This article started as an example and additional content for last week’s discussion of Visualization, but that article evolved in a different direction, and this material no longer seemed to fit. So I pulled it to give both the room they needed.

Six Questions To Create A Building

Everything happens somewhere.

In order for any event to occur in an RPG, we need to specify somewhere for it to happen. That means that we have to create a LOT of locations in the course of a campaign, or even a moderately-large adventure.

Most of those locations will be buildings of some sort, simply because that’s where you find people, and that’s where you find objects of interest, and therefore, that’s where things happen. I have a set checklist that I mentally follow whenever creating a building, and that’s – at least nominally – the subject of today’s article.

• What’s it for?
• How big is it?
• Who built it?
• Where is it?
• What’s it made of? And lastly,
• What does it look like?

Seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? And notice that the last step is to visualize it – so that I’m ready to describe what I’m seeing, mentally, using the techniques described in the Visualization article and the series on Stylish Narrative.

But this series of questions is even more useful than meets the eye…

What’s It For?

Everything has a purpose.

But that’s a very loaded proposition – the creator may have had a quite different purpose in mind to the current inhabitants, who may have a very different purpose to that of the DM.

Each of these purposes will shape, or reshape, the structure of the building in question. The purpose of the creator will dictate the fundamental “bones” of the architecture. The purpose of the current owners/occupants will change the way that the spaces in between those fundamental bones will be filled, and the fascia that is applied. And guiding the decisions of both, from behind the curtain, will be the plot needs of the GM pulling the strings.

My personal experiences include working in an office space designed early in the 1970s which had been adapted to house clusters of cubicles – from almost everywhere inside the building there was no direction in which you could see an unbroken view of the outside, and when you were working in one of those cubicles, you were cocooned like a monk in his cell. And I saw what happened when they redesigned the space to take down the barriers between the workstations that comprised each cluster, orienting them so that everyone could see the outside in some direction – it felt like the building had grown 50% larger, there was suddenly so much space around each person.

I’ve also worked in a 19th-century wool-store that had been refitted as a data processing center – desks side by side and facing each other, each with a computer screen and a book-stand – and noticed how the original purpose of the building defined where the supporting columns were located, and how large they were, and how these became the hubs around which modern utilities like phones and power supplies could be run, and so dictated the way that the building functioned in its new role.

I’m not a big watcher of renovation/home decoration programs or magazines, but it only takes a passing acquaintance with such sources to recognize how large a transformation can be achieved with relatively minor changes – and yet, if you look closely at most such transformations, you can still perceive the lingering echoes of what was there before, even if they now have to be assessed in a new context that obscures that original design.

Purpose is one of the most important defining characteristics. At the same time, it’s often the easiest to put your mental finger on; it’s then “simply” a matter of interpreting those purposes into design, layout, and decorative elements. It’s hard to get that right – but it’s fairly easy to spot when it isn’t done correctly, because the space will make no sense once you look at it with a little perspective. The biggest mistake that most people make is waiting until they are about to use the space in a game before doing so.

How Big Is It?

Size matters (just ask any Dr Who fan about the TARDIS).

Size has two major effects, plus a third superficial one, that need to be noted and accommodated.

The first effect is that size dictates what can happen conveniently and efficiently in a given space. If the space is too large, then people will either be overwhelmed by it, or so separated that communication becomes a problem. Either way, efficiency and convenience suffer.

The second effect is a corollary to the first. If an operation is in a space of any particular size, it’s because they think or thought that they would need that space. If an insurance company occupies a 16-story skyscraper, they will need every single one of those floors for something. If a Hardware store occupies one-and-a-half acres (and at least one in Sydney does – I know because I helped set up the shelves and stock for it at one point) its because they have that much hardware that the space will be full. If they didn’t need as much space, they would relocate to cheaper premises, or never have moved into this location in the first place. If there wasn’t enough space, again it’s unlikely that this location would have been acceptable.

Let’s go back to that Insurance Company for a minute, which I know about because I worked for them for a number of years. The ground floor is all about customer service. There’s a floor for each branch of insurance, and a floor for senior management, and a floor for IT, and one for the computers themselves, and a floor for computer security, and a floor for the staff cafeteria, and a floor for training, and a floor for the printers that produce the renewal notices, and a floor for building maintenance, and a floor for the air-conditioning plant and elevator power. I count that as being 10 floors, so there have to be four major branches to the insurance operation (in fact, there were more until some were moved into a neighboring building). And one of those remaining floors is shared with the call center and switchboard, and another is shared with an internal library. And that’s with a number of key functions outsourced, like graphic design. Each floor has meeting rooms, and secretarial stations, and middle-management, and bathrooms for staff use, and security stations. At 14 floors, it was bulging at the seams. All that exists to service one floor of customer service, and a number of branches.

I see this go wrong all the time in home-brewed locations because in any operation, 9/10ths of it don’t show to the outside world (well, maybe it’s more like 1/2, but you get the point). People place something in an immense castle, with no thought of what will fill it. It happened with Assassin’s Amulet, too – the original map, though beautiful, gave few suggestions as to the purposes of the individual rooms. It was more-or-less assumed that the GM would fill things in himself – back before Johnn and I became involved. It took a lot of creative effort to allocate functions to all the internal spaces.

The final aspect of size is that it is equated to grandeur – but only if you can successfully convey a sense of immensity, and that’s more easily said than done. Even photographs often fail to capture it – as someone who has both seen the real thing and gone looking for photographs that adequately express the incredible size of the California Redwoods, I can assure you of that! Either the immense height is not adequately captured, or the physical size of these trees is shrunken; it takes a camera with the ability to pan up to begin to put scales into perspective.

To some extent, the same thing takes place with buildings; rows of windows can provide a useful tool for estimating height, but they come in so many shapes and horizontal sizes that they are an unreliable guide in that dimension. And even then, ceiling heights can throw you curve balls by increasing the size of windows/glass panels more than you realize.

Visually, the easiest way to convey immensity is with richness of detail. That simply doesn’t work in a communications mode that is serial in nature – the spoken/written word, for example. And yet, anyone who knows anything about Hollywood trickery knows that this, too, can be deceptive; it works because the mind makes certain assumptions about the size of small details, and so enlarges its comprehension of the space containing those objects.

And, in fact, it’s those relative sizes being incorrect that tends to give the game away when we look at miniatures; there is a mental discontinuity between the scales that makes the image an obvious miniature (the other photographic flaw is the rate of blur with distance, which our minds interpret into how far away the camera was). Still more cues include the detail of rocks and the sharpness of shadows.

Size is one of those tricky things to get right, and getting it wrong can totally blow the credibility of what you are describing. So I place thinking about it early in the creative process.

Who Built It?

You can’t really think about an original purpose without thinking about the original creator – the designer/architect/builder/decorator combination that caused the building to exist the way it is. Each will leave his own distinctive stamp on the structure in many ways.

That’s a level of detail that most GMs don’t go into – myself included, under normal circumstances. But even beyond that, there are different periods and styles in architecture, and those are also quite distinctive – and those I definitely pay attention to, because they tell me what a lot of the details will look like.

One page that I have bookmarked and refer to often is Wikipedia’s Graphic Timeline Of Architectural Styles. Each of the architectural styles is linked to the appropriate Wikipedia page, making it a great way of quickly connecting to an appropriate style – and if you use “open in new tab” or its equivalent in other browsers, you can skim and go back immediately if the results aren’t what you want.

Of course, there is absolutely no rule that says that architectural styles in a Fantasy world should look like those with which we are familiar, and defining a common architectural style can be a great way of unifying players’ perceptions of a culture in a fantasy game. Maybe the major buildings all have minaret-style domes made of glass, while the smaller ones reflect that design element in the shape of their doors (very Arabian) with stained glass inset above the lintel and rectangular stained glass panels along the sides of the main entrance of the building. This may be part of their religious iconography, a representation of the halo around their deity (or one of their deities). Throw in outer walls with sides canted inwards at a 10-degree angle or so, and you get a formalized representation of a tent, which starts to hint at the history of the culture.

In other words, if our cultural history doesn’t apply, I strongly recommend that you invent one for your campaign – even if you crib from real sources and apply a blender.

This, of course, is even more important and essential (and even harder) when you’re dealing with a future-based setting. The best futuristic sci-fi movies have a consistent architectural theme or two that makes it possible to identify a set photograph of even a movie that you haven’t seen before as belonging to the show/movie. Star Wars certainly has it. Tron had it. The City Of the Daleks in the 70s Dr Who serial had it. Blade Runner has it. Star Trek started to get it in The Next Generation and certainly had it by the time Deep Space Nine and Voyager rolled around.

One of the keys to future architectural style is not changing things too much. The doors on the original starship Enterprise were immediately recognizable as doors; that was necessary because it was a 1960s audience who was viewing it. Compare the cutting edge architecture of today with what people of 100 years ago thought the future would look like and, while there are some similarities, there are also a great many differences; the forecasts are less bound by function and far more simplistic in style, far more compromised to be recognizable by their audience.

Making sure that the building that I am mentally creating either fits the architectural style of the period in which it was created or one of the older ones, or is famous for not observing the fashion (notorious might be a better term) is an important step in creating the building because it connects the building with the culture and history of those that created it.

Where Is It?

Every somewhere sits in an environment (I was going to write, ‘every somewhere is somewhere’ but that’s starting to get too Baroque!)

The location can be either more important than “who made it” or less, or sometimes both at the same time. Which is to say that function will almost always trump form, and function in this case means adapting the style to suit the environment. What happens is that in the essentials, the purity of a style is compromised where necessary; but if it is not essential, the style will dominate the design.

Major impacts that may need to be accommodated include rainfall intensity, flooding, snow, high temperatures, earthquakes, wildfires (also known as bushfires), surface erosion, and strong winds. The more frequently these occur, the more strongly they will influence or even dominate other considerations when designing/constructing structures.

Which brings me to a side-issue that needs to be made at this point. I won’t go into it too deeply – I’ll do another article at some point digging into things more substantially – but this will serve as a primer for that article.

The impact of severe climate is the product of two different facts: the severity and the frequency with which that severity (not more nor less) can be expected to occur. Multiply these together, and add up all the results, and the total is the risk of complete failure that the building faces. If any of those risks exceeds a threshold level based on the expected lifetime of the structure, the design will need to mitigate or otherwise allow for it.

For example, let’s look at flooding. We’ll take 100 years as a typical expected lifetime. Once every ten years, low levels of flooding can be expected, so the likelihood is that it will need to withstand that flooding ten times in its lifetime – this obviously has to be taken into account in the design of the structure. Once every 25 years, moderate flooding will be experienced – so that’s 4 times in the expected lifetime. The major structure would probably take this into account, but that’s about the threshold. Once every 50 years, the building may experience severe flooding, but you probably wouldn’t factor that into your design.

Why? Because one-in-fifty-years events don’t come along like clockwork. What this really means is that the risk is greater than 50-50 that such an event will occur within 50 years of the last such event. Each subsequent half-way step toward 100% risk also multiplies the timescale by the number of steps, so the likelihood is 50% at 50 years, 75% at 100 years, 87.5% at 150 years, 93.75% at 200 years, and so on. There is a reasonably high chance that the building will never experience this problem within its 100-year projected lifespan, so unless there is some reason to expect the risk to go up, you wouldn’t expect to allow for it.

Standards have greatly changed in this respect over the years. These days, the risk to the building is secondary to the risk that the building may pose to others should catastrophe strike. Liability rules over Existence, in other words, and liability risks tend to be much higher with larger modern structures because it’s risk-per-person. The risk to an individual might be low, but multiply it by thousands and it quickly overtakes the risk to the structure as a design consideration.

The other change that has occurred is that absolutism has been replaced with an estimated repair value, and that is compared with a more flexible threshold, the estimated total value of the building. Putting everything in terms of dollars has only happened in the latter half of the 20th century, though it existed as an emerging trend for a century or so prior, but it has the virtue of being a more black-and-white real-world outcome. But we’re wandering off the point of relevance to this article.

If only it was as simple as adding structural or design elements to meet environmental survivability requirements. Quite often, solving one problem compromises capacity to deal with another. You don’t need to be a professional architect, but you do need to be aware of these potential compromises when imagining your structures – and, once again, the risk of the building becoming unusable dictates relative impact on design.

What’s It Made Of?

A secondary impact of location is in availability of construction materials.

Some constructions deliberately utilize non-local material simply because they are hard to obtain and hence evidence of commitment and importance, so what is not available is just as important as what is common.

Furthermore, different construction materials have different requirements in actual usage. Certain types of roofing materials require different levels of support from the structure because of their weight, for example; and in some places, snow loading can potentially exceed the weight of the roof if the design doesn’t take into account the need to shift that weight. (That’s why roofs are pitched at steeper angles in snow country. But these are bad for cooling – so flat roofs are preferred in higher temperature environments. Neither of these are the horizontally strongest designs, those tend to be at about 45 degrees of pitch – so those are what prevail in areas of strong wind. Flat roofs, on the other hand, have much greater potential vertical strength – so these are more prevalent in tornado-prone areas).

Whoops, I seem to have wandered back into the previous point – but that’s okay, because they are very strongly associated. Getting back on point, then, the stronger a frame has to be, the heavier it is, and the more strongly it needs to be held up/held together by the vertical parts of the frame. That’s a truism that becomes less relevant with advances in steel in the early 20th century, so this is a stronger factor in older buildings.

The local church in the town where I grew up that I attended as a child doesn’t need columns to support the roof – but it does have tremendous wooden beams spanning the entire structure, about a foot square in cross-section. They must weigh close to a ton for every 2-3 feet of length – and they are quite long, at least 60′, so each beam must weigh 20-30 tons, maybe more. There are at least 12 of those beams – so the foundations have to support more than 400 tons even without figuring the foot-thick stone walls into account. For comparison, there are complete multistory Japanese castles that are estimated to weigh that much. That’s about the weight of a fully-loaded 747 Jumbo, and the weight of the largest industrial excavator ever built in Germany, and the weight of the Locomotive that powers the Orient Express. The walls need to be made of such heavy stone in order to support both themselves and that load.

What’s It Look Like?

Once all the practicalities and historical contexts have been taken into account, all that’s left are the surface superficialities.

Yet, these are often the most visible elements of the design. Designers and decorators never seem to like being forced into anything by practical realities and go out of their way to hide the compromises that they are forced to make, simply because they are compromises with reality. In another structure where they are not necessary, the same decorator would quite happily incorporate the look of the very design features that they have just hidden, simply because they aren’t necessary.

How do you hide necessary design features? You make columns look like statues, you sheath walls in some entirely different construction material, and sculpt nooks and crannies and shapes into the walls. In short, you turn them into decorative features and build the rest of the appearance around them.

A number of structures are also over-engineered to provide scope for design features. For example, castle walls are designed to withstand siege equipment and cannon-fire; that necessitates walls of a certain thickness, but would you ever be comfortable in a structure designed to be only just strong enough to protect you? There’s always the chance that someone would get in a lucky shot, or build a better siege weapon – so you would engineer your outer walls to be at least three times as strong as they needed to be, if you could; four or five times would be better. And then it occurs to you that if the walls are going to be that thick and strong, you could build a secret escape passage into them and they would still be more than three times as strong as they need to be…

The Derivation Of Answers

The mental design process runs a lot faster than this article may have conveyed. Ultimately, it comes down to making six decisions – so somewhere between 3 and 12 seconds is enough time for me to envisage a structure, even without allowing for “typical” structures short-circuiting the process. With such shortcuts – and they only come with experience – I can imagine and describe a tavern, or a cottage, or a skyscraper, about as quickly as I can bring the word to mind.

What’s more, because they occur more frequently, the more common a structure in a game, the more readily such shortcuts come to mind – with experience.

What I have learned over the years is that spending those few seconds – or even, for a less experienced GM, maybe ten or twenty seconds each – thinking about each of the six questions gives me a strong foundation for making snap decisions about anything else that may come up.

You can improv only as fast as you can think, and this process lets me improv about as fast as the words can come out of my mouth. On a more complicated structure, I might need to spend a little more time thinking about it to achieve this – but a pause of 5 or 6 seconds is barely noticeable, and is easily covered by rolling a few dice and pretending to count them up. And if you can make the results of that dice roll relevant in some way to your subsequent description/narrative, so much the better, and you will never be caught out by your players!

A Building Without Walls

What may surprise people who haven’t thought about it enough is that the same process can be applied to other sorts of locations. A clearing in the forest or jungle, for example. A swampy hollow. The entrance to a giant anthill. Any location can be treated as “a building without walls” and the same process applied – though some of the questions might need tweaking, or a more metaphoric interpretation.

For example, let’s think about a forest clearing. What’s it for? A potential danger or trap, a passage for forest animals. How big is it? About 3 meters (10′) across, surrounded by brush and heavy trees. Who built it? There are three possible reasons for a clearing: first, there used to be a tree there, but it was destroyed by lightning/fire; second, there may be particularly dense stands of trees to east and west, reducing the light reaching this spot, and inhibiting growth there; or third, the soil may be especially poor there by chance. Deliberate construction doesn’t appear on the list, but might be a fourth – trappers did do that, I believe, to make their traps more accessible. Where is it? A thick forest in a cooler climate. What’s it made of? The brush to either side includes nettles and thorn-bushes, so the clearing is relatively confined. What does it look like? A span of mossy earth and plants a few inches tall surrounded by thicker undergrowth and dense stands of tall trees that keep the area in shade. Clearing done!

If you eliminate the need for walls, anywhere becomes a building, and the same tools, the same six questions, can make answers flow as needed.

The Building Of A Metaphor

The utility of those six basic questions doesn’t stop there. A more liberally-metaphoric interpretation of those questions enables the same technique to be used for just about anything you can think of.

For example, let’s build an off-the-cuff encounter for our clearing, in a D&D/Pathfinder setting.

What’s it for? A local noble feels threatened by recent events and has placed a guard here to try and drive the adventurers off. How big is it? Enough to trouble the party, but not realistically to defeat them. Who built it? Baron Mars Aeppin, who was forewarned by a seer of the party’s coming. Where is it? A clearing in the forests to the southwest of the Baron’s castle. What’s it made of? One knight and his two harpy allies who are perched in the trees that overgrow the clearing. And finally, What does it look like? A knight in polished ring-mail stands ready in the center of the clearing, a shield on one arm and his sword drawn and pointed at his feet, signifying his readiness for battle but an initially non-belligerent stance; the heraldic device on the shield is an inverted red “V” against a yellow background and a black eagle in flight above it (note that I am deliberately using a visual description and not technical heraldic language). The knight is Sir Reginald, the Baron’s brother, a nobleman himself who hopes to inherit the childless Baron’s estates one day. The encounter clearly invites a parley with the party, but one that could turn hostile immediately if the party do not accede to the Baron’s demands that they withdraw from his lands.

From this beginning, an entire plotline could easily be improvised – all the ingredients are there. The seer’s prophecy is self-fulfilling; by acting to bar the party, the Baron invites their attention (they would probably have ignored him otherwise). The seer therefore has an agenda of his or her own – she has Sir Reginald enthralled and if she can engineer the Baron’s downfall, she can claim the estates through him, using them as a stepping stone. The only question is where the Harpies fit in – they are unlikely allies, there is a story there.

A basic and simple plot, but one fully capable of diverting a party for a day’s play – and one that took about as long as typing “from this beginning, an entire plotline could easily be improvised”. A couple of seconds more thought might enable the seer to be linked into existing plot threads within the campaign, and the characters to become a bit more rounded than their current one-dimensional state – but you’ve got lots of time to do those things as play progresses.

So learn the six questions, understand why they get asked in the order they occur, and the apply general principle of practicalities to superficialities/personalities to your GMing day-in and day-out, and, and not only will your repertoire expand enormously, but you’ll have more time to create those memorable oddballs that don’t fit the usual patterns and focus on running a good game in which everyone has fun. That’s a lot of reward for a small effort!

Continuing the great character giveaway, here is an interesting (and nasty) villain from the Zenith-3 campaign, which can be easily adapted for use in a wide range of genres. He may not have quite the same impact in any world in which the PCs do not seek to avoid the death and suffering of others, however.

Introducing ‘Mortus’

‘Mortus’ is an homage to a great character from Marvel Comics, ‘Thanos,’ who (as just about everyone should know) figures to loom large in the Marvel Movie universe Real Soon Now. While, in my campaign, he goes by the same name as in that source material, I’ve changed it here for publication purposes.

Mortus behind the curtain

He first appeared in my campaign as a generic Brick in the Paranormal War plot arc (which was my ramped-up version of The Great Supervillain Contest (the Champions module by Dennis Mallonee, available in original printed form from Amazon for close to the original price, or as a PDF from ) in which the name was used purely for shock value – the players hear the name and have their characters show up for the fight loaded for bear and packing death – only to find that he’s a (relative) pushover. They kept waiting “for the other shoe to drop”.

When they defeated him, he was rescued by the villain behind the Paranormal War, and quietly dropped out of sight immediately thereafter. At the time, he couldn’t even tell the PCs why he had happened to choose that particular name – “it just sounded impressive” – which is just a fancy way of saying to the players that I had spent my creative efforts elsewhere at that point.

When the time came for him to reappear in the 2015 adventure, “Mixed Emotions”, leaving that as empty ‘negative space‘ paid off, big-time. This was a different group of PCs, and a different campaign (sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to the original campaign which was conducted simultaneous with it’s historical prequel, both of which were sequels to the campaign I used to playtest the game system – are you all keeping up, in the back of the room?) Because of these differences in campaign, and the fact that ‘Mortus’ was expected to carry the attention of the whole team (instead of having one-on-one parity with a single member), I needed to ramp him up considerably.

So, once again I trod the familiar philosophic ground of Death (from the original name of the character), and Life, and interesting ways of entwining them. Anyone who has read Assassin’s Amulet will know that this is familiar territory to me, creatively. Fortunately, it’s a creative space with a lot of elbow room, and I was able to find a new idea. What’s presented here is the result.

Doing the artwork (which I can’t show here for copyright reasons) was fairly simple – I only had to take everything that was blue on his existing costume and render it green, then everything gold and render it blue – and Matt instead of high-gloss. I also worked hard at making his face more gray and less purple. Two images were done, based on the work of other creators, so I can’t show them here. One emphasized a more skeletal and ‘deathlike’ face, the other was introspective, almost tender, and rather more sympathetic in tone.

The encounter started off the way I expected it to run and then went wildly off-script, as the PCs decided that ‘Mortus’ was too big a threat for them to simply chase off. This resulted in them undertaking something breathtakingly cosmic – but I’ll get to that in a future installment – that was built into my campaign plan but wasn’t intended to happen until the last third or so of the campaign. Fortunately, I had my rough notes ready – and the outcome’s effect on the character was so extreme that I was able to shuffle the resulting potential ally off into the sunset to reassess his life and come to terms with the new reality of his existence. He was so radically transformed that it’s fair to suggest that this will be the only appearance of the character as described in the campaign.

Mortus: Official (i.e. What the PCs knew, even if the players didn’t):

Mortus emerged during the Paranormal Wars, seemingly just another brick out to make a name for himself. He emerged as something of a conundrum. He is urbane, cultured, civilized, self-effacing, almost humble, sociable, friendly – and profoundly psychotic – in a rather friendly way.

He has no memory of his origins, and seemed to have little purpose beyond examining all the ways life could be lost in meticulous, ruthless, obsessive detail. His heart didn’t seem to be in the contest, but nevertheless he made it a considerable distance into the conflict with sheer physical force and brutality. At some point he appears to have decided that further participation was not of interest to him, and abandoned the contest before it was revealed as a trap; it is not known whether this is a sign of greater intellect, better instincts, or a reflection of his personal obsessions.

Mortus’ Costume:

(Refer description given previously). The colors of Mortus’ costume are the “Blue of Purity” and “The Green Of Life” – his own descriptions.

Mortus: The True Story:

Mid-way through the Paranormal Wars, Mortus discovered an obsessive fascination with life and and how death could be delayed or turned aside. Losing interest in a contest in which he felt he stood little or no chance, he absented himself without notice from the competition and began studies which would make a Nazi “doctor” squeamish.

Mortus doesn’t want personal power. He never uses flunkies or assistants, preferring to do everything himself to ensure that it is done correctly, and he will take as long in his preparations as he feels necessary. His plans are all small and relatively petty, at least on a cosmic scale; easily satisfied by individual deaths and mutilations. This makes it easy to underestimate him. He is far more than a Mere Brick.

Until recently, he thought he was an experimental clone of Behemoth*. His vision is noble: “If we can conquer death, and master the forces of life, all those we have lost can be returned to us. There will be no more suffering the agonies of isolation and grief. How many people were killed in the First World War? How much more difficult would the powers at large have found it to justify such slaughter if the Archduke Ferdinand had been restored to life? It is too late for that conflict, and yet the question lingers: how many more may be saved in the future from a reduction in causus belli? And even if the price proves to be the life of another, how many volunteers would there be for such an operation? It has always been said that the death penalty would not bring back the victim of a murder; what if that were no longer the case? There are those who contribute more than their share to society; how many of those can be maintained by donations of life from those who waste their lives, when the final moment came? How much good might they do?”

Mortus is a villain not because he is a bad guy, but because he is an utterly ruthless and psychopathic good guy – on his own terms.

Mortus: The Truth Within The Truth:

Slowly the truth has been eating at his ignorance like a cancer:

There was once a cosmic entity who decided for reasons of its own to bond with a mortal. In the process, the entity came to love the mortal’s mate as much as the mortal did. In time, the mate was poisoned by the radiations emitted from the cosmic experiments and studies of the duality, and eventually died. Both part of the entity became consumed by insanity of different kinds, growing out of their grief; they decided that they needed to know all about life and death in order to conquer the latter for all time.

For eons he worked, yet still the ultimate secrets eluded him. There was never enough time for a completely comprehensive analysis of the subject, never enough time for the research required. He had long ago run out of willing subjects, but that triviality would never stop him. Now he faced the death of his universe, his work still incomplete, and he decided that this was unacceptable. If only he could be trusted, then what he needed was more of himself. Many more. And so he divided himself, and scattered his facsimiles throughout the spacetimes, where they would linger and grow. Beginning as mere bullies, they would mature in power and knowledge as the inherent obsession manifested, until they had learned all they could – at which time they would be re-merged into the collective consciousness of the original. An infinite number of cosmic entities, all working to their utmost, throughout space and time – surely one of them would discover the secrets of Life?

Even the name “Mortus” is not of the villain’s own choosing, he has come to realize. It was bestowed in another space, another time, for one who committed genocide on an unfathomable scale, and resonated throughout the multiverse, subconsciously infiltrating the psyche of every other “Mortus” analogue.

All of this makes a lot more sense to those familiar with the comics appearances of Thanos if you substitute the original name back into the above and then read between the lines…

* Behemoth was one of the founding PCs in the campaign. A “smart brick” who was a genius at building things and less so about understanding how they worked, the theory behind them, or what the limitations would be that resulted, he ended for several years of the campaign being replaced by an evil clone of himself that he had created in his own efforts to prepare for the accidental death of a member of the team – including himself. After virtually destroying the life and reputation of the original through increasing irrationality and petulance, the clone was killed in a dramatic act of defiance, triggering the automated systems that were supposed to release the clone from its stasis – where the clone had incarcerated the original. Hey folks, guess who’s back from the dead? There’s a lot of irony in ‘Mortus’ thinking that he was another Behemoth Clone, under the circumstances…

Introducing Mortus In-game:

Before Mortus himself makes an appearance, his handiwork should become known. Find a war zone (i.e. where people won’t be missed). Locate a village within that war zone. Depopulate it by abducting the entire population in their sleep – those who are awake are left behind to raise the alert. Over the next 24 hours, have the missing who were in good health reappear – with slices extracted from them, or horrible disfigurements, or missing vital organs, or whatever else you can come up with. Examination will show the time of death to be the exact moment that they reappeared – so everything they experienced took place ante-mortum. At the same time, several of those who were suffering from serious infirmities or incurable diseases/conditions when they were abducted will also be returned – alive and completely cured.

Hypnosis permits a character to posses the brainwaves of sleep (and hence be amongst those abducted) at some future point, while ensuring that the ‘sleeping’ character can awaken instantly to meet the mad surgeon/scientist, Mortus.

I found some of the descriptions of Delgonian “torture” in various Lensman novels to be useful reference in describing the ‘treatments’ inflicted by Mortus.

Mortus: Powers & Abilities:

Again, note the lack of stats. These were whatever I needed them to be for the adventure, depending on what the PCs tried to do – and whether or not I thought it would/should work.

• Immense STR
• Immense Stamina
• Incredible Durability
• Naturally accomplished HTH combatant
• * Genius in all known fields of science and engineering
• * Can absorb & release vast amounts of cosmic energy, enough to destroy most mortals
• * TK
• * Telepathy
• * Matter Manipulation
• * Master Strategist

Mortus also possesses a teleport chair of his own design, named “Sanctuary” which is capable of:

• Space Flight / FTL
• Teleport
• Force Field Projection
• Weapons creation and automated firing
• Artificial Intelligence
• Telepathic Link to ‘Mortus’
• * Time Travel
• * Extra-Dimensional Movement (EDM)

* Denotes a power that Mortus is only slowly becoming aware that he has, and which he has limited control over.

GM’s Notes: Defeating Mortus:

To drive Mortus off, all that needs to be done is to disrupt whatever experiment he is currently running. He will then go elsewhere and start over. Defeating Mortus is another question – it’s almost impossible. At best he can be captured and temporarily detained.

But, as I mentioned earlier, the PCs found a way to go beyond that “at best”. Full marks to them.

The Philosophy Behind Mortus:

Mortus exemplifies a couple of simple philosophies taken to the ultimate extreme: “The End Justifies The Means”, and “Being Cruel To Be Kind”. In order to perform any sort of experimental surgery or practice any sort of experimental or risky medical procedure, you have to be able to justify it in terms of the lives that will be saved from what you will learn, regardless of the outcome of this one attempt. By definition, that means that procedures more likely not to be harmful will almost certainly not be successful.

Science tends to be very sure of itself, very affirmative in its predictions. Medicine is often thought of as a science, but the reality – as exemplified over many seasons by the TV series “House” (now available in a single box set containing all 8 seasons) – is that it remains as much of an art as a diagnostic science. Individuals are just too different, one to another, and the biology and chemistry and psychology of the individual is too complicated for simple analysis.

Mortus, as a concept, pushes those facts to the extreme. Any pain or loss he causes can be justified if it advances his cause, the elimination of sickness, pain, and death. The key to his self-justification is to learn as much as he possible can from his experiments. Intervention by others merely changes the scope of what he can possibly learn. One of the stratagems proposed by the PCs (and quickly rejected, I might add) was to threaten his database of collected results; I was prepared for this option, with a canned response from Mortus: “Then you will be the ones who will rob their sacrifice of any meaning, not I; I will simply have to start again. Who will be the true villains if you do this? On whose head will fall the suffering of those who might otherwise have been saved?”

By deliberately making Mortus an urbane, calm, and even warm individual, it only highlights the barbarity of most choices of possible response. This villain’s very existence makes the PCs – and the players – feel like philistines, out of their moral depth, children throwing stones at the glasshouse. Finding a response that the players can live with requires them to get to the nitty-gritty of what both they, and their characters, really believe – if there is any doubt whatsoever, Mortus will (metaphorically) crawl through it and get under their skin. His demeanor and philosophy accomplishes that, while ensuring that they have enough time to fully explore that territory.

Comparing Mortus and Lon Than:

Lon Than was presented in the previous episode of Pieces Of Creation. He explores the moral ambiguity if “War for the prevention of War”, in the context of the imminent Second World War, and the fears that many felt heading into that conflict. This ambiguity is at the heart of the Pulp genre; violence to prevent violence is justifiable and even heroic, when done in the name of a worthwhile cause, and by those standards, Lon Than is a hero.

And yet, the character and the debate that his existence creates never feels as deep or as personal as the debate that Mortus inspires, even though there are many thematic similarities between the two. They both explore the concept of villainy being a line that cannot be crossed, no matter how morally justifiable such a crossing appear, and in the process, investigate the question of “what is a hero and what is a villain?”. I once suggested that the scariest villain was the twisted might-have-been, because they “play with the primal forces of why the character is who they are.” Lon Than and Mortus are the sort of characters I had in mind when I was writing it…

I was originally going to present another character as well, a not-especially civil gentleman now going by the name Énorme Force. At the last minute, I decided that either his presence (especially last on the bill) would either overshadow that of Mortus, or Mortus would overshadow his – and so pulled his appearance for a subsequent article, when the Great Character Giveaway continues. Until then, I wish everyone a safe, happy, and prosperous New Year.

The Impossible Mission

It doesn’t matter how skilled you are in your use of descriptive language and extraordinary narrative if you don’t know what it is that you are supposed to be describing. It follows that GMs need to construct and maintain a mental image of their world as it exists at any given moment in order to be able to describe it when necessary.

But that’s only half the story. Depending on your approach, you may need to maintain two or even three separate and yet interrelated perspectives on this world, or more.

There’s the view of the world from the point of view of the PCs. There’s the same scene as viewed by the NPCs. In both cases, there may be – perhaps even should be – individual variations. And then there’s an omniscient overview that describes what is really happening, which doesn’t get described to anyone, but which is used by the GM for decision-making and rules interpretation. Before you know it – four PCs, four NPCs, and an omniscient perspective – you can be up to nine or more simultaneous views.

Let’s think for a moment about each of these world-views as a streaming video that is being produced “live”. Have you ever tried opening eight or nine web pages each of which has a different video streaming to it at the same time? Neither have I, but I’ve had enough of them open to be able to describe the results: Stutter. Freeze. Jumps. Babble. Confusion. Unresponsive computer systems, too caught up in the momentary demands to be able to acknowledge even the movement of the mouse, let alone a click to pause one of the videos or close one of the web pages.

We can’t even devote 100% of our capacities to the purpose: we have to not only translate it all into narrative; we have to anticipate what may be coming next; we have to keep an overall storyline above, and beyond the immediate, progressing, and coherent; we have to deal with rules questions and mechanics questions; we have to make decisions on behalf of the NPCs, and those decisions have to be rational from their perspective and based on what they know or don’t know. We’re lucky if even half of our attention can be focused on maintaining this narrative view.

GMs aren’t superhuman

All of which makes GMing sound like a completely impossible task for any mere mortal to perform. Yet hundreds of people manage it every day; how is that possible?

The reality is that we function like a television director, switching from one “camera” to another, and ignoring the rest. What’s happening in our heads is exactly what happens when you have too many streaming video pages open at the same time, but they start paused and we adjust the timing slider before we unpause them – automatically pausing all the others each time we switch focus. And we’re so busy with all of that and everything else that we have to do that we don’t even notice the mental stutters, and brain-freezes, and jumps, and babble in our heads.

Well, at least, that’s the way we do it when we start out, when we’re beginners. There are better techniques that permit retention of a more comprehensive worldview with smaller overhead that we each naturally develop over time. So subtly does the change take place that often we don’t even realize that our methodology has evolved.

And that means that we don’t know how best to use what we have, or its limitations and how to work around them, or even if our personal technique is as good as that of the next GM – a question that is inherently blurred by the fact that we’re all different individuals with different strengths and weaknesses.

It’s only when you stop and think about what it is that you do, and make notes – mental or otherwise – that you even begin to appreciate the complexity of the problem, never mind the solutions and workarounds that you have in place. You have to be conscious of your subconscious techniques before you can improve them – or even simply take command of them.

I’m very process-driven and a particular strength is analyzing those processes – so it’s fair to expect that I’ve put more thought into identifying and understanding the processes that I use to do nine (or more) impossible things before breakfast – well, before lunch, anyway (you shouldn’t try and GM on an empty stomach, it only adds another layer of distraction to an already over-burdened cerebral cortex).

In particular, there are six primary techniques that I employ, and the purpose of this article is to describe each of them. In combination, they enable me to perform what would otherwise require superhuman levels of concentration – and to leave enough mental capacity in reserve to deal with everything else that being a GM requires of me. The six techniques are:

1. Abstraction/Simplification
2. Selective Detail Focus
3. Omniscience and Error
4. Perspective & Purpose Reload
5. Reaction Flags
6. Visualize, then Describe

Abstraction/Simplification

I always start with an overall impression of the situation. Chaos, confusion, happy crowds, a pastoral scene, a country lane toward low hills and distant mountains, a peasant village built in a quagmire, gleaming perfection, towering skyscrapers crowding in on the streets no matter how wide the sidewalks may be, whatever. A crowd of any sort tends to feature prominently if present – in fact, I will usually construct a mental “Generic villager couple” briefly and then forget it except as associated with a particular descriptive label which I can use to recall that image, at will – for the next few hours, anyway.

I’ll use the same technique for each of the major features that I might be called upon to describe – I’ll visualize each, then set that visualization aside in favor of a vague placeholder in my general mental overview. Unless there is something distinctive or unusual about the object being simplified, and that something is likely to be of interest/relevance to the PCs, it will only take 1-3 seconds to visualize each element of the overall landscape or setting.

Another element that I will focus on during this process is the tone or mood of the scene. Wherever possible, I like to have this either reflect or contrast with the detailed elements of the overall scene. That means that for each element, I need only to recall whether it contrasted or complimented the tone to have a clue as to the visual particulars of the element, and can choose my narrative language accordingly.

With that mental image constructed, I can describe the general scene, with special focus on establishing the tone. As a general rule, I will describe overall images in one of three sequences, or a combination thereof: top-to-bottom as though it were a painting, projected image, or stock movie scene (ie distant to near); left-to-right [those who read right-to-left should use that sequence], ending at the most important object in the scene or skipping over it entirely if it is not “hard right” in the image; or (in dramatic situations only) weak contrast to strong contrast, which usually equates very roughly with either increasing importance or increasing closeness. On occasions, where the most important take-away is to be a sense of travel from one place to another, I will employ a front-to-back/near-to-far approach.

There’s always more to say about these techniques than there’s room, or time, to convey. One point that I was unable to squeeze in that was too important to disregard is this: no matter what the internal logic is that you employ for determining the narrative sequence, the most memorable and important object is the last one that you mention – whether that’s what you intended or not.

This technique is very film noir in many ways, painting a broad overview in almost poetic language as succinctly as possible. “Waves of purple bracken and grass rise and fall with the warm summer breeze, and for a moment it seems the entire plain, as far as the rocky foothills, is paying repeated homage to the mountains, bowing and scraping before the lords of nature.”

Gaps and Discontinuities

Now read that example again, paying attention to how few particulars were actually provided: “bracken, grass, warm summer breeze, plains to rocky foothills, mountains”. More important is the tone of majesty and dynamism conjured. Yet, the image that was conjured up was far more detailed, because the listener’s mind “fills in the gaps”.

If those imputed details are replaced with a more-specific version in the next few seconds that conforms with what has already been presented, the overall impression in the listener’s mind is updated accordingly; if not, there will be a discontinuity, with the specific version existing in mental isolation from the overall scene. The exact time-frame will vary from one individual to another, and that clock keeps ticking regardless of any interruptions experienced. Practice, experience, and knowledge of the players combine to permit a vague judgment about how much detail I can provide in any given description before that occurs.

Whatever the deadline is, I have that long and no more to squeeze in additional background detail before I have to turn my attention to the foreground. Never try to continue with background beyond the limit; not only will half your “audience” fail to integrate the additional background details in their own mental image of the scene, half of them will try anyway, and lose track of other important details, no matter how unimportant the replacements may prove to be. In particular, the carefully-established tone will tend to wash out and become generic.

As a broad rule of thumb, no more than three additional sentences or conjoined statements, each no more than a line-and-a-half long (typed) or 2-3 lines long (handwritten). I can invest all of that in one specific object, whose importance within the scene grows accordingly, or can spread the love.

Note that it is far too late to illustrate the process here – the internally-conjured picture has had time to become fixed in the minds of most of you. There had better not be any significance to any of those background elements because your image won’t be the same as that of the next GM over. The same thing happens with players.

And so, the narrative moves on from the background to the foreground – and that’s the province of the next technique that I employ.

Selective Detail Focus

You don’t have time to describe everything that can be seen except in the most generic overtones. You have to be selective in what you choose to highlight, as already stated.

But there’s a complicating wrinkle: you don’t have time to fully describe anything in complete detail, either. A detailed description always has to consist of suggestive shorthand, an extract from the melange of verbiage that you could use to describe the object. At best, you can allocate a specific into a general class of like objects, imbue it with one or two specific qualities that sub-categorize it, and provide one or two specific details that identify and distinguish this specific example.

And a further complication: unless you somehow manage to perpetuate the tone and dynamics of your general scenery, those are the first things that get drowned out by an excessive deluge of detail, unless your audience make a special effort not to lose them. Any request to do so tends to break the mood all on it’s own, just to further complicate matters.

Fortunately, the poetic use of vocabulary can effect a partial rescue of this difficult situation. And that’s a strength that only tends to grow with time and expertise.

For example, let’s insert a lone, isolated, tree into that previous image, in the middle of the field. Describing the bends of the limbs and the shape of the leaves and the color and texture of the bark and the dynamics of the situation on the specifics of the tree could easily require a thousand words or more – but you don’t have a thousand words, you have six lines at most, and that has to cover every object to be detailed.

Borrowed terminology

Every object that we describe has a specific vocabulary assigned to it to describe the object. The language used to describe a tree’s particulars, for example. Sometimes we can get more mileage from using the specific vocabulary associated with some general element or elements already specified as present in the scene, creating an association between the object and the scene in which it is to be located, making it feel a natural part of the overall scene.

For example, we could describe the tree as “majestically tall” and the leaves as “silver-topped by the sunlight” – both imagery associated with mountains. We could describe the bark as rough and broken, or we could use the terminology associated with rocky outcrops and hills: “craggy”. This language has to come naturally; there is an inherent discontinuity between the subject and chosen terminology. Where this discontinuity is small, the language adds to the description; when it grows too great, the description becomes disruptive to the growing mental image.

This fact demonstrates that there is constant feedback between a visualization and the language that we choose in order to express that visualization, something that even many writers don’t seem to realize.

There is one sure test that I know of for detecting this sort of over-reaching, and it only works with the written word, which has the quality of permitting the re-establishing of mood by re-reading what comes before the disruptive description: insert a deliberate mental discontinuity with an inappropriate action being performed by, on, or to the object and note how strongly the mood is disrupted. If the break is strong, then the language works; if it is weak, then the effect of the disruption is also weak.

Describe the tree and then have someone cut it down with an axe. If the mood is shattered, your language works; if there is no sense of that shattering, then the mood was already broken, and your description has gone too far.

“In the center of the field stands a majestic elm of the sort that immediately begs the inner child to look for hand-holds. Craggy bark is hidden by a surcoat of green and white, the leaves brightly silver-topped in reflected sunlight on their upper surfaces.”

Two sentences, but they bring the tree to life. Adding anything more – a scorch-mark where the tree was once struck by lightning, or marks carved into the bark – begins to run the risk of breaking the mood, even though it further defines and distinguishes the tree.

Describe the three most important things, at most, using a total of six sentences, at most – and try to avoid those limits if it doesn’t leave out something important. Those are the limits that we usually have to work with before moving on to the interaction between characters and environment. That mandates squeezing every last skerrick of value from those words.

The flow of attention

Another element that requires attention is the flow of narrative. You can’t usually skip around; there needs to be a continuity of flow from one thing to the next as the mental “eye” travels across the landscape we’re visualizing.

That’s why the most important element is the last thing that gets described, or rather why the last element described looms in the mental landscape of the listener as the most important element – it’s the most “attention-arresting” element, by definition, because that’s where we arrest our attention.

To demonstrate this, let’s now turn attention to a couple of other elements in our example, starting with the mountains. If we were to describe these before the tree, there is a natural continuity closer to the PCs, and the tree becomes most important; if we describe the mountains after the tree, the distance, and hence the sense of traveling over that distance, becomes the most important.

There is a complicating wrinkle in that some of the most obvious visual language has already been usurped for use in describing the tree – that puts that narrative content off-limits, in effect stating by implication that the tree is more important than the mountain, because the tree has usurped the narrative content of the mountain.

“Jagged peaks jut into the sky in shades of soft purple, framed by wind-swept clouds poignant with impending rain. One in particular looms like a broken shark’s-tooth, and somehow you know that to be your destination.”

Let’s dissect that example for a moment. There’s a reinforcement of “craggy” elements – from hills to tree-bark to mountains, helping cement the whole as being a single scene. There’s a color that we hadn’t mentioned before, but that is implied by “bracken” at least in my mind – though maybe I was thinking of heather, come to think of it. Not being a native of England – and this is clearly a pseudo-English scene, in my mind – I’m a little fuzzy on some of the specifics. The advantage of preparing narrative in advance is that we can pause and research these details, but let’s assume this is being done on the fly at the game-table, and that we can’t afford such a luxury – so there may or may not be a reinforcement of purple coloration in the mind of the reader. The framing provided by the clouds is very important, adding contrast to the scene – anything even slightly dark in front of something light looks even darker and more significant. There’s a reinforcement of weather – summer breezes in the general description, and wind-swept clouds in the mountain description – and we’ve added a slightly ominous note in impending rain, which also implies dominance by the mountain. And I end with a specific shape and a reinforcement of the sense of distance and travel. This uses none of the terminology stolen for use in the tree and that further unifies the location as a single scene.

If this visualization and description comes before that of the tree, it emphasizes the tree as a pause in the journey; if it follows that of the tree, it emphasizes the journey and turns the tree into punctuation along the journey.

Flow with a third Element

Now, let’s add an Orc under the tree. Again, we only have two sentences to capture his presence. (Actually, because he’s the only thing with volition in the scene so far, we can probably squeeze in a third – let’s see how we go).

“Shading himself beneath the tree from the heat is an Orc, reclining against the trunk, dressed in dark-leather jerkin and wine-toned leggings. From a set of hand-carved pan-pipes, he blows an evocative tune of the majesty and purity of nature and the wonder of life.”

“I waste him with my crossbow!!”

There’s that discontinuity test, deliberately inserted because I had this Orc doing some decidedly non-traditionally-Orcish things. I don’t know about you, but the test showed me that the Orc and his activity fits the scene, however discontinuous the activity might be with respect to tradition and expectation. And yet, there is the sense that something is wrong with the description of the scene.

The problem is that we have gone from tree to mountain to Orc, and that doesn’t make sense in terms of visual flow. Because he has volition, and is normally hostile, and is close at hand, the Orc is clearly the most important element in the scene; he has to come last, but that doesn’t fit the flow that had previously been defined.

Below, I’ve recast the sequence in the more logical sequence of “General – mountain – tree – Orc – disruption test” – observe how much more strongly the disruption is felt:

“Waves of purple bracken and grass rise and fall with the warm summer breeze, and for a moment it seems the entire plain, as far as the rocky foothills, is paying repeated homage to the mountains, bowing and scraping before the lord of nature. Jagged peaks jut into the sky in shades of soft purple, framed by wind-swept clouds poignant with impending rain. One in particular looms like a broken shark’s-tooth, and somehow you know that to be your destination.”

“In the center of the field stands a majestic elm of the sort that immediately begs the inner child to look for hand-holds. Craggy bark is hidden by a surcoat of green and white, the leaves brightly silver-topped in reflected sunlight on their upper surfaces. Shading himself beneath the tree from the heat is an Orc, reclining against the trunk, dressed in dark-leather jerkin and wine-toned leggings. From a set of hand-carved pan-pipes, he blows an evocative tune of the majesty and purity of nature and the wonder of life.”

“The tree tears him limb-from-limb!”

It’s like a splash of cold water, or a slap to the face, isn’t it? We have this steady accumulation of tranquility, in which a distant hint of rain is the greatest threat, so powerful that even the Orcish nature has yielded to it – and then there’s that sudden disruption, experienced with so much more force, because when the flow is incorrect, the tone stops accumulating. Putting the mountain description in the wrong place saps the power from the tree and the Orc’s description can only recover that lost ground at best.

“General, Mountain, Tree” works, and so does “General, Tree, Mountain”. “General, Mountain, Tree, Orc” works – but “General, Tree, Mountain, Orc” doesn’t flow and doesn’t work anywhere near as effectively as a result.

The absence of detail

It’s also worth noting that there is nothing particularly distinguishing about the Orc other than his behavior. That’s because any such description would undermine the significance of the behavior by making the Orc seem more typical of his kind, or by adding to the discontinuity between expectation and presented reality beyond the point of sustainability.

I was originally going to add a third sentence mentioning a yellowish scar over one eye and a notch missing from one ear, providing that specificity, but when I got to “wonder of life” I knew instinctively and through that I could go no further without undermining the effect that I had achieved. You can try it for yourself, if you want. Instead, I decided that it would be better to hold off on that description until after the initial interaction between PCs and Orc – an interaction that I would expect to be a parley, not an act of violence.

As a general rule of thumb

As soon as I have the general description, like a rough sketch, I will visualize it and select the visual flow that best suits what I want to present to the players as a scene – then visualize each element in sequence along that narrative flow. That means reserving any terms that I might want to usurp for a later descriptive element, as was the case with the tree borrowing from Mountain “descriptive language”.

If I’m preparing my narrative in advance, it is often easier to visualize things in out-of-continuity order and then re-sequence them, exactly as this example has demonstrated. I find it easier to focus on the scenic elements that I want to convey when I do so. Your mileage may vary.

Omniscience and Error

Does anyone here know how a GIF animates with such a relatively small file size – compared to an uncompressed video file? MPEG-II, III, and IV changed the balance of such things, but comparing a GIF with an MPG-I of the same animation is startling. 10K of GIF file can become 1M of video or more, especially if against a plain background.

The secret is that the MPG encodes every point of light or color in each and every frame, while the gif only records the differences from the last frame. Complicated backgrounds with light and shadow and movement fight against this means of file compression, while a solid background emphasizes it.

I handle all those different visualizations of a scene that may be required using exactly the same principle. I don’t try to envisage the complete environment from each character’s point of view – I focus on maintaining awareness of the omniscient perspective and the differences between that and how each character perceives what is happening. Since, by definition, the omniscient perspective is “what is really happening in the scene”, every such difference becomes a point of erroneous perception by the character.

Take our Orc sitting in the shade. If the PC’s advance, making parley gestures, the Orc would assume that because his actions were not hostile, he is being granted safe passage if he leaves, NOW. Fearful, he would leap to his feet, bow, and start to retreat, still facing the PCs, with an expression of fear on his face. If I were a paranoid PC or NPC, or one with military or hunting expertise, I would assume that it is a trap and that he has a companion hidden up the tree, and is attempting to “lure us into range” with his trickery, and would keep arrows notched and at the ready, pointed up into the hidden recesses of the tree – the GM’s off-hand mention of “a tree begging to be climbed” occupying the forefront of my mind.

Since no NPC knows exactly what is in the player’s minds, and the NPC perspective might or might not be correct in assuming the possibility of a trap, but our omniscient perspective knows better, both the Orc’s behavior and that of the paranoid PC/NPC are framed around erroneous interpretations of the situation.

Further simplifying the impossible problem posed earlier is the fact that many of these erroneous perspectives will be common to several different characters, with (perhaps) minor variations – it thus becomes possible to have one set of differences for multiple characters.

Perspective & Purpose Reload

Key to the ‘Omniscience and Error’ technique is maintaining awareness of each character’s Perspective and Purpose, i.e. what they want to achieve in any situation with which they are presented. I regularly refresh and reload this information into my conscious mind, in particular at the start of play and before any important scene in which they appear. I always want to be able to answer the mental question of “why does this matter to the character?”

Doing so not only assists in roleplay, it helps me determine what a character will pay attention to in a visualization and how they will interpret it and react to the circumstances presented to them – and that, in turn, helps me to sharpen the visualization in the ways that matter to the character.

Reaction Flags

The other characterization aspect that holds particular relevance to my internal visualization of a scene are ‘reaction flags’. A Reaction flag is anything that is likely to trigger a particular response on the part of a PC. This is a lot easier with the Hero System, where these are explicitly defined for each character, but even in D&D I’ve found the concept useful; it just requires a greater exercising of analysis and judgment.

By way of example, let me point readers at three specific parts of the Orcs and Elves series.

• Part 5 contains a specific section of relevance, “The Personal Quests” of the members of the PCs party. It’s about 4/5ths of the way down the page; look for the second map, which is labeled “The Golden Empire”.

To put those personal quests into perspective,

• Part 2 discussing Elves, Drow, Ogres, Dwarves, and Halflings in Fumanor and specifically introduces three of the members of the PC party: Eubani, Ziorbe, and Arron.
• Part 3 does the same for Orcs, Dwarvlings, The Verdonne, and Humans, and specifically introduces Tajik, Leif, Verde, and Julia Sureblade.

Those personal quests and character backgrounds define what matters to each of the characters, and that in turn dictates their relationships. They also define how each character will perceive events around them, rather vaguely in the case of the PCs, and rather more precisely in the case of the NPCs. They are a focal point for each character – because this was/is a campaign about quests and their fulfillment.

Visualization 101

It doesn’t matter what it is that you’re trying to describe, it is far easier to do so if you can see it in your head before you decide on word one, however vaguely. The more complex the situation, the more difficult such a visualization becomes, but the benefits of doing so are also proportionate to the complexity.

That was supposed to be the last word in this article. But, along the way, I remembered an exercise in creative writing that I was once introduced to, and that may be of benefit to readers. It isn’t a solitary activity; it requires the assistance of someone who can do some sort of rough sketch at the very least, and the more artistic capability that person has, the better. This person should not be one of your players.

A Handy Exercise

Read the general description to the artist. Have them very quickly and lightly sketch whatever they think the scene looks like. Read, in turn, the descriptions of each element, and have him sketch them in more detail and more affirmatively. This may require some erasure. When you’ve finished, look at the sketch – is that what you intended to convey? Is there anything missing? Is there anything wrong?

The theory is that the more skilled the artist, the better they are at illustrating whatever they can see in their mind’s eye; and therefore, they provide a direct test of the effectiveness of your descriptions at conjuring images within that mind’s eye. You can only get better with practice.

And that is the last word!

Season’s Greetings!

Welcome to Campaign Mastery’s Great Character Giveaway, and Merry Christmas! This article is (hopefully) going to be posted a few seconds into Christmas Day (my time) so it seemed only appropriate that it contain a Christmas Gift.

In fact, it’s the first of such gifts that are going to be coming your way over the next month or so. Mondays, in the meanwhile, will continue with the usual articles. It’s also worth noting that this month’s Blog Carnival, now almost concluded, is on the subject of giving home-brewed holiday gifts in the form of gaming-ready creations to blogdom at large…

The characters that I am giving away are actual characters from the different campaigns that I’ve run over the last year or so. But more than simply being interesting characters who pose deep and meaningful questions for the PCs to ponder, they are also examples of how to integrate plotlines and research and NPCs, and how to think on your feet. In most cases, I won’t be including stats, because they aren’t really necessary – and so were never developed.

The first one that I have to share is a trio: the featured villain from the last Adventurer’s Club pulp adventure (“Prison Of Jade”). his Divine Mistress, and her Sister….

The First Hint

While on a completely unrelated adventure in Copenhagen, the PCs had a chance encounter with another guest who was staying at their Hotel and his flunkies. They did not get a good look at his face, or payed little attention, but because all four were Asian in a distinctly non-Asian country, in an era before tourism was really affordable, they suspected that the group may have been rivals after the same MacGuffin than they sought, so they investigated briefly and quietly. They learned that the leader was registered under the name Dr Than, and that his party were from many different nations who simply walked out of their previous lives without explanation. There was a police officer from Hong Kong, a fisherman from Australia, and a middle-aged businessman from California.

One of the PCs recognized the name “Lon Than” as belonging to a Chinese scientist/occultist/philosopher of dark reputation.

Notes from behind the curtain:

While (at the time) we weren’t completely sure of the detailed plotline in which Dr Than would feature, and had even less idea of who he was, this was simply a tease that we knew we would pay off down the track.

After establishing that Dr Than had nothing to do with their mission, the players promptly mentally filed him under “red herring” (as intended) and went about their business.

The Buildup

From that point on, we made sure to drop recurring mentions of Asian people disappearing, walking out of their lives, leaving behind family and friends without a word, and at the same time started dropping hints about well-to-do Asians who were acting strangely, “not themselves”. These were never even as central to any given plotline as Dr Than’s first appearance had been; it was simply a familiar piece of the plot “furniture”. A pattern slowly built up over the course of a number of years, a common element: many, if not all, of the people affected had just received a piece of Jade, whether that be a ceremonial bowl, a piece of jewelery, a statue, or even – in one case that the PCs didn’t notice – a jade camera lens-cap.

Notes from behind the curtain:

The PCs didn’t take the time to investigate any of these; if they had done so, they would have learned that those acting strangely but still going about their lives as usual were also withdrawing regular sums of money from their bank accounts (or stealing them from employers or businesses), and that the money was then simply vanishing. This would have been suggesting of Blackmail, another red herring.

Other plot developments also took place aimed at integrating this plot thread, which was slowly taking shape, with the campaign. Since any use you make of this plot will occur in a different setting, those aren’t particularly relevant here – so I won’t go into details.

Encounter with Kali

In the course of another completely unrelated adventure, the PCs received some unrequested assistance from Kali, inhabiting a statue of herself. During that roleplayed encounter, she told the PC having the encounter, “I am not your enemy unless you make me so.”

Notes from behind the curtain:

There was absolutely no hint that this was in any way related to the Jade plotline. It was simply something that happened, and was surrounded by other, unrelated encounters of a Divine nature, so nothing more was thought of it – exactly as intended.

Precipitous Beginning

The encounter that actually pushed all this to the forefront of the player’s attention was a raid on a suspected smuggling ring operating out of a warehouse in New York City’s docks region. Before the raid could actually begin, it was interrupted with a dramatic (and unrelated) action sequence that was the direct lead-in to another adventure about a Nazi Lunar Weapons Platform established using Amazon Technology. This tipped off the smuggler that something was going on; he began burning records and through himself out a 5th-floor window rather than face questioning. Faced with more immediate concerns, the players let the matter drop, sure that the decision was both right, and would come back to bite them before long.

Despite the lack of a living criminal to interrogate, not everything was destroyed before the PCs intervened. They recovered a newspaper article listing the 100 most influential Asians in America, 2/3rds of which had been ticked off; a bunch of mailing tubes, about 20 of which were addressed to the last 20 names ticked on the list; 20 pieces of jade jewelery, some generic and some custom in nature; and the fact that the criminal was a printer of no known criminal record who had sold the family home out from under his wife and children in order to buy the warehouse without comment or explanation to them.

Notes from behind the curtain:

That was as much opportunity as the PCs got to determine what was going on; they regarded it simply as an escalation of the previous pattern, and went about the adventure that we had planned for them at this time, which had far greater urgency in their minds.

The Campaign Backstory

Okay, I was trying to avoid cluttering up this account with a lot of irrelevancies, but have realized that a brief snapshot of the campaign is the shortest distance between two points: where this narrative is at, and where it needs to go. So, in a nutshell:

• The PCs are members of a private organization, “The Adventurer’s Club”.
• One of the founding members is ‘Doc’ Storm, an inventor and adventurer – my co-GM’s Homage to Doc Savage.
• The Club library contains many rare (and often dangerous) manuscripts as well as blueprints for many inventions of Doc’s.
• A corrupt literary agent working for the library in Europe was skimming from the funds under his authority to buy rare books for himself. To replace and supplement those funds, when they weren’t enough, he started stealing books from the library which he considered over-valued and selling them on the black market. In time, this still wasn’t enough, so he stole some of Doc’s blueprints and filed documents, and placed them on the black market.
• The Copenhagen mission mentioned earlier was an attempt to retrieve one of the stolen blueprints which had been sold to the Nazis, and which detailed how to construct (following a 2-3 year program) a nuclear weapon, compiled by Heisenberg.
• The national-security implications of this and the other thefts (which included a heat ray that started a firestorm in Singapore) led the FBI to perform a “hostile takeover” of the club. Doc Storm left immediately for Washington and began to work to undo this development.
• The PCs went about other adventures, and slowly learned that the FBI agent placed in charge was a fan of the club and an OK guy. They then encountered details of a planned coup against the US government supposedly being led by General Smedley Butler, in the course of which, that ‘OK guy’ was blown up by the revolutionaries because he was getting too close to the truth. The wash-up left the club back under Doc’s control, but also left him badly rusty after 6 months of political games in Washington and no adventuring.

All caught up? Good!

The Confrontation Begins

While the PCs were off dealing with the Amazon problem, Doc decided to investigate the biggest problem that he could find that no-one was working on, made overconfident by his success and so eager to get back into the field that he refused to acknowledge how out-of-practice he was. He traced the shipment of jade jewelery etc that had been found in the warehouse to a freight agent in Chittagong, then part of India (these days, it’s part of Bangladesh, but in the 1930s there was no such country).

When the PCs returned, they were whisked away to a private meeting with his wife, Trish Storm, who told them that she was afraid Doc was going to get in over his head. She charged the PCs with helping him – without damaging his reputation or pride, which meant doing it without him even knowing they were around.

What’s more, because Doc would eventually (or very quickly) find out, the usual club resources would not be available to the PCs on this adventure – they would be on their own. So began “Prison of Jade.”

Before they left New York, they identified an unscrupulous Chinese Mystic – not someone on whom they would usually rely – and received a briefing on the mystic properties of Jade.

The Mystic Properties Of Jade

Jade is an ornamental mineral that comes in two primary varieties and many exotic variations. The two varieties are officially known as Nephrite and jadeite. Nephrite can be found in a creamy white form (known in China as “mutton fat” jade) as well as in a variety of green colors, whereas jadeite shows more color variations, including blue, lavender-mauve, black, pink, and emerald-green. Of the two, jadeite is rarer, documented in fewer than 12 places worldwide. Translucent emerald-green jadeite is the most prized variety, both historically and today. As “quetzal” jade, bright green jadeite from Guatemala was treasured by Mesoamerican cultures, and as “kingfisher” jade, vivid green rocks from Burma became the preferred stone of post-1800 Chinese imperial scholars and rulers.

The Jain temple of Kolanpak in the Nalgonda district, Andhra Pradesh, India is home to a 5-foot (1.5 m) high sculpture of Mahavira that is carved entirely out of jade. It is the largest sculpture made from a single jade rock in the world. India is also noted for its craftsman tradition of using large amounts of green serpentine or false jade obtained primarily from Afghanistan in order to fashion jewelery and ornamental items such as sword hilts and dagger handles. However, true jade can be found in various parts of India, of varying quality. In Chinese and Buddhist faiths, the opaque stones (including most varieties of Jade) are symbolic of the body and mind, the translucent stones are symbolic of the soul and spirit.

Jade is attributed with many mystic properties.

It is sometimes known as the “Stone Of Heaven”, a name that derives from China and Burma, and as the Elixir Of Life. It blesses whatever it touches, and is valued in China for its beauty and powers of healing and protection. An endless variety of gems, vessels, incense burners, beads, burial items and statues have been wondrously carved from Jade, as well as musical instruments and pendants inscribed with poetry.

Jade is the ultimate “Dream Stone,” revered as the spiritual gateway through which to access the spiritual world, gain insight into ritualistic knowledge, encourage creativity, and the ability to dream-solve problems. It is cherished as a protective talisman, assuring long life and a peaceful death, and is considered a powerful healing stone. An amulet of good luck and friendship, Jade signifies wisdom gathered in tranquility, dispelling the negative and encouraging one to see oneself as they really are.

Jade is also the stone of calm in the midst of storm. Its action balances nerves and soothes cardiac rhythm. A piece of Jade kept in a pocket or on a pendant to stroke from time to time recharges energy, and traditionally guards against illness. Jade may also be used to temper the shock or fear of the very young or very old being cared for in the hospital or away from home and family.

Jade is also known to be excellent for healing feelings of guilt, and for extreme cases of defeatism. As a travel stone, Green Jade prevents illness while on holiday, is beneficial for those traveling alone, and protects children and pets from straying or being hurt while on a journey. Green Jade also fosters chi, or Life Force energies, and is excellent for hiking, gardening or relaxing out of doors.

In addition to those qualities:

• Green Jade is a crystal of love. It is supportive of new love, and increases trustworthiness and fidelity. It also inspires love later in life.
• Black Jade emanates strong, protective energies to ward off negative assault, physical or psychological, including self limitation.
• Blue Jade calms the mind, encouraging peace and reflection, and is valuable in promoting visions and dreams.
• Brown Jade is grounding. It connects to the earth and provides comfort and reliability.
• Lavender Jade alleviates emotional hurt and provides spiritual nourishment. Its energy is of the highest etherized spectrum.
• Orange Jade brings joy and teaches the interconnectedness of all beings. It is energetic and quietly stimulating.
• Purple Jade encourages mirth and happiness, and purifies one’s aura. It dispels the negative and increases one’s level of discernment.
• Red Jade is a stone of life-force energy, dispelling fear that holds one back, and urges one to action.
• White Jade filters distractions, pulls in relevant, constructive information and aids in decision making.
• Yellow Jade is cheerful and energetic, a stone of assimilation and discrimination.

Jade has been associated with many deities in many cultures:

• Bona Dea, the Roman Earth Goddess of Fertility and the Greek Goddess of Women. She protects women through all of their changes, and is a skilled healer, particularly with herbs.
• Chalchiuhtlicue, the Aztec Water Goddess and Protector of Children. Her name means “Jade Skirt” or “Lady of Precious Green.” She is the mother of lakes, streams, and rivers.
• Kuan-Yin, the Chinese Goddess of Mercy, Compassion, and Unconditional Love. She is the most beloved of the Chinese goddesses and is regarded by many as the protector of women and children, and champion of the unfortunate.
• Maat, the Egyptian Goddess of Justice. She represents the underlying holiness and unity of the Universe.
• The Moirae, the Three Goddesses of Fate in Ancient Greece. They appear three nights after a child’s birth to determine the course of the child’s life, each having a different part to play in divining his fate.
• Brigit, the Irish Goddess of Fertility.
• Coatlicue, the Aztec Goddess of Life, Death, and Rebirth.
• Dione, the Phoenician Earth Goddess.
• Hine-Nui-Te-Po, the Polynesian Goddess of the Night.
• Tara, the Buddhist “Savioress” Goddess.
• In some obscure Hindi legends, Jade is described as the doorway to Kali.

Notes from behind the curtain:

Ninety-nine percent of this information is absolutely genuine, compiled from three or four websites including Wikipedia. However, it also contains a few items carefully “salted” into the text for adventure purposes – specifically, the last item on the list of Deific associations, and a slight amendment to the “Stone Of Heaven” and “Dream Stone” paragraphs: “It blesses whatever it touches” has a double-meaning in the context of this villain, and acting as a “spiritual gateway” through which the wearer can “access the spiritual world” implies that the spiritual world can also access the wearer through that “gateway”.

In Chittagong

The PCs had various encounters, most aimed at Doc (and which clearly demonstrated both his years of experience, his innate expertise, and how badly unfit for field work he was). Several times they had to act to save his bacon, while walking the tightrope of discovery. Doc traced the shipment through various hands and discovered that the Jade was coming from far upriver, the tiny village of Dambuk in the most north-eastern state in India.

Their contact in New York had also warned that most documented versions of the Hindu faith available to Westerners and those influenced by them had been assembled piecemeal from corrupted forms of the true doctrines, and were not to be relied on. Interpretations and content often varied from village to village and region to region, and no-one knew anymore what was truth, what was half-truth, and what was fiction.

Going Upriver

More encounters followed as Doc made his way upriver, with the PCs in another vessel not far behind. Along the way, they had another encounter with Kali, who invited them to Afternoon Tea through a Herald. When they accepted the invitation, sure that Kali could have forced the issue if she really wanted to, they were escorted into the palace, where they found Kali standing before a golden throne of skulls, bathed in night on one side and bright sunlight on the other. “We meet again, Captain,” she began, addressing Captain Ferguson (one of the PCs). [Pause for reaction]

“Past assistance notwithstanding, you have no reason to entrust yourselves to my goodwill or honesty. Therefore I tell you nothing and give you no instruction, make no demand, but simply suggest that you may be enlightened on your quest if you seek out Mahatma Sharma in the village of Chapar. Have no doubt that if required by Karma to do so, I will act to destroy you and the world that surrounds you, but I should regret the necessity. I am not, by choice, your enemy.”

Social niceties such as refreshments and small talk followed, but Kali refused to speak further regarding these statements. She hinted that events were even more serious than the PCs realized, and got the sense that the need to “act to destroy you and the world that surrounds you” was not some remote event but immediately at hand if the PCs were not successful.

The adventure

Suffice it to say that the PCs succeeded on all counts and the game world didn’t end, thanks (in part) to the instruction they received from Mahatma Sharma. Doc attempted to disguise himself using a piece of Jade and fell under the power of Lon Than, but the PCs realized that this had taken place and were able to free both him and the others under the villain’s control (either through blackmail, coercion, or mystic power), and he took care of the rest. At the end of the Adventure, the villain was seemingly killed, but the body was carried away down a waterfall and never recovered – so Lon Than may be back if we come up with another suitable plot.

Behind The Scenes

Creating the adventure was a slightly complicated in that the simplest way to proceed was as follows:

• Work out what the Villain had done in order to get the Jade to New York;
• Work out how Doc would trace the above from the other end;
• Work out what the Villain and his henchmen would do when they discovered Doc’s efforts;
• Work out what the PCs could do about these actions;
• Work out what the Villain and his henchmen would do about the PCs;
• Insert encounters for the PCs designed to establish plot points, eg Doc being rusty, Doc being taken over;
• Work out what information the PCs would need to find a solution to the problems posed;
• Insert encounters for the PCs to put that information into their hands – not necessarily all that obviously.
• Populate the adventure with interesting, colorful, and believable NPCs and miscellaneous encounters.
• Check the continuity of events from the Villain’s point of view; check the continuity of events from Doc’s point of view; check the continuity of events from the PCs’ point of view. Make sure that what everyone is doing (or are expected to be doing, in the case of the PCs) at any given point in time makes rational sense in light of what they know, how they are interpreting that information, and their personalities.

Ultimately, this was an adventure about the interplay of those three layers – the villain, the hero past his use-by date, and the PCs trying to keep him just barely safe without revealing their presence. In general, while we had lots of encounters seeded, and certain products of such encounters that we wanted to eventuate, the course of the adventure was chosen by the players in response to the events taking place around them, and the need to maintain secrecy help keep them from departing too far from what we had planned.

And so, with the background and preamble established, to the main points of interest to others: the characters. This information will be conveyed in the sequence that is clearest to the reader, and not in the sequence that things were learned by the PCs.

Dr Lon Than

Dr Lon Than is an expert in Hindu theology and holds several doctorates in Philosophy. Like many others, he foresees the coming Global Conflict and – based on the events of World War I – is utterly horrified by the prospect and willing to do almost anything to stop it. Dr. Than believes that World War One proved that mankind cannot be trusted to guide itself.

His initial attempts were founded on the notion of world domination in order to steer it on a new course either directly or indirectly. In the course of these failures, he acquired a reputation for “Plots and Plans that seem to come out of left-field and be almost trivial until they snowball into something world-shaking.” His failures left him desperate, sensing that he was running out of time.

Through his professional association with the University Of Beijing, he came into possession of a statue of Kalika carved from a piece of Jade and recognized its significance. Kalika, sensing a spirit sympathetic to her role in existence, began to instruct him in what needed to be done to release and unleash her from the fetters that constrain her from acting. As his tutelage progressed, she was able to grant him the powers he needed.

In particular, he acquired knowledge of how to prepare Jade to make the possessor an active convert to Kalika’s cause.

A mystic ceremony is followed by a bath in two different metallic salt solutions. The jade is then subjected to an electrical arc, and finally the mystic ceremony is completed by binding the jade to his will by means of a drop of his blood. The process combines alchemy, sorcery, and science and is effectively unduplicable by anyone else.

Once a prepared piece of jade is worn, even in a brooch or other setting, they are subject to The Prison Of Jade. Lon Than can take control of the person at will, see through their eyes, etc, provided they are wearing the jade. The person being controlled believes that what they are being told to do is entirely their own idea or is that of the God(s) that they worship, and will bring their full faculties to whatever task they are instructed to perform – even at the cost of their own lives. They will continue to work wholeheartedly and with all their faculties even if Lon Than ceases direct supervision of the prisoner’s mind for a time, and will simply go about their normal lives once any instructions have been carried out.

This is not the traditional mind control; those affected devote their full abilities, resources, and faculties, and even their lives, to achieving the goal of “awakening” Kalika in the belief that a period of violence in which 95% of mankind are wiped out is preferable to the threat of mankind wiping itself out completely.

Because of their “special affinity” with Jade, the process is most effective against those of Asian descent, less effective against those of Western Descent, and controlling individuals of exceptional ability takes his full capacities, leaving almost all his network of servants and assistants on “autopilot”, i.e. no longer under his direct and conscious control and supervision.

With his knowledge, he traveled to Dambuk and began to create a network of willing servants to further his cause.

Lon Than’s Network

Dr. Than is now controlling the richest Asian peoples in the world, as well as various well-connected and useful individuals, because these are the people who can most plausibly distribute small gifts of his “special” jade. When he reaches a critical mass of people, he will have effective control over all Asians, at which point he will direct his followers to worship Kalika, initiating an orgy of mass destruction.

He has subjects in New York, London, San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Peking, Stockholm, Sydney, Melbourne, East Indies, Delhi, Batavia, and many other locations: 3-400 important people and 50 minions scattered around the world. Dr Lon Than has control over some of the men and women of the village of Dambuk, who have kidnapped the children of the village to force the rest of the village to work as slaves on his behalf. Only the elderly and infirm are left to survive as best they can. The story of how Lon Than created his network of servants was told to the PCs by one of those elderly residents, from the standpoint of the theology of the village:

“We have always been gifted with treasure from the mountain. We have traded it when we found it for many things. Food, Iron, Tools. Many have come here in the past in search of the mountain’s gift, but none found it. We became accustomed to a new stranger arriving, all excited and eager, every year or two; all left disappointed. Late the summer before last, another came, and this one was different. His eyes carried the darkness of a very deep cave within, and he spoke with a voice that enthralled those who heard it for as long as he deigned to speak. He hired two of our young men with gifts of the heavenly stone, the first who had brought a gift of the mountain back to its home rather than seeking to plunder, and the three set out to explore the region.

“A week later, they returned, and he announced that his gifts had found favor with the spirits of the mountain, who had seen fit to offer bounty to reward him. He bestowed some of these gifts and when next he set out, it was with the company of a dozen, each of whom now proudly wore a piece of heaven made stone as badge of his service to the mountain spirits.

“Two weeks more, and they returned again, carrying a small basket each of the precious mountain heart. And the man said that the mountain spirit required more men to carry for him, as the dozen had not been enough to gather all the gifts offered, and he feared that the spirits would take offense if their bounty were rejected a second time. And so all the village’s men and some of the younger women went with him the third time.

“Three days later, and those who had left with him returned, and by stealth they crept from house to house gathering all the children in silence, binding and gagging them, and taking them up into the mountain. And then the man returned with his escorts and told us that the children were hostages to the will of the Mountain Spirit and the entire village save those who were too old and weak to work must labor in service to its bidding. There was much weeping but we had been left without choice, and so we accepted.

“As the weeks passed, we noticed that those upon whom he had bestowed the gift of the mountain had a strange look in their eyes, a green glow like that of the mountain heart, that they were as strangers to those who had known them, and obeyed his every command in word, thought, and deed. They were not controlled, they were convinced without and beyond the power of words alone.

“As the winter approached, and the mountain became more difficult to climb, he told us that he was to leave to do the mountain’s bidding, but that we were to provide food for those who labored in the heart of the mountain, and that he would return with the thawing of the snow. He took with him many of the gifts bestowed by the mountain.

“He returned with the change of the seasons in a boat with much food and many strangers, all taken into the mountain’s service while he was away. They came from many distant lands. There was one who was not what he appeared to be, and somehow The Mountain’s Servant saw through his pretense. In the middle of the village, even as the boat was being unloaded, the Servant denounced the impostor, who swore that his secrets would never leave his lips. We expected the servant to force the truth with pain and suffering, but instead he simply bestowed the gift of the mountain in the form of a small pendant, and the impostor told all without pause, the latest recruit to the Mountain’s service. When the boat left, the new recruit went with it, bearing many small packages of mountain’s gift to be sent to the powerful and deserving throughout the world.

“Since his return, the mountains’ servants have grown in number by ones and twos and threes, a few more every week, until now they number in the dozens. Last night, the most recent recruit to the mountains service came to the village, a tall man of power, who have his name only as Fenbao, Storm in the western tongue*. From his appearance, we thought he might have been another seeking to learn the secrets of the Mountain’s Servant under false pretense, but his face and mind were as stone and he would not answer the simplest question, even when no others were in earshot. We could only tell that he was alive and not a statue of cast metal by the occasional twitch in his hand**.

“When the dawn came, he went with the others up to perform the Mountain’s bidding.”

* Doc Storm
** Doc is a world-class surgeon, his hands never twitch, and the PCs knew it. From this information, they deduced that he was still fighting for control.

The Immediate Future

At the time of the PCs reaching Dambuk, Lon Than is about 25 days away from a massive shipment of mind-controlling Jade. This shipment will take something like three months to distribute. At the same time that the shipment is dispatched, his servants in various theological centers in India and elsewhere in Asia will begin a ‘reformation’ movement aimed at converting 75% of Indian Hindus to a pro-Kalika doctrine within a year, using predictions about the future that his existing servants will ensure are accurate, in a vast global conspiracy. The delivery of that final mass-shipment of Jade is aimed at controlling individuals who have been carefully put in place in various countries who will almost simultaneously manufacture provocations throughout the world, instigating global war. The necessary instructions for achieving this are being embedded in the Jade; touching it will be sufficient to achieve the goal with no further intervention from Lon Than.

Notes from behind the curtain:

Lon Than is an interesting character. Clearly very intelligent and capable of subtle and sophisticated planning, he is a scientist driven by a variant theology that is ‘primitive’ in the sense of 20th century society. His overall objective is one that the PCs support and have worked to achieve in the past, by doing what they can to oppose the forces leading to war; there is a sense that it would have taken only a gentle nudge for the PCs to have ended in his shoes (except that none of them are Asian). The major difference between Lon Than and the PCs is that he has given up trying to forestall war and ’embraced the madness’.

The PCs never broached the mailing center, though they deduced its location, and so never learned just how narrowly Total Global War was avoided.

Kali and Kalika

The following is a deliberate distortion of abridged elements of Hindu belief for story/game purposes. No offense is intended to any who follow that, or any other, faith. We have made it deliberately difficult to find where doctrine ends and our ‘reinventions’ begin in order to ensure plausibility of narrative, but assert that everything below is either fiction or severely compromised, and should not be the foundations of anyone’s understanding of Hinduism.

I wish you could see the illustration that I did of Kalika. It’s gorgeous, probably the best digital painting that I’ve ever done – turning the skin of a portrait of Kali green and adding “Jade effects”. But because it was derived directly from another artist’s work, I can’t display it publicly or make it publicly available.

Kali, also known as Kalika, is the Hindu goddess associated with empowerment, or shakti. She is the fierce aspect of the goddess Durga. The name Kali comes from Kala, which means black, time, death, lord of death: Shiva. Since Shiva is called Kala — the eternal time — the name of Kali, his consort, also means “Time” or “Death” (as in “time has come”). Hence, Kali is the Goddess of Time, Change, Power and Destruction.

Although sometimes presented as dark and violent, her earliest incarnation as a figure of annihilation of evil forces still has some influence. Various Shakta Hindu cosmologies, as well as Sh?kta Tantric beliefs, worship her as the ultimate reality or Brahman. Comparatively recent devotional movements largely conceive Kali as a benevolent mother goddess. She is often portrayed standing or dancing on her husband, the god Shiva, who lies prostrate beneath her. Worshiped throughout India but particularly in Kashmir, South India, Maharashtra, Bengal, and Assam.

The figure of Kali conveys death, destruction, and the consuming aspects of reality. As such, she is also a “forbidden thing”, or even death itself. The Karpuradi-stotra clearly indicates that Kali is more than a terrible, vicious, slayer of demons who serves Durga or Shiva. Here, she is identified as the supreme mistress of the universe, associated with the five elements. In union with Lord Shiva, she creates and destroys worlds. Her appearance also takes a different turn, befitting her role as ruler of the world and object of meditation. In contrast to her terrible aspects, she takes on hints of a more benign dimension. She is described as young and beautiful, has a gentle smile, and makes gestures with her two right hands to dispel any fear and offer boons. The more positive features exposed offer the distillation of divine wrath into a goddess of salvation, who rids the sadhaka of fear. Here, Kali appears as a symbol of triumph over death.

In Kali’s most famous legend, Devi Durga and her assistants, the Matrikas, wound the demon Raktabija in various ways and with a variety of weapons in an attempt to destroy him. They soon find that they have worsened the situation for with every drop of blood that is dripped from Raktabija he creates a duplicate of himself. The battlefield becomes increasingly filled with these simalcra. Durga, in need of help, summons Kali to combat the demons; in some versions, Durga actually assumes the form of Goddess Kali. Kali destroys Raktabija by sucking the blood from his body and putting the many Raktabija duplicates in her gaping mouth. Pleased with her victory, Kali then dances on the field of battle, stepping on the corpses of the slain, releasing them to the judgment of heaven.

Some accounts note the similarity between Kali and Raktabija, asserting that Kali is herself a demon who has been seduced to higher cause by her love of Shiva. There are several suggestions that theirs is a forbidden love, but that Durga granted the pair an exception to the Divine Law. However, the forbidden nature of their love persists, her every touch poisoning Shiva and threatening his life; a burden that they bear in the name of Love. Kali is therefore symbolic of all love that is difficult or denied by fate, and is frequently invoked when choosing to defy that fate regardless of the potential cost, ie total destruction.

Kali is also viewed as a protector of humanity from enemies both within and without. Some accounts describe her as without mercy, others contradict this characterization or confine it in some manner. Kali is an ender of suffering, and bringer of mercy, in many accounts, including some in which she can never experience this quality herself. At least one version of Kali’s story states that she could choose to be merciful and hence perfect, but that she continually bestows this mercy on the suffering of others, sacrificing her own progress through existence for their benefit.

Some accounts suggest that Kali is also the bearer of souls to judgment, and of souls who have been judged to their next stage of life. She is thus destruction and creation in one.

Another popular legend states that after her victory over Raktabija, Kali became drunk on the blood, and lost all self-control, dancing on the battlefield in a destructive frenzy that laid waste to the very populace that she had rescued from the Demon. She was about to destroy the universe when, urged by all the gods, Shiva lay down in her way to stop her. In her fury and exultation, she failed to see the body of Shiva lying amongst the corpses on the battlefield and stepped upon his chest. Realizing only then Shiva lies apparently dead beneath her feet, her anger is pacified and she calms her fury, becoming suffused with remorse. Shamed at the prospect of keeping her husband beneath her feet, she stuck her tongue out in shame and submission, releasing her consort, who stood up and took his place beside her. Realizing that his ‘death” was a symbolic depiction of what she was about to do, she ended her dance – until the next time she is overwhelmed with bloodlust and victory on the battlefield, even if that bloodlust and victory is not hers, but only viscerally experienced through the acts of man. This Buddhist belief contends that any form of battle or violence risks awakening the destructive side of Kali’s nature, a fate that can only be avoided by a gesture of peace and surrender to fate.

Kali is usually depicted as having blue skin, as are all the gods, symbolic of the purity of the sky, but a few rare depictions show her with Green Skin, the color of demons.

Kali’s role is not one of destruction per se, but of the destruction of evil. She is the spiritual vessel into which all man’s violent impulses are delivered and is only able to maintain purity of purpose through the self-sacrifice of her twin sister Kalika, who siphons off all the malevolent intents and embodies them on behalf of the pair. This difference in their natures causes the two siblings to be eternally at odds, with Kali usually holding the dominant position. From time to time, however, man’s lust for destruction rises above his better instincts and Kalika becomes dominant.

Kalika’s philosophy is best summed up in two western phrases: “Giving them enough rope” and “He who lives by the sword”. She encourages an orgy of violence from the shadows, and in the name of her sister, which ultimately burns itself out and restores the karmic balance of mankind – and gives her sister a bad reputation at the same time. Kali knows full well that her good works as a protector of mankind from the Demons and Devils that seek to overpower it are only possible because of the role her sibling plays, giving the two a complex relationship. Kali seeks to permit mankind to evolve and progress spiritually at its own pace and in its own direction; Kalika functions as a fail-safe for when mankind chooses the wrong direction.

Kalika is not an evil force per se, though she performs acts that others might declare evil; her philosophy is more about “clearing the path” for new growth and “cleansing the earth”. She embodies the western phrase, “It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.”

Notes from behind the curtain:

In roleplaying the pair – we prepared to roleplay Kalika though that prep was never called upon – I found that keeping the different attitudes toward the PCs firmly in mind helped frame modes of expression and tone of voice. For Kali, that was calmness, placidity, and friendship tinged with either regret or hope, depending on what she was saying. In fact, think Tweety without the speech impediment.

For Kalika, it was angry schoolteacher – “You’ll be sorry if you make me do this,” – tinged with Bugs Bunny, and a touch of Daffy Duck’s somewhat excitable nature – “…I’m quite looking forward to it!”

Wrap-up

So, there you have it: Dr Lon Than and supporting infrastructure. Did he survive? It’s arguable that the PCs, acting as Agents Of Kali against her sister’s machinations, have proved that hope is not yet dead – from an obsessed Hindu fatalist’s point of view. But that was then, and if Lon Than survived, this will be ‘now’, and many things may have changed…

It would be easy to adapt Lon Than to derive from a Fantasy genre, deriving from any death/vengeance deity. The scope might change – destroying the Kingdom before it destroys all its neighbors or something like that. The main elements are to preserve the ambivalent nature of the characters, who are both villains from one point of view, but with a nobility of purpose. And that’s the real danger of obsession: it doesn’t matter what your ends are, the mechanisms that you are willing to use taint everything that you do. Who needs an anti-paladin when there are Paladins around willing to do the job?

A collision of thoughts: the origins of this article

The other day, I was searching through past articles looking for a particular reference for a cross-link when I found myself re-reading my article contrasting literary processes and writing for games (The Challenge Of Writing Adventures for RPGs), and – as happens to me from time to time – I experienced a collision of unrelated thoughts, putting 2 and 2 together and getting 4.

I immediately paused what I was doing and began making notes for this article. The subject is character skills, and the assumptions that our social conditioning makes of the game systems that we play in respect of them.

Specifically, I started thinking about the concept of Transferable Skills, and whether or not that concept was, could, or should be reflected in the way we – and our game systems – interpret character skills in an RPG.

Transferable Skills

A “transferable skill” is a skill learned doing one profession that has elements of a broader ability and hence can be applied to tasks required of some other profession. They are often vaguely defined, general, and overarching – “Communications Skills”, “Customer Relations”, “Problem-Solving”, and so on. Employers like them because they demonstrate that a potential recruit is bringing abilities to the table that will value-add to the proposed position, should they be offered it. These days, positions and promotions are won and lost based on an individual’s transferable skills.

And yet, the concept is not really reflected in the skills systems of most RPGs, which make assumptions about the nature of the learned abilities of a character, and which are then often interpreted in a completely different fashion – one that does take the concept into account – by GMs in the field.

I have always maintained that understanding the nuts and bolts – the underlying concepts and mechanics – that are embedded in our rules systems makes a GM better able to interpret and utilize that game system, so when I spot one of these underlying concepts or mechanics, I like to share that insight with the readers here at Campaign Mastery.

There is no formal definition of the way most GMs and RPGs interpret skills; instead it’s something absorbed by osmosis at the game table, first as a player, and then as a GM. That won’t fly if we’re going to take a good hard look at the subject, so that’s the place to start.

Coining a concept: “Adaptable Skills”

The way most GMs (in my experience) interpret skills listed on the character sheet is as the focal representation of a more general capability. “Fishing” as a skill is assumed to imply skill at tying fishing lines, knowing the signs of a good place to fish, knowing how to clean a fish, and all sorts of other things. “Fishing” is simply the label assigned to a gestalt of actual skills.

Because this interpretation isn’t actually defined or written down anywhere in most cases, the point where such skill systems frequently run into trouble is when two or more skills overlap. One could argue, for example, that “Fishing” would include at least basic knowledge of how to cook fish, and possibly even how to prepare the most common accompaniments for fish – the basic, traditional recipes. Some GMs will accept this rationale, while others will rule that because there is usually a completely separate skill, “Cooking”, this element of “fishing” in the common-world sense of the term is specifically excluded.

If a character has both “Fishing” and “Cooking”, a new nuance is introduced – how does the GM interpret this? Do they compound? Does simply having one give a bonus to the other? Does one have to make a successful check of the less specific skill before this can occur? Is it always the higher one that the character gets to roll, or is it the one that the DM considers more directly applicable? Is consistency of interpretation uniform, or is there a general rule and some specific or ad-hoc variations?

The other aspect of the question is using a skill for some other task. “I’ve got ‘fishing’, so I know the basics of how to tie knots.” Let’s break this example line of argument down into its’ constituent elements:

• “Fishing” is made up of many separate minor sub-skills;
• One of those sub-skills involves the tying of knots in fishing lines to make nets and repair those fishing lines;
• The same knots can be made in a different material, e.g. rope;
• Therefore, a “fishing” check enables a character to tie someone up, the check determining how effective the result is at restraining the subject.

“Fishing” and all the other skills on the character sheet are not a transferable skill, but they are an abstracted representation of a whole string of skills that are considered to be transferable, under this interpretation. A skill on the character sheet, in other words, is not transferable, but it is “adaptable” to a different purpose.

The GM who interprets skills in this way is perfectly entitled to increase DCs, or their equivalent in other game systems (skill modifiers or whatever) to reflect the degree of difficulty in adapting one skill to another. Balanced against this is the capacity of a player to argue that they have several “adaptable skills” with the same core ability in common – continuing with the knot-typing example, “profession: porter”, “animal handling”, and “riding” could all be assumed to involve knot-tying in the same way that Fishing does. If each such skill adds +1 to the effective skill of the character at “adapting” the skill they will actually check against, you have the basics of a sophisticated skill handling system, one that balances ubiquity and universality of some transferable skills against the need to actually use a skill in a way the character not covered by the character’s specific vocational training.

Skill Systems from a rules perspective

There are two essential approaches to skills as used by rules systems. These are described in many different ways all ultimately meaning the same thing: you have “narrow”, also described as “focused”, “strict”, and which define skills from a “bottom up” perspective; and “broad”, which may use terms like “generalized”, “relaxed”, “adaptive”, or “interpretation”, and which define skills from a “top-down” perspective.

Quite often, rules systems won’t be explicit about these underlying assumptions, leaving GMs to get themselves into a tangled mess – especially if the GM assumes one interpretation and players another. Things can get even trickier when you adopt a “Say ‘yes’ quickly” approach to skill interpretation, something that Campaign Mastery (and a great many of the GMs who contributed to our recent 750th post) have advocated for quite some time, because that implicitly assumes a “top down” perspective, such as the one described using the “fishing” example – and that doesn’t work properly if the game system isn’t engineered to match.

Skill systems from the bottom up

“Bottom up” skill systems assume that there is a specific skill for every task, and that each skill explicitly defines what it can be used to do, and nothing more.

More sophisticated versions of “Bottom Up” skill systems involve “prerequisites” and may also invoke “tiers” of ability – for example, you may require “mathematics” at a certain level before you can buy “physics” beyond a certain level, and your skill in physics may be capped or restricted to some number relative to your mathematical skill.

Further variants are a little looser, employing pricing levels to achieve similar ends – “+1 physics knowledge” may cost 2 “skill points” or equivalent if you have “mathematics” below a certain standard.

And there are many hybrids. “Specializations” may offer greater specificity in advanced topics, for example.

Such systems generally are characterized by having a great many skills on offer, and are more commonly encountered when looking at Sci-Fi and modern-day genres, where the breadth of knowledge is greater and the existence of specialized expertise is more justifiable. Levels in a given skill are relatively accessible, but diversity of available skills diffuses advancement to reasonable levels; characters may be “experts” in one or two fields, but will have relatively low skill levels outside of those fields. The concept of a “jack of all trades” also has considerably greater currency in such systems, which convey that a character has a moderate level of expertise in all skills but more restricted specialist expertise.

Skills applied in other ways

Skill systems, like all RPG rules, are slightly-vague abstract simulations of a more complex “reality”. They are inherently imperfect, because perfection requires such levels of detail as to be impractical at a gameplay level. Because of these imperfections, Bottom-Up skill systems may break down when characters attempt to do something that isn’t covered by the specific applications provided by the system mechanics.

GMs ultimately have two options: to extend the existing definition of a skill to incorporate the proposed new application, or – if it sufficiently broad that it should have been a skill in the first place, to add a new skill to the system. The best yardstick for determining the optimum answer is the scope of the proposed new application; if it is of a scale commensurate with the other specific skills supplied by the game system, then it should be a new skill; if not, it should be a new approved application of an existing skill. The use of this yardstick maintains the system’s integrity in terms of inflation of available skills, and the overall degree of abstraction within the system remains relatively consistent.

The GM’s problems don’t end there, however; introducing a new skill as part of the existing body of rules is inherently retroactive; it has to be assumed that the skill has always been available for players and NPCs alike to take, but that (for some reason) none of them have ever done so. This can shatter credibility like so much spun glass. Most of the time, this disaster can be avoided by permitting retroactive adjustments to character skills, creating a minor break in continuity of development that can be glossed over. Ideally, characters should not be permitted to completely “unlearn” a skill, but can reduce levels of expertise in another skill in order to develop the “new” skill in their stead.

This leaves the verisimilitude of the past intact except under one specific circumstance: where the existence of the new skill would have materially changed the outcome of a key plot event, saving the villains for example. Completing the remediation process requires the retroactive insertion into campaign history of some reason why this would not have worked, or (alternately) assuming that the event did in fact produce a different outcome that was concealed from the PCs at the time by trickery or deception. Their enemy really did escape, but he tricked them into not realizing it – until now!

Because this will obviously have an impact on the current and future campaign, recasting or even invalidating parts of it, the GM has to decide which choice is the least harmful to the campaign – editing either the past or the future (actually, there’s a third choice, but that’s a subject for an entirely different article).

Skills applied to related tasks and sub-tasks

Rules debates about skills in a bottom-up system tend to be about whether or not a given task is inherently a part of the abstraction described by the skill. Does a skill in “History Of England” include a detailed knowledge of the history of Wales? Or just the history of interaction between the two? (Okay, that’s a fairly simple example; the answer is “no”.)

So let’s ask a curlier one: to what degree does ability to drive a horse-drawn wagon confer the ability to drive a reindeer-drawn sled? The two are more-or-less equal in scope, so arguably “Sled driving” should be a completely separate skill – but the two are similar enough that you could argue that they are both specific applications of the one skill, “driver of animal-powered vehicles” – and the rest is simply a question of making suitable allowances for environmental conditions. So this is right on the cusp of falling either`way.

Because skills are interpreted so precisely and narrowly in the “bottom-up” model, such debates are always about trivial minutia that has suddenly assumed disproportionate importance, and hence always infuriating and annoying to all concerned; and because there are more skills in such systems, this sort of debate occurs more regularly. As a result, there is a constant temptation to impose some inflexible ruling or overarching guideline, or to settle such questions quickly without giving them the thought they deserve.

It was thinking about such broad generalities that led me to come up with Look beyond the box: a looser concept for NPCs.

Skills applied to complex tasks

To some extent, it’s when a character attempts a complex task that this sort of system comes into its own, because the complex task can be broken down into smaller subtask, defined as requiring a separate skill roll (often against a completely different skill). This means that any failure in the complex task can be precisely pinpointed, as can the consequences and the timing of the discovery of the error, which in turn defines what remedial action (if any) is possible – turning the complex task into something that can be roleplayed, and giving the player something to do while their character is tied up performing this task.

TORG took this one step further, building time variability into each part of the complex task – these were broken down (by default) into four stages (A, B, C, and D) and permitting the character to roll for each only when a card was played/turned over with the appropriate letter. If, as your turn, you completed A successfully, for each subsequent round (while others were doing whatever they were doing) you were assumed to be doing B until a card came along with a “B” code to signify potential completion of the “B” step – you then rolled for success or failure.

Transferable Skills in RPGs

Another way of looking at bottom-up systems is as explicitly defining every occupation and task in terms of the explicit transferable skills. Every skill is either one of these “universal building blocks” or represents those elements of the vocation that are not transferable, By defining vocations in this way, a more comprehensive and complete analysis of both tasks to be performed in-game and character abilities to perform specific tasks is assembled.

Summary Pt 1: Transferable Skill Systems

Bottom-up skill systems are those in in which the purposes/actions to which a skill can be applied are defined and restricted, and in which no skill can be assumed in a task that is not explicitly specified, can require the addition of new skills whenever actions are defined that do not already exist within the skills system. Skills function as defined and discrete applications of the skill-system class of capability. Your skill in any given complex activity is the combination of your skills in all the lesser tasks defined by an individual skill.

Skill systems from the top down

These are fundamentally different in concept to the bottom-up approach. A skill implies the ability to perform all the subtasks, and is an abstracted entity that comprises all the subtasks. The more skills the set of available skills is broken into, the greater the granularity of the system, ie the level of precision possible. However, that level of precision is defined by the game maker and rarely actually discussed within the game rules.

Transferable skills are considered to be implied and embedded within the system rather than explicitly defined. The “Skill” that is listed is a synthesis, an abstract representation of the capability of completing every task that is explicitly listed and any task that the GM rules is also part of the field regardless of its not being explicitly stated.

This enables the player to argue that their skill in Animal Riding includes the basics of how to care for the animal, and therefore gives them a chance to use that Animal Riding skill to diagnose the problem and find a solution when a mount falls ill.

Right away, we’re in deep water with that example, because there is obvious potential for overlap in transferable skills – let’s make it obvious by talking about “Profession: Animal Veterinarian” – but there are often no guidelines for how to deal with such overlaps, or such guidelines have a sense of being ‘tacked on afterthoughts’.

Skills applied in other ways

A skill can be applied to any task the GM decides that it is relevant to, beyond a small range of specific and mandated examples incorporated into the skill description. This immediately raises the specter of GM inconsistency as a problem that can occur. On top of that, everyone will have a slightly different knowledge and understanding of what is or is not covered by a particular skill, so confusion can result when jumping from one game table to another.

Players will have different levels of expertise in any given field to their characters, and because so much is not explicitly stated, this can impact on what they think their character can do with the skills that they have.

Furthermore, it is reasonable to expect that most players will have at least one sphere of knowledge in which they are more expert than the GM is, and may disagree (with good cause) with the GM’s calls on the scope of a skill.

As often as not, attempting to apply a skill in any non-specified way will trigger a discussion of the scope of the skill – which is deathly dull to everyone else at the game table – at least until everyone comes to terms with the unwritten “rules” in the GM’s head.

Skills applied to related tasks and sub-tasks

This is where the greatest scope for disagreement potentially lies. I know one GM who advocated the line that since skills were not listed amongst the exceptions, stacking limits applied when multiple skills potentially applied to a given task. If he had chosen to permit players to use their highest relevant skill to roll against, he might have gotten away with it; he did not, instead defining a principle he called “allied skills” in which the skill that he nominated was the primary skill against which checks had to be made, and any relevant related skill was worth +1 to the die roll if, and only if, it was at a higher skill than the primary skill to be checked. Even that might not have been too bad – it certainly sounds reasonable on the page and in context – but he then further ruled that every subtype of a skill was an explicitly different skill and that a character’s racial profile automatically appended the skills with an invisible “subtype”; in other words, an Elf who put points into the “architecture” skill was explicitly taking levels in “Elvish Architecture”, which was a different skill to “Human Architecture” and so on. “You have no skill in [X]” became a repeated refrain at his game table – for about three weeks before his players deserted in droves.

Where this GM really went wrong was treating a top-down system as though it were a bottom-up system. He wanted everything to be explicit and racially-profiled – something that is not unreasonable, but that can be managed in a number of ways – when the system is designed to be more abstract and umbrella-like in its definitions.

Skills applied to complex tasks

This tendency to gather things under a single abstract umbrella often also manifests in how the GM chooses to handle complex tasks. Quite often these will also be abstracted and generalized into a single die roll for success or failure, with the GM and players improvising a narrative that describes how that die roll will be interpreted – a success may be achieved after setback after setback is overcome, for example.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but many GMs also use the degree of success or failure as a measurement of other narrative criteria, such as the character’s satisfaction with the result. Others “band” degrees of success – barely succeed and your end result looks like you did the work while wrestling alligators, barefoot; succeed by 5 or more to get a “good quality” result; succeed by 10 or more to get an “excellent quality” result; and so on. Still others use degree of success or failure to measure how long completion of a task to a minimum acceptable standard takes, with that minimum acceptable standard being defined by the skill level of the character at the time – so a “marginal success” by a character with a skill of 10 means something completely different to a “marginal success” by a character with a skill of 2; the character with the skill of 10 sets himself a higher acceptable standard, and is entirely likely to reject as “junk” something that the character of skill 2 would be quite chuffed at accomplishing

Too many interpretations for one die roll! Some GMs see such proposals written up online, or in gaming magazines, and try to implement them all at the same time because they sound cool. The result: it never rains but it pours; the only question is whether it’s milk and honey or acid rain.

Some GMs, realizing the problems that this can cause, chooses from die-roll to die-roll which interpretation is most useful for the current game circumstances. In fact, I sometimes do so, myself – though these tend to be exceptional circumstances. This can be a problem because the players never know what a die roll will actually achieve, beyond the mere fact of success or failure; there is a strong temptation to cheat as a result, or at least, to “massage” the circumstances to be in their favor.

By-and-large, a GM is best served by deliberately choosing one meaning as their normal default for a given campaign and using the alternatives to make each campaign a little more distinguishable from the last. They can then integrate that choice into their rules and rulings, treating the other variables as independent of the die roll, therefore giving them greater narrative control at the game table, which they will exploit for dramatic purposes. So long as this is made clear to the players going in, there should be no problems.

Transferable Skills in RPGs

Transferable skills in a top-down system are the “glue” that connects one skill to another, the overlap in each skill’s scope, never explicitly defined. This actually provides an excellent characterization tool that can be exploited by canny GMs and players if both agree: a player can give his character a matches advantage-disadvantage pair in which they get a -1 or -2 in one transferable skill and a matching increase in another. It is therefore assumed that, since the character’s overall ability in any given skill does not change as a result, the other aspects of an affected skill are benefited or harmed to like extent. This natural “knack” or lack of it thus becomes a defining filter, coloring the skill system for that particular individual in a specifically-defined way.

However, there is a caveat to this approach; the GM must be sure that each element of the pair really does balance the other. Taking a penalty in anything related to Goblins may sound well-and-good, but it’s no real penalty if goblins are rarely-if-ever going to feature in the campaign. Both advantage and disadvantage have to be approximately equal in applicability for this to work, and there also needs to be a hard limit on the number of such pairs that can be accepted. Experience has shown that 1 is too simplistic, 2 is manageable, 3 is about the limit – but this function is also dependent on the number of players; this was in a player-light campaign. If there are more than 3 players at the table, I would set the limit to two.

The great power of this concept this the flexibility that it brings, You could have a character who is hopeless at anything to do with maps – but excellent at dealing with animals, whether that be tracking them, riding them, hunting them, cooking them, or whatever.

This example also brings up the second great pillar of equality of which the GM should be mindful: significance. At first glance, you might feel that these are inadequately balanced, because the advantage will apply far more frequently than the disadvantage; but that’s not necessarily the case, because on a lot of the occasions when it is relevant, the advantage won’t achieve anything particularly significant beyond the characterization, but while the disadvantage won’t apply very often, almost every time that it does will be important.

The last time I used this was to create a shy, introverted, withdrawn character with extremely poor people skills – who became a silver-tongued devil when bargaining, bartering, or trading. “Please, just a little more, guvner. I’m juft a poor widdle orphan boy stwuggling to earn a little money to buy food for my poor sick muvver. Have a heart.” I doubt the player would even remember the encounter now, even if he had not passed away a few years back – but the ‘street urchin’ went home with about twenty times what he should have, given the true quality of what he was peddling. Changing his appearance and patter, he proceeded to tap the same target another four times without being recognized, earning about 4,250 gold for products that (if as advertised) should have been worth about 500 gold – and which were actually worth between 5 and 10 gp!

Game system design implications

Many systems designers don’t think about these two very different approaches, employing both in equal – and confused – measure. Sometimes, it’s the case that one half of a development team has one perspective while other has the opposite – and unless the line editor figures out the point of disagreement in philosophy, half the skills system ends up being incompatible with the other half.

Points-buy systems – small purchases vs expensive ones

One way of figuring out what was going on in the game designer’s head is to look at the number of skill points that it costs to improve a skill, and hence what likely skill progression is likely to be. If skills are expensive, the likelihood is that the intent was a top-down system, while if they are cheap, the likelihood is that the intent was a bottom-up system. Of course, “cheap” and “expensive” are relative values; they need to be placed in context by looking at the rate of progression of penalties or increases in difficulty.

For example, in the Hero System, skills are relatively cheap, and there are a lot of them. The implication is that these should be interpreted as a bottom-up system. Skills in 7th Sea, in comparison, are quite hard to put up, and the implication is that these should be given a top-down interpretation. The same can be said of Star Wars: The Edge Of Empire, to use a more recent example.

D&D, 3.x, and Pathfinder

And what of D&D/Pathfinder? Ah, therein lies the rub. There are enough skills in these games to suggest a bottom-up approach, and they tend to be relatively easy to put up – but so are the difficulty targets, at least at lower levels. The examples of play offered for both hint at a top-down approach. But the DCs that should be applied to tasks are a muddle – rising more quickly with increased difficulty than skill levels at lower character levels but rising more slowly with increased difficulty than skill levels at higher character levels. It thus becomes ridiculously easy to achieve DC25 as a target at even moderate levels. What we have here, then, appears to be [is] a conceptual problem in the design of the game mechanics for 3.x that Pathfinder then inherited. This problem largely went away with D&D 4th edition from what I can tell, and was definitely less of a factor when I playtested 5th ed.

A solution of sorts is possible: most of my campaigns use ([DC-5]x2)+5 to set the DCs for any given task, where the “DC” in square brackets is what the book says it should be. So DC5 remains DC5, DC8 becomes DC14, DC12 becomes DC19, DC18 becomes DC31, and DC25 becomes DC45. The theory is that characters won’t attempt High-DC tasks until they have a reasonable chance of success, and this keeps those high-DC tasks at arms length until the characters are quite high level. Other solutions are possible, though possibly less convenient: “([DC-10]x3)+10, no effect on DCs under 10”, for example: DC5 stays DC5, DC8 stays DC8, DC12 becomes DC16, DC18 becomes DC34, and DC25 becomes DC55. This decreases the effect at mid-ranges (DC 10-20) while increasing it for higher DCs.

Both these are shortcuts for simulating a more precise solution in which DCs are increased at a rate more commensurate with skill level progressions, or a revision of the stacking limits rules to cull some of the ways of evading these that have built up over the years. Be that as it may, what we have in 3.x/Pathfinder is a system designed at least in part as a bottom-up system and used almost-universally as a top-down system. But for all that, it’s a better solution than the total absence of one in 2nd Ed, or AD&D.

It’s sometimes said (inaccurately) that the Chinese ideogram for “trouble” represents ‘two women under the same roof’. Certainly, an accurate alternative would be ‘two game systems at the same game-table.’

Is such a butcher’s hack truly the only solution? After all, the same problems occur with other game systems, too; can we not find a more interpretational solution rather than fiddling too much with game mechanics? Changing the way we translate in-game attempted actions into game mechanics, in other words?

The Bottom-up approach

There’s a simple three-step process that turns D&D/Pathfinder into a true bottom-up system (provided the GM is also willing to add additional skills as necessary, and as described earlier):

• Define the tasks that in aggregate comprise the overall action being undertaken.
• Player rolls against each task at the same basic DC. If he succeeds in all tasks, then he has succeeded in the overall action. If he fails in one or more then the overall result is at best a marginal success and at worst a complete failure, trending toward the worst-case result with each additional failure of a subtask. The GM interprets the results accordingly.

What this systemic interpretation achieves is a number of useful things. First, it redefines every attempted action into the application of transferable skills. Second, it checks those individually. Third, it represents overall competence as more valuable than being good in one specialist subject when it comes to real-world applications. Fourth, by increasing the number of times a high-DC must be achieved, it at least partially alleviates the mismatch. The rest can be handled by the GM being more generous in his interpretations at low levels, and much more strict at higher character levels. But, to avoid any suggestion of bias against high-level characters, base that differential tolerance on the DC required – so rolls at DC 5 tasks are treated generously, while rolls at DC 16+ or 20+ or whatever are treated very strictly.

It can even be argued that this is a more realistic interpretation, insofar as complex and detailed tasks are more prone to total failure if each element is not completed successfully, while simpler tasks have more leeway for error. Get the design of a chair a little bit wrong, and you may have to cut off part of one leg of the chair to balance it; get the design for a castle’s supports wrong even a little bit and the whole structure will come down.

One roll to rule them all

It is also possible to Conflate the relevant skills into one roll, if desired. All it takes is a calculator: Multiply the die rolls needed by each other and divide by 20^(n-1) to get the chance of total failure; multiply 20 minus those die rolls by each other and divide by 20^(n-1) to get the chance of complete success; everything else is a smooth continuity in between. For two rolls, 20^(n-1) is 20; for three, it’s 400; for four, it’s 8000; for five, it’s 160,000.

For example, lets say that for a task, the character has 3 rolls to make, requiring 4+, 8+, and 6+, on d20. 4x8x6=192, so the chance of total failure is 192/400 on d20, or 0.48. Effectively, no chance. (If the last roll required had been 16+, we would have gotten 1.28 on d20, i.e. a 1 in 20 chance). The chance of total success is (20-4)x(20-8)x(20-6)/400 =16x12x14/400 =2688/400 =6.72 on d20. So 13 or better to succeed completely, 0 in 20 chance of complete failure, and an overall likelihood of success after overcoming some difficulty or success taking a little longer than desirable, or a partial success.

You could even use the principle that a natural 1 is always a failure and a 20 always a success. In this case, that would make no difference to the chance of success, but would ensure the risk of total failure remains.

A top-down alternative

It’s also possible to adjust our thinking to make D&D/Pathfinder a more truly top-down system. I’ve already telegraphed the way to do so, in fact.

• The GM selects the one most applicable skill to the task at hand. This is the primary check that they have to make.
• All DCs over 10 are increased by 5.
• If the character does not have the required skill at a level greater than or equal to half the DC, the DC is increased by (an additional) 10.
• For every relevant skill that the character has that is both greater than the DC required AND the primary skill, the character gets +2 to his die roll.
• For every relevant skill that the character has that is greater than either the DC required OR the primary skill, but not both, the character gets +1 to his die roll.
• The player makes his primary skill check as indicated. Success indicates total success, a 1 indicates total failure, anything in-between is subject to GM interpretation.

Once again, this achieves a lot of different things. It acknowledges that high skills in a related discipline bring proficiency at a transferable skill to the problem, without bothering to get into the nuts and bolts of what that skill is. The player simply has to recite a list of the skills they think might be relevant while the GM counts (either to himself, aloud, or on his fingers) a “yes”, “no” or “partial” modifier. It’s fast, only taking a few seconds. Only one die roll is involved, but the results solve the problem of high DCs at high levels by imposing the additional requirement of a skill level equal to or greater than half the DC, then increasing that DC if the result isn’t achieved. The principle is one of making the DC higher, then allocating conditional modifiers to erode that penalty if the character meets the requirements; it means that a character should easily succeed at tasks that are within the scope of his character level’s expertise, but will have to have things go their way to have a reasonable chance at succeeding at anything too far beyond reasonable.

An abstracted half-way house

In theory, it’s possible to design a game system that abstracts all tasks into a group of “specific” skills which are then used as building blocks for any particular skill check. Roll under target, Stat +1 for each building block, -2 for each building block missing, one roll. I have never seen such an approach actually used, but it’s possible.

The Zenith-3 rules approach

The Zenith-3 game system offers a very different alternative that’s worth a brief description.

• Stats give ability checks.
• Specific ability checks are then combined to give aptitudes, i.e. how good people naturally are and how good they can get.
• Aptitudes are used to calculate specific base skill scores in Fundamental Skills when those skills are purchased.
• The price of a skill, and the cost of improving it, depends on the difficulty of the skill and this “natural talent”.
• Some skills are defined as “Expert” skills, and are based on, and require, specific Fundamental Skills.
• Skill levels in those Fundamental Skills are used to derive base levels in Expert Skills.
• If the character doesn’t have the required skill, the aptitudes are used instead.
• The System biases against unskilled use by imposing penalties for not having the required skill.
• The System insulates skill levels against changes in stats by simply altering the improvement cost thereafter, not retroactively.
• Characters can purchase specialized areas of expertise within a given skill.

There’s a lot more; it’s a complex system that specifies well over 100 specific skills and details exactly what they can be used for. It is a deliberately bottom-up system that is equally deliberately designed to have top-down application in-play. But, at more than 20 pages of tiny, tiny, type plus the skill descriptions themselves (which have not been completely finished at this point but still add another 48 pages of type), it’s far too extensive to be published here (or anywhere, under the terms of the license for the Hero System, on which it is based).

Game-play implications of top-down and bottom-up

If the system is clear about its approach, interpret it accordingly, knowing what the system expects. Evaluate the tasks proposed either in terms of the relevant skills or in terms of the subtasks involved, and determine a result accordingly.

When the design is confused – which is more common than my focus on 3.x/Pathfinder may make it seem – make an interpretation and stick with it.

A flexible compromise

There is one final compromise on offer for dealing with confused mechanics, and it may be the best answer of them all. That’s why I’ve saved it for the next-to-last word.

• If the skill description explicitly defines a function, it is directly applicable and must be tested whenever that function arises as part of a complex task. This defines some activities as requiring multiple skill rolls and having multiple vectors for failure, though they can still be conflated through basic probability math. All you need be able to do is multiply and divide, as described earlier.
• If no skill explicitly defines a function, use a top-down approach, looking not for transferable skills but for Adaptable skills.

Conclusion

A lot of the trouble that arises from skill systems is unnecessary, caused by GMs not understanding the intent of game designers, or game designers not understanding the implications of what other game designers have put in place. There are solutions to all these problems, of varying complexity and impact on a game. Understanding what the underpinning philosophy of the game system is enables you to make the correct choice of solutions when presented with problems, and avoids many of the problems by framing the interpretation of attempted actions into game mechanics in the correct way.

Where there are so many solutions, there are bound to be more. Sometimes groups will stumble onto something that seems to work without ever understanding why it works. If whatever you are currently doing is working, don’t change it – but use the discussions in this article as a tool to understand it and why it works, enabling you to enhance it further – or simply avoid harming it. If, however, any of the problems described struck home for you, this article should tell you why they are happening – and at least some things you can try in an effort to do something about them.

Welcome!

It’s time for a really big party! This is officially the 750th post here at Campaign Mastery! But it’s more than that: It’s also, as close as makes confusion, our 7th birthday – you see, Johnn and I started pre-loading the Blog with content and getting into the necessary habits to keep things rolling from November 29th, but we didn’t go Live until December 28 (in between he invited feedback from a few trusted sources, which is why some early comments are dated within that period). And, if you split that difference, you get December 16 or 17th – which just happens to be yesterday or today! And on top of that, it’s Christmas next week!

There have been all sorts of different plans for how to celebrate – I’ve been thinking about this for the last year!

Blogdex 750?

Plan A was to update the Blogdex. After all, it was first released as part of our 500th-post celebrations. Real world events necessitated that I shelve those plans; I had family functions to attend back in early October, which used up my stockpile of stand-by quick articles and then some – material that I would have needed in order to achieve the ‘free time’ that a Blogdex demands. What’s more, last time it was so big (over 24,000 words) that it broke various aspects of the blog infrastructure, like the RSS feed – so this time I would have to divide it into a series, just to make it fit. I figured that I would need 2.5 months (the original took 3.5) to write it – and I simply wasn’t going to have it.

Hitting The Spot?

Plan B was to share the hit location system that I came up with in my first campaign – capable of accuracy to the centimeter and yet very fast and easy to use. It quickly became apparent that recreating this digitally was going to be another Big Project that would not be ready in time. I’m still sneaking time into that here and there in odd minutes, so it should appear in 2016 sometime.

Project X?

Plan C was to kick off a series that has been in development for more than a year, a secret collaboration between myself and a couple of regular contributors to the Ask The GMs column, but it has turned out to simply be too big to have ready in time. In fact, it might not even be ready until mid-2016, though I’m pushing hard to get it done sooner! In fact, that’s what I expect to be doing over Christmas.

Party To End All Parties

And so to Plan D. A compound of various lesser forms of celebration, like having different activities at the party. We start with the welcoming speech (which you’re almost finished reading). Next, we’ll get the technical bits out of the way – Reasons to be cheerful, part 750! I’ll follow up with a glimpse of some of what I have planned for 2016 in Things To Come (warning: not all of them may eventuate). After that, I have a Q&A extracted from some recent correspondence clarifying a few things in past articles so that they are of maximum help to a beginner. And then, there will be the pièce de résistance – a swarm of helpful hints from my fellow GMs. And I use the term “Swarm” advisedly; I’ve had over 150 contributions from over 150 GMs from around the world, a better response than I ever thought possible. This party is going to be epic!

Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 750

I realize that this title’s reference might be too obscure for a lot of readers. If that’s you, check out this link and then this YouTube video and you will know everything you need to know. Personally, it’s not my favorite ID&TB song – but it’s a great title!

Over the last 7 years, we’ve had more than 590,000 visitors according to Google Analytics – and can expect to hit the 600,000 mark at the start of February (maybe even a little sooner), and the content has been viewed more than 1,000,000 times – we passed that landmark in late June.

Of course, Google aren’t the only way to count these things. We also have an analytics plug-in that’s been keeping track of such details for about five years, and IT has counted more than 812,000 visits since it went active. In all that time – as of this writing, which I’m starting a little in advance – we’ve had 4,769 comments and pingbacks [about half of them replies] that weren’t adjudged to be spam (and more than 1,265,000 that were!)

In that time, I’ve seen a lot of gaming blogs, podcasts, websites, and other resources come and go. In fact, I think we’re currently in the third or fourth generation of site since Campaign Mastery started!

I think it says a lot about what has been achieved here that there are posts from the first month or two that I still refer to regularly. Of those 750 posts, I think there have been only 10-20 that were not evergreen in nature. Even those that were relatively focused on a particular iteration of a game system are transferable to other, popular, game systems and are still current.

Things To Come

I’m proud of the content that Campaign Mastery has built up over the past seven years. But I don’t want to dwell too much on the yesterdays; instead, let me focus for a minute on just some of what is planned to come up over the next year (several of which have been promised through the course of the year just past):

• updating the Blogdex;
• my original hit location system;
• the philosophies of skill interpretation;
• table construction tricks;
• reinventing the concept of campaign history;
• a Christmas giveaway;
• Google Image Search usage and tricks;
• dealing with excessive PC wealth in gaming;
• more ATGMs;
• more of the Basics For Beginners series;
• a couple more entries in the “All Wounds Are Not Alike” series;
• creating a building;
• the power of GM visualization; and
• that epic series that I mentioned!

And that’s only about 1/3 of it!!

A quick Q&A

Last week, I received an email from Tracey Snow, a relatively inexperienced GM. Because both it and my reply are rather lengthy, I’ve interspersed them in the format of an interview.

Hi Mike,

Hi Tracey.

As I’ve mentioned in a couple comments on your blog, I’m trying to get back into RPGs and GMing but so far, it’s been a struggle. You and a good few others have raised the bar of player expectations considerably in the years that I have not been active with RPGs and I feel like I’m in over my head. It’s like I’ve just learning to add and subtract and now I’m trying to solve a calculus problem!

That is as much my fault as anything. Reading your blog, I want to incorporate all your years of practice, learning and thinking about creating memorable campaigns into the first one I put together. I’m trying to remember to start small and work my way up but I like having a good understanding of where I’d like the story to go.

I really enjoy all of the detail and in-depth perspectives you put into Campaign Mastery. It’s really is a Master Class on GMing. You consider aspects of the hobby I have not seen anywhere else and you go into depth on your subjects in very amazing ways. I learn so much from any of the articles and they never fail to make me think about how I might incorporate the topic at hand when I get to that point in my GMing.

Unfortunately, from where I sit, reading your blog is almost more of a frustration than a help. So much of what you write, assumes the reader has GM experience and a process that can be improved by your insights. Since I’m still trying to work out a process for creating a world, a campaign, integration of multiple plot lines and fill it all in with sub-plots and side quests and make sure I’m not railroading the players that much of what I read on your site I can’t yet take advantage of.

I’m sorry that you’re finding it a struggle, and that CM has been one of the sources of frustration. You’re right in that Campaign Mastery is pitched more at experienced GMs than at relative Beginners. There are two reasons for that.

The first is that I was a beginner so long ago that I struggle to remember what it was like, and hence I’m never sure how useful my advice would be. That’s the main reason why it’s taken me almost 7 years to get to the “Beginner’s” series that you mention.

The second reason is that if you pitch at the beginner level, once the readers pass that level, there is little of value that they can get from the articles, whereas if you pitch at the expert, or wanna-be-expert, then even if something is beyond a reader now, they can come back to it when they have greater expertise. So there is longevity and greater residual value.

I know there is a great amount of information in your archives for new GMs. I have been stumbling across articles that are slowly helping me fit the puzzle pieces together. I really wish there was a Table of Contents for the site that could guide me through your articles in a logical order. That said, as I persevere through the archive, I’ll come up with a basic for one for you! Also in that vein, I’ve been impatiently waiting for the latest “beginners” series you have started to continue in the hope that it will help me.

A table of contents? What you need is the BLOGDEX – which lists all the articles that had been published to that date by subject and reviews (briefly) the contents of each. You can find it here: A Blogdex Celebration.

I was planning to update it for the 750th article, due in just a week or so, but realized that I was not going to have enough time to do it properly (it’s not the writing so much as the organizing, structuring, and formatting). So that’s on the agenda for maybe the 800th post, due close to the middle of 2016.

As for the “Beginners” series, new parts of that are currently planned to start at the end of January – but that schedule changes on an almost-weekly basis, and if anything, they will be brought forward from that (they subsequently have been, even though all this was written just a week or two back – Mike).

I had a few questions that I thought I would ask in hopes that you might be able to flatten out my learning curve. Here goes:

I’ve had a difficult time finding articles and content that will help me at my level of experience. Are there keywords that you would suggest I use to search for articles on specific topics? I have used the category lists and the general archive list but it’s often difficult to discern what information is covered in an article from its title.

Keywords: most of my articles start with a fundamental principle or subject and begin with a simple treatment of it, growing more advanced as you read, or at least, that is the goal. The idea is that once the reader starts getting out of their depth, they can simply skim through until they either get to the end of the article or a new section starts. It doesn’t always work that way, but that’s the basic structure that I aim for. So a keyword search won’t help except in relation to specific topics.

Have you outlined your process of Campaign building from the first blank piece of paper to your first play session? You have lots of articles detailing specific tasks in the process but is there one that identifies all of the steps you take to cover campaign, adventure, encounter and world building and in what order you do it?

I have – the “New Beginnings” series was a major one in 2015, running for 11 parts, and was both as specific and as comprehensive as I could make it. You can find it here: The New Beginnings series.

You seem consummately organized and, like me, you appear to prefer working through a defined process. I would assume that you have created templates for anything you are preparing (NPCs, locations, plot arcs, etc.). I have seen a few of them but is there an article where you list and give examples of all of the ones you have come up with?

I do have processes that I work through but not fixed templates. The broad process was the subject of “One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post” which you can find here: One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post.

You’ll find that most of the process-related articles will refer back to that as a foundation – and if you look at some of the early articles/series like “Distilled Cultural Essence” you’ll find that they connect forward, as well. That’s because this is the basic process that I use for all writing, from adventures to campaigns to blog posts.

The other article of relevance is “Top-Down Design, Domino Theory, and Iteration: The Magic Bullets of Creation”, which you can find here: The Magic Bullets of Creation. It details the other logical processes that I employ in order to create the headings/structure that populates the “One Word At A Time” process.

Is there an article where you discuss your process for or provide an example of your session prep tasks?

Session prep is very much dependent on two principles: What do I need for a given adventure, and what do I need to spend time on so that it will be ready when I need it for a future adventure. I’ve tackled the subject many times and often touch on it in other articles as well. There is no one article, as my own practices have evolved over time, and as I think about subjects for Campaign Mastery! I suggest the following:

• To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?
• Writing to the limits of longevity
• Amazon Nazis On The Moon: Campaign Planning Revisited
• The Fire Fighting, Systems Analysis, and RPG Problem Solving series

…and the New Beginnings and Basics For Beginners series, in which I look at all of these and sometimes offer simpler (but less effective) alternatives.

Is there an article where you discuss how you run a session and track information while you’re at the table? Do you use a computer at the table or do you make notes and incorporate them into your electronic system later?

I’m terribly disorganized in that respect, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t hold what I do up as an example of “Best Practice” to anyone! I never stop to take notes, and consequently often forget what’s actually happened after a campaign/adventure has departed from “the script” – to which I never adhere, and I’m often the most guilty party at letting plots “evolve” in the course of play. Sometimes that works to my benefit, sometimes it’s a train-wreck. Worse still, I’m usually too physically exhausted after a game session to make any notes while things are fresh in my mind. I’m going to try to line up an article for 2016 on what some of my fellow GMs do to solve these problems and will be as interested as anyone in the results.

What is the differentiating factor between a campaign and an adventure in your mind? Reading “Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow”, you indicated that the campaign was coming to an end but you’re seeding it with plots that will come to fruition in the sequel campaign. That rather sounds like what you do with story arcs in other articles so I was wondering what the difference was.

An adventure is always designed to run to a firm conclusion in which the major plotlines are resolved or transformed by events. A campaign may be closed (designed to run to a firm conclusion) or open, with no firm ending in sight, and involves the resolution of minor plotlines, ongoing subplots, and overarching “super-narratives” or “campaign loops” or “story arcs” or any of half-a-dozen other terms used for the concept. So both bigger and smaller – and a campaign is made up of adventures and subplots bridging between them and providing context for them, so the end of a campaign will also be an adventure. That means that the end of a campaign is the end of everything – unless you KNOW that your players want a sequel, or you want to prepare for the possibility, in which case you deliberately include subplots that are NOT going to come to a conclusion; these then form the basis of the sequel campaign. Essentially, the differences are immediacy and scale.

For the record, I’m still not completely happy with “Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow” – things weren’t explained as coherently or clearly as I would like. The “Back To Basics” articles –

• part 1: adventure structures
• part 2: campaign structures

– attempted to simplify and clarify by starting simple and gradually layering in complexities one after another, but it still ended up confusing some people. I took a third swing at it in the “Amazon Nazis” article and the “New Beginnings” series.

Do you have a glossary for terms that you use in your articles? Your recent article where you try to define an adventure talks a lot about that specific term but in various articles, you have used many different terms to discuss varying ‘sizes’ of storyline. I’m trying to get a handle on what each term means to you. I find it a little difficult to tell which ones you use a synonyms for each other and which are unique (I can attach my effort to define them if it will help).

A Glossary? Not really; my terminology evolves as my understanding of best practice evolves. That was what actually led to the article on trying to define an adventure! If you were to send me your attempt at definition, I will turn it into an article on the subject of clarifying the terms, if that would be of benefit to you (and others), and give you co-author credit :) (Tracey has, since this correspondence, provided her notes and such an article is in the works. She declined my offer of a co-author credit, so I’m giving her the kudos she deserves for her efforts here!)

The reason I don’t have one is for the same reason that I have poor game-table record-keeping: I’m too busy doing it to stop and take notes! The only difference is that the “it” in question is writing an article instead of running an adventure!

Do you have any third party resources you would recommend to someone in my position?

There are a number of articles and blogs out there – try the results of . The problem is that most of them will be pitched at absolute novices, and will be of no value to you. The “Beginners” series is my attempt to bridge that gap.

Do you have any advice in general that you could offer?

Actually, as it happens, most of the advice being offered in the 750th post will be relevant to your last question! But the bottom line is this: don’t try to follow all the advice that I, or anyone else, offer. Read it, tuck it away in the back of your mind, and just game – the parts that are relevant to your style will work their way forwards without you even realizing it. From time to time, you may be confronted with a problem and go “aha – I vaguely remember reading some advice on that subject once upon a time, now where was it…” An example comes to mind: Lucas, of The City Of Brass, was a recent participant in a podcast on gaming and mentioned a technique for handling masterminds, but couldn’t remember where he had read it – at first. He found it again here after the show: Making a Great Villain Part 1 of 3 – The Mastermind.

Note that Lucas hadn’t memorized the entire article – just the broad principle, which was “The GM should assume that whatever happens, the Mastermind will have anticipated it and will have a plan to turn it to his advantage.” You don’t have to come up with those plans in advance, you simply develop them on the fly in response to PC-instigated events and changes in circumstance.

I’m sure I have more questions but I’ve taken well more time than I intended already. Thank you again for all the work and effort you put into your blog. I have learned so much and I look forward to learning even more!

Postscript: There are two other articles that I should probably have brought to Tracey’s attention, the latter more than the former. These are:

• Bringing on the next generation, Part One: Player Peersand,
• Bringing on the next generation, Part Two: Gamemaster Mentors

Seeing what advice I had at the very beginning might have been helpful in placing her own efforts into context.

Party To End All Parties, Wildest One In The Book

Another possibly-obscure reference! Skyhooks were one of THE iconic rock bands of the 1970s, and if there’s one song that epitomizes the parties of the era in which I grew up, it would be this one – making it the perfect piece of theme music for this special post! YouTube link to the video is here.

I wanted to do something extra-special for this anniversary post.

So I reached out to just about every GM that I know and asked them one simple question:

If you could give just one piece of advice to another GM, without knowing anything about their campaigns, rule systems, or players, what would it be?

I have been absolutely blown away by the response, and can’t thank those who have contributed enough!

An important note

Some people have suggested that they would want to follow just about everyone on the following list with a twitter account. More power to them, they are all worth following for one or more reasons! But please remember that twitter restricts you to 100 follows a day, and there are a LOT more than 100 twitter users on the list below.

1.	Mike Bourke @gamewriterMike(Me) Campaign Mastery’s Owner/Operator
	Don’t live or die by anyone’s advice (not even mine). Listen to the core and find your own way of incorporating it into your game. You can always get more specific later, but you need to make your own mistakes to evolve your own ‘voice’.
2.	Ian Mackinder – a long-time friend, we’ve been playing in each other’s campaigns for about 34 years. Ian’s last major contribution to Campaign Mastery was the two-part article on Vehicles in RPGs (Part 1, Part 2).
	No plan, no matter how brilliant, will survive contact with the player-characters.
3.	Ian Gray – another Ian. This one’s been a major part of my games over the last 15 years or so. A frequent contributor to Ask-The-GMs, Ian has also provided a couple of articles to Campaign Mastery. most notably (in tandem with the first Ian) When Good Dice Turn Bad. He’s been GMing on-and-off since 1994.
	Flexibility and Pacing are Key.
4.	Saxon Brenton is a regular and incisive contributor to Ask-The-GMs in recent years and currently collaborating with Mike and Blair Ramage on something big. One of these days I’ll get an article out of him in his own right! Saxon has GM’d sporadically since 1993. Still, he’s the only one of my players to be mentioned by name on Wikipedia…
	Present a story that is interesting and fun for the players to participate in.
5.	Nick Deane is a relatively new returnee to GMing after a bad experience the first time out. He’d probably prefer me not to count that attempt, so he’s been a GM for about a year. Nick often contributes to Ask-The-GMs, and he and Ian Grey were instrumental in formulating the concepts at the heart of the mega-answer on Spell Components (Some Arcane Assembly Required).
	Don’t try to force your players to stick to the planned story. Know the basics of the topics involved in your planned adventure – if it centers around a court case, know the basics of the court system in your game – and just let events unfold.
6.	Blair Ramage is, in some ways, the very definition of old-school, having started playing before original D&D was even released in Australia using a copy a friend brought back with him from a US holiday. He and I co-GM The Adventurer’s Club and are collaborating on a mega-article with Saxon at the moment. He is also a frequent contributor to Ask-The-GMs.
	Try not to fall too much in love with your NPCs, try to let the players carry the story. (Yeah, I know that sounds funny coming from me!)
	[Explanation: this was one of the perceived mistakes that Blair was making in the Adventurer’s Club campaign before I came on board – the combination of NPCs with more experience than the PCs who were also homages to Blair’s favorite genre characters. His notion was that they would be around to provide a helping hand in whatever field the PCs needed or to bail them out of an especially tight spot if necessary – reasonable, in the context of a game world with an ongoing history, but not good for the health of the campaign. Our biggest step forward was finding a way in which the PCs were going to be superior to these more-experienced characters that let us relocate them farther into the background. Which just goes to show the gulfs that can arise between what is reasonable for a game World and what is reasonable for a Game.].
7.	Mike Wells was the first player to sign up to my first campaign. We’ve butted heads across the game table on many occasions through the intervening years; he has been a formative influence on my GMing style that persists to this day, for better or worse.
	Work with the environment. You have no idea how many times that’s gotten me out of trouble as both a player and a GM.
8/9/10.	Admiral Rob (twitter: @evilkipper, website: www.evilkipper.com is a proud Dad into D&D – “Collects like a butterfly, Paints like a snail!” And a very nice guy. We’ve known each other through twitter for a couple of years now, and he’s always been supportive.
	Pick a system and world you love, and your enthusiasm will drive everything else.
	Andvarr A (@AndvarrA), “Man of Beard” and Gamer from Scotland, added,
	“….and your insanity”.
	Admiral Rob replied,
	“Insanity comes naturally the first time you hear the phrase ‘let’s split the party’.”
11/12/13.	Adam of RPG Kitchen (@RPGKitchen): “Our mission is to help people create, share and play RPGs and use the proceeds to help feed the hungry.” What more can I say?
	Above all else make sure people are having fun. Unless you’re playing Cthulhu, in which case they should be scared.
	Symatt (see below) added,
	“Players deserve everything they get … [when] playing Cthulhu.”
	Phil (twitter: @thedicemechanic, website: The Dice Mechanic), from the “Southern Middle. Ish.” of the UK, (describes himself as a “Geek, gamer and argumentative non-specific critic.”) commented
	“But if I’m genuinely scared, I won’t stick around.”
14.	Danny Rupp of @criticalhits, who provide a Tabletop gaming news feed and more from Critical-Hits.com:
	Prioritize your RPG planning based on the likelihood content will be encountered/engaged by the players.
15.	Home Brewed Games (@Sandboxbrewed) is an RPG game designer whose goal is to help further the hobby I love, by showing the next gen of gamers the power of their imagination.
	Stay loose, let the adventure unfold naturally, and have fun.
16.	David Andrieux (@DanAndrieux) describes himself as a Physicist, business strategist, and Sci-Fi lover. Technology, storytelling and game design enthusiast. He writes for Tales of Extraordinary Physics.
	Never say ‘no’. Let your players try (for better or worse) and build on their ideas.
17-29.	Symatt (@symatt) is a Story Teller and “Role Playing Player” from Ipswich, Suffolk, England and an early friend through twitter.
	As a GM for the last 20+ years: System is not as important as some place upon it. As long as you (GM) have a passion for what you want to run, [and] that will show in your games. Rules can come to you as a group. Learn together. Have fun, let your players have fun. Things will come to you as you play or run more. Listen to people around you. If you like what you see keep doing it if not drop it and move on. It’s your game as much as your players. Something on twitter now is about “fun”. How do you make sure to have “Fun”. I guess it’s like when people tell you to smile. I sit at a table with the hope that my players enjoy that session. That is a GMs fun I guess. Players on the other hand need a guiding voice . Some know how to play and get what they enjoy from a game. For others it can be a harder experience and so a GM can have a harder time. Learn how the dice work. How combat works in your chosen game and go from there. Be open and creative. Tell a story. Engagement with the players is the key. If you find that part easy then GMing will come easy. Don’t expect to be the best thing since sliced bread straight away. I am still learning and I take pleasure in that.
30.	BattleBards (@BattleBards) offer a premier tabletop RPG Audio Library & Tools for RPG Campaigns from Los Angeles. Community-driven and Kickstarter-funded. Their website is Battlebards.com.
	Being a GM is about building a story alongside your players, not in spite of them.
31.	6d6 RPG (twitter: @6d6Fireball, website: www.6d6rpg.com) is a publisher of roleplaying games, adventures and settings based in Nottingham, UK, (in particular the eponymous game system) with writers and artists from all over the world.
	The job of a GM is to keep the game moving forward. Never let the players get stuck in a rut.
32.	Elric of Melniboné (@Elric_VIII) writes about Imrryr, the Dreaming City, in both English and Italian.
	Let your players be themselves! Rules apply only so long as they don’t get in the way of self-expression and fun.
33.	Nvenom8 Designs (@Nvenom8_Designs) is a 3D Designer, Digital Artist, Tabletop Gamer, and “Huge Nerd” in New York, USA. His web store is at Nvenom8_Designs.
	The old improv rule of ‘Yes and…’ holds true: whenever possible, don’t say no. Saying yes and adding keeps things moving.
	He then added,
	Actually, that advice applies equally to players who are roleplaying with one another or with a GM – give the others material [to work with or play off].
34.	Dan at RootHome (@RootHomeSetting) is American, the creator of the RootHome Setting “a world of primal myths and legends”, and a player of #pathfinder and #DnD. He’s a reasonably new but good friend on Twitter.
	Let the game system serve the story you are telling. Don’t be afraid to play off PCs emotions.
35.	Liz Theis (@liztheis) does business development & marketing for Lone Wold Development (twitter: @lonewolfdevel, website: www.wolflair.com). She is also a reader, gamer, history nerd, & MBA student in the “Bay Area” (presumably, of San Francisco, California).
	I love this 750 message idea. My piece of advice is quite simple. Don’t forget that playing a roleplaying game is a lot like collaborative story-telling. Find ways to connect your players to the story. Perhaps that’s asking your players for secrets that come out during the campaign, or asking them to come up with backstories that influence the adventures down the line. By tying the players to the world, they’ll feel like it’s *their* story too.
36.	Sven Lotz (@sven_lotz) is a Gamer, TRPG Veteran, and Rail Traffic Controller (amongst other things) from Olten, Switzerland, and a new acquaintance through twitter.
	Play with the players, not against them.
37.	Brendan Davis is from Bedrock Games (twitter: @Bedrockgames, website: www.bedrockgames.net), makers of the table-top RPGs Sertorius, Crime Network, Servants of Gaius, Arrows of Indra, Horror Show and Terror Network, from Lynn, Massachusetts.
	Relax and don’t force the adventure. The more relaxed you are, the easier it is to be creative on the fly.
38.	The Hydra DM (@TheHydraDM) tweets about games of all stripes – with a focus on tabletop RPGs. He blogs at The Hydra DM to “give back to the community that helped him along his way ever since 2010, when he first realized there was an amazing half of gaming (tabletop ones!) that he barely noticed before.”
	Know what the characters want & why it’s so hard to get. Former is a plot hook, latter is gameplay. Ask players if in doubt.
39.	Brent Phillips (@allgamer1) is “a gamer of all forms, cards, pen and paper and PC from Texas, USA” and another new acquaintance as a result of this celebration party!
	Don’t let the written rules keep the players from having ridiculous fun.
40.	Skirmisher Publishing LLC (@SkirmisherGames) is a creator of earnest and useful role-playing games, supplements, rules, sourcebooks, miniatures, and wargames based in Canyon Lake, Texas. Their website is at www.skirmisher.com.
	The rules are a guideline and shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of a good story being told, modify them as necessary.
41.	Mattias Johnsson, on behalf of Team Järnringen (twitter: @Team_Jarnringen), makers of the Symbaroum RPG (a successful Swedish RPG):
	Identify what makes each of your players happy when playing RPGs (exploration, XP, moral dilemmas, action, whatever) then give them that, in a dosage that keeps them satisfied but longing for more.
42.	Feral Games Inc (website, twitter @FeralGamesinc) are an independent games company in the UK making tabletop RPGs #ChroniclesofAerthe with an international team of writers and artists.
	Always remember the rules are their to be broken, the players are there to have a good time and anything is possible.
43.	Andrew Y (@thatonegm) is operator of a game blog at Gather ‘Round the Table and Editor, GM, game designer, writer, & Associate Professor with @TheRPGAcademy. He’s also American.
	Find the goal of each session and make sure everything you do reflects that goal. A goal should be a simple phrase like “Make my players sweat,” “Surprise my players,” “Make my players care,” or even “Make my player laugh” You’ll see that those examples are player-oriented, and I think they should be. No matter what kind of game you’re playing or what kind of story you’re telling, your players are the primary audience. (Even if others are observing or the game is being recorded, your players are still the lens of emotion through which any other audience will view the session.) And if you can’t think of a specific goal for a session, here’s one that should be your default: “Help my players have fun.
44.	Grand DM (@grand_dm) is a DM of three decades, tabletop game enthusiast, creativity aficionado, writer, and proprietor of the Gametavern. He blogs at www.ultanya.com.
	Listen to the players as the game unfolds. Often they will devise all sorts of wonderful ideas that you should not be afraid to embrace. The ability to shoot from the hip during a game session is the hallmark of a great gamemaster.
45.	Frank Winters (@rpgunion15) is a “roleplayer, storyteller, & gamer” from Smithtown, NY, who is currently writing his own rpg and blogs at The Roleplayers Union.
	Being a storyteller for over 20 years my one piece of advise for a fellow GM is to make the players the stars of the game. The players write the story, you tell it. Keep rules to a minimum and just remember to have fun.
46.	Hungry is a long-time supporter of Campaign Mastery through his website, Ravenous Roleplaying.
	My #1 piece of advice to any GM is to have fun. Take the phrase “Role Playing Game” and mix it up a bit to form the sentence “You are playing a role in a game.” While the last word of that sentence is “game” it is arguably the most important. Games are intended to be fun. Therefore: have fun!
47.	Jon of Run A Game (twitter: @RunAGame, website: www.runagame.net) is an RPG blogger, nerd, nonprofit fundraiser, & dad from Maryland who mostly uses twitter to talk about running tabletop RPGs.
	Hook every single antagonist, goal, and conflict in your game to your players’ characters’ bonds, relationships, ambitions, and histories.
48.	Party Roll Mark (@Elmoogle) of the Party Roll Podcast is the resident Party GM of a group in Texas, Michigan.
	Remember that you are an arbiter of rules, but also entitled to have fun.
49.	Tom Stephens (@dagorym) is a Librarian, Astronomer, Programmer, Husband, Father, and Gamer, “not necessarily in that order”, from Spanish Fork in Utah. He also runs a blog, Arcane Game Lore.
	Know the rules for the system. Or maybe better: You are the rules expert. It shouldn’t be on the players to look up rules. Their role is to decide what their character does and says. They should only be there for the story, you worry about the mechanics. This is especially true for new players, whether to the group or to gaming in general. It’s on the the GM to either know the rule, know where (and be able) to quickly look it up, or adjudicate and look it up later. Nothing grinds a game to a halt faster than constant rule checking. If they want to do something that you know would be very unlikely and their character would know that as well, tell them that it most likely won’t work but they don’t need to be the rules experts. If the player wants to learn the mechanics later, that’s great but if all they ever want is to be there for the story aspect and leave the mechanics to you, that’s fine too.
50.	Amelia Serif (@maarlzipan) is a freelance writer from Melbourne, Australia, currently with Another Dungeon (twitter: @AnotherDungeon, website: www.anotherdungeon.com), with a deep interest in Japanese language, culture and a passion for games.
	Always strive to develop strong motivations for your NPCs. The believability of any RPG world lives and dies at the hands of your NPCs, so make sure you know why each one of them gets up in the morning.
51.	raark (@raark) is a “public Servant, Gamer, nerd, & occasional motorcyclist”, currently residing in Queensland, Australia, but originally from New Zealand.
	Know your world. Nothing breaks immersion faster than a DM who doesn’t know they lay of the land of his campaign. Something I’m guilty of all too often. I also like to record my games, playing them back I can review my performance and spot areas where improvement is required.
52.	RPGCache (@RPGCache) is a tabletop RPG Gamer into “D&D, AD&D, and OSR” from Portland, Oregon.
	Keep things moving. One place that had gotten bogged down in my games was arguing over rules. We all agreed to let me the GM make a quick decision and have that stand to keep the game moving and designated one player to be the rules master to review the rule. That person would the inform the group of the interpretation and the next convenient break in action. Any disagreements and arguments over the rules are to be done at end of game or over email before the next session.
53.	Dusque (@Rolecasters) is a Dungeon Master, illustrator, writing squire, & “geek underwear model”.
	Tie character backgrounds into your campaign. Also pose ethical choices to the players, it will help their characters grow.
54.	Flippy is @FlippydaMan on twitter, and tinyhorsies is his game, a pick and play RPG for adults and children. His avatar never fails to lift my mood.
	Always remember that it’s a game and the objective is for everyone to have fun. So, do anything you think you need to to make sure that this is accomplished. This might mean changing, modifying, or ignoring the rules. Or it might mean adapting the game to the style of the players. Some players will want to use the session to express their inner beings while others might want to play it as if it were Dynasty Warriors (going around killing stuff). This may also include talks with players off-games, asking what they liked, etc, which in turn will allow you to know how much to prepare so you don’t feel like you spent too much time in something they are going to ignore. You may also have to talk with the one player that is spoiling the experience for everyone else and maybe kick him out. Of course, there are many more things you can do, from having always Hawaiian pizza to dressing up to playing with candles. Just think [to yourself], ‘how can I make this more fun?’ and opportunities will arise.
55.	Helms Wake (@one2ebay) is a new D&D YouTube show starting to grow, and a new twitter contact.
	The way I DM (I have been told my games move like reading a book) is a complete story were the NPCs strongly bond with player characters, through hate, love interests, friendship. I feel that a game with NPCs that the players care about strongly adds to game play. The game is completely boring and dry without this, I feel. The way I come up with my stories is strange but works for me: I listen to all kinds of music and picture events and create my story line through the feelings a song gives me. Strange but works well for me :) Me and my buddy are just starting out making videos. We have played d&d along time.”
56.	The Worst DM (@TheWorstDM) is a “Purveyor of artisinal tabletop gaming sessions” from the city of California in Maryland, USA. His website is located at theworstdm.com.
	The most detailed and elaborate games you create often won’t survive past the first encounter if the players aren’t on board with it. Games have to be enjoyable and engaging for the entire group, not just you. Be flexible as a GM and everyone will have fun.
57.	DMpathy(@DMpathy on twitter) is a blog offering tabletop advice from a game master who cares.
	Listen to your players! Find out what they want out of the game and how you can provide that experience for them. You can have the most fun running a game by making it fun for your players. So keep checking in and communicating with them to make sure they’re having a good experience, and respond accordingly.
58.	James Introcaso (@JamesIntrocaso) runs the World Builder Blog, the host of the December round of the RPG Blog Carnival, and hails from Arlington, Virginia. (His tip has been edited for a G-rating – so you can probably guess what he actually wrote).
	Playing an RPG is a lot like [any other game]. As long as everyone is comfortable, having fun, and being safe then you’re doing it right.
59.	RPGentlemen (@RPGentlemen) is a 5e DnD Live Play Podcast by improv comedians, featuring “a trust-fund barbarian, a living trash pile named Window, and poor decision making.”
	Regardless of the system, my advice for new GMs: Embrace the madness.
60.	Foster Leathercraft (@fosterleather) on twitter, website ) are from New Westminster, British Columbia, and became enthusiastic supporters of this project and great to chat to in the course of it. New friends!
	Have fun. If the DM isn’t having a good time, odds are the players aren’t either.
61.	miggybaz (@miggybaz) is a lover of tech and gadgets, a follower of the BTCC, and Amiga lover and a Retro gamer whose favorite game is the Warhammer Fantasy RPG. He hopes that makes him a geek!
	It’s your job to make sure the players have fun so act the parts, give good descriptions, and let them flesh out their PCs :) It takes a while to be a good GM. I let my players do practically what they want. They eventually follow the plot!
62.	David Caffee, aka @Chaos Trip Studio, produces “innovative game designs for Pathfinder and D&D 4th Edition”. He is based in Ohio.
	Advice I’d give any GM for any game: know what your players are excited about and where they want to take the game.
63.	Chris Constantin (@drevrpg) locates himself in Edmonton, Alberta, and his blog is Dark Revelations – The Role Playing Game. His twitter bio states that “The Hodgepocalypse takes North America and the d20 system and makes it a diverse world filed with magical rites, modern technology and bizarre cultures.”
	Give them what they want, but in a way they don’t expect.
64.	Daniel K (@Daniel_G_K) is from New Holland in the Antipodes – which to those in the know translates to the Western side of Australia. A lot of his tweets are game-related and is another who was very enthusiastic about this project, becoming a friend in the process.
	I guess this doesn’t apply to every DM [but it’s] genuine advice: try to stay more sober than the players.
65.	Richard A. Hunt (@AWizardInDallas) is a gamer, writer, artist, father, and programmer, from Plano, Texas.
	The rules are a guide, not a straight jacket. Never acquiesce to player demands for a rules as written game. Such a strategy will be your undoing as a GM.
66.	Campaign Coins (@CampaignCoins produce beautiful coins and pendants for RPGs from Melbourne Australia. Their website is campaigncoins.com.
	(slightly paraphrased) “Games are powered by goals, obstacles, and rewards. We always remember the obstacles but don’t give the others the attention they deserve.”
67.	Rhidian from Apprentice Games (twitter: @AppGamesNotts, website: apprenticegames.co.uk), an online article site based around the hobbies they love so much with a particular focus on Live Action Roleplay, or LARPs, suggests,
	If everyone if enjoying themselves you are already doing it right. Your game doesn’t have to be held to an arbitrary ideal of a ‘good game’ nor does every campaign have to be your magnum opus. So relax and have fun with it.
68.	Red Eye Ragnarok (@RedEyeRagnarok) is a Programmer, Video Gamer and a Roleplay Gamer from Bavaria in Germany.
	If you’re not completely new to running games, I would recommend to focus on player engagement. But how do you achieve this? One simple method: Ask questions. If something isn’t important for an overarching experience, ask a player about it. You don’t have to come up with everything yourself as a GM, since you are playing with other people too and they might have good ideas themselves. Say ‘yes, and’ or ‘yes, but’. Build on the ideas your players give you.
69.	Brandon Radke is “Nerd-In-Chief” from Lettuce Inn Games (@lettuceinngames on twitter, website lettuceinngames.wix.com, makers of BLOOD: Path of the Shinobi); describes himself as A well rounded geek for a lop-sided world; and can be found in River Falls, Wisconsin.
	The best advice I could give to any GM is to not shackle yourself to the rules. Whatever game you’re playing, this is a game. With your friends. You’re supposed to be having fun, and the fun lives in the moments you have with your friends, no matter what you’re doing. The rules are there just to keep things fair and balanced, but when they become the centerpiece, you’ve lost the thread of why you’re gaming in the first place.
70.	Pieter-Jan Maesen (@PieterJanMaesen) is from Antwerp, Belgium, and describes himself as a boyscout, Father, Economist, Informatician, Scout and DM Interested as in politics, art, history, Pen & Paper RPGs, and new media.
	Learn to say yes to your players and work with everything they bring to the table.
71.	Ubiquitous Rat (@ubiquitousrat) is a longtime associate of Mike’s on Twitter, and describes himself as a slightly overweight, bearded blogger who rather likes lasagna. He’s also a teacher who’s into roleplaying, religious spirituality, UK politics, and rat-keeping. Given the second-last of those, it’s no surprise that he is a UK resident. His blog is UbiquitousRat.net.
	Obstacles, not plot – oppose their goals with obstacles (info gather, resolution, celebration).
72.	D’n’DUI (@DnDUI) is a podcast and webcomic where the participants drink themselves “under the tabletop”. Available on dndui.com, iTunes and Stitcher.
	A character embodies a particular part of the player, help them explore that extension of their personality.
73.	Berin Kinsman needs no introduction to anyone whose been into RPGs and blogging – he was one of the first, under the name “Uncle Bear”, and showed a lot of us (by example) how to do it. He is the publisher behind www.asparagusjumpsuit.com, and their twitter account @readwriteroll. NB: Asparagus Jumpsuit have almost finalized plans to switch to a new, more serious, business name. Follow now or the link may be dead when you do!
	Read a lot of fiction in a lot of different genres, to better understand the fundamentals of storytelling.
74.	David F Chapman (@autocratik of www.autocratik.com) is a “Writer, Ennie-winning TTRPG Designer, Creator of the Vortex System, Gamer, Editor, General Geek, RPG nerd and Autocrat” based in the UK. He is probably best known for his work as game designer on the award winning Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space roleplaying game for Cubicle 7 Entertainment.
	Don’t be afraid to go off of the rails. Some of my best gaming experiences have come with just letting the players do the crazy, off-adventure, bizarre plans that had me thinking on my feet.
75.	Burning Games (website, @burning_games on twitter), produce FAITH, a Sci-Fi pen & paper RPG that uses cards instead of dice, and are based in London, England, and the Spanish communities of Santander and Bilbao. You can buy their products with their Pledge Manager. Calos GQ from Burning Games offers:
	Prepare yourself to be unprepared. You should create a story that leaves room for things you were not expecting – listen to the players’ ideas and expectations and work with them.
76-78.	Todd Secord (@ToddSecord) is an Illustrator, Game Designer, Blogger, and more, and a member of the Nerd Tangent podcast (@NerdTangent). His website is United Nerdery.
	I let the players dictate the course of play as much as possible no matter what the game. So my advice whenever starting any new rpg is to keep the first scenario nice and simple. If you’re running a pulp genre – start a jungle quest for a lost artifact. DnD related? A basic dungeon crawl. Super Hero? A head to head against a rival villain in the city streets.
	With beginners, slow and steady wins the race. With experienced players the game system itself and how it plays will likely be the biggest attraction. In this case, allowing for a simple test drive generally gives way to more intricate possibilities. If we’re talking hardcore veteran players, they’ll likely push the possibilities right away if given an easy starting line. [Adjust your campaign planning accordingly.]
	Keeping those first few sessions to genre tropes makes it easier on players and GMs alike in learning a new game while still keeping it fun.
79.	RPG Stream (@RPG Stream) started with HeroQuest, then and followed that with RPGs: RuneQuest, then D&D. He is a self-described fanatic collector of fantasy miniatures.
	Study your module. Believe in your adventure. Improvisation comes later.
80. & 81.	Ken The DM(website, @Ken_The_DM on twitter) doesn’t give away too much about himself, but he writes a blog about gaming and is clearly passionate about the hobby and looking to make the jump into the industry as a professional (you can download his first attempt at a commercial module from his website). He offers two separate pieces of advice:
	Experiment. Play every RPG you can. I love D&D; it’s my jam. But experimenting with other systems made me a better dungeon master. Here are some examples: I stole the interlude system from “Savage Worlds”. Pure gold. Running “Everyone is John” taught me I could improvise a session cold. “Beyond the Wall” taught me how to run a shared sandbox. Running these games made my D&D game stronger. Regardless of what you love, play everything.
	and,
	Let go. Let your players participate in the world’s creation. Often (and I am guilty of this myself), we view ourselves as the sole sovereign of content, and players are mere toys for our amusement. Let it go. Let your players help build the world. I bribe my players to journal about their character’s experiences. This provides a steady supply of hooks, bonds, and content. Yes, you give up control and naming rights (the Dwarf, Drilly Drills, offered the innovative name of “Drills Hall” for her homestead), but you get a world that is ultimately richer, more vibrant and creative. Its not about the name, its about the lore you and your friends create.
82.	Triple B Titles (@Triple_B_Titles) are a family-operated independent game studio, creators of Ring Runner and Dungeons and Deuces. They are currently working on Popup Dungeon, a roguelike papercraft tactical RPG that lets you create any weapon, ability, and hero! Their website is www.triplebtitles.com (hint: mouseover the squares, then scroll down). Theya re also amongst the long-term supporters of Campaign Mastery.
	You’re only as valuable as what you bring to the system.
83.	Brabblemark Press (@brabblemark) are publishers of the Corporia RPG, whose kickstarter campaign I reviewed in Taking Care Of Business. Brabblemark are based in Chicago, Illinois and have gone from strength to strength since they first offered Corporia to Kickstarter.
	Be willing to abandon your scripted plots and story arcs; follow the players down their improvised paths.
84.	Dirk the Dice (@theGROGNARDfile) is from the GROGNARD file. Dirk is the host of The GROGNARD RPG Files podcast, and Tweets about Runequest, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, T&T (and other games from ‘back in the day’). He’s from Bolton in the UK.
	Always have an interesting encounter ready in your back pocket – just in case.
85.	rpgames.be (@RPGamesbe) is an RPG blogger & collector from Belgium, and a Buccaneer Bass crew member. He also has an occasional blog which looks at the Belgian RPG scene (and contains content of interest to those outside that country) – you’ll find it at this link.
	Don’t worry about the rules, focus on the story and have fun!
86.	Norse Foundry (@norsefoundry) are makers of quality dice (especially metal ones), dwarven coins, and bit more (order from their site (norsefoundry.com). They love to play the games that can use their products, and have an irrepressible sense of tongue-in-cheek humor, as evidenced by their “about us” page and the advice they’ve offered:
	Swing Hard and always carry a big metal D20!
87.	John Bennett (@JohnRPGdesign) is a freelance writer for the Pathfinder RPG and is currently the Line Developer for Shadows over Vathak published by Fat Goblin Games, amongst other professional achievements.
	To create the world and NPCs WITH your players. Fully involve them in the storytelling process.
88.	Sarah Wolf (@sarwolf0) has GM’d exactly once, and was initially worried that with that level of experience she would have nothing worth contributing! She is also a novelist and a CPA from Raleigh, North Carolina. She’s passing on some advice that her more experienced players gave her that she says really helped when she got started:
	Two [of my] players know the game rules well, so they told me to focus on story, not mechanics. That helped me prepare.
89.	Jeux et Féerie (@EtherneOfZula) is an RPG community/group from Monaco, and some of the tweets are in French (the name “Jeux et Féerie” translates as “Games Extravaganza” according to Google). There are some nice items available at the Jeux et Féerie website, new additions are announced via the twitterfeed. They have supported Campaign Mastery for years.
	Get the game and players before [you get] the rules.
90.	True Mask Games (@TrueMaskGames) is a “tiny indie game and RPG design studio from Austria” (Graz, to be more precise). “Gamers of the world unite!” They are currently working on a Celtic Mythology RPG (I know at least one person who will be interested in that, if it’s in English – and there is a very good chance that it will be, their tweets are!)
	Know your players and put a decent amount of work and passion into the game! Fun for everyone is the most important thing!
91.	Geek In The Closet (@GeekNTheCloset) is an aspiring roleplaying game designer, artist, cartographer, writer, heavy metal guitarist, and owner of the geekinthecloset.com Pathfinder RPG fan site, which was still in development when I checked (but looks extremely pretty and will be a quality presence on the web when complete!)
	Unlike board games which are typically enjoyable by strategically manipulating other players using a strictly enforced set of rules and predefined playing field, roleplaying games are unbounded by such conventions, and the rules serve only as a framework for setting the stage for fantastic scenarios that are limited only by the groups collective imagination and interests. As a GM, your role is to call upon them to create challenge, discard them when inconvenient, or even covertly bend them in the interest of entertaining your audience.
92.	Lucas (@EmbersDS) of Embers Design Studios, home of the City Of Brass, needs no real introduction here because I’ve gushed about his products twice now: The Book of Terniel, in Things That Are Easy, Things That Are Hard, and (more recently), Yrisa’s Nightmare in Yrisa’s Nightmare and other goodies. He’s been a friend and supporter ever since we first connected over the Terniel fundraising campaign.
	Remember it’s just a game. Have fun, don’t let the rules get in the way.
93. & 94.	The Carpe GM (@TheCarpeDM) is another Chicago resident, and felt that he couldn’t do better than to quote @TheAngryGM:
	“The point of your first game is to get the most basic skills down: Narrate and Adjudicate.”
	He added,
	“…and know who to steal from”.
95.	Erik Luken (@icehawke) owns Arkayn Game Designs, calls Elgin, Illinois home, and describes himself as a gamer, game author, geek, online DJ, and programmer. he also has an occasional blog about programming, gaming, and writing called pentarch.org under the name Shadow Network.
	Listen to your players and let their paranoid conjectures write the story.
96.	Basement Heroes (@BasementHeroes) is a #DungeonsandDragons adventure podcast. “Follow our misadventures as we bungle our way through #DnD 5th edition” under DM @hansenjames. You can subscribe to the Podcast through iTunes at podcast/basement-heroes. They haven’t said where they are actually located, but the GM is in South Salt Lake, Utah, so it’s a good bet that the other participants are also Salt Lake City residents.
	Do what you do and enjoy best, and your players will feel that passion and enjoy it too.
97.	Randall Newnham (@coffeeswiller) is a “geek, gamer, father, [and] game blogger”. he is also Playtest Director for Escapade Games and hails from Eugene, Oregon. He is currently working on the playtesting for a new game, Storm Hollow, which seems to combine elements of an RPG with a boardgame, and is described by Escapade Games as “an upcoming storytelling adventure game for 2-7 players where players can go on fantastic adventures in about an hour”. There’s an interview with one of the designers at this podcast site and you can pre-order copies here – not cheap, but high-quality boardgames these days never are. You can also drool over some visual spoilers released about 5 months ago at this link if you’re interested.
	Say “yes!” as often as possible. This gives the players agency in their story.
98.	R. A. Whipple (@RA_Whipple) is a retired PR counselor turned aspiring author who enjoys smooth jazz; classic films; and old school, evocative, social, tabletop Role-Playing in Warsaw, Poland, and another long-time friend through Twitter.
	Know and incorporate the player (not just his/her character) into the system/game. Engage & engross the player. That’s what I call ‘GM = System’.
99.	Rich Green (Twitter: @richgreen01, website: parsantium) is an D&D gamer & game designer and a bookseller who has the happy fortune to barrack for Palace (presumably Crystal Palace FC, since Rich is a Londoner). Author of the “Parsantium: City at the Crossroads” city sourcebook and the brand-new “Icons of Parsantium” – see Rich’s website for more information.
	I recommend reading widely – adventures, games supplements, novels, history & other non-fiction, comics, magazines, whatever – and always have a notebook (or phone/tablet note-taking app) handy so you can jot down cool ideas for your game that come to you when you’re reading.
100.	Peter Samet (@petersamet) is a “full-time film editor, part-time science fiction writer, [and] occasional existential crisis sufferer [who] spends way too much time trying to answer impossible questions”. I wanted to run a quote from Peter as a contribution to this post but he’s not on Twitter very much these days (by his own admission) and permission didn’t reach me in time. So I’ll have to settle for linking to his original tweet, instead.
	2:50 AM – 28 Jul 2015
101.	Mik Calow (@Vobeskhan) has been a Gamer for 30+ years, is a D&D player & DM, and a fan of sci-fi and fantasy. He also blogs and writes in between being a parent and grandparent in Leicester, England. He’s been a buddy of Mike’s on Twitter for a year or two.
	Don’t be afraid to say No to your players, if it doesn’t fit your campaign don’t allow it.
102, 103, & 104.	@Symatt (again):
	Oh no, more thoughts. What is meant by a “new GM?” A GM that has never played a game before and so doesn’t actually have a clue at all, or A GM that has been playing for years and so has witnessed many GMs good and bad? If you have decided to step into the role of GM through want or need (i.e. no-one else wants to do it) you will have a basic understanding of what you are going to do. A GM reads most of the book. Well, at least the “how to run a game” and the “dice rolling” parts. Saying NO and YES to players is part of the gig, it’s like saying ‘don’t be afraid to say “Role for Initiative”‘, it’s part and parcel [of what you do]. As a GM, you have got the game you want to run. You are excited by the game you want to run. That’s enough to start anyone on the path to “GM Enlightenment”. So I guess what I am saying is: No One is right. Just do it your way. Learn as you go. You will know what feels right for you and so what is right for your players and the Game.
	and, (Paraphrased and edited, any mistakes mine):
	Personal experience has shown that a player who becomes a [reluctant] GM lacks the motivation to learn how to do it well and so is terrible at it. It’s just not what they want to be, and it affects how they GM.
	and also, (Paraphrased and edited from a couple of conversations, any mistakes or misinterpretations mine):
	Trying to give advice to anyone is generally a difficult task. GMs should learn from playing and observing others play, but I have found that some players who become GMs can’t see past what they wanted when they were a player to the bigger picture. Different people want something different from every game, and its the GM’s job to satisfy all of them. If a GM does say no to something, or make it difficult-to-impossible, they generally have a very good reason – try to work out what that is before assuming it’s directed at you personally, and definitely before blindly saying ‘yes’ to the same question when you’re a GM.
105.	Paul (@spookshow71) is a lover of books, comics, movies and geeky stuff; a tabletop Gamer; an Engraver, Ex-Goth, and “Level 4 Dad” from the East Midlands, England.
	Watching, listening, and reacting to your players during the game is as equally important as how much preparation you do. Their engagement – their enjoyment – is the best gauge of your game’s success. Work with that, and you won’t go far wrong.
106.	Oz Garcia (@gash26) is “an ill fitting mansuit with spiffy magic fingers” into coffee, d&d, and dccrpg [Dungeon Crawl Classics] who channels Teddy Roosevelt from Austin, Texas (see his profile pic!).
	Put all the extra books, supplements, and splat books, aside and play the bare bones game once in a while. In the end all those books are are marketing ploy and the real purpose of the hobby is to HAVE FUN!
107.	Total Party Thrill Podcastis a podcast for GMs and players where the hosts discuss their campaigns, and more, in order to inspire yours. You can subscribe via iTunes. They also have a twitter account, @TPTCast.
	Prepare the least amount you need to run a session. Trust in your ability to improv.
108.	@Mundangerous from Mundangerous.com is one of the hosts of the Total Party Thrill podcast and an occasional RPG blogger in his own right.
	There are hundreds of RPGs out there, so play the ones that facilitate the stories you tell. Don’t feel like you need to fit a square peg into a round hole.
109.	Emily Rochelle (@TheCraftyDM) is part of the ‘She’s a Super Geek’ live-play RPG Podcast, in which (in most episodes) the contributors play a different RPG live “on the air” and record what happens – sort of a virtual playtest for the rest of us. Her credentials don’t stop there, check out her twitter account for more.
	Remember that everything is made up and the points don’t matter as long as everyone’s having fun.
110.	Chris Jensen Romer (@CRJ23) is into History, Science, Games, and Ghosts. He also has a blog about RPGs at “And sometimes he’s so nameless” but that hasn’t been updated in a while, perhaps because CJ has been overseas.
	Always give the players what they want – but not what they were expecting.
111.	Dreaming Glo (@Scarletrogue12) is a relatively new friend on twitter (about 6 months, now, I think) who describes herself as a “Wife, Mom, RPG Player, Gamer, Browncoat, Whovian, Poet, Witch, Dreamer.” Her Twitter avatar is a pair of ruby slippers (I couldn’t tell at twitter’s icon size, it looked like a cork being released from a bottle to me!).
	Know your NPCs inside and out. They can make or break your game; they matter, and are a great tool. Good NPCs make the game great – Too many DMs focus so heavily on the rules they forget how important the NPCs are.
112.	Chief Shark Boner – a.k.a. Devon J Kelley (@Shark_Bone of the Shark Bone Podcast) – is a new acquaintance (the shark bone podcast Sandbox #21 is the one in which Lucas [tip 92] remembered my article [see my “interview” with Tracey Snow, above] and was kind enough to link to my article – which is how I became aware of the story). Devon is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.
	Know your story. It’s easier to improvise when you know where you’re going.
113.	Adventurer’s Quarter (twitter: @AdventQuarter, facebook page / website: denvergamestore) is a game store promoting RPGs in the Denver area – specifically, in historic Olde Town Arvada, Colorado.
	You author the book that is your setting and style, but your players tell the story and get to fill the pages.
114.	Diana Stein (naiadstudios.com) is a very gifted artist and a fantasy DM from “outside Detroit”. She tweets as @d_h_stein.
	To new GMs: running a game is like riding a roller coaster with multiple end points you can’t see. At the end, it’ll be ‘let’s go again!’ To old GMs: listen to your players again. They want to bring fun to the table too!
115.	Sarah Otto (@ruminateyou) is a Secondary Art Pre-Teacher, Game Master, Minecraft Lover, CMU Student, and Anime Club member. She doesn’t tweet often, and I was pleasantly surprised when she responded to my invitation.
	Stop planning and start playing. GMs go above and beyond to plan a spectacular game when, usually, the players won’t tell the difference. Some of the best stories happen when you reach the end of your plans and improvise. Imagination is best left to is own devices. Now, I’m not saying to ignore the usefulness of prebuilt tools. But before you make new monsters, learn to use the ones in the books creatively. Give them different names and different features on the fly – just use their stats (this is known as “re-skinning” – Mike). When you learn to let loose and shape the world at will, the players will too.
116.	Chaserone (@wardostarks) is a self-confessed nerd who works in IT and occasionally writes. Based in Montana, he and I go back to shortly after I joined Twitter. Strangely enough, I think we’ve talked more about general stuff than gaming over the years.
	Rules can be guidelines.
117.	Nercore T-Vegas (@NerdcoreTVegas) is a “Writer and event organizer active in the building of literary and gaming communities in NW Pennsylvania”. He has a blog at Nerdcore T-Vegas but hasn’t posted to it for getting toward a couple of years – but he tweets more regularly.
	Rules are meant to enable the story, not disable it. There is leeway for actions that enhance the gaming experience.
118.	James Arthur Eck (@JamesArthurEck) is an electrical engineer, fantasy novelist, and online game designer. Author of “A Different Reign on the Horizon” and maker of the Mind Weave RPG.
	Take player ideas seriously and let them work or have a chance of working if at all plausible.
119.	Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips needs no introduction to long-time readers of Campaign Mastery, but for anyone who doesn’t know, he co-founded Campaign Mastery and was a weekly contributor for the first three-and-a-half years here – so at least 1/4 of this history belongs to him – but it should be more than that because without him (amongst others), there would have been no Campaign Mastery. The Roleplaying Tips newsletter (aside from a couple of individual articles here and there) was the first place that my gaming content was published regularly, and continues to offer tips every week (with the occasional break). Subscribe via the link to have the newsletter delivered to your inbox. Johnn lives in Beaumont, Alberta, and also has a twitter account @roleplaying tips through which he regularly tweets gaming goodness (including links to my articles, Thanks Johnn!).
	Have more fun at every game. Do this by improving your game master skills so you gain confidence. Shore up your weaknesses, but do not focus too much on those as that’s not where you derive your fun from. Instead, figure out what you like most about GMing and focus on taking those skills to 11.
120.	Matt from dicegeeks.com runs an epic site with updates around-the-clock and a monthly newsletter amongst a whole heap more content. He’s also on Twitter at @dicegeeks where he’s just about as active.
	Allow your players to tell the story with you. Some GM’s, when they start out (me included), have grand stories with plot points down to the smallest detail. If you have a story like that, write a novel or a screenplay. Do not try to GM an RPG campaign around it. Give the players some direction, but always let their choices take the story to places you never dreamed of. You won’t regret it, and your players will love you for it.
121.	Christian Lindke (@ChristianLindke) is an MBA, SF and Fantasy Fan, Film lover, Pen’n’Paper RPG Gamer, PhD Student, and Non-Profit Program Director in Los Angeles. He also finds time to Tweet, occasionally blog to “Advanced Dungeons And Parenting“, and post to facebook. Sleep must be an optional extra.
	on’t be afraid to say yes to your players’ “crazy” ideas. The best game-related stories come from collaboration.
122.	D. Hunter Phillips (@Digitalculture0) is a Sci-fi & Fantasy Author, roleplayer, gamer, and board game reviewer from Washington DC.
	Incorporate backstory elements from the players’ characters.
123.	MITC Productions are “the producers of the Monkey in the Cage and Useless Drivel Podcasts and purveyors of gaming, geek culture, and everything in between.” Hailing from Southern California (which is a very big place, I’ve been there), their twitterfeed @MonkeyInTheCage is mostly used to announce new podcasts and otherwise keep people up to date with what’s happening.
	Take it one step at a time and definitely don’t over-think it!
124-130.	Rory Klein (@RoryGKlein) is a “Husband, Father, IT Solution Provider, D&D Veteran, Old School RPG Gamer, Board Gamer, PC Gamer, Blogger and lover of Coffee”. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa and doesn’t tweet very often – but replies a lot. He was very helpful and encouraging when I was diagnosed with Diabetes earlier this year and is easy to “talk” to via twitter. He also has lots of good advice:
	You need to sell the campaign to your players. If you not excited about the adventure you going to be running, your players certainly won’t be.
	You need to engage with your players; find out what they like, what they want to achieve and find a way to incorporate it into your campaign. An excited DM and invested players will make for a great campaign.
	Don’t worry about the rules, don’t worry about the “bling” these are all secondary – get your players as EXCITED as you are about the adventure you going to be running.
	Once the campaign is running it is a group effort to maintain the story, help it grow – don’t let that responsibility fall onto just one player and or the DM.
	Listen to your players and likewise players need to help the DM achieve the goals of the campaign.
	Between sessions use email to engage your players, encourage your players to message you with input. Ask how you can make things more fun, ask for feedback, never be afraid of criticism, how else will you be able to improve your skills as a game master.
	Most importantly have fun don’t turn the campaign into a chore and remember it is a group effort and the campaign will only be as memorable as the people taking part in it. So put away those phones and electronic devices focus on the story at hand and let your imagination run free…
131.	enduringsecond (@enduringsecond) is a new contact made through the process of organizing this party special. I can never look at his or her twitterfeed without finding something new of interest (most recently, “what it felt like to test the first Submarine nuclear reactor”). Interested in RPGs, virtual worlds, serious games, space travel and science fiction. Lest that put you off, he/she also re-tweeted about Tunnels And Trolls not long ago!
	Be fair and consistent, nothing worse for a player than a GM who seems arbitrary or unfair.
132.	Asako Soh (@Asako_Soh) (aka Johann Gottlieb Fichte on Twitter) is another long-time twitter contact who has often been supportive. He describes himself as a Roleplayer and academic interested in “philosophy, neuroscience, books, whisky, and comedy” – and an “Occasional pipe smoker”. He’s an Active twitter user. I remember him once telling me that both “Johann” and “Asako” are names of his characters – even the gender assignment in this introduction is speculation on my part: “Johann” is a male name, “Asako” is a female – so who knows? It doesn’t bother me, and neither should it bother anyone else – just enjoy the frequent interesting tweets and interact.
	Ask the players what they would like to experience and provide it.
133.	Robert Oglodzinski (@writinggames) – I could try to guess how to pronounce Robert’s surname but I’d probably get it wrong and wouldn’t want to insult him by trying. He is a game writer / designer from Warsaw, Poland who is currently working on “CD Projekt Red” for Cyberpunk 2077 and also curates links about retro video games through Paper.li/AncientScrollPL (I tried to get a link but could only link to a particular issue, so check his twitterfeed if interested and ignore any link your browser adds automatically to the last sentence). He also tweets a LOT about RPGs and is a new contact for me – but one that I expect to check regularly.
	Fun & freedom of choice before rules.
134.	Gamemaster Raphi (@GMRaphi) describes himself as a “Neutral Good role playing game geek, experienced Game Master, [and] part-time mmo addict” from Olten, Switzerland. Do yourself a favor and check out his Deviantart page if you like eye candy for your games/imagination. He tweets and re-tweets a lot when he gets excited about something – currently The Force Awakens.
	Try to play RPGs with your friends. Usually that’s easier than making friends with people who happen to like the same games as you do.
135.	David Jacobs (@il_beavo) is another new contact resulting from the organizing of this collection of advice, but he became an enthusiastic supporter right away. Located in the Blue Mountains, Australia, which is the mountain range west of Sydney. He describes himself as a “gamer, carer, and cat-parent; former political hack, and occasional short-form writer (but not actually a beaver. Sorry.)” – you probably need to know that his profile pic is of a Beaver in order to get the joke. David tweets & re-tweets on a variety of topics – everything from Australian politics to history to humor (of the very Aussie sort evidenced by his profile).
	Keep the pace up! Boredom is death. Chandler’s Law: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand”.
136.	Eric M. Paquette (@ericmpaq) is a long-standing twitter-friend. He’s from Ottawa, Ontario, a player (both PC and GM roles), and interested in all games. He also serves as CanGames’s Web Content Director, and as RPG & Children’s Games coordinator. A lot of his tweets are about Sci-Fi/Fantasy media, RPGs, and social issues/awareness subjects.
	This is a cooperative game with the whole group. This game belongs to the whole group. Ask questions, listen, and be a fan of the protagonists. Remember, characters in great stories fall and then rise.
137.	Tobias Wichtrey (@twoddr) of twoddr.net is a software developer, D&D dungeon master, mathematician, musician, and more, who tries to be a game designer. Tobias is from Augsburg, Germany. For various reasons, he rarely updates his blog any more and, in fact, has only recently returned to Twitter after a lapse of almost a year.
	Learn to incorporate your player’s ideas into the game even if they contradict what you originally had planned.
138.	^(;;;)^ obskures.de (@obskures) tweets “geek stuff in Denglish (German-English)” about “Books, comics, games, movies, music & skeptical humanism”. He also warns, in his profile, that “Your mileage may vary!” – but I’ve never regretted following him a couple of years back. As you could guess from his language comments, his website is also in German, probably because that’s where he lives!
	Be prepared for improvisation and don’t let the rules get in your way. A ruling is more fun than a 2h discussion. Your mileage may vary. If you enjoy the rules debate process, hold it separately after the game so that those who don’t can leave or watch TV.
139.	Joe Kushner (@JoeGKushner) was last mentioned in these pages in describing the context and origins of the article Always Something There To Surprise You – Plots as Antagonists, but I’ve known him on Twitter for a lot longer than that. He’s a “long-time role playing gamer, miniature painter and currently supply chain analyst” in Chicago, Illinois. His website is Appendix N, “Inspired by the original Appendix N from the 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. Musings on how to use things ranging from reading a variety of materials, games, movies, and miniatures for your role playing games.” But he hasn’t posted very much there lately, due to a combination of circumstances – ones that I doubt will last forever.
	Never stop reading. Outside of standard inspiration from genre-appropriate material, everything can be filed for later.
140.	Seasonal Feelings (@MattyD47) is another new acquaintance from something approaching my own neck of the woods – at least from an American point of view – since he calls Hobart, Tasmania (Australia) home. His twitter profile states that he is a “Player of guitar. Modifier of Nerf guns. Batman enthusiast. Quite tall. Comms for @procreateapp (an art-creation app), cast member of @TheGamesMaestro (a musical web series inspired by Dungeons and Dragons). Afraid of ceiling fans.” (There’s that dry Australian sense of humor again!)
	Roll with it – whatever the players do, however the dice fall, go with it. Work it into your story. Flexibility and improvisation are invaluable.
141.	TPK Games (@TPKGames) is a third-party publisher for the Pathfinder RPG based in Waterloo, Iowa. You can find out more about their products from their facebook page. They certainly have a number of them that interest me! Their advice is short and to-the-point:
	Story > Rules.
142.	Lindan (@Cthuloid) is a “Progressive technocrat” who “codes .NET for a living” when not “Despairing over world stupidity [or] wasting time with RPGs, Football, World of Tanks and League Of Legends.” From Wiesbaden, Germany, his tweets are a mixture of English and German and on a variety of subjects, including many on RPGs. Another new contact coming out of this party!
	Make it clear from the start that making the game great is a SHARED responsibility between you AND your players.
143.	Michael from (@TheRpgAcademy), on the other hand, is an old buddy on Twitter, from Cincinnati, Ohio. He was last mentioned here as the instigator of An AcadeCon For Your Consideration, where I described him as “a supporter of Campaign Mastery and an occasional conversationalist on the subject of gaming for several years”. He co-hosts the “Table Topics” podcast and is a DM and player on “The Campaigns Podcasts”, both on The Rpg Academy website.
	Don’t talk so much. As a GM your job is to be the Ring Master at a circus. You show up to set the stage and then fade into the background until you need to change the scenery. Some of the best RP moments come in the silence that happens when the GM isn’t afraid to sit quietly for a bit.
144.	Lena R. Punkt (@Catrinity) comes from Hamburg, Germany, and tweets in German (but occasional re-tweets are in English) – and, as you’ll see from her advice, her English is pretty good – better than Google’s German-English translations! :) Lena’s website, Xeledons Spiegel (translation: Xeledon’s Mirror) is also in German. Her currently preferred game is DSA (a German RPG, translation: The Dark Eye (refer this wikipedia page if, like me, you have never heard of it before. This article on RPG.net, which describes the basic rules, might also be of interest). Lena’s recent tweets have been about music. She has a boring office job during the week but gets to play RPGs with her friends every weekend.
	Find out what things your players enjoy or don’t enjoy. The best adventure won’t be fun if your players don’t like the genre or setting or kind of gameplay.
145.	Civilian Zero (@DownToDM) has just moved to Orlando, Florida, and has no group to DM any more. Nevertheless, RPGs are the subject of most of his tweets. He also has a website, Hastur Hates Us All, that’s worth visiting for blog posts and graphic resources (read: pretty pictures) suitable for Cyberpunk and Fantasy gaming (and readily adaptable for superheroes).
	It’s just as important to learn to improvise as it is to learn to prepare well. No plan survives contact with the players.
146.	Kennon Bauman (Twitter: @TheUniverseGM, website: www.theilluminerdy.com) is a professional analyst and lapsed historian, a father, a gamer, and your go-to guy for secret history, UFOs, and conspiracy theories, from Baltimore, Maryland.
	Treat every session of a game like it’s the only session you will ever run. Make a clear beginning/middle/end, and pack all the fun you can into every moment.
147.	Doc Wilson (@DocDraconis) is a “Singer, Gaming Humorist/Cartoonist, Gamer, Game Designer/Publisher, Writer, Movie Lover” from Canada and a new acquaintance. His blog/game company is Shared Weave Games.
	While GMs are these in equal parts: Writer, Improv Actor, Lawyer, Mediator, Salesman, Referee, Mentor, Mad Scientist, and Ambassador, they must always remember that he or she is this one thing above all else: A friend.
148.	Rob Bodine (@GSLLC) is from the Gamer’s Syndicate LLC (site can be slow to load) in Manassus, Virginia, who are the hosts of synDCon, the Washington DC metropolitan area’s newest table-top gaming convention. They also put out a paper.li, “#GSLLC’s #Gaming and #Geekery” – again, can only link to specific editions, check their twitterfeed – which has gaming links in the Headlines, Arts & Entertainment, Videos, and Sports sections, just for starters. Always worth checking out, the Gamer’s Syndicate is (are?) another long-time twitter acquaintance.
	The most important advice to DMs (and players, for that matter) is to understand that different people play the game for different reasons, and not one of those reasons is objectively wrong. I wrote an article for Loremaster.org a while back that was lost when the site crashed, but it wasn’t anything ground-breaking. It talked about the various types of players, which others have discussed before. My list included, among others, storytellers, combat tacticians, actors, and gaming significant others (“GSOs”), who are non-gamers playing simply for the sake of their significant others. Every single one of those people has as much a right to the game as others, and it’s important that each one have fun. What’s difficult about DMing is making sure those players are happy around the table despite the presence of other player types. So, my advice to the DM is to start from the following perspective: Acknowledge the existence of all of these different player types, and do your best to accommodate all of them. Keep in mind that *most* players are willing to bend a little, and their usually forgiving, so as hard of a job as DMing is at times, everyone’s on your side and are there to help.
149.	Billiam Babble (@billiambabble) offers hand-drawn modular dungeon sections and other such goodies through inkedadventures.com. He has a general gaming blog at Adventures and Shopping.
	I think my advice would be (which stems from anxiety and regret of so many missed opportunities) is never be frightened to make both the rules and a scenario, the world, your own. Also if the players have gone too far off the main path, tell them, even if it is out-of-character.
150.	Twice Jaked Potato (@Jakeplusplus) hasn’t done much tweeting for a while, but has done lots of replying. I first encountered Jake in #RPGChat (which I wrote about as part of my article on the GM’s Help Network. He re-blogs strange stuff at Crease++on tumblr, worth checking out.
	Go with the flow. Guide your world, but don’t forget to let it guide you, too.
151.	Randelf Snowwalker (@deadorcs): “Writer, gamer, blogger, thinker, husband, father”, from Topeka, Kansas. Lots of RPG-related tweets, which may slow down until January because he doesn’t think he’ll get to see The Force Awakens until then. He has a website that hasn’t been updated in a couple of years at The Dead Orcs Society but which has archives which may be worth your time.
	No matter what RPG you’re playing, it’s about the PCs being characters in a story. Always hunt down the story to tell.
152.	Brian Fitzpatrick (@gameknightrvws) – Fitz has been a long-time supporter and fan of Campaign Mastery from his home base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, through his old website, Game Knight Reviews (presently being archived through Gamerati) and his own game-product publishing company,Moebius Adventures, whose products I’ve reviewed a couple of times (Places to go and people to meet and A Serpentine Slithering To Adventure). Note that the links in those articles may have expired – check the new site at www.moebiusadventures.com if the links are dead, or you want to check out the more recent products that he has on offer.
	Set things in motion and be willing to let your players lead the way to unexpected destinations.
153.	Joshua (@einsteinsarcade) is another long-time supporter of Campaign Mastery (lots of my friends have shown up for this party)! He’s from Austin, Texas and “Enjoys Games (Analog & Digital), Horror/SciFi/Fantasy Media, Faires/Conventions/Festivals, and Things Occulted”.
	Never forget, as a GM, you’re there to facilitate storytelling.
154 & 155.	Lesser Gnome (@LesserGnome) is an Old-School Role-Playing Game Publisher offering Old-school sensibilities with modern presentation, from Arizona, USA. Past products include the Ennie-nominated “Whisper & Venom” and they have just released a limited Collector’s Box Set of their latest offering, “Death & Taxes” – go to their website lessergnome.com for more information.
	Love your ideas but accept that some won’t work in-game.
	and,
	Difficult people cannot be fixed and ruin games.
156.	A night on the game (twitter: @gamingtales) is described in their twitter profile as “a transcribed recording of the ups & downs of a group of players trying to roleplay over the internet, recast into literary style. And other RPG, TRPG & gaming-related bits”, but most of the tweets in recent times have been more general interest RPG and video-game material. There is also a gaming tales blog but it doesn’t seem to be updated very often.
	Make sure the players are going to have fun. Obvious but crucial.
157.	Bill Bodden (@BillBodden) is a “freelance writer, gamer, geek, and mostly nice guy. Mostly.” His occasional blog is at billbodden.com, and reveals his usual haunts as being the “upper Midwest” of the USA. His CV is impressive to say the least, having contributed articles to half-a-dozen magazines, had his fiction published in one gaming magazine and two anthologies, and written gaming-related material for Fantasy Flight Games, Black Library (a division of Games Workshop), Green Ronin Publishing, Margaret Weis Productions, and Modiphius Entertainment.
	Be flexible; there’s only so much prep you can do. Sometimes you have to fly by the seat of your pants!
158.	Ollie Gross (@derO23) is “married, father of twins, cat wrangler, gamer, TV junkie, movie buff, comic book nerd, metalhead, [and] indentured in the digital saltmines”. Games, TV, and movies are also the subjects that he mainly tweets about. His website is “Exquisite Waste Of Time” but it hasn’t been updated in a couple of months. Which doesn’t mean you won’t find anything of interest/value there!
	Never work against your players. RPGs are always a collaborative effort & shared responsibility for everyone to have fun.
159.	Sir Gareth the GM (@SGKeep) is primarily a tabletop gamer, but also “a dabbler in many things geeky” who loves to GM and who is working on a tabletop #rpg called Pythos in his free time. His website is Sir Gareth’s Keep and holds a couple of posts I’ve definitely bookmarked for eventual reading.
	Be flexible. Like any work of art, tailor the game for your audience (your players). Don’t be afraid to tweak the script!”
160.	Rob Wilkison (@Misfit_KotLD) is a “history and RPG geek, old and grumpy, [and a] Bastard GM”. He also admits to being a Metalhead and feminist. Tweets or Re-tweets something every couple of days on average from Jacksonville, Georgia, USA, and joins in other conversations with similar frequency. His blog is Random Thoughts – Musings of a lazy scholar and GM but hasn’t been updated in over 6 months. That said, there’s a 19-month gap between that item and the previous one, so Rob clearly only hits “publish” when he has something to say, and a quick glance was enough to tell me that I wanted to read it all from start to finish.
	Fun comes first and foremost, even for the GM.
161.	Steve Wollett (@SteveWollett) is a self-confessed Geek, Gamer, Writer, and Movie Buff from Nottingham, Maryland, whose interests include Cosplay, Comics, Collectibles, SciFi, and Horror. He tweets and re-tweets a lot, little of it RPG related, but most of it’s interesting to me anyway. Your mileage may vary.
	Your job as a GM is to create the story, so long as you push the story forward and everyone enjoys it, you have done good.
162.	The Vulture GM (@The_Vulture_GM) describes himself as a “Gamer & GM for DnD 5E and Pathfinder, DCC RPG fanboy, Thinker of things, Producer of minimal content, Half-lefty, [and] Mediocre min-maxer since ’83”. Lots of his tweets are game related, and he tweets good advice like this, and what he has offered the 750th Party:
	Forever learn. Learn from others experiences, your own mistakes, other game systems, other genres.
163.	G*M*S Magazine (@gmsmagazine) is a “website all about Boardgames, Role Playing Games, Card games and some things geeky” who are reaching out for Patreon support from their fans. Based in Brighton, (England presumably), their website (also known as G*M*S Magazine) has a wide variety of content – a few articles, a few podcasts, a few videos, and a lot of reviews of Books, RPG materials, board games, card games, and more.
	Go with the flow of the players and have fun. Remember it’s not about you, it’s about the players and having fun, so let them do and play as they wish and reign in some common sense, but not your sense. Then come into the game and join the flow, but your players should come first.
164.	Shane Hotakainen (@veganshane) is a vegan nerd into punk rock and gaming in various forms, from St Paul, Minneapolis (and I hope I spelt that right!). He’s also a “Star Wars dork” and “Whovian Browncoat”. Most of his tweets are not currently game-related.
	Be flexible and don’t fall in love with your story, because it is not your story. It belongs to you the players. No plot survives first contact with the PC’s so enjoy where the game takes you.
165.	Robert W. Thomson (@RobertWThomson) is a long-time friend of Campaign Mastery, and used to head Four Winds Fantasy Gaming. He was generous enough to write the forward to Assassin’s Amulet for Michael Tumey, Johnn Four, and Myself. Way back in April 2011, I reviewed “Players Options: Flaws” (On The Nature Of Flaws). Sadly, Four Winds closed its doors, and Robert took on a more everyday occupation doing other things that he loves. Currently located in Butte, Montana, he has only recently started using his twitter account again on a regular basis, but seems determined to make up for lost time! Not a lot of his tweets are gaming-related, but there’s the occasional gem, such as his “OH @ The Gaming Table” tweets, eg “I have as much gold as I have XP!” which often produce a belly-laugh. Hopefully he sticks around for a long time to come!
	Let the players tell much of the story. Have an idea, but be willing to add or adjust based on player desires or actions. If the characters must be led in a specific direction, do your best to make it feel like it was their choice to do so.
166.	Paul from Dingles Games was one of the first supporters of Campaign Mastery, asking us to review his online Monster Generator for 3.x, something that I did way back in March of 2009. What impressed me most was the way he responded to reports of flaws and shortcomings in his product, taking immediate remedial action. I am pleased to state that in the years since, that review has sent more than 3,500 potential users his way (I don’t know if we still are, but at one point we were his number one source of hits), and his generous acknowledgement of the review has sent traffic back Campaign Mastery’s way as well. The generators at Dingle’s Games have only diversified and improved over the subsequent years, as have the number of glowing reviews he has received. He had a twitter account, which is how he learned of the 750th party and made his contribution, but it appears to have closed since. UPDATE: It hasn’t closed, Paul has simply changed the account – it’s now @NPCaDay. Paul is located in Nottingham, England.
	DMing is not you vs the party, but the party participating in, and helping write a story in which you have created the framework. Most important is everyone having fun. It’s better to let some things go rather than creating an argument.
167.	Sean Holland from Sea Of Stars has been blogging for almost as long as Campaign Mastery has, and is even more prolific, posting daily or close to it. You could spend years working through the archives. There are currently 738 posts categorized as “World Building”, for example. I have huge respect for that; no-one who hasn’t tried doing anything like it can appreciate what it takes to post something every day for six-and-a-half years! So I was really chuffed when he offered a contribution to the party:
	Talk to your players. Learn what they want from the game, what problems they are having and what excites them. Communication is the key to a successful game.
168.	Matthew Bowers (@chaoticDM) is a “Level 27 solo Dungeon Master and microblogger” who has been “DMing by the seat of my pants since 2009”. He tweets regularly and converses readily. He has a blog at chaoticdm.wordpress.com but understandably hasn’t updated it since January 2013 – probably when twitter took over his life! Matthew is from Arlington, Texas. He and I have been bumping into each other on Twitter for years.
	‘Yes, and…’ is the best way to make your players feel like they are directly contributing to the game narrative.
169.	Grumbling Dwarf (@GrumblingDwarf) represents the Wisconsin Tabletop Gaming Community, based in Madison, Wisconsin – RPGs, Board Games & Miniatures Gaming. The account is managed by @SeanPKelley. The first non-RPG tweet I found in the timeline was a R.I.P. for Christopher Lee (can’t fault them for that, I posted one myself, but that was quite a while back). Often, there’s only one tweet a month for this account, so it’s not very active – but worth paying attention to when they do.
	Embrace any feat and just put yourself out there and be open to feedback. It is not to criticize, but to make you better.
170.	Sean Longinus (@CroweLonginus) is a contributing RPG writer, aspiring fiction & poetry author, and a HUGE NERD (his capitalization). Tweets are irregular and infrequent but worth attention, just like those of Grumbling Dwarf.
	Trying to force your players along the path you want is like bathing a cat: no-one’s going to have any fun.
171.	Scott Hardy (@Gamesdisk) joins many more conversations than he starts – a man of relatively few words. His advice follows the same pattern:
	Have fun when you GM.
172.	Katrina Ostrander (@lindevi) is a new acquaintance, like many of those who responded to my request for contributions. She is the Fiction editor at Fantasy Flight Games and former producer for #Star Wars: Edge of the Empire (playing that on Saturday!) & Age of Rebellion RPGs. A Blogger, gamer, GM, and writer from Roseville, Minnesota. Her blog is at triplecrit.com but hasn’t been updated in a while – as usual, though, the archives may yield treasures.
	Get to know your players and discuss expectations beforehand, especially regarding tone, humor, and lethality.
173.	Chris Kentlea of Ennead Games was kind enough to contribute to the party! Ennead Games’ site is chockablock full of content and it doesn’t look like thinning out any time soon. (I stopped scrolling down when I got to page 17…) They also have to have a several hundred products for sale through DriveThruRPG. (suspicion confirmed – the tally stands at 336 items!) That makes them a Big Name Publisher in my book, so I’m grateful to Chris for participating! Ennead Games also have a twitter account: @EnneadGames.
	Don’t be afraid to say yes when a player asks ‘Can I do (x)? As long as it makes for a good story, then go with it. Conversely, don’t be afraid to say no if it makes the story or game worse.
174.	Roberto Micheri (@Sunglar)… Roberto is a great guy, and one of the first RPG contacts I made on Twitter. He describes himself as an “educator, lover of life and literature. Big Babylon 5 fan! My favorite pastime is pen & paper role playing games.” He’s active in the Puerto Rico Role Players (which is where he lives) and frequently promotes Campaign Mastery to them through their facebook page (I gave them and him a shout-out in the “Facebook” section of The GM’s Help Network).
	Be consistent and relax, it’s only a game. Consistency is key, more than being witty or creative every time, make sure you play every time. If you set a schedule, keep it. There will be great sessions, there will be less stellar ones. Don’t get discouraged, play on. Nothing kills a campaign like not playing! If you’re consistent you’ll get to practice all the tricks, try all the things you’ve always wanted to do. If the old advice is a writer writes, a Game Master runs games… But relax, it doesn’t need to be perfect, you’ll make mistakes, that’s OK. No one is perfect, your players will understand. Don’t beat yourself up if things didn’t go as planned – soldier on, game on, and have fun, always!
175.	Eric Weberg (@eweberg) is a husband, father, tabletop gamer, developer, DBA, project manager, admin, and IT-jack-of-all-trades in Jackson, Wisconsin. Another of those “doesn’t tweet often but pay attention when he does” accounts.
	Go fast and go big. People don’t play Tabletop RPGs to count coppers. Hit ’em hard with crazy stuff.
176.	Rambling Roleplayer (@RPGRambler) writes of himself, “I play games and talk about them sometimes. I’m also a husband, dad, boardgamer, wargamer, amateur carpenter, and all around geek.” He generally blogs regularly, though he’s had time off recently – in fact, his blog (The Rambling Roleplayer) should have new content up by the time this is published. He offered a very thoughtful reply to my question:
	Familiarize yourself with the system, but don’t feel like you have to commit all of the rules to memory. A general understanding of the broad concepts and an idea of where in the books to look for specific rules will serve you just fine. Also, start the game with all of the dials at their default setting. Sometimes the temptation is very strong to jump in to a complex story with high-powered characters right out of the gate, but this is probably a mistake. Instead, your first game should be played with first level or “beginning” characters, or perhaps even pre-generated characters. If there are lots of “optional” or “advanced” rules for your game system, consider implementing only a few or none of these rules for your first few games and then introducing such rules gradually. Also, run a published scenario rather than a homebrew adventure for your first game if possible, preferably one designed for new players and game masters. Trust me, focusing on building a good foundation at first and then adding complexity will pay dividends later, leading to a much richer and more enjoyable game experience for everyone.
177.	Travis The RPG Guy (@therealrpgguy) runs a gaming YouTube channel, and is another new contact.
	Do not “tell” your players what happen. Show your players through descriptive words – how things smell, taste, look, sound and feel.
178.	Misadventuring 101 (@rpginitiative) broadcast their weekly Pathfinder game in Maryland as a podcast. Listen in at the initiative podcast.
	Expect the unexpected and be willing to go (within reason) where your players want to take the story with their decisions.
179.	Larry Hollis (@Xer0Rules) is another of those twitter users that I’ve “known” off-and-on for years. Yet another Maryland resident, a fair amount of his tweets are usually about RPGs or related material. He converses more often than he tweets. Larry’s also been known to have a strong opinion or two.
	“Yes, and/but” is the best thing a GM can have in their toolbox. Using them with care will always add to your game.
180.	Mark Caldwell (impworks.co.uk) is a web site developer by day and a Writer, RPG Gamer and CG Artist by night. Impworks is his website, and Liverpool, England, is where he usually hangs out.
	It’s a good idea to vary the difficulty of encounters. If the difficulty of tasks constantly increases at the same rate as any improvement in PC abilities it’s hard for players to judge how much better they have become. So it’s a good idea to have PCs sometimes face a challenge [that] they [have] faced before to show them just how far they’ve improved. This might be having them fight opponents very similar to a memorable encounter from an early adventure, have a rogue pick a lock like the ones they faced in their first dungeon, or have them repeat a hack from early in their career. Recurring opponents can be particularly useful for this if they improve only a little between encounters.
181.	Darred Surin (@verycuteGM) is “a young woman exploring gaming whether it be in the form of video, board, or role-playing. I am out on a mission to try it all plus with more cats.” She has a YouTube Tube channel and a website that at first glance is fading into disuse and mostly about her cats – dig deeper and you can find RPG stuff, often biographical in nature.
	Try to limit your use of ‘no’ during gameplay. Let the player us their imagination, let them attempt crazy antics! It’s fun when they succeed or drastically fail. The worst thing you can do is stifle their imagination.
182.	Leonardo Gedraite (@LeoGed) is from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Most of his tweets are in Portuguese, and so are many of his re-tweets, which seem to outnumber the former by a huge margin, as he himself admits in his profile. Translated, that reads: “A Herpetologist looking for Tadpoles, Good Books and Questions. Random tweets on: Science, Comics, RPG and Fantastic Literature (And many re-tweets)”. His twitter account is protected – you can ask to follow him but he gets to choose whether or not to let you do so. I translate his feed into English to read it; most of his tweets/re-tweets seem to be humor or about Brazilian issues, with the occasional nugget of gaming gold. His advice is simple but profound:
	Have Fun!
183.	The Gamefather Moe T (@WindsorGaming) is the/a “Gaming ambassador for the Windsor [Ontario, Canada] area. Event organizer, reviewer and player.” He has a website, the Windsor Gaming Resource that probably isn’t all that relevant unless you are likely to be in the area, though some of the reviews might be of interest. A new acquaintance through this project, I liked his answer so much that I have deliberately made it the last word.
	Never forget it’s a game. You are a group of friends gathered together to play a game and have fun, nothing more.

I agree with all the advice offered above (even the ones that are contradictory; that just means my agreement is qualified in some way).

Onwards and Upwards

And so this 750th post celebration comes to an end. I hope everyone had a good time, and takes away some good memories. And now, it’s time for me to start thinking about the next article, because that’s the reality of blogging. (Oh, #$@@! I just realized what this means: I now have less than 250 posts to try and think of a way to top this as an event…)

This article is the result of some recent work that was done for the next adventure, “Boom Town”, in the Pulp Campaign that I co-referee, “The Adventurer’s Club”. Players in that campaign don’t have to worry, I’m not going to give away anything that will damage the game!

How big is a LOT of money – say, $100 million? In Pulp Campaign currency? In large bills? I recently had to work out the answer to a very similar problem, and got some very surprising answers along the way – answers that challenge everything I’ve ever read in terms of treasure for RPGs.

Currency Conversion: The effect of inflation

Pulp campaigns are generally set in the 1920s or 1930s, and ours is no exception. We’ve specified that the date is 1930-something but have played (and will continue to play) very fast and loose with what that “something” is – we have no problem with making events from 1938 and 1932 happen more or less concurrently, so long as it makes internally-consistent sense to the plotline.

The first problem that has to be faced is currency conversion due to inflation. Fortunately, the sourcebook on which the campaign is based includes a table showing the value of $1 (2005) equivalent for every year from 1920 to 1939. This table isn’t in the Currency chapter, it’s buried in a sidebar on page 261 – but it’s there.

So, problem solved, right?

Not really. This is a world in which the social repercussions of the Great Depression were not as severe as they were in our history. The easiest way to achieve that consequence is to have the Depression itself be less severe, and shorter. So we’ve decided to use the pre-depression value from 1920 of $10 – meaning that 1$ “then” will buy you what would cost $10 in the modern (2005) era, or its cultural equivalent (if there is any).

To further complicate matters, our experience is mostly in Australian dollars – but what should we use as our conversion factor? The modern-day exchange rate (about 0.72¢ US)? The 2005 value (between 0.73¢ and 0.78¢ US, depending on the month of the year)? The 1920 rate (0.72¢ US again)? Or the 1935 rate, which is used as a standard in the game system for such things, and quoted as being 1 Aust Pound = $8.24 US)?

Here’s how we’ve cut that particular Gordian Knot: if we’re converting our experience of everyday prices, we use US 0.75¢ for every Australian dollar. So, a new car costing about A$25,000 in 2005 would cost about 2005-USD 18,750 – which we already know is the same thing as 1930s-USD 1,875. If we then need to convert into 1930s-Australian-Pounds, we divide by the $8.24 quoted in the Pulp book to get £227.5 – and then round off to an even £230.

But most of the commodities and objects we care about will be quoted in US dollars, so that’s the backbone of the conversion. So how much additional inflation has there been in the US since 2005? The answer, according to www.usinflationcalculator.com, the answer is $1.22. So that lets us convert modern-day (2015) prices to Pulp prices (starting to see how complicated all this can be?)

The NTD unit and the “M” prefix

From the very first time we ran the pulp campaign, we’ve struggled with terminology. You can see how clumsy it is to include the year in order to distinguish between 2005-US-Dollars and Pulp-Era-US-Dollars. Even “1930’s USD” is too complicated, and when spoken aloud, an easy source of confusion. We’ve tried half-a-dozen different solutions but none have been completely satisfactory. It was while thinking about this article (I always think about my articles before I write them!) that I finally found a good answer. From now on, “$” will refer to 2005 US dollars, a “new” currency, NTD will refer to nineteen-thirties US dollars, and an “M” prefix will describe Modern-dollars.

What we have established so far, then, is:

M$1.22 = $1 = NTD 0.10, and A$1 = $0.75, and NTA£1 = NTD 8.24.

So intuitive is this new pair of definitions – NTD and M – that I don’t even have to define “NTA£”, the meaning is self-evident.

Size In NTD Currency

So, getting back to the question that was at hand – how big is $100 million USD in NTD?

$100m = NTD 10m.

In hundred-dollar bills, the largest note in US currency, that’s 100,000 banknotes.

So how much does a million dollars weigh?

Believe or not, you can get this information on the web! US currency hasn’t noticeably changed in weight since then, and all the denominations weigh about the same – it’s quite different in Australia, where the notes are all different sizes.

A million dollars in US $1 bills is equal to 1 metric tonne but weighs about 1.1 tons by U.S. measure, or 2200 lb. Each time the denomination of the bills is increased, the weight of a million dollars decreases. When weighed in $100 bills, a million weighs approximately 22 lb.

Is that all?

It is, and it’s enough – because that means that 1 million notes weighs the same whether we’re talking $1 bills or $100-bills. So our NTD 10m is 220lb in weight. Unless you’re phenomenally strong, that’s about as much as you would ever want to try carrying.

How much space does it occupy?

Of course, the same is true of how much space a million dollars takes up. U.S. currency is 0.0043 inch thick. A stack of a million one-dollar bills would measure 358.33 feet tall, but if you use $20 bills, the stack is only 3.58 feet tall. $100 bills = 8.592 inches.

And our NTD 10m would therefore be 85.92 inches tall in NTD 100 banknotes if in a single stack, or 8.592 inches in ten stacks.

Next, we need to look at the other dimensions of a US banknote. Google reports that this is Width 2.61 inches x length 6.14 inches.

I drew some rough sketches, and found that the closest arrangement to a square that I could reasonably make with those approximate proportions was 13″ x 12.3″, consisting of 5 columns of bills side-by-side above a second row of 5 columns of bills:

The more rows you add, the more perfect you can make the square – but the more unreasonable the size. But ten stacks, 13.05″ x 12.28″, and we already know that each stack would be 8.592″ inches tall.

I have a suitcase that is just a little larger than that, in all three dimensions. With a little padding, our NTD 10m would fit in it quite nicely. I wouldn’t want to carry it, it weighs about twice what I can comfortably manage – but I’m not particularly strong.

Gold

Might some other commodity be more convenient? Well, when you want to talk about something universally valued, the next commodity that comes to mind is gold.

Quite some time ago, we found a US Government PDF which lists the values over the last century or so of all the metals mined on earth. We’ve referred to it any number of times since. It only goes up to 1998, but it goes back to the 1800s, depending on the commodity in question. All the values have been calculated in 1992 USD.

One dollar in 1992 is worth $1.39 in 2005, according to the same calculator linked to above. But the prices are (generally) per pound, or per troy ounce – so there are other conversions involved.

Gold is a problem however, because during the Great Depression, private ownership of the metal (other than in jewelery quantities) was made illegal – so we don’t have any values in our reference document prior to 1968.

Google to the rescue again! Entering “Price of gold 1920” gives the following: “The official U.S. Government gold price has changed only four times from 1792 to the present. Starting at $19.75 per troy ounce, raised to $20.67 in 1834, and $35 in 1934. In 1972, the price was raised to $38 and then to $42.22 in 1973.” So the value we want is NTD 20.67 per troy ounce, and there are 14.5833 troy ounces in a pound (or 32.1507 in a kg, which is more convenient because that’s what the game system uses. But never mind that).

So NTD 10m = 10,000,000/20.67 troy ounces = 483,792.9 troy oz, or 33,174.4 lb (15,069kg), or 16.6 TONS. Oh, my aching back! Gold is heavy.

In fact, we were so discouraged by this result that we didn’t even bother checking platinum; and, as for silver, it had no chance.

Diamonds

The other obvious choice is diamonds, preferably uncut, and hence untraceable. All sorts of things affect diamond values, so it was very hard to track down any conversion information, but eventually we found a quote that stated that gemstone quality diamonds were worth roughly $7000/carat in 2014. That sounds promising!

Applying our conversion factors (and assuming that there’s no real difference between 2015 and 2014 values), that gets us 7000/1.22/10= NTD 573.77 per carat. Which means that NTD 10m would be 17,429 carats.

That was enough for me to decide that getting that many uncut diamonds would be almost impossible in the time frame required; there simply wouldn’t be that big a demand. 1000, I might have believed, maybe even two. Seventeen-plus? No.

My co-GM wasn’t completely convinced.

How much does a carat weigh?

This was something I didn’t know off the top of my head. The answer turned out to 1 gram = 5 carats, or 1 lb = 2267.96 carats. Call it 2268.

So our 17,429 carats would have totaled 7.7 lb. That’s nice and portable!

How large is a 1-carat diamond?

This answer absolutely astonished us. A one-carat CUT diamond has a spherical diameter of about 6.5mm or 0.2559 inches. It’s about the same size as large buckshot or pellets. So, let’s imagine a rectangular container, about 3″ square. How tall would it have to be to contain our 17,429 carats?

3″ x 3″ works out to 137 cubes each of 0.2559″, side by side. In actual fact, you could only get 11 x 11, or 121, in an even layer. So if all our diamonds were cubical, that would be 17,429/121 = 144 layers, at 0.2559″ per layer, or 36.8″. That’s right – three feet tall.

But we’re talking about spheres, and spheres can pack more compactly than cubes (or less, if they are just tossed in a heap – something I remember from a 1950s or 60s Scientific American). Each set of four spheres creates a hollow space that can partially contain the next row. 11×11 could contain a new layer of 10×10. As a rough estimate, you can get about 26% more in any given volume when packing spheres vs cubes. So, in reality, our column would only be 74% of 36.8″, or 27.2″ tall.

2 1/4 feet is better than three feet – but still an impractical total.

In the end, I satisfied my co-GM with a point about the circumstances that were to be in effect at the time that ruled diamonds out of the question, and the discussion moved on to the next point in our planning.

But after he left, I got to thinking….

Wait a minute – diamond scarcity is linear?

If $7000/carat is even close to a reasonable estimation, every treasure table I’ve ever seen in FRP is wildly off the mark. Why? Because the implication is that diamonds are found in inverse proportion to their size. For every two one-carat gems, you would find one two-carrot gem. For every 4 one-carat gems, you would find 2 two-carat gems and 1 four-carat gem. The size and frequency of occurrence, multiplied, give the same constant value. Assuming all else to be equal, of course.

Yet, everything I knew about gemstones in an AD&D/Pathfinder world – or a Runequest world, or whatever – had value going up with increasing size by more than just the multiple of size. Bigger gems are rarer.

If finding gemstones twice the size were twice as rare an event as the linear expression suggests, it’s easy to calculate that the value would be proportional to the square of the size – still assuming all else to be equal. If it were three times, you can soon show that the relationship is roughly value = size to the power of 2.5. In fact, log(N)/log(2) works out to be the exponent of size, for those mathematically inclined, where N is the number of n carat stones that has to be found before you find one of 2n size.

This is way too complicated for ordinary game use – and too inflexible – but it highlights the general principle, which is that larger = rarer = more valuable than size alone would indicate.

The largest rough gem-quality diamond ever found was 3106.75 carats (it was cut into 105 smaller stones, including the Greater and Lesser Star Of Africa). If the relationship was linear, that would mean that total diamond production up to that point was 3,107 one-carat diamonds.

In fact, the human race currently mines about 133 million carats of diamonds a year. That makes diamonds of the record size at least 42,086 times more rare – that’s how rare they would be if we found one per year. But we’ve been mining diamonds for a lot longer than one year – at least a decade at the current rate or close to it, I suspect, and then lesser quantities for centuries earlier. We could conservatively increase that rarity factor by anywhere from 10 to 200. I suspect 50 to be close to the right number – so 2,104,300 times as rare and valuable as expected. If we keep up current production for that long, I would expect an equal stone to be found sometime in the next 150 years – but not for at least 50.

Collectible Coin Values

You can never tell where the next useful factoid in a game or game design is going to come from. In this case, the information comes from a perhaps unlikely combination of sources: a couple of websites on the valuation of collectible toys, and the TV show, Pawn Stars (more the latter than the former).

The basic appraisal method for rare and vintage coins, as explained on the show, is as follows: there is a base value, which is the inherent value of the object. In the case of a precious metal coin or bar, this is the value of the gold, silver, or platinum it contains (and definitely NOT the face value). There is then a simple multiplier applied to this value, which represents a number of other factors: the desirability of a particular item (which is related to the rarity, but also takes into account aesthetics), the condition of the item, the overall scarcity of items of this particular type and subtype, and the specific scarcity by condition.

You simply look up the type of coin, and in some cases, the location of minting, and find a table which cross-references the date of minting and the condition to get the multiplier.

This process takes all the complication out of the problem. You don’t need to know fancy maths, you just need a value that seems reasonable. In most cases, precious metals never lose their intrinsic value (which can be looked up online for minute-by-minute accuracy – for example, right now, gold is fetching A$46.478 per g, while the current US price is $1078.24 per ounce. (Which makes gold worth about 122% more at the Western Australian Mint (theirs was the price I quoted) more than it is in the US. Of course, by the time you bought and shipped it here, anything could have happened – and gold is too heavy to airfreight! The electronic transfer of ownership, on the other hand, is quick and simple, and banks and governments do that sort of thing all the time.)

Other collectibles

Other types of collectible, from stamps to rifles to toys, operate on the same basic system. There is a base value, which is the depreciated purchase price, and a multiplier that combines the same specifics. However, there are two big differences: the first is that these are manufactured commodities, and the rate of manufacture is something that can be adjusted according to demand; and the second is that there is no absolute inherent value, which means that for a while, the value of such things drops toward zero. The collectability is being outweighed and overpowered by the depreciation, i.e. by the assumed wear and tear. The result is that what should be a relatively smooth progression is full of lumps and bumps.

Art Appraisal

Both of these are fundamentally different to the values attached to works of art. While the size of a painting or sculpture plays a role in assessing it’s value, it’s by no means the bottom line. Of greater importance is the ‘name’ of the artist, and the quality of the work as it presents in the modern era. Put those three items together and you get the base value of the work.

To those considerations you need to factor in the number of works by the artist – and, in this case, more generally means more valuable, especially if the artist was making his living from his art, because that signifies a commercial appeal (and also determines the frequency of forgery, which often goes hand-in-glove with his popularity). Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), who few will have heard of, holds the distinction of being the single most-commonly-forged artist; in 1940, Newsweek reported that out of 2,500 paintings produced by Corot, 7,800 were in the United States. Corot sometimes authorized poor artists who imitated him to put his name on their paintings so that they would be easier to sell. In an ARTnews survey of art forgery, experts were asked, Who are the ten most faked artists in history? The almost unanimous vote went to Corot. Of the rest, the most recognizable names are Salvador Dali, Vincent Van Gogh, and – possibly – August Rodin. At least, I’m not an expert, but those are the names that I recognized!

Such imitations form a third category of artwork, usually considered distinct from actual forgery. Many famous painters had workshops where they taught students their art, and some went so far as to permit the students to paint over sketches that they themselves had in fact done. So the lines between artist and forgery are a lot more blurred than most people realize.

Great store is set by the provenance of art – who sold it, who bought it, and are there any suspicious gaps in the ownership records.

On top of all of that, there comes the question of damage to the work. This is generally not like the depreciation or deterioration or even condition used by other collectibles markets; instead, it tends to be an accelerated linear scale based on the amount and severity of the damage. Slight damage to a small area has a small negative effect on the value; greater damage to a small area has a disproportionate negative effect, and so does slight damage to a larger area. Substantial damage to a significant portion can render a valuable work worthless – or not; you also have to take into account the location of the damage. In general, damage to the face of a subject costs more than damage to their clothing, which costs more than damage to the floor or background, or lesser figures.

Art Restoration “repatriates” damaged art to something as close as possible to the original, and techniques have come a very long way. But it’s always a risk; there have been occasional failures, in which a painting worth X, which would have been worth ten or twenty times as much if successfully restored, has been completely destroyed by the process.

Nevertheless, that’s how the current value of a piece of art is established. But, there is another complicating factor: most (collectible) artwork is sold at auction. And every sale at a higher price increases the value of all other works by that artist, while every sale at a lower price – or failure to sell at the ‘reserve,’ or minimum asking price, reduces the value of all other works by that artist. It’s not unknown for owners of extensive collections by a given artist to bid the price up on other paintings by the same artist, regardless of whether or not they like it or actually desire to buy it, simply to protect the value of what they already own.

And one more complication: buyers have been known to buy based not on what art is worth, but on what it will be worth. Few artworks by famous artists deteriorate in value, assuming that they are properly maintained; growth in value may slow or stagnate, especially if the style goes out of favor, but it will rarely go down, damage notwithstanding. On top of that, every year a few paintings are damaged or destroyed, either by accidents, failed restorations, vandalism and/or crime, or carelessness, with the first cause ranking way above all the others. That inherently makes the remainder more rare. The longer a painting has been in existence, the greater the opportunity for these forces to come into play, so age has a definite but vague relationship to value.

The bottom line is this: Art is worth what someone will pay for it.

Real Estate

The final commodity of value that I’m going to discuss is land. When you see a house for sale, how has that value been set – and what’s it really worth?

Property valuation is not an exact science, but some years ago I had the opportunity to chat for a while with a broker and was astonished by how far removed from a science it actually was.

The oft-touted first consideration is Location, or more specifically, the general locality and its’ economic prospects. Next, there’s proximity to a past sale value, which establishes a baseline. Ideally, like will be compared to like, in terms of building size (usually measured by the number of bedrooms and the overall size of the home). Relative location compared to the past sale is also important; closer to the economic heart of a location, even by a few feet (or meters) can have a small but appreciable impact on the value estimate. Another all-important factor is the relative “worth” of homes – what’s been happening in the housing market lately, and what has inflation been like?

Next, the agent will typically consider any changes to the neighborhood since the reference sale took place. Does the home now being sold have greater access to amenities than was the case when the reference home was sold, for example. Have bus routes changed? Is there a new railway station? Has a shopping mall opened just down the street, or a new entertainment venue?

All of that will get taken into account, more-or-less intuitively, to provide a “base value” of what the agent thinks this particular home is actually worth. On top of that, agents will sometimes add on any taxes that will have to paid, stamp duty, etc, and their own fees or commissions; or these may simply come out of what the owner actually receives of the value when the sale takes place. The latter is more common, I think.

It’s actually quite routine for two separate values to be placed on a prospective sale – one represents the reserve, or the minimum price that the seller will accept; the other represents what the agent thinks the property will actually fetch in an auction. Which is, of course, the next variable. Again, experience permits a Realtor to make an educated guess as to how these will play out, based on recent auctions in the area.

I have to admit that I was rather surprised that, as far as the broker I spoke to was aware (and he had been in the real estate game for 30-odd years), there had never been any attempt to statistically model the different influences on price to produce a more definitive set of estimates. There aren’t even any guidelines to follow – no hard-and-fast, universally-accepted ones, at least, beyond the self-fulfilling maxim that property values always go up in the long run.

What’s more, the broker didn’t think that such a study was possible; there were too many variables to be taken into consideration, and the values in any give case too “noisy”. Nor would he be all that interested in the results of such a study, for the same reasons.

Most of what a real estate agent does, in terms of property valuation, is use instinct and experience and an awareness of local issues and improvements to guesstimate a base value and a level of interest – which, in turn, will manifest in more spirited bidding in an auction, and a greater likelihood of a higher price. Beyond that, there is their ability to talk up the property; the more positive things that the agent can use as selling points, the more the property is (nominally) worth.

The bottom line: Like art, Real Estate is worth what someone will pay for it, and Real Estate valuation is a performing art – with no disrespect meant to any real estate agents who may happen to read this!

The treasure comparisons

Look at the treasure tables from any game system – at least from every game system that I’ve ever seen – and you will find patterns that look nothing like what I’ve discussed here. They don’t even come close to being a representation of reality, let alone a reasonable one.

Coins are worth their face value, nothing more nor less. Gems are worth an amount rolled on one or more dice – either a linear scale or a bell curve. Ditto jewelery and art and other collectibles like rare books.

The question is, can we do better? I think so.

Adapting the collectibles system for Objects & Commodities of Value

I think there’s an easy way to adapt the “real life” system for valuing commodities into a simple system for GMs to take control over treasure, with pronounced advantages for the game.

The random component

Let’s start with a simple principle: a random roll that yields a value, in which extreme results are possible, but unlikely. There are three ways that I know to achieve this:

• Cascading Die Rolls: roll d whatever, and if you roll the maximum, add the maximum result to a subtotal and roll again. There are variants, which make cascades less likely, for example roll a d6. If you roll a 6, add five to the subtotal and roll 2d6 the next time. If you roll 11 or 12, add ten to your tally and roll 3d6 – and so on. This stacks bell curve upon bell-curve to produce an open-ended roll – but one in which the most likely result is fairly low: average on the first d6 comes from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, and is therefore 3 and 1/3. In one-in-six cases, you then get to roll 2d6, with possible outcomes of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10, 10, or an average of 6.1666 – but because these only happen in 1 in six cases, the contribution to the overall average is 1/6th of that, or about 1.028. In two out of 36 cases (i.e. one in 18), you then get to roll 3d6, with possible outcomes of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15, 15, 15, or an average of 10.125 – which only adds one sixth of one 18th to the overall average, or 0.09375. The probability of increases become increasingly remote as you go up the scale, and hence the impact on the overall average, which currently stands at about 4.455. Note the pattern of increasing maximum results (multiples of five) – these are increasing with each additional dice, and will continue to do so until they get to five in length – and then it’s back to one again. Or you can simply cap the results, say at the 3d6 level, resulting in a minuscule increase in the average. With that, our maximum result is 5+10+18=33.
• Multiplied Die Rolls: roll d whatever, and then multiply the result by d something-else. Let’s say d10 x d6. That gives a mean result of 19.25 but a maximum result of 60. Every dice multiplier that you add increases the maximum faster than it does the mean. But I don’t like this method, because the means are so high, and it takes a LOT of die rolls to get them down – and you have to divide the end result by a constant to keep the results somewhere in line. d10 x d10 x d10 x d6 / 60 gives a maximum result of 100, but an average of 9.36 – but the calculation is pretty hard work.
• Divided Die Rolls: paradoxically, it’s a lot easier to work with Divided Die rolls. This can either be AdB/CdD in structure, or dA x dB / dC. An example of the first might be 5d6/d6 – which gives a maximum result of 30, but an average of 6.85; and there’s just one in 46,656 chance of getting that maximum. The alternative is even easier: d6 x d10 / 2d6, for example, which has a maximum of 30, the same as before, but a mean of only 2.87. The calculation is relatively easy because it doesn’t need to be exact; the multiplication is easy, and if we say “round down” then all we care about is how many whole results from the dividing die roll will fit within the result. For example, d6 x d10 / d6: rolls of 4, 8, and 3 respectively, so 4×8=32, and 32/3 rounds down to 10.

On the basis of simplicity and speed, I recommend the simpler form of the divided die roll. There may be occasional minor anomalies, such as the chance of getting a 12 being higher than those of an 11, or the fact that it’s impossible to get a 19, 23, 26, 28, or 29, but those are worth living with. If they really bother you, subtract 6 and add a d6 to all results of 6 or more.

The rational component

Next, we need something to interpret those die rolls against. And the simplest thing in the world is for the GM to do a quick and simple graph. There are two basic forms, as shown:

Use the top one for precious metals, gems, jewelery, art, and real estate; use the bottom one for anything else. If in doubt, decide for yourself whether or not this is an item that is ever likely to decrease in value. If not, use the top one; if it is, use the bottom.

The top graph shows a gentle curve that steepens before leveling out. The bottom shows a curve that drops, levels out, drops again, steeply increases, flattens, levels, and then rises sharply. The main difference is that the second one declines below “base value” before rising, and it’s a lot lumpier and misshapen than the first. NB: don’t use these graphs, draw your own – these are just examples!

Combining Roll and Graph

The far left is the minimum random result, the far right is the maximum. Simply estimate by eye where on the graph your result falls and look at the vertical value relative to the base line.

To do that, you’ll need to assign a vertical scale. This can be whatever you want – just do a rough one by hand if you like. There are two options: the first assumes that this is a logarithmic graph (usually base 2 or base 10), and the second is a standard linear graph. I recommend the former for the former type of curve and the latter for the latter.

Base 2? Base 10? Why? Base 2 because that means that you are reading off how many times the base value has doubled – a relatively simple calculation to perform; Base 10 because it’s a standard that every scientific calculator can handle (such a calculator can also handle base 2 if you know the maths of logarithms, but that’s too esoteric to go into here).

Either way, it means we get to set a maximum value for whatever the PCs find, relative to the base value that we assign for the commodity.

On this version, I’ve simply divided the top one in half (by eye) and then halved each of those halves to get four divisions. Each will represent two doublings of the base value. That means that the maximum value is 2^8, which you can count off on your fingers anytime you need to (if you don’t know it by heart): 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256. So the peak is 256xbase.

I’ve done the same thing in the green (profitable) part of the bottom graph, and divided the bottom part the same way. The divisions aren’t exact, exactly as you would expect. The in-profit part divisions represent a multiplier of 1+ 2 per division mark, while the lower divisions are 75%, 50% and 25% of base, respectively.

To use these, I simply roll a result for whatever it is that the PCs have found using the divided die roll, find where on my graph for that commodity that puts me, read off the adjustment, and apply it to my base value.

Using d6 x d10 / 2d6: I roll a 9 out of 30, so I come across about 1/3 of the way and then back a tenth (by eye) and find myself almost exactly at the mid-point between base price and the first mark, representing one doubling – so the value of the item found is 2xBase Price.

Same roll on the bottom graph: this time I get a four, so I go across about one-third of the way, then back about half-way (which gets me to five) and then about 1/5th more, and find myself about midway between the 75% and 50% mark – so what has been found is worth 60-65% of base value; there are lots of them and they aren’t very desirable at the moment.

Top one again, and this time I roll a zero – so this example is worth base value.

Bottom one, and this time I roll a 15, half-way across the graph – finding an example that is past the bottom point of the graph but only just beginning to climb in value; it’s between 25% and 50% of base value at the moment, perhaps a shade close to 50% – call it 40%.

If you want a higher chance of getting a more rightward result, use a smaller divisor on the divided die roll. One d6 instead of 2d6, for example.

The collateral benefits

The curves that you draw for your graphs tell the story of the commodity in question, but you are in command of interpreting it. If the curve rises steeply, it means the value is climbing quickly – why might that be the case? If the curve is flatter after a steep curve, it means the value isn’t climbing as fast as it was – why might that be the case?

Attaching a reason to any given change in a valuation curve not only gives you more information about whatever it is that has been found, it gives you an avenue for converting bookkeeping into roleplay. A player correctly interpreting the description of an object into a probable value also gives you a chance to embellish your campaign history, and in the process, embed clues to current events for the players to pick up on. if there’s a particular historical episode that you want to reference as adventure backstory, simply salt an encounter with a relevant period item instead of a randomly-chosen one; telling that item’s story and description gives you a window into the past, which you can use to deliver that backstory.

Suddenly, everything not only is connected to everything else, it feels connected to everything else. What was perceptibly random has been given meaning, and a narrative value beyond mere worth.

Level of differentiation

How many graphs you use is up to you. You could use just one for all precious metals, for example, or one each for gold, silver, and platinum, or one each for coins from the Kingdom of Gunwalla, or one for each type of coin from that Kingdom. You can be as explicit and specific as you want. Since it takes seconds to draw a rough box, seconds to roughly divide it horizontally into quarters, and seconds to draw a curve, there is no reason not to have a hundred of them, produced ad-hoc as needed.

If you want a little consistency, use one master graph to cover a group of relevant commodities and subsequent detailed graphs to make finer adjustments.

Using biases

Finally, you can bias the results. Replacing the d6 on top with d4+2, for example, obviously biases the results to the higher end of the scale somewhat; but it’s simpler just to add something to the pre-divisor roll. This can be used to cover makers with known reputations for good quality of workmanship, or fame, or whatever.

By the same token, adding anything, even something as small as +1, to the divisor makes a massive difference to the end results that are possible, biasing results to the lower end of the scale. A craftsman with a reputation for shoddy workmanship, for example, or an artist regaled widely as a “hack”.

The tools are all in your hands, and very easy to use; what you do with them is up to you.

Okay, so this is Campaign Mastery’s 749th post – and you know what that means? It means it’s time to break out the party hats…!

GMs sometimes ask more than one question. Where these directly relate to each other, or the context is important to the answers, they are generally lumped together. When they aren’t, which is far less frequent an event, they get split up and answered separately. Which brings me to today’s topic: Writing characters out when players leave the game.
	This question comes from Nic, who wrote (regretfully, more than 5 years ago): Hi guys, I have three questions which I hope you can answer (though not all at once, as they’re unrelated to each other): 1) What kind of “trapdoors” do you use to ensure characters can be written out of a campaign? Sometimes a player can’t continue to play for whatever reason, and I’m sick of the clichéd, “He got killed,” “He just left,” solutions. It’d be nice to have a story fueled reason, and one that does not preclude a character from making a return at a later point. 2) Do you utilize handouts for campaigns/adventures? More specifically, I’m about to begin a campaign in my own world setting, and I’m wondering should I provide a handout with some background reading? If yes, what should I include and how detailed should I get? 3) I often have the need to bounce my campaign ideas off others, to point out massive plot holes and the like, or just for some extra inspiration and ideas. My problem is that anyone who I could plausibly do this with is someone who I already game with. Can you recommend any decent online forums or the like where GMs congregate to help each other out? If there isn’t one in existence, are you guys in a position to begin one? Many thanks for your time. I love your website and hope you can answer my questions and gain some interesting topics to post about. Keep up the good work! Cheers, Nic. PS, Thanks for all your help with my campaign so far!
As I explained in the last ATGMs, I don’t know whether Johnn offered Nic some guidance at the time, but I dashed off a quick note in reply that – in hindsight – was barely adequate. Because these questions are completely unrelated, as Nic himself suggests, I have been answering them properly in separate ATGMs posts – here’s a link to Answer #1 and here’s Answer #2. A while back, in preparation for these articles, I discussed the questions with a number of my other GMs, and between us, came up with answers of… let’s just say, “varying” depth. Their thoughts have been folded into the response presented below.

There was a time when this question would have been so much easier to answer. But that was a long time ago – a couple of years at Internet Speed… what follows is a potted and possibly myopic review of RPG-related inter-GM connectivity. Bear with me, it will all make sense in the end.

Person-to-person

In the really bad old days, GMs were expected to make – and learn from – their own mistakes. It wasn’t that asking another GM for help with a problem was socially-unacceptable or anything, it simply didn’t seem to occur to people. I was lucky in that I had a fellow-GM first as a player-peer and then, as a mentor. Most people didn’t.

That didn’t mean that we didn’t learn from each other – we did. We stole ideas and techniques from each other all the time, absorbing them by osmosis, and bull-session, and from Dragon magazine’s columns, and by playing in each other’s games. But we didn’t solicit advice from each other.

I can still remember the first time I admitted to another GM that I was having trouble coming up with a plot solution to the corner the players had painted themselves into, and asked for suggestions – though I no longer remember anything else about the event! He looked at me a little strangely, and then offered a couple of ideas – none of which I used, but which did spark my own creativity and give it a bit of direction.

After that, it somehow seemed to become more acceptable amongst our circle of players/GMs to reach out for assistance when we needed it. It still didn’t happen often, but every now and then, someone would ask for input.

Bulletin Boards

For the truly geeky, the 80s also brought the home computer, and with it, access to Bulletin Boards. As home computing grew, as shown in the graph on the right (sourced from this Ars Technica article, where it is available in much more detail), these became more popular – at least until the coming of the web, but I’ll get to that in due course.

The basic principle of a Bulletin Board is this: someone starts a discussion on a particular topic, and anyone who visits the board can read what’s been said. Anyone who signs up (and sometimes anonymous visitors) can post a reply, which forms a permanent part of the conversation.

Some bulletin boards were very general, and may have had a category of threaded conversations about RPGs (well, about AD&D, I expect, given the era); others were more specific. You could visit this board to talk about technology, another for politics, and so on – and, given the synonymy of audience, game-related bulletin boards were fairly common.

Newsgroups

For even longer than there have been home computers, there were newsgroups, and they function in a very similar way to a bulletin board – they just did it through email software. Post a question to a newsgroup, and you could get back hundreds of replies – or none.

Bulletin Boards through the web: Forums

The Web changed everything, or so it seemed. Certainly, as computers became more graphical (spurred on in part by the growth of the web’s graphical capabilities), bulletin boards (which are inherently text based) were forced to evolve. Nevertheless, they remained popular through the initial website boom.

They worked in essentially the same way that they always had. You went to a website, clicked on the entry in a master list of subjects or categories, and began reading curated discussion threads.

Chat Rooms

The next big development was the chat room. These made it easy to drop into a themed room on RPGs – avoiding those rooms in which people were actually playing by chat! – and chatter to other GMs from anywhere in the world about the hobby, about life in general, or about some problem that you might be having. The actual help that you got was sometimes a question of pot luck, but you soon learned which times of day were most likely to be productive (unsurprisingly, these synchronized with US and English/Western European work/study practices – usually between 8 and 9 PM (their time), respectively.

The big problem with Chat rooms was that, for the first time, conversations were ephemeral – they didn’t last. That slowly began to change as storage media became cheaper and of greater capacity, however. But eventually the chat rooms either became forms of social media or vanished.

Yahoo! Groups

At about the same time as Yahoo were setting up their chat system, they also created their own version of Newsgroups, which they called (strangely enough) Yahoo Groups. It’s a sign of how contemporary these events are becoming that Yahoo Groups are still around, though they are relatively unloved these days, slowly being strangled by dedicated Facebook pages.

Google Groups

It was only a few months later, as I recall it, that I started hearing about Google Groups. These took about another year to actually manifest (again, from memory), and – again – they are still with us, though slowly becoming depreciated in the face of social media. They even survived the transition into Google+ more-or-less unscathed.

As evidence of how interconnected all these ideas were, Google Groups also provides access via the web interface with Newsgroups (remember them?)

The biggest difference between Yahoo and Google Groups, and what had gone before, was that you didn’t need to run special software or do anything fancy in order to create one; these suppliers provided everything you needed. All you had to bring to the table was an idea, and an email address – and they would even supply the latter if you needed one!

Some people suggest that it’s easier to join such a group than to leave one. I’ve never had any problems, but YMMV.

Rise Of The Blog

If the web was the killer that (almost) killed bulletin boards, WordPress almost killed everything else when it made the blog easy and accessible (well, relatively so). Forums like Barrock’s Tower (on which I was increasingly active until it died) shut down. Google and Yahoo groups began to evaporate – the group never goes away, it just doesn’t get much use any more. Dedicated websites were either shut down or migrated onto the WordPress platform – or one of its less ubiquitous rivals. (This is a pet peeve of mine – the Wayback Machine preserves the web pages to tell you how great a resource used to be without conserving that resource if it was designed to be downloadable. When people talk about how big the internet is, they don’t realize that we’ve literally thrown away most of what there was before the year 2000. Don’t get me started…)

In fact, Campaign Mastery exists because Johnn Four and I had an email discussion about archiving past articles on his website and whether or not to migrate Roleplaying Tips onto the WordPress platform – something that Johnn eventually was able to do, using expertise gained while getting Campaign Mastery up and running…

These days, there are hundreds of RPG Blogs. But 90% of the blogs that were alive and kicking when Campaign Mastery was just starting are now dead. And so are 90% of the blogs that started at about the same time we did, the “Campaign Mastery” generation. And 90% of the ones that replaced those. Longevity alone has made CM one of the great RPG blogs (of course, I like to think that content is the reason we have survived, but it’s honestly equally attributable to the old publishing virtues of regularity and reliability – in other words, hard work over a long period of time).

Publisher-hosted Forums

At much the same time as Campaign Mastery was having it’s second birthday, game publishers began getting very serious about their in-house blogs and public forums. Sure, these are going to be system-specific, but there will be a certain amount of portability, even if the system in question is not the one that you are playing.

There was a time – only a few short months ago – when that alone would have been sufficient answer to Nic’s question. But then came the news that WOTC was shutting down its forum, a decision that was to take effect on October 29th, but was delayed a few days (without explanation). Any content not migrated elsewhere on that date was simply deleted, lost forever. The Killer: social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter. What I can’t answer is whether or not the lost pages can be found via the Wayback machine – can anyone shed light on that?

So far, to the best of my knowledge, they are the only game company to have taken this step, and the social media fallout was (ironically) quite critical, which may delay or even defer any such decision by anyone else.

That said, many of these publisher-hosted forums are extremely picky when it comes to following their rules. I got kicked off the Hero Games forum, for example, because in my first post I announced that I had written an article offering some house rules for the system. In fact, I was kicked off so hard that I couldn’t even read the announcement that I had been evicted. Less than community-spirited of the moderators, but that’s their prerogative; I simply didn’t go back. But follow their rules and you should be fine.

Social Media

These days, the killer is social media. And that’s a problem, because the other interfaces (even chat, though it didn’t start that way) all curate their content and enable users to search it. Facebook will let me know how many people have liked an article but won’t let me see anything that they’ve said about it. Twitter was more content-creator-friendly – until an update a week or so back meant that the counter stopped working, and with it, the click-able link that automatically searched for tweets linking to the article by link. You can still attempt a manual search using keywords from the title – but wont find everything, no matter how recent it is.

That’s the other problem with social media in this context, a I mentioned above. On twitter, once a tweet is more than 24 hours or so old, the odds of your ever being able to find it again start going down – fast. Heck, even getting too many comments too quickly “loses” some of them – sometimes just for a few hours, sometimes for a day or two, and sometimes forever.

Facebook is better in that regard, but has a policy in place of not showing you everything unless you are specifically named as a recipient.

Social Media is designed for immediacy, and disposable consumption. For Nic’s purposes, it’s fine – but it is not a replacement for a forum, not without software enhancement, anyway.

Facebook

Facebook is the Godzilla of social Media. Twitter may have overtaken it in popularity amongst some specific demographics, but the 2015 numbers speak for themselves: 156.5 million facebook users, 60.3 million instagram users, 52.9 million twitter users, 44.5 million pinterest users, and 19.1 tumblr users, according to this breakdown. (Interestingly, those numbers bear no relation to the number of visitors Campaign Mastery gets from the different social media: StumbleUpon (which didn’t even rate a mention in the article) 43,645 visitors; Twitter, 5,470; Reddit 3,354; Facebook 3,103; pinterest 862; tumblr 8; and instagram 0!

Be that as it may, EnWorld’s discussion thread concerning the delay of closure of the WOTC forums also has a number of posts discussing alternatives. Here’s what one user had to say about the RPG community on Facebook: “Facebook D&D talk is quite active. Its biggest problem is that it’s hard to find information, because there’s no organization whatsoever, so the same things get asked, then answered, a lot.” Morrus, the admin, replied, “Facebook recently announced that public posts (like those on pages and public groups) will be archivable and searchable. That will be the thing, I think, that bridges the difference between a forum and a social network.” (You can read more of the discussion at this link (takes you to the last page of the discussions).

However, you probably have to be a member of a particular group/page before you can search it. So it’s not “outsider-friendly”; it’s more like a closed-door chatroom. Having said that, overall, I would have to describe Facebook as the heir to the BBS way of doing things, minus the navigation tools that made bulletin-boards and forums easy to navigate.

If there’s a group that fits your needs and interests, join it. You’ll generally find it fairly active, or obviously inactive; there’s not a lot of in-between room. For example, I know that there’s an active Puerto Rico Role Players group on Facebook (shout-out to Roberto Micheri [facebook, twitter]) who’s been active in promoting Campaign Mastery there :) )

If you don’t find one, you may need a broader exposure.

Twitter

Twitter has advantages for this purpose well beyond what Facebook can offer because Twitter has hashtags. A hashtag, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a keyword preceded by a “#” mark – there can’t be any punctuation or spaces, otherwise, it can be anything. Depending on the search options you choose (and you can change your choice after a search) you can look for individual posts or “tweets” containing the hashtag, or people whose name contains the phrase, or groups. You can filter the results to only include people “near” you (geographically) or in other ways.

What’s more, I can state from personal experience that the RPG community on Twitter is as exuberant and engaged as you can ask for, and extremely tolerant of total strangers saying “Hi, I run an RPG, can you…” Twitter is more of a conversation, in other words.

The only thing you have to watch out for is that there is often no distinction made between computer-based RPG games and -gamers and the tabletop variety. Helping with that is that most people take advantage of the ability to pen a brief profile (strictly limited in length) which is usually enough for you to make that distinction for yourself – and, if not, you can go to that person’s twitter page, look at what they have been saying (and how recently they have said anything, for that matter) and whether or not they reply to others. So twitter gives you all the tools you need to make up your own mind whether they are a relevant fit.

#RPGChat

Twitter has one other Grand Attraction when it comes to RPGs – a regular “virtual gathering” where players and GMs talk to each other about gaming, using the hashtag “#RPGChat” (I don’t get to attend anywhere near as many of these as I would like). To quote The Illuminerdy, who facilitate #RPGChat, it is “the ultimate role-playing game brain-trust. Use the hashtag any time to summon a geeky think tank willing to discuss your pressing gaming quandaries or join us during the “official” chat Thursdays at 9pm (Eastern US Time) for a more structured RPG-related discussion.”

#RPGChat is the brainchild of @d20blonde, known in real life as Liz Bauman who is definitely one of the first twitter accounts you should follow if you’re into RPGs! (And if you want to help her keep making it better, you can support her efforts through Patreon for $5 a month. But it’s free to all to participate, so join in and try it a time or two first).

While it’s possible to join in using the normal twitter interface, there is a specific *free* piece of kit that helps immensely – Tweetchat.

Here’s what Tweetchat does for you: You type in the hashtag that you want to monitor, in this case RPGChat (I don’t actually think it’s case sensitive, and I don’t think you need to include the hash-mark, it does that for you automatically). It then extracts and displays ONLY those tweets that have the hashtag, and automatically inserts the hashtag to everything you type while logged on through Tweetchat.

But for Nic’s purposes, he would probably be better off befriending a dozen or so other GMs on twitter and having more in-depth conversations with them. It’s easy to use twitter as pseudo- chat software, I do it all the time!

A myriad of partial solutions

Most of these options have never completely gone away. Newsgroups are still around for example, but because most ISPs no longer carry them, you have to search for a host, and know how to configure your settings to connect to that host. Also, because most e-mail is now handled on-line through a web interface and not off-line, you may want a piece of specialist software for the purpose.

Similarly, as EnWorld shows, there are still a few RPG-oriented forums out there.

While none of these – for one reason or another – may completely be the answer to your needs, between them, you can connect to a very large community indeed. Between them, there is no reason to ever feel that you are alone as a GM!

Resources

I’m going to close this article with a list of specific resources. This list is not complete – I haven’t linked to any of the game publishers’ forums, for example, because these should be easy for anyone to find. These are more about the exotic solutions – though I’m starting with a very mundane one…

Person to person:

• Go hang out at your local game store, talk to the other customers and to the staff, make friends, then call on them when you need help.
• Talk to your players, they have a vested interest in the game, and it’s better to have good ideas than to keep secrets.

Newsgroups:

• You can get a list of newsgroups dedicated to RPGs from this page at rpg.net – but it was last updated in 2009. Most newsgroup software will let you search for groups (and will require you to download a full list of the many thousands of newsgroups hosted into the software before you can access one) so I am quite sure there are more.
• This Wikipedia page lists different newsgroup software that’s currently available; read up on them through Wikipedia’s links until you find one that you like, and go from there.

RPG Forums:

In no particular order:

• En World – most functionality is free, but there are exclusive bonuses available to paying subscribers.
• RPG.Net
• Roleplay Social

…and don’t forget about the publisher forums for specific help. If D&D’s your passion, EnWorld is the place to go.

Chat Rooms:

In no particular order:

• Roleplay Chat
• Roleplay Social also have a chat room facility.
• Rolepages
• Stack Exchange, which also has the benefit of curating (storing) transcripts of each day’s chat. I don’t know how long they keep them for, or whether or not they are searchable for keywords.

Yahoo Groups:

• Yahoo Groups offers a browsable list by category, or you can search for a keyword. A search for “RPG” produced a list of 19,010 groups (not all of which will still be active, but Yahoo tells you when someone last posted in the group, and you can sort by that or by other criteria like number of members. “Roleplaying Games” gave 1,310 additional results, and “D&D” produced a further 1,918 groups – though there may well be considerable overlap amongst all these. If you have any trouble, do a Google search for “How to use Yahoo Groups” as Yahoo’s help system is an equal blend of frustration and assistance, and always has been.

Google Groups:

• Once again, the Google Groups options are browse or search, though they aren’t quite as obvious as Yahoo manages to make it. There are 1137 groups with RPG in the title (Yahoo requires descriptions of the groups which are also searched when you enter a keyword). I personally have the impression that Google Groups is a neglected stepchild within the Google structure – and certainly the relative number of groups to Yahoo indicates that this is one battle that the search giant isn’t winning. Nevertheless, the reduction in numbers might mean that there’s less rubbish to wade through before you find what you’re looking for.

Blogs:

I could list a hundred or two Blogs here. I’m not going to do so.

Charles Akins at Dyver’s Campaign puts out an approximately-annual list of active RPG Blogs called The Great Blog Roll Call. I’ve linked to the most recent (2014) version of the list. Here’s an FAQ about it, which includes a statement that he’s aiming for the 2015 version to come out in January.

I couldn’t hope to match his efforts for comprehensiveness – so, so far as I’m concerned, if you’re looking for something specific, load up a copy of the Blog Roll Call and search within the page for any entries containing your keyword.

I note that there’s none that use the terms “beginner” or “novice” or even “newbie”, though. So I’ll list a few specific ones to redress that (in no particular order):

• Philippe-Antoine Menard, better-known as The Chatty GM, has a series at Critical Hits specifically targeting beginner GMs.
• Justin Alexander has a group of articles aimed at beginner GMs called “Gamemastery 101” at The Alexandrian, and adds to it. I was going to link to several of the articles, but they are all indexed on this page.
• Leaving Mundania has a single great post of Advice for first-time GMs that was too good not to link to (even though it’s targeted at LARP GMs, much of the advice is transferable).

Most blogs don’t have anything like Ask-the-GMs, but are happy to answer questions, especially if you pose them on a relevant blog (heck, Ask-the-GMs has been closed for a couple of years now, after it became clear that it was getting too long a list to manage – but I still answer privately if I can). If the post has closed comments, look for a “contact” link. However, it takes time to operate and maintain a blog, so replies may be shorter than you would like.

That said, there are one or two that do nothing but answer questions (which eases my conscience over keeping ATGMs closed for so long, no end). I don’t have any links to specific ones, but I have come across them in Google Search results in the past – though not today, or I’d have mentioned them!

Finally, I can’t go past my old collaborator, Johnn Four and Roleplaying Tips. He’s a very busy guy, so it might take him a few days to reply (though he tries to be faster), but if he can’t answer you to his own satisfaction (or at least point you to a couple of relevant articles in RPT), he’ll pose your question in a future issue – provided that it’s not so esoteric that no-one else would be interested, of course! – on the general principle that if one person wants to know about something of general interest, others will also find the information to be of value. Strictly speaking, RPT is a newsletter, but it’s archived as a website, so it’s close enough for my purposes!

Have I missed something?/Disclaimer

I freely admit that this is not my area of expertise. The resources above were compiled with a series of Google Searches and selecting the results that seemed most relevant, guided by my awareness of the history of personal computer use. That means that I am quite certain that there’s more out there that I haven’t found. Feel free to drop a comment, especially if you know of a blog that focuses on beginners!

Nor do I have personal experience with many of these services and software. If you have a cautionary tale, or want to be the first to champion something that works well, please leave a comment. The goal here is to help others who know less than you do!

About the contributors:

As always, I have to thank my fellow GMs for their time and their insights:

	Mike: Mike is the owner, editor, and principle author at Campaign Mastery, responsible for most of the words of wisdom (or lack thereof) that you read here. You can find him on Twitter as gamewriterMike, and find out more about him from the “About” page above.
	Blair: Blair Ramage was one of the first players of D&D in Australia, using a photocopied set of the rules brought over from the US before they were on sale here in Australia. When the rulebooks finally reached these shores, he started what is officially the fourth D&D campaign to be run in this country. He dropped out of gaming for a long time before being lured back about 15 years ago, or thereabouts. For the last eight years, he has been co-GM of the Adventurer’s Club campaign with Mike.
	Saxon: Saxon has been vaguely interested in gaming since the early 1980s, but only since going to university in the late 1980s has the opportunity for regular play developed into solid enthusiasm. Currently he plays in two different groups, both with alternating GMs, playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th ed., the Hero system (Pulp), a custom-rules superhero game (also based on the Hero System), Mike’s “Lovecraft’s Legacies” Dr Who campaign, WEG-era Star Wars, FASA-era Star Trek, and a Space 1889/Call of Cthulhu hybrid. When it’s his turn he runs a Dr Who campaign. He cheerfully admits to being a nerd, even if he’s not a particularly impressive specimen. He was a social acquaintance of both Mike and Blair long before he joined their games.
	Nick: Nick also lives in Sydney. He started roleplaying (D&D) in the mid-1980s in high school with a couple of friends. That group broke up a year later, but he was hooked. In late ’88 he found a few shops that specialized in RPGs, and a notice board advertising groups of gamers led him to his first long-term group. They started with AD&D, transferred that campaign to 2nd Ed when it came out, tinkered with various Palladium roleplaying games (Heroes Unlimited met Nick’s long-term fascination with Marvel’s X-Men, sparking his initial interest in superhero roleplaying), and eventually the Star Wars RPG by West End Games and Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set. This also led to his first experiences with GMing – the less said about that first AD&D 2nd Ed campaign, the better (“so much railroading I should have sold tickets”). His second time around, things went better, and his Marvel campaign turned out “halfway decent”. That group broke up in 1995 when a number of members moved interstate. Three years later, Nick heard about what is now his regular group while at a science-fiction bookstore. He showed up at one of their regular gaming Saturdays, asked around and found himself signed up for an AD&D campaign due to start the next week. A couple of weeks later, He met Mike, and hasn’t looked back since. From ’98 he’s been a regular player in most of Mike’s campaigns. There’s also been some Traveller and the Adventurer’s Club (Pulp) campaign, amongst others. Lately he’s been dipping a tentative toe back into the GMing pool, and so far things have been going well.
	Ian: Ian Gray resides in Sydney Australia. He has been roleplaying for more than 25 years, usually on a weekly basis, and often in Mike Bourke’s campaigns. From time to time he GMs but is that rarest of breeds, a person who can GM but is a player at heart. He has played many systems over the years including Tales Of The Floating Vagabond, Legend Of The Five Rings, Star Wars, D&D, Hero System, Gurps, Traveller, Werewolf, Vampire, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and many, many more. Over the last couple of years he has been dirtying his hands with game design. He was a contributor to Assassin’s Amulet, the first time his name appeared in the credits of a real, live, RPG supplement. Recently he has taken to GMing more frequently, with more initial success than he was probably expecting (based on his prior experiences). Amongst the other games he now runs, Mike and Blair currently play in his Star Wars Edge Of The Empire Campaign.

In the next ATGMs: When characters put down roots – handling strongholds and bases

So the month of November is over, and the Blog Carnival has migrated to James Introcaso’s World Builder Blog. His subject is “Homebrew Holiday Gifts” and there have already been a couple of awesome posts, go check them out!

Last Time

A little short of a year ago, the last time Campaign Mastery hosted, the subject was Twists and in the round-up, I wrote:

Every time you propose a topic for [a blog carnival], you have to worry that it will not inspire others; that it may be too narrow, or too broad, or simply not resonate with your fellow bloggers. Until the entries actually start rolling in, you never really know how well your theme will actually be received.

In general, I found that “With A Twist” was a much harder topic than I was expecting it to be, and I think others discovered the same thing. at least to begin with. Once a necessary shift in mindset occurred, however, the floodgates opened; what was intended to be two entries from Campaign Mastery became three, then four, then five, until most of the month was spent poking into different aspects of the theme. At the same time, after a slightly slow start, submissions from other participants began to trickle in, gradually accumulating to a far more impressive total than I expected at the beginning.

This Time: The Lesson

This time around, the subject was “The Unexpected”, and entries were noticeably down on the usual. As is my way, I devoted some measure of gray matter to the question of why that unexpected result (oh, the irony) might have eventuated, and I’m reporting the results of my musings here as the introduction to the roundup, and because there’s a lesson or two for future hosts.

First, despite my listing a whole heap of articles possible under the heading, none of them seemed to resonate with most of the potential participants. I had forgotten the wise words quoted above, and saw only the excellence of the final result. So that was the first handicap that the carnival topic had to overcome.

Second, I entitled the announcement of the carnival “A Stack Of Surprises” because that was the name of the article that accompanied that announcement. And that seemed to cause confusion – some contributions even thought that was the theme for the month – an uncertainty that failed to crystallize thinking by other bloggers.

Third, that confusion meant that rather than mining a broader category that happened to overlap with the previous one, some people’s thinking will have been narrowed to be even more confined than “With A Twist” – and that in turn meant that their best ideas on the subject had already been written.

In summary: too difficult, too soon, too similar, too confusing, and – consequently – too narrow.

Ultimately, I think my biggest mistake was in trying to make the blog carnival conform to what I already intended to publish – which was the origin of all the other problems encountered. Railroading doesn’t work in games, and it seems that it doesn’t work in blog publishing, either!

Under the circumstances, I should be thankful that anyone found something to say… but despite the difficulty, there were more than just my contributions – all credit to my fellow bloggers!

And so, to the contributions…

Narrative Surprise

• 6d6rpg: The Cult of the Traitor: Jaye Foster posits the notion that betrayal and treason might be part of a deeper conspiracy, caused by external manipulation. The consequence is that no-one can be guaranteed incorruptibly loyal. No-one. And that can be quite a nasty surprise to the players if it is unexpected!
• World Builder Blog: Turn the Expected Un: Back in “with a twist”, James Introcaso wrote about building up a big-picture plot twist within a campaign (Twisty Turny), and for this blog James offers up a sequel of sorts to that article (and links to a whole heap of other posts at his blog that can be used to surprise players) containing a series of tips and tricks to yank the rug out from any player who thinks he knows what the GM has in mind.
• Tales Of A GM: RPG Blog Carnival: Narrative Surprise: This is also a sequel to the article offered for “with a twist”, Reading Around the RPG Blog Carnival: Plot Twist Cards, in which Phil Nicholls reviewed Paizo’s Plot Twist cards, and how he intended to use them. In this carnival’s article, he contrasts what was (at the time) just theory with the actual results and impact that his game has experienced. If the GM doesn’t know what’s going to happen, how can the players possibly expect it?

Surprise Mechanics

• Campaign Mastery: A Stack Of Surprises not only announced the Blog Carnival, it addressed a very technical and tricky question – should surprise bonuses stack? I started by looking at what happens in the real world and made some very interesting discoveries…

Portals

• Campaign Mastery: The Unexpected Neighbor: Portals to Celestial Morphology 1/4: My major contribution to the blog carnival was taking a deep look at Portals, Gates, Rifts, and Teleports and how they could have radical effects on campaigns. In addition to each part offering 5 ideas for using these planar transportation links, each part opened with a mind-bending implication and a set of variables that GMs and players often take for granted. The theme for part one was ‘Unexpected Neighbors’ and consisted of:
  • Using portals to effectively reshape the cosmological topology;
  • Detailed discussion of the parameters that define Portals etc;
  • Ideas #1-4: Temporally-unstable Portals
    • Idea #1: Connecting to the Future
    • Idea #2: Connecting to the Past
    • Idea #3: Anarchic Time Connections (Closed Window)
    • Idea #4: Anarchic Time Connections (Wide-open)
  • Idea #5: The Neighbor Of My Neighbor (is closer than you think)
• Campaign Mastery: Destination Incognita: Portals to Celestial Morphology Pt 2/4: The theme for part two was “unexpected destinations” and offered:
  • The capacity of portals to undermine any form of defense;
  • Idea #6: The World Is My Nexus (with alternative interpretations)
    • The “Stargate” Fantasy Campaign Premise
    • The Four Worlds Campaign Premise
  • Idea #7: Destinationally-unstable Portals
  • Idea #8: For Every Portal, There Is An Equal And Opposite Portal Opened
  • Idea #9: For Every Portal, There Is Another That Connects Two Random Planes At Random Points
  • Idea #10: The Wound In Reality
    • Bonus: An example of how I research game ideas
• Campaign Mastery: The Shape Of Strange: Portals to Celestial Morphology Pt 3 of 4: Part three started to get into some of the stranger possibilities:
  • Using portals to effectively reshape the topology of the game world by connecting high with low;
  • Idea #11: Portals to the Afterlife
  • Idea #12: Transfigurations by Portals
  • Idea #13: Socio-Ethical Morphology (i.e. Alternate History) through Portal Networks
  • Idea #14: Portals can only connect to Variant planar topologies (i.e. Alternate Cosmologies)
  • Idea #15: Variable-Difficulty Portals
• Campaign Mastery: Feel The Burn: Portals to Celestial Morphology Pt 4 of 4: The final part of the series dealt with Energy and Portals.
  • Explosive release of the energy holding a portal together;
  • Portals as Magical-energy vampires;
  • Idea #16: Gaining Energy In Transit
    • Balanced Energy Flows
    • Unbalanced Energy Flows
    • Light
    • Sound
    • Heat
    • Kinetic Energy
    • Potential Energy (Gravity?)
    • Disintegration
    • Electrical
    • Chemical
      • Combustion
      • Pressures
      • Polymerization
      • Enzymes
      • Potions
      • Potion Miscibility/The Human Body
    • Cold
    • Magical ‘Energy’
    • Spiritual ‘Energy’
    • Negative Energy
      • Bonus: House Rules for making Negative Energy losses harder to overcome
    • Life (Positive) Energy
  • Idea #17: Losing Energy In Transit
  • Idea #18: It’s Electrifying: Portals are a Planar battery
  • Ideas #19 & 20: Bad Is Good
    • Idea #19: Global
    • Idea #20: Local

Void Jump Shock

• Arcane Game Lore: Void Travel Sickness – November RPG Blog Carnival: Tom Stephens didn’t originally intend this article to be part of the Blog Carnival even though he was inspired by my series on Portals (above), but from the start I felt that there was enough flexibility in the Carnival Theme for it to qualify. Although I think he was initially taken aback by that, once he got on board, Tom grabbed the ball and ran with it, even editing his original article to better fit.
• Campaign Mastery: Blog Carnival: The Unexpected Reality: While I was approving the resulting pingback, I was musing about the relationship between the carnival theme and his article, and wrote this article about using the rules as a plot delivery system and using the plot as a rules delivery system, which absolutely justifies his article as part of the carnival.
• Arcane Game Lore: Your Final Destination – Exiting a Void Jump – November Blog Carnival – part 2: The combination of his first article being included in the Carnival (which kept the subject at the front of his mind) and the second part of my portals series led Tom to follow up his first article on Void Jump Sickness/Shock with this article discussing the limits of unpredictability and Navigation in his Interstellar Jumps.
• Arcane Game Lore: Designing Out Loud – Void Jumping: Finally, Tom rounds out his discussion of Void Travel with some more specifics and limitations on the process that ties the whole together. This article sneaks into the carnival at the last minute, because he was delayed in publishing it through end-of-semester projects. Day jobs get in the way for everyone from time-to-time, so I didn’t hold that against him :)

Wrapping Up

And so, the November Blog Carnival comes to a formal close. Some great articles, covering a wealth of genres from fantasy to sci-fi to superheroes, with a few side excursions possible along the way into places like the Cthulhu Mythos, and some definite lessons in not getting too creative – and not getting too locked-in – in your hosting duties along the way. Campaign Mastery is next scheduled to host the same time next year, so I’ll see you all then if not before!

I’m writing this article on the day that the idea occurred to me, but I’ve held it back until an opportune gap appeared in the publishing schedule.

I was waiting for the bus today (well, on the day that I wrote this), and that got me to thinking. More on that a little later.

If you live anywhere near the end of a long bus route, you will probably be familiar with the fact that they are almost never on time. If you ever have occasion to venture into the heart of a city with multiple public bus routes, you will also have seen the phenomenon of one bus following a number along the exact same numbered route. Both of these are aspects of Sequential Bus Theory.

Somewhere about 10-15 years ago, there was an interesting article in Discover magazine, which at the time I bought religiously every month – at least until rising prices and cost of living put it out of my reach and the habit was broken, but that’s another story. This article reported on the analysis of a math or physics professor (I forget which) who was waiting for the bus, and filled the time by analyzing the maths of what happens when you have two buses traveling along the same route.

I found the fact that there was math to explain the observed phenomenon mildly interesting, but what struck me more than anything else was the editorial surprise that seemed to be evinced by the professor’s findings. After all, it seemed to me, simple logic and some rather obvious assumptions made the results inevitable.

The Logic Of Bus Schedules

If you were a bus scheduler, how would you determine when the bus was supposed to arrive? You would assume an average speed of travel that would be a function of the speed limit and the number of times the bus had to stop and start. You would factor in the average waiting time at each red light along the way, and you would allow a bit of a fudge factor for variables. In order to allow for the number of times the bus had to slow, stop, and start again at bus stops, you would determine the average passenger numbers and average length of trip. You would then apply a statistical analysis that would tell you that some points along the way – where the bus route intersected shopping centers and railway stations, for example – would be cluster points where a great many of the passengers who had accumulated en route got off, and more passengers than usual got on, only to disperse, a few at a time, at subsequent stops.

Taking all this into account, you would prognosticate how long it should take the bus to reach each stop along the way, and publish your schedule accordingly.

And it would never be right.

The reality of Bus Schedules

Statistically, for any given bus route, there would be a specific average number of passengers getting on and off, which has to equal the same thing if the whole route is considered (because at the final stop, everyone has to get off the bus). Now, consider the effect of just a single passenger more or less using that bus at a handful of stops. Each such additional passenger takes time to get on, and time to get off, and increases the likelihood that a bus will have to stop at all at any given bus stop. The inevitable result is that each extra passenger delays the bus just a little bit, and that accumulates over the entire trip.

It doesn’t have to be an extra passenger. It might be getting a run of red lights – it happens – or having to wait for an extra vehicle to make a turn at a busy intersection, or any of a dozen other things.

Time, once it has gone, is inordinately hard to make up. At first, the “fudge factor” would mask the deficit in arrival time; but over the years, bus schedulers, mindful of an ever-less-tolerant customer base, would eat away at that fudge factor and demand greater accuracy in the timetables. Every effort to impose such greater accuracy would cut the fudge factor, and – in theory – make the timetable more precise – without achieving much success in practice.

The Exponential Timetable Catastrophe

But that’s not all. Passengers are not this static thing that simply exist at bus stops until the bus arrives; they are a dynamic phenomenon, always arriving from somewhere. If there is an average number per stop, that is simply the product of the average rate at which they reach the bus stop multiplied by the interval since the last bus. So, if a bus is delayed by anything, there will be more time for passengers to reach a bus stop, ensuring that the bus will be further delayed, which in turn enables still more passengers to get to the stop and be waiting for the bus.

And there are so many factors that could cause that initial delay that the result seems inevitable – the bus will always be late by the time it gets close to the end of its scheduled route.

Flawed Compensation and Good Luck

If you were a clever scheduler, you might assume that there will be some sort of delay somewhere in the journey, and have it set off a little earlier than the strict law of averages dictates. Even without this, inevitably, some buses will encounter a good trip instead of a bad one – a few passengers running late who miss the bus, a run of green lights, traffic that conveniently gets out of the way. Each such event would make the bus run that little bit ahead of schedule, allowing fewer passengers to arrive at the stop in time to catch it, requiring fewer stops, and once again we have an exponential effect in the other direction.

Again, the result seems inevitable; taking into account our earlier finding, the bus will always be either early or late at any given stop, and only the amount will vary.

Sequential Buses

Let’s expand our simple universe to describe two buses running along the same route. The first bus to arrive at a stop picks up the passengers who are waiting, obviously. So, if the first bus is late, what happens to the second bus?

Well, the bus that was late picks up passengers who (theoretically, according to the timetable) should have had to wait for the next one to arrive. That makes it progressively later and later. Meanwhile, the second bus, who departed some time interval after the first, finds fewer passengers to pick up, simple because those passengers are now riding on the first bus – so it gets progressively more and more ahead of time.

Inevitably, either the second bus stops for an extra period of time somewhere to get back on schedule (irritating the passengers on board, who just want to get to their destination ASAP), or it catches up to the first bus. The next time that first bus stops and the second bus has no-one wanting to alight at the stop, it will overtake the first bus, becoming the first bus in line. But that simply means that at the next stop, where more people than usual are waiting for the bus because it is late, the new first bus will stop for them to get on board – and (unless someone wants to alight), the second bus will cruise back past it. The buses will begin playing hopscotch, passing each other time and time again, until they reach their destinations.

What if the first bus in line is the one that gets all the good luck? Well, that means that it will be early, and continue to get earlier, and so close in on the bus that left before it, while the second bus will find more passengers waiting than average, will be delayed, and will grow progressively and exponentially later, falling back toward the bus scheduled to depart after it. Same result, in other words.

The Law of Averages

It’s usually fairly unusual for everything to go one way or the other, and that’s the saving grace for our bus scheduler, who would otherwise be at his wits’ end about now. It’s like tossing a coin a great many times in succession – every outcome has an equal probability of occurring, whether it be HHHHH or TTTTT or HTHHT – but there are so many more outcomes of “mixed” heads and tails in any order that the extreme outcomes (all heads or all tails) are unlikely. The longer the run of coin tosses, the more unlikely it becomes.

In terms of our buses, the longer the route, the more chance there is for something to either speed or delay the bus, but the less likely it is to be consistently one thing or the other. There is a certain level of resilience to the timetable as a result, that wants to push the bus closer to being ‘on time’. However, past a certain threshold, this effect will be overcome by the exponential nature of either delay or advance, and the longer the route, the greater the chance that at some point, that will occur.

The Length Of Route Criticality

So the shorter the bus route, the more accurate the timetable will be. Obvious, right? But shorter bus routes are inefficient, because there is a turnaround time and a period of inactivity at the end of each run, while the driver waits for the next scheduled departure time. Cost-effectiveness promotes longer bus routes, minimizing this dead-time in proportion to the period of time in which the bus is performing its function of conveying passengers.

Governments in democracies hate wasting money; it makes them too easy a target for the opposition. It tends to lose you government. That’s one reason why promising to make the buses run on time is always a popular election platform; not only does it target ‘government waste’ and imply reduced demand for taxation (leaving more money in the governments’ pocket for other services, or more in the pockets of taxpayers, or some combination of both), but it implies a promise of making life more convenient. It’s all gravy, in other words, so long as you actually deliver.

The length of route is critical to efficiency of operation and accuracy of timetables, but in opposite directions. That means that somewhere in the middle, there is going to be an optimum point of balance between both – and that shifting the priority this way or that just a little bit makes it easy to appear to achieve such a promise.

It seems obvious to me – others might disagree – that the optimum balance is that balance of frequency of service and route length (usually another compromise) at which the degree of inaccuracy becomes sufficient to achieve “hopscotching” given an above-average level of delay or worse, i.e. when there is a 50-50 likelihood of achieving catastrophic inaccuracy on any given trip sufficient to overcome that “stable threshold”. And that means that for any given specific bus, there’s roughly a 50% chance that it will be early, and a 50% chance that it will be late, and that at regular intervals, enough metaphoric coin tosses will have been made for one bus to get too many heads or tails in a row and you will get hopscotching.

You always tend to see hopscotching more often in the city centers simply because they are, by definition, a hub for public transport – there are more chances that you will happen to see the phenomenon there, simply because more bus routes come together there.

What has this got to do with Gaming?

Excellent question. Gaming is full of discrete events that accumulate towards specific targets. The expected length of combat (based on how many hits you think the PCs will achieve what damage they will do relative to a HP target) or the accumulation of XP, for example.

If you think of each XP handout as the delay caused by passengers getting on or off a bus, the inaccuracy of the timetable at the end of each route is analogous to the achievement of any specific total – like the XP needed to gain a level. What’s more, gaining enough XP to gain a level earlier than expected can force the GM to increase the level of threat required to challenge the party, which only increases subsequent XP awards – so this, too, is an exponential relationship.

Unfortunately, there is no analogous threshold caused by the law of averages, because the inputs – the parameters that define the amount of XP earned – are not random, and hence not governed by the law of averages. Instead, they are functions of character levels, and part of the problem.

That’s why many campaigns seem to spin out of control, especially at higher levels (analogous to longer bus routes).

Matters aren’t helped by the opposite phenomenon; if characters are advancing too slowly, GMs have a need to compensate in order to maintain player satisfaction. It’s almost impossible to get the scale of such compensation right; instead, they keep compensating until they achieve an inadvertent exponential boom.

Some GMs then try to compensate in the other direction by throwing wildly dangerous encounters at the characters – and that’s how Monty Haul syndrome starts. Over-the-top encounters and wildly improbably rewards which fuel the need for even more over-the-top encounters, earning still vaster rewards. Every Monty Hail campaign could, if analyzed sufficiently closely, be traced back to a single instance of throwing too harsh an encounter at the characters (and compensating with extra rewards) or giving too large an award away in a single encounter that put someone over the top.

Solving the problem

So, we need some law-of-averages method of solving the problem. It was while waiting for the bus today that I thought of one (told you I’d get back to that). It means turning some of my accepted practices and advice on its head, and reinventing the way I handle one specific aspect of my campaigns in future.

The mechanism that I’ve come up with is the wandering monster.

Not just any wandering monster, mind; and that’s where the break with past practice (and recommendations) comes into play.

You see, I used to roll completely randomly for wandering monsters; at best, these were based on an ecological pattern, as described in the Creating ecology-based random encounters series, and Random Encounter Tables – my old-school way. Within the assigned parameters of what could be there, it was whatever the dice came up with, and it could be anything from too easy to too hard to just right in terms of encounter difficulty.

Well, that’s just not going to cut it anymore. That way lies inherent Monty Haul or sudden death, either directly or as a result of compensating for a weak encounter that wasn’t worth the playing time.

Instead, what’s needed is a probability table that determines the difficulty of the encounter relative not to how powerful the characters are at the time, but how powerful they should be.

Let’s say that things are measured in relative EL based on character levels. What’s needed is a random roll that defines and constrains the level of drift away from that average, giving an actual encounter EL, and to set up encounter tables with entries that correspond to the range of ELs that might transpire – a small subset of the whole, a part of the ecology. Everything else becomes something that you describe in narrative (no xp) as inconsequential or something that dismisses the PCs as inconsequential (no xp) because they aren’t a big enough threat. “The spiders flee as you approach.” “The Dragon passing overhead fixes you with a baleful glare before effortlessly ascending to 10,000 feet and proceeding on its’ way”.

Ideally, this should run along the lines of 1:2:4:2:1 or 1:2:4:8:4:2:1, i.e. the greatest probability should center on the average, and the maximum deviation from that should be whatever is considered tolerable. Personally, I think that ±3 is too great a spread, so I would recommend the first of those. The total result is 10, so 2d6 would work well:

2	3-4	5-10	10-11	12
Target EL -2	Target EL -1	Target EL	Target EL +1	Target EL +2

Or, you could decide that you want to bias the results even more strongly toward the average by using 3d6 (and the familiar bell-curve):

3	4-6	7-14	15-17	18
Target EL -2	Target EL -1	Target EL	Target EL +1	Target EL +2

or,

3	4-7	8-13	14-17	18
Target EL -2	Target EL -1	Target EL	Target EL +1	Target EL +2

which gives a more diffuse result about the center while still keeping the extremes quite unlikely and giving greater weight to the average.

Of course, none of this will work if it’s in addition to the rewards-for-achievement built into the adventure; that’s just a free pass at achieving Monty-Haulism. No, the assumption has to be made and built into the adventure that there will be N random encounters worth an average of X experience points, and that expectation has to be incorporated into the estimates of what EL the characters should represent, and should therefore encounter.

The greater the proportion of XP that is awarded in this fashion, the stronger the “Law Of Averages” effect – and the more latitude you have to make the major villain a little nastier if it looks like it will be too easy to be satisfying.

This works as a leavening agent because if the PCs are short of where they should be, they will earn more XP from the random encounter; and if they are ahead, they will earn less.

Why have a random adjustment at all?

Another excellent question, the “virtual reader” inside my head and to whom I write is firing on all cylinders today! If there is no variation, players will quickly work out that every encounter is pitched to some set target; they will rule out being surprised by a foe who is stronger than they expect, and will become more aggressive accordingly. A range of 5 ELs can make a major difference.

Further encouraging diversity of result

I would even go further and say that a subsequent encounter (determined on a d3 roll) should receive the opposite modifier to the one determined randomly, just to ensure that the sustained random rolls can’t bias to one extreme consistently over several rolls. This preserves the random variation while playing toward the average overall result.

This system may not completely eliminate the problem of exponential growth or shortfalls in XP totals, but it will impose a buffer similar to that experienced by the “bus” example.

Other applications

As implied when I first began discussing the relevance of sequential bus theory to RPGs, these are just the tip of a very large iceberg. Here are three other examples to consider:

Loot

Where is it written that loot should always be commensurate with the threat? So long as it averages out correctly, why shouldn’t some encounters yield more than expected and some less? Why not use a second roll on the same table (any of the three offered above) to determine the treasure yield? In fact, why not deliberately under-pay on the random encounters so that you have margin to be more generous on the important ones?

Magic Items

As I was thinking of the above, another thought came to me – a whole new approach to determining what magic items would be handed out in treasures.

Instead of specifying that a given encounter yields X items, why not set magic as a set percentage of the overall reward and hold off handing anything over until the accumulated amount in a player’s pool equals the value of the item you want to give them? That means that there will be less random junk handed out – with its potentially game-unbalancing escalation in PC capabilities – and more deliberate placement. You can even ask the player to define what magical goodie they would like next – and how long it takes for it to show up depends on its value. You could even state that treasure above a certain value per item gets added to the booty of the final encounter, even if it was earned in an earlier encounter.

Once again, that means that the booty handed out conforms not to the success achieved by the characters, but on the success they should have achieved – derailing the Monty Haul train for good.

Getting back to Combat

You could think of the damage inflicted by a blow as the number of passengers boarding a bus, the expected number of blows of average result needed to defeat a foe as the number of stops, and the total damage that has to be inflicted as the travel time. This actually runs in reverse to the bus analogy (more gets you there sooner, not slower), but that’s OK – the principles stand.

There are all sorts of biases to combat outcomes that are built into the D&D/Pathfinder game systems, and they can interact in a number of ways. Players recognize this and try to maximize the compounding and cascading effects in an intelligent manner in character creation and evolution through experience levels. Min-Maxers take this intelligent manner to an extreme that is only barely within the spirit of the rules. The GM, on the other hand, has very limited capability in terms of response; there aren’t many mechanisms that alter the number of hit points that a creature has, and most methods of altering the rate at which damage is inflicted will simply fall into the hands of the PCs after a successful combat. Instead, they often fall back on trying to match the PCs at their own game, enhancing attacking capabilities through the combination of feats, stats, and equipment/abilities – but many of those, too, will end up in PC hands at the end of the day.

Consequence & Solutions

The result is that characters are often far more effective at dishing out damage per hit die of character than their enemies are at doing so per EL. While solving the experience and treasure traps will mitigate this somewhat, the potential still exists for confluences of combat-effectiveness-enhancements.

What is needed to finish the job is some mechanism for ensuring that the averages are respected, despite enhancements. This removes much of the cause of what is often described as “game imbalance” by trending the effect of results toward the average.

Now, it’s not fair for a good character design to be penalized to the extent of the player getting no reward for his efforts in design, so what is also needed is a mechanism by which they can be rewarded for combat effectiveness without cutting short the battle. I’ve run encounters in which one character of exceptional prowess took down the encounter before any of the other characters could act, or needed to act; the optimization of design was such that they weren’t even on the same planet in terms of effectiveness. I’ve also seen the same thing done with mages – a fireball spell wiping out the enemy before anyone else even got to act.

One Answer and its flaws

I’ve also known at least one GM who solved the latter problem by deciding that additional dice of arcane attacks did not stack, but simply added +1 to the degree of difficulty of the saving throw, and thereafter added +1 to the damage inflicted by a single dice. So a 12d6 fireball did 1d6 points of damage, plus -11 to the save; if the character failed the save, the amount by which he failed, up to that full 11, was then added to the damage. So the most a 12-dice fireball could do to a single character was 17 points. This tracked reasonably well with what a fighter of equivalent level could achieve with a typical weapon and appropriate enhancements from magic and feats, so on the whole it worked reasonably well; and that, I think, masks the fundamental flaw with the approach, which is that it penalized characters for intelligent design.

A better solution

I have an alternative: above the average expected damage per blow, damage accumulates in a pool. It is then translated according to the size of the HD of the target into a number of “full dice equivalence”, which is then applied as a negative to the damage-above-average that they can apply. That means that additional combat capability ultimately translates not into a quicker kill, but into greater control on the battlefield. Or perhaps it could be applied, at least in part, into ensuring that the target’s defenses were weakened for the attacker’s next round of attacks, letting them “get on a roll”.

A caveat

Changing something as central as the combat resolution system is not something that can, or should, be done lightly. I’m certainly not going to be rushing out to implement this change in any of my campaigns; it requires a lot of thought and more than a little simulation and number-crunching before I’d do that. Nor am I, therefore, advocating it to anyone else out there – simply putting it forward as food for thought.

The accumulation of small bites

In conclusion, then, anything that accumulates towards a threshold or target of any sort in a game can be viewed with fresh eyes through the lessons of Sequential Bus Theory. Phenomena that can be easily identified but not easily analyzed become more clearly understood, and therefore more controllable by the GM. That takes some of the anarchy out of a game, leaving the GM with more room to reward appropriately when merited, and giving players more control over the future fortunes and development of their characters.

Greater control over those aspects of the game that have an inherent trend to go out of control is always a good thing, so that’s food for thought indeed.

And that’s what I thought about while waiting for my bus to arrive. It was late…

Welcome to the final part of Campaign Mastery’s major contribution to the November 2015 Blog Carnival. The theme this time around is the Unexpected, and this series is all about taking something that is usually assumed to be basic and reliable – portals and gates – and throwing some unexpected surprises into the mix…

To recap: Most GMs (and certainly, most players) assume that a portal is nothing more than an express train running from point A to point B in the celestial firmament, a shortcut across planar boundaries that connects two points in localized space that might otherwise be barely in the same cosmos. So convenient do portals make transit from one plane to another that the portal connection is seriously the defining attribute of the the two planes, assuming it is at least semi-permanent. They inherently rearrange the cosmology of existence to suit whoever’s doing the casting – and can do so in different ways at something close to a moment’s notice, if you know how to make them!

That notion got me thinking about all the nasty surprises that GMs can pull using portals. This series of four articles is the result.

It’s not unreasonable to think that it takes a lot of power to create a portal, energy that is locked up inside the connection. Breaking the portal could then release that energy – explosively.

Consider the possibilities. Tiny micro-portals as a means of arcane-based combustion in a simple reciprocating engine? Bigger portals as anti-ship weapons? Still larger portals as a means of threatening an entire city with mutually assured destruction – your wasteland, their prime real estate, both will go up in one release of acrid smoke. And the only thing that can be done about it is to trigger the mayhem – or live with the knife at your throat, knowing that an invading army is just twenty paces away!

Under such circumstances, you can’t not belly up to the negotiating table and bargain as thought your life depended on it. But that puts whichever party is the least stable in the driver’s seat! Which will cave first: your principles, or your certainty of continued existence?

But the fun doesn’t stop there! All that energy has to come from somewhere; whoever created it may have planted the initial “seed” but something has maintained the portal since then. Let’s assume it to be ambient magical energy. Now contemplate what happens when a party, well-equipped with magical items, chooses to go through the portal, perhaps in an attempt to get their homes out from under this sword of Damocles. Isn’t it reasonable that a Portal would simply seize upon the most accessible power supply? Instead of weak, diffuse, ambient magical energy, there’s all this concentrated power in the form of magic items that have just entered it’s maw….

There are two or three choices that the GM has available. First, he can permanently strip magic items passing through a portal of all magic. That’s a great way of ‘resetting the clock’ after giving out too much of the good stuff, a mistake that we all make from time to time. Or maybe there’s a priority order in which only the most powerful three items get permanently drained. And the third option is to have anything that isn’t permanently drained temporarily stripped of its power, to gradually restore over a period of hours, days, weeks, or months.

Personally, I think that stripping everything is going too far, and so is a regeneration period in months. But anything less is fair game – and means that PCs will arrive with lower-than-usual cover fire into a situation that is (usually) more dangerous than those they ordinarily face. The first time they encounter this (especially if they don’t have any forewarning) it will be a very unpleasant shock; every subsequent occasion will be cause for angst and “there has to be another way, any other choice would be preferable”.

Not only does this notion help protect the campaign against excessively powerful goodies and other potential campaign-wrecking mistakes, not only does it up the stakes of high-level adventuring (while providing a mechanism which eventually confers an advantage to the PCs, making it likely that they will overcome the obstacles in the long run), but it prevents abuse of Gates and Teleports themselves. A win all round – though the players may not see it that way…

And, now that you’ve absorbed that little blow to the gut, let’s make some more PC jaws drop…

Parameters

There are a couple of key parameters that readers should bear in mind through the fun and games that follow. I’ve listed six, but there may be others that haven’t come to mind.

Direction
Portals and gates can be Mono-directional, Bi-directional, or Unidirectional.

• Mono-directional: Objects can only pass from one specific end of the portal or gate to the other end, and not vice-versa.
• Bi-directional: Objects can pass from either end to the other, but travel can only be in one direction at a time. Attempts to travel in the other direction when something is already in transit can be blocked or can result in a collision of some kind.
• Unidirectional: Objects can pass from either end to the other at the same time.

Permanence
What’s the behavior of the portal over time?

• Temporary: Portal lasts for a finite amount of time, and then it’s gone, or changes.
• Enduring: Portal appears permanent and stable – and then isn’t.
• Recurring, Reliable: Portal appears on a predictable basis. More complex versions may follow a pattern.
• Recurring, Anarchic: The portal is in existence at unpredictable times for unpredictable durations. It may be consistent in other parameters, or unpredictable, or cyclic.
• Permanent: Portals connect A to B permanently until disrupted or destroyed. Other parameters may change randomly or according to some pattern.

Size
While the values for this parameter described below suggest consistency, that’s not necessarily the case.

• Small: One person at a time can pass through the portal. Others may have to wait to enter until that traveler arrives, or they may be able to follow like links of sausages. That first variation also introduces the variable of travel time.
• Medium: A small group of up to four or five can pass through the portal together. Anyone more has to wait. Travel time is significant.
• Large: A wagon or large group can pass through the portal together in squads or units, up to fifty or so people at a time. More have to wait.
• Immense: An army, or a fully-crewed ship, can pass through the portal at the same time. Travel time can be tactically significant.

Travel
This parameter can be independently assessed for each end of the portal.

• Stable: The location of the portal entrance/exit is fixed in geographic location relative to something.
• Proximate: The location is defined within a locus of probability surrounding some surface feature; the exact location at any given time within that locus may differ either predictably or randomly.
• Defined: The portal is in one of a set number of locations, usually but not necessarily in close proximity, and is prone to change from one to another periodically or randomly, or perhaps after each use.
• Wandering: The portal moves, either randomly or in a predictable manner, and is not bound to any particular geographic locus. Unless it recurs with great rapidity or doesn’t move very far at a time, this can confuse people as to whether or not it is the same portal each time.

Disruption
Why should everything always leave a portal in the same condition as it left? Effects can be physical, or mental, or spiritual; and temporary or permanent. There may or may not be ways of shielding against, or mitigating, the effects. There may be patterns to the disruptive effects. A fixed degree of disruption vs. a percentage disruption can also be very significant.

• Safe: Portal travel inflicts little or no damage.
• Demanding: Portal travel inflicts minor damage that can be managed but may require planned recovery protocols. Mitigating capabilities begin to become significant.
• Difficult: Portal travel causes temporary near-incapacitation, or more significant long-term damage. Mitigating capabilities are very significant.
• Dangerous: The effects of Portal travel are temporarily incapacitating or debilitating for a significant period. Portals are only safe to use when the destination is protected by friendly forces.

Repeatability
There should be some way of disrupting or destroying a portal, though it may be dangerous. What happens then? Will a/the portal reform of it’s own accord, or must a new one be intentionally created? And will it connect with the old destination, or go somewhere new, or something in between?

• Precise: The same origin point leads to the same destination point.
• Self-Locking: The same origin point leads somewhere close to the old destination point and will eventually lock back onto the old departure point.
• Resistant: The old destination point resists the formation of a new portal connection. This resistance may be overcome in some manner.
• Vague: A new portal from the same origin may be directable to some point near where the old one was, but the exact same destination is unreachable.
• Unpredictable: A new portal from the same origin will connect with another point completely at random, uncontrollably, within the destination plane of existence, perhaps restricted to a significant region.

I’ll be repeating the essential contents of this panel at the head of each of the articles. For full discussion of these parameters and their possible effects, refer to part 1 of the series. Keep these parameters and variables in mind because I’m liable to switch gears between them without notice!

Idea #16 – Gaining Energy In Transit

You can think of the concept of energy differentials as forcing the Portal/Gate system to comply with the laws of Thermodynamics, or the conservation laws in general. Or you can get less technical about it all, and simply have fun with the idea while implying that you are tipping your hat in that direction. Either way, this idea, and the converse that follows, serves to enhance and increase the verisimilitude of the campaign, which naturally takes a small hit every time you bring in something “fantastic”. It implies that there are rules and game physics in place – and so long as those remain consistently applied but unexplored, that’s a real asset for a campaign.

Inconsistent application undoes all that goodness, and should be avoided on general principle, but the real prize – and danger – is that the players will want to understand those game physics and utilize them to their benefit.

The net result of this is a subgenre of Fantasy that I’ve rarely seen, and which I call “Hard” Fantasy, in the same way that there is a subgenre of Science Fiction called “Hard” Sci-Fi. If that’s where you want your campaign to go, and are comfortable doing so, that’s fine – but if neither of those things are true, a little more anarchy in the system might be a preferable choice.

That’s what’s achieved by a limited, willful, inconsistency that is randomly driven, as opposed to the more scientific hard “natural” laws that consistency mandates. This takes you back into the realm of implying that there are natural laws at work, but that there are unknown and unidentified factors that prevent formulating any rational description of those laws – in other words, we’re back to tipping the hat in the direction of verisimilitude, but not actually walking down that path.

I suspect that most GMs will be more comfortable adopting this approach, though there will be exceptions (NEVER try to GM a bunch of Engineering and Science professors unless you’re adequately prepared for the experience! And Lawyers, don’t forget to be wary of them, too…)

Ahem. Getting back on point, so you’ve decided that it might be fun to think about the possibility of Gaining Energy In Transit. Right away, there are two possibilities: Balanced and Unbalanced energy gains. After that, we get to think about the different types of energy to be gained (warning: some of these ideas take ‘game physics’ and smash it in the face with a two-by-four)!

Balanced

‘Balance’ implies that sometimes you get a snake and sometimes a ladder. This can be on a transit-by-transit basis (no consistency whatsoever), a Portal-by-Portal basis (this portal consistently causes travelers to gain energy, that one to consistently lose energy), a Tit-for-Tat basis (this time, you gain energy, next time you lose it), Directional (you always gain energy going this way, but lose energy going the other), or something more sophisticated relating to relative destination and the game cosmology.

Whichever option you choose, the bottom line is this: gains and losses always balance out (after taking into account any energy utilized by the Portal/Gate/Teleport/Rift itself).

Combining with all these options are the other possibilities already suggested – consistency vs randomness (one applies more naturally to some of these than others, and vice-versa), the concept of thresholds before any effect is felt, which may or may not be in play, and the concept of restricted maximum effects (useful in terms of keeping the game playable but not necessary). Nor do you have to be consistent across all forms of interdimensional transit – this is a great opportunity to infuse some distinction between Portals, Gates, Teleports, and Rifts.

Unbalanced

The converse is unbalanced. From a physics point of view, this means that the transit itself doesn’t take place within a closed system – the external “reality” can have an impact on travelers, and vice-versa. A portal draining energy from the Positive Energy Plane either sucks Positive Energy from travelers (an energy loss, dealt with in the next major section) or suffuses the “transit environment” with Positive Energy that travelers are exposed to as a result. Inefficiencies and leakages and the imperfection of human creations all lend themselves to the latter notion.

With any of these possibilities, one thought that the GM will have to confront is what effect passage of air/water from one side of the Portal to the other will have when the energy gain (or loss) is taken into account. That’s why the concept of “thresholds” appeals to my evil-GM side – it eliminates one source of warning for PCs of what is about to happen to them!

There are many variations on the “unbalanced” option, because “unbalanced” does not imply “inconsistent”. If every gate or portal results in an energy gain or loss, that’s not balanced – but it is consistent. Rolling randomly for the amount and direction of energy flow is inconsistent (sometimes a loss, sometimes a gain), and may be unbalanced if there is a bias one way or the other. Perhaps the potential for gain or loss increases with length of passage, or frequency of passage within a time interval? There are lots of ways to play with the ‘reality’ that you are offering.

Not the least of which is the type of energy that we’re dealing with…

Light

Probably the safest and tamest option is Light. Anytime someone exits a gate, or maybe on entry, or both, there’s a blinding flash of light visible for miles around. And maybe for the next hour or whatever, the travelers glow like candles. Kind of makes stealth and surprise difficult to achieve – but that can be a good thing for the GM.

I’m not going to get into the different spectra of light, I’m assuming that what is meant here is “visible” light.

Sound

Almost as obvious and relatively safe is sound – ignoring burst eardrums and deafness. Again, it’s an attention-getter. Instead of a glow, temporary deafness might result.

Heat

Probably the most obvious one is that things go up in temperature. This can be a very dangerous choice; humans have a very limited tolerance for increased internal temperatures, as is shown by the effects of rising fevers. There’s no agreement as to the upper limit for ‘normal’ internal temperatures, with sources ranging between values of 37.5 and 38.3 °C (99.5 and 100.9 °F).

38 °C (100.4 °F)

This is classed as hyperthermia if not caused by a fever. Effects: Feeling hot, sweating, feeling thirsty, feeling very uncomfortable, slightly hungry. Chills are not normally experienced unless this is caused by fever.

One of the first effects to be noticed is the body attempting to regulate it’s internal temperature with sweating. Humidity is a huge factor, because in high humidity, the body’s ability to regulate its internal temperature is compromised. If you have high temperatures and humidity, a person will be sweating but the sweat won’t be drying on the skin, and that’s the mechanism by which sweat provides cooling.

39 °C (102.2 °F)

Severe sweating, flushed and red appearance. Fast heart rate and breathlessness. There may be exhaustion accompanying this. Children and people with epilepsy are thought very likely to experience convulsions.

An increase in body temperature increases heart rate; the blood vessels near the skin dilate (get bigger) to release heat. This reduces blood pressure, so the heart must beat faster to compensate, and ensure blood still goes to the vital organs. So your heart would start to race. This demands more oxygen, so breaths tend to grow shorter and shallower until we start to pant. Heat rash and muscle cramps are early signs of being overwhelmed by heat.

Heat exhaustion is a relatively common reaction to severe environmental heat and seems likely to occur with increased internal temperature and exertion – the degree/duration of exertion declining with greater temperature. It causes symptoms such as dizziness, headache and fainting. It can usually be treated with rest, a cool environment and hydration (including refueling of electrolytes, which are necessary for muscle and other body functions).

40 °C (104.0 °F)

Fainting, dehydration, weakness, vomiting, headache and dizziness may occur as well as profuse sweating. Starts to be life-threatening.

Studies have shown that up to this point, there is no effect on the ability to reason or on memory, at least in low levels, but that there was a 10-11% slowing in the rate at which these tasks can be performed. There was also a significant decrease in alertness and an increase in irritability. Elevating core body temperature has been shown to reduce force generation during “prolonged maximal voluntary contractions” – so strength and load-bearing capacity are reduced, as is the ability to sprint or run long distances. People more frequently suffer disturbed sleep and awaken at night more often when overheated even slightly, and in fact a slight cooling of the skin has been found to be the single most effective treatment for insomnia by some researchers.

When a person is exposed to heat for a sustained period, the first thing that shuts down is the ability to sweat. Once a person stops perspiring, a person can move from heat exhaustion to heat stroke very quickly. Heat stroke is more severe and requires medical attention; it is often accompanied by dry skin, confusion and sometimes unconsciousness.

41 °C (105.8 °F)

When people experience body temperatures this high, it is considered to constitute a Medical emergency. Symptoms include Fainting, vomiting, severe headache, dizziness, confusion, hallucinations, delirium and drowsiness. There may also be palpitations and breathlessness.

42 °C (107.6 °F)

Subject may turn pale or remain flushed and red. They may become comatose, be in severe delirium, vomiting, and convulsions can occur. Blood pressure may be high or low and heart rate will be very fast.

43 °C (109.4 °F)

The result is normally death, or serious brain damage, continuous convulsions and shock. Cardio-respiratory collapse will likely occur. Extreme heat is only blamed for an average of 688 deaths each year in the U.S., according to the CDC, but when affected by sustained heat, the health ramifications can be serious, including major organ damage. Kidney failure, liver failure, etc, are also common.

44 °C (111.2 °F) or more

Almost certainly death will occur; however, people have been known to survive up to 46.5 °C (115.7 °F) – with massive levels of medical support and potentially permanent aftereffects.

Human Exothermia

The basic reason for all this is that the human organism is a complex interweaving of biological and biochemical processes, and these are highly temperature-sensitive in some degree. We derive our energy from food, and this process releases waste heat – which is why our body temperatures are normally quite a bit hotter than the outside environment. While some of these biological processes fail above a certain body temperature, many of them cannot take place below certain temperatures – so there is actually a relatively narrow range of body temperatures that we consider normal. In other words, the human body is exothermic (generates heat) and has evolved to the best compromise for maximum overall efficiency.

There are, in fact, several variations in body temperature; anything and everything from smoking, drinking alcohol, sleeping, or even mild exercise can have an effect.

All this means that you can forget about swords becoming red hot or melting – the PCs would be long dead before they could experience it.

Or would they?

Thermal responsiveness

There are all sorts of ways in which flesh is different to metal. If you need any convincing, go ahead, poke yourself with a finger – then do the same thing to the back of a spoon. So why should the amount of heat energy gained be the same for both?

Let’s assume that a temperature gain in the body just short of inducing delirium also brings about metal reaching it’s melting point. I’ll use centigrade as it’s what I’m used to: that’s an increase in living biological tissues of 4°C, and an increase of about 1330°C – let’s call it 1332°C for convenience – for steel. That means that for every 1°C of body temperature increase, metal increases in temperature by 333°. That would produce life-threatening burns at about the same time as you started sweating if you were wearing metal armor – assuming a simple linear correlation. So that’s out. Instead, I suggest “mapping” the melting/ignition point of various substances onto the human temperature increase and forgetting any scientific rigidity.

Kinetic Energy

Why not add Kinetic Energy, i.e. Energy of movement? This implies that there would be an acceleration effect, and that passage would feel like a roller-coaster, getting worse as the amount of increase rose.

A linear scale is fairly dull and tame, or probably instantly lethal. “Roll a d12 and multiply by 10 for the number of feet/round that you are moving when you exit” – or hexes per round, or whatever. 120′ per round, a round is 6 seconds, that’s 20’/second, or about 13.6 miles per hour. Tame. Multiply by 20 instead, and you can get up to 27.2 mph increase. Wow – painful, capable of causing injury, but unlikely to be lethal unless you ram straight into something, and even then you might make it if it wasn’t sharp. But the average is only about half that – 14.733 mph. To make things interesting, we need to increase the multiplier again, but not by so much as another doubling – we don’t want death or injury to be the ‘average’ result, but we do want it to be a threat. Even a x30 factor seems a little high. So let’s call it x25. That gives an average of about +18.4 mph, and a maximum result of about 34 mph. Any increase beyond this point only makes the effect more lethal. But I don’t like this; it doesn’t let the PCs do anything about it.

“Roll d12 and that’s how many times your speed doubles” is more appropriate for an acceleration effect, far more devastating at the extremes, and yet tamer at low levels. Let’s assume that you enter the gate at a slow walk (5’/round, the slowest the D&D system lets you move without actually standing still): Roll a 0, that’s x1, so you emerge at 0.568182 mph, the same as you went in. Roll a 1, you get x2, for about 1.13mph. A two, and you get 2.27mph; a 3, 4.54mph; a 4 gives 9.09mph; a 5 yields 18.17mph, about the same as our average on the linear scale; a 6 gives 36.3mph, a shade worse than our worst-case result; a 7 produces a very dangerous 72.7 mph; and it only gets worse from there. 8=145mph; 9=291mph; 10=582mph; 11=1164mph; and a worst-possible result is an eye-stretching 2329mph. The speed of sound at ground level is approx 761mph, for comparison purposes. So that’s maybe a little too dangerous for us; why not permit entry at 1′ per round, and divide all those speeds by 5? A 12 result wouldn’t be enough to break the sound barrier – but a speed of 465.6mph will break many other things, starting with bones and working up.

Assessing the effects is relatively simple if you know basic physics: momentum is mass times acceleration, or mass times velocity divided by time. We don’t know what the momentum or acceleration actually is, and we don’t need to; the time is going to be the same, either way, so all we need is the relative masses of what we are talking about, and the effect on speed will be proportionate. So lets compare a typical car and the human body: Google reports that “the average new car weighed 3,221 pounds in 1987 but 4,009 pounds in 2010”. Call it 4000 pounds. The average human weight, world-wide is 136lb. So our person moving at speed X has the same effect on things that it hits as a car moving at about 136/4000=3.4% of speed X – and suffers the same effects as being hit by a car traveling at 3.4% of speed X.

Our worst-case speeds were 1164mph and 465.6mph, respectively – 3.4% of which is 39.576mph and 7.9mph. I don’t know what that sheds more light and perspective on: the dangers posed by auto impacts, the resilience of the human body, or the dangers posed by a human moving faster than the speed of sound! Call it a tie….

Of course, you could always enter a portal at a dead run. Boots of speed, anyone?

This information (provided by Katzenmami69 to Yahoo Answers) should also be taken into consideration:

“Big aeroplanes have emergency slides to evacuate passengers in emergency cases. These are always very hard-calculated to get the passengers out at maximum speed without actually killing them. At rescue trainings they always get a fair few broken bones and other minor injuries, and those trainings are mostly with trained aircraft staff… A typical speed to rush down such a rescue slide is 7 meters per second, that is only about 25 km/h!

“We survive car crashes at much higher speeds only because we don’t crash into the obstacle with the same speed as our car. Every crash at higher speed than about 50 km/h is lethal to any human.”

Potential Energy: Gravity?

Potential Energy is energy of position relative to a zero point. Hold a ball up in the air, and you give it potential energy; when you let it go, that energy is transformed into kinetic energy (speed) by the force of gravity. Even lifting your foot to take a step gives it Potential Energy.

So what happens if you suddenly have ten times as much Potential Energy as you did? Well, effectively, you (and your foot) is effectively ten times as high as it was. Instead of being maybe 6 inches off the ground, your foot is suddenly 5′ off the ground, and hits the ground as hard as it would from that height.

So what just happened?

Potential Energy is Mass times Acceleration due to Gravity times Height. Obviously, your foot is no higher off the ground. So the increase in Potential Energy can either manifest as increased mass (your foot weighs ten times what it did, just long enough for it to fall), or increased force of gravity – for the fraction of a second it takes to land.

Quite obviously, neither makes much sense in terms of conventional physics. Set that aside for a moment; I’m interested in what happens to the rest of you, the part that (hopefully) isn’t falling.

An instantaneous increase of weight of both yourself and everything you’re carrying is simple to work out and appreciate; an instantaneous increase in the force of gravity you are experiencing can also be useful in terms of the effects of G-forces. Working it both ways: Your 200 pound backpack suddenly weighs two THOUSAND pounds (1 ton). Or maybe you’re one of those STR 25 freaks with a backpack weighing 800 pounds (a heavy load for STR 25 in Pathfinder) – which suddenly weighs 8,000 pounds (4 tons, or two cars). I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but even if you weren’t, you’re falling – hard.

So x10 potential energy is a very big deal. Fortunately, you would probably wouldn’t see it coming. x10 potential energy is effectively the same as your body experiencing a G-force of 10Gs – and we know what that means. Sitting (or, presumably, standing), the human body can take about 5.5Gs for 3-4 seconds. So you would almost certainly black out instantly. To quote GoFlightMedicine:

“At larger +G forces… a larger discrepancy of blood pressures between cranium and the lower body occurs. At some point, intracranial perfusion cannot be maintained and significant cerebral hypoxia (no blood = no oxygen) follows. The end result is unconsciousness.”

Or, if severe enough, death, I would expect.

Throw in burst lung sacs, ruptured capillaries, internal bleeding.., excessive G-forces are no joking matter.

Things are better if you’re on your back – 14Gs for up to 3 minutes is tolerable (and that’s why astronauts lie down for liftoff), and on your stomach, you can cope with 11Gs for up to 3 minutes.

The time factor is crucially important. Crashes in motorsport can result in impacts of over 100Gs – but because the time is measures in milliseconds (or less), these are often so survivable that the driver walks away unharmed. Tragically, that’s not always the case, and even a relatively low-speed impact can be fatal if things go wrong.

There’s a lot more of interest regarding this subject on this Wikipedia page, but it’s beyond the scope of this article to dig any further. Suffice it to say that a tenfold increase in Potential Energy will probably be lethal, a five-fold increase crippling, and even a doubling would cause injury.

The most useful and practical interpretation for game purposes is to ignore the increased-G interpretation and simply go with the “everything weighs X times what it did” – and it’s all still moving at the same speed that it was. So if your walking forwards, you get a massive shove in the back as your pack tries to punch a hole straight through you…

Disintegration

Heat and Kinetic Energy are both aspects of things in motion, and potential energy increases result in motion. What if the directions of motion are random (like heat) but on individual cells or particles (like heat)? Wouldn’t you call that a disintegration effect? Telling your players to “Save vs Disintegration” at the DC of the gate’s construction would surely get their attention in a hurry.

I wouldn’t actually do it that way if I were to invoke this rather more extreme effect. It seems to me that the better-constructed the gate, the less dangerous it would be – so I would use X-minus-DC-of-construction instead. Depending on what you set X to, that can be quite a rare event – but a worrying one, nevertheless.

I generally don’t like instant-kill effects, even with a saving throw. So I wouldn’t do this. Someone else might, though.

Electrical

As soon as you mention the differences between steel armor and human flesh, electrical properties come to mind. How lethal you wanted this to be is up to you, but it’s rather more nuanced than the all-or-nothing of Disintegration. The basic form would remain the same: “Nd6 electrical, save for half effect UNLESS you’re wearing metal armor”.

10d6 would be lethal to most low-level characters, but from about 4th level on, potentially survivable – by some characters, some of the time. It only gets better from there; above 11th level, most characters would survive.

If N were “4xd6,” that’s a more variable and dangerous event. You might get lucky and roll a 1 or 2, giving 4d6 and 8d6, respectively. Or you could roll a 6 and offer up 24d6.

I would work backwards – determine at what level you want the average character to survive about half the time, how many HP you expect them to have, and then how many d6 rolling an average of 3.5 equals that number. That gives you N. You can even grade it a little more generously by making it survivable at that level on an average result of 4 or 4.5 on the d6, reducing the number of dice required (N), and the threat.

One thing I like about this option is that the characters who are least able to cope with the damage are the ones least likely to be wearing metal armor – rogues and mages.

Of course, another option is to trigger an Epileptic Fit. Epilepsy is, essentially, electrical signals in the brain being misdirected and triggering more misdirected signals in a chain reaction. As this Wikipedia Page makes clear, this would not be considered Epilepsy per se, but the effects would be the same. It’s even possible that real Epilepsy could be triggered by the experience, as pathways in the brain change with experience, a phenomenon called neuroplasticity which is one of the more fascinating discoveries of recent years.

Chemical

When you dig into it, most electrical effects are chemical in origin, involving the motion (there’s that word again!) of electrons. Aligned electron spins make a material magnetic, shifting of electrons from one material to another build up a charge differential, which can be released as static electricity, and so on.

So that implies that the energy might be in the direct form of chemical energy. Chemical energy is defined by Wikipedia as “the potential of a chemical substance to undergo a transformation through a chemical reaction [or] to transform other chemical substances.”

Chemicals which make chemical reactions occur at different rates, or even make them possible in the first place, are called catalysts, so in effect, what this is proposing is that “gate energy” acts as a catalyst.

But a catalyst for what reaction? Messing with the biology of the organism is difficult and complicated – so I’ll come back to that option in a moment.

Combustion

Instead, let’s look at a couple of other possible catalytic reactions. One of the most obvious would be to trigger a combustion reaction in selected substances that don’t normally burn (or don’t normally burn without exposure to great heat). In Iron and steels, this process is also called Rusting (and it usually happens very slowly). Aside from potentially explaining one of the more fun creatures in the AD&D lexicon, the Rust Monster, this offers an evil something else you can do to metal-wearing PCs!

(Some people might think that metal won’t burn. Stuff and nonsense – get some steel wool and tease the fibers apart and you can set it ablaze with a match or by brushing it against a 9-volt battery. See this youTube video.) The more compact the steel, the harder it is to set it alight because the metal tends to conduct the heat away, that’s all.)

Pressures

Pressure inside a vessel is the result of a substance being confined within a smaller space than it would “like” to occupy. If the pressure is too great for the object doing the confining, the object breaks or explodes, liberating the contents in a pressure explosion. One way of causing pressure to increase is to heat the container and substance inside (here’s a link to part of a Mythbusters segment showing what happens – note that they had to disable a number of safety features designed to prevent this from happening!)

But heat isn’t the only way. Some chemical reactions release gasses or create substances that naturally want to occupy more space than the original source did. The result is the same: pressure.

Polymerization

Next option: turning oil (in lamps and lanterns) into a plastic sludge. Doesn’t need much more explanation, does it? For more information (if necessary, just to confirm the validity of the theory), click this link.

Enzymes

Okay, so we’re edging closer to biological reactions. In biology, the equivalent of a catalyst is an Enzyme. But the effects are still too complex for our purposes.

Potions

So let’s get exotic and turn attention to Potions. There are two possibilities to consider under this subheading: that the potions are unaffected (because there’s no biological process to change until the potion is consumed), or that there is a change in the nature of the potion, possibly at random or semi-random.

The first one seems trivial – but it isn’t. I’ll come back to it.

Changing one potion into another seems workable, but there’s a problem – most potions are designed to have a positive benefit, and random changes say that half the time, the consequences should be undesirable. There are two ways of correcting for this – stating that half the time, the potion has the opposite effect, or stating that in most of those half-cases, it simply becomes a poisonous substance. I would actually throw in a small percentage chance of no change, another small percentage chance of diminished or increased effectiveness (halved or doubled), and chance equal to the “no change” of something exotic happening, like the potion becoming a non-cubical Gelatinous Cube (maybe it would become cube-shaped if released from confinement in the vial), or Black Pudding (just to go completely old-school on you).

Potion Miscibility

Finally, we’re in a position to simulate chemical energy being introduced into the body of a traveler in a practical way. The method is to employ another old-school plot device: the potion miscibility table. I’m not sure that this was ever canonical, despite its appearance in 1st edition D&D – but here’s an official WOTC link….

Cold

“Cold” isn’t normally something we think of as an Energy. It’s normally considered to be the absence of heat. But this is fantasy, where strange things can apply, and “Cone Of Cold” (in D&D / Pathfinder) and various cold-based effects (Hero System & general superhero games) are a lot easier to cope with conceptually if you think of cold as being a force that is inimical to heat, just as heat is inimical to cold.

Amusingly, the same things that make armor-wearers more vulnerable to electricity and heat – the conductivity of metal – also leaves armored characters vulnerable to intense cold.

Even more amusingly, unlike external cold, we’re talking about an infusion of energy – so wearing furs and the like won’t protect you, and neither will rings and other magic defenses.

Magical ‘Energy’

So, what happens when you soak up magical energy? When your magic items soak up magical energy? When one or both exceeds it’s capacity? When you cast a spell, or are the subject of a spell, while in this condition?

One of the most obvious possibilities is simply that whatever the effect is, it exceeds your control. A shield spell raises your AC so much that air can’t get in. A fireball spell triples in effect and goes off at your fingertips. There is an obvious correlation that should apply between an effect being as strong as you can cast not because of the strength, but because of control, and that implies that any loss of control should have negative consequences at least most of the time. It’s possible that what might happen is simple leakage so that what was supposed to affect one target instead targets multiples (making no distinction between friend and foe), but that’s about as beneficial as it’s likely to get.

ANY effect can be harmful if taken too far, and if the GM is creative enough.

Spiritual ‘Energy’

This is an obvious corollary to the Arcane Energy option. But (aside from the possibility of replicating the Arcane effects for Clerical spells), I have to admit that I’m coming up dry when it comes to effects. Maybe everything I’ve already put into this article has my brain temporarily fried, but nothing’s happening – so I’ll leave it at that, and move on.

Negative Energy

This is a fairly self-evident option, if a nasty one. It could manifest as a loss of hit points, but that seems fairly tame. You could rule that it does so many d6 of negative hit points, and that if this total exceeds HD+HP Bonus, the character loses a level before the remaining negative HP are applied. Or you could make it CON loss, or you could rule that one in three, four, or five level losses are actually CON losses.

This actually brings up a pet bugbear of mine: Negative Energy losses are too easy to overcome in D&D. One spell and they’re done? Pshaw. This stuff should be scary.

So here are some House Rules to nasty it up. A Lot.

A) DC to overcome Negative Energy effects and permit them to be recovered at the normal rate:

1. Multiply the number of levels “lost” to negative energy by the Maximum HD size Less the character’s Con bonus.
2. Add any HP lost in the attack or effect, including any done as ordinary damage.
3. Add five for every point of stat loss.
4. Add ten for each other effect, if any.
5. Halve the total, rounding down.

B) The amount of recovery that is possible after such treatment is the amount by which the spellcaster’s total exceeds this DC. This can be applied to a lost stat (uses 5) or to recovery of a level (uses HD size+CON bonus).

C) A character who successfully “heals” any part of negative energy damage suffered by another cannot make another attempt to do more for as many days as the DC that they had to overcome have passed.

D) A character who attempts to “heal” such negative energy damage and fails cannot make another attempt until they gain a character level in the class whose ability was being used, and no character of lesser character level may make such an attempt.

E) Until the character suffering the effects of Negative Energy recovers ALL lost levels, the number of lost levels multiplied by the spell level of any healing spell or Cure spell used on the character is deducted from the benefits received from such a healing spell, eg, Cure Moderate Wounds (Level 2 for a Cleric) on a character who has lost 4 levels to negative energy, reduces the normal benefit of such spells by 2×4=8 points.

F) A character suffering from the effects of Negative Energy are considered to have an effective maximum hit points equal to their total after the negative energy effects are applied.

G) This also applies to any calculation of consequences for excessive Positive Energy, i.e. Positive Energy doesn’t overcome the effects of Negative Energy, the latter just makes you go boom that much faster.

H) Negative Energy can be left to heal naturally. This occurs at the rate of 1 HP per week, 1 Level per month, OR 1 point of stat loss per year. Characters cannot heal more than HP Dice Size plus CON Bonus in hit point losses in this way without then healing a negative level or stat loss. Recovery is slow and difficult.

I) Negative Energy Levels count for 1/2 a level each for other level-related calculations EXCEPT XP required to advance. So if you lose 4 character levels to Negative Energy, your chance to hit, Feats, etc, are calculated as though you were TWO levels below your actual level and not FOUR.

J) Characters suffering ANY form of negative energy levels cannot advance in level until they have earned XP sufficient to bridge this gap, PLUS what they need to advance. So if were 10th level and you lose (effectively) 2 levels due to negative energy effects, you are effectively 8th level, but before you can gain 11th level (and effectively be 9th level), you have to earn (Pathfinder Medium Advancement) 24,000 + 30,000 + 50,000 = 104,000 XP more than you needed to get to 10th level (105,000). Character development is GLACIAL compared to unaffected characters.

K) Rather than reducing skills or losing skills, negative energy level losses are multiplied by the character’s normal Skill Points per level and the result distributed by the player as negative modifiers to skill checks. The character can choose to apply these at the normal rate for the improvement of a skill and it’s a temporary loss, or can double the number of skill points of “loss” that is represented for a permanent, never-to-be-lifted negative modifier, that’s up to the player.

Negative energy effects aren’t necessarily crippling to a character, but recovery from them is NOT as simple as casting Restoration.

Life

Life is good, life is sweet, life restores hit points, life makes you explode… literally, if you absorb too much of it. Life is Positive Energy, and there’s only so much of it that you can take.

Note that it’s entirely possible that you get Negative Energy passing one way through a portal and Positive Energy on the return trip…

Idea #17 – Losing Energy In Transit

I don’t have to go too deeply into detail on this one; rereading the relevant “gain” entries should make things fairly clear. Suffice it to say that the only thing worse than gaining energy might be losing it!

Idea #18 – It’s Electrifying: Portals Are A Planar Battery

Only for the engineers out there. If two sides of a portal are at different energy potentials (regardless of the type of energy), that differential can be used to do work – making the portal a source of energy that can be exploited.

I had this be the “solution” that one space-time came up with to imminent heat-death in the Zenith-3 campaign. They quite literally began pumping in energy from a space-time that wasn’t facing heat-death for quite a long time (and in which the PCs happened to be living), or rather their greatest scientist did, and was hailed a hero for his efforts. In effect, this began to reverse the flow of entropy in his space-time while accelerating it in the victimized space-time; in due course, an equilibrium would have been reached in which the work required to pump more energy in would match that which was achieved by the process – at which point, he would have switched to some other victim space-time. In effect, he had expanded the “closed system” of his space-time to suddenly encompass both the space-times that he had connected and energy differential took care of the rest. His process had been operating for a millennium before the consequences were even noticed in the PC’s local space-time, and at first they were mistaken by scientists for a new class of Supernova, the “infrared supernova” – ever since, those scientists have been trying to incorporate the mistake into their cosmology. The PCs discovered the truth and shut down the entropy siphons – and a millennium from now, that will be noticed by earth-bound scientists as well.

But there are lots of lesser applications, suitable for widespread neo-industrial application. Let’s say that we’re talking about Light – that means that you can light a city with a million mini-portals, each of which radiates light constantly. Heat? Cooking, Home warmth, and industry – independent of fuel. And so on; you can see the potentials.

The problem is that these will almost certainly all have been discovered by accident, and not be well-understood – if they are understood at all. The energy is coming from somewhere, not necessarily in the same form, and that somewhere might be overjoyed (if you are bleeding off an excess that could destroy them), outraged (if you are stealing their necessary supplies) or alarmed (if you are undermining a central pillar holding the cosmology together) – depending on who they are and how well they understand what’s going on. If they are only a little better-informed, these might all be strictly theoretical consequences, and there would be a diversity of views – and a diversity of opinions concerning what to do about it.

Oh, and if you think my plotline is unlikely, take a read of

• Scientists may have just found proof of a parallel universe leaking into our own, and
• Will Our Descendants Survive the Destruction of the Universe?

– both of which were published years after I ran my adventure!

Ideas #19 & 20 – Bad Is Good

In the last part of this series, I offered up Idea #13, Socio-Ethical Morphology through Portal Networks. I’m closing this series by taking the term “energy” as a metaphor for the momentum of events, and giving them a massive twist.

There are two alternatives: Global and Local.

Idea 19: Global

“Global” means that everything that the PCs were/are supposed to do in their normal universe, they have to do the exact opposite of in the newly-accessed universe. If they have to defend the kingdom against a Troll Army in one, they have to join the Troll Army in destroying the Kingdom in the other. Alignments and personalities remain unchanged – but the entire set of priorities is twisted and inverted.

Once you’ve figured out what the circumstances might be to bring about a consistent world in which things are so radically different (and yet the same), this sort of world becomes a cinch to create; every time you end in a contradiction, simply invert something until the contradiction goes away.

This technique can also be invaluable in terms of shedding light on obscure aspects of your original campaign world that you are having trouble figuring out!

Idea 20: Local

My final suggestion is that nothing is different – except the role that the PCs have carved out for themselves in the plotline. The NPC good guys are still good guys, the NPC bad guys are still bad guys, the basic situation is the same – but in one, the PCs are on one side and in the other, they are opposed to it.

For an added twist, keep the PCs alignment and personalities unchanged, and twist the circumstances in which everyone finds themselves. The more black-and-white everyone’s behavior, the harder this is; but if you have shades of gray in your character’s morality, and are willing to completely rewrite the history that brought everyone to this point, the results can be a haunting exploration of the road not taken – in advance. Which can be a great tool for the PCs to decide a number of things, like how far to go, that they may be equivocating about. And, in general, it’s the last thing that the players expect.

Conclusion

Of course, if you implement all of these possibilities, no-one would ever dare go near a portal. Heaven only knows when or where it might lead! Applied in small measure – or perhaps, configurable through flaws in the creation process, or deliberate intent – you can have player’s heads spinning in no time. It might be, though, that without careful planning and expenditure of effort and arcane resources of the most expensive kind, any portal is inherently unstable – and each time someone passes through it, you roll a d20 for which of the effects described in this series will be experienced. It might be a LONG walk home for someone!

So this officially brings Campaign Mastery’s hosting of this particular episode of the Blog Carnival to an end. Just in case there’s a tardy response or two, I won’t do the usual roundup for a week or so, but the carnival now officially moves to jamesintrocaso’s World Builder Blog. The subject: Homebrew Holiday Gifts. Best of luck with it, James!

I was musing about Tom’s entry into the Blog Carnival (Void Travel Sickness) while approving his notification/pingback, and the thought came to me: if the players were the test crew on board the first starship to be built, they might have no idea that “jump shock” would be part of their situation.

That was how a broader principle, one that I hadn’t paid much attention to in the past, was brought to my conscious attention: “Anything not disclosed in the game rules and background that the PCs are going to have to cope with is, by definition, unexpected.”

So let’s rectify that omission.

Rules as Plot Delivery System

This notion isn’t one that comes naturally to me, in either concept or execution. It’s a whole different concept in Metagaming – using the rules, and specifically, willful omissions from the House Rules that are provided to the players, as an important element in propelling the plots forward.

It’s very hard to surprise players if the house rules that you provide go into lavish detail on one of the central phenomena of your game. At the same time, you need to have those rules in place, ready to use. A good example comes from the Shards Of Divinity campaign: there were lots of rules about illusions and how the perception of them bent reality. I think something like 1/3 of the initial set of House Rules related to the subject (unlike my usual practices, I shared the House Rules for that campaign as they were being developed, rather than in a single block of finished rules).

As a result, the abilities of the Fey when the PCs reached the Land of Two Courts came as no surprise, and had unexpectedly little impact. I now find myself wondering if I missed a bet in my handling of that plot development (which was intended to be a major campaign milestone); would I have been better off had I not shared those rules, and left the powers of the Fey to be a surprise?

I’m still of two minds on the notion, because of the dangers of willful omissions from the Rules.

The danger of willful Omission

There are three significant downsides to not being inclusive, when it comes to the rules, that come to mind. These are the prices that may have to be paid in return for the surprise factor, and hence the heart of the question of whether or not that surprise is worth the effort.

Danger One: Verisimilitude

House Rules and related content should always describe the game world and “operating environment” as the PCs understand it to be. What relationship that understanding may have with the reality is at the crux of this question.

My reasoning (under the heading of “Verisimilitude”) in including those illusion rules, had the question arisen, would have run something like this:

1. If the application of Illusions actually ‘bending reality’ are as ubiquitous as I intended them to be, any educated mage would be thoroughly familiar with them. Since that knowledge might well impact on a player’s decision to run a mage, there is a metagame argument against keeping them a secret, but let’s set that aside. This argument states that all Mages (and any other class who has a valid educational argument for understanding the general principles of magic) would posses some level of understanding of the theory. (No one ever got as far as understanding the ‘why’, but let’s set that aside, too).
2. Illusions have been used on the battlefield to fight Wars and Skirmishes in the past. They are too effective, and too well-known, for that not to have been the case. It follows that anyone with military training would at least know of the general principles and how they have been applied in the past – in gritty detail. Furthermore, anyone with knowledge of History would also be aware of the generalities.
3. Magic is as well-known in the game environment as basic physics in the USA of the 1940s. Almost everyone knows of it, and some of the more colorful past experiments and theories are well understood or misunderstood. Everything would fall at the same speed if not for the air; ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’; the basic relationship between speed and distance traveled, and the broad concept of acceleration as ‘what makes you go faster’; and so on. So everyone should be aware – at the very least – of the general principle that ‘Illusions bend reality until you see through them’.
4. Understanding the basic principles of Magic would be an absolute requirement for effective administration at a political level. So anyone with any political knowledge should also have at least basic knowledge of the general principle of Illusions.

With every step of this reasoning, the circle of those who should have at least some awareness of the principles has grown, to the point that it encompasses just about everyone except a rural hick. Certainly, every PC should know enough, even as a first-level character, that they should be so informed. What’s more, only one character was being deliberately started as a 1st-level PC; the others were all to be 5th level, for reasons that have nothing to do with the current subject of conversation. They would all be that much better-informed as to the reality in which they were living. So the secret is out of the bag already; what more harm can be done by spelling out the actual mechanics that were going to be used to translate theory into in-game practice?

Under the above circumstances, keeping this element of the game-world premises a secret would only have harmed the verisimilitude of the entire campaign. Maybe it would have been enough to keep the actual mechanics a secret until the PCs had direct experience of them, but even there, anecdotal information would outline those mechanics in summary. The work-level involved in redacting this information is going up, but the payoff is getting smaller – and the risks are not being in any way mitigated. So, in hindsight, I would have done exactly the same thing – at least in this circumstance.

Danger Two: Player-GM relations

Another problem to contend with is the perception that could arise that the GM is keeping secret from the players things that the players are entitled to know. Players are generally tolerant of the occasional breakdown in verisimilitude and the occasional oversight on the part of the GM, but this is a horse of a completely different color – this is a willful and deliberate act on the part of the GM.

It would be like promising a light romantic comedy and delivering a tale of love in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Half the audience may love the surprise twist; the rest will feel like they’ve been deceived, even cheated. Or an action-adventure in which there are no stunts.

If your justifications for secrecy are ironclad, you might be forgiven. Through gritted teeth, in some cases. But is it really worth the risk of putting your players off-side?

Danger Three: Player-Campaign relations

And, even if the players forgive you because they can see that you had what you thought were good reasons, how would this perception impact on the way the players feel about the campaign? There is a very real threat that the deception would fatally poison it. Because if the GM can withhold one crucial set of facts, you have to ask the question, What else is he hiding?

Overcoming the Dangers

All of these problems are avoided if the omission can be made central to the premise of the campaign and explicitly described as such. Which brings me back to Tom’s article.

If you describe the campaign as “The world’s first starship, equipped with a brand-new propulsion system called Void Jump, is ready for launch, and you are the expert crew who have been assigned to find out exactly what it can do,” then the absence of rules concerning Jump Travel is an inherent selling point. You can even go so far as to tell the players that you have worked out the rules concerned but they will have to learn them, in character, the hard way.

All of the negatives go away, and in fact become positive selling points for the campaign.

It should come as no surprise

The key difference between the two proposals is that the surprise in the latter case comes as no surprise at all – the GM has deliberately highlighted it. Because the players are expecting it, and there is an obvious and ironclad justification for not having the rules spelt out for them, they know what to expect. Furthermore, because the players will be expecting an adventure of some kind to result, they will even be expecting things to go badly wrong.

There might be some residual time dilation that leaks into the trip, so that while they think that they have undertaken only a 10-second “jump” to give a basic full-power test to the engines, they’ve actually been running for a decade or more – and the PCs suddenly find themselves a long way from home, and with an obvious hole in the basic theory of operation of their transportation and its underlying physics, and faced with problems of navigation that are (10 years divided by 10 seconds) 31,557,600 times worse than they expected. Throw Jump Shock and aliens into the equation, and the need to figure out exactly where they are and how they got there, and there will be plenty for the PCs to do.

(You would have to ask why this effect hadn’t shown up on unmanned tests of the drive. Two answers come to mind: they did, and the crew were warned in advance that none of the unmanned test vehicles showed up where they were supposed to; or there’s some sort of quantum “step” that they have tripped over because these engines are so much bigger than the small prototypes, which in turn was necessary for moving a ship large enough to have a crew on-board. Or, a third answer: they did, and the authorities deliberately withheld the information for their own reasons – and those reasons had better be good ones! But if an action can be plausibly attributed to an NPC, the GM can frequently get away with things that wouldn’t otherwise be tolerated. If choosing the third course, I would have a message ‘delivered’ to the PCs in some fashion explaining the in-character justification, to be found as soon as they emerged).

In fact, there would be similar questions for the GM to have answered about Jump Shock itself – are mechanical and electronic systems subject to it? If yes, the phenomenon should have been discovered by those unmanned test flights – perhaps through animal “passengers”. If no in both cases, then it comes as a surprise to the PCs – but there is something that can be done about it, long-term. It might be that the pre-electronic sci-fi writers had it right after all, and the best solution is to have the ship ‘programmed’ to function via machined and pre-designed Cams and gears…

The Natural Method: Organic Rules Growth

It was when laying out this article that I realized a second broader principle: This sort of thing goes on all the time, quite naturally.

Rules structures evolve organically over time in most campaigns. Some new situation comes up and the GM evolves rules to cope with it, or some deficiency in the existing rules comes to light. Any set of rules are always going to be insufficient to cover every possible situation than might arise. Or it might be that the GM creates an adventure and then discovers that the rules he’s been using don’t have the scope to cope with its needs.

And so the rules evolve to meet the changing game needs. It doesn’t matter that the GM may be as taken by surprise as the players; it doesn’t matter how necessary or justified the rules change might be. What matters is that the willingness and ability to evolve the rules when necessary is one of the mandatory traits of even a half-reasonable GM, and that – by definition – these rules come out of nowhere because of a plot development – something a PC or NPC is doing, will do, or wants to do. (One of the marks of a great GM is being able to do this without delaying or stopping play. I admit to not quite hitting that standard most of the time – I take a minute or two to think things through. And, if I have to, I will suspend play and get everybody at the table involved in drafting a rules solution – but that hasn’t happened in a looong time.)

Plot as a Rules Delivery System?

Finally, there is one other aspect of the whole question that’s worth mentioning. One of the big points that I emphasized in my mega-series on New Beginnings is that you need to allow space for players to familiarize themselves with any house rules that you have introduced. I even suggested throwing in an encounter or a plotline specifically for the purpose of letting them do so without anything earth-shattering, like the main campaign plot, hanging in the balance.

In essence, this is like interrupting an online adventure with a tutorial on some new capabilities that you have just acquired.

Let’s go back into the tabletop RPG arena. There are some new rules that will be in effect henceforth, for whatever reason. You’ve designed a “tutorial” encounter or adventure to show them off, test them, and permit final tweaking before they become as canonical as any of the other game rules for the campaign. There are two possible approaches: you can publish the rules in advance, possibly confusing players and yourself, pre-empting the tutorial adventure, and taking a lot of time explaining, clarifying, and answering questions in advance – or you can reveal the rules one at a time as the tutorial unfolds and only after they have been tested and approved, and are declared canonical, do you make them available to the players – saving you a lot of time and effort that can better be devoted to getting the test/tutorial right. Sounds like a bit of a no-brainer, doesn’t it?

Players may even turn up to the game table not knowing of the metagame agenda for the day. So long as they get an adventure out of it, they have no real cause for complaint under these circumstances.

You can even encourage tolerance by asking each player to offer an opinion on the proposed rules changes after the test/tutorial. That makes them ongoing participants in deciding the future of the campaign. And that’s never a bad thing.