Only a short article this week (at least in terms of word count) because there is easily five times as much work beneath the surface!

A few weeks ago, I read a really interesting analysis of the mathematics of the D&DNext advantage mechanic by the Online DM. And yet, there was a disconnect between that analysis and the actual situation in which that mechanic would be employed that meant that I still didn’t have a feel for the impact and implications that the new system would actually have in play.

So this week I wanted to go beyond the maths provided by the Online DM (and others) and think about the consequences.

Recapping The Results

The Online GM reduced his results to a single table, showing the % chance of success based on what you needed to roll in order to succeed, under three different conditions: a straight d20 roll, when you had Advantage, and when you were Disadvantaged.

The Mechanic

When you are adjudged to have the advantage, you roll two d20s instead of one and keep the best result. When you are adjudged to be at a disadvantage, you roll two d20s instead of one and keep the worst result. When neither side has the advantage, you roll a single d20.

The Table Of Results

The results from the Online GM were:

Target	d20	With Advantage	With Disadvantage
1	100%	100%	100%
2	95%	99.75%	90.25%
3	90%	99.00%	81.00%
4	85%	97.75%	72.25%
5	80%	96.00%	64.00%
6	75%	93.75%	56.25%
7	70%	91.00%	49.00%
8	65%	87.75%	42.25%
9	60%	84.00%	36.00%
10	55%	79.75%	30.25%
11	50%	75.00%	25.00%
12	45%	69.75%	20.25%
13	40%	64.00%	16.00%
14	35%	57.75%	12.25%
15	30%	51.00%	9.00%
16	25%	43.75%	6.25%
17	20%	36.00%	4.00%
18	15%	27.75%	2.25%
19	10%	19.00%	1.00%
20	5%	9.75%	0.25%
21	0%	0%	0%

The shortcomings of this result

This table of results is not as useful as it could have been, for the simple reason that the key variable by which they are indexed is not one that is immediately at-hand, but is the result of an earlier calculation – one that the system doesn’t actually require determining. The actual mechanic is to roll dice, add bonuses or penalties, and compare the result to the target number set by the DM.

Rather than the results of the analysis being instinctively understood and directly applicable by the GM to assess the impact, he has to interpret a theoretical situation, translate the result into the appropriate entry on the table, and then interpret the results. It’s no surprise that the significance of the mechanism is not readily accessible for most GMs.

Well, if that’s the problem, let’s fix it.

Relative Impact

As a first step, let’s rewrite that table of results so that instead of giving an absolute percentage of success, it displays the impact of the advantage/disadvantage mechanism relative to the base value of a straight d20 roll. For future reference, I’ll call this Table 2:

Target	d20	With Advantage	With Disadvantage
1	100%	+0%	-0%
2	95%	+4.75%	-4.75%
3	90%	+9%	-9%
4	85%	+12.75%	-12.75%
5	80%	+16%	-16%
6	75%	+18.75%	-18.75%
7	70%	+21%	-21%
8	65%	+22.75%	-22.75%
9	60%	+24%	-24%
10	55%	+24.75%	-24.75%
11	50%	+25%	-25%
12	45%	+24.75%	-24.75%
13	40%	+24%	-24%
14	35%	+22.75%	-22.75%
15	30%	+21%	-21%
16	25%	+18.75%	-18.75%
17	20%	+16%	-16%
18	15%	+12.75%	-12.75%
19	10%	+9%	-9%
20	5%	+4.75%	-4.75%
21	0%	+0%	-0%

Now, that’s a very interesting pattern. For targets of 9-13 there is very little difference – if you were to plot these on a graph, that range would be almost flat. 7 & 8 are also almost identical, as are 14 & 15, and the same can be said for 5 & 6 and 16 & 17. But we’re still not quite in a position to really look at what these results mean.

Bonuses & Targets

When you’re talking Advantage and Disadvantage, you’re generally talking about attack rolls. The target value – which is indexed to the results shown above – is the difference between the AC of the target and the combat bonuses or penalties of the attacker.

The example that the online GM mentions by way of proving that those bonuses are still around and part of the game system is prone, but really there are few other mechanisms for the implementation of magic weapons and the like. What’s more, an appropriate stat still contributes a bonus as well.

Most ACs in the game will fall in a range between 1 and 25. Let’s carry the results up to 30 to be on the safe side. Most often, bonuses will be zero-plus-stat bonus – when you’re talking PCs that’s anywhere from +1 to +5. Throw in the potential for a -2 (prone) and up to a +5 (magic) and possible bonuses totals run from -2 to +10. When you put all of these into a table of target numbers, we get:

Table 3: Target Numbers	Bonus
AC	-2	-1	+0	+1	+2	+3	+4	+5	+6	+7	+8	+9	+10
1	3	2	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
2	4	3	2	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
3	5	4	3	2	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
4	6	5	4	3	2	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
5	7	6	5	4	3	2	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
6	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1	1	1	1	1	1
7	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1	1	1	1	1
8	10	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1	1	1	1
9	11	10	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1	1	1
10	12	11	10	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1	1
11	13	12	11	10	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2	1
12	14	13	12	11	10	9	8	7	6	5	4	3	2
13	15	14	13	12	11	10	9	8	7	6	5	4	3
14	16	15	14	13	12	11	10	9	8	7	6	5	4
15	17	16	15	14	13	12	11	10	9	8	7	6	5
16	18	17	16	15	14	13	12	11	10	9	8	7	6
17	19	18	17	16	15	14	13	12	11	10	9	8	7
18	20	19	18	17	16	15	14	13	12	11	10	9	8
19	–	20	19	18	17	16	15	14	13	12	11	10	9
20	–	–	20	19	18	17	16	15	14	13	12	11	10
21	–	–	–	20	19	18	17	16	15	14	13	12	11
22	–	–	–	–	20	19	18	17	16	15	14	13	12
23	–	–	–	–	–	20	19	18	17	16	15	14	13
24	–	–	–	–	–	–	20	19	18	17	16	15	14
25	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	20	19	18	17	16	15
26	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	20	19	18	17	16
27	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	20	19	18	17
28	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	20	19	18
29	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	20	19
30	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	20

Once again, a very interesting – if fairly familiar – pattern. This sort of table should be fairly well-known and obvious to every GM who’s been around for a while.

It’s only when you make the mental connection between the two tables that the real significance of the fairly obvious pattern makes itself clear. An increasing bonus creates an upward trend in benefits (as shown in table 2) from a combat advantage AND a similar trend in penalties from a combat disadvantage.

This all becomes clearer when the appropriate values are transplanted from table 2 into table 3 to give tables 4 and 5:

Table 4: With Advantage	Bonus
AC	-2	-1	+0	+1	+2	+3
1	+9%	+4.75%	+0	+0	+0	+0
2	+12.75%	+9%	+4.75%	+0	+0	+0
3	+16%	+12.75%	+9%	+4.75%	+0	+0
4	+18.75%	+16%	+12.75%	+9%	+4.75%	+0
5	+21%	+18.75%	+16%	+12.75%	+9%	+4.75%
6	+22.75%	+21%	+18.75%	+16%	+12.75%	+9%
7	+24%	+22.75%	+21%	+18.75%	+16%	+12.75%
8	+24.75%	+24%	+22.75%	+21%	+18.75%	+16%
9	+25%	+24.75%	+24%	+22.75%	+21%	+18.75%
10	+24.75%	+25%	+24.75%	+24%	+22.75%	+21%
11	+24%	+24.75%	+25%	+24.75%	+24%	+22.75%
12	+22.75%	+24%	+24.75%	+25%	+24.75%	+24%
13	+21%	+22.75%	+24%	+24.75%	+25%	+24.75%
14	+18.75%	+21%	+22.75%	+24%	+24.75%	+25%
15	+16%	+18.75%	+21%	+22.75%	+24%	+24.75%
16	+12.75%	+16%	+18.75%	+21%	+22.75%	+24%
17	+9%	+12.75%	+16%	+18.75%	+21%	+22.75%
18	+4.75%	+9%	+12.75%	+16%	+18.75%	+21%
19	–	+4.75%	+9%	+12.75%	+16%	+18.75%
20	–	–	+4.75%	+9%	+12.75%	+16%
21	–	–	–	+4.75%	+9%	+12.75%
22	–	–	–	–	+4.75%	+9%
23	–	–	–	–	–	+4.75%
24	–	–	–	–	–	–
25	–	–	–	–	–	–
26	–	–	–	–	–	–
27	–	–	–	–	–	–
28	–	–	–	–	–	–
29	–	–	–	–	–	–
30	–	–	–	–	–	–

 

Table 4: With Advantage (cont)	Bonus
AC	+4	+5	+6	+7	+8	+9	+10
1	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0
2	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0
3	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0
4	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0
5	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0
6	+4.75%	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0
7	+9%	+4.75%	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0
8	+12.75%	+9%	+4.75%	+0	+0	+0	+0
9	+16%	+12.75%	+9%	+4.75%	+0	+0	+0
10	+18.75%	+16%	+12.75%	+9%	+4.75%	+0	+0
11	+21%	+18.75%	+16%	+12.75%	+9%	+4.75%	+0
12	+22.75%	+21%	+18.75%	+16%	+12.75%	+9%	+4.75%
13	+24%	+22.75%	+21%	+18.75%	+16%	+12.75%	+9%
14	+24.75%	+24%	+22.75%	+21%	+18.75%	+16%	+12.75%
15	+25%	+24.75%	+24%	+22.75%	+21%	+18.75%	+16%
16	+24.75%	+25%	+24.75%	+24%	+22.75%	+21%	+18.75%
17	+24%	+24.75%	+25%	+24.75%	+24%	+22.75%	+21%
18	+22.75%	+24%	+24.75%	+25%	+24.75%	+24%	+22.75%
19	+21%	+22.75%	+24%	+24.75%	+25%	+24.75%	+24%
20	+18.75%	+21%	+22.75%	+24%	+24.75%	+25%	+24.75%
21	+16%	+18.75%	+21%	+22.75%	+24%	+24.75%	+25%
22	+12.75%	+16%	+18.75%	+21%	+22.75%	+24%	+24.75%
23	+9%	+12.75%	+16%	+18.75%	+21%	+22.75%	+24%
24	+4.75%	+9%	+12.75%	+16%	+18.75%	+21%	+22.75%
25	–	+4.75%	+9%	+12.75%	+16%	+18.75%	+21%
26	–	–	+4.75%	+9%	+12.75%	+16%	+18.75%
27	–	–	–	+4.75%	+9%	+12.75%	+16%
28	–	–	–	–	+4.75%	+9%	+12.75%
29	–	–	–	–	–	+4.75%	+9%
30	–	–	–	–	–	–	+4.75%

 

Table 5: With Disadvantage	Bonus
AC	-2	-1	+0	+1	+2	+3
1	-9%	-4.75%	-0	-0	-0	-0
2	-12.75%	-9%	-4.75%	-0	-0	-0
3	-16%	-12.75%	-9%	-4.75%	-0	-0
4	-18.75%	-16%	-12.75%	-9%	-4.75%	-0
5	-21%	-18.75%	-16%	-12.75%	-9%	-4.75%
6	-22.75%	-21%	-18.75%	-16%	-12.75%	-9%
7	-24%	-22.75%	-21%	-18.75%	-16%	-12.75%
8	-24.75%	-24%	-22.75%	-21%	-18.75%	-16%
9	-25%	-24.75%	-24%	-22.75%	-21%	-18.75%
10	-24.75%	-25%	-24.75%	-24%	-22.75%	-21%
11	-24%	-24.75%	-25%	-24.75%	-24%	-22.75%
12	-22.75%	-24%	-24.75%	-25%	-24.75%	-24%
13	-21%	-22.75%	-24%	-24.75%	-25%	-24.75%
14	-18.75%	-21%	-22.75%	-24%	-24.75%	-25%
15	-16%	-18.75%	-21%	-22.75%	-24%	-24.75%
16	-12.75%	-16%	-18.75%	-21%	-22.75%	-24%
17	-9%	-12.75%	-16%	-18.75%	-21%	-22.75%
18	-4.75%	-9%	-12.75%	-16%	-18.75%	-21%
19	–	-4.75%	-9%	-12.75%	-16%	-18.75%
20	–	–	-4.75%	-9%	-12.75%	-16%
21	–	–	–	-4.75%	-9%	-12.75%
22	–	–	–	–	-4.75%	-9%
23	–	–	–	–	–	-4.75%
24	–	–	–	–	–	–
25	–	–	–	–	–	–
26	–	–	–	–	–	–
27	–	–	–	–	–	–
28	–	–	–	–	–	–
29	–	–	–	–	–	–
30	–	–	–	–	–	–

 

Table 5: With Disadvantage (cont)	Bonus
AC	+4	+5	+6	+7	+8	+9	+10
1	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0
2	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0
3	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0
4	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0
5	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0
6	-4.75%	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0
7	-9%	-4.75%	-0	-0	-0	-0	-0
8	-12.75%	-9%	-4.75%	-0	-0	-0	-0
9	-16%	-12.75%	-9%	-4.75%	-0	-0	-0
10	-18.75%	-16%	-12.75%	-9%	-4.75%	-0	-0
11	-21%	-18.75%	-16%	-12.75%	-9%	-4.75%	-0
12	-22.75%	-21%	-18.75%	-16%	-12.75%	-9%	-4.75%
13	-24%	-22.75%	-21%	-18.75%	-16%	-12.75%	-9%
14	-24.75%	-24%	-22.75%	-21%	-18.75%	-16%	-12.75%
15	-25%	-24.75%	-24%	-22.75%	-21%	-18.75%	-16%
16	-24.75%	-25%	-24.75%	-24%	-22.75%	-21%	-18.75%
17	-24%	-24.75%	-25%	-24.75%	-24%	-22.75%	-21%
18	-22.75%	-24%	-24.75%	-25%	-24.75%	-24%	-22.75%
19	-21%	-22.75%	-24%	-24.75%	-25%	-24.75%	-24%
20	-18.75%	-21%	-22.75%	-24%	-24.75%	-25%	-24.75%
21	-16%	-18.75%	-21%	-22.75%	-24%	-24.75%	-25%
22	-12.75%	-16%	-18.75%	-21%	-22.75%	-24%	-24.75%
23	-9%	-12.75%	-16%	-18.75%	-21%	-22.75%	-24%
24	-4.75%	-9%	-12.75%	-16%	-18.75%	-21%	-22.75%
25	–	-4.75%	-9%	-12.75%	-16%	-18.75%	-21%
26	–	–	-4.75%	-9%	-12.75%	-16%	-18.75%
27	–	–	–	-4.75%	-9%	-12.75%	-16%
28	–	–	–	–	-4.75%	-9%	-12.75%
29	–	–	–	–	–	-4.75%	-9%
30	–	–	–	–	–	–	-4.75%

 

Some interpretation

Viewing the results in this way makes a number of implications clear.

• For any given combat bonus, there is an optimum AC which maximizes the benefits of Combat Advantage which is equal to 11 plus the bonus.
• That same optimum AC also maximizes the penalties that result from Combat Disadvantage.
• At ACs lower than the optimum, Combat Advantage makes a likely outcome (a success) even more likely.
• ACs lower than the optimum are divided into two bands: those that are 6 or more less than the optimum, where combat disadvantage has a relatively small effect, and those that are between that value and the optimum, where combat disadvantage is significant.
• At an AC greater than about 16 more than the total combat bonus, chances of success begin to decline rapidly despite combat advantage.
• At an AC greater than about 7 more than the total combat bonus, chances of success decline rapidly with combat disadvantage.
• The greater the combat bonuses, the less significant (in general) combat advantage is except for a small band of low ACs.
• The 50% success mark is at (approximately) target=11 (straight d20), target=15 (with advantage), and target=7 (with disadvantage).
• The 25% success mark is at (approximately) target=16 (straight d20), target=18 (with advantage), and target=11 (with disadvantage).
• These can be used by the GM to select opponents posing different standards of tactical challenge.
• The relative tactical importance of achieving advantage over your opponents is variable depending on your combat bonuses and the AC of the opponent.
• The relative tactical importance of denying an opponent advantage over you is variable depending on your AC and your opponent’s combat bonuses.
• The two will rarely be the same. The optimum tactics to employ in any given situation are hence highly variable.
• The higher your combat bonuses, the less important tactical advantage and disadvantage are. It follows that min-maxing a character construction will often be less effective than being average and using smart tactics.
• It also follows that the optimum target value for min-maxing is different in every encounter. Past a certain point, the player is expending a great deal of effort to replace part of one benefit with an increase in another. As a result, it is both more difficult and less rewarding to min-max a character.

Conclusions

For my money, that last point is the greatest possible justification for this mechanic. All the other benefits – a more complex set of tactical considerations, the ability of a smart GM to work the system to provide a greater challenge to the players, and so on – are simply icing on the cake. In fact, there will be circumstances in which it is better overall for a min-maxed character to make themselves secondary to the battle and permit a character with good but not perfectly-tweaked ability totals to assume a better tactical position.

This will be especially true if the DM makes the precision of his adjudications with respect to combat advantage and disadvantage proportionate to the attack bonus of the min-maxed PC while being a little more generous (either way) on the part of non-min-maxed characters.

Will this end min-maxing and an elitist approach to character construction? I doubt it. Will it make these things less of a concern to DMs? Quite probably.

And that’s a very good thing.

P.S.

Anyone interested in the subject might also like to read Advantage vs Flat Bonuses at Critical Hits.

For obvious reasons, I’ve been in a very introspective frame of mind in recent weeks. It occurred to me today that my life has now changed almost comp-letely from where I was ten years ago.

Ten years ago, my primary occupation was as a bookkeeper. I hadn’t worked for a few years, but was still searching hard for employment and writing the occasional DVD review. These days, I write for Campaign Mastery twice a week and work on my own gaming publications the rest of the time. I’m now considered disabled because of a degenerative back problem that limits how much I can work; ten years ago this problem was a recurring but undiagnosed problem growing progressively worse. It had not yet reached the point of being semi-crippling.

I was living in a unit in a different suburb. I walked to the shops every day or two to shop, and made relatively little use of my refrigerator. Having lived in that location for more than ten years, I knew the shopkeepers and had set routines in terms of shopping and consumption. My diet was relatively consistent, week-to-week.

I now live too far from the shops to casually walk to them – actually, it’s not much farther than I used to live, but my health is not as good as it was. I travel to the supermarket every six to eight weeks and spend up big, then get it home delivered – using the refrigerator and freezer extensively. I’m only now getting recognized by a few of the local shopkeepers, and I can’t say I know any of them by name yet. I eat very few of the same foods that I did back then – having grown tired of some, having others become unavailable or too expensive, and simply having different shops available to me. (I still go back to the old stores occasionally and am still remembered there).

