described earlier didn’t kill the campaigns in question. In some cases, the character simply wasn’t essential enough; in others, a solution was found in which another player took over running the PC; or one PC was killed off while another took their place. In still other cases, a scheduling solution permitted play to continue more intermittently, or even regularly.

Ultimately, to survive the death of a key player, the GM has to do two things: (1) Identify what made the player so essential to the campaign; and (2) find a replacement who will bring those same qualities to the game. Both easier said than done, but no-one ever promised it would be easy.

Of course, if you make some preparations in advance, it can make the whole job a lot easier. I’ll get to those measures as they come up.



Photo by Niels Kolb from FreeImages

The loss of a key character

This happens one of two ways: (1) You lose the player as well as the character, but it’s the latter loss that is campaign-critical; or (2) The player gives up the character, but is willing or even eager to stay in the game. What makes the losses critical in both cases is that the character in question was the focal point of too many of the GM’s plans.

Here, you have a few more options to consider. You can replace the character as the focal point of those plans; you can keep the character as an NPC; you can arrange for a new player to take over the character (with the former owner’s permission); or you can replace those plans, effectively throwing away most of the old campaign plan and creating a new one that stretches forward from this point of in-game time. Or even some combination of the above.

It’s important to distinguish between a character’s mindset and the capabilities that he or she brings to the team. The first is very hard to replace, the second is trivially easy.

Something that I learned from Babylon-5: for every character, no matter how central, have an exit plan, a way for them to leave the spotlight, either permanently or for a very long time.

If one of the players in my Superhero campaign, Zenith-3, were to decide to call it quits, or got tired of the character that they are running. I would be able to cope. I have an exit plan in place for each of them. To pick one at random, let’s say that Nick left; he runs a mage, Runeweaver. Now, Runeweaver is too complex a character for anyone to simply take over, so that would also remove a character who is central to a lot of my plans. Some of those central roles would be taken over by another character, sometimes a PC, sometimes an NPC. Some would simply retreat into the campaign background, in-game events like any other. Some might be simply dropped completely. But the campaign would survive.

The loss of a key foundation

This only happens when playing in a contemporary time and place, or a contemporaneous one.

Scenario 1: Let’s say that you were playing a cold-war spy campaign in the 1980s. Suddenly, the Berlin Wall comes down and the Soviet Union breaks apart. A key piece of your campaign foundation has just disappeared from under you. This leaves you with only a couple of solutions: Continue on as though nothing had changed, putting your campaign into (effectively) a parallel world from that point on; or incorporate the new events into your campaign, even though you don’t know the whole story and who the real players behind-the-scenes are, and possibly never will.

The first puts your campaign’s narrative above that of the real world, the second means that you are left without an antagonist – a role that you will have to fill.

You only have until your next game session to decide. Your choice will have repercussions for the campaign that will persist until its ultimate conclusion, so we aren’t talking trivialities, here.

Wouldn’t thing go smoothly if you had realized, back when you were first thinking about the campaign, that this might happen in some way, and had devoted a little thought along the way to the decision? You need not have actually made a decision yet – but at least you’ve thought through the alternative choices and have some idea of how the campaign will evolve as a result.

Scenario 2: One of the features of the TORG system was that all games were (supposedly) being played in a shared reality, with a newsletter keeping GMs abreast of developments elsewhere. While this might work for isolated adventures, with very limited continuity, it really is catastrophically lethal for a campaign. For example, you might build your entire campaign around the character known as The Gaunt Man, one of the primary villains of the game world that comes with the system. What do you do when some other group somewhere snuffs him?

I saw this potential problem coming right away, and since I intended to run a campaign, and not a string of unrelated adventures, I ditched the association. I made my decision in advance, and built the campaign around the consequences of that decision. Game supplements published afterwards and new material from the game company could either bend to my will, or be disregarded within my campaign.

Official TORG brings in the Incan space gods? Sorry, not happening. TORG officially kills off the Gaunt Man? My version is alive and well and sends you his regards. TORG officially rewrites the Cyberpapacy by having it invaded by the Pulp Realm? Mine remains as it was, thank you kindly. If you give me an idea or resource I can actually use, I’ll gleefully incorporate it; but if it doesn’t fit, it’s gone.

The same decisions have to be made: reflect the changing reality in your game or put your game above the source material.

I can be reliably expected to adopt the latter approach, every time. The same hard line also applies to third party supplements for game systems – I’ll incorporate them on my terms, or not at all.

As shown in Pieces Of Creation: The Hidden Truth Of Doppelgangers, to make “The Complete Guide To Doppelgangers” (a game supplement from Goodman Games), work in my world, I had to write a sequel that was even longer than the original. They make a great 1-2 punch, though, and you need to buy the Goodman Games supplement to use my add-ons.



Photo by praise139 from FreeImages, cropped by Mike

The loss of player interest

This is completely lethal to a campaign, but it usually results from campaign toxicity that has built up over time.

That means that there have usually been warning signs that have either been ignored or that went unnoticed. If you detect and act on those warning signs, this trauma never results; if you wait until things reach the ultimate conclusion, it’s usually too late.

But it’s usually the case that these toxic problems completely blindside the GM, who is under the impression that everything is right on track; that’s because he is looking at the big picture through rose-colored glasses. Some GMs become prickly and precious when their hard work is criticized; again, a natural reaction.

Therefore, a GM needs some means of diagnosing the health of their campaign from an objective perspective, but that’s easier said than done. The best indicators of health that I have noticed are when the players say or show that they had fun, or very interesting, or unexpected, or that they enjoyed the session, or keep coming up with ideas and thoughts about their experiences even after the session has wrapped, or engage in extra activity outside of the game like sending emails with questions. If none of those things are happening, it’s time for the GM to look more closely at the campaign because it may be ill.

If there’s a problem, it could come in a great many forms. Perceived or actual favoritism, a Players vs GM mentality, a lack of sufficient rewards, perceived or actual railroading, personality conflicts, a toxic playing atmosphere, rules problems, plot problems, and ideological conflicts are just some of the many possible issues.

Whatever the problem is, you have to identify it and take immediate action to expunge it from your game. That can be trivially simple or it can be tremendously difficult, such as asking a player to leave. Every circumstance will be different, so I can’t offer much in the way of meaningful advice.

The loss of GM interest

When you eat the same food, day after day, you eventually get sick of it. When that happens, you might try some variation on the same food, or you might look for something completely different with which to replace the boring old meal, whatever it was. Sometimes, you will eventually go back to the old choice, when you tire of the replacement, and possibly of the replacements’ replacement.

Other times, you can simply discover that you don’t enjoy eating something anymore that you used to love. I get that way with chocolate, especially white chocolate, for example. I went through a phase of hating pumpkin – it lasted about 14 years.

The psychology of why we like what we like and why those preferences change is poorly understood and incredibly complicated. Fortunately, for my needs within this article, it suffices to say that it happens.

So it is with campaigns. Sometimes, you just need to take a break from the same old thing before you can resume it; most of the campaigns I run take most of December and most of January off, 6-8 weeks a year in total. Given that they occur monthly, some will miss one session, some two.

Even so, it’s possible for the GM to simply run out of breath in a campaign without warning. At other times, it can be exhaustion caused by bingeing.

I’ve learned the hard way that if you run a campaign one day a weekend, write that campaign on the days immediately before and after, and work on the rules of that campaign throughout the rest of the week in between, by the time six months is up, you will be tired of that campaign and everything associated with it. Every day per week off that you can take adds 6 months to the time before that exhaustion point is reached. At best – write the day before you run, and do no work on the campaign in between – that gets you two-and-a-half years of constant weekly play before fatigue sets in. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Running that campaign every second weekend and replacing it with something completely different in tone doesn’t just double the number of years before fatigue sets in, it quadruples it to ten years.

Once-a-month play can get it as high as twenty or thirty years, or more, because you are no longer binge-consuming the same thing, day after day after day.

But inevitably, sometimes the GM just loses interest one weekend. He simply can’t be bothered any more. That often occurs when the campaign that has resulted is not what the GM pictured when he started it; I’ve seen campaigns grind to a complete halt because the players took over and dictated that they were going to be doing something else within the game than what the GM expected.

When this happens to you, it’s time for drastic action. There are several solutions of increasing severity:

1. Take a break for a weekend and play something completely different.
2. Introduce an “Elsewhen” alternative campaign thread that you can explore whenever you need some more substantial relief.
3. Shut down the campaign for a fixed period of time and run something completely different in the interim. Make sure that you players know that you’re feeling burned out and need a break, and that the campaign will resume on such-and-such a date.
4. Inflict catastrophic change upon the campaign such that it is suddenly something completely different to what it was. Caution: there is usually no going back.
5. Shut the campaign down for a LONG period of time, usually indefinitely. I’m talking about a decade or more. If you don’t scratch it for long enough, the old itch will eventually return. You will probably then need to revamp it into a sequel campaign, most of your players will have other commitments or have dropped out of gaming entirely.

I’ve never tried the “catastrophic change” option, but I’ve employed all the others when the need arose.

The final tale of a GM losing interest happens when it all starts to feel more like work and less like play. Preventing this requires drastic action – you need to find a way to take the prep needs down several notches, even if that means surgery on the campaign – because it’s generally solo activities that feel more like indentured servitude and not the actual playing time.

Again, sometimes a break can be all you need to recharge those batteries, and sometimes you may need to take even more drastic action to rekindle your enthusiasm; the recommended treatment is very much an intermediate solution.

The Roads To Recovery

Catastrophic campaign death is not inevitable; it can be avoided. If you leave it to the last minute to do so (and sometimes there’s no helping that), it can merely result in the campaign getting very sick for a while. Uncover a problem quickly enough, and it may not even be noticed.

Quite often, though, what doesn’t kill you still leaves the campaign convalescent, limping along for a while. Make no bones about that, and be prepared to consider putting the campaign on “light duties” or even “bed-rest” for a while. The roads to recovery can be long ones, full of unexpected bumps, twists, and bruises.

Lifetimes

Whenever the subject of campaign longevity comes up, someone always raises the question of what a campaign’s typical lifetime is, anyway. My stock reply is that no-one’s ever done the statistics so no-one knows.

Well, that’s not good enough for Campaign Mastery. So, here are my thoughts: Some campaigns are quick – no longer than a single adventure or a single session’s play. Sometimes, that’s even by design. Others are long-lived, experiencing multiple generations in comparison.

It’s my belief that the product of a campaign’s lifespan in adventures, multiplied by the number of campaigns with that lifespan, equals the division of one dumbbell curve by another, as a measurement of the probability of any given campaign having that lifetime.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? So, let’s say 6d6 divided by d6 (it’s not, but it’s a good start). The lowest result on the 6d6 is 6, and the highest result on 1d6 is 6, so the lowest result of the resulting probability curve is 1. The average of 6d6 is 21, and the average of 1d6 is 3.5, so the average result will be 6. The maximum result of 6d6 is 36, the minimum result of 1d6 is one, so the maximum of the divided die roll is 36.

This is a curve that peaks early, and then has a long rightward tail of low-probability outcomes. Mapping out the resulting curve can also show a secondary (much smaller) peak of probability or even more – this example actually has three, indicated by arrows on the graph below. Note that I’m not saying that this is the exact probability curve of campaign longevity, only that I think it probably looks something like it.

This actually makes more sense if you think of it as a series of scaled dumbbell curves compounding together. You see similar results when you cross-reference age against mortality rates in olden times, though perhaps not this exaggerated. And that’s the key – it indicates that there are a series of thresholds that a campaign has to cross to gain access to the next phase of longevity.

What exactly these thresholds are remains open to debate. Clearly, one of the first is design intent – if you only intend a campaign to last one adventure, it’s not very likely to extend very far beyond it (there are exceptions). What the other challenges are, and precisely when they occur in the course of a campaign’s lifetime, is uncertain.

As a campaign ages, two forces compete for superiority within the campaign, and it seems likely that balancing these will be one of the last thresholds that has to crossed. These are Degeneration and Rejuvenation.

Degeneration

Degeneration is how I describe the atrophy that occurs as plot and character options are taken off the table because they’ve been done already. This not only makes the GM’s job more tedious, it makes it harder to create adventures that engage the players, and puts increasing stress and strain on verisimilitude. It has all sorts of toxic effects on the campaign as it is experienced at the game table, in other words.

The distinction is important; the GM might have all sorts of original ideas, but if the road to them lies in a channel of boring, the campaign could easily shoal out before it ever gets to those interesting ideas. Or the GM might have all sorts of interesting short-range ideas but none of them seem to go anywhere substantial. Any campaign that lasts long enough will almost certainly experience one, if not both, of these problems in phases.

Rejuvenation

Rejuvenation combats degeneration by introducing new situations, new ideas, new contexts, new cast members, and new relationships. They not only make the players look at what you are currently offering in a new light, but can force reevaluation of the old, and even make it new again. If carried out in such a way that the past remains consistent, it builds incredible depth into the campaign; if it forces an inconsistency into the past that has to be resolved, it causes it throw out offshoots of plot that create breadth. Both are good, and both directly counter the trend towards degeneration.

The Slow Death

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or so it is said. Sometimes, that might be true – if you learn from the experience and adapt to the changing reality. Traumatic events that don’t kill you right away can return to finish the job if you don’t modify your circumstances – or don’t modify them enough.

Each of us has a line that we will not cross, in terms of modifying our behavior, because crossing that line would sacrifice too much quality of life. Mere existence is not enough. It may be selfish, when viewed from the perspective of family and friends, but there are times when it’s right to be selfish – or right not to be. Every wrong answer in this area is someone else’s right one.

So it is with campaigns. There’s only so far you can go in preserving the life of a campaign before it is no longer recognizable – and so many of these life-extending acts involve ad-hoc surgery, that never fully heals, that the patient can easily die on the operating table from the induced stress of the surgery, anyway. Like doctors, we’re bound to try, up to the point at which the effort becomes futile – but that point is different for every GM.

Proactive Anagathics

It’s not enough to simply avoid these problems, but it’s a start. Preventative maintenance is intended to keep a car from breaking down, just as preventative medicine is intended to keep the body from breaking down.

In the latter quarter of the 20th century, it became popularly recognized that activity was necessary for the maintenance of biological longevity potential and realization of that potential. The phrase “use it or lose it” has been in common circulation ever since. Even more recent revelations that some of the exercise forms that were most popular at different times could be counterproductive in health terms for certain individuals and certain conditions has not mitigated this common advice.

Management of my diabetes would be a lot simpler if my back injury did not restrict the activity levels of which I am capable so severely, for example. When I was younger, I used to walk the 12 km (about 7.5 mile) route shown below from gaming every Saturday, with a 125kg (approx 275 lb) pack on my back. Google’s estimate of 2 hrs 37 minutes is a little optimistic, it used to take me 3-4 hours (I did once manage it in 2 hrs 45m, though) – because I could only afford to use public transport one way and eat on the day. These days, I struggle to walk more than 150-200 meters (about 500-650 feet).

Map produced using Google Maps, data ® 2019 Google. Click on the image to open a larger, more legible version. I’ve highlighted a number of iconic Sydney locations that were close by, just because.

As a result, I’m keenly aware of the impact of minimal exercise, and of doing what I can to at least maintain my current fitness levels.

Campaigns are a little different, in that the routine activities don’t do anything in particular to increase the “health” of the campaign; they do nothing but keep the “heartbeat” ticking over. That’s because a campaign is a collection of stories, (or possibly one larger story) and those activities are just means to the end of generating that story through interactions – characters & rules, players and GM, players and Characters, PCs and NPCs, PCs & environment – the list of interaction types goes on and on.

Variety of interaction is the campaign equivalent of keeping active, of exercising to maintain or improve health and fitness. Every piece of advice that you can think of regarding exercising for health applies – sometimes only as a metaphor – to variety of interaction in this context.

But, just as I take vitamin supplements and the like to enhance my quality of life, so there are other measures that can be taken at a campaign level. On their own, they aren’t to ensure good health, but in conjunction with Variety of Interaction, they can ward off or assist in the management of various health crises along the way.

Continuity Resets

I think of these as “checkpoints”, moments of stability in the story of the campaign. When you reach a checkpoint, you declare what has been to be as canonical as anything in the campaign background, fixed and relatively immutable. If something goes catastrophically wrong, you can simply fall back to the state of play as it was at the last continuity reset and proceed from there.

How canonical should a campaign background be? is an obvious followup question. Without going into it too deeply – this is already a long article (5800 words and counting) – I treat a campaign background as past issues of a comic book. Anything within can be altered or rewritten as necessary provided that such changes in continuity would not have been obvious to the participants of the past events at the time – but that this should not be done whimsically, but always to achieve a definite and deliberate purpose within the context of the campaign’s future from the point of continuity alteration decision onwards. In other words, consistency matters, too.

A continuity reset point doesn’t mean that the past is untouchable – it simply represents a decision on the part of the GM that events prior to that point will only be changed with good reason, and therefore constitute an anchor to which the players can attach the campaign.

Prep

Last week’s article noted that good prep was essential to good improv. Good prep is essential to just about every campaign activity, to be honest; but this incorporates activities that a lot of GMs don’t think of as prep. Things like thinking about the campaign, about how different characters perceive campaign events and the world around them, about what can be done to permit PCs to experience parts of the campaign’s potential that they haven’t yet tapped, about what stories you can tell using the building blocks already in place, and so on.

Good prep is like detox for your campaign, cleaning the gunk out of clogged arteries, finding new facets of the established campaign elements to explore, and creating an inventory of unused ideas in the back of your mind to call on when you need them – whether that’s to add sparkle to a planned adventure that you are writing or to feature when drafted in at the last minute as in improvised sequence.

Plot

Players, like readers of books or audiences for visual entertainments of all sorts, will forgive an awful lot if the plot is good. My players would agree that most of the time I don’t shine when it comes to portraying an NPC in-game. I can’t do much to change my voice, for example, and am moderately awful at accents. Because my plots receive a lot of care and attention, though, these flaws are overlooked.

Having a solid plotline that you understand completely means that when things threaten to go off the rails, you know where the overall story has to go, and can start looking for high roads instead of the now-blocked low road. So long as the roads all lead to a sensible and entertaining resolution of the plot, who cares? Do you really care how the PCs get from A to B, so long as they do so? Sure, if they follow the trajectory that you’ve anticipated, you can use some of the extra polish that you’ve prepped, but that is just icing on the cake.

No plot is complete until you know how it is going to end. I don’t start exposing one to the players unless I have already visualized a likely outcome and how that will impact the bigger picture. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about an encounter, with the ‘adventure’ being the bigger picture in question, or an adventure or significant plot development, with the plot arc being the bigger picture, or a plot arc with the overall campaign being the bigger picture – the principle scales.

Structure

At a superficial glance, you might think that my Zenith-3 campaign is very similar in structure to the Adventurer’s Club campaign. The differences are subtle, and easily overlooked – but they have a cumulative impact that makes the two campaigns quite different.

The Zenith-3 campaign entwines the lives of the characters within, through, and around multiple plotlines. Each player character has his own plotline, connected by virtue of his sequential experiences and interactions with characters. In addition, there are group plotlines, and a game world plotline, all arranged in a Master Plan that connects everything that happens, and everything that happens does so for a reason – even if that reason is simply because it sounds like fun.

I’ve described the structure of the campaign before, as best I could – but when I thought of this article, I conceived a new way of expressing it, almost as an infographic or a flowchart.



It starts with an overall story. I then create a long list of plot threads that can run through that overall story, either shaping it or being shaped by it, or both, in the form of campaign notes. Using the overall story as a guide, I can determine when each of these plot threads should start and when they should finish. The overall story only takes place within these plot threads, so it’s important that there be relevant plotlines for each part of the overall story.

I then break each of those plot threads into discrete series of events, shown on the graphic above as the “plot breakdown”. The effect is to break the plot thread into smaller pieces that fit together perfectly to create the totality of the plot thread.

When the time comes to write an adventure, I extract all the contemporaneous pieces until a clear adventure theme takes shape. The campaign plan tells me which pieces to select, acting as an index, and looking up those individual pieces within the plot breakdown for that plot thread gives me the content of the adventure. But, as isolated pieces, there is no narrative flow; only when assembled into such a narrative structure does the adventure take shape.

The resulting structure designs the required level of longevity required to complete all the plot threads into the campaign.

I actively tinker with the structure and plot threads throughout – if an event doesn’t make sense in terms of the narrative flow, it may be delayed, if a future event does make sense it may be brought forward. The internal sequence of events can be manipulated. Both of these manipulations are represented in the diagram above.

All these effects take place in the planning stage, a rough synopsis of what will be in the final adventure. The operational principles are, (1), that no event occurs in isolation – NPCs (and PCs) have to react to it, and that reaction is an intrinsic part of the event for all that it follows the event or revelation in question, and may in turn trigger other events or create the conditions for those events to have the desired impact; and (2), that no Primary Character should be doing something without the other Primary Characters also doing something at the same time. Which means that if Blackwing gets on the communicator to the team leader, St Barbara, the conversation always has a context, always connects through into the personal lives of the characters concerned.

I also want to draw special attention to the columns in the “Campaign” plan (blue background) labeled “Implied Plot Threads” and “World Plot Threads”. Implied Plot Threads integrate anything that the player has said that he wants his character to do with external events that exist only to add to that character’s personal plotline. World plot lines exist to advance time within the campaign world and include everything from political developments to public holidays to sporting milestones. These keep the game world from being static, and make the environment feel more alive.

I see that there’s one term used above that I haven’t fully explained – a “Primary Character” is any PC, or an NPC that is being treated as a PC by the GM. Some GMs don’t like such characters, I find that they have too many advantages to be ignored. The only thing these NPCs lack is a player; and that only if you define the GM as a “non-player”.



Image by stokpic from Pixabay

Planning

The relationship between plot and planning is akin to the relationship between strategy and tactics – one is big-picture, the other is smaller-picture. Strategy can be defined and described by the tactics that are arranged in a deliberate structure to achieve the goal of the strategy, which includes anticipating the enemy and what they will attempt to do.

I do most of my planning during the process of transforming an adventure outline into a playable written adventure. That’s when I (and my co-GM in the case of the Adventurer’s Club campaign) determine that I need an NPC to do X or a description / visual image to do Y (sometimes, these visuals are only essential in some permutations of what a PC might do, and may appear to the players as superficial fluff if that permutation doesn’t eventuate, but there’s nothing wrong with the occasional fluff that helps the players visualize their world!)

The process of creating an adventure for the Adventurer’s Club campaign demonstrates how profoundly planning can impact a straightforward plotline, just by taking into effect character capabilities and personalities.

The differences start at the structural level – adventures for the AC campaign are self-contained story ideas, sometimes with a predetermined beginning, middle, and end; they aren’t part of a cohesive narrative, though they do remain part of a continuity.

When the time comes to write an adventure, we break the adventure down into logical steps or stages. These aren’t quite Acts and they aren’t quite scenes (because they may include multiple scenes in multiple locations), though we call them scenes for lack of a better nomenclature. In the example below, there are 19 such scenes, which are assumed to feature all PCs (and usually do – but we aren’t afraid to divide the party if that makes more sense).

We also touch on the personal lives of the PCs so that they are always doing something when the main plot comes calling. Those are illustrated by the smaller color-coded blocks at the top of the diagram below. You can see that most of the PCs have three-scene personal plotlines, but “FO” has four, simply because that’s how many it took to resolve the little mini-plot that is taking place in that PC’s personal life this time around.

These personal plotlines usually precede the main action – though there have been times when we’ve put them in the middle, or omitted them entirely. While they don’t often add to the main plot, they are never permitted to detract from it.

It’s important to note that this is not an example invented for this article, it’s the actual adventure that we have almost finished writing, and which we expect to start in early October. It should take two or three sessions of play to complete, bringing us to the December break in play.

A real-world example from the Adventurer’s Club campaign. Click on the image to load a larger, more legible, version.

The lower part of the illustration depicts how the adventure pieces have been arranged to create the finished adventure.

At first, everything looks sensible – the opening chapters of each character’s mini-plots occur in a sequence that makes narrative sense, running across the page. It should be noted that when actually written, “DH1” was longer and larger than the other first scenes, as reflected in the diagram. That’s followed by the second row, where SZ2 is larger than the other second pieces of the preliminaries.

The third row is where we begin to segue into the main plot of the adventure. We decided that a different sequence of characters getting their scenes made more narrative sense, but otherwise there are no surprises. To express this, the row has been split into two sub-rows. This double-sub-row ends with the All-PCs start of the main adventure.

The fourth row is where things start to go crazy. SZ4? FO4 and 5? CF4? DH4a and 4b? EB4? DH5, 5a, and 5b? Where did they come from? When we wrote the second scene of the main plot, we realized that only one PC was involved – and so we extended or subdivided the other PCs personal plotlines accordingly. That’s what happens when the pieces of the plot get sequenced into a narrative. This row is effectively split into five sub-rows, and they all lead into main plot scene 2.

You can interpret the rest for yourself. Following the principle that each PC should have some story happening to them or around them at all times, the focus wander from one PC to another as they experience their individual plot sequences. You might also note that main plot scenes 5 to 12 and 14-15 have been subsumed completely into individual characters’ plot sequences. Among other things, this shows that each of them has a role to play in resolving the overall adventure. There’s also an “all PCs scene 20” and “all PCs scene 21” thrown into the plotline simply to tie up loose ends in a player-satisfying way.

It might seem that there’s no room for player input, that the script has been written in advance, but that’s not actually the case; in some cases, we could state that one character’s capabilities or personality made them a near-certain choice for certain activities, but in others, we were less certain. The structure of the adventure is completely accommodating of any decision short of non-participation that the players choose to make; the plot developments are derivations of the logical steps required to resolve the plot. In fact, some of the scenes are marked optional because we weren’t sure if they would take place at all!

It’s entirely possible that players may force us to skip certain scenes because of their choices, or to play some scenes out of this planned sequence; that quite often happens. This narrative is structured to accommodate our best guesses; we’ll go off-script if the players make other choices.

It’s important to realize that both arrangements are telling the same story. The only difference is that the second adventure has been customized for the PCs in the campaign and for the logical progression of time.

Detailed planning like this isn’t everyone’s boat; I don’t do it for the Zener Gate campaign, and I get even more convoluted in plotting the Zenith-3 campaign. These choices are not capricious; they are a combination of deliberate choice and responding to the desires of the players.

It should be noted that each style of adventure yields a definite “normal adventure format” – in the Adventurer’s Club, that’s individual plotlines leading to an all-PCs main plot; in the Zenith-3 campaign, it’s individual plot threads combining to tell a broader narrative, with personal events and world events forming connective ’tissue’ in-between. Every campaign develops such a “format” (in the Television series sense). It might be teaser, title sequence, plot development, complication/reversal, victory, aftermath – a classic dramatic structure – or it might be something else, but one emerges in every campaign (there are times when that can be turned to advantage, and times when you can gain an advantage by deliberately violating it – useful if advanced plot techniques you should always be aware of).

If campaigns age because plots become increasingly complicated by the past, especially the accumulated weight of plotting mistakes, such planning structures and techniques greatly diminish the chances of “playing yourself into a corner” by letting you discover the problem in time to do something about it. Never complain about writing yourself into a corner – because you got there in time to avoid the problem. Things are far worse when you “improv” yourself into a corner.

It follows that careful planning and plotting is just as useful in avoiding Geriatric Disease of the campaign as they are for successful improv.

Exit Plans

I’ve already touched on this, so I’ll just briefly mention it again. For every campaign, you should have an exit plan for every PC, every player, and every major NPC (because you never know when one will get accidentally killed).

In fact, you can define a “major” NPC as an NPC whose death would adversely impact on the campaign, or would have done so in the past.

So, you now have all the tools that you need to prolong the life of your campaign and keep it fit and healthy even when it gets a little long in the tooth. That means that it’s time to take a look at the consequences and implications!

The Social Consequences of Lifestyles

When we’re young, medical advice is (generally) all about treating traumatic and unusual events. As we age, visits to the doctor become a regular occurrence for most of us, and the emphasis slowly shifts to chronic conditions and their management. Similarly, lifestyle advice shifts from creating advantages or opportunities for the participant to minimizing the constraints that restrict life.

Another way of phrasing it is that when we’re young, medical advice concerning lifestyle changes are aimed at prolonging life, but when we age, the goal shifts to prolonging quality of life. In general, lifestyle alterations change when we can be expected to die, and what will kill us (absent traumatic events).

There is a certain degree of delaying the inevitable when discussing such measures, giving rise to complex medical issues – for example, When do the measures we undertake to extend life begin to cost us more in quality of life than we gain?

Of course, it will vary from individual to individual and from measure to measure. Giving up Pizza is a lot easier for most people than giving up sugar. Some people will find it easier to give up sugar than caffeine, for others the relative difficulty might be the other way around. But the general rule remains: if you accept the premise that mere continuation of existence is not enough, and that quality of life matters, a decision that you will probably have to make repeatedly as you age is whether or not the gains are worth the price. And, when the price is unacceptable, is there are satisfactory compromise that will yield a significant amount of the benefit?

So it is for campaigns. Beyond a point, the costs can outweigh the gains. A sensible campaign plan will have a number of natural end-points. If your campaign plan doesn’t have such potential end-points already, you might like to consider inserting ‘natural’ endings into your master plan.

Endings imply the natural question of what comes next? What happens after? In essence, you have four choices.

• Same campaign & characters, different players.
• Same campaign, different players, new characters. Implies some sort of in-game catastrophe.
• Similar campaign, different characters, probably a mixture of old and new players. This hits the ‘reset’ button, kills off plotlines that had become tedious, but still draws on background and other material from the old campaign, in effect making it a sequel campaign. An in-game explanation for the transition is required, which is often some sort of in-game catastrophe.
• Different campaign, different characters, may or may not be the same players. In other words, start a new campaign and lose the old one.

Sometimes, it’s better to let a campaign die a natural death and move on to something else.

Campaigns are a story

I’ve stated a couple of times already in this article that Campaigns are a Story, or a series of stories. But I want to briefly look at the consequences and implications, especially in terms of campaigns aging.

Every story has an optimum length. You can only make that optimum shorter by cutting plot threads out, or longer by adding more. You can think of this as a campaign’s natural “lifetime”; if it ends before reaching that optimum, it has died prematurely (and usually traumatically); if it ends after reaching that point, it’s been on life support for a while and lingered more out of force of habit than substance. I’ve experienced both outcomes.

But, just as we are medically concerned with quality of life, so we have to be concerned at the campaign level with “Quality of story”. When a campaign lives beyond it’s natural limits, it’s quality of story that suffers. Individually, the adventures may be fine, even excellent or inspired on occasion; but the sense of purpose that held the plotlines together is missing, and that begins to show. Death is inevitable.

Your goal, when designing a campaign, should be to match the optimum lifespan as closely as possible to the optimum duration of reliable quality of story. This lets the campaign go out on a high.

Of course, that’s a really difficult thing to determine in advance. Personalities and creativity and skill and interest levels and Character investment and all sorts of other things come into it. None of these are fixed quantities, they change over time, most of them for the better. So quality of story will not only go up over the course of a campaign’s lifetime, the duration during which you can sustain an acceptable quality will extend. How much better will you get? Unknown – and, in part, it depends on how good you already are.

How much of what you do well is the result of experience, how much is expertise and training, and how much is inherent instinct? The first increases automatically with practice, the second increases only with an effort to improve that is sustained over time, and the third can only be better understood and accessed.

I grasped these points fairly dimly when I was planning the first Zenith-3 campaign (the current one is a sequel with mostly the same characters). Since I couldn’t predict how much more experienced or skilled I would be at the end of it, just that I would be both, I built some slack into the plan, some padding – adventures and plot threads that could be incorporated into the campaign to extend its lifetime or ignored if they would extend its life too far. I knew what the last three adventures in the campaign would be, because these tied up all the plot threads established at the start of the campaign in a huge climax; but how far removed those would be from the preceding “scheduled” adventure was unknown. As things turned out, it was about two years, real time, maybe three. That’s a lot of padding, even in a 13-year campaign.

That was also the time that I was planning the current Zenith-3 campaign – not a coincidence; I had been stockpiling ideas throughout the preceding decade. Some of those ideas were appropriated for Earth-halo padding; most of the rest became the source material for the new campaign.

Not all padding is evil; this is padding for good effect.

Campaigns on Life Support

So your campaign is treading water, barely holding it’s head above the waves and about to go under for the third time? It’s a campaign on life support. That means that you are artificially pumping up the excitement with tales that grow more outrageous and exaggerated with every outing. You don’t know what’s coming next, only that it has to equal or better the last day’s play in grandiosity. The PCs are too capable, able to solve anything less with trivial effort.

And yet, for some reason, you don’t want to end the campaign – not yet, anyway. Maybe because you haven’t yet created a replacement to your satisfaction, or because you’re waiting for a particular rule-book to be published, or because your players haven’t yet seen the writing on the wall and insist on continuing.

You have two choices to try giving your campaign a new lease on life: Heroic Measures and Radical Surgery.

Heroic measures means throwing away everything that the players think they know about the campaign and replacing it with something that only presents a superficial resemblance of the old background. Then hitting the players between the eyes with the difference, without warning. In effect, it’s shoving the old players into a new campaign that you haven’t fully worked out yet. It usually starts in cataclysm and only gets more violent from there.

“The gods are fakes under the control of a demonic presence from outside reality and the afterlife is the gaping maw of that presence. It has consumed and perverted so much positive energy that the barriers between reality have begun to break down. The PCs awaken one morning to great cracks in the sky through which different planes of existence are leaking…”

Think Epic, then double it.

Radical Surgery forces all the existing PCs to retire, a new batch of villains to emerge from the woodwork, and the players to start over in the same game world with novices – first level characters, in D&D parlance. This keeps more of the current game intact, but provides fresh avenues for exploration.

Use radical surgery if you still have unknowns in the campaign, things you haven’t played around with – whether those be draconic social structures or the recipes of lava giants, the truth about fey or the hidden secrets of beholders. Or whatever. If there’s still unused source material, in other words. Use Heroic Measures if you need to throw the old out to make room for new source material.

There’s no guarantee that either approach will save the campaign. And there’s no going back from either. Both are very much voyages into the unknown.

All things must end

Inevitably, one way or another, every campaign will end. If you follow my advice in other articles, you’ll finish it in a blaze of glory, an exclamation point that will transform the campaign into a monument to your creativity and skill as a GM, a Norse Ragnarok or Biblical Armageddon.

Implicit in both is the question of what comes next? What happens on the day after Infinity?

Every ending implies a new beginning. The trick is to manifest the transition in a graceful manner. That never happens by accident; it’s a happy chance that the actions and processes that enable it also enhance the campaign along the way.

Last time we played my superhero campaign, the players got through all the material that I had prepared and polished with more than an hour of playing time remaining. (I thought that I had prepped enough – but, oh well…)

While I had some vague ideas about what was to follow, I hadn’t yet put them into coherent form.

Nevertheless, I was able to improv those vague ideas into an entirely acceptable day’s play.

We’ve all been caught in that position before – forced to choose between improv and letting the players down.

I’ve written several articles on improv gaming for Campaign Mastery in the past, and for those looking for technique tips, I commend them to your attention. Just type “Improv” in the search box at the top of the page.

For this article, I want to look a little deeper than technique into what’s necessary to make improv a success.

You see, in the days that followed, those vague ideas all fell into place, crystallized as from a super-saturated solution by the improvised play part-session. Everything made perfect sense, including the parts already played.

It is entirely likely that if I hadn’t admitted the situation here, the players involved would never have been certain that what happened wasn’t what I had always intended.

1st Requirement: Ideas

I’d already spent time thinking about what I could do for both this part of the adventure and several subsequent ones that are to follow, generating ideas in isolation and brainstorming possibilities. I simply hadn’t found the right connecting thread with which to tie them all together, yet.

That meant that I had limited the scope of the improv required, at least to some extent. Less to create out of whole cloth means less to go wrong.

2nd Requirement: Characters

I had already defined and named most of the NPCs that would be involved.

This is an area that I am not good at improvising, so having the building blocks already worked out to some extent meant that I was again constraining the scope of the material to be invented to areas in which I was strong.

The lesson is that when all else is equal, prep the material which is of greatest importance and with which you have the most trouble inventing on the spot first.

3rd Requirement: Interactions

One of the many thoughts to which I had subjected the ideas mentioned in (1) was contemplating how different PCs might interact with those ideas and vice-versa.

Ideas and encounters aren’t just things that happen, they have to propel not only the main exterior plot but, through interaction with the characters involved, enable them to advance their own individual plot threads in some fashion. This gives them gravitas and relevance to both the characters and the campaign.

This is an especially important standard when it comes to random encounters and wandering monsters in D&D. Each encounter should be viewed as an opportunity, not just as a random happenstance.

4th Requirement: Context

I already knew the overall shape of the campaign, and of this plot thread within the campaign, and the goals that these encounters were to satisfy within those contexts.

That helped refine the ideas by telling me what could be accepted as is and what needed tweaking to conform to the requirements. In other words, I wasn’t starting out completely blind; I already had some idea of the ‘shape’ of the plot needed.

