Today I want to share a simple technique for elevating your narrative text.

It requires you to follow just two rules:

1. Ignore the sense of sight for as long as possible.
2. Don’t use a noun or a verb unless you have already described the object using rule 1.

Sounds too simple, doesn’t it? But let’s give it a try:

A D&D Example

Echoes trace the shape of a large room. A grinding mechanical noise from the right is punctuated by the clunking and clanking of some sort of clockwork mechanism powered by the gurgle of running water. From somewhere in the distance comes the sharp metallic tang of treasure or blood. Your blood runs cold and your heart skips a beat as a moaning whisper emerges from two rows of human skulls suspended from ceiling chains, causing the hairs on the back of your neck to stand on end. You’re certain there’s something hostile in the shadows…

Now, let’s try it without the techniques described in those two rules:

You enter a large room; your torches can’t illuminate the corners or far end. Your eyes can just pick up a golden gleam in the distance. There’s a water-wheel powering a clock set into the right wall. A series of human skulls is suspended from chains in the ceiling. Every time the clock advances with a clunk, they emit a moaning whisper. Something moves in the shadows…

The scenes are the same. There’s nothing wrong with the second description, which I’m sure most GMs would have used without a second thought. But it lacks the mystery, the menace, and the poetry of the first, and that’s because describing scenes without recourse to visuals, engaging the other senses of the PCs, compels the use of evocative language that stimulates the imagination.

I think that’s worth the 27 extra words, don’t you?

It works with any genre, though the effectiveness can vary. To demonstrate, let’s try a Pulp example, with the straightforward visual version first:

A Pulp Example

The water shimmers in the moonlight by the docks, casting harsh shadows within which almost anything could be hiding. From one of those shadows comes a burst of light as a suspicious character in a trench-coat lights a match on the sole of his shoe before bringing the flame to a cigarette lodged in the corner of his mouth. For a moment, the end glows red before the match is extinguished, ground beneath a heel, and the figure vanishes back into the recesses of cargo waiting to be loaded onto the African Freighter.

You should note that I have deliberately made this as evocative as I possibly can, emphasizing the dynamics – the motions and changes – within the situation. In particular, the NPC is not part of the furniture, some static fixture – he is doing something, even if the PC observer(s) don’t know what it is, beyond the superficial.

Now, let’s try rewriting that scene using our two rules:

The salty tang of the air lingers about the rotting timbers of the old docks. Waves crash softly against the pylons and reflect the harsh moonlight that plunges much of the surrounding area into twilight. Every nerve is stretched taught as you reach out with all your senses to penetrate the gloom. Suddenly, the sound of a match being struck against the sole of a shoe is followed by a dazzling burst of light beside one of the crates, followed moments later by the acrid scent of burning tobacco as a trench-coated figure ignites a cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth. The deck creaks as loading cargo aboard the African Freighter continues; there is the soft squeak of a leather shoe as the shadowy figure turns and vanishes behind the crates awaiting the attention of the ship’s crew.

Although it appears considerably longer, in fact there is just a single word’s difference in word-count between the two. While the first is easier to imagine, visually, the second places the listener/reader more clearly into the scene. And the second provides the additional information that cargo is currently being loaded onto the “African Freighter” – the first gives the impression that this is not yet occurring. That gives a sense of a more compressed timescale, i.e. that the players have less time to act than they may have thought – and that’s usually favorable to the Pulp genre.

If I were to further polish the second version, I might throw in something about “the distant voices of the crew, stifled by distance and a settling mist on the way to becoming a fog” – for the added atmosphere and the verisimilitude of not implying that they are functioning in an improbable and suspicious silence. Or – depending on the situation – I might make a point of noting the absence of those voices, just to clarify the situation and elevate suspicions amongst the players.

Use sparingly

Of course, this will get old quickly, and the technique works especially poorly in deliberately static scenes. Sound requires motion to generate it (most of the time – electronic systems providing a notable exception). In fact, the absence of sounds and scents can imply mechanical efficiency – “A robotic cleaner glides silently across the carpet, lifting stray dust particles into its flattened bowels” – so don’t bother looking for footprints.

Here’s the thing: once players are embedded into a scene, it takes serious reliance on game mechanics to break the mood, especially if you reinforce it with a single non-visual reference when that seems appropriate. So use this technique early in a scene and then resort to mostly visual cues as the players interact with the setting. A skill check won’t shatter the mood – only combat, or a break in play, will do that, though it can erode away if not refreshed occasionally.

This is a good thing, because most of us find this to be a far greater stretch, creatively. It does get easier when you get into the habit, and it does function as a reminder to engage the other senses from time to time – a reminder that is often timely. In general, it requires you to think more about the scene, and it forces you to add dynamic, changing elements to what might otherwise be a still life.

Extra Senses

Extra Senses can be an additional problem, but that’s nothing new; you almost-certainly already have the problem of their not being shared by everyone, and have hopefully evolved techniques to get around the issue. What’s that? How would I do it?

The simplest approach is to tell the players that if they want to play Character X, who has the extra sense, to tell them all of what it reveals to him, that will make noise that others could hear, but you will assume the character is doing so automatically unless he indicates otherwise before it is too late – then append that description to the narrative generated using the technique I have described.

Even if this is a telepathic “noise” that those not attuned to it can’t hear, this uses one of the allowable senses – sound – to function as a delivery vehicle for the added sense.

A secondary technique that can be effective if employed consistently is to describe the findings of an additional sense in visual terms – the only thing that is so described when applying this technique. Making a deliberate exception for the extra sense elevates it above the “purely visual,” psychologically.

A secondary benefit to either of these approaches is that they streamline the process, and provide a consistent approach that ensures you are rarely caught off guard by “You forgot that my character has [x]” syndrome, while still permitting the character to retain control. All that has to happen is for you to then leave off the relevant paragraphs until the character with the extra senses acts. Then you can give them the additional information and let them act accordingly.

Yes, this is a compromise; ideally, you would be able to tell the PC with the extra sense everything that they detect in private and let them decide what to share with the rest of the table, but in practice this doesn’t work very well much of the time. Where there is the possibility of a character acting in a controversial manner, of course, you have little choice.

What does work is to develop a specific lexicon to describe a particular extra sense. This is the sort of effort that only needs to be done once, or once in a campaign if you are prone to redefining the nuances of extra senses from campaign to campaign like I am; the longer the campaign lasts, the more that effort will pay off.

It may be useful to assume that each race that possesses an extra sense accesses and interprets it a little differently, creating nuance that the players will rarely if ever actively notice – but that adds enormously to the depth and immersiveness of the campaign. Personally, I tend to think about that sort of thing when I’m developing a race’s presence within the campaign in detail and ignore it until then (or until I need it because of some spell or magic item).

A useful way of developing those lexicons is to examine the effect of the different color filters provided by photo-editing software. As you will have seen from past examples –

• The Remembrance Of The Disquiet Dead: A Spooky Spot and Campaign Premise (2013)
• Stream Of Consciousness: Image-based narrative (2014)
• Stalking Fear: The Creepy in Non-creepy genres (2016), and
• Footprints of Fools and Wanderers: The vagaries of Marching Order (2017)

– the effects of these can be quite astonishing. There are three basic approaches to contemplate:

• Duplicate Image – in which you make a copy of the image in a new layer and then use it as a filter to manipulate the base image;
• Manipulated Image – in which you make a copy of the image in a new layer and then distort or manipulate it in some way;
• Imposed Image – in which you apply some other image as a filter to manipulate the base image or part thereof.

And, of course, there are combinations of the above, and considerations of the severity of the impact of the change (most often determined by the opacity of the upper layer).

I could offer some examples at this point, but I think I’d rather save that for when I have more time to create a tour-de-force of image-manipulative techniques.

Additional Narrative Resources

This, of course, is hardly the first article that I’ve offered to assist GMs in polishing their narrative. Here’s a roundup of several related articles that may be of assistance:

• A Picture Should Be Worth 1,000 Words (2010) (which also shows off some more of my photoshopping/art techniques and efforts)
• The Poetry Of Place: Describing locations & scenes in RPGs (2013)
• People, Places, and Narratives: Matching Locations to plot needs (2013)
• Adjectivizing Descriptions: Hitting the target (2013)
• The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative, a 6-part series (2014)
• Stealth Narrative: Imputed info in your game (2015)
• Taking advantage of the sensory hierarchy (2015)
• I see with my little mind’s eye: The power of Visualization (2015)

(As you can see, it’s been about 3 years since I wrote anything on this topic – so this article can be described as “It’s about time!” – I hope it’s been worth the wait!)

…at least, I hope it’s new. As I wrote, a strong sense of deja vu crept over me, and it started to sound awfully familiar. But a careful search of past posts failed to turn up anything…

I come up with more ideas than I can ever use. Until I co-founded Campaign Mastery, I simply threw away the excess; these days, it’s my practice to give these away for free to the readers here.

On Saturday, I was talking with the players in my Zener Gate campaign about Ian Gray’s new Fantasy Campaign before play commenced for the day. As he described his new campaign, I suddenly came up with a very novel idea of my own, one that has nothing to do with his – so I can quite happily reveal it here.

In actual fact, this is not one campaign, but two that have to be run contemporaneously. Players may be in either or both campaigns, but it would make things more interesting if there was a less than 100% overlap the rosters. Both are Fantasy campaigns, but could be adapted to Superheroics or Sci-Fi.

D&D could be problematic as a game system with editions for which Epic Levels are not available (i.e. 4th ed and 5th ed.) 3.x would work just fine, but you might need to adapt The Epic Level Handbook from WOTC before you could run the campaigns using the Pathfinder game system.

The First Face Of Janus

The first campaign is high-to-epic level. The PCs are agents of the Gods, a task force devoted to furthering the Gods’ will, protecting Heaven & the afterlife, and the souls that abide there, confronting the Gods’ enemies, undoing the handiwork of those enemies and disrupting those enemies’ schemes – sort of a divine “James Bond” campaign.

The overall campaign objective of the PCs is to ensure the Primacy of the Gods, because the Gods empower mortals and shelter their spirits after death, harvesting power in the process, which is used by the Gods to empower more mortals. In a way, then, all clerical magic is the will of the ancestors with the Gods more as “Guiding Middlemen” than the ultimate powers.

The Gods have a number of enemies that the PCs of this campaign will have to contend with. There are those who would supplant them and harvest soul power for their own benefit; there are those who suffered when the Gods made some mistakes in the remote past, and who hold a grudge time can never erase; there are some whose ancestors held positions of power within reality but who were evicted from these roles when the Gods created the universe as it now is; and there are those who are philosophically opposed to what the Gods are doing.

It is very much the design intent of this campaign that the mortal realm be extremely remote and irrelevant to the campaign; its just there. This campaign should occupy a grander stage of strange metaphysical places and planes of existence.

The Second Face Of Janus

The second campaign is low-to-mid-level. The PCs are just ordinary people trying their best to make ends meet and – if it’s not too much trouble – make life a little better for themselves and others. There are a number of social forces that strive to exert control over everyone within reach, from the Church to the Local Nobility (and ultimately, the King or Queen). To this end, draconian punishments are meted out for trivial offenses; fleeing this oppression, the PCs have become outlaws and scofflaws and bandits. Some are good people, others are rogues, but most are just ordinary folk swept up in something beyond their control.

The Nobles, both local and overall, are appointed by Divine Right, and backed by the Church and their Holy Magics. The Rebellion was little more than an annoyance until a drunken friar discovered that Clerical Magic was not forbidden to those who went outside the lines of standard Theology. In fact, most of the edicts of the Church are intended to do nothing more than keep themselves in Comfort and Safety, protected by the armies of the Nobles that the Church imbues with political Authority. Some churchmen, to be fair, believe earnestly in the Holy Scriptures; but most are hopelessly corrupt.

With this discovery, the Rebels began to discover Purpose. And so they began plotting, and training, and now are ready to begin recruiting allies of their own, in a (perhaps quixotic) quest to overthrow the whole corrupt mess and cleanse the True Faith of the demons that have corrupted it.

What Neither Group Knows

Events in the Mortal Realm mirror those in the Divine, and vice-versa. In Campaign One, the PCs are the authorities dealing with enemies of their own making; In Campaign Two, the PCs are the rebels created as a reaction to the overbearing of the Authorities.

The players are likely to put this together in reasonably short order, however. The Divine Agents plan an ambush, and the Rebels are caught in an ambush. The Rebels capture an important magical heirloom and ransom it for the release of an important figurehead, and a Celestial Kraken attacks the Afterlife and escapes, stealing one of the Capstones Of Reality, demanding the release of the Spirit of his Ancestor that it may continue its’ cosmic journey, interrupted so long ago by the Gods. And so on – you get the idea.

The PCs are literally, their own worst enemies, and are doing half the GM’s work for him….

Both groups have laudable goals, even essential ones, especially when the Divine Agents learn that the Gods hold all creation together by the force of their Wills, and victory for their Enemies could mean the destruction or enslavement of all.

Which makes it seem like, if only one faction can win, it is the Gods and their Divine Agents, and the Rebels should be sacrificed. This decision is far more easily reached if the roster of players is the same in both campaigns, which is why I recommended that there be at least some players in one campaign but not the other.

Then the Rebels learn that the apostasy of the Church threatens to undermine the power of the Gods; the Rebels can’t lose, or it could mean the destruction or enslavement of all….

Metagaming, Metagaming, All Is Metagaming

Once the Players in both campaigns realize that both factions have to “win” their respective campaign challenges in order for any of them to “win”, despite it being apparently impossible for them to do so, expect them to start metagaming the two campaigns with a vengeance.

Let them.

This is, in fact, what the whole campaign is about. The PCs will have to go beyond what any of them know about the game universe and the physics that underlies it, will have to find a way to change “the rules of the game” (in a social, political, and metaphysical sense), and may in fact have to overthrow the Gods themselves in order for any of them to have a lasting success in their respective campaigns. They will have to redefine what Victory is, and what it means, in order for both groups to achieve their objectives!

And it will have to work at the small scale, in the Low-to-mid-power Campaign, as well as in the more cosmic high-to-epic-power Campaign.

The ultimate solution will probably be Diplomatic in nature, stitching together fragile agreements between natural enemies and compromising on long-cherished ideals and – possibly – removing those who are obstructionist to these terms. Because both sides winning (in one sense) will also mean them losing (in another) – the specifics are up to the PCs to devise.

That’s where the campaign supposedly ends, but any event that upsets the status quo in either facet of reality will also disrupt the fragile peace. A natural disaster in the mortal world; invaders from the “outside”; a hot-headed younger generation of Divine Enemies…. there’s LOTS of scope for sequel campaigns.

Of course, you will never achieve that same level of through-the-looking-glass elevator-down-in-the-pit-of-the-stomach surprise of the big plot twist, but that doesn’t negate the challenge posed by the enforcement of Symmetry between the two faces of Janus.

Bonus Content: A Cosmic Phenomenon

Another idea that I had during the course of the same conversation, that is rather too small to make a post on it’s own, is the arcane equivalent of “Old Faithful”. A place that “casts” a spell as reliably as clockwork, sometimes to greater effect, and sometimes to lesser. What you choose to do with this concept depends on the spell you choose as the “eruption”, but whatever you choose will have a profound impact on the underlying “physics” of how it works and where it is – and don’t forget to think about what people might be able to do with the phenomenon / location. Think strategically….

It’s a funny thing, but once you’ve thought of two or three tips on an important subject, other thoughts on the same subject start crowding in. This was going to be a quick article listing a handful of tips, things that I always keep in mind when creating an NPC, but then the ideas started flowing…

Some are broad guidelines, some are things not to do. Still others are character elements that I normally consider must-haves. As more tips crowded into the available writing time, of course, the depth with which I could explore each naturally diminished, so I can only hit the highlights of most of them.

Everyone has a different approach when it comes to creating their characters; these are techniques that work for me, but they might not work for you. But hopefully at least one or two can be added to your regular routine, and there may be exceptions to that routine when they can provide an extra helping hand.

So here are ten of my best tips for creating NPCs!

1. Never Forget The Character’s Purpose

I always make sure that the NPC serves the plot or relationship purpose for which they have been created. And the first step is always to make sure you know what that purpose is. It might be to deliver information to the PCs, it might be to do something, it might be to function as an antagonist or an ally – every NPC always has a purpose to fulfill. Anything more that you get out the character beyond that is a bonus.

Bonus Tip

You can never tell which NPCs will become regular fixtures within the campaign, aside from those deliberately designed to do so. So I never assume that an NPC is going to be a throwaway; they are all designed with the potential to grow into a more substantial role within the campaign. That way, when I need a character three adventures from now, I start by revisiting the ‘throwaway’ NPCs from the past, with a view to reusing one if I can. This not only builds continuity and verisimilitude into the campaign, it makes it feel like its all one world, even if players aren’t aware of how you’re working this magic. On top of that, it can save me a lot of prep time!

2. Never Start With The Numbers

There was a time when the first thing I did when creating an NPC was to reach for the dice to generate stats. Quite often, that meant patching the character’s role within the campaign or replacing it entirely. Misfitting between stats and function can spur great creativity from time to time, but it can also lead to horrible malfunctions. These days, I never roll dice for stats, and stats are often the last things that I generate if I do them at all – refer Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep.

3. Appearance Is Important

There are two things that I always try to use to tell the PCs who a character is. The first is Appearance; I’ll get to the second, later.

That means paying a lot of attention to minor nuances and broad impressions. It sometimes means photoshopping additional elements into a character portrait – for example, a union organizer’s badge onto a cap or shirt pocket. On one occasion, I had to replace all the buttons on the shirt being worn in a photograph to convey the nuance that I wanted.

Other times, I’ve been able to employ cultural icons to shortcut the process of identifying the character, for example using an image of J.R. Ewing, as played by Larry Hagman on Dallas, to represent an eccentric Romanian Lawyer in the mid 1930s. Instantly, the character became an Americanophile, affecting his attitude, his speech, his patterns of behavior. Perceptions of the character also immediately shifted into the twilight of morality, which is what we wanted; the NPC was there to (metaphorically) sell the PCs a gift horse, and we wanted them to be looking into it’s mouth, counting it’s teeth and legs, and looking for the fly in the ointment of something that seemed too good to be true – basically, because it was. Creating the attitude that would lead the PCs to discover the rest of the adventure was the purpose of that NPC, and getting the appearance right served that purpose (and gave the NPC a lot of free color).

Things are a little more difficult if you don’t use images to depict your characters. It’s easy to take descriptions so far that by the time you get to the end, the players have forgotten the beginning. You have to condense the heck of descriptive narrative, and you have to actively seek out other ways of delivering important bits of information.

4. Always Have A Handle

Something I always do is make sure that I have a handle on the NPC by deliberately building one in. This is a shortcut to getting into character, often a more succinct synopsis of who the character is. It’s often informed by the purpose that the character is there to serve. Anything else can be tossed aside except that purpose. (See 3 Feet In Someone Else’s Shoes: Getting in character quickly for other tips in this area).

The key point I’m making with this tip is to do whatever you can in the design and construction process to make it easier to get into character quickly when you have to play that NPC.

Tip 9 has a test to use to measure how effectively you can get into character in advance, permitting design tweaks before the NPC appears in play.

5. Look For Ways To Be Distinctive

Distinctiveness gives players a handle with which to relate to the character quickly, making it quicker and easier for them to roleplay interactions with an NPC. I always try to anticipate group-conversation scenes in which the NPC might appear and make sure that the NPC will “stand out” in some way from that group; this is a further function of distinctiveness that is subtly different from the first. The two are not fully interchangeable, though sometimes the one mark of distinction will achieve both.

I’m not great at giving different voices to NPCs, and nuance is often lost when gaming in a crowded situation, so I have to achieve most of my efforts in this direction in the form of speech patterns – which can be more subtle – and the occasional badly-faked accent. I’ve developed techniques that aid in the latter, which you can find discussed in The Secret Arsenal Of Accents.

6. Don’t Be Abnormal If You Don’t Have To

It’s very easy to shade an NPC into a caricature. If that’s what I’m deliberately aiming for, fine, but most of the time what I want is something rather more “ordinary person” – even if what I’m creating is a religious fanatic or ninja assassin or whatever. This acts as a brake on distinctiveness, preventing it from getting out of hand.

7. Subvert Cliches More Often Than You Represent Them

When I rebooted my superhero campaign back in 2001, I began what is now an 18-year crusade against cliches and cardboard-cutout characters. Several articles here at Campaign Mastery have addressed the issue, but it started with the character creation guidelines issued to the prospective players of the rebooted campaign.

It forced the players to stretch beyond their previous experience, but it says something that most of those players are still players within the campaign and that at least two of those early characters are still active in the campaign (though one has had multiple ‘owners’ through the years) – and that those characters are still growing and evolving, while remaining true to their core personalities.

Nevertheless, a cliche that is implemented with a clever twist is often faster and easier to create than a completely original character, and there are times when that’s a necessary shortcut, or an appropriate choice. And, on at least one occasion, an NPC deliberately invoked a cliche to mislead the PCs as to his true nature and motivations.

My rule of thumb is to make sure that I break the mold more often than I use it as a template. My ‘good guys’ almost always have some shady corner somewhere – it might be in their backgrounds, or in their personality, or just be a potential to go too far in certain circumstances. Very few of my antagonists have no bright spot, or (at least) the capacity to claim to have one. And both are inextricably affected by circumstances as the character perceives them. Which keeps them fresh and dynamic. The day that stops being the case for a particular NPC is the day to start thinking about that character’s imminent retirement (though I’ve usually laid some preliminary plans in that direction, anyway, just to be on the safe side).

Something that I will take quite a lot of time over is getting the PCs to trust an NPC if that’s appropriate, especially if the NPC is initially perceived as an enemy. It takes time to build a relationship like that; only when that status can be metaphorically ticked off does the character get to advance to the next stage of their plotline.

Don’t be afraid to play a long game. Design characters to evolve and grow into what you need them to be, whenever you can. It pays big dividends in the long run.

8. Better Than A PC?

One trap to look out for is creating an NPC who is better at something than the PCs. There are times when that’s fine – creating a villain who has to stand up to the entire group of PCs, for example – but there are times when it’s demotivating to the players. In particular, I never create an allied NPC who is better at the PC’s shtick than the PC is, without also saddling them with a crippling shortcoming of some sort.

9. The TV Tests

Record a TV show that regularly has dialogue between two characters whose personalities you know well. Playback that section of the show, pausing after each character says something, and then reply in the persona of an NPC that you’re creating (translating anything that doesn’t fit the milieu into a statement that does). If you have to stop and think about it, the character is insufficiently delineated in your mind.

Next, find another section of the recording that meets the same criterion. This time, predict what the other character will say in response and what your NPC would say in response to THAT. This tests the speed with which you can get into character. If you can’t immediately respond in character, your ‘handle’ (see tip 4) is inadequate.

These two tests are simple but surprisingly comprehensive. As a general rule, they will push the character in the direction of simplicity and cliche, so it becomes an acceptable design technique to deliberately go too far in the preliminary design process, then simplify and ‘clean up’ until you reach a satisfactory compromise between distinctiveness and playability.

One word of warning regarding this technique: when using a character in play, you will usually have other things on your mind and may be more mentally ‘tired’ from hours in the GMing chair. I used to be able to GM for 20 hours straight; these days, I’m exhausted after about 6. Part of that is being better at the job, more focused, and playing to a higher standard, but part of it is getting older, and part of it stems from increasing physical infirmity that has to be overcome.

None of those debilitations is in effect when running the test, so make allowances and don’t mislead yourself into a false sense of security. Run the test just before heading for bed, when you’re tired, or make sure that you precede any appearance of the NPC with a rejuvenating break.

10. Start Telling The Story With The Name

This is the other half of the story that commenced with Tip #3. You have virtually total control over the name of the character; sure, you can pick some vaguely-appropriate name that has no significance whatsoever, but you can also use the name to tell the players quite a lot about the character.

Ethnicity, Social Class, Self-Image, and even Personality can be expressed – at least in part, and in a preliminary way – by the name and by the way the NPC gives the name.

Picture a well-dressed NPC, slightly youngish, who has just been asked his name or put into a circumstance where offering it is culturally appropriate. The character takes a deep breath, sighs, and says in an almost-regretful tone, “My name is Galahad Jones.”

Right away, you can tell that the christian name is distinctive, and that the character finds the name to be a burden to live up. He would have been teased mercilessly as a child. He is naturally inclined to be a good guy, but feels hemmed-in and unable to be human because of the name and the pressure that it places on him. If he ever does find a situation that enables him to fully let his hair down, he’s likely to go way, way too far.

Or perhaps the character draws himself erect and announces with a sniff, “I am Harold Hawthorne-Sainsbury the Fourth, and don’t you forget it. You may refer to me Sir H.” Instantly, you know that we’re talking about a flake off the extreme upper-crust, British, possibly American, an exerter (and demander) of privilege and possessor of a deep-seated insecurity (this is skirting very close to a cliche, however, so use this one with caution).

Or, for a third example, the character grins, sticks out his hand, and announces “Bradley Hawthorne-Sykes the Third – call me bud! Good ta meetcha, buddy!” – the character expressed is at odds with the formality of the name, and indicates a character who is so comfortable with his social rank and its privileges that he doesn’t need to grind them in the faces of everyone he meets. He also sounds like someone who genuinely enjoys people and tries to meet them all from a standpoint of equality and respect.

That’s a lot to get out of so little.

Good NPCs should be rich, fun to play, and interesting to encounter. They should fulfill their plot functions with flair and style. The interesting thing is the way so many of these desirable attributes help make the others easier to achieve.

Second Bonus Tip

Oh, one more thing while I’m in the vicinity – no NPC exists in isolation. They all carry part of the campaign background with them, and – if they get the chance – make that background accessible to the players. Of course, for some NPCs, that is their sole or primary plot function, but even when that’s not the case, I always try to take advantage of the opportunity that the NPC presents in this area. Just something else to keep in mind when creating your NPCs!

This article has been in preparation for a very long time – since May 2017, in fact. I hope it proves to have been worth the wait…

While there is no such thing as “winning” in an RPG, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t success, and that not all success is created equal. Some success may not be desired, some may not be desirable, some may be hard-earned, while some may come naturally. This article will seek to understand success in its myriad forms and then apply that knowledge to the RPG concept to see what can be made of it.