The programmes that I watched on TV, the websites that I visited, even the computer games that I played, were all matters of habit. I don’t remember the Tv shows that dominated my viewing landscape, but at the time there were only six channels available. These days, there are 16 (not counting redundant duplicates and home-shopping-only infomercial channels). While a couple of the shows that I watch regularly are repeats of classic TV, most of the programmes I watch regularly at the moment had not yet premiered. One of the few things to remain consistent to both periods is that I watch every Formula 1 Grand Prix. The websites that I visit regularly now are very different – for one thing, Twitter didn’t even exist ten years ago! I now get my TV guide and weather reports over the internet. Because of changes to computer technology – ten years ago I used Win98, and now I don’t – many of the games I used to play no longer function, sadly. Not that I have as much time in 2012 to spend on them.

My weekend activities also followed a fixed pattern. I played RPGs at a fixed time and place – a game store in a reasonably nearby suburb. I travelled to games according to a set routine – with Ian Mackinder once a month and with Stephen every other time. The games being played were fixed to a timetable – I played 7th Sea on the first Saturday of the month, GM’d my original Fumanor on the second Saturday, GM’d Warcry on the third Saturday, and GM’d the original Zenith-3 campaign on the fourth. On the fifth Saturday, on those months that had one, I would board game. About once a month, I would also run a campaign, “The Rings Of Time”, on a Sunday.

In modern times, about half of my gaming happens away from the suburban game store for various reasons. These were mostly held at Stephen’s place until his passing, and I expect that they will now take place at my home, simply because it is the most convenient location. I will usually be using public transport to get to gaming when it IS at Burwood, but will be able to get a lift home most weeks with Ian. While a fixed timetable is no longer essential, I still produce one every year. 7th Sea has moved to the second Saturday, and I am no longer in that campaign; the first Saturday of the month is now devoted to The Adventurer’s Club, the pulp campaign that I co-referee. At the same time as Seventh Sea, I usually run Fumanor, splitting the year between the two campaigns. Over the last few years, there have also been periodic Sunday sessions split between the Fumanor: One Faith and Warcry campaigns. The latter is necessary because the third Saturday has been given over to a new campaign, Shards Of Divinity. I still run the Zenith-3 campaign on the fourth Saturday of the month, and on any fifth Saturdays as well.

My reading matter has changed to some extent as well – I used to buy two formula-1 related magazines, one or two computer magazines, and a general motorsport magazine. These days, I only get one monthly F1 magazine. I still have all the books that I had back then, and still re-read them regularly; while I have added some additional ones to the list in the meantime, most of them are classics. Heck, half of the books in question were added to my collection back about 30 years ago. So that’s one area that hasn’t changed much.

The Character Analogue

These changes have occurred one piece at a time. Some of them have been gradual; others have been the result of monumental disruptions. This is normal, the product of simply being alive. Life is inherently a dynamic process.

Compare that with the state of existence of most characters in a roleplaying game. The default status of these characters is static and unchanging. This is something that I have talked about previously, in Time Happens in the background, part of my Lessons From The West Wing series.

In that article, I suggested tracking encounters with NPCs by campaign day number, and ensuring that the NPCs circumstances have changed by an appropriate amount according to the interval since the NPC had last been encountered. I also suggested using a building that is commonly seen as a visual calendar to reinforce the impression of the passage of time.

What I have realized in the last week is that this is not enough. No PC in ten years, game time, would be as unchanged by circumstances as we are in real life.

Muddying the confusion: Static Societies

When it comes to societies in RPGs, they are also quite frequently static except as the direct result of events in which the PCs are involved. To some extent, this is due to fidelity to genre; to some extent, it is due to preservation of game setting; to some extent, it is because our impression of feudal society is that it didn’t change all that much for long periods of time; and to some extent it’s because its a lot of work and GMs have better things to do with their prep time. These reasons all have a certain level of validity, but they aren’t enough to justify the lack of personal change in the life of a PC.

A more serious consideration is the fact that a PC belongs to a player, not to the GM, and therefore it should not be subjected to arbitrary change without that player’s consent.

Rather than simply throwing up our hands in defeat at this point, though, let’s simply take these two requirements – minimal GM prep time and player involvement – as parameters that my eventual solution will have to satisfy, and move on.

Muddying the confusion some more: The shortness of existence

What is the average life expectancy in a game? Not of PCs, but of the general population?

This is obviously something that is going to be extremely variable, dependant on lifestyle, diet, economic status, and a whole host of other factors. But most fantasy games are based on the feudal era of human history – so, to restate the question, what was the average life expectancy in that era? I’ve heard all sorts of numbers used in different games, and had a lot of trouble tracking down any historical statistics to use (mostly because the notion of compiling such was unheard-of until the Domesday Book of 1086. But, finally, I came across this Wikipedia page on the subject. And very interesting reading it makes, too, especially the numbers for Medieval Britain – 30 years, but if the individual survived to the age of 21, the forecast could be extended to 64 years of age. Since some people would obviously die at the age of 21, that essentially means that as many people died above the age of 64 as died below it, though we can’t say exactly what the distribution of numbers was – it is statistically just as likely from the information presented for them all to drop at 65 as it is for some to survive to the age of 80, or 90, or 100 – or 1000, for that matter.

What can be deduced from these numbers is an absolutely appalling child mortality rate – enough people under the age of 21 died to drop the overall average from 64 to 30. In fact, more than half of all children could not have survived to reach the age of 21. (In fact, I think it would work out to be 64/94ths of the population, or about 68%, but don’t hold me to that).

These numbers suggest that in any group of 100 people, roughly 3 would die in any given 2-year period. (100/64=1.5625). And two of those would be children.

Sure, the fantasy world has access to healing that this population didn’t have, but at the same time, there are many more ways to get killed in a fantasy world – so we can rather arbitrarily assume that these factors roughly balance out. Though there’s lots of room for a GM to weight the balance one way or the other, if he so desires.

Compare that to the modern age, with an average lifespan of 67.2 – and that’s including those areas of the world which have still not received the full benefits of modern medicine, nutrition, and so on. In the western world, the life expectancy average would be higher again. Assuming an even distribution of deaths at each age below this point, and using the results to exclude those who die at 21 or less, gives me a rough average of 97.7 years.

Both numbers suggest that we’ve added something like 32 years to the average lifespan.

Here’s the significance: in a world where people die younger, they will try to pack more into the time they’ve got. They can only go so far in that respect, of course, and that also brings in the question of opportunities for advancement socially and professionally. But it would not surprise me to find that the average age of marriage was reduced proportionately – by a ratio of 67.2/97.7, or about 69% of what we’re used to.

What’s the point?

The whole preceding question is about how quickly things will change. The conclusion is that any given change will take place after only about 70% of the time we’re used to. Middle age, and the respectability that comes with it, wouldn’t be age 30 – it would be age 21. Marriages wouldn’t take place at an average of 25 years of age, they would happen at about 17.5 (on average). A couple’s first child would arrive within a couple of years – say, around 19-20 years of age. Their second and third children would follow at intervals of about 18-24 months – by the time the couple were 25, four children would be typical – but there would be around a 10% chance that one of them would have died already (2 in 3 will die under 21, and the eldest is now around 6 years old; 100 x 2/3 x (6+4+2+0)/21 / 4 = 200 x 12 / 3 / 4 / 21 = 200/21 = 9.5%. By the time the couple is 30, their eldest would be around 11 (assuming he was still alive) and the father would be looking for a trade into which a boy could be apprenticed – even if it was simply “farm boy”. Certainly, the child would be expected to earn his keep soon, if not already. If a daughter, it would be time to start seriously thinking about accumulating a dowry.

Multiply this accelerated pace of life by the number of people a character knows, and there should be something happening every week. That something might be minor, or it might be major. And that’s without taking into account dramatic circumstances like Wars and Orcish invasions and the like.

Ending The Confusion

While society overall might not change very much, the individuals within it would be changing almost perpetually. Similarly, a PC’s family and neighbors would be in a constant state of flux.

What we need is a system for simulating that flux, one that also meets the other criteria that I’ve outlined.

That calls for a reasonably complex system that is nevertheless easy to use. My favorite tool for such systems: a deck of ordinary playing cards.

The List Of Events

During character generation, or when first implementing this system, the GM simply shuffles a deck of cards and hands them to a player. He then explains the rules: Red cards represent a positive event – a birth, a marriage, whatever. Black cards represent a negative event – an illness, robbery, imprisonment, death, and so on. The face value of the cards gives a rough guide to the severity. After every 2nd picture card, the deck must be reshuffled.

Then he simply tells the player to invent a list of events to match the cards he turns over. These should be described as succinctly as possible – who (generally) experiences the event, and what happens to them. “Brother falls ill.” “Father breaks leg”. “Friend imprisoned”. “Sister born”. “Father remarries.” “Honored by the Duke”.

These events should be listed on a sheet of A4 or foolscap paper with the PCs name at the top, and the name of the player.

The players should be encouraged to be as creative and soap-opera as possible in making out these lists, and not to fear repetition if they run out of ideas.

In The Meantime

While the players are working on their lists, the GM can create one for the neighbors and shopkeepers that the PCs encounter. This should be twice as long as those of any given player, because the GM will get more use out of it. Since this list will address multiple people, there is no need to be consistent – it’s quite possible for there to be multiple “father remarries” entries, for example. Otherwise, the same rules apply.

Sequencing events

Once everyone’s finished their events, the next step is to shuffle them in order so that the players don’t know exactly what is going to happen next, and can’t take advantage of it. The easiest way is to take the picture cards out (except for the aces) and shuffle the remaining cards.

• Spades = 1-10
• Clubs = 11-20
• Hearts = 21-30
• Diamonds = 31-40

With this chart, or some equally-simple list of suits, the GM should be able to write a number next to each background event almost as quickly as he can turn cards over. Once he has each list in sequence, the tables are ready for use – the GM should file them away until he needs them. Of course, if necessary, after dealing with the first 40 events, he can start again if necessary.

Employing the Domestic Events list

So, here’s how it works: Each time the PCs are in a position to interact or hear from a family member, the GM takes the next item in numeric sequence off the list for that PC. Using recent game world events as a guide, he puts it into a context, and simply describes a single paragraph of “news from home”. If a week passes without the PC being in position to receive such news, the GM jots his paragraph down on a sheet of paper, adding events each week (in order) until the PC is in a position to hear from home.

With each event, the GM has a three-fold choice:

1. he can interject an event of his own creation, leaving the next item on the list for a later time;
2. he can replace the subject of the event with the name of the PC, or the PCs spouse (if there is one), or append “-in-law” to the subject, as he sees fit;
3. or he can use it as it stands.

Each time he exercises options 2 or 3, he crosses the number off the list. So the event that the GM has numbered (randomly) #1 happens first, then #2, and so on.

Similarly, every time the PCs interact with a neighbor or a shopkeeper, the GM can select the most recent event that has affected them off the list that he has created.

When a list runs out, the player or GM simply generates a new list and files it away.

The goal is that in 10 years – about 520 events – the mundane life of the PC should have changed completely.

Just as it would have done in real life.

Non-fantasy gaming

A similar approach should work in every game. Some of the events might be different – there would be less emphasis on death and injury and more on career milestones and changes in a modern game – but the general principles will still hold.

Give it a try and see how much your PCs lives come to life!

Slow combats kill games. This hard truth frustrates you and I because, as GMs, we feel it’s our responsibility to facilitate fast, sleek and exciting sessions.

When combat grinds, you end up with fewer encounters in a session. Fewer encounters means less story told, less adventure and less fun.

Combat grind also saps your players’ energy. You put effort into bringing enthusiasm and excitement to the table. You employ techniques with pacing and encounter design to create even more focus and drama.

But then combat grind comes along and deflates the table like a farting balloon.

Slow combats kill games.

So what is a game master to do?

Table Rules To The Rescue

One of the biggest reasons your combats are slow is players. They dawdle. They’re indecisive. They don’t know the rules and need the same rule explained to them every time. They chatter and don’t pay attention. Some even pay more attention to their phones than the GM!

With Tony Medeiros of LeonineRoar.com, I have published the world’s first online course for game masters. It’s called Faster Combat and in 52 info-packed lessons we teach you step-by-step exactly how to cut your combat time in half.

And believe it or not, we show you how to also increase drama and roleplaying at the same time!

One of the lessons covers the 17 Table Rules for Speed, and that’s what I want to show you today. This post contains info directly from the course, with some additional commentary from me just for Campaign Mastery.

I’m going to cover 11 of the rules today. I’m hoping if you like this advice and use it to increase your combat speed, you’ll consider enrolling in the Faster Combat course for GMs.

What Are Table Rules?

Your game books cover the rules of play. They tell you how to resolve different actions. Even if you use a rules light system, your rules still provide a framework for figuring out who shot whom and whether hiding in a fridge during a nuclear blast was a success.

However, game systems rarely help you with the social aspects of play. Things like slow players or disrespectful players.

Social etiquette, respect and procedure greases the wheels of smooth GMing and great game sessions.

A table rule is a simple group agreement about how to handle problem situations that often arise during games.

There are no villains here – you all play to have fun. But the problem comes when people with different backgrounds, experiences and expectations impose their style onto others without checking first.

If I told you your dice was cocked and your natural 20 was disallowed, you’d be very mad at me, especially if the issue of cocked dice had never been discussed before.

Johnn: I’ve always GM’d that cocked dice don’t count.

Bob: Well, in my previous group we allowed them!

Sarah: WE always used to re-roll cocked dice, but only if it was really cocked.

Johnn: What do you mean by really cocked? Like, 15 degrees or more?

Sarah: Yeah, like that.

Johnn: Ok, let me get my protractor and get a measurement.

Bob: Screw this, my roll counts!!! @#@$#!

You can avoid these nasty situations and speed your combats up a lot with some simple table rules.

Below, I offer several examples of great table rules for speeding up your battles.

How Do You Create A Table Rule?

But first, let’s quickly discuss how you create and handle table rules.

Again, your game books probably say either the GM has final say, or that the rules are suggestions only and your group should change them as they see fit.

In neither case do you get any help on what to actually do about keeping everybody in the loop and happy with rule changes and additions.

So here is what you do.

Step 1: Make a list of table rules you want to implement that’ll speed up combat.

Step 2: Take 15 minutes at the start of next game session to talk over each rule.

Step 3: Go through each rule one by one and explain WHY you want this rule. The why is critical for player acceptance. If they understand the purpose of the rule and its benefits, they will comply much better during sessions.

The best way to explain why is to state the proposed rule and then add “because”. The word because is a clear and clean segue for you to explain your reasoning.

“Dice rolled on the floor do not count…because nobody can see what you rolled and it’s not fair to introduce that ambiguity. Plus, I want you to immediately roll a new dice and look for the dropped dice after your turn…because that will speed up the game, especially for those hard-to-find dice.”

Step 4: Have a brief discussion, consider amendments and change any rules accordingly.

Step 5: Next session, give all players a copy of the group’s new Table Rules For Speed. Be consistent and fair in their application.

Step 6: At the start of each session for the next few sessions, ask if there is any feedback on the table rules. Have a discussion, make amendments, distribute revised rules accordingly.

Step 6 should only be for two, three or four sessions until each rule has been tested, contested and rested. From then on, it will be smooth sailing.

Occasional hiccups will happen. In these cases, go back to the steps above, which are all about clear communication, group collaboration and fairness.

Ok, let’s dive into my suggestions for some Table Rules For Speed!

Top 17 Table Rules For Speed (Expanded)

Here are the very best table rules to help manage your game table and increase turn speed.

These table rules are designed for fairness and to help you run faster combats so you can chew through more exciting encounters every session.

Table Rule 1. Speak Up: Ask

Simply ask your players to take their turns faster.

Tell them things appear to be grinding to a crawl and the pace of combat needs to increase so there’s less waiting around the game table.

Tell your playgroup you’ll regularly ask players to pick up the pace throughout a given session or campaign.

This is the most important part of the table rule. You are getting player permission to call them out periodically when they drag the pace down. Without this table rule and their permission, you come off looking like a jerk.

But because this issue has been discussed, when you do ask a player to hurry up, the groundwork has already been laid that this type of GM callout is acceptable and is for the good of the whole group.

This table rule also communicates it’s not personal. All players will be subject to this callout, which makes any potential sting painless when it happens.

If you can, try a friendly approach. “Bob, I’m invoking Table Rule #1. Please finish up your turn quick here so I can move on to Frank.”

If you do this, soon you’ll be able to snap out, “Table Rule #1” and get a smile – and a faster player – instead of a stressed or hurt player.

It just becomes part of your group’s social standards, no harm or foul.

Table Rule 2. No Take Backs

Use the classic chess or board game piece rule: once you’ve declared an action or moved your miniature, there’s no taking it back.

Use this if your group has indecisive or highly tactical players.

Some players are tricky. They’ll announce an action and wait to see your reaction. If they think you’re about to lay down some smack, they’ll quickly recant and think some more.

You give away the consequences with your energy, facial expression and body language. You might even give yourself up with how you speak: “Awesome, well then, your foe….” Speak like that and a player realizes they’ve made a mistake and will do a take-back.

This table rule should include a GM protocol to help it along. You don’t need to discuss this, it’s just something you do. When a player declares their action, you confirm, then declare it final, then react.

How you word this is up to you, but one suggestion is:

Sarah: I charge forward, sword swinging above my head, giving my fierce battle cry!

Johnn: Haha, that’s a great description. So you charge forward? (? Your smooth confirmation, before reacting)

Sarah: Yes.

Johnn: (now you react ?) Great! To your horror, the floor drops beneath your feet. As you attempt to avoid the trap, you catch the glint of massive spiked cylinders churning below in a pool of vile blood and gore. [Make a Reflex save.]

Table Rule 3. Reroll Dice That Fall Off The Table

Flying dice cost time. And the odd thing is, good rolls on the floor tend to count, but bad rolls must be re-rolled because “my dice rolled off the table.”

Establish a clear rule on what to do when this happens and apply this table rule every time, regardless of what the dropped dice rolled.

One option is the player (or GM) must re-roll a new dice immediately. This saves the quest-for-dice delay, and it removes any temptation to ask for an appeal when the dropped dice result is spotted.

Another option is to not allow re-rolls for players with bad aim. Have those rolls count as a 1. That’ll quickly make everyone a lot more careful with their dice. This is especially good for players who are a little careless or who aren’t paying enough attention to the game.

You might also consider using a communal dice tray. A game box lid does just fine. All player dice must be rolled into the tray. Put the tray where you can easily see it.

Players should remove their dice from the tray once finished their turn so other player’s rolls do not accidentally touch another player’s dice and get “contaminated.” (You would not believe the dice arguments I’ve had with players, but as with any form of luck, superstition and habit sets in.)

A nice benefit of a tray is minimal cocked dice. No lie: a former group ruled a 15 degree angle or gap or more constituted a cocked dice. I brought a protractor to sessions. This only lasted a couple of sessions though, because it was so silly, but the protractor became a symbol.

Table Rule 4. No Cross Talk or Interruptions

Ask players to not interrupt or disrupt other players during their turns. It’s just the player and GM, focused on each other, working out that player’s turn.

I recommend you do not allow in-character talk with the active player, either.

Instead, for maximum turn efficiency, allow players to roleplay with each other when inactive as much as they like as long as they do not get too loud. This lets players plan and chat and entertain with each other without costing game time.

I know this breaks your game’s round length – how could so much conversation happen in those 6 or 10 or 30 seconds? – but it’s a nice compromise.

If you don’t like this, then consider allowing only in-character talk (no meta-gaming, please) with the active player. And just allow brief phrases, replies or an exchange of one sentence during the short period a combat turn represents.

The biggest time drag comes from indecisiveness. Some people cannot make snappy decisions. And if you allow other players to talk with the active player and introduce new ideas and choices, you just make indecisive players take even longer on their turns (which is stressful for the player too).

Not allowing cross-talk also prevents meta-gaming. Players cannot share info the active character would not know during his player’s turn. (It will happen out of turn anyway, but things always get “real” when the spotlight is on you, and minimizing meta-gaming this way helps roleplay and drama.)

The opposite of indecision is over-analysis. Does your group discuss and analyze every option on each character’s move? Holy cow, that’s a big peeve of mine and it takes up a lot of game time.

Finally, interruptions break concentration and steals the spotlight away from the active player. Not only does this slow combat down, but you rob characters of their shining moments.

You also rob roleplaying, because if you honour spotlight time and make it safe, players will roleplay PC actions and abilities more often.

Table Rule 5. Use Clear Language

Require that everyone declares targets, distances, hit rolls and damage totals clearly.

Make sure players point to miniatures or make sure every miniature is labeled so players and GMs can easily call them out throughout a combat.

Add up damage done to a target and say a single number out loud whenever possible.

The spirit of this rule is to avoid ambiguity. The time it takes to go back and forth cause combat turns to slog down.

Bob: I hit the lizardman for 10.

Johnn: Great, the lizardman….

Bob: No, wait! I do 8 with the sword, 2 for strength, 1 for the bless and 1 more for power attack. Ok, I do 12.

Johnn: You sure?

Bob: Yup.

Johnn: Great, the lizardman reels back but takes the damage like a true warrior. He hisses and you think he’s actually laughing at you!

Bob: Wait, what? No. I hit the already-wounded guy. Does he die?

Johnn: Oh, sorry, I thought you were attacking the guy in front of you.

And on and on it can go. Plus, in the example above it blew my great combat description and my little GMing moment of flavour. Boo.

One solution is to confirm everything. But that’s tedious too.

Instead, if players can help you by being crystal clear on all the facts involved in their action, you don’t need to confirm, you avoid the lengthy back and forth and demoralizing errors, and combats go by much faster.

Note: you can help players help you by giving them your full attention. Do not reward players honoring Table Rule #5 with a request for them to repeat themselves because you were only half listening.

Table Rule 6. Snack After Combat

No snacking during turns.

Encourage everyone to eat meals before the session so players have their full attention on the session and combats, rather than their food.

Members of my group take turns supplying dinner at the start of sessions. That way we eat together and the meal is taken care of, plus we fit in some great social time and session readiness time.

If you allow snacks at the table (which most of us do) then ask players not to eat on their turn. This makes turns go a little faster, and it keeps the game area cleaner. It’s also easier to not talk with your mouth full. :)

Table Rule 7. Make Passive Checks

Don’t slow down combat with yet more rolls.

Use passive checks or just assume success for certain situations, especially at higher levels of play.

Many games already include automatic checks like this (i.e., “Take 10”).

Ask yourself whether chance of failure adds any value to a particular situation. Does it add drama, chance of a great story result or twist, or fun because of chance of failure.

If the roll would add little to gameplay, hand wave it instead for the sake of brevity.

Doing this actually enhances story and roleplaying because you can dive seamlessly into great narrative or description, adding flavor, without the stilted effect of dice rolls and result calculations.

You can also ask players to provide great descriptions for automatic checks.

Johnn: Frank, no need to roll your climb because it’s just a 3 foot leap. You succeed. Instead, describe what happens.

Frank: With clanking armor and jingling weapons, Krog gingerly steps over the lava stream. He grunts from the heat and almost trips as his visor accidently closes, but he makes it across and keeps running towards his foe!

Table Rule 8. Seating = Init

Once initiative is set, have everyone sit in initiative order as a visual aid to track initiative.

Then play proceeds clockwise around the table with less time wondering whose turn it is.

This works when initiative is fairly static. If you play a game where init changes each round, I could make a case for switching to average init, and not just to speed up combat, but to make combat more strategic as well.

For example, as mentioned in Module 3 of Faster Combat, “an average initiative result approach yields a consistency of more realistic and immersive role-based quickness through an entire campaign’s worth of combats. Monstrous insects tend to always act faster than slow-moving giants, for example.”

However, I know init is very much a GM and group style choice, so there is no one perfect solution. My Pathfinder group rolls once at the beginning of combat, and we use a lot of readied and delayed actions, so seating in init order would end up being musical chairs.

But think how easy initiative management would become if each player knew it was his turn once the guy on his right is done, or that his turn is coming up soon because Bob seated over there is taking his turn now.

Visual, intuitive and fast.

Table Rule 9. Stand Up

Ask everyone to stand during combat.

Standing increases energy and attention levels. And in the case of combat, it increases focus.

Another perk: it makes players a little uncomfortable and motivates them to finish combat faster.

Sitting for too long – especially without good breathing practices – makes you tired. Standing up gets the blood flowing again.

Standing for combat also subtly implies action.

Table Rule 10. No Dice Massaging

Ban dice massaging from your game table.

A second or two is okay, but approaching five+ seconds every time someone rolls dice is an annoying time waster.

Do you have a player who must fondle his dice before every roll? I had one. We got into arguments over it. The superstitious ritual just kept getting longer and more involved.

It got even worse when the player ran into a bad luck streak. Suddenly the massages turned into performance art. Great for festivals, bad for fast combats.

Here’s where you can help me. Dice massaging is creepy, but fancy dice rolling moves are cool! Do you know of any sites or videos that show you cool ways to roll dice (fast). I thought magic trick sites might have some interesting flourishes, but um, no dice. So the quest continues.

Table Rule 11. Announce End Of Turn

When your turn ends, announce it clearly and audibly.

A simple “Done,” works. A “Done, Dave is next,” is even better.

And the platinum version? “Done, Dave’s next and Andrea – you’re on deck.”

This table rule speeds up combat in two great ways.

First, it makes it crystal clear when the next player’s turn activates.

Ever had those moments where nobody knows whose turn it is and the game simmers for awhile? You are busy checking up something behind the screen, so you don’t catch that the next player is oblivious it’s their turn.

Crisp hand-offs improve round speed and leave no guesswork about who should be declaring their action right this moment. It also prevents players from spacing out.

Think of it like a baton race. The fastest team depends on excellent hand-offs.

The second reason this table rule is so effective? When a player announces his turn is done, that’s it.

Similar to no take-backs, if something was forgotten that was potentially beneficial, it’s lost: do it on your next turn.

You stave off arguments, time-consuming retcons and re-calculations.

You also prevent the next player’s turn getting interrupted halfway through, which is a bit rude and flusters some players. Plus, sometimes the interruption forces a player to rethink their turn and start all over again. Killer.

This table rule encourages everyone to pay attention on their turn and make good decisions fast.

Bonus Tip

Print out your Table Rules For Speed and put them on the back of your GM screen. Just like B.A.’s screen in Knights of the Dinner Table, the table rules are public and there for all to reference all the time.

If you do not use a screen, post your table rules up on the wall, or get them laminated and put them on the table each session.

Summary

Done right, the Table Rules For Speed you assemble become part of your group’s culture. The silent message they deliver each session includes respect for each other, and to speed gameplay up so everyone can enjoy more encounters and story every game night.

You all have more fun because the group’s table rules grease wheels that might otherwise get jammed up from bad practices, poor communication and a weak gaming spirit.

Go through the list of table rules above. Select the ones you think would benefit your group best.

Add new ones as you sit fit (and please share them with us – I’d like to hear what yours are).

Have a group discussion. And then begin your faster combats. Roll initiative!

The death of a player naturally forces a GM to reassess his campaign and plans. But this sort of tragic event is not the only reason why this might become necessary – a player might move away, or might simply tire of the campaign and want to play something else, or might even give up roleplaying altogether – because they are getting married or have joined the army or something. I’ve seen all of these happen in the past (including the two reasons for retiring from RPGs), and with the passing of Stephen (see Remembering Stephen Tunnicliff), I’ve been forced into just such a reappraisal. I thought, therefore, that some reflection on the processes involved might be of value to our readers.

Campaign Viability

The first issue that must be considered is whether or not the campaign is even viable without the player. Was the player so central to the campaign that it is better to simply close it down? Are there still enough players to maintain the style and genre? There is no one answer to this, it will vary with number of players remaining and from campaign to campaign.

In many ways, losing a player is like losing a cast member from a successful TV show. There are times when the programme doesn’t even break stride (Dick Sergeant/ Dick York in Bewitched comes to mind), times when the programme collapses completely (can you imagine Happy Days without the Fonz?) – and there may even be rare occasions when the change is for the better (though I can’t actually think of an example off the top of my head).

Campaign Vitality

A second, related assessment asks the same questions concerning the PC that belonged to the departed player. Was the Character so central to the campaign that it cannot be salvaged without that character? Are there still enough PCs to maintain style and genre? Each player brings something unique to a campaign, usually expressed through the way they run their character – can that be replaced? Can some other player step into the role, or can the role be written out completely and replaced with someone else?

Once again, every campaign will be different in this respect.

Character Options: Immortalize, Commemorate, Retire, Replace, Discard

If the decision is made to remove or replace the missing player’s character, the next question is what to do with that character. Especially in cases such as the one in which I find myself, there is a strong desire to create some form of lasting memorial to the player through the character, immortalizing them as a permanent fixture within the campaign.

A less extreme approach is to give the character a grand exit that will commemorate their role within the campaign, though that usually works better with advance planning.

More prosaic still is to simply retire the character – have him hang up his spurs and exit, stage left, or ride off into the sunset.

If the character is too central to the campaign, there are two alternatives, both of which come under the general heading of “replace” – you can either keep the character, giving it to a new player, or you can bring in a new player with a new character to fulfill the same role. I’ve employed both approaches in the past – Blackwing, in the Zenith-3 campaign, is currently on his third player; and when Nick (one of my players) dropped out of the Fumanor campaign briefly, a new character stepped into the breach.

Finally, there is the option of simply killing the character off and letting the campaign progress as it will.

Ideally, the decision should be made in advance, after consulting the player, and with their cooperation. Where the departure is sudden, however, this is a choice not available to the GM, and he will have to make the best choice that he can on his own – perhaps after discussing the matter with the other players.

My Campaigns

So, with the preamble out of the way, it’s time to get down to cases – considering my campaigns, both active and inactive. I’ll start with my D&D campaigns and work my way through to the others.

The Rings Of Time

This D&D 3.x campaign was already shut down due to a shortage of time – prep time somewhat, and play time in particular. In this case, Stephen was 2/4ths of the central plotline and one of the two players. His involvement was absolutely central to the campaign, and for this reason, it will never now be restarted.

The Tree Of Life

When I first approached the notion of playtesting D&DNext, I wanted to do with the playtest exactly what I would do if I were really using the game system – building an ongoing campaign from it. This is the campaign that I came up with. With the game system now moving on to a new phase of playtesting, this campaign was shut down because it would have been incompatible with what WOTC wanted the playtesters to do. The plan was always to restart the campaign when it became appropriate to do so, but Stephen was going to be integral to that, so I am no longer sure about doing so. Ultimately, it probably depends on whether or not a new player can step into his shoes.

Fumanor: The Seeds Of Empire

Since Stephen was not a player in this campaign, there is no decision needed.

Fumanor: One Faith

This campaign started out as a solo campaign for one player, but added a couple more as it progressed, one of whom was Stephen. The future plans for this campaign called for it to bifurcate, half the plotlines following the original central character and the other half revolving around Stephen’s Bard. The other new PC was intended to share in Stephen’s adventures. Quite obviously, I have two options: I can maintain the campaign plan as it is, or I can scrap it and integrate the other players into the primary strand in a more traditional structure.

For quite a while, i was in two minds about which course to choose. Ultimately, three considerations came together to settle the question definitively. The first was the realization that the Bardic strand of the campaign would not work without Stephen’s Bard; the second, that the other new PC, on his own, was better suited to the non-Bardic strand; and the third, that if I had the Bardic Strand happen in the campaign background and increased the significance of events therein, I could immortalize Stephen’s Bard as a key element of either the big finish of this campaign, or as a central element of the next.

It means a minor revision of the campaign plan, and the scrapping of about half the adventures planned, but it is by far the best answer for both this campaign and for the desire to immortalize the contributions my friend had made to my games.

Shards Of Divinity

We had a new player join the original Fumanor campaign about 2/3 of the way through, but Shannon was a relative novice when it came to campaigns of the intricacy and complexity of the games I run. He found himself out his depth and dropped out after a little less than a year. Part of the problem, he felt, was that he had not been part of the campaign from the start, and was always trying breathlessly to catch up with the other players. So he asked me to come up with a new campaign for him to learn in. The result was the Shards Of Divinity campaign.

Stephen’s character was a member of the supporting cast, one who was about to come into his own as the campaign moves into a political phase. Without him, the tasks facing the PCs in fulfilling their ambitions will be more difficult, but Stephen was not central to this campaign. It’s my thinking at this point that I will simply give his character a new Contract to fulfill (he’s a thief who has recently turned Assassin) and quietly write Stephen’s character out of the campaign.

Fumanor: The Ultimate Chaos (working title)

It came as no surprise to my players when I started compiling ideas for the Next Fumanor campaign shortly after play got underway in the current campaigns. The plan was for each of the three Fumanor campaigns to contribute an epic-level character for a big finish to the entire campaign set. From the original campaign, Ian Gray would reprise Aurella, the greatest mage of the known world; from the Seeds Of Empire campaign, Nick would contribute Tajik, his Orcish Cleric; and from the One Faith campaign, Stephen would contribute his Bard.

Those plans have obviously been knocked in a heap by Stephen’s passing, but using the revised plans evolved for dealing with his loss in the One Faith campaign permits the original idea to be perpetuated, at least in spirit. We may well need a third player to join the campaign, though; fortunately, we have one who believes he is ready to step up into the “Big Leagues” in Shannon, after two years or more of the Shards Of Divinity campaign.

The Warcry Campaign

This started out as a solo campaign for one player, and although Stephen and one other player subsequently joined it, they were always peripheral to the overall campaign. So this campaign will continue without Stephen. The question then becomes, what to do with his character? At the moment, they are in the middle of the multipart epic “Daughters Of Darion” plot arc, in which the titular PC has to locate husbands for his daughters, and interrupting that will be quite difficult and badly disrupt the overall narrative of the campaign. At the same time, that plot arc has more than 2 years left to run, and Stephen’s character would be a complex and difficult-to-handle NPC.

If the campaign is going to be damaged, regardless, the next goal must be to minimize that damage. The best answer is to impose a short, sharp shock – get it over and done with as quickly as possible and then get the campaign back on track. That, to me, suggests an intermission in the middle of the plot arc – and right now, when they happen to be in between adventures, is the best time for such an interruption.

Having made that decision, I then have to think about an adventure that will lead to Stephen’s character retiring or dying or something suitably dramatic. It was always intended that the campaign would eventually travel to Stephen’s Character’s Homeworld and confront his arch-enemy there. If I write the character out of the campaign, that plotline will never be needed – and there’s been a lot of work put into that plotline. I always intended to slot it in somewhere – it doesn’t appear in the campaign plan that I outlined in my discussion of adventure names – so why not here?

With a few tweaks, it would give Stephen’s character an epic send-off, writing him out of the campaign. The only difference would be to ramp it up and give the character a predetermined pyrrhic victory instead of letting the character find a solution that enabled him to continue in the campaign.

Zenith-3: The Regency Campaign

Stephen was not a player in this campaign, but his past characters remain an indelible part of its history. More than any other campaigns of mine, this one bears his imprint. His characters, especially Behemoth, will remain a lasting legacy.

The Adventurers’ Club

This campaign has a much more ensemble feel to it. Stephen was one player out of 4, so it should be possible for it to continue. Nevertheless, it is now at the limit of viability, in my opinion – I’m only one half of the refereeing on the campaign – losses for various reasons (it started with 8 players, of whom I was one) are now seriously threatening that ensemble tone. It’s almost at the point where players and co-GMs might want to discuss the possibility of players taking on a second character, or of bringing in one or two new recruits.

None of these decisions is entirely up to me, since I only co-referee the campaign. They will need to be discussed with my co-GM before a final decision is reached.

In terms of characters, Stephen’s character is central to both the current adventure and to the next one that we have planned. I think that we can probably rewrite the next one to focus on a different PC, probably Saxon’s priest; Ian Mackinder’s Sea Captain would be a more logical focus, but he is already the central focus of the B-story. The difficulty we will face is that Ian is not a very strong detective when playing games; he may love the detective genre, especially Sherlock Holmes, but that is not his strong suite and never has been. In that B-plot, he would very much have been relying on Saxon and Nick’s contributions in that area; now he will have to rely on Nick alone. Will they be up to the challenge? We may have to resort to some NPC assistance or even to being a little more generous in interpreting situations and feeding the players clues.

That leaves the current adventure, which really is all about Stephen’s Character. I had come up with the plotline and Blair and I had rejected it as being just too evil – but then Stephen asked us to come up with a plotline in which his character gained a Noble Title, and since that was at the heart of the plotline I had devised, we basically said to each other, “He’s asked for it.” The question to be asked is whether or not we play out the adventure, or simply tell the players what the outcome of it was and move on to the next adventure – which is not yet completely written and ready for play. My feeling is that we should continue, and tweak the ending so that the character gets to retire with his title intact. Another of our mutual friends and ex-players, Michael Price, is perhaps the most capable of emulating Stephen’s sensibilities, and the possibility of asking him to fill in for the rest of the current adventure is also something Blair and I need to discuss.

The washup

The old show-business maxim is “The Show Must Go On”. A roleplaying game is not the same thing; there is no reason why you can’t shut one down following the loss of a central player and start a new one in its place. But, at the same time, there is a natural desire to respect the investments in time and effort that have been made by the other players (not to mention yourself) and an inclination to immortalize or commemorate the PC whose player is no longer at the table.

There are times when the right thing to do, and the best thing to do in terms of the campaign, is to give in to those inclinations. But there are also times when the best thing to do is to write the character out, either with a bang or with a very quiet whimper.

All too often, GMs only have one solution in their dicebox to deal with the sort of eventualities listed at the start of this article. Hopefully, this has expanded the repertoire of tools available for coping with this particular problem. If you need assistance in replacing the player, of course, you can consult our ebook, ‘Filling The Empty Chair’.

This article has now been translated into French by our friends at PtgPtb!

An empty Death is a terrible thing

When Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) died in Star Trek: The Next Generation, there was an outcry amongst fans. Not because the character had been killed off so much as because she died what was later described even within the series as “an empty death” – a death without meaning, carried out purely to demonstrate how evil and powerful the enemy that week – a pool of black goo – was.

We expect our heroes to survive, or to die a heroic death. Either is usually an acceptable option.

Wandering through the Wilderness

That means that wandering monsters and random encounters should never put a PC at risk. This imposes a tricky burden on the GM, because without the potential threat, such encounters are empty and meaningless – and boring.

The solution to this conundrum is to make sure that such random encounters are always plot-significant in some way. That in turn means that any danger they pose is entirely warranted, and the GM can institute such threats with a clear conscience.

Snippets of information

This changes the problem from a difficult one to something that is easily manageable with a bit of pre-planning. The question now becomes how to impart significance to random encounters.

Well, there are two types of encounter – those that will be trivial because they pose no threat to the PCs, and those that will not be trivial. There’s no need to impart significance to the first, which leaves only the second; and those are almost always encounters with sentient creatures. Which offers a solution – by using them to solve a second problem.

GMs always have a lot of information to impart to the players. Information overload is something that is all too easy to incur. By using these random encounters as a conduit for nuggets and snippets of such information, the encounter becomes one of significance.

Relative Value

That is not the end of the story, of course. It makes no sense for high-value information to come from a low-value encounter; for the information to be valued by the PCs it must carry a risk proportionate to its value.

The solution is to break the information to be imparted to the PCs down into individual chunks. Keep a list, sorted or rated by importance. When an encounter takes place, select the appropriate piece of information from the list. Give minimal or even misleading context. Treat them like rumors – because that’s exactly what they are.

A Side-benefit

There’s a side-benefit to this approach. High-level players who over-rely on Teleport for hit-and-run dungeon crawls will suddenly find that they are leaping into a situation blind, and having to work twice as hard, simply because they are bypassing all the informative nuggets that the GM has prepared. The GM can give his bad guys any enhancement they need with a clear conscience – complete immunity to whatever they are normally vulnerable to, for example, or the fact that they have allies. In fact, whatever is necessary to make them suitably difficult for the PCs to overcome – simply because they have chosen to ignore the hints and clues and advance warning that the GM has provided for them.

The surrogacy alternative

Another approach is to ensure that fatalities in meaningless encounters are experienced by NPCs – surrogates. Redshirts, if you will. While most GMs dislike the practice to some extent, because it drastically increases the workload during play, most PCs like to surround themselves with NPCs. If they are going to do that anyway, why not take advantage of the fact?

An Empty Life is a terrible thing

Originally, this is where this article was going to end. But then I received an email from one of my former players, someone that I had contacted regarding the death of my friend and player, Stephen, about whom I wrote on Monday. In the process of catching up with each other, he related the following story (slightly edited):

I’ve only been involved with one gaming group here in the US, ran by my ex-wife’s brother – it was not bad, fairly interesting, but he had a REAL problem with ‘player death’ in that it never happened… even if you WANTED it to happen – which really conflicted with the style he was trying to run for his world. He was shooting for something that felt like epic myth, but failed to take into account that in all the great epics, the hero’s death is a major point. Without typing up 10 pages of backstory, I’ll try to summarize what happened, and actually annoyed me to the point of leaving the group a short time later.

As with most big epic stories, our main enemy was a Loki type demigod – you know, bastard half-son trickster, red-headed stepchild type that was just a malevolent PITA for us constantly… especially moi, who would take every opportunity to snub, insult, and generally just mess with him.

We came to a big story point in this game where we were holding back a horde of beasties from the gates of the major city – undermanned and outnumbered, you get the deal – so the big bad guy decides to personally turn up. At this point I was saying to myself ‘enough is enough’. We broke for dinner at this point as a cliffhanger and I quietly plotted something that would probably end the entire conflict, possibly foul up this demigod really nasty, but will 100% kill my character. I figured ‘epic hero setting, this will be awesome, I get to die the huge epic hero death!’

In a previous ‘solo hero quest’, my character (an exceptional archer) had been given a bow with a bunch of fairly nice arrows and some nifty properties. One was an arrow that does no damage when it hits a target but which permits the next arrow I fire from anywhere to hit that target. I had already abused this on one occasion to blackmail a King – shot him in the neck and left it at that (the DM was “Hmmm I didn’t think of THAT!”).

Another was an arrow that just sent someone ‘home’ – their home and hearth. Pretty useless, you might think. And finally, the bow: if I cut my palm on the bowstring prior to firing, whatever I shot lost hit points if they tried to advance on me past the point where they were when it hit them – but I would also lose 1/4 of the HP inflicted on the target.

If you’re thinking ahead you can see where this is leading. This demigod turns up at the gates and summons more beasties to reinforce the attacking hoards. I shout out to him, so he can see me good and proper as I aim, hit him with the ‘mark’ arrow right on his left shoulder. He laughs and gives his ‘puny mortal’ speech. Off goes a second arrow, which hits him in the forehead; it bounces off and I just say ‘home!’, sending him back to the underworld he crawled out from. The DM is scratching his head at this point, right up until the next round when I say ‘Okay, I’m cutting my palm on the bowstring’.

The whole table went silent. It was priceless. The DM asked me roll – and I get a critical success! …and I just casually ask ‘So, how far away IS the underworld… in meters?’

The point being that I had set up the villain. He would HAVE to travel back to make an example of one who had DARED not only to touch him, but had shot him three times. That sort of affront you can’t leave rest! He’d travel back, sustaining damage the whole way. He would be so damaged that at he’d probably be banished to underworld to lick his wounds, and either way an entire city of defenders would see him all jacked up by a mortal. Of course I’d already be dead when he arrived; I’d be in the negative millions of hit points, there was no coming back from this, and I knew exactly what I was doing…. Epic Hero, Epic Death.

It didn’t happen that way. In ‘the nick of time’ all the battle clerics joined hands and did some heal critical riff in unison, and throw in some unasked for and improbable Divine Intervention and wow, I lived. How did the Battle Clerics even know what I was doing? I was the only person in game that would be privy to exactly what I’d planned and executed!

So I survived, but the character wasn’t fun to play anymore. No moment in future gaming with that character could possibly rival that moment, that was the pinnacle, and thus should have been the end point for that character.

The point that Peter is making with this story is that the GM should not have messed with the Players intentions. By bending everything all out of shape to keep the character alive, against the deliberate intent of the player he cheapened the entire expression of genre within the campaign.

In a nutshell, he railroaded the campaign. Really, REALLY badly. There were two possible motives for this: One, it messed with the big finish that he had planned; and/or two, he wanted to be sure that all the PCs had a share in the glory.

And it wasn’t necessary. A little flexibility, a little creativity, and a willingness to discard the big finish that he had planned, would have enabled the GM to up the ante enormously. Writing off the cuff, I replied with the following:

I would have let your action succeed, and let your character die. That of course would not have stopped the events that the bad guy had set in motion – someone from his army would have appointed themselves his heir and successor. The rest of the PCs barely escape with their lives, and the bad guys’ forces run rampant.

Meanwhile, you and your enemy get to confront each other in an afterlife that should not exist and did not exist until you killed this demigod – your enmity is so strong that it transcends death. Not that either of you can actually hurt each other any more, your stats have all equalized from the release of the energies that had made the bad guy semi-divine.

The new #1 bad guy then figures out that his previous master is not completely dead and can be used as a power source, permitting him to up the ante even further. What he doesn’t realize is that he is expending a limited store of energy. The rest of the PCs figure out where he is getting his seemingly-inexhaustible supply of energy (without realizing what the source is) and set out to cut off the supply. They appear by your side in the afterlife.

At this point you all have a clear advantage over the former demigod enemy, but you have realized in the meantime that simply killing him will release his power in its entirety to the former #2 – with no-one left to stop the new Bad Guy.

The only solution: for the rest of the PCs to give up their escape route to free you from the afterlife, taking your place, because you are now the only being around with enough power to take down the #2 after the rest of the PCs do the old #1 in, once and for all. In other words, “If, in an epic climax, a PC comes up with a masterstroke, let it work – then up the ante again”.

An empty death is no worse than an empty life. Unfairly preserving the life of a PC, in Peter’s example, undermined the value of that PC’s entire life.

The Lessons Of Life And Death

The next time you are planning an encounter in a game, make sure that any PC death resulting from it will be a meaningful death, and not a random act of violence designed to make the villain look mean. Any time a PC dies, it should be important to the plot. And if a Hero decides to save the world with a Heroic Sacrifice, don’t cheapen it by undermining the Death. Make sure the player knows the consequences of his choice, and then say ‘yes’. Then up the ante in an even bigger finish if you have to do something to involve the other PCs.

A friend of mine, and a long-time gaming associate, passed away from a massive heart attack this morning. I think I always knew that one day I would receive a phone call with that unhappy news, and at the same time, felt that day would never come. If having fun can be described as feeding the inner child, then Stephen Tunnicliff didn’t just indulge that child, he plied it with campiness and whimsy at every opportunity. While the results could sometimes be annoying, more than often his sense of fun was pervasive and encouraged that inner child in all those around him. At the same time, he was one of the most generous men I have ever known, capable of more exuberance and joy de vivre than anyone else I have ever met. He attended my 21st, and my 40th, Birthday parties. I was at his 50th a few years back.

Stephen in the early '80s, his sense of humor on full display

We regularly had New Years Marathon gaming sessions with him – three days of gaming, morning, afternoon, evening, and night. For many years he was my regular transport to gaming, and often he was the hub around which our gaming revolved. It is a measure of our friendship that of all the campaigns that I have run over the years, Stephen was a player at one time or another in all but two or perhaps three of them. In the histories of those campaigns, he left an indelible impression. Stephen was the kind of player who would pull a lever on the wall just to see what would happen. If given an opportunity to sew mischief as a character, he had to be held back not to indulge the temptation. His first act in the One Faith campaign was to swap the labels on some vials of ingredients being used to brew quick-and-dirty healing potions by an NPC whose attitude had rubbed him the wrong way, just as a practical joke at the NPCs expense – and not realizing that the opportunity had been deliberately set up as Stephen-bait in order to advance the plot. At the same time, he was capable of getting more deeply into character than anyone I knew, because he knew his own tastes and tendencies and created characters that would give himself the opportunity to indulge his own sense of humor. There’s a lesson in character construction in that practice for all of us. I don’t think I will ever sit at a gaming table without remembering him. Rest in peace, Stephen. My games, and my life, will be the poorer without you.

Campaign Mastery was down for a few hours this week due to a configuration issue resulting from a server restore by our host. This manifested as an offer to download a file instead of opening the site. Diagnosing and solving the problem meant that this article couldn’t be finished in time to upload it on Monday as intended. On the other hand, it’s our first downtime at the site since we first went online, over three years ago, so that’s not a bad track record! I just wanted to take a minute to apologize for any inconvenience.

Last Thursday I posted “One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post” and promised to do a future article on how I use the same techniques to write an adventure. The intention at the time was to show the development of a real adventure from one of my campaigns as the subject and example, but I have since had second thoughts on that count; firstly, since none of the adventures coming up in any of my campaigns are going to be typical in this respect, and secondly, to avoid giving my players any additional OOC knowledge.

That leaves only two options: break my promise (something I try not to do), or come up with a whole new campaign in which to set this example adventure.

To most people, the idea of coming up with an entirely new campaign on just a day or two’s notice might be daunting, but it’s not something that holds great fear for me, as illustrated by my past giveaway campaign ideas here at Campaign Mastery – All Is Three and The Frozen Lands. And, as it happens, the day after posting One word at a time, and coming to the realization that I needed a new Campaign Premise for the purpose, I thought of one. The fact that it came to me while working on ideas for this, completely unrelated, article is an absolute bonus.

The Big Picture

I’m a big fan of implementing bold new ideas into each campaign, giving them a distinctive background structure that makes them different and fresh. The Frozen Lands was about the return of an Ice Age when the world was geared up to fight Global Warming; All Is Three focuses on a hierarchy of Lizardkind evolution and the relationship between three energy types (Divine, Defiling, and Arcane); The Zenith-3 Earth-Regency Campaign is about superheroics in a world where the British Empire never fell; and so on.

I’ve been trumpeting this philosophy almost as long as I’ve been writing here at Campaign Mastery, starting – appropriately enough – with A Quality Of Spirit: Big Questions In RPGs from December 31, 2008. This article talks about questions such as “What is the soul?”, “How Does Magic Work?”, “Does modern Physics apply?”, “What is the nature of time?”, “How was the universe/multiverse created?”, “Are there other planes / other dimensions, and if so where did they come from and what keeps them apart?”, “What are the Gods and where do they come from?”, and so on, and the importance that these questions can and should play in designing a campaign.

Particularly significant is my final comment to the article, where I state:

“…The important thing when considering a ‘Big Picture’ question is working out the implications down to the mundane levels…”

before adding,

“…One of these days I’ll probably write a post on how to do that…”

…which also tells you how far back my ideas list for Campaign Mastery articles stretches!

The Little Guy

That’s what this article is all about – at least making a start on this very big topic. The ambition is to take a campaign concept as it is being developed and look at how to pursue the implications and consequences of the big ideas down to the level of the everyday world, and why it’s important.

In order to achieve this goal in any reasonable length, it’s vital that the “big ideas” actually be a little smaller and more compact than usual.

Why?

The short answer is verisimilitude, believability, plausibility. The longer answer is sustainability.

It is certainly possible to have a campaign in which you have the big ideas but haven’t worked out the implications. The result is that when the players start looking at those implications, they ask “why isn’t this [logical consequence] of [big picture idea] happening?”, and you have to scramble on the spot to answer it.

It’s almost inevitable that you will have to do so occasionally, in any event. But the less development work you have put in, the more you have to improvise, and the greater the chances of a contradiction – which then leads to more scrambling to resolve that contradiction.

On the other hand, if you are at least one step ahead of the players most of the time in your understanding of the game world and how it works, then you can simply sit back, look smug, and reply “That’s a good question. Your character doesn’t know the answer. How are you going to find out?”

In fact, your players can start (in theory) with knowledge zero about “why is it so?” and discover the root premises at the heart of the campaign as they play, while the GM can deliberately salt the adventure path with interesting and enlightening factoids and experiences.

The result is a campaign with inherently greater interest than just another knock-off of the generic fantasy model.

The Serendipitous Collusion Of Disparate Inspirations

So, let’s talk about this new campaign so that we can get into the discussion of how to pursue the implications of big ideas down to the common-man level.

This campaign premise unites elements from a recently-aired episode of the BBC TV series Time Team titled “A Copper Bottomed Dig”, about the Swansea Copper Smelting Industry at Pentrechwyth, Swansea, and specifically the slave trade. Added to that was my recent article on Demographics and Aging, and the impact on the societies of long-lived races by their longevity; and a number of CM blog posts that I had recently reviewed to pick out the ones where I felt the anchor graphic had contributed something extra to the article (refer One word at a time for the results).

The result was a “perfect storm” of ideas that gelled into a concatenation of campaign elements.

Unlike the previous two campaign examples that I have offered here, this particular campaign is not open-ended; it has a specific overall story to tell and it comes to an end after that tale is told.

The Slaves

I started with the concept of slavery, and the notion of “the lesser of two evils” and asked myself under what circumstances would slavery be the lesser of two evils? Obviously, when racial survival was threatened, with enslavement offering an escape.

The next question didn’t really occur to me – for some reason, possibly the influence of All is three or a recent mention on Twitter of them as foes, but from the very beginning I saw the slaves in question as Kobolds.

From there, asking “why” each time knocked down successive dominos. Kobolds enslaved themselves to the various PC races because they were under threat of extermination from Gnolls who viewed them as food.

The Gnolls, who would normally prefer easier prey, faced starvation due to a famine gripping the world – a notion derived from another recent documentary on the collapse of the Egyptian Empire. And what might cause a famine? How about a devastating drought?

That gave me the entire story of why the Kobolds were slaves.

The Campaign Plotline

Next, we need a twist and a direction for the campaign to follow.

What if the Slavery wasn’t simply about survival? What if the Kobolds were in league with someone who had arranged the whole thing simply to put the Kobolds in position to do something more important – like a mass slaughter of sentients?

Perhaps the energy released when something dies, and which Necromancy taps, is proportionate to the lifespan of the creature that is killed. A Necromancer doesn’t have the power to cause a famine, but he can do a deal with someone who does, such as a Devil or Demon.

Perhaps the Necromancer had built some device designed to do something big – make him a god, say. To function, it needs vast amounts of life energy, but it needs to be powered up in stages or the device will absorb more energy than it can store. Each successive wave of murders, in sequence of the lifespan of the creatures targeted, provides the power to use in controlling and absorbing the next stage.

Halflings/Gnomes to Humans to Dwarves to Elves, a hierarchy of devastation. Perhaps it would need to be followed by a Deity or Demigod? That would certainly provide the Necromantic Power to permit the Necromancer to ascend.

It seems an overly ambitious plan for any mortal Necromancer to come up with out of the blue, but what if he weren’t the ultimate evil? What if the being behind the drought had been putting ideas into the Necromancer’s head all along, and rather than simply being a tool of the Necromancer, was the real villain? The degree of planning and organization points to a Ruling Devil not a Demon Prince.

But my players would be expecting a plot twist, and would be looking for it. To surprise them, I need something more – perhaps a second plot twist?

How about if he himself was just an unwitting pawn, the puppet of a deranged Deity, and the real purpose of the Necromantic device was not to elevate the Necromancer to godhood, but to destroy Hades and the other planes of Hell, wiping out the Devils and Demons who abide there? A Deity, tired of the eternal struggle with the forces of evil, might well become desperate enough to consider the sacrifice of 4/5ths of the sentient “good” population of the world, and one of his fellow deities, to be an acceptable price to pay for total victory over those forces.

Putting It All Together

So, what we have is a campaign with the following basic themes:

• Slavery
• Deception
• Betrayal
• Insanity
• Necromancy & Life
• The Price Of Virtue

And with this structure:

1. Campaign Introduction – Establish drought, famine, slavery, social impacts, intro characters
2. Theme Introduction – Establish the themes of deception, betrayal, insanity, and the price of virtue, bind characters into a team. Introduce the relative life-force concept.
3. Gnoll Raid – Establish the Gnoll presence and the Necromancy theme (arm the leader with a life-stealing weapon)
4. Halfling Massacre – Begin the core plotline. Halflings killed by Kobolds, Kobolds killed by Gnolls – no witnesses. Humans, Dwarves, Elves begin taking precautions against slave uprisings.
5. Gnoll Scouting – PCs are sent to scout a Gnoll encampment in an attempt to figure out what they are up to. Outcome: The Gnolls report to a mysterious ‘Master’ who is pulling the strings.
6. Human Massacre – The PCs return to report what they have discovered only to find that what happened to the Halflings has now been done to Humans. Due to the precautions taken, there are survivors, but all is chaos. The PCs have to rally the survivors and bring order from that chaos.
7. Necromantic Spillage – The cleanup detail (one of the jobs that the PCs will have to organize) is disrupted when some of the workers turn cannibal, seemingly die from some form of poisoning (negative energy suffusing the corpses) and rise as ghouls.
8. Gnoll Invasion – The PCs come to the hard realization that there are not enough people to survive as an independent community when the Gnolls take advantage of the collapsed defenses to launch an invasion. They have to lead their rag-tag band of survivors to the nearest safe refuge, the tunnels of the dwarves, under repeated attack from Gnolls.
9. Refugee Underground – The Dwarves are suspicious and reluctant to accept the refugees. They are having internal problems of their own – their citizens have been vanishing. The PCs have to solve the mystery or they will be turned away. They find evidence that the missing dwarves have been captured and enslaved by Drow, but things don’t add up. Digging deeper, they discover that a Dwarf has been eliminating rivals for the affection of a popular female dwarf.
10. Zombie Apocalypse – The Dwarven crypts crack open in an earthquake, releasing Dwarven Zombies with added powers that no-one can explain.
11. Dwarven Massacre – The Kobold slaves working the mines for their Dwarven Masters take advantage of the chaos caused by the Zombie Apocalypse to turn on their masters, weakening the defenses against the Zombies. The PCs and the tatters of the Dwarven and human populations are cornered and fighting for their lives as wave after wave of uber-zombies attack. They are about to attempt escape Through an act of sheer desperation, when….
12. Elvish Intervention – …a rescue party of Elves arrive. They lead the party and the other survivors back to their camp, where they reveal that they had come in search of the PCs specifically, because they had detected a funneling of the life energy liberated by the slaughters leading to something Necromantic going on in the Gnoll lands – and the PCs are the experts in conditions there. All the Necromantic problems they have experienced have just been leakage, a side-effect of something bigger. The discussion is then interrupted as a band of Demons erupts from a hole in the sky. Their gloating and shouts during the ensuing battle describe the combatants as “the ones who know too much” – referring to the Elves as well as the PCs.
13. Raid – The Elves lead the PCs back to their community, only to discover that while the Demons were attempting to destroy the PCs and their Elvish rescue party, Gnolls had set fire to the Elvish Forest (distracting the defenders) while Demons had freed the Kobolds that had been imprisoned following the PCs warning, trapping the Elves between flames and a violent death. The Elves are sure that some of their kin will have survived; they will take charge of the survivors and lead them to safety, but they need the PCs to mount a secret raid into Gnoll Territory in search of whoever or whatever is responsible – and stopping them. The Elves don’t know exactly where it is, but they can point the PCs in roughly the right direction. And so they set out…
14. Necromancer – When the PCs finally reach the tower of the Necromancer (the only structure still standing in the right direction), they have to get into it. Inside, they discover that a High Priest of [deity to be sacrificed] had survived the massacre and is being tortured by a tall figure with very small arms until he summons his deity’s avatar. The PCs interrupt and fight the Necromancer [species?] to an apparent victory, rescuing the High Priest. Afterwards, they learn about the Necromancer’s foul creation, the Ascension Crystal, and the purpose behind the Kobold Betrayal. They also learn that leakage from the Ascension Crystal is responsible for the Undead Traumas that have added to civilization’s recent woes, and that the problem will only get worse if the Crystal remains intact. They are considering ways of destroying it when [Demon’s Name], a Balor, appears and reaches for the crystal…
15. Life Is Hell – In an attempt to drive off the Balor, [The High Priest] summons the avatar of [Deity to be destroyed]. Balor Gloats, fires a bolt of energy into the Ascension Crystal which blasts the Avatar. Reality is briefly disrupted, revealing the connection between Avatar and Deity. As the PCs watch in horror, the Necromantic Energy erupts up the connection, turning the Deity into a greasy spot. [Demon] Gloats some more, exultantly proclaiming that the Ascension Crystal is now fully charged, a theological bomb capable of destroying the Heavenly Planes in one fell swoop – or perhaps he will employ it to destroy the Archdemons of the Nine Hells and ascend to dominion over all. He gates out with the Ascension Crystal. The Gods show up to investigate what had happened to their fallen brother. They reveal that they cannot enter the Abyss – if it’s bad for mortals it’s even more deadly for Deities – it is going to be up to the PCs to save Divinity from extinction. Succeed and eventually the survivors will repopulate the world, fail and the Demons will assume dominion over all. But they can assist the PCs by giving them superior equipment – the best in the world, in fact. When so armed and equipped, they open the Gates Of Hell long enough for the PCs to enter. Once there, they have to follow the trail of the Balor responsible until they recapture the device. This quickly leads to a confrontation with the first of the Archdemons who rule the Nine Hells…
16. The Council of Nine – I’ve always felt that the Lawfulness of Devils would translate into a firm hierarchy, and there is no use in having a position within that hierarchy if it doesn’t get flaunted before your lessers every now and then. That implies that the ruling Lords of the Nine Hells would have regular gatherings for the airing and resolution of grievances and the addressing problems affecting the entire group – a conclave or council of some sort. It should also be clear that no Balor could get away with the things [Responsible Balor] has done without the tacit approval of one of the Ruling Lords. As soon as the PCs reach the uppermost layer of Hell, they should find themselves enmeshed in a lawful-evil bureaucracy through which they have to fight there way in order to present their case to that Council. (Members of the council are detailed in Fiendish Codex II, Tyrants Of The Nine Hells). As a result, the PCs will find themselves enmeshed in the ongoing dominance games of the Council, but will eventually get to present their case to the most powerful of the Ruling Lords, Asmodeus. Of all the Lords, Bel would seem to be the most likely to be behind the events, but Levistus would run him a close second and either Baalzebul or Mephistophiles a distant third. Asmodeus would seem to have the most to lose, and is capable of compelling the cooperation of the others, so if the PCs are convincing, they will win permission to play detective in the Nine Hells.
17. The Face Of Evil – The PCs discover that none of the Nine current Archdukes Of Evil are responsible, the culprit is one who was cast down from the council in “recent” times – The Hag Countess (refer Glasya in Fiendish Codex II), who has forged an alliance with Belial. Confrontation by the Council results in confusion as both first attempt to lie their way out of trouble and then blame each other; Asmodeus will verify that neither of them actually thought of the idea, the Balor [Responsible Demon] who acted as their instrument and go-between approached each in the other’s name. A search of the records of Hell has meanwhile established that the name of the Balor is not recorded on their infernal rolls. But if he’s not a Balor, then who or what is he? And how long do the PCs have left before he uses the power of the Ascension Crystal? For that matter, why hasn’t he done so already?
18. The Axe Falls – The Epic Conclusion. As the nearest thing to “Neutral Parties”, equally mistrusted by all, the Council Of Nine set aside their enmity (briefly) in the face of a common and unknown enemy and invest the PCs with command of a small army of Hell. The Ascension Crystal is located in the centre of the central layer of the Nine Hells, right next to the entombed true body of Levistus. Clearly, he has withheld vital knowledge from the Council. Confronting his Aspect reveals that he was challenged to a duel of honor – and lost. Had he won the duel, he would have been freed from his prison; since he lost, he was compelled to assist in the creation and empowerment of the Ascension Crystal, and the manipulation of Balial and the Hag Countess who caused the Drought. He is somehow blocked from naming the other party to the duel, but Asmodeus sets to work unbinding him from the compulsion – at which point an Army of Archons invades the council chamber and Hell generally. Although they don’t have the power to defeat the Lords of Hell, they can delay them – which leaves the PCs as the only independent force that can stop whoever is ultimately responsible from triggering the Ascension Crystal. Asmodeus forces the aspect of Levistus to open a portal to his true body, where his servants continue their unceasing attempts to cut their master’s body free of the ice that entombs it. The PCs, pursued by and under fire from Archons themselves, travel through it to confront the true architect of the untold misery, the Mad God [Identity to be determined].

The final parts of this campaign completely (and temporarily) invert the loyalties of the PCs, as they go from compelling the reluctant aid of the Archdevils to being their allies against the Mad God. At some point in that final battle, they will experience a reality check in which the irony of their situation will be emphasized to them, when their enemy attempts to employ Reason against them. The PCs hold the balance of power – they can turn the Ascension Crystal against Heaven and the Mad God (wiping out the Gods in the process) or permit the Mad God to wield it against their temporary (reluctant) allies – justifying all the evil that has brought them to this point. Of course, the price of doing what’s right means giving the Devils unchecked superiority over the mortal world. They may even fight amongst themselves! Ultimately, they get to decide the fate of the world.

It needs a name

Even when a campaign idea is only in initial development, it needs a name, if only to provide a label for use in discussing the campaign. This can be the final title, or just a working title. Based on the apocalyptic events of the outline and on the environment (for reasons that will become clear shortly), I have decided to give this campaign the working title of “Arignoza”, an unrecognizable blend of “Arizona” and “Ragnerok”. This will be the name of the human kingdom from which the PCs, as a group, will derive, giving it an obvious meaning for the players to comprehend immediately. It also has a second layer of meaning since “Arig” sounds very like “Arid”, which describes the drought-stricken premise of the game world. Only the GM needs to know that there is a third, even more obscure layer of meaning – and yet, knowing the derivation of the name, the GM can never help but be reminded of the overall plot every time he mentions the name of the campaign, a useful mnemonic.

Big Changes for ‘the little guy’

None of this will be all that credible if the initial foundations of the campaign are not plausible. There are two things that whose impact should be felt, and displayed, by every member of society, in everything they do. Those are the drought and its consequences; and the “Slavery” of the Kobolds. A third element, the threat of the Gnolls and reactions to it, will also need careful integration. Finally, the connection between lifespan and the strength of the life force liberated and utilizes by Necromancy will need to be established very clearly. These are all requirements of the first two adventures in the campaign. Later, the society and bureaucracy of Demons will need equal care in its preparations, but a lot of that effort is carried out for the GM in Fiendish Codex II.

The Effects Of The Drought

Urban populations need food to survive, and food needs water. Civilization will necessarily contract into those areas where water is still available – along the banks of the major rivers, the sources of natural springs, and mountainous valleys. Entire villages and towns will be necessarily abandoned, or starve. The ruins will provide shelter for undesirable neighbors of all types – provided that they, too, can survive on minimal water supplies.

Cattle and Horses need grass, and grass would not fare very well under the impact of a decades-long drought. Large livestock would be a luxury that few can afford, and the prices and upkeep of such creatures would become prohibitively expensive. Crops that require a lot of water like wheat, cotton, and rice would also fail over wide areas. Access to potable water would be the determining factor in land values, and wars would no doubt be fought between those who have and those who want.

Inevitably, famine would result, and as much as nine tenths of the population would die off within the second or third year – there would be a small grace period while people survived on stores. For some years, ruined towns and cities would be havens of disease, entered only at great risk and greater need.

Animal products would also become much more expensive, and be much less common. Cloth in general would be reserved for the rich (wool would be too hot to wear except in the mountains). Dried and woven reeds would become the common clothing. It would become more common to travel by night, when cooler temperatures would reduce hydration needs. Similarly, hard labor would also be a nightly activity.

Humans require light in order to work at such times, and the combination of torches & lanterns with the naturally dry conditions would cause a number of devastating fires. Buildings would be made of adobe, clay bricks, or stone, not timber. In fact, forests would shrink and deteriorate. For a while, there would be abundant dead wood for furniture, but as the drought entered its second decade, this commodity would also be becoming more scarce and valuable.

Overall, a continental climate would more closely resemble that of Arizona or Mexico.

The depopulation would also have its effects on the price of labor. Less time could be spared from the needs of survival for any form of higher education, and skills would necessarily be far less broad. It would be worth considering a house rule reducing the number of skill points available to characters, or perhaps many class skills would become cross-class skills.

Any community which contained a wizard or sorcerer capable of summoning a Water Elemental would prosper in comparison with those without. Such abilities would automatically make one a prominent member of society to be catered to.

A systematic approach

All of the above were determined by free association. For a while, that approach works – but it’s altogether too easy to overlook something. For that reason, when I am assessing the impact of a big change like this one, I use the free association technique to get my thoughts into the correct headspace and then turn to a more systematic approach.

In sequence, I consider:

• Products, Crops, & Foodstuffs,
• Skills, especially Crafts & Professions,
• Social Impacts,
• Economic & Employment Impacts,
• Educational Impacts,
• Social Class Impacts,
• Law-enforcement Impacts,
• Theological Impacts,
• Myths and Legends,
• Government Impacts,
• Race Relations & Lingual Impacts,
• Military & Natural Disaster Impacts, and finally,
• Character Class Impacts.

This list is carefully sequenced in such a way that contributing secondary factors can be taken into account based on earlier findings. The relative availability of products, crops, and foodstuffs determines what raw materials exist for skills to utilize, and hence alters the skill pool. Both of these in turn weigh into the social impact, and those consequences are then reflected in the economic and employment effects on society, and so on. For each item, I use the relevant sections of PHB and DMG (or their equivalents) as a reference checklist.

Once I’ve been through the list once, I go through it again looking for Tertiary consequences, but in general the first pass is usually enough. The goal is to determine the impact on the everyday lives of everyday citizens, because this is the framework into which characters – and especially PCs – have to fit.

I then repeat the process for the next ‘big ticket’ item on the list, bearing in mind the consequences of the first.

For example, and in the case of this campaign concept, the lack of draft animals would mean that slave labor would be a natural substitute. In order to obtain enough food for everyone, this would in fact be an absolute necessity. Kobold-carried litters would also replace wagons. If it is assumed that the Lizard-like characteristics of Kobolds would make them more able to survive on low water rations, they might well be better-suited to survival in this environment. Having a Kobold slave could markedly improve the survival prospects and prosperity of even the lowest and most poverty-stricken members of society, and it would be easy for the numbers of slaves to quickly exceed the numbers of non-slaves. I chose Gnolls because they seemed the type of creature to eat anything – but with their natural food supplies depleted by the drought, they would be forced to turn to some other food supply, something plentiful in number. The Kobolds, under these circumstances, would seem to fit that description.

Grand Concepts and The Little Guy

The power of a grand concept is the excitement of the imagination that it presents, but in order to arouse that excitement in players, it needs to be presented to them in a digestible format. You need a revelatory scene in which this particular secret underpinning of existence stands revealed. When this reveal takes place, it can be under one of two circumstances: either it explains the “why” of things that the PCs have observed in the past, revealing them to be practical consequences of the high concept, or it is contradicted by the absence of those practical consequences.

I’ve used both phenomena in past campaigns and adventures to my – and the campaign’s – advantage. Presenting the everyday consequences as “just the way things are” early in the campaign makes the conceptual underpinning feel utterly plausible when it is discovered by the players, as they gain a new understanding of the world akin to the exultation of a physicist discovering a new Law of Physics. What’s more, understanding this “why” gives the players a tool to use in their planning for the future because it is an understanding of How The World Works that others do not share. It might make new technologies possible, or ways to bypass seemingly impregnable defenses, or simply by excluding the consequences, hint at other undiscovered principles. It can provide motivations and explanations for past events and insights into the history of the world.

A false or incomplete explanation can seemingly explain everything, only to stand revealed as flawed when decisions based on that explanation don’t have the expected outcome – a phenomenon that I used extensively in my Champions campaign, where I had worked out a complete game physics but NOT revealed it to the players. As a result, more than a dozen adventures could be derived from the revelation of parts of that game physics, and some of the most entertaining adventures were simply the PCs in a laboratory trying to figure out why something was happening, or how they could achieve a certain technology that they considered useful. When I started the Zenith-3 campaign, I was able to take the entirety of that original game physics and describe it as the state of the art, superscience well in advance of the general human understanding – since I had been able to expand on it in secret for a decade or so, incorporating new ideas and new real-world discoveries. You can see the impact of this approach in my campaign excerpt, It’s Reality, Jim, but not As We Know It: St Barbara.

So powerful and functional is the relationship between high concept and mundane consequences that I frequently use a desired “mundane consequence” to derive a functional high concept that will justify it, as I explained in A Perfect Vision Through A Glass, Darkly and Part one of the Distilled Cultural Essence series.

A practical approach is also the ideal solution

I want to conclude this article by pointing out the virtue of compromising in this approach to campaign design and construction.

Creating a completely-delineated cause-and-effect sequence that proceeds flawlessly from a big idea to encompass all the possible consequences and their interactions takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. It’s altogether too easy to miss something, even when adopting the carefully systematic approach I have described, and which I employ. In order to make this approach practical, you have to establish a hierarchy of needs, derived from the campaign outline – a list of encounter and plot elements that you know are going to appear in the campaign. Working out the impact on those of the big ideas is quite enough work to be getting on with.

There’s absolutely no mention of Dragons or of Demons in the example Arignoza campaign outline. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be affected by it; to the contrary, the Longevity of both would be of great importance, and would probably be the source of their powers. I would even be tempted to make Demonic abilities Arcane in nature instead of divine, an ultimate threat to Wizards and Sorcerers just as Devils are to Clerics. But I don’t have to spend a lot of time working on the impact on these creatures until one of them becomes important in the campaign. (If I were to decide to accede to that temptation, that would be as soon as a Wizard became important to the party, ie if a player chose that class for his PC). I might even use Dragons as an equivalent threat for Druids to combat, just to extend the principle, because it would seem to be consistent.

A better example, perhaps, would be Bugbears and Trolls. The ascendancy of the Gnolls would certainly impact on these other menaces, and they would be equally affected by the drought and resulting famine – but I don’t need to worry about these monsters until one turns up in the campaign.

Aside from making the whole project manageable, this “zone of exclusion” imparts flexibility to the campaign background. If my projections of consequences turn out to be a little bit off in one particular or another, or need reinforcement to enable the players to fully suspend disbelief, I can use one of these other races to provide a correction or that little bit of confirmation as necessary.

Another key question are the identities of the deity to be sacrificed, and of the one who has chosen such a desperate solution. One of the PCs will almost certainly be a cleric; choosing the cleric’s deity is up to the player; making the chosen deity one of these two who are so central to the plot makes the plot especially relevant to the PC in question. If the cleric’s deity is the one to be killed in furtherance of the plotline, he will become bereft of powers until the other Gods step in to fill the breach, and will fire the cleric for revenge, an added depth of motivation but one that undermines the “Players’ Choice” aspect of the big finish. If the clerics’ deity is the one that has gone mad then that insanity can be hinted at in advance of the revelation, and it makes the choice of whether or not to oppose him all the more poignant for the PC. Choosing between these options shouldn’t be done in advance, but should be left until the Player chooses his deity – then adjudged on the basis of the personality and portfolio of the deity in question.

Sandboxing the development of the campaign background to those elements that are needed at the current time within the campaign not only spreads out the workload involved in creating the campaign, it gives the GM flexibility. Until it is actually necessary to do so, I would simply note these ideas and index them by key words. I might hint at them in player briefing materials without giving details, but that’s it.

In conclusion

People generally derive great satisfaction from taking observations of effects and deducing the causes that lie behind them. The more convincing these theories are, the more they explain, the greater that satisfaction. This is as true of gamers as it is to scientists, conspiracy theorists, or the public at large. It is one of the reasons why police procedurals are such an enduring television genre. By determining the consequences for the little guy, the mundane and everyday, and the ordinary inhabitants of the game world, you are offering clues to the end cause for your players to consider. The more fundamental the conceptual change, the more broadly its effects should be (and would be) felt, the more clues the players have as to that point of uniqueness within your campaign, and the more plausible that point of uniqueness will seem when it is finally deduced or revealed.

At the same time, the more fundamental the conceptual change, the more it needs those consequences to make it plausible. Their absence undermines the credibility of the GM and campaign just as strongly as their presence reinforces it. There is nothing worse than the GM revealing the central concept of his masterpiece only for a player to reply, “I’m not convinced.”

The Devil, as always, is in the detail.

Every writer gets asked, from time to time, his or her process for writing. For those on the outside of the profession, this question is usually cloaked in the guise “Where do you get your ideas?” – something I’ve answered here and there on previous occasions – but for those on the inside, the question is more frequently couched in more specific terms. In particular, I’ve been flattered with praise for my ability to see the trees while keeping an eye on the shape of the forest, for being able to hold a broad overall plan in mind while focusing on a narrower question. My campaigns have a similar style about them, with smaller building blocks – adventure plots and subplots – that come together in a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts by virtue of the connections between those creative elements.

I use the same, essentially self-taught, process for writing everything – from RPG adventures to fiction, correspondence to game supplements. That means that it is a subject worth examining here at Campaign Mastery. I’m going to do so from two perspectives: first, I’m going to talk about how I write a Blog Post, using this very post as the example, and then – at some future point (which might be as soon as next week) – I’ll illustrate how I write an adventure for one of my campaigns.

Initial Subject

I start with a subject. Sometimes this is just a heading, sometimes it’s a paragraph, and sometimes there’s correspondence. I keep a list of these at the bottom of the file in which I keep blogs under development – the only time a prospective post leaves this document is when it gets deleted after posting, or when it gets extracted to a separate file because it has formed part of a tightly-connected series. Quite often, this will form the blog title and/or subtitle, or at least, a working title. There’ll be more on the subject of article titles a little later.

The initial subject for this article was “How I (Usually) Write” – which has indeed formed part of the subheading for this post.

Synopsis

Although I will occasionally write a 1-2 line synopsis of what the article is about when I first list the subject, I will more often leave that until I actually start writing the blog post itself. The synopsis outlines the subject of the article and the value that it proposes to offer the reader. This is a reminder to myself of where the article is to go, what I’m trying to say in it, and why the journey is worthwhile. These almost always end up being incorporated into the first paragraph or two in the introduction, or the last paragraph or two in the conclusion (very rarely, both).

The synopsis for this article was “Structure, Process/Procedure, Narrative – same process as for adventures and novels. Creativity and dialogue vs. logic.”

Headings

I then break the discussion down into a series of bullet points that will usually become the topic headings. While I may sometimes have a clear vision of the breakdown sequence, more often than not these are generated by free association and then ordered into something vaguely sensible. These are signposts on my mental “map” from point A (introduction) to B (conclusion), with the narrative to serve as tour guide. If there is no obviously logical sequence, as when I am trying to look at all aspects of something, or (sometimes) when I am trying to answer a question, I’ll try to proceed from simplest to most complex.

Subheadings

More often than not, a single layer of headings is not deep enough or rich enough to encompass the full details. This is especially true if there is a list of some sort involved, where each item on the list needs its own discussion. As a rule of thumb, if everything I have to say will fit into a single, reasonably brief, paragraph, the list is better treated as such; if it doesn’t fit that restriction, then it’s better to present the list and then dedicate a subheading to each item on the list.

Because both headings and subheadings are generated by both logic and free association to identify related questions, this permits a holistic approach that usually ensures full coverage of a subject, and a somewhat organic structure to the article that reads naturally. While they will often be listed in the same sequence they are thought of, because one thought naturally follows another, there will be times when I will go back and insert a new item, and times when I will use drag-and-drop on a line to re-sequence the thoughts into something more coherent.

Blueprint Review

The end result is a working blueprint for the content. The progression from discussion point to discussion point should be reasonably clear; to mix metaphors, the blueprint is a plan for the eventual shape of the forest. Using it as a guideline, I can focus as much attention as necessary on each individual tree while preserving the overall shape of the landscape. I will usually review this blueprint a time or two before I start actually writing the article, just to ensure that there are no other topics to be discussed, and that the “roadmap” does indeed get from point A to B, from proposal or idea to some sort of destination.

The “roadmap” for this article, showing both headings and subheadings, is shown below, exactly as I produced it. A couple of the entries were inserted afterwards, and some of the topic headings became subtopics, and vice-versa, but the overall structure reflects the routine process that I employ to write a blog post. You’ll notice that I’m often lazy about capitals in the list – I want to generate it as quickly as possible.

* introduction
* initial subject
* synopsis
* headings
* subheadings
* blueprint review
** heading synopsis
   – why, how, the urgency
* stylistic considerations
* one section at a time
** narrative considerations
** resequencing headings & subheadings
** author’s comments, asides, and sidebars
** links & references
* length & subdivision
* read it
* revise it
* spellcheck it
* the title
* wait
* re-read it
* artwork/illustration
* editing
** layout

Heading Synopsis

Usually, the heading is enough. Sometimes, though, the heading might be more artistic and expressive than defining of the subject, or there might be some subtle point that I want to be sure to make. When that happens, I’ll add another 1-2 line synopsis under the heading. It’s important to do this before you start writing anything more than the introduction, and preferably while still at this stage of the writing process, because these are the sort of details that can get lost when you get distracted by the actual writing, or that can so monopolize your attention that you lose focus on the overall direction of the article – that “forest for the trees” problem manifesting itself.

The “roadmap” shown above uses a heading synopsis when describing this very section. I probably didn’t need the “why” and “how”, but wanted to be sure to remember to mention the urgency, ie the need to do such synopses while you still have the overall article in mind – and not to wait until those details are forgotten.

Stylistic Considerations

When I write, there are a couple of rules that I try to follow, from which I will only deviate when absolutely necessary. The first is to always try and describe or explain the need for something before I actually provide it – I always want the answer to the question “Why is this here?” to be self-evident. The second is to ensure that there is always a topic introduction before moving into subtopics – something you’ll see in action in the next section of this article. And the third is to always define a term or procedure before I employ it, unless that term is sufficiently well-known within the sphere of RPG games or is otherwise self-explanatory.

The Writing Begins

I then start writing the article. I tend to adopt a conversational style, simply because that comes naturally to me. Sometimes, I even point-counterpoint myself to keep the narrative going. While I may have a general idea of the topic, and even of what is to be said concerning that topic, I’ll generally start at the top of each section and work my way down until they are all finished – or until the length becomes so great that I have to divide the post into a series (more on that a little later). Sometimes I will have a few rough notes to follow, made when I start working on a section, just to make sure that I mention everything I want to do, and use any particular turns of phrase that have come to mind and that I especially like.

I tend to write very quickly as a result of this approach. However, unlike a real-life conversation, you can always go back and insert in an afterthought when one comes to mind (as it often does) – such as this entire paragraph.

Sometimes I will leave writing the introduction until the end, at other times it flows naturally. In general, the less sure I am about what conclusion I will come to, such as when I am illustrating or discussing some process or procedure that I use, the more likely I am to leave the introduction until the end.

I also have a weakness for being warm, friendly, and (hopefully) witty in my opening paragraphs – if they aren’t entertaining enough, they may get scrapped and left until later.

Narrative Considerations

Another point that should be made is that I don’t slavishly follow the blueprint. If what I have to say in any given subsection leads more naturally to a different subheading than the one originally scheduled to follow the passages just drafted, then I will at least consider moving that subsection. Conversely, if for some reason I’m having trouble elucidating the point of a particular subheading, then – after a couple of attempts – I will move it down the list, or simply leave a half-dozen lines of blank space so that it becomes obvious that there is a blank to be filled in.

The goal is to have the narrative flow naturally; instead of completing one subtopic and going all the way back to the main topic to start the next, I try to build on the neighboring (and preceding) subtopic.

That also means that sometimes, one subsection will consume another – as this one has done to what was supposed to be the next subtopic, “resequencing headings & subheadings”.

Author’s notes, Comments, Asides, and Sidebars

I’ll often drop these in to break up an article that’s becoming too monolithic. I have no rules to decide when to do so – in general, if I think of a side-comment at the time, I’ll often include it in the narrative at that point, but use some form of formatting to set it aside from the rest of the text. So they are usually written at the time and when I get up to the point at which they appear.

Another reason to include them is that I am a big fan of glimpses “behind the curtain”. If you know what an author or game designer is trying to achieve with a given chapter, rule, or subsystem, whether they succeed or fail becomes less important. It helps interpret anything that’s unclear, and provides a direction for any replacements – whether those be by the same author, by a house rule, or by some other means up update. If I know why something is there, it can help me understand what is there. Or elsewhere, by analogy. It also helps distinguish between design objectives and unintended byproducts.

Comments also get added in, occasionally, when I feel the need to clarify something and don’t want to monkey with the original text for some reason. These are the equivalent of footnotes, but are presented generally at the point of referance rather than at the end of the article.

Sidebars are a different story.

Sidebars

When I toured the US in the 70s, my family and I visited Las Vegas. While there, we had the option of a side-trip to the Grand Canyon, but couldn’t afford it – and were distracted by the theft of our luggage, anyway. When I went back to the States in the 90s for the Boston Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention for the uninitiated), I took in a day excursion to Salem, Massachusetts. Sidebars are the same thing – something extra, not needed for the main text, but relevant and that add something substantial to the article.

Sometimes, these are written before I start work on the article, sometimes they are written when I get to that point in the article, but most frequently I will leave them until the very last. The reason for this is simple – until the main article is written, I can never be sure whether it will prove necessary to incorporate them into the main text or not. There have been any number of occasions when I have written myself into a corner and something I had slated for a sidebar furnished the escape hatch. (There have also been occasions when content originally thought to belong in a sidebar grew sufficiently to become a new article in its own right.)

Having learned from this type of experience, I will generally define and position a sidebar at the time I’m working on the main text but leave the writing of it until I’ve reviewed the text without it. At most, I’ll make a few notes in advance.

Links & References

Links & references, on the other hand, happen while I’m writing – and they happen afterwards as well. Let me explain:-

Because I write my posts offline and only upload and format them when they are ready to go – except under unusual circumstances – URLS don’t become hyperlinks until the editing stage, when I’m actually using the word processor that comes with the Blogging platform. Prior to that, they exist in a far more primitive form.

Nor do I like interrupting the flow of adding words to the text to go chase up some reference unless I need the information in order to continue writing. The rest of the time, I’ll simply put the phrase to be hyperlinked on a line by itself, followed by a blank line, and then the reminder “[link]”, and then continue writing the text. Like this:

Here’s a line of text that is going to have a
linked reference

[link]
in the middle of the sentence.

Once I’ve finished writing, I go through and look up / search for the URLs that I need for the link and copy-&-paste them into the blank line. I can find them within the text quickly and easily because of the world “link” in the square brackets. So, assuming that I have done so for the example, it would now look like this:

Here’s a line of text that is going to have a
linked reference
http://www.goesnowhere.com/not-a-real-web-page/
[link]
in the middle of the sentence.

If, on the other hand, I needed to look something up in order to continue writing the article, I’ll put the URL into the space immediately I access the web page. So it will look like the second example above immediately.

In the editing phase, I cut the URL out of the text and convert the phrase on a line by itself to a hyperlink, do any editing (I like URLs in my articles to open in a new tab rather than taking readers away from the article, so I insert ‘target=”_blank” if I have to), then tidy up the sentence. In other words, the above would be changed to read

Here’s a line of text that is going to have a
<a href=”http://www.goesnowhere.com/not-a-real-web-page/” target=”_blank”>linked referance<a>

[link]
in the middle of the sentence.

and then to

Here’s a line of text that is going to have a <a href=”http://www.goesnowhere.com/not-a-real-web-page/” target=”_blank”>linked referance</a> in the middle of the sentence.

once I have double-checked that the link works properly. Which means that the reader sees:

Here’s a line of text that is going to have a linked referance in the middle of the sentence.

exactly as intended. NB: don’t bother clicking on that hyperlink – it doesn’t go anywhere!

Length & Subdivision

I aim for my articles to be between two and three thousand words each, but I’m pretty poor at estimating the length as I go, so I’m not overly bothered if a post weighs in at anything less than 5,000 words. If a post is significantly more than 5,000 words, I start taking a hard look to decide whether or not it can be split in two. If I look like hitting that 5,000 word limit (i.e. I’ve written “a lot” of text) with 3/4 or more of the article still to be written, I’ll think even more seriously about whether or not it can be turned into a series of smaller articles.

Several of the 21 series (and counting) that we have here at Campaign Mastery started life intended to be a single article.

Lately, I’ve been a little more flexible in this respect; our WordPress installation used to have a problem losing text if a post was more than about 5K words. The longest post that I can remember ever posting here is about 12000 words long – a special case – and the shortest was only a couple of hundred – again, special circumstances. By and large, I average 3500-4000 words a post.

Subdivision, if it is to occur, happens in one of two ways: (1) I simply run out of time and put the break-point at the end of the last-completed section; or (2) where possible, I divide the article into two parts along more logical lines.

Once again, this article is an example; the original notion was to include the ‘writing an adventure’ equivalents as part of the text, probably in a different-colored text box to distinguish from the ones that look like this. By the time I got to the section on sidebars above, I knew that approach was a non-starter as I already had three-and-half screens of text. These words are located most of the way through the fifth screen. So I immediately revised the opening paragraphs and split the article in two. This part comes in at between 4800 and 4900 words.

Read It

The first thing I do when I finish writing an article is to read it – top to bottom. I’m specifically looking for phrasing that doesn’t sound quite right, explanations that don’t explain clearly enough, obvious errors of logic, and other such faux pas. I’m also giving my mind a chance to find any blank spots in the text where I should have explained something but didn’t. I usually won’t revise it at this point – I want to read through the whole thing without pausing. Anywhere that needs revision, I’ll simply change the text color and move on.

Revise It

Having read it from start to finish, I’ll start again, revising it as I go.

Spellcheck It

While I don’t use a full-powered word processor to write things – I normally rely on Wordpad – when the article looks finished, I’ll copy it into a word document and spell-check it. I didn’t do this for the first year or so, and as a result some horrendous errors crept in. I usually set the language to US English, even though my native tongue is Australian English – we have some different phrases (which stay in), and some differences in spelling – “colour” instead of “color”, “behaviour” instead of “behavior”, and so on (which get corrected). The reason is that most of Campaign Mastery’s readers are American, and this is at least a gesture of recognition of that fact. Once I’ve finished, I’ll copy-and-paste back over the original in my working document.

The Title

It’s common for me to have the title of an article before I start to write, but I have been known to be tweaking it at the 11th hour. Most Campaign Mastery titles come in two parts, the artistic and the literal. The artistic title is what I actually think of as the title of the piece, and the literal is a subtitle that explains what the article is about.

The title of this article, therefore, is “One Word At A Time” and the subtitle is “How I (Usually) Write A Blog Post”. The goal of the artistic title is to be distinctive, and to give the collective “title” a bit of unique flavor.

When it comes to series, I generally turn the Subtitle into the series title and shift the “artistic” title into the subtitle position, though there have been exceptions made. An obvious example is the ongoing series detailing the history of Earth-regency from my superhero campaign.

Above all, the goal of the title is to entice people into reading the article, and secondarily to communicate the subject. Everything else can be considered tertiary to those objectives.

Wait

Whenever possible, I like to leave an article to sit for 24 hours before making it public. This gives me time to clear my mind of all the things that I was thinking while writing it, setting me up for the next step:

Re-Read It

Every writer strives to achieve clarity in their writing. Clear communication is far more important than any pretentious literary merit that is often only in the eye of the beholder, anyway. The best way that I know of achieving that clarity is to read what you have written after putting some distance between yourself and the process of writing it.

Art/Illustration

There are three types of picture that go with an article at Campaign Mastery. The first clarifies, amplifies, explains, or illustrates part of the text. These illustrations are not always part of an article. The second is a visual reference, such as the cover of a book that is referenced within the text. Again, these illustrations are not present all the time. The final type I think of as the “anchor” to the article. These are always at the top of a post, and it’s a very rare article at CM that doesn’t have one. Each of these is handled a little differently.

Specific Illustrations

If these are going to be very quick to produce, I do them on the spot. If they are going to take time, I’ll do a quick sketch of what I have in mind on a pad of paper and wait until I’ve finished writing. But I break both rules all the time, depending on how inspired I’m feeling and how clearly I can see the end result in my mind’s eye.

Visual References

Whenever I cite a reference, I always like to tell people where they can buy it, whether that is Amazon, eBay (okay, there haven’t been any from there yet) or RPGNow. And, when possible – and if it won’t interfere with the flow of the text by distracting the reader from the message and ideas that I am trying to convey – I like to illustrate that reference. If nothing else, it helps break up monolithic blocks of text; but secondly, it can add a second channel of communication. I find that if you are doing nothing but reading words, it often doesn’t paint a picture in the mind; but that once you kick-start the visual sense, it keeps working. I wish that more movie/TV studios, actors, and musicians made publicity stills available for use without copyright complications to use for this purpose, but I’ll work with what I can get!

Anchor Illustration

These exist to function as a visual ‘tag’ for the article, and to kick-start that visual sense that I referred to a moment ago. They are usually left until the text is finished. I always aim for the anchor illustration to add something to the text, whether its a sense of personality or a metaphor for the subject matter. I work hard to find the right illustration, and often have to ‘tweak’ or enhance it before all the nuances that I’m trying to convey are present.

When I finish writing the article, I list as many key words or metaphors for the subject as I can think of. I deliberately try to find a different angle or perspective on the subject in the picture; it’s not enough for it simply to illustrate the article, I want it to add to it. Sometimes this goal is achieved, sometimes I only come close – and sometimes I have to take what I can get. Here are 25 samples from the last two years that I think really hit the mark, in reverse chronological order (click the thumbnail to open the post):

Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2)	A Rational Intuition	The Echo Of Events To Come: foreshadowing in a campaign structure	Pieces Of Creation: The Hidden Truth Of Dopplegangers	Making The Loot Part Of The Plot: The Value Of Magic
Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming	By The Seat Of Your Pants: Six Foundations Of Adventure	We All Have Our Roles To Play: Personality Archetypes, Part 4. Photo by clafouti.	The Nth Level Of Abstraction	On The Nature Of Flaws
Life, Death, and Life Renewed - March 2011 Blog Carnival	Wham! Clang! Kapow! Character Conventions In Pulp	Lessons From The West Wing III: Time Happens In The Background	We All Have Our Roles To Play: Personality Archetypes, Part 2	The Dark Side Of The Mind: Examining Psionics, Part 5
All This And Psionic Spam: Examining Psionics, Part 4 of 5	The Value Of Information: Examining Psionics, Part 3 of 5	'How Hard Can It Be?' - Skill Checks under the microscope	Jolting The Status Quo	The Anatomy Of Evil: What Makes a Good Villain?
We All Have Our Roles To Play: A Functional Perspective on Personality Archetypes, Part 1	The Critical Threshold: A brief debate on the Merits of Extreme Results	It's Not Like Shooting Sushi In A Barrel: A Personalized Productivity Focus For Game Prep	Sophisticated Links: Degrees Of Separation in RPGs. Image by Clix.	The Frozen Lands: A Science-Fiction Campaign Premise

So let’s talk about this article and its keywords. It’s all about writing, so:

quill, pen, words, type, typewriter, typing

If I don’t find the right illustration, or something close enough for me to modify it into what I need/want, then I’ll think again, looking for more keywords. You can see at the top of this article the one that I chose! It came from the very first search term, which doesn’t always happen. I added the blue framing “flashes” to complete it.

Obviously, I don’t upload the graphic until I work on the editing and layout, but I will define any captions and hyperlinks in advance. Here, for example, is a full definition from a recent post:

PicR: LPnosunm_s.jpg
Upload: LPnosunm
Caption: The Lunar Prospector was one of the science highlights of 1998. Click on the thumbnail for a larger image.

It specifies that I am to upload both a large-sized image and a thumbnail, and that the thumbnail is to be displayed on the right-hand side of the text and link to the full-sized image.

Editing & Layout

The last thing that I do when writing an article is to upload both it and all the graphics, review it once again, check the layout – I hate orphaned lines because of illustration size, so I do a lot of work on that sort of niggling layout issue – finish converting URLs to hyperlinks, and so on.

“I normally don’t change the text much at this point,” it says in my rough outline of this section. Yeah, right. That’s both true and utterly deceptive. Most of the text won’t change, but occasionally there will be a rephrasing to help the visual flow of text, and there will almost always be something that I rewrite in the 11th hour.

I don’t have to worry about bolding or italics in the editing because I normally incorporate such emphasis in the actual writing process. Similarly, I do most of the work of creating lists, blockquotes, and any html at the time. I do as much as possible in advance because the text editor provided by the blog installation is a difficult to use.

The final touches are administrative – categories and tags. And that’s the procedure I employ to write an article.

AutoREALM is open-source mapping software for RPGs. It operates as a vector-art program that operates on various layers, similar to the commercial software Campaign Cartographer. In 2005, development ceased on the software as the people working on it found the need to prioritize activities that actually put bread on the table. As a result, the last Operating System to support AutoREALM is Windows XP.

The Software That Would Not Die

This was a program that would not lie down and die. Kept alive by a sporadically-active Yahoo Group under the direction of Michael Pederson and Keith Davies, successive coders came and attempted to advance the project, only to discover the project taking over their lives and bowing out. In the meantime, programming languages came and went, and it became clear that a complete from-the-ground-up rewrite was going to be necessary if AutoREALM was to live again. The project to do so was pretty much dead and ready for the embalmers when Berenger Morel stepped forward late last year and began a rewrite in C++ 11 which is now progressing to the point where outside contributions become possible.

Berenger has asked members of the Yahoo Group to publicize this need in hopes of finding people to share the workload before he burns out as others before him have done.

Bear in mind that this is a completely new rewrite and as such does not yet come close to the functionality of the original – check out this feature list from the 2005 version at Sourceforge.

The ultimate goal is to advance the new version of AutoREALM beyond the 2005 level of functionality. The code is designed to be more flexible, more easily updated, and more modular. Lots of care and effort is being expended to keep the long-term firmly in view; a less robust version could have been released some time back, but Berenger is aiming to make this software best-in-field, and taking no shortcuts. The end result should be software that can evolve more quickly, and be more extendable.

So where’s it at?

Right now, Minimal Basic Functionality Only. It’s not ready for end users yet. But it IS ready for coders to come in and add functionality to the bare bones. In addition to developers who are able to implement functionality – starting with the 2005 list of functions, Berenger would like:

• to be able to publish news in a blog, to allow people to discover AutoREALM, and keep people informed in an easier way than mailing lists. Mailing lists are a good way to discuss wanted features and to help people to do things, but are not the best way to inform them of progress. So, Berenger would greatly appreciate that someone became something like AutoREALM’s reporter, to inform people on what is happening on the development side. He could do this himself, but his time is limited and better spent in further development instead of communications.
• The repository he is using to distribute the software provided, amongst other things, a bug-tracker and a wiki. Berenger would like to give the wiki a better structure, but it is a time consuming task, and he is not very used to wikis. So he would like someone to come in and organize the Wiki.
• He needs people to create and distribute packages and installers. It is not really a programming task, but it will probably need some knowledge in that domain. Berenger is only able to make the Debian one (for Linux), so at the very least he needs something for windows, and if possible, other Linux distributions and the Mac OS.
• He needs alpha testers to find and report situations which are able to crash the actual code base. In short, testing the stability, by acting like a really stupid user, by trying to do things he did not think anyone would try, by corrupting configurations and so on.
• He needs someone to help with documenting the code. he did not take time to write comments on most of it, and the sections which have been documented have since been completely rewritten without that documentation being updated. This task will need someone with appropriate technical expertise.
• He would also like people to go to sites which have articles about AutoREALM and notify them that the rewrite of AutoREALM has restarted in 2012, and compile their URLs to keep them informed about progress.
• Finally, he wishes additional Developers working to add all the functionality of the 2005 version plus any new features people can think of! In the near future, if not right now, the binary will have the features it most needs (i.e. it will be capable of loading plugins and managing render windows), but there are only one or two plugins plus the render library (DLL file for windows users) completed just to show that that things works and are easy to use (at least, that’s what is being worked on at the moment – it’s mostly a matter of dotting i’s and crossing t’s before these are ready to go). The idea is to attract other contributors, now that the application’s basic structure is set, because with somewhere near 100 functions (menu items and toolbar buttons) remaining, there is still a lot of work to do in implementing features before the software is ready for more rigorous testing and public scrutiny.

The repository is located here: https://bitbucket.org/bmorel/autorealm

Is anyone interested in helping out? You can get started by joining the AutoREALM Yahoo Group and getting in touch with Berenger. There is also a separate mailing list at Sourceforge for developers at autorealm-develop@lists.sourceforge.net.

Let’s get this great piece of freeware off the launchpad and back into operation before Berrenger suffers the same fate as all the others who have worked on bring AutoREALM back to life! After all his efforts, that would be a shame, and a waste.

Side-note: there are a couple of places in the above where the text is a little hesitant about the current status of the project. That’s a bit of stage-fright on Berrenger’s part – it’s one thing to make promises to a semi-private mailing list, and quite another to put something you’ve invested a lot of effort into on public display. So if things aren’t quite 100% ready or it takes a little while for him to get offers of assistance organized, be gentle with him!

Introduction (reprised from Part 1)

I use scenario/adventure titles all the time. Used correctly, they can put players into the correct frame of mind to react in the “right” way to the events in a scenario, conceal the identity of a villain until or hide a plot twist until the big reveal, heighten the drama of a situation and/or raise the expectations of the players. At the very least, they provide a referent ‘index’ to the events that occur in the course of the adventure. They can also add to the flavor of the campaign, reinforcing genre elements.

Many of the same methods and criteria that are used for naming campaigns are also relevant to naming adventures. Double or even triple meanings, exaggerations, heightened drama, metaphors and use of nouns, taking synopsis phrases out of context, and so on, are all valid tools to be used.

The heart of this article are a massive number of examples, with discussion of where the name came from, how it relates to the adventure, and – where appropriate – why it is an especially apt title. I’ve organized these by campaign, so that the campaign notes provided in the previous part of this series can be helpful in providing some context.

Some of these adventure titles will be discussed in more detail than others (mainly because it takes time to boil adventures down to a one-sentence synopsis, while I can cut-and-paste from more detailed summaries in next to no time)!

In part 1, I analyzed adventure titles from the Pulp Campaign that I co-referee and from the Fumanor (D&D) campaigns that I run. This time around, the focus will be on my superhero campaigns. But first, I want to discuss naming style for a moment…

Naming Style

It might seem obvious, but some of the best techniques are: the adventure titles that you put forward should reflect the style and genre of the campaign. That permits the titles to be part of the “buy-in” by the players into the correct mindset of the campaign. You can digress from it briefly, but that’s the general rule that should be followed.

That means that Fantasy campaigns should occasionally reference one or more Fantasy elements. Pulp adventure titles should read like the title of a pulp novel. And superhero adventures should read like the issue titles in a comic book.

Before you can access the correct style of naming for an adventure, or a campaign for that matter, you need to understand the conventions of the genre you are using.

Fantasy Campaigns

All right, High Fantasy campaigns, if you want to get fussy. These should have a poetic or lyrical flavor, and should be dripping with a sense of wonder, a flavor of the exotic. There should still be drama in the name, but it should be relatively muted.

The more fantastic the plotline is going to be, the more prosaic the title. Save your really amazing titles for more mundane events, when you need to infuse the adventure with something more.

The reason is simple: if you use an exotic title for a high-fantasy adventure, either the scenario will fail to live up to the jaw-dropping amazement promised by the title, or a good title will be wasted gilding a lily.

Of course, avoiding predictability means that this rule should occasionally be broken, but the principle stands.

Consider an adventure in which the PCs have just returned from the dungeon, loot burning a hole in their pocket, and they intend to rest up, replace their consumables, add to their equipment, level up, and hunt around for where the next adventure is coming from.

Giving such an adventure a name like “R&R” or “Going Shopping” is literally true, but not very exciting. “The Markets of Localtown” is a little better, but still not terribly exciting. “The Perfect Button” or “Silver Threads And Golden Needles” are pretty good, with hints of the exotic, which can be used as a source of inspiration. “Bargain of a Life-time” or “Three Daggers From Wishbane” carry vague threats and ominous overtones, making them better yet, as is “The Backpack From Hades”. The same can also be said of “Abdul The Rug-merchant” – especially if Rugs are not on the PC’s shopping lists. Any of those four would be great titles for such an ‘adventure’.

Once you have the title, you can use it for additional inspiration, a foundation for a subplot that keeps the entire day’s play – and the overall shopping expedition – more interesting and less of a session of paperwork.

What might I derive from such titles, under these circumstances?

• “Bargain Of A Lifetime” is suggestive of a Faustian bargain or a deal with the devil. Free association and modern-day paranoia suggests a connection with phishing and other scams – and there we have the basis of a plot. The PCs overhear a con-man offering a bargain that’s too good to be true – are they sharp enough to detect the con, or will they be taken in? If they detect the con, will their consciences permit them to let it continue? If they don’t want to get involved, perhaps the con-man gets caught but manages to shift the blame onto one or more of the PCs? As a subplot running while the PCs are shopping for their purchases, this can enliven the whole session.
• “Three Daggers From Wishbane” suggests a matched set of blades. Making a plot out of them suggests something unusual about one of the three. Right away, this gets me thinking about the Sherlock Holmes story “The Six Napoleons” which I saw on TV recently. So what we have here is a mystery plot that can run in the background.
• “The Backpack From Hades” suggests a rather exotic cursed magic item – but if they are told the title, the players will probably reach the same conclusion and be on the lookout for it. So use a little narrative judo, and make the plotline about their paranoia – it should only take a coincidence or two. Perhaps someone, fleeing through the crowd of shoppers with the authorities hard on his heels, thrusts the backpack into the hands of a PC (mistaking him for a confederate) – and the backpack is like a white elephant or bad penny thereafter, always finding its way back to the party and bringing trouble along the way. If it contains stolen property, it might not even be a magic item at all!
• As for “Abdul the Rug-merchant”, anyone who has read the Mythadventures series will immediately recognize the name. Abdul, also known as Frumple the Deveel, is an unforgettable character from a couple of the books (and name-checked in a few more). So perhaps the other merchants cannot buy or sell the PCs the things they want (even though they have them in stock) because they all owe money to Abdul the rug-merchant, who has levied a claim against the merchants in local court, causing the magistrate to freeze the merchant’s assets. In order to actually achieve what they are setting out to do, the PCs will have to solve the town’s problem – which is that Abdul has the entire merchants’ quarter under his thumb!

Pulp Campaigns

The adventure titles used for a pulp campaign should be markedly different, just as the style is very different. Titles are shorter, and more melodramatic, emphasizing doom or disaster or imminent danger or mystery. After a while, they can start to sound repetitive if you aren’t careful.

In general, it doesn’t matter how minor the titular plot element is intended to be – choose a dramatic title and then, if necessary, inflate the role of that title element.

When it comes to pulp titles, nouns should rarely exist without an associated adjective (shown in italics): ‘The Crystal Skull’, ‘The Jade Empress’, ‘Pirate Ship’, ‘The Woman In Red‘, ‘The Ghost of Haunted Hollow’, ‘The Bloody Hand’, ‘The Temple of Doom‘. The exception tends to be when a plurality is used for dramatic effect – ‘Thirteen Monkeys’ works very well as a Pulp title (even though the movie is not very pulp-oriented).

The rule of thumb: Make it melodramatic, and imagine it as a book title. Does it work in that context?

Superhero Campaigns

Of course, if you want to talk about melodramatic titles, you have to even ramp it up a little more when you start talking about Superhero adventures! Which brings us back to where we were up to when this article started.

Some Context: A brief history of the Ullar / Ultras / Champions / Project: Vanguard / Team Neon Phi / Project: Vigilant / Solo Mini-series / Zenith-3 / Dimension-Regency campaigns

I started my superhero campaign in August of 1981. That’s slightly more than 30 years ago. I’ll say that again – thirty years ago.

The Ullar Campaign was played continuously as a solo campaign for two weeks and told the story of Ullar, a refugee from ‘long ago and far away’ whose galaxy-wide civilization had been destroyed, and his series of battles against an immortal evil Sorcerer and would-be conqueror, Mandarin. Ullar was the world’s first superhero. If the whole thing sounds reminiscent of the Superman mythos, it was! I was both player and GM, and the whole purpose of the campaign was to establish back-story for a later campaign and learn the game system. Ullar arrived at the climax of the Second World War and was driven to become a Hero by the horror of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His adventures occupied the years 1945 to 1958.

The Ultras Campaign started in July of 1981 and was played weekly for a couple of years, starting with three players, losing one of the three and adding a fourth – only two of whom had any experience at all as roleplayers. The first session ran for 20 hours straight! Its adventures started a few weeks after the Heroic Death of Ullar in 1958 and ran through until the mid-1960s. At it’s core, this was the story of two runaway slaves from an interstellar empire and a genius accountant who believed he was destined for something more. The fear and paranoia of the two principle characters, on Earth illegally at the height of the cold war with it’s rampant xenophobia, and operating without official sanction (unlike Ullar), had a major effect on the campaign. Although they eventually won some measure of public respect as Heroes, they shied away from the authorities in their confrontations with the Immortal Sorcerer, Mandarin, who had managed to survive his apparent destruction at the hands of Ullar. Ultimately, the public compared them with the extremely popular and charismatic Hero who had come before them and been idolized, and found them wanting. When they finally defeated Mandarin, ending his menace for all time, public mistrust and official dislike drove them back into deep space.

The Champions Campaign started in the first weekend of August, 1981, exactly two weeks after the commencement of the Ultras Campaign. Set in early 1970, it told of a gathering of Heroes inspired by Ullar. At times it was played weekly (14-20 hour sessions), At times it was fortnightly, at times monthly. For two years while I lived away from Sydney, it could only be played every 3 months or so – whenever I could save up enough money to return for a week or so – typically, 8-15 adventures would be played.

The first spin-off campaign from this original seed was Project: Vanguard, the adventures of a group of trouble-prone teenaged trainee superheroes established by the main group to provide the next generation of superheroes.

After a few years of play, this was followed by the Team Neon Phi campaign (about a team of UNTIL super-agents) and Project: Vigilant, a group of younger trainees.

At around the same time, I decided to do a set of “limited series” – limited-duration mini-campaigns featuring a solo adventure for each member of the original team, and for the Project: Vanguard graduation exercises. Originally intended to cover a single four-week period in game time, these spread out slightly to cover eight weeks – but took two years to actually play. The Solo Campaigns had the lot – guest characters, guest GMs, even guest game systems! Well, everything except one thing, and that followed the Solos: Ragnerok. All the spin-off campaigns shut down and coalesced with the main campaign, and the next 5 years were all about putting the pieces in place for the most ambitious phase of the campaign to date. Unfortunately, just as those pieces were about to start connecting into a bigger picture (literally, only 2 or 3 sessions before the groundwork started connecting), the campaign shut down. It didn’t fold, but the players wanted to take a year off, and then weren’t interested in restarting it when the time came.

In 2000, I started making plans to restart the campaign – not where it had left off, but in a whole new incarnation, where the original campaign was all background, all the old plotlines had been wrapped up, and there had been five years of intervening development in events. Originally, I was simply writing the story of the wrap-up to the old campaign so that the players could see what they had missed, but at the same time I had started the Fumanor campaign and the players persuaded me to reboot the superhero campaign using the old campaign as a background. This became the original Zenith-3 campaign which wrapped up in 2010 on the 29th anniversary of the original campaign.

Along the way, it created it’s own spinoff, the Warcry campaign, which I’ll be talking about separately.

Prep had long been underway for a sequel, and after taking a year to dot the i’s , cross the t’s, and polish the game – plus updating the characters to the latest generation of the game rules – the latest incarnation got underway at the start of the year with the Earth-Regency campaign.

All told, that’s something like 500 adventures. That’s a lot of titles! Too many to actually discuss them all. Heck, that’s too many to even simply LIST them all in the same way that I did for – so I’m not even going to try. Instead, I’m going to pick a few from here and there at random, but concentrating on the more recent campaigns.

The Early Campaigns

There were no titles for the first two campaigns. This was a marked difference to the third, and was how I learned for the first time just how useful a good adventure name could be.

The Original Champions Campaign

• ‘And there will be champions’ – originally a one-session fill-in adventure, this introduced two PCs and ran them through a Bank Robbery. They chose to team-up thereafter. This uses a play on the term ‘champions’ to mean ‘heros’.
• ‘We are The Champions’ – The original game was so successful that the players wanted to turn it into an ongoing campaign. With the introduction of a third PC and the first encounter with Mandarin, the team-up became a Team.
• ‘And then they were four!’ – a fourth PC is recruited.
• ‘Four into One won’t go’ – they might have been a team in name, but there was some distance to go before they were a team in reality. Disputes about purpose and direction interfere with achievement as four strong-willed individualists begin learning how to work together. This was a prophetic title, extrapolating from the behavior and relationships between the players in previous sessions.
• ‘M.E.W.S.-ings’ – for several game sessions, the players had been talking about finding a technological solution to their problems, especially where and when Mandarin was going to strike next. From a GM standpoint, credibility could not have been sustained with the Team encountering Mandarin at every turn – so they missed a couple of encounters, got it right but were too late a time or two, and staked out the wrong target a few times. At the end of the previous game session, one of the players had said, ‘what we need is a Mandarin Early-Warning System’, and the others agreed. Since this solved my credibility problem, I was more than happy to make the session all about the development of the system, finishing with another Mandarin encounter.
• ‘A cold wind blows’ – to test their theories (part of the MEWS development process) and deal with a growing lack of public confidence in the team, the Champions organize a trap for Mandarin. The title refers to the planned bait, a “Viking Scroll”.
• ‘The Hobbitlord’ – This adventure was based on the proposition, ‘What If Gollum missed at the end of the Lord Of The Rings?’ and extrapolating from there. Frodo pushed Sam into Mount Doom, claiming that he and Gollum had gone over the edge together, and took Sauron’s power as his own – though he was not yet strong enough to access it. When he did so, all the things Sauron had achieved also went away, exactly as though the Ring had been destroyed. All proceeded as described in the remaining chapters of the Lord Of The Rings, except that Frodo never chose to go to the Gray Havens. Once Gandalf was out of the way, he systematically betrayed the remaining fellowship and their allies, and took long pilgrimages to various places where he slowly mastered the lessons of evil and power. Eventually he took up the mantle of Sauron, resurrected the Nazgul (replacing their fallen leader with a corrupted Aragorn), and proclaimed himself the Hobbitlord. This was a very carefully-crafted adventure title, designed not to be taken too seriously by the players, not realizing that Frodo used it to put a fairer face on his abject cruelty and evil. As a result, they let their guards down a little, making it all the more poignant when acts of cruelty and outright sadism were performed in the name of the Hobbitlord. At the end of the adventure, they thought they had destroyed the One Ring and Frodo along with it.

The Team Neon Phi Campaign

• ‘Operation American Dream’ – Liberating US Politics from the grip of Viper. The title reflects the more military tone of the new campaign and a metaphor for American idealism.
• ‘Snakeskin & Lace’ – Destroying a Viper lab where a new Designer Drug, Lace, is being created. I’m no longer 100% sure of exactly where the title came from, but it employs the contrast between the two named elements especially effectively. I suspect that I may have been inspired by the phrase “Leather and Lace”. ‘Lace’, of course, has a double meaning in this context, being both the name of the drug and the term used for the fancy cloth, but it’s the latter that comes to mind when you hear the title.

The Later Champions Campaign

• ‘The Hobbitlord Rises Again’ – Frodo had learned from Sauron’s undoing. The ‘One Ring’ the heroes had destroyed was a fake, and the demise of The Hobbitlord was as false as the fall of Sauron had been. In due course, he rose again in a new body, that of an Orc-Hobbit mongrel… With the team now consisting of new players who weren’t there the first time around, I was able to pull the same trick a second time. Even having been briefed on the first encounter, they weren’t prepared for what they encountered.
• ‘Down And Out In Barad-Dur’ – Part 2 of the adventure, which also had other plotlines running for other players at the same time. The title draws inspiration from a movie, obviously, but actually refers to the PCs having been captured and facing imminent defeat.

The Zenith-3 Campaign

• ‘To Reach The Summit’ – The first adventure of the new campaign draws its title on the meaning of ‘Zenith’. Sadly, that was about the only thing that I got right in this adventure – it was supposed to give the campaign background and briefing, plus a couple of surprises, and a bit of roleplay. Instead it was 10 hours of lecturing by the GM that put the players to sleep. The adventure is 46 pages long…!
• ‘Flaw Enforcement’ – the second adventure in the Zenith-3 campaign draws it’s title from the phrase “Law Enforcement”. One of the problems the team had to solve on arrival was the corruption of the police force by Organized Crime under the protection of Governor Capone. I thought it only appropriate that the title of the adventure should be a corruption of the phrase that described what was supposed to be happening.
• ‘Maniac Depressing’ – Another adventure that didn’t quite work, but the title was excellent. It tells the players nothing significant in advance while being completely relevant to the plotline about a frankesteinian researcher blending human and animal DNA in a madhouse with the patients as test subjects.
• ‘Dekhay Abd Ruin’ – This title relies on the villain’s name being an English word, or a misspelling of one – which is not all that uncommon when it comes to supervillains. In this case, the villain is named “Dekhay”, but the plotline packs some extra meaning since the plotline is all about the collapse of his civilization.
• ‘Links’ – This title has a triple meaning. First, it describes the subject of the plotline, which is concerns the connections between unrelated events falling into place. Second, it name-checks the villain of the piece, a villain named Link. Thirdly and finally, Link is the missing piece in the spiderweb of connections that are described by the first meaning of the title, so he is literally the “link” that ties everything together.
• ‘Black Tom’ – One of my favorite adventure titles. ‘Black Tom’ is the name of a Pirate from the 16th century who was abducted by Aliens and plugged into their starship as a replacement part for their computer. Over time, he took over the computer, killed the crew, recruited a new black-heated crew of pirates, and – well, the rest of the story seems fairly obvious. So why do I consider this to be such a good title? Because (1) it names the villain, (2) sounds dramatic, (3) hints at his personality, and (4) is suggestive and reflective of his background. That’s a lot for two short words!
• ‘Double Jeopardy’ – This is a plotline in which one of the PCs was replaced by an evil double. As a result, the team found themselves in danger not once, but twice – the first time as what appeared to be the adventure, and the second time when the double was exposed and threatened to melt down a nuclear reactor if the PCs did not let her go. At the same time, the title was about the danger that the double was put in – and about the danger that the original was facing while the rest of the team didn’t even know she was missing.
• ‘Reflections Of Strange Lines’ –This was probably the most complicated single adventures that I had run to date, and is still one of the top two or three. I love the title because it is so mysterious and yet carries overtones (at least to my mind) of a sense of the cosmic. Parts of the initial idea for the adventure came from the way early comic artists would depict “strange new worlds” as having curved lines, obviously inspired by the notions of canals – something like the illustration above, in fact. Add to that the fact that any straight line on the surface of a globe is actually a curve, and that since space is curved, the strangest lines of all would be perfectly straight – and top it all off with a second meaning for “straight lines”, that they are the shortest distance between two points (or, in the case, between two connected facts that the PCs had to deduce), and a phrase that I had picked up somewhere: “Military men tend to think in straight lines”. Those two facts were a cthulhuesque scifi/fantay take on “Knowledge that man was not meant to know”. The final element to the scenario title was the double-meaning of “Reflections” – the literal meaning, and the one associated with remembering events. The literal meaning connected with the adventure from all of the previous influences I’ve described, which means that no mirror is perfectly flat, and that any straight line seems to bend when reflected or refracted – without changing the fact that it’s still a ‘straight line’, while the metaphoric one actually described the content of the adventure. That content: well, I might write it up in full sometime for Campaign Nastery, because I’m quite proud of it, but it exposed a part of a PC’s past that they no longer remembered, knowledge that had been blocked because it was too dangerous to know, and its rediscovery by the PCs. Once restored to the World Of Strange Lines, the PC would begin recalling the past events by association. It also explained some facets of the game universe and its history that had been hidden since the early 1990s – and required the PCs to erase the entire event from their minds at the end of the adventure.
• ‘A Noble Ambition’ – Noble was an NPC superhero who was running for President. This plotline was all about a deranged political supporter of his campaign who decided that what was needed in order for Noble to win was a wave of sympathy, which the lunatic could create with an assassination attempt designed to fail. The subtext was that the ambitions of one man – no matter how well-intended – influence others in unpredictable ways. The PCs had to find a way to stop the lunatic without violating their self-imposed promise not to try and bias the election beyond making sure it was conducted in a fair and honest manner. So the title actually refers to three separate ambitions, each of which can be considered “Noble” – and, in fact, a fourth if one includes the ambition of Noble’s rival in the election – the supervillain who had been behind almost every substantial problem that game world had, but who had only been doing what HE thought was right all along. That four-way layer-cake of meaning makes this adventure title something special.
• ‘The Case Of The Grim Gargoyle’ – One of the PCs had gone feral in a previous adventure, and it was time to pay the piper in this adventure, as he is arraigned and prosecuted for murdering the flunky of a supervillain (the same one referred to in the previous adventure). I’ve always been a fan of courtroom drama, but the opportunities to pay homage to the genre in a roleplaying campaign tend to be few and far-between. Special Prosecutor Perry Mason faced off against a young Defense Attorney Denny Crane (Boston Legal) in a Federal Court presided over by Judge Schumacher, a character I had always based on Ray Walston’s performance as Judge Bone in Picket Fences. I’m inordinately fond of the adventure, because I believe that I was able to capture the characteristics, mannerisms, and though processes of these rather notable characters perfectly, without doing any of the characters are disservice with my portrayal. The title was a deliberate homage to the naming style of Perry Mason’s literary exploits, as this list of novels will show. To complete the analysis of the title, all you really need to know is that PC in question had a body that resembled that of a human-sized gargoyle, and that the character was recovering from a bout of depression at the time of this adventure – hence, “Grim Gargoyle”. Although the connection is a visceral one, the title will never fail to bring to mind the unique personalities and plot twists of the adventure, encapsulating its essence perfectly – for me at least.
• ‘Force 13’ – Originally titled “Crochet Of Time”, which is not a very good title. The PCs are trapped in a repeating loop of time in which the planet they occupy and defend is repeatedly destroyed. The situation gets more complicated when the PCs learn they are responsible for the (inadvertent) creation of the loop in time, and that undoing it will unleash an even worse chain of events – unless they get really clever. The original title refers to the solution to the problem that I had built into the plotline – I always make sure there is at least one answer in case the players can’t come up with their own – which is why it is such a poor choice as a title. The final title refers to a scale of temporal incident, something analogous to the Richter Scale (Earthquakes), Beaufort Scale (Hurricanes), or Fujita Scale (Tornadoes). The “Celestial Typhoon Scale” goes up to 16 (and, in theory, can go even higher); the event which creates the loop in time is Force 13 on this scale, an event that had only been theoretical previously. In order to solve the problem, the PCs have to team up with their arch-enemy – the same villain mentioned in reference to “A Noble Ambition”.
• ‘The Armageddon Disconnection’ – The campaign was now building up to its big finish, and the primary purpose of this adventure was to ramp up the stakes while eliminating significant parts of the PCs support network. Much of the consequences were actually aimed at the next campaign. The title is one of those that sound immediately familiar, even though (so far as I can determine) it is completely original, and certainly was when it was first written, back in 2006. Mandarin’s Empire (refer to the original campaign, above) used to imprison its criminals using pre-programmed “Time Stop” spells contained in sarcophagi-like ‘mummy cases’. As Ragnerok approached, all but the worst criminals were pardoned and returned to the labor force. The remainder, like everything else from the Mandarin, were scattered throughout time and space in the post-Ragnerok universe. Now, one of them has been found – and the criminal is about to be released… This was another variation on the Knowledge Man Is Not Meant To Know, the criminal was an arcane researcher who went after forbidden knowledge regardless of the cost to others. When he is released, he replicates his research, causing the Universe to “quarantine” space-time, trapping the PCs and turning their temporal connection to other worlds they had influenced into lethal monofilaments of temporal energy – like the headquarters of the Parent Team. This was a team-up with another old Enemy, a clearing of the decks of NPCs that I no longer wanted to have around, and set-up for the future. The title uses “Armageddon” as an adjective to modify “Disconnection” – usually a verb, but in this case, used as a Noun. At first glance you might not recognize the significance of this, but what it is proclaiming is the cause-and-effect relationship, and the fact that in this adventure they are inverted – Armageddon is not the result of the disconnection, it is the cause. That alone is a subtle hint that there’s a complicated causality relationship at the heart of the plotline. This violates my normal rule about giving solution hints in the title, but because there is nothing hidden in this plotline’s overt events – the loop in time – things that would normally be hidden until they occur are known full well to the players if not the characters – and it’s to the players, not the characters, that the adventure title is addressed.
• ‘The Light Of Morning’ – The big finish to the original Zenith-3 campaign is a five-part adventure collectively titled “The Light Of Morning” – a reference to the dawn, to seeing the light, to the light at the end of the tunnel. The first is an allusion to beginnings, the second to understanding, which comes in the middle, and the third to endings. In this case, these terms are not used to form an overall continuity from beginning of a story to an end, but from the middle of a story to an end and thence to a new beginning, the dawn of a new day. This title is so steeped in meaning and significance that it alone would earn this adventure a reference in this list, but there’s more: A deliberate naming structure was used in the subtitles of each of the five parts that adds to, and enhances, the overall significance of the events in that phase if the adventure.

• ‘Elements Of Perpetuity’ – this part of the adventure focused attention on those elements of the team that were going to be staying behind when most of the team moved on to the new campaign setting.
• ‘Elements Of Conclusion’ – this part of the adventure focused on things that were coming to an end – goodbyes to significant NPCs and the like. At the same time, one last round of plot developments began to surface with the deaths of a reformed villain.
• ‘Elements Of Transition’ – with the third part of the adventure, we move from the ‘ending’ to the ‘understanding’ as the PCs realize that the villain of the campaign, who had seemed defeated, and to have accepted that defeat, had one final all-or-nothing plan to achieve his goals, a kamikaze run that – if successful – would have destroyed everything the PCs had fought for and won. Win or lose, he – and the PCs – would never be quite the same again.
• ‘Elements Of Resolution’ – The epic final confrontation with the villain, as still more plot threads come together to show that while the road in between may have been different if they had made other choices, this confrontation was inevitable from the moment the PCs set foot in this game setting, back in the first adventure.
• ‘Elements Of Regeneration’ – The PCs win, though it is a closer-run thing than they expected or were comfortable with. This is a campaign epilogue, exploring the consequences of the final confrontation, and of everything the PCs had done in the course of the campaign, and ending with the reconstitution of the elements of the old team into a new one, in new circumstances, en route to a new campaign setting.

The Earth-Regency Campaign

There have only been two adventures in the new campaign so far, so I can’t offer too many examples from it!

• ‘New Beginnings’ – This title doesn’t just refer to the fact of a new campaign or a new start for the team, its central action offers ‘new beginnings’ to the lives of a new PC team member, a new NPC team member, and a new (artificially intelligent) headquarters. It also marks the beginnings of a number of new relationships between the PCs and some NPCs who will become significant to them in the future.
• ‘Blood Runs Cold’ – You’re always learning. The method used to introduce the game setting to the PCs last time around was so disastrous it was almost a year before everyone found their feet. This time around, I wanted to spread things out a little more, so this adventure was deliberately designed to give the old PCs a chance to learn what their new teammates could do, and for the team to start gelling. To avoid distracting the players with all the complications of learning a new game world at the same time, this was set on one that they already knew well. The title alludes to the circumstances of the adventure, in which they confront a Vampire with centuries of skill and planning behind him. An atmospheric noir style was deliberately invoked through the adventure, mostly in the descriptions of the settings, and the title was deliberately couched in a very noir fashion to get the players into the right frame of mind.
• ‘The Gift Of Dying’ – The adventure that the players are about to start. A Christmas adventure which has as a subplot the team members shopping for appropriate gifts for each other, but the main plot will be the hunt for the hardest type of serial killer to catch – someone who mails one bomb each year, targeting the postal service. This is an adventure to let the players become better acquainted with the new game setting. The title is a somewhat poetic allusion to the actions of the villain, who was inspired by a piece of art that I came across on the internet – it’s probably copyright, so I won’t be showing it here, but do a Google Image search for “Bad Santa” and you will find it, plus some variations.

The Warcry Campaign

Warcry was a member of Zenith-3 until it became clear that – due to a flaw in the rules system – he was vastly overpowered relative to the other characters. Rather than retire the character and ditch all the plotlines I had planned for him, his player and I decided jointly to give him his own solo campaign to use as a rules development test-bed. This campaign very strongly a space opera / soap opera / superhero blend. I’m not going to explain or comment on the adventure titles, as I’m running short of time, I’m simply going to list them. Some of the titles are weaker, some are stronger – I’ll leave the exercise of identifying which is which to the reader. Note that I have revealed this list to the players, so I’m not giving away any secrets here!

• 01. Intelligence Games
• 02. Death Redux
• 03. The Nebula Project
• 04. The ‘Daughters Of Darion’ epic:
•    04a Getting To Know You
•    04b Bugs In The System
•    04c Legacy Of The Ancients
•    04d Dramune Run – this is the adventure we have just finished.
•    04e Cargo Macabre
•    04f Unscheduled Detour
•    04g Quantum Queen
•    04h Voices Of The Gods
•    04i Who Mourns Adonis?
•    04j Where Credit Is Due
•    04k An Air Of Diplomacy
•    04l The Wedding Planner
• 05. The Mists Of Avalon
• 06. The Freedom To Disbelieve
• 07. The Convention Of Cross-Time Ichigos
• 08. The Stillness Of Light
• 09. Journey To The Centre Of The Blackwing
• 10. Red Mars
• 11. The ‘To Crown A King’ epic:
•    11a Crusade
•    11b Balance Of Evil
•    11c The Devil’s Bargain
•    11d Revolution
•    11e Redemption
•    11f Epilogue I
•    11g Epilogue II
• 12. The ‘Paint Me A Picture’ Trilogy:
•    12a Paint Me A Picture
•    12b Family
•    12c Demon To The Left of Me, Demon To The Right
• 13. The Wine-Dark Depths
• 14. Time After Time
• 15. Instant Karma
• 16. An Empire Built On Trade
• 17. Show A Little Backbone
• 18. A Stroke Of Luck
• 19. A Lesