A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Benoit, a regular reader and occasional commentator here at CM, who has translated a couple of my articles into French for a wider audience. He had noticed an unusual phenomenon during a recent game and was wondering if… well, why don’t I simply quote his email?

Hi Mike,

In a recent session, I noticed that the place of the gamers around the table was very important. For example, when two players disagree about what to do, the discussion is harder if they speak face to face (as if it was a kind of confrontation) whereas, if they are just on the same side of the table, it is softer.

In another group, I saw I had to put the shyer players next to me so that they can whisper their wishes and not be overwhelmed by more charismatic players who take a broad part of the time of play.

Therefore, I was wondering if, in all your posts, you dealt with that topic of how the place of gamers around the table has an influence on the pace of gaming.

Sincerely,
Benoit Huot

(No, that’s neither myself nor Benoit in the illustration, at least as far as I know. But it’s a scene that would not look out of place at any tabletop game.)

Today’s article will be an expansion of the reply that I sent, because this is a subject of potential interest to a great many GMs, and because I’ve had one or two (hopefully) original thoughts on the subject. Johnn and I had actually discussed this issue with the intent of doing an article on the subject, though I’ll be darned if I can find that discussion despite having email archives that run all the way back to 1993 – so I’ll be starting from scratch. If some of the initial thoughts seem a little elementary, it’s because I’m doing my thinking out loud…

The Significance Of Seating

Where people sit can have an influence over game play that is both profound and subtle. An array of subtle consequences and minor influences battle for supremacy and some cascade into a substantial impact on the emotional states and even the attitudes of the players concerned. This article is going to attempt to take a comprehensive look at the different factors that go into deciding where people sit at the gaming table and how those positions both reinforce existing personality traits and trends and mitigate them – and at least give the GM a greater awareness of the influence these factors can have. I hope I can get through it all in a single article, as I think the discussion will be weakened if I have to split it up! In an attempt to do so, this will be a relatively shallow analysis – I’m striving to be comprehensive, not deep, this time around.

Considerations of Seating Position

The place to start is by asking the question “why do players sit where they do at the gaming table?”

I’m sure that every GM who games with the same players for multiple game sessions will have noticed the phenomenon – and in some cases, may have noticed subtle differences depending on the game that is being played, and the in-game roles of the characters portrayed by the players.

There are more than 19 factors that combine to give an order of preference to the choice of seating location. The most dominant and assertive personality amongst the players will take his preferred seating position, the next most assertive will then take his most-preferred from amongst those that remain, and so on.

1. Shy/Quiet Players

It follows that the player who is quietest and most shy, most introverted, will tend to get shuffled into the least desirable seating location on a regular basis. Since these players tend to be relatively soft-spoken, sometimes having difficulty raising their voice above a whisper, that can make them hard for the GM to hear, and they can often get sidelined within the game – which sometimes means that players and GM don’t get to hear valuable contributions to the discussion. There is a natural temptation for the GM to move such players closer to themselves to encourage communications with that player. This can sometimes work, but it is fraught with potential difficulties.

Firstly, by elevating the shy character out of his position in the pecking order, you can make the player uncomfortable – sometimes to the point where they will leave the game, and frequently to the point of reducing whatever enjoyment they get from the game. Second, by accommodating their personality handicap, you encourage it. Third, by permitting the player to speak softly and still be heard by the GM, you are effectively saying that it’s OK if the other players don’t hear what he has to say, so long as you do.

A better solution is to permit the player his preferred seating, but shine the spotlight in his direction early and often – and insist that he speak up, repeating himself if necessary. Get the player to state his actions before giving the more dominant players any opportunity to make the choice for him – and if it’s an uncustomary direct and responsive action choice (it often won’t be) you can even shade you rulings just a little in his favor to encourage him.

I was an extremely introverted child, and emerging from that took several years and a number of experiences both painful and exhilarating. RPGs completed the transition from shy kid to occasional extravert in far less than a year, thanks to GMs who followed this exact prescription.

2. Noise

A lot of gaming environments are noisy, and very often this factor is not taken into consideration. Some players are more sensitive to noisy environments than others and will tend to place themselves as far from the source of the noise as possible.

Practicality states that the GM should attempt to locate himself in the quietest position at the table. Not only do all the players have to hear more of what he has to say, more often, but he also (generally) has more that has to be said than anyone else – and talking over a lot of noise requires him to raise his voice, which can result in a sore throat and even full-blown laryngitis at the end of a game session. (Hit tip: some of the sports drinks out there, especially the ones designed for tissue rehydration, can MASSIVELY mitigate this effect. I could not GM for more than about 5 hours without a Powerade Blue to preserve my voice – the other flavors don’t seem to work as well, and neither do several of the other leading brands. The flavor name is technically “Mountain Blast” or something like that. It’s way better than a throat lozenge.)

A related question – especially if your player population is aging – is the acuity of their sense of hearing. I have tinnitus in one ear, the legacy of a nasty cold. I don’t want a quiet player to sit on that side. Similarly, some players will have better hearing than others – they should sit further away.

Usually other factors take precedence over this one – which means that you’re stuck with these issues, however they manifest at your table. This effect can easily compound with a tendency to speak quietly – sometimes the “introvert” doesn’t speak up because he can’t hear you properly.

3. Traffic

If you game in a public place such as a game store, library, or convention, you will almost certainly have to content with traffic. So long as the accessways are not so narrow that someone has to stand up to let such traffic past, it’s simply another source of noise, and everything that needs to be said was covered in the previous section. As soon as traffic flow reaches the point of disrupting the game, however, it becomes a consideration in its own right.

Practicality, at first blush, suggests that the GM be in the position that is most removed from the traffic; he is the central figure of the game, the person who is involved in every PC conversation, every character action, while quite often this interaction is one-on-one with an individual player – meaning that the game will be disrupted less frequently that way. But there are other considerations, in particular mobility. I have to use a cane, and cannot take the physical stress of repeatedly standing up; the same could be true of anyone at the table. Heck, there is no reason why one of your players can’t be in a wheelchair, or have a leg in a cast! Anyone so affected should NOT be placed in a position near heavy traffic – at least in theory.

But there’s a contradictory factor here – quite frequently, these spaces are the ones with the most empty space around them, and that can make it easier to get up when you have to. In fact, there are so many permutations under this heading that every situation will be different – and moving a table a couple of inches this way or that can make a huge difference. So all I can really do regarding this category is to raise awareness of the issue and leave each individual to prioritize and accommodate the circumstances under which they game.

4. Interactive Space

Players whose characters interact with each other should sit together to facilitate that interaction – but this is rarely a high priority when choosing seating at the table, often to a game’s detriment, as the alternative is speak across the table, making communications more difficult. It means that a player can either face the other player that he is interacting with or the GM – not both.

5. Handedness

Why are people left- or right-handed? I don’t know – but its a fact that people usually are, and that this has a lot of influence over their lives in a miriad of subtle ways. For example, when you write, you need space for your elbow; in a confined space, that makes it necessary to twist the body somewhat; and that can force a player who is incorrectly seated to turn away from the GM when doing so. A player’s “work space” will tend to favor their handedness as well, while their “storage space” will favor their off-hand – so a right-handed player will usually place their character sheet to their left and leave space for die rolling, making notes, drawing maps, or consulting rulebooks, in front and slightly to the right. The player occupies an asymmetric space.

People more often look to their hand side than their off-hand side. Correct positioning means that they will be looking at the battlemap or the GM when they do so; incorrect positioning means they will be looking at the walls, the bookcase, the TV, or whatever.

People naturally interact more casually with a person placed at their on-hand side than their off-hand side. They also tend to pay more attention to people placed at that side when they are speaking.

In addition to these direct effects, handedness can therefore interact with the notion of interactive space and other influences in very complex ways. Placing the more dominant player to the off-hand of a less-dominant player when the pair share an interactive space can equalize their respective influences within the interactive space – but can also elevate one player’s degree of interaction with the GM over that of the other, by virtue of Proximity. (Are readers starting to glimpse the complexities of the subject?).

6. GM-Player Interaction

That, of course, brings up the question of GM-Player interactions. If it were possible, the perfect place for the GM to be is in the middle of the table – not the middle of one side, but the exact centre – at least some of the time. That placement doesn’t work (even in theory) when the GM needs to address the entire group. It follows that the perfect table shape for gaming is a horseshoe or Omega symbol. The players sit around the circle (on the outside) and the GM has both the wings for his stuff – he can sit behind them to address the group or move to the centre to deal with one or two players individually.

Now that I’ve dispensed with that particular flight of fancy (though I’ll come back to it later), let’s get practical. There are three considerations concerning proximity to the GM that may play a part in seating arrangements:

• Players who interact more frequently with the GM may need to be closer to the GM;
• Players who are more interested in the game should be closer to the GM;
• Players who need to pass frequent notes to the GM may need to be closer to the GM, especially if the fact that a note has been passed is also to remain a secret.

It’s entirely possible that absolutely none of these factors produce a preferred seating arrangement that agrees with any other.

7. Electrical Constraints

These days, I use a laptop as a GM. So does one and occasionally a second of my players. Unless the table is to be festooned with electrical cables running in every direction and through the mapspace or the personal space being used by all the other players, we need to sit more-or-less adjacent to each other, and close to the outlet.

8. Physical Constraints

Physical constraints can also play a big role in where players sit. You don’t have to give the photo of my deceased friend Stephen (Remembering Stephen Tunnicliff, June 4 2012) to realize that he was a very large man. If a table was large enough for two to a side, he generally needed the end of the table all to himself.

Nor is that the only possible physical constraint – as was suggested under “traffic,” above, anything from wheelchairs to broken legs may have to be accommodated at different times.

I once gamed with a guy with a broken arm and couldn’t pass this point without mentioning that it takes more table space to do things with your off hand when you aren’t used to it – make appropriate allowances when necessary!

9. Practicality

Here’s another practical consideration: some players need more space simply because they have more “stuff”. Quite often, only one or two players will be providing rulebooks for the table, for example. And even if you don’t need to run a laptop from an electrical outlet, it still takes up a significant amount of table space.

These considerations alone can dictate how many people can fit along one side of a table.

10. Ease Of Extraction

I also hinted briefly at this consideration when discussing Traffic. Quite simply, some players need to get up from the table more often than others – because of medical conditions, for example. In addition, some GMs prefer to take players aside for private discussions away from the rest of the group – something that is a lot easier if they are in a position with greater ease of extraction. Some characters may require this treatment more frequently than others, or more predictably. If the GM can anticipate it, he will usually want to factor it into the seating arrangements at the table.

11. Access to storage

The GM will generally have greater need to be able to access storage than any of the players, but storage space is generally not evenly distributed around the table – which means that this is a factor in determining the preferred seating position for the GM. And, since a player cannot occupy the same table space as the GM, this inevitably denies a particular table position to the other players.

12. Natural Preference

Some people are uncomfortable with their backs to a doorway or open space, while others prefer it. While those with severe Agoraphobia and Claustrophobia will undoubtedly be receiving treatment and probably not able to attend a game regularly, these – like most conditions – can exist in a range of degrees from extreme to discomfit. Problems of this sort, even in mild form, are very real and may need to be taken into account in determining who sits where.

Another point to consider under this heading is that some players simply like to be able to look the GM in the eye.

13. Positive Game Interaction

Characters who interact with each other or as a team should have their players closer together. This consideration is an outgrowth of “interactive space”, above – but where that item concerned itself with a player interacting with another player, this is all about players being able to interact as a group with the GM and vice-versa. In the Pulp campaign at the moment, the players have divided into two teams – putting the members of those teams side-by-side means that the GMs can more readily speak to both. As I said under “ease of extraction,” if the GM can anticipate it, he will usually want to factor it in.

Another factor that should be taken into consideration is team leadership – if this matters to the internal logic of the campaign (it does in a superhero team, for example, or in an AD&D game where one or two of the characters are nobles), these character’s owners might be better placed right next to the GM.

14. Negative Game Interaction

Sometimes a GM wants to alter the table arrangements to impede “negative interactions”. This can be anything from breaking up cliques, to making it more difficult for two players to conduct side conversations, to simply separating two players with a dispute (for example, a case where one keeps intruding on the “other’s” space).

The problem with this goal is that it sometimes makes matters worse. Side conversations that were quiet murmurs between two players seated side-by-side can become a louder conversation across the table – or (perhaps worse) two side conversations at once, distracting not only the players originally affected but two players who were previously able to pay attention to the GM.

If you’re having a serious problem with negative game/player interactions, rearranging the seating can be a worthwhile experiment – but don’t be afraid to validate the results of that experiment after an hour or two, and further reshuffle things as necessary. Once (back when we had plenty of room), I was even forced to exile one player to a completely separate table to deal with this sort of thing – but I’m not going to name names or go into details of that just at the moment.

15. A caveat

While we’re on the subject, any alteration in seating intended to achieve a positive effect can have the reverse effect under the wrong circumstances – you’re dealing with people, and people are not always predictable. A change intended to reinforce good behavior or mitigate bad behavior can simply place the offender in a position to teach a good player some bad habits.

For that reason, seating positions should never be altered capriciously. Instead, changes should be made with a clear purpose in mind, and GMs should be ready to change the arrangements immediately it becomes clear that this purpose is not being achieved by the change. It can be better to call a ten minute break and rearrange the seating (inducing a temporary disruption within the game) than to have several hours of mid-level continuous disruption while you’re trying to play.

16. Characteristic Sequence

If you’re running an adventure with a lot of combat, you could do worse than to rearrange seating into initiative sequence. If you’re running a detective/analytic adventure, it’s at least worth contemplating putting the players into the sequence of Intelligence score. The advantages should be obvious; with all else being equal, this would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, as this article has shown quite clearly, all else is definitely not equal.

17. Psychology

Through all of this discussion, I’ve been focusing on reasons why people might be seated elsewhere than their “natural” locations – while never addressing the question of why people choose the default seating position they normally occupy. The closest I’ve come was in talking about the most dominant character having first choice, and so on.

Preferred seating positions tend to reflect a blend of player and character psychology. It was the difficulty in trying to assess this element that has delayed the appearance of this article for so long, but at last I think I’ve gotten a handle on it. Consider the diagram to the right.

• Position A is the GM, as the person with the greatest level of authority at the table.
• Position B1, adjacent to the GM, is “The Cooperative Position” – it is conducive to friendly conversation, cooperation, and negotiation.
• Position B2, opposite the GM, is “The Competitive-Defensive Position” – it can either reflect a defensive mindset on the part of the player or a desire to control the game; it reduces the chances of cooperation & collaboration and increases the chances of formality and rivalry. It also promotes an attitude of independence. Proximity to the GM enables direct confrontation or an aura of shared authority if the GM agrees with the player seated here. Don’t be surprised if your most problematic player or rules lawyer chooses this seating position.
• Position B3, beside B2 and as far removed from the GM as possible, is “The Independent Position”. The most extremely independent position, it is more aloof and less confrontational than position B2, though it emphasizes and aggressive level of independence and sense of competition. This is also sometimes described as the “Competitive-Aggressive” position, and if the rules lawyer doesn’t take B2, this is where he will prefer to sit. The difference is that at position B2, the urge is to get the GM to agree, at B3 the urge is to overrule the GM when the player thinks the GM is wrong. However, it is also sometimes chosen by those who would prefer to avoid confrontations of any sort because it is the most removed position from the firing line. I prefer the term “Independent Position” because how the player chooses to exercise that independence is an individual thing.
• Position B4 can be either beside the GM (as shown) or at the opposite end of the table to position B1, and is the “Ally Position”. It enhances agreement between the GM and the player, cooperation, and a united front against positions B2 and B3. However, any tension or disagreement between the GM and this player has an increased propensity to escalate beyond the game and turn nasty.

This behavior is conserved with rotation and reflection – B2 is always opposite the GM, B1 is always at the corner to the GM, B3 is always alongside B2 or at the opposite corner to B1, B4 is whatever’s left. However, there is a bias resulting from handedness – the GM will usually have B1 on his off-side, which means that if both are right-handed, B1 will have the GM to his handed side.

Note that these are preferences based on the existing psychology and attitude of the players concerned – these are the positions they will gravitate toward if left alone to make their own choices, and usually without even thinking about it.

There are a couple of other aspects of seating psychology that are worth mentioning: Sharing a side of the table represents sharing power, and diminishes individual authority, while having one table-side to oneself conveys a subconsciously-perceived air of authority and command.

And yes, there are specialists and consultants who are experts at this kind of thing who work out the seating arrangements for major political functions, White House dinners, etc. This was (deliciously) spoofed in a Yes, Prime Minister episode where someone arranged the seating for dignitaries at an official function alphabetically – “Iran, Israel and Jordan all in the same row – we’ll be in danger of starting World War III” (or something along those lines, I don’t have the exact quote to hand).

18. Behavior Induction

Placing players in specific seating positions can induce a shift towards the psychological traits associated with the position. GMs can seek to reduce the intensity of confrontations with a rules lawyer by placing them in position B1, for example, or can acknowledge his mastery of the game mechanics by placing him at B4 and assuming that he is almost always right in his calls. A shyer character can be placed in positions B2 or B3 and deliberately spotlighted by the GM early and often (B2 is probably preferable, since the player is unlikely to speak up and the GM may forget to engage him within the game if he is not directly in the GMs eye line to act as a reminder).

There are a vast number of possible seating configurations possible. But playing around with seating in an attempt to induce or modify behavior is chancy and often has undesired consequences; it’s better to analyze the existing seating positions after all the other factors listed in this article are accommodated as a guide to the possible psychological impact of the seating position – then making allowances and modifying your tone, and behavior as a GM, accordingly.

The illustration to the right depicts just a few of the possibilities – there are two four-player examples and two five-player examples.

Option 4-1 places the GM at the head of the table and the four players down each side of it. This places both B1 and B3 in Cooperative positions and permits them to ally against B2 and B4 – both of whom are divided by the table.

Option 4-2 gives one entire side of the table to the GM, placing B1 and B2 in weakened Cooperative Positions (proximity to the GM matters). B3 and B4 are both in Competitive-Defensive positions, and the GM can move from one end of the table to the other temporarily to place one in the more negotiation-friendly position (at the price of temporarily emphasizing the independence of the other).

Option 5-1 is essentially the same as 4-1 but with an extra player seated at the end of the table. This creates two “independent” positions but with the right players can work very well, since it encourages alliance between B1 and B2 on one side of the table, B3 and B4 on the other, and inclines B1 and B3 to cooperate/collaborate with the GM while encouraging B2 and B4 to cooperate/collaborate with B5. This is the natural seating arrangement for collaborative meetings, though a power struggle can emerge between the GM and B5 at the far end of the table.

Option 5-2 again gives an entire side of the table to the GM, especially if B1 is right-handed and B5 is left-handed. It places B2, B3, and B4 in clearly subordinate positions to the GM, and virtually eliminates the fully-independent seating position in favor of an additional pair of Competitive-Defensive positions.

19. Size matters

Table size may leave you with little option. I use arrangement 4-1 a lot when gaming at the Games Store because that’s the amount of table space available there. At home I have a much bigger table, and generally use the end of it for storage of game materials, while I adopt a lopsided 4-2 or 5-2 configuration (eliminating the B5 position).

If the table is too large, it is better to reduce the amount of space available than to permit isolationism to occur. To explain what I mean by that, I have to start with a couple of extracts quoted from the Wikipedia Page on Personal Space:

Personal space is the region surrounding a person which they regard as psychologically theirs. Most people value their personal space and feel discomfort, anger, or anxiety when their personal space is encroached. A person’s personal space (and corresponding comfort zone) is highly variable and difficult to measure accurately.

• Intimate distance ranges from touching to about 18 inches (46 cm) apart, and is reserved for lovers, children, as well as close family members and friends, and also pet animals.
• Personal distance begins about an arm’s length away; starting around 18 inches (46 cm) from the person and ending about 4 feet (122 cm) away. This space is used in conversations with friends, to chat with associates, and in group discussions.
• Social distance ranges from 4 to 8 feet (1.2 m – 2.4 m) away from the person and is reserved for strangers, newly formed groups, and new acquaintances.
• Public distance includes anything more than 8 feet (2.4 m) away, and is used for speeches, lectures, and theater. Public distance is essentially that range reserved for larger audiences.

Personal space is highly variable. Those living in densely populated places tend to have a smaller personal space. People make exceptions to, and modify their space requirements. A number of relationships may allow for personal space to be modified and these include familial ties, romantic partners, friendships and close acquaintances where a greater degree of trust and knowledge of a person allows personal space to be modified.

Isolationism occurs when an activity is carried out at a distance greater than that at which it would normally occur. When we see this take place, we often place an imaginary wall between the participants; it is as though they are going through the motions of pretending to have one level of intimacy with each other while actually having the more removed relationship.

The same thing happens in terms of roleplaying collaboration and cooperation when players are seated too far apart – as though the characters were pretending to be a party while they are nothing but chance-met travelling companions. Gaming is a social activity, and that social factor is strained or lost entirely if participants are at Social distances or more removed from each other.

The other extreme is better, but just barely. While it is principally carried on in the imagination, Roleplaying is a Table-top activity, and does require some table space – at the very least, enough to have a rulebook open, a notepad at the ready, and space to roll dice. If that’s all there is, though, players will feel claustrophobic even if not normally so inclined. Continually-bumping elbows will fray even the most even of tempers. If the table – such as a card table – is too small, it is actually better for the players to sit on the floor or on a couch and leave the table exclusively for GM use.

Round Tables – a new headache

People often have the strange notion that the area of control of someone sitting at a table is semicircular. Certainly, the focus of attention is a semicircular area – but books are rectangular and project outward from that focus-of-attention area, as shown by the diagram above. This can cause problems at a round table (or even a shape that is only more or less round, as shown to the right – the areas of each player overlap, which means they are getting in each other’s way, as shown to the right.

A large enough table can avoid this problem, though such tables are rare. A slightly larger table than the one illustrated could satisfactorily seat half the number of players shown (i.e. three); a more rounded table of that size could just about cope with four players and a GM.

How were the areas of attention set in the example?
The right-hand side, inner corner, is as far as the lefthand can reach while seated; the left-hand side, far corner, is as far as the right hand can reach. It’s that simple, really.

New Players – a special case

A lot of the undesirable behavior described above becomes not only acceptable but encouraged when introducing a new player, especially a player who is new to the game system or to roleplaying in general.

It’s often a good idea to partner such players with a more experienced player who can explain the rules as necessary and advise against actions that might be newbie mistakes, for example. This side conversation is not only understandable, it’s desirable – when the alternative is the GM interrupting the game to make those explanations.

It follows that the placement of new players at the table of an existing game requires very careful consideration. You want them close enough to be able to interact with the GM, and with the Mentor chosen – but at the same time, sufficiently distant that quiet side-conversation will not disrupt play. They will probably need to access rule books more often than an experienced player, possibly even more often than the GM. For every scene, location, or individual that the GM mentions or name-checks, there will be a backstory that the new player won’t know – once again, either the GM interrupts the game to explain the context, or relies on another player to do so. At the same time, at least initially, everything the new player does will need to be monitored while he is learning the system – everything from rolling the right dice to applying the right modifiers to finding the right numbers on the character sheet. Correct player seating can make all of this easier and less disruptive, or it can impede both the learning process and gameplay.

Conclusion

There are so many factors to take into account in determining the best seating arrangement that any attempt to preplan a configuration are almost certain to fail. Change one seating position to address one of these factors and you also alter half-a-dozen others, making it practically impossible to predict the outcome.

Prioritizing one factor of special significance can yield an operational plan that will at least enhance the game in that respect. Recognizing that nothing comes without a price tag, at least this article can permit the GM who is willing to experiment (or who has no choice) to analyze the consequences and refine his choices. At least we won’t be working in a state of ignorance!

With the Christmas season apon us, I thought it an appropriate time to talk about Christmas gifts suitable for tabletop gamers, some obvious, and some not-so-obvious. My family often complain that I’m hard to shop for; I disagree, and this list is the reason why…

Rulebooks

The most obvious thing to give another player is a rulebook from their favorite game, or from a game that you think they might like to play. This is especially true if they are on a financially-constrained budget and you know they can’t afford to buy these books for themselves. If you aren’t a gamer yourself, this may require the covert assistance of someone they game with.

Gaming Paraphernalia

Gaming Paraphernalia comes in many varieties and some of it makes for good gifts – while some of it doesn’t. I’m going to hit a couple of high points:

Dice

Most players are very well equipped with dice. That means that if you are to give something of this sort, it needs to be something exotic. There are stores out there that specialize in dice – explore them, with advice from other gamers if necessary. I once gave one of my players a d3, a d5, a d7, a d14, and a d16 for Christmas.

But there is a downside to this choice of gift: they will have limited utility (otherwise they would have reached common circulation long since). Of those dice mentioned above, only the d7 saw even occasional use (for random assignment of the day of the week). Now a d24 and a d60 – those would have seen a LOT of use for random generation of the time-of-day.

Character Sheets

These might seem like a good gift, but they don’t tend to go over all that well, for a variety of reasons. For one, they look relatively cheap in an age where photocopiers are commonplace; for another, their utility may be limited or even non-existent; and for a third, the player will almost certainly have something worked out – some system or character sheet – that they already use. One of my players likes to use an A4 hardcover notebook for each character, so that he has room in the book for notes, etc, for example. So avoid these.

Character Portraits

I’ve been commissioned to produce character portraits for other gamers a couple of times. Properly framed, and especially if the character is a favorite of the player, these make an excellent gift. Leave the artist plenty of lead time, though – commission at least 3 months before the gift is to be handed out – and be sure to work with them on the question of mounting and framing. And expect to pay a fair price – a good portrait may take 20 hours or more to create, and at $20 an hour (a fairly minimal rate for this sort of thing) that runs you to $400. The better the artist, the more lead time and money will be needed – but the more satisfying the end result is likely to be. WORK those twitter and facebook connections!

Miniatures & Figure Sets

If you give someone miniatures, make sure they are relevant – and properly painted by someone who knows what they are doing. This can cost as much as a character portrait.

Figure Sets that are genre-relevant can be a suitable alternative to give a GM. We use a lot of Cardboard Heroes and Marvel Heroclix for figures in the Zenith-3 game (with the occasional Fantasy figure for something exotic). However, once the GM has enough for his needs, these go over like a lead balloon – so definitely consult others in the gaming group first.

Other

There are a few items that count as “Other” Gaming paraphernalia. Ian Gray has provided our group with a set of magnetic initiative trackers – use a whiteboard marker to label one with the character’s name, and you can move them around as necessary, then slide them to one side when they have acted – or to the other if they are holding an action, or casting a spell, or otherwise haven’t completed their action yet. The rule of thumb for these and similar gaming bits is that they generally make excellent gifts – if the group doesn’t have them.

Dice Bags and shoulder bags and the like also fall into this category, but these can be chancy as gifts – the recipient often has enough of them already.

Fiction

Fiction seems like another obvious choice – but you quickly run into the problem of personal taste. Sometimes you’ll hit a winner, and sometimes not. Another caveat is being sure of what the intended recipient already has.

If it’s a new book by their favorite author, you’re on relatively safe ground. If it’s a new anthology within a genre they like, you’re probably reasonably OK as well. Beyond those two circumstances, things get a little trickier.

Non-Fiction

It’s often easier and safer to buy a work of non-fiction. Personal tastes tend to be less of a factor, and there are always new books being published in virtually every field – and since gaming covers such a wide terrain, it’s impossible to keep up with it all.

I’ve broken this category down into no less than 19 sub-items (and I’m sure I’ve left something out!) Some of these may require some detective work.

Psychology & Characterization

We all, as players, want to get inside our character’s heads. Books on characterization help us do that, so anything new on that subject is always a good gift for a gamer. To a lesser extent, the same is true of books from the related field of Psychology.

How-to-write

Most gamers tend to write – or, at the very least, to fictionalize. We write character backgrounds, and adventures, and magic items, and campaign histories, and so on and on almost endlessly. As a group, we are probably the most literate subculture, excluding those who make a living from reading or writing. Anything that makes our writing better, or more accessible, or easier, is definitely suitable as a gift.

World Almanacs

For players or GMs of any campaign set in a modern era, a World Almanac is an especially good gift. I have three – 1996, 1998, and 2012 – and use them all the time. Also the CIA world factbook. The occasional copy of the Guinness Book Of World Records probably fits somewhere in or around this category as well.

Cartography & Atlases

One of the most entertaining books that I read this year was about how the US states got their shapes. I have 5 atlases that I use constantly, including one from the 1970s and another from the 1950s. I’d love to add one for pre-WWII to the collection for use with the Pulp campaign.

The thing with atlases is that they all present the same basic information to different levels of detail and clarity. One of my atlases gives almost no information about smaller settlements, nothing on roads, etc. But it’s excellent about mineral deposits and land use and vegetation. Another is very detailed – so much so that it can be hard to find what you are looking for. And another is in between these two extremes. I’ll frequently generate maps for my modern-day games using Google Maps and screen captures – but we’ll always use an atlas to decide where we want to be looking.

Writer’s Guides

As a GM, we’re always looking to bring the game era to life around the players. As players, we want to make our characters feel authentic. Writer’s guides help us do both. If only they were better indexed (sigh).

Science

The single best, most readable, most comprehensive compendium of scientific history and knowledge that I have ever read is Asimov’s New Guide To Science. It was published and last updated in 1984 – making it almost 30 years out of date! Nevertheless, as a starting point for understanding more recent developments and discoveries, as a foundation, it is excellent and irreplaceable. I have a number of other books on science in my collection – but science never stands still. Books on the subject – especially those targeted at a non-specialist market – are therefore always good gifts for anyone who games in the modern or sci-fi genres.

Histories

Games always happen in some period of history (except for the sci-fi genre). Books on history are therefore a good choice of gift for a gamer, especially those devoted to a period related to the one they game in. Perhaps the second most interesting book I’ve read this year was about the confrontation between FDR and the US Supreme Court – and while nothing in its contents has yet impacted on the Pulp Campaign, sooner or later it will.

Books on mythology

For a fantasy gamer, and a superhero gamer, these are good choices, for obvious reasons.

Travel Guides

Remember what I said about Writer’s Guides? Travel Guides can be just as useful, especially ones that contain more than a list of hotels and hotel reviews. The more literate the description of a place, the more useful these are. It’s the next best thing to going there in person – something that is often beyond the means of most gamers.

Political Analyses

Ahh, Politics. EVERY campaign has politics in it. The more you understand about politics and political shenanigans, the better. Books about politics are always good gifts – provided they are reasonably unbiased.

Sociology

If every society has politics, it can only be helpful to understand more about that society. So books on sociology – again, aimed at the general public – are also useful ideas for gifts.

Books on language

These fall into two sub-sub-categories. Books about English should really be lumped into the How-to-write category; that leaves books on other languages. These can be anything from translation dictionaries (though these days the free translators on the internet are a reasonable substitute) through to full courses in speaking an appropriate language, through to the most useful and hard-to-find books of all: how the language impacted on and reflects the society in question. Again, every culture communicates amongst its constituents – the more you know about the limits and impacts of the modes of communication used, the better you can play in or GM that culture. And lessons learned about, say, ancient Rome can always be transferred to some other fantasy or sci-fi Kingdom or Realm.

Books About Names

Baby books that offer the meaning of names are a dime-a-dozen. Once you have one, you are pretty much set.

Or are you? How about one that divides its content by nation, and by era? What were the most common names of 14th century Portugal? What can a surname tell about a family background? How are places named? The utility of such books depends on their structure. Read the reviews carefully and you can uncover a hidden gem or two.

Books About Things

These tend to be genre-specific, but there’s a wealth of choice within each genre. For sci-fi gamers, a book on spaceships. Or planets. For pulp gamers, a book on classic cars, or early aviation. For fantasy gamers, a book on armor, or weapons, or castles. For the modern-day gamer, consider how-it-works books.

Books about Genre

There are always books about Genre. Books about science fiction for the sci-fi gamer. Books about fantasy for the fantasy gamer. Books about swashbuckling for the swashbuckler. Books about comics for the superhero gamer. You get the idea! The tricks here are making sure you get something the intended recipient doesn’t already have, and making sure you get the genre right – there’s a big difference between modern sci-fi and space opera, for example.

For-Dummies Books (and similar) on crafts and skills their characters possess but the player does not

This is definitely something a lot of people don’t think of. Give a gamer a copy of the boy scout manual, or a survivalist guide, or a primer on how to paint. What you are really giving them is a reference book for their character. Just make sure to include the inscription for use with (character name) on the card, or they will never know why they’ve got a book on fishing.

This is definitely an option that few people think of, and an endless source of new gift ideas. It requires a consultation of the player’s peers, however.

References & TV/Movie Guides

These tend to be fairly obvious. Give a sci-fi player a book on the 100 best sci-fi movies, or the making of Stargate, or whatever. These should really be in the “Books about genre” category, but I wanted to single them out in order to sound a word of warning: if the recipient is not a fan of the specific series, your gift will go over like a lead balloon – and if they are a fan, they may well already have the item in question. So this sub-category is very definitely a double-edged sword of Damocles.

Books on software that they use

I don’t use Photoshop very much – I’m more a CorelPaint person (not that they’ve made that particular software for years). I have Photoshop, I just don’t use it much. I have collected a number of books on how to use this software – and would have been happy to receive them as gifts before I bought them.

This option requires more detective work than most, but it can pay off big-time if you get it right.

Gift Certificates

And, if your imagination – or your ability to do the detective work – fails you, there is always the rather flavorless and unimaginative option of a gift certificate for a bookstore. Which at least ensures that the recipient will get something that they want.

DVDs

Another popular gift idea, but one that is a little more fraught with peril of duplication than books.

Movies & TV

The key to this type of gift is choosing something that the recipient both wants and doesn’t have – and that can be a tricky proposition. The more they like a series or a movie, the more likely they are to already have a copy. Conversely, the fact that they don’t have it can mean that they don’t want it.

Science Documentary

Safer ground can often be found in the area of documentaries. I’ve singled out two specific types, of which Science Documentaries are the first. But if you know someone is into documentaries, these can quickly encounter the same problems as those listed for generic Movies & TV DVDs.

Historical Documentary

Documentaries about history, especially history relevant to the genre of gaming, are another choice worth keeping in mind. I’m a big fan of the BBC series, Time Team, for example, but until recently, there have been very few DVDs for the series. Everything that was said above about Genre-related Books applies here.

CDs

Soundtracks and Special Effects CDs can be an unusual choice – but an interesting and different one – where the intended recipient is a GM.

Storage containers

Gamers always need more space to put things. Bookshelves, storage cubes, DVD/CD cases – they can all make excellent choices for gifts.

Stationery

Another category few people seem to think of, but one in which there are a couple of quality choices available.

Parchment & Other fancy papers

Most people have a printer of some sort for their computers. These can render something that looks vaguely like parchment as a background to text. But have you ever considered the possibility of giving a GM a number of pages of ‘simulated’ parchment cut to an appropriate size for their printer to use for maps and game props? Silver-colored heavy paper is often used for Weddings and the like – but can make a wonderful game prop for anything sci-fi or superhero. Drop by your local printer and ask about fancy papers…

Whiteboards, overhead projectors

If they don’t have one, consider one of these options for a GM. The utility should be obvious.

Software

Software as a gift seems to be declining in popularity. It’s always hard because it needs to run under the right operating system AND be useful to the player/GM – and, at the end of the day, there might not be anything much to show for it. This gift these days is often relatively intangible.

Gaming Software

There are, nevertheless, examples of gaming software out there. If you can find the right one, it can be useful. A star atlas for the sci-fi player, for example.

Character Generators

GMs love character generators and similar tools that take the pain and effort out of generating encounters. If the results are editable and customizable, so much the better. But giving a fantasy gamer a Call-Of-Cthulhu character generator won’t get you far – consult the other gamers with whom the recipient plays.

Art Software and Add-ons

Some people will love this as a gift, others… let’s just say, not so much. There are all sorts of plugins for art software, some of them quite pricey, others quite affordable or even free. Compatibility and making sure the art software the recipient has can run the add-on can be the stumbling blocks – but you can get around that if you include compatible software and maybe a novice’s user-guide as part of the bundle.

Text Editors

Have I already mentioned that gamers write – a lot? Oh, Good. Then the gift of the latest version of the software they use – provided it will run on their computer – should be an obvious choice, but one that people never seem to think of.

Fonts & Clipart

This one’s a little more technical. There are some excellent free fonts out there – and there are a lot of even-better not-for-free fonts. At the cheap end, giving someone a cheap font collection (or a clipart collection) can be a great choice for a bargain-basement gift. At the more expert end, look for a font seller online and a gift certificate, or buy a commercial font / clipart collection.

Mapping Software

A perennial favorite software choice for gamers, there are some excellent choices out there – and some not-so-great ones. Some are free, some are not. Again, some detective work (especially using twitter or other social media) can reap big dividends.

Computer Games

This is the no-brainer gift in the software category – provided you buy for the right operating system and hardware. Suddenly, the usual detective work and due diligence are back in vogue.

T-Shirts

A gift of a t-shirt is as much work as you want to make it. The more effort you put into matching the shirt with the recipient’s tastes, the better recieved it will be. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, a T-shirt is just something that you wear, and these are given as gifts way more often by the unimaginative than perhaps they should be.

Geekdom

There are always geeky items, which most gamers will love. A phone shaped like a Dalek? – why not? A cake mould shaped like the Millennium Falcon? – why not?

Gift-giving should be about more than a commercial transaction in which you buy something for someone else. It should be symbolic of affection and the best aspects of a relationship between giver and recipient. The more imagination and thought and care that goes into the selection of an appropriate gift, the more likely you are to hit a winner – the more you are saying to the recipient with your gift, “I value you enough to have put some effort into this.” Of course, allowances for circumstances should always be made – but there are bargains enough out there that thought and diligence will usually get you something appropriate and within your price range; it’s just a question of looking hard enough and being creative enough with your choices.

We’ve all made mistakes, done things that we regret, mourn missed opportunities. We all have shameful little secrets that we would not want to have exposed, usually deriving from our childhood or youth – but sometimes from later in life. This is actually a sign of maturity and moral growth in the individual by virtue of the regret and shame associated with the secret.

Quite often, what we regret can therefore be a signpost to the values and morals of the individual. It can profile the character in several key respects.

One of the first questions I ask when I’m constructing a PC or an important NPC is, therefore, “What does this character regret? What’s his ‘Shameful little secret’?”

The Deed Itself

First of all, consider the deed itself. It could be an opportunity missed (leading to the logical question of why it was missed – was the character hesitant or untrusting or miserly? Did they simply make a misjudgment?) or it could be a case of opportunism, a yielding to temptation – or it could be a personal failure of some kind, or even something completely out of their control.

Examples

Here are just a few of the many possible examples of shameful secrets:

• Stole food from a hungry family
• Lied about a misdeed and saw another punished
• Was tempted by his brother’s wife
• Envied the success of another to the point of sabotaging them
• Could not save his parents from a violent death (shades of Batman!)
• Inadvertently caused the death of a sibling
• Took more than his share
• Never got to say goodbye to a parent, sibling or child
• Never got to ask forgiveness of a wife
• Cheated on an exam they could have passed with a little more effort
• Gave up an opportunity offered to them for what seemed like good reasons at the time
• Made a mistake under the influence of alcohol
• Was deceived by a con-man
• Took a violent revenge – on the wrong person

Means, Motive, and Opportunity = Personal Circumstances = Key Backstory

The circumstances surrounding the event will define an important element of the character’s personal backstory, touching on the economic and social parameters of their formative years – as well as those of the time surrounding the event. These will then have ramifications and knock-on effects into other aspects of the character. They are defining aspects of the character’s life.

Consider the first example listed above.

There are several possible reasons to steal food that come to mind:

• The character was starving/hungry
• Someone depending on the character was starving/hungry
• The character wasn’t hungry but got a thrill from the crime
• An immature attempt to make the character look cool or manly
• A dare
• An act of rebellion

Take only the first of these, and consider the following possible circumstances (Means + Opportunity) and what the consequently mean for the character:

• The character was a peasant who stole from another peasant family
• The character’s family was wealthy/noble who took from a peasant because his family had power and it was his right to satisfy his whim
• The character was a child in the great depression
• The character was a survivor of Hurricane Katrina (or some other natural disaster, especially one that was mismanaged in some way)
• The character was in a concentration camp
• The character was a German Jew and it was the early 1940s
• The character is Ethiopian and it was the 1980s
• The character was from a broken home and living with a parent who couldn’t make ends meet

Regrettably, there are some people in any era who went hungry, and the circumstances always leave their marks on those who experience it.

The Discovery Of Shame/Regret

Some acts become seen as shameful simply because the character grows up, or something that they thought was necessary is found not to be. Others are simply causes for regret that become subconscious drives for the character.

Some combinations, however, require an external trigger before the character comes to view the past misdeed as cause for shame/regret. Since I have been focusing so much on the “stealing food” regret as an example, perhaps the character encounters a hungry child later in life who mentions a sibling who starved to death after their food was stolen, or perhaps he falls in love with someone who went hungry at one point, or who works for UNICEF or some other aid organization.

Moral Compasses & Psychological Impacts

The regret or shame can speak about the character’s personality in two distinct ways. Firstly, there is the temptation or judgmental issue or trauma of the event itself, and its moral & psychological impact, and second there are the consequences of the regret.

A key part of Bruce Wayne’s life as Batman is trying to live up to what he perceives his parents would have expected of him. He desperately wants the approval of his Mother and Father (and of course, can never get it). He became one of the foremost detectives and fighters of his era (if not THE foremost) because of the shame he felt at not being able to protect his family – never mind that he was just a child; his entire life since has been a reaction to the helplessness that he felt, and that also plays into the way he treats the helpless that he encounters as an adult (like Dick Grayson). And of course, there is the need for revenge. All these are consequences of the event and his reaction to it. The fact that Batman is such an iconic character speaks to the power of this approach to characterization – the Dark Knight strikes a chord in everyone who’s ever felt helpless.

Another iconic example would be Spiderman, whose regret is that he failed to stop the criminal who killed his Uncle Ben when he had the chance, due solely to his own ego. That’s the trigger that turned a nerd into an obsessed hero – who masks that obsession, and the fear that he feels while acting as a superhero, with wisecracks and flippancy. He will never be able to give up being Spiderman (or not for very long), as a result. Someone once tried to describe Spidey to me as a “thrill-junkie” who gets his buzz from living dangerously, but I don’t find that proposal plausible. While he has found, from time to time, that he loves being Spiderman, he is also acutely aware of the price that he and his friends and family and relationships (both personal and professional) have had to pay. If the “thrillseeker” concept was even close to correct, it would be boredom that led to his returning to the role after giving it up for a while; it’s not, it’s innocent lives.

Hyperzeal

It is sometimes said that there is no-one more zealous than a convert. I’ve used the principle in characterizations myself. But I think that it’s an exaggeration and that this is an appropriate place to go into the subject briefly.

I can think of only four types of behavior that warrant what I am calling “HyperZeal”. The first is that of the addict who lacks confidence in his ability to withstand temptation if surrounded by others still partaking of the substance to which he is addicted – whether that be alcohol or nicotine or anything else real or imagined. The second is an individual who is already prone to obsessive behavior. The third is someone who receives some benefit from grinding his new axe; and the fourth is someone who has been brainwashed. Only if one or more of these circumstances apply would someone become an extreme fanatic in consequence of a reforming experience.

Less extreme, but still a radical change of behavior, is someone who objects to being around those who do as he once did, or is prone to lecture them when they are encountered – a reformer, or true believer. A reformed smoker might be uncomfortable around other smokers, might lecture them on the evils of cigarette smoke, might even go out of their way to avoid smokers (and complain when he is not given the opportunity to do so at, say, a restaurant) – but he won’t go around plucking cigarettes out of people’s hands and crushing them underfoot (without good cause, of course).

Most people will stay exactly the same people they were before – but with a temptation that they continually or occasionally have to fight. The reformed thief will still habitually assess each room he walks into for security and valuables worth stealing. The reformed hacker will still habitually assess computer security vulnerabilities. The reformed member of a congregation will believe in the tenets of his newly-chosen faith, will ensure that he attends services as frequently as is required or more, and will resist temptation to do anything he used to do that is now forbidden – but will usually not think of the religious limitations imposed on his behavior as his first thought. In fact, he will usually go about his daily routine without a second thought – until something acts to remind him of his newly-held beliefs.

I don’t (normally) think about my philosophy regarding personal responsibility when watching an episode of Undercover Boss or whatever – not unless it comes up in the course of the episode. I don’t think about my religious beliefs when ordering a hamburger unless the act itself is a religious prompt within that faith. I have a mild lactose intolerance – I don’t think about it when ordering food, only after the fact when I experience the symptoms that tells me I’ve consumed more milk products than my system can handle. I have friends who are diabetic – they act when necessary in response to the symptoms that they have consumed too much or too little sugar, give it passing thought before purchasing a product that is extremely high in Sugar content – and ignore it the rest of the time, except when running their regular blood sugar test.

It’s a truism of screenwriting, scriptwriting, and fiction writing: characters in conflict are more interesting than those who are not. Hyperzeal makes the character internally unconflicted to an extreme, but tends to place that character in conflict with everyone else around them; while all lesser approaches internalize conflict (making the character less predictable) but better able to relate to others. Or, to put it another way: Hyperzeal restricts the plot manifestation of the conflict to those occasions when the subject of the hyperzeal is present; less narrow characterization can apply more frequently and more broadly – which makes the character interesting more of the time.

Disproportionate Shame or Remorse

The degree of shame – from personal embarrassment to abject humiliation to (literally) die-before-admitting – normally depends on the severity of the act relative to what is permitted by the individual’s moral standards, and the severity of those moral standards in the first place. Note that this says nothing about society’s standards of accepted behavior; this is all about the character.

If the character’s normal moral standard is extremely straight-laced and morally conservative, even a slight deviation from that acceptability is a Big Deal to that character; most people, if the source of the shame were to be revealed, would wonder what all the fuss was about, because it doesn’t seem all that serious from an outside perspective. A character whose moral code was less rigid might reply, “That’s nothing, I once….” – to which the only correct response from the morally rigid is “How can you live with yourself?”

That’s normal. What sets these defining moments apart from a more routine existence is that there is usually a disproportionate degree of shame, humiliation, or remorse involved. It’s character-defining by definition because the event is defined as one that, more than any other, has shaped the personality of the individual.

Denial and other reactions

Having considered how the event has impacted the character’s motivations and thought processes, and how the guilt, remorse, or shame that character feels has further shaped the personality, the next aspect of the event to consider is how the character consciously or publicly reacts to similar events or to mention of his ‘dirty little secret’. It’s not uncommon for people to deny that such watershed events in their lives have had any impact on them whatsoever. It’s also not uncommon for them to embrace the change in themselves as being effect, rather than cause – “I didn’t change because of the way it made me feel, I felt the way I do about it because I changed.”

Most people will be happy to talk about the encounter that triggered the change of perspective as a turning point in their lives while never mentioning the reasons why it had such an impact on them, i.e. their “shameful secret”. Sometimes you can infer the nature of that secret from the consequences, but usually it’s not possible to do so. The bright, shiny cylinder heads of the refurbished engine get all the credit, but the power of the engine comes from it’s hidden depths, to push forward another analogy. In fact, it’s not uncommon for people to deny that the “secret” event ever took place at all, or that they were involved in it if it did.

Particularly extreme reactions can include a guilt complex in which – in order to avoid accepting blame for what they have really done – people subconsciously camouflage their guilty feelings by becoming harshly self-judgmental about other, unrelated issues. When others perceive the pattern of blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong (whether it’s rational to do so or not), they will often overlook the singular case in which the guilt is warranted, preserving the secret at the cost of the character’s mental health.

To use a character’s fictional “dirty little secret” as the driving force behind their characterization, it is necessary to identify as many ways as possible for the event and the reactions associated with it to influence the character’s personality. There will be both positive and negative reactions to any event, and sometimes these can be hard to pin down. As a general rule of thumb, the consequences and the event come as matched pairs; if you don’t like the way the personality shakes out as a consequence of the guilty secret you’ve chosen, pick a different one, being guided by the part of the consequences that you don’t like.

The Current Context

Something else to bear in mind when assessing the impact of a given secret shame is how that secret has driven the character’s subsequent life choices, and the context that this places on his current status. That context can have quite different effects if the character is a priest or a con-man, a cop or burglar (reformed or otherwise).

That “or otherwise” demands further discussion. Consider the personality potential for a D&D thief who feels guilty about stealing from people – but doesn’t stop, instead “making up for it” in some other fashion – donating to charity, or religious devotion, or simply getting blind drunk after each “big haul”. Any of those makes an immediately plausible and interesting character, with subtlety, depth, and nuance. It might take a brilliant psychoanalyst and many, many couch sessions before the character even knows – consciously – why these feelings of guilt follow a successful crime.

Nor does the uncovering of that cause automatically reform the character – it simply grants him understanding. Coming to terms with the sense of shame or guilt might simply enable them to steal without remorse thereafter.

No Regrets?

Which brings me to that singular group of people who can honestly say they have “no regrets”. There aren’t many of these; to have no regrets either makes one a dangerously unbalanced sociopath without conscience, a worm with absolutely no sense of ambition at all, or someone who has come to terms with the events of their life – or someone who has abdicated personal responsibility for those events and decisions to some “higher power”, a desperately fatalistic perspective restricted to the true religious zealot.

Let’s think about it for a moment. It’s become fashionable over the last fifty years or so to regard someone who says they have “no regrets” as being wise, gentle, at peace with himself and the world – a saint. It ain’t necessarily so. If a character has no regrets, they have no reason NOT to do anything that leaps into their heads. On physical incapacity can stop them from attempting the impossible, or the near-impossible – depending on how practical they are. Such characters can be heroes, or villains of the first order. Even in comparison to a maniacal dictator who regrets his occasional failure to inflict pain on others, a villain who genuinely has “no regrets” can be a scary proposition.

Food for thought, and yet another example of how powerful a technique this approach can be in defining a character. When the one descriptive label can include saints, devils, and the meekest of the meek, and make all of them more interesting as characters, it’s got something going for it.

Keeping Secrets

I rarely divulge a character’s “dark secret”. I find that to do so generally defines the character as “the secret”, reducing them to caricatures of the rounded personalities that they could have been. Instead, I’ll write the secret at the top of a sheet of paper labeled “How to roleplay (character name)” and never show it to anyone – except possibly the GM.

But there are exceptions. When we were redesigning Blackwing for my superhero campaign (refer items 25 and 27 in my recent article The Acceptable Favoritism: 34 Rules to make your player’s PCs their favorites and the section “Example: The Blackwing Evolution” in The Moral Of The Story: The Morality and Ethics of playing an RPG), it was decided that we should clear the air a bit concerning the integrated character background we had developed between us. Blackwing’s dark secret was that he had been unable to protect his younger sister from the abuse of his father, a policeman – a memory so traumatic that he not only denied it, he suppressed it. When he himself became a cop, he entered a self-destructive behavior spiral – becoming a corrupt cop who hated corrupt cops (and himself most of all). While this cycle leveled off from time to time, even showed brief reversals, ultimately it dragged the character down almost to the point of thrill-killing enemies in combat. He made Wolverine seem positively new-age enlightened in comparison, and came that close to crossing the line into supervillainy! Only the fact that they were enemies engaged in the service of a villain making a deliberate attempt to subvert the rightful government of the country saved his bacon as a team member. In order to start the rehabilitation of the character, it was necessary for the shameful secret to come to light, which occurred in a crossover adventure with the Warcry campaign. With this revelation and the understanding that came with it, the other players suddenly realized that their characters had unwittingly become enablers, feeding the character almost enough rope for him to hang himself. Prior to these developments, Blackwing had been a contender for second-in-command of the team; he is now close to the bottom of the pile. But he has regained his self-respect and is working through his issues – some of which were worsened by outside sources, to be fair.

We were able to hang almost every aspect of the character’s personality – including many things that were otherwise mutually incompatible and almost incomprehensible – off this central “dark secret” and its impact on the character. And, while the character is now recovering nicely, he will be dealing with the scars for a long time to come – especially when it comes to relations with women.

(If you want to know what his player and I have planned, and you aren’t a player in the Zenith-3 campaign, check out the “Big Example” from The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure (roughly the second-half of the article). You might want to start with the first of the comments, though, to put events in context – or you could read the plotline first and discover what it’s all about the same way the (other) players will.)

The Value Of The Shameful Secret

Most people have a shameful secret. Therefore, the same should be true of most characters. Deciding on the nature and circumstances of that secret can be a fast-track to rich and unique characterization – and what GM doesn’t like a shortcut in their repertoire?

In Deus Ex Machinas And The Plot Implications Of Divinity I talked about the relationship between divine beings and a campaign’s structure and narrative, and how a big-picture perspective on the role divine power plays within a campaign can make or break the plausibility of the campaign. At the end of that article, I suggested that at some future point I would examine the ‘big picture’ answers to some thorny questions from the standpoint of my different campaigns.

With this article, I begin the process of making good on that promise by examining the Theology of Fumanor and how it has influenced and shaped the campaigns that I have run in that game world, those that. I am still running, and the ‘big finish’ epic campaign that is still in the formative stages for after the current campaigns reach their conclusions.

Since the first campaign began, twelve years ago, the Players have learned a lot about the Theology of Fumanor, finding that it was both simpler and vastly more complicated than they originally expected. I can’t give you the full story here – there is nowhere near enough time – so I’m just going to hit the high points.

The Campaign Background Pack

To start with, I did something original with the campaign background – I built an offline website, breaking the narrative up into smaller sections, some just a single line or paragraph long. These were then threaded to present the narrative as “The Campaign Background As Known To” – One thread was for ordinary people, one for Elves, one for Mages and Priests, one for Historians and Sages, and one for the GM only. Each of those four groups had parts of the history missing, or misinterpreted, or had even invented as an explanation for real world events that bore little or no resemblance to the truth. Prejudices and Racial myopia were also factored in. The story was then rendered in a “Holy Book” style – similar to the style that I used recently in presenting the tale of the Loss Of Paradise (The Shared Kingdoms: A Premise from the Shards Of Divinity campaign).

As in our history, there was a time when the only group keeping written records was the clergy, and their version of the origin story therefore became canonical. If you looked at it too closely, there were a number of things not said and some internal contradictions – subtle ones – but, superficially, each of the named threads told a story that held together and explained the origins and history of the universe as that group understands it.

The Metaphysics Of Creation

So what’s the real story, stripped of all the pseudo-religious trappings (and wrapped in pseudo-scientific trappings instead)? What is the origin story of this game universe?

The players don’t know. They’ve received hints of it, again viewed from a pseudo-religious perspective, but since their characters lack the scientific grounding to understand it, I’ve never bothered to tell them the ‘real story’. I’m presenting it here for the first time:

The Chaos Powers

Before the world existed, there was only “The Void” and the Chaos Powers. There was nothing of permanence, no structures or reality. According to doctrine, the Void cast out the Chaos Powers; the reality was something more complicated, and is still barely understood by the players. The problem with this beginning of the origin story is that it doesn’t explain where the Chaos Powers came from.

The solution lies in Chaos Theory. “The Void” was something akin to the universe before the big bang, an infinitely-concentrated energy field occupying a single point of infinite size, a singularity. When everything is random, anything becomes possible, and inevitably – sooner or later – random chance will produce a coherent, stable, structure of space-time. Like a crystal forming about a seed in a supersaturated solution, entropy condenses into space-time around that stable coherence. Anything within the singularity that can exist within the resulting space becomes part of it; and anything that can’t, by definition, must be outside of the resulting universe. In effect, the act of becoming a structured universe with space and time censors the contents of the universe to only those things that belong there.

The circuitry within a television set isn’t necessary to receive a picture on that set; all the circuitry does is manipulate the energy carried by the circuits in the appropriate ways to translate a coded signal (the transmission) into a visual image on the screen. If you could manipulate the energy fields directly, the circuitry is completely unnecessary. By analogy, the biological structures of the brain are no more necessary for sentience than are a pincushion or a piñata; they simply make it easier for the property of sentience to arise and to create more of itself. If anything is possible within the infinite singularity, then random chance also permits – mandates? – that parts of it will be sentient by pure chance. A peculiarly anarchic and disordered sentience, with no particular means of interacting with or even perceiving its environment, perhaps – disembodied minds with no frame of reference for ‘reality’. These minds could be considered analogous to an infant within the womb, and that’s what the singularity was to them.

Quantum Mechanics tells us that nothing can be observed without the act of observance changing that which is observed, however minutely. Generalizing “observed” to the (more accurate) term, “interacted with” and it becomes clear that the creation of space-time not only gives form and structure to “the void”, the interaction of that space-time rejecting that which cannot exist within it because it does not observe the same natural laws as the resulting universe must change that with which it has interacted. The creation of the universe gives those sentiences within the Void something to become aware of, and those parts of the nature of the universe that were not contradicted by the natural laws of the sentience would be imprinted on that sentience. The analogous situation is that childbirth – a painful and traumatic experience for the child, however necessary and natural it might be.

And that’s the Chaos Powers. Sentiences who were self-aware but aware of nothing else but their own existence in an environment perfectly suited to their existence (by definition) suddenly being subjected to a change in themselves and their environment. Since the only direction of change possible from perfection is in the direction of imperfection, the creation of the universe is a traumatic event experienced by the chaos powers, a rejection, if you will, an expulsion into a less-than-perfect (and hence – by comparison – infinitely torturous) existence. They would want nothing more than to restore the universe to the condition they once enjoyed.

It would take time for them to evolve in accordance with those elements of natural law that were consistent with their natures, developing sensory awarenesses and discovering that they were not alone. They would naturally both band together for their mutual advantage and at the same time hate each other’s very existence. In time, they might find that they can project their awareness into the space-time that had rejected them because they are only partially incompatible with it; and might even find ways to draw on the incompatibility to disrupt the natural laws within the universe. But they would not stand unopposed.

The Gods

Returning to the principle of quantum mechanics cited above, it should also become clear that the distinctiveness of the chaos powers – their property of sentience – would also change the universe in the process of interaction. Since such interaction, by necessity, can only occur at the interface boundary between finite space-time and infinite no-space-no-time, where reality itself is ‘crystallizing’ out of chaos, the property of sentience would become imprinted on parts of the newly-formed universe. Since these, by definition, are part of the universe and wholly within the scope of the natural laws it contains, they are fully at home here. But there is also a connection to the chaotic, again by virtue of the ‘imprint’ of the chaos powers left on the dimensional boundary between what is-and-can-be and what-is-and-cannot-be. The resulting beings can learn, in time, to transition a portion of the reality around them into another stable configuration that is consistent with the natural laws of the universe. They can learn, in other words, to manipulate reality by breaking natural laws – so long as they put them back together again when they are finished.

The very act of ‘rejecting’ the chaos powers created the Gods. Again, at this point in their existences, they are only potentially self-aware, and only potentially capable of awareness of the universe around them. Both attributes will come to them in time, even as the universe develops structured realities through the interaction of energy and its collapse into matter over time.

The Titans?

Another element of this origin story that deserves a mention, because it was definitely part of my thought process, is that of the Titans of Greek Mythology. The Greeks had come up with various Deities, but needed an origin for them. To answer the question “Where did the Gods come from?”, the Titans entered Greek theology. The ancient Greeks didn’t seem to realize at first that this only moved the problem without answering it – the question then became “Where did the titans come from?”. To answer this, they created “Gaia”, “Uranus”, and “Pontus” – (Earth, Heaven, and the Sea, respectively) as the progenitors of the Titans – but that’s where they seemed to run out of answers. So Pontus’ origin was attributed to a spontaneous pregnancy by Gaia with no father involved. Uranus was also supposedly the son of Gaia, with some sources suggesting that this was another spontaneous pregnancy while others name Aether (“Light”) as the father. Both origins are unsatisfactory, as neither Aether nor Gaia have origins, and spontaneous pregnancies are question-begging at best.

Certainly, at the time, an unwed mother-to-be might have claimed union with a God or even a completely spontaneous pregnancy (resulting in a virgin birth) to avoid social stigma, so the Greeks may have found these origins satisfactory, even though they seem to be at odds with the fundamental Greek philosophy. But Gaia was also known as “The mother of all” and the personification of everything that existed before the Titans, who in turn gave rise to both other generations of Titan and to the Gods. So, in a way, the entire origin story of the Greek Mythos can be viewed as a metaphor for the origin story described in preceding sections of this article – with the Chaos Powers as the Titans, the Gods as the Gods, and Gaia as the entirety of the universe, or even the ‘seed’ of space-time, and that’s because I had the Greek mythology in mind when creating this origin story.

Nihilistic Chaos vs. Life-affirming Order

So, ultimately, here’s the situation we end up with: The Chaos Powers, who oppose the sterility and predictability of the universe, and want to see it destroyed utterly, reduced to the state of infinite possibility that it once possessed, and the Gods, who being a part of the (super-)natural order, oppose the Chaos Powers. The fundamental divide of reality is not good vs evil but order vs chaos.

It’s worth spending a few moments at this point in contemplation of the psychology of the Chaos Powers. They were complete and self-sufficient, their every need met by the chaos around them; they had no higher awareness because they had no need for one. All that was traumatically taken away from them, leaving them with an unquenchable need to make themselves whole again. Their nature is not an ideological difference of opinion with the Gods of Fumanor, its a fundamental difference of realities. They do not particularly value their intellects, rather they seem them as tools at best and symptoms at worst. They don’t employ strategy, they use cunning. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” is always a valid defense.

Imperfection

If the Gods were omnipotent, there would be no contest; it would only be a matter of time before they devised a plan without flaws, and executed that plan to perfection.

If the Chaos powers could just be patient, eventually entropy will iron out completely, and the universe will dissolve back into the infinite no-space no-time that spawned it.

Fortunately, from the perspective of a GM creating a framework within which interesting adventures can take place, neither the Gods nor the Chaos Powers are omnipotent. The Gods are imperfect and have executed imperfect strategies in the past, the consequences of which they continue to struggle against. The Chaos Powers are quick to discover and exploit any flaw, loophole, or opportunity. But at the same time, the Chaos Powers are driven by this need which is utterly insatiable by anything but total victory (and possibly not even then, but that’s getting ahead of myself); eternal patience is not possible for them, they have to continually attempt to upset the status quo. The history of the world is a continual struggle between these two antagonistic forces.

Mortals & The Chaotic Diaspora

The story goes that the Gods created Men, Elves, Goblins, etc etc etc. The story also goes that the Chaos Powers “inspired” this act of creation as a means of formenting anarchy amongst the Gods. No-one knows which version of the story is correct, or even if both are, or neither, not even the protagonists concerned. Both are human mythology; the Elves have a different take on the whole question, which has yet to be revealed to and explored by the Players, so I’m not going to go into it here.

However it happened, the Gods discovered that Mortals, while individually weak, could collectively decide the conflict between the two primal antagonists, and so sought to indoctrinate these mortals into an army of supporters. They also found that the power of this belief could be harnessed by them in various ways.

The Chaos Powers also saw mortals as tools that could be used to undermine the Gods, and some of the Chaos Powers transformed themselves into the evils that tempt mortals into foolish acts – Greed, Envy, Sloth, and so on. Anything that spreads anarchy or uncertainty empowers the Chaos Powers. Asking who began to spread their influence over mortals first is an unanswerable question; both sides saw an opportunity and sought to exploit it. The official human theology states that the Gods created mortals because the act of creation itself promotes Order, that the Chaos Powers corrupted them, and the Gods created the institutions of worship and religion and government to combat these corruptive influences.

Again, according to human theology, other Chaos powers transformed themselves into Devils and Demons, while some sought to send extensions of themselves into the world – extensions to which mortals gave names such as Cthulhu and Yog-Soggoth and He Who Must Not Be Named. And still others became the creatures who infest the outer planes like Beholders and Efreet and Illithid. And lastly, a few became the sources of Wild Magic, the originators of all that is arcane. The greatest of the Gods then sacrificed himself to create an orderly structure to confine the practice of Magic.

The Role Of Alignment

In part 3 of my series on Alignment back in 2009 (An Unnecessary Evil? – Focusing On Alignment Part 3 of 5), I showed how redefining the labels used to identify axes of morality within the alignment system could transform it from a characterization straightjacket enforcing PC and NPC behavior into a tool for greater and more subtle characterization. A lot of my thinking on that subject stemmed from the way Alignment is used within the Fumanor Campaign.

Alignment and morality are largely humanoid concepts. The Gods represent extremes of Order, and the Chaos Powers extremes of Chaos. The more strongly one supports the Gods in this ongoing war, who operate from a ‘struggle now, reward later’ perspective in which anything that brings victory closer is not only moral, it is mandated, the more strongly aligned with Order the character is. Piety, in other words, is a direct reflection of the strength of the alignment of Order. Chaos, in comparison, denies that the Gods are doing anything constructive for the world. By opposing Dogma and supporting innovation and originality, one is aligning his or her moral compass more closely with the “Anarchy” of chaos. From a metaphysical perspective, the laws of chance favor Chaos and an eternal, unreachable perfection with no room for individualism is the ultimate goal of the Gods. There is even a neutral perspective in the centre which holds that neither of these are the driving force between societal and social growth, but rather the betterment of human existence stems from the tension and interplay between the two.

That leaves the “Good vs Evil” axis. “Evil” is defined as the desire for immediate self-gratification and the rights of the individual over those of any collective society; “Good” means placing the general welfare of society over the personal needs and desires of the individual. Various “Neutral” philosophies are possible, such as the view that society collectively is made up of discrete individuals and the concept of a “collective good” is a fiction.

And that produces an interesting dichotomy: The Chaos Powers, by definition, are various shades of Chaotic Evil. At best, they can be Chaotic Neutral, working to achieve the overall goals of the “Race” because of what it will gain them as individuals. The Gods, in comparison, are Lawful-to-neutral by definition, but can occupy any position on the Good vs. Evil axis. This diversity produces friction and occasional disunity amongst the Gods, and that is a vulnerability that the Chaos Powers have been able to exploit time after time.

The Limitations Of Divinity

Of course, Gods form “familial groups” as implied by the Greek Gods. In fact, to one tribe or another, each of the pantheons in the original Deities & Demigods was “their” Pantheon. Now, humans are an inventive lot, and prone to making stuff up because it sounds like a good story. Unbeknownst to the Gods, the “connection to chaos” that enabled them to work their miracles – a key component of what made them Deities in the first place – responded not just to their wills but to the beliefs of aligned beings. This was the unexpected price that had to be paid for their accessing the greater power of Worship: whatever their subjects believed about them became part of their makeup. Zeus found himself unexpectedly eyeing attractive geese, and the occasional cow, not to mention anything in a skirt that happened to pass by. Hodur found his eyesight fading. Balder became invulnerable – except for his heel. It didn’t matter whether or not they wanted to express their divine abilities in this fashion – the priests had said this was the way it was, and so it came to be.

In an attempt to recapture some of their independence, the Gods started spreading different stories of their own to distant tribes. If there were three different interpretations out there of who and what they were, they could pick and choose between them as necessary. The Chaos Powers also muddied the waters with their own stories, seeking to undermine the sense of purpose of the Gods..

This was just one of several conflicts between them in the game history. The revolt of the Shadow Gods for example, when Loki, Coyote, and several other “Evil” Gods were tempted into revolt. But in terms of a deeper understanding of the Theology, they are unimportant.

The United Pantheon

I’ve described in past blogs the story of that first Campaign, Fumanor: The Last Deity. Probably the most succinct summary is in Grokking The Message: Naming Places & Campaigns about 80% of the way through the article, in the section on Naming Campaigns.

So, just who is in the united Pantheon that the PCs put together?

Athena and the Wild Hunt

Greater Goddess “The Hunter”, (more correctly “The Huntress”)

• Predator animals
• Rangers, trackers and bounty hunters
• Hunting and tracking
• Wisdom
• Judgment & Insight
• Judge of the dead

Athena was goddess of wisdom and battle in the Zues Pantheon prior to the Godwar. She blamed herself for not seeing it coming and has lost the few soft edges that she had previously. She would have engaged in an orgy of self-destructive recrimination and angst, but as most senior of the surviving deities, she found herself too busy rebuilding from the ashes and planning to grant herself the luxury. Once her tasks are complete and the replacement for Olympus secured, she can take the time to grieve; until then, her personality is somewhat on the erratic side, but characterized by a ruthless determination to overcome the difficulties set before her. She now stalks the Planes like a predator, seeking absolution that no-one else can grant her. Her wits and insights have not deserted her; it was Athena who decided that the only way to unify the survivors into a new pantheon was to place the entire issue into mortal hands; without direction from one who could truly Believe in the new pantheon as a whole, the disparate origins of the Gods would have produced at best an empty shell which could never have withstood the next onslaught of the Chaos Powers. Only a True Believer could mould and shape the perceptions of the mortal population.

The Wild Hunt were part of the pantheon worshipped by the Celtic Men, whose homelands were lost during the Godwar. They enter the material plane at a random location once a night, seek out the greatest evil in the vicinity, and attempt to destroy it. When their master fell in the Godwar, Athena proved the only deity able to subdue them, and certainly the only one willing to make the attempt. The pack now gather only rarely, and only when great evil is perceived; instead they roam the planes and serve as Athena’s eyes and Ears. It is rumored that like most of the Gods, the new divisions within the Celestial Sphere have bequeathed them with even more fearsome powers, and with a new mission – to seek and destroy the worshippers of the Chaos Powers, the pawns who give them eyes and ears and hands with which to further their vile ambitions.

One of Athena’s responsibilities is to judge the spirits of the dead who are brought before her. Many are sentenced to an existence of pain and torture, until given a new opportunity to prove themselves worthy by Yama; a few are found worthy of a place in Elysium; and a handful are recruited to act as the agents of the Gods, foreswearing the heaven for the glory and honor of being chosen to serve the gods.

Freya

Greater Goddess “Beloved Lady Of Life”

• Birth and fertility
• Domesticated animals
• Patron Deity of Gnomes, Pixies and Halflings
• Agriculture and the harvest
• Love and friendship
• Protection and preservation
• Family
• Peace
• Mercy

Freya was the goddess of Love and Fertility and leader of the Valkyries in Odin’s Pantheon. Although a powerful deity in times of peace, her power tended to wane in more turbulent periods, and was never as strong as many others when it came to direct confrontation. She was sorely wounded in the early stages of the Godwar, and was close to death, as was Loviatar. In desperation, Frey merged the two together, binding them into a single being with his own life. But three into one won’t go, and eventually Freya and Loviatar healed sufficiently to divide themselves from their joined existence. They had, in the meantime, experienced life as a unique and distinct being, partaking of the attributes of both, and when the Goddesses re-divided, those experiences remained, producing a new being – Freya-Loviatar – given life through the self-sacrifice of Frey.

Freya was changed by the experience; her horizons broadened to include many aspects and attributes of domestic tranquility. She is now the mother-figure of the pantheon, the matriarch who rules behind the scenes. Kind hearted, generous, and merciful, she is beloved by all and is the unifying figure of the new Pantheon.

Half of Freya’s original body is buried within the rubble of Mount Olympus.

Loviatar

Greater Goddess

• Storms
• Snow, ice and cold
• Patron Deity of Storm & Snow Giants
• Fear
• Malice
• Pain & the alleviation of pain
• Deceit
• Despair
• Obsession, Determination & Implacability
• Vengeance
• Concentration & Focus
• Leadership & Inspiration
• Sacrifice
• Bailiff Of The Dead

Loviatar was a minor member of the Kalevatha Pantheon, a mortal woman who became a Demigod, whose portfolio was pain, desire, cruelty, and cold. Almost killed during the Godwar, she was markedly changed by her survival (the tale of which is given in the entry for Freya, above). She was one deity who displayed extraordinary personal growth through the experience, going from a minor entity to one of the most powerful of the Gods, and seeking to rise beyond her natural inclinations to meet the challenges before her. When the battle looked lost, it was the combined Freya-Loviatar who gave the Gods renewed focus, inspiration, and determination, and afterwards, she selflessly attempted any task that needed doing, no matter how unlike her inclinations she saw them – from healing the injured to granting peace to the desolate and courage to the fearful. When the combined being, Freya-Loviatar, re-divided, Loviatar retained many of the attributes that the combined being had displayed. She transcended mere beauty to achieve Charisma and Leadership, and many Warriors believe that she protects and strengthens them in battle.

Nevertheless, she is as much feared as revered; Mercurial of temperament, she is capable of following gestures of great kindness and sympathy with acts of total fury and violence, particularly when baulked. Loviatar has a strong ruthless streak and very much practices what she preaches. Armed and fortified by her weapon, Mjolnir, formerly the weapon of the Thunder God, Thor, and the repository of remnants of both his power and that of Zeus. She also retains her icicle dagger which grants her immunity to magic. Loviatar is now the next best thing to unstoppable.

Just as Loviatar can inspire the single-mindedness and obsessive behavior that can be needed to extract revenge, she can also withhold the emotional fire, leaving the victim in the grip of fear or despair; despite her more terrifying aspects, she remains a deity whose goodwill is to be cultivated. Note that she is not interested in Justice, and issues of good vs. evil, and other lofty philosophies; Loviatar is all about Retribution, her philosophy is “us vs. them” – which clears away all the baggage and gets right to the heart of the matter. Her power waxes and wanes through the course of a year; in hotter climes, she as at her strongest in Summer, while in cooler climates, Winter is her time. In moderate climatic areas, she is consistently stronger in Winter, but is capable of sudden peaks of power in Summer that surpass this level of power – for a short time (a few hours, no more). It is said that ducks fear her, which is why they fly south for the winter – and north for the summer. This is considered sensible of the ducks.

Loviatar is an extremely beautiful woman of refined features and seductive red lips save when in a vengeful rage, when her features reflect the pain of the acts for which she is pursuing vengeance. She rarely takes the lead in planning, preferring the simplicity of simply doing, but when she does she commands the respect of the other Gods, all of whom would willingly follow her into battle. At the same time, it is far from unusual for Loviatar to be conducting some specific mission on behalf of one of her fellow Gods when encountered.

Loviatar is untrusting when it comes to Drow, always ready to believe the worst of them. This produces a strange love-hate relationship amongst the Drow, whose stiff-necked nature lends them to committing acts of revenge as casually as breathing. It takes a lot of effort for a Drow to gain her assistance (though she will rarely oppose them without cause), but it is when she does choose to act on their behalf that Drow are to be most feared.

One of Loviatar’s more noteworthy tasks is Bailiff Of The Dead, who actively conveys the souls judged by Athena to their punishment or reward. The Dead half of Loviatar’s original body is buried at the Crossroads of heaven, where the fields of Elysium contact the Underworld, preventing the passage of souls from one afterlife to the other.

Freya-Loviatar

Lesser Goddess

• Moon and the night
• Darkness
• The dead, Ruler Of The Afterlife
• Beauty
• Duty and loyalty
• Law
• Order
• Nightmares & Conscience
• Patron of Legal Advocates and any who labor through the sunset hours

When Freya and Loviatar were strong enough to withdraw from the composite being they had become to save their lives, a spark remained (see Freya, above). There were those aspects of their former lives that they chose to leave behind, and other aspects of the shared existence which had arisen. With the life-force bequeathed to the combination by Frey, that remnant became a new being, Freya-Loviatar. Her personality is a blending of those of her “sisters”, both stern and compassionate, ruthless but honorable, and loyal. As her own identity grows and becomes more unique, it is anticipated that she will choose a new name.

Timid and diffident when confronted by her more experienced Brethren, F-L has tremendous power at her disposal when she brings it to bear. It is her task to reward the good and punish the evil, as directed by Athena, until Yama grants the latter a parole to attempt to better their lot. Although she keenly feels her relative youth, which is reflected in her chosen appearance, F-L retains the experience and memories of both Freya and Loviatar, and as such her mood and appearance waxes and wanes like the phases of the moon; at times she is shy and withdrawn, at other times she is bright and forthright. She can be, by turns, kindly and cruel. In other words, a typical teenage girl with an overblown sense of responsibility.

Duty is paramount to F-L, and she is rarely encountered outside of her Castle, which sits astride the boundary of Elysium and the Underworld. The only occurrences that regularly bring her out into the world is the breaking of an oath made in her name, something she takes very personally. However, she can frequently be found in places of great beauty. Rarely worshipped on the worshipper’s behalf, prayers to F-L are a part of any marriage, and any funeral; and she is often invoked when an oath of great seriousness is sworn. Although she can currently be characterized as a Lesser Goddess, that is more because F-L rarely displays her full powers, which are by no means inferior.

F-L is of a serious demeanor; flightiness and trivialities and disobedience irritate her. She often punishes those she deems disrespectful to the attributes she embodies with visitations by nightmares and poor sleep; and all aspects of conscience are given over to her. Undead, and those who traffic in their creation, are abhorrent to her, and she reserves the very worst punishments she can dream up for Necromancers. It is only at such times that her legacy from Loviatar achieves full expression, and her full power revealed. To some extent, this is due to necessity; F-L knows that those who have escaped from her realm once are bound less-strongly to it’s embrace even when returned to it, and require constant vigilance. To endure the suffering and pain of the Underworld is a duty, and those who refuse to abide it are hurtful and shameful to F-L; it is her responsibility to keep the dead in their place, and every Undead represents a failure on her part. However, undead – when risen from their graves – are no longer subject to her power and authority, and hence she must appeal to others to return them to her domain. There is a tentative relationship evolving between F-L and Ushas, who cannot bear to see her upset; she has only to quiver her chin and assume a mournful and teary expression, and she goes up in flames. She thus spends a great deal of time and effort opposing Necromancy on F-L’s behalf.

Nepthys

Lesser Goddess

• Trade and bargaining
• Production, productivity and entrepreneurs
• Wealth
• Cities, construction and civilization
• Patron Deity of Orcs and Goblins (as they become more civilized), Mercenaries, and of all Women betrayed by Men
• Generosity and Charity
• Diplomacy

Nephthys served as the protector of good souls after the death of their mortal bodies in the Pantheon of Ra. The burial practices of the Ra pantheon’s clergy required her to guard also the wealth of the departed, for their use in the Pantheon’s afterlife, as well as the physical tombs used as their resting places. Following the Godwar, it was a natural extension for Nepthys to add the wealth of the living and the construction of their residences and dwellings and communities. She soon found that this kept her so busy that her traditional portfolio was being serviced inadequately, and so she gave up the protection of the dead to Freya-Loviatar when that merged deity became divided from its constituent deities. With Trade, Wealth, Cities and Construction all within her purview, bargaining was a natural addition; and from that came Diplomacy and Civilization in general. Nephthys often serves as an intermediary between mortals and the other deities; any donation to a temple or church is assessed by her in respect to the givers ability to give. She thus gained Generosity and Charity, rounding out a balanced portfolio. Businessmen will often seek to invoke Nepthys’ favor before entering into a bargain or a negotiation, often with a donation to charity or to the needy. She takes a wry amusement from the irony that her favor is sought by the giving away of the object of her powers.

Once married to Set, Nephthys left him when that deity turned to evil. With his destruction during the Godwar, she is a Widow reveling in her new-found freedom. She is one of the more demanding gods, whose favor can never be taken for granted. Something of a power-broker and a matchmaker, she is often perceived as subordinate to the more confrontational deities; but behind the scenes, it is her favor that often dictates the outcomes of struggles for supremacy, for it is her gifts that enable one side to better equip themselves than their enemies.

Nephthys is still fascinated by the details of her new authority and considers no point of an agreement to small. She favors both the bold and the painstaking, though the bold soon lose her favor if they take her for granted. She is remarkable for her capacity for gossip, rumor-mongering, and idle chatter, but is all business when its called for.

Pan

Lesser God

• Untamed animals
• Patron Deity of Sylvan creatures & most Giants (see also Ushas and Loviatar), musicians, composers, poets, playwrights, dancers, jesters, vintners and barmen
• Passion and lust
• Celebration
• Music, song, dance, and creative performance
• Charisma
• Rebellion
• Instinct and impulse
• Wine
• Optimism
• Seduction & Flattery

Pan is the deity whose portfolio has changed the least, but he is not unhappy – even if it was his nature to be morose. On the contrary, he has held several wild celebrations to commemorate his victory over his brother Apollo about who was the “real” God of Music.

This is not to say that there have been no changes. Pan’s natural animal magnetism, his sheer charisma, have both gone through the roof, and he has also acquired much of the responsibilities of his deceased brother Dionysius. All passion is now within his province, as are the responsibilities of instinct and impulse. But, in exchange, he has foregone his weather attributes and much of his control over nature. Only those creatures which live by instinct, or try to, are still within his sphere of influence.

Pan is, at best, a capricious deity – not to say, irresponsible – incapable of keeping his mind on any given track for any length of time, to whom seriousness, solemnity, and reflection are anathema. He becomes frustrated beyond measure by the angst-ridden meditations and recriminations of Athena; his philosophy is to live for the moment, for once passed, it is gone forever. What’s more, he delights in the fruits of creativity applied to entertainment, which he considers to be a party whose positive aspects endure beyond the celebration. (He also believes that if one is enough, two is better!) Pan prides himself on being the archetypical Party Animal. At the same time, his lack of regard for the consequences makes him brutally honest.

Pan is, however, the god of Silver Linings. Not of hope, but of Optimism. No matter how dim the circumstances, he can always find something to celebrate, and his simple joy de vieve can penetrate even the blackest of moods – even Athena’s.

It’s not entirely unfair to accuse Pan of intermittent and interminable affairs with all the goddess’ of the Pantheon. (Most of them feel that life with Pan is too much for anyone to take for very long, anyway, and they are happier to take him in small doses!) As a result, Pan’s relationships with the other deities are more complex than is usually the case between members of the same Pantheon. In general, he finds them too stuffy to put up with for very long – but great fun for the occasional dalliance or diversion. It is commonly perceived that Pan shows up in disguise at all the best parties; and often suggested that he thinks his presence is what makes them the best parties.

Ushas

Greater Goddess “The Holy Crusader”, “Bane Of The Undead”, “Dawn’s Mother”, “Goddess Of The Dawn”

• The sun and day
• Patron Deity of Ogres, Fire Giants, Paladins, Knights, Explorers and Pathfinders, and Judges
• Light
• Life and healing
• Creation and new beginnings
• Hope
• Justice
• Honor
• Exploration
• Holy Crusader

The Dawn Goddess of the Hindu Pantheon continues her war against darkness in the new Pantheon, now responsible not only for the more overt phenomena associated with the Dawn but with many of the more symbolic aspects as well. Other attributes have fallen to Ushas because of her crusading attitude, and still others because she ranges beyond the bounds of the known world. At the same time, Ushas is one of the more spiritual of the deities. Ushas is rarely incarnated in tangible form, splitting herself and her attentions into the spirit of discovery and adventure; while rarely participating directly, she frequently embodies the chance encounter who advises travelers where trouble, and treasure, may be found, the expert who appears out of nowhere with timely advice. Although not strictly the patron of adventurers, it is a rare party who will set forth into the wilderness without seeking the blessings and guidance of Ushas.

Ushas has been affected the least by the Godwar in terms of outlook, emotions, and personality. She is a little more responsible, and a little more willing to act as a team player instead of a lone crusader – when its necessary – but in general, her attitude is, “it’s past – move on”.

However, Ushas tends to be very “right now” – direct and not all that interested in the long term. “Day always ends, but the Dawn always comes again” is central to her philosophy. “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today” might well be a direct quote. Hair-triggered and hot-tempered, she can be extremely prickly, and even her worshippers grow nervous when she is nearby.

Ushas has one final responsibility; when Yama decrees that a soul has expiated the sins of their last life, it is Ushas who brings the spirit before him to be born into a new body for another attempt at life. It has been said that Ushas and Freya are Godmothers to all mortal races – and disputing it within Ushas’ hearing is not conducive to a long and happy life. When Freya blesses a woman with the conception of a child, it is Ushas who watches over that child at the moment of Birth, acting as spiritual midwife.

Much Necromancy involves perversions of the rituals of Ushas, one reason why she hates it so; but see also the entry for Freya-Loviatar, above.

Yama

Greater God

• Death & Dying
• Rebirth and reincarnation
• Philosophy & Self-Discovery
• Time and the seasons
• Balance
• Inevitability and Destiny
• Prophecy
• Intellectual Curiosity

Yama is a deity who likes to keep busy. Before the Godwar, he acted as Judge and Executioner of mortals within the Hindu Pantheon, moonlighting as a Buddhist philosopher and the King of the Seventh Hell of the Chinese. His responsibilities in the latter department may have been foregone with the destruction of the Chinese Hells in the Godwar, but his other areas of interest have expanded, if anything. He not only personally captures the souls of every dead sentient and conveys them to judgment, he is death itself, separating spirit and flesh at the instant of ultimate mortality. He is also involved in the release of souls from the afterlife when it is time for them to be reborn into a new body for another turn of the cycle of mortal existence. Only with his direct antecedence with Athena is resurrection possible.

Such a broad involvement in key moments of existence could not help but turn a thinking being to a philosophical bent. Yama is the most cerebral of the Gods, a trait the Gods find useful in preparing newly-deceased souls to judgment in the proper frame of mind.

Yama is the very definition of impartiality and equality. When it is time, it’s time. This makes him the ideal instrument for the protection of balance – of all varieties – including the stately and inevitable progression of the seasons. Other deities may handle the weather, Yama looks after the climate. He is also intimately connected with the passage of time and with the concepts of inevitability and destiny, by his very nature.

Yama is the most powerful of the Deities; it is he who decides between life and death, for only he knows when a mortal’s time has come. He considers himself above emotional considerations and is dispassionate to the extreme. He is also the deity who uses his power the least – largely because he is so busy in so many places at once. It is extremely rare to encounter him unless one is dying, though from time to time he will put in an appearance if it is called for by one of his other responsibilities. Yama never needs to sleep, and millennia of sleep deprivation might explain some of his peculiarities – an issue Yama is more than willing to debate at length.

Yama’s blessing is usually sought through other deities rather than directly, especially Freya in her capacity as Goddess of Mercy and Ushas, as Goddess of Healing and Life – either to end suffering by granting a quick and easy death, or in seeking to avoid the inevitable for a time. Less commonly but hardly rare is seeking the intervention of Kos on behalf of the frail, elderly, wounded, or maimed, that they might be granted a glorious end, a death in battle, one last Big Deal, or whatever.

Yama and Athena are slowly edging toward a relationship, but Athena is too wrapped up in her current duties to consider such a thing and Yama is incapable of an emotional attachment in any event.

Kos

Greater God “God Of Dooms”, “The Doomsayer”

• Patron Deity of Dwarves and Dragons, Loremasters, historians, scribes, linguists, teachers, Generals and Warriors
• Battle & War
• Planning
• Languages
• Knowledge
• Teaching
• Fate
• Courage
• Chivalry & Courtesy

The last survivor of the Nehwon Pantheon, Kos is another to whom the aftermath of the Godwar was a chance for personal growth – one which he has capitalized on. In his former role, he was the Barbarian God who destroyed cowards in battle. The reward for courage was survival, and hence his existence encouraged bravery and discouraged cowardice. Fairly simply as honor codes go, but it was a start. Kos’ own honor code was far more delicate, and designed to educate those of wavering courage, giving them an opportunity to grow and change their ways.

From this fairly specious justification, he has claimed all aspects of Battle and War, from the training of warriors through to the conduct of the battle; he then extended that to teaching, languages, & Knowledge in general, claiming Chivalry and Courtesy along the way. Although strictly speaking a Barbarian God still, he always tries to assess his situation and behave accordingly.

The last of his portfolios, Fate, requires a little explanation, in particular the difference between Fate and Destiny, which belongs to Yama. Destiny is about inevitability due to the natural order of events. Fate is about what happens in between, and is about circumstances more than outcomes. A man can be destined to die, but fated to live in poverty. But more than that, Fate is not inevitable, it can be turned from it’s course with sufficient effort. As the God of Fate, Kos is all about the intelligent assessment of circumstances and the divining from them what the fate of an individual is. Of course, the “poverty” example is fairly trivial; as ability to read fate increases, the determinations can grow more subtle, and the probable future of some extraordinary individuals can be discerned to a fine degree.

Kos is not simply about predicting fate – in fact, that is within Yama’s purview, though Kos shares much of his ability in this regard – it is about the attempt to change or make the best of, one’s fate, about the individual rising above his circumstances and trappings to be better than he was forced to be. Which brings us back to his lessons of courage to the meek….

Bes

Lesser God

• Patron Deity of Gamblers & Thieves
• Greed
• Sea travel
• Strangers
• Chance, fortune and fickleness

Bes hasn’t changed much as a result of the Godwar. His portfolio was luck before and it’s still luck. He has added a couple of minor second strings to his responsibilities, but which still reflect the capricious nature of a fickle fortune – the mood and nature of a chance encounter, for example. It is said that fortune favors the brave – but that is more the result of other deities reducing the scope for differences in outcome. Bas considers the foolhardy as arrogant and presumptuous, and in general spurns those who do not assess the odds. No, it is those with foresight, who do what they can to maximize their chances, who do not presume apon his favor but who respect him as he is, who generally win his favor. “Luck favors the prepared” is far more accurate.

Thus it is those who count the cards, who know the odds, who load the dice, that receive the good fortune that he can bestow – for a while. His patience is short-lived – he is fickle – and considers that those who push their luck, by continuing to gamble beyond a reasonable point, are thumbing their noses at him, an impiety of the first order. There is more to luck than simply the turn of the cards or roll of the dice, after all; and while he may hold little sway over those matters if the cards are marked, or the dice weighted, he can control the luck of the other players in discovering the cheating, or of an old enemy arriving unexpectedly.

No matter how grand the gesture, Bes will not remain favorable for long. Smaller gestures in greater frequency appeal to him more. At the same time, he delights in visiting reverses on those who refuse to gamble at all; he is a little vain and insists on the respect and obesience which he considers his due.

In terms of his relationships with the other deities, they are prickly at best. A cordial atmosphere can become heated arguement in the wink of an eye – and his mood can return to sunshine and flowers just as quickly. His closest friendship, and deepest angers, are reserved for Nephthys; though he stands in awe of Loviatar’s achievements in bettering herself. He has become fascinated by the concept of Karma, to which he was introduced by Ushas, and is exploring the implications at the current time; prior to his discovery of the notion, Bes had little understanding of his own nature, but through it he is beginning to perceive a bigger picture, and one which promises to expand his responsibilities and perspective in coming years.

Corellon

Lesser God

• Patron Deity of Drow
• The fine arts
• Plants
• Survival and physical endurance
• Land travel & Wanderlust

Of all the survivors of the Godwar, the race hardest hit was that of the Elves. All but wiped out, and all but one of their deities lost to them, Elvish society was slowly reconstituting itself from what little remained as the original campaign began. But the toll of their insular practices and inward focus had also been accumulating, and they stood at a crossroads; either they would choose to forego much of what was once Elvishness, accepting that the mortal blood which flows through their veins had condemned them to fall short of what was, and that they must be a part of the world around them, or they would recede and vanish.

At such a vital time, and with his powers at low ebb due to his loss of worshippers in any event, Corellon was forced to focus much of his attention on his existing subjects. At the same time, he needed to accept some non-elven responsibilities, and worshippers, in order to educate his charges, to broaden his power base, and to ensure his own survival. Corellon’s responsibilities are thus less than that of any other deity in the pantheon, and he has been reduced to the role of a Lesser Deity.

Just as his people had one foot on the threshold of greatness and one over the abyss, so too did Corellon in many ways. He had invested much of his passion and love in his people, and should they fall, so will Corellon, at least for a time. The stress of the situation weighed heavily apon him, making him gloomy and unhappy company. While Pan has managed to raise the occasional smile and the recollection of better times (after much effort), Correllon’s bleak, brooding mood soon returned.

Corellon had staked the entire future of his people on the education of Serenity (one of the PCs) in the new principles which he wanted her to bring back to his people. For a time, it seemed she had learned the required lessons, but in the end a lifetime of mental ruts and prejudice proved too much. In desperation, he persuaded his fellow Deities to attempt the salvage of the plan by bestowing apon Auralla (another of the PCs) the task of Serenity, even knowing that the sorceress could not be as effective as an acknowledged Elf would have been. The result is that one elf has seen the light, and given hope to Corellon, but that hope is yet fragile and could easily be crushed by events.

Elvenkind as a group are responding to Corellon’s dark moods by becoming darker in tone themselves, their society evolving in ways that bring them ever closer to their estranged kindred, the Drow. It is Corellon’s hope and plan that this will make reunification easier; but he is no longer the noble spirit that was once the epitome of Elvish Culture. Athena worries that should his desperate bid fail, Corellan will become as Llolth, at best a reluctant ally to the other Gods, and that the current unity in the Celestial Sphere will fail, possibly even sparking to one last Act in the Godwar saga – for should the Drow not turn from their current path, they too will fall.

Ultimately, Aurella achieved a partial success in her mission, revealing that Lolth had not been killed in the Godswar as the Drow Priestesses thought, she had in fact abandoned her worshippers in an all-or-nothing bid to finally achieve Divinity; of all the contenders for the final Divine vacancy, she was convinced that she was the only viable choice. Exposing the subterfuge of the City Mothers (who had been using Arcane Magic to simulate Lolth’s continued presence amongst “her people”), Aurella triggered a revolution amongst the Drow that returned them to the worship of Corellon. But Lolth was a schemer, and always had a backup plan, which she put into effect apon being denied Divinity, subverting the already wavering Elves of the forest. As a result, Elvish culture has experienced a total inversion; the Drow are slowly learning civilized modes of behavior and reforming their society, even while the Elves are being corrupted. One of the primary plot threads of the current Fumanor campaign, The Seeds Of Empire will be the resolution of this situation.

Arioch

Greater God, former Chaos Power

• The Elements: Fire, Earth, Wind and Air, and Water
• Destruction
• Technology and artifice
• Secrets
• Truth
• Alchemy
• Chaos
• The Individual

Chosen by Aurella’s Chorus to complete the Pantheon and immediately ranked amongst the most powerful of their number.

Arioch was the first (and so far, the only) Chaos Power to recognize that even if his fellows achieved their goal, they could not undo the changes within themselves; victory would not bring the satisfaction and peace they sought, would not fill the need that burned within. The only real solution was to sublimate that need into some other goal that was more achievable. It was this change in philosophy that ultimately persuaded the PCs of the first Fumanor Campaign that he was the right choice from amongst the contenders for the vacant divine position.

Anything that any mortal wants to keep secret is known to Arioch, and while he is bound by the “laws” of Divinity to protect that secret, he can act on his knowledge, or have others do so without explanation. That has made him one of the Prime Movers of subsequent campaigns, and what has emerged is a personality of surprising depth, a sly sense of humor and absolute integrity. The (new campaign) PCs, initially suspicious because of his personal history, have come to see him as good company and the closest thing they have to a friend and ally within the pantheon. The elf in the party worships Corellon, but he is friends with Arioch.

This good relationship has been strained on occasion, because – like any chaos power – Arioch will not let friendship (or anything else) get in the way of accomplishing his mission. He is friendly with the PCs because that serves his purposes. Both sides know it.

Looking to the future

This primer has only scratched the surface. Already within the campaigns, moves and countermoves by the Gods and Chaos Powers have been made, and the PCs are coming to realize that mortals hold the balance of power between the two forces. Lolth is the wild card; she can swing things either way. The players were quite amused by the fact that – having achieved her objective of becoming a Deity, or at the very least, a Demigoddess, she has less freedom of choice and ability to act than she did before; she has traded power for the freedom to use it as she will. They stopped laughing when it transpired that Lolth had been aware of the trade-off and had a plot in hand to remove those constraints – and probably a backup plan should that fail, knowing her. At the same time, they are becoming increasingly aware that the time is coming for another major confrontation between the Gods and the Chaos Powers – one in which the potential exists for an ultimate winner and an ultimate loser. The Chaos Powers have had a couple of major plots fall apart on them and are now on the back foot, with the Gods able to take the offensive for the first time in an Age – but the Chaos Powers are at their most dangerous when painted into a corner. So far, the forces of universal destruction have been able to counter each move by the Gods through some fast thinking and opportunistic craftiness, but there are hints all around that the Gods are preparing some all-or-nothing gamble – and their mortal “supporters” aren’t all that sure they like the odds, or the prospect of being caught between Hammer and Anvil…

The Theology of Fumanor is a central pillar of the campaigns and the plots that are unwinding within them. More than merely a list of deities, the Theology is at the heart of the campaign, and always has been.

A book on the structures and natures of different governments within our world got me to thinking anew about perhaps the most seminal creation within the background of the Hero System – U.N.T.I.L.

Specifically, thinking about who the organization is; how they fit into the policies, principles and charter of the United Nations; what’s wrong with the “official” version of the organization; how the organization is depicted in the Zenith-3 campaign and the Hero Systems campaigns – and a new take on the answers to some of these questions.

The Official Position

When I first read the Champions sourcebooks, I was still relatively naive as a writer and GM. Conceptually, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the idea, and the acronym is excellent – but I shuddered then, and still do, at the organization’s actual name.

The Name Problem

Brace yourself: “The United Nations Tribunal on International Law”.

Where does one begin? “The United Nations” part of the name is fine. But then it starts to fall apart.

A “Tribunal”? Isn’t that what you convene when you want to hold an enquiry into something – sort of like Congressional Hearings? Well, that’s close – it actually means a “Court Of Justice, or a local board hearing claims for exemption from military service during World War I” according to the Pocket Oxford Dictionary. The name, applied in this context, makes U.N.T.I.L. closer in concept to Judge Dredd than to the organization described in sourcebooks such as “Champions Universe”. Nothing wrong with that as a concept, but it is not what is described.

Second Problem: “International Law”. It isn’t what most people think it is. And it certainly isn’t what U.N.T.I.L. concern themselves with. International Law has nothing to do with criminal acts by individuals or even rogue/terrorist organizations, it concerns relations between nations. Even International Criminal Law deals with things like war crimes, acts of genocide, and ‘crimes against humanity’. Anti-piracy measures and the law of the sea are as close as International Law comes to acts by individuals and they are covered by a completely separate field within International Law.

Which leaves a Champions GM with three choices:

• Reinvent the organization;
• Rename the organization;
• or have an organization whose actions are at odds with their mandate and mission, and which are actually just as illegal as the criminals they pursue.

That’s right – since adherence to International Law is voluntary, and not an obligation, even if International Law was far more encompassing than it actually is, U.N.T.I.L. would have no authority to enforce it. Their every act is therefore just as criminal as the acts of an organization like VIPER, or S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

Renaming The Organization

The easiest option, on the face of it, is to rename the organization, and keep right on trucking with them as an established campaign element, fighting villainous organizations and supervillains. But this proves a little trickier in practice than it appears.

My reasoning, back in the early 80s when my campaign was just getting started, carried me that far; but in-game events modified the central concept way beyond the standard, so I won’t go into that just now. Instead, here’s a brand new meaning for the acronym that solves the problem for those looking for the simplest solution: the United Nations Terrorism, Intervention, and Law-enforcement Agency.

Doctrinal Relevance
This title gives U.N.T.I.L. three responsibilities or doctrines:

• Terrorism – mandates opposition to villainous and terrorist organizations such as Viper and Genocide;
• Law-enforcement – mandates assisting the national and/or local authorities in enforcing local laws when the criminals have superpowers or supertech or some other ability that puts them beyond the capabilities of ordinary police forces; and,
• Intervention – mandates prevention of attempted invasions from beyond the earth (aliens and/or other dimensions) as well as operations relevant under International Law such as the pursuit and capture of those wanted for trial on charges of War Crimes, acts of Genocide, etc.

Between them, this gives U.N.T.I.L. the authority and the mandate to do everything that they do in most Champions campaigns, but it also throws some interesting ramifications into the mix.

International Law doesn’t even get a direct mention in the title, though it does get mentioned indirectly under the heading of Intervention, simply because there are some fun plotlines (chasing Nazis, helping against alien invaders, etc) that otherwise would fall outside the range of what U.N.T.I.L. is permitted to do. (I have sudden visions of U.N.T.I.L. trying to prosecute Dormammu for Crimes Against Humanity…)

Since International Law has an extremely limited criminal code, it becomes necessary to use some other criminal code to sanction U.N.T.I.L. operations against Supervillains. The obvious choice is the domestic law of the country in which they are operating – having been authorized to do so by the nation in question either as a blanket permission or on a case-by-case basis. That means that they may be forced to persue ‘super-criminals’ for activities that the agents don’t consider crimes – or look the other way because the things the criminals are doing aren’t actually crimes under local laws. Conflict is at the heart of storytelling, and this throws a whole new internal conflict onto the pile for the PCs to explore.

There’s still scope for operational fine-tuning; for example, how proactive are U.N.T.I.L. permitted to be? Does the doctrine of ‘hot pursuit’ apply? Must U.N.T.I.L. apply formally for permission to operate in a country on a case-by-case basis, or are there specific organizations they have a blanket authorization to pursue? Are U.N.T.I.L. agents required to respect procedures and authorization requirements for specific activities – ie do they have to read miranda rights while operating in the US, do they have to go to court for permission to wiretap a phone, etc? Subordinating U.N.T.I.L. to local laws can have a number of repercussions!

The Law-enforcement responsibility also authorizes U.N.T.I.L. to operate Stronghold (or some equivalent) for those criminals that the local penal institutions cannot hold. But that also brings into view the question of the proper treatment of criminals – as anyone who has read ‘Catch Me If You Can‘ knows that different countries have very different attitudes to criminal rehabilitation and punishment (it’s not made quite as clear in the movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks).

Finally, notice that drugs are not mentioned anywhere directly. Unless they are locally illegal, or are being used to fund terrorist activities, they are none of U.N.T.I.L.’s business.

Reinventing The Organization

The second solution is to reinvent the organization to fit within the parameters of what International Law actually covers. Like any large organization with a chain-of-command whose commander-in-chief changes periodically, what is permitted – both officially and unofficially – will change from time-to-time, anyway. Put some proactive go-getter in charge and it is likely to exceed its mandate regularly and egregiously – and until they actually tick somebody off, he will probably get away with it. But International Relations is a prickly subject, and delicacy is often required to prevent extreme positions from producing extreme reactions to events – and that means that a go-getter is likely to be viewed, at best, as a “loose cannon”.

Leaving the name “as it is, officially,” and remaking the organization to suit, leaves each individual nation to come up with its own solutions – something that would undoubtedly suit the USA in the Champions game universe, but would leave many smaller nations relatively helpless. But that’s where the new thoughts that I mentioned come in.

These days, the growing trend is termed supranationalism. The difference between a supranational union or confederation such as the European Union and the United Nations is the agreement to confer on the supranational union authority within and – to a strictly limited extent – over, the member nations. If each of the “continental divisions” of U.N.T.I.L. was in fact a locally-authorized organization answering to such a union, with a general administration coordinating relations between them, you end up with a quasi-UN organization that can collectively be referred to as U.N.T.I.L. but which is actually six separate organizations, with the authority to act within their divisional jurisdiction. Each would thus fall into a middle ground between an independent supranational law-enforcement operation and a full UN operation.

Does this seem like it’s splitting hairs? It isn’t, and the difference lies in one key word: sovereignty. Nations routinely delegate and authorize supranational organizations to act on behalf of the collective, yielding a little of their sovereignty; they yield no such authority to the United Nations. At the same time, the UN quite happily functions as a coordinating and administrative body between individual nations and hence between supranational organizations, so this “umbrella” role is in keeping with their usual practices and policies.

This is very much a case of being able to have your cake and eating it, too – a perfect solution. What’s more, the quasi-autonomy of the resulting supranational organizations leaves room for disagreements and conflicts between them, which U.N.T.I.L. Command can mediate in the medium or long-term but which provide additional plot potentials in the meantime.

U.N.T.I.L. as the enforcement arm of a nascent world government

If that sounds very specific, it’s because that is the niche that U.N.T.I.L. – The United Nations Tactical / Intelligence / Legal Corps – occupies in my game world. This is a quite different take on the organization from that of the “Official” mould due to behind-the-scenes manipulation and intervention in the creation of the organization by an alien from a completely different culture, in my game world.

Ullar came from a world with a strict meritocratic caste system. It was not only possible but routine for qualified individuals to move from one caste or sub-caste to another. Mapping of genetic potentials at birth and evaluations during the educational period of how much of that potential had been actualized by the individual determined what caste(s) and sub-castes were open to the individual, and free choice was restricted to those options the state adjudged as suitable for the individual. In many ways, it drew elements from a dystopian view of our future, but it remapped them into a functional – if fragile – utopia. At the very pinnacle of that society, above even the administrative powers of the planetary governments, was a group of troubleshooters called The Order, who were freed of all restraints of law – but were enjoined to obey the maxim of “The Greatest Good For All,” and mentally restructured to enforce compliance. That was the key to this society: something very akin to utopia was achieved by the sacrifice of virtually all personal liberty, but that utopia was inherently unstable; it was the constant corrective actions of the Order that kept it all from falling apart. Although it predates the publication of Magician by some months, there are few organizations more reminiscent of this society than that of Kelewan under the Great Ones, shorn of the Oriental societal influences and recast as a high-tech society rather than a fantasy one. When the Csoltaran Federation finally fell – and the details are not especially relevant to this analysis – he escaped in suspended animation while his ship’s computer searched for a planet inhabited by suitable life forms. After 1900 million years – or so – it found Earth.

Ullar’s initial thoughts were to remake the society of the world to what he “knew” was a better system, but his arrival coincided with the first nuclear weapons test in 1945, and his compassion forced him to assist in relief efforts following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which set him on the path to becoming Earth’s first hero instead of it’s first supervillain. He parlayed the gratitude of a pair of Japanese officials and his analytic resources into an even more rapid Japanese resurgence following the conclusion to World War II, in the process elevating those allies to key positions within the new government; then used that influence to have Japan join the United Nations years earlier than would have been the case. Along the way, he carefully recruited a few others. Step by step, he bootstrapped his supporters into key positions and had them subtly nuance the opinions of political leaders and the general public. In particular, he persuaded the United Nations of three key ‘facts’:

• that League Of Nations failed to prevent World War because they granted certain states unlimited sovereignty without reserving the collective right to intervene before a sovereign state threatened others;
• that without a multinational enforcement arm to carry out such interventions, their decrees were toothless and irrelevant;
• and that without a guaranteed autonomy from political shackles, such an authority’s purpose could too easily be perverted.

Ultimately, Ullar’s true goal was to create an organization of “political troubleshooters” to deal with problems that were too big for any one nation to deal with. U.N.T.I.L.’s task was not to fight wars, but to intervene strategically to confine wars and to target the causes of war – an earth equivalent of The Order. Its commander was to advise the UN in the deliberations, and was answerable directly to the security council – but after the fact. One of the terms of membership in the United Nations was acceptance of the authority of U.N.T.I.L. – but with it came a clean slate, and full pardon for past ‘misdeeds’. In due course, he announced his presence to the world, and became the first individual to petition the UN for global citizenship. The question of life beyond earth was immediately resolved, and the intentions of that life was clearly a subject beyond the jurisdiction of any one nation – exactly as he had intended, U.N.T.I.L. was placed under the jurisdiction of the agency that he had helped to create.

Superheroes breed supervillains

Ullar’s reform agenda had barely gotten started when he was required to set it aside when the world’s first supervillain arose. The conflict between the two was to reshape U.N.T.I.L.’s mandate forever, so much so that the public largely forgot that it had any other function. Supervillains, by their nature, were deemed to be squarely within U.N.T.I.L.’s mandate, but they went further and claimed jurisdiction over dealing with the causes of supervillain creation. Aliens, super-tech, so-called “sorcery”, psionics, superheroes and villains of all sorts became their province. This didn’t happen overnight; it was a gradual process. In game terms, it is now about 40 years since Ullar first arrived (he’s been killed twice in the line of duty and resurrected once), and U.N.T.I.L. has become an umbrella with fingers in a great many pies. At the same time, they have accelerated the technological profile of the world by 10-15 years – personal computers are now common-place (in 1986!) and the internet is about to explode.

Divisional Structure

U.N.T.I.L. has 10 divisions in my game world:

1. Command Division – Admin & Policy setting
2. Security Division – Responsible for the security of U.N.T.I.L. bases, UN Facilities, Missions & Envoys, for counter-intelligence activities and for the confinement of supervillains.
3. Legal & Economic Division – Super-tech can produce economic disruptions on a massive scale; aside from legal reforms and legal analyses, and handling U.N.T.I.L.’s overall budget, this division forecasts and attempts to keep control of these disruptions, keeping them to a manageable level. A particular challenge to this group are the legal ramifications of superheroes.
4. Science & Technology Division – At the same time, U.N.T.I.L. has some of the most brilliant research scientists on the planet working for it, analyzing both captured goodies and conducting pure research.
5. Intelligence Division – Before you can intervene, you need to know where intervention is necessary. This division not only analyzes the inner workings of organizations like Viper and Demon, it plants double-agents, keeps an eye on the intelligence apparatus of key national governments and organizations, and in general tries to be the first to know everything that happens.
6. Resources Division – Bases, vehicles, field equipment, etc.
7. Training Division – Trains, recruits, and vets new agents – the latter in consultation with the Security Division.
8. Political Division – The intelligence division is about knowing, the political division is about doing. Their mandate is to settle disputes equitably and peacefully by providing a third, neutral party. Also known as the diplomatic wing of U.N.T.I.L.. They are also responsible for speaking on behalf of the planet to representatives from other worlds.
9. Operations Division – Chase after supervillains and terrorists and rogue aliens and so on. The division that most people think of when they think of U.N.T.I.L..
10. Superhero Liaison Division – In recent times, it has become fashionable to provide a liaison to superhero teams operating in U.N.T.I.L. jurisdiction and under the auspices of U.N.T.I.L.. The Liaison Division grants superhero teams a mandate to operate as independent field units within U.N.T.I.L., and pays the members accordingly, and even helps fund the team’s activities – but insists on hands-on oversight. The difference between a Sanctioned Team and a group of Vigilantes. Originally constituted as part of the Operations Division.

Further Evolution

U.N.T.I.L. has continued to evolve within the campaign world. They get some things right and some things wrong; they are sometimes slow and occasionally hamstrung by UN regulations and motions. When the US left the UN in my campaign, it deprived U.N.T.I.L. of about 55% of its operating budget and several of its key operatives and bases. Political developments such as the rise of the 4th Reich in Central Europe and the 5th Reich in South America have further hampered their effectiveness.

An organization like U.N.T.I.L. can never be completely ineffective or helpless within a campaign, or it might as well not exist; and won’t be worth the trouble it poses for the PCs – but it also can’t be the solution to every problem, or the PCs become unnecessary instead of in the spotlight. This metagame conflict is a juggling act that every GM has to cope with.

In general, from a metagame perspective, things are unlikely to get better in the short-term; I want problems to be solved by the PCs, not some ubiquitous superagency. At the same time, U.N.T.I.L. is working slowly but doggedly to minimize the impact of those problems until the PCs discover the solution to the problems – once the critical problem is solved, U.N.T.I.L. will handle the cleanup, leaving the PCs to move on to the next problem on their plates. And that’s the real purpose of U.N.T.I.L. within my campaign.

The Measure of Progress

U.N.T.I.L. has one further function – because it will always prioritize the most urgent problems at hand, no matter how insoluble they might appear, a quick glance at the problems they are dealing with provides an effective yardstick for the PCs to measure their success and the impact they are having on the game world. But, in general, they are just a part of the general background. They pop up when the plot is something they would have knowledge and jurisdiction over, and stay out of the way the rest of the time. That’s why it is so important to know who and what they – or any equivalent global or national organization – are – so that you know when they should be involved and when they should not. You want organizations like U.N.T.I.L. to be exactly what it says on the tin.

Right now, in-game, the era of Japanese Management Techniques is beginning, with the economic and bureaucratic convolutions that comes with it. This is going to have the effect of saddling the PCs with a number of bureaucratic hurdles to overcome that are humorous (at a player level) while annoying at a character level. In particular, there’s a Field Marshall Tomkins who the PCs will come to loathe, because he’s fighting the change by insisting on every administrative ‘i’ being dotted and every bureaucratic ‘t’ being crossed. Over time, it means that important policy decisions that might once have been made from On High will get handed to the grassroots level – including the PCs. And neither that, nor the likelyhood of trouble from the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, are coincidence (insert evil laugh here).

What will U.N.T.I.L. ultimately become? I have no idea, that will be directly up to the players – but it will be fun to watch!

Having given Campaign Mastery’s readers (and myself) a break from the series, today’s article contains another Kingdom write-up from my Shards Of Divinity Campaign, once again in more detail than even the players have seen it before…

Metagame Origins

A ‘Hinterland’ is technically a region behind a coast or rivers, i.e. separated from the main political region by water. I didn’t know that when I created the Longex Dextora, using the term in its more metaphoric interpretation of “Outlying Region”. As geographic relationships changed during campaign development, the concept of Longex Dextora changed with them, extruding a long finger into the central regions of the shared kingdoms, though the bulk of the Realm continued to form the south-eastern and southern sides of the Shared Kingdoms. Ironically, the upshot is that The Hinterlands are no longer hinterlands in any way, or at least, not exclusively.

Conceptually, the Hinterlands were created as a place for dominance-and-independence games between Orcs, Giants, Gnolls, and Goblins, and Byzantine politics between Humans. When the geography was redrawn for the umpteenth time, a large chunk of the former aspect of the conceptual origins was lost, and for a while I thought I had painted myself into a corner as a result of a somewhat piecemeal development process. It was only when the blindingly obvious – that these non-human races didn’t need to respect later, Human-imposed borders and boundaries – occurred to me that it all started to make sense once again.

Other elements of my original concepts remained. The heart of the Kingdom remains a series of hills of various sizes in a slightly marshy river delta. Each of these almost-islands has its own political independence and a blend of unique traditions and customs held in common with most of the others – so much so that I didn’t bother trying to enumerate specific variations. Each would have a slightly different population blend, slightly different land use requirements, and so on.

A trouble hot-spot

Above all, I wanted this to be a region where trouble was always brewing, and threatening to spill out into the rest of the Shared Kingdoms, which (up to this point) were generally looking far too stable.

I achieved this by postulating that some island areas had a regional strategic importance far in excess of their capacity to maintain the level of population required to support them as independent entities. These would serve as keystones to a temporary regional dominance; capture one or more and you became the dominant force in that part of the realm, but the need to maintain adequate defenses would soon drain the vitality of the conquering army to the point where a rival could (and would) relieve them of possession of that strategic keystone. The new conquerors would then hold it for a while, even as it sapped their strength, until yet another rival would grow strong enough to take possession.

Alliances of instability

This sort of anarchy only really exists in isolation, of course – as soon as one Kingdom allies itself with a stronger neighbor, the equality of balance required to keep everything on a knife-edge is disrupted. Perpetuating the cycle of anarchy in the face of this dampening presence made it necessary for one political alliance to be balanced with a second, and a third, and a fourth.

Lurking in the back of my mind was a vision of World War I, where a series of political entanglements forced one European Power after another into the conflict like a series of falling dominos. I was also rather inspired by the images of the brawl in the Taiwan Parliament in 2007 (Youtube video) who nevertheless had to come together every year or two to send a “unified representative” to the Council of Kings. It seemed to me that after getting swept up in the anarchy a time or two, the “allies” of the different factions would get together and actively conspire to lock the loonies up in their asylum, controlling the situation to prevent a WWI-style scenario. The “allies,” in other words, would act as firemen trying to keep this sputtering fuse from triggering an explosion.

Finally, I needed a reason for all this to matter. Setting the Capital of the shared Kingdoms at the northern end of the temperate zone, and having the Longex Dextora principally stretching from that point to the south and south-east placed it squarely in temperate and subtropical climatic zones (I had some other ideas for the tropics, so that was as fair as it went). That means that ultimately, even a smallish area could sustain a fairly large population. The region was now the equivalent of France and the Iberian Peninsula – while being mostly land-locked, and the grafting of the legendary passion of the Spanish completed the concept.

In-Game Origins

The Longex Dextora was, prior to the arrival of refugees from the Fall Of Paradise, part of a considerably larger region with a rich – if barbaric – history. In the temperate regions, Orcs had been subjugated by Giants from the northern mountain regions, while the Goblins living in the subtropics had been enslaved by Gnolls from the tropics. The dividing line between the two territories was the marshy river ‘delta’ that would ultimately become the Longex Dextora.

A series of border skirmishes resulted between the two forces with the border shifting from one side of the disputed region to the other depending on the season and the winds of fortune. Neither band of conquerors were entirely at home in the climates of the peoples they had subjugated; the Giants could only come south during the winter months, while the Gnolls could only come North during the summers. To rule their territories on their behalf during the “inclement seasons”, they appointed and educated selected proxies from amongst the conquered subjects. A striking pattern of semi-instability evolved as a result.

The Seasonal Conquests

At the start of an arbitrary year, one group – let us say it is the Gnolls – are dominant, and mount probing military expeditions into the North, capturing many of the Keystone “Islands” and becoming dominant in the region of the future Longex Dextora. As summer wanes, the Gnolls retreat from these territorial gains, leaving them under the control of their “trusted” Goblin proxies. The Goblins spend the autumn months building up their defenses using whatever materials come to hand, while in the north, the Orcs are similarly being driven to prepare for War by their Giant masters. As winter falls over the temperate regions, the Giants emerge to lead their Orcish fighting forces in a winter campaign against the Goblins. By the time the winter is ending, they have overrun the majority of the keystone “islands” and dispossessed the Goblins, who flee back to the south. Now is the time for the Giants to press their advantage, but the climate is opposed and the season is turning against them, and they are forced to retreat back into the mountains, leaving Orcish Proxies to loot the former Goblin settlements. Throughout the spring, they would strive to prepare fortifications, ready for the late-spring/early-summer return of the Goblins and their Gnollish masters.

A strange social symbiosis evolved. The Goblins would plant winter crops before departing for harvesting by the Orcs and the Orcs would plant summer crops for their Goblin enemies – actually, both sides were planting against the off-chance that this particular piece of territory would be held, this particular year. Sometimes, one side would decide they had no chance of retaining the territory and fail to plant these crops; when they were inevitably displaced, they would learn that their opposition had “punished” them by failing to plant their equivalent crops. The result was famine for both sides equally, and no real change in the balance of power.

Inevitably, and regularly, the “overseers” left behind would contemplate a revolt against their masters, perhaps even an alliance with their rivals on the other side, but these were always quickly settled by the simple tactic of not sending reinforcements, leaving the rebels to face an assured defeat at the hands of that “other side”.

Quasi-stability lost

It is not known how long this situation persisted. It may have been centuries, it may have been millennia. But eventually, a wild card brought this oscillating stability crashing down. Dwarves emerged from their mining tunnels – a force that neither Giants nor Orcs had known the existence of – and cut the supply and communications lines of the Giant commands. Sensing that the moment to overthrow their giant masters had come, the Orcs rose in general rebellion, trapping the Giants and their sycophants between hammer (Orcs) and Anvil (Dwarves).

Over the next several Winters, the Giants strove to reestablish their conquest of the Orcs, but were ultimately driven completely out of their former territories by Orcish Death-squads who were completely satisfied to trade their lives for another kilometer of territorial gain. Twenty Orc lives were traded for every Giant slain – which was a net victory for the Orcs. Meanwhile, the Goblins and their Gnollish masters were left in virtually undisputed control of the formerly disputed lands. The Orcish territories effectively contracted northwards.

The Giants then attempted to travel south through the Thunder Mountains which stretched almost all the way to the formerly disputed territory, thinking that they might be able to dislodge the Gnolls and conquer the Goblins as a replacement army, bypassing the Orcs and ultimately trapping the rebel Orcs in a pincer movement, for the Dwarves had proven no more receptive to Orcish types than they had the Giants.

Forced into the Gnoll territories, the Giants did their best to carve out a new realm, but were no match for the cunning and cruelty of the Gnolls, and were eventually forced back north into the frozen wastes. But they did enough damage to the Gnoll gangs that the Goblins were able to mount an insurrection against their masters, having built up their numbers during the years that they had been free of the annual Orcish invasion. The Gnoll flanks were overexposed by their pursuit of the Giants and the Goblins, despite horrendous losses, succeeded in dispossessing all Gnoll claims north of the tropic line.

A war of attrition

But this had given the Orcs time to regroup and rebuild their numbers, even as it diminished the Goblin ability to resist; an Orcish army came south, intent on subjugating the Goblins for themselves while they were weakened by their struggle with the Gnolls, just as they themselves had been dominated by the Giants, but the Goblins were not eager to trade one set of masters for another, and the old patterns were reestablished – without their former masters in command.

Slowly the Orcs – who could function in the subtropical regions – began to eat into the lands claimed by the Goblins, but each gain was difficult and Goblins proved adept at guerilla attacks behind the Orcish front lines. Keeping a region pacified frequently tied up as many troops as it had taken to conquer it, and both sides were bleeding each other to a standstill.

That was when the first human settlers arrived, moving into the No-mans-land between the two factions, renaming it the Longex Dextora, and forcing both factions to retreat. Captured humans quickly became the political ‘currency’ of the two adjacent hereditary enemies, the one thing they agreed on, and an already-messy two-way conflict became a three-way political minefield of shifting loyalties and temporary alliances, complicated by the occasional attempted Resurgence of Gnolls or Giants. As the human presence slowly expanded and ate away at the Orcish territories to the north and the Goblin territories to the south, the former occupants of the myriad of island forts found their regions of influence contracting.

The last gasp of the Orcish Empire

Blocked to the south once and for all, the Orcs began exploring west, and a cluster of small valleys containing Gnomish Settlements was discovered. Deprived of their chance of empire through conquest of the Goblins, the Orcs sought to turn their will apon the seemingly-vulnerable Gnomes. The result was an almost-stable condition of anarchy, with no group strong enough to dominate. But the Gnomes proved to be naturally-gifted at the Byzantine politics that emerged and were able to trade alliances with Goblins, rival Orc tribes, Human tribes, Gnolls, Giants, Fey, and Dwarves as necessary to always maintain enough strength to resist and those who would conquer them.

Eventually a wave of human settlers from the west reached the Gnomish valleys and before long the Gnomes were completely surrounded by men, the Orcs driven back to the east into the Thunderhell. The Gnomish Monarchy then rose to power in response to the human settlements around them, and the Parumveneaora joined the Shared Kingdoms, giving the Gnomes enough military backing that they no longer need fear Orcish conquest.

At much the same time, the Elves began to push south and west from their forest, pushing the Goblins still further south and even driving the Gnolls out from their subtropical domains in response to their own internal problems. The elves were not interested in conquest per se, but nevertheless cleared the way for new human settlements as a byproduct of the conflict between the newly-emergent Drow and the traditional Elven monarchy. When the Dwarves and Elves joined the Shared Kingdoms, the Longex Dextora was largely secured – only for the locals to fall victim to the tyranny of geography, which encouraged independent city-states and internal instability.

The Geography

The Longex Dextora is a somewhat lumpy and slightly wedge-shaped ribbon that runs from the western desert line to the coast of the continental landmass (which has never been given a name – there is not enough of it explored for it to be viewed as a continent yet). It spans five different geographic regions in the process, each with its own character.

The western region runs south from the capital along the desert line. The most habitable regions are to the temperate north, the east which encompasses both temperate and subtropical zones, and the south which is solidly subtropical. Much of it is relatively sparsely populated save for clusters of dwellings located around ancient wells that have yielded potable water for centuries, thanks to an underlying artesian water basin. This area is as flat as a pancake except at its northern extremity.

The central region runs from west of the Elven Forests to east of that area and to the south. Prime farmland, this is the food basket of the Realm, varying from temperate to subtropical. The climate and geography are similar to that of inland Texas, and more meat animals are raised here than anywhere else in the Shared Kingdoms. The region is also very reminiscent of the wild west in other respects!

East of the central region is the area surrounding the central river delta to the north, south, and west. Subject to periodic flooding, this region is the most fertile of the Realm, and the subject of intensive farming of cotton and grain. To the north are Orcs and Giants and the Thunderhell; to the south are Goblins.

The delta forms a wedge to the coast that is fully embedded within the Eastern region. A number of hills of varying sizes and heights surrounded by water, some connected by fords and others by bridges, while others are accessible only by boat. This is the dominant region, politically – not that the Longex Dextora has a capital city to speak of. South of this wedge is another, a swampland which is essentially a continuation of the delta without the higher lands. Think Louisiana bayou. While settled around the fringes, this area is still the native territory of Gnolls.

Finally, to the north and east of the coast, a number of small settlements nestle against the range of mountains that run north-south and on various islands. Each of these is essentially independent but lacking the resources of the delta “islands”, making them relatively minor members of the broader society.

Borders

For most of its length, the Lihume Magnusortali (Great Eastern River) forms the northern border of the Longex Dextora.

The only exceptions are where the Iriduserde Foliumprasi (Vivid Green-Leaf Forest), (Home of the Elves) runs along the river (taking a bite out of the Longex Dextora); and East of that point where the territorial claims of the realm expand to form a border fringe to the north (nominally with the Ineodolus Imperascora, but this is the Thunderhell where borders are ill-defined at best).

The eastern border is the Undus Verdestus (Green Ocean), while to the south lie the Jungle lands of the Tawnton Dieltriporprasi a collection of independent primitive Tribes. Although the Shared Kingdoms consider them collectively and don’t distinguish one tribe from the next, they are actually separate political entities with minimal connections to one another. In a state of near-perpetual war with each other are rogue Kingdom colonies, barbarian Orcs, and all manner of other strange creatures. It is often said that no good comes from the Tawnton, only varying degrees of trouble and strife. Serving as a semi-civilized fringe society between the Jungle and the Longex Dextora are a number of independent Goblin settlements, at their most numerous due south of the Elven Forest. These are technically part of the Longex Dextora but are not officially recognized as such. The geographic proximity leads some to speculate that Elves and Goblins are both varieties of Fey who achieved an independent existence during Fey prehistory; none of the races named will comment on this speculation.

Like several of the Shared Kingdoms, the Longex Dextora has one border that is (at best) a little fuzzy. To the west lies the Diabolectus Pectusora (The Devil’s Heart), a vast desert of blistering heat and ancient ruins and monuments, the origins of which are long-forgotten and which are the favorite targets of adventurers. While theoretically the Longex Dextora employs the desert line as its border, the reality is that the boundary is not so clear-cut and the realm gradually peters out as habitation becomes unsustainable.

Neighbors

The most significant neighbors of the Longex Dextora (politically) are therefore the Elves of the Iriduserde Foliumprasi, and the Traders and Guilds of the Ineodolus Imperascora. However, one would be foolish to ignore the Gnolls, Goblins, wild tribes, and desert-dwellers even though they have no political affiliation with the realm.

The Society

There’s little point in getting too specific about the society within the Longex Dextora – it changes all too frequently. Instability is the watchword in these parts, and impermanence a way of life. City-states change their names and affiliations frequently and unpredictably. Politically, it could be summed up as chaos within anarchy wrapped in confusions.

Nevertheless, there are some common features to the collective societies of the Longex Dextora, and while there are exceptions to every one of those common features, the starting point can be summed up fairly simply: A feudal structure overlayed on the top of something else, with byzantine politics as the cherry on top.

For example, the towns in the central regions can be considered large cattle ranches complete with cowboys, goblin “Indians”, and crossbows instead of pistols. The ranch houses are fortified small towns, often with a castle for the “ranch owner”. Sheriffs and outlaws and cattle rustlers – but the sheriff is appointed by the Nobleman (titles vary and are largely self-appointed).

Similarly, the settlements in the eastern Delta can be viewed as isolated Kingdoms or city-states, each with its share of serfs, villeins, craftsmen, farmers, tax collectors, its own city watch, and so on – but there is a neighboring kingdom, usually hostile, half a mile in this direction, and another in that direction, and one even close over there, and one a mile away in still another direction – none of which are fully able to support their populations without food and trade goods from outside their boundaries.

The western portion of the realm is a blend of Medieval Spain (without the seagoing aspects) and the middle east – again, overlaid with a ‘traditional’ feudal society.

The Noble Clans

Ultimately, the nobility of the Longex Dextora can be traced back to five distinct families – the Gaviota (Seagull), Lobiota (Wolf), Bueynte (Ox), Halconte (Hawk) and Serpienza (Snake) clans. While there has been some attempt to retain bloodline purity, this principle has been ignored often enough in attempts to create a temporary alliance that every member can trace some circuitous route to each of the five.

Nobles & Nobility within the Longex Dextora

While the City-states themselves are independents, they have adapted a republican political system for choosing their representative to the Shared Kingdoms. Each City-state nominates a Senator to represent their interests; the senators choose a member amongst themselves to be the Speaker Of The Republic, who in turn takes his place in the Council Of Kings. They use the standard Titles, and hence have no King. Most don’t place much importance on titles, anyway.

Education

Children from the age of 3 are rotated amongst the different craftsmasters of the settlement performing novice apprenticeships for a period of at least three months. At the age of eight, in an order of priority dictated by the local noble, the craftsmasters select a promising apprentice for more advanced training. Some horse-trading has been known to take place to ensure that a master will get a specific apprentice for whom he has a special fondness. If no craft has been identified to which the child is especially suited, the child becomes a serf, responsible for the maintenance and farming of a specific tract of land. If a child is deemed suitable for a craft but there are no vacancies within that craft, he will normally be traded to some other city-state for goods, wealth, or a suitably-skilled apprentice for whom the city-state has a need.

For the next eight years, apprentices serve under the tutelage of the master or his designated proxies. After each two year period, the master can deem the apprentice unsuitable and terminate the relationship or trade the apprentice with a master of the same craft from another city-state. At the end of this period, the child is deemed both an adult and receives the title of Journeyman. He is now expected to find his own opportunities to advance his craft (while paying 40% of his income in taxes to his parent city-state and 20% to the Master who educated him). When a master of his craft dies or retires (with the permission of the noble), journeyman have a year-and-a-day to present themselves to the ruler of the city-state as a prospective new Master. A panel of Masters – each of whom receives a fee set by the ruler of the city state for the task – examines the professional workmanship, character, and skill of the proposed new master. A year-and-a-day after the death/retirement of the old master, the panel may affirm one of the applicants as the new master, or declare the office vacant for the next five years as there are no suitable candidates.

A master receives remuneration and rewards from the ruling noble at a rate decreed every 5 years by the noble. In return, the noble is entitled to the full production of the master for that period of time. If the master is not paid the promised sum, he is entitled to sell some or all of his production to other city-states or members of the public to make up the shortfall, so nobles rarely fail to meet their promised obligations. While the master has no choice but to accept the offer of his patron, he retains control over how efficiently and effectively he works – so if the noble offers a pittance of what the master considers his skills to be worth, the master can produce a mere pittance of the total production he might have been capable of achieving, spending the balance of his time planning more elaborate works or simply relaxing. More honorable nobles will release a Master from obligations to his throne if they find they lack the resources to keep him productive much of the time. When seeking a new Master, the noble must publish his promises of rewards in advance – with the consequence that if he is too tight-fisted, he will fail to attract candidates of sufficient quality.

Upward Social Mobility

Some of the city-states have changed owner so frequently that the social system itself has adapted to take the circumstance into account. The principles that have resulted have, in turn, become generalized and applied to other situations, producing the opportunity of upward social mobility if they are willing to risk enough to claim that opportunity.

In a nutshell, once removed from the direct authority of a member of the nobility, a runaway of whatever social rank must be taken at face value by any other city state. If he can demonstrate sufficient skill, expertise, or simple willingness to serve, he can be accepted by his new patron as a legitimate member of the new social class he has defined for himself. Of course, no-one fully trusts a runaway on general principles, but there is a big difference between the childhood oath that new apprentices are required to swear and the informed oath of personal loyalty that must be sworn as an adult. Expectations of fidelity are much higher, and so are the punishments for the betrayal of that trust.

There have been a number of secondary consequences that have resulted to the general betterment of society. In most historical feudal societies, the serfs were considered expendable, cannon fodder at best, something to be trampled if they get underfoot at worst. They have been uniformly ill-treated by the majority of feudal nobles. Neither of these facts are true in the Longex Dextora; most conquests treat the serfs as part of the land, and harming them ultimately reduces the value of the ground conquered. They are not even forced to fight on behalf of the noble, and are left in peace by invading armies. And, of course, if a noble habitually mistreats his serfs and servants, they will all migrate to rival city-states – which means the noble and his supporters will start getting hungry by-and-by if they don’t pick up rake and hoe themselves – never mind that the desertions will weaken their ability to retain control of the city-state, whose vulnerability has just been advertised in all directions by the runaways. The occasional loss can be tolerated, especially since this is often a two-way street; mass migrations are to be avoided.

Spies

Of course, it doesn’t take much imagination for a noble to see in this social practice an opportunity to infiltrate friends, enemies, and neighbors with spies. Intelligence networks are an inevitability.

The thing with such networks is that they spiral, in costs and manpower, out of control at exponential rates. First you have the spies, and then the communications channels, and then the counterspies, and then the security officers, and then the backups for all of the above, and then the analysts and strategists, and then you need the resources to actually use the acquired intelligence to your benefit.

It is very easy to overextend your resources, leaving you more vulnerable than had you remained in ignorance.

The Politics

The independent city-states don’t agree on much, but one of the things they DO agree on is that they will not let themselves be steamrollered by larger alliances of communities. In many ways, the laws of Longex Destora are lowest common denominator with regional and municipal extensions. Even so, there are some communities that won’t even go along with the bare minimum laws of The Hinterlands, and these have broken away to form their own communities. Groups like the Solvo Mondibanus refuse to accept the conditions of the Shared Kingdom, unwilling to surrender one iota of their sovereignty.

Theory is one thing, reality another. None of the independent city-states is completely independent. They all have treaties and trade links both with other independent city-states and with the rest of the Shared Kingdoms. The result is that together they have formed four major political alliances within the Senate, and the balance of power between these groups is constantly shifting. The situation is made still more anarchic by the continual coming and going of members from each alliance, both with changing circumstances and through generational changes in rule within each City-State. Adding to the noise level are a number of truly independent states who will ally with, and bolster the numbers of, whichever group is most advantageous for them at the time.

From A PC Perspective

The Longex Dextora works brilliantly as the background for a character of almost any class. The combination of the Apprentice/Journeyman/Master hierarchy and the upward mobility permit a character to have a background of any social level the player might desire and still be a cleric, or paladin, or whatever the character’s chosen class is. There are combinations possible here that are simply unworkable anywhere else. Adding to the potential is the capacity for a variety of interesting events in the character’s past – betrayal, ambition, treachery, manipulation, seduction by a lady of noble birth – ingredients that propel the character into whatever personality profile wants to have.

From A GMs Perspective

That same potential makes this a fun place from the GMs perspective. Adding the potential for enemy incursions both foreign (Goblins, Gnolls, Orcs, Giants, Drow) and Domestic (another city state) to the variety of less widespread plotlines and the inherent political instability of the area means that almost any plot can be set here. It’s even possible for a long-forgotten Dungeon to be uncovered in the western realm (even though ‘in theory’ they lie beyond the borders of the Longex Dextora, that border is intentionally blurry). An entire campaign could be set here with some additional work specifying the key city-states. Even more useful is that the geography naturally sandboxes adventures here to whatever extent the GM might require.

Virtually any city or castle or ruin from any game supplement can be relocated to one of the islands of the delta.

And on top of that, there’s an entire genre-with-a-twist waiting in the central regions!

The Language Relationships Table: The Obscure Languages

There are 26 spoken languages in Shards Of Divinity, divided into four groups: Common, Unusual, Rare, and Obscure. As mentioned in the previous part of this series, if a character has more ranks in a language than its relatedness relative to the language he is trying to speak, he gains a +1 synergy bonus on his attempts to use the language.

For example, an elf would have Elvish (aka Elven) as his native language. If he was trying to speak Dwarven, he would get +1 if he had 8 ranks in his native language – or if he had 4 ranks in Draconian, Giant, or Terran, or 6 ranks in Trade Tongue or Abyssal or… well, the list goes on. He can qualify for multiple +1 bonuses if he meets multiple targets but only one per row on the chart – so he might get +1 for 4 ranks in Giant, +1 for 6 ranks in Trade Tongue, and +1 for 8 ranks in Elvish.

Twenty-six languages won’t fit all in one reasonable-length table, even though that’s how they were presented in the original house rules, so they have been broken down into a series of smaller tables. In this part of the article, we’re going to look at the Obscure Languages. Note that this table includes languages that are currently not known to exist in the campaign world.

Obscure Languages	Relatedness
	Ranks	Related Languages
Pious¹ Notes: ¹Language is: Common for Human Clerics and Priests, Rare for other humans, Obscure for non-humans.	2 ranks	City-State, Celestial
	4 ranks	Original, Draconic
	6 ranks	Kingdom, Gypsy, Abyssal, Infernal
	8 ranks	Trade Tongue, Sylvan, Orc, Old Kingdom, Elvish, Draconian
	10 ranks	Druidic, Terran, Gnoll, Halfling, Undercommon, Dwarven
	12 ranks	Aquan, Ignan, Goblin, Tribal, Gnome
	14 ranks	Giant
Druidic² Notes: ²Language is: Unusual for Druids only, Rare for Gypsies, Elves & Fey, Obscure for all others	2 ranks	Gypsy, Elvish, Sylvan, Aquan, Old Kingdom
	4 ranks	Halfling, City-State, Draconic
	6 ranks	Undercommon, Gnome, Trade Tongue, Original
	8 ranks	Kingdom, Draconian, Celestial, Orc, Giant, Tribal, Pious
	10 ranks	Goblin, Dwarven, Terran, Abyssal, Ignan
	12 ranks	Infernal, Gnoll
Undercommon³ Notes: ³Language is: Unusual for Elves, Dwarves, and Demons, Obscure for all others	2 ranks	Abyssal, Elvish
	4 ranks	Draconic, Terran, Celestial, Infernal
	6 ranks	Sylvan, Aquan, Druidic, Dwarven, Draconian
	8 ranks	Pious, Gypsy, Old Kingdom, Original, Ignan, Orc, Gnoll
	10 ranks	Gnome, Halfling, City-State, Giant
	12 ranks	Kingdom, Goblin, Tribal, Trade Tongue
Terran	2 ranks	Dwarven, Infernal, Draconian, Undercommon
	4 ranks	Draconic, Celestial, Abyssal, Ignan
	6 ranks	Giant, Gnoll
	8 ranks	Orc, Pious, Trade Tongue, Original, Elvish
	10 ranks	Goblin, Tribal, Gnome, Old Kingdom, City-State, Gypsy
	12 ranks	Sylvan, Aquan, Druidic, Kingdom
	14 ranks	Halfling
Ignan	2 ranks	Infernal, Terran, Draconian
	4 ranks	Dwarven, Draconic, Undercommon, Celestial, Abyssal, Giant
	6 ranks	Elvish, Gnoll
	8 ranks	Original, Pious, Gnome, Orc
	10 ranks	Sylvan, Aquan, Druidic, City-State, Trade Tongue, Goblin
	12 ranks	Tribal, Old Kingdom, Halfling
	14 ranks	Kingdom, Gypsy
Aquan	2 ranks	Sylvan, Elvish
	4 ranks	Draconic, Druidic
	6 ranks	Old Kingdom, Gypsy, Undercommon
	8 ranks	City-State, Original, Halfling, Orc, Celestial, Draconian
	10 ranks	Trade Tongue, Gnome, Abyssal, Terran, Dwarven
	12 ranks	Kingdom, Pious, Giant, Tribal, Ignan, Infernal
	14 ranks	Goblin
	16 ranks	Gnoll
Draconic	4 ranks	Elvish, Draconian, Celestial, Orc, Original
	6 ranks	Dwarven, Abyssal, Giant
	8 ranks	City-State, Aquan, Sylvan, Undercommon, Terran, Infernal, Ignan, Goblin, Tribal, Gnome, Pious, Druidic
	10 ranks	Gypsy, Old Kingdom, Gnoll
	12 ranks	Trade Tongue, Halfling
	14 ranks	Kingdom
Abyssal	2 ranks	Celestial, Inferna
	4 ranks	Draconic, Undercommon
	6 ranks	Gnoll, Terran, Dwarven, Elvish, Pious
	8 ranks	Orc, City-State, Original, Giant
	10 ranks	Goblin, Sylvan, Aquan, Druidic
	12 ranks	Gypsy, Old Kingdom, Kingdom, Trade Tongue, Gnome, Tribal
	14 ranks	Halfling
Infernal	2 ranks	Celestial
	4 ranks	Abyssal, Terran, Draconic, Ignan, Gnoll
	6 ranks	Draconian, Undercommon, Pious
	8 ranks	City-State, Original, Elvish, Orc, Goblin
	10 ranks	none
	12 ranks	Kingdom, Druidic, Gypsy, Aquan, Sylvan, Tribal, Gnome, Trade Tongue
	14 ranks	Old Kingdom
	16 ranks	Halfling
Celestial	2 ranks	Draconic
	4 ranks	Pious, Abyssal, Infernal
	6 ranks	Orc, Draconian, Elvish, Original, City-State
	8 ranks	Gnoll, Ignan, Terran, Dwarven, Giant, Undercommon
	10 ranks	Sylvan, Aquan, Gypsy, Goblin, Tribal, Gnome, Kingdom
	12 ranks	Old Kingdom
	14 ranks	Halfling, Trade Tongue, Druidic
Original	2 ranks	Draconic
	4 ranks	City-State
	6 ranks	Elvish, Draconian, Celestial, Orc
	8 ranks	Gypsy, Dwarven, Abyssal, Giant, Tribal, Pious
	10 ranks	Old Kingdom, Druidic, Aquan, Sylvan, Undercommon, Terran, Ignan, Goblin, Gnome
	12 ranks	Trade Tongue, Gnoll
	14 ranks	Kingdom, Halfling

Language Descriptions & Notes: The Obscure Languages

The following language descriptions frequently mention rendering text using particular fonts that I have in my collection. Some of these may have unrestricted licenses, some may be free only for non-commercial use, and a few may even have come with collections or software that is only available to paying customers. In the seventh section on Languages,, I’ll include a brief sample of text rendered into each language and displayed using the relevant font. For now, all that really needs to be noted is that I have chosen fonts that ‘look right’ for the language as I envisaged it for this campaign.

Similarly, a number of modified modern languages have been used as a shortcut for simulating the various fantasy tongues. The goal was not to create a genuine language, not even to be consistent, but simply to create an appropriately non-English “sound” with the right sort of accents and noises. I hope no speaker of any named language takes offense – or undue compliment – from the use of their native tongue. Such usage says nothing about the language itself, and even less about the people who actually use it; at most it is a commentary on the sounds and flow of syllables that result to English-speaking ears.

Some of the languages fall into multiple categories. While it might be redundant, each language description is included in all relevant categories.

Pious:

Also known as ‘Divine Speech’. Used exclusively for the conducting of human religious services and ceremonies, the way churches used to use Latin. It derives from one of the City-State languages (described seperately elsewhere), making it the most ancient human tongue still in regular use. As such, it uses a lot of generic terms for more recent innovations; it has no descriptive terms or proper names for different non-human species, for example. Instead, it has a number of terms for describing an individual’s state of Grace, from “Irredeemable” through to “Most Holy”, which are applied to whole classes of non-human. “Heretics” might be Orcs or Elves or Fey or Wizards.

Pious is used for all formal church doctrines and holy books, and this blanket terminology shapes theological attitudes to non-human species. For example, the title ‘Paladin’ literally translates as Protector or Defender. As such, anyone who takes up arms to defend a Church may be blessed as a paladin by the church, and treated in the same way as would a Paladin, giving rise to such phrasing as ‘The Paladin then gathered to him paladins to oppose the heretic’.

This sample phrase also shows other aspects of Pious deriving from it’s age: (1) a stilted, almost pretentious, phraseology; and (2) collective nouns are used only for the subject, not the object; ‘The Heretic’ might be one or it might be a besieging army. The next phrase in this story might well be ‘And the Heretic were layed low by the holy might of the paladin.” Sentences tend to be short and declarative, with full stops used where commas might be expected. It is also normal practice to number each statement.

Note that this language is not taught to non-priests, though many laymen will gradually pick up phrases here and there. To render text into Pious, translate into Greek without font change, then add or subtract vowels as necessary to permit a smooth flow.

Pious is considered a Common tongue for Human Clerics and Priests, a Rare language for other humans, and an Obscure language for non-humans.

Written form: display translated text using a Greek language or appropriate mathematical Symbols Font.

Druidic:

The first release of the Shards Of Divinity House Rules asserted that “Druids do not have a separate language’. Further examination of the campaign concepts have shown that this is both true and misleading; there IS a language called “Druidic”, but it is NOT a language that can be used to communicate effectively with anyone else that knows the language. Rather, it is a learned ability to communicate with nature, to hear what the surroundings have to say about the weather that is coming, the local conditions, any threats within the region, any sites with peculiarities nearby, where the nearest spring is, and so on. It is also employed to tell the spirits of nature that inhabit every geographic feature, that shelter and nurture every species of animal and plant, that bring the rain and the storms and the weather, exactly what the Druid would like them to do. They may not listen (they often don’t) and may not answer the request in a timely fashion (they don’t have the same concept of time as mortals, but neither do Druids, so that’s all right).

This “Druidic” language has evolved from little bits of a number of different languages, predominantly Elvish and Sylvan, but with a slight tinge of more human languages such as Gypsy and Old Kingdom. Each Druid’s Circle – and, in fact, each Druid – develops his own Druid’s Tongue. As initiates, this essentially comprises parts of the lowest common denominator amongst the “Druidic” of the Druid’s Circle that has accepted the initiate; as a character grows in understanding, so his version of “Druidic” becomes more and more unique, and more and more dedicated to the terrain in which he spends most of his time. It also, therefore, becomes less and less useful generically, ie when the Druid is outside his own terrain. Druids who adventure will often need to select companion species to accompany him; while they may be useful for other reasons, the dominant reason for their presence is to translate the Druid’s requests into the local dialect. Of course, the less native they are to the local environment, the less help they can be.

Druidic is considered an Unusual language for Druids, a Rare language for Gypsies, Elves & Fey, and an Obscure language for all others.

Translating into Druidic is an ‘entertaining’ exercise. Extract and translate proper nouns other than animal and plant species using a random choice of Sylvan, Elvish, or Kingdom. Translate the remaining nouns into sounds and/or actions that are characteristic of the creature. Reformat the rest of the text using Alphabet Of The Magi – then interpret loosely into animal noises, weather sound effects, hand gestures, and anything else that comes to mind.

There is no written form of this ‘Language’.

Undercommon:

This is a “perversion” of Elvish, according to the Elves, that is spoken only by Drow and a few subterranean races that they have manipulated into attacking other species.

Undercommon is considered Unusual for Elves, Dwarves, and Demons and Obscure for all others.

To translate into Undercommon, first translate into Elvish as per the notes on Elvish Names and then apply the following transformations: replace c with z, replace ch with gh, replace p with k, and q with t. Then tweak for a flowing pronunciation.

To render Undercommon text, display the result using the appropriate Elvish variant by tongue.

Terran:

Terran is used by a number of underground-dwelling species such as Xorn. It is a blend of influences from a number of different languages, primarily Draconian and Dwarven.

Grammatically, it has been influenced by the Elvish dialect known as Undercommon. However, most of the simplest (and probably the oldest) terms derive from a fourth source – the same “other” that influenced Gnoll, and which theologians associate (rightly or wrongly) with Devils (Knowledge Religion, 20 ranks, is required to know of this association). Since Draconian contains elements that the same theologians associate with Demons (Knowledge: Religion 15 ranks is required to know this), the implication drawn by theology is that these anti-social elements abide in an underground environment, and have most strongly influenced the development of those who live beneath the earth. These theologians claim (with absolutely no evidence) that Giants and Gnolls were emissaries of these fell forces who were driven to the surface by primitive Dwarves, or in order to carry out the will of their hidden masters.

To translate into Terran, start by translating all 1-syllable words of 4 letters or less into Filipino, then modify the result as per the Naming rules for Gnomes. Translate everything else as per the rules for Dwarven names. Then modify to give a flowing speech.

To render Terran, use Dwarven runes.

Ignan:

Ignan derives from virtually the same sources as Terran, but has even less Dwarven and virtually no Undercommon influences. To theologians (Knowledge: Religion 20 ranks), this is obviously because those who speak Ignan are closer to the dwelling-places of Devils and Demons, and hence the conditions of The Hells (from whence Devils and Demons derive) must resemble those of Ignan speakers – underground, hot beyond belief, sulphurous atmosphere, etc.

To translate into Ignan, start by translating all 1-syllable words of 4 letters or less, and all verbs, into Filipino. Translate everything else into Greek, phoneticise, and then reverse the sequence of syllables. Then apply the character substitutions specified for Gnomish names.

To render Ignan, display the results in Autorealm Phoenician.

Aquan:

Aquan is a blend of Sylvan and Elvish, as heard underwater.

To translate into Aquan, first translate into Gaelic, then apply the substitutions specified for Elvish character names. Finally, replace all ‘a’ with ‘u’, all ‘e’ with ‘o’, all ‘i’ with ‘uo’, and all ‘m’ and ‘n’ with ‘b’.

To display Aquan script (very rarely encountered), display the results using Tengwar Sindarin.

Draconic:

This language is known only to Elves, Dwarves, and Fey, and then only to well-educated individuals (Ask the referee if you think you might qualify). Well-educated humans may have been taught a ‘reconstructed’ version derived from its influence on other tongues, but this is not true Draconic any more than pidgin English is James Joyce. Since no human in living memory can prove to have communicated with Dragons, despite the occasional rumors and claims to the contrary, and the other species don’t talk about Dragons, the language can be considered dead. There are legends that dragons taught elves advanced spellcasting, and that they had been taught to write by Dwarves, but these might by myth.

To translate into Draconic, use Russian and then phoneticise, rephrasing any terms that do not translate into literal phrases. Draconic mouths cannot distinguish between p and b, or between u and w, so replace the latter with the former.

To render Draconic – according to legend – use Dwarven Runes.

Abyssal:

The public at large don’t even know this language exists. This is the mythical ‘native tongue’ of Demons, and merely speaking it is grounds for the harshest of punishments and implicit proof of irredeemable corruption. Theologians of sufficient education (Knowledge Religion 15 ranks) may be taught to recognize its grammar, syntax, and parts of its vocabulary. However, some characters have an ‘effective’ ability in Abyssal due to the influence of the language on other languages used by species considered “fallen” or “corrupt” by the Pious, notably the users of Undercommon and Draconian.

Theological doctrine restricts this knowledge on the grounds that it could be confusing, as this language contains elements that bear a strong resemblance to the mythic language of Heaven, of which Pious is a simplified and imperfect child (much like humanity itself). It is felt by the church hierarchy that this would be too confusing for lay preachers and ordinary priests, not to mention the public. Again, unless you have sufficient Knowledge Religion to know about the language, you will not know about the controversy.

To translate into Abyssal, use Greek and phoneticise for nouns, then Russian for everything else.

To render it, display the results in Autorealm Phoenician without spaces between words except on either side of a Proper Noun, and without other punctuation except at the end of a complete passage of text. Then insert spaces at the end of every 1d4 syllables.

Infernal:

This language is also a secret from the general public, for much the same reasons as Abyssal. This is the mythical ‘native tongue’ of Devils, and merely speaking it aloud is believed by theologians to be an open invitation for the theft of the soul. Theologians of sufficient education (Knowledge Religion 20 ranks) may be taught to recognize its grammar, syntax, and parts of its vocabulary, and some characters have an ‘effective’ ability in Infernal through the influence of the language on the tongues of other species considered “evil” or “diabolical” by the Pious, notably the use of Terran, Ignan, and Gnoll.

To translate into Infernal, use Filipino. Rephrase anything that doesn’t translate.

To render it, use Autorealm Phoenician.

Celestial:

The existence of this language is widely-known to the religious, but no-one can actually speak it. Many characters have the equivalent or a marginal smattering of it through the impact it has had – according to theological doctrine – on other languages. Those with sufficient Knowledge Religion (20 ranks) will know that both Abyssal, Draconic, and Infernal are all purported to be corruptions of the language. The language most closely related to Celestial that is in modern usage is Pious.

To translate into Celestial, translate into Filipino.

To render Celestial, display the results using Symbol (a Greek-like font).

Original:

This is the mother tongue of humans, and is both dead and lost. The families of Paradise split this language into the Nine City-State languages. It would seem that with such a wealth of lingual structure, reconstructing the original language would be easy; even the fact that the City-State languages are themselves now dead and obscure would seem little more than an added complication. The problem is that the city-state languages are internally contradictory in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary; clearly there has been wholesale language cross-contamination and creation.

To translate into Original, use a random selection, syllable-by-syllable, of Dutch, Portuguese, Greek, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Latin, and Icelandic.

To render Original, display the resulting text in Czar, with the occasional syllable in Symbol (i.e., Greek Characters).

Choosing modifying adjustments to your source language

Okay, so using the tips that I provided in The Ineodolus Imperascora, you’ve chosen your language and even identified a few recurring character groups that you think will sufficiently transform the sound of the spoken language into something new. The next thing to think about is what you are going to actually do with each of those character groups.

After all, you have hundreds of choices. If your letter group is one particular consonant, you have 21 others to choose from – and that’s just replacing one for one. Instead, you could replace your chosen consonant with another plus a vowel – or even a vowel and a consonant, or a vowel wrapped between two consonants. You could even go “consonant – vowel – consonant – space – consonant” – padding out the original part-word and splitting the resulting word into two at that point.

For me, the best approach is to look (briefly) at the incidence of the character group being replaced. The higher it is, the greater the impact that the change will have. Then I plan my global search-and-replace sequences based on the resulting level of dominance that I expect the new sounds to have.

Here are a few relevant sites:

• English text frequencies
• Cryptography Hints
• Monogram, Bigram and Trigram frequency counts

That last link is especially useful as you can copy and paste a body of text and have it analyzed for you. For example, if I copy this article up to and including this point here ·, I find that the most common letter pairing is th (by some considerable margin) followed by he, an, in, er, and then a number of pairs that are just about equal in frequency: ny, re, on, al. But that’s no real surprise; a check of the trigram frequency count shows that the most common trio of letters is “the” by a margin of three-to-one relative to the next highest – which is roughly a tie between the considerably less likely “bsp” and “nbs” – with “and” and “ing” just behind in fourth and fifth place. Changing “the-and-a-space” in a body of text would therefore have a huge impact.

In the preceding paragraph alone, just replacing “the-plus-space” with “AG”, “the-without-a-space” with “BO”, “bsp” with “ZOO”, “nbs” with “VHA” and “ing” with “RUE” gives:

That last link is especially useful as you can copy and paste a body of text and have it analyzed for you. For example, if I copy this article up to and includRUE this point here ·, I find that AGmost common letter pairRUE is th (by some considerable margin) followed by he, an, in, er, and BOn a number of pairs that are just about equal in frequency: ny, re, on, al. But that’s no real surprise; a check of AGtrigram frequency count shows that AGmost common trio of letters is “BO” by a margin of three-to-one relative to AGnext highest – which is roughly a tie between AGconsiderably less likely “ZOO” and “VHA” – with “and” and “RUE” just behind in fourth and fifth place. ChangRUE “BO-and-a-space” in a body of text would BOrefore have a huge impact.

But most of the English is still there and recognizable. That’s why I prefer to work with two-character pairs, or less.

Here’s the same paragraph again, but this time replacing the six most common letter pairs with “AG”, “BO”, “ZO”, “VHA”, “RUE” and “HUL” respectively, then replacing the most common pair of vowels with “EY” and the most common single vowel with “STY”:

AGat last lBOk is STYspSTYcially usSTYful as yEY cVHA copy VHAd pastSTY a body of tSTYxt VHAd havSTY it VHAalyzSTYd for yEY. For STYxamplSTY, if I copy AGis articlSTY up to VHAd BOcludBOg AGis poBOt ZOHUL ·, I fBOd AGat AGSTY most common lSTYttSTYr pairBOg is AG (by somSTY considSTYrablSTY margBO) followSTYd by ZO, VHA, BO, STYr, VHAd AGSTYn a numbSTYr of pairs AGat aHUL just abEYt STYqual BO fHULquSTYncy: ny, HUL, on, al. But AGat’s no HULal surprisSTY; a cZOck of AGSTY trigram fHULquSTYncy cEYnt shows AGat AGSTY most common trio of lSTYttSTYrs is “AGSTY” by a margBO of AGHULSTY-to-onSTY HULlativSTY to AGSTY nSTYxt higZOst – which is rEYghly a tiSTY bSTYtwSTYSTYn AGSTY considSTYrably lSTYss likSTYly “bsp” VHAd “nbs” – wiAG “VHAd” VHAd “BOg” just bSTYhBOd BO fEYrAG VHAd fifAG placSTY. ChVHAgBOg “AGSTY-VHAd-a-spacSTY” BO a body of tSTYxt wEYld AGSTYHULfoHUL havSTY a hugSTY impact.

Suddenly, most of the English is gone, aside from the occasionally recognizable word. But as I read over the results, I found myself changing the pronunciation of even those familiar words in response to a natural rhythm from the changes – “EYES” for “is”, “AYS” (rhymes with haze” for “as”, and so on.

So how did I choose that particular set of replacements? Well, to be honest, I made them up off the top of my head. If I were doing this “for real”, though, I would try to use phonetics to characterize the race in question. Elves, for example, should have a lyrical, melodic, even lilting quality to their speech. Sounds should all be relatively soft – lose anything harsh or hard. And stick a vowel in between every second or third word instead of a space – then replace all prior instances of that vowel with a space. Those are the sort of changes that immediately come to mind for converting English into a (non-Tolkien) Elvish. Thinking on it even further, I would realize that every “forbidden sound” involves moving the tongue to the roof of the mouth – “t”, “d”, “z” – or popping the lips – “p” – or a “k” sound (including some “c” and “ch” sounds. So my second draft of such a process would be to replace “t” with “th”, “p” with “f”, and every “k” or “c” with “ss”; then get rid of every “d” or “z” completely.

But it gets a lot easier when you aren’t starting from English in the first place. There are a number of languages with that lyrical, lilting quality already – Welsh, French, Spanish – so if you start from one of those, you not only have eliminated virtually all of those familiar words from the outset but achieved half your goals.

Using Accents

One final trick – no matter how bad you are at accents, reading words made up from a foreign language in a false accent adds yet another color to the language that helps make it distinctive!

Next: Parumveneaora (The Vale Of Dreams); The Language Map; And some discussion of the reasons for this approach to languages.

Earlier this week I received an email from Richard Hetley, a writer & game designer from Megara Entertainment. Magara have a new kickstarter-funded project, and Richard was inviting me to write an article about that project.

I’ve received a number of such invitations in the past, and turned them down (politely and with words of encouragement where appropriate) (and sincere well-wishes, regardless) for a variety of reasons – most frequently because there did not seem to be enough appeal to our readership, and/or because by the time the article was written and posted online, the funding window would have closed.

Richard managed to avoid the first of those opportunities to roll a catastrophic “1”, and the product itself interested me enough to avoid the second – not for what the project is, per se, but for what gaming value I could get from it.

The latter is what I’m going to be writing about, but the proper place to start is by introducing the project itself.

Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memories

Here’s the press release describing the project and a couple of links to both the kickstarter page and a free preview adventure:

Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memories is a full-color print gamebook now on Kickstarter

“Gamebooks” are a type of RPG more commonly known as “Choose Your Own Adventure” books in years past: stories where you control the plot yourself, deciding what a character does in each scene and turning to some other indicated page to see what happens next. Arcana Agency puts the reader in control of a team of paranormal investigators in 1930’s New York City. It’s written in third person (“he,” “she”) instead of second person (“you”), which is a departure from other gamebooks, and allows you to control multiple characters at once (like an adventuring party in print book form). It also does those little stunts that you can only manage in a book, like “Go to the page number that matches the combination on this lock,” making play more interesting and challenging than just a series of paths (and avoiding “Darn, wrong path, I’ll cheat and take the other one”).

There is a free “demo” available (both links are to the same file):

Arcana Agency: The Case of the Unghostly Ghost (link 1)

Arcana Agency: The Case of the Unghostly Ghost (link 2)

This download, The Case of the Unghostly Ghost, is a playable prequel that links up to the Kickstarter gamebook at the end. The last full day to pledge to Arcana Agency and help bring The Thief of Memories into the world is 12/12/12.

Gamebooks In General

Most “gamebooks” don’t excite me all that much, I’ll be honest. The choices of action are frequently confining and limited, and sometimes ridiculously stupid or shortsighted. At other times, you are forced to make a choice on too little information. You are often in the roleplaying guise of a character that is insufficiently defined, up front, for you to make the decisions required. I often want to make a different choice mid-paragraph to the railroad tracks laid down by the authors. And sometimes these products just seem horribly capricious and random (and I’m thinking specifically of some of the TSR “Choose Your Own Adventure” products here).

Frankly, in general, if given the choice between an “gamebook” of this sort or a game supplement or module, I would choose the supplement/module any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

What’s Different about Arcana Agency:

In a nutshell: The eye candy. The kickstarter project describes the book as “richly illustrated” and folks, they aren’t kidding.

At the top of each page is a relatively small panel containing an illustration:

like the one above from paragraph 48 (near the start of the adventure, I think), or the one below from paragraph 540.

A clarification courtesy of Richard, who commented below, and is part of the project team: The illustrations at the head of each page are a consistent banner used for an entire adventure and not different on each page. It seems the two that I have presented above are from the Thief Of Memory and the Case Of The Unghostly Ghost. Each banner is also an excerpt from a larger image within the adventure. We don’t want people to expect more than they are getting – but at the same time, what they are getting is so tremendous that it’s a minor point.

Beneath that is a section of text – over a full-color textured panel, mind – and then the real reason for the size of those smaller upper illustrations becomes clear. Half the page or thereabouts is a glorious full color illustration – and, to judge by the examples proffered, an illustration not so much of the action but of the setting.

Check out the above excerpt from pararaph? section? 48 – the Brooklyn Museum, or the one below for an alleyway scene.

The Game Value

So, the reason I am so enthusiastic about this project is because even if the adventure totally blows (and I have no indication that it does fit that worst-case description), I can use these illustrations in my pulp campaign or my supers campaign, I can just add anything unusual or distinctive to the scene verbally.

I once advised that ‘One picture should be worth 1,000 words’. Using The Thief Of Memories as a game resource, over and above any enjoyment that can be derived from the adventure itself saves me 1,000 words of flavor text, enabling me to focus on distinctive features. I could use that “Brooklyn Museum” illustration for any museum or the study of any wealthy individual just by describing some changes to the window dressing:

• “The painting is a gothic castle backed by storm clouds. As you watch, lightning flashes from the painted clouds and you hear the rumble of distant thunder.”
• “At the end of the corridor is a polished suit of plate mail with brightly-colored enamel on the breastplate. The crest is that of the Family Plantagenet.”
• “The painting is surprisingly cheap and tacky, heavily faded, and looks out of place.”
• “The walls and floor are painted an antiseptic green, now stained with wild splatters of blood.”
• “The mysterious woman in scarlet turns the corner, but when you reach the corridor down which she fled but a moment earlier, all you see is this…”

Similarly, the alley setting can be used as any alley, anywhere, enabling me to get straight to the point:

• “As you pass the drunken beggar, his eyes glow a bright green.”
• “You are just in time to see the caped and hooded figure slipping into the shadowed doorway down the alley.”
• “The water in the dingy back alley appears – mysteriously – to be running uphill.”
• “Completely out of place in this era of steamships comes the distant sound of an electronic whine.”
• “The painting of an alley is breathtakingly realistic, and you almost feel like you could step through the frame and into that past era. Unexpectedly, the beggar raises his hand toward you in a pitiful gesture of need, his outstretched hand emerging from the canvas…”

You don’t need to know what any of these examples means – the visual and the narrative alone are enough to hook you into whatever the adventure is going to be.

I could have written a lot more on this subject, but I rather think that the visuals speak for themselves. The ability to frame your own explanations around whatever is illustrated there makes this a lavish collection of top-quality game resources – and well worth the admission fee. So if you’re the GM of a Pulp-era game, or a Steampunk game, or a Modern-era game of any sort, or any of several other genres – check out this Kickstarter and consider backing the project. The rewards make it definitely worthwhile. So check out the fundraising page at kickstarter and consider backing the project. Here’s that link again…

With contributions from Ian Mackinder, Ian Gray, Steven Beekon, Saxon Brenton, & Blair Ramage

This article has been sitting around in my to-do stack for a little over three years. I simply never got around to finishing it – until now. I do find myself wondering if the additional experience has given the contributors any changed opinions or anything more to add, though.

Every DM would like to think that they make every PC unforgettable to the players who operate it. Sadly, even the best of us don’t always succeed, though it happens more often than not. But what can we do to help players take the next step, and make a given PC a favorite character – the type of character that they will bring up as a reference over and over again, and always recall with fondness?

I got to thinking about this when, in my reply to a comment about an article here at Campaign Mastery, I referenced one of my player’s favorite characters from a long-moribund campaign (you can read about Tetsura here).

While I had some personal opinions on the subject, I decided on this occasion to go to the horse’s mouth and solicit additional suggestions from my players, many of whom are GMs in their own right. They all immediately agreed that (i) it was a very tricky question, (ii) that it was a very interesting question, and one worth an attempt to answer!

As I see it, the GMs role achieving this goal comes in three varieties: Things they should encourage, Things they should actively Do,, and Things they should avoid doing at all costs.

Things to encourage

Okay, with 34 ‘rules’ to get through, there’s not going to be much room for fluff; explanations will be short and succinct, or we’ll be here all day! The first 14 ‘rules’ are all things that the GM has no direct control over, but has the capacity to encourage and assist in developing. Some are, at least superficially, in direct contradiction; it’s in finding a way through those contradictions that the GM can directly influence the process of a character becoming one of the player’s favorites. This also explains just why this is so difficult to achieve – it’s capturing lightning in a bottle, it won’t happen every time, or even often; but if you know what to try and achieve, you can’t help but better your chances.

1. Favorite Characters are easy to play

If a player has to stop and think about the personality of the character all the time, the effort gets in the way of it becoming a favorite. That means that the personality has to emerge naturally from some aspect of the personality of the player.

2. Favorite Characters have depth

Cardboard cutouts taste like processed wood pulp – cockroaches and mice might like it, but that’s where the list ends. Achieving depth requires the character to have an original perspective that makes the player aware of subtexts to situations that would otherwise have either passed them by completely or been force-fed to them by the referee.

3. Favorite Characters invest in the campaign

Characters have to act as though they have lived through the campaign background and the events experienced in play prior to the character joining the campaign. The adventures within the campaign are the stories of the characters’ lives, and they have to have sufficient involvement that the player can recall those stories intimately and immediately.

4. Favorite Characters are invested

It’s not enough for the players or the GM to care about what happens in the campaign, the character has to care – and I don’t mean that the player has to pretend that their character cares, I mean that it has to actually make a difference to the character and his future plans and ambitions.

5. Favorite Characters can do something the player finds “cool”

A double-barreled one, this. Every character can do something, and most have at least one trick in their repertoire that someone will find “cool”, but finding something that this player considers “cool” is a bit trickier, involving both game system, character capabilities, player personality and expectations, and what the GM puts on the menu for the game. But there’s even more to it than that; a “cool” gimmick is one that can be used in a variety of situations, and never grows stale as a result – and that’s another very tricky requirement to negotiate.

6. Favorite Characters fit an archetype that matches the player’s preferred playstyle

There are innumerable articles around the net and in old magazines which attempt to shoebox players into different categories. Every time I read one of those articles, I found that I fitted into multiple ‘shoeboxes’, which to me always suggested that the categories were too specific. For my money, there are only two real character types: Roleplayers and Rollplayers, but they each have different requirements; and even within those broad categories, some roles come easier than others.

7. Favorite Characters are unique

Each and every character should be an original in some respect, and not a trivial variation. The longer you play, the harder that is; once a player has tried his hand at all the archetypes, he is reduced to nuancing variations – or to discovering/creating a new archetype. The first is harder to make distinctive, the second is just plain harder – but potentially more rewarding.

8. Favorite Characters entertain

Another multipronged statement – because I’m not just suggesting that they be fun for the player, but also for the GM, and for the other players to interact with (or just to observe in action!). But with the mix of personalities – players and GM and characters – this can be as elusive as a will-o-the-wisp.

9. Favorite Characters become a touchstone of the campaign

There are some characters that become favorites during active play, but most don’t achieve that ultimate accolade until after they retire or are retired, with the benefit of hindsight and fond memories. It always seems, though, that a character who becomes a favorite is one who is constantly being remembered and referred to by other players in the campaign years later.

10. Favorite Characters are more than their statistics

This is a subject for a series of blog posts, but they take a long time to research and write – I know, I’ve tried! This is actually two separate items under the one heading; the best characters reflect their statistics and abilities from root to tip, producing a perfect synergy that enables the personality to shine through in everything that the character attempts; and the best characters also go beyond the game mechanics to capture a concept in play – the statistics are like a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object, they can specify it, but cannot completely capture the essence of the character. That requires words, and imagery, and action, and emotion.

11. Favorite Characters are neither under- nor over-powered

Another big topic. Characters should always be able to make a significant contribution to the problem at hand, but should never be able to solve those problems on their own. Underpowered characters make the player feel like a victim of events; overpowered characters make the GM feel like a victim of the players, to which he usually responds with negative behavior – grudge-monsters, intentional targeting of PCs, ramping up encounter difficulties.

12. Favorite Characters should be strong personalities

They don’t have to be boisterous and shouty, but favorite characters should have a personality that oozes out of every word they say and every move they make. It doesn’t matter how interesting a character is at an intellectual level if they don’t have visceral appeal.

13. Favorite Characters don’t overwhelm the player, GM, gameplay, or campaign

A triple-header, and another subject with room for whole articles under its umbrella. If the character is too complicated for the player, sometimes they will get it exactly right and other times they will find themselves lost in confusion, with the ratio of one to another the only variation. A favorite character is one that 99% of the time, the player can put on like a pair of comfortable shoes and just “wear”.

Sometimes players attempt to achieve this by shunting the harder parts of a character onto the GM, especially true in the case of a roll-player; but conceding that much control over the character means that the character’s personal style is at least partially that of the GM, and that alone is enough to get in the way of that character becoming a favorite of the player – though it may seem for a while that they are, if doing so enables the player to hit that “comfortable shoe” standard. The satisfaction that comes from a character that is completely your own, when you get everything right, makes a ‘shared’ favorite pale in comparison.

Finally, if your character becomes the central focus of the entire campaign, and even trivial choices manifest in horrendous difficulties and committee meetings and loads of angst about the long-term consequences of the decision, it keeps the character from becoming a favorite. Sure, the power and authority can be heady, and even enough to make this character a short-term favorite; but in the long run, this will pale and the character will come to be more work than fun.

14. Emotional Investment occurs in character development as well as in play

A very subtle point with which to conclude this section. The emotional investment is that of the player, who has to care about the character. Characters who have a personal shortcoming and mature beyond it, players who care about how the character will develop and who actively seek out situations in which the player will be forced to grow, are both central to a character becoming a favorite.

This suggests that a positive-feedback loop is at least part of the process of a character becoming a favorite – the players cares enough about the character for his personal development to matter, so that when the character begins to rise above, and/or to make progress in solving or overcoming a (real or perceived) shortcoming, the player becomes even more emotionally invested in the character.

But there is also a danger – solving a character’s problems leaves a vacuum in their wake. Characters can lose the depth that made them interesting to play as their problems are solved. Ideally, every solution will bring with it fresh problems, new perspectives, and fresh emotional landscape for the player to explore. Angst may not be a central requirement of a favorite character, but the ongoing capacity for angst is.

Things the GM should do

Part two of the list consists of a baker’s dozen things that the GM who runs the campaign should be actively doing if the character is to become one of your favorites. A lot of these are simply dramatic storytelling techniques that are to be encouraged in any GM, but we (the contributors and I) want to go beyond simply saying that these should be on the list of things good GMs do and encourage GMs to actively put time into thinking about these on a regular basis, and looking for ways to improve their performance in these 13 key areas.

15. Favorite Characters snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, even when they fail

Temporary setbacks and dramatic reversals are part of any good drama. Every adventure should take PCs up to or even beyond the point where all seems lost – but the good guys should always win in the end, be it in the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth hour. Adventures in which the PCs can plod from the beginning to an inevitable victory should be few and far between; they leave characters feeling empty and lost. At the same time, these victories should never be the results of a die roll – even if the final die roll is a failure, the PCs should be able to rescue the situation.

16. Favorite Characters engage in the campaign

There is a difference between characters investing in the campaign (rule 3) and characters engaging in the campaign. The actions that a PC takes should have an impact on the campaign, the decisions and choices even more so. The character should never be indifferent to what is happening around them, they should be involved. I’ve lost count of the number of plot ideas that I have had, and set aside, simply because there was no way for the characters to engage in the plotline. If it’s not going to matter to them, it’s not worth getting involved in.

17. Favorite Characters show what they can do

I’ve twice had characters in other campaigns in which those characters were never given an opportunity by the GM to demonstrate what they could do. One GM was overwhelmed by the combination of laziness and the scope of the background that I had presented – returning it to me after the year-long campaign folded due to his lack of interest, he admitted that he had never gotten around to reading it. His theory was that he could force-fit each PC into a different compartment and treat them as generic cogs in the plot. For some reason, none of the players count their characters in that campaign as their favorites, and none of them count that campaign as a favorite, either.

Some plotlines should be deliberate star vehicles for a character, and each PC should get their share on this spotlight merry-go-round. It’s not enough for the Player to understand what makes a character unique, the GM has to understand it too – and then has to deliberately play to it from time to time. Unless both of these occur, the character will never be a favorite of the player.

18. Favorite Characters change the campaign

NPCs should react to the character’s deeds, words, and philosophies. A great PC changes a campaign with his very presence.

That doesn’t happen by accident, or not very often.

Every well-designed character has the potential to change the campaign in this way, so it is not the responsibility of the players to see that this happens. That means playing to the character’s strengths and to their weaknesses, giving them opportunities to manifest the uniqueness they contain, and if necessary, the GM should reinvent the campaign world or elements thereof to make that happen.

19. Favorite Characters are given an early “Moment of Awesome”

If a character has a cool shtick, the GM should look for ways to let them use it. Even if they don’t, the character should be put in a position where he can do something awesome – and not something that’s dependant on a successful die roll (what if the character fails?) Sometimes that can mean injecting the improbable into a situation. It often means playing to the strengths of the player, not just those of the character. Think of these as Hero Moments – each character should get them. The battle with the cave troll in The Fellowship Of The Ring is a good example.

Sometimes, when the sole purpose of an encounter is to permit one specific character to have a Hero Moment, I’ll prolong it even if strict game mechanics mean that the encounter should be long dead if the character in question hasn’t had his shot yet. That may be bad GMing from a purist standpoint; it’s great GMing from a narrative standpoint. And if I have to retcon an explanation into the encounter afterwards, so be it. On other occasions, when strict game mechanics would keep the encounter running, but this would overshadow the Hero Moment, I’ll have the encounter finish early (usually by a misjudgment resulting from the Hero Moment). So it all evens out in the end.

An example from long ago: The PCs were trying to stop some machinery on an engine of doom (a mechanical tank – wheels and cogs and steam-power). Standing between them and the mechanism was a hulking great warrior. Because this was a hero moment for the fighter with the engineering skill, even though he was overshadowed by another fighter in the team, the enemy warrior refused to fall as the more powerful fighter rained blow apon blow down on his back. Bleeding from a mass of cuts, one arm hanging uselessly, all that the better fighter really achieved was the shredding of the warrior’s armor. The better fighter asked, rhetorically, ‘why won’t he fall, I’ve done XXX points of damage!’ to which I answered, “He’s too stupid to know he’s dead.” Finally, the lesser fighter got his chance; one blow – delivered ineptly to a point completely different to the one at which he was aiming. It did no damage but it tripped the warrior, who fell through the blade of the better warrior, severing his head and sending it flying across the room, where it bounced off two walls and the ceiling and landed in the perfect position to jam two vital cogs. The improbability of the warrior surviving long enough to achieve this spectacular demise was forgotten as the table dissolved into helpless gales of laughter. It didn’t matter if the weaker fighter succeeded or failed in his roll – he failed in practice, but had he succeeded the warrior would have inadvertently deflected the blow so that it severed his head.

Such “Moments of Awesome” can seem contrived if you aren’t careful, mostly because they often are. Playing to a character’s unique strengths reduces the frequency and severity of contrivance. And they definitely don’t happen by accident – very often (I’ve seen it once*, though, so you can’t rule it out).

* Really want to know? Okay, in a nutshell: Ian Gray was playing Eubani, a PC who was originally created for an entirely different player and who became an NPC when that player changed his mind about joining the campaign. Eubani and his fellows encountered a civilization of people who seem to blend the races of Dwarves and Halflings. There was a big feast, everyone swilling beer, and the warriors of the clan telling boastful tales of their prowess. So Eubani got to his feet and told of some of the adventures of he and the other PCs – and got an exploding critical on his Perform: Storytelling check. And then rolled another 20, and then 20 again, and so on… he ended up with a total of 145 or something ridiculous like that. What he hadn’t recognized was that this was how the men of that culture attracted the women, a peacock strut being put on by the bachelors present in a bid to woo the hand of the somewhat hot-tempered and flighty princess, who promptly fell head over heels for this dashing figure…

The sooner in a character’s “life” such a moment of awesome occurs, the more it will become a hook for the player to hang his personality on, a touchstone moment for the character.

20. Favorite Characters are given the opportunity to do cool things

This one’s easy: put the characters somewhere where “interesting” things are happening – and then find ways for them to participate. The trick is not making them seem contrived.

The more spectacular something will be if it succeeds, the more the GM should encourage that success. But don’t make every success a spectacular one – you need the really spectacular moments to stand out.

21. Favorite Characters evolve throughout the campaign

Engagement (Rule 16) means that the characters change the course of events by getting involved in them. Character Evolution means that the events in which the character gets involved change the character.

We’re not just talking about mechanical changes, but about personality growth. Difficult decisions, things where the character’s moral judgments have unexpected results, philosophic and emotional conundrums of all sorts.

22. Favorite Characters grow as ‘virtual people’

This is not quite the same thing as rule 21. A character can be a collection of carefully-documented personality traits on the page, or they can live and breathe and extend themselves into areas beyond that documentation. Those personality traits might be generalized high points, but there’s more to them than that.

This is also especially true of characters in game systems that don’t even document personality traits. The Hero System gives characters psych lims, to describe personality traits so strong that the influence the character’s actions. These are at least a starting point. Pathfinder and D&D give no such starting point, instead furnishing racial and character class descriptions that are abstract manifestations of common personality traits – finding an individual amongst this statistical mélange is up to the player.

23. Favorite Characters are only as good as their enemies – but the line is razor-thin

If your opposition is powerful and you defeat them by force of arms, then you are more powerful. If you beat them by clever strategy, then you are more clever. If they have a cool gimmick, it makes your gimmicks even cooler. If the strongest person in the world fights only wimps, they will never have a reputation worth a damn. And unless they have something the players can boast about to each other, they will rarely come to occupy a special place in the players’ hearts – at least that’s the theory.

So a favorite character succeeds against tough opposition.

But never opposition so tough that they make the players feel helpless, or worse, feel that the GM is throwing the PCs victories they don’t deserve. No matter how superficially powerful, the PCs must always feel like they are making progress, that they have a fighting chance – if they can only stack the deck in their favor just right. There is a razor-thin sweet spot that takes time and experience and luck to hit consistently.

This is an especially difficult problem in superhero and pulp games, in which the “good guys” are required to win (at least in the long run), by the rules of the genre. In fantasy gaming, its more acceptable for one of the good guys to get killed by sufficient opposition, especially if their sacrifice leads to the final victory. You can’t have that happen regularly in the Pulp or Supers genre.

A favorite trick to help is to make the villains really tough – but vulnerable, directly or indirectly, to one or more of the ‘cool’ abilities of the characters. The trick is then to get that information into the hands of the PCs without them feeling that you’re throwing them answers from the back of the book. But you can’t do that all the time or it becomes stale. Another technique I’ve used to good effect from time-to-time is to make the villains immune to all the standard tricks of the PCs – but vulnerable to one or two of the less-frequently used abilities.

24. Favorite Characters have background elements which the GM infuses into the campaign

Every player likes to make his mark on the campaign. The more a PC contributes, not only to the present-day action, but also to the campaign background, the more special they become, and the more connected to that game world. If the character feels tacked onto the campaign world, they are exceptionally unlikely to feel achieve the depth of connection with the player required for them to become a favorite.

This is more than the villain-of-the-week being someone the character’s background name-checks. Plotlines and motivations and ambitions should all emerge from the character, and should reference not only what the character was doing then but what they are doing now. The adventures, in other words, should seem to emerge organically from the PCs being who they are.

But there is a caveat – the player must like that part of their character background. An encounter with a villain the player thinks sounds like ‘a cool idea’ who the GM can take to a whole other level? The PC (and that NPC!) are on the fast-track to becoming favorites. But if the GM’s interpretation falls short of the perceived ‘coolness’ of the concept, or the idea is not that great to start with, it can make the Hero feel as lame as the villain.

25. Favorite Characters have a non-mechanical interaction with the game

We’re starting to get into slightly slippery territory here, which is always where the most profound insights are likely to be found. This sounds like a simple thing to define at first – but if you try and put salt on the tail, it slips and wriggles loose very easily. In a way, this goes back to the character being more than just a collection of characteristics, but the catch is that they have to be that ‘more’ both in the eyes of the player and in those of the GM, and those perceptions have to manifest within the game. If both sides can perceive the character as more than just that block of numbers without trying then they have almost certainly achieved ‘favorite’ status.

It often helps if you can capture the essence of the character in a single line of description or two beyond a mere summary. But construction of such descriptions often takes the part of complex and convoluted compound sentences, and that puts them more into the province of a summary than a capturing of a character’s essence. There is a level of artistry, almost of poetry, in these summaries when they work right. For example, contemplate the following alternatives:

1. A sentient dimensional boundary in the form of a gargoyle who uses his tremendous strength and aggression to expiate his guilt over past failures.
2. A near-invulnerable brick with homicidal tendencies and the ability to change size and shape.
3. A man driven by guilt to find redemption for the sins and mistakes of his past.

All three of these are describing the same character, as players in my Zenith-3 campaign will immediately recognize. But in terms of this requirement of a favorite character, only the third one hits the nail on the head; the first is full of compound constructions and is an almost mechanical summary of the conceptual basis of the character; the second is blatantly superficial; but the third gets to the core of who this character is. It says nothing about what the character can do, but is all about what he will do and why. It transcends game mechanics – and, in this case, even transcends genre.

The real reason for the slipperiness of this ‘rule’ now stands revealed – it uses the vague term “game” when it should have used the specific term “campaign”.

Or should it have? Is there not a grain of truth in the first part of version A – “A sentient dimensional boundary” – to which this rule would also apply?

A unique character concept, provided that it is sufficiently tightly integrated with character background and abilities, can push beyond what the game mechanics can envisage to become “cool” in its own right. A fascinating idea may not be enough to carry the character all the way to favorite status, but it can certainly get the character part-way there. And that’s why I didn’t change the “rule” and rewrite these paragraphs.

26. Favorite Characters are in a game where another player is having fun

I’m sure most of you thought that this was going to read “a game where the player is having fun”. But that pretty much goes without saying, and is one of the motives behind this article in the first place.

Laughter is contagious. Smiles are contagious. This is also true of irritability and impatience and unhappiness, though the first two can often overcome the latter moods. It follows that if one player is having fun, the other players can viscerally enjoy that entertainment, and contribute to it, and are more likely to enjoy playing their characters as a consequence. If it happens regularly enough, the character will become associated with that sense of fun, of being entertained – and that gives the player the capacity to discover those elements of their character that can make them a favorite.

I have never found any player’s favorite character to derive from a campaign where someone else was not having a barrel-load of fun.

27. Favorite Characters belong to their player

Each player brings something different to their interpretation of a character. When that difference of expression achieves the point of a distinctive uniqueness, the character is usually a favorite.

I’ve referred to Blackwing as an example a number of times in this article, and the reason is simple: he’s been played by three different players, and each brought something radically different out of the character. Blackwing started out as a relatively ordinary brick in a magical suit of armor whose wearer ‘liberated’ it from a Demon stronghold during a police raid. Instead of turning it in, the character put on the armor and became a superhero. Because the player was new to constructing characters who were more than a collection of stats, his background, as synopsized, had several holes in it – where the armor came from, why the character would choose to essentially steal the suit from the evidence locker, how it gave him super strength and resilience, what Demon were doing with it in the first place, and so on. So I filled in the blanks, but the character was not really a favorite of his creator. Then something happened, and the character transformed into a gargoyle. This was intended to be a temporary situation, a consequence of the additional conceptual material I used to fill in the blanks – a “one ring” style of seduction, and the character’s reluctance to remove it completely, and the way it achieved that power-up. But Nick found the angst of the character appealing, and the concept of being trapped in gargoyle form interesting, and asked to keep the change. The character even changed his name from “Knight” to “Blackwing”. For completely unrelated reasons, a year or two later, he dropped out of the campaign (later to return with another character when the reasons for his departure no longer applied) and Blackwing became the plaything of a new owner. Blackwing version II was totally over the top, a hyper-exuberant shapechanger with wolverine-style morality. He had razor-sharp claws backed by super strength, and he wasn’t afraid to use them. Jonathon had so much fun playing the character that it had to be a favorite, but the time came (as is often the case in really long campaigns) when he had to drop out – and Blackwing was passed to a third player. At first, Saxon struggled to get a grip on the character, but Jonathon had carried it to the point where the real background story was beginning to emerge – the character had hit its lowest ebb and become everything that it hated, and was in a somewhat self-destructive frame of mind. Going through the entire character concept from top to bottom, a few unifying elements (the ‘guilt’ aspect, predominantly) were added and the third definition of the character given above began to emerge. Blackwing is now moody and angst-ridden a lot of the time, but now has complete control over his appearance – he no longer has to be a gargoyle, he just feels more comfortable looking like a monster because that is what he became, in his own eyes. One major plotline in the new campaign is the completion of the rehabilitation of the character in the character’s own eyes. Is Blackwing now one of his favorites? I don’t think he’s quite there yet – but that’s the trend at the moment. It will simply take the right circumstances for everything to ‘click’ to make that step – and another set of ‘right circumstances’ for it to be recognized by the player.

You may be wondering why this rule is in this section and not in the preceding one? What can the GM do to influence this factor?

There are two things. The first is to craft adventures and subplots that permit the player to really explore the character and find aspects of it that they like, to find ‘their own voice’ to use an acting metaphor. The second is to talk to the player about the character from time to time, to help the player get under the skin and inside the skull of the character – then use that information to shape opportunities for roleplay within the campaign.

The better the player understands the character, the more effortlessly he can step into the character’s shoes, and the more he will enjoy playing that character. The better the GM understands the character, the more opportunity he can provide for the character’s personality to find expression in campaign events. Both make the character more fun to play – and that helps make not only that character but every other character in the game, a favorite.

Things the GM should NOT do

If there are things that the GM should encourage the player to do, and things the GM should actively pursue himself, then equally there are things that the GM should not do – or, if they are necessary, at the very least should approach with extreme caution and trepitude.

28. Weaken a Character

“Weaken” is perhaps the wrong term. “Undermine” is a far better verb to describe the action to be avoided.

If a character is capable of bench-pressing a fully-laden oil tanker, and his strength is reduced to the point where he can merely lift an empty one, it doesn’t really alter the fundamentals of that character very much. But if a key element of the character is a sense of exuberant freedom, the last thing the GM should do is force the character to feel trapped and confined with no escape in sight, and especially not without the full connivance of the player. If the character has a shtick that is “cool”, the GM should never take that shtick away from the character. He can render it ineffective against a single foe, but should never remove it – or do anything that removes the “cool” from it.

29. Interfere with a character

A GM can help a player get under the skin of his character. That’s not only fine, it’s recommended. But the GM should never force the character to behave in a certain way against the wishes of the character. The most he is ever justified in doing is taking the player aside and trying to understand why the player thinks the character would behave or react in a certain way.

But there’s more to it than that. Interfering with a character can take many forms; another is to arbitrarily redefine who and what the character is. If there is a problem with what the character can do, get the player’s assistance and approval for any changes before they become rules.

30. Take Over a character

A stronger form of the first two types of detrimental behavior. Telling a player what his character does is a real no-no, and can poison any prospects of that character becoming a favorite. Heck, it can even turn a player off an existing favorite. You can explain context, and perception, and employ logic and persuasion – but NEVER arbitrarily override a player’s choice of action.

Furthermore, the GM should never permit any disapproval of an action to bias him against the outcome of that action. I don’t care if the GM thinks that an Elf will automatically do X under Y circumstances, that doesn’t justify forcing an elf character to fail when he attempts to do Y. The GM can advise “you think that will probably not work”, he can ask if the character is sure of what he is doing, he can even request a discussion of the logic behind the decision (especially if the GM suspects that player knowledge is being used as character knowledge) – but at the end of the day, the GM has to interpret the player’s choice of actions impartially.

There is an exception: if a player is unable to attend a game session, or is going to be late or have to leave early, it may be permitted (even required) for the GM to take over the character. In which case, it is incumbent on the GM to play that character as he thinks the player would have done even if he thinks the right way for the character to behave is differently.

31. Make a character feel helpless

I don’t completely agree with this rule. Now if it read “Don’t make a player feel helpless,” that would be a different story.

I have no particular problem with circumstances occasionally making a character feel helpless provided that the player never feels that way – so long as there is a clear path for the player to follow that will lead to the character finding a solution that reveals that they aren’t actually helpless after all. This is where the GM can divulge some ex-parte player information to the benefit of the campaign – but be warned, there is little more excruciating than the GM dropping hint after hint and the player still not being able to grasp a solution that seems obvious to the GM. Better by far to present the player with a complete chain of logic on a note leading to the ultimate conclusion than to leave the player feeling stupid for not being able to see the blindingly obvious – or the blindingly inobvious, in this case. Presented with the solution, the player can then roleplay past the roadblock.

Oh, and on the same general theme: never have an NPC present a solution that should have been obvious to the PC. It will only make things worse.

32. Make a character look hopeless

A subtly-distinctive variation on the preceding point. If an opponent is so hard to hit, for example, that the combat monster in the party is having trouble landing a telling blow, Never, ever, make it look like its the character’s fault. You can have blows bounce off surprisingly resilient armor, you can have the enemy twist away from the blow by the narrowest of margins so that what would normally be a devastating injury becomes an easily-ignored flesh wound – these both imply solutions to the problem, or at least that it’s because the enemy is impressive, not that the PC is un-impressive. This applies especially to the character’s shtick, the thing that makes them special and earns them their place in the party. Frustration makes no favorites.

33. Let a character dominate the campaign

Warcry had to leave the Zenith-3 campaign, because he had come to dominate it. In order for the opposition to be able to go toe-to-toe with him, they had to be able to take any other PC out of the battle with a single blow. I have seen the same thing happen with other characters in other campaigns under other GMs – there comes a point where the choice has to be made between the character and the campaign. Where time permits, perhaps the character can diverge into a spinoff campaign – but its better for the character to retire with dignity than for the whole campaign to come crashing down.

There are more ways to dominate a campaign than with sheer force, however. It can be just as bad for the campaign to suffer a character who knows everything and whose decisions are therefore the only ones that matter. Or a character who has maxed out every skill in the book.

Every advantage beyond the norm that the GM gives to a character should be balanced by an equally-restrictive liability or disadvantage. In the Shards Of Divinity campaign, the central focus is a character who knows things no-one else does, and that gives the character an advantage over everyone else – PC or NPC. But the character’s contemporary knowledge is lacking, the character is several levels behind his companion(s), and that knowledge is sharply restricted to human affairs – he has extremely limited knowledge of elves and dwarves and other non-human species. Nor does he know anything much about things that were not significant to human history in the past, but that are going to be significant in the future. And finally, the character is capable of both breathtaking insights and bone-headed stupidity. His companion(s) are there to back him up and support him, he is their employer – but the balance in terms of game play is far more 50-50 than it may first appear.

34. Let a favorite NPC or past character steal the spotlight

I, personally, would have split these two points apart into two separate rules – but this is the way the GM who submitted the point phrased it, thinking of two completely separate campaigns as he did so.

Because the senior (NPC) members of the Adventurer’s Club were all modeled on Blair’s favorite Pulp characters from fiction, and were all more experienced than the PCs, the first is something of which he has been accused a number of times. His goal was to ensure that any resource the players needed, they could get their hands on, and that the providers of these services and resources would be competent to handle whatever the PCs asked of them. The inevitable result was that the PCs were overshadowed by any club member who did the same sort of thing that the PC did, because the NPCs were built to a different standard. One of the goals – with Blair’s full agreement – that I stipulated when I first came on board as co-GM was that we ‘humanize’ these expert NPCs. If they are more experienced, they are more famous – so make sure that they have more problems with fame. Give them blind spots and weaknesses and flaws outside their areas of expertise, and make these worse than those of the more fully-rounded PCs. And give the PCs an advantage that the other club members don’t have – the ability to cooperate effectively – then have the NPCs recognize this advantage and come to the PCs for help and guidance. In other words, lower the NPCs and elevate the PCs in importance to the campaign. We haven’t finished this rehabilitation yet – but we’re getting there.

The second part refers to past characters. This is aimed squarely at me, I think – though I’m not aware of any occasion on which a past character has actually stolen the spotlight. In any campaign that’s run for as long as my superhero campaign has done, characters come and go, replaced by younger individuals. This immediately opens the campaign up to two separate blind alleys – the first is to have the PCs so overpowered relative to the campaign concept that the campaign becomes untenable; the second is to expose the campaign to the same problems described above for the Adventurer’s Club. Dealing with this conundrum is an ongoing exercise. For a start, combat fatigue has become a real factor for the senior team. I also subtly play up their flaws, limitations, and weaknesses whenever they are present. I give them problems to deal with that are beyond the scope of what the PCs are generally expected to deal with. A plotline late in the first Zenith-3 campaign deliberately killed off many of the more powerful members and those whose story potential was less than the survivors. Circumstances have given the PCs a particular expertise in a number of areas, and they have now been designated the parent organization’s go-to group for dealing with those problems (this has yet to actually impact the PCs but it will in due course). Extra efforts have been invested in humanizing the NPCs. In the first campaign, the NPCs were given restricted access to campaign events and NEVER got involved in battles (well, almost never). Their role was as mentors and guides – and some were good at it, and some bad, and some a mixture of both. In the new campaign, the NPCs and the PCs approach each other far more from a position of equality – while at the same time, the great killing-off has further reduced the PCs access to the NPCs. All of which makes the PCs more the masters of their own destinies – and the point-people for the problems that their characters confront.

Again, there is an exception to both of these: an NPC who makes the PCs laugh can generally have as much rope err spotlight as he can steal.

Concluding Thoughts

Analyzing why you like something enough to make it your favorite thing of that type is never a waste of time. It puts a GM in touch with the personal strengths that are the pillars of their style, it informs players more clearly of what they want – and what they don’t – and the process facilitates and encourages participation and dialogue.

• Players and GMs, Who is Your favorite PC and why?
• GMs, who is your favorite NPC and why?
• Also, GMs, who is your favorite PC amongst the characters within your campaign – and why?
• And can anyone think of any additional “rules” that we may have left out?

If you’ve followed the advice that I proffered in the first part of this article, your proposed sequel campaign is now brimming with ideas but they are scattered and incomplete. Some of these campaign seeds will flower and bloom, others will wither and lie dormant and unused. They are not yet part of a campaign. Culling, compiling and hammering them into a unified shape is necessary before the campaign can be made ready for play.

Big Pictures

The place to start is with some major decisions. Because there are quite a lot of items to consider in this context and at this time, I’ve subdivided these decisions into four subcategories – Big Picture Decisions, Theme Decisions, Interval Decisions, and Campaign Structure Decisions. Some of these will come naturally and immediately to the GM, others may require considerable contemplation.

Meeting Expectations

The Key to making these broad general decisions is knowing what the players expect from the campaign. I made a big deal of this in the first part of the article so I’m not going to rehash here the points that were made earlier. In general, there are three ways of handling those expectations, and as a general rule you will want to employ all three. The first way of handling expectations is to meet them.

There are going to be some expectations on the part of the players that you want to satisfy, hands down. For one thing, you don’t want to marginalize the achievements of the precursor campaign – and that means that the sequel is going to be all about consequences and reactions to consequences. You won’t want to make any major changes to the style of GMing that you employed in the first campaign, so that means that the campaign structure will be largely similar. Favorite NPCs, especially the ones that the players love to hate, shouldn’t be changed. So many of the key components of the campaign are fixed.

Inverting Expectations

At the same time, there are some expectations that the players may have that you will want to deliberately turn on their heads. In particular, any notion they may have that the previous campaign solved all the world’s problems, that an evil figure will have somehow become an angel following the defeat of his plans, that allies and friends will be steadfast, and especially that any relationships with NPCs that their former characters had will survive intact. Friends fall out and drift apart all the time. People make well-meaning mistakes all the time. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes, and while everything that the PCs may have done in the big finish may have been done with the best of intentions, the outcome was what it was and not what wishing would make it.

Some former enemies may be revealed in the course of the new campaign as having good reasons for what they did, and may become allies – especially if social or political circumstances within the campaign change. And some characters do reform, or attempt to reform.

My rule of thumb is for characters to always be true to themselves. If they are villains, there is a good reason for that behavior – even if it’s just that they are evil! The better you understand who your NPCs are – or, in this case, were – and how they think, and why, the more easily you can interpret who they will be and what they will do under the changed conditions following the precursor campaign.

Twisting Expectations

A favorite technique of mine is to take a couple of selected expectations that the players hold and twisting them. This comes under the general heading of “Be careful what you wish for”. This takes an expectation, especially one that’s outcome- or consequence-related, and appears to satisfy it while delivering a wholly unexpected and undesirable / desirable outcome. In The Hobbit, Gandalf and his allies drive the Necromancer from his lurking place in Mirkwood – only for him to stand revealed in The Lord Of The Rings as Sauron, and more dangerous than ever.

Managing Expectations

One of the most valuable tool that you have in your arsenal is the reminiscing session. Get your players together after the campaign for a post-campaign party. Play games, eat, drink, be merry – and above all, reminisce. If there’s a revelation or two about the previous campaign that you can finally reveal (even if it makes you look a little foolish), do so. Then listen to what the players have to say very carefully; the conversation will tell you volumes about their expectations of the sequel.

To some extent, players will be unsurprised that things have gone to hell in a hand basket since the preceding campaign; they will expect you to twist and manipulate events to create the scope for a new adventure. So you have a certain latitude. Above all, if the new campaign is to invert or twist expectations of the precursor campaigns’ outcome, part of the new campaign must be the reforming of that outcome; if the players can see the potential for this, they will forgive and accept an awful lot.

There are some expectations that you want to encourage, if you can possibly deliver on them. Insights into what happened in the preceding campaign are a good thing to promise. Try not to encourage the expectation that the new campaign will be “bigger and better” – or even that it will be “flashier” or “grittier”. You can probably promise an interesting plot twist or two, since every good GM throws these in as a matter of course.

Historical Foundations

One useful technique for throwing the big picture into perspective is to sum up the previous campaign as analogous to a historical period, then look at what came next. You might decide that the most appropriate analogy is between Imperial Rome at its height, for example – in which case, the sequel campaign should have a theme of increasing decadence and corruption, “barbarian” incursions, and decline preparatory to the fall of the Empire. There are two ways you could play such a campaign theme – either the PCs are going to be the key to reinvigorating the Empire, or they are going to ultimately become its executioners, a mercy killing after it has undermined and abrogated every principle that made it worthwhile. Of course, the “invading barbarians” don’t have to be from a well-established neighboring Kingdom or rival Empire, they could be from another plane of existence!

These progressions seem “natural” when they are encountered, they are inherently recognized as plausible and believable.

A Plurality Of Civilizations

Of course, it’s always fun to have several different civilizations at different stages within their evolutionary cycle. If the Elves were learned and wise and socially or politically strong in the previous campaign, perhaps they have slipped into decadence – just as the Orcish civilization is starting to emerge from the tribal stage and forming city-states, and the Human Kingdoms are beginning to dream of Empire.

I’m a big fan of the concept that organizational structural change becomes inevitable through growth and efficiency demands. The first Fumanor Campaign was all about recovering from the apocalypse that took place a century earlier in the campaign background and discovering the true cause of the collapse of the old Empire. In the course of the second, the Kingdom of Fumanor (for which the campaigns are named) had grown too large for effective administration from a central position; it was being held together by baling wire and good intentions and not much more. On their estates, the Nobility was more or less independent and the situation was ripe for civil war. That war was the big finish to that campaign, and its outcome dramatically increased the size of the Kingdom beyond any hope of central administration; it is falling apart at the seams in the third and fourth campaigns. One of those campaigns focuses on the never-ending task of putting out increasingly-damaging forest fires in the dynamite factory, holding the Kingdom together despite the inevitability of it flying apart; while the other is dealing with the confrontation with an empire that emerged from the apocalypse more powerful than it had been previously and has since slipped into decadence. Ultimately, both campaigns (and they started off as a single campaign) are about the growing pains as the Kingdom Of Fumanor becomes the Fumanorian Empire – or collapses into warring city-states and a new age of barbarism.

Golden Ages make dull settings

As a general rule, Golden Ages are dull. There’s not enough internal division to make a political campaign interesting, there’s no external threat big enough to threaten them. Expansion is both easy and inevitable. The average citizen can live out a life of moderate prosperity and never be endangered. If the outcome of the prior campaign was an expected new golden age – or even a promised one, if the GM got carried away with his flavor text at the wrap-up – either the sequel campaign is in trouble or the GM is definitely going to have to undermine that rosy promise. Systemic political and social flaws must be uncovered and brought to light, new threats must appear from the outside and internally, and in general, there’s got to be trouble afoot.

Counterpoint

That’s not to say that there can’t be a fun campaign set within a golden age if the GM is creative enough. It will simply be radically different to the preceding one. An age of exploration and discovery and progress, an era of prosperity and opportunity and civil liberties, can carry the seeds of its own inherent demise. Human flaws and failings and ambitions won’t have changed all that much – some people will feel threatened by the prosperity of group X, some people will see the opportunity for personal gains beyond the general, and there’s always the potential of an even bigger enemy on the outside, or even simply an evenly matched rival that’s come out of nowhere. There’s still plenty of scope for adventure – don’t let the difficulty put you off. It’s going to be a harder campaign to run than if everything was falling apart, but in part that’s because it’s an unusual setting – and uniqueness of campaign is always good.

Themes

Having nailed the general concepts of the background of the new campaign, and how it is going to differ from both the expectations of the players and from the old campaign, it’s time to think about themes for the new campaign.

A Theme, in this context, is an element or transition of style or content that will recur throughout the campaign. It can usually be summed up in a relatively pithy and very brief statement.

“All things must pass”. “Some things are inevitable”. “The road to hell is paved with Good Intentions”. “One Man Can make a difference”. “We’re all more than the sum of our parts”. “There are things man is not meant to know”. “Evil cannot help itself”. “All men carry the seeds of their own destruction within”. “Into every life a little rain must fall”. “Death is a dangerous business”. “Winter always follows a Summer”. “Be careful what you wish for”. “Anarchy is its own reward”. “Individualism is Solitary”. “Even a fool can be wise after the fact”. “No-one in Babylon-5 is exactly who he or she appears to be”.

Think of them as taglines that sum up all or a significant part of the campaign – or, in this case, are intended to. As game play proceeds, the interaction between plot and player, between PC and environment, will generate new themes, some of which may supplant the themes the GM initially had in mind.

For example, my current Zenith-3 campaign has fourteen themes (and there may be more that I’m not going to reveal here):

1. In order to be a hero, one must do heroic things. Even if no-one is watching.
2. A Villain is someone who does villainous things. No matter what their reputation or intent.
3. Black & White morality can be fuzzy around the edges.
4. For part to be saved, sometimes part must be lost. But who decides which part is which?
5. Everything you thought you knew is wrong – except the parts that aren’t. Twists and turns await.
6. Perspective or Insight can be more valuable than expertise.
7. Technology can be useful or user-friendly; it’s rarely both at the same time.
8. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
9. Nothing is forever, and the more permanent it seems the more suddenly it can be swept away.
10. We are all flawed. Sometimes those flaws can destroy us.
11. Inevitability says nothing about Duration.
12. There are more things in heaven and earth than exist in ANYone’s philosophy.
13. All victories have a price.
14. A team is more than the sum of its parts and no stronger than its weakest link.

Virtually every adventure of significance in the campaign will play into one or more of those themes. The planned big finish to the campaign will involve almost all of them.

There are at least seven types of theme. There may well be more, but these were all I could think of when planning this article.

Social & Political Themes

Social and Political Themes deal with relationships in general, and how people interact within those relationships. Things people agree on, things they don’t, and the confrontations that result. A sub-theme of one of my current Fumanor campaigns is the emergence of the Orcs as a politically- and socially-progressive influence. Yes, you read that right.

Mystic Themes

If the supernatural is going to play any part in your campaign, you should tie it to one or more Mystic Themes. Most of the examples from my campaigns need a lot of contextual explanation, or would reveal secrets about those campaigns that I don’t want made public, but here’s one from the Shards Of Divinity campaign: “Magic has no conscience.”

Cosmological Themes

Some campaigns have cosmological themes, indicating that “what’s out there” is significant. A common theme to all the Fumanor Campaigns is “Order Vs Chaos”. One of the themes of the Shards of Divinity campaign is “Creativity comes from God.”

Emotional Themes

Many themes will be emotional in nature, dealing with the relationship between individuals. “We are all flawed. Sometimes those flaws can destroy us” is definitely emotional in nature.

Tonal Themes

Sometimes a theme is simply a common emotional connection. “Hope is eternal”, “Sadness is inevitable”, “We all do things we regret”, and “Despair is self-defeating” are examples.

Philosophical Themes

By far the majority of themes will be philosophical in nature. You don’t have to look very hard through the list of revealed themes from the Zenith-3 to see the truth of this fact.

Conceptual Themes

Finally, there are conceptual themes. These encapsulate a big idea that will be explored at length within the campaign. I often use these conceptual themes as the basis of a campaign’s title – “Seeds Of Empire”, “One Faith”, “Shards Of Divinity”, “The Tree Of Life” being a handful of examples. You could probably add “The Adventurer’s Club” to that list – before I named the campaign, it was simply referred to as “Blair’s Pulp Campaign” or “The Pulp Campaign”. An exception that you might think belongs in this list is “The Rings Of Time” campaign – “The Rings Of Time” was intended to be a one-off adventure that the players insisted on continuing, and which lent its name to the overall campaign.

How big an interval?

The third of the big decisions that has to be made is how large an interval will separate the sequel from the precursor campaign. There are essentially five options, and each have their own strengths and weaknesses, advantages and flaws. NB: I’m excluding prequels and other such variations from consideration here. The topic is already quite big enough, thank you!

Retrograde beginnings

The least-common of the five is the Retrograde Beginning, where the new campaign starts prior to the conclusion of the precursor campaign, overlapping with it. This permits the establishment of characters prior to the in-game spotlight landing on them, permits the exploration of a different aspect of the big conclusion of the precursor campaign, and emphasizes the continuity between the two. Setting the new campaign in a location close to, but not part of, the big finish locale – so that the new PCs can look apon their old character’s achievements from a distance – is also useful. Another benefit is that there is very little work needed on the campaign background, because the entire precursor campaign IS the background. And finally, the overlap pretty much guarantees that the new campaign will get started with a bang!

If you choose this interval, be sure and make it work for you. Take advantage of this temporal setting, or you will find yourself saddled with the flaws without receiving any real benefit in compensation.

Those flaws: the new PCs may try to get involved in events that were ‘settled’ in the prior campaign. The players will be put under additional pressure concerning player-knowledge vs character-knowledge. There won’t be time for new seeds and plotlines to sprout unless these are also inserted retroactively into the old campaign.

All of which makes this type of campaign harder to set up and to GM in its early stages, which no doubt is the reason why it is so uncommon.

The more leftovers from the old campaign that you have, especially in terms of unresolved plotlines and unused adventures, the more useful this approach is. But there is one final caveat – why did the old campaign wrap up? If it was for any of several possible reasons, including having grown to complicated and unwieldy, you may find those problems perpetuated into the new campaign from day one.

Immediate Commencement

Pretty much all of the above also holds true for the second time-interval option: starting the sequel campaign the day after the previous one wrapped up. It avoids or mitigates some of the flaws, but also fails to take full advantage of the benefits. In many ways, it’s a “nothing” solution. It’s much harder to surprise the players under this arrangement; the foundations of the campaign will be too well-known. There are times when this is the right way to go – I chose this approach for the interval between the Zenith-3 campaigns, because several of the characters were crossing over from one campaign to the next, and because there was a radical change of location involved.

Near-term commencement

A better choice is to set the new campaign in the near-term but definitely after the conclusion of the previous campaign. That means that the GM has to fill in the blanks of what’s happened in the meantime, but this gives him the chance to “clean house” and write out plotlines that were becoming counter-productive. The big advantage of this approach is that it gives the GM a little elbow room and a cleaner sheet of paper at the start of the new campaign. But it’s somewhat more work to set up than either of the preceding campaigns.

There is a sub-question, of course: what exactly is the “near-term?” Generally, it can be conveniently measured in months, and it is certainly less than 2 years, but that covers a lot of ground.

Years Later

There are some definite advantages to having even more elbow room. This weakens the bonds between the campaigns substantially, giving the new campaign a life of its own. That makes it harder to reuse props and maps from the old campaign, but also means that the GM has had time for new seeds to be planted in consequence of the old campaign which have now sprouted into whole new plotlines.

Generations Later

This is so far removed from the precursor campaign that the two have very little in common. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. I once designed a campaign using this interval that was all about the dark and dirty little secrets of the intervening years and the price that the then-rulers made with ‘Ye forces of Darknesse’ for the last 300 years of peace. Never got to run it and the notes are now long-lost. What those rulers didn’t know was that the PCs in the preceding campaign had locked ‘Ye Forces Of Darknesse’ away until certain things took place so the place was safe from the Vile Horrors for that period of time in any event – nor did they realize that the price (in citizens to be handed over to the Evils) was gradually fulfilling the conditions of release of the Evil Lying Horrors. (I don’t remember much more about that campaign design).

The example works because it leverages the timeline – the fact that it is generations after the original campaign is a key plot point. And that’s the key to all these big decisions: make an informed decision after considering the alternatives and then put it to work for you.

Overarching Plotlines

The last of the big decisions is one that’s relatively easy to make, because you made it for the precursor campaign and probably don’t want to change it. That decision is whether or not to have overarching plotlines that extend from the beginning of the campaign to the end. My style is very narrative and plot oriented, so I usually answer ‘yes’ to this. Others prefer a less structured approach where things don’t happen until the PCs get involved with them. Like most big decisions, both have their advantages and their drawbacks, and there is also some middle ground to explore.

Yes

In the ‘yes’ case, the goal is to turn all your campaign ideas into a series or list of events that are going to occur around the PCs, who can then choose to get involved in them – or not. If they take too long to resolve something, another problem rears up to further complicate their lives. One plotline leads to another, or sets up circumstances in which another plotline becomes more significant than it otherwise would be. Railroading is the big danger here. It takes more work in advance, but at the same time adventures are faster to write because they always have a context and a direction. The campaign can be likened to a road map for the campaign, in which the GM is going to wash out certain bridges and cut certain roads and may even have set one or more intermediate destinations – but the actual navigation is up to the players. Because the GM is setting the destinations, his campaign structure need only concern itself with the dual alternatives of whether or not the PCs find a way to reach that destination or not; everything else is contained within the individual adventure.

No

In the ‘no’ case, plotlines don’t exist until a PC interacts with them by going to a certain place or talking to a certain individual or making a certain decision. The GM never develops any plotline beyond the basic concept until it becomes clear that this plot idea will be part of the next session of play. This is less work in advance (but more work for each session), is a lot more flexible, but runs the risk of feeling static. From time to time, a GM can be caught out when the players unexpectedly zig instead of zagging and shoot off in a completely unexpected direction for which the GM has no plotlines on standby.

and Indifferent

There’s an intermediate position in which there are some overriding general plotlines, general directions that everything is going in, but within which the individual plot ideas are left undeveloped until needed. The notion is that the general direction will provide an interpretive context for the plot idea at the time that the plot idea gets used, so that it automatically updates the plot idea as necessary.

To be honest, I find this approach to be half-baked and more work – with more potential for leading yourself up a blind alley – than either of the others. But some people swear by it.

The Random Element

In all three cases. it should never be forgotten that PCs are wild animals, untamed and unpredictable, capable of licking the palm of your hand one minute and ripping the head off your campaign the next – sometimes for no better reason than ‘because they can’. No matter how carefully planned, the PCs will do something unexpected – sometimes brilliant, and sometimes crazy; sometimes insignificant and sometimes critically important. The more rigid your planning, the more vulnerable to the Wild Card your campaign becomes.

With that vulnerability comes the fact that everything listed in the campaign plan is there for a reason, and if you carefully noted that reason at the time, you can fill in the blanks and get the campaign back on track relatively quickly. You may be more vulnerable to the unexpected, but you can recover more easily.

In contrast, the GMs without a master plan can be left floundering when their minds come up blank. They bet the farm on their ability to improv a plot development no matter what the PCs did, and their bluff has been called. It happens less frequently but when it happens it’s a lot more severe, and can even bring the entire campaign crashing down.

And the GMs with a vague master plan but no concrete details planned in advance? They are somewhere in between. The PCs will always constitute a random element that needs to be taken into account.

Making Allowances

I solve this problem by making allowances. While the high points of the next adventure may have been written down months or even years in advance, its the current situation as defined by the past decisions and actions of the players that place the internal details in context. By always framing the adventures from the point of view of what the NPCs involved are doing, I have the freedom to let the players tell me what the PCs are doing.

The advice presented below is generally relevant regardless of what type of campaign structure you choose; some structures require additional steps in the creation process, that’s all. It will be fairly obvious which ones those are, and when they don’t apply.

Campaign Phasing

No campaign is ever the same all the way through – unless it ends prematurely, of course. Instead, campaigns can be subdivided into phases or stages. The larger and more complicated the campaign, the more stages it will have. If a campaign is considered to be one long story, phases are the equivalents of volumes within that multivolume plotline.

In fact, there are multiple different criteria which can be used for this breakup, and they all distinguish phases of the campaign by differences in the treatment of one or more criteria within the campaign. Some coincide with phasing by other criteria. When I’m planning a campaign, and especially when I’m planning a sequel campaign – for reasons that I’ll get to, shortly – I carefully plan out the phases of the campaign.

Logical Phasing

Logical Phasing distinguishes between parts of the campaign based on in-game events and locations. If the campaign is about the founding of a new nation, on a newly-discovered continent, for example, it would break down logically into:

• Discovery Announced: An expedition of exploration returns with news of the new discovery. The decision is made to colonize the new world.
• Outfitting the Colonizing Expedition: A leader is chosen and several officers appointed to the expedition (the PCs). They supervise the outfitting of the expedition, deal with attempts to undermine or cancel the expedition, attempts to use it politically, attempts to cut its funding, and so on.
• Making The Voyage: Finally, the expedition is ready and sets off for the New World. Before they can get there, severe challenges will have to be overcome.
• Establish The Colony: Landfall at last! The colonies are established, but the new colonists face unexpected dangers from natives and wild animals the like of which they have never seen before. To make matters worse, the climate is turning against them. And then they discover that another nation has also landed colonists and layed claim to the continent!
• Growth and Confinement: Having survived the initial phase of settlement, the colony is booming. It has several neighboring colonies, some allies, some enemies. But rule from afar is beginning to grate, and decisions are being made that favor the home country over the colony – something the colonists are beginning to resent.
• Revolution and Independence: Eventually, things boil over into a revolution, something the mother country won’t take lying down. Will the colonies succeed in uniting with each other and winning their independence?

Does the above sound familiar? It should – it’s a narrative describing the colonizing and independence of America, compressed to fit within the single lifetime of a band of PCs.

Logical Phasing breaks the campaign into discrete logical stages; the adventures that fit within each stage are often radically different from those that are sensible in a different stage (some ideas will work in multiple stages, though).

Thematic Phasing

Sometimes a campaign’s themes change and evolve in the course of the campaign. If handled well, this approach can yield a grandeur and epic sweep to the campaign; if handled poorly, it’s just confusing. You could summarize the themes of the “America” campaign as “Politics; Exploration; Politics; Revolution” for example, where these are successive and not parallel.

Another one might be “Signs and Portents; The Coming Of Shadows; Point Of No Return; No Surrender, No Retreat; The Wheel Of Fire”. This should sound familiar to anyone who has watched Babylon-5…

Dramatic Phasing

Here’s another criteria to consider. “Inconvenience; Passing Difficulties; Direct Threat; Life Or Death; All or Nothing”. This is an example of phasing where the dramatic significance of the outcomes is the distinguishing factor. When the campaign starts, the worst that can happen is inconvenience, a temporary setback of no real note. Through progressive stages, plotlines become more and more critical and the risks ever greater until finally the point of playing for all the marbles is reached in “All or nothing”. This could be about alien invasion, or the zombie apocalypse, or the fall of an empire, or any of a dozen other subjects and settings in almost as many genres. There are worse ways to structure your campaign.

Emotive Phasing

Another choice is to look at the emotional overtone that you want to dominate the plotline. A great example would be a campaign whose emotive overtones follow the Five Stages Of Grief because a deity was killed during the climax of the precursor campaign, or at the very least, his death became inevitable. (The stages are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance). Or perhaps the campaign is the life story of a particular ruler, as viewed through the eyes of the PCs.

General Phasing

Most people will recognize the stages of general phasing. They are components of virtually every large narrative work.

• Introductions: Establish the foundations of the situation and introduce the key players.
• Developments: Something happens that makes the live(s) of the key players ‘interesting’.
• Reactions: People react to the changing circumstances. But consequences continue to mount until:
• Things Get Worse: It’s only now that the real seriousness of the situation becomes fully apparent. Friends often become enemies in this phase.
• Revelations: Heading toward a climax, this is the GM’s last chance to reveal who the real opposition have been all along, or what’s really been going on. Former enemies may become allies.
• The Chips Come Down: The enemy makes his move, or the PCs move against the real source of their problems. Either way, both sides are now fully committed.
• Payoffs & Conclusion: the big conclusion, and everything that’s been leading up to it yields a payoff or resolution. The plot threads all come together, and are wrapped up in suitably dramatic fashion.

As such, it makes a great model for a campaign phase structure, and will usually exist in parallel with any other phasing.

Plot Arcs & Threaded Narratives

One of the great strengths of the plot arcs and plot threads system is that each plot arc and plot thread can have it’s own set of general phases. Some plot arcs may wrap up completely in the Introduction and Developments phase; these can be said to exist purely to lay the foundation for complicating another plot thread that follows.

The current Zenith-3 campaign consists of 36 plot arcs, each with a beginning, middle, and end, and many with more complex substructures of the full general-phasing variety. The overall campaign has been structured into 13 phases, each of which has it’s own distinguishing features of the types discussed above. In the diagram below, campaign phases are in rows and plot arcs are in columns.

The 13 phases are grouped into six overall stages. Phases 9 to 6 are “Pre-apocalypse”; Phases 5 and 4 are “Apocalypse Stage 1”; Phases 3 and 2 are “Apocalypse Stage 2”; Phase 1 and 0 are “Apocalypse Stage 3”; Phase -1 is “Apocalypse Stage 4”; and Phases -2 and -3 are Apocalypse Stages 5 and 6, respectively. The whole campaign has been mapped out into 130-odd parts. Only four of the plotlines are unresolved until the big finish – though one that the PCS thought was resolved will make a surprise return at the very end.

Pre-apocalypse – that is to say, phases 9 through 6 – occupy about 2/3 of the campaign. Apocalypse Stage 1 occupies about 2/3 of what’s left, and Apocalypse Stage 2 about 2/3 of the balance. Each of the boxes in phases 1 through -3 represents a single adventure or less. “Apocalypse Phase 0” is the beginning of the cataclysm itself, something I don’t think will surprise anyone. Earlier phases are preliminary skirmishes, maneuvering for position, and so on.

I’m starting to get sidetracked, so it’s time to move on.

The Relevance to a sequel campaign

It might seem obvious, but here it is: the combination of the precursor campaign and the sequel campaign can be viewed as ONE BIG CAMPAIGN.

Instead of the climax to the precursor campaign being an end-point, it suddenly becomes a mid-point. Things the players thought they understood in the precusor campaign can prove to have a completely different meaning by the time you’re finished with them. Making the precursor campaign (at least nominally) part of a broader structure carries a lot of advantages.

It totally does away with the ‘blank sheet of paper’ problem. It automatically builds in player and character expectations. It predefines the answers to a lot of the big-picture questions – and does so in a way the GM should be reasonably comfortable with, because he ran the entire precursor campaign that way.

It’s like saying “The Hobbit” is Book 1 of “The Lord of The Rings” – the plot connections between the two become immediately apparent, as does the whole backstory of the ring (so far as it is known to Frodo at the start of the latter book).

But the sequel campaign, viewed in this way, also has all the advantages of a reboot of the series. Anything that didn’t quite work in the old campaign can be tweaked and adjusted as desired, so long as a few core elements remain.

Here’s another way of looking at it: The precursor campaign was the TV pilot, and the new campaign is the TV series. Very few shows make the transition from Pilot to series without a few tweaks along the way; sometimes the changes are dramatic, with a largely different cast, and other times they are barely noticeable. And, once you have planning for the new campaign underway, you can set aside the old one without even mentioning its existence to the players.

Plots or encounters in each phase

Each phase in the campaign will have certain preordained plots and encounters in addition to those isolated adventures. These will stem from one of three sources: Conflicts, Confluences, and Continuations. These encounters and plots all exist simply because NPC A or Plot Circumstance B came about in an earlier plotline.

Conflicts

For example, if you establish a rabidly anti-religious villain, who likes to run around burning churches to the ground, he’s likely to put in an appearance if a plotline in the new phase involves constructing a new temple of special significance or opulence. If you have established a Kingdom with a vested interest in controlling the trade routes between two rival nations, they are likely to react when the PCs start a shipbuilding industry in one of those nations, giving them a capacity they never had before. Anyone of special significance to a campaign should react to any development within it – whether that reaction manifests as an event of significance to, or is even noticed by, the PCs.

Every adventure should be reviewed before, during, and after it is run with a view to answering the question, “Who’s going to have a problem with these events / this outcome?”

Confluences

Events which occur in-game will represent opportunities to some established figures – who will take advantage of those opportunities if they can, and may try to do so, regardless of the likelyhood of failure. If you only have a 1% chance of success, you only have to try 100 times to have a reasonable level of hope that your ship will come in. Heck, every time after the first 49 should be an overall 50-50 shot or better – the chances of any one scheme succeeding remain miniscule, but persistence will win in the end!

Every adventure should be reviewed before, during, and after it is run with a view to answering the question, “For whom do these events / this outcome offer an opportunity – and what will they do about it?”

Continuations

And some plotlines simply occur because the main plotline hasn’t run its course yet. KAOS will still go after Maxwell Smart; it’s simply what they do. ‘More of the same’ should always be on the agenda!

Organizing your ideas

This advice will apply generally to all campaigns, but especially to those that don’t employ the threaded-narrative approach. For campaigns in that style, I have actually spelt out a specific approach suited to your specific needs in an earlier article, Back To Basics: Campaign Structures (about 3/4 of the way down, look for the heading “My Campaign’s already running…”). Of course, your campaign isn’t already running, but it’s easy enough to adapt the approach spelt out therein. Of course, the more you know about the PCs who will be inhabiting your campaign (even though play has not yet started), the better.

Index Cards or Post-it notes

The best approach is to use index cards or post-it notes. TV shows do this all the time to decide how to structure their scenes in an episode and how to structure their episodes into a season.

On each, use about half the card or note to summarize, as succinctly as possible, one of your plot ideas. Then put them on a table or stick them to a whiteboard so that you can move them around as necessary to group them. I like to number each one as a reference point. How you are going to group them depends on the type of phasing you’ve decided on. Some adventure ideas will work better early in a campaign, others may be better placed later. But I’ll get into that after commenting on a couple of alternatives.

Virtual Cards

These are the computer-based version of your yellow post-it notes. You will want software that lets you put them anywhere you want and move them with just a mouse-click – I’ve seen some that always places them at a fixed point on the screen and some that won’t let you move them at all. Neither is useful for this purpose.

I’m not a big fan of virtual cards.

Brainmapping Software

Same idea, different interface. ‘Nuff said.

Cut and Paste

One of the simplest approaches, and one that I have used many times, is simply to open two documents in your favorite word processor and put them side by side. One contains all your unorganized ideas, and the other is empty. You’ll create headings in the empty one as necessary, and then cut and paste ideas from the master list until they all have a home in the new, organized list – except for the ones that are left over and don’t fit, of course.

Organization Structure

The major way of organizing these cards / post-it’s / notes is by plot thread (if you’re using a threaded model) and campaign phase. I like to note six things beyond idea number and the synopsis:

• Campaign Phase: If you’ve decided that you want your campaign to be phased “Happy, Sad, Angry, Hopeful, Desperate” then the first thing you will want to do is identify which, if any, of these categories the adventure idea fits into. You will often get more than one answer. To save space, I will use a numeric code or an alphabetic one – “Ha, Sa, An, Ho, De” would do. Use a row for each phase and do a special card which prominently identifies the phases of the campaign to use as a heading for the row.
• Theme: If you’ve decided on one or more campaign themes, consider each idea for whether or not it represents one particular theme from amongst those listed. Unless you have deliberately chosen to have your thematic structure evolve during the course of the campaign, you will want to have at least one example of each theme in each phase of the campaign. Use a column for each theme, and do a special card which prominently identifies that theme to use as a heading.
• Content: I’ll use a one-word summary for the style of adventure. “Drama, Action, Twist, Emotional, Soft, Talky – whatever comes to mind. You don’t want two of the same thing in succession. If necessary, I’ll use two words. I may then add one more word if it’s justified: “Necessary”.
• Fun: A rating (none, 1, 2, or 3 stars) for how much fun I think the adventure idea will be. If I’m pressed, I might use two different colors and rate each for fun from both GMs and Players points of view – but I usually don’t bother. You’ll obviously want to prioritize the ones that are going to be the most fun.
• Completeness: How complete and ready to run is the idea in its current form? Some of my ideas are multipage, detailed affairs that could probably be run without further development, others are nothing more than a single line: “Killer Computer, twist is….” This permits you to pick and choose between your ideas based on the amount of prep time you have available at the time that you are doing prep. I usually rate them 0 to 3 stars, where 0 is the least complete and 3 is almost ready to go.
• Participation: Finally, if there’s a specific character type or race who is going to find the adventure particularly significant or interesting, I note who they are on the card/note. If you know who the new PCs are going to be, you can restrict yourself to them as individuals, otherwise you will have to be more general in your approach.

The process

So, rate each adventure and then stick the card or note in the appropriate spot. If there is already an idea in that space, the order (front to back) should be: any that are “Necessary”, followed by “Highest combined Fun & Completeness rating” (break ties with Fun rating).

Some spots will fill with multiple ideas, some might not have any. When you’re finished, you will have a row of ideas for phase 1, and another for phase 2, and a third for phase three, and so on. After any “necessary” ones that are there to set up the big finish or communicate a key theme, concept, or plot development, the idea on top will be the one that is most fun for the least effort.

Don’t be surprised if your ideas reveal a development line as the campaign unfolds, in which one theme starts out as dominant but another comes to the fore as that one fades out. Don’t be surprised if particular campaign phases show a preference for different types of adventure or for different themes. You can identify and analyze all sorts of patterns and progressions within the overall campaign.

Save your unused ideas!

It should probably not need mentioning at this point to anyone who has read the first part of this article, but save any discarded ideas – you never know when one will come in handy! I’ll even rate them in the same way that I have the ones actually in use for the campaign – just to make it easier and faster to pluck one out of the slush heap if I really need it.

Fill in the empty boxes

It does no good if all your ideas are in the middle, or at the start, or at the finish. It’s not good if all your ideas cluster around only two or three themes. But here’s the best part: since you already thinking along the right lines, this is the best possible time to fill in some of those empty boxes.

1. Go to the first stack of ideas within that theme that you have (if any). Leaving the top one, reconsider the rest, in the order they are stacked – are there any that can be moved to an earlier phase, or a later phase? If not, put them back where they came from and move on to the next stack within the theme.
2. Once you have worked your way through all the second-best-or-worse-within-theme ideas, if you still have empty boxes, look across the phase at adventure ideas that speak to other themes (leaving the topmost one in place). Can any of them speak to the theme that’s unrepresented? Can you add a twist to the plot idea to incorporate a theme that needs filling?
3. If the space still needs filling, you have three choices:
   • Leave it empty;
   • Look further afield – check your slush pile again. Look in any related themes outside of that phase that have multiple entries for one that can be massaged to fit.
   • Come up with a new plot idea right now. Look at the theme that is unfilled and ask yourself how that theme might show up in a plot during that particular phase of the campaign.

The one thing I recommend that you Never, Ever do is mark the space “TBIL” (To be Inspired later).

Tweak the Necessary Ideas

Next, look at any plot ideas that have been marked as “Necessary” and that have at least one other idea in the same pigeonhole. Do any of them have 1 star or less for fun? If so, can any of the more fun ideas underneath be tweaked to incorporate whatever element made this plot point “Necessary?”

Cull the excess ideas

Next, go through any stack with multiple ideas. Eliminate unnecessary ones any that have 1 star or less for both fun and work, and put them back into the slush pile. If there are still multiple cards / notes in a slot, repeat the process for any that have less than two-stars for fun. You only want to keep the best. (Don’t throw the cards away, you might need them back in a minute).

NPC Comeuppance

Do any of the ideas that are left feature NPCs who need to get what’s coming to them before the end of the campaign? If so, is there such a payoff plot point somewhere on the table? If not, choose an appropriate idea from the slush pile, mark it “Necessary” and add the notation “Payback (NPC Name)” – and immediately add one star of fun for the “just deserts” factor. Then put it in the appropriate phase and theme space.

Compile the campaign plan

Go across the table and on each card add the Phase Number. That adventure idea is now committed to taking place within that particular phase. As you finish each phase, gather all the cards in that row and put them in a stack. The final step is to compile these stacks into a document. This could be as simple as “Phase 1, Theme 1, Adv 07, 23; Theme 2, Adv 11; Theme 3, Adv 16” and so on. You are now free to pick and choose these ideas for development into adventures as you see fit, right?

Continuity

Sorry, not quite yet. You can’t have a villain doing something after you’ve written them out of the campaign. You can’t have a trading consortium make someone an offer after their ready cash was stolen in an adventure (unless the PCs recover the loot of course). With your ideas more or less in rough order, go through the stack one more time looking for any such continuity foul-ups. You need to fix them before your campaign plan is complete. If necessary, subdivide the phase.

The Campaign Creation Endpoint

So, if you follow the procedure, what do you end up with?

Plot Threaded Model

Instead of themes, these work on plot threads as the organizing principle. Otherwise it’s exactly the same. However, as an extra step, the threaded model requires you to actually assign each adventure an order in which they will occur.

So, what you will end up with is a structure something like this:

Campaign Phase;
   Phase description;
   Themes and related notes;
   Adventure 1 within the phase, with Plot thread or arc; themes; notes, rating
   Adventure 2 within the phase, details as above;
…and so on. After all the adventures in Phase 1, you’ll have phase 2, then 3, and so on.

Every adventure is occurring in its allocated place for a reason. Make sure you note that reason, so that you know what you have to fix if the PCs Wild-Card messes up your plans.

Sandboxed Model

The sandboxed model is just as simple. It will look something like this:

Campaign Phase;
   Phase description;
   Adventure 1 within the phase, with themes; notes, & ratings
   Adventure 2 within the phase, details as above;
…and so on. After all the adventures in Phase 1, you’ll have phase 2, then 3, and so on.

To use this list, simply look at the current phase of the campaign, find the adventure that fits the amount of prep time that you have available, choosing the most fun one first, and that’s the adventure that you write up for your next game session. But you can only get out of that phase after all the necessary plot points have been ticked off (and should only get out of the phase after all the three-stars-for-fun ideas are taken care of, at the very least).

Applying these principles to non-sequel campaigns

It should be fairly obvious that most of the difference between a sequel campaign and a non-sequel campaign is the existence of the precursor campaign. That means that the players will have certain expectations of the sequel that they would not have of a new campaign, and that some of the prep has been done already; but it also means that in some respects, the GM has a little less freedom. Hopefully, he will need less freedom anyway, because parts of the new campaign are preordained by the old one. Don’t be surprised if you need an entire phase or three of the campaign just to sweep away parts of the past that are going to get in the way of the new campaign later on – especially if you choose a short interval between campaigns.

Beyond these effects, the techniques described work for ANY campaign. Sequel, non-sequel, it makes no difference (some other campaign types like Prequels are a whole different kettle of fish).

Further Reading

Use the following links to look for other articles here at campaign mastery on the subject of campaign creation:

• Campaign Creation
• Campaign Management
• Planning & Preparation
• Encounter Design
• Adventure Prep

Have fun!

A long time ago, when I had an idle six months or so, I came up with a theoretical model for chaotic systems from a roleplaying point of view. I was looking for a way to simulate the behaviour of the stock market in the Champions Universe. The result was 31 pages of 6-point type (the largest font size that I could use and still have some of the key tables fit on a single page of text). To test the system, I applied it to the conditions then operational in the real world stock market and found that it had a 98% correlation with reality in the long term.

The system never saw play. It was obviously completely unwieldy; it took a lot of effort and a lot of prep time to use. But, purely for the sake of stimulating the minds of our readers, I thought I would go through some of the logic steps that I followed way back when. Will I, or anyone else, ever use the resulting system? Probably not – this is likely to be a purely intellectual exercise.

Cycles Apon Cycles

The starting point was to suggest that the movements of the stock market were largely cyclic, trending towards a mean value. This is simple to achieve with an RPG: If we call the mean 1000, then we can have a range of plus-or-minus 1000 to play with.. If yesterday’s value was lower than 1000, then the odds favour an increase, so I used a 3d20 table in which 2/3 of the results were an increase and 1/3 was a further decrease. I then scaled the results as a proportion of a “typical” movement.

• Lowest result: 3
• Highest result: 60
• 1/3 of 60 is roughly 20, so apply this as a negative modifier if yesterday’s result was below 1000.
• 3d20-20 gives a range of -17 to +40. If the average change on a typical day on which the stock market went up was 100 points out of 1000, that would give 100/40=x2.5 factor.
• So the bear market daily trend is +2.5 x (3d20-20).
• 2/3 of 60 is roughly 40, so apply this as a negative modifier if yesterday’s result was above 1000.
• 3d20-40 gives a range of -37 to +20. If the average change on a typical day on which the stock market went down was 100 points out of 1000, that would give 100/37 =x2.7 factor. The higher factor means that drops are going to be steeper than gains.
• So the bull market daily trend is +2.7 x (3d20-40).
• In actual practice, I didn’t use the +1/3 -1/3 ratio, I used a table that showed the likelyhood of a gain or loss according to how far the current value was from the mean.

I played around with the numbers a lot more, but that illustrates the general principle.

But there is also a weekly cycle, and a monthly cycle, and a yearly cycle, and a 7-year cycle, and an 11-year cycle. So do the same set of calculations for all of these, but divide the effects of these cycles into a constant modifier that gets applied each day to the result.

• So if the 7-day cycle yields +21, that becomes +3 daily – and is then rerolled according to where the stock market ends up at the start of the next week.
• Similarly, the 365.25/12 (monthly) cycle divides whatever the scaled result over that period is by 30.4375, so a change of -15 would become a daily modifier of -0.493 (3 decimal places is plenty).
• The yearly cycle divides whatever the scaled result over that period is by 365.25. With maximum scaled change of say +150 points, that would be a daily modifier of +0.41.
• The 7-year cycle divides whatever the scaled result over that period is by 2556.25 – but I would use 2500 as being close enough. The maximum scaled result might be +250/2500=+0.1.
• The 11-year cycle divides whatever the scaled result over that period is by 4017.75 – but I would use 4000 as being close enough. The maximum scaled result might be +400/4000=+0.1.

Something I learned when playing around with the sums of Sine Curves and shifting one horizontally with respect to the other was that there were times when they would cancel out and times when they would add together. These same principles are the foundations of playing around with biorhythm results, which was a fun early application of home computers – unless you took the whole thing too seriously. This method uses a similar technique.

There have also been suggestions made that there is a 23-year cycle. And no, it had not escaped my notice that all these are prime numbers.

Variable cycle length

In the model that I created, I went a step further, and set up periodic cyclic adjustments in the length of the cycles. Since I was doing the whole thing with a piece of custom computer software I had written in BASIC, this was easy to do. I seem to recall assuming that the maximum permitted cycle change was limited to 10% of the average cycle length.

Long-term growth

The next thing that I factored in was the long-term trend – and by long-term, I’m talking 25 years or more. This is a constant trend, always upward. Small on a daily scale – around the +0.25 mark, as I recall (though memory might be faulty), this perpetually moves the goal posts. I kept this as a separate value to the daily summation of cycles so that they were always measured against a fixed basis. As I recall, part of this was a fixed increase and part of it was an amplification effect, so that actual daily swings increased in amplitude as the stock market grew.

For Greater Realism

The amplification effect has greater impact on losses in the downward part of any cycle and greater impact on the upward part of any cycle. My refined computer model and set of rules actually looked at each cycle and amplified it accordingly. Downward effects in general tend to be harsher, more sudden, and less frequent, so I also factored that in.

Similarly, in a recession (or worse yet, a depression), movements tend to be flattened, while in a boom things tend to be a bit more excitable. So I built a “prevalent mood” factor in which reduced daily changes or amplified them accordingly.

Day Of The Week

Stock Markets don’t generally trade over the weekend, or late at night each day. That means that the most dramatic changes tend to be on a Monday, when people scramble to catch up with the purchases and sales that they would have made over the weekend if they had been able. If the Saturday trend was up and the Sunday was down, that doesn’t matter too much. If both were down, then even if the Monday trend is upward, the market will tend to continue to decline. Any reasonable model has to factor that in – mine did.

Significant Events

There’s a whole heap of significant events that happen in a year, or a decade. I modelled these into three categories: Amplifiers, Bear Events, and Bull Events. Some of these happen regularly every year, like quarterly profit projections and end-of-financial year reports, others happen with lower frequency and less predictability, like natural disasters, or new industries, or new government initiatives. (EVERY government decision makes money for someone!)

Amplifying Events

Amplifiers are things like financial reports from big companies. If these are generally more positive than expected, the result will be a stock surge. If they are less positive than expected, the stock market will deflate. These tend to amplify the correlating cyclic effects – so an unexpectedly large profit announcement will amplify any cyclic trends that were upwards, while a more pessimistic announcement will amplify negatives. Add too many of these together and you get large-scale movements like recessions and booms.

To model these, you need to consider the overall composition of the stock market, and how much the largest companies on that market contribute to the whole. If the 100 largest companies are 40% of the market (they probably aren’t that much), then each has an influance of about 4%. A ten percent change in value is therefore 10% of 4% or plus-or-minus 0.4% of the total market value. And a ten-percent change in profits is a big deal that doesn’t happen very often – usually 1% is closer to the mark. But we’re only interested here in the extraordinary results.

Using this chain of logic, I decided that all I cared about were the ten companies with the biggest change in profits for the year. It didn’t matter who they were – simply determining their overall ranking would be enough to model what was going on. In practice, it turned out that the four biggest such rankings were more than enough. If those four were all positive, the results overwhelmed negative effects amongst the other six, and vice-versa.

That was enough to set a trend in the overall amplification factor, year-on-year. Of course, special attention had to be paid to new companies and closures/amalgamations/hostile takeovers but these were simple – exclude them because someone else will take their place. A company that is subject to a hostile takeover will improve the profitability of the new parent company, as will a merger.

Bear Events

Some random events are catastrophic and tend to pull the market down. But something I learned from my time working in the Insurance industry is that to some extent, these are predictable – you might not know where and when, but the larger the area / customer base, the more certain it is that something will happen somewhere in any given time period. Using these principles, I developed a table that randomly selected how long it would be before the next catastrophic bear event and how severe it would be. Each Bear Event not only amplified any downward trend, it compressed any upward market trend, and it reduced the overall size of the market as well.

These effects were simulated by adjustments to the various multipliers and modifiers on the cycles and to the overall results as well. The size of those adjustments was dictated by the severity and was termed the “significance”.

Each bear event also carried a third factor – rate of rebound. This was set up to use compound interest principles (sum of a geometric series) to determine how slowly the market would rebound from the catastrophic event. Some were deep and slow, others were deep but quick to recover; some were shallow and quick (and had little overall effect as a result) while others were slow but persisted for a long time.

The most cataclysmic bear event until recently, in the popular consciousness at least, tends to be the trigger for the Great Depression, when the stock market lost about 1/3 of it’s value in a 24-hour period. It’s worth noting that at the end of the Depression, the stock market was actually higher than it had been prior to the Wall Street Crash. In terms of actual losses, there have been a couple of more significant cataclysms since, but until the GFC none of them had quite acquired the popular cachet as the events of the late 1920s.

Crippling strike actions, Droughts, Wild Weather, and Banking collapses are all bear events.

Bull Events

I used the same principles for Bull Events. These tend to be less frequent than Bear Events, and less severe. Nevertheless, some events tend to bring an immediate surge to the market. Strangely, Wars being declared and Peaces being declared are both Bull Events. Though the constituent stocks involved will be different, the overall market reaction to both is generally positive.

Interestingly, I found that the rebound “downwards” after such events tend to only be about half the size expected unless a Bear event intervenes. Instead, the market ceases to rise very much in response to cyclic upswings, in effect “borrowing” from future increases to fund a consistently higher market value. Typically, too, what “rebound” there is tends to follow reasonably quickly – usually less than a week after the event, and often the next day.

Patterns Of Successive Bull & Bear Events

Given the random nature of the interval between successive bull and bear events, regardless of magnitude, it’s obvious that there can be four different patterns:

• Bull-Bull
• Bull-Bear
• Bear-Bull
• Bear-Bear

When I looked at these historically, I found that in each category, there was a change – I chose a flat 10% per event but it is probably a variable – that the market would overreact to the second of these. When a market overreacts, it resets the clock UNLESS the event that follows is of the same nature as the event that suffers the overreaction. When there is no overreaction, the % chance of an overreaction to the NEXT event simply increases by the 10% rate.

I think this has more to do with human psychology than with any actual impact on profitability or stock values.

Overreactions have the effect of boosting the significance of the event, but also bringing forward the recovery from the event.

Superheroics as Market Events

All this was for a world in which there was a globe-trotting organization of superheroes who went wherever the trouble was. When one showed up, it usually spelt trouble for that particular neighborhood because they tended to be there for a reason.

Superheroic interventions come as a paired Bear-Bull event outside the normal continuity of such things. Insurance companies tend to face massive payouts in their wakes, and manufacturing can be severely impacted, as can mundane things like freight deliveries that can have a big impact. Throw in the psychological impact on the population, and the Bear part of the equation is easy to see.

When they succeed, they rarely stick around to help with the cleanup – that only invites a second wave of trouble to an already damaged or devastated infrastructure. At the same time, a victory by “the good guys” has a definite morale-boosting effect on the general population and is followed by a phase of reconstruction. There are opportunities to modernize equipment, write off debts, and do other things that help the bottom line. There also tends to be national money – a sort of “disaster relief” – that flows into the local economy. Where businesses have been devastated, this simply helps pick them back up to where they were – but to anything that survived, it acts as a boost. So surviving a superheroic intervention tends to be an economic stimulus, at least locally.

Overall, then, Superheroes are good for the economy. That effect, plus the general confidence that results from security, means that new members are a positive market event – a Bull event – unless they are replacing old, established, hands. The loss of members is a negative market event, a Bear event. Public assessment of the reputations of the heroes plays into this as well – a new or returning member of massive popularity is a good thing, while the loss of a mistrusted member can even be a positive market event.

The best way of simulating all this to-ing and fro-ing about new members is to go back to where we started, with another extra “daily cycle” – but with the GM evaluating events in the campaign instead of rolling the 3d20. Similarly, the events of superheroic intervention are best simulated by an initial negative impact – a straight drop in the markets – followed by an additional weekly cycle in the positive direction.

Nowheresville

No community has yet engineered a crisis to bring about a superheroic intervention to stimulate the local economy in my game world. In general, politicians are too scared of the potential political fallout if they get caught engineering such a crisis. Nor has anyone attempted to stage a superheroic intervention in a bid to manipulate the stock market – most responsible businessmen are too conservative for that. But when governments or individuals feel their backs are against the wall, extremes of behavior can result… There are certainly a couple of plotlines there, waiting to happen.

Superheroic Spinoffs

Superheroes tend to come with baggage. The corporate entity that was building killer robots gets shut down by the superheroes, and the assets then get foreclosed by the banks and insurance companies – including the technology that went into those killer robots. With a little tweaking by some (hopefully) clever engineers, robot manservants and cleaners go on sale a year or so later. Heat rays, new energy sources, personal jetpacks and antigrav platforms and, well, you name it – they all have industrial applications. The presence of superheroes is generally good for the productivity of the world, and that’s a series of long-term bear events. Part of the thinking that I try to do whenever a villain is encountered in one of my campaigns is to decide how long it will take before that villain’s tech begins to seep into the general economy, and what shape it will take.

And, when I want a particular technology to enter general circulation, the best place to start is by introducing a supervillain using that tech into the campaign!

Superheroic Funding

Which brings up an interesting related question: where do superheroes get their money? Some are inventors – and everything said above about recovered villain-tech applies equally to on-general-sale hero-tech. Some use their abilities to predict the future. Some are inherently wealthy – but that wealth always has limits. Some have government funding – which always seems to have strings attached. The parent team to Zenith-3 in my campaign runs a four-star zero-G hotel in their asteroid base – with tickets stamped “at your own risk” – and one member has published a massively-popular book of philosophy (the profits from which he turned over to the team) which then became the basis of a cult (that was the bad news) which continues to funnel collections to the superheroes (which they aren’t all that comfortable accepting).

Superman used to repair a lot of the damage himself (at least temporarily), and help out on large civil construction projects, saving Metropolis a bundle. He would also squeeze the occasional lump of coal into diamonds, and had an instinctive knack for creating collectables, most of which he gave away. Add to that the tourist trade he brought in, and the occasional insurance company subsidy by the city government doesn’t seem so arduous. I used to think the stories where the Man Of Steel built bridges and so on overnight were light-weight – only when I started thinking about the economic impact of a superhero did I see that these “light” stories were an essential part of the “Superman Operation”.

If Lex Luthor wasn’t already the richest man in the world (or close enough to it), his many licenses and patents from anti-superman activity would surely have carried him to that point in a few short years. I wonder when he’ll figure that out, and what his reaction will be? An amusing thought on which to conclude!

It happens to all GMs if they stay behind the screen long enough: a campaign comes to an end, and the players insist on a sequel – but the whole reason the campaign has come to an end is that the GM has run out of ideas for the original campaign (or at least, out of ideas that were as good as the ones already used).

There are often good reasons to say no, or at least ‘not yet’ to such a request. The GM might want a change of pace, or might want to run a different game or genre for a while. He might have a new idea that he’s been developing in the meantime. Some players may be more enthusiastic about a sequel than others. The GM may feel that the ideas on which the original was founded have run their course. The campaign may have reached the point where it feels more like work than recreation. There may have just been a big finish which has left the GM feeling burnt-out. Or he might be unsure about what made the first campaign so popular that a sequel is demanded in the first place – and so, not sure of what to keep and what to throw away.

At the same time, there are some tremendous attractions. The GM has invested a great deal of time and energy on the background and NPCs of the existing campaign – being able to recycle some of that material into a new campaign obviously gives him more bang for his buck, more reward for his effort. Any props, maps, or game supplements bought specifically for the old campaign also get reused, increasing the gaming value for dollars invested. A lot of the work of a new campaign is already done.

On top of that, there will always be things the GM feels he could have done better, or that he got wrong – a sequel is a way to get that monkey off his back, and that can be a powerful inducement.

But sequel campaigns are scary propositions. There are a number of pitfalls – I’ll be discussing some particular ones in the paragraphs that follow, but there are others.

Preplanned Potentials

The first time a sequel is demanded can come as a shock to the GM, and an extremely flattering compliment that makes him want to say yes, even if he has no ideas on tap for such a campaign. Then the doubts set it – Was the campaign really that good? Or did it go through a painful initial awkwardness that the players want to avoid? Is it just that the players finally have the GM housetrained? Does the GM even have any ideas left that are any good?

After it’s happened a time or two, though, you learn to anticipate the possibility. Throughout the course of a campaign, I’m thinking about the campaign that will follow, and storing ideas for it. I will often deliberately pre-plan the potential for a sequel into my campaigns from word one, which can make the process of implementing such a sequel a much happier one.

The First Decision

Whether you have done so or not, when you are faced with the question, you have three immediate choices: To say ‘yes’, to say ‘no’, or to say ‘eventually’.

It’s easy to say yes when you’ve already prepared for the possibility, and don’t feel like you need a change of pace. It’s easy to say ‘eventually’ if you have the sense of a campaign idea but it needs more development, or if you want to actually have a brief change of pace while working on the sequel campaign – and that at least keeps the gaming group going in the meantime, even if all you do for six months is play board games. It’s very hard to say no in the face of player demands for more, but sometimes that is the right decision.

Before you can make that decision properly, you need to consider the major potential pitfalls.

Lightning in a bottle

For any campaign to run its course and reach its conclusion, ending with a bang rather than with a whimper, it must have had some magic in the alchemy that went into its life. Running a sequel is rather like trying to capture lightning in a bottle – it’s possible (you need a leyden jar and a kite) – in other words, some very specific preparation.

Knowing the specific preparations that need to be made depends very much on knowing what it is that you are trying to capture. Exactly what was it that the players enjoyed so much that they want more? Was it the game setting? Is it some of the NPCs, or the style of the adventures? Are there unresolved questions that they want answered? Do they genuinely want to know what happens next – in other words, was it the plot? Was it the way their characters became entwined in the plot? Only if you can identify the particular brand of lightning that you captured the first time around can you know what the sequel must keep – and what can be thrown away and replaced with something new.

At this point, I recommend that you pause for a moment and read ‘Why Movie Sequels almost always fail‘ (link opens in a new window).

Now, I don’t agree wholeheartedly with the article; the very example offered of eight heads in ten flips of a coin argues against the core point, because while the article is using all ten coin-flips to describe just one movie or book, the metaphor is inexact, and it is equally valid to call each flip a different movie. So eight heads in a row would be eight out-of-the-ballpark successes – with two flops (tails) somewhere in the run, of course.

Another flaw in the arguement is that no-one covers unsuccessful songs, and while that’s somewhat true of shows like American Idol, and to a lesser extent of shows like X-factor and The Voice, as a general rule it’s not true at all. There are four sources of successful songs:

• Original Songs written by the artists
• Original Songs written by other artists but not used by them
• Covers of songs that the new artist feels didn’t achieve the success or attention they deserved, or were album tracks that were not released as a single by the original artists
• Covers of successful songs.

The first three sources are especially important for first and second albums, before the artist develops the confidence and ability as a songwriter.

The truth is that people generally like the version they hear first over other versions – even if the version they hear first is a cover version. It’s only when they are already aware of a song that they know that the comparisons become valid, and the performance is judged on its own merits. So it comes back to expectations, and to capturing that lightning in a bottle for a second time.

‘Been There Done That’ syndrome

Keeping the wrong things can lead to the new campaign feeling old and stale right from the beginning – in other words, to “Been There, Done That.” The worst mistake a GM can make in preparing a sequel is to make it exactly the same as the successful campaign. Even new characters aren’t necessarily enough novelty value to keep a campaign sequel functioning. Only if you are sure that this won’t be a problem should your answer be a ‘yes’ or ‘eventually’. Later in this article, I’ll offer some specific techniques for avoiding this, but the bottom line remains – know what cards to keep in your hand and which to throw away.

Player Expectations (In General)

A key issue is the general question of player expectations. The sequel campaign will have to be bigger and better in all the areas that made the precursor campaign shine so brightly, but that’s not enough.

Star Wars I-III

For proof of that statement, all that needs be done is contemplate the reception of the second Star Wars trilogy. With the exception of the unmitigated loathing felt by many for the character of Jar-Jar Binks (which I’ll discuss separately in a moment), there were a number of other problems with this trilogy. Little things like the so-called “prophecy of the one who will bring balance to the force” that were never explained, and were then totally ignored. The whole transition from movie #2 to #3, and especially the ease with which the big bad villain of the intervening animated series was dispatched, which showed completely inconsistent power levels. But, there were arguably as many holes in the older trilogy (though they were less prominent). No, the real problem with the original trilogy is that it failed to satisfy the expectations of the audience.

That was an inevitable risk, of course – because Lucas had a choice: to tell the predictable story, or to try and keep the plot at least a little surprising. In other words, it was the fact that these were prequels that was the handicap to be overcome – and doing so resulted in a lesser story than what might have been. Personally, I don’t find the movies as bad as most people seem to think – ignoring the irritation factor of specific characters and overlooking the plot holes and inconsistencies, they are as good as “The Empire Strikes Back” in my opinion, and I didn’t expect them to be any more than that – due to the problems inherent in everyone already knowing the basic plot in the first place.

The Necessity Of Jar-Jar Binks

By far the biggest criticism of that trilogy, and one with which I absolutely agree, is the incredibly annoying character of Jar-Jar Binks, and it was all about the vocal characterization, which I found offensive and demeaning to African Americans – even though it was a member of that race who was providing the vocal.

But what all the criticism of Jar-Jar fails to mention is the absolute necessity of a character to fill that role, specifically someone well-meaning but manipulable and yet part of the inner circle. The leading characters couldn’t do it, they had to be too heroic to be the tools of the true villain. The entire first movie is about getting Jar-Jar into that central position, the entire second movie is about setting up the (poorly-explained) conspiracy – with (unknown to anyone) the same person playing both sides against the other. And the third movie is about the transition from Anakin to Darth Vader and the ultimate delivery of power to the true villain by the foolish Jar-Jar.

The biggest problem of all with Jar-Jar is that he is absolutely essential to the plot; and, knowing this, it becomes even less comprehensible how none of the people working on the film could fair to realize just how annoying the characterization was going to be. I am absolutely convinced that if they had told Ahmed Best to use any other accent, Jar-Jar would have been funnier – and far more acceptable.

All this is relevant to the question of sequels in general. Certain characters, events, or plot devices may be absolutely essential to explaining the transition from old campaign to new – but if those characters are too annoying and distasteful it can contaminate the entire sequel. Taking an especially beloved character and ‘ruining’ them can have the same effect.

The Psychology Of The Sequel

Many of these issues are inherent in the vary nature of a sequel, and they all boil down, in the final analysis, to player expectations, what the players want in a sequel. Deliver that core and the rest is yours to play with as you see fit.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

The more players in a campaign, the more likely it is that some of them will have differing expectations and desires of a sequel campaign, and satisfying all of them leaves the sequel as an insipid copy of the original. The mere fact that you have more people to satisfy leads to compromise, and each compromise sucks some of the vitality from the ensuing sequel. This is one of the ongoing complaints about the Hollywood Studio system. An excellent example is the story of Star Trek V, as recounted in ‘Captain’s Log: William Shatner’s Personal Account of the making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier‘. This movie started out as an interesting premise, but was eviscerated by studio demands and rewrites and budgetary limits until it was a morbidly-decaying corpse of a plot. The philosophical issues raised by the original plotline were deemed too controversial, for example, completely ignoring the fact that Star Trek had tackled the core issue a number of times. It might never have made a great movie, but it would have made a good one – instead of being the worst of the entire franchise (and I include Star Trek The Motion Picture).

The mistake that was made here was in trying to salvage parts of the plot after the original premise was ripped from it, and would have proved far too expensive anyway. It would have been better to start afresh with a new idea than to proceed with a half-baked and shallow copy of the original plot. (These days, with CGI, the original could probably be made – but would still have been too controversial for the studio, but that’s a different arguement).

Sequels Are Hard

There is an expectation amongst GMs and Players alike that a sequel campaign will be easier to create than an original, and to some extent there is a certain validity to that statement – because some past creativity can be recycled, the workload in those areas is reduced. What few people take into account is that what’s left is a LOT harder than it usually is. When the necessary effort is put in, however, the sequel can be greater than the sum of its parts.

I make the above statement not to discourage GMs from creating sequels in response to player demand, but to inject a little realism into the expectations of both sides of the GM screen. Don’t expect it to take only a few weeks – it will usually take as long as creating a new campaign from scratch would have taken, if not longer. The best approach is to start working on nuts and bolts for a sequel campaign (if there is going to be one) as soon as play begins in the precursor campaign – and to develop the two in parallel. The ideas can always be recycled if no sequel campaign manifests.

Something borrowed, Something New

So much for generalities. Lets now move on to the heart of the topic – how to escape and avoid these pitfalls. I’ll assume that you already have some idea of what your players enjoyed most about the old campaign – enough to request the sequel in the first place – and what elements are free to be reinvented as necessary.

Campaign Seeds

History has a continuity that makes it different to fictional stories. Organizations may be dead, broken, or scattered – or simply bereft of leadership. Their original purpose may no longer be fulfill able, but their ambitions (in general terms) will continue. Political Factions won’t go away, and ideas are even more pernicious. So the place to start planning a sequel campaign is always to sketch in a rough outline of who and what are left after the big finish to the old campaign, and how those groups might react to the changed circumstances following that climactic conclusion.

If you have five organizations left over, devising a plan for each for them to achieve their original goals, or something equivalent, gives you an excellent foundation. Since there is no action without a reaction, even in writing, these groups will be opposed by others for various reasons – if they have no opposition left, one will immediately start to gestate.

Another thing to note before you begin is exactly what the PCs – and players – expected would be the washup from their final battle in the precursor campaign. While deviations from this should be expected by the players and intended by the GM, it remains the starting point. Remember, the Road To Hell is paved with Good Intentions!

There are some specifics to dig out and throw into the idea heap for a sequel campaign. These are the seeds from which the new campaign will grow, so lets look at each of them in some detail.

Accumulated unused Plot ideas

Every GM accumulates plot ideas that don’t fit their current campaign for one reason or another. A good example of that is shown by Johnn’s article here at CM a few years ago, Undead Are Taking Over… What happens? and my reply, The Undead Are Coming!.

Some people just forget these; other, wiser, heads put them in writing. Who knows when they might an idea? The are all grist for the mill in a new campaign, especially any that derive from the precursor campaign!

Leftover Plotlines

Almost every campaign also accumulates its share of leftover plotlines that were never wrapped up. It’s easy to get diverted. Like a snowball rolling downhill, these – no matter how minor they were at the time – can become major elements of the new campaign.

Leftover NPCs of importance

Significant NPCs who survive the finale of the precursor campaign will continue to hold the same basic ambitions, modified as necessary to take the finale events into account. This can be especially important if the finale leaves any sort of power vacuum, as is often the case.

And that brings me to:

Leftover Politics

Politics is usually larger than any one person. Once hostilities break out, for example, the death of the architect is usually not enough to restore peace; at best, it may make peace possible. Whatever political forces were at play will either be continued by the successors of those who were lost in the precursor campaign or will be usurped by opportunists. With additional time – and the question of how large an interval in game time there should be between campaigns is something that will be considered in part 2 of this article – some of these political imperatives will change, some will become muted or reduced in priority, and a few will be achieved, rendered impossible, or made irrelevant – and new ones will rise to take their place.

Backup Plans

Arch-villains rarely have just one plan up their sleeves. Even if the villain is apparently killed in the finale, one of his flunkies or aides can always step forward, usurp the title, and claim his predecessor’s backup plans as his own. And that totally ignores the possibility of someone figuring a clever way of surviving. So far as new PCs are concerned, they would not necessarily even know that there had been a change – at best, one of the villain’s plans was stopped by some adventurers making the ultimate sacrifice – or the ultimate mistake.

Exceptionally clever villains may even have anticipated the success of the PCs in the precursor campaign, even their own destruction in a final confrontation, and layed plans accordingly, for their own return. I used that trick for both the second and the third Superhero campaigns in my Champions universe, with a villain who simply would not stay dead!

Player Expectations (Specific)

The best way to avoid the “Been There, Done That” problem is to assume that ‘the perfect solution to all the world’s problems’ that ended the previous campaign is neither perfect nor the solution to all the world’s problems. At the time, everyone (including perhaps you) was seeing it through rose-colored glasses, and it was the best approach that they could find at the time. If you can reach the point where you are thinking “if the PCs only knew [x] at the time, they would have done [y] differently” in the prior campaign, then you have the foundations of a sequel. [x] might be something that was already in existence, or something that someone would do to try and take advantage of the situation during or after the big finish.

A key principle is that “it is possible for men of good conscience to disagree honestly”. In politics, it’s easy to become cynical – never forget that there are going to be some on the other side who are utterly sincere in their beliefs that [z] is the right thing to do, the best thing to do, and that they may have a point – no matter how much your own, equally sincere, belief may be that [z] is the worst possible thing to do. Everything that went into the decision-making of the PCs at the conclusion of the progenitor campaign should be picked apart and viewed with suspicion. Is there an assumption that can be twisted to the ends of a new plotline?

New Ideas

As you compile lists of these raw ideas, new ones will inevitably come to you. Add them to the list!

Allocated Plotlines

I will pre-allocate a number of plotlines from the outset. Substitutions are permitted, but these are blank spaces each of which I strive to keep filled until play commences.

Sometimes these allocated ideas are not big enough to sustain an entire adventure. When that happens, I look for themes, or associated subjects in common, or simply ways to take two small ideas and meld them into one large idea.

A Plotline for each type of PC

Every campaign and genre has its own set of archetypes. In Pulp, it can be detectives and mad scientists and secret agents. In superheroes, there are Psionics and Martial Artists and Energy Protectors and Bricks and Detectives. 3.x has its character classes, Star Trek has its bridge stations and the specialists who work at them. Then there are the questions of Races. Once I have the foundations of the campaign and a list of ideas with which to populate it, I start by deliberately choosing ideas each of which will feature one type of PC. Either the players will have someone apon whom that plotline will focus amongst their number, or they will have to find a way to handle a problem for which none of them is really suited – either makes a good start to a campaign structure.

A Plotline for each specific PC

Once the players start generating characters (if they have to), I also like to ensure that there is at least one plotline for each PC. These go beyond race and class and focus on the individual and his or her circumstances. This is an excellent tool for making each of them feel part of the campaign.

A Plotline for each specific Player

And, if I know them well enough, I like to have one specific plotline targeting each of the players, if there isn’t one already. The common thread might be plotlines that each player will especially enjoy, or plotlines that target a weakness or blind spot of the player, or that simply revolves around a subject of interest to each player.

Campaign Seeds

So you have a list of ideas, and the foundations of a campaign, and some initial thoughts about possible plotlines, but they aren’t a new campaign yet. These are Campaign Seeds, rather like adventure seeds but with a broader scope. Nurturing these seeds and growing them into a full campaign is the next stage in the process…

Sometimes you know, when you start an article, that it’s going to be too big for a single post. It’s going to take too long, or you have some intricate details to work out, or it’s just too big a topic. This was one of those times. Next week in Part Two: Organizing your Campaign Seeds, Interval Decisions, Consequences to campaign structure, Managing player expectations, and more on sequel campaigns in general!

I mentioned in my last article that each GM evolves their own standard style and formatting for the adventures that they write. This time around, I thought I would look at exactly how I format adventures for my campaigns. I write most of my adventures on a PC – the same one I’m using to draft this article, in fact. For the most part, I will use the rtf format and Wordpad; when an adventure is finished, I will import it into Word for the addition of final touches.

As you read this, it may occur to many of you that its structure bears no little resemblance to a pseudo-coded flowchart. My professional background is in computer programming, and I still employ many of the skills learned in that capacity in various ways – adventure planning being just one of them.

Wordpad

Wordpad suits my needs for the bulk of the writing because it is a simple, fast-loading rich text editor – meaning that I can use fonts and text color, have access to bold and italic, and can indent text quickly and easily. I try not to use tabs because while the tab marks will transfer into word, the tab settings won’t. In fact, I would use Wordpad for everything (and sometimes do anyway) if it only had a few more features.

Word

I use Word to insert headers on all but the first page and footers with the page number on all pages. I’ll also insert page breaks at the last minute. Opening a Wordpad-created document in Word carries with it all the formatting and content of the document, but none of the page layout specifications, like page size and tabs. I generally don’t attach illustrations, props, and handouts to the adventure, keeping them in separate documents so that I can distribute them more readily. As a general rule of thumb, jpgs and pdfs are the formats used for these extras.

Laptop

In play, I will use a laptop to display images and a hardcopy of the adventure to GM from. The hardcopy lets me take notes. I’ll also have a copy of the adventure in electronic form on the laptop; at the end of play, I can use a color code to indicate scenes that weren’t played and where in the adventure we are up to.

Page Layout

Page layout is the final step in the process, but it’s also the logical place to start.

Margins

I’ll generally leave the minimum margin my printer can handle on the RHS of the page and about 2 inches / 3-4 cm on the left. This gives enough white space on the page for notes. The header will be located about 1.5cm (half an inch) from the top of the page, and the footer about the same.

Header

In the header, I’ll put the name of the adventure, in the same font (but a smaller size) as that used for the main title. I’ll use a font size that puts the entire title on one line, but certainly nothing bigger than 14 pt – or smaller than 7.5pt. Although I’ll leave the header off if pressed for time, I prefer to leave it in.

Footer

The footer is in a standard font, eg Arial, and 9 or 10-point text. It will only contain the page number. I spend minimum effort on this, and will also skip it if pressed for time – I can always manually write page numbers in, if I have to.

Adventure Structure

The overall structure of an adventure consists of two sections: The front page(s), and the content. Let’s look at the front page(s) first:

Title

The front page(s) contain a lot of different pieces of information. The first is the title of the adventure, rendered in a legible font that captures some of the style of the adventure, in a fairly large font – rarely less than 24 point, and occasionally more than 72-point. I don’t care if anything else fits on that page or not – this is something that I can hold up like a movie trailer at the start of play. In general, I won’t use a graphic, for two reasons: Clarity (I want the players to be able to read it at a distance) and Time (which can always be better spent elsewhere).

Subtitle, Campaign

As a subtitle, I will usually indicate which campaign the adventure is for. This is helpful when you go looking for campaign notes several years later, saving you from having to locate named characters to work out which campaign they’re from. In the meantime, it helps focus the mind on the unique attributes of that campaign.

Anticipated Participants

Either on the same page or at the top of the next, I’ll have a list of the characters I expect to participate in the adventure, in the following order:

PCs & Players – PCs and the players who own them are at the top of the list. These are the stars of the adventure, or should be. This also serves as a useful reminder of character names. I try to always address people by character name unless I’m instructing the player to do something. This is also a convenient place to jot down xp rewards after the adventure!

Key NPCs – I sometimes follow that with a list of the major NPCs, in the anticipated order of their appearance. If I find time, I’ll put a page number after the character name to indicate where the description is, but I so infrequently have the time that this is a convention honored more in the breach than in the observance.

NPC Illustration Checklist – After each NPC name, I’ll put a pair of open brackets separated by a space, like this: ( ). When I find and save an appropriate photograph or illustration (or create one) for a specific character, I’ll make an angled mark like this: (/). After I’ve done any editing or resizing needed, I’ll change the slash to an ‘X’ by putting in the other stroke. When I’m getting everything out ready for play (or packing, if the day’s play is to take place away from home), I’ll add a horizontal mark, indicating that the image has been printed and/or copied to a memory stick for use on the laptop.

If the adventure is anticipated to take more than one game session, I’ll add as many sets of parentheses as there are expected to be sessions. The goal is to make sure that I always have what is needed to run the adventure.

Prop & Game Aid Checklist

The same technique is used for a list of any props or game aids that I want to be sure to take. The number of times this has saved my bacon is embarrassing to admit – and the number of times I wished I had taken the time to compile such a list for an adventure is even greater. And yes, character sheets and the scenario printout are both items to include on the list!

Dates

Sometimes, these will be followed by a number of dates.

Date Written – The date the scenario was written is of obvious use, since it permits different drafts and revisions to be distinguished.

Date Play Commenced – The date play commenced – or was expected to commence – is of obvious value in sorting the adventures chronologically. Sometimes I will number the adventures instead, especially if the third batch of dates listed below are to be used.

Local Date – This is the in-game date when the adventure is expected to start, and is usually followed by the in-game date when the adventure is expected to conclude. Some campaigns which involve time travel or interdimensional travel may have multiple dates shown. I’ve had to recreate the local date, or work out from scratch what the local season is, too many times. The Local Date is something I always like to include. If I’m not sure how long a preceding adventure will take, I’ll leave a space to write the appropriate local date in, and use a relative indicator for the end date: “Local Date  (_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _)  – (+5)”, for example – showing that while I don’t know when the adventure will start, it’s expected to take five game days to complete.

Synopsis & Structure

The dates (if any are shown) are followed by a brief synopsis of the adventure. Heavy emphasis on the “brief”. If it’s longer than 4 printed lines, it’s too long. This is an important and useful summation for me, as GM – it provides context for everything that follows.

General GMs Notes

That’s followed by any general reminders that I’ve made to myself. In addition to anything else that might be there, this will include three specific notes:

Metagame Function – What relevance does this adventure have in relation to others that may be planned or may have already occurred? This is vital information; in the event that I’ve somehow completely fouled things up, salvaging the metagame function of the befouled adventure is priority number one. I’ve written adventures specifically to introduce a character who will become important later in the campaign, or to establish a theme that will become significant, or to wrap up a plotline. I’ve written encounters whose sole purpose is to advance some background plot or other. Blair and I wrote a plot whose sole purpose was to justify the FBI taking over the Adventurer’s Club in the pulp campaign of the same name for various reasons.

Style, Tone, & Pacing Notes – What sort of mood am I shooting for in the adventure? Creepy? High-Octane? Paranoid? Mysterious? Romantic? Slapstick? Melodramatic? Sad? That’s the tone. How do I plan to achieve it? That’s Style. Do I want to push the pace or linger over details? Is there some portion of the adventure that should be especially frantic? Or perhaps there is a particular tone that I want to avoid – that’s been the case more than once. These questions should form the basis of everything in the plotline that isn’t there to serve the metagame function. Props, for example: if there’s a photo, rendering it in pastel colors and giving it a frame of love-hearts (things that my art packages make easy) gives everything a romantic overtone.

Moreover, if things get fouled up, salvaging the mood is the number two priority. Any decisions or action that I ad-hoc should still fit within the overall tone of the adventure – so that it is not completely obvious that I am ad-hocking the adventure!

Absentee Notes – What will it do to the adventure if one of the expected players can’t make it? What’s my strategy? Are there any absences with which the adventure could not cope at all? I only make notes under this heading when I absolutely have to, but there are times when it’s inevitable – when a plotline is designed to be a star vehicle for one particular PC, for example. If that PC’s player can’t attend, there are only three options: Cancel the game session, run the next adventure in the sequence (assuming that it’s finished and the metagame considerations don’t make it impossible), or run something else more-or-less off the cuff (even if it’s an out-of-continuity adventure). Under most circumstances, there are still more options available – you can brief the player and get key decisions in advance, and/or run the PC as a temporary NPC for the session, for example.

Content Structure

The final category of information to form part of the preliminary pages of the adventure is the content structure. Is this a three-part adventure, or a two-part adventure, or a one-part adventure, or a five-part adventure – and why? In general, if there is a major shift in focus or tone, it’s better to break the adventure into two parts at that point. Sometimes these parts will be given unique subtitles, sometimes they will simply be called “Part 1”, “Part 2”, and so on. Sometimes adventures end on a cliffhanger, and at other times they reach a firm conclusion with some downtime for the PCs before the next adventure starts. That’s the sort of information that I place in the content structure notes.

For example, the final adventure of the previous Zenith-3 campaign had the overall title of “The Light Of Morning”, which was a somewhat poetic allusion to the coming of a “New Dawn” within the campaign. It was an adventure in five parts.

Part One was subtitled “Elements Of Perpetuity” and was all about lasting impacts and the preparations by Zenith-3 for their ‘retirement’ and their replacements taking over. At the same time, two of the team had retired to serve the newly-elected President – one as Chief Of Staff and the other as chief advisor and wife – and were in the process of moving into the White House. There were a number of difficult policy decisions that had to be made. So the subtext of this part was “After we’re gone”. It ended with a cliffhanger – an explosion in Southern Arizona creating a crater 32 miles across and 8 miles deep, which quickly began filling with Lava while Temporal Warning alarms went haywire all over the team’s headquarters, signaling a massive incursion from off-dimension.

Part Two was subtitled “Elements Of Conclusion” and was all about wrapping up outstanding plot threads (including some that the team thought had already been dealt with). Ironically, some of them led back to the crime boss they came across in their very first adventure. The explosion was the literal destruction of one of those plot threads. The temporal incursion was not explained, but side effects – like the Daleks who were invading Korea dropping like flies – show that if anything it’s even bigger than they thought. This also ends in a cliffhanger (one which would take too long to explain here).

Part Three was subtitled “Elements Of Transition”. The solution to the two cliffhangers was revealed, leading the retired ex-members to return for one last mission. It transpired that the real villain of the entire campaign (who had just been defeated in his bid for the Presidency) had one final card up his sleeve – a desperate plan for a suicide mission to achieve his true goals, one which united the power of the three biggest threats that the PCs had encountered in the course of the campaign within his body. Mutually as compatible as matter and antimatter in collision at close to light speed, the combination turned his body into a huge bomb capable of destroying almost anything. This was all about the changes within characters – both the PCs and the villain.

Part Four was subtitled “Elements Of Resolution”. It brought a permanent (is there any such thing in superhero comics or games?) end to the villain, and resolved the central themes that had been part of the entire campaign – unstated at first, hidden for a time, and then overt for the final year or two. And it ended with the godlike beings who had been protecting and surreptitiously guiding the PCs for the entire campaign ‘going away’ to rest and recuperate. “For now, you are on your own.”

Part Five was subtitled “Elements Of Regeneration”. It featured Inauguration Day of the new Presidency that the PCs had brought into existence, the final departure of those characters who were going to move on to the new campaign, and the arrival of the NPCs who were taking their place. The theme for this part was the new beginnings for that campaign world.

The first three chapters were all buildup; the fourth was climax; and the fifth was conclusion and denouement.

Where there is no major change in tone, but the adventure is deliberately planned to span more than one game session, I will divide it into Acts instead. There’s no real difference in practical terms, but this nonclemanture shortcut helps me keep the overall structure straight.

Some plotlines have more complex structures. Blair and I once ran an adventure that was actually four simultaneous plotlines, one of each PC, in different times and places. We cut from one plotline to the next at the conclusion of a scene in one of the plot threads. This permitted cross-connections between the plot threads. There were two metagame reasons for doing so: First, it gave us the opportunity to show the PCs how much their lives had changed since they started play within the game; and second, it let us try out, and get experience in, the technique, which we knew we were going to need in the future.

Part or Act Structure

Okay, so those are the constituents of the front pages of the adventure. In a pinch, if you’re good at off-the-cuff adventures, that might even be enough; I’ve done it before, and used to do it regularly. But, in general, I find it helpful to have an actual written adventure, no matter how brief the writing might be.

Each Part or Act has the same overall internal structure. Some Parts are further subdivided into acts, especially in a threaded plotline.

Jump Flag

The first thing that might be encountered – on the same line and in the same font as the title (see below) – is a Jump Flag. That’s a number preceded by a trio of hashmarks, like this: ###2. I’ve tried using fewer, but I find that the repetition of three makes the jump flag stand out when just glancing at the page. Each is also followed by a space.

A Jump Flag works similarly to an Anchor or Target in HTML – it’s a destination that indicates that players might arrive at this point having bypassed some of the plot. In other words, it’s a point in the plot to which the characters might Jump – hence the name. I’ll talk about Jump Flags and their use in Scene Structure / Choices & Navigation, below.

Plot threads (if any) are identified by alphabetic character as part of the Jump Flag. This is incredibly useful in writing the adventure because it permits the writer to focus on one plot thread at a time within an Act or Part, complete the current iteration of drafting/writing content for that plot thread, then move on to the next.

Act Titles

All parts or acts have a title, even if it’s just “Act I” or “Part 3”. Some have specific titles, as is the case in the example offered above. This will again be rendered in a decorative font, usually in 14- or 18-point type.

The font chosen might be the same as that used for the adventure title, which has the advantage of providing an ongoing thematic consistency; or it might be a separate font if legibility is an issue.

Scenes

Each act consists of one or more (usually more) scenes. Each time the action takes place in a different location, it happens in a different scene.

Next Act

Each Act concludes with any notes about what action or interactions be resolved before the next act can begin, and any notes about wrapping up the Act.

Scene Structure

Scenes also have a standard structure. There is a header line and then the content.

The header line consists of up to 4 elements: Plot Thread ID, Scene Number, Location, and Estimated Playing time.

Plot Thread ID

The first is an identifying thread code, if necessary. These are exactly the same alphabetic character used for Act jump flags.

Scene Number

And, like Jump Flags, scene numbers follow. These are in the format Act-decimal-scene number.

Where a scene is written in more than one way – reflecting changes in the plot as a consequence of anticipated character decisions made by the PCs – it may be followed by a lowercase alphabetic character indicating which version of the scene it is. So scenes “1.3a” and “1.3b” are variations on scene 1.3; only one of the two takes place, and the end of each scene will have a jump flag to the next scene in that particular thread and variation.

Location

Where does the scene take place? This is just a summary or location reference, not a full description. It is on the same line as the scene number.

Estimated Playing Time

Sometimes I will include an estimated playing time for the scene. This is especially important in threaded plots that are eventually expected to coalesce back into a single plotline. If there is one, it will be in brackets on the same line as the location and scene number.

Pacing Notes

Immediately after the header will be a line with any pacing notes to observe in the scene. These are only included when the pacing of the scene is noteworthy. I have sometimes employed a technique in which one or more players are sent away from the table (and out of earshot) for exactly X minutes; the result being that characters not sent away have just so much time to act before they are ‘interrupted’ by the ‘arrival’ in the scene of the other PCs.

Pacing notes are preceded by three percentage signs and must fit on a single text line, for example:
%%% slow and deliberate until the wolf howls, then v.fast

Introductory Narrative

Every scene has a description of something. It may be a location, it may be the action being performed by an NPC, it may be a list of those present. This narrative is intended to be read to the players verbatim.

Timecheck

Where it’s important, the narrative passage may conclude with a timecheck – what time it is where the PCs are. Coordinated threading is almost impossible to get right without timechecks.

Referring to Players

For anything relating to game mechanics – calling for a skill check, for example – the players name is used. Everything else refers to the characters by name. Tenses are used appropriately for the narrative to be read to the players, as are first and third person usage.

Dialogue & Action

Dialogue is separated from narrative or other dialogue passages by a blank line. It is written in the style of a script (though aligned left) – character name (in bold), with a colon, and with subsequent lines indented. I will usually use quotation marks to distinguish dialogue from actions employed instead of words. Italics are used for any foreign language.

For example:
Girlfriend: “Ludo, sweetie, does this mean that we won’t be going to Casablanca after all, mon         capain?

If a PC is expected to respond, especially the case if this is a conversation with the PC or a question to one, I will put (reply) after the line of dialogue. If a PC is expect to respond to an action or announcement, I will put (react) after the dialogue/action. In both cases, the bracket means “pause for PC(s) to” do whatever is in the brackets.

GM Notes

These are quite common, and include any instructions to me as GM. They are preceded by a row of three asterisks and a space, like so:
*** Describe the journey to Nassaud, Romania. Aprox 106km, 3hrs by hired car or train.

Choices / Scene Navigation

Sometimes the PCs will have a choice that has more substantial repercussions than can be contained in a single scene. These will be preceded by a less-than greater-than pair, a space, and then the decision to be made. Indented on the following line will be navigation directions within the adventure. For example:

<> How do PCs react?
   – Break down the door: goto scene 3.13a
   – Shoot out the lock: goto scene 3.13b
   – Pick the lock: goto scene 3.13c
   – Find another entry point – continue

Note that the most likely choice continues within the current scene, presumably scene 3.13.

Props & Handouts

Amongst the other GM instructions that may given are those which involve props and handouts. If these are simply given to the player to read, I use the normal GM Notes indicator (***) but if the player is expected to do something more than that, I use a trio of ampersands instead: &&&. This is followed by some means of identifying the prop or handout. There are two ways of handling the question of what the player is to do with the prop: a standard GM note (*** )on the following line, or a Choice Flag (<> ).

Act Exit

Choices, actions, NPC dialogue, or even a descriptive passage of narration can signal the end of an act, or even of the entire adventure. Something has to go last, after all. Two equals signs followed by a greater-than signifies the end of the act, and is followed on the same line by the jump flag code that identifies the next Act in the adventure. If there’s no flag code it means go to the next act in sequence, i.e. the next passage of text that starts with the words “Act XX”. If, instead of a flag code, the direction is “PCs Exit, stage left” or “fade out” or any of half a dozen other terms that mean the same thing, they are to be read to the players and signify the end of the Adventure. While I sometimes use these terms at the end of an Act for dramatic effect (by putting the text on the line after the Jump Flag), it is more usual to reserve them for the adventure exit.

Break Points

Three exclamation points in a row signify a Break Point. These come in two varieties: minor and major.

Minor Break points are points in the action which are suited to letting people get up and stretch their legs, go to the rest room, have a cigarette break, etc. These will have the advised length of the break shown in brackets after the Break Point signal; this is followed by anything that the plotline requires me to do as GM during the break. The estimated time to complete the task is included in the break length – so it’s not impossible to see things like

!!! (20 mins) setup battlemap town #2.

That might include a 10-minute break for me as GM and 10 minutes to set up the battlemap, or 5 and 15, or whatever. I will usually set up the map and then take the break, but sometimes I’ll do it the other way around – especially if I’ve told the players to stay away until I come and get them (a sure sign that I want the layout to come as a surprise).

Major breaks are exactly the same as Minor Breaks except that these are also suitable cliff-hanger or dramatic beats on which to end the day’s play. A Major break is signified by simply underlining the exclamation points.

I will also, on rare indications, wish to indicate “don’t take a break at this point!” That is usually the case where the plot would seem reasonably suitable for a break based on what has just happened, but that the action that follows is unsuitable to restarting after a break, or it might be because there is a better breakpoint a couple of minutes away.

Next Scene

The final element of a scene’s structure is any “*** goto” instruction pointing to a jump flag or new scene. This is only present if there are some scene variations to be skipped. For example, Scene 3.13 is to be followed by variant scenes 3.13a, 3.13b, and 3.13c according to the earlier decision example. At the end of each of these (except 3.13c, obviously) there is a notation to proceed to scene 3.14, or perhaps to Act 4.

As We Play

Two things will happen as we play. The first is that I will take notes on the printed page of the adventure (if necessary using the back of the preceding page for extra room). This will usually include noting the choice of figures used to represent various NPCs.

The second is that I will color code the electronic copy of the adventure. Gray indicates a scene that’s been skipped, Red indicates a scene that had a radically unexpected outcome, and blue indicates a scene or act that proceeded more-or-less according to plan.

The big advantage that is conferred by this color-coding method is that I can review the adventure days or weeks later and make any adjustments necessary as a result of any red-flagged sections. They serve as a mnemonic device that can be invaluable – even if it’s only for preparing a synopsis of play for the start of the next section.

The Wrap-up

So how many of these do I actually use? The answer is all of them – slightly inconsistently. The GM Notes indicator is pretty ubiquitous. Everything else comes and goes. The objective when formatting an adventure is clarity of communication to the GM – not when you’ve just finished writing it and it’s still fresh in memory, but 2, 3, 48 or more months later. To achieve that clarity, I’ll sacrifice anything I have to – including the standard formatting.

It’s probably worth noting that I don’t add these formatting marks in after the fact, I insert them as I go. Sometimes, with a complex plotline, that requires keeping a separate document that’s nothing but act and scene structure notes and navigation pointers, so that I can see more of the plot breakdown at the same time.

Most GMs would be unlikely to have as formalized a structure as this. Heck, some of my adventures are nothing more than title and bullet-point notes. But by classifying the types of information that might need to be incorporated into an adventure as I have, at least you have an option to bear in mind when the issue comes up in your adventure writing!