Because it’s a field that I know quite well, have thought about extensively, and that a lot of people can relate to, I am going to undertake my initial analysis through the prism of popular music. Bear with me, I don’t have a road-map…!

Popular Success

The foundations of this article were laid when I remembered some interviews from 70s, 80s, and 90s TV in which various performers rubbished the notion of seeking popular success. The phrase most commonly used was “selling out”, and it’s one that always irks me. It implies that it’s easy to be commercially successful, and that it requires less artistry and/or depth and is more formulaic.

There are 52 weeks in the year. Pop charts have been maintained, in one form or another, for more than 50 years, and are typically refreshed on a weekly basis. That means that at most over that time period there have been 2600 number one singles on the top-40 charts (or their equivalents).

In fact, turnover tends to be a lot slower than that; while a few tracks make it to number one only to be dethroned the following week, many remain ascendant for two, three, four, or more, weeks. If we set the real average at a conservative 2 weeks. Because the estimate is conservative, the number will almost certainly be crowding the lower end of the scale. It’s not unreasonable to use a nice, round, 1000 number ones for the time period.

For every number one hit, there are at least 40 more (and more likely, 400 or 4,000) acts who would like to have had that measure of success with a song released at around the same time. The intensity of that desire may vary, as would the price of achieving it, but the desire is nevertheless there.

At best, then, any given single has a one in forty (or four hundred, or four thousand – how many songs hit the global market in any given week?) chance of making it, of being the most popular single of a given week. That, to me, doesn’t make it sound particularly easy.

On top of that, every #1 artist has had “sure fire” hits that crashed and burned, while some successes have come right out of left field. While formula may make you a successful artist, with regular top-40 appearances for a while, it’s rare to ride one all the way to the top of the charts. That generally requires something extra, something more than mere formula.

Commercial success is never anything to be ashamed of, either for the artist or the purchaser. It’s hard to achieve, and harder to achieve consistently, and harder still to achieve better than anyone else in a given time period. Having a number 1 – in anything – means that more people liked your product than anything else in that particular time period.

The RPG Equivalent Of Popular Success

There are a number of measures of success that could be considered the equivalent of a measure of “popularity”. Anything from having a waiting list to join the campaign, through to players gushing with enthusiasm to third parties about the campaign, could qualify. But for my money, before you can identify the true equivalent, you need to amend the terms of reference. An RPG isn’t a one-off purchase, which is the case with a hit single; it’s more like a subscription service that players and GM pay for with their social time. To me, that means that the true equivalent of a popular success is having players who will move heaven and earth to attend, be sincerely regretful if they can’t, and who show up, week after week, month after month, on time and ready to play.

And as with popular music, there are those who might decry the rigidity of an organized schedule, who prefer the spontaneity of friends simply deciding to enjoy a fun activity together for a few hours. I’ve known at least one GM who ran an “open house” campaign – come one, come all, show up at the designated time and be assured of getting a seat. His games were anarchic but very dynamic, often with one set of players working to advance one in-game agenda while others pursued completely unrelated goals. But that sort of game is rare and rarely long-lived; for most, having a regular group that can be relied upon to show up to play at regular times, is the ambition.

Artistic Success

In some ways, you can trace the artist-vs-commercial success to the dysfunction within the ranks of the Beatles, and in particular the Lennon-Vs-McCartney stoushes for which the band were famous in the late 60s. In other ways, you can trace it back further, to the Beatles-vs-Rolling Stones debates of half-a-decade earlier. Artistic credibility and artistic integrity have always been seen as running counter to commercial success. And in still others, the roots trace back into other media and earlier eras; famously, A. Conan Doyle grew so tired of the popularity of Sherlock Holmes undermining his other literary endeavors that he attempted to kill the character off.

Artistic Success can be divided into two types of achievement: Content, and Trend-setting.

Content Success is what Lennon and other “serious artists” often aspired to – or claimed to aspire to. It’s the success of communicating something beyond mere entertainment value, whether that be opposition to war, promoting ecological soundness, feeding the hungry in a drought, raising awareness of some issue, or simply using your music as a vector to create awareness of a social position not actually expressed in that music. Others find this sort of thing pretentious; and there is a middle ground.

Trend-setting is devising new instruments and new musical forms and structures and styles that create a new genre or sub-genre to which many other artists then connect and further. Punk, Ska, Disco, Prog-Rock, Metal, Rap, Hip-Hop, Blues, Reggae, Country – name a genre and there will be artists who were at the forefront, and artists who steered that genre into new directions, redefining what the Genre was or could contain. Often, the public are dragged into acceptance of these changes only reluctantly, as when Bob Dylan went electric.

A third variety of artistic success is the Crossover, in which an artist forges a link between two disparate styles or genres, gaining acceptance in both. To some extent, crossover artists are a fiction; most styles and genres are a spectrum, with individual works (and to some extent, individual artists) tending to occupy a given niche within that Spectrum. Thar position will have some elements in common with other examples from their genre, and some elements that are as distinctly different as day and night. And each such position will also have elements in common with niches within other genres, permitting the artist or individual work to explore this common connection.

It could even be more accurate to suggest that each style and genre comprises multiple spectra, one for each trait that is not definitive of that style and genre, and the crossover artist simply brings an unexpected combination to public attention.

The RPG Equivalent Of Content Success

Because I strive to make each campaign distinct and different from all the others that I run or have run in the past, I could be accused of chasing Artistic Success in it’s Content form.

There are some GMs and players who want nothing more than a dungeon-bash, devoid of deeper meaning or heavy conceptualizing. While I’m happy to throw those in as a bit of variety, and to help with the timing (giving plots time to mature before they land on the PCs’ backs), it’s not the style of campaign that I usually offer. You could argue that the Zener Gate campaign is the closest I’ve come to running the mindless dungeon-bash, and I wouldn’t argue – but I tend to think of it more as episodic “capsules” of meaning, not as being devoid of deeper meaning. And, given my personal tastes and the way my mind works, I won’t be surprised to find deeper plotlines emerging from the mix.

I’m a big advocate of aiming for uniqueness in the content of any given campaign, and have been so throughout the almost ten years of Campaign Mastery. There are many different reasons, ranging from differentiation in the players minds to discovering new ground to explore in your stories and characters as a consequence of that uniqueness.

The RPG Equivalent Of Trend-Setting Success

Trend-setting is a harder notion to quantify into an RPG analogue. Inventing a new genre or reshaping an existing one is so rare that it doesn’t fit, and besides, is more often achieved by game system design than by individual GMs.

That doesn’t mean that there can’t be stylistic elements that emerge from one campaign and sweep the world, or seem to. Isometric maps were one such. Dungeon Tiles were another. But these are rather smaller than genre-defining.

Campaigns face two hurdles that prevent this kind of success. The first is that most campaigns are too small to encompass an entire genre, though one might be an archetype or prototype. Campaigns have only a limited number of players and a single GM and simply cannot change the world very easily. The second hurdle is that most campaigns lack the scope to be genre-defining or -redefining; there simply isn’t enough material published, let alone gaining widespread acceptance, to exert that level of influence.

Game systems have a far easier job of clearing both hurdles. The first is simply a matter of popularity, which can come from innate innovation, through a connection to a popular pre-existing franchise, or in any number of other ways. The second is that by definition, a game system incorporates its fundamental assumptions about the nature of the world that the game system is supposed to simulate, and hence the game system itself can easily become an exemplar of a new genre or sub-genre – if the authors are sufficiently creative.

That creativity can itself be a spur to success, assisting in the clearing of the first hurdle. But you need both – something original to differentiate the new from the old, and sufficient resources and popularity available on a sufficient scale to enable new creators to add to and expand on the new genre that results. And it’s HARD to do, and even harder to do well.

The RPG Equivalent Of Crossover Success

This is rather easier to achieve, because it means taking an element of one genre and treating it in the way that another genre would be expected to treat it. Nor does popular success need to follow in order to achieve a successful crossover; it can be enough that a few adherents like the results.

Take TORG for example. It had a logical, functional, spell-design system – so much so that when I wrote software to automate the process, I had more trouble getting the text editor designed to incorporate design notes into the description and other text-based fields of indefinite length to work properly than I did the basic mechanics of the system. This was the sort of plug-in modular design that you might use for designing classes of space ships, trading speed for cargo capacity, so as to achieve a consistent standard of technical capability, but the TORG system applied it to something that was strictly fantasy in nature – Spell Design.

It remains, for me, the gold standard of spell construction systems, because it inherently provided consistency of effect levels relative to the inputs and casting efforts required. It did that without effort because that was baked into the design system itself.

By applying a consistent game physics to my superhero campaign, way back in the early 1980s, I achieved another crossover success.

If you write a horror adventure set in the Old West, regardless of the game system, you can measure the success of the crossover by the usual standards of success that would apply to any adventure – is it logical, playable, fun?

Performance Success

Still another form of success is that of the virtuoso, who makes an instrument do something more than was thought possible. The two greatest developments in instrumentation over the last century or so have been the synthesizer and the electric guitar, and both have had their ‘geniuses’, for example Kraftwork, Vangelis, and Jean Michel Jarre (synths); Hendrix, Clapton, Satriani, and Eddie Van Halen (electric guitar). I don’t pretend for a minute that those lists are exhaustive!

And yes, a second form of performance success can be defined as Perfection in Reliability – someone who delivers exactly the same performance, night after night, day after day, year after year. A performance can be perfect, i.e. without flaws or errors, and yet not be considered a virtuoso performance. Indeed, that’s what a lot of acts look for in their rhythm sections – they want a solid foundation upon which to build, rather than someone who will compete for the limelight or even detract from their own performance.

The RPG Equivalent Of Performance Success

I know I’ve written about the short-lived cyberpunk campaign in which I was a player on an earlier occasion. The plots were pedestrian, the GMs grasp of the game physics superficial, his understanding of the internet even less developed, his grasp of organizations and the logic they employ almost cartoonish; yet people, myself included, came back for session after session until he chose to kill the campaign out of dissatisfaction with the aforementioned problems, especially the first, mainly through having insufficient prep time to meet his own standards.

The reason? He excelled at bringing NPCs, both pre-planned and off-the-cuff, to life. Each was given a unique and distinctive voice and vocal pattern and, when appropriate, accent, and he never forgot one. It was like playing an RPG with Mel Blanc – except that none of these voices was in the least cartoonish. He could even hold conversations between three or four different NPCs, switching effortlessly from voice to voice.

When he first did it, all our jaws hit the ground. From that moment on, you could not have pried us out of that campaign with a crowbar and hydraulic arm. We barely noticed the deficiencies other than as passing irritants, so compelling was the virtuoso performance going on around us. It was compelling and fascinating in equal measure. When the players discussed it amongst ourselves afterwards, we soon reached agreement that none of us could even come close to that level of performance – ever.

At the same time, it challenged us all to up our games. If we couldn’t match that GM’s performance in that respect, we could hone our skills in other areas to at least try and match the overall standard of his campaign. I focused on plot, and verisimilitude, and creativity, because those were the areas where my strengths lay. Others focused on characterization and narrative flavor, or on historical accuracy, or on a wild left-field kind of free-wheeling loopiness and unpredictability.

Because that’s what exposure to genius does – it forces you to lift your game.

Conceptual Success

Another form of success is being able to successfully link smaller stories into a larger narrative or theme. Artists as diverse as The Who (Tommy), Genesis (The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway), The Foo Fighters, and Pink (The Truth About Love) have achieved it. Pink Floyd have two to their credit: Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall.

Understanding this type of success requires some knowledge of how record production works. At the start of recording, the artists play ‘demo versions’ of their ideas. The producer chooses the tracks that he feels are (potentially) the best or most interesting, refines them sonicly and stylistically with the performers, records the resulting performances, culls any that don’t live up to the standards, repeating the process until enough are completed to fill the required album length. He then arranges them in a compelling sequence to create the album. In the process, the producer leaves his own personal imprint on the sound.

Integrating a conceptual element adds new requirements to the mixture that increases the difficulty of each of the other steps. The primary goal shifts from making the best individual pieces of music possible to telling the story or exploring the theme as comprehensively as possible. If artist and producer are not careful, this results in some pieces of the whole being weaker than others, i.e. of a lower artistic standard. A conceptual success has avoided this flaw, which implies a great deal of extra work and creativity in crafting installments of equal strength and merit; some tracks may have been achieved easily, because they were the best ideas in the first place, but others will have started as weak tracks and have to have been rewritten and redeveloped endlessly to achieve this standard.

I automatically discount soundtracks from this unless they are entirely or almost entirely comprised of original musical performances; taking individual slices of otherwise available music and marrying them to a particular moment in the narrative means that for each ‘spot’ to be filled, hundreds if not thousands of performances can be considered. Success in terms of the narrative is externalized to the production team of the movie, TV series, or stage performance, not the creative musical artist.

The highest caliber of conceptual success lies in adding something new to the understanding of the subject matter by the audience. Tommy is a tale of success against the odds and the price that fame can exact; The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway deals with the loss of innocence and the corrupting influence of merely existing in a non-innocent environment; The Wall deals with the process of becoming an individual and suppressing emotions that detract from social conformity until they bring the individual to the breaking point.

The RPG Equivalent Of Conceptual Success

There are at least three ways of looking at Conceptual Success in RPG terms.

The first lies in the strength and depth of the concept itself, which expresses itself through the campaign background and game mechanics through which the concept is to express itself. For example, you might come up with the concept of an evolutionary life-cycle of souls, based on a generalization of the concept of reincarnation, blending concepts from several real religions. Expanding on that concept and integrating every possible consequence and ramification into the campaign and its mechanics achieves this type of Conceptual Success.

The second views an adventure as analogous to a single concept album, and the disparate activities of the GM – from integrating the plot concept with the specific PCs involved in the campaign to every nuance of presentation – to individual tracks. If everything meshes perfectly, you have successfully translated the premise of the adventure and its plot developments into a conceptual tour-de-force.

The final alternative views the campaign as the concept-album equivalent, and individual adventures as the building-blocks of the campaign. You could even describe the second method as shaping the perfect tree, while this method demands perfection in the shape of the forest while ignoring the shape of individual trees except as they influence that desired outcome.

Which brings me to a truism that some of you may not have recognized.

Every author focuses on his own strengths, because that’s where the bulk of his good ideas lie. I’m strong at plots and plotting, and at narrative and depth, so a lot of the articles that I write focus on ways of doing these things better – in this context, at aiming for a Conceptual Success. In fact, I have produced several articles aimed distinctly at achieving one or another of these forms of conceptual success. I’m always looking for (and frequently finding) new ways of describing the concepts and principles at the heart of my techniques in the hope of making clear to those readers who didn’t ‘get it’ from those already written.

You will find, in comparison, relatively few articles on creating characters and characterizations – I’ve presented my best techniques in those articles and have little more to offer on the subject, at least until some fresh insight smacks me between the eyes.

Blogs, in turn, appeal to two types of reader. There are those who share the same strengths as the author, and hence the author is ‘preaching to the converted’ about technical details and processes and nuance; and there are those for whom the author’s strengths are their weaknesses, and they discover a technique from the ‘expert’ to improve their games. And there is a third kind, if the author numbers analytic capacity amongst his skill-set – those who read the author for inspiration, understanding, and (occasionally) provocation. If I write an article on how to design encounters, for example, you might agree with virtually none of my approaches – but are nevertheless challenged to look at your own methods and the inherent shortcomings that they entail, in the process becoming better in one of your own areas of strength.

If a blog doesn’t appeal to you even if it’s a subject that you are interested in, it could simply be that it doesn’t tell you anything new because you are already an ‘expert’ in those aspects of the GM’s craft. That doesn’t mean that there is necessarily anything wrong with either the blog, its author, or you as a reader – just that you don’t happen to need what that author is offering. You might find their next post stimulating!

Logically, if you can articulate why you enjoy reading a particular RPG blog or blog post, you may discover something about your own strengths and weaknesses as a GM (or whatever your role happens to be). And that’s true even if you simply like the writing style of the author – because it provides samples that you can objectively analyze, which leads you to the same sort of revelations.

Human Success

Such success is also possible on a smaller scale, down to the individual track. There are some performances in all our lives which have opened our eyes to a new awareness of ourselves and the way we are constructed. These are most commonly in the romantic or melancholy mode, occasionally in the social mode, and rarely in any other. I could offer examples of each, but this is inevitably a personal choice; what awakened awareness of some aspect of being human to me might not have had the same effect on you; it may have come too late or too soon, or simply been beaten to the punch. And some people may never have had that particular revelation, or may have learned the experience directly rather than in the form of a musical revelation.

There are those who claim that exploring ourselves and expressing what he finds is the ultimate responsibility of any artist. Those are the artists who strive for Human Success.

The RPG Equivalent Of Human Success

At first glance, you might have the impression that there is no RPG equivalent of Human Success; this hobby is, or should be, all about entertainment, after all, and any insights or self-improvements that occur should be serendipitous and not the result of deliberate designs on the part of the GM.

I exclude the application of roleplaying as a therapeutic practice, obviously, though there can be overlaps.

Such a first glance ignores how much of ourselves we unwittingly incorporate into our games. Let us say that from somewhere – it doesn’t matter where – you gain some new insight into human relations. Even if you don’t deliberately make that new insight the center-point of an adventure or encounter, which – in their excitement, many people will do – that insight cannot help but color the situations and options that you offer to the players in encounters and situations henceforth. Anything less is to deliberately inject a false note into your GMing, a character or scene that just doesn’t ring true, when you know better.

I can’t see any rational GM deliberately sabotaging his game that way, can you?

The term “paradigm shift” is sometimes over-used, but – however subtle it may be – that is, nevertheless what has occurred as a result of your new insight; you literally can’t look at things quite the same way ever again.

A consequence is that, as writers and GMs, we become ever more stylistically “Locked” as these insights accumulate. When you’re ignorant, you have no idea how things are likely to eventuate, and so are open to overly simplistic approaches to the situation presented. There is a freedom and flexibility conferred by ignorance. Once you are no longer as ignorant, you know more about why certain approaches to problems should not work, and hence you narrow the solution set to the problem, which accordingly becomes more difficult for your players to solve.

They, in turn, have to shift their mind-set, and will do so after an indeterminate period of groping for a better approach. Most of the featured NPCs in my Zenith-3 can be (and often are, by my players) viewed as puzzles to be ‘unlocked’ before the players can get to the heart of why they behave the way they do. Once that puzzle lies open before them, the possibility of finding common ground and meaningful compromises becomes open, so that conflict that seemed inevitable is averted and an enemy is transformed into an ally. At the same time, some characters with whom the PCs had a superficial concordance have been transformed through circumstance and choices made into someone with whom the PCs cannot, in good conscience, continue to call a friend or ally.

So far, in the campaign, four enemies or former enemies (Holo, E-III, Thanos, and Defender) have become allies or friends, another (Dr Heinrich Vossen) has become a respected neutral party (the PCs don’t fully agree with his agenda but have been forced to concede that if he’s right, he’s doing the right thing in an ethical way, despite external appearances), another enemy has discovered common cause with the PCs (Voodoo Willy) – and a major ally (Behemoth) has become an irreconcilable enemy. On top of that, there is an organization, UNIT, that started off as an enemy and has polarized even more strongly against the PCs even while some individual members have become allies; and another organization, IMAGE, who started as allies but which are increasingly showing themselves as antagonistic to the PCs best interests, not through malice, but through well-meaning bureaucratic interference.

(The real villains of the campaign have yet to reveal themselves; I’m still moving chess-pieces around the metaphoric board).

All of which seems to undermine my earlier confession that characterization isn’t one of my strong points, I have to admit. But it doesn’t come naturally to me; what does come naturally are the plots that yield these outcomes. The NPCs were then designed (or re-designed, in a couple of cases) to fit the potential plot outcomes.

Flagpoles

Similarly, there are pieces of music that perfectly encapsulate some personal milestone in our lives, and that thereafter perpetually have particular significance bestowed upon them in the eyes of the individual. This flagpole might be shared amongst many others, or might be a work so obscure that hardly anyone has ever heard of it. Commercial success, simply because it puts a work in front of more people’s ears, is more likely to produce a flagpoles, but there are always exceptions. Each of us compile a ‘personal soundtrack’ through our lives in this way, often without recognizing it. But a flagpole is always recognizable after the fact; hearing that tune or passage of music immediately takes us down memory lane to the flagpole, a turning point in our lives.

The RPG Equivalent Of Flagpoles

This is a difficult one. It’s trite to suggest that we’re looking for flagpole events in the lives of the PCs – encounters or whatever – but nothing else comes immediately to mind.

That’s because there is an element of serendipity to a performance achieving this personal significance – “the right song at the right time” – that cannot be attributed to the artist or production process.

To identify the true RPG equivalent of Flagpoles, we need to dig a little deeper. What makes a particular tune a Flagpole?

Well, the reaction of the listener is vital. A potential flagpole can only manifest as an actual flagpole if it is, in fact, “the right song at the right time.” So, while the artist is not responsible for that actualization, he is responsible for creating the potential for it to occur.

So, what is that potential? It’s the capacity for an emotional resonance – and the transformation in question is simply a deeper connection between that resonance and the listener that is triggered by the circumstances in the listener’s life.

Which makes it clear that a flagpole need not actually be contemporaneous with the events to which the resonance connects; the association can be after the fact, if the tune happens to perfectly sum up some aspect of the individual’s life and emotional state at one particular time.

The transformation from potential to actual makes flagpoles deeply personal. You can’t reveal one without revealing some aspect of the individual’s life through the connection.

I could reveal a couple of mine – one that few would ever have heard of, but that captures a bleak perspective with hope nevertheless in the distance that was appropriate for me at the end of 1981, another that many would recognize that stems from a time about a year earlier, or a third that would give completely the wrong impression.

What’s more, it would be possible to infer relationships between the events symbolized by these flagpoles to construct a narrative around my early life – an accurate one in one case, and a completely inaccurate one in another.

I’m choosing not to go any deeper into those matters, not for reasons of privacy, but because it would take us too far off topic

So, a flagpole is a potential emotional resonance that forges a deep and persistent relationship with an individual. It could be a triumph, a melancholy, a wistfulness, a sorrow, a sense of friendship or companionship or optimism regardless of the odds – any emotional state that a person can experience.

Flagpoles need not be musical; in times past, a line or two of poetry, or a snatch of narrative from a novel, or identification with a character from a play or story, have all been flagpoles for people.

(Indeed, this is a shorthand that I sometimes use to inform players about an NPC – simple telling them that this or that has a particularly deep significance to the NPC, so long as they recognize the reference, tells them something about the character).

The artistry lies in creating that potential for resonance with the listener by perfectly capturing an emotion in some media form or another.

Contemplate the phenomenon of the “favorite character” – refer The Acceptable Favoritism: 34 ‘Rules’ to make your players’ PCs their favorites – and realize that there must have been a singular moment within the campaign when that character went from being just another collection of stats and personality traits to be a favorite of the player.

It’s creating the circumstances where it’s possible for that to occur that is, in my opinion, the true RPG equivalent of a ‘flagpole moment’. And not saying “no” at the critical moment.

One of the responses to the article to which I’ve linked, Jeff V, relates just such a moment in a Call Of Cthulhu campaign, in which – against all the odds – a PC shot Nyarlathotep in the head. Jeff was clearly the GM of the game, and would have been perfectly within his rights to say something like “the bullet enters the head and mushrooms into a cloud of red mist as it passes clean through. And then the cloud freezes in place and the gaping wound begins to close.” This is Nyarlathotep we’re talking about, after all. But he didn’t get in the way of the moment.

Jeff also makes the point that this is the ONLY time he has ever seen such a moment arise by chance; every other time, he has had to carefully contrive to create the potential for the moment to occur.

Which is why this is the perfect RPG analogue of the flagpole moment.

Documentary Success

This is the final category of success that I am presenting, and it’s one whose title and definition have morphed and changed considerably.

Like any aficionado, I have heard a number of live albums through the years; a few manage the task of putting the listener in the moment and making them feel they were ‘there’ even when they weren’t. Most are failures in this respect, and provide nothing but an inferior rendition of a piece of music.

That was my starting point, but the concept was broadened while writing the section on Flagpoles, above, by the realization that some pieces of music succeed in capturing the essence of a moment, era, or event, and being able to present that essence to others even if they didn’t experience it first-hand. Were I to list a few examples, I have no doubt that there would be surprises amongst them, music that many have never heard of; others would be well-known.

Obscurity convinced me that such examples would be a wasted effort; were Campaign Mastery a Music blog, it might be a different story. My proudest moment as a composer comes in having achieved Documentary Success in capturing the emotional impact of 9/11 as I experienced it, to the point of having some who actually lost loved ones in the event tell me that I helped them come to terms with the event and begin the healing process with my music, that I had created for them a Flagpole Moment.

The RPG Equivalent Of Documentary Success

There’s an equivalent phenomenon that I’ve only experienced perhaps a half-dozen times in my 38 years as a player and GM. In fact, at an average interval of about six-and-a-third years, I’m probably about due for another one.

It’s when every player at the table is so deeply in-character and in-the-moment that they become seamless, reacting as though they were their characters. It doesn’t last, and is usually broken when one of the players needs to consult his character sheet for something – the bubble is punctured by game mechanics, in other words – but for that short time that it persists, it’s magical, because it means that the game world has truly come to life for the players. This is the ultimate artistic achievement for a GM – well, one of them, anyway.

When you look over the totality of the possibilities, it should seem that several of these forms of success lie within your grasp at any given moment. Even contemplating them has brought out a number of tips and tricks to bring them closer to reality. But, even if you never get there, or have not achieved any of them so far, the very effort of trying for one or more of them can make you a better GM.

Targeted Self-Improvement

But that raises a difficult question: which of them should you prioritize? Should you aim for the one that you find the most difficult, or the one that you feel closest to achieving?

Every GM will have a different answer. We all have strengths and weaknesses; aiming for the one that’s most difficult is an attempt to improve capabilities in which we consider ourselves weak, aiming at the one that’s closest is playing to our strengths.

For my money, you should always try to achieve them all, but priority has to always go to what you’re closest to achieving. Once you have done so, or are sure of doing so, however, it drops to a point further down the list, and something else becomes “closest”. Eventually, your efforts will naturally migrate from your strengths to the things you’re only “okay” at; the effort improves your capabilities in that department, and then – succeed or fail – you can move on.

This continual self-assessment dovetails attempts at self-improvement with the things that you’re already good at; this not only keeps your confidence as a GM at a sufficiently high level, it keeps your players satisfied. After all, it’s your strengths as a GM that have presumably drawn them to your gaming table and that keep them coming back for more.

It’s similar to running a business – generating invoices may not be your strength, you may be better at getting customers in the door – but if you’re a sole proprietor, you’d better generate invoices anyway, or you won’t be in business very long!

“But I don’t know what I’m good at,” and “But I’m not that good at anything,” come plaintive wails from the back of the auditorium. So? Even if the pinnacles of success described are far beyond your grasp, you will still be closer to one or two of them than the others. Use this discussion as a diagnostic tool. There will be some things that you find to be easier than others; that, too, is indicative.

And, even if neither of these informs you of what your strengths as a GM are – it can happen in the case of extremely inexperienced beginners, or those who have never thought in these terms before? Then assume that they are all within your grasp. After all, if you haven’t learned what you’re doing, you haven’t learned any bad habits yet, either – and losing one of those is a LOT harder than not being sure of what to do and muddling through, anyway.

Even in such cases, however, I’m sure that one or two of these forms of success will appeal to your personality more than the others. Use that to set your initial priorities, in the absence of any other guide.

Decide what form of success you want to achieve, and work on achieving it while playing to your strengths, and the simple fact of thinking about how to go about bettering yourself in this respect will improve you as a GM. The tools for understanding your GMing style and directing your efforts at self-improvement are now yours; the rest is up to you.

Above all, never be discouraged by failure. You learn more by analyzing these than you ever do from success that was achieved through a lucky combination of circumstances. If you do stumble into a winning situation, congratulations and enjoy the feeling for as long as it lasts – but be aware that if you don’t know what you did to achieve it, you don’t know what will kill the goose laying these golden eggs. Every time you succeed, you have to start working to succeed again. Success is a fleeting pinnacle, but the effort to achieve it is satisfying in and of itself.

Nothing says “organized randomness” like a fractal image!
This one is courtesy pixabay.com/Shabinh,
cropped and color-enhanced by Mike, and looked so gorgeous that you can get a larger version by clicking on the thumbnail.

Anarchy.

Chaos.

Flexibility.

Uncertainty.

Control.

Challenge.

Unpredictability.

All of these words can be used to describe the influence of Randomness within an RPG. Every GM uses randomness in all seven of these ways, the relative significance being the primary variant. But why do RPGs contain a random element?

Randomness in RPGs derives from two sources, neither of which can by considered truly random, as you will soon see.

Player Choice

The one thing at the table that the GM has, theoretically, no control over, is the players. In practice, there is the GM’s understanding of the psychology of the players, of the characters that they are playing, of how the player plays the PC; there is knowledge to some extent of how the PC will react to a broad range of triggers and conditions, and can manipulate mood and situation to play on those factors to at least some extent. So player choice is never purely random, even though it may sometimes seem capricious (at best) to the GM.

The better the player, the more he will hone in on some “inner truth” about each character that they play, which they can use as a foundation and guiding principle, ensuring greater consistency of characterization over many sessions. Sometimes, a less-skilled player will find a character that simply “fits” their psychology like a glove, subconsciously finding that “inner truth”; such characters are very likely to become a favorite of the player in question.

And sometimes, no matter how experienced and capable they may be, an experienced player will be unable to find that “inner truth” at the core of a character, and will consequently struggle to roleplay them either effectively or to their satisfaction.

The more consistent the characterization, the more predictable it becomes to the GM, and hence the more control the GM has over this aspect of unpredictability at the game table.

Such control can never be absolute, however, because of the presence of the second source of randomness.

Die Rolls

Die rolls are employed to collapse the quantum uncertainty of an outcome into a finite resolution of uncertainty. If the game mechanics are d20 based, there are 20 possible outcomes of any given die roll; modifiers may shift those possible outcomes one way or another, but there remain just twenty possible results.

That can, of course, change if some exploding die roll mechanism is incorporated into the rules, but let’s keep this discussion simple.

Right away, the randomness of any outcome can be seen to be restricted to just those 20 discrete possibilities. For the additional flexibility and scope of randomness, some game systems are percentile based; others employ non-linear probability to achieve greater variability. I’ll get into that in a moment.

In practice, in many cases, the degree of variability actually collapses still further. Success or Failure – a binary state, almost certainly of unequal probability, but nevertheless a simple yes-or-no proposition. Some GMs add interpretations of degrees of success or failure as a rules refinement to overcome this simplicity when the situation is suggestive of more than two possible outcomes. Others subdivide a task and require appropriate checks for each subdivision.

If, for example, the character is attempting to bake a cake, you could divide this into ingredient selection, ingredient mixing, baking, and decoration. Get any one of them wrong and the end result may or may not be edible. But – unless it’s particularly important, or one of those steps presents an unusual challenge for some reason – most of the time, the same results can be achieved with a degree-of-difficulty measure.

That means that if a character succeeds by 10, their outcome will be just a little more appetizing than a character who succeeds only by 5. The only thing that a character who just barely succeeds will be confident of is that the cake won’t accidentally poison those who eat it.

Another way of handling these nuances is to ignore margin of success and instead apply modifiers to the roll. A master baker’s minimum standard of success is going to be a lot higher than that of an unskilled home baker for whom edibility is the primary objective. That is easily simulated by “raising the bar” by one every time the master baker adds X to his skill level. X could be two, or three, or perhaps four. I don’t recommend it to be more, or less, than that (out of twenty). This modifier determines success or failure according to different criteria than the simplest such meaning. You can even have a rule that, above a certain skill level, that simplest such criteria is always achieved except on a critical failure.

The psychology of the character should also factor into this discussion. A perfectionist will have a much higher standard of success than the ordinary practitioner. “It’s light, moist, delicious, and beautifully decorated.” – “Yes, but the bottoms dried out just a little too much, the baking tray was too close to the heat, so the cooking is just a little too uneven. I’m ashamed to put them forward for others to eat.”

In the non-linear probability model, the fact that some outcomes will occur with lower frequency. This can be seen when you plot the probability by outcomes of various dice rolls.



Graphs generated using AnyDice.com

The graphs to the left show the probability of outcome of 1, 2, 3, and 4d6, stretched horizontally to the same size. As you can see, 1d6 is a flat or linear probability (as you would expect), 2d6 is a straight line up and another down, peaking at the mean result of 7, 3d6 is a somewhat imperfect bell shaped curve, while 4d6 gives a very smooth bell curve by comparison. That means that with multiple dice, extremely low and extremely high results are quite improbable while outcomes close to the mean are relatively likely. The more dice you add, the greater the likelihood of a “central” result, a fact that I took advantage of with the “additional dice against a moving target number” mechanic in my Zener Gate rules.

It can take a while to intuitively grasp the impact of an nDx roll’s probability curve, whereas a flat roll can be instantly understood by almost everyone, making a linear system easier for beginners to get a handle on. Once you do, you can generally operate with reasonable ease, but you do need to shift mental “gears”.

Since nDx gives access to a limited number of low-probability outcomes, enabling a match to be made between a target number and the significance of success in achieving that number, that is more nuanced than a linear curve of similar size in terms of outcome range. The minimum percentage chance of an outcome on d20 is 5%, by definition. The minimum percentage chance of an outcome on 3d20 is 0.46% (3 or 18), and the next most improbable result is 1.39% (4 and 17), and the one after that is 2.78% (5 and 16). Only at the 6 and 15 results do the probabilities roughly match – 4.63%. The “missing” chances have to go somewhere, and the place they go is on results closer to the mean (10.5) than 6 and 15. Results of 10 or 11 account for 1/4 of the outcomes, and results of 9 and 12 are almost as likely at 23.14%.

But the collapsing into known possible outcomes mean that while the outcome in any individual case might be unknown and unknowable, in terms of the outcomes, these are very much predictable – and a good thing, too, because it enables creation of adventures that can encompass a range of outcomes.

Those are the only two mechanisms by which randomness enters the game. Everything else is under the direct control of the GM. And, as you can see, by changing definitions and difficulty settings, or by the manipulation of the players, even these are under the indirect control of the GM to at least some extent.

Which leaves out answer to the question of what purpose randomness serves within an adventure on very shaky ground. It must serve some useful purpose, or why bother having it?

So, what are the possible uses, given these new facts?

Image courtesy pixabay.com/TheDigitalArtist,
cropped and enhanced by Mike.
Once again, a larger version is available by clicking on the thumbnail!

Giving Players The Illusion Of Freedom

A cynic is sure to suggest that one possible purpose is to give players the illusion of being free to act as they see fit. Determination of success or failure is down to the die roll, an independent arbiter, and not the capricious whims of a GM. Die rolls, in other words, provide a metagame mechanism by which players can seize control of the game from the GM, or at least attempt to do so.

Empowering The Players

This posits a very adversarial relationship at the gaming table though. A less adversarial function that amounts to the same thing would be the GM willingly yielding an element of control over the game to empower the players, giving them confidence in their control over their characters.

Die Rolls For Everything?

Taken to its extreme, players might be permitted to roll dice, or be asked to roll dice, for absolutely everything that their characters want to do, down to whatever level of minutia the GM sees fit. “Make an armor roll to put on your left boot. Okay, now make another one for the right boot…”

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet, I’ve been in games (very briefly) that operated in exactly this manner, if not quite to this extreme. In fact, the very premise of task subdivision derives from such interpretations of the presence of die rolls within an RPG. The difference is that task division separates a complex task into multiple logical stages that can be clearly articulated and the impact of their success or failure on the ultimate outcome can be interpreted by the GM.

Derailing the Plot Train

This is one of the most important functions of die rolls in a game. By injecting a source of unpredictability as to outcome, however shaped and controlled by the GM, they enable the deliberate derailing of plot trains.

Instead of saying “no”, the GM says “It probably won’t work, but roll…”

The problem is that a failure to succeed is sometimes interpreted by a player as the GM manipulating the circumstances to ensure that the dice say ‘no’ for the GM, acting as a proxy for his will. That brings us back to that issue of “Illusion of freedom” again.

The illusion of a plot train is just as damaging to a campaign as a plot train. The only solution is to permit the dice to fall where they may at least part of the time – and make sure the players know it.

The dice, in other words, won’t do your job for you. It’s your responsibility to avoid plot trains, through your choices, through listening to the players, and occasionally risking a little anarchy slipping through the cracks.

Anarchy

This function of randomness within an RPG actually relates directly to the events that inspired the entire article. Since they’re relevant, the time has come to relate the story (in very compressed form, I assure you).

On Saturday, the adventure opened with the characters in the middle of an emergency. I started by relating to them how things got to this point – a villain, confronted in a reasonable way, tactically, with the characters doing the sort of thing that they would have predictably done anyway, but things didn’t go according to plan, resulting in the emergency.

How the players chose to deal with this emergency was up to them – I followed my usual maxim of “where there’s one solution to a problem, there will be others,” and – in fact – the solution they came up with was much better than the one I was prepared to offer if they were truly lost – and if they rolled well enough on an appropriate skill.

With the emergency resolved, they had to come up with a plan to deal with the villain responsible, which was actually the point of the whole encounter, which was part of a much larger picture that’s been building up in subplots for several adventures now. It took only seconds for me to recognize that the players were coming up blank.

I could have had someone make a die roll, but instead chose a non-random approach: an NPC offered a plan that was (a) in keeping with his personality as the players have come to see it; (b) tactically sound; and (c) within the group’s capabilities, giving everyone something to do. Accepting the plan was purely the PCs prerogative – sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t (and sometimes the plans are deliberately designed to contain unacceptable shortcomings or risks so that they will be rejected – the NPC isn’t just a mouthpiece for the GM to tell the players what to do). But, in this case, the plan sounded (and was) reasonable, if a little left-field, so they accepted it.

And then one of the players repeated a line he had used earlier, and which is a common one at my gaming tables: “tell us where the plan goes wrong.”

According to my adventure plan, it didn’t. But I saw an opportunity to inject a little anarchy and derail any perceptions of plot trains, so I had the team’s leader (chosen by the other PCs) roll on behalf of the team. If that roll had been good enough, the plan would have succeeded as described, but that wasn’t the outcome; the die roll indicated that it was about 66% successful. Since the plan had five steps, I decided that it was stage 4 that failed, chose a rational cause for that failure to have occurred, and presented the PCs (effectively) with a new problem.

If the PCs failed to solve that problem, I was prepared to let the villain escape – the anarchy factor, because I would have to come up with a new encounter with him on-the-fly – but immediately after devising the problem, I saw a solution that would enhance the credibility and viability of the main plot function of the adventure (in scenes that we have yet to play). This was only possible because one of the usual players was absent on this particular day, due to ill-health, and I happened to be wearing the “Runeweaver Hat” at the time, i.e. I was running the PC as an NPC. So he offered a solution to the problem that worsened a long-term problem being created by the villain ultimately responsible and left it to the team’s leadership and the player whose character would be directly affected to choose whether or not to accept the proposal – with no certainty on the player’s part that it would work, of course.

He did, and play proceeded.

As you can see, a little anarchy can be a good thing, prompting player engagement and permitting the occasional refinement of the “big picture” on the fly. If I had thought of it in advance, I might have scripted the entire encounter the way that it eventually played out – but I didn’t. Instead, I let the players AND myself think on our collective feet.

Challenge

Which also illustrates the challenge that randomness can provide the GM – not every random factor can be anticipated, or should be. Keeping the main plot more-or-less “on course” is the challenge, or modifying that main plot to incorporate unexpected changes in circumstance.

The players won’t always notice that you have done so, but even the occasional appreciation of such changes reinforces their perception (correctly) that the PCs, and the choices that the players make for them, do ultimately make a difference. And that makes the game more fun for them, and for the GM, both directly and vicariously.

Problem-solving is a routine challenge for the players. Permitting the occasional spur-of-the-moment bout of problem-solving by the GM brings the two roles closer together, and directly tears away at any perceived player-vs-GM adversarial relationship.

Flexibility

Deliberately incorporating a controlled level of unpredictability into a game forces the GM to be more flexible in his planning, and that gives him the scope for greater flexibility at the gaming table.

Players who read my adventure plans after the fact are astonished at three things: How much of it has been planned in advance, how much has been deliberately set up in past adventures or to feed into future situations, and how much of what some might consider “the important bits” has not been planned.

I’ve spoken of this before: if you can get contextual inference to do the “big picture work”, such as consequences of the fact that an adventure is even taking place, then you can be indifferent as to the outcome of that adventure once it is underway. Again, this neutrality affords you flexibility and gives the players license to be creative.

Control

At the same time, in most adventures, there are critical moments (which often seem to be of superficial significance at the time), beats that I need the adventure to hit in order for the big picture to continue evolving according to my larger plans.

Randomness through die rolls, controlled by the techniques described earlier, and
coupled with the manipulative techniques and triggers described, permits steering of these moments within a narrow range of possible outcomes. Setting situations up so that either outcome serves your purpose in different ways can be difficult, but smart players recognize that a die roll can fail, and are prepared with both back-up plans and with arguments that enhance their likelihood of success in the first place.

The incorporation of some genuine anarchy provides an effective camouflage for these moments. And, even if they notice at the time, most players are prepared to let such moments slide, first because they are of only superficial significance at the time, and second, because they are confident that when they do snowball into significance, the players will be given greater flexibility in how to respond.

You only get that level of trust on the part of the players by earning it. Every piece of deliberate anarchy that you court in a campaign can be thought of as money in the “credibility bank” – ‘funds’ that you then draw on when you need to.

At the same time, I put a lot of research effort into my adventures. Once again, every measure of credibility that you can incorporate adds to the willingness to let something slide, for the sake of the adventure, when you inevitably mess up. Keeping a positive balance in both “accounts” earns you brownie points for when you really need them. And that’s a form of big-picture control, too.

Predictably Unpredictable In A Controlled Way

I try to be predictably unpredictable in my adventures. Plot twists, but not all the time. Things planned only vaguely. Multiple option branches within a limited range of possibilities. Player flexibility and the occasional injection of anarchy – as much to enhance my own enjoyment of the game and the challenge of running it well, as to provide entertainment for the players. But all controlled and confined to the immediate situation or to longer-range circumstances that I can work around, to the ultimate benefit of the big picture that’s taking shape and evolving in the background.

Randomness is the tool that enables all of this to occur. And that more than justifies its presence within an RPG.

BONUS CONTENT!

This is a section that I was going to drop in wherever it seemed to belong but which, at the end of the day, didn’t seem to quite fit anywhere; it’s just a little bit off to the side of the main subject of this article, but too good to ignore, and not large enough to spin off into its own article.

D&D Combat is described not as simulating every blow exchanged, every parry and thrust, but as representing the cumulative result of many individual attempts to inflict harm upon an enemy.

That definition is at odds with the variability of linear probability die rolls. You can even argue that 3d6 provides too much variability.

A far more realistic simulation of this principle could be achieved by defining the success of a combat interaction as the % that the attack value represents over the sum of the attack value and the defender’s armor class, then multiplying that by the damage roll, or even multiplying it by the maximum damage that can be inflicted.

• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: 10/25 = 40%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 40% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.
• Attack of 5 vs an AC of 25: 5/30 = 16.66%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 17% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.
• Attack of 20 vs an AC of 10: 20/30 = 66.66%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 67% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.

If you still felt it necessary to have some randomness, add the same d6 roll to the attack value:

• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15, Attacker rolls a 4: [10+4]/25 = 56%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 56% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: Attacker rolls a 6: [10+6]/25 = 64%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 64% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15, Attacker rolls a 1: [10+1]/25 = 44%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 44% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict.

If you still want to preserve the extreme results of a critical or a fumble, you could use an exploding d6. This works as follows: if you roll a 6, roll again, and add 5 to the result for every additional die rolled. If you roll a 1, roll again, and subtract 5 from the result for every additional die rolled.

• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: Attacker rolls a 6, then a 1 for a total of 5+1=6: [10+6]/25 = 64%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 64% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict, and a critical hit.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: Attacker rolls a 6, then a 3, for a total of 5+3=8: [10+8]/25 = 72%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 72% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict, and a critical hit.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: Attacker rolls a 6, then a 6, then a 4, for a total of 5+5+4=14: [10+14]/25 = 96%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 96% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict, and a critical hit.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15: Attacker rolls a 6, then a 6, then a 6, then a 2, for a total of 5+5+5+2=17: [10+17]/25 = 108%. So in a round of combat, the attacker does 96% of the damage it’s possible for him to inflict, and a critical hit.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15, Attacker rolls a 1, then a 4, for a total of 4-5=-1: [10-1]/25 = 36% – and a fumble.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15, Attacker rolls a 1, then a 1, then a 6, for a total of 6-5-5=-4: [10-4]/25 = 24%, and a fumble.
• Attack of 10 vs an AC of 15, Attacker rolls a 1, then a 1, then a 1, then a 2, for a total of 2-5-5-5=-13: [10-13]/25 = -12%. If I were writing this game system, I would have this damage be inflicted on someone on the attacker’s side – PLUS a fumble.

If that makes fumbles and criticals too frequent for you, you could employ a d20 check as usual to confirm. But, since it minimizes the significance, you could probably achieve the same result by requiring a second exploding result before a formal critical or fumble was declared: so a 6 then a 6 gives you a critical but a 6 then a 5 just gives you a better hit; a 1 then a 1 gives you a fumble, but a 1 and then anything but a 1 simply gives you a worse hit. That makes the chances 2.78%, a little over half what they are in the d20/pathfinder system.

The effects of gaining attack levels aren’t so much in overwhelming damage, it’s in the reliability of that damage. Being able to do 35 points or whatever every – single – turn – is usually more valuable and a more reliable indicator of expertise than someone who might do 60 points if they get lucky, but might only do 10.

But the major reason I like this as a variant combat system for d20/Pathfinder is the impact on the mage/fighter game balance. Let the ever-flashy mages roll all their dice in an attack – they might get lucky, they might not. But against a fighter with lots more hit points who is repeatedly hacking away 20 or 30 HP every round, sometimes more, the fighter will win at least as often as he loses. Think about that.

Refinements are possible. Do you add any STR bonus (or DEX bonus for bows) to the damage before or after you apply the percentage shown? I can see things working either way. The latter does mean that you can literally achieve ineffectual blows with low strength.

It’s always fun to play with randomness!

As I said, not directly relevant to any of the discussions of the main article – but too interesting not to throw out there, anyway.

There’s a show that I like to watch now and then on a local Free-To-Air lifestyle channel called “Rescue My Renovation”. It appeals because it not only explains what was done wrongly but the correct way that it should have been done, and why.

This presents practical information that I’ve found useful from time to time in both real life and behind the GM screen (I never forget that every one of the techniques employed was a lesson learned the hard way at some point in the past).

Host John DeSilva comes across as personable and a genuinely nice guy, a “favorite uncle” who just happens to be a builder.

I’m not a handyman by anyone’s measure. My father, brother, and brother-in-law are far more in that category than I would ever claim to be, and my uncle is an honest-to-god builder, but I’ve picked up enough from hanging around them every now and then, and from shows like this, that I can quite happily deal with any construction-related situation that comes up while in the GMing hot seat.

The show is from the US’ DIY Network, part of the Discovery group of channels, and quite deservedly received a solid 7.7/10 on IMDB. I’m always a little suspicious of the “reality” of “Reality TV”, but all the indications are that this one is absolutely genuine. There has also been some criticism of renovations performed by the DIY Channel’s former incarnation, but none of that has landed on the doorstep of this particular program.

It’s pity that the show seems to have very quietly vanished after the 2014 season – never formally canceled, just not being filmed any more (more than anything else, that tells me that the DIY Renovation craze of the last 2-3 decades is faltering, but that’s just a side-note).

In this particular episode, DeSilva recited what is practically his mantra – (paraphrasing”) there is a right way to do things and a wrong way. The right way is demolition, get your framework right, call in your specialist services (plumbers, electricians, etc), floors & walls & ceilings, and finishing – paint, decorations, furniture, and so on.

My first thought was that this wasn’t completely true, and had even been violated a time or two on the show. That’s because it didn’t make mention of two additional services that aren’t always needed but are critical when they are involved: Architecture and Design.

And my second thought was that there are lessons here for the creators and GMs of RPG Adventures. In fact, a number of different areas of application immediately tumbled forth into my consciousness, one after the other, making this article all-but-inevitable. But, before I get into those applications, let me expand a little on that first thought.

Architecture

The construction methods of most homes are well known and don’t actually need architectural design – you decide the dimensions and layout of the rooms, which gives the dimensions and overall shape of the construction, lay out your foundations accordingly, build everything with an ample margin of safety on your tolerances, and simply apply all the lessons of practicality that have been mastered over the centuries when it comes to this sort of thing.

There are three occasions when architects are still required. First, when there’s some problem with the site that needs to be fixed or accommodated that will compromise a straightforward design; second, when you want to achieve something fancier than a robust, sturdy, design, including pushing the boundaries of what is permitted by the local government with authority; and third, when the resulting building needs to be certified for use by the general public – department stores, shopping malls, petrol stations, and the like, or for other special purposes (everything from prisons to opera houses falls into this category). And “problems with the site” can include spanning the borders between two or more such local governments – all of whom must be satisfied.

The reasons architects aren’t really needed (aside perhaps from satisfying Local Governments) for most basic constructions and renovations is that the structures and designs are fairly standardized, and so the loads and methodologies can also be standardized to a large extent.

Minor variations are easily accommodated by that ample margin of safety that I mentioned – If the frame can support two-and-a-half times what it is normally going to be called upon to bear, variations in design, layout, and construction can generally be accommodated without a second thought. An experienced builder will even know when the design limits and safety margins are in danger of encroachment and call in specialists before their own reputations are endangered.

In fact, commercial construction operates in a very similar way – decide what the loads are likely to be and then build in an ample margin of safety. It’s when these margins are eroded by compromises that buildings become unsafe.

This was driven home by a recent episode of another TV show, Seconds From Disaster, dealing with the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, which collapsed in 1995. You can read the Wikipedia page to which I’ve linked for more details, but, in brief:

• The building was originally designed to be an apartment block, but during construction to create a large department store.
• Substandard concrete was used for ceilings and walls.
• Column strength was compromised by a reduction in size from the 80-90cm indicated in the design to 60cm to maximize floor space. In addition, in part to save money, they contained only 8 steel reinforcing bars instead of the required 16, reducing their load-bearing capacity by about 50%.
• Floor slabs were incorrectly constructed, with their strength compromised by placing the reinforcing steel mesh 10cm below the surface instead of the normal 5cm – which doesn’t sound like much, but actually makes a big difference to their strength and to the loads being transmitted to the columns, effectively reducing the strength of the structure another 20%.
• The columns were deliberately spaced as far apart as possible, again to maximize floor space, a decision that also increased the load each had to sustain
• The original design was for four floors, but a fifth floor was added during construction. Originally intended to be a roller skating rink, during construction the decision was made to convert it to contain eight restaurants. In South Korea, restaurant patrons are seated on the floor, so this change required the inclusion of heating elements within the floor, dramatically increasing their weight.
• As a result, the columns were supporting approximately four times the weight that they had been originally designed to take. Eventual collapse was inevitable, needing only a trigger event to set events in motion. Things were made worse when the columns were cut back to make room for fire suppression systems installed around the escalators.
• That occurred when three 15-tonne air conditioning systems were relocated on the roof by placing them on rollers and dragging them to their new location. But it would be another 2 years before the progressive failures led to the ultimate collapse; in that time it was inspected by city officials a number of times and certified as safe, the last time just a couple of weeks before the collapse.
• There were ample warning signs on the day of collapse (early signs were noted more than two months earlier, before that final inspection) and both the Building Engineer and Manager recommended that the building be closed, only to be ignored by the building’s owner, who insisted that the store remain open. At the time, it made profits of about US$4 million per week, and was used by an average of 10,000 customers per day. This was about 5 years after construction was complete.
• 502 people were killed and more than 1500 trapped during the collapse, which took just 20 seconds to unfold. The investigation triggered a comprehensive review of constructions within South Korea, which found that 1 in 7 high-rise structures needed rebuilding, and 4 out of 5 needed major repair work. Only one in 50 was deemed safe. The Owner of the department store was jailed for 10 1/2 years for criminal negligence. His son and the CEO of the business was jailed for 7 years for corruption and accidental homicide, and 21 others including 12 city officials.

What I find most astonishing and enlightening is the fact that despite these multiple, willful, and flagrant compromises of the load-bearing capacity of the structure, it stood for 5 years. That speaks volumes about the scale of the margin of safety required of modern construction. While I’m sure that the standards are not as strict when it comes to domestic dwellings, there’s a LOT of room between “barely strong enough” and the commercial building standard.

Interior Design

It’s not entirely inaccurate to state that the architecture determines what a space can be used for, while the Interior Designer decides what it will be used for, as well as what it will look like. Whenever an interior designer has been called in on Rescue My Renovation, it has always been at the beginning of the project, for two very good reasons:

1. The more time they can be given to tweak and refine designs, the better the final result is likely to be, especially if there are problems to be overcome or unusual requirements to be satisfied.
2. Determining their base requirements before work commences permits all subsequent stages of the work to be guided be the desired end result. If additional structural reinforcement is needed at some point – a beam running across a wall, for example – it is a lot easier to incorporate it before you put the walls up.

The more fancy features are to be incorporated, the more critical (2) becomes. You don’t simply drop an interior courtyard and water feature into the design and expect a happy ending!

RPG Relevance Pt 1: Adventure Design

The entire process of construction – which is exactly the same as that of renovation, save that the latter has the additional initial stage of demolition – is analogous to the normal process of designing an adventure.

• You start by determining the structure that you intend to follow.
• You then determine roughly what the content will be for each structural component;
• …and then you create whatever content you require.

You may be guided through this process by a desired plot situation, or a desired stylistic objective, or can simply put things together guided by the stylistic traits of the genre.

For example, in my Zenith-3 campaign, adventures comprise two different primary structural elements. The first is personal development for the PCs, interpersonal relationships, roleplay-dominant scenes, background developments, and so on. The second is the major plot of the adventure. In terms of game sessions, I will normally aim for a ratio of 1-2 to 1, measured in game sessions, of these elements.

The simplest possible structure is to have all the “Personal” plots take place, evolving the background, the characters, and their personal soap operas, into a new situation, and then the major plot – like walking through a series of vestibules, waiting rooms, and the like, before reaching the living room.

Major Plots are almost always designed to connect to one or more PCs personal plots, and may also incorporate significant background evolution. The last adventure, for example, contained three or four game sessions of personal plots and a two-session main adventure, which significantly advanced one plotline of one the PCs and included a minor advance in a group plotline. The other PCs weren’t just along for the ride; they all played a part in determining the outcome and got their equal share of the spotlight, but one PC was the obvious focus of the adventure.

The next adventure, which I’m in the process of writing at the moment, has three structural elements, the first of which has already been dealt with in-play. You can describe this additional phase as housekeeping – decisions on future directions for each of the PCs. Next weekend (if all goes according to plan), we will enter the personal-plots phase of the adventure, much of which is built around the ramifications of decisions taken in past adventures. It will then segue seamlessly into the major plot, which – from a PC perspective – will (at least initially) appear to be just another of these personal plot-lines (that’s a favorite technique of mine, it means that the players can never tell what’s going to be significant so they have to pay attention to everything).

In isolation, the personal events are just things that happen, that show the ongoing Personal Lives of the PCs. When the campaign first started, each adventure was typically separated by 2-3 game weeks of time; currently, the interval is 1-2 game weeks. As the campaign continues to ramp up, that will become 3-7 days, then 2-5 days, then 1-4 days, 0-3 days, 0-2 days, and finally 0-1 days. As the campaign approaches its climax (assuming we get that far), there may be multiple adventures in succession over a single game day.

Even if they aren’t consciously aware of it, this impacts the players perception of the lives their characters are leading. Right now, pacing wise, they are reasonably comfortable. That will change.

This inevitably alters the balance between the personal plotlines and the main plots, shrinking the first and expanding the latter. Over time, there will also be an increase in suffusion between the two.

‘Suffusion?’ you say? What’s that?

You’ll note that there’s nothing about the duration of the main plots in preceding paragraphs. Sometimes these are a single concentrated incident, sometimes they are a succession of events in close sequence, and sometimes there are inevitable pauses and gaps and delays – but a person doesn’t stop being a person just because they are in down-time during a major plotline. Which means that I can occasionally sprinkle a main adventure plot with “personal developments” that may or may not be unrelated to the main plot.

I deliberately referred to the ‘personal lives’ content as holding no greater significance in isolation a little while back. That’s because when you view them collectively, themes and trends can be detected – because life is not a random assortment of ups and downs, there are identifiable highs and lows and patterns. It’s more like the pattern below:

Well, actually, that’s a bit too regular and predictable. Life is even MORE like this:

Sometimes, these highs and lows deal with a single individual, sometimes they are spread across a whole group, and sometimes they are something in-between. The only thing that you can say is that, over time, and ignoring other factors, they will tend to average out to a consistent level of some sort. If we were talking about a happy, healthy, moderately wealthy individual, that average would be on the plus side of the ledger; if not, it might be on the negative.

We’re talking about PCs here, so stability is a meaningless concept. Instead, their lives will lurch from success to catastrophic failure and back again, and the only certainty is that tomorrow will be different! But there will still be highs and lows, trends and events that buck them. Or, at least, there should be; the term “comfortable PC” should be an oxymoron if applied to anything other than a strictly temporary situation. Life should be calm only because it’s winding up to deal a haymaker!

These trends can happen accidentally, but many of my plotting techniques are aimed at controlling and directing them, to “suffusing” my smaller plots with broader narratives.

Those clued in, mathematically, will recognize the base graph shown above as being the sum of two sine curves of differing period and amplitude – one small and fast, the other larger and slower. These are analogous to individual plot developments in the life of a PC and to trends and larger plotlines affecting those specific events. Since there is always going to be some “splash” from one PC’s plotlines affecting another PC, there should in fact be at least two more such components PER ADDITIONAL PC, and then there are the individual major plotlines of each adventure, and the even broader plotlines that link those together.

But the techniques by which this incredible complexity is achieved are simple and straightforward, and the equivalent of what an interior designer does during the construction of a room or building. You can even extend the analogy by considering each major character – every PC and every NPC treated as a PC – as a room and the entire campaign state – the campaign as it is at any given moment – as the totality of all those rooms. The totality of the campaign, from start to finish, is the story of the “construction” and “redecoration/re-purposing” of the entire building.

The first step in creating an adventure is to decide on the structure for that particular adventure. Once that’s done, you’ve defined the “spaces” that need to be filled. Some of these will be essential narrative elements, and I then add more to more-or-less equalize the spotlight time across the different PCs.

I know what most of those essential narrative elements will be because I’ve broken a single plotline – large or small – into smaller pieces. Putting these in place within the adventure is the equivalent of putting up the walls and flooring. I rarely go so far as to include specific dialogue or flavor text; those are the “finishing” stage, the painting, decoration, and furniture.

Sometimes, if I’m in need of direction, I will select a graphic or visual image or concept – a piece of furniture – and frame the rest of the “room” around it. More usually, the plot defines what I’ll need, and I go out and look for it, or create it from scratch. And sometimes, there’s an ongoing give-and-take back-and-forth.

RPG Relevance Pt 2: Campaign Design

I don’t think I need to spend a whole lot of time belaboring this point; quite obviously, designing a campaign is just a matter of scaling up the processes used in designing an adventure.

The fundamentals are still designing a structure, applying elements to the specifications resulting from that design, and then creating details of those elements to decorate and finish the design.

The major difference is that these are – or should be – all designed and intended to change over time.

It’s always my preference to avoid showing the campaign elements the way that I want/need them to be for the main campaign; instead, I show them the way they used to be and show the PCs the events that transform them, having those events impact on them in the earlier phases of a campaign. This not only makes the players feel like part of the campaign world, it gives the major campaign events poignancy and direct relevance to the players – it gives them Gravitas.

It’s important to realize that the more of your design work that you can complete at the Campaign level, the less you have to do at the Adventure level. This is important because you can usually delay the start of a campaign until the design work is finished, but it’s more effort – and more dangerous – to delay the start of an adventure until it’s finished, or to start playing it without having finished creating it!

Another analogy that occurred to me at about this point in thinking about this subject is that genre is analogous to architectural style. This not only influences the structure and shape of the building, but defines what furniture and decorative elements are or are not appropriate within. These rules can be broken, if the need is sufficient, and these deviations can even shed new light on genre elements by exposing them within a new context through the resulting contrast. But you have to know what you are doing, or you will be relying on a lot of serendipity in your designs.

RPG Relevance Pt 3: System Design

That chain of thought led me to the third aspect of relevance: RPG system design.

If the genre of the game is considered to be the architectural style, the functions that the system is designed to facilitate, and their relative priority, can be thought of as the framing infrastructure – the timbers and beams and foundations that define the shape of the structure.

Characteristics, Characteristic Checks, saving rolls, combat mechanics, a skill system, experience systems, and archetype expressions (character classes in D&D, for example) – these will be common to almost every game system, present in one form or another.

Those with the highest design priority will be the richest and most detailed, while those with lower priority will tend to be more vague and generalized.

Other design priorities may be embedded – a magic system, a technology system, interplanetary or interstellar travel, cosmological principles, a particular look-and-feel. If a Star Trek game system felt like you were running a Battlestar Galactica campaign, you would consider that design a failure because it did not convey the essential flavor of the source that you were aiming for, just as a Star Wars campaign that felt like a Terminator or Jurassic Park movie would be wrong. Some of these will be defined by the genre, others may not.

The actual substance of each of these game system elements is akin to the decoration and finishing of the rooms in a building. Ideally, they will work together in harmony, and will be practical, functional, spaces. In practice, there’s always at least one room that’s a little bit clumsy or awkward, over-decorated or even ugly.

The redecoration/renovation motif is relevant, too; quite often, you can replace one piece of the design with something else. The only thing that you have to do is make sure the doors and windows match up – the inputs from other design elements, and the outputs to those elements. If you wanted to, for example, you could replace all the character races in D&D with something else. Or change the character classes. Or replace the Saving Throw system. Or tweak the Combat system. Or whatever.

Conclusion

In almost every respect, then, RPGs are analogous to construction, and the methodology that has evolved to produce habitats and structures that don’t collapse around our ears can be applied to the hobby to its betterment.

You can not only construct better, more reliable, adventures, you can understand those adventures more clearly – enabling more rapid and purposeful ad-hoc invention and intervention when necessary (the equivalent of emergency repairs)!

You can construct better, more effective, campaigns, that are more engaging and more entertaining while requiring less work to maintain, because you more clearly understand campaign structure.

You can construct better, more efficient, more flavorful rules systems and subsystem tweaks, because you not only have a more holistic understanding of the way game system structures interact, but can more readily isolate one structural element from another. You can see more of the connecting threads behind the set designs and, from them, derive a deeper understanding of what the designers were trying to achieve.

And all of that can only make you a more effective GM in the final phase of RPGs, without which all of the above is meaningless – play. Which makes the game better for everyone involved. Amply justifying the time spent on this subject – writing it, on my part, or reading it, on yours – I think.

Last week’s post was (technically*) the 1000th here at Campaign Mastery. Appropriately for such a number, it dealt with big-picture abstractions and the fundamental principle upon which the blog is founded – having more fun at the gaming table. That make’s this post (again, technically*) the 1001st – a number that itself both the seeds and burden of inspiration.

* for various reasons, there are any number of posts that shouldn’t get counted, in my opinion, like being forced by the technology to publish an article in three simultaneous posts because of its length – which happened early on. Depending on which posts you consider eligible for counting, the “True” 1000th will fall in December… or January… or possibly March…

I don’t know about anyone else, but my first thought upon encountering the number 1001 is to remember Scheherazade’s stories, and that leads me to think about Arabian stories in general, which leads me to Genies, which leads me to Wishes. So that’s the potted history that’s in back of this article.

GM Role

Nothing reveals the GM’s role in an RPG as “the arbiter of reality” more sharply than the sudden intrusion into the game as a Wish. Depending on how old-school your campaign style is, this could quite literally change everything.

More recent incarnations of game mechanics have tightened the reigns, to the point that a Wish seems underwhelming and over-sold, promising big things and unable to deliver. Starting from 3e D&D onward, the spell – whether granted by an item or by the spell-caster’s own abilities – increasingly seems unworthy of the name.

Such “Wishes” are detrimental to the sense of wonder, of fantasy, that should be inherent in the genre, at least in my opinion.

And yet, this whole question is inextricably entwined in one of the oldest complaints about the D&D game mechanics, that of the game imbalance between Mages and everyone else at higher character levels. Part of the assorted attempts at resolving that complaint, both official and unofficial, that have been instituted through the years, inevitably involves a catastrophic neutering of the power of a Wish.

My general inclination is to reject this neutering, at least in part. It’s my contention that since the GM dictates the availability of wishes in items, a better solution is to divide the problem in two – “Wishes”, as per the spell, can be as constrained and limited as the needs of game balance dictate, while rarity and difficulty of creation can be used to constrain the impact of more powerful “Wish” items.

The name “Wish” for a Mage Spell is thus revealed to be a matter of Wishful Thinking, a pun that sealed this attitude to the subject in stone as soon as I conceived it.

But, at the same time, this is – potentially – letting the genie out of the bottle. Some constraint and restraint is required, or a Wish is the equivalent of giving a monkey a buzz-saw and inviting them to “do their worst”.

Three Primary Considerations

When a Wish is made in one of my campaigns, there are three questions that have to be answered before any adjudication of the results can be possible. These are Campaign Damage, Hubris, and Balance.

1. Campaign Damage

Will granting the wish inherently damage the campaign, for example by providing an easy answer to one of the central dilemmas that the entire campaign is intended to resolve?

The more “high fantasy” the campaign is, the more this becomes a problem, an irony that is not lost on me!

2. Hubris

Will granting the wish inherently elevate the PCs to a position greater than that of the Gods? Or, to rephrase the point, if all it took was a wish to solve the problem then don’t the PCs think the Gods would have thought of that already?

No problem defined as being too great for the Gods to solve with a wave of their hands is subject to direct solution through a Wish.

3. Balance

Will granting the wish inherently elevate one individual PC above his peers in deliverable game power to an excessive extent?

“I want +20 Armor and Sword!” – No, no, no, no, no. Not going to happen.

“I want +10 Armor and Sword!” – will happen ten minutes before the first.

“I want +50 to my Hide In Shadows!” – getting closer to the mark, but still – no.

“I want my sword to have 1 inch per character level range so that I can hit targets at a distance.” – Hmm, interesting, let’s talk….

Ways Of Saying No

There are lots of ways of refusing an unreasonable request. At the GM’s discretion, any or all of these may also burn a “charge”, i.e. a Wish – too bad if you only have one!

1. Outright Denial

The simplest and most direct is simply to say “no”. But, having gone to all this trouble to inculcate a sense of wonder into the campaign, an arbitrary and outright denial that punctures that bubble of suspended disbelief seems counter-productive; an argument that I have heard advanced for adopting the “weak Wish” proposals from the outset.

2. Temporary Change

It’s far more satisfying to reinforce that sense of wonder by having the transformation requested occur – for a while. And to remind the PCs that sauce for the goose is also good for the gander – if the PCs use this as a temporary power-up, so will their enemies.

Of course, it won’t be necessarily obvious that the change is only temporary…

3. Delusion

In one campaign that I ran, making a wish that was beyond the power of the Wish to deliver simply caused the character making the wish to be subject to the delusion that their wish had been granted – Monkeying with the character’s sanity being the only way for the Wish to actually deliver the request.

My thought is divided on the question of whether or not the players should be informed of this in advance. It would largely depend on the social attitude towards those who were “strange in the head” in the culture, and whether or not the PCs would have had the opportunity at some past time to observe such an individual. “Old Frederick, he got one of them wish thingies, and wished to be King Of The World. Hasn’t been quite right since, going around in finery and issuing meaningless orders and imagining that people fall over themselves to obey.”

At a metagame level, players should be aware that attempts to rort the system risks bringing the wrath of the GM down upon their heads, and that this is not a good idea. But some people just can’t help themselves.

4. The Rules Lawyer

I normally eschew “rules lawyer” approaches to problems. But if a player asks for it, I’ll unleash both barrels. On one occasion, a player who was granted a wish submitted his request in writing, with 16 typed pages of detailed specifics of the request’s fulfillment that would not constitute the granting of the Wish in the opinion of the character making the wish.

This for a request that, if presented in a straightforward manner, I would have had no problem fulfilling.

You see, there was a movement in the 70s and 80s that cast the players and GM into adversarial roles; a notion that the GM should be doing his level best at all times to kill off the PCs, and anything was fair game if it avoided this fate. The rules, and in particular a strict interpretation thereof, was the player’s only defense. This, despite an outright statement in the GM’s Guide that the rules as published were only guidelines and suggestions, and the GM was free to interpret or rewrite them as they saw necessary.

Of course, abuse of that authority led to greater demands by players to control their own destinies, for the GMs to be forced to adhere to the rules, and for the rules to be sufficiently comprehensive that the GM would not be required to make arbitrary decisions.

I don’t hold to that principle at all. Instead, I adhere to a variation on the original old-school approach – “the GM is free to interpret or rewrite the rules as they see necessary for the betterment of the game.” The game is not served by denying players the ability to do anything not explicitly permitted by the rules; it is not served by capricious or hostile rules interpretations. The purpose of the game is not to “win” – it’s to have fun, and the players and GM are engaged in a cooperative effort to that end.

Three pages of legalese is a violation of that principle. It was certainly no fun to read it, and would have set an unwanted precedent to let the player get away with it. Nor was it appropriate for the INT 14 character to have submitted such a wish!

Almost immediately, I spotted a major hole in the reasoning of the player. Putting it on paper took no more than 1/4 of a page. I then handed it to the player in question and gave him a choice: submit a simple request that didn’t assume that the GM was an enemy power, or I would rule based on that 1/4 page response (to the character’s severe detriment), and to go away and think about his choices for a week or so.

These days, I am even less tolerant. In essence, if you act as a rules lawyer, on the basis that you will not only ruin my fun but that of everyone else at the table, you are asking for it with both barrels.

5. The Monkey’s Paw

The nastiest way to say no – and what I mean by “with both barrels” – is to go full-blown Monkey’s Paw on the PC. And then run a mini-adventure in which the crippled and maimed PCs quest for another Wish with which to undo the first.

As a general Rule Of Thumb

If a wish doesn’t violate one or more of the three Primary Considerations, I won’t reject it. Even if it does, I may use one of the alternative rejection methods, depending on the results of considering a fourth issue: How Much Fun Will It Be To Grant The Wish?

The answer falls into three categories:

• None or minimal – rejection if a violation, shrug and say OK if not. But try to persuade the player to make a different choice.
• Fun for a while, but not in the long term – rejection via method 2 if a violation, shrug and say OK if not. When it stops being fun, I can give the player the chance to rescind his wish, or provide another Wish to undo the effect.
• Fun, fun, fun – rejection via method 2 if a violation, evil grin and ready agreement if not.

The Scale Of A Wish

Because I always think about the scale in terms of answering the question of just what can be done with a Wish, especially an item-borne wish, long experience has shown me that the scale of the wish has a big bearing on all four considerations. When I aggregate all the possibilities into a master list, I end up with a 12-step scale.

1. The Cosmic Wish

The most likely to violate Principles one and/or two, this is a substantial reordering of the game universe. But it’s also an invitation to the GM to be at his most creative, so there’s always an off-chance that I’ll say ‘yes’ – though that “yes” might bear an uncanny resemblance to a “Monkey’s Paw” refusal, at least at first.

There is a fairly predictable pattern to the way events would unfold. First, the player would achieve whatever his direct intent was (a good thing, from his point of view). Second, negative consequences and ramifications would begin to be observed, leading others to discover the reordering of nature. Third (if it hadn’t been undone already), positives would be discovered, showing that the change isn’t uniformly good or bad, just different.

It’s a key element of human nature to notice the negatives first, unless blinded by optimism, but it’s dangerous to reject a policy simply because some negatives have been observed; the question has to be whether or not the change on the whole is better, worse, or neutral, and that can’t be done without identifying the positives. Most people won’t wait, and substitute an ideological bias one way or the other, leading to a false appraisal.

Often, this is because the negative effects will happen more or less automatically, with no need for action, while the positives will require some effort to achieve. The benefits are potential, in other words – and manifesting/achieving them thus becomes another thread within the campaign, potentially unveiling a whole new opposition force, upending established alliances, and – in general – upsetting the apple-cart of predictability.

BUT – and it’s a big one – you always have to ask the question of why someone else doesn’t use a Wish to restore the status quo. That leads into complicated issues of Destiny and Causality that might not be everyone’s cup of tea to contemplate. The simplest answer is simply to state that no Wish can ever completely undo the effects of another, and that resistance to change increases with each attempt to rewrite reality – and don’t worry about why.

2. The Divine Wish

In my campaigns, the Gods are limited in some respect. Omnipotence and omniscience don’t work well as campaign premises – something that I wrote about back in 2010, in A Monkey Wrench In The Deus-Ex-Machina: Limiting Divine Power (and don’t miss the discussion in the comments!)

That means that it might be at least theoretically possible for a Wish to impact at a Divine level – replacing one Deity with another, for example, or elevating a PC to Divine status. Assuming that you can skirt any problems with the three Principles, this simply opens new cans of worms for any PC who didn’t realize that in some respects, Gods in my campaigns are going to be as circumscribed as humans, if not more-so!

Indeed, one of the driving factors throughout the history and in-play time of my Fumanor campaign was Lolth’s attempts to ascend to True Godhood, because she had never made this discovery, and the PCs recognized it as a consequence of opposing some of the machinations she had set in motion.

In the Rings Of Time campaign, this was also true – but this time, it was the PCs, having been used by “The Gods” to do their “dirty work”, who determined to claim the rewards of Divinity. After all, they had done the work of the Gods already.

But it’s more difficult to evade the Principles at this scale. Not impossible, though.

3. The Planar Wish

A wish that affects just one plane? Theoretically possible, but there would be domino effects and repercussions that would need careful study before you could be sure that one of the three Principles would not raise a veto. If inspired, though, this is the sort of thing that I had in my with rejection method number 2.

4. The Civilization Wish

Wishing a change to an entire specific race? Again, possible – but this is quite likely to impact on Principle number 1, or simply not be fun, at least after a while. So it’s something that I would have to think very carefully about before granting.

Wishing that all Gnomes grew an extra inch in height? No problem. Wishing that the Drow reformed? Big problems. Wishing that Elves respected human leadership? Hmm, maybe. Wishing that Dwarves were less stubborn? Maybe. Wishing that humans discovered gunpowder? That’s more problematic – how do you know what Gunpowder is or can do, to wish for that? Wishing for humans to have an additional racial advantage to bring them more in-line with the Demi-human races? Assuming that potential problems with Principle 3 can be avoided, that might be possible.

The devil is in the detail.

5. The National Wish

Instead of an entire race, how about one particular Kingdom or Tribe? For example, if one Tribe of Orcs is known to be more willing to negotiate in good faith or be opposed to war, Wishing for that Tribe to be ascendant over the others might be completely reasonable – and raises an entirely new question for a GM to ponder: “How long does it take?”

A wish may not be able to get there directly, but may be able to start a domino chain of events that leads to the desired result. Directly elevating that Orcish Tribe, for example, might be beyond the power of a Wish, but starting a Civil War that would eventually have the same result might not be.

Of course, should such a Tribe discover – after gaining that ascendancy – that it was the result of PC interference in internal Orcish Politics would not only fracture the tribe, politically, but probably start the War that the PCs were trying to avoid. But the temporary respite might be worth it.

It’s in putting such options on the table that Wishes achieve their ultimate value in an RPG – providing they haven’t been neutered.

6. The Regional Wish

With each reduction in scope, the likelihood of a Principle 2 violation recedes, while the likelihood of a Principle 3 violation grows. A wish that affects only one geographic region, such as a bountiful harvest, or a Gold Rush, brings this point into sharp relief. In fact, it’s fairly difficult to imagine a Hubris violation at this small a scale. If the Wish were limited in duration, I would be even more strongly inclined to grant it – for example, “I wish for good weather for the next two weeks”, or “I wish for it to rain on your city for a year and a day”.

7. The Local Wish

Actually, I would regard that last one as a “Local Wish” – one affecting just part of a geographic region. These rarely have much impact beyond flavor, and that makes them eminently grantable for the most part. One still needs to keep a weather eye out for domino effects, especially if affecting a Capital City or vital Trade corridor.

One can also strike trouble with overreaching in some other respect – “I Wish for this fortress to be Impregnable” is asking for trouble of the Monkey’s Paw variety – some virulent disease that devastates the population would lead most invaders to bypass such a fortress without attacking, for example.

8. The Family Wish

With the Family Wish, the danger of a Principle 3 violation becomes ascendant, though targeting the wrong family might still incur Principle 1 problems, and I can still envisage potential overreaches – wishing that your family was the Royal Family, or that you were Heir to the Throne, for example. On the other hand, if I can think of enough additional burdens and consequences of interest – if I can see ways of making it fun, in other words – there might only be Principle 3 dangers to consider.

This brings up an important principle that hasn’t been mentioned so far (and note the lack of capitalization): balance can sometimes be achieved in the face of an overreaching wish that would otherwise produce a Principle 3 violation through the imposition of additional life complications for the character. This, in essence, plays Principles 3 and 4 off of each other. The key to resolving such possibilities is whether or not they would result in one character receiving a disproportionate share of Spotlight Time.

9. The Personal Wish

With the downsizing of a wish to this scale, Principle 2 violations (Hubris) largely fall away, but the potential for Principle 3 problems (Imbalance) becomes acute. Nevertheless, this can be a viable solution for some campaign problems – a player takes multiple levels of a particular class with laboring under a misinterpretation of the class mechanics, for example, and wants to trade them all in for levels in a completely different character class. Provided that power levels are equitable, this would be a perfectly satisfactory application of a Wish.

Class and Ability synergies have to be carefully watched, however – if one class permits a character to always attempt a Reflex Check for half damage, and another grants the ability to always take no more than half damage after a Reflex Check, the combination represents a significant power upgrade for the Character.

Often, decisions at this scale are the subject of negotiated compromises instead of outright verdicts. The guiding principle is always the 4th – more fun for everyone is the goal.

10. The Sub-personal Wish

Rather than affecting the whole of a character, Wishes at this scale affect just one attribute or aspect of the character. The considerations are very similar to those of The Personal Wish, but are less likely to result in problems.

I have a set of rough guidelines that I follow. If the character has a positive stat modifier, a single wish can raise that stat to 18 (sometimes 20, depending on the campaign); if not, it can only raise the stat to 14, and a second wish is needed to get to 18. Thereafter, a single wish increases the stat to the minimum required for the next highest stat bonus.

Similarly with magic items: if the original item is +0 or +1, it can become a +2 item. A +2 item can become a +3, a +3 can become +4, and +4 can become +5. If the game system progresses beyond that limit – Pathfinder does, from memory – so does this principle.

11. The Potentiality Wish

When you reach the top of the scale, you enter the realm of the Potentiality Wish – that is, wishing for an item or ability to have the potential to exceed that threshold. In D&D (3.x), that means +6; in Pathfinder, I think it’s +11.

The wish has two effects: it enables the item to be enchanted to that degree, and it ensures that there is someone out there, somewhere in the game world, with the skill and expertise to so enchant the item. I make no promises about who they might be (ally or enemy), or what might have to be done in the form of a quid-pro-quo to earn their cooperation, or how much it might cost the PC.

Another way to think about Potentiality is that the player has wished for an Adventure with one particular reward to be written into the campaign narrative. Every other aspect of that adventure is the province of the GM.

12. The Mechanical/Trivial Wish

Sometimes-contributor Ian Gray takes his Wishes down to an even smaller scale – he wishes for just +1 to one particular attribute or item at a time. His reasoning is that the GM is far more likely to grant such requests (while not paying attention to the total being achieved), and is far less likely to “monkey” with the outcome.

I discussed this at greater length in The Power Of Synergy: Maximizing Character Efficiency about 6 years ago (how time flies!) but that article then moved off on a different tangent to this one.

What is your default position?

Some GMs have a default position, when it comes to wishes, of saying “no” unless it can be shown that there will be no ill-effects. This reflects the woeful restriction of Wishes in the game rules, the unnecessary sacrificing of genre and flavor for practicality, and an admission that the GM either lacks the time, enthusiasm, or imagination to properly scope out the potential consequences and assess them.

Other GMs have a default position, when it comes to wishes, of saying “yes” – provided that the request is on an approved list. This is almost as bad, and for exactly the same reasons.

My default position is to say “maybe – let me think about it for a minute.” And then the actually spend that minute in deep thought about the consequences, the campaign, and the Four Principles that I have described in this article. If there’s a problem, can it be mitigated? If there’s a reason to say “no”, can it be worked around? Can fulfillment of the Wish be delayed until that objection is no longer a problem? Is there a means of saying “yes?” and coping with the consequences?

Ninety times out of a hundred, that 60-second review will produce a definitive outcome, ranging from a “yes” to one of the five ways of saying “no”. Occasionally, it will lead to a “I’m inclined to say…” either yes or no, followed by a “but,” and further discussion. On rare occasions, I may have to say, “I need to give it more thought.”

That’s the virtue of the four principles – and the flexibility provided by multiple ways of saying “no”. They cut through the fog, by posing specific questions and prompting productive lines of thought.

Ultimately, when you boil the first three Principles down, they are all reflections of a potential to reduce the amount of fun at the game table, making them specific derivatives of the fourth and final principle – and that’s why the fourth can occasionally override the others, showing a path through the valley of “no” to the signpost that reads “yes”.

Forget about saying “yes” or “no” by default. “Is it more fun?” should be the gold standard of decision-making at the game table, the question that overrides all others, and you can usually get there by compromising. This is just one example of how that can be put into practice.

I know a number of former GMs who gave up the job. Some of them reverted to being players, some of them occasionally still dabble in the big chair, and some were so traumatized by the experience that they gave up RPGs entirely.

There are always three parts to the equation that dictates a GM’s longevity.

The first is the amount of work required and the GM’s capacity for completing that work in a timely fashion while maintaining some sort of personal life beyond RPGs. No GM should ever be put in a position where they have to choose between family and an activity with friends, and if one is, most of the time you can expect the activity with friends to be the loser. And, even if things never get that far, stress resulting from overwork can force the GM to abandon his role, anyway.

The second is the degree of skill with which the GM executes the various tasks, both in-game and prep, that comprise that game function, and his ability to recognize and acknowledge that skill. A GM who feels, rightly or wrongly, inadequate to the demands placed upon him by the big chair, will often take any excuse to abdicate his role, if necessary by shutting down the campaign and beginning a new one with a different concept, game system, and possibly even genre. This outcome is still more likely if the GM is, in fact, inadequate in the estimation of the players concerned; their lack of support can discourage the GM before experience gives him the chance to rise to the standard demanded. Of course, the standards applied by the players may be unrealistic, or the GM might even be genuinely swamped by the demands being placed on him. It can be hard to judge. And, of course, the still more-likely prospect may be that they are somewhere in between these extremes.

My co-GM’s experience in the early days of the Pulp Campaign is relevant. Although extremely knowledgeable in a number of fields – in fact, of us all, probably the most knowledgeable in those fields, including genre knowledge – his ability to execute a campaign was not up to the same standard.

This had previously killed off a Traveler campaign when the players wanted more information about the different factions in a civil war before committing themselves instead of diving in up to their necks, and were insistent on peaceful trading in the meantime. He could not find a way to engage us in adventures; his entire campaign plan was predicated upon us choosing a side in the war and actively engaging in the military campaign.

After a couple of okay-but-not-brilliant adventures, frustrations were beginning to mount in the Pulp Campaign. In particular, his plan to backstop the players and fill any gaps in their capabilities with ultra-capable NPCs, a lack of expertise in the game system that showed no signs of improving and which led him to continually over- or under-estimate how effective his NPCs would be, and the sheer number of players (9 or 10) – which resulted in none of them receiving an adequate share of the spotlight – had the campaign on the rocks.

All the players acknowledge that they were at the point of pulling the plug. Some were intending to give it one last chance to improve, others were already prepared to pull the pin.

That was when I stepped into a co-GMing role. I had virtually zero genre knowledge, but knew how to string plotlines together into bigger pictures, knew the game system, and how to solve most GMing problems. I was able to put together a coherent concept for the campaign that emphasized the collective power of the PCs and minimized the individual capabilities of the NPCs, was able to put some depth into the plotlines and incorporate them into a more sweeping plotline, and able to provide the expertise needed to challenge the PCs without overwhelming them. What’s more, I was able to expand the adventures to encompass the palette of capabilities of all the characters. As some players left the campaign because they weren’t in love with the genre, we were better able to focus these efforts on those who remained, and so ended up with a stable line-up.

We’re currently running through the 31st adventure since we teamed up, and working diligently on the 32nd, which we expect to begin early next year. We’re also into our 12th year of co-GMing the campaign, so it’s gone from a near-death experience to extreme longevity!

The third critical factor is the amount of fun that the GM extracts from the process. What floats their boat, ticks their boxes, and keeps them happy to invest the kind of effort that’s required to create a campaign to modern standards?

That’s the subject for today’s article.

Itches to scratch – Prep

There are two parts to GMing – prep and play – and they are about as different as chalk and vulcanized rubber. Prep is the 90% that players rarely see; but for some GMs it is the reason they get up in the morning and think gaming.

RPG Prep is creating plots and situations; creating characters; creating locations; contingency planning; and may also involve creating maps, props, flavor text, research, psychology, strategy, and big-picture conceptualizing.

Inevitably, there will be parts of this cocktail that appeal more than others, and parts that any given GM does better than others, and parts that they perform more efficiently than others, and the likelihood that any of these attributes coincide is vanishingly small, but happens more often than some might think.

That’s because the things that we’re good at tend to be performed better and/or more efficiently, both because we’re more inclined to devote our full attention to them, and because our skill in performing those tasks is part of the reason why we enjoy them. It can convey a sense of being in control of an otherwise uncontrolled melee of competing demands for our attention.

When Practical Solutions fall short

Equally, there will be some approaches to the craft of GMing that work for a particular GM, and some that fail miserably, no matter how objectively practical the approach might be. A good example is Johnn Four’s “5 room” systems – while I can appreciate the practicality, having tried the approach a couple of times, I found that for me, they sucked all the fun and coherence from my prep, turning it into something that had to be done rather than something that could be enjoyed for its own sake. It felt like the process was in control, not me.

Waning enthusiasm for game prep is a sure sign that your prep system isn’t scratching your personal prep “Itch”.

Johnn has also tried my techniques, and found that while he started strongly while utilizing them, he was unable to sustain coherence and output in the medium-to-long term; his campaigns escaped his control, and his enthusiasm for them waned in proportion. He needed a more loosely-structured approach that nevertheless suborned everything into a consistent pattern – the “5 room” system that he now espouses.

Once again, waning enthusiasm is the key indicator.

Every GM is different, and every GM needs to find their own solutions. That creates good blog content, because the only certainty is that your solutions might fit others. I can share my techniques and Johnn can share his, and we’re both right – and might both be wrong when it comes to the needs of “GM Johnny”.

Moreover, exposure to multiple techniques means that you can cherry pick what you need to get you past a particular creative “hump” or problem. You learn something even if the overall experience is negative and your response is, “I’m never doing it that way again!”

The conflict between Need and Desire

My process, in a nutshell, is to create a to-do list and then prioritize the items on it. Some may generate new entries or alter existing ones, so the list is always growing and evolving.

I divide the list into “must’s” and “desirables”, estimate how long the must’s will require (minimum) to complete to a minimum acceptable standard, and make sure that I allocate at least that much time to them. That automatically adds “Polish [X]” to the list of “desirables”.

Of course, I’ve added refinements and complications that suit me to that process, but that’s what the essentials boil down to – making sure to do the essentials to the minimum acceptable standard and then spreading what free time remains on the remainder, selected by value to the adventure and how much that process scratches my personal itches.

That means that some parts of the GM’s task are forever being neglected by my prep, but I know I can live with that because if I couldn’t, it would be on the “must do” list. For example, having some idea of what a villain can do with his powers is a “must” for my superhero campaign, actually translating that into game mechanics is close to the bottom priority of the “desirables” list, more often not done than complete. I trust myself to be able to improv a translation of concept into game mechanics during play, and find I get more “value” (both in polish and in fun) from polishing the abstract concepts.

I’ve described my planning process and some other techniques in previous articles, most notably

• Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity (task list and prioritization process);
• The Ubercharacter Wimp: Plotting within your PCs limitations (a tool for the faster creation of featured NPCs);
• Creating Partial NPCs to Speed Game Prep (a process for the rapid construction of non-featured NPCs, without personalities);
• By the seat of your pants: the 3 minute (or less) NPC (creating personalities quickly, either in advance, or at the game table – which goes well with the preceding article);
• It’s Not Like Shooting Sushi In A Barrel: A Personalized Productivity Focus For Game Prep (a more abstract and theoretical foundation that eventually became the Game Prep process described in the first article listed).

There are a couple of problems with this technique.

1. All your “itches” might end up in the “desirables” column.
2. Itches that make the “musts” tend to be front-loaded into the start of game prep.
3. You can easily overindulge because you enjoy what you’re doing.

1. It all feels like work

If all the parts of game prep that you enjoy end up on the desirables list, your game prep is a list of chores that have to be finished before you can go and play – if you get any “play” time at all.

Every now and then, you can cope with this, but it’s not sustainable, even if it is the “responsible” approach.

Now, I’m not smart enough to solve the problem of work-life balance to universal satisfaction, and this is just another reflection of that social issue. But I have a solution to this particular problem – distributing the “musts” throughout the available prep time, and – in the process – leaving a little room for indulgence in the daily or weekly schedule.

For example, if you have a total of 10 hours a week to devote to game prep, and the “must do” list for the current adventure you are working on requires 6 of those hours, that leaves 4 hours for fun. You can either spend all six of those hours up-front, making sure that the “musts” get done, or you can decide that for every two hours spent on “musts”, you will spend one hour of the available prep time on a “desirable” that scratches your personal itch. That uses up half the time allocated to ‘desirables’ before the ‘musts’ are complete, technically violating the principles of the prep structuring process, but it’s a lot more sustainable over the long term.

The real problem, which I can only partially solve through efficiencies like “Partial NPCs”, still arises when there isn’t even enough time to complete the “musts”. But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

2. That’s the fun part over with

A similar problem arises because of the natural human tendency to prioritize the tasks that we enjoy most, when all other factors are identical. If you apply that tendency to the list of “musts”, it’s easy to see that you will do as many of the fun parts first as you can – and then find the rest of your game prep to be a chore.

The solution, once again, is to deliberately distribute the fun and the work – and, in fact, to prioritize the “work” over the “fun”, as that provides an incentive to get the “work” done.

That’s not always possible, because of the principle of “dependence,” which I haven’t mentioned so far. Simply put, it means that some tasks depend on the output of other tasks, and so can’t be carried out until the dependent tasks are complete. The prioritization process is vastly complicated than the elegant model described by the earlier synopsis because of this factor.

There are only two ways of approaching this problem – either you do all the dependents first, regardless of the prioritization sequence with “fun” as an incorporated factor (the top-down approach) or you create some jigsaw pieces without knowing whether or not they will fit (a bottom-up approach).

The choice for me is a simple one – if I have ample time in hand (“Musts” consuming 50% of the available prep time, or less), I’ll go with the bottom-down approach because there’s time to completely redo a jigsaw piece that can’t be hammered and filed to fit. If time is tight, the more serious strict dependence must be followed.

But here’s a fun fact that shows the underlying complexity of the whole situation: with a little discipline, the more you indulge the “fun when it’s scheduled” bottom-up approach, the easier it becomes to do so. The solution is to save and index discarded jigsaw pieces.

Let’s say you have an idea for an interesting location. Normally, you shouldn’t spend time on it until you finish outlining the plot and know whether or not it’s going to be needed, but if you have the scope for some self-indulgence, if it turns out not to fit the plotline, you can save it for an occasion when it does match your needs.

The more you indulge in the bottom-up approach, the more leftover puzzle pieces you stockpile against future needs, so the smaller the risk entailed in future indulgence. Of course, the more such puzzle pieces that you stockpile, the more dependent you are on your indexing process to quickly find what you are looking for.

3. The Danger Of Overindulgence

Self-indulgence at any time leads to the potential for overindulgence. In this case, that usually takes the form of spending more time on a list item than the minimum needed to produce something of playable standard – simply because you are enjoying working on what you creating at the time.

This is actually both a manifestation of, and a cause of, “Can’t see the forest for the trees” syndrome, where you loose perspective on the bigger picture and begin to obsess about the details of one part of that bigger picture.

You can actually reach the point of counter-productivity – the more details you load into a list item beyond the necessary, the greater the danger of incongruity and incompatibility between the details and that bigger picture.

The self-discipline required to avoid overindulgence is the price you pay for permitting distributed ‘fun’ prep. Everyone will have their own line that they should not cross, and it won’t be a fixed thing for any given individual over time, either. To guard against over-indulgence, the best solution is to end each prep session with a review of how what you have done fits into the whole. You will soon recognize when you have over-indulged – and when such indulgence begins to threaten your capacity to complete the other items on your “must” list.

Personally, I punish myself for any over-indulgence by insisting that the extra time spent eats into the time reserved for other social activities. I might have to forego watching a TV series that I enjoy, or stay home and work instead of going out, or getting up early, or whatever. It’s important that it be an activity that I would enjoy so that it’s an actual punishment.

Itches to scratch – Play

For some people, prep contains the only parts of GMing that they actually enjoy; running an actual game is the price they pay for the stimulation needed to trigger prep. Some of these people spend all their time designing adventures and campaigns and never actually playing them!

Other people go so strongly in the other direction that they would (and do) eschew prep almost completely, relying on their capacity to improv. (While I can do that, I find it too stressful; but it’s better than not GMing at all).

Most people fall somewhere in between these two extremes. And that means that there are some parts of sitting behind the GM screen that they enjoy and some that they don’t, or don’t enjoy as much. Interpreting rules and dynamic rule creation, depicting multiple characters in a session, communicating persona or plot, being the center of attention or the ringmaster – these are all aspects of being a GM that may constitute an “itch” that the process of GMing scratches.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that the amount that you relish what you may be doing has no impact on your performance. There are NPCs that I’ve played that were strictly mechanical, by-the-numbers, resulting in an at-best adequate performance, and others that were so joyous to depict that I threw myself into the part, chewing the scenery most entertainingly. Players notice the difference. It can even change from week to week – this week, a smarmy official might be the big winner, next week a crazed scientist or mage.

Isolating and analyzing different activities comes far more naturally when prepping for a game session than it does when actually running a game session. That’s because such analysis and it’s documentation represents additional tasks at exactly the time when we’re already maxed out.

The only acceptable methodology is to review your memories of the events of the game session, perhaps aided with a prompt or reminder of some kind, such as a recording of play or log of events, both in- and out-of-game. Although not as visceral and in-the-moment accurate, this can at least provide the basis for some generalized appraisal – and more detailed analysis can be misleading, anyway – see, for example my comments on relishing playing particular NPCs a few paragraphs ago. If one of those showed up on a given day, “roleplaying NPCs” might get quite a high score, whereas on a day when none of them front up, “roleplaying NPCs” might get quite a low score. Only when that pattern is correctly identified can you think about functional strategies for increasing your enjoyment of your time behind the GM screen.

With a reasonable understanding, however, you can start adapting your GMing style to scratch your in-game “itches” more frequently and mitigate or change the elements you don’t enjoy as much.

Vicarious Engagement

One source of pleasure behind the GM screen that is often overlooked, and which deserves special mention, is Vicarious Engagement. This occurs when the players are engaging in the material you have prepped for them and clearly having fun, and you can vicariously enjoy the entertainment you are providing.

This is far more powerful than most people realize, because it feeds back into virtually every other aspect of GMing. If the players are having fun, they will be more tolerant of rules interpretations, they will react more strongly to the NPCs who are supposed to elicit reactions, they will immerse themselves more fully in the plot and in their character’s reactions to the circumstances in which they find themselves, they will be more forgiving and tolerant of the GM in general.

If, on the other hand, they are not having barrels of fun, that also feeds back into everything the GM does. They will be less tolerant of the need for rules interpretations, they will be more blase even toward provocative NPCs and frankly dismissive of those not designed to elicit a strong reaction, will not display heart-felt reactions in any event, will go through the motions rather than engaging with the plot, and will be less forgiving of anything and everything.

There are two sides to every coin, and it’s easy to see the negatives without appreciating this feedback/amplification effect. Having fun is infectious, and misery loves company; use these truisms of human psychology to your advantage. And contemplate this scenario: if you are able to fake your own level of enthusiasm enough to push your players onto the “enjoyment” side of the above equation, the principle of vicarious engagement can feed back to you to make the pleasure that you were feigning genuine, even if only to a lesser degree.

This same process has often been recommended for those feeling down – forcing yourself to smile has the same chemical effects within the brain as actually enjoying yourself, and those in turn make you feel better. It’s ten-cent pop psychology, but it works to at least some extent, and any improvement is a good thing!

A Log Of Labors

The best approach is to maintain a log of your activities over a couple of game sessions, both prep and in (reconstructed) play. That will give you some indication of which situations come up most frequently, and permit you to assess which ones you derive the most satisfaction and pleasure from – and that’s the basis of reasonable steps to improve your satisfaction with all aspects of your GMing.

Nor should you fall into the trap of thinking that the two are disconnected. They aren’t – inadequate prep of NPCs, for example, leads to greater improv, which may lead to either greater or lesser enjoyment from those NPCs behind the GM screen. The optimum strategy in your particular case might be to prepare less, not more.

What makes you Itch

Another way to look at it is to assess, as dispassionately as possible, your GMing strengths and weaknesses, then modify your prep and GMing style to maximize the value of the first and mitigate the second.

Find your itch, and scratch it. You will be a better GM for doing so, and it only takes flipping a few elements from negatives to positives to radically alter the overall balance within a campaign.

Not that you should perform this kind of postmortem all the time. It’s too distracting and self-obsessive for that to be good for you. An annual check-up is usually enough, plus (perhaps) a review a month or so after implementing any changes to see if they’ve had the desired impact.

If you have more fun at the game table, there’s a preponderance of probabilities that your players will, too. If your players have more fun at your game table, not only will your game be strengthened, but you are more likely to enjoy it too. Scratching your itch is a win-win. You won’t find a better bargain than that!

There are lots of good reasons to have a strong supporting cast in an RPG.

They permit interactions which reveal or highlight aspects of a PC that otherwise might get an infrequent airing, for one thing.

Trusted NPCs can serve as proxies for the PCs, or can supplement their skill-base.

Or, fourth, they can facilitate plotlines and subplots that would otherwise be impossible to deliver to a PC.

It’s the latter function that I want to focus on in this article.

The Splash Vector

There are any number of situations in which there’s a reasonably obvious right-or-wrong decision to make.

Sometimes, there may be more difficult choices on offer, in which a player character can be presumed to exercise due caution and do their homework, because of that degree of difficulty.

“Disasters never ‘just happen’,” as the tagline from the Canadian documentary series Seconds From Disaster reads; “They are a critical chain of events…” Break the chain, and the disaster doesn’t happen, or doesn’t have as severe an impact (depending on how late in the piece that opportunity is taken).

In essence, it takes a minimum of one error or circumstance to create the potential for disaster, and at least one more to transform that potential into a manifest reality. Even then, there may be multiple opportunities to discover the imminent catastrophe and mitigate, minimize, or even avoid it entirely; these have to be avoided if the catastrophe is to become both inevitable and to exact it’s maximum toll.

Which is what the GM usually wants to flirt with – the deeper into this chain that a twist can be inserted to turn catastrophe into disaster averted, the more dramatic the situation is, and the deeper the architect of that salvation has to become immersed in the plotline.

Last-minute escapes are more thrilling than situations which are easily averted.

The decisions involved in these chains of events also deserve some scrutiny. These are either overt actions or failures to act, and – if overt – can either be what would normally be the correct choice (but isn’t, for reasons unknown to the protagonist of the story), or can be an incorrect choice of action; either will deepen the crisis to it’s next stage. Even the right action taken too late, or not taken strenuously enough, can transform the danger of a potential disaster into an actual disaster.

But here’s the thing: if you’ve been able to engineer a situation in which the usually-correct choice of action will only make things worse, and a player can usually be relied upon to make the correct choice of action – for reasons I’ll get into in a moment – why wouldn’t you make them the central figure of the resulting drama?

It’s only when you can’t rely upon the Player to let his PC get into the situation all the way up to his neck, or when your plot objectives require a less immersive situation – another point I’ll get to in a moment – would you need to target a Supporting Character and draw the PC into the situation by virtue of the relationship between that Supporting NPC and the PC, i.e. to utilize the Splash Vector.

The diagram to the left illustrates all this in the simplest way possible. This catastrophe chain consists of 9 events, though the last three are variant outcomes of the same singular event, If I’m honest.

Event 1 is the initial error or condition. It defines the blue-to-green zone, which contains mistakes or circumstances. The green-to-red zone deals with discovery and response. Event 2 is discovery after the fact, and is the reason maintenance work on aircraft has to be inspected before that vehicle returns to the sky. Both of these, on discovery, lead to inconvenience or difficulty, nothing more.

Event 3 is where things start to get interesting. Something unexpected starts to happen; it has to be correctly assessed and diagnosed and the correct remedial action, if any, taken. At each point from event 3 onward, the correct choice of action leads to the previous outcome – so, getting the assessment and diagnosis right, and taking the right action, at Event 3 leads back to mere inconvenience or difficulty.

Getting to Event 4 means that one of the trilogy of actions at Event 3 was not handled correctly for whatever reason. It represents one final chance to resolve the situation before it becomes dangerous, or to discover and correct that Event 3 failure. Success leads to Worsening Difficulties, preventing the situation from escalating leads to Potential Danger. Making the wrong choice leads to Event 5.

Event 5 means that the situation represents a potential danger. Pilots and the masters of other vessels have a phrase, “Pan-Pan-Pan” (sometimes just “Pan-Pan”), which is used to alert others that the vehicle has an urgent situation that does not yet threaten the lives of those aboard or the operation of the vehicle itself. Handle this correctly and the best possible outcome is that the danger remains only potential; the slightest shortcoming in response (including simply taking too long to reach a decision) leads to the danger manifesting, and leads to the declaration of an emergency, and a mayday to alert others that assistance may be needed.

Event 6 arises from a failure to prevent the situation from worsening – if there was ever an opportunity to do so, of course. The best outcome from this point is an emergency satisfactorily resolved, with passengers, crew, and/or vehicle having been placed in danger but not harmed to the point of disaster. This event represents the final opportunity to prevent such a disaster, and margins at this point are usually razor-thin.

Events 7-9 represent disaster, with various degrees of mitigation. Loss of life is now inevitable, only its degree is now in the command of those ‘controlling’ the situation. If we’re talking about an aircraft, event 7 might be a successful crash landing with successful evacuation and no casualties but a wrecked multi-million dollar investment, or it might be less than a third of the souls aboard being lost. The maritime equivalent is the ship sinking but all the passengers and crew rescued. A “mayday” call means that the commander of the vehicle is anticipating an Event 7, even if that’s only a worst-case outcome. Event 8 is a moderate disaster – some casualties are expected, but there is also an expectation of some survivors. Event 9 means that there is no hope of survivors (though sometimes there are a few, anyway).

Some chains of events may have more opportunities in given stages, or none at all. The worst situations go directly from Event 1 or 2 to Event 7, with the crew never being aware of the danger they are in until it is too late to do anything about it. These were once commonplace, but have mostly been engineered out. These days, the worst case you can reasonably be expected to confront is a chain that runs Event 1 to Event 6 to Event 7-9.

Olympian Heights vs Confirmation Bias, Logic Errors, and Hubris

Putting a PC on the path of such a disaster chain – depending on how softly you define “disaster” – is a regular occurrence in RPGs, because the implication is that there is something that can be done about the situation – of the PCs are sufficiently quick-witted and aware of the situation.

They are aided in this respect by the GM, who usually issues multiple warnings of imminent cataclysm, and by the separation between player and character. Because they are not personally in danger, this presents the players with the perspective from Olympian Heights, and that alone can permit a more rational decision-making process than those that would be experienced if they really were in such a situation.

There are several basic responses to emergency situations:

1. Counterproductive Fight-or-flight
2. Denial
3. Confusion
4. Freezing
5. Panic
6. ‘We have to do something, now – this is something’
7. Incorrect action taken through misdiagnosis of the situation – at best, this only consumes time, at worst it makes the situation worse
8. Correct action in insufficient measure, too late, or both
9. The correct action to prevent or mitigate escalation

Now, how many times does a player have a PC choose anything but the last three – and with the full expectation that they are choosing the 9th and last option? It’s rare. Very rare.

That means that any of the other outcomes have to be applied to the character by the GM. Options 7 and 8 are usually tolerable, because that still leaves the player in command of the character, though there can sometimes be disputes about the character realizing in time that their action wasn’t having the desired effect.

Options 1 to 6 are less tolerable, even if they are reasonable responses for this particular character in this particular situation.

There are three major reasons for characters making the wrong choice of response – Hubris, in the form of overconfidence; Logic Errors which lead to incorrect or insufficient responses being made; and Confirmation Bias, in which we become so convinced of what we are doing that we can become literally blind to anything that contradicts out interpretation of the situation, and which I discuss in the context of players in this article.

Players are susceptible to each of these, but are less likely than their PCs to succumb because of the Olympian Perspective. (That perspective can also leave them more vulnerable to Confirmation Bias because it reduces the price-tag of speculation; most player Confirmation Bias results from the player assuming that his theory of events is correct, leading him to ignore as red herrings the evidence that the GM intended the players to use to disprove incorrect theories).

That means that unless you can be sure that there’s no opportunity to mitigate the situation prior to Event 4 at the earliest, PCs make unsatisfying targets for these situations.

Which brings me back to the Splash Vector, but first I want to talk a bit more about the choice of whether or not to expose PCs to a situation. In other words, I want to discuss a few more reasons why there’s a problem, and look at the scale of that problem, before I demonstrate the ways in which the Splash Vector can provide a solution to the GM.

Immersion Depth and Plot Significance

The more easily the correct course of action can be determined, the earlier in the catastrophe chain the sequence can be broken by an intelligent character behaving rationally.

It follows that the earlier a PC becomes involved in the plotline of such a situation in an active way, the lower the significant impact that plotline will have on the character, and the lower the player’s immersion within the plotline.

The logic given at the end of the previous section has already stated that only a few situations relative to the total pool of possibilities are definitely suitable for PCs. The reduction in impact means that some of the remainder can still be of use, with the assumption that the threat will be defeated at some intermediate point – Events 3-6, in other words. However, the immersion factor means that the earlier within this sequence that the intermediate point is reached, the less valuable the situation is to the GM.

As a practical measure, anything that can obviously be dealt with at Event 3 can be ruled out. Easily-solved problems at the Event 4 stage are trivial and also not, therefore desirable. Problems that can be easily resolved at Event 5 are therefore the minimum that are of value even as a subplot.

That’s at least half the potential plotlines that have been ruled out.

But it gets worse. Not every problem metastasizes into the next stage of the disaster chain. A huge number of potential inconveniences or difficulties never escalate beyond the irritation stage. I have no data on which to assess the relative proportions, but each Stage comprises more situations than the next higher Stage.

Let’s see what that means using 4 different values: 75% metastasize, 50% metastasize, 10% metastasize, and 0.5825% metastasize (I’ll show you where that last number derives from, along the way):
 

• 75% advance to the next stage, 25% are easily resolved at the current stage:
  • 75% of 6 become 7-9, so 6 is 4/3 of 7-9.
  • 75% of 5 become 6, so 5 is 4/3 of 6, which is 16/9 of 7-9.
  • 75% of 4 become 5, so 4 is 4/3 of 5, which is 64/27 of 7-9.
  • 75% of 3 become 4, so 3 is 4/3 of 4, which is 256/81 of 7-9.
  • 75% of 2 become 3, so 2 is 4/3 of 3, which is 1024/243 of 7-9.
  • 75% of 1 become 2, so 1 is 4/3 of 2, which is 4096/729 of 7-9.
  • So, for every stage 7-9 situations, there are 5.6 stage 1 events. Minimum. And about one in six mistakes leads to a disaster.
  • Another way of stating this is that for every 800,000 Stage 1 events, 200,000 are easily resolved and 600,000 will escalate to stage 2.
  • Of those 600K Events, 150,000 will be easily resolved and 450,000 will escalate to stage 3.
  • Of those 450K Stage 3 events, 112,500 will be easily resolved and 337,500 will escalate to stage 4.
  • Of those 337,500 stage 4 events, 84,375 will be easily resolved and 253,125 will escalate to stage 5, where they will be useful as a minor subplot or better.
  • Which means that useful plots comprise an estimated 31.64% of the total. And that’s with an unrealistically high proportion of escalation.
     
• 50% advance to the next stage, 50% are easily resolved at the current stage:
  • 50% of 6 become 7-9, so 6 is 2x 7-9.
  • 50% of 5 become 6, so 5 is 2x 6, which is 4x 7-9.
  • 50% of 4 become 5, so 4 is 2x 5, which is 8x 7-9.
  • 50% of 3 become 4, so 3 is 2x 4, which is 16x 7-9.
  • 50% of 2 become 3, so 2 is 2x, which is 32x 7-9.
  • 50% of 1 become 2, so 1 is 2x, which is 64x 7-9.
  • So, for every stage 7-9 situation, there are 64 stage 1 events – and 1 in 64 mistakes leads to a disaster. I don’t know what the error rate is during aircraft servicing, but there are an estimated 39,000 commercial and military aircraft in operation currently, so that would be about 2 newsworthy air disasters a day at a 1/64 rate. That seems to be about 1/365th or so of the true rate – call it 1/400th for ease of calculation, or 0.5825% metastasizing – which is where the fourth of the values comes from, but is getting ahead of ourselves a bit.
  • Another way of stating this is that for every 64,000 Stage 1 events, 32,000 are easily resolved and 32,000 will escalate to stage 2.
  • Of those 32K Events, 16,000 will be easily resolved and 16,000 will escalate to stage 3.
  • Of those 16K Stage 3 events, 8,000 will be easily resolved and 8,000 will escalate to stage 4.
  • Of those 8,000 stage 4 events, 4,000 will be easily resolved and 4,000 will escalate to stage 5, where they will be useful as a minor subplot or better.
  • Which means that useful plots comprise an estimated 6.25% of the total. And that’s with a still-unrealistic proportion of escalation.
     
• 10% advance to the next stage, 90% are “easily” resolved at the current stage.:
  • 10% of 6 become 7-9, so 6 is 10x 7-9.
  • 10% of 5 become 6, so 5 is 10x 6, which is 100x 7-9.
  • 10% of 4 become 5, so 4 is 10x 5, which is 1,000x 7-9.
  • 10% of 3 become 4, so 3 is 10x 4, which is 10,000x 7-9.
  • 10% of 2 become 3, so 2 is 10x, which is 100,000x 7-9.
  • 10% of 1 become 2, so 1 is 10x, which is 1,000,000x 7-9.
  • So, for every stage 7-9 situation, there are 1 million stage 1 events, with this progression rate, which is the one I instinctively selected as being “realistic” until I did the calculations in the previous results group, and hurriedly inserted a reasonably accurate value earlier into the article!
  • For every 1,000,000 Stage 1 events, 900,000 are easily resolved and 100,000 will escalate to stage 2.
  • Of those 100K Events, 90K will be easily resolved and 10,000 will escalate to stage 3.
  • Of those 10K Stage 3 events, 9,000 will be easily resolved and 1,000 will escalate to stage 4.
  • Of those 1,000 stage 4 events, 900 will be easily resolved and 100 will escalate to stage 5, where they will be useful as a minor subplot or better.
  • Which means that useful plots comprise an estimated 0.01% of the total. And that’s with a still-unrealistic proportion of escalation.
     
• 0.5825% advance to the next stage, 99.4175% are “easily” resolved at the current stage – calculated “realistic” values:
  • 0.5825% of 6 become 7-9, so 6 is 1717x 7-9.
  • 0.5825% of 5 become 6, so 5 is 171.7x 6, which is 29,472x 7-9.
  • 0.5825% of 4 become 5, so 4 is 171.7x 5, which is 5,059,554x 7-9.
  • 0.5825% of 3 become 4, so 3 is 171.7x 4, which is 8,685,292,912x 7-9.
  • 0.5825% of 2 become 3, so 2 is 171.7x, which is 149,114,663,056x 7-9.
  • 0.5825% of 1 become 2, so 1 is 171.7x, which is 25,599,083,786,461x 7-9.
  • So, for every stage 7-9 situation, there are roughly 25.6 million million stage 1 events!
  • For every 25.6 million million Stage 1 events, 99+% are easily resolved and 15 thousand million will escalate to stage 2.
  • Of those 15 thousand million Events, 99+% will be easily resolved and 8,737,500 will escalate to stage 3.
  • Of those 8,737,500 Stage 3 events, 99+% will be easily resolved and 5,090 will escalate to stage 4.
  • Of those 5,090 stage 4 events, most are easily resolved and 3 will escalate to stage 5, where they will be useful as a minor subplot or better.
  • Which means that useful plots comprise an estimated 0.00000000001171875% of the total. Or 99.99999999998828125% of possible plotlines are useless for the purposes of directing at a PC.
     

Fortunately, we don’t have to think of all those possible mistakes as GMs – we get to cherry-pick one that we can make interesting or relevant. The full list, potentially, includes everything from not storing enough soft drinks to forgetting to attach the engines when the vehicle was last maintained, and all points in between, plus every possible weather configuration of note, and the risk of collisions, and, well, anything and everything you can think of, quite literally, and more that you don’t.

Modern design and engineering has redundancy and safety measure heaped upon redundancy and safety measure. That’s why so few of those problems escalate beyond the inconvenience stage. But, if we broaden the concept of “disaster” to include adverse personal developments, there are far fewer protections. Nevertheless, the principle remains clear – more plots are almost certainly unsuitable for PCs than plots that are suitable. That was the case with every possible metastasizing rate that we considered. In fact, you need a rate of just over 89% escalation before it stops being true.

And some people think it’s easy coming up with Adventures that are interesting, internally logical, and engaging – just a side-note observation :)

The Splash Vector (cont)

The Splash Vector simply means that instead of targeting a PC directly, you target an NPC with whom they have an established relationship, who then asks the PC to step in and get them out of trouble at some point deep in the disaster chain. In other words, we target the NPC and hit the PC with the ‘splash’ so that the PC can’t dodge the problem by taking the relatively obvious escape routes early on in that chain.

Players can have no objection to NPCs exhibiting the full gamut of possible reactions to a crisis. NPCs are just as susceptible to Confirmation Bias, Logic Errors, and Hubris, as anyone else – and the GM doesn’t even have to require a roll to test for it. In fact, they can be “forced” to (mistakenly) make the worst possible choices until they have escalated a situation to the point where it will be difficult (and interesting) to solve without a disaster taking place.

A lot of those rejected plotlines – and they outnumber the directly-useful ones, remember – are suddenly back on the table.

Let’s take an example:

NPC has an accident of some sort and are subsequently sued. They hire a lawyer they saw on a TV advert, and don’t tell anyone about the accident or lawsuit. They lose the case and now have 30 days to come up with a substantial sum of money. They do the worst possible thing and borrow the money from a loan shark with ties to organized crime for what they think are ‘easy terms’.

That alone might be enough trouble for the PC to have to deal with, especially if the goal is merely to seed the campaign with the presence of a gang boss who is known to the PC – this is a great way to bring them to the PC’s attention. Or you might need to escalate matters a little:

The loan shark manipulates circumstances so that they default and then blackmail the NPC into doing illegal acts for him. Which leads to the NPC being arrested and charged. The NPC’s blind faith in people leads him to retain that same TV lawyer again. At which point the PC learns of the situation, and has to somehow extract his friend / partner / relative from it.

Or another:

NPC receives an email from a Nigerian Prince in exile who needs help in recovering 1 billion dollars in gold. The PC would know better, but the NPC is taken in – and has their money and their identity stolen.

That’s enough for some entertaining role-play between the two (provided that the PC somehow learns of what’s going on, probably through the boasting of the NPC), but the actual process of closing an old credit card and replacing it with a new one, etc, is likely to be more tedious than entertaining, so anything more than a roleplay can probably be hand-waved away. This is absolutely fine if having the NPCs identity be stolen is just an establishing condition for a bigger problem, in which case it’s better from the perspective of the GM trying to engineer “interesting times” for PCs that this PC remains ignorant of the situation for a little while longer.

…That identity is then used to acquire a credit card, which is used to purchase high-end electronics, which are resold – and, of course, no attempt is made to repay this money… Meanwhile, the NPC is so confident that he’s about to become wealthy that he goes into debt splurging and buying gifts for everyone. At which point the PC realizes that something is wrong, extracts a confession from his friend (face-palm when he learns of the Nigerian Prince) – just as the police show up to arrest the NPC for credit fraud…

It doesn’t matter what the trouble is, an NPC can either get into it more plausibly than a PC can, or can make a poor choice that makes a bad situation worse.

Splash Vector Requirements

Of course, for this to work, you need an NPC with the right qualities and personality, and you need to have established a relationship between the NPC and the PC in game time. The more remote that relationship, the greater the risk that the PC will say “No”, or decide that it’s too much work or too difficult a problem.

But it’s not for the GM to state that there’s such a relationship, or to dictate it’s depth and whether or not there is sufficient strength in it that the PC will put himself out so much for the NPC. That’s all up to the player.

That means that the GM can’t take the relationship for granted. Instead, he should ensure that the relationship develops by involving both PC and NPC in mutual events in-game prior to drawing on that investment.

There are times when you can drop an NPC into the plotline “cold” with an alleged relationship to a PC and have it accepted as the plot hook, but it feels forced, because it is.

As a general rule of thumb, if the relationship is a personal one, even if it hasn’t been established in-game, a personal crisis is justifiable – a relative having gone missing, or being held hostage for an impossible ransom, or whatever. If the relationship is not, a personal crisis probably won’t play, but if the promise of “adventure” is high, you have your next best chance of pulling it off.

Once an NPC is established in-game – and you’ll never know for certain whether or not they’ve been established enough until the time comes to pull the trigger – anything becomes possible. If the relationship is not yet enough, the previous rules of thumb stand.

Confidence

One technique is to use these facts to boost confidence in the relationship, via a simple four-point plan.

1. Embed the NPC as a regular figure within the campaign. Have them interact with the target PC on a number of occasions.
2. Use the rules of thumb given in the previous section to engage the PC in a high-adventure personal crisis, i.e. one that could be safely used with a drop-in NPC.
3. Have the NPC provide significant assistance to the PC at some personal cost, repaying the debt incurred in (2). The (2)-(3) combination greatly deepens the relationship.
4. If the response to the events of (3) give you confidence that the relationship is ready-to-use, go ahead with the real test of the relationship. If you are still lacking in confidence, return to step one (interactions) to more deeply embed the character.

Of course, you will have to be subtle about it – this plan falls apart if there’s any whiff of orchestration involved.

A broader field of opportunity

For that reason, I will often embed several NPCs into a campaign with no intent to use any of them for anything in particular – then wait to see which ones “take”. This gives a broader field of opportunity, because it means that I can pick and choose which relationship is most “ripe for the picking” at the time that I need one.

There are a couple of indicators that can be usefully employed to measure that readiness. If both you and the player can name the NPC without looking it up, that’s one sign that they are entrenched within the campaign. If the NPC is fun to play, and it has become easy to involve him or her in some way, that’s another. The combination makes it even more certain.

Of course, you will need to customize these indicators to suit your group, and the way that they play. A player who is naturally good at remembering NPC names (or who maintains a list of them) will obviously discount the efficacy of the first of those signals that I mentioned.

A little cold-blooded prep can also go a long way – deliberately seeding the campaigns with NPCs whose relationships you expect to need at some future point, i.e. deliberately emplacing the NPCs that the future plotlines will require. If nothing else, this gives you the chance to see whether or not those necessary NPCs “take” or if you need to tweak them or even replace them.

Think of this as giving some method to your madness when it comes to casting choices. Having a direction is always a good thing!

It’s not often that I start one of these article with no certainty about where it’s headed, and with no intention of even attempting to be comprehensive, but that’s the situation in which I find myself this week.

Last week, I participated in an extended conversation through Twitter with Daniel Lonson and several other GMs about the need for a definitive lexicon for use in defining the intended Genres of an RPG Campaign.

You can read Daniel’s original post on the subject at this link. But the upshot is that there are certain labels that get thrown around by GMs and players with little or no agreement as to what they actually mean, a situation that can lead to expectations that aren’t met and all the negative effects that can flow on from there.

This strikes me as something of greater relevance to convention gaming than to regular campaigns, simply because the former is a gathering of strangers while in the latter case, the players presumably already know each other.

But I can also see the relevance when it comes to third-party products – if you buy a module labeled as “high fantasy”, and the editors/publishers have a completely different interpretation of that term to the one you use, you can feel ripped off by false advertising. That’s a situation that’s bad for the consumer, bad for the producer, and bad for the industry in general.

To some extent, this is not a new problem, nor one that is exclusive to RPGs, as I pointed out to Daniel. Sci-Fi fans have been arguing over the dividing line between Science Fiction and Science Fantasy for decades, and into which category specific works (such as Star Wars) fall.

Then there’s the question of all those works that were written in good faith, only to be invalidated by more recent scientific discoveries, should be placed – are they still Science Fiction, or are they something else? Can Hard Science Fiction still be placed in that category even when the foundations are invalidated?

These questions have never been answered definitively to the point of universal acceptance. Not even close, in something close to a century of debate on some issues.

I was also concerned that defining the genre of a campaign risked painting the GM into a corner in which he was afraid, or unable, to go beyond the stated definitions, where they thought that the only way to satisfy everyone was to stick as closely to the narrowest definition of their selected genre. This could be stultifying and even counter-productive.

Nevertheless, the longer the extended conversation continued, the more I began to dimly grasp the foundations and principles of a possible solution. This article is intended to formalize and structure my thoughts on the matter, providing a foundation and structure for future discussions – before other thoughts crowd them out of my head.

The problem, of course, is that it’s really hard to definitively describe what you can only grasp in nebulous half-formed concepts. As I wrote to Daniel, “I feel like we’re still groping in the dark a little, trying to comprehend the shape and structure of what we’ve stumbled into. But at least we’ve groping in a useful direction.” – a sentiment with which he readily agreed, saying, That’s pretty much where I am too! I’m happy to do nothing but to let this topic simmer in the back of my mind.”

The initial concept

My first thought was built around the example of distinguishing high fantasy from low fantasy as a “test case”, deriving a system of thought from the process, and then extending that system of thought into a more comprehensive set of genres and sub-genres, to provide the sought-after universal lexicon.

The problem is that there are no universal hard-and-fast standards. Examining this sub-genre in any depth brings that very firmly to your attention. But I thought I saw a way around this – if you could list half-a-dozen genre elements that everyone could agree were usually, or even just often, associated with high fantasy while not being common in other forms of fantasy, then we would be on our way.

If we were to define a continuity from low fantasy to high fantasy, then simply by stating that “X of the Y high-fantasy elements will frequently feature in this RPG/Campaign/Adventure”, you could assign a score on a scale of 0 to whatever, where whatever was the number of defined high-fantasy elements.

This avoided the binding of hands that initially concerned me, while still enabling a definitive lexicon; where individuals placed the dividing line between what they labeled “high fantasy” and what they did not no longer mattered. This bypassed completely the need for language.

What’s more, by being more expansive on the list of defining traits, I could foresee the construction of a genre “fingerprint” that conclusively identified where a campaign or adventure was going to sit, on average or most of the time.

Traits such as “realism of violence”, “level of pseudo-science assumed to be canon”, “degree of historical foundation”, “presence of ‘alien’ races”, “scale of magic”, “presence of magic”, “PC impact on history/world”, and many, many, more.

Collectivization and Simplification

What’s more, it was my hope that most of these could be subordinated to a more general rating. If we could pin things down to four or five general criteria that could be numerically derived from the subordinates on a universal 0-to-10 scale, it would become practical to define the exact genre of a work in a manner that was readily comprehensible.

Maybe “High Fantasy”, “Science Fiction”, “Adventure Scope”, “Historical Foundations” and “Soap Opera” would work for those general criteria. For example, a typical D&D fantasy campaign set in the Forgotten Realms might read:

High Fantasy: 6/10
Science Fiction: 1/10
Adventure Scope: 4/10
Historical Foundations: 2/10
Soap Opera: 3/10

If you were to examine those scores, not knowing anything about the system or setting or planned campaign, you would conclude that most adventures will tend to be localized, with relatively low PC ‘personal life’ content, that high fantasy elements will be present from time to time but not overwhelming, and that while specific elements might be inspired by history, the game setting itself was an invented one.

If you compare that with my Zenith-3 campaign, you get an entirely different ‘fingerprint’:

High Fantasy: 6-9/10
Science Fiction: 7-9/10
Adventure Scope: 4-10/10
Historical Foundations: 4-6/10
Soap Opera: 7/10

From these scores, you can determine that the fantastic will be routine, whether science-fiction or high fantasy in nature, but that there would be a large pseudo-science foundation to the latter, that adventures can vary from the local to national to international to interplanetary to inter-dimensional multi-reality in scope, sometimes without notice, that the game world is more strongly rooted in historical foundations, but twists or distorts that reality, and that PCs “personal lives” are a very strong element within the campaign.

Bringing the discussion back to the original point, however, the usefulness of these fingerprints is directly related to the value of the definitions of the lexicon employed. If we can’t agree on what “High Fantasy” is, for example, a rating for its involvement is making a promise that might well be misunderstood through vocabulary differences – we’re right back where we started.

This is about the shape of the answer, not about the content of the answer.

Complicating the picture: Intensity and Frequency

In terms of any of the specific topics, there are two criteria that are being boiled down into a single numeric scale, or worse yet, into a binary yes/no. Those criteria are Intensity and Frequency.

This diagram illustrates the problem. It shows four very different campaigns that all have the same overall rating in one topic – let’s say the scope of magic within the campaign, for the sake of argument – if the overall rating is simply measured as the linear distance from the 0,0 point, which is the most obvious way of approaching it. That rating is a perfectly average 5.

The Red campaign gets there with infrequent highly-cosmic events. The purple, more than twice as frequent, but slightly diminished in intensity. The blue shows the same increase again in frequency, but the intensity is down to 4/10. And the green? The intensity barely nudges the scale at about 1.5/10, but it happens almost all the time.

This also gives an impression of just how difficult it is to assign meaningful values to these attributes without a lexicon to define them. Is intensity 7 continental cataclysm? Or national disaster? The threatened destruction of one plane of existence, or merely of triggering the Big One in San Francisco? Or, perhaps, in Washington, DC?

A lexicon is essential to providing context. And that’s a wholly separate discussion for each of the specific criteria.

The second problem illustrated is exactly how to take the two scores – Intensity and Frequency – and combine them into a single overall score, distill them down. There are lots of ways of doing so. We could multiply them together and divide by 10, or take the square root of the multiple, or average them, or take the square root of the sum of the squares, just to name a few.

Let’s take Intensity 8 and frequency 2 as a test case, shown by the purple double-ring above and to the right of the red campaign on the diagram above. The average is 10/2=5, which undersells the intensity fairly dramatically. The product over ten is 1.6, which totally misstates the situation. The square root of the product is 4, somewhere in between these two, but closer to the simple average. And the square root of the sum of the squares? 64+4=68, the square root of which is going to be 8-point-something. That somewhat oversells the intensity while underselling the relative infrequency of the event.

You can’t really decide on the basis of a single test result. Is four more representative than 5? Perhaps you might want to bias intensity as the more important factor, or to bias the more extreme of the two results. Which factor is more important – or do you want to weight results toward a high outcome only if BOTH are high (that’s what XY/10 does).

To properly evaluate this, you need at least three values – low intensity high frequency, high intensity low-frequency, and one that’s somewhere in the middle. And maybe a high-high and a low-low combination as well. And referees who have run campaigns with those characteristics, who can then assess the different ways of combining the scores and rank them in realism of description of the campaign. And be prepared to discuss their reasoning.

Once one has been solved, you can introduce a new question into every subsequent discussion: is the “standard model” that was just derived appropriate? In a lot of cases, the answer will be yes – and in some cases, it might be no, requiring a new appraisal.

Complicating the picture: Chronal Morphology of Campaign Criteria

Morphology is shape, and Chronal Morphology is how that shape changes over time.

You see, over time, the PCs grow more powerful, and that means that the threats become more dire, and that can mean that the entire “fingerprint” of the campaign can change.

There are three patterns to that change, and they are mutually exclusive (though they can nevertheless be combined). Campaigns are generally either Discontinuous in this respect, or they are Continuous, or they are Fixed.

I am using the term Continuous to describe a campaign in which the criteria – it might scale of magic once again – gradually increases as the power level goes up. Discontinuous refers to a campaign which increases the criteria only at certain checkpoints – be they after certain adventures, or in certain phases of the campaign, or whatever. A shape of Fixed obviously indicates that the fingerprint criteria doesn’t change.

Combinations are possible – a campaign might be fixed with respect to one of the criteria and continuous thereafter, or two fixed levels might be ‘joined’ by a Discontinuity, and might – once a certain level is reached – plateau off at a new ‘fixed’ level.

To be meaningful at a campaign scale, trends are important. Whatever model is eventually accepted needs to take into account the potential for Chronal Morphology in its criteria.

Just a beginning

So that’s an outline of what I envisage. It’s more of a work order than a body of work, at the moment – a summary of what I think needs to be done in order to achieve the overall goal of a common, definitive, lexicon for describing campaigns, genres, and adventures.

Those involved need to:

1. Agree to the plan below, or devise some satisfactory variant, with convincing reasoning for the variance;
2. Define a list of general criteria that is sufficiently diverse as to collectively describe all the possibilities;
3. Define a list of characteristic traits that collectively assess a campaign’s position within one of those general criteria (and a single trait may manifest in multiple general possibilities;
4. Define, for each trait, what different numeric standards of Intensity and Frequency represent, and which of the two (if either) should be considered the dominant or defining characteristic of that trait;
5. Determine, for each trait, how intensity and frequency are to be reconciled, in accordance with the decisions made in (3);
6. Define a methodology for combining the different traits that make up each of the general criteria;
7. Define a simple linguistic or graphic representation of the general criteria – the genre “fingerprint” of the product, be it campaign background, game supplement, module, or game system;
8. Demonstrate, through the application of the results to multiple test cases, the efficiency and accuracy of the resulting genre fingerprint, and – in particular – identify any “weak spots” in the lexicon;
9. Establish a mechanism by which revisions and improvements to the standard definitions can be made.

That’s years worth of work for a team of GMs. But it’s a beginning – a blueprint for a process. That in itself represents a step forward.

Anagathics (n) – drugs and treatments that halt and reverse the progress of aging.

At least, that’s what they are called in Traveler – since we don’t exactly have any proven medications that achieve this yet, nor even research into the science on which such treatments could be based that’s advanced enough to make treatments even theoretically practical, there’s no real need for a label for the generic field of study. At the moment, we’re still in the early stages of understanding the root science, usually referred to as Gerontology.

And, of course, so much of the field is corrupted by the often-questionable pseudo-science used to market the latest salves and creams from purveyors of beauty products that most attempts to research the subject online falter – if not crash-and-burn outright.

Back in July, two-and-a-half months ago, I reported on some ideas deriving from the book I was reading at the time, “The Biology Of Human Survival” by Claude A Piantadosi, M.D., and applied those to defining elemental biology and how it could be used to inject new color and vitality into those well-known fantasy creatures, in (In)Human Survival: The Biology of Elementals and More..

There were even sections (written ad-hoc as the article took shape and ideas flowed) regarding elves and aging – the primary subjects of today’s article.

The section on Aging drew on analogies with environmental stress over time to derive a practical method of simulating aging in RPGs. The section on Elves built on the concepts described and applied the notion of redundancy as a safeguard against data corruption to the DNA of long-lived species.

Reading the book is slow going – I don’t have a lot of time, and many of the sections require thought to digest and analyze, since my knowledge of physiology is amateur at best. As a result, I have only recently completed a chapter which is actually largely dedicated to the subject of aging.

And that, in turn, has prompted some new thoughts on the subject of aging and what might one day be done about it – appropriate for many sci-fi campaigns – and the possibility of a “naturally-evolved” equivalent, which applied the concepts to that staple of fantasy gaming, Elves.

Describing those ideas, and their source, is the purpose of today’s article. I had hoped to be reviewing a kickstarter campaign currently underway for a fantasy game product, but the permissions required didn’t arrive in time. Most of the factual content derives from Chapter 12 of the above-cited book, “Air as Good as We Deserve”.

Oxygen, The Enemy Of Life

Every higher organism that we know about requires oxygen to survive. So it’s really interesting to note that oxygen is poisonous to most animal cells.

It was Joseph Priestley, discoverer of Oxygen, who first suggested that it in it’s pure form, it might not be good for us. More than a century later, the reality of Oxygen Toxicity on the Central Nervous System was proven by Paul Bert, a French scientist.

The toxicity of Oxygen is a function of the partial pressure of the oxygen in the atmosphere being breathed. The partial pressure is the pressure that would result if that gas occupied the entire volume at the same temperature as the mixture of gasses of which the gas concerned is one element. If you add up all the partial pressures of a mixture of gasses, you get the total pressure exerted by that mixture.

Although the details are a lot more technical (and useful), in a nutshell, if the air is 30% oxygen, the partial pressure of the oxygen is 30% of the total pressure of the air (assuming both to be at the same temperature).

While we need a minimum partial pressure of oxygen in order to breathe – the required pressures etc being one of those “useful details” I alluded to – that’s all you need to know to be able to follow this article, which is more concerned with too much oxygen.

Different organs are impacted to different extents; the two most directly concerned are obviously the lungs and the brain.

Above 3 atmospheres of oxygen, brain functions are disrupted by Oxygen Toxicity in an hour or less. At about 1.5 atmospheres, brain functions are not affected (and if that were all that were involved, life would be indefinitely sustainable). In-between those values is where the interesting happens. At 2 atmospheres, toxicity occurs after about 5 hours of exposure. This shows that as oxygen pressure rises above that 1.5 atmospheres threshold, survival time plummets.

The lungs are somewhat more resilient, being able to cope with 5 atmospheres of pure oxygen for about 6 hours. However, Oxygen Toxicity occurs eventually at much lower pressures – at about 1.2 atmospheres, the tolerance limit is about 30 hours. This is noticeably lower than the effects on the brain.

It’s how the oxygen becomes toxic that is of greatest interest and relevance. In a nutshell, the oxygen is not perfectly “consumed” by the lungs, resulting in the creation of two different free radicals – any chemical – atom, molecule, or ion – that contains at least one unpaired electron is a “radical“. They can often be thought of as the products of an incomplete or partial chemical reaction, and the chemistry of radicals has many important biological functions – for example, free radicals are used by white blood cells to create hypochlorous acid with which to kill microbes, and muscles can only relax after contraction through the functioning of a radical-based (Nitrous Oxide) reaction. NO is also an important mediator or trigger in many other processes, from blood clotting to neurotransmitter function and the immune system. Excessive production of NO is toxic through the formation of secondary chemical derivatives named Reactive Nitrogen Species; Insufficient NO appears to be involved in hypertension and related cardiac conditions.

The unpaired electron of radicals makes them extremely chemically reactive.

So the body naturally contains and produces radicals, and would die without them. Because of this, biochemical controls are present to eliminate excessive radicals (and to trigger the creation of more if there aren’t enough). Higher oxygen pressure becomes toxic by increasing the rate of incidental radical creation beyond the limit that these control mechanisms can cope with, permitting the radicals to damage and puncture cell membranes, shut down key enzymes, break down DNA, and trigger carcinogenic mutation within cells. Obviously, the higher the partial pressure of oxygen, the more free radicals result, and the more damage to the organism these radicals can inflict in a given time-span. The tapestry of biochemical processes upon which life depends can literally become so threadbare that it unravels completely.

The bottom line: while cells require oxygen-based reactions to generate their energy, oxygen in excess can tear those cells to pieces because the biology can’t absorb that much oxygen in the environment..

The damage that results comes from free radicals, and that – interestingly enough – is one of the damage mechanisms of radiation, and stress, and pollution (poisoning, in other words), and diseases. Free radicals are thought to be produced by damaged biochemical processes in cancerous cells, responsible for some of the toxic effects on neighboring cells that permit cancers to grow, and to spread to other organs, and to metastasize from benign forms to virulent.

Oxygen is a necessary evil; no other reactions convey as much energy to and through biological systems. But it’s very much a deal with the devil when it becomes too much of a good thing.

Oxygen, The Enemy Of Life part II

How many of my readers have spent any serious time thinking about the way cellular structures work? You have a bloodstream that carries key ingredients to a cell – but it doesn’t flow through the cell, so it’s “cargo” has to be released, delivered through a cell wall, where chemical “handlers” make use of it to fuel the various functions of the cell.

Our fundamental biochemistry evolved through a number of stages. To start with, early “cells” probably couldn’t do anything more than reproduce – they would not even have had cell walls at that point, just what we now consider the cell “nucleus”. That might have come next as a natural defense against environmental changes, providing a means of optimization and containment of the biochemical environment. Somewhere along the way, the ability to encode information into complex molecules as a means of preserving information came along, probably right after self-replication. Then, function differentiation enables cells to behave differently, and some learn to form larger, multi-cellular organisms. Further biological differentiation separates the great biological kingdoms – microbial life, plant life, and animal life (probably in that order).

As soon as plant cells adapt to utilize chlorophill, they begin consuming carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen as a waste product into the atmosphere. Prior to this time, there was little or no atmospheric oxygen to speak of, it was all in compounds with other elements. That atmospheric oxygen also dissolved into the water, where animal life learned to extract it using gill structures. Eventually, some aquatic life migrated onto land, and well, we all know the basics of the rest of that story.

The anatomy of our cell structures reflects this evolution, because the environment in which those key biochemical reactions can take place was defined by the environment in place when the reactions were first developed.

That’s why cells have walls – to contain an environment within that differs from the environment without. Huge amounts of our early evolution is directed at optimizing the conditions under which those reactions occur most efficiently.

All of which means that there are parts of some cells where free oxygen is an absolute no-no. Why? Either there are chemicals involved that would react with oxygen, or there are chemical reactions that would be disrupted by Oxygen radicals, or both.

In fact, you can view free radicals as overcoming – through their increased reactivity – the protections that have evolved to keep oxygen away from where it is unwanted.

Defeating the enemy?

Keeping oxygen away from where it’s unwanted is thus a critical necessity of cellular biochemistry for both animals and oxygen-producing plants. So critical is this function that in human biochemistry a number of mechanisms have evolved to cope: special enzymes, radical “scavengers”, and cellular “machinery” to repair oxidative damage. There are 5 major antioxidant enzymes; a few of the more significant radical scavengers include vitamins C, A, and E, and whole families of related compounds. These defenses are all maintained in specific locations in cells where unregulated oxygen reactions are undesirable.

When production of those pesky Reactive Nitrogen Species discussed earlier exceeds the cellular capacity of antioxidant defenses, the normal oxidant-antioxidant balance is disrupted, which is called oxidative stress. If not checked, oxidative stress alters other biological processes in a domino effect by altering the structures or functions of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. Oxidative stress is also associated with the damaging effects of atmospheric pollution, diseases such as arteriosclerosis (the hardening of the arteries) and Alzheimer’s, and other aging processes.

Supplementary antioxidants have been shown to augment the natural defenses against oxidative stress. Although it seems to have calmed down recently, it wasn’t all that long ago when “antioxidant” was a ubiquitous marketing must-have when it came to selling foods. The driver of the decline was the rejection as unproven of the underlying science by the US Food & Drug Administration in 2012.

The human capacity to produce and utilize antioxidant defenses declines with age, something that is still seized upon by the makers of skin treatments, even though the scientific evidence of antioxidant benefits varies from the promising but inconclusive to the outright dubious. The fact that many if not all such studies have been funded by the cosmetics industry and comprise largely anecdotal evidence or other methodolical flaws leaves the case in an underwhelming state.

Nevertheless, as the old saying goes, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” – and there is enough smoke around the relatedness of aging and antioxidants that this share of the dietary supplements field alone is worth more than $2 billion annually, world-wide, and rising. This field is a blend of genuine science, traditional remedies of uncertain efficacy, and snake oil products / sales pitches, which always raises questions of reliability about any information originating from these sources.

At best, then, the science of supplementary antioxidants as beneficial is unproven. The theory seems reasonably sound, but there have been a long succession of such theories that sounded good only to fail deeper scrutiny.

The problems seem to be three-fold:

• First, do antioxidant supplements actually survive the process of consumption to reach the bloodstream and increase the antioxidant load of the body? Or does the presence of dietary antioxidants simply trigger a reduction in internal generation of antioxidants to maintain the same overall levels? Or does the dietary process so disrupt the antioxidants that they have no effect?
• Second, does an increased antioxidant load in the blood lead to a supplementation of the body’s natural capacities, particularly in individuals whose capacity for self-generation of anti-oxidants is affected by aging or other factors – can the antioxidants get from the bloodstream to where they are needed?
• And Third, is the decline with age of antioxidant capacity cause or effect (or both?) Can any actual improvements in condition be medically proven? Or are the benefits overblown?

But, for the moment, let’s assume that there are direct correlations between various diseases and symptoms of aging and the body’s accumulated cellular damage from free radicals. This is sometimes known as the Free Radical Theory Of Aging.

It might not be the whole story – in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. But it’s enough to suggest that antioxidant therapy might produce a mitigation of the aging process, all else being equal.

One of the major alternative theories of aging is that of replication error in DNA – it is well known that there are occasional “transcription errors” when DNA replicates. The theory is that these errors accumulate over time to produce the effects of aging.

There’s a significant overlap between these theories that can’t be entirely ignored – free radicals are known to cause DNA damage, so as a causative mechanism for accumulated DNA damage, a link between the two theories can be established.

Personally, the DNA-damage theory of aging explains why, when you get old, your new skin cells are “old”. It’s as though the specifications to which the cells are manufactured keep changing, and not for the better. That supports the latter theory.

On the other hand, such damage would be more or less random in nature, while aging symptoms are largely uniform across the species. What’s more, I know of no instance in which hands are reduced to stubby appendages or feet/legs to flippers purely from aging – both known outcomes from induced mutation from radiation or from chemicals such as Thalidomide. That raises serious doubts about the DNA-damage theory, in my book.

It is possible to resolve this problem by specifying that aging is controlled by specific types of genetic damage that cannot be repaired properly, and that gross mutations of the type raised in the preceding paragraph are either weeded out or repaired naturally, and that it is this repair mechanism that is damaged or inhibited by the external mutation factor.

This in turn suggests that a specific type of unrepaired damage leads to each symptom of aging or perhaps that a few such problems lead to a cluster of related symptoms, raising the prospect that a few specific treatments aimed at repairing those specific forms of damage would, collectively, provide substantial improvement in longevity and quality of life.

This may or may not be a true position, so far as the science is concerned. But RPGs often require simplification of scientific principles, and it’s a good enough working theory that we can move on to impacts.

The rise of new problems

Human lifespans have been increasing for quite a while, anyway, as causes of death are eliminated or brought under control. Malnutrition, Infection, the lack of remedial surgical techniques – one by one, previously fatal conditions have been controlled or contained as mortality factors.

The Wikipedia article on Life Expectancy contains a most interesting table showing the life expectancy at birth for typical representatives of different eras and locales. In Classical Greece, for example, the expectation was 25 to 28 years – but if you lived to age 15, you would probably live to an age of 37-41 years. And rare individuals might well exceed this range – this is very much an average, the peak of a bell curve.

Assuming that the bell curve is symmetrical about a peak of 39 years from the starting point of 15 years, we get an estimated peak of 39+(39-15)=39+24=63 years. For anyone to live longer, their age has to be offset by an increase in the numbers dying early, which violates the symmetry but preserves the overall average.

The late medieval English Peerage had a life expectancy at birth of 30 years – but if you survived to 21, your life expectancy was an additional 43 years for a total of 64. Again, if the bell curve is symmetrical about that 64 years, we get 107 as the end-point.

The 1950 world average life expectancy was 48. The 2014 world average is 71.5 years. But there is no longer any resemblance to symmetry. In developed countries, the number of centenarians is rising by 5.5% a year – at which rate, it will reach a global total of 4.1 million in 2050.

There’s more than a little truth to the suggestion that each breakthrough in life expectancy simply brought a new type of mortality into common experience. I doubt that very many citizens of ancient Greece experienced Cancer-related deaths, for example – disease, malnutrition, and infection would have carried them off before they were routinely old enough for that to be a common cause of death.

There was a time when heart disease was the biggest killer in the western world. When that was defeated, cancer arose. Now that we have started learning techniques for dealing with that, enough will survive to discover a new source of mortality – there are some suggestions that mental conditions such as MS, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases increase mortality directly, or those might even be the major killers in a post-diabetes world; 9.7% of the US population suffer from that disease, which carries a 10-20 year reduction in life expectancy, and the rates are growing.

“Aging,” as we think of the term, therefore means different things in different eras, and is more related to infirmity through age-related conditions than about survival directly – these days.

Perhaps it’s not so inappropriate that such a large part of the “publicly known” research is coming out of industries concerned with the cosmetic and superficial, after all.

So anagathic treatments would be more about ameliorating the effects of aging than about actual improvements in longevity, though there would be some cross-over.

Let’s think, then, about what outcomes are most reasonable to achieve.

Sci-Fi Anagathics

It’s entirely likely that different symptoms would be impacted to different degrees. To some extent, this might be due to prioritization of research, or weighted severity of impacts – appearance might be reduced by X years, while propensity for arthritic problems is reduced by Y years, for example. Increased mobility and capability would lend itself to a somewhat more active lifestyle than simply sitting around in a nursing home, and that in itself could add another 10-20 years to the average lifespan.

Benefits can therefore be divided into three categories:

• Preventative (delays the onset or worsening of the condition within the effectiveness range of the medication);
• Remedial (repairs damage already experienced); and
• Indirect, as described above.

Rather than try to list every possible condition experienced during aging, I would suggest employing broad categories and subdividing when necessary:

• Cosmetic (Skin, Hair, Spots)
• Sensory (Taste, touch, sight, sound, balance)
• Structural (Bone brittleness, circulation)
• Mobility (Musculature, balance)
• Intellectual (Memory, reasoning, flexibility)
• Internal (Digestive, resistance to Cancer, resistance to Organ Failure)

Nor is it really necessary that one treatment do it all. Several independent treatments are more likely, reducing the likelihood of complications. Medical plans stretching out over the coming decade or so would specify which anagathic treatment was to be administered and when.

The most logical form of that treatment is nanotechnology of two types – one delivering antioxidants to where they are diminished or depleted, and the other targeting a specific aging aspect or group of symptoms.

It’s likely that the treatment would be less effective each time it was administered; first-generation Anagathics would delay the aging process, but only provide limited restorative capabilities.

The age achieved when first administered would also be a factor.

Later-Generation Anagathics

These limitations would be eroded, generation-on-generation. Effectiveness would increase, especially in terms or restoration. Treatment might even be split into two strands – specific restoratives and a more preventative cocktail that rises in strength as the subject ages lives longer.

The tolerance and effectiveness of repeat doses would increase, as would the efficacy window of each treatment.

It’s entirely reasonable to expect each generation of Anagathics to be punctuated by the rise in statistical significance of a new leading cause of death among the subjects, or perhaps, the return of one thought defeated (through an entirely different causal chain). For example, as we age, appetite generally diminishes; some of that may be due to programmed inactivity, some of it due to the weakened senses of taste and smell, and some of it simply programmed in because the elderly consuming fewer calories would provide a survival benefit to the species as a whole.

It’s also worth noting that reducing the diet to a point short of malnutrition has been shown to produce an extended lifespan – suggesting that this may be an anagathic treatment that we already enjoy without realizing it!

The Ultimate Anagathic

It’s quite possible that preventative Anagathics would improve to such an extent that they can be taken regularly without diminution of effectiveness, leading to the virtual abandonment of restorative treatments as no longer necessary. Lifespan could be extended to an effectively unlimited degree – so long as you kept taking them. But there would still be limits to the human lifespan; no mechanism can be designed to last forever, and we would now be a long way removed from what we have been prepared for by evolution.

Once again, this is likely to take the form of some new mode of death that’s already known and relatively rare, but that the race survives long enough (the anagathically-extended ones, anyway) to experience as a more frequent outcome.

Social Effects

These would be inevitable, and would likely take two contradictory forms at different points along the age scale. Initially, people would take advantage of relative health to become more active – perhaps even more active than they had ever been. As they aged further, however, they would probably become far less likely to tolerate personal risk.

Larry Niven’s Known Space series looks at the impact of anagathic treatments on the society at large in a number of the stories, especially cases where the treatments are less than legal – for example, having a brain transplanted into a clone body. Look especially for the stories involving Beowulf Shaeffer.

Equally, some of Heinlein’s stories are relevant and useful – in particular, Methuselah’s Children, Time Enough For Love, and Glory Road.

But there would undoubtedly be effects beyond those suggested by these sources. Business effects, for example – with the one CEO likely to live for hundreds of years, and similar prognostications for management, advancement is likely to be stultified. This is likely to cause frustration at the pace of promotion which leads to horizontal transfers as a means of accelerating that pace. Even so, opportunities would be limited, so it would be far more common to start your own business, or take some years off to acquired additional qualifications.

We already live in a world in which 30% of new businesses fail in their first two years, 50% in the first five years, and 66% within the first ten – now contemplate the statistics if the number of new businesses increases five- or ten-fold. While a few of them would survive, economies can’t grow fast enough to sustain that level of enterprise; even if the total number of successes at each milestone doubles, that’s a small fraction of the much larger pool.

Investment in start-ups would become far more risky, simply because more of them fail; so fiscal conservatism would become more acute, even approaching the point of policy paralysis.

Of course, if Anagathics are less widely-available, due to expense for example, the social impacts would be equally profound if different in character. Jealousies and resentments would be magnified by the rarity.

The one thing that can be accurately forecast is that there would be profound social consequences.

Let’s talk about Elves

It’s easy to translate these concepts into an explanation for the longevity of Elves and other races. Some campaigns give Dwarves an increased lifespan, for example – a naturally higher restorative factor, repairing the damage of aging, would be in keeping with their naturally higher Constitutions.

But shifting to an organic basis that has naturally evolved means that the organism would have naturally evolved to accommodate it. For example, you might find that the clotting mechanism that deals with wounds would be more rapid, restricting blood loss and enabling quicker healing with less risk of infection.

In particular, repairing damage becomes easier if the ongoing rate of damage is reduced, just as it’s easier to repair a machine if you can turn it off. One of the key factors in the survival rate in pure-oxygen atmospheres is metabolic rate.

Rodents have a high metabolic rate, after 50 hours of exposure, they start to die from a combination of lung injury and other factors. By 75 hours, 50% of them will be dead. Only one or two percent will survive through the 100-hour mark. After 120 hours, virtually all will have expired.

Primates, including man, are less susceptible; 100 hours is roughly when we start dying. At the 150-hour mark, the chances of survival are about 50-50. At the 200-hour mark, only one or two percent will survive; and by 275 hours, the survival chance has dropped to essentially zero.

Birds have a lower metabolic rate; at about 175 hours, they begin to die, but by the 200-hour mark, 98% or so are still hale and healthy. At 250 hours, 75% will have survived. At 300 hours, that’s down to about 25%, but that’s still high compared to the higher metabolic-rate species. It’s not until 400 hours that bird survival rates hit 0%.

Turtles have one of the lowest metabolic rates known amongst air-breathing species. At about 250 hours, they start dying, but by the 400-hour mark, only about 5% will have died. The shape of the curve suggests that a fair number would survive past the 1000-hour mark.

This suggests that Elves, with naturally anagathic capabilities, should – if anything – have a deeper sleep state than that of humans, whereas most of the game systems seem to suggest the opposite.

This threw me for a loop for a few minutes, threatening to bring my entire theoretical construct crashing down. But then I had an interesting notion regarding personality development. What if Elves maintained a simplified “archive copy” of their past personality profile which could take over while the “real mind” was waking up? Perception of issues would be simplified, and the most recent developments in personality would be absent.

There are all sorts of personal experiences that produce profound personality development. Personal tragedies, marriages, the birth of children, and so on. These landmark events and the profound changes they induce in thinking would trigger the creation of a new archive personality.

While the character sleeps, this backup personality – almost indistinguishable from the main personality – is on standby to command the body while the main personality is snapping out of it’s sleep state.

I particularly like this notion because a comparison between the ‘old’ mind and the current one would reveal the impact of spells such as Sleep and Charm, and even permit the backup to take over if such outside influence was detected. Thus, the Elvish resistance to such spells can be explained as a byproduct of their longevity.

Couple this with a natural resistance to changes to DNA as suggested in the article linked to at the start of this piece, perhaps in conjunction with the addition of fresh fruit (EG blueberries or blackberries) and nuts as a dietary need to provide the antioxidant “payload” to be distributed through the Elvish body, and Elvish Longevity can be fully explained, With bonus justifications for other Elvish Traits.

Why is this useful?

If you have some logical rationale that explains an unusual capability, not only can you use that knowledge in formulating descriptions of the capability ‘in action’, but you can interpret new phenomena in the context of that explanation – making your job as GM a lot easier and more interesting.

For example, accepting the above justification of Elvish longevity and ‘repose’: An elf joins the rest of the party in a tavern. They all get roaring drunk before their social outing is rudely interrupted by a press-gang. An elf can switch to his back-up (not drunk) personality – he may be thinking in crude, black-and-white extremist terms, relating directly to where that personality was last updated, but he’ll at least be thinking clearly.

Now, the ability to go from dead drink to wide-awake and thinking clearly is useful, but it’s “ordinary” enough not to be all that impressive. But, unlike most such cases, an elf can go back to being dead drunk as soon as the battle’s over…

Everything that you can define, pin down as being just a little different from everyone else, helps make your campaign unique – and easier to run.

Or, “Dwarves are from Marz, Elves are from Venusia”, which was almost the title of this article!

I was thinking about another post (that you will hopefully see in a week or so) when an idea for a completely original D&D/Pathfinder cosmology occurred to me. In a matter of minutes, it had become a fully-fledged Campaign Setting.

You could view this setting idea as adding science to fantasy, or covering science with a load of fantasy and imagination. Unfortunately, the local presentation sequence masks that mostly-ubiquitous theme because the beginnings are almost completely Fantasy in nature. Oh, well.

There’s more than a little Flash Gordon in this campaign setting – travel between worlds may not be routine but is easy for those who know how, and migration between those worlds is a regular, if unpredictable, event. One can quite literally turn the corner and find yourself somewhere else, caught between two hostile armies – or almost anything else you can imagine.

There’s also lots of scope for GMs to further develop the setting to suit themselves. This is the barest beginning.

The layers of reality

All of existence is contained within a number of layers of reality. The bottom-most – depending on who you ask and the prevailing wind on the day – is the Earth. Above the Earth is the Air domain followed by that of Water, and above that, the Fire. These four are known as the Inner Planes. Beyond the fire are the Astral Reaches, which contain the Many Worlds, and beyond them, the Outer Planes. The most distant of those planes are The Abyss and Hades, a shared domain, and beyond them once again lies the Earth.

Many who are less precise in their speech identify the Many Worlds as planes in their own right. Some consider The Abyss and Hades to be elements of the Earth Plane, and not planes of existence in their own right, and – truth to tell – definitions get a little fuzzy when you look to closely at the details.

Issues Of Alignment

Some layers align more closely with one specific alignment, others with another. This influences who feels at home there, but there are exceptions to almost every specific rule you care to nominate. These alignments are, therefore, more in the nature of guidelines than they are of laws, but humans were ever wont to over-simplify.

The Layer of Earth

The Earth is home to sub-layers of light and dark – referring to the alignments that are comfortable living there, and not to any mere physical property. Parts are pro-chaos and others, pro-order. These energies leech their way to the surface over time; for a race to stay comfortable, it must attune itself to their surroundings, or morphically challenge the shape of the energies by actively pursuing a philosophy conducive to a particular alignment, transforming their realm into one of the few fixed points.

Humans are native to the surface of the Earth, and they have grown adept at transforming the earth beneath their feet into bricks and mortar and stone, which they use to envelope themselves in the protections of Earth. In the shallows and deeper places, Water gathers into seas and oceans, fed by rivers when chaotic conditions within the Water Plane deposit some of its substance upon the Earth as rain.

Many races and species from elsewhere have found comfortable existences in the near-Earth. Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes, and more abide there, close to the surface. Deeper still is the Underdark, whence fled the Drow to join other creatures both friendly and hostile. Life is more primal in these regions, and forces extremes of perspective on those who abide there; think of it as ideology turned up to 11.

Beneath the Underdark lies the Deeper Stone, where dwell Elementals of Rock, Stone, Soil (Earth), Sand, and Glass. Little is known of their domain, save that they no longer require pockets of Air in which to reside; instead, they swim through the Deeper Stone as though it were water, in the process creating ripples of light and darkness that propagate through to the surface above.

The Layer of Air

The natural domain of many creatures that fly, and adopted home to many more, most races require a little Air in which to abide unless they be water-breathers. As one ascends in height above ground, the creatures who reside their increase in size and power until one reaches the Upper Air where dwell the Elementals who are native to this realm. Creatures of Wind and Gas, they have many distinctive sub-forms.

Air is naturally chaotic in small things but orderly and even stately in more serious matters, Implacable but difficult to move. They tend to look at the big picture and the long term.

The layer of Water

This is a relatively thin layer, only 5 or so miles deep, but is home to all manner of great sea creatures. Go Big or Go Home might well be a motto, at least of the Near Waters, those closest to the Air. The Far Waters are home to the Elementals of liquid, steam, and ice.

Water is similar to Air in its alignment – chaotic in the smaller details but orderly in the greater – but tends to focus on short-term gains, even if these are only temporary. The operating philosophy of this realm is therefore the complete opposite of their atmospheric neighbors.

There are those who claim the Moon is a location within the layer of Air, while others call it a location in the layer of Water. In truth, it wanders back and forth between the two in a regular cycle, the mysteries of which have not yet yielded to intelligent inquiry.

The layer of Fire

Uppermost of the inner layers is the realm of flame. Most of this realm is beyond mere vapor, but near to the great floating halls of the ice Elementals of the layer below, the fire congeals into something almost earth-like, providing a surface upon which those accustomed to great heat may reside in comfort.

Conflict in the layer of water is prone to attracting the ire of the layer of Fire, producing a flash of light and heat that – once begun – will rarely stop until it strikes Earth as Lightning. Such conflict also agitates the layer of air beneath, creating dark clouds, and the uneducated believe that these are the origins of the bolts of lightning that strike occasionally; the educated know better.

The layer of Fire is almost a contradiction within itself; naturally inclined toward chaos, it prefers to maintain a completely orderly existence in order that the disruption caused by the inevitable outbreaks of anarchy may become all the more significant.

The great white spot, otherwise known as the sun, is a good example. This maintains an orderly track across the plane of fire, clearly visible from the layers below. At first, appears to be a large speck; closer examination shows it to be a ball. Closer examination still shows that its surface constantly heaves and thrusts, and yet it rarely exceeds the natural boundaries that give the illusion of a simpler shape. Elementals of fire and flame, crystal, lava, and gem, are native to this realm.

The Astral Reaches

Location of the Many Worlds, of which more will be said anon, the Astral Reaches are a place of emptiness, where there is neither air nor earth nor water nor fire, and yet it is filled with those things (and more) in constant transit. Astral Corridors connect everywhere with Everywhere else – until they collapse, leaving those traveling within in an environment that is almost certainly profoundly unnatural to them.

Distance may be said to have no meaning here, though it is truer the mark to say any distance has all possible meanings at once, and the traveler has no say in which of those meanings he will experience. Twins may set out to travel from A to B, each holding the other’s hand; to one, mere minutes may have passed, while the other experiences the passage of days, weeks, or even years.

Since distance is measured by the time it takes to transit it, the term itself has little or no meaning within the Astral Reaches.

Similarly, alignment has little significance in the Astral Reaches, though pockets here and there may “lean” this way or that. Statistically, half of it trends orderly, and the other half to chaos – but which half is which is not something that is permanently fixed.

Some creatures, such as Beholders, are believed to be native to the Astral Reaches – no-one knows for sure.

The Many Worlds

Within the Astral Reaches may be found the Many Worlds, locations of substance congealed by the droppings left behind in semi-stable pockets and eddies.

Mercurus

The closest to the Fire is Mercurus, native home of the Gnomes. One face of Mercurus constantly faces the Sun, aligned thus by great machines constructed by the Gnomish Ancestors; most Gnomes live in constant service to the great underground machines, which are forever breaking down and needing repairs. These repairs are carried out as rituals and by rote; the nature of the machines is long forgotten.

Entirely distinctive ecosystems have grown to exist within the worlds of shadow and light which lie naturally side by side, and great pillars of stone and metal have been erected to manufacture environments conducive to the farming and maintenance of these ecosystems by the Gnomes.

These two pursuits have made natural miners and engineers of the Gnomes, who live underground in the managed environments created by their ancestors. Because there can be little expansion of living space, population pressures mount until terrible wars become inevitable. To control this tendency, there are harsh restrictions on the number of young permitted, and excess population are “encouraged” to resettle elsewhere.

No-one can be sober and straight-laced all the time, and the Gnomish outlets for pent-up needs of self-expression are wild parties and childish pranks. The latter makes them welcome visitors in most places, the latter ensures that permanent residence is not welcomed anywhere. Many are vagabonds, endlessly traveling through the Astral Corridors to this place or that. Hidden colonies have been established almost everywhere.

Some resent the way their race is treated by others, and a Gnomish Cell is frequently part of any resistance to established authority (and prone to create such a resistance if none already exists). Nevertheless, most Gnomes are easy-going and friendly folk.

Venusia

Next most distant is Venusia, native home of the Elves. Half forested and half swamp-like, Venusia is green and lush, and many species beyond the Elves derive from it.

Altitude is a measure of status amongst them; “high-born” is meant both literally and figuratively. Over the years, these statuses have been reinforced to the point where they may be considered sub-races, but the potential for all paths lies within each and every elf, from the most common farmer and tender of roots to the owlish habits of the grand masters in their lofty residences. Gregariousness and Isolationist at the same time, at least in potential; practical and studious and artistic; romantic and hard-nosed. Individual preference and the opportunities provided by society shape these potentials by restricting those aspects of the Elven character to which the individual can give expression. Elves are always a study in contradictions. “What is good for you may not be good for me, thus I can council you to do that which I could never contemplate in conscience clear” is an Elvish proverb that sums up the race remarkably well.

Marz

Third most distant from the earth is Marz, native home to the Dwarves. Marz began to die an incalculable time ago, following the great War Of The Worlds with their neighbor, Phaeton. Phaeton was destroyed, but the victory was a Pyrrhic one; the Martian ecosystem was devastated in the process. The Dwarves were forced to relocate underground, where they cling to existence rather than become like Gnomes, who they disdain. This stubbornness and pride forces them to refuse to admit that there is anything wrong with their home or the way that they live; nevertheless, there are more expatriate Dwarves living just below the Earth and in the upper Underdark than there are survivors on their native home.

Of necessity, they have learned to be efficient and effective excavators, though they would rather be artisans. Because they are deemed more reliable than Gnomes, they are generally thought of as being more skilled than the latter by Humans. Dwarves are intolerant of Elvish culture because it reminds them too much of what they would rather be doing but – pride once again – that they can’t admit to.

“Boots and all” is a popular Dwarfish philosophy that succinctly sums up their race. Once they set their minds to something, it is almost impossible to turn them aside; they will dedicate their lives to accomplishing it, even if the need to do so has long passed, or if it will no longer achieve the goals initially set for it.

A secondary trait is a ruthless pragmatism – even if the end-product of a Great Work is no longer useful for the intended purpose, Dwarves are adept at finding some way to use it to their advantage. At the very least, they will find someone to sell it to for hard currency.

Underneath the surface, Dwarves are hot-headed and passionate, likely to fly off the handle at any provocation, though they will often mask these discontents. Only those whom a Dwarf trusts implicitly are permitted to see his temper when one gets really upset. “Time withers the mightiest branch and renders to loam the hardest rocks; be ye therefore like unto the passing of days, patiently grinding down that which opposes ye,” is another telling Dwarfish proverb.

In terms of alignment, Dwarves are naturally inclined toward order, but the objectives of their potential to dedicate whole generations to a Great Task are dictated by a Chaotic Fractiousness. It may be six generations before a Clan can get around to seeking revenge for an insult, but when they do, the entire clan will focus obsessively on that task until it is complete.

Phaeton, the shattered world

Phaeton was the fourth of the Many Worlds until it’s native Orcs offended the Dwarves. Orcs are the type to build up towering resentments and blame others for their own misfortunes, and they breed like rabbits; once entrenched, they are almost impossible to dislodge. Populations are controlled through violence, either toward each other, or toward the outside world. There are as many survivors infesting the earth today as there were living on Phaeton at the time of its destruction.

Despite outward appearances, the most powerful social force amongst the Orcs are their women, who do as they please regardless of the edicts of male Orcs. Thus, despite the unrelenting population pressure, restrictions on the number of offspring are unacceptable to the Orcs.

Phaeton was unrelentingly pro-chaos in alignment, and many who know of it’s fate consider the current state of the Shattered World to be an entirely appropriate expression of that alignment.

Jove

Jove is one mighty world surrounded by smaller ones in a tight cluster. The outermost places in that cluster are the native home to Halflings and Kobolds, the former aligned to order and the latter to chaos. Native to the innermost places are creatures that can be considered “supersized versions” of those races, Hill Giants and Trolls, plus the Bugbears of G’mede. Native to Jove itself are the True Giants, whose nature depends on the ascendancy of a particular point within the cluster relative to their place of birth, at the time of their birth. The True Giants include Stone, Fire, Frost, and Storm varieties, but it is rumored that there are more varieties than just this dominant set of four.

Giant society is strictly hierarchical in some ways according to the sub-race into which an individual is born, by virtue of natural ability, but in all other respects, the races are strictly egalitarian, measuring all Giants as equals. Unfortunately, they are also very protective of their privacy, so specifics are hard to come by.

Only when gathering in expatriate enclaves do Giants tend to socially discriminate amongst the other sub-races, seeking out environments and circumstances more closely matching their racial preferences.

Saturnus

Saturn is home to another great cluster, and a ring that surrounds the plane of the world at an angle. It is considered one of the most beautiful worlds in the sky as a result of this phenomena.

Half the world (the half on the leeward side of the rings relative to the sun) is chaotic in nature, the other half is orderly – but the term “half” is misleading in this context. Chaos is in fact natural only to 25% or so of Saturnus – but, since the World rotates clockwise relative to the point at which the rings rise, which “half” is variable over time.

Saturnus is the native home of the Dragons, and – like the Giants – whether or not a hatchling is metallic or colored depends on the alignment of the hatching place at the time, relative to the rings – the offspring of Brass Dragons may be Brass or Blue.

Some say that there are a few who hatch at the exact moment of transition and are Neutral in alignment; this writer can neither confirm nor deny this claim.

Despite the natural disagreements in philosophy and nature, all Dragons are respectful of each other and avoid conflict with other Dragons. This is the result of a dragon-wide treaty negotiated eons ago that was founded upon, and forces recognition of, one basic fact: Dragons are so powerful that any conflict between them costs the aggressor almost as much as it does the party who is the focus of the aggression. The only rule even the Chaotic Dragons will always obey is that Dragon does not fight Dragon.

Not on Saturnus, anyway. Unlike many other species, Dragons do not permanently relocate to elsewhere, such as Earth; though they often tour around and may establish a “summer home” or equivalent. They are tourists, and some tourists are obnoxious and/or decadent.

All breeds of Dragon tend to fall victim to an addiction if exposed to it whilst away from Saturnus – “Gold Fever”. They can quite literally become addicted to hoarding wealth, fondling it, playing with it, even bathing in it. The way this wealth is acquired tends to be filtered through the sub-racial philosophy of the individual – colored Dragons kill, loot, and steal to enlarge their hoards, metallic dragons hire themselves out for various endeavors to earn the gold to add to their collections.

Neptunus

Little is known of Neptunus, the water-world, save that many of the creatures native to the realm also reside in the plane of Water and occasionally escape to the seas and oceans of the Earth. The generic description “Great Sea Monsters” describes them, by all accounts.

The outer planes

Each plane has its own nature. Several are naturally connected to one another by some means, effectively daisy-chaining groups of related planes together. Many are inhabited by either natives or inhabitants who have emigrated from elsewhere. More are being discovered all the time – for example, none know which of the outer planes is the original home of the Rakshasa or the Ilithids.

Residents tend to be extremely powerful and disinclined to tell tales – not verifiable ones, anyway.

Hades and The Abyss

Although given different names, these are really two different names for a single location which shares some characteristics in common and several distinct points of differentiation. Whether these are natural, or a side effect of the inhabitants that populate these distinct sub-realms is not known.

Both consist of “bubbles” that drift through the deepest reaches of the Earth – sometimes in solid form, sometimes liquefied into magma by heat – either randomly or at the direction of the ruler of each sub-domain “bubble”. Sub-domains are linked and connected to form “planes” of similar natures, and several of these planes are daisy-chained together through further tiers of linkages to form complex relative structures. The individual constituent sub-planes may be neighbors or remote from one another, and it can vary from one day to the next; however, the distances between them is abolished by virtue of the portals that link one to another, creating what is effectively a “virtual plane” greater than the scope of any individual plane.

Inhabiting Hades are the Devils and their servants and subordinates. Creatures of a dominantly orderly nature, they believe in promotion through merit and strict observations of hierarchy, and spend their time plotting, planning, and scheming – then putting those plans into action when they have been polished and perfected. Hades is also named the “Nine Hells”, describing the “sub-planes” of which the virtual plane is constructed. The population is slow to grow, and it is a rare honor for a new Lord Of Hell to be enthroned – and, since such are always the former lieutenants of an existing Lord, who knows (many of) their secrets, this represents an announcement of power by the new Lord’s former master. Of course, this constraint is intolerable to the new Lord, a tool to be manipulated and discarded as soon as possible – so it is to that end that the new Lord immediately bends his plots and schemes.

Just to confuse matters, Hades is also the name of one of the individual Nine Hells.

Inhabiting The Abyss are Demons and their slaves. Creatures of dominantly chaotic nature, they believe in the dominance of force and the constant challenging of unruly subordinates to weed out the unfit. Population growth is higher than Devils, but so are “losses” along the way. Demon Lords essentially reach their station by slaughtering the rest of their generation. Loyalty is forced through might and intimidation, punishment and bribery. This inherent tendency to chaos is tempered by the individual desires of specific Demon Lords, which biases what would other be pure chance.

Other Races, Places, and Phenomena of note

There are a few other points of interest that should be noted.

Positive Energy

Mention has been made of waves of energy, alternately positive and negative, rising through the Earth from unknown sources.

The positive energy is channeled through their belief structures by Druids and Clerics to empower the class, and is also manipulated by Elves to shape their abodes. These two character classes have also learned to store such energy for later use.

Negative Energy

The negative energy can be harnessed by Necromancers. If present in sufficient quantity in the vicinity of a corpse, it can transform the dead into Undead – an unfortunate result, given human propensity to bury their dead. Divine energy can disrupt the flow of negative energy that sustains the Undead – if enough Divine energy can be directed toward the problem, which is not as easily done as said.

Burial at sea produces the same effect, though the corpse will almost certainly have been reduced to bones by the time silt sufficiently covers the body to convey the Negative Energies into the remains.

Some cultures burn their dead, the only sure way to avoid this problem. Elves wrap their dead in leaves and leave them at the feet of trees to decompose; this makes Elvish Undead very rare (it usually works) but the few who rise again are far more dangerous than most.

Drow

Some elves have proven receptive to the Negative Energy, distorting their characters and personalities after exposure. Accepting this source of personal power begins the transformation of an Elf into a Drow.

Drow are hunted and killed by the Elves if they can, but all too often the nascent Drow escapes into the Underdark in search of like-minded radicals, having performed as much mischief as they can manage without being detected prematurely.

Indeed, the Drow maintain Menzoberranzan and other strongholds as focal points of Negative Energy that they might serve as beacons to the newly transformed. It is therefore a truism that the more trouble society is likely to have from Drow, the less it will be troubled by Undead, and vice-versa.

Arcane Energy and Astral Streams

As the corridors of Astral Existence (also known as Astral Streams) move through the other planes of existence, the friction between states of reality generates Arcane Energy, which is harnessed by Mages, and upon which many creatures rely for sustenance or harness for additional abilities, such as the Draconic ability to Fly (their wings have insufficient span to support them unaided; the wing shape acts as a living focus for the Arcane Energies. Hence, if the wings are damaged, the flight ability is impaired, a fact that hid this process for centuries).

This also means that Arcane Energy is readily available throughout existence.

Some Astral Streams (statistically, half of them) flow upward from the ground; if conditions are exactly right, these can serve as carriers of Positive or Negative Energy, such that anywhere that conduit touches will observe a release of that energy for as long as it lasts – minutes, days, weeks, years.

Some connection between this phenomenon and the Drow “Negative Focal Points” is widely believed to exist, but has never been proven; the Drow have been uncooperative and the Elves close-mouthed.

Passage between worlds

When an arcane spell is miscast, or is sufficiently powerful, it diverts nearby Astral Streams toward the focal point of the energy (i.e. the caster). If one is sufficiently bent so as to come into contact with the Arcane Energy release, it opens an unstable and temporary passageway into the Astral Stream; any matter or creature entering this Unbound Portal is swept from it’s native realm, to be deposited an unknown span of time later somewhere else.

Astral streams cross infrequently, but regularly, and some travelers have learned to navigate the resulting “network” – though that term implies a stability and permanence of structure not present in reality.

Some locations seem to attract multiple and reliable intersections, creating Astral Nexi, great switching points within reality. Arcane Schools and the like frequently occupy such locations because they provide a convenient power boost to those who know how to harness it, and because the concentration of miscast spells by inept apprentices inevitably creates one at such locations anyway.

There is an inverse relationship between a nexus, and the probability of emergence; it is as though these were special Astral Places, no matter where they may be located in another realm. In fact, more isolated the stream being used as a conduit between worlds (voluntarily or otherwise) is from other Astral Streams, the more likely it is to serve as an emergence point.

Some areas have been identified that seem to deter the presence of Astral Streams in the same way that an Astral Nexus gathers them, and thus are more reliable destinations than others. Some means of enhancing this trait, such as circles of standing stones, magic circles, pentagrams, etc, have been devised over the millennia.

One fact remains consistent, however, as a deterrent to the development of cross-world trade and tourism: such points are inevitably a long way from the easiest points of access to the Astral Network.

Ethereal Flows, The Afterlife and The Wall of Death

When mortals expire, their spirits (unless trapped Necromantically) travel along another set of transitory conduits to an Afterlife. These conduits are NOT the same as the Astral Network, and have been dubbed Ethereal Flows.

Some flows lead to a particular outer plane, part of the Afterlife Cluster; these are said to be positive in nature. Others lead to Hades; these are said to be negative. Convention describes the outer planes as “up”, visible only as Stars in the night sky from the Ground, while Hades is described as “down”, defined as the directions of these flows.

The terms come from the determination that positive Ethereal Flows are attracted to those receptive to positive energy, i.e. those who have lived good lives, while negative flows are attracted to those who are more receptive to negative energies. It is theorized but unproven that Ethereal Flows share a relationship to Clerical Magic that is analogous to that of Astral Streams and Arcane Magic.

A third group is neither positive nor negative; some theologies claim that this occurs when one of the “wrong” type of Ethereal Flow captures a Deceased Spirit. Because their hold on this Flow is more tenuous than if they were strongly bonded with it, they are near-certain to be cast off somewhere as a disembodied spirit; these have natural access to the Astral Streams and can eventually make their way to a location of significance to them – place of birth, place of death, place of dishonor, or place of residence – where they can attempt to gather enough of the spiritual energies appropriate to their natures (positive or negative) that they will eventually be granted a more secure grip on an Ethereal Flow.

Legend states that if the Spirit believes strongly enough that they have an unfinished task to complete or is sufficiently agitated at the time of death, they will thrash around in the Ethereal Flow and may break free in a similar fashion.

The Spirit who is carried by a Positive Flow to a “happy” afterlife (the definitions of which vary widely) eventually passes through The Wall Of Death. Prior to this event, the spirit can be restored to the body through various Spiritual (or sometimes Arcane) spells and practices; there is an Ethereal Cord connecting the body with the spirit.

Passage through the Wall of Death severs that Cord. Thereafter, even response to various means of communications with the Dead is completely voluntary on the part of the Spirit; they can be supplicated and importuned, but the choice is always that of the Spirit. Beyond that, the only way to contact an uncooperative Spirit is to employ Arcane abilities to travel to the Afterlife without first having died and then to search out the Spirit. Almost every Theology actively discourages and even seeks to punish this practice.

It is widely known that beyond a certain interval, spirits of the Deceased can no longer be contacted at all by any means. It seems certain that the Afterlife itself is merely some form of staging point to a further existence of some kind.

The Gods

Positive Spiritual Energies are gathered and stored by Clerics after filtration through the Cleric’s theology, his Faith. You may be wondering, what happens to the energies that they accumulate beyond their capacities to store that do not get liberated as Clerical Spells?

The answer is: the same thing that happens to Positive Energies that pass through the Pious who do not have the capability to manifest it as Divine Magic, according to the strength of their Belief. It takes a hundred or more non-clerics to so “shape” spiritual energy to the same extent as a first-level Cleric.

If there is sufficient belief, the object of that belief spontaneously manifests into existence, usually somewhere in the outer planes (simple statistics, there are lots more of them than there are other locations). The % probability, per day, of this occurring is 0.001xW+0.1xTCL, where W is the total number of non-clerical worshipers and TCL is the grand total of all clerical levels. Only worshipers of the exact same Theology count. 1000 levels of cleric gets you to 100%, even without worshipers, as does 100,000 Faithful. Neither are probable nor easy to achieve, but a lesser number will be sufficient, given enough time. The threshold is 0.1% per day, or 1% every 10 days – which has a cumulative probability of success of 99.9% in a mere 6904.3 days. But 60% might be enough, or 30%, or 5% – you only need to get lucky once!

If necessary, any trappings – even an entire plane of existence – will manifest as surrounding environment for the Deity, who will match the understanding and sophistication of the Worshipers at the time. The God will know what the worshipers believe he knows, will have the personality they think is his, will have the imperatives that they believe in, and will believe any tale of origins that they do. He will conform in every respect to the Deity they believe in at that exact moment.

Deities are a mixed blessing to a Theology. Visible manifestations of divine Force help gather new believers, some Spells may come more easily, and – in a pinch – a Cleric may be able to draw directly on the power of the Deity, or of the congregation.

But, because they can never change from that initial conception, they tend to lock the Theology in stone as well; Deviation from Doctrine leads to a loss of benefits, at the very least, if not prosecution and punishment.

If the faith nevertheless changes, or the church is overwhelmed by a schism, the chance of divine death is 100 minus 2x the chance of spontaneous manifestation. So if the followers ever fall beneath a critical number, the God is in trouble. But that’s not necessarily the end of the story.

Imagine the following: A deity manifests after a couple of hundred years of being worshiped by a fair number of Believers. There is almost certainly a great chance that the God will disappear equally spontaneously a day or so later. He may come and go a number of times before he is able to stick around, each time with no memory of not having existed for as long as the worshipers think he has been around.

As faith in the Deity grows stronger, the day comes when his existence is relatively secure, and he no longer risks spontaneously not existing on a daily basis – well, not very often, anyway, and even if he does, he can be certain of re-manifesting shortly. It’s like having a night off from Divine Duties and drinking too much.

But, one day, he or one of his worshipers responds to a change in the surrounding cultural situation by revising an Article Of The Faith. He convinces another, who convinces another, and before you know it, half the Faithful believe in a different God, or a different version of the same God. Suddenly, the old God’s head is back on the chopping block, and should he ever fall, there is an unknown danger that the Deity to manifest will not be him, but the version of him believed in by the rebel faction.

And, should that deity ever manifest, his knowledge, beliefs, and reality will conform with the revisionist beliefs, even to the point of remembering always being this way, and doing all the things ascribed to him by the revisionists.

Meanwhile, the original faithful are left without a deity to reinforce their beliefs. It seems clear that the revisionists had it right all along, because THEY still have a God to support them. The old faith collapses completely, and the population converts to the new way of thinking.

Gods evolve, then, not continuously but in fits and lurches that occur eventually after the Faith of which they are at the center, changes. The Gods are always out-of-step and lagging behind the times.

Which is why they vest so much trust and authority in their priesthoods. Interpretation of Doctrine can change without changing the Doctrine itself, essentially translating the modern world into terms comprehensible by a simpler entity. Should they ever fail to do so, or should they change Doctrine too much, their faith is on the path to extinction. The safest solution is to keep converting new populations to the “True Faith”.

It’s a LOT easier to gather and persuade 10,000 ordinary people than it is to accumulate 100 levels of Clerics who believe. The combination yields a 20% chance of manifestation (and a 60% chance of extinction). But the beliefs of those 10,000 are going to evolve as the society develops in sophistication and in response to outside events. A conservative approach to evolving theology is both mandated by the need to preserve and sustain the God they believe in, and something that will eventually condemn that deity to the scrap heap of lost religions, supplanted by something newer and more sophisticated. The only option: ultra-conservatism, forbidding any sort of change in culture and society until you are rejected as out-of-touch.

Being a God in this universe is never more than a temp job..

The Wrap-up

The above may have taken hours to write up and explain, but almost all of it was the result of ten minutes inspired thinking in, and after, my shower the other day. Think about the consequences in terms of the adventure potential, and I think you’ll see why I was excited by it.

You’ve got the fact that Aberrations or other exotic creatures can spontaneously manifest anywhere. You’ve got waves of Undead, with whole cemetery rows potentially rising from the dead – when things take a bad turn. You’ve got Deities scheming to sustain their own existences, and Devils scheming to gain power, and others scheming for the sake of scheming. You’ve got Demons stirring up mischief because that’s how they measure rank amongst themselves. You’ve got a whole new cosmology to explore, and whole new relationships between races. At any turn, any failed spellcasting roll, you may find yourself in a whole new bundle of trouble. You’ve got new races and new variations on many old favorites. You’ve got Gnomes as something more akin to Palestinians who were forcibly relocated to the West Bank, and a deeply-held Dwarfish secret shame. And you’ve got the age-old confrontation between progressives and arch-conservatives, a battle that neither side can afford to win – or to lose.

If you can’t get an adventure or twenty out of that lot, hang your dice-bag in shame.