5th Requirement: Training

I’ve read a lot of stories, of all lengths, and watched a lot of TV and movies. More usefully, I’ve digested and analyzed what I was seeing and reading. What’s more, I had practiced constructing relevant reviews of such material.

For example, here’s a review I wrote about a movie called T3rminal Error, which was published by a site that offered free DVDs for those willing to write short but literate and useful reviews:

T3rminal Error (Flashback Entertainment) 95 minutes

Reviewed by Mike Bourke

There’s an art to getting maximum enjoyment from a “B-” movie. It involves deliberately overlooking the odd moment of wooden acting or poor direction, seeking out the humor that would be there if the second-rate effects and sets were deliberately second-rate, and plugging holes in the plot with your own imaginative speculations. The less of this work you have to do in order maintain your engagement with the plot and the characters, the more successful the B-movie is; in other words, the key is to adopt a different critical standard to that which you would employ when judging an A-grade movie.

‘Mars Attacks’ lampooned B-movies from the Science Fiction genre by deliberately making one as a comedy; in just about every way I can conceive, it could be and should be honored as the ultimate primer in how to go about this art. Which brings me to “T3rminal Error” starring Michael Nouri, Marina Sirtis, and Matthew Ewald. Judged by A-movie standards, this would not score terribly well; judged by B-movie standards, it’s excellent. I first came across it in my local video store when they were offering 7 $2-a-night movie-rentals for a week at $10. I went through a LOT of B-movies at the time! But this one stood out, for reasons that will become clear as this review proceeds, and which led my to buy the DVD when I spotted it.

The plot is fairly straightforward – embittered ex-employee creates an evolving virus contained within a sound file to exact revenge on his ex-boss. In the tradition of all B-movie killer viruses, this one quickly gets out of hand, growing and evolving at computer speeds to become ever more deadly, intelligent, and self-aware. It’s up to the ex-boss (Nouri), his wife (Sirtis), and his son (Ewald) to escape the virus before it kills them.

This is an action-drama first and foremost. At the time, computer viruses were not often contained within sound files, and there were no computer viruses that could evolve or adapt to security measures. Neither of these facts are true, 4 years later. And while it’s improbable that even a virus evolving at computer speeds could achieve sentience as quickly as this does, and especially not while maintaining its basic nature and purpose, it’s not completely implausible. So plot-wise there are no major holes, though there are a few niggles here and there, but it’s fairly predictable and just a little cheesy – one of the defining characteristics of a B-movie.

Then there’s the acting. Sirtis, in 2002, was just coming off years of regular work on Star Trek The Next Generation and had appeared in at least 3 Star Trek movies. Calling her “an accomplished actress” is not unreasonable. Surprisingly, young Matthew Ewald seems almost as casually-competent in his role. Which leaves Michael Nouri… While he gets some great lines at times, especially when dealing with a long-time associate stuck in wheelchair, there are times when his performance comes across as a little wooden. He gives the distinct appearance of being somewhat uncomfortable with his dialogue and its technical terminology. In other words, Syrtis and Ewald deliver performances far superior to typical B-movie standard. And, by the way, that technical terminology is mostly used correctly, something that is rare for even big-budget movies, let alone B-grade ones. Where it isn’t used correctly, it’s because the movie was just a little bit in advance of developments that we have seen arrive; the concepts were right, but the terms that have since been attached to those concepts in real life aren’t the same as those used in the movie.

There are no extras. Picture is in standard 4:3 television aspect ratio. Sound is Dolby stereo. Production values are as good as B-movies get, which is pretty high, if rarely cutting-edge in any respect.

By B-movie standards, this is A-grade entertainment – eminently watchable action-adventure. By A-movie standards, it’s a long way short of cutting the mustard; but don’t let that stop you from giving this disk a turn in your player. So long as you know what you’re letting yourself in for, you won’t be disappointed.

Feature: 6/10 (9.5/10 B-standard)
Picture: 8/10
Sound: 7/10
Extras: 0/10
Overall: 6/10 (9.5/10 B-standard)

PS: Checking around, I’ve discovered that this DVD has a different cover in the US, and has also been released in some markets as “Peace Virus”.

All that means is that I’m used to deconstructing and reconstructing stories, and have thousands of them filed away in the back of my memory somewhere – a treasure-trove when you have to come up with something in a hurry.

6th Requirement: Experience I

I have lots of experience in generating ideas and structuring/refining them to fit a defined plot requirement. While you can do so without that experience, it makes shortcuts possible (that effectively increase available thinking time) and makes you more aware in advance of potential pitfalls and how to avoid them.

7th Requirement: Experience II

Coupled with that, I also have a lot of experience in implementing an idea on the spot and making sense of it later – and of what can go horribly wrong when you do so. Again, this permits greater efficiency of process and greater awareness of dangers and the best way to evade those dangers.

The two types of experience are not the same, but they do add to and enhance each other. One teaches technique, the other editorial review and rationalization. Applying the techniques on the fly and as you go makes the ad-hoc material more substantial and more correct, as though it had been pre-planned; applying the editorial review teaches how small picture elements relate to a big picture, and the rationalization techniques can then be applied to the selection of those ‘small-picture’ elements to have them contribute to the big picture you want – it doesn’t do you much good if your picture elements are painting daffodils while you wanted them to be assembling an Eiffel Tower.

8th Requirement: Time

I can’t emphasize this enough – all of the above had been done well in advance, and I had tackled the question of what would come next even if a sufficiently-developed thought had not yet been derived to answer that question.

In other words, I had set time aside to come up with the answers, and had primed my internal think-tank to focus on the problem by reminding myself of the parameters and plot objectives and the pieces I had to work with. It was just that the thinking time had not yet yielded anything satisfactory.

When you present the subconscious with a problem, it tends to keep working at it. Strange associations may form with material you are watching or reading (or may not); eventually, seemingly from out of the blue, you will have a flash of inspiration.

This process takes time. When you haven’t had enough time to complete it, and hence have to improvise a solution, you still have the benefit of the time spent trying to solve the problem; these create a kind of instinct for what should be there.

Normally, when you recognize the results for what they are, you take the time to test the logic and implications (and so on) of the plot element. When you’re improvising, you don’t have time for that, you have to trust in that instinct; and the longer you’ve been trying to think of an answer, the sharper those instincts will be.

9th Requirement: Effort

It does little good to just sit around, waiting for an idea to present itself, during that time; you have to actively work at it. You have to ask yourself the question that you are trying to answer repeatedly whenever you have an odd moment to spare; ask it as you’re going to bed, as you’re in the shower or bath, while you’re eating lunch – and then spend a minute or two trying to think of an answer or a different approach to the question. If no answer is forthcoming, set the question aside – until your next opportunity to mentally poke the problem.

The subconscious is easily distracted, and if you don’t refresh the problem’s priority by regularly returning to it, it is all too easy for it to be put into the too-hard basket – the round one, by the door, that gets emptied every night.

If that happens, you will get to D-Day and find nothing but silly ideas that don’t make sense, don’t achieve the story goals, and won’t cut the mustard. And then you really are in trouble. So you’ll probably go with one of them anyway, and deal with the fallout later.

Like the time the PCs in an early D&D campaign of mine were confronting a Black Dragon of enormous size (courtesy of a random mixture of potions that it had swallowed – the PCs hoped to poison it, or blow it up, or something). The party mage, who fancied himself an alchemist, stepped forward with the foolish notion of somehow neutralizing the mixture and returning the dragon to manageable proportions.

I hadn’t anticipated that possibility, hadn’t spent any thought on it whatsoever – a mistake, in hindsight – and the only idea I had was a silly one, but I went with it anyway. So the dragon swallowed him whole. Next session, I had to make sense of this and get the PC back in the game.

The alchemist realized that he was in the Dragon’s stomach, with the potions, many still in their bottles, and was able to mix some of them with certain herbs in his backpack (with suitable effort in the form of rolls) to construct an extremely strong emetic. Result: the dragon projectile-vomited up not only the alchemist but the potions as well, both opened and unopened, ending the effect of the unstable potion miscibility, and making it feel unwell-enough that it retreated from the battle, a bit more wary of swallowing humans wearing funny clothes in the future.

The Tenth Requirement: Trust

The last requirement is the toughest one of the lot, especially after you’ve been burned by throwing out a silly idea and having to scramble to put some sense back into things, later. You have to have developed trust in your instincts – not blind faith, mind you; you still have to be aware of how far your trust can extend, so that you can recognize the bad ideas that lurk beyond it for what they are. This trust is a constantly-changing thing, and it can be game-system and genre- sensitive.

You can only develop trust in your instincts when you’ve done the hard yards and met all the other requirements that I’ve listed, because they are the foundations of prudence, inspiration, and good instincts.

And you never know when you’ll have to rely on your instincts, so it behooves us all to make them as good as we possibly can. Even to the point of running an atypical campaign on the side to sharpen one or more of these requirements.

This is an article inspired by a bus stop.

As I got off the bus at my stop the other day, I briefly contemplated the fact that I had two different routes to choose between. I always choose one over the other as being faster than the alternative, despite having to wait for a ‘walk’ signal at the corner. If I chose the other direction at the Bus Stop, I would be able to cross the street without waiting. It’s not much farther – so why do I consider it the slower choice?

To start explaining, here’s a rough diagram of the street at the bus stop:

And here’s a rough diagram (not quite right in proportions) of the two routes:

In truth, the two are a lot closer in length than these illustrations make them appear. But that’s all right, this is good enough for explanatory purposes.

I always choose Path 1 and never Path 2 (unless forced to by circumstances).

It’s not because of length. It’s for this reason:

Path 1 involves a lot less uphill walking. The downhill is also shorter, but that’s not really a consideration in comparison. Even with a 2- or 3-minute wait at the lights (which I don’t always have, it should be noted), Path 1 is a little faster than Path 2 and a LOT less work.

I really don’t like sloping, hilly, ground. My knees work a lot better on flat terrain (they don’t like stairs, either – going up or down. It’s a question of cartilage – I have almost none in my knee joints, it’s been squeezed out like toothpaste from in between, pushing the kneecaps out and up at the same time.

So, anyway, I got off the bus, contemplating the two paths, and then realized that there was a potential post for Campaign Mastery in the thought.

Sloping Ground

You see, most GMs don’t like sloping ground in their games, either. They are complicated to describe, they add content without substance to descriptions of areas, they are (relatively) boring. “You enter a 20′ x 30′ space with a curved alcove at the far end of the room, which slopes 5 degrees up from right to left and 10 degrees up from far end to alcove….”

They are proverbially difficult to map, both for GMs and for players, so much so that KODT did a whole 5-page strip poking fun at the knots of precision you had to tie yourself into way back in issue #6 called “Wherever You Go, There You Are”, reproduced in Bundle Of Trouble #2 (which is still available, I think). This was offered as a series of webstrips in 2003, but sadly, no longer seems to be available.

In summary: A gaming session with a complex dungeon means that someone has to be doing ‘Mapping’. Bob complained that he was sick of doing the mapping. Dave and Brian both turned it down and tried to convince Bob that it was his duty. Sara volunteered, saying she did not mind the chore. Dave responds, “No Offense, Sara, but you take way too much time mapping. Besides, you didn’t bring your French Curve or T-square.” In the end Dave is made to do the unwelcome task, but his mapping skills are so atrocious that the Knights keep falling into the same 10′ spiked pit, though it takes quite some time for them to discover this. soon find that the dungeon isn’t riddled with spiked pit traps, but that they’ve been going round in circles and repeatedly falling into the same pit. When the realization sinks in, they confront Dave and examine his map:

…which leads to the inevitable outcome:

In truth, player mapping also introduces all those complexities of description, as well; the GM not only has to be prepare ‘sloping ground’ content, he has to communicate it clearly to the players. “The floor rises by 7.5 degrees for the first 50′ and then falls by 6 degrees for the next 60 feet.” “I’m a 3’2″ halfling, can I see over the ridge?” “Ummm…”

So why should a GM consider it?

Three Reasons To Bite The Bullet

I’ve got three reasons. How good they might be depends on a whole host of factors. One or more of them might be compelling for you. At the very least, this states what you are sacrificing in return for the benefits of clarity and speedier presentation of the tactical situation in-play.

1. Slopes are natural

Flat ground anywhere doesn’t happen by accident. Slopes are natural and normal. Even on ground that is nominally flat, minute slopes are present and cause rainwater to collect in streams and rivers, cutting channels and forming banks. The slopes might only be a tenth of an inch in a mile, a millimeter or two in a kilometer, but they are nevertheless there – and many places have ground that slopes far more seriously and notably.

2. Higher Ground

Not all changes in floor elevation take the form of slopes. There are steps, shelves, and all sorts of other descriptive terms that can be applied to the landscaping. One of the reasons for such variety in descriptive language is because differences in elevation proverbially confer a combat advantage. So instantly recognizable is the concept of higher ground that I was able to use it for the title of this article and everyone would have instantly understood the subject.

3. A Grasp Of Complexity

Players often like black-and-white simplicity. “Is this proposed act an alignment violation?” “What’s the difference between good and evil?” “Is it as simple as Us Vs Them?”

Real life isn’t like that, as many GMs have pointed out in discussing the D&D alignment system. Alignment should not dictate or confine choice of action, it should merely classify those actions. Alignment should be more robust than a single choice; instead, it should drift, naturally, this way and that. Characters can, and should, take decisions when pushed into a corner (physically or metaphorically) that they would not normally countenance.

A GM who can cope with sloping ground and the complexities that it entails is probably a GM who is flexible enough to cope with nuance and shades of gray, and the richness of characterization that it unlocks, and vice-versa.

Of course, a whole different standard applies to running games for kids and younger teens. But, from an adult perspective, a GM who can cope with sloping terrain is more likely to run a complex and interesting game. It’s not a universal rule, but it’s a good starting point.

Is Higher Ground really such an advantage?

Of these three, the tactical considerations seem the most important in a number of ways. And, since I dislike relying on proverbs that may contain little more than a grain of truth, I think that motivation requires closer examination.

Mythbusters

Sometimes, the challenge in researching a particular subject is finding relevant information. At other times, it’s separating the wheat from the chaff. This is one of the latter occasions. A quick Google search immediately yielded a vast number of websites to use as sources, from which I quickly cherry-picked eight for closer examination.

Let me start here: In “Star Wars Special 2: The Myths Strike Back“, Mythbusters investigated the validity of the line from the third Star Wars prequel in which Obi-Wan declares that Vader has made a mistake and let him claim the higher ground. I always liked that line, because I saw a double meaning to it – the physical, and the moral, making it nicely symbolic of the whole “Light Vs Dark” theme of the entire franchise.

In an interview with the L.A. Times in 2015, Adam Savage said, “There are plenty of military reasons that higher ground is great, but most of them are about being an army. High ground allows you to see your opponent coming. It allows you tremendous advantage in a battle, but Obi-Wan says it as a one-on-one thing. So the first thing we wondered was, ‘Does this matter in sword fighting?’ …we reached out to some sword fighters, (and these were fencers who used double-edged weapons as medieval reenactors) and none of them had solid reasoning or referred to some tactic where the higher ground is always better.”

Their testing argued that in a lightsaber duel, higher ground did not present a convincing advantage. Lower ground won 26 duels, higher ground 24. But I found it significant that the weapons involved didn’t weigh very much, that many of the victorious blows were touches on legs and ankles that might or might not be lethal against armored enemies when using traditional weapons (which do have significant weight), and that a touch was enough to disable, maim, or kill with a lightsaber – significantly more effort would be needed with those traditional weapons.

In a “What’s New With Phil And Dixie” strip in the back of a Dragon issue, many many years ago, it was suggested that the best way to simulate real combat from a fantasy game in real life was to get two telephone directories, hold them out at arm’s length, one in each hand, and bang them together with the arms outstretched as hard as possible for five minutes.

It’s a harder test these days, because most telephone directories are now online, but if you just try waving a hardcover book around at arm’s length for a few seconds, you’ll quickly realize that it’s a LOT harder than it sounds.

In short, I was far from convinced that the Mythbusters results could be extrapolated to cover all situations.

Historically

From Wikipedia’s page on High Ground:

“The military importance of the high ground has been recognized for over 2,000 years, citing early examples from China and other early-dynastic cultures who regularly engaged in territorial/power struggles.”

In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, military leaders are advised to take high ground and let the enemy try to attack from a lower position.”

The whole point of castles and forts was to elevate troops into positions where they could strike the enemy more easily/effectively than the enemy could strike them.

“…Getting the high ground is not always advantageous. In the Battle of Jieting of the Three Kingdoms period of China, Shu Han forces occupied a hilltop, which Cao Wei forces soon surrounded and isolated the Shu forces from water supplies and reinforcements. The Shu forces suffered a humiliating defeat, and the Shu northern expedition had to be aborted.”

This brings up an important point – the degree of elevation change is significant. The answers change with elevation beyond the reach of melee weaponry. Or do they? Another question to be explored as I proceed. I’ll save it for ‘fired weapons’, because it seems most relevant there.

An RPG Player’s Answer

One of the websites that came up in researching the subject was Role-playing Games Stack Exchange, where “user4000” wrote, way back in 2012:

“I just don’t understand how attacking someone from higher ground is an advantage in melee combat. I always think of two examples where I can’t see this to be an advantage.

• “Example 1: A kung-fu fight in a room. If I stand on a table but my opponent doesn’t, how is this an advantage? I increased the reach between us, punching him requires me to bend, and a kick coming from higher up is not harder to block or dodge.
• “Example 2: In a sword fight, a knight is on a rock. You can strike me from above, yes, but I can strike your legs more easily. Again, you’ll have to bend over to block and attack. Again, the reach between us is increased.

If small opponents get bonuses to attack and defense because they’re small, what sense does it make that becoming ‘taller’ (i.e., having higher ground) suddenly gives me an advantage over you?

Most systems I know give you an advantage if you are on higher ground – why?

The most popular of the 5 responses was from a regular user of the site, Tynam:

“I’ll deal with your first example first: standing on a table in that situation is not particularly an advantage. It’s also, therefore, very unlikely behavior for a martial artist. (Not counting Feng Shui players). Standing slightly up from your opponent, on the other hand, is an advantage for many of the reasons below. It brings your kicks to better target points with less effort, while costing you nothing.

“Historically, however, standing on tables or fighting indoors is an unlikely scenario. Let’s discuss the more common swordsman (or in your example, armored knight) fighting uphill against similar opponent. In this case the higher-ground advantages are huge.

“(To help make examples clearer: our swordsmen are on a hillside. Tom is higher up, Lowry is lower down and facing uphill.)

• “The assumption that Tom needs to ‘bend over’ to block is false. The leg guards work perfectly well while standing in a normal fighting crouch, regardless of the origin height of the attack – it has to be at Tom’s leg height regardless. At worst Tom ducks slightly.
• “Lowry, on the other hand, gains defense for his legs but loses it at the head, and loses access to attack Tom’s head. Is this a fair exchange for Lowry? No! (Hint… which would you rather lose, leg or head?)
• “Endurance matters! The defense advantage for Tom is large. Tom needs to guard his legs and abdomen more… some of the least tiring guards, because your arm drops low. Lowry needs to guard his head more… needing him to lift the weight of his weapon more often. And he has to block against greater force, because Tom has gravity aiding in the downswing.
• “On this theme, gravity is Tom’s friend. Most styles use more cuts down than up, for a reason – those cuts have more power with less muscular effort. (And for the beginner, cuts down are also easier to execute and to feint with.) Lowry also has to lift the blade more to perform equivalent cuts and thrusts.
• “Footwork matters! In a duel both fighters move in all directions. Stepping backwards uphill leaves you less likely to trip than stepping backwards downhill. And more likely to catch yourself before dying. (In a massed formation during battle the rules are different, but that applies to most things.)
• “Balance matters! If both are competent, neither fighter will particularly lean forward or back… or they’ll lose. (Tom ducks down, not leans forward, to strike the head.)
• “Reach really matters… but only to the key target points. All else being equal, on a mutual thrust, Tom hits the head while Lowry hits the calf. Guess who’s limping away from that fight?
• “For armored knights with swords the situation is even worse, because the legs and chest are very hard to injure on a man in harness. (That’s what the armor is for, after all.) The good target points on a suit of plate armor are mostly upper body. (Although this match is historically unlikely outside competitions; poleaxes would make more sense, and are slightly more even because of the leverage advantages they grant.)
• “Vision matters! As wraith808 correctly says, looking up is harder than looking down. And it’s a lot harder if you’re wearing a helmet. Lowry has to work harder to keep his eyes on Tom. And can more easily be distracted by attacks coming at the head.
• “Speed matters! When Tom attacks he’s closing the distance downhill, with gravity aiding his strike. Lowry is climbing to do the same.

“All this only applies if the height difference is a couple of feet, or a not-too-steep-hill. At more than that this isn’t a swordfight as such; Tom is hacking down at a climbing opponent.

“This is a summary of a complex issue… but the purpose of game mechanics is to summarize complex issues. A flat bonus is not an unreasonable representation of this effect.”

That seems fairly comprehensive and definitive. Nevertheless, there are a few things to add to it.

Advantage Q1: Stabbing Weapons

Pikes, spears, polearms, and swords are some of the staple weaponry of fantasy gaming.

Thrusting down, gravity pulls on the arms, and the armor on them, and the weapon, increasing the effect that it has. Whether or not the addition is enough to overcome head protection is different question; but you have a better chance of success with that assistance than without it.

When thrusting upwards, gravity is your enemy – and you will probably have to elevate your arms above the horizontal, so you not only have to fight gravity, you have to fight it harder. The weight of your arms, and their armor, and the weapon, all have to be pushed upwards with force against the power of gravity, repeatedly.

For an unknown number of thrusts, the benefits might be minimal, but over time, they would become overwhelming. Fatigue matters!

Even if your combat system doesn’t track fatigue, it seems only reasonable to reflect this situation with a bonus – initially, for all the reasons listed by Tynam, but inevitably for all those reasons plus fatigue.

Advantage Q2: Slashing Weapons

This is probably the most ubiquitous weapon type in fantasy gaming, if you include crushing weapons that are wielded in a similar manner, like morningstars, maces, and hammers.

Analyzing these has to be done separately by stroke type; while overhead blows are spectacular, there is often less muscular effort involved in a horizontal strike or ‘sweep’ (and they tend to be harder to dodge and faster).

So, an overhead strike: you have all the effort involved in getting the head of the weapon over your head and swinging downwards. But, once you reach that point, gravity does the rest; all you have to do is hold on. If time is an issue, you might achieve greater effect by continuing to add muscle power to the blow, but you are probably better served by saving your strength and simply steering the downward blow toward your enemy.

The greater probability is that your blow will land on the head, shoulders, or back of your enemy. Head is bad; shoulders not much better; a blow to the back is probably the best choice, from your enemy’s point of view. Better still, they might be able to use a shield to protect themselves – but that involves lifting that to head height or more and holding it there, a considerable physical effort. When he attempts to strike back (he is going to fight back, isn’t he?), natural human kinesthetics means that the shield will be lowered as a counterbalance, increasing the thrust and speed of the weapon. Nevertheless, the vital organs of his foe are more likely to be accessible by only the tip of his weapon and not the blade; so the effectiveness of most weapons is diminished by the design under these circumstances. And then, the shield has to be raised again.

Higher ground definitely seems to confer an advantage in this situation.

How about with horizontal sweeps? This seems a little more problematic. The uphill character is fighting gravity to hold his weapon horizontal, even if the weapon is designed to be used this way – for example, a scythe. But “horizontal” might be something of an oversimplification; I can easily believe that you would start with the weapon slightly elevated, would send it along a somewhat-horizontal arc, with a rising follow-through, like this (vertical scale exaggerated):

Gravity assists with the strike, and – assuming that enemy flesh or armor doesn’t bring the weapon to a complete stop – then slows the stroke to a stop and then commences returning it to the ready position ready for the next stroke.

Once again, we have gravity working in favor of the character on the higher ground. Even if the converse is not true (depends on the weapon), that’s still an advantage; only the scale would vary.

Advantage Q3: Thrown Weapons

Thrown weapons are an easy one. You get increased range from elevation, and therefore, diminished range from a lack of elevation. It doesn’t matter too much if you’re talking darts or grenades.

Advantage Q4: Fired Weapons

For this one, I’m going to defer to a Quora answer from Bob Kinch to the question “Why is having the ‘high ground’ a tactical advantage in a gunfight?”. Bob is a former soldier, Combat Engineer, and Competitive Marksman in the Canadian Armed Forces with 42 years experience. His answer is:

“It’s so important that when the pre-eminent historian of his time, Liddell Hart, wrote his seminal book about what the Germans did during WW2, he called it ‘The Other Side of the Hill.’

“The reason that officers got horses, wasn’t because they were lazy, but [because] it allowed them to see over top of the front ranks and see what was going on beyond it.
Hills work like that too.

“Lets pretend you and I are fighting and you are on the top of a hill. You can duck down, go on the left side, pop up, fire a shot, swing around to the right and shoot again. I can only shoot at your head. You can shoot at my entire body.

“Am I fighting 1 soldier or 2, or 10?

“If I’m wounded, you can shoot me again. If you’re wounded, you can bind your wounds, and I won’t even know you are hurt.

“If I see dust behind you, are you being reinforced or are just kicking up dust to fool me? (Rommel used that trick in the desert) If I get reinforced, you can see it from miles and leave. And I won’t know it until I get there.

“And yeah, fighting uphill sucks. An old Arctic warfare trick is to throw water on the snow, so now you are fighting uphill, on ice. You can’t fight well and I know where my kill zone is.

“Your grenades fly farther. My grenades fly shorter.

“You can see exactly where your artillery lands. I can only guess about mine.

“I think you see the point.”

Once again, that seems like a fairy comprehensive and definitive response.

Several of those advantages only scale with greater height. If your enemy is at the top of a castle wall and you are not, you’re in a very bad place. Those on the top of the walls can rain anything from molten lead, boiling oil, or arrows down on you. Elevation again increases their range, while reducing yours, so you will be under attack for some period of time before your attacks can even reach the enemy – assuming parity of weapons and that they open fire as soon as you come into range.

Accuracy becomes a little harder to judge, though.

One of my favorite computer games many years ago was a golf simulation. Like most such, there was a meter that moved when you actuated a stroke which you stopped when it indicated that the stroke would be made with the power desired. Firing at an “uphill” target is like playing that golf game with the meter hidden – you can only estimate with each shot how far you are pulling the bow back, and minuscule variations are amplified through ballistics into considerably larger deviations. Only the most expert of archers can hope to deliberately hit a target; the rest simply fill the air above the target with arrows in the hope that they hit something worthwhile when they land.

Those attacking ‘uphill’ have the same problem, compounded by reduced range.

Of course, the final extract from the Wikipedia page quoted earlier should not be forgotten; elevation is not the be-all and end-all; siege techniques can still produce an eventual victory. But it’s not easy and not all that dramatic.

Advantage Q5: Tactical Awareness

This was explicitly raised in the answer from the RPG Stack Exchange, and mentioned in passing in a number of other sources. Height makes it easier to get an overview of the current tactical situation, permitting resources to be targeted where they are most likely to be effective. Most tactical simulations adopt an overhead perspective for a reason!

The Short Answer

Having considered all the possibilities, the only viable conclusion is “yes”, elevation confers a marked advantage in combat; the only questions are ones of magnitude.

Revisiting The Issue

But that brings me back to the question of whether or not GMs should worry about slopes and elevations – are they, in fact, too important to be set aside so casually?

Definitive answers are hard to come by, when discussing broader areas of game mechanics and GMing style, but I think that the demonstrated importance of elevation makes a solid argument for this answer, too, being ‘yes’ except when contraindicated by genre and setting.

The realism, for example, might get in the way in some superhero campaigns, or could contradict the combat ‘rules of genre’ in a pulp campaign. Those are cases in which elevation effects should be restricted only to the most overt. Spiderman’s swings can always defy gravity enough to get him to another rooftop, at least in an urban environment; in fact, I remember one issue in which he had to pursue a villain into the suburbs, finding himself a fish out of water in the new environment.

But we have now reached the point where GMs need to have a good reason, one that they can clearly articulate, in order to justify this simplification of real world geometry. Slopes and steps and shelves and all the other mechanisms of the rise and fall of natural and artificial elevations should be the default, not the exceptions that they are now.

Simplifying Implementations

If elevation changes can no longer be obfuscated out of descriptions and deemed an unnecessary complication, then the only thing to do is to look for ways of simplifying our way out of the complications that ensure from it’s inclusion.

There are four ways that I can see of doing so. If mishandled, they can be mutually exclusive, but managed properly, they should go a long way to alleviating the problem.

The Trivial Change

In smaller areas, or in appropriate terrain, you can define elevation changes as negligible. One thing that I like about this approach is that it implicitly defines elevation changes under other circumstances as not being negligible, making this a ‘soft’ way to introduce the new approach into a game.

The big difference is that this has to be done as a deliberate choice by the GM, not as the default assumption. That’s a subtle change, but an important one.

The Fixed Angle

The next technique for simplifying elevation issues is to exclude anything more than a foot or two as a separate tactical issue. You can then define these as relative to a base of fixed angle across the entire area to be mapped.

For example, you might define the ‘natural slope’ as being 1′ every 100′ from one side of the dungeon to another. To all intents and purposes, and local variations notwithstanding, there is a significant slope but in any local region of the map, the terrain is effectively flat.

You could measure the slope from one corner of the map. Or from a specific high- or low-point within the bounds. That’s up to you. So long as you don’t provide exact measurements, just subjective impressions, you marry the realism of incorporating slopes and tactical considerations to the abstraction necessary for simple terrain and roleplaying action.

What’s more, this can be used to permit more extreme slopes for dramatic effect. Picture a dungeon in which there is a 20-degree downslope:

Such a slope would leave the players in no doubt whatsoever that any room which was flat would have been constructed that way deliberately. Of course, humans tend to do that sort of thing automatically; other cultures might have different ideas. In particular, I can see Dwarves as being “respectful of the earth” or some such, justifying some pretty immense slopes.

How immense? Well, the steepest grades that cyclists traverse in the Tour de France are about 20%. That’s a percentage of 45 degrees of incline. Twenty percent of 45 degrees is about 9 degrees. So this angle is more than twice as steep as something a cyclist using muscle power would try to ride over.

But, at the same time, the steps in my apartment climb at an angle of a little under 45 degrees, a little more than 30. Call it 40° for convenience. These are fairly typical steps, as you might find in any staircase. The change in elevation each step represents is a little more than half the length of my foot, to put it another way.

So the slope of the proposed area is only half of that. It’s not an area full of stairs up and down. You could just about manage this as a sloping terrain. The lower your center of gravity, the less trouble you’d encounter – so Dwarves and Halflings and Gnomes are just fine, the latter positively scampering back and forth. But the tall man-folk and elves, that would be a far less convenient story. Twenty degrees is quite enough to turn an ankle… and anyone who’s ever done that will know how much it can handicap you.

Or you could designate every room as being flat and level, and every corridor as being inclined by a 50- or 60-degree angle – a very steep staircase. Does it matter that every room is at a different elevation within the dungeon? Not particularly – but it puts a lot of earth above and below, which is good for the soundproofing, don’t y’know? So you can commune with nature in privacy?

The Changing Level

In fact, that’s my third technique – abandoning any concept of the flap plane of the map representing a flat plane on the ‘ground’.

Once you grasp this concept, there are all sorts of things you can do with it. Different levels in towers and lighthouses. Rooms and dwellings in a great tree with steps spiraling around the trunk. Rooms in which gravity twists along the length of the chamber until horizontal to the original ‘ground’ level. Space stations with “gravity plating” at odd angles.

The stepped approach

But my biggest trick for making elevation changes manageable is the Stepped Approach. This states that no slope is significant until it creates an elevation change of x (inches or cm, that’s up to you). As a general rule of thumb, 6 inches or 5 cm are the usual amounts I work in. When the slope makes that much difference, there is a “virtual step” which runs the full width of the exposed terrain – except on that line across the battlemap, it can be considered flat.

Depending on the slope, that might divide the room into bands of 20 feet, or 10 feet, or 50 feet, or even be like contours on a physical map of elevation, twisting and contorting into curved lines:

For the price of a few seconds thought when it comes to environment design, this really does present the best of all possible worlds – this is a very complex slope that has been reduced to a simple set of elevation changes. (For the record, this is a temple or alter (depending on the scale) that has been carved out of the side of a mountain, taking advantage of a natural fold. There may well be a hidden cave at the upper end. Of course, you have to climb up the slope to the altar/temple. This quick demo map took me less than half an hour to create – and five minutes of that were because I kept making a mistake on the layers, and drawing my elevation markers in the wrong places.

Depending on the scales chosen, each step might be anything from a few inches to a foot or two, and my usual six inches sits comfortably right in the middle of that range. If you wanted to make the place seem even more alien in design, you might even decide that these were actual steps, deliberately carved into these strange curves and preserved pristine.

The Final Word

Slopes and steps are underused in environment design for RPG adventures, and there is no good reason for it. The techniques described will open a third dimension to your creativity, if you let them. Go forth and slope!

And remember – the long way is the way with the lengthier uphill section. By which I mean that if you get used to handling slopes with smaller examples and situations, larger and more complex elevation situations can be taken in your stride; save this element for when it makes a huge difference and you can find yourself overwhelmed.

Like most things in life, you have to learn how to do the simple things before you can cope with the most difficult examples, but if you master the fundamentals, you can muddle through just about anything.

If you want to start a conversation with a tabletop gamer, all you have to do is ask their opinion on GMs fudging die rolls. Everyone has an opinion, a theoretical best-practice policy, and everyone has a preferred approach in the real world – and the two don’t always match. Some people even have different preferences when they are a player compared with what they do when they are GM!

In my Quora feed the other day, I came across an answer by Dave Rickey to the question “How do game designers engineer luck into video games?”. Dave is a video game designer, so he is well-qualified to answer the question. I found his words so interesting that I reached out for permission to reprint them here, which he was generous enough to approve. I’ll be back afterwards to discuss the relevance to tabletop RPGs.

How do game designers engineer luck into video games? Answer by Dave Rickey, Game Designer, Reformed Contrarian   We cheat. Seriously, the Random Number Generator (RNG) is only the beginning, we do all kinds of things so you can feel like you’re having ‘good luck’:   Often, it is impossible for you to be one-shotted by hand held weapons. Maybe we hard-cap the damage you can take from a single hit, or you can’t be dropped below X health by a single attack.   1a. Warning Shot variation: AI’s first attack always misses.   Artificial Stupidity: The lower your health gets, the worse the AI gets. They stop taking cover or dodging as well, make dumb pathing decisions, etc.   Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: The lower your health gets, the more the AI misses.   3a. Conservation of Ninjitsu variant: The more attackers, the worse their aim.   There’s a hidden buffer in your health meter, so when you look like you have a sliver of health, you actually have quite a bit.   We drop more health packs/potions or ammo when you really need them.   If something is pure RNG (Random Number Generator), we fiddle very low odds in your favor: minimum 10% chance when it really should be 1% or less.   Or we force a success when you have X number of sequential failures (usually related to the inverse of your chance, to break ‘losing streaks’)   And so on. People love feeling like they ‘beat the odds’, so we stick our thumb on the scales, usually in ways they can’t see. And many things that are perfectly reasonable from a systems or narrative design PoV just aren’t fun to experience. Getting to spin and take out the enemy that just shot the wall next to you is fun. Barely surviving a tough fight you numerically should have lost is fun. Perseverance in an upgrade ‘crafting’ roll that gives you a cool weapon is fun. Feeling like you are lucky is fun.   So we cheat.

 
Okay, so let’s talk about these in a Tabletop RPG context. I’ll keep my numbering the same as Dave’s so that you can match my commentary to his “tricks of the trade”.
 

1. one-shot kills can be hugely entertaining for a player when he’s the one inflicting them, and promote screams of outrage when a player is on the receiving end. Hard-capping the amount of damage inflicted can be trickier to achieve in a Tabletop RPG unless you couple it with a one-shot weapon that must then be discarded – which usually gives one or more PCs a free shot while the enemy changes weapons, a factor that should be taken into account when deciding what the cap should be. See also “Altering The Combat Equations”, below.
    
   1a. Warning Shot variation: I like to use this approach when I want to boost the tension at the table. Giving the enemy a really nasty weapon that does horrible things to the landscape beside/behind a PC or other obvious threat and that they will never get to use at full effect again is a great way to amp things up – if used sparingly. It gets fairly obvious fairly quickly.

    

2. Artificial Stupidity – I prefer to use “Induced Desperation” or “Touch Of Panic” versions of this idea, because “artificial stupidity” tends to get noticed by players and can cheapen and undercut the desired sense of victory and achievement. “Induced Desperation” means that one of the PCs gets in a “lucky shot” on a miss that affects something the NPC is worried about, or that they are up against some sort of time limit that the PCs don’t know about; it causes NPCs to make mistakes, fire wildly, or choose to attack another PC without administering a coup-de-grace. You need to really sell this through narrative and roleplay or it becomes obvious.
    
   “Touch Of Panic” works the same way, but implies that the NPC is worried about something that the PCs don’t know about (because the NPC appears to be winning) – something that transforms a potential victory into a potential loss. It’s all well and good inflicting 10 points a round (or whatever) but nowhere near as good when you need to do 20 a round in order to finish before reinforcements arrive, or your power pack runs out of juice, or whatever. The core of the concept is that however successful the NPC appears to be, they are also battling some sort of clock – and while they may be winning the first fight, they are losing the second, which induces Panic and wild attacks that often go astray. Once again, this needs to be sold properly through narrative and roleplay to be believable. Another variation that can work is the “Premature Coup-de-Grace” or “Premature Gloat”, both of which permit the almost-defeated to get a free kick in – which can sometimes be enough to turn the tide.
    

   For example, I once hit the PCs with a Big Bad who they knew was almost unstoppable because of his affinity with the legendary weapon he wielded, and indeed he whittled through their ranks like wheat from chaff, not stopping to administer killing blows because he had to move on to the next enemy. Finally, the last PC was almost at his mercy when he made the mistake of counting his chickens before they hatched – he went for a Premature Coup-de-Grace, which gave the first PC he had “defeated” the chance to knock the weapon out of his grasp, which in turn gave the almost-defeated character a free shot at an obviously-vulnerable spot. Weakened massively, he fought gamely, but one by one the other PCs recovered and rejoined the fray, and eventually the bad guy went down. Knocking the stuffing out of the PCs with an obviously superior and intimidating enemy raised the stakes enormously, and the turning point inverted the odds, calculated on the assumption of the results from the initial battle.

    

3. The Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy gets a little obvious when you don’t have a lot of action to distract the players. But there are ways… See “Altering The Combat Equations” below.
    
   3a. Conservation of Ninjitsu variant Good one, if you can avoid it becoming obvious. Video game designers have the advantage of being able to test their fights repeatedly to see whether or not they are too tough; Tabletop RPG GMs don’t have that ability, and have to go with their best guesses based on prior combat performance. See also “Altering The Combat Equations” below.

    

4. A Hidden Health Buffer is a clever solution for a video game but not one that will work very well in a Tabletop setting where a player is responsible for tracking the Health of his character. If you can persuade your players to let you track all the damage without announcing how much is being inflicted, just telling you what their current total is at the start of combat, it can work – but good luck getting them to go along with that.
    
5. Extra Health Buffs: These are more frequently handed out just before they are likely to be needed in a tabletop RPG, a practice that can cause problems if they aren’t needed after all and start to accumulate. Avoiding this problem requires the GM to keep careful track of how many the PCs already have, because asking how many healing potions characters have just before they find more makes your intent blindingly obvious. I overcome this difficulty with a prior combat encounter which requires a character to use one or more healing potions, giving the GM to ask how many the character has left, and get the same info from the other players. This enables the “cache” to be discovered to be adjusted in size.
    

   That reminds me of a fun moment from long ago: Healing potions in this campaign were usually kept in a bottle of particular shape, so that you could find one in your pack by touch without taking it off (an idea I got from the unique shape of the traditional glass coke bottle). On this occasion, the PCs discovered a treasure cache which included one of these bottles – but when they opened it in the middle of the next battle, all that was inside was a note from a well-known brewer of such potions which read, “I.O.U. 1 Healing Potion – Dabny” (not the name of the Brewer)…

    
   Extra Ammo Refills: TT RPGs are notoriously bad at tracking ammo, for all sorts of excellent reasons. It’s not that there aren’t rules for doing so, it’s just that they are so damn tedious. So this can only be used in selected situations – such as Cinematic Combat – when the entire “Running out of ammo”/”Discovery of ammo cache”/”Reload at the last possible second” sequence can be delivered in narrative form. Sometimes, you can use a “dud” to reduce the amount of ammo a player thinks he has in order to induce this whole sequence. This works by eliminating the paperwork overhead and preserving only the intensity of the situation.
    

6. Fiddling The Odds: see “Altering The Combat Equations” below.
    
7. Forced Success after X sequential failures: this can be a lot more difficult to pull off in a Tabletop RPG because the mechanics of arriving at a chance of success are not hidden beneath the surface, as they are in a video game. It’s a lot easier to do the inverse: Forcing failure on an NPC after X sequential successes. But that brings me to…

Altering The Combat Equations

Any combat equation has four parts: Roll, Modifier, Probability of Success, and Effect. You normally have the same set of equations for the enemy, as well, though the specifics will vary. Of these, for the player’s attacks, the roll is known to the player, the modifier may or may not be known, the probability of success is known if the modifier is known, and the first-order direct effect is known – any interpretation or secondary effect is usually the GM’s province – but needs to be credible, according to the primary effect. That makes that equation difficult to manipulate.

Which leaves the enemy’s attacks. Of these, the player may or may not know the roll, won’t know the modifier (but will probably notice severe inconsistencies in it), usually won’t know the probability of success, but can estimate both it and the modifier from repeated attacks, and needs to be told the effects, both direct damage and secondary effects, though they will know the rules as they pertain to their character – making secondary effects a minefield to be manipulated very cautiously.

So, if you want the capability to manipulate the flow of combat in your game – even if you don’t use it, or don’t intend to – you need to take some active steps. First, you have to keep something hidden from the players. In terms of player attacks, that can only be the modifier to their combat rolls and the probability of success; you will have to do all the mental arithmetic required and announce simply “hit” or “miss” before moving on to effects. You can’t make the die roll for the player, and you can’t hide the modifier if you announce what the character needs to hit, because it’s simple arithmetic to get one from the other.

Now, the only way that you can actually hide the combat modifier is by adding more ingredients to the mix than just the combat bonuses that the character gets automatically. There are two ways of going about that – keeping all the modifiers together, or dividing them into two separate categories. The first choice requires the player to announce his combat bonuses at the same time as he announces his roll; the second permits him to apply his combat bonuses to the die roll and simply announce the total. But it also means that the GM needs to explicitly think of the “additional modifier justification” as something outside the control of the player – and it has to be there with every roll. For example, if you justify it under the heading of “environmental effects”, you need to be able to articulate those effects and their environmental causes every time.

However you approach it, the simple fact is that this means more work for the GM. Which is just one of many possible reasons that a GM might choose not to do it.

Which leaves only manipulating the enemy’s rolls. If you do this without also doing the same thing for the PCs, you must never let the players suspect that you are being anything other than scrupulously fair; because you are leaving yourself wide open for accusations of GM Bias against the PCs, and an extremely unhealthy us-vs-him mentality can arise.

Nevertheless it can easily be done – but it once again means hiding something from the players. Arguably, and ideally, it requires hiding everything from the players except the outcome – “Hit” or “Miss” – and the effects (“…doing 25 damage and stunning you for d6 rounds, I’ll let you roll…”). To explain why, let me tell you a little story…

The Discovery Of Manipulations

The more intelligent and analytical the player, the harder it is to conceal any manipulation of the combat equation from them. I once played with a lawyer (not a rules lawyer, I hasten to add) who could, after three or four attacks by an NPC, predict roughly what the modifiers of that enemy were, what the chances of success were, and could therefore predict what I had rolled – then alter his tactics accordingly. This was back in the days when I hid my die rolls behind a GM screen. It made him a very challenging player to GM for.

If the GM makes his die rolls in the open, it’s even easier for predictions – and becomes even more obvious when the GM is fiddling the odds. The key to doing so, I’ve found, is to create a dynamic environment in which some change in circumstances leads the player to expect that one or more of these known factors will change – and that the change will be unstable. That could be an environment filled with smoke or fumes, or a walkway that can collapse at an importunate time, or any number of such things.

You could even regard these as small-scale dues-ex-machina, but that’s generally overstating them – if that label can be applied, whatever you have in mind is probably too extreme. For example, a creek that just happens to flood at the right moment to knock an enemy off his feet momentarily is going too far.

There’s nothing wrong with occasionally going to far, either. But you need a curtain behind which to hide as you pull these levers – a secretive die roll after each round of combat, for example, supposedly to see when the flood arrives, plus some justification for the flood like obvious high-water marks. You can also get away with a lot more if the cure seems to be almost as threatening as the enemy supposedly was – so also sweeping PCs off their feet, demanding saves against drowning, etc, makes this seem less like the GM intervening and more like the GM adding a maraschino cherry of a challenge on top.

The Philosophical Debate

There’s also the deeper philosophical question of altering the odds at all. Some groups would rather the certainty of letting the chips fall where they may, others might prefer the GM to provide a safety net. I have a long-established track record of not killing PCs unless they do something stupid. I don’t generally include things like a savage playing with the controls of a nuclear reactor – the savage has no context in which to determine that this is a stupid thing to do. A character from the modern day – no matter how illiterate – has no such excuse. But he or she also has the capacity to make more rational and purposeful adjustments to those controls – which is not the same thing, and provides no justification for a “stupidity kill”.

Ultimately, there’s a lot of room under this heading for different answers, all of them right from some perspective and all-but-one of them wrong from other perspectives. Answers could range from doing everything in the open, to hiding as much as possible but never manipulating the results (and let the dice fall where they may), to only manipulating results under defined circumstances, to only manipulating the results for one faction, to a more egalitarian approach to manipulating the results.

One of the other comments to Dave’s answer speaks to exactly this point – Hahn Ackles wrote.

There’s a huge ideological divide here, as you no doubt well know.

I’m a very narrativist GM myself, much like you describe, but over on the Pathfinder forums I have debated with some people are way far on the other side. I’ve spoken to people who say that fudging dice is morally wrong, people who roll everything out in the open and even freely tell their players target numbers, etc. It’s very fascinating what different people call fun and what hills people choose to die on.

The reasons that game designers play with the odds is to ensure as entertaining an experience as possible. Tabletop games have different tools available, but the same broad objective. It is useful to consider the techniques that they employ to see what can be transferred into our form of gaming.

And again, huge thanks to Dave Rickey for giving me permission to quote his answer to the Quora question, and to Lawson Shepherd for asking it in the first place. You can read the other responses to the question at this link.

This is an article about a technique for repairing continuity and plot problems that is especially suited to long-running campaigns and to campaigns deriving from published sources.

I’m not going to leave anyone who hasn’t mastered telepathy in suspense: the technique is Patching one plot hole with another.

For some that will be enough of a description – they will either be saying “How obvious” or “Absolutely brilliant!” at this point. But most will be puzzled – how can you patch one hole with another? Why is this technique especially useful for long-running or established continuity?

The technique is a centerpoint of my Lovecraft’s Legacies Dr Who Campaign, because it works so well in this type of setting, so there’s no better way of explaining the technique than showing how it has been used within that campaign.

This is the 14th article devoted to the Dr Who campaign in question, but I’m going to assume that readers haven’t read any of them, and aren’t that familiar with the source material upon which the campaign is built, just to ensure that you get the maximum possible value out of the article.

Introducing Dr Who

So, what is Dr Who all about? Well, it’s a TV series from the BBC which has been running – with an extended break in the middle – since the early 60s. As a series, it has a number of foundations that have served it well over the years, both from a literary standpoint and from a production standpoint.

The central character is The Doctor, a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey with two hearts. The Doctor is usually accompanied by one or more companions, usually earth people who have come along on the Doctor’s travels to share in his adventures.

The Doctor travels in a TARDIS, which is a space/time transport vessel that is at least semi-sentient and which is possessed of a ‘chameleon circuit’, a plot device that is supposed to disguise it wherever it goes. Before the series started, however (or so canon holds), the doctor visited mid-twentieth-century London and the chameleon circuit got stuck leaving the TARDIS in the form of a blue police box. The TARDIS is notably bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

A common theme is that there are any number of hostile and malevolent and just plain selfish species out in the universe, which teems with sentient life – and a like number of less nasty species (some of monstrous appearance) which are often simply misunderstood. Earth people are a not-especially bright civilization that are at the center of attention far more often than chance would dictate.

One of the reasons for that prominence is that the Doctor is fascinated by the human race and loves their better qualities dearly, and so protects us from getting messed around by these other species. On the interplanetary scale, we punch a long way above our heads as a result, and that advantage in turn leads the human race to have a glorious destiny, forming empire and federation after empire and federation. We become the glue that holds the universe together, at least in social terms.

Adventures can take place in any location, on any planet, at any point in time. But a disproportionate number – about half – take place (at least partially) on or around Earth.

The Doctor is not always in full control over where the TARDIS takes him, though he likes to pretend otherwise. He might not always know where he’s going, but it’s always somewhere interesting, and it has been revealed that the TARDIS itself takes him not necessarily when and where he thinks he wants to go, but to a time and place where he is most needed.

There’s a lot more, but that’s enough for you to be getting on with.

The campaign takes place in between two episodes of the TV series. At the end of the previous episode, “The Angels Take Manhattan”, two of what were arguably the Doctor’s closest companions (Amy Pond and Rory Williams) had been exiled into the past by assassins in the form of statues of weeping angels, where they had lived out their lives and died.

In the next ‘episode’, a Christmas Special entitled “The Snowmen”, the Doctor was in a deep funk, seemingly over the loss of Amy and Rory, and refusing to help anyone. Events, of course, don’t permit him that luxury, and force him to take a renewed interest in the world, but that’s neither here nor there.

It simply didn’t track. The “funk” wasn’t deep enough for it to be an immediate consequence of his loss, and he had shown little sign of it at the end of the preceding episode, despite the events being even fresher within his experience. At the same time, it was too shallow to be explained by the passage of intervening time since the loss. The circumstances demanded that he grieve for the pair, recover, and then encounter some fresh source of angst that led to his state at the beginning of the Christmas Special.

Those, then, were the parameters of the campaign, the before and after into which it was to be sandwiched.

Here’s how this article is going to work

Having established the framework and continuity into which the campaign fits, I think it best to lay out a blueprint for the rest of the article.

We’ll start with an introduction to the campaign by Saxon Brenton, the one and only player involved – because his perspective is going to be a little different than my own simply from being on the other side of the table. He can provide a player’s perspective on the technique.

I’ll then describe the Technique and offer some mandatory requirements in order for it to be used with success.

After that, I’ll look at the relevance of the technique beyond this one campaign.

That will be followed by my campaign introduction, and by an examination of a number of common traits that the adventures within it are designed to exhibit.

Once you know what to look for, I’ll briefly synopsize each of the adventures that have been played to date, with emphasis on how those campaign traits manifested within the adventure and how they became an application of the technique in question.

I’ll follow that up with a player’s perspective on the campaign by Saxon, and then a last word from myself to wrap up the article.

Each stage of this construct is therefore built upon the ones that have preceded it in what will hopefully be a sensible and comprehensible manner. It’s going to be a long article, so let’s get started!

Campaign Intro – by Saxon Brenton

Lovecraft’s Legacies is a continuity-heavy Dr Who single player campaign which features a single concept as the plot hook for a linked series of adventures.

That concept is the presence of a comparatively low level Lovecraftian entity who wants to open an extra-dimensional gate to let in the rest of the pantheon, who would then conquer the universe and rewrite the laws of reality to their preference.

The Whoniverse as we know it would not be expected to survive the change in management. This being is a possessing entity who is only loosely tethered in time and space, and every time the Doctor has defeated one of its plots, it leaps forward to another time and place to try again.

The adventures overall have been interesting, challenging and fun. So far the half-dozen-plus adventures have given the opportunity to revisit old, high profile, and fan favorite settings, characters, alien species and enemies.

I will dare to use the dreaded description ‘fanwank’ – but since both the player and the gamesmaster are moderately intense Dr Who fans, this is neither unexpected nor unwanted. Fanwankery is hardly a pejorative if it not only doesn’t get in the way but actually increases the enjoyment of those involved, but that’s always a matter of personal taste.

Meanwhile there’s a flip-side of continuity being created within the adventures, a subtext to established continuity as both the Doctor and his opponent learn from past encounters and failures, and adjust their tactics accordingly. The fate of the universe as being inhabitable by its current resident is at stake, and the task is only getting more difficult with each encounter, giving a sense of increasing risk and danger to the campaign. Mike has just revealed that the entire campaign will be ten adventures long but I could already sense that things are building up to a big finish!

The Polytime Technique

The poly-time technique is to use one apparent plot hole as the solution to another. If there’s a character who mysteriously vanishes from an adventure only to turn up later with a lame excuse for his absence, that’s a plot hole. When some other plot hole manifests, for example someone has chopped a hole in the side of a boat that was visibly intact a few minutes earlier, just in time for the characters to take to the water in it, the technique would suggest using the character from the first adventure to chop that hole. It only then remains to construct a viable way of bringing the character and the boat together at the same time, giving the character a reasonable motivation to damage the boat, and any other tidying up of loose ends.

Of course, this is a trivial example, designed to simplify the technique as much as possible. Maximum fanwank is achieved if the solution to the first plot hole is also provided by what the character experiences in the course of his involvement in the second.

Real-world usage is a little more complicated.

Use of Canon as a resource, not just a background

This technique uses established Canon as a plot resource, not simply as a static background. That’s an important shift in mind-set, and one that can have profound effects on a campaign – because you can’t really turn it off once you’ve made that mental transition. Whatever the source material says is only the beginning; you can insert whole new volumes in between one paragraph of that canon and the next. To my mind, that’s the proper function of a campaign or adventure background – as tools to facilitate an entertaining story.

Limitations

It might seem at first that this solution mandates access to time-travel, and certainly the relatively ubiquity of time-travel techniques in Doctor Who makes it easy to use in the Lovecraft’s Legacies campaign but the absence of time-travel is simply a limitation on the technique, not a fatal flaw in its applicability.

The limitation simply mandates an appropriate domino chain starting with the character’s actions in the past that results in [x] happening – [x] being whatever has to be explained to resolve the second plot hole when the PCs encounter it.

What is undeniable is that this is a lot of work on the part of the GM (though it’s often fun, too) – so this is not a trivial technique to be used for small problems of no great importance, this is something major to solve a major issue.

There are a couple of genuine requirements, however, that are not so easily set aside.

Required: A rich established continuity

The first is to have a detailed background or continuity to use as a source. These are more common than you think, as you’ll see when I get into the “relevance” sections. This is the stack of Lego bricks that you are going to use to fill in the holes in future plots – it’s hard to build anything without them.

Required: Intimate Familiarity with Canon

On top of that, you have to know that source material very well. It’s not enough to posit that Dr Strange can fix your plot problem by popping into your adventure and doing some bibity-bobity-boo; you need the character to be available at the right time and place, to have a reason for being at that time and place, and a reason for doing what he is being brought there by you to do. You have to be able to examine the Canon critically, identifying flaws and potentially-incomplete explanations within it, and then use those for your own purposes.

And, once the continuity has been patched, you need to let events unfold as they will, at least so far as the PCs are concerned; you can’t railroad them. Which means that the outcome as they experience it has to be independent of the outcome as it will be recorded for posterity.

If the plot hole to be patched is noticed during play, this is relatively easy to achieve. If not, if this is a retroactive repair, that’s a lot harder, a lot messier, and a lot less desirable – so much so that it is often not worth the effort.

Relevance I – Game Settings

So, let’s consider what sources might meet these requirements, in terms of game settings. I think you’ll be surprised at how broad they are.

Forgotten Realms

This game setting is the foundation for almost all D&D games, even though the GM and players might not be aware of it. You can change the geography and the society and the species profiles but if you’re using the PHB and DMG, the Forgotten Realms setting is the underlying foundation. Elves are the way they are in the Core Rules because that’s the way things are in the Forgotten Realms. If you don’t want to use the Forgotten Realms, then you have to explicitly change Elves to match. Ditto for all the other races, and the classes, and so on. There are implicit social and sociological constructs embedded within all these (especially in the flavor text) that are right for the Forgotten Realms, from which they derive, but may not be right for the world of Lanxia or the island archipelago of the Sunset Isles or the dark underground of the Dwarven Passage, or wherever you have set your game.

And if the Forgotten Realms is your foundation, then the key events within the Forgotten Realms continuity are yours to play with and draw upon as you need them.

Eberron

Eberron is the “other” popular foundation. It was notable for being comprehensive, internally-consistent, and completely different from the Forgotten Realms. If Eberron is your game setting, then you definitely have the rich continuity and background to draw upon; what you do with them is up to you.

Lord Of The Rings

Great-granddaddy of all campaign settings is the Lord Of The Rings, and the whole of Middle Earth. I’ve played, now, in several LOTR campaigns; one died because the GM refused to permit any alteration of the established continuity, limiting what the PCs could achieve. One died (very quickly) because the GM ignored virtually all the continuity and made it a very generic fantasy campaign with the occasional recognizable element that appeared with no justification or internal coherence. And one took the approach that everything prior to the campaign date was – seemingly – as written in the official continuity, that events would continue to unfold as they had in the books unless the PCs managed to interfere in the logical progression of events, and that all of that was available for him to use if appropriate, and it could have lasted for quite a long time if the GM hadn’t dropped out of RPGs.

TV/Movie Properties

This, of course, is where Dr Who fits in. But the technique equally applicable to campaigns based on Stargate, Star Trek, Babylon-5, Mission Impossible, Xena, Game Of Thrones, Twilight, James Bond, Bill and Ted’s Big Adventure, or Gilligan’s Island – whether there’s an official RPG adaption or not. Ditto Book properties like Ringworld and Dune and Xanth and Pern and Sherlock Holmes…

Comic Sources

Anyone running a superhero campaign has every comic ever published to draw upon. And we do, all the time. These days, there might also be campaigns based upon the re-interpretations of the comics presented by the respective Movie franchises – and not just the successful ones. After all, if your nose was put out of joint by the Fantastic Four movie following the ill-fated attempt to reboot the franchise (see my review in Fantastic Flop: GMing Lessons from a filmic failure), what could be sweeter than a Fantastic Four campaign in which you “get it right”?

The entirety of fiction and entertainment is open to you – the only question is which setting will you choose? Heck, I once played (very briefly) in a game world that was completely modeled upon and derived from, “Stairway To Heaven”!

Relevance II – Other Uses

But those represent only part of the value of this technique. More sparing usage not only minimizes the down-sides but permits local application to solve smaller occurrences of this type of problem.

Module Backstories

Have you ever read a module or published adventure and thought “this looks like fun, if only it all made more sense?”

It used to happen regularly, back when The Dragon included small adventures in its middle pages – some were excellent, some were merely ripe with potential – and a lot of the time, the difference came down to a backstory in which someone crucial to the history of the adventure site made some appallingly stupid or nonsensical decisions – or expected players to make decisions of similar character or to blindly follow the adventure script.

There have been some commercially-produced and -sold modules, too, that were inadequate when put under the microscope. And even some otherwise quite interesting adventures that relied upon backgrounds, assumptions, or settings that were simply incompatible with my campaign. Sometimes these were explicitly set out, sometimes they weren’t.

Sure, you can simply replace the existing background of the adventure with something more appropriate, but why not kill two or three birds with the one stone – increasing the cohesion of the campaign, integrating the packaged adventure with your campaign more tightly, and turning lemons into lemonade – especially valuable if you bought lemons thinking they would be oranges.

Flawed Modules

And what if the adventure itself was good in most respects but had some moment of madness in the design? I once bought a module for low-level D&D characters in which storm giants HP was inadvertently noted as 4HP instead of 40HP. Since the encounter in question explicitly described them as being wounded and at low strength, this problem wasn’t necessarily obvious.

If you notice it before it’s too late, it’s an easy fix. If you don’t however, the credibility of the adventure takes a hit because this opposition was far too weak to have survived to do the things that they were supposed to be able to do later within the adventure. With the quick-and-easy solution off the table, the only solution is to plug the hole.

I’ve seen modules in which groups of enemies will attack blindly regardless of the apparent strength of the opposition. Or will ignore obvious advantages in combat. or simply do something stupid – like trying to ambush the PCs by hiding in a room that they know contains a pack of minotaurs after the PCs had proven too tough for a frontal assault. So what are the minotaurs, then – chopped liver?

Past Mistakes

But by far the most common reason to pull this technique out of your back pocket is to fix past mistakes that you only discover after the fact. Once again, you could invent a ‘fix’ out of whole cloth and inject it into the campaign, but how much more robust would the campaign be if you could arrange things so that it wasn’t actually a mistake, despite what you thought at the time?

The Lovecraft’s Legacies Dr Who Campaign

Okay, I’m the first to admit that it’s not often that a sci-fi Time-travel campaign is relevant to fantasy campaigns, but looking at the usage made of this technique “in the field” permits an analysis of the benefits and liabilities of the technique, and that’s what’s important here. But first, I need to provide some context by talking about the campaign itself.

Campaign Traits

In addition to the qualities inherited from the source material, described earlier, there are five traits that are significant in this particular campaign that should be noted at least briefly.

Game System

The game system used for this campaign is a simple one that I devised several years ago for another time-travel campaign, with a few simplifications thrown in (the previous one got hung up on describing starship/timeship capabilities. This version handles all such questions as plot problems).

A tour of the greatest creations within the canon – a rogue’s gallery of sorts

One of my intentions with the campaign plan that I came up with was to visit each of the iconic enemies that are part of Dr Who canon.

Extension Of Canon

Each adventure should extend the official canon, thereby giving it a significance beyond the superficial plot device used to link the different adventures.

Healing Of Canon

There aren’t all that many problems with the Doctor Who canon that don’t fall into the category below. But there have been a few, and I wanted to take the chance to “play around” with some of them, confident that I could heal these breaches.

Holes In The Continuity of Space-Time

There are a number of holes in the continuity – not all that surprising, really, especially given the broadcast history of the series. To be more specific, there are Internal Contradictions, Logic Flaws, Failures Of Physics (some of them due to more recent discoveries, some of them cases where the writers/producers should have known better), and Inexplicable Contrivances concocted purely to get the writers out of an immediate plot hole without regard for the broader plot consequences or past continuity.

One of my objectives was to “fix” some of these problems.

Surprising Confluences

Lastly, I wanted to pack as many surprising twists and turns into the campaign as I could in order to resolve the problems listed above – rather than introducing new elements into the canon with each adventure, I wanted to involve building blocks that the player would (generally) recognize, do something new with them, and have that something resolve the existing problem as well as moving the internal plotline forward.

So far, every adventure has fulfilled at least one of these and usually most of them. You will, of course, recognize the seeds of the technique that is the subject of this article in the last item.

With those “what-to-look-fors” identified, the next step should be to briefly synopsize the adventures of the campaign very briefly (except for the most recent ones) so as to provide some actual examples of the use of the technique.

Adventure 1: Wrinkles In Space-Time

Canon Extensions

Give the Doctor time to grieve and then wallow in unproductive self-pity so that he will be back to normal for the rest of the campaign. Add Lovecraftian Horrors to the canon.

Canon Problems

1. It had been hinted in the past that the TARDIS’s additional interior size is actually “borrowed” from the surrounding space, however nothing had ever been shown to get “stolen” by the TARDIS.

2. It had been stated explicitly that it was very hard to get into alternate and pocket dimensions from our space-time but that there could be connections between the two, and several notable exceptions had occurred in prior continuity. In fact, it’s easiest to think of the TARDIS as a pocket dimension, explaining how it can travel through space and time without relativistic problems.

3. It had been shown that when the TARDIS dies, this additional space will leak through into our space-time, causing it to become as large on the outside as it was on the inside.

Solutions

Not all pocket dimensions are equally difficult to get into, and the difficulties can be different in the other direction to those of entering from this side (a different piece of established canon). The TARDIS sampled additional space-time from those that surrounded OUR space-time (new) and “remodeled” them to its own needs, choosing preferentially from those that were easy to access from our space-time.

Synopsis

The Doctor is deeply depressed by the fate of Amy and Rory and by repeated failures to rescue them. He has taken refuge in a Buddhist Monastery in the Himalayas. The campaign begins 364 days later, as one of the monks who the Doctor has befriended attempts to rouse him from his funk. The next day, one of the monks vanishes and another is found dead. The doctor is forced to take an interest in the outside world as this murder mystery deepens, eventually discovering that a nightmare from outside space-time is attempting to rewire the TARDIS’ systems to open a portal that will allow horrors exiled from space-time at the dawn of time to return. To the Doctor, these sound like Lovecraftian Horrors. The creature attempting this task escaped from the pocket dimension into which these horrors were exiled, but it’s body swiftly burned out; it has possessed the missing Monk and had killed the only witness to this body-snatching. The Doctor prevents the possessed Monk, named Inchon, from succeeding, but the possessing spirit escapes into the future to try again. The doctor and his friend, Jangshen, depart in pursuit.

Metaplot Notes

If the difficulty of transit is different depending on the direction of travel, pocket dimensions can be used as prisons. There have been past hints in the continuity that accord with this use, including the “exile” of Omega, engineer of Time Travel. If you wait long enough, a low-probability event will occur – like the TARDIS sampling from one of those prisons, releasing the captive imprisoned there. This occurred while the Doctor was at the Monastery.

Adventure 2: Monstrosity Of Steel

Enemies (other than Inchon)

Mechanical men. Bio-engineered face-hugging mind-control creatures. Mind-controlled students and staff. (Robots of various types are a staple enemy of Dr Who canon, as is “the monster of the week”.).

Canon Extensions

This adventure filled in a number of the blanks about Inchon and his capabilities. Paris, during the time of electrification, is not somewhere that the Doctor has ever been shown to have visited before, but the name given by the French newspaper to the Eiffel Tower was completely real and provided the title for the adventure.

Canon Problems

1. The Doctor is a little hit-and-miss when it comes to playing detective, but it was necessary that the character be fed certain information in the course of the adventure.

2. It was also important to show Inchon reacting to the threat of the Doctor, and the Doctor learning to track Inchon.

3. The Doctor needed a way to escape the perfect prison, i.e. Inchon’s trap.

Solutions

The trio of NPCs, plus his new Companion, provided the detective skills necessary. They also possessed the capabilities needed to give the Doctor a chance to escape Inchon’s trap.

Synopsis

The Doctor followed Inchon through space and time to Paris, April 1892. There was an uncertainty factor that meant that the Doctor knew only approximately where and when Inchon had arrived or would arrive. The adventure title refers to original newspaper descriptions of the Eiffel Tower. Three of the Doctor’s old friends, resident in London during this time period, happen to be on Holidays in Paris and detect his arrival. They are reunited and team up to locate Inchon. Instead of going to work on a new portal device, Inchon sets a trap for the doctor, with a defaced Cezanne as the bait. This almost succeeds in trapping the Doctor in a pocket dimension. Inchon escapes, thinking his enemy destroyed, and returns to the private academy he is using as a base of operations, having created an artificial life-form as a form of mind-control (using the students and staff as slave labor to compensate for the crudity of the technology available). The Doctor tracks Inchon there, frees the students, overcomes the “metal men” that they had constructed for Inchon, and destroys the portal equipment. Inchon escapes through time once again.

Adventure 3: Too Many TARDISes

Enemies (other than Inchon)

Dinosaurs. Several varieties. Lots of them.

Canon Extensions

It’s known that Captain Jack Harkness was working for Torchwood at this time. It is also known that the 3rd Doctor was working for UNIT in this time period. There has been no information provided by canon as to the relationship between these two organizations a this point in their respective histories, even though Torchwood was explicitly created to defend Britain against aliens, and especially against The Doctor. Extends River Song’s involvement with the Doctor.

Canon Problems

1. Despite being a socially-advanced alien, the Doctor’s past attitudes were in accord with the mainstream misogynistic mores of the broadcast era (for obvious reasons at a meta-level); this causes a logic problem within the characterization of the character.

2. The Doctor had never encountered Torchwood, and he should have (of course, he couldn’t because the writers hadn’t invented it yet).

Solutions

Explores past misogyny within the canon and resolves the logical characterization contradiction. Reveals that events were manipulated by River Song and Jack Harkness to keep The Doctor and Torchwood apart and unaware of each other in the era.

Synopsis

Inchon underestimated the Doctor in 1892, a mistake that he would learn from. When he arrived in August 1975, he set about crafting a more perfect trap, not realizing that there was a past incarnation of the Doctor already present (the third Doctor). The resulting paradox of the same TARDIS present in two places at the same instant fragmented time. The Doctor encountered several of the populace of the time, himself of the era, and several people he would only come to know in the future (though they already knew about him). His future wife, River Song, with the help of the contemporary version of the now-immortal Captain Jack Harkness, straightened time out and the two doctors working together were able to disarm the Vortex Fragmentation Bomb that was supposed to destroy the entire planet, Doctor included.

Adventure 4: The Essential Disaster

Synopsis

2155, and the Daleks invade Earth. Except that it never happened, as far as the Doctor’s understanding of history goes. He and Inchon (now in the body of Dalek 3765) work together to thwart the invasion and restore the timeline, consigning the master plan of the Emperor Dalek into a closed loop in time..

Enemies (other than Inchon)

Daleks, of course.

Canon Extensions

The explanation behind the situation would take far too long to explain, but the fact remains that a couple of Dr Who movies were made starring Peter Cushing that are not considered part of the official continuity and that flatly contradicted some elements of the TV show of the time. A rewritten version of the plot was subsequently used in the regular series. I always thought that this was the result of a failure of imagination on the part of the writers (even if the TV show couldn’t have afforded to have Cushing guest appear and couldn’t acquire the rights to the movie footage to use for the purpose). Although it is supposed to cause all sorts of problems, the Doctor meeting past versions of himself (“crossing his own time stream”) is a fan-favorite trope from the series, one that seemed appropriate for this adventure even though I had just had him do so in the previous adventure.

Canon Problems

1. Events within the movies are contradicted by the TV series, and the Doctor can’t have a “forgotten regeneration” to explain where the Cushing version of The Doctor. The Cushing version fails to exhibit many typical Gallifreyan traits, including the ability to regenerate.

2. The non-Cushing (PC) version of the Doctor should be more aware of his own mortality; he is running out of regenerations. The TV audience (and the player) knows that he will be granted more because the Christmas special “The Time Of The Doctor” had already aired, but The Doctor doesn’t know this, it hasn’t happened yet. (Contrary to what modern audiences might think, it had already been established that the Time Lords could bestow a fresh “cycle” of regenerations, though it isn’t clear what the quid-pro-quo at their end is).

3. There have been a number of “copies” of The Doctor in different episodes. While most of them meet their fates on-screen, in one case it was implied – a would-be world conqueror named Ramon Salamander. When Salamander’s conquests began to unravel, he attempted to escape using the TARDIS by impersonating the Doctor, just as the Doctor had impersonated Salamander to get proof of his guilt. Prematurely triggering the dematerialization process with the TARDIS doors still unraveling was Salamander’s undoing; he was blown out the doors and into the Time Vortex, presumably to his doom. However, this entire portion of history is contradicted by later episodes, which do not mention Salamander’s conquest of half the planet at all.

4. In a different episode of the same Doctors’ tenure, a group of time-traveling rebels attempt to travel back in time to disrupt a completely different dystopian future, one that is also contradicted by subsequent canon.

5. The Doctor ended the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks. He was only able to do so because of his history with the Earth, as shown in The Day Of The Doctor. Thus, if the Earth is destroyed, the Doctor’s history is changed, and the Daleks win the Time War. This vulnerability should be well-known to the Daleks (and justifies their many attempts to conquer or destroy the Earth) and to the Doctor, but has never been explicitly referenced within the series.

Solutions

To avoid creating a paradox (where did they come from, otherwise?) the Time-traveling rebel’s dystopia has to exist somewhere. If they are part of a closed loop in time that ends in a ‘resetting’ of history prior to the coming of that Dystopia, this problem is solved. If Salamander’s conquest was within this closed loop, the contradictions in canon are resolved. If one of the Doctor’s regenerations doesn’t actually count because it was derived from another source (another of the Doctor’s enemies, The Master, once attempted to steal the Doctor’s remaining regenerations, so it can be done), then he has one more than he thinks he does – and if the ‘contemporary’ (PC) Doctor then donates that ‘extra’ regeneration (that he didn’t know he had) to Salamander (without knowing it at the time), Salamander can become the Cushing version of the Doctor and the “regeneration ledger” balances. That “extra” regeneration was the one forced on the First Doctor in The War Games (1969). The Doctor and Dalek 3765 (Inchon) enable the Cushing Doctor to defeat the Dalek scheme to invade the earth, and prevent their backup plan to destroy the planet, and leave the time-travel technology used by the Rebels for them to find, closing the time loop. Inchon escapes while the Doctor is engaged in completing this task.

Adventure 5: The Upgrade Disease

Synopsis

Natives of a planet named Mondas contact an Earthman, Lord Byron McReedy. Inchon arrives, detects the tech, uses it to mask his signature by constructing a Quantum Suppressor using info learned when he was Dalek 3675. The Doctor arrives in Scotland in 2675, and discovers that a variety of Cybermen that this incarnation has never seen before are buried in Omnium Steel Caskets, but are being raided for cybernetic part designs by McReedy, an effort in which the Mondasians are assisting, so that they can use cyberparts from this unknown variation of Cybermen to bridge the tech-gap between his own version of Cybermen and those of a crashed ship of Cybermen in Suspension that have been discovered in a Mondasian archaeological dig. Inchon reactivates the dormant Cybermen hoping to trap the Doctor in a crossfire; instead, the Cybermen interface with each other and immediately begin to co-operate in the cyberconversion of Mondas. In the confusion, the Dr is able to escape back to Earth along the Zeiger corridor, which enables transits between fixed points on both worlds. Jangshen & The Doctor come up with a way to ID Inchon and send him “on his way” by bouncing the TARDIS’s Quantum Signature off the Zeiger Corridor and looking for the blank space where Inchon’s Quantum Suppressor damps the signal, simplifying their problems. But this gives the Mondasians time to complete their upgrades and send an expeditionary force to Earth through the Zeiger Corridor. After taking steps to secure the bridgehead between the worlds (by Cyber-converting McReedy and his servants), they begin preparing to bring a larger force to expand beyond the McReedy estate’s grounds. The Doctor then engineers a way to disconnect the Zeiger Corridor, using an E-space shunt, but it will throw Mondas temporarily into E-space by way of the Void. This ensures that the Dimension-lock with Earth cannot be immediately re-established, ending the threat.

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Enemies (other than Inchon)

Cybermen, multiple varieties. Mondas citizens.

Canon Extensions

Oy Vey, where to start? Cybermen canon is rife with confusion and contradiction, most of it glossed over in later appearances. Contradictory reports of their origins on the planet Mondas feature in their first and second appearances, for example. New abilities and vulnerabilities appear and disappear with each appearance in the canon, sometimes explained, sometimes self-evident in origin, and sometimes not (see also “Canon Problems” below). As prep for this adventure, I had to reconcile canon from every appearance of the Cybermen into a coherent history of the “species” in two documents (the original version of Part 1 was richly illustrated to highlight the differences between different cyber-populations, but most of the illustrations were not available for public use, so they have been redacted in the version being offered to readers).

It’s not going too far to describe the entire concordance as a Canon extension, especially the new content in part 1 (in blue).

Canon Problems

While the concordance solved most of the continuity problems associated with Cyberman history, there were some deliberately left for the adventure to resolve (without being obvious about it). The one major appearance of the Cybermen that post-dates the concordance (World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls) complicates but does not invalidate the content of either adventure or reference.

In particular, two attributes needed explanation. First, the “gold dust” vulnerability: The notion that the only substance to trigger this vulnerability ruled out the two most obvious explanations (dust clogging leading to overheating of components, powdered conductive material causing short circuits). This vulnerability appeared without explanation and was eliminated in the same way, but remains central to a number of appearances of the Cybermen, as the Concordance makes clear. Second, the ability to “learn” from the ways other Cybermen had been destroyed and adapt to neutralize the vulnerability that were exhibited in Nightmare In Silver seemed to emerge from nowhere.

Solutions

Incorporating a secret and very specific vulnerability into Missy’s redesign of the Cybermen seemed a logical precaution for her to have taken. Using that design flaw in the course of the adventure to bootstrap that vulnerability into the early Cybermen designs was the clever part. However, this required some of them to have survived the events of the two-part episode which unveiled them, Dark Water / Death In Heaven. This was possible if the destruction of one Cyberman was enough to damage the self-destruct mechanism of an adjacent Cyberman; since there were billions of these Cybermen, it seemed probable that this would have occurred in at least some cases. It remained only to extrapolate what the human population would have done when these inanimate remains were discovered, and secretly burying them in mausoleums and installing alarms to warn them of activity within seemed most rational, given that they could not be easily destroyed by the technology of the day. This view was reinforced by the (background) presence of a surviving Cyberman in the later episode “The Raven”, which post-dates the campaign but had been aired at the time of play.

The “adaption” technology was distinctly reminiscent of the Borg from the Star Trek franchise; it seemed natural for the ability to have been copied by Cybermen during a cross-over. To my astonishment, just such a crossover was already semi-canonical, appearing in a comic mini-series; all I had to do was add the “consequence” and make the cross-over canonical.

This left only discrepancies in the reported origins of the ‘Species’ to be reconciled, and having harvested “Cyberman” parts make their way to Mondas to be used as templates for Cyberman upgrades completed the reconciliation.

Metaplot Notes

Inchon devises a means of hiding himself from the Doctor’s sensors. This is eventually overcome by locating the one spot on earth from which no readings can be obtained, a “blank spot” caused by Inchon’s masking technology. The Doctor doubts this will work a second time, Inchon is too clever for that.

Adventure 6: The Dalek That Bleeds

Synopsis

It’s an observed pattern that in any season in which the Daleks appear more than once, the second appearance is both a big surprise and something “major”. Recognizing this, I deliberately made this adventure bigger in almost every way than adventure 4, “The Essential Disaster”. To preserve the surprise, I withheld the title of the adventure until part-way through. The adventure was inspired by the discovery, while searching for images to use with Adventure 4, of images of the 50th-anniversary 12” Dalek (available from Amazon) action figure with a prominent Union Jack (shown to the right). I immediately thought of the events of the 2010 Doctor Who episode, “Victory Of The Daleks”, and the plot began to take shape.

The action (mostly) takes place in New New London, in the year 4775. The Doctor arrives, pursuing Inchon, and encounters the union-jack ‘uniformed’ Daleks. He is then taken into custody by Commander Charith, a martian officer, and Charith’s squad. Convincing Charith that he is a friend of the Martian people, Charith takes the Doctor to meet Prime Minister Alexis Crowne, who explains the current situation: Earth has fought the Daleks on a number of occasions, and lost most of these fights. They have decided that they need a new class of weapon in order to fight back. They have created their own versions of the Daleks based on human DNA from frozen human embryos and Genetic Engineering and impressed upon them that the Dalek obsession with racial purity means that they will never be accepted by the “True” Daleks. However, if these Faux-Daleks aid humanity in wiping out the Skaro-Daleks, humanity will transplant them into fully-human clones of the original bodies before the Genetic Engineering took place – so their only hope is to win the war and exterminate the Skaro-Daleks. This puzzles the Doctor somewhat as the genetic alterations would cause the cloned human bodies to reject the human-Dalek brains. Crowne then introduces him to “Dalek 001”, also known as Progenitor, who is now fully human, proof that it can and will be done. The Progenitor is the central figure of the human-Dalek faith, revered by them all, and one of the five-member Board Of Command who control the Earth’s defenses. The Doctor is unable to detect any sign of the surgery, another puzzle. The Progenitor tells him that in the years since the Human Daleks became operational, they have won roughly half their battles with the Skaro-Daleks – which is a record only the Doctor can claim to have bettered up to this point in history. In 50 years, they expect to have forced the Daleks out of 70% of the galaxy. Despite this success, Charith and the other Martians are left uncomfortable by the human Daleks; they are warriors, they should be leading the battle, not watching from the sidelines and playing messenger.

While the situation itself gravely concerns the Doctor, in the back of his mind is the problem of finding Inchon and what he could be doing with all this military technology around. Assuming that Inchon has corrected the flaw in his masking technology, the only way to locate him is to try and analyze the secondary effects of his actions on events. Jangshen, under the Doctor’s Guidance, begins attempting to find some pattern that might be relevant. Meanwhile, the Daleks send a Gravitational Cascade to destroy the earth, launched from one of their saucer ships. This attack can be easily redirected by Earth’s defenses to destroy the Skaro-Dalek ship that launched the attack – too easily, to suit the doctor; why would the Skaro-Daleks launch an attack with such a slim probability of success? They are more efficient than that! They are up to something. The Doctor is then confronted with a human-Dalek that has gone insane, which explodes because of a built-in Inversion Bomb. The Progenitor sadly reflects on the fact that they are prone to such insanities, and dwells on the horrors they experience within the Dalek Shells, which were originally captured and rebuilt Skaro-Dalek exoskeletons, but which have been redesigned and rebuilt by the humans.

The Doctor realizes that The Progenitor is dwelling on this in an attempt to distract from what actually happened, and so he ignores the bait and focuses his mind on the actual events, reasoning out the logical fallacy of the entire ‘human Dalek’ program – if the ‘human Daleks’ succeed in supplanting the Skaro-Daleks, they would have every reason to simply take over the Dalek Empire and none at all to revert to human form. What’s more, the human Commanders know this and have incorporated the Inversion Bombs into the human-Dalek designs to end this threat when it becomes necessary. They have no intention, and never had any intention, of “restoring” the human Daleks, even assuming that it was possible. Which means that “Progenitor” is a fake, a sham, a carefully-coached actor whose job is to keep the human-Daleks docile. What’s more, if the humans could remote-detonate the human-Daleks, that means that there’s some command trigger to activate the bombs, and it doesn’t seem reasonable that the Skaro-Daleks would not have found that trigger. It follows that the trigger is entirely internal, and must therefore be based on the thought patterns of the human-Daleks – whenever they think a “disloyal” thought, or become confused, or question the Progenitor, the human-Dalek is designed to ‘go insane’ through toxins released into their blood, both triggering the weapon and justifying its use with the ‘induced’ insanity. The human-Daleks are the worst kind of slaves, they are slaves who have been designed to destroy themselves if they ever even suspect that they have been enslaved. They have no prospect of EVER being free, and don’t even know it. And, should they ever complete the task assigned to them by their slave-masters, it will merely trigger the most heinous act of Genocide, something akin to what the Doctor himself did at the fall of Gallifrey, which he has regretted and mourned ever since.

Meanwhile, Jangshen has inadvertently activated the TARDIS’s Emergency Holographic System, in the form of Rose Tyler, and the two are attempting to locate Inchon through minute discrepancies in the temporal vectors of the planet. The arrival of a time-traveler causes a minute “wobble” that *might* be detectable through the need to auto-correct the atomic clocks that are the foundations of the electronic network that surrounds the planet. It’s tedious work but it pays off. And then it pays off again. And again. And again. And again. Every 23.257 seconds, in fact, a new ripple erupts. And always from the same location, a bunker designed to be the Final Defense against the Skaro-Daleks before the human-Daleks drove them away, and disused since. Jangshen doesn’t understand this at all, and so contact the Doctor to bring him up-to-date. While Jangshen is doing so, “Rose Tyler” recognizes a pattern within the readings and self-launches the dematerialization circuits. The TARDIS fades away and the Doctor’s communications link goes dead in mid-communication, only to reappear around the Doctor.

At the console, Jangshen has discovered that the TARDIS interface screen is flashing the message “Omega Directive”. But the Dr is completely distracted by the unexpected presence of Rose Tyler who tells him, “Omega Directive Enabled”. The TARDIS re-materializes in the Calm Zone, a temporal plateau, one of those rare instants when nothing of importance was happening anywhere in the universe. The Omega Directive turns out to be something the Doctor added to the TARDIS systems following the events of The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang and The Wedding Of River Song. If the TARDIS detects an imminent threat to Space-Time Itself, it is now programmed to surround the Dr, wherever he is, and relocate him to a Calm Zone within the time stream to give him time to focus on the nature of the threat.

A threat to the existence of space-time itself is something that is bigger than Inchon. It’s something on the scale of the Time War. It’s something so big that the Doctor determined that *no matter what he was doing or how important it was,* he needed to interrupt it to look into the problem. Jangshen goes over the discoveries that he and Rose had made with the Doctor, who realizes that the readings are consistent with the construction of a planet-sized Inversion Bomb; a detonation that large would destroy the Earth throughout time – and because the Earth and its citizens’ descendants have been the focal point of so many critical events in History, the resulting paradox would wipe out the entire universe. It’s only then that the Doctor realizes that the process of sweeping him up has also resulted in capturing the destroyed chassis of the human-Dalek whose existence was terminated by the much smaller Inversion Bomb. Examining it, he discovers that it doesn’t completely match the blueprints that he saw; it has undergone a hardware upgrade, which was triggered by a firmware revision which took place in the Skaro-Daleks at about this point in time.

With horror, the final pieces fall into place for him. The human-Daleks are all connected into the Dalek sub-link network that permits Daleks to access their common database, by virtue of legacy circuits copied into their prototypes by the humans from the original design without understanding what they did. This would permit the Skaro-Daleks to remote-control the human-Daleks. Every defeat seemingly inflicted on the Skaro-Daleks has been a subterfuge to buy time while their “slave Daleks” have been constructing the planet-sized Inversion Bomb deep in the underground bunker, and by now, it must be close to complete. This isn’t just *like* the Time War, it *IS* the Time War – with the Human Race in place of the Gallifreans. Same enemy, same enemy objective. The Dr has lived through this horror story once, he’s not sure he can cope with it a second time around – despair did unhappy things to his psyche. The Omega Directive was enabled as soon as this was discovered by the TARDIS, and echoed back through the internal timeline of the TARDIS to activate the emergency control systems, who immediately attempted to retrieve the Doctor, but who was already on board. This was a contingency that his programming did not anticipate and it gave them some flexibility in choosing how to respond. Accordingly, they materialized as “Rose” at the appropriate point in time and space for the TARDIS’s systems to gather the data that the Doctor would need to understand and end the threat, aided by the efforts of Jangshen. As soon as sufficient data had been obtained, the program could be delayed in its primary function no more; it engaged and rescued the Doctor from the imminent disaster and (effectively) kidnapped him to a place where he had the leisure to analyze the problem and derive a solution.

After a very thoughtful planning session, the Doctor traveled into the past to a point before his previous arrival and intercepted Commander Charith, who he again convinced of his friendship. He then laid out the full situation for the Commander, and enlisted his aid in planning a strike against the planetary bomb despite the inevitable Dalek guards who would be protecting it. Once that was dealt with, they would jam the Dalek sub-net, releasing the human-Daleks; this could not be done sooner without alerting the Skaro-Daleks what they were up to. Charith would have forewarned the Martian troops aboard each vessel to be ready to take control of the fleet and bring it back to Earth, which the Daleks were sure to assault frontally when their plot was exposed. The result would be the annihilation of the human-Daleks and most of the Skaro-Dalek fleet that they already thought destroyed. Humanity might suffer a military setback, but would retain most of the progress gained against the Daleks.

Of course, it didn’t quite go according to plan. Complications along the way were (1) The size of the big Inversion Bomb; (2) A trap set by the Daleks against possible Time Lord interference – a Chronal Inversion, sort of like a water-slide in time, that hurled the TARDIS toward a Positron Whirlpool (a naturally-occurring temporary aperture into a pocket dimension in which time doesn’t exist), where the TARDIS and all its inhabitants would be pinned their like a fly in Amber for all time; (3) The Inversion Bomb design had been perverted / corrupted by Inchon, who has taken over the Progenitor, so that it would rip open a portal into the Lovecraft Plane, permitting his masters to escape back into the real universe. By the time the Doctor had dealt with all that, the human Daleks were under direct Dalek control and closing in on the TARDIS, possibly with the intent of deliberately triggering their internal inversion bombs. One or two, the TARDIS can cope with. But fifty, or a hundred? The Doctor wasn’t sure, and time was running out.

He had to use the emergency communications channels within the bunker to inform every human – and human-Dalek – throughout the universe of the truth of their existence, triggering “insane” thoughts in all of them, something he was still hoping to avoid. And then he would have to learn how to live with himself – but better that than that the human race be tainted with the choice forever. But that didn’t quite work either – the Doctor’s transmission was blocked – from inside the TARDIS! Since Jangshen and Charith were the only beings other than the Doctor who were present, the Doctor jumped to the conclusion that one of them had betrayed him. Jangshen then revealed that the Rose simulation, forecasting what might be required, had shown him how to block the Doctor’s broadcast and repeated your words in a separate transmission, to spare the Doctor from the emotional burden. They then re-materialized and went after the Progenitor, only to find him dead, as Inchon had again fled into the time-stream.

Enemies (other than Inchon)

True Daleks (from Skaro); human-Daleks; “Dalek 001” (The Progenitor). Potentially, Earth’s Government.

Canon Extensions

Inversion Bombs, Positron Whirlpools, The Omega Directive, Temporal Plateaus, Gravitational Cascades, and Human Daleks. What’s more, it’s canon that the Daleks ruled most of the Galaxy until they were defeated and driven ‘underground” by Humans in this era, despite humans being no match for them in every encounter to date. The “Human Daleks” seemed a logical military development that could explain this piece of Canon.

Canon Problems

Various episodes had shown that Daleks had survived the Time War. It didn’t make sense for them to throw their entire fleet at the Earth in their big return episode (Bad Wolf / The Parting Of The Ways), given the number of times that they had been defeated at the 11th hour by the Doctor; at least half would have been dispatched to stand by with a “Plan B” at some other point in time. It also didn’t make sense that the Doctor would not have taken precautions after the crack in time caused the TARDIS to explode, destroying the universe in The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang.

Solutions

The plotline simply put those two precautions into direct conflict, then had Inchon manipulate the conflict for his own purposes.

Metaplot Notes

It had been a while since Inchon had been able to attempt to fulfill his primary ambition, but I wanted to create the sense that he was getting closer to success with each attempt. He had achieved a strategic advantage in Adventure 5, it only made sense that he would utilize it in Adventure 6. Nor has the Doctor found any way to counter it, creating a sense of danger for adventure 7. The Omega Directive informed the Doctor that the creature he’s been calling Inchon must have a true name, and would have given it at some point if it were not significant in some way.

Adventure 7: Hell’s Angels

This is the most recent adventure played in the campaign.

Enemies (other than Inchon)

Weeping Angels.

Canon Extensions

1. Angel life cycle, Angel sociology, two new types of Angels, origins of the Angels, Angel abilities, Angel combat tactics.

2. “Doctor/Donna” impact on the timeline of the universe (refer Donna Noble and the episodes “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End”).

3. In canonical references, Jenny (“The Doctor’s Daughter”) travels by space-ship, the same means by which she departed her planet of birth. In the comics, which some sources regard as non-canonical, she repeatedly travels with a Vortex Manipulator (“cheap and nasty time travel” according to the Doctor). I wanted to extend her canon within the campaign, and it seemed likely that a least one of the Doctor’s enemies would track her down thinking that she was her “father”. While these events took place completely off-camera in terms of the campaign, they were referenced in the plot.

4. Society during the latter days of the Second Great And Bountiful Human Empire.

5. “Bad Wolf” Canon (refer “The Parting Of The Ways“).

6 How Omega was able to achieve the things that he did in The Three Doctors and Arc Of Infinity episodes.

Canon Problems

1. The Weeping angels have only appeared in a few episodes of the TV series and at least one of them was, at least in part, cheesy, which did what was once a fan favorite no favors at all. To reform them, they needed to be given a serious role in a serious story, with depth and emotion.

2. “That which beholds a Weeping Angel is itself a Weeping Angel” is a pivotal piece of Canon from the two-part episode “The Time Of Angels” / “Flesh and Stone” but some of the implications were never considered. Why don’t the Angels travel as photographs of themselves, for example; and can an image held in the mind’s eye serve the same purpose?

3. The mechanism of feeding on the untapped potential lives of their victims needs further elucidation.

4. Why do they look like they derive from Roman Catholicist statuary? Why do they even look human?

5. In “The Time Of Angels,” why did “Angel Bob” need to communicate with the Doctor and company? Why take the soldier’s voice at all?

6. Why did the Angels travel to early 20th century Earth (where they were present during “The Angels Take Manhattan”). Why go anywhere before that planet has space travel? Why did they appear to be hunting Amy Pond and Rory Williams?

7. Why did the “Bad Wolf” make Captain Jack Harkness immortal and how did she know how to do it?

8. A machine designed to clone humans should not have been able to clone a Gallifrean, yet one did in “The Doctor’s Daughter”.

9. The Doctor is convinced that his “daughter” (actually a female clone) is dead, and unable to regenerate. This belief is seemingly confirmed by the time he departs; only then does the body begin to regenerate and Jenny reawakens. Why did it take so long – and, if the Doctor was right and she could not regenerate, how then does she do so?

10. The politics and sociology of human society at the time is contradicted by different episodes.

Solutions

Canon Problems 1-6 were explained by the Angel-related Canon Extensions. Problems 7-9 were resolved by extending the “Doctor/Donna” and “Bad Wolf” Canon Extensions.

Synopsis: Part 1 “The Heaven-Sent”

Inchon’s flight through space and time is abruptly diverted by an unknown force. The trail leads to the year 6843, the latter days of the late period of the Great And Bountiful Second Empire Of Man. While this society is, in many ways, enlightened, in others it is falling apart; class differences, overpopulation, and starvation are rife, but at the same time, equality between species is close to universal and there is high regard for the rights of others. So many non-humans are represented at the Imperial Court that the Empire is commonly referred to as a Federation. A series of encounters with officials leads to the pair being sent to the Arena to fight for their right to stay on the planet; the Doctor recruits their opponent, a species of alien he’s not had anything to do with in the past, and all three escape to the TARDIS, which has finished extrapolating Inchon’s new destination.

Following, the trio travel to Beta Lacertae III, discovering it to be a Janus world, tidally locked to the Red Giant star 170 light-years from Earth. Its solar system includes two Hot Jupiters also in close orbit and a rocky third planet massing 0.8 Earths that is tidally locked. Normally on such worlds, there is a hot side, where metals run like water, and a cold side locked in frigidity, and a narrow habitable fringe in the twilight between the two, made all the more dangerous by planetary wobble as the Hot Jupiters pull it this way and that. It’s usually more trouble than it’s worth to settle on such worlds, but on this world there is some sort of force field protecting the hot side from the worst that the slowly-dying star can throw at it, keeping the day side warm but temperate, and trapping the heat arising from tidal stresses sufficiently that the south pole is covered in ice sheets but the rest is liquid water which is being pumped to the day side, enabling high-intensity agriculture, broken up by rocky valleys and peaks – some of which contain active volcanoes, and some of which are the seat of mining operations. To one side of the north pole is a vast arid desert crisscrossed by water-bearing channels. It’s a garden world with a red sky.

The most heavily built-up part of the planet is the twilight zone, which is effectively one vast city circumnavigating the entire planet. The TARDIS has touched down in a garden or park on the sun-ward edge, but the night-world is not far away because of the terrain in this location. When the Dr and Jangshen go out to explore the city, they find it abandoned and empty. Lights still burn in empty rooms, and there are signs that the people vanished in the midst of their normal routine.

When they investigate the day side, they find the gardens and farms filled with Buddha statues. Jangshen pauses at each and bows his head in silent prayer before moving on to the next. Slowly, The Doctor became aware that the statues are moving to keep up with the pair but only move when they aren’t being watched – a trait of Weeping Angels. In fact, they have gathered quite a crowd. When the Dr warns Jangshen, the Monk replied “but these are images of the Holy Buddha, the most revered man alive or dead throughout my homeland. He is as a god to us.”

Becoming concerned, the Doctor leads the pair back into the Twilight City; the Buddhas didn’t follow them into the twilight. When they head for the night side, at the edge of the twilight zone and facing toward the light, there is a solitary angel, it’s hands covering it’s eyes. The farther they went, the more of them that they see. The night is as heavily populated by Weeping Angels as the day is with Buddhas. There must be tens or even hundreds of thousands of them, all told. That explains to the Doctor what happened to the residents; the Weeping Angels must have sent everyone into the past – the entire population. That would have generated enormous power for them to consume, enough to sustain them for centuries – or to do something *really* big, like finding and diverting Inchon within the time-stream, for example.

The great unanswered questions are “why” and “where is Inchon now” and “how much havoc could Inchon cause in the body of a Weeping Angel – a species that has never embraced technology, piggybacking on the tech of others?” Unlike the Buddhas, the Angels do follow into the Twilight zone, at least partway. What that might signify, the doctor had absolutely no idea. The Angels and Buddhas even move to concentrate their numbers at positions diametrically opposite each other, with the Doctor on a straight line between them. Realizing that the numbers are too vast to keep more than a few quantum-locked at a time, and that if they wanted to attack, they would have been able to do so by now, the Doctor deduces that the Angels want something from them. Selecting a point midway between the two groups, the Doctor looked skywards and loudly challenged both groups to explain themselves – what do they want?

From his pocket came a muffled reply. Checking it, he found that his Sonic Screwdriver was talking to him. “Do you remember this voice, sir?” The voice is unforgettable to the Doctor – his mind instantly flashes back to Alfava Metraxis, and Angel Bob – but he was destroyed in the 51st century, almost 1800 years ago. The voice confirms that it is not that of the Angel who the Doctor referred to as Angel Bob, but one who remembers him, as all Angels do, and then explains that what one angel knows, every angel throughout time also knows. The voice of Angel Bob then explained that there were limitations to this awareness, but there were certain memories that throughout time they considered definitive statements of what it meant to be an Angel, in terms of behavior and appearance.

Until an event is decided, is fixed within the timeline of the Angels, they can know nothing about it. Only after it is resolved does the memory become accessible to other Angels. Angel Bob saw only the short-term solution to the crack in time of throwing The Doctor in; it was only after the crack was sealed and the universe rebooted by the Doctor that they learned that he was capable of creating a better long-term solution. The instant that he did so, every Angel throughout time knew it to some extent. Amy and Rory had been sent back in time as a reward, because once sent back in time by the Angels, they were completely immune to harm or interference by any agency – which, the Doctor realized, was why his attempts to ‘rescue’ them had failed.

The Angels kill by sending an individual back in time to a moment as far removed from their moment of death as their remaining lifespan, and into conditions such that they lead lives of grace and security. Wars cannot touch them, fate protects them from all ill-fortune. The Angels feed on whatever potential they had to change history within those lost years, in the process coming to know the lives of their victims at least as completely as they know their own. From the Angels’ point of view, they confer on their victims a form of immortality, because those victims live on in the Angels’ memories for millennia.

Some of those sent into the past gain great wisdom from the experience, and impart that wisdom to others through their writings before the end. Others are deranged by the experience. One example was conflated with others to become an important religious figure to the Western Church, and it’s the iconography that developed out of his writings that defines their forms as Angels. Because of that, he, too, was considered definitive to the Angels, who actively protect his existence and lifetime. Another is now known as Buddha, and some Angels make the individual choice to reflect his iconography in their appearance and philosophy.

The two world-views were fundamentally opposed, and a civil war between the Angels is about to take place throughout time as a result. Because this war would be futile, they wanted to avoid it. If the Angels knew how it ended, and who was victorious, there would be no need for it to actually take place – but they don’t, and can’t, and so brought the Doctor to Beta Lacertae III to arbitrate a peace between the factions.

But the Angels were hardly willing to leave such a vital thing in the realm of chance; they had forced him into the body of a volunteer Angel, and quantum-locked him using our combined energy. So long as the Angels existed, and the arbitration remained unresolved, the Western Angels would keep him confined, but if the Doctor decided against them, or refuse to mediate and they then lost the civil war with the Buddhas, he would be released with access to all the powers of a Weeping Angel. Moreover, because he was then one of them, his actions would also be definitive – or perhaps the term should be, re-definitive – of what is normal behavior for an Angel. In effect, every Angel in the universe would become an Inchon, seeking to release the Lovecraftian Horrors.

Synopsis: Part 2 “The Heavenly Chorus”

The second part of the adventure saw the Western Angels, through their spokesman (who the doctor came to refer to as ‘Black Bob’), sparring with the opposing Buddha faction, led by ‘Golden Dave’ as the Doctor nicknamed him. Black Bob, for all that he was attempting to force the decision to be in the favor of the Western Angels faction, still insisted that the Doctor go through the motions of arbitrating the dispute, and that meant listening to both factions until the Doctor understood the differences between them.

The Buddhas came at the issue far more indirectly; after distancing themselves from the past acts claimed by the Western Angels on behalf of the whole population, they wanted to talk about the Doctor, suggesting that he ‘ran from past to future’ in order to avoid his ‘now’ and distract those around him from this behavior because it embarrassed him. The Doctor had to admit that the claim that he lacked equanimity was at least somewhat accurate. The Buddhas then equated the whole of the Weeping Angels to the Doctor’s situation, and described the Western Angels approach as bargaining with threats and bullying; he intended to counter with Truth, rather than playing that game. In response to the threats of an enemy with the powers of a Weeping Angel, he described the origins of the species.

‘How did the Bad Wolf know how to achieve the things that she did?’ was the question he posed rhetorically, before answering that she was ‘ guided, across time, by the Doctor-Donna gestalt. Both possessed the human capacity for what you would call meddling; in the instant before you drew the knowledge of her recent history from her, the Doctor-Donna reached out across time and space and showed the Bad Wolf how to make the changes that were desired.

Some of these changes, the Doctor knew, such as obliterating the Dalek Fleet and all the Daleks then menacing the Earth. Some he knew of, but had not understood, such as the transformation of Captain Jack Harkness into an immortal companion for the Doctor, so that he would never be alone except by choice. They made it possible for the human replication device to create a half Time Lord clone of the Doctor as a back-up for him, and either delayed or induced her regeneration until after the Doctor had departed, and – like the Doctor – was now knocking around Time, getting involved here and there, having stolen the Master’s TARDIS when he assumed the identity of Professor Yana. And, somehow being aware of the threat posed by Inchon or another being like him, they created the Weeping Angels to perform a final mercy-killing on all sentients in the universe should Inchon’s kind prevail.

Black Bob was unimpressed, pointing out that unless knowledge altered decisions, it was worthless information, and therefore had no value. But two could play that game, and if the Western Angels matched the Buddhas offer of information, the Doctor would once again be left only with the choice between Galactic Doom and deciding in the Western Angels favor.

He started by comparing what the Angels were created to do with what the Doctor himself had done when he had deployed the Moment to end the Time War – a decision that the Doctor was forced into in despair, but that has haunted him ever since. But one Angel is not enough to fulfill their Final Mandate, and so he went on to describe the Angel’s life cycle, and pointing out that the Western Angels were the ‘true’ form, while the Buddhas were a “pacifist perversion”. Black Bob then twisted the knife that he had deployed earlier, claiming that above all the Angels had to be true to their natures or every life that they had consumed throughout history was a pointless waste, and reminding the Doctor that he knew what that was like, having learned the same lesson in the Time War, and comparing the Pacifist Buddhas to the War Doctor.

This was psychologically very clever in a manipulative way, because if the Doctor accepted the equality that Black Bob had constructed, and the Doctor continued to reject the actions of the War Doctor, his past incarnation, he must also reject the Eastern Angels and decide in favor of Black Bob’s faction. Fortunately, the Doctor recognized what Bob had attempted to do, and simply by labeling the logical equality as unproven, was able to set aside the implied demand for an immediate decision, and return to the Buddhas to hear their response to what Bob had said.

Golden Dave countered the brutal logic of Bob by describing the evolution of societies as the civilized superseding the savage and the adult superseding the child, then suggesting that the Eastern Angels had outgrown the petty viciousness of the Western Angels. He then addressed the claim that the Eastern Angels were Pacifists, and the implication that they would be unable to carry out the Angel’s mission. This was an important point, because if the Doctor had any doubts about it, he could at least attempt to prevent their “Final Mandate” by choosing the Eastern Faction – or, if he supported that Mandate, to choose the Western Faction. Dave claimed that the difference between the two factions was that the Eastern Angels were discriminating, choosing victims who would benefit from the opportunity for personal growth and for whom the Angel’s Touch would be merciful, while the Western Angels were want to force their “mercy” on everyone. The Eastern Angels would enlighten, and offer potential victims a choice; the Western Angels would not, because they lacked the empathy to correctly assess anything as complex as “Mercy” or “Cruelty”. It was for this reason that what they considered a ‘reward’ was so unpalatable to the Doctor.

Bob’s counterargument was about the individuality of the Angels, which gave him a hook into another emotional soft-spot of the Doctor’s. He revealed that three Buddhas accompanied Omega into his exile, and – cut off from the racial ‘link’ that unified the Species – reverted to a simpler form, and were instrumental in enabling Omega to master that realm and survive. Again, the differences between Western and Eastern Angels were displayed in a subtle but profound way; when the decision was made to reward the Doctor for his actions, the Western Angels chose a direct reward, while the Eastern Angels chose to reward those who put the Doctor into a position to do what he did, holding the individual at arm’s length – the Buddhas gave to Rassilon what he most earnestly desired, the fanatical loyalty of his fellow Time Lords, and the kudos for mastering time itself, and leadership over the Gallifreyan Council; and they gave Omega, the handmaiden who engineered Rassalom’s ascent to power and glory, infinite life and the ability to create anything he wished simply by wishing for it – until Omega sought to use his power to threaten the space-time from which he had sprung. Reconnecting with the matter world also reconnected the Buddhas with their Kin on the outside, and so the truth became known to them all. In other words, their lofty arrogance ‘rewarded’ Omega with millennia of torture and loneliness, followed by destruction.

He then played another trump card. In all their history, only the thirty Angels that accompanied Angel Bob and a handful of individuals have ever been destroyed that no hope of their eventual resurrection remained. Even though when quantum-locked, Angels appear to be made of stone or metal, and can be vaporized or shattered, it’s only a matter of exposure to sufficient energy before they can reform themselves. So it’s very significant when an Angel dies; they know each other for virtually their entire existences, shared each other’s insights, successes, and failures, and learned from them. Which made it all the more significant that one of their number – they don’t use names they way other species do – volunteered to die in order to imprison the Inchon-spirit. This was a naked bid for sympathy toward their faction and cause by the Western Angels, having first sensitized the Doctor through his affection and regard for Omega. In fact, at every turn, the Western Angels had attempted to push the Doctor’s “buttons” in order to manipulate him, while the Eastern Angels had been more philosophical, more intellectual in their arguments, attempting in that way to appeal to the Doctor.

Golden Dave had also recognized this strategy, and wasted no time in pointing it out to the Doctor. There was nothing that Dave could point to as being a lie, but the totality of the impression Bob had created was – according to the Buddha – so wildly inaccurate that it could not be countenanced. Dave admitted that both the Angels as a whole and Buddhas as a group had made mistakes, but had learned from them. Omega, he argued, would have survived almost as long without the aid of the Angels who accompanied him, but without the mercy they conferred on him, it would have been an existence bereft of all but existence itself, and the awareness of each particle of his body being eroded by the radiation which suffused his being. They had, he claimed, sought to spare him the physical torture that would result, but could do nothing to prevent the psychological torture that he inflicted upon himself until it consumed his mind, despite their best efforts.

He then counter-attacked by discussing the immediate future, stating that the Empire Of Man was fall within a generation with incalculable suffering when it does so. Whichever faction wins this dispute will conduct a mercy-killing of somewhere between one- to two-thirds of the population, scattering the victims throughout the remote past. The Doctor’s decision will merely dictate whose philosophies will be employed to choose the victims. What’s more, neither faction had any choice; both factions had been increasing their numbers ever since Inchon had appeared because the “Day of Need” was potentially approaching. With every jump into the Future that Inchon makes, he becomes harder for the Doctor to stop, simply because the technology that he needs is more readily available. Already, the humans of this era had created a primitive form of time travel. Both groups believe that each such jump henceforth will double the danger that Inchon poses; they must be ready against the possibility of his success, and so must now commence as a rapid a growth in numbers as possible – and there is not enough available energy within the universe for both to achieve the necessary numbers. Which meant that they could no longer defer settling the question of the two factions.

Dave decided that the Doctor needed a reminder of why he had become so angry with the original Angel Bob. To deliver it, he opened a space warp and pulled through it an Attack Cruiser of the Empire. A few minutes later, having failed to reach anyone with their communicators, their landing craft touched down in the city. Dave forecast that they would decide that the Angels were responsible, and attack, and that in retaliation, the Western Angels would slaughter everyone aboard. He suggested that the Doctor go and meet them; he might even be able to keep them alive for a while, or persuade them to leave. To sharpen the stakes in the Doctor’s mind, the humans were being led by an old friend of the Doctor, added the Buddha.

With the human landing craft already touched down and undoubtedly disembarking troops, it would take only minutes for them to determine that there was no-one living in the Twilight City, and start looking for someone to blame, and not long thereafter, they would discover the Buddhas and the Angels. But no-one suspected the nature of the Buddhas – and the nature of the Western Angels was only too well-known. Conflict would be inevitable – unless the Doctor intervened. There was no time for him to waste!

After a mad dash through the corridors and walkways of the city, with Jangshen close on his heels, the Doctor intercepted the squads of Imperial Troopers, who were accompanied by Alpha Centauri, a diplomat and – as promised – an old friend of the Doctor; the alien’s species is genderless by human standards, and so it insisted on the impersonal pronoun. The squad leaders were just beginning to suspect the situation they had found themselves in when the Doctor arrived. After the Diplomat had vouched for him, the Doctor had filled the (depreciating tone, please) Soldiers of the situation. Commander Hansford, the senior Squad Leader, ordered a drone launched to confirm the situation and then made a preliminary report to Captain Mitchell Swann, in overall command aboard the Cruiser Arthur C. Chester, overhead.

While they waited for instructions, Alpha Centauri and the Doctor caught up with each other, the Doctor learning that after he had helped save Peladon 38 years earlier, it had arranged for the Doctor to be appointed to Ambassadorial rank – officially, Ambassador-at-large for Peladon – just so that he would have the authority to argue with Federation Bureaucrats should that ever be necessary. That would not be helpful in this situation, as the Cruiser is a Military command – but it also means that the mission’s commanders had no authority to lock the Doctor up.

When it learned more of the current standoff between factions of Weeping Angels, whose very name was now revealed as a misnomer, Alpha Centauri pointed out what would appear to be a logical flaw in the Doctor’s understanding of the situation, one that suggested that all was not entirely as it seemed; the Western Angels must be very low on energy, as they had been on the Dark Side of the planet exclusively for quite some time, and must have consumed a great deal of their energy reserves in diverting the Doctor to the Janus world. That suggested that their threats were, at least partially, a bluff.

Hungry for energy, they would not be able to help being drawn to any source of energy that they could harvest – like the ship’s compliment. Meanwhile, those on the sunlit side had been accumulating almost unlimited reserves by virtue of their location; the two positions were in no way equitable. How, then, could the Western Angels be so confident of being able to match their Eastern counterparts?

Alpha Centauri’s intuition, honed by decades of experience as a negotiator, told it that the Eastern Angels, in bringing the Cruiser here, had been manipulated into doing exactly what the Western Angels wanted. Captain Swann was reactionary and hot-headed, even by human standards; he was certain to react violently. How that would benefit Black Bob’s faction, it didn’t know, but if the Eastern Angels learned of the deception it suspected on the part of the Western Angels, the Buddhas would have no choice but to react – again, most probably, with violence. They were all standing at the edge of a very unstable precipice.

The pair were then joined by Commander Hansford, who relayed the message that the Captain was not inclined to wait for confirmation; he has decided that an Agricultural World was not worth the effort of preserving. The landing party had just ten minutes to evacuate before the Captain commenced a Naryon Bombardment that would melt the entire planet down to slag, Angels and all.

The Doctor realized that a Naryon Bombardment had other potential outcomes. A comparatively minor shift in the polarization of the Naryon Particles would deflect them away from the planet, to strike one of the Dark Jupiters, where they would trigger stellar ignition; or to Beta Lacertae itself, causing the star to explode in a low-level Nova. Igniting the Dark Jupiters wouldn’t do much harm to the Buddhas, but destroying the star would obliterate the day side and flood the night side with Radiation for the next millennium or so, giving the Western Angels victory in their civil war before it was even fought – and marooning the doctor without the TARDIS, which would also be severely damaged, or possibly destroyed; it too was on the day side of the planet, in the direct path of the stellar explosion.

Synopsis: Part 3 “Hell’s Angels”

The Doctor reviewed his options carefully, coming up with a plan that blended several approaches to the problem in the hopes that one of them would be successful. Step one was to explain the problem to Commander Hansford. The Doctor was at his most persuasive, and Hansford detailed one of his squads to assist the Time Lord while he returned to the Imperial Cruiser with the others and Ambassador Centauri, there to attempt to talk the Captain out of his headstrong action.

None of them gave this solution a great chance of success. But it was to be hoped that it buy enough time for the Doctor to implement his second line of attack. He had briefly considered not telling the Eastern Angels what he and the Ambassador had deduced, but the potential consequences should they learn of this violation of their trust were too disastrous. No, he had to ‘come clean,’ and call the Western Angels’ bluff, even though it would inevitably instigate hostilities between the Eastern and Western angels. He hoped that the Eastern Angels, forewarned, would be able to prevent the Western Angels ploy, redirecting the Naryon Bombardment safely to one of the Hot Jupiters.

Black Bob had deduced what the Doctor would attempt to do – they knew him pretty well by now – and had deployed a number of his Weeping Angels in the Twilight City in an attempt to delay or prevent it, but had not allowed for the presence of the additional soldiers. With the Doctor coordinating their efforts, the group managed to keep all the Western Angels quantum-locked until they reached the party of Buddhas surrounding Golden Dave.

The Golden Buddha was philosophic, telling the doctor to calm himself and commenting on the inefficiencies of respiration, before pointing out that the Doctor had not taken into account the way that the Western Angels had reconfigured the force fields that made this Janus World suitable for agriculture, which not only divert a significant level of the radiation on which the Angels feed onto the daylight side to the dark-side, but also focus cosmic radiation onto the concentration of Western Angels. As a result, the two sides were more closely-matched than he thought; both sides had known that conflict between them was inevitable if it was not averted through mediation, and had prepared accordingly. Black Bob may have been arrogant enough to think that he was manipulating the Eastern Angels to his advantage, but the Eastern Angels had seen through his machinations almost immediately. However, he had escalated the state of hostility between the factions. “The moment that the humans attempt to fire the weapons that were rendered inoperative before we brought them hence, he will be chastised. You may then declare a cease-fire between us.”

The Doctor waited while the seconds before the deadline drained away, hoping that the Ambassador had been able to prevail on the Captain’s good sense, thankful that he had not thought to suggest that the weapons may have been sabotaged – an act that the headstrong Captain would probably blame on the Ambassador or on Commander Hansford. At 1 second past zero, Dave announced, “Hostilities have now commenced. Pay close attention, Doctor. You are unlikely to ever see anything like this again. The Angels are now in a state of civil war.”

From somewhere behind the party, an energy bolt arced through the twilight zone to strike one of the Western Angels, shattering it. In mid-air, the pieces seemed to fold in on themselves as though space-time was curdling around them, perpetually growing smaller until nothing remains. You realize that the Eastern Angels of the past must have “fed” upon people who were instrumental in the history of that Western Angel, in effect interfering in its life-cycle to such an extent that it was never here. A series of the buildings in the twilight zone collapsed, almost seeming to implode, and then exploded to rain down on the Western Angels – how the Angels achieved that the doctor can’t begin to guess.

One of the Buddhas collapsed into a heap of rapidly-vanishing rubble – it seemed two could play at the game of altering the past. The sky ripped open as a warhead of some kind penetrated the force-field and detonated, flooding everything in the vicinity with a moment of heat and light and – presumably – hard radiation, before the Eastern Angels absorbed the energy.

In response, space above the Western Angels rippled and twisted, opening a new space-warp above the night side – a space-warp leading to a point close to the surface of a black hole. Scores of angels were ripped from the surface by the gravitational force to be sucked through the space warp, which also sent the Imperial Cruiser tumbling through space toward Beta Lacerta.

In retaliation, another space warp opened above the Eastern Angels and issued forth a large number of asteroids which began to rain down on the day-side. None of the impact points were close to the Doctor, but the impact and concussive force were still enough to deafen him temporarily and knock him to the ground before the Eastern Angels re-positioned their ‘black hole portal’ to suck the remainder harmlessly away.

In two minutes, half the Western Angels had been destroyed, and a like number of Eastern Angels. Suddenly, the Doctor realized that with every angel who is destroyed before they ever reached Beta Lacertae III, anyone that they had exiled into the past subsequent to the moment of destruction also returned. History was literally being rewritten before his very eyes – about half the population of the Agricultural Colony had now returned to the Twilight City, only to be caught in the crossfire. As soon as he realized that, the Doctor declared, “That’s Enough!”. Fortunately, Golden Dave agreed, and dispatched the Doctor to broker a cease fire and resume negotiations.

Both sides had the implacability of stone – but, unlike humans, they had not grown excited or angry at any point in the exchange. Jangshen suggested that the Doctor use his ‘ambassadorial authority’ to require the War Cruiser to begin rescue and evacuation of the ‘returned’ humans. He appeared to have sustained cuts, bruises, and a broken arm – probably in the course of the bombardment.

While doing so, a line of logic presented itself to the Doctor, an argument that could end this civil war permanently – if he could be persuasive enough. The Angels entire dispute was predicated on the concept that the Doctor would eventually fail to stop Inchon, and thus they need to be ready to enact their ‘final solution’. But that fatalism ignored the lesson that the Angels had learned from the original Angel Bob – that they could see only the short-term, but the Doctor was capable of finding a solution in the long-term that was superior to that short-term vision. They could not see the alternative because the outcome had not been determined, and the indeterminate is always unknown to the Angels – giving them free will by not hamstringing them with foreknowledge of their ‘destiny’. And, if Inchon was defeated by the Doctor, their entire purpose was moot – perhaps it might be best not to mention that!

Just as the Doctor was going over this line of argument for flaws, he and Jangshen start fading in and out. “What are you up to, Doctor?” demanded the Golden Buddha, irked for the first time. The Time Lord had just enough time to announce “It’s not my doing, I assure you!” before the world around him vanished into a severely blue-shifted space. The Doctor recognized the effect as a 75th century Transmat teleportation beam – he has one in the TARDIS which he tinkers with from time to time, but has never been able to get to work properly. It’s an effect that doesn’t belong in this time – or any time for another 1100 years or so.

A moment later, the Doctor and Jangshen reappeared in a room with curved walls angled outwards from the top, featuring large windows that revealed that he was now in orbit around the planet – in a ship or facility that the Imperial Cruiser did not or could not detect. A somehow-familiar voice announced, “There is a flaw in your logic, Doctor. The Angels abide not against the threat of Inchon, but against the menace of Inchon’s masters. Nor is that the only difficulty with which you must now contend.”

If it weren’t that he had brought him to mind earlier, the Doctor might have had a great deal more trouble placing the voice. With that advantage, he had more trouble believing his ears than in identifying the voice of Omega!

As though in response to this thought, came the answer, “I am not Omega, though we Imprinted upon him and so share his voice.” Turning away from the windows, the duo found the center of the room now occupied by a set of pedestals upon which resided statues of the Romano-Greek gods in the classical style.

Instantly, the Doctor deduced that this must be a third faction of Angels that neither Eastern nor Western groups knew about, but there was no response to the Doctor’s reply; suddenly, he realized that both he and Jangshen were staring at them, freezing them into immobile stone, unable to respond to your questions. Turning both of them away to face the planet below through the windows, he repeated his reply.

“You may address me as Zeus, and think of us as the Celestial Chorus of the Angels. We are the descendants of those you we call Titans. They were the Angels who accompanied Omega into exile, and became isolated from the definitive imprinting events that have marked our kin below. Instead, we imprinted ourselves upon Omega, the engineer of Time, before the isolation affected his mind. We are here because there is – and needs to be – a third way. Before I can explain further, I must provide you with additional information about my kind.”

The Doctor was already almost certainly the foremost authority in existence on the subject of the Weeping Angels, thanks to the education he had received from Black Bob and Golden Dave. He wasn’t sure how much more there was to learn, or even if he wanted to be the focus of attention of an entire species of Angels, but curiosity got the better of him, as it always does.

Zeus explained that the book written by Rastan Jovanich contained misinformation deliberately fed to him by the Angels even as he studied them, for the express purpose of manipulating the Doctor into behaving the way he did – the way the Angels remembered it – when he confronted the original Angel Bob.

Jovanich wrote, “That Which Holds The Image Of An Angel Is Itself A Weeping Angel”. This was, according to Zeus, an overstatement at best. It was more accurate to state that “That Which Holds The Image Of An Angel is a beacon to that Angel”. The Angel in the image still needed to expend its energy stores in whole or in part to transport itself to wherever the image was. Since they abhor the waste of energy, finding it akin to voluntarily starving oneself, Angels rarely made the effort, except when there was no other choice. It is usually more energy-efficient to arrange physical transportation by others, usually unwitting. This is why Angels do not normally travel as images which can be transmitted over some communications channel.

Both Western and Eastern angels were bound to this limitation. The Celestial Chorus, however, were not. They travel in the memory of those who have beheld the Angel, but transport little more than a mote. They then transfer the stored power that would have been expended in transporting the whole Angel to that mote, causing it to grow and to remember having been the original Angel. This destroys the original Angel, but leaves a duplicate behind that is exact in every detail – except that it is in a different place. In effect, the Angel has traveled at almost zero energy cost.

It follows that they need only show ourselves to someone who is traveling to their desired destination, and the Celestial Angel could then follow them to the desired destination. Furthermore, because they are Temporally Discontinuous, they can arrive at that destination at any point in time, before or after the nexus was carried there.

This gives the Celestial Chorus an ability far beyond those of the Angels on the planet below. But it was soon revealed that this was not their only area of superiority. Weeping Angels feed on radiation, in fact, on any kind of radiant energy. An eternity spent in the antimatter realm created by Omega’s will had bestowed upon them near-unlimited energy reserves. That is one reason why they had chosen the appearance of superior beings – in comparison to the limited and subordinate aspects that their “lesser kin” project.

While Zeus spoke, the Doctor noted that he could observe the Angels moving in the dim reflections on the glass in front of him; their appeared to be limits to the quantum-lock defense mechanism that he resolved to file away in his back pocket against need in future encounters.

Not all radiation is equal to Weeping Angels, continued Zeus; some forms are converted more efficiently than others. The antimatter universe created by Omega is suffused with anti-synchronous photonic energy, which is what ate away at his physical body until nothing remained but his force of will; but Omega, thinking that he was bending the singularity to his will to create servants, transformed their physical reality to a form optimized to use that energy as sustenance – another advantage.

While the Titans were cut off from the racial memory of the angels, they retained what they had known prior to their emergence into the antimatter universe. From the day that the Titans were created by Omega, they knew that the time would come when Omega would attempt to escape his confinement. Indeed, had he recognized the Titans as sentient, it would have been a simple matter for him to have done so, for they could have taken over the task of sustaining the antimatter realm long enough for him to ride his Photonic Transfer Beam back to the matter universe. But the Titans could not permit that; it was not in furtherance of their goals.

The Doctor had attempted to destroy the antimatter universe by bringing it into contact with the unconverted matter in the Second Doctor’s flute, left behind when the Doctor thwarted Omega’s first escape attempt. One of the three Titans, who were designed to exist in either matter or antimatter realms, enveloped it and digested the energy of the matter-antimatter annihilation. This destroyed him, leaving only two companions to share Omega’s isolation, but it spared the realm. This enabled Omega to survive long enough to make a further ill-conceived attempt at escape, an attempt that led to his destruction, but left his world intact in the heart of the Black Hole.

A Titan’s brief sojourn upon the Earth, when Omega sent him to steal a Time Lord to take his place, had enabled him to reconnect with the Angels common mind, discovered their division into Eastern and Western philosophic factions, and he gave that common mind enough of their truth to satisfy them; but the Titan recognized that the conflict between the factions would be inevitable, and would jeopardize the Angels ability to complete the purpose for which they were created. And that could not be tolerated.

So the Titans spawned a new generation of Angel – the Celestial Chorus – and began planning for the day when they had to intervene. Since time runs backwards within the anti-matter realm – a phenomenon some had erroneously labeled “anti-time” – the Chorus were able to act prior to their coming into existence (by this universes’ narrow interpretation of the entropic arrow). Their first task was to ensure that they could not only depart and enter the antimatter universe at need, but would be able to know when the Angels nature led them to the brink of Civil War and would be able to travel to that time and place.

To facilitate this, and unknown to him, Sargent Benton carried one of us through the Doctor’s safeguards and into your TARDIS in his memory, there to lie in wait for the needful time. The Doctor never knew that had an additional traveling companion, all this time, for her primary task was to wait, undetected. Accordingly, she assumed the form of a mermaid in his swimming pool room which he thought to be nothing more than a decoration by the TARDIS. That is how the Celestial Chorus were able to arrive at precisely the right time and place.

Knowing their origins helped the Doctor understand the differences between this faction and those below – they had chosen figures of belief and worship as the defining figures in their respective ideologies, while the celestial chorus had chosen an engineer, someone who worked with practicalities, not philosophies. They were not bound by “defining moments”, but were free to choose their own paths according to the needs of the mission. They could be as ruthless as the Western Angels or as merciful as the Eastern Angels, at need. Both the factions had virtues and flaws in their approach, and both had made a grievous error of logic.

There could never be a mercy-killing on the scale of what both now contemplated for humanity; picture the chaos if a third or more of the galactic population were projected back in time, at the same time, to reappear a century or two earlier. This is a flaw in the expectations of both sides toward the fulfillment of the Purpose all Angels share, a failure on the part of both groups to grasp the needs of that purpose; they had assumed that the abilities they already possessed would be sufficient to complete the Purpose, and instead of preparing themselves to carry it out, they had spent their time formulating ever-more-narrowly-drawn definitions of themselves.

Both were so locked into the limitations of what they think it means ‘to be an angel’ and the powers that their respective definitions provide them that they could not see any other way. If the impasse between them is not broken, the brief skirmish the Doctor had witnessed would spill out to every inhabited planet and star in the universe, because if the residents of the universe all die in an Angel civil war, there would be none to suffer should the Horrors escape their confinement. That is how the purpose of the Angels would be carried out, if the Doctor and the Chorus do not prevent it.

The Chorus felt that the Doctor’s only real choice was the pragmatic one, just as the only true way of carrying out such a mercy killing is by ensuring that it is never needed. To this end, they had even manipulated their lesser kinfolk in minor ways, such as giving Black Bob and his cohorts the notion of rewarding the Doctor by ‘protecting’ his past companions within their personal histories. This inevitably resulted in pain for the Doctor, for which they offered a regret they admitted to be empty, because they considered it an utterly necessary pain; it drove the Doctor to be at the Taktsang Monastery when Inchon forced open a crack into this reality.

The Doctor was the Chorus’ chosen weapon against the Horrors that were driven out of this universe long ago. Rather than preparing against the day of his failure, they chose to believe that he was not the kind of being who would permit such a defeat to be the last word; he had never done so in the past.

The Chorus had a plan “B”: should it become necessary, they would unite and lead the sentients of the universe in an all-or-nothing suicide mission in opposition to the Horrors, for death was death, regardless of the mechanism, but such death could be empty or the ultimate act of defiance against an unreasonable alternative. But they preferred to bet on the Doctor.

With a new understanding of the stakes, the discussion turned to the situation on the planet below. The Chorus had a solution to the impasse between the two factions, one that only the Doctor could implement. The requirements to enact this solution had been brought here as a result of more manipulations by the Celestial Chorus – an Imperial Cruiser from the Human Empire, a Diplomat of scrupulous fairness and honesty, and the Doctor as a driving force. With such a cast of characters, if the Doctor were himself the playwright, how would he use them to bring about a resolution, Zeus asked.

That question catalyzed the Doctor’s thinking – vague and only partially-formed ideas locked into place. Alpha Centauri had the skills and experience to negotiate recognition of the Angels as a sentient species by the Human Empire and their ruling Federation, joining the thousand other species so recognized. The Captain of an Imperial Cruiser had the authority to then ratify that treaty on behalf of Earth. Since such a treaty would need to be trilaterally binding, it would also require each faction of the Angels to accept the rights of the other – not the Celestial Chorus had any intention of giving any of the participants any free will in the matter. Both sides would therefore be the winners and both the losers – and the cost of their defeat would be their capacity to carry out the Mercy Killing of the Human Empire that had recognized them, which was an act that was only valid if one could see all ends – something that, because of their own involvement, the Angels could not.

The Chorus thus redefined the task for which the Western Angels had brought the Doctor to Beta Lacertae to something with a fixed objective, rather than the vague and open-ended demands of the two Factions.

To encourage diligence, the chorus then “set certain events in motion that should encourage all sides to negotiate with a maximum of alacrity and an intolerance for bogging down in side-issues” and declared their involvement in the crisis to be at an end, and translocated the Doctor and Jangshen to the planet below using the 75th century transmat. Only then did the Doctor realize that he failed to inquire about it when he had the chance; the Angels clearly still have secrets that he has not penetrated – a constant in his universe that is somehow comforting, for the day that he knows everything was the day the universe became boring.

Both Golden Dave and Black Bob demanded to know where the Doctor had gone, and how. He answered them simply by pointing out that a number of celestial beings had an interest in the future of the Universe and some of them had intervened to show him a solution to the problem they had posed him. As he was explaining this, he noticed that the stars had begun to move, and he started trying to determine who was responsible and what they hoped to gain. A soldier from the Arthur C Chester hurried up, his arms raised in a parley gesture, calling for the Doctor, not noticing that several Buddhas had crowded in behind him and outstretched their arms, ready to exile him to the past. The Doctor hastily intervened.

The soldier had a message from Captain Mitchell for the Doctor: Something had broken the planet out of solar orbit; it was beginning to plunge toward Beta Lacertae. The ship cannot escape; its engines were damaged during the brief engagement between the armies of Angels. In three hours, the planet, the ship, and both factions of Angels, plus the Doctor and Jangshen would all be destroyed.

The collision of that much mass with that much momentum would punch a hole through to the core of the star, which will nova shortly thereafter. Worse still, Inchon would be freed, and there would be no-one left to stop him – except the Celestial Chorus and their planned universal lemmings “Plan B”. However, the Doctor realized that it might be possible to repair the engines and save the ship – if the Western Angels held the drives together when they wanted to explode, while the Eastern Angels protected the crew and passengers from the drastic acceleration that would be required. But that would not happen unless they all worked together, and that wouldn’t happen unless a peace was brokered – before the planet was obliterated. This was obviously the ‘gentle nudge toward a solution’ that the Chorus had provided.

Things proceeded rapidly from that point. The statement that someone had placed the angels in such a position that neither faction could ever complete their Purpose if their dispute continued left both sides amenable to a compromise that would have seemed unthinkable only a day earlier. As though it were his own idea, the Doctor then punctured the assumption that had motivated both groups to bring the dispute between them to a head, showing that each could again survive and prosper alongside the other. However, their conflict had threatened the Empire, and made them aware of the dangers the Angels posed to them – even now, anything that might possibly be an Angel was almost certainly surrounded by Imperial Military with weapons trained on it. The only hope that the Angels had of ever surviving to complete their ultimate Purpose was to negotiate terms with the Humans and adhere to them scrupulously.

With the Angels thus motivated to establish diplomatic relations with the humans, he turned his attention to persuading the humans aboard the Arthur C Chester to negotiate with the Angels. Because their survival was at stake, they were relatively easy to corral. Negotiations were moved aboard the Arthur C Chester, and the TARDIS moved on board. The terms of the agreement were simple and straightforward, and largely a matter of protecting each side from the citizens of the others. As much time was spent laying out how the three groups would cooperate in the mutual saving of each other’s lives, because the Doctor refused to leave the returned inhabitants of the Agricultural Colony to die with their star. The ‘Chester’ could not hold them all; it was not large enough, and the humans would add so much mass to the ship that it could not escape if it tried. The solution was to park the humans in the TARDIS, where their masses were irrelevant to the vessel. They were soon being stuffed inside the bigger-on-the-inside traveling box like sausages. With the Doctor’s assistance, the engines were repaired in the nick of time, and as the Nova flared in the windows of the ship, it got underway.

Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor tuned in the Temporal Distortion Scanner that he has rigged to trace Inchon’s flight through time and space. Because of the added “kick” that the Angels have given Inchon, the old model of when and where he would skip to next were completely out the window, so he had no idea where his hunt would take him next.

Suddenly, the doctor realized that he may have missed a trick – the “Omega Directive” had told him that there was a significance to “Inchon’s” True Name that he would only understand when he learned the name. Since Inchon was in the form of a Weeping Angel, that knowledge would have been available to Black Bob, even if not to the Golden Buddha. He had plenty of chances to ask them what the true name was, and it might have been a valuable hint as to what to expect in the future. But that chance is past. He would just have to muddle through as usual – but perhaps that was for the best. Ignorance permitted him to view problems with a clear and undistorted perspective, and that was too valuable an advantage to give up.

Jangshen, meanwhile, had been chastised by the encounter with the Angels, learning that there was far more to the universe than could be solved using the guidance of his limited philosophy. He apologized to the Doctor for his attitude and resolved to treat the quest upon which they were engaged with greater gravity, henceforth.

Adventure 8: Revolution No 9999 (unplayed)

I can’t provide too many details of this adventure, except to say that it will be more of the same. The driving force will once again be the Inchon-Doctor struggle, but that will be secondary to some unexpected old friends and enemies having problems of their own – problems that the Doctor will inevitably get drawn into. This adventure won’t so much deal with a plot hole from existing canon as it will a plot ‘blank spot’ left by that canon. In terms of pacing, I want to actually back off a little after the intensity peak of “Hell’s Angels” to give the sense of anticipation a little longer to build. I’m also strongly tempted to make this a “Christmas Special” just to preserve the meta-relationship between the TV show’s structure and the campaign, but I’m not going to stretch the adventure out of shape to achieve that.

Adventure 9: Render Unto Ceaser (unplayed, working title)

This is intended to be the second-last adventure of the campaign. From a metagame perspective, any fan of the TV series should be able to predict which old enemies have yet to become ‘perturbed’ in their tracks by the Inchon-Doctor struggle, but I’ve been careful with my working titles not to give the game away.

Adventure 10: The Infinite Monster (unplayed, working title)

I’ve planned all along for this to be a big finish that brings together all the plot threads that have been left dangling here and there. Because I outlined what I intended for this adventure to contain before I started work on adventure 1, I’ve been able to continually refer to it and set things up in advance. It will have the usual mix of surprise characters, and will complete integration with the existing TV canon, delivering the Doctor to the mental state of “The Snowmen” in a believable way that is satisfying to the player for all that he already knows the end result of the campaign. It’s not the destination in this case, it’s the journey, that matters.

Campaign Review by Saxon

I asked Saxon a number of leading questions about the campaign and have synopsized his responses, and a few things that he’s said at the game table, into a narrative-form review. This is all about what this plot repair technique brings to a campaign that is based entirely around the use of the technique, from the player’s perspective.

I’ll first contextualize my comments with what is hopefully a relatively simple general statement on my feelings on continuity.

I’m getting old. The approach I took to psycho-analyzing Blackwing as a character in Mike’s Zenith-3 campaign may give a different impression, but…

While I’m still moderately enthusiastic for the details of my fandoms, I no longer take the pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths approach that multiple conflicting details NEED to be reconciled by the likes of separate universes, time paradoxes rewriting history, erroneous reports, or overenthusiastic re-tellings of stories by bards around the campfire who need to keep their audience enthused and are therefore gilding the lily.

These days I’m more likely to be influenced by the real-word knowledge that stories have to be created under constraints of time and budget – and possibly also a tongue-in-cheek description I once heard that “its all in a continuity, but the stuff that counts is the stuff that you’ve read / watched / listened to and particularly the stuff that you liked”. So when it comes to the broad scale continuity of a shared fictional setting, as a rule of thumb if there is a problem, is there an interesting or useful solution? Otherwise it’s just another niggle to be noted – it exists but it’s not worth your time to get an ulcer over. Heck, it doesn’t even necessarily need to be the same interesting solution.

With regard to the Lovecraft’s Legacies campaign: I enjoy Dr Who generally, and I enjoy the details of Dr Who continuity (sometimes shaky or mutually internally contradictory though it may be), and the opportunity to play within those is both entertaining and interesting / thought provoking. However, that simply means I’m immersing myself in the game session. Most use of continuity falls into the enthusiastic “Ooo, that’s creative and interesting” category and goes no further. However the full gamut of reaction elicited by the campaign ranges from “Ah, that’s a useful solution that I’ll keep in mind for later use” through to “No, I disagree with that, but this isn’t my game so I’ll suspend disbelief and run with it anyway.”

The campaign has relied on several plot holes within the official continuity, some generally recognized, and some not. Filling those plot holes with other content from the official continuity contributes to the ‘look and feel,’ and the entertainment value of the campaign, for a fan who knows the references. However, it does presume that a tour of Who continuity is of major importance to the campaign, and therefor makes it very different from what I expect a Doctor Who campaign for fans with less of a knowledge of continuity would be. Or for that matter, non-fans who are simply using the TARDIS as a prop for quick and easy time-space travel and who have zero interest in continuity. This is a campaign methodology that works for those already predisposed to immersion within the source material.

That said, the immersion definitely adds to the interest levels. There is a puzzle aspect to seeing how the gamesmaster is fitting the often-unexpected pieces together, as well as the pleasure of interacting with old favorite characters and places.

A lot rests on the solutions within the campaign being credible within the limitations imposed by the ‘look and feel’ and the established continuity of the official sources. On an individual basis the explanations Mike has engineered are fine, and range from fascinating to startling to outright fun. They are, at least, no more contrived than some of the things that have been broadcast. On a meta-level, their frequency can be jarring; the nature of some of the plot holes being filled means that they often need a complicated explanation for what was happening behind the scene to explain what was perceived as happening the first time around. These sort of complications are possible within Dr Who, and within certain runs of the show such as the Moffat period can even be frequent, but the fact that so many of them are necessary within the campaign’s string of adventures is indicative of the use of the campaign theme of examining and repairing continuity. For me that is neither good or bad, but I can see how it might be off-putting to other types of players with different expectations. The answers Mike comes up with are at least credible, within the context and bounds of the Who universe. If that’s weren’t the case, I might have a much bigger problem with the campaign’s heavy continuity.

Every adventure has extended Dr Who canon with reference to places, people, and events from within the official continuity, rather than being internal to the Campaign. This has an impact on the
campaign as experienced by me in my capacity as a player. It involves bringing back old fan favorites, in startling new contexts, which creates a level of emotional investment and also the challenge (when I remember) of having the Doctor react in a particular way to someone who is known to him. So I’m fine with that. It’s kind of like Forest Gump technology, which you would definitely need to use if this were to be done as TV episodes – and way beyond the normal budget of a Doctor Who season. You get the same kind jaw-dropping surprises from past continuity.

Having to abide by an established continuity (though flirting with original content at the edges of that continuity) might make things easier or harder for the GM, who has to do a lot of research for each adventure – it shows – but despite what might be expected, it doesn’t really make things any easier or harder for me as a player. I play each situation on its merits, drawing on what I know of the characters to devise solutions that are in character for the role that I’m playing. If I come up with a particular approach to a problem within the game that’s fine, but if I’m temporally stumped, Mike’s GMing style of having a few mapped-out prompts for ongoing plot events usually covers things. Certainly it’s more entertaining for the player to recognize continuity references and react to them, but that’s not an aspect of difficulty.

It’s possible that if my knowledge of Doctor Who was even more substantial, the campaign’s tone and content might be even more entertaining, but that would not necessarily make the game any easier to play. Mike typically has good plot summaries, which that increased knowledge might replace in part; so it’s simply a matter of catching the Easter eggs. I suppose ‘sense of involvement’ makes things more fun, and that in turn leads to an easier gaming experience, but in general terms, and despite what I said earlier, you don’t have to be an expert to enjoy this type of campaign – it just provides a bonus entertainment factor.

Plot twists are harder to achieve when locked into an official continuity, as every Dr Who writer and show-runner has found. The approach employed by the campaign – and hence by the plot structuring technique at the heart of it – permits me to be surprised not so much by the plot twists but by the pieces of continuity that Mike selects to fill the story void. The synergizing of multiple parts of Who continuity means I can’t be sure what direction a piece of existing continuity will take, so it’s all a ‘plot twist’. Or at least, I don’t find myself anticipating what direction events will take. It’s interesting to compare this with the other campaigns Mike runs. The pulp campaign tends to run on pulp cliche tropes, and part of the fun is trying to anticipate (with snarky commentary to the other players) what’s going to happen next – and the plot twists that survive that treatment are more surprising as a result. Similarly, superhero tropes are well-established, though the heavily character-driven nature of the Zenith-3 campaign ignores or inverts those tropes so often that plot twists often feel secondary to the ongoing soap opera. That said, Mike pulled the same trick in the last Zenith-3 campaign, where the “cosmic” built up slowly, as though events were overtaking the lives of the participating characters. Each campaign holds a different sort of appeal that comes from the style of campaign and of GMing.

Mike has used a home-brew rules system that is very flexible and rules-light for the Doctor Who campaign. While some might prefer a richer, purpose-driven system, for me, simpler is better. My dislike of being bogged down in hard/complicated maths calculations is well known; being able to quickly and simply make rolls means I have less chance of being taken out of the game. I can’t see that the rules system used adds or takes much away from this particular campaign.

Overall, I enjoy the campaign. I find playing the Doctor as he gets to explore a fictional setting, and indulging in a sense of wonder, to be an agreeable way to pass the time. The campaign is both interesting and compelling, especially seeing different pieces of continuity connect together to create a whole and encountering favorite pieces of that past continuity – and some that I had almost completely forgotten that get a fresh breath of life from the new context. Internally to the campaign, I’ve been surprised at the depth of emotional investment that I had as the character in the fate of Omega in the most recent adventure. In terms of a plot-device-as-the-campaign-premise level, the extra-dimensional Lovecraftian aspect was a completely unexpected twist. I wasn’t expecting the Lovecraft / Who mashup that introduced the villain that set the campaign off. (I should mention that Mike withheld the campaign’s subtitle until after the first adventure’s Big Reveal).

The Last Word

The more adept you are at applying this plot repair technique, the less you have to fear from plot holes. You can either patch these as they come to your players’ attentions, or simply make a note of them and tell any players who notice the hole that their characters don’t have all the answers, but that they will be provided in due course, if the campaign lasts that long.

You can either do so in an “untold adventure” which takes place roughly contemporaneously with the plot hole, or by invoking some form of time travel to permit events to have ramifications at other points in the continuity – thereby solving the plot hole.

No adventure that does nothing else will ever be completely satisfactory, it should be noted. There is a price to be paid for being continuity-obsessive, and to compensate for that, you need additional content of interest to justify spending valuable gaming time on the adventure. If you are even a little bit unsure that the adventure will deliver in fun, you might be better off telling the story in a less interactive medium such as a short story.

But no GM’s toolkit is complete without this technique in their back pockets in some form or another.

About the authors:

Mike: Mike is the owner, editor, and principle author at Campaign Mastery, responsible for most of the words of wisdom (or lack thereof) that you read here. You can find him on Twitter as gamewriterMike, and find out more about him from the “About” page above.

Saxon: Saxon has been vaguely interested in gaming since the early 1980s, but only since going to university in the late 1980s has the opportunity for regular play developed into solid enthusiasm. Currently he plays in two different groups, both with alternating GMs, playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th ed., the Hero system (Pulp), a custom-rules superhero game (also based on the Hero System), Mike’s “Lovecraft’s Legacies” Dr Who campaign, WEG-era Star Wars, FASA-era Star Trek, and a Space 1889/Call of Cthulhu hybrid. When it’s his turn he runs a Dr Who campaign. He cheerfully admits to being a nerd, even if he’s not a particularly impressive specimen. He was a social acquaintance of both Mike and Blair long before he joined their games.

Whew! Finished at last! I apologize to all my readers who missed reading something new from Campaign Mastery last week, but I had grossly underestimated how long this article would be, and hence how long it would take to write my contributions…

Watching the Australian performance in the Women’s Ashes cricket series last night, where they absolutely destroyed the English opposition, inspired this article.

Australia batted first, and set England a target of 270 from their 50 overs (refer to this post if you don’t know enough about Cricket to know what I’m talking about).

This is a reasonable total, about par for a Women’s one-day international match. Australia then took the field and restricted England to a mere 75 for their 10 wickets. Most of the punishment was inflicted by just one bowler, but it takes a fielder or wicket-keeper to take a catch, so this was a team performance, nevertheless.

Ellyse Perry took 7 wickets for just 22 runs. This was the lowest total ever for England against Australia, and England’s greatest ever defeat in this form of the game- a 194-run loss.

It was as comprehensive a dismantling as I have ever seen on the sporting field. But don’t take my word for it – here’s a profession review of the match for those interested.

And that got me to thinking: There are times when one side of the table or the other has a horror run, when they can’t take a trick, when random chance comes out butter-side-down for every dropped slice of bread on a day when everyone is all thumbs. Equally, there are days when everything one side touches turns to gold, when they can’t lose a contest if they try.

The Improbability of Improbability

In most cases, these runs of improbable luck are best explained by the temporal concordance of a number of lesser improbabilities.

Statistically, 1/3 of the time you are up, 1/3 of the time you’re down, and 1/3 of the time you’re somewhere in the middle. But how quickly you cycle through these periods – the length, in game sessions, of these cycles – is different from one player to another, and subject to so many random distortions that they are impossible to predict.

What can be stated is that 1/3 of the time, when you are up, someone else at the table will probably be down, and someone else will be somewhere in the middle. Just 1/9th of the time, will two of you be ‘up’ at the same time. And, 1/27th of the time, all three of you will be ‘up’ at the same time.

Now, in a party of 3, that’s ALMOST as good as it gets – but we also have to consider the other side of the table. 1/3 of the time, the GM will also be ‘up’ – but 1/3 of the time, his luck will be ‘down’. So the closest equivalent to luck perfection (from the players’ perspective) will only occur 1/81th of the time.

The more players you add, the more likely it is that some of them will drag the table average ‘luck’ down, and the rarer it will be for everyone to be at their peak at the same time. Four players – one 243rd of the time. Five players – one time in 729. Six players – once in 2187 game sessions. Even if you play every week, the stars are likely to only align once in 42 years. But, when they do, the effect will be that much more profound.

And that’s with a very generous “1/3 of the time” definition of being ‘up’. What if it’s only when you’re within 10% of your best or worst that counts as having the golden touch?
3 players + GM – one in 10000. 4 players: one in 100,000. 5 players: one on 1,000,000.

Lightning has to strike somewhere. How many gaming groups are there, all over the world? If there are 10,000,000, that 1-in-a-million shot is likely to be experienced by 5-15 groups somewhere in the world every week. If there are 1 million, that’s 5-15 groups every 10 weeks, or 5 times a year. If there are 100,000, we get 5-15 occurrences every 100 weeks, or sometime in a roughly two-year time-frame.

But, personally, I would expect the 1,000,000 mark to be closer to the truth than the 100,000, by the time all the games run at gaming conventions and over the internet are taken into account.

Regardless, lightning is still going to strike somewhere every now and then – on a regular basis. How is a campaign supposed to cope? What should the GM do?

Case 1: The GM’s luck is lousy / The players can do no wrong

This is the circumstance that will transpire for at least some of the players at your table more often than the converse (which I will discuss a little later). There’s a natural tendency to compensate – avoid it like the plague.

Revise and review your personal mindset, immediately. There are three courses of action open to you, in broad terms:

1. Avoid letting players take advantage of the situation;
2. Use the situation to enhance the fun for the players;
3. Fight the situation despite the harm that it might do to the campaign in the medium-to-long term.

The problem with (3) is that you risk making your current headache a recurring migraine. “Compensating” usually requires “Overcompensating” before it has any effect, but the associated rewards for the players will linger beyond this one game session, and can turn what should be a one-session peak for the players into the new standard – this way lies Monty Haul.

Answer (1) means throwing minimized opportunities for success, reward, and advancement in the PCs direction for as long as their acquisition is an almost-inevitable outcome. Flocks of 1-HP bunny rabbits, little lost lambs, and the like. The players can tell what’s happening and will recognize your response to it for what it is – an act of desperate cowardice. Forever more, you will be the “Killjoy GM” – and your players will be ripe for other GMs to steal.

In terms of reasonable responses, that leaves only the most difficult one of all – option (2). Is there an NPC or enemy type that the players have always hated/feared and that you don’t care about, one way or the other? Now is the perfect time for him to rush in where even a fool would hesitate to tread, heaping some humiliation on his shoulders and letting the players convert their luck into a profound satisfaction that costs you nothing.

Of course, the players have a couple of choices to make, too. They can ride their luck for all its worth while it lasts – but that leaves them vulnerable and potentially exposed when the worm turns, having gotten themselves in too deep and over their heads.

They can overcompensate, or even suspect the GM of greasing a slippery slope beneath their feet, giving them just enough rope to end up in that ‘over their heads’ situation before lowering the boom on them.

Or they can simply enjoy the sense of being all-conquering without going out of their way to use it unreasonably.

I would assess the relative likelihood of these three choices as 6:3:1. Or maybe 7:2:1. But, no matter how they choose to react, it will be up to you to steer things in a safe direction.

Remember your priorities: Fun for the players, fun for yourself, preserving the campaign, telling an engaging story – generally in that order. All lucky streaks end. When they are someone else’s lucky streak, regardless of the game you’re playing, the trick is to survive until that happens.

Look at it this way: you are being gifted a rare opportunity. The PCs are riding the crest of a Tsunami, and relying on you to ensure a soft landing at the end of it.

If you want some more specific and practical advice, you can apply the techniques explained in

• Sequential Bus Theory and why it matters to GMs, and/or
• High-Fives and other in-Game Rewards, and/or
• Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Part 9: Rewards With Intent, and/or
• Objective-Oriented Experience Points.

For good measure, you can contemplate the suggestions in

• Conditional Modifier Magic: Combating Power Creep in RPGs.

Revise your priorities. This is a crisis for the campaign, but the other side of any crisis is opportunity. What you do with that opportunity is up to you – but I suggest you use it to enhance your campaign, not destroy it.

Case 2: The GM’s luck is unstoppable / The players can’t turn a trick

It’s very easy to let this situation go to your head. Don’t be tempted; it will hurt you in the long run.

Although the two may seem complete opposites, there’s more than a little similarity between this crisis and the one described above.

Once again, you have three options to contemplate, and they will sound awfully familiar:

1. Take full advantage of the situation for as long as it lasts;
2. Use the situation to enhance the fun for the players;
3. Go timid so as to give the PCs a fighting chance.

Once again, let’s take a closer look at these three alternatives, in the expectation that at least two of them will have hidden price-tags that are undesirable.

So, what does the first option boil down to? A TPK? PC humiliation (or worse yet, player humiliation)? Or simply taking every ambition the PCs have been trying to fulfill and making them impossible to achieve for the foreseeable future? On reflection, perhaps the TPK is the most palatable course!

I’m a firm believer in the maxim that only player stupidity should open the door to this sort of punishment. If the players are making reasonable choices, the application of unreasonable consequences are a failure on the part of the GM. In such cases, failures should not be terminal.

Option (3) is harder to pin down as !!br0ken!! On the surface, it seems a reasonable solution. The price that is paid is in credibility. The more you weaken the opposition to be overcome by the PCs, the less credible it is for them to have done the things that have given them a fearsome reputation, and that is fatal for player bragging rights. “Man, those woolly lambs were just killer, you know?” just doesn’t sound right.

On the contrary, the players want to be able to brag of success despite the GM doing his level best to stop them, to feel that they have achieved something noteworthy.

Don’t water down the opposition, but don’t have them call down the wrath of the Gods upon the PCs, either. Have the oh-so-superior opposition get temporarily distracted by an opportunity they hadn’t even dreamed possible – only for the players to block it, once their luck turns.

Which is sounding an awful lot like option (2) once again.

You know what? All those articles I referred to earlier are still relevant. Steer the PCs into courses where your lucky streak won’t permanently derail the campaign.

Once again, you aren’t the only one making decisions. How the players react is another question entirely – but, as a general rule, the breed tend to be incurable optimists. They know that every streak ends, eventually – at least, the smart ones do – and that they are better off manipulating circumstances so that they aren’t dependent on luck, good or bad.

And, if you do the same, it becomes a contest of roleplaying, not rollplaying, and everyone benefits by saving the die rolls for when they add to the fun. See Two ways to play: Roleplaying and Rollplaying if you don’t believe me.

An unusually short article, today – mainly because the article I was going to write started looking too long, given the intrusion of “real life” into my week. Normal service (plus some?) should resume next week.

Distillations Of Personality is an unfinished series at Campaign Mastery about the tips and tricks that I use for designing NPCs in my campaigns. As originally conceived, and as it will be executed, this article was not part of the 3-part series. So don’t bother searching for parts 2 and 3 – they haven’t been published yet! In a (perhaps in vain) hope of minimizing confusion, I’m describing this as a series “extra”, and not as a part of the series.

Personality means different things to different characters. In some cases, it refers to motivations, and why they are doing whatever it is that they are doing that brings them into an interaction mode with one or more PCs. In others, it may refer to a morality, to things that the character will or will not do. In still other cases, the personality exists to do nothing more than give the NPC some life and color when conversing with a PC.

You can easily spend multiple pages outlining a personality and analyzing how it will express itself in the course of play. Certainly, any even moderately complex personality will require an essay of such length to convey to the GM everything he needs to know to play that personality as a typically rounded, consistent, and coherent, individual – consistent and coherent with respect to the personality, that is, it doesn’t say anything about the characters sanity!

If you slavishly follow the advice that has been presented within the rest of the Crafting Of Personality series, the end result will very much resemble that multi-page essay.

There are two problems with this.

1. Most GMs don’t have time to waste on unnecessary material.
2. Even if you had time to create it, most GMs don’t have the time available at the gaming table to read and assimilate it.

That’s why so much of the design process that I employ is oriented around brief, bullet-point-like, notes. They are faster to generate, and designed to help you hone in on the personality of the NPC, enabling you to extract out the elements that are actually relevant to the personality. You then develop those into a small paragraph, an excerpt from the still-unwritten multi-page essay that would result without that discrimination.

The “Crafting Of Personality” series is so busy telling you how to generate the notes and convert them into functional personality profiles that it doesn’t go into this aspect of the process – and this is potentially the most significant of the lot!

Today’s article is designed to correct this problem…

The Elements Of Personality

Personalities and their expression can be boiled down to eleven elements. Every character has something to file under each of these headings. It’s important for the GM to understand each of these, their relationships, and how they contribute to the personality, in the abstract; and also to understand how these will manifest within the experienced expression of personality for the PC encountering the character.

The Elements of Personality are 1. Inheritances, 2. Principles & Values, 3. Flaws, 4. Predispositions, 5. Habits, 6. Desires & Needs, 7. Tolerances And The Padded Wall Of Morality, 8. Perceptions, 9. Interpretations, 10. Instincts & Responses, and 11. Other Manifestations – language, articulation, surprise, & attitude.

For a time, I thought the necessity to discuss each would make this article unreasonably long and difficult to write, but then I thought of a way to package a lot of the information as a pair of diagrams:

This shows the constituent elements and their relationships. Unfortunately, it’s right on the edge of being illegible, there’s so much squeezed into such a small space. So you might want to click on it to look over the full-sized image in a new tab. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you get back.

Let’s take a closer look at the constituent elements, very briefly.

Inheritances

There are two kinds of personality inheritances – behaviors derived from a role model, often a parental figure, and behaviors derived from opposition to flaws perceived in a role model. The rebellion of youth always translates into some personality traits that are deliberately different to those of the role models a character is emulating. You can’t have the one without the other without stifling the rebellious urge, which tends to build up beneath the surface until it explodes anyway – though that may take years. When it does, the usual result is an over-reaction or mid-life crisis.

Principles & Values

While some of these can be learned or obtained from other sources, the majority will be inheritances, either from the parental figures or from third parties within childhood. They help to define the predispositions, tolerances, and intolerances of the character – his or her morality.

Flaws

A ‘Flaw’ in this context is a potential for failure of morality or judgment. Sometimes these derive directly from inheritances, sometimes they emerge from outside sources.

Predispositions

Predispositions are akin to prejudices, but they do not have to carry the negative connotations that the latter implies. They are any default potential behavior. Sometimes, these traits will engage automatically, sometimes they simply incline a character in a particular direction, and are subject to revision if they seem inappropriate.

Habits

Habits can also positives, or regarded as such; they include all rote behaviors. Many habits are flaws that have manifested to such an extent that they are a driver of choices and behaviors. A susceptibility to alcoholism might be a flaw, but if the character never takes a drink, or only drinks on social occasions, the susceptibility never manifests. If the flaw does manifest, it means that the character is drinking more, or more often, than is healthy for them (including socially and/or professionally). Once a habit manifests, it will typically grow in both frequency and severity until it comes to dominate the characters’ life. At some point, the character will become aware of the damage being inflicted upon other areas of their life that they value, and may break the habit – but the flaw is not removed, and thus the habit is lurking, waiting to return.

For example, attending church every Sunday is a Habit. So is buying a lottery ticket every week, or rubbing your earlobes when thinking. As a general rule, none of these is considered socially reprehensible.

Desires & Needs

Principles, Predispositions, and Habits all feed into Desires and Needs. These are markedly different in that they change; once satisfied, they no longer affect the character. Some are recurring, and will return with the passage of time; others are singular demands that will vanish once satisfied, or be replaced with another singular demand. The difference between a Need and a Desire is intensity – a need MUST be fulfilled, a Desire is not so acute – and there are an infinite number of gradations between the two.

Some desires may not be recognized as such, and will have no impact on a character’s behavior until an opportunity arises for fulfillment of the desire. Characters who have never desired wealth can be tempted into larceny by a sufficiently large pay-out, for example, surprising everyone (including themselves).

It has been suggested that there is a hierarchy of needs, which I have employed to define characters in the past, in particular with reference to non-human charactersnon-human characters.

Every trigger will be assessed with respect to the desires and needs that it might satisfy. If there are none, then there will be no behavioral alteration because of the need/desire. If there is one, however, it may push the character toward atypical behavior.

Tolerances And The Padded Wall Of Morality

Preventing such opportunistic behavior are, perhaps, the character’s morals.

Morals are such a complex subject that they really deserve an article of their own. Many people view morals as a code, a set of absolutely black-and-white rules that the character has to follow.

Reality is a lot messier. The hard brick wall of morals is full of cracks – a crack being an “exception” that the character will make, under some circumstances. Covering the surface of this hard wall, and eating into it at times, are softer layers of protection – tolerances and intolerances. These are where many of the cracks derive. For example, a character who is intolerant of Gays may make an exception with respect to several of the moral “rules” that govern his life. Or it may be women in power, or people of color, or any of a dozen other intolerances.

Tolerances are things that the character will put up with, will tolerate. Sometimes, these reinforce the morality wall; sometimes, they encounter a crack that subverts the tolerance. Sometimes they are positive, and sometimes negative.

Intolerances are things that the character will not accept. These can also be positive or negative – a character can be intolerant of injustice or racial prejudice or pink flowers.

Tolerances and Intolerances aren’t black and white, or moral judgments – they simply are. They are, in truth, inheritances manifesting through a character’s principles and values. It’s when there is a conflict between the character’s morals and his tolerances that characters are most vulnerable to internal conflict and creating new “cracks” in their moral code – for example, when a religious code demands tolerance but the character’s experience and upbringing gives them a predisposition toward intolerance.

The final point to note is that cracks in the moral “wall” are not uniform. More fundamental morals, and those stemming from a chronologically earlier stage of life, tend to have more cracks than those moral choices consciously made in adulthood, to the right-hand-side of the “wall”.

People are more at home demanding action of others than they are in taking action themselves, especially if there is any moral uncertainty involved. It’s a lot easier to tell someone else to break the law (or change the law) for you, than it is to break the law yourself, especially when others could sit in judgment over the actions.

Mobs occur when a crowd ‘egg each other on’ sufficiently that they overrule this tendency toward moral caution; a mob can and does engage in behavior that no individual member would dare to engage in (though they may suggest and demand that others engage in it) – looting, violence, misjudgment, vandalism, arson, even lynchings and murder.

Perceptions

Perceptions are how the character sees events within the world (the way the character sees the world itself is a predisposition). Thus, a predisposition may color or distort perceptions. Another way to look at perceptions is to consider them a classification matrix, but this overly-formalizes a more instinctive and unthinking response. Habits, desires, needs, and predispositions all shape how a triggering event will be perceived.

I used to think that they did so purely by providing the context that was used to frame the event, but am no longer so confident of that position. Since they can drive behavioral responses to the trigger with no interpretational analysis at all, any contextual impact is negligible.

It might be more accurate to say that they provide a contextual framework for interpretation, but act directly upon more instinctive forms of behavior. But I have no evidence to cite, so the best answer is to assume that they operate directly to alter the perception of what the trigger is.

For example, an individual may react to someone speaking on the television based on their gender, their race, their apparent education level, their career, their authority level, their physical attractiveness, their apparent prosperity or social class, their past perceptions of the individual on-screen, or what they are actually saying. Or all of them at once – with a different reaction from each aspect.

Interpretations

When a perception is analyzed by the individual to determine a course of action, or simply to work out what is really going on, their intellectual and analytic capabilities are brought to bear on interpreting the perception of the event.

It is worth observing that this is the first element of personality that is directly impacted by intellectual capacity, though there may have been indirect effects on other elements.

Instincts & Responses

An instinct is a reaction without forethought based upon survival needs. If the trigger event threatens the character unexpectedly, they will react instinctively. Forewarning engages the character’s perceptions, and may also lead to an instinctive reaction or a per-determined non-instinctive response. Some habits cause reactions that appear instinctive, as there is little or no thought evident, but they don’t make sense within the narrow definition of ‘instinct’ used, so they have to be something else. Call them “automatic responses” for lack of anything better. Only if the event is filtered through Interpretation will it trigger a reasoned response – subject to all the flaws and potential failures of reasoning, of course!

Other Manifestations – language, articulation, surprise, & attitude

There are a number of other manifestations of these personality elements. There are four of them that I’ve identified, and may well be more. Those four are Language (what the character says), articulation (how clearly they say it), surprise (how they express being startled) and attitude (expressed personality).

Triggering Events

Given the variety of triggering events, and the many different filters that might impact on that event’s interpretation, it’s easy to see how complex a fully-detailed personality profile needs to be. Fortunately, when you get right down to it, you usually only need to consider a broadly-defined or specific subset of these behaviors. What you really want is a guideline and a basis for intelligently amending that guideline if circumstances warrant.

Interaction Mode

The specifics required can be further confined by anticipating the interaction mode that the encounter will occupy, permitting you to keep guidelines outside that range even more general and loose.

There are four basic interaction modes:

• Monologue
• Dialogue
• Emotional Response
• Action

Monologue

When the character is present only to impart information with a minimum of back-and-forth, the goal is to provide them with a notable and noticeable personality. Doing so forces the players to consider the monologue as something other than ex-parte communication direct from the GM, raising uncertainties about its accuracy and reliability, and making the character delivering the monologue seem a part of their world.

Some characters simply speak their mind. The more forthright the mode of delivery, the more likely this is to be the case. At the other end of the spectrum, there are characters who never utter a word without calculating the impact that the word will have, and selecting amongst a broad vocabulary the word that will have just the impact that they desire. The first is a bundle of personality with the occasional factual statement thrown in for seasoning; the latter is almost bereft of personality in many respects, the “person” being subordinated to the “message” and it’s effect.

In the middle, though, there are a whole host of more ordinary folk. The triggering events of significance will be the content of their monologue – some parts may be distasteful, others invoke derision, and so on. For such characters, you need only understand the personality enough to be able to determine how they will feel about the message content.

The next factor in monologues is the breadth of subject matter, which is a function of length of monologue. If the monologue is only long enough for a single announcement, there will only be one emotional response to be conveyed; if the monologue covers a wider range, you may have three or four acute responses and a default mode to consider.

Dialogue

Dialogue comes in two forms: conversation with one or more PCs, and conversation with one or more NPCs that a PC happens to overhear.

That statement brings to mind an utterly irrelevant anecdote that’s too much fun not to share. At one point in my super-spies campaign, Team Neon Phi, Stephen Tunnicliff’s agent planted a bug on a suspected enemy agent. Except that he was forced to rely on a third party to actually plant the device, something he failed to advise the other players of. Well, the intermediary flubbed their die roll, and the bug ended up being planted on a fruiterer. When then players came to listen to their carefully-intercepted intelligence, all they got was a lot of talk about apples, oranges, pears – the apricots are on special – sprinkled with other monetary amounts and miscellaneous topics of gossip. They spent hours trying to figure out the code…

Okay, where was I? Oh yes – “conversation with one or more NPCs that a PC happens to overhear”. Of the two, this is the harder one to achieve successfully. You not only need to give each speaker their own personality and mode of interaction with the others’ personality, you need to make these sufficiently different and distinctive that the players can tell who’s saying what – all while being consistent and achieving clarity of communication. Other than that, it’s easy.

When you actually look into it, though, it’s a problem that differs in degree but not kind from the first variant. So long as you are sure to give enough nuance and differential expressions of character to each participant, it’s just a matter of being able to switch mental gears between the two.

Some contrasting personality profiles are easy to switch between – I call these “complimentary” profiles – while others are more difficult (I call these “contrary” profiles). Unfortunately, my experience tends to suggest that the classification to which any specific combination should belong varies from one GM to another. It’s more psychological than anything else.

I also find that you can cope with “Contrary” profiles if everything is pre-scripted; it’s satisfying any improvisational dialogue that might arise that causes the problem, most of the time. And that has given me a solution – have one or more stock phrases or expressions for each character that you can use to buy time while you make the mental “gear shift” Even if you overuse these, you can tell your players that you’re trying to use it as a verbal shorthand to them to make it easier for them to identify who’s speaking!

With that difficulty out of the way, Dialogue is both harder and easier than monologue. Easier in that less intensity of definition is generally needed; harder in that you have less control over the triggers than is the case in a monologue.

Another trick that helps considerably: a lot of the time, you can simply have the “trigger condition” be the PC in general, permitting a common default personality expression throughout. Throw in one or two exceptions of a broad and general nature – “Stutters when angry or upset”, that sort of thing – and you’re golden.

Emotional Response

Which brings me neatly to Emotional Responses. These occur when one emotion will be triggered within the NPC by the PC, or when the NPC is to trigger a single emotion within the PC (a much harder trick). You can’t sing one note for very long without it becoming excruciating to listen to; so you need ways to nuance and finesse the emotion, different ways of expressing it that you can employ in sequence.

It’s important that the emotion and the way that you express it are rationally connected, make sense. Exotic responses – including clinical and dispassionate ones – often feel forced and unrealistic.

I also try very hard to avoid exhausting my entire repertoire on one occasion. Having several different choices that you haven’t used lately can make the whole job a LOT easier.

Action

The most complex expression of personality is always having the character do something, because any action raises the questions of what the character can and can’t do, will and won’t do, and what exceptions there are to those limits. Before too long, you can find yourself back at the “full profile” situation that we’ve been trying to avoid.

My solution here is to go to the heart of the personality profile – the inheritance and any coloring issues – and improvise everything from that foundation and one or two relevant specifics.

Other Interaction Modes

This isn’t an exclusive list of possible interaction modes, but the others don’t come up very often, or are variations on one of the above. These four make clear the general principles to employ to meet any need, in any event – from the interaction mode, determine what the key aspects of the personality profile are going to be, use any notes you have to determine the relevant traits of this particular character, and improvise anything that falls outside that broad parameter.

For example, a PC might be trying to influence a particular (prejudiced) witness prior to them taking the stand. To that end, the PC arranges to attend a sporting event featuring a team that he or she knows the witness is passionate about, dressed in such a way as to imply that they are also a supporter of the team in question.

That gives us three interaction modes, possibly four:

• Celebrations;
• Despair;
• Camaraderie / Dialogue / Bonding?;
• Witness.

Only the third matches one of the four primary interaction modes in any way, and the circumstances are very different to most dialogue situations – sufficiently so that the GM decides a specific solution is required.

Try these, for example:

• Jumping up and down, hugging everyone around them doing likewise, chanting a player’s nickname, toasting his dear departed father (who used to play for the team), eyes brimming with tears, embarrassment.
• Sitting and glowering silently, looking at his feet (unable to look at the field), downing his beer in one huge gulp, defiant yelling.
• (requires a successful skill check to advance) to next stage: (derisive) “Ah wouldna have picked a toffeenose like you lilywhites tah be a fan o’the Lions. Lancashire-bloody-county seems more your speed.”, looks askance at the PC after a moment of mutual celebration (and hugging), buys a beer for each – “Drink up afore it gets warm! Cheers! GO THE BLOODY LIONS!!”
• If the PC achieved “bonding” with the NPC, the testimony will be colored in the PCs favor. If not, the testimony will be cynical and slanted against the PC, with the occasional caveat.

…with links to two different monologue versions in subsequent paragraphs to pick between. By interspersing modes 1 and 2 plus a default mode (drinking, cheering, and banner-waving) according to the course of the game (decided by die rolls), the PC and NPC have a number of shared experiences that justify the PCs interpersonal skill rolls / CHAR rolls (depending on your game system) to establish a friendly relationship between the two. It’s Show and not Tell.

In broader terms

NPC Personalities only exist as modes of expression, as reactions to events and statements from another character (PC or NPC), as a restriction upon the choices of action, or as a consistent foundation that permits a PC to predict future behavior.

The great virtue of the system extolled in the main part of the Crafting Of Personality series is that it reduces a complex profile into notes while imbuing a character with individuality. With those notes as a basis, it becomes relatively easy to extract only the bits that you need for any given appearance by the NPC in an adventure for development while retaining the consistency that results from a fixed foundation. This system provides the best of both worlds – broadness of scope and focus on the relevant – with minimal overhead and wasted time.

One of the oldest plots in the RPG canon is the search for a lost treasure, guided either by a map or trail of clues. This, like any other puzzle, gets solved like a detective novel or TV show – a mystery to be divined, one clue or step at a time.

But there are some significant differences, too, and the wise GM will be cognizant of them and of the additional hurdles that they impose.

When all a clue solved gets you is another clue to be solved, one breadcrumb after another, it’s easy to feel like you’re standing still.

Markers Of Progress

Probably the most important difference is the easiest to state: mysteries in forms other than an RPG have visible markers of progress.

If we’re talking about a mystery novel, every chapter, every page, takes us visibly closer to the end of the book – and, assuming that the author is playing fair as promised by not explicitly stating otherwise in the title or on the cover, to the solution. It might be on the last page, or the second-last page, or even in the second-last chapter – I’ve seen all three employed – but the writer gets there before the end of the book.

If we’re talking about a TV show, time is measured in minutes and acts by ad breaks, but the same principle holds – unless it’s a two-parter, or a serial, the solution can be expected by the end of the hour. If it’s a serial, then it can be expected by the end of the season, so it’s the same thing, just on a different scale.

Movies, because of their relative flexibility in running times, are slightly more uncertain in their timing, but only slightly – you know before you sit down that this movie is either self-contained or a part of a larger structure, and – either way – have some expectation of how much progress will be made in the story-line by feature’s end.

Comparing Apples and Elephants

Contrast those examples with your typical RPG.

Minutes of in-game time bear no resemblance to minutes in real time, and there is no consistency to the relationship between the two – sometimes, it may take hours to resolve a few minutes of action (in combat, for example), while at other times there is something more like a one-to-one relationship, and at still other times, hand-waving of time compresses many hours or days of game time into a few seconds of real time.

The same variability to a slightly lesser extent also exists with respect to pages of material.

A single adventure may be one, two, three, or more game sessions in length; and game sessions are almost certainly also not entirely predictable in start time, length, or end time, for that matter. Depending on the campaign’s style, adventure length might also include a fraction of a game session.

Furthermore, the continuity implicit in the concept of a ‘campaign’ implies that there is no certainty that a mystery will be solved within the confines of any given single adventure, except perhaps the last one. Factor in the concept of a sequel campaign (2-part article), and you take away even that exception.

The net effect is that, even while it might be possible to check off another step forward toward the solution, you can never know how many such steps remain between the game ‘now’ and the answer to the questions posed.

It can be argued that this is a more realistic depiction of real life, in which one can never tell when or even if a mystery will be solved in any given day, week, month, or year. And that’s true enough, but it’s not necessarily a good thing.

Verisimilitude As Capital

A lack of progress creates frustration, and frustration – unless used and manipulated very carefully by the GM and resolved in good time – is anathema to the primary purpose of any RPG, entertainment. It’s my opinion that this particular realism is one that a campaign simply cannot afford.

You don’t have to read very many articles here at Campaign Mastery before you learn that I work extremely hard in my campaigns at achieving Verisimilitude, and strongly, strongly, strongly recommend others do the same.

A google search for the analogous terms “Verisimilitude”, “believability”, “believable”, “realism” or “realistic” finds 330 results. The tag “Plausibility” shows that there are 161 posts explicitly relevant to the subject. That’s about 15% of the articles here, or about half of the articles that mention the subject! One of the reasons for this obsession on my part is to build up Verisimilitude “Capital” that I can spend when I need to. In other words, by being heavy on the realism and believability and the suspension of disbelief in other areas, I gain tolerance of those areas in which I need or want to be intentionally un-realistic.

Ticks Of The Clock

It’s my contention that the GM needs to insert deliberate “ticks of the clock”, markers and signposts that create a definitive impression on the part of the players that solving part of a mystery or puzzle carries them that much closer to a solution. Even setbacks should, by ruling possible solutions out of contention, create this impression.

Emotional intensity within RPGs is a complex subject, which is why I’ve devoted an entire series of articles to it (Swell and Lull – another 2-part article). I’m about to complicate it even more for you.

Often, correctly-judging the emotional pacing needed will signpost an imminent climax to the story-line, and that will usually result from or lead to the solution. It’s normally the case that this intensity derives from the hints and cues that things are coming to a head, but it is possible to invert the cause-and-effect relationship. This article is going to show you some ways of doing just that.

The idea is that if you can create situations in which it feels like things are heading for a climax, getting more dangerous, or more exciting, the players will interpret that as climbing the intensity curve, and therefore getting closer to the solution. They will feel as though they are making progress even if they have simply followed one clue to be unraveled to another.

The reality is more complicated, of course. You have to do some of the work with pacing, plot, and language – the tools of the novelist – but you can get the players to assume that more has been done through some quite simple tricks that aren’t all that different to what you would have been doing, anyway.

Climbing The Ladder

Let’s start with the most obvious one. If each victory brings a new target into view, one higher up the “food chain” of the enemy hierarchy, it becomes inevitable that eventually the protagonists will reach the top, and confront the head of the operation. How many steps are there in this particular ladder?

As a general rule of thumb, no matter what answer came to mind in response to the previous question, the best answer I’ve ever seen is “one too many”. Why? Because the size of the organization dictates the resources they can throw at a situation, and that dictates the scale of their realistic ambitions.

The only way a small group can dream of overthrowing the current political leadership, for example, is by absorbing whole the infrastructure dedicated to supporting that political leadership. Anything else will require a larger organization with that small group as its head.

Let’s try this exercise: Each major town has a sub-leader. Each sub-leader. has a dozen flunkies, some at hand, and others in smaller towns. Ten sub-leaders report to a regional commander. Each regional commander reports to the villain’s lieutenant and proxy. The villain’s lieutenant reports to the leader, as does the leader’s spymaster. The spymaster has a network of two agents in each major town, and half-a-dozen agents scattered in key positions around smaller towns. Every 5 individuals requires one administrative staff-person. Every 10 individuals requires 1 recruiter, who has two assistants. Every person to whom more than 10 people report also has 1 security guard per ten people reporting to them, times four shifts. How large an organization are we talking about? Any guesses?

Well, it’s going to depend on the number of major towns. Depending on definitions and terrain, there could be anything from 20 of them to about 500. Let’s pick 100 as some sort of “unreasonable average”.

100 sub-leaders. 100×12 flunkies=1300 total. 10 regional commanders. 1 lieutenant. 1 chief villain. 1 spymaster. 100×2 spies in major towns, plus 100×6 spies elsewhere, totals another 800. 1 admin person for each sub-leader. 1 admin person for each regional commander. 1 head of admin. 800/5=160 admin people working the spy network. total so far = 1300 + 10 + 3 + 800 + 100 + 10 + 1 + 160 = 2384. So that requires a team of 2384/10 = 239 recruiters, and 478 assistant recruiters, or another 717. But they need another 717/5=143 admin people, and a chief recruiter. Plus 100 security guards for the sub-leaders and 10 for the regional commanders and 10 for the major town spies, and 60 for the smaller town spies, plus 24 for the recruiters, and 31 for the admin section, all times 4 shifts. Plus one head of security. Total: 4186. Wait – with 940 security, we will need more recruiters and assistants (94×3), and more admin for the total (1222/5=245), and more security for the additional admin (245/10=25) and more recruiters and guards… I get 4745. I might be off by a couple.

Wait – there are no security forces assigned to the leadership. And there’s no paymaster and no means of disbursing payments to this absolutely massive conspiracy. And where is the money coming from? And how about some accountants? And guards for the money? Before you know it, you’re at the 10000-15000 people mark – to take over 100 towns.

And how about cities? A one-to-25 ratio seems about right – so 100 major towns requires about 4 cities. But it might be better stated as 3-5. Am I really suggesting that such a well-organized coup would ignore the cities? Would ignore the Capital? Sure, there aren’t as many of these, but they have a lot more people in them, and represent a lot more power and cloak-and-dagger. By now, our coup is getting up toward the 30,000 mark, and represents a significant (hidden) industry within the nation in question.

How many ladder-steps – adventures – should be devoted to smashing this organization? Well, assuming that this isn’t the whole thrust of the campaign, the minimum is probably going to be 5 – detection/small town, large town, regional command, security, capital/command.

But – “one too many”. That says that we should conflate two of these. Detection/small town + large town would work. Or regional command + security. Or even security + command. The result is a far more taut adventure chain, in which visible progress occurs at each step up the hierarchy.

Rankings as Rungs

D&D has “character levels”. Some other games have similar measures. In Hero Games, (XP spent – 100)/5 gives a rough equivalent in a low-xp campaign (halve it for a high-xp campaign). The exact mechanism doesn’t matter, which is why I’m employing the more generic term “Rankings”.

• Adventure #1: half-a-dozen rank 2 enemies (easy pickings).
• Adventure #2: half-a-dozen rank 4 enemies (more difficult).
• Adventure #3: four rank 6 enemies (about the same), plus a dozen rank 2 enemies.
• Adventure #4: two rank 8 enemies plus half-a-dozen rank 4 enemies (getting difficult now).
• Adventure #5: one rank 12 enemies plus two rank 8 enemies plus four rank 6 enemies and a dozen rank 2 enemies (maybe we’ve bitten off more than we can chew…)

This is an example of using rankings as Rungs – because you can see the opposition becoming more significant, and more central to each adventure with each step up the ladder, the excitement level builds, and the expectation is that Adventure#4 or Adventure #5 will be the top – depending on whether or not you have a plot twist and a hidden power and a much larger conspiracy to be revealed after the PCs think they’ve swept all before them in adventure #4.

The difficulty posed by the opposition provides a very subjective set of “rungs” that can be utilized not only to signify progress, but also to build emotional intensity over a multi-adventure arc – or even within an adventure.

Rewards as Rungs

A truism of most D&D-type games is that the more potent the opposition, the more experience is garnered from overcoming them. This provides a secondary mechanism by which Rankings can be translated into rungs as the PCs climb the ladder.

Most GMs will have recognized this, but not as many will realize that even in the absence of Rankings-as-rungs, rewards can be used to signal progress.

Let’s imagine that the PCs are about to explore a dungeon. They aren’t the first to go down there, but they hope to be the first to plumb the deepest levels and return. Sounds fairly typical so far, doesn’t it?

So, on the first level, they find few remains and few rewards of any note. On the second level, they start finding remains of past adventurers more regularly, but they have been stripped of almost everything of value – someone in the past has clearly had the same idea. Most rewards have been looted.

On the third level, they find remains about as frequently as before, but these still have items of low value or low-value-relative-to-their-bulk-or-weight. Since pickings have been relatively thin, to date, even these poor rewards have value – but the inconvenience factor outweighs the value for the most part. Some supplies can be replenished, however, and there might even be one or two items of moderate value that have been overlooked. Most rewards have been looted but some goodies remain.

On the fourth level, they find remains relatively infrequently, and many of them still have mid-level rewards in place. However, the best goodies have been looted – not by fellow adventurers, half the time, but by enemies who will turn them against the PCs. Effectively, the opposition have been taken up a rung, but the rewards are getting more noteworthy. What they do still have on them are many of the supplies and low-level rewards that were taken off corpses in the upper levels. Many of the caches of rewards that have collected here have NOT been looted significantly.

On the fifth level, there are only one or two sets of remains – but they are reasonably well-equipped, and probably as well-prepared for what they found as the party are. The fact that they did not survive whatever they encountered increases the sense of threat to the PCs. Most of the caches of rewards are intact. If anything, rewards might seem disproportionately high, just as those previous were disproportionately low. But if they succeed in clearing this level and get out alive, they will not only earn bragging rights – they will reclaim most of the rewards carried below by their predecessors.

In effect, there has been a flow of valuables from upper levels to lower, with dead adventurers as the vehicles of migration.

Whenever you contemplate emplacing a reward, think about what is likely to have happened to it since – then relocate anything worthwhile downwards. If there has been trade between the different groups, this furnishes a secondary mechanism in which migration of rewards can occur in both directions – so significant treasure in the hands of the residents of an upper level should signal to the players that such trade has occurred.

This approach to designing the dungeon can apply a veneer of realism to even the most randomly-generated residence of fiends and critters – or, at least, remove one of the less obvious and rarely considered failures of realism, making the suspension of disbelief that much easier. Throw in some thinking about the ecology, and how the creatures would have not only survived but prospered, and how they would alter the spaces they control, and an astonishing level of verisimilitude can be achieved.

More importantly, from the perspective of this article, there is an obvious progression that signals to the players that they are approaching the completion of their quest. There are visible signs of progress.

A quick side-note: When setting up relations between the societies you emplace beneath the surface, don’t make them all friends and allies. Every alliance should tick off someone else – whether they can do anything about it, or not.

This takes some events that would have otherwise been mere combat opportunities, the same as the one before and the one to come afterwards, and makes roleplaying opportunities out of them – while ensuring that diplomacy will not solve ALL the PC’s problems.

PC should encounter artisans, and potential friends, and enemies, and plots, and con-men – the full gamut of human existence should be twisted to fit this microcosm. This not only makes the dungeon seem more like a real (and realistic) place, it makes the encounters more interesting, too. And if the PCs get an easy ride through part of one level as a result, that only means that a lower level will be out for their blood that much more passionately.

Who’s paying attention?

I think the point is pretty much proved by now, so I’ll present just one more example.

Using a hierarchy of those monitoring the PCs also creates the impression that their endeavors represent noteworthy progress even when there is no such impression to be derived from the events themselves – provided there is some mechanism of interaction between the PCs and those supervising.

You can use this principle in all sorts of situations where the other mechanisms don’t work or don’t apply.

For example: You are a spy ring, operating in enemy territory. At first, your reports go to a minor functionary who seems mostly bored. Then he starts to show signs of interest, and then fascination. Then someone more senior, with a higher rank, starts taking their reports – and is obviously engaged with those reports. Next, that person starts issuing missions to the team rather than leaving them to their own devices. Some of these assignments fail, some succeed. The next thing the PCs know, they are reporting to that individual’s superior, and are being given specific information to obtain and high-level contacts. A few more successes on these assignments and they get reassigned to a General who begins sending them on rescue and sabotage missions…

There’s a clear progression up the ladder of who their orders are coming from and who they are reporting to. Even if their operations seem isolated and to have no lasting effect, from the on-the-ground perspective, this creates the impression that high command can see impacts that are not visible to the players – diversion of resources, heads rolling within the enemy command, and the like. The clock is clearly ticking it’s way toward a victory of some sort by the side represented by the PCs.

Or maybe it’s solving a mystery – the PCs start by interacting with a street-level constable, then a detective, then a sergeant of detectives, and ultimately with the captain of the detective squad – and maybe even then directly with the chief of police. These interactions start out with the PCs being opposed by the official forces of the law, then are grudgingly respectful, then eager and friendly and cooperative.

Once again, realism sells the validity of the ‘clock’, the ‘clock’ creates the impression of progress, and progress implies and is reflected in, emotional intensity. The campaign grows more and more exciting and feels more and more like it’s coming to a head.

On a bigger scale

Using combinations of elevations in the stakes, alliances, enemies, etc, I employ these techniques regularly within larger campaigns to signal progress towards a conclusion. Consequences may spin off into a sequel campaign, or into a new set of plot threads. There are dozens of ways that the PCs can interact with the universe around them at both an in-game and a meta level, and each is a lever that can be adjusted to slowly elevate the campaign in intensity, with natural variations along the way.

These techniques scale – though the level of detail and depth that you need to employ will vary with that scaling. I tend to think of it in terms of adding rungs to the ladder – if you have 5 steps between “A” and “B”, progress will be a lot more obvious than if you have 50 – and “B” would need to be more significantly different from “A”, to boot.

Detective Breadcrumbs

So these are good management techniques to employ at any time, in any campaign or adventure. But it’s when you have inflicted a mystery on the PCs that it becomes absolutely critical, because one breadcrumb looks exactly like another when you project them out of the in-game realm, through the meta-realm, and into the real world that is inhabited by the players and GM.

We aren’t talking about the characters feeling like they are making progress, but about the players feeling that their characters are making progress. That’s a subtle but very important distinction.

A defined list of suspects, and a series of clues each of which, when correctly investigated and unpacked, crosses a name off that list, fills the requirement. It’s not the only solution, but it’s one that works.

When planning an adventure or a campaign, you need to actively look for the opportunities that what you have planned provides you in terms of clock-ticks. This sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident.

A Real-world example

Take the current adventure in my Zenith-3 campaign. Act 1 was set in what has become ‘home’ for the PCs – not a single scene took place outside it. Act 2 brought them back to the primary Earth of the campaign setting, from which three-quarters of the PCs derive and spelled out the rest of the adventure’s “clock ticks”. They know that Act III will be in Brazil, Act IV will be in Central America and Mexico, Act V will be within the US as they set up a base of operations, and Act VI will deal with the 4th of July and a plot to detonate a nuclear device – somewhere, and will be the climax of this particular adventure.

Visible progress is made with each Act. Which means that shortening the Acts, in terms of game time required, will automatically escalate tension. Acts I and II were whole-session; Acts III and IV will be half-session in length (a couple of hours); Act V will probably be a full-session, more because of player input than anything I prepare, which will be a deep breath before we take the plunge into the high-speed action of Act VI, which might last one or even two game sessions.

This sense of progress will be critical, because none of these intermediate acts will advance the main plot of the adventure much if at all; they are more about traveling to the location where that main plot can be engaged. This is a logical step – before you can solve a mystery, you need to travel to where the mystery is – but that doesn’t mean that this travel feels like progress. In a different campaign, or even at a different time in this one, I would even contemplate hand-waving the travel; but there’s too much game-relevant material that is incidental only to the main plot of the adventure for that to be a viable option.

That’s what I mean about looking for the opportunities.

If it’s ever your intention just to frustrate the players – and there are times when that can be useful – then ensure that there are no clock-ticks, no progress markers – lots of sound and fury but nothing that will feel very significant, activity without apparent purpose. Why might you want to frustrate players? Because when that pent-up frustration is released, the sense of progress, of achievement, can be amplified – if it is done properly.

Like emotional intensity, progress markers are not just an end in themselves, but are a tool that can be used in various ways to elevate and accentuate your strengths as a GM. They bring so many side-benefits that it’s easy to justify their inclusion.

But, most of the time, it won’t happen by accident. And even if it does, if the game system has built something that can be used as a progress marker into the game-play, it can still be enhanced, nuanced, and manipulated through intelligent application. It won’t happen by accident – but if you are aware of the potential, and of the options open to you, you’ll discover that (over time), it will happen.

This month’s Blog Carnival is being hosted by Pitfalls & Pixies, and the subject is all things Fey.

I’ve never been very satisfied with the way D&D handles Fey. There was not enough information in AD&D to run them properly; they seemed to be just dressed-up humans, or monsters like any other (just a little smaller than usual). 3.x did a somewhat better job, but still didn’t provide enough information on setting, society, or politics, at least not in the core rulebooks.

As a consequence, Fey have only played a significant role in two of my campaigns.

A Tale Of Two Campaigns

When I was growing up, I read a lot of Enid Blyton’s fantasy short stories – things like the Wishing Chair. One of these collections focused on the Small Folk – I forget the name of it. But I drew on memories of those stories and a dozen other fairy tales to create the Fey for my first campaign. And promptly locked them away in their own plane – one with limited windows for transition to the Prime Material Plane, a place where Fey could only exist for a short period of time due to the presence of cold iron – which was iron that hadn’t undergone a particular heat-treatment during the refinement process to drive out impurities.

Of all the Fey, only Elves had unlocked a way to survive on the Prime Material Plane in an ongoing way. Elvish Forests were a kind of compromise between the reality of the Fey Plane (“The Land Of Two Shadows”) and the Prime Material Plane. But some aspects of the reality from whence they derived remained, and these ultimately manifested in the separation of Elves into Light Elves and Shadow Elves (often mistranslated as ‘Dark Elves’ or Drow). But this was so long ago that the Elves themselves had forgotten their origins (if you want to read about Elves in this campaign, you’ll find more information in He Once Was Elves, in which I recycle some of my old notes into the basis for an interesting (and modern) NPC for my superhero campaign.

In play, however, I kept running up against questions for which this limited development had not prepared me, and so shelved the Fey in my campaigns for many years to come.

That changed with the creation of the Shards of Divinity campaign. Although I’ve mentioned that campaign numerous times in passing – a snippet here and a snippet there – much of it remained hidden from the players, and so went unreported in these pages. For this article, I’ve decided to reveal many of these secrets for the first time, acknowledging for the first time that the campaign is dead.

It started dying when Stephen Tunnicliff passed away; although I thought that the campaign could continue without him (and it did, for more than a year), all the fun had gone out of it, and several attempts to rejuvenate the campaign had failed. It’s now been years, and I have zero enthusiasm for restarting it, even though the focal player (the whole campaign was a Star Vehicle) has indicated a couple of times that he would like to do so.

Without players, there is no campaign. Without a GM, there is no campaign. Each side of the game table holds the other hostage. And so the campaign is dead.

For readers of Campaign Mastery, however much they might sympathize with this situation, or even regret it on my behalf, this is hardly all bad news – because it lets me reveal the secrets within the campaign that were being held back because the players had not discovered them yet. And the Fey are at the heart of it all.

A Snapshot History of the Shards Of Divinity

The creator of the universe did so for two reasons: first, it was an act of creation, which was his hobby and greatest pastime. He had already created lesser beings simply for the company they would bring, for he was also extremely lonely in his solitary existence, which was the second reason. Where he had come from, he had no idea; one moment, he wasn’t, and the next instant, he was. He often communicated his enthusiasm for the project to these lesser celestial beings, not realizing that – like many older siblings – they resented his affections being transferred to his youngest creation. In a jealous rage (they were very petty and child-like), they tore him to pieces; but, at the last, he protected his creation by infusing all of existence with fragments of himself, giving the world magic.

The Angry Ones, his children, then turned their animosity toward the universe that had stolen their father’s affections, blaming it and its inhabitants for everything, and attempting to destroy it so that the shards of their father could be liberated and he could be restored, and everything would be as it was before this vile creation had come between them. They really had quite a limited understanding (despite their near-omnipotence), and that was married to the petulance of a three-year old.

The last creations of the Creator, the Dragons, rose up against the Angry Ones and, by manipulating the shards of Divine Creation around them, and sacrificing their own Independence from those Shards, they were able to imprison them in a planar construct and eject that reality from existence, and thought the matter settled. Some few amongst Dragonkind argued that the Angry Ones were as capable of survival as the Creator, and that the universe should be prepared for their potential return at any cost; others felt that protecting and shepherding the lesser species that he had created, and so protecting his legacy, were more important. This dichotomy of perspectives caused a split amongst the previously-unified dragonkind, one that grew until the kin were sundered.

The quickest non-draconic race to advance were the Elves, followed by Dwarves, then Halflings, with Humans the slowest to progress. The Dragons instructed the Elves in how to draw upon the Shards of Creativity to cast spells even while their own internal debate was unresolved but coming to a head. Chromatic dragons told selected members of the royal family about the Angry Ones, information that the Metallic Dragons had been shielding the lesser races from. One princess of the royal house proved receptive to the chromatic perspective, and the seeds of the rebellion that would become known as the Drow were sewn.

Meanwhile, the primitive humans had begun imagining supernatural beings who made the sun rise, the plants bloom, and to explain various other aspects of the world around them, and the power of belief joined with the presence of the Shards of The Creator to spawn the Gods. In some ways, these were as primitive as the humans who invented them, in some they embodied the best aspects of the humanity to come, and in others, the worst. These gods were forced to formalize religious practices amongst the humans and select spokesmen as intermediaries because every time a human invented a fanciful story, their reality flowed like water.

The Angry Ones returned, leading to a pitched battle. The disagreements between the branches of Dragonkind led to the schism between draconic kin, but the Elves fought by their sides and together succeeded in once again driving the Angry Ones out – at the cost of the lives of (almost all) the elder Dragons. The Elves became the tutors of the youngest Dragons, inverting the relationship between the two, and becoming the heirs to the mission of the elder Dragons – to protect and nurture the world against the return of the Angry Ones. But they could only pass on what they had been taught, and so much lore and expertise was lost. Not even the most skilled mage of the modern day can hold a candle to the skill and power of the Elder Dragons of yesteryear.

The valley which was the cradle of human civilization was, unknown to them, the crown of a volcano, and eventually, it awoke. They fled even as lava destroyed everything they had known, destroying what they thought of as an endless garden where life was easy. They met Elves for the first time as rescue parties were dispatched from the Elvish Forests. The survivors of the different tribal city-states scattered and founded new Kingdoms. Slowly, the cosmopolitan reality of the modern world built up as multiple species (mistakenly called “races” by some sources) learned to live together.

That’s the history of the world of the Shards Of Empire campaign in a nutshell. One of the races with whom contact and political connection was eventually made were the Fey, which is why all this is relevant to today’s article.

A world of illusion made reality

Before I can describe the Fey as they were used within the Shards campaign, though, I need to take a brief side-trip into game metaphysics and the resulting house rules.

The world of Shards was a world in which imagination created or transformed reality. Illusions, so long as they were believed by those who beheld them, were reality, but with each interaction with an illusion, subtle differences to what would have happened in reality made that perception more uncertain; eventually, it would fail.

This was a deliberate game-balance concept (amongst other functions) – it meant that there was a down-side to being highly intelligent, and in particular to being a mage. Elves shared the problem, since they were innately sensitive to the minor flaws in the illusions that revealed their true nature – and that common connection was where the concept of ‘Elves being the first Wizards’ came from.

The Problem With Warlocks

One of the great problems that most people ignore is ‘How does magic work?” This is a subject that I discussed in one of my very early posts here at Campaign Mastery, A Quality Of Spirit – Big Questions in RPGs. Clearly, this is a question that I had answered for the Shards Campaign, but it was a solution that held implications for several races and classes. One of the classes most affected was Warlock.

I’ve always had a conceptual problem with the Warlock class. There are very few interpretations of how the character class works that don’t cheapen and undermine Wizards, and Wizards are one of the iconic standard classes in D&D. Wizards are restricted and bound to their spell-books and require processes for the creation of new spells, the recording of spells into those spell-books, and the memorization of spells from those spell-books. Warlocks do their thing with none of those restrictions or liabilities and don’t give up much of the power or effectiveness of the Wizard in exchange. What’s more, they get an Eldritch Blast that Wizards don’t.

The Shards solution to the big question of what Magic was also solved the Warlock problem: All warlock powers were illusions.

In AD&D, there was a specialist subclass of Wizard with its own unique spell list, called Illusionist. For Warlocks in Shards, instead of banning the class outright (as I usually do), I rejigged Illusionists into Warlocks. Any spell on the Wizard list that mentions Illusion or that can be considered an Illusion was downgraded in power for everyone except Warlocks. All the other spells were downgraded for Warlocks but not for anyone else.

But we never got the opportunity to really explore the implications, because the Warlock in the party dropped out after a single session. It would have been fun watching him create ballistae and bridges and whatnot out of thin air, laying enemies low with Eldritch Blasts, only for anyone not actually killed to rise unharmed when someone broke the illusion, while the Wizard in the party fought to perpetually fail his saving throw to see through the illusion.

Fey Sources

One of the primary sources I used for the Fey in Shards was Faerie Tale by Raymond E Feist. His research for this book went back to a lot of the original sources, un-prettied up for modern fairy tales (hence the title), and it proved invaluable. I added to that some material from the TORG fantasy realm, Aysle, and a number of lesser sources, and supplemented these after the core concepts were in place with some relevant 3.x supplements such as ‘Fey Magic’.

So if some of the following seems familiar, that’s probably what you’re recognizing.

Masters of Illusion

The Fey in Shards were the true masters of illusion. Where normal characters got a saving throw to see through normal illusions, while some classes and races could automatically succeed, when it came to Fey Illusions, most people got no save at all, and those who would normally succeed automatically only got a save – and a difficult save at that. Now put such Fey in an environment where Illusions become reality… they could literally work Miracles – so long as you believed in them.

With Fey, everything was always about Perceptions. The glass is always half-something, but whether that’s full, empty, black, white, or pink, is up to the Fey. And they excel at the playing of diplomatic, social, and political games (there are those who would say that they excel at playing games, full stop!)

The Fey Realm lies in a pocket plane that is difficult to access save at points where the barrier between the worlds is thinner, marked with Fairie Rings by Energy Vortices connecting the realities. They were emplaced in this environment by the Dragons to provide a last line of defense against the Angry Ones, and everything about the Fey stems from that fact. The Dragons were fairly certain that if the Fey were ever needed in their last-line-of-defense capacity, the reality beyond the Fey Realm would be not be something they wanted to preserve; at the heart of the pocket plane that the Elder Dragons created was the largest single Shard Of The Creator that remained, and the limited size of the Realm meant that there was a higher concentration of Creative Force there than anywhere else in existence. This force leeched into the Fey and everything else within the environment, and made them what they are today.

The dichotomy within the Dragons also manifested in the mindset of the Fey. It started as the difference between supportive love and tough love, and simply intensified from there. You have one side that is trustworthy and honorable and enlightened, and another that considers itself superior to all others, is absolutely ruthless, and cares only for what all those inferiors can do for them – whether that’s to entertain them as playthings or perform menial functions as slaves. There is no middle ground; the Fey Realm is a place of absolutes.

These two factions contend endlessly for control – but there are conditions that must be met before any challenge for the Throne is permitted. So long as the faction in control avoids those triggers, it stays in command. There is a professional civil service that is drawn from the best of both factions and that serve for life or until voluntary retirement; the faction in command appoints new members to the civil service and rules on promotions, but there are limits on how far an individual can advance in one step. The rules of the Civil Service were set through negotiation between the two factions with the legendary Rainbow Dragon, last of its breed, as arbiter, and were a combination of powers each side insisted on having and limits that they wanted to impose upon the other side – even if it meant that they had to abide by them, as well. It takes unanimity between the factions to vary the laws that emerged, and that is such a rare event that the Fey use them as markers to divide epochs.

Challenges may take any form desired by the challenging faction, within limits defined by the nature of the triggering condition. These rules are so arcane and obscure that only the Civil Service know them all. The most senior civil servant from each faction must agree on the restrictions that are relevant, and how they apply to the current situation. The challenger then chooses a confrontation – usually a game or contest of some kind – that both these adjudicators agree is within the rules that they have identified as relevant, adding any scoring regulations as tradition demands – and as they see fit.

Such Challenges can be anything from shape-changing to a chess tournament to hunting some fell beast to poetry recitals to puzzles of logic. The assumption which enables these to represent a valid contest for the transition of power is that they abstractly simulate challenges that might befall the Fey at any time, and the winner is the faction whose philosophies have therefore demonstrated a greater capability for dealing with the problem. Of course, the abilities and temperament of the opposition are a key consideration when choosing the form of a challenge, and this fosters a grudging respect between the two factions. And both sides do anything and everything they can think of to cheat, short of breaking one of the Greater Rules that result in immediate disqualification of the challenge.

Fey are divided into ranks which function like levels within a character class. Creating and maintaining an illusion is an act of will, but there is a difference between the singular application of will required to create something (or the appearance of something, which is the same thing to the Fey) and the continual concentration needed to maintain that illusion – even when sleeping – without being distracted or unable to function. (There were a whole raft of game mechanics devoted to handling this).

Fey are born with an inherent base level in these ranks, a birthright that is determined by averaging the current ranks of the parent Fey. However, above 16th rank, Fey are sterile with respect to their own kind and must mate with a human of appropriate gender. This immediately limits the offspring, since Humans are far more limited in capacity to wield Fey illusions than the Fey are (their Wisdom Bonus provides a surrogate equivalent level). What’s more, Fey are rarely fertile more than two or three times in their natural lives, and none can predict when or if they will have a future opportunity for progeny. They have to grasp the opportunity whenever it presents itself.

This ensures a diverse gene pool and a regular turnover of leadership within each faction, and means that experience and expertise – which the Fey earn through the crafting of Illusions – are the primary means of promotion through the ranks of their faction.

It also becomes relevant when scoring certain forms of contest; convincing two Fey of rank 15 is as important and useful as convincing three Fey of rank 10. Most Fey do not belong to either faction exclusively; that is a philosophic choice that need only be made upon reaching Rank 10, in order to progress further in Fey Rank. It should also be noted that while one faction is distracted by the necessity of ruling, the other is free to practice and scheme, ensuring that there is a regular turnover of ruling faction. In particular, ruling factions may seek to bring on challenges at times when they consider themselves dominant and likely to win any challenges; these opportunities cannot be refused by the rival faction or the conditions for a challenge will be reset as though they had lost the challenge, and they might need to wait decades for another chance – or it might happen next week.

Ambassadors from the Court are drawn from the Civil Service, producing a continuity of relations with other races, especially Humans, who have grown powerful enough to threaten the Fey should they ever unite against them (there is an unsubstantiated rumor that all Warlocks are actually half-Fey, which means that to some extent the attitude of Humans to Fey depends on the reputation of Warlocks – rising and falling depending on factors completely outside Fey control).

A little thought will reveal the byzantine nature of the politics that result from these circumstances and realities. These conditions are mirrored on a smaller scale on a dozen or more estates, each of which appoints a number of delegates to the Unseelie Court. A perpetual conundrum is whether or not to risk conceding local authority in order to send your most capable representatives to court, which in turn elevates your faction’s chances of successfully challenging for the rule of the entire Realm.

This, of course, only scratches the surface and hints at the exotic strangeness of the Fey. But it’s a foundation for others to build upon within their own campaigns, and provides an example of how Fey can be integrated into a campaign while still respecting whatever sources the GM has at hand. The results are sure to be different in every case, and that, too, is part of a fascination with the Fey that only deepens, the more you read about them.

Style without substance is a soap bubble, all surface glitz and no depth – and just as fragile. Substance without style is utilitarian and contains no room for fun. For anything – including RPGs – to succeed, you need something of both.

I once saw an interview with a comedy TV writer – I forget who or in what – but the gist of it was that “Comedy needs to be dangerous.” Which is to say, that it needs to examine controversies, needs to dare to risk poking fun at serious issues and problems, or it becomes irrelevant fluff. Doing so means that a joke may fail – and be weeded out – but when it succeeds, it grants perspective and breaks down entrenched positions.

Comedy doesn’t need social relevance to be funny – but being irreverent about social issues increases the likelihood of engaging the audience, and if you can get them to laugh about something serious, they are being seriously entertained.

So you need both style and substance.

In Conflict

It’s often the case that the two are in conflict. The nuts-and-bolts of game mechanics are a “great” way to puncture mood and interrupt flow, and that’s reflected in the role combat has in building up the emotional intensity of a story, as described in my two-part series on Emotional Pacing, Swell and Lull (Part 1, Part 2). But, if the game is to have substance, it needs the crunchy bits.

In Harmony

Having the two co-exist in harmony is a lot easier said than done. You need the design of the game mechanics to play ball, and you need the substance of the style to be appropriate. If neither quite fits that recipe, then you have some ongoing conflict between the two, and only the severity is in question.

If you have been a GM for any length of time, I’m sure that you will have experienced one of those days where everything seems to go right in terms of the game reflecting the genre and engaging the players and being fun almost effortlessly for all concerned. The players laugh naturally at the funny bits, take seriously the serious bits, are pensive and reflective and contemplative when appropriate, get fired up and gung-ho on cue, and it all blends seamlessly.

Nine out of ten of such days will be days which are “pure roleplaying,” with no crunch involved beyond the mechanics of character construction. Maybe more.

But the tenth day is the one that makes a GM feel like he’s really in command of his craft and at the height of his powers – like he really knows what he’s doing. I get that feeling maybe once a year – on average. Those are the days when the game mechanics play an active role in the adventure but don’t break the mood, they enhance it, and vice-versa. Those are the days that you live for, as a GM.

Those are the days when the game mechanics and tone and adventure content and role-play interaction and narrative all work together in harmony, synergizing to produce an entertainment greater than the sum of its parts. As a general rule, you do nothing differently to what you’ve done a thousand other times – it just seems to work better than usual, for some reason.

The Crunchy Bits

It’s hard enough getting these two natural antagonists to line up in support of each other at the best of times without the game mechanics and campaign fighting each other. That’s why choice of game system for any given campaign is so important.

There’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t use D&D to run a superhero campaign – it just requires some creative interpretation. That’s no longer a fireball spell, it’s a fire-blast power. Those aren’t Magic Missiles – they are now Cosmic Power Bolts that will twist and turn around obstacles once locked onto a target. It’s all in the flavor text and how you interpret it.

I would never do it.

There are constraints upon the D&D system mechanics that are wholly artificial in nature, such as the level system and the concept of only engagements with equal or better foes being significant or noteworthy, that simply don’t fit the super-heroics mold. In a superhero campaign, the concept is far more egalitarian: you can fight off an alien invasion this week and be crawling through the slums after a human-alligator crossbreed the week after, and both should be expected to provide a similar level of challenge to the PCs. Trouble can come from a costumed punk robbing a bank as readily as a costumed world-conqueror and be equally challenging to solve.

The game mechanics of D&D are in conflict with the genre of superheroes, and therefore with almost all campaigns belonging to that genre, and that’s all there is to it.

Even within the fantasy milieu, some concepts work better with D&D than others, and to force the two into a shotgun wedding usually means drastic surgery on the game mechanics – for example, “No-one in existence has more than 6 levels, and XP earnings are 1/10th of the book value.” If you really want high-level magic to be so rare – all but non-existent – there are better game systems out there to choose from.

If you want your crunchy bits and stylistic elements to harmonize, it’s much better if they start off on speaking terms!

Ultimately, the purpose of “the crunchy bits” of a game system are to facilitate attempts by characters to do something. They have to

• Define what characters can’t do;
• By exclusion, define what characters can do (anything else);
• Define how the chances of success should be determined;
• Define how those chances are to be tested;
• Define how the results of any such test are to be translated from cause into effect.

Every game mechanic subsystem can be defined in terms of an ordinary function that they are intended to simulate, but these usually interlock with each other. A skills subsystem, for example, ties into the experience subsystem, which ties into anything else that is or can be improved through the acquisition of expertise and field experience, such as the combat subsystem, or the spellcasting subsystem.

But the things that a character can be expected to want to try and do will be defined by the genre and circumstances – so the substance can never be fully divorced from style.

Style must hook into Substance

While game mechanics can be varied with House Rules, these are generally just tweaking the system to achieve the last few percentage points of compatibility between campaign and rules. For the most part, you need the mechanics to be consistent and predictable, and variations to be explicit and documented. Only if there are no relevant rules to draw upon can new-rules-on-the-fly be justified.

The more mature a game system, the fewer such blind spots there should be. Human error and failures of design notwithstanding, the trend should be toward comprehensiveness.

If the mechanics are fixed and not easily changed to suit the needs of the moment, it becomes clear that style must hook into substance and not vice-versa. That means that one requirement of the mechanics – and one that is often overlooked – is that they should provide anchoring points for style to integrate with the mechanics.

These anchoring points generally come down to interpretation of results. What does it mean when the player rolls a 17 on his three d6? Or gets an additional d6 to roll for something? What’s the significance of missing a target by three instead of eight?

But the style can also dictate which mechanics are relevant – circumstances which require a skill check, or a saving throw are dictated by the story, and are therefore within the GMs purview.

Style Washes and Splashes

Style in an RPG can be thought of as a watercolor painting. It comes in two basic flavors: “Washes” and “Splashes”.

In watercolor (and other painting forms), a “wash” is an area of broadly similar color, frequently employed as background. It’s achieved by using a lot of water (or appropriate diluting agent) mixed with the paint – the technical terminology is a “thin” layer of paint. “Wash” effects are practically synonymous with watercolors, however.

More intense concentrations of paint are used for featured elements of an image. There’s no one general term for using these, because there are dozens of different ways of applying the paint and each of those has its own specific name. Since I needed such a generic term for use in this article, I’ve chosen to call them “Splashes”.

The above images aren’t there just because they are pretty. The watercolor analogy is a very exact match for the use of color – what I’ve been calling “style” in this article – in an RPG. You have the persistent content, the stuff that’s there all the time in one form or another – the “wash” – and the featured, attention-grabbing bits, the “splashes”.

That also makes these images symbolic of what can be done with these two elements – and carefully-judged applications of the harsh inks of game mechanics. They depict the art of the possible.

Stylistic Wash

The analogy isn’t perfect. There are four major elements of roleplaying game-play that can carry style, or be shaped to deliver style, and they can all be used for wash or punched up in significance for splash.

Stylistic wash describes content that is always present in one form or another. Descriptions for example – you are always describing something. Skill Roll interpretations (including attack rolls in Combat) are naturally wash unless you make a big deal out of them or the results of success or failure are dramatic in story terms. Story and characterization are ever-present, but can bubble along gently without standing up and demanding attention. These are all stylistic wash.

Stylistic Splash

Stylistic Splash is when an element forces its way to prominence. But there are degrees of prominence – from in-your-face-can’t-be-ignored to first-among-near-equals. Danger, drama, intensity – these are manipulable aspects of style that control prominence and emotional intensity.

In practical terms, things that demand the PCs act should come last, and things that establish atmosphere should come first. Big-picture should precede specifics. Obvious should precede subtle. Attention-getting should precede things you have to look for or think about. Actions should precede thoughts.

By my count, that’s five different criteria, all demanding that some things go first and some things should be last – but some have to be in the middle, no two can happen at the same time, and the chances that all five will concur is vanishingly remote.

When you have multiple priorities in conflict, judgment comes into play. Genre can be a guide, but ultimately, regardless of genre, the objective has to be the telling of a clear story without confusion. And, when those decision-makers also evenly balance across two different choices, personal preference is the only remaining factor – and that’s where an individual style comes from.

Accidental Style

Some people don’t think about these things – they just tell the best story they can at any given point in time and let the chips fall where they may. They might even think that they don’t have a distinctive style.

Well, I’ve got news for them: In every game I’ve ever played – or sat next to – I could tell who was GMing just from the description of a day’s play. We all do some things better than others, and do some things by reflex (ignoring other choices that might be equally or even more valid) – unless we make it our business to explore our options and technique – and that adds up to a personal style whether we planned to have one or not.

If you don’t do it deliberately and with forethought, it will happen anyway – but it will be accidental and instinctive, and you will have no control over the process or the outcome.

Concept As The Vehicle Of Style

I stated earlier that there were four primary vehicles of style. The first of these is concept – these are the ideas that you have; more specifically, the ideas that you do not reject.

Remember the line from all those John West ads – “It’s the fish that John West reject that makes them the best”? It’s not quite right as an analogy to this situation, but it’s close. The difference is the presumption that there will be better fish to source, somewhere – a law of averages deal that would rarely let John West down – but that’s not all that true of one person working in isolation – i.e. a GM – when it comes to ideas.

Both factors – breadth of imagination and selectivity – play their part in the broad concept of, well, “concept”.

Plot

The discerning, who may have glanced ahead at the section titles to come, may well have noticed the absence of two things that they might have expected to see – I’ve written about both often enough. These are Plot and Story.

Plot is “intended story” – and it’s generally vague in some respects (or it should be) because the GMs is not the only creative mind engaged in the RPG process. To avoid too much uncertainty, plot is often produced in outline terms only, a practice that I recommend. Plot often lacks an ending; it concentrates more on the problems that will have to be overcome than it does the process of overcoming them.

Another way of saying “intended story” is to say “Story idea”, or even “Story concept”. And that is why Plot doesn’t get its own listing; I consider it to be a part of the broader term, “Concept”.

Story

If plot is “intended story” then “story” has to refer to “plot as executed, not just as planned”. But that consists of three things that are not plot: Narrative and its delivery, Character Interplay and the imputed personalities of the characters depicted, and Interpretation of situations and random results within the context of the situation at the time. Those are the only ways that the players experience plot in the RPG, so those are the terms that the GM should employ when considering the translation of plot into story, i.e. the execution of the plot.

Just as plot is subsumed into the broader term, “Concept”, so “story” is divided into the three aspects of story that are deliverable, because those are the practical manifestations of style.

Want to frustrate yourself endlessly for an infinite amount of time? Try to tell someone how to have an idea. Where they come from, we really have no clear idea – just a lot of double-talk about having a strong imagination (i.e. an ability to produce ideas on demand), or being a lateral thinker (i.e. the ability to produce ideas no-one has even thought about before). Somehow, we have the ability to abstract unfinished stories or images or whatever and project possible ‘next parts,’ or extensions of the existing content, to ‘grow’ the content – and that new content is then called an ‘idea’.

Some people have visual ideas, some have narrative ideas, some have plot ideas, some are strong in broad abstract concepts, some are gifted in emotional projection, some are gifted with musical imaginations – the list is almost endless. In every field of human endeavor, there are ground-breakers who advance the art of what is possible, and those who plod along in their footsteps.

So I can’t really tell you how to have ideas, let alone how to have good ideas, because no-one really knows how it happens. I can tell you various means of strengthening your imagination, however – as others have done – and pretend that this will be sufficient.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: all those imagination-strengthening techniques add up to exposure to other people’s imaginations so that you can mentally add to your storehouse of the ‘existing art’. You could read every novel ever published and it still won’t make you a great novelist – but it will make you a workmanlike novelist. You may not be capable of that instinctive leap that extends the art – but you will be ‘state of the art’. That’s not quite the same thing, but it’s close enough for our purposes – and may even be more suitable to our needs. Because, as with comedy, pushing the limits means sometimes failing.

Or, to put it another way: don’t fret that you aren’t a genius. Being competent is more than good enough, and may even be better.

Because that means that you have a vast number of alternatives from analogous situations cataloged in your subconscious that you can draw upon to solve most plot problems. Given a problem, you can come up with ideas.

The other half of the creativity equation is something that can only really be learned from experience. Some things are always going to be unacceptable because they contain logical flaws stemming from not having put the right foundation ingredients in place; some because they are too far removed from the genre; and some because they won’t take the story in the right direction. Others will be acceptable because the players will not tolerate them, or because they will create discomfort for no good reason.

But with thousands of possibilities, or millions, there are still going to be a wealth of choices remaining, which is where the GM has to exercise his judgment and style. The only advice I can offer in this respect is extremely broad – remember what you are trying to achieve (fun for all); remember what you are trying to achieve in plot or story terms; and contemplate what your players enjoy, and in particular, whose turn it is to have the spotlight. If you play to those requirements, and strive not to be overly-predictable, you won’t go too far wrong.

Concept is primarily a “splash” mechanism, though each “splash” leaves a cumulative contribution to the background “wash”. One reason why it’s important to make as many of your ideas good ones is that they never completely go away – good, bad, or indifferent. And it doesn’t take a lot of bad taste before the mix becomes unpalatable – or a lot of mediocrity before it simply becomes bland.

Narrative As The Vehicle Of Style

Style, in the form of flavor, is often most obvious when incorporated into narrative, simply because so much needs to be described in any RPG. At the same time, narrative can put players to sleep if there is too much of it; an RPG needs to be interactive.

Case in point: for the next game session of the Zenith-3 campaign, I have to brief the players on a situation in an unfamiliar location – which means telling them the ground rules, i.e. the political situation. I also need to establish characterizations for a whole bunch of NPCs that haven’t appeared before, which means still more narrative. As things stand, the whole thing is likely to be soporific. To solve this, I need to find ways of making it more interactive, of getting the players involved.

In the current draft, they aren’t even permitted to speak – but I’ve solved that problem, which is a start, however minimal! I need to inject more such modes of interaction, and add some more opportunities for the players to get involved. More questions for them and fewer answers from me. If that means that what would currently take about 3 hours to get through expands to need four or five hours to get through, i.e. the whole day’s play, so be it. Better a slow day than a dull 3/4 of a day!

So important is narrative as a conduit of style and flavor, and so difficult the constraints, that I have written a major series on the subject: The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative. There’s no way that I can summarize everything that’s in that six-part series in a few short paragraphs, the best that I can do is refer readers to the source.

Narrative is ephemeral, for the most part; once it’s delivered, and the players have stopped interacting with elements of it, it’s gone. Unlike Concepts, there’s very little persistence.

That’s both good and bad; it means that a bad passage of narrative, once it’s gone, does little ongoing harm, but it also means that you have to continually do a top job with your narrative, you can never rest on your laurels.

Interplay As The Vehicle Of Style

The third primary conveyor of style is the interplay between characters. It was only recently that I discovered that I had never written an article on the subject for Campaign Mastery and set about correcting that deficit; the results may be found in Speaking In Tongues.

It’s critical in interplay situations that any characterization established within the preceding narrative be sustained, deepened, and enhanced; while few players will remember what a character has said, the personality that is conveyed by their choices of language and tone will usually be remembered. If that personality accords with the narrative, the impact can be greater and more memorable than the sum of its parts; if the two are in conflict, there will be a vacuum created, an empty spot where “characters” are concerned. Players might remember someone’s identity intellectually, but those characters won’t mean anything to them.

Who are the characters that you remember from TV – from a series such as MASH (chosen because I expect almost everyone to have seen it)? Who remembers Sargent Benson? Anyone? He was the character brought in by a general whose nose was out of joint to spy on the deportment of Potter’s command for I-corps. A one-off appearance. Contrast that with Corporal Klinger – who was also brought in for a single episode, in fact, for a single joke, and who did such a tremendous job that he became a series regular.

You might think that comparison is unfair, simply because Klinger became a regular – so let’s throw in a couple of other one-shots. Captain Bardonero, BJ’s practical-joke playing friend, played by the Australian actor James Cromwell in the episode Last Laugh. Or Captain Roy DuPree, the cowboy and temporary replacement surgeon exchanged for Hawkeye by the 8063rd? Both were memorable characters because they had strong on-screen personalities, expressed through on-screen dialogue. “Here’s to the three of us. We’re gonna have more fun than a mosquito in a blood-bank” – in a Southern drawl.

Like concepts, characterization is a “Splash” that lingers as a “Wash”, leaving an imprint on the campaign. And Interactions between PC and NPC are the delivery vehicles for characterization. It doesn’t matter how complex and rich the personalities are that you create in character biographies; what matters is what you can deliver in-play.

One of the worst mistakes that new GMs make is focusing on major NPCs; this usually changes the first time one player says to another, “This must be important, the NPCs got a personality” – or words to that effect. That’s a sure sign that everyone who isn’t an obvious featured NPC is a cardboard cutout and recognizable as such – and can (and will) be treated as such by the PCs.

Make your incidental characters as rich and complex as you can. Not to the point of turning them into caricatures, but enough to make them all feel real – and the result will be that the game world will feel more real, even when those characters aren’t around.

Interpretation As The Vehicle Of Style

The last of the four major carriers of style in an RPG is how you, as GM, interact with players attempts to use the game mechanics to do things – whether that’s to call some relevant information to mind (a knowledge skill), make a fishing net out of reeds (a practical skill), bluff an NPC (an interpersonal skill), strike a target (a combat skill), or put doubts aside (an internal skill).

There’s more nuance to this aspect of gaming than you might think. You have control over:

1. Whether or not to call for a skill check;
2. The circumstances that surround that call;
3. Which skill to ask for a check of;
4. Potential substitutes or alternatives to that skill;
5. How you will handle potential synergies;
6. The translation of circumstances into modifiers to targets or difficulty numbers;
7. The question of degrees of success or failure;
8. Interpretation of the outcome;
9. How you describe that interpretation in narrative form;
10. Whether or not repeated attempts are possible; and
11. What modifiers may be appropriate for repeated attempts.

All of these can be definitive of at least part of your personal style, and of the campaign style (what’s the difference? You carry your personal style from one campaign to another, but your campaign style is specific to a particular campaign or genre.)

Some are obvious, others less so. A particular GM, for example, might be generous in the latitude applied to substitute skills and potential synergies, but harsh on the modifiers – and, if he’s consistent about that, the players will notice. It will mean that characters will either succeed easily or face catastrophic odds, and will perpetually be on a knife-edge. While the GM would probably see this as a balanced approach, the players will not, though that can be mitigated through partial successes and other forms of degree of success. All of which gives you some idea of how rich and complex the interplay between these 11 decisions can be.

I know one GM, for example, who never comes right out and indicates success or failure; instead, he describes the outcome and leaves it up to the player to decide whether or not that’s good enough. I couldn’t do that, it’s not part of my style. Which is exactly what I’m getting at.

There are a number of articles here at Campaign Mastery which collectively address all these questions and the contrivance and conveyance of style that results.

• The Nimble Mind: Making Skills Matter in RPGs;
• “How Hard Can It Be?”- Skill Checks under the microscope;
• Precision Vs Holistic Skill Interpretation; and,
• Narratives Of Skill: How To ‘Improv’ Outcome Descriptions In Advance.

One way of looking at an RPG game session is as a continuous blend of narrative and interaction punctuated by Interpretations of Outcomes. It’s an interesting perspective when you contemplate the significance of game mechanics, for example. But it’s also relevant when assessing the way these decisions deliver and manipulate style. As with several of the aspects of gaming that have been discussed, the first impression is that these will principally be “splash” elements – but players will adjust their own playing style to maximize their advantages, and that creates an ongoing effect on style that is carried beyond individual skill checks / attacks.

Whats more, the GM tends to modify his own style in reaction to behavioral changes by the players, and that is also an ongoing influence.

Wrestling With Style

All these influences on style and the human tendency to fall into behavioral patterns means that every GM has his own distinctive style, which hearkens back to what I said earlier – that after getting to know them, I could recognize each GM’s distinctive style and identify them from a description of a day’s play.

There were a couple of occasions when that didn’t work, and someone surprised me. But they were rare. Some GMs I could recognize just from knowing their style as a player.

Sometimes, the content that a GM is trying to deliver can conflict with his style. As a result, he never feels comfortable or settled and is always forcing himself to execute the material he is supposed to deliver.

There are times when, in order to run a scene, an encounter, or an entire adventure or campaign, the GM has to wrestle with his style, do combat with the instincts that he can normally rely on, and second-guess every decision.

As a general rule of thumb, if you don’t read it, or watch it, you won’t succeed at GMing it – except in comparison to someone even worse at the job. In the Zener Gate campaign, I ran an adventure set in the old west at one point – and had to struggle with it all the way, and exhausted my entire stockpile of ideas for that particular setting.

But sometimes, you can surprise yourself, too – I was never in great difficulty in running the Team Neon Phi (super-agents) campaign within my superhero game universe, and both players and myself enjoyed a romp full of cloak-and-dagger and shadowy conspiracies, to such an extent that I would not hesitate to run such a campaign again.

The Heavens Align

There are times, though, when the heavens align and everything clicks. The result is the most fun that you can have as a GM.

There is a danger, the first time that you experience it, that you will then start to chase it, meddling with one or more of things that got you there in the process. You can get yourself in such a tangle of frustration that you eventually give up completely – I’ve seen it happen.

This danger tends to be mitigated by experience; you become more aware that you aren’t doing anything different to what you usually do, and that enables you to avoid this trap. That’s the point at which you can start improving your game in a constructive way, adding to your repertoire to maximize the opportunities for lightning to strike again, without getting in the way of the prospects.

The same thing happens in other media and activities, too. You can be an actor, and discover one part that makes it all feel effortless and natural, or an acting partnership that has genuine chemistry. It happens in game design – of both the computer-game and board-game varieties.

It’s worthwhile taking a moment to consider how this would look from the outside. I think the key word to be used in description is “effortless”, or results in great disproportion to the effort that has been expended. I got that impression when reading a proposed advertisement for Gambino Free Slots – and I get to read a lot of them for such sites. With many, they have one point of distinction, and sometimes that’s of interest and sometimes not; with Gambino, it was one thing after another. It was an impressive litany of positives.

Unfortunately, there was nothing in the submitted advertisement that would make it of interest to the majority of Campaign Mastery readers, however impressive it might have been as a piece of advertising. But it was enough to get me thinking, and this article was the outcome.

Mastery of your style as a GM – or in any other endeavor – begins with an understanding of the constituents of that style, and how they manifest within the endeavor in question. Once you understand those, and the synergies that are possible between them, then you too can hope to do the equivalent of hitting the slot machines jackpot. And, if slot machines float your boat as well as RPGs, you could do worse than to take a look at Gambino; just follow the links provided.

Over the weekend, Campaign Mastery was described by the very flattering term, “one of the best Treasure Troves for a DM”. Aside from feeling very chuffed at the compliment, my mind immediately started to think about Treasure Troves. This article is the result.

The Map

So, how do you find a treasure trove? The two obvious answers are “Look in a dungeon” and “Follow a treasure map”. I’ll talk about the first of these in a little bit, but let’s start with the Treasure Map that somehow finds its way into the hands of the party.

The most important question about treasure and anything to do with it, as implied by the title of the article, is always “How did that get here!?” So, how did it come about that the treasure map was available for the PCs to get their hands on it? Answer that with any plausibility and the whole campaign’s credibility is enhanced and reinforced; fail to do so, and the credibility of everything else is threatened and undermined.

This is important because if you have a reputation for credibility, players will forgive or overlook the occasional lapse, whereas if they have to fight tooth and nail for anything even smelling of justifiably, their first reaction to anything will be frustration and “here we go again” – neither of which are conducive to having fun in most cases.

It’s not necessary to construct an entire backstory for the map (though it does leave you ready for just about anything); some hints that there is such a backstory is usually enough to “sell” the credibility of the map, which convinces the players to invest the time and effort into following it, which in turn gets the adventure moving forwards instead of having them sit around stirring up mischief and getting themselves in trouble.

It’s too easy for a GM to misapply the principle of ‘letting the players decide their own fates and make their own decisions’ into being completely passive. That just doesn’t work. You need to dangle opportunities for adventure in front of them until they decide which one to follow next. Life is full of stuff that just happens, why should a fantasy life be any different? Only the type of “stuff” should vary.

In practical terms, there are only two – perhaps three – parts of that backstory that matter.

1. The Immediate

Who did the PCs get the map from and is it credible that they had it to lose? I’m never particularly interested in identities when it comes to answering this question; generic labels tend to expose any issues more quickly. “Rufus Dowdrop owns the map and will use it in collateral in a game of Starsdrop” is not as informative as “An ex-military lowlife possesses the map and will use it as collateral in a game of Starsdrop”. Or it could be “A street punk”, or “A wealthy local”. Of those three answers, only the last needs no further elaboration or justification; but the other two are suggestive of two entirely different answers.

One more tip: there’s a very strong temptation to employ the past tense when thinking about these things; in the GM’s mind, the map is already in the hands of the PCs. DON’T DO IT. Using the future tense, as I have above, makes a huge psychological difference to the GM – instead of thinking about the map as a static thing, it suddenly becomes the key to unlocking a plot, the beating heart of an adventure. Instead of writing a heavy background sequence, you are immediately more engaged in finding ways to get the PCs into the story. Such a small thing, but it makes a huge difference.

2. Origins

Who drew the map in the first place? Again, generics are less work and more quickly reveal problems and inadequacies in the credibility department.

3. In-Betweeners

Is it a serious contention that no-one has ever tried following the map before? If so, this needs explanation in the context of the “handover” to the PCs: “I’ve held onto this map for years. It’s the last valuable thing I own; I always hoped that one day I’d be able to mount an expedition to find the fabulous treasures that must lie at the end of the trail. But I never could. Now it’s come to this…” Three sentences, but they carry a barge-load of credibility in selling the map to the PCs.

On the other hand, every time someone has tried to follow the map and failed, you have two further things that need explanation: how the map was returned to “Civilization”, and what happened to those other adventurers – at least in legend.

The Destination

The second major thing that the GM needs to consider – and the “origins” question above will play directly into the decision – is what will (in generic terms) be found at the end of the map, and is that credible?

Most maps either don’t meet the “treasure map” trope, or they are to a military cache or emplacement (if into relatively ‘known’ lands) or to a mine that has not been rediscovered (if into relatively ‘unexplored’ lands).

Everything else is simply a mark on a normal map, 99% of the time. It would take an expert eye – or long and close examination – to pick out the one marking on the map that doesn’t correspond with something well known, and that therefore might be worth exploring. “Wait, I don’t remember an [x] between Longhop Marsh and Little Bigstrap,” where [x] might be an inn, or a monastery, or a temple, or whatever, “but there’s one marked on this map. We have to check it out!” – and the adventure is off and running. But unless you spoon-feed the discovery to the players, it might take them weeks or months to notice it, because there’s no good reason for it to be marked any differently to any of the other locations on the map.

“Treasure maps” – maps with a notable and obvious “X” marking the spot (visible or otherwise) get past this problem immediately. There may or may not be a route marked; there may or may not be good reason for retracing that route if there is one, and the players may or may not have access to the information they need to make an informed choice. This is such a concatenation of improbabilities that in most cases, the players will have to make blind choices about how they are going to get to X. They might find that there’s good reason for following the trail – it’s the only viable route, for example, or that it’s the least dangerous approach (which is why it was used in the first place). Or they might have to just muddle through on their own.

The “lost mine” is problematic for the campaign, in the long run, unless it was mined out (but the players don’t know and can’t find out about this). Legend can have it be stuffed full of gold ore, or silver, or gemstones. Such things tend to grow in the retelling. But it makes a natural “dungeon”.

Outnumbering such by at least 100-to-1 would be the alternative – military caches or installations, especially ones that were set up by lost expeditions or long-past military junkets.

What’s in the Treasure Trove?

The “book” – interpreted in one specific way – says that PCs of a given character level will typically have ‘one of these at +x and one of those at +y’ – and the GM therefore, in the minds of some players, has an obligation to make those magic items available to the players – which means putting them in hoards or Treasure Troves.

Forget the book.

Using this as a guide to treasure emplacement is a short-term band-aid that will do long-term damage to the campaign.

What gets emplaced in a hoard or treasure trove should always make sense in terms of the nature of the location.

Let’s say we’re talking about a military cache. What would be there? Well, ordinary swords break from time to time; so there would be some of those. Daggers are utility devices as much as weapons, and likely to blunt over time; while they can be resharpened, that takes time and makes some noise. So letting them get blunt and having replacements on hand makes sense. Preserved food and water? Quite plausible. Other cooking supplies: salt and spices? Possibly, but these are frequently expensive. Still, the amounts needed are relatively small, so it’s not entirely implausible. Replacement tents and tent-pegs and bedrolls and blankets and other consumables like fresh uniforms? Absolutely.

Now drop in a +3 sword of Giant-slaying, or whatever. It sticks out like a sore thumb – who has enough such magic items that they can afford to leave on in a cache? Only someone in a campaign that gives away such items like a politician’s promises. It makes no sense, has zero credibility – and damages the credibility of the rest of the campaign.

An elite unit might have +1 or +2 swords. Especially if they are foreign – Elvish or Dwarfish or whatever.

Something I remembered in table conversation on Saturday: In the second campaign I ever played in, characters were 3rd level before they even got their hands on a (non-magical) long-sword as opposed to the short-swords that were ubiquitous. Three fighter-types came to blows over which of them most deserved to have this powerful weapon, and the extra damage that it could inflict.

So forget what the book says. Don’t sacrifice your credibility so cheaply. Instead of a +3 sword of Dragon-slaying, emplace three or four +1 weapons.

The Fumanor Solution

I spent almost twenty years thinking about such things before the Fumanor campaign got off the ground. That’s one reason why it (and its sequels) lasted for so long – 13 years (and still unfinished, but in hiatus at the moment).

It’s strange, but even with everything the players knew about me and my GMing style, they were still blind to some things and never discovered them in all the years they spent in that campaign.

For example, they bitched about the low level of magic floating around the campaign despite the existence of various ways to buff the plus of items within the campaign, and ways to take two +1 swords for example and create a single +2 weapon out of them. Two +2s could make a +3, and so on. Embedding a ‘special ability’ of some sort consumed as many pluses as the rating of the ability “Vorpal” was a +5 equivalent, so a +5 weapon with “Vorpal” was a “Vorpal Sword +0”. One of those plus a straight +5 gets you a “Vorpal Sword +1”. And so on.

But no sword can hold more than a +5 bonus unless the extra is consumed in special abilities. So to get from a Vorpal Sword +1 to a VS +2, you need two +5s, and two mages of equal ability (4 levels per magical plus) casting simultaneously. To get from a VS +2, you need four +5s, and four mages, and so on.

In a similar way, there were methods for embedding those “special abilities” into a sword.

Think of the typical dungeon as the bottom level of a pyramid scheme. To ascend to the next rank up, you need more people at the bottom. Or in this case, swords.

Directions Of Adventure

There’s one exception to the rule of thumb: when you’re using treasure hoards as a carrot to lead the players in the direction of the adventure after the current one. It only stands to reason that confronting, say, Giants, would be a lot more intimidating if you had only standard equipment than if you had a sword of Giant-slaying in your kit. So, when the Seneschal of the throne comes to you with a paying quest into the Giant-lands, while you could always say ‘no’, it’s far less defensible to do so if so equipped – and because of the perceived advantage, you would be more likely to say ‘yes’.

In A Dungeon?

There have been players and GMs who have tried to tell me that things should be different in a dungeon. To which I say, ‘maybe’.

You can think of a dungeon as a pyramid scheme, with the parties attempting to clear the dungeon getting a certain depth into the dungeon based on their levels and equipment. There would be – or at least, should be – more parties with +1 equipment than those with +2, and so on.

That gives a distribution model like the one to the left. This is a dungeon which has defeated one party with +4 weapons and another with +5 weapons, both of which are therefore present to be found – maybe – but you’re almost 1/3 of the way through it before you find even a +1 weapon.

When magic levels are low, it makes character levels more important. Magic is the great equalizer – until it falls into the hands of those characters most capable of taking it off a lesser character, and then it becomes a geometric or even exponential boost to their general combat effectiveness.

Goodies will stay wherever the characters who previously attempted to clear the dungeon fell (not necessarily the same thing as how deeply they got, they may have turned back but been too weak to fight off a lesser threat on their way out) – unless someone moves those goodies. Anyone who knows what a weapon is should be expected to recognize a good one. Anyone who tries to live in anything approaching a civilized way is likely to clean up the mess. If there’s a weapon or magic item, they particularly don’t like being around, they are likely to find a hole and drop it – where it then ends up is anyone’s guess. It’s also likely that some of the goodies from within will be traded with outside forces for things that the residents want more.

Sentient beings will apply whatever they’ve got in the way of smarts to any situation, in other words, and that will impact on where things will be found.

Now, it’s not necessary to compile a complete history of every item in the dungeon; that would become an onerous task very quickly. But you do need to think about things a little and give some positive indication that you have thought about them in your descriptions of areas and encounters, and especially, placement of treasures.

The Believability of Characters

Credibility has one more demand to make. If there’s a +5 weapon in the dungeon, how credible is it that a PC can retrieve it using nothing better than a +1 or +2 or whatever?

This usually works the other way around – if the dungeon is such that characters of the PCs calibers can get through it, why would anyone better equipped have failed to do so?

There are ways of explaining and justifying these situations – the most obvious is that the better-equipped characters have “softened the residents up” for the PCs. But if that’s the case, it should again manifest within encounters, and a notable absence of treasures to be found – they’ve all been scooped up by the better-equipped characters, with the only exceptions being something they didn’t find or something that was so worthless they didn’t bother taking it.

It must also be remembered that the PCs won’t know what the NPCs “ahead of them” are equipped with. At best they may find a hint or two – the corpses of a couple of creatures that the PCs would have been troubled by, for example.

In a nutshell

When you’re the GM of an RPG, you’re engaged in the processes of telling, and facilitating the telling, of stories. If those stories are full of holes, they won’t be very good. If the plot elements, including treasure placement, that you feed to the players are good, they facilitate the spinning of ripping good yarns and enhance the credibility and gravitas that you can command as a storyteller. If they are not so good, you damage your credibility as a storyteller and damage the stories that can be told using the raw materials that you are providing.

And it doesn’t matter what the genre of game is, or what the nature of the rewards are – the basic principle holds true. It could be tech or intelligence in Star Wars or a mystic amulet in Call Of Cthulhu, just as much as it is true for gold and magic in D&D/d20 or it’s many variations. The core commodities of story and credibility are just as unyielding and essential, no matter the genre.

When you put it that way, it seems to be an easy decision to make, doesn’t it?

This article was prompted by last Saturday’s play in my Zenith-3 (superheroes) game, but I use the techniques in all my campaigns.

But I want to start by quoting a question that I answered over the weekend on Quora, because it’s also relevant.

When running an AD&D game, what do you do to really make your players sweat?

A: I smile a lot, and become more generous in every possible way at the game table. “Failed your roll? ‘Nah, that doesn’t make sense, not for a character of your skill. Re-roll it.”

For a few minutes, they enjoy it. But, if it persists, they start getting nervous, and paranoid. At which point, I drop in a harmless encounter which would normally not even rate a mention, to give their nerves a focal point – and stop being “Mr Fluffy”. Which they read as an indication that the Ax-Murderer GM is stalking them!

But, if the question had been, When running an RPG, what do you do to really scare / worry your players? my answer would have been completely different. In a nutshell, I would have written:

“Know their characters better than they do”.

The GM’s responsibility

Part of the job of being a GM is to occupy the shadow of each PC that takes part (hence the title of this article). That means understanding them while having no direct control over their actions.

The benefits and advantages of doing so are almost innumerable. It enables me to tailor both campaigns and adventures to give the PCs preeminent roles, it enables encounters to be designed that will engage the characters (and through them, their players), it makes an equitable sharing of the spotlight far easier to manage, and it adds to the sense of integration between characters and the game worlds that they occupy, enhancing plausibility and a sense of realism even in the fantastic. It reduces my workload in adventure prep by focusing on avenues the PCs are likely to explore, it gives the player a deeper understanding of their own characters, increasing their levels of engagement with both character and campaign still further, and – under the theory that players and their characters share at least some common ground in terms of personality – it increases the interest in and enjoyment of the campaign by the players.

Some Background

In the Zenith-3 adventure that concluded in our last session, a plot twist that I’d been building for 20-odd years was suddenly revealed. The focal points of that plot twist were two of the PCs, one of whom has been through three different players in his lifetime.

The first player treated the character as a brick/detective. It was his first character made to the standards of this particular campaign, in which every word of background is examined minutely in the course of play. I may have provided the campaign background, but what the character had experienced in his past was up to the player (with me as reference library and research assistant). The player even commented that he’d learned more about creating personalities, not just characteristics, from that character creation session than the entire rest of his gaming ‘career’ to date.

Part of what I do as a GM is look for ‘plot holes’ in these backgrounds, things that need more explanation than the player is willing or able to provide. I dutifully point these out to the players, giving them the option to patch them, and if they can’t, and if I can see a solution, I integrate those into my campaign plan as revelations to take place during play. Sometimes, when the hole is likely to trip the player up in the meantime, I’ll even outline my answer and the core of the plotline in which it will be revealed. This enables the player a more rounded and complete view of the personality that they are playing from the beginning – which usually makes the character easier to play.

Because the player was new to this depth of engagement, his background had more holes than most – not only had the character done something completely opposed to the principles he espoused and all his professional training by stealing and using a piece of potentially dangerous equipment, but he had then lied about it. At the same time, the character’s personality seemed to shift, becoming more paranoid and apprehensive. This could all be explained by having the equipment itself influencing his mental state, so I proposed to the player that the equipment was seductive, a bit like the One Ring in Tolkien. The player also left it to me to explain how his character’s powers worked – he simply stated that they were imbued by the suit.

In play, the character displayed access to his abilities even when not using the equipment (a suit of armor). The only possible explanation for this “action at a distance” was for the suit to have changed the character in some fashion, making itself redundant – while keeping him from realizing this. In fact, the character was becoming psychologically dependent on the suit and the sense of protection that it offered – perfectly-molded body armor tougher than steel and half an inch thick (more at the soles of the shoes) will do that.

The time came when the team leader instructed the team’s scientific-type to analyze exactly how everyone’s powers worked (after they had been taken by surprise by another of these revelations). After initial measurements suggested that there was something not right with the internal dimensions of both the suit and the character, the tester made the mistake of asking the player to remove the armor. He didn’t want to, but tried to do so, and couldn’t. His muscles simply wouldn’t do what he was telling them to do. The tester suspected that the reluctance might extend deeper than suspected, and attempted to use persuasion to reassure the subject, failed, and then decided to employ more forcible measures. A flash of light, and the character being examined stood transformed into the shape of a gargoyle, only barely humanoid. The two then became distracted in examining the new physical reality of the character, and completely ignored the fact that there was no longer a suit of armor involved to be removed for independent analysis.

This transformation was only intended to be temporary, something that would occur whenever the character felt threatened – including by someone attempting to remove the suit – but the player decided to give up the campaign for unrelated reasons, and the new player liked the gargoyle idea. So it became a semi-permanent transformation. Over time, under this player’s control, the character became more and more feral, a ‘shape-shifting killing machine’.

When that player was forced by outside circumstances to give up the campaign, a third player took the reigns, initially on a trial basis (that was in 2006, and the player is still running the character, so I think the trial has been successful!) One of the first things that the new player did, before even accepting charge of the character, was to attempt to reconcile everything into a coherent picture, on the assumption that it was all the same person the whole time. The character became more balanced, got his “personal life” under control, and began rehabilitating himself both in the eyes of everyone else and in his own eyes as well – starting from a foundation of actively disliking the character as a person!

As a kind of “soft introduction,” the character had a miniseries under the new player’s control in which some of what we had collectively decided came to light and the character started coming to terms with his tangled psyche. Half of the character took his father as a role model, as many males do, especially in the absence of a strong maternal presence; because of that, the character wouldn’t let himself perceive that the father was abusive toward his daughter (and all three of his children), but it still made a subconscious impression, and part of the character both hated and was furiously angry with both the role model and with himself, while feeling guilty over his inability to intervene. Eventually, the sister ran away and joined a cult that got mixed up with aliens – as happens in a comic-book reality – and got to be rescued by the scientific type and the PC, beginning the process of self-discovery and coming to terms with his past.

In due course, he realized that the closer he came to emulating his role model in the character’s past career as a policeman, the more he resisted it, self-sabotaging. If he started getting good in the robbery division, he would put in for a transfer. If he started getting too good and it was too soon for a transfer, he did something to get himself a reprimand. At the same time, though, he had an absolute hatred and distrust of corrupt police officers and hypocrisy. All of which contributed to filling in the plot holes that I had initially identified in the character design.

Which brings me back to the revelations of the previous game session. In that day’s play, the character was finally forcibly removed from his gargoyle shape and stripped of his armor by someone the characters all thought was a villain – but who was actually just an enemy doing what was necessary. The revelations were two-fold: that the character had never been released from the dimensional confinement of the suit, in which he had been ensnared from the moment he first put it on; and that as part of its self-defense against being removed, the armor had been shunting every doubt and uncertainty to another PC – who, coincidentally, was the creation of Knight’s original character.

This addressed a separate set of contradictions in-game: we had a character who was (historically) a leader, skilled, trained, and sure, who was exhibiting poor tactical judgment and a reluctance to lead in play – a reminder that just because you write something on a character sheet, it doesn’t automatically confer the ability upon the player.

This disconnect between what the character was capable of, and what the player was capable of delivering in-play, was a different sort of plot hole, one that needed to be explained in-game and integrated into the psyche of the character the way his player was handling him.

My original draft only had the suit of armor suppressing these negatives as an explanation for the increasingly manic performance by Knight’s second player, when the character adopted the name “Blackwing”. But having the doubts and uncertainties that are natural to us all, and that hold us back from going to far, exported to the second PC made perfect sense.

A Psi Complicates Matters

Always.

In this case, the Psi in question had mentally scanned both the characters in question. So my in-game explanation for what I consider to be Metagame phenomena introduced a new plot hole that also needed filling: why had this Psi, one of the most powerful in existence, not detected what was going on?

The game session a couple of days ago dealt with the immediate psychological aftermath of the revelations and the immediate impact that was felt on the behavior of the characters, and sought to explain those – in effect, it ‘reset’ the foundations for those characters going forward.

In the process, it not only needed to address the Psi problem, it had to closely examine the personalities as they had been played in-game of the characters, providing the raw materials for the players to begin evolving their characters as they saw fit. This was something that would not have been possible had I not become at home in the characters’ shadows.

I’ll get to the how in a moment; first, let me answer the questions posed earlier. Every time the Psi had “connected” with the central character of this plotline in the past, he was actually linking to a simulation of the character that was generated by the suit. Even the character thought this simulation was the real thing, and so was completely unaware that it was being edited by the suit to protect itself.

As for why the Psi hadn’t detected the “outside influence” on the newer character, after specifically going looking for one a few game sessions ago, the explanation was even simpler – the self-confidence problems being experienced by the character were real, and the ‘dumped’ emotional states had acted only as a trigger, releasing an emotional flaw that the character had suppressed and locked up, long ago.

They were both victims of the suit. One had reacted by losing self-confidence in the field, feeling doubt and uncertainty for the first time in years, emotions that he had never learned to handle because he had never had to; and the other, being released from constraints that were being amplified and triggered by doubts and uncertainties that he no longer feared becoming wild and almost manic (reminiscent of what the first character had become at his ‘worst’, in fact, though that was left unstated).

Finding The Shadow

Before you can become so close to a character that you can be said to be occupying his shadow, you need to find that shadow.

First-order information comes from the player explaining what the character is thinking. Second-order information comes from observing the character’s behavior in the hands of the player. Third-order information comes from backgrounds and other written material provided by the player, while Fourth-order information comes from background material etc written by the GM. The process of “occupying the shadow” means integrating all of the above into a simple description of the core personality of the character, understanding how that core ‘unpacks’ into the events that shaped the character and into his attitudes to situations, and being therefore able to predict how the player-character gestalt will react to any situation you might, theoretically, place them in. Sometimes, it’s necessary to pose an adventure or an encounter just to observe a character’s reaction, filling in a blank space in your information on that character as he is in play.

First-order information

I always encourage my players to provide first-order information in-play. If they do so, and an action they have chosen does not accord with what they are trying to achieve, I will point that out to them, and offer alternative options that are a better fit, rather than sustaining a disconnect between what the character is trying to achieve and what choices the player perceives for getting from A to B.

If a character declares an action, and it doesn’t have the desired outcome, it’s too late to say what you were trying to achieve – everyone has to live with the events as described. Usually, there are exceptions and back doors that can be applied retroactively to get a “do over”.

By encouraging players to speak their character’s minds, it permits me to assist them in achieving those immediate desired ends, so their roleplay is “truer” to what the player wants. And he learns from that, becoming a better player within my campaigns in the process (the skills learned might not be fully transferable).

It also more closely simulates the in-game reality in which comms is handled (usually) by the Psionic that I mentioned earlier, for obvious reasons – she wouldn’t just be sharing intentional communications and hosting discussions, she would be conveying intentions and perceptions (something which has cause the occasional problem in the past), all raw and unedited.

That clear statements of what the character thinks or expects or desires or is trying to achieve generate a side-benefit for me in my role as GM is just fortuitous.

I have read advice here and there that the GM is supposed to be impartial. Fiddlesticks! The GM should be partisan as all get-out – his job is to generate a good time for all participants, not just in the short-term but through the life of the campaign. The PCs have to eventually win – but there is no obligation on the GM’s part to make that victory an easy one.

Second-order information

The next most reliable source of information about a character that I have is the words and actions that they perform without explaining their thought process. This places me in the position of needing to translate these actions into personality traits by observation and supposition, and hence this material is inherently a little less certain.

But there is usually a lot more of it, and patterns can still be observed.

Third-order information

This is usually more factual in nature, and requires still more interpretation by the would-be analyst. Any fact that isn’t established in-game is also subject to revision as necessary right up until it comes into play. What’s more, there can sometimes be a vast gulf between what’s on the page and what the player/character combination can actually deliver on demand, in play.

All of these combine to make this information more theoretical than actual. I often treat it as a stepping-stone to more concrete first- or second- order information.

There is a fourth source of error that can sometimes manifest, too, that needs to be mentioned: the GM has to bring any NPCs in the information provided by the player to life. It’s one thing for the player to state that there’s such-and-such an NPC in the character’s background with whom the character has a particular relationship, but the GM has to actually create and play that NPC in such a way that the player feels that the PC could and would have that relationship with the NPC. And sometimes, that doesn’t quite come off.

When this fourth problem manifests, it usually indicates – at a metagame level – that the PC is perceiving things about the NPC that they hadn’t previously observed, and their relationship will change as a result – even if those “things” aren’t part of the NPC as generated by the GM. There have been occasions where I have had to completely rewrite an NPC on-the-fly to either incorporate such “things” or to make the current situation an aberration in the normal relationship between the two.

Of course, even when events have been established, there can always turn out to be more to the story!

Fourth-Order information

This includes the campaign background, and any theorizing or analysis that the GM performs on the basis of lesser-order information until the player himself acknowledges that it “fits”, it “makes sense”. I’m never trying to tell the players how to play their characters; instead, I’m trying to understand the characters as the players are portraying them, and employing that understanding as a tool for campaign, adventure, and encounter/NPC design.

The “order” of the information represents the reliability of the information as a basis for achieving that understanding.

The Process

I’m not sure whether or not being a professional analyst would be helpful in achieving that understanding or not. I suspect that in some ways it would, while in other ways it might hinder – in particular trying to see the forest for the trees. But I don’t know – I’m not a professional analyst!

As such, I adopt a more literary approach, trying to sum up the personality of the character in a few brief words, and continually refining that summation as a result of the feedback that results when you employ it and hit – or miss – the mark.

This isn’t something that you can apply on an occasional basis – it has to be a fundamental part of your approach to GMing, so that you can get that constant feedback and become more experienced in the technique.

I start by looking for common threads and patterns in the first-order information, which I integrate into my current understanding of the character as soon as the player states it. Under the guise of better understanding what the player is trying to achieve, I will ask about any contradictions between this occasion and past ones.

Sometimes, that has resulted in a player saying “I’d forgotten about that” and changing their minds about the now; on most occasions, it will establish an exception to the previous pattern, or even undermine the perceived (and strictly hypothetical) pattern itself, as the player tells the GM, “No, that’s a misinterpretation of what I was trying to do back then.” But either way, it’s a learning experience that makes the GM better at anticipating what the character will do, or attempt to do, in the future.

I then turn my attention to any third- and fourth-order material, using second-order material as a ‘filter’ to try and weed out an erroneous or rogue associations. Always, I’m looking for patterns and parallels, and trying to imagine what was going through the character’s head. When it comes to events that occurred to the character, I try to understand what experiencing that did to the character, how he coped, and what lingering effects it might have had – being guided in particular by any actions taken in close proximity to the effect.

It sounds easier than it actually is in practice.

As an example, here are a number of snippets of information regarding the second PC who featured in the day’s play just passed:

1. “I used to sit on the docks with my grandfather and fish. We’d talk for hours when they weren’t biting.” (statement during roleplay)
2. Master’s degree in Archaeology (from the written character background).
3. “My parents thought I was wasting my time digging holes in the ground.” (statement during roleplay)
4. …was closest to his Aunt Vigdis, who encouraged his love of archaeology… (statement from the written character background)
5. “I probably looked up to that old man more than anyone else in the world when I was a child” (continuation of the first statement, during roleplay).
6. His father was a fisherman, often away at sea. (statement from the written background).
7. His grandfather taught him to sail (statement from the written background).
8. “I want to study wood-carving like my grandfather used to do” – statement during roleplay.

None of these is 1st order – they are all 2nd-order and 3rd-order. Nevertheless, when you assemble them, a cohesive picture emerges of someone whose parental figures were his grandfather and his aunt Vigdis, respectively. His father is little more than a void, and his mother gets even less attention. So compelling is this unified picture that you never question whether or not 1, 5, and 7 all refer to the same grandfather – you normally have two, after all! Assemble all of these and it becomes clear that the person who would be the character’s first choice for life-guidance would be the Grandfather, while the person he would first turn to for unquestioning support would be Aunt Vigdis.

When, in the course of the most recent adventure, the character was to encounter someone who he thought was his grandfather (conjured out of his memories), it was essential that the NPC I presented fit the mold. Little things – like sitting with legs dangling off the end of a pier, talking to the character as an adult, but simplifying things when necessary, or taking the time for one last cast of the fishing line, added up to a total acceptance on the part of the player. I don’t know about him (or you), but when the character sat down beside the old man and made one last cast with his fishing line, I could see little yellow gum-boots and the leathery texture of the old man’s skin in my minds’ eye – even though neither of those was mentioned. The NPCs’ first words were, “You’re almost old enough now, Anders, to start making choices for yourself.” There was a clear implication that the old man meant small ones – the PC would have been about three years old at the time – but by not saying so, it extended the narrative to apply to the current (adult) character. “Time to go, your Aunt Vigdis will be waiting,” implied that the old man lived with his daughter, probably too frail to care for himself full-time. The player didn’t even blink at this addition to his background. Walk with me, and I’ll make sure you don’t miss anything interesting”, said the old man. Since this was to be a walk into the character’s subconscious mind, a therapeutic tool, this statement actually went directly to the relationship between them – he wasn’t offering to guide the character’s choices, or make suggestions, just to make sure that he noticed all the choices available to him, and to assist in evaluating them. Choices and decisions were still the character’s.

In this way, the character found himself living snippets of his own background, and patterns that he wasn’t even aware of placing into it were slowly revealed to him – an overachiever who prefers others to set the standards he should live up to and who then does as much hard work as needed in order to excel, because he had learned that this was the easiest way to get the approval of, or attention of, an authority figure. The character was aware, subconsciously, of the void in his life left by his parents, and even though he had filled that void, it was still only a substitute for the real thing. Later, when for the first time in his life he was seriously injured, he experienced doubt and uncertainty for the first time, and had no-one left to pull him through. When his health returned, he found himself adrift without a guiding mission, and suppressed this lack of self-confidence, smothering it under a sense of being unable to fail when mere survival is viewed as a success. Then, when there were no authority figures to set the standards, the character’s pattern became to set himself impossible challenges so that no-one could blame him if or when he failed at them, defining his own mission in life.

All this fitted the narrative provided by the player like a glove – but it also filled in gaps and provided motivations. Presenting it in this way left the player able to make informed choices about the characters’ future behavior, while making sense of the past choices that – until now – had simply seemed like ‘the best choice on the table’.

Where to from here?

With the resetting of the mindsets of two PCs out of the four at the table, the campaign clearly felt like it was turning a corner or starting a new chapter. The last couple of adventures have all had a sense of new beginnings in other ways, so this was a continuation or new expression of that ongoing sense. It was appropriate that other aspects of the status quo receive a shake-up, too – so the adventure began to introduce a new plot-thread, an occasional campaign-within-a-campaign with a high cloak and dagger element to it that is going to introduce complications into the PCs lives that they never dreamed possible. In a very real way, they are all going to have to reinvent themselves in some fundamental ways. And, while they are doing so, the players directly impacted by the psychological revelations regarding their characters will have time to reset and set new directions for their characters, which will – to some extent – modify the ‘shadows’ that I am inhabiting.

A great campaign leaves its mark on the characters that participate in it, just as those characters should leave their marks on the campaign. If you were to take a character from one campaign as it was when it started, and insert it into a different campaign with a different GM, the character should evolve differently – no matter how similar they might be at their cores. And those differences will ultimately mean that they have different impacts on the campaigns.

Every PC is unique to the campaigns they inhabit – in a great campaign. The GM’s goal should always be to run the best campaign that they can, given their skills, knowledge, time, and the players who are going to participate. Being able to inhabit the shadows of those characters is an essential tool to achieving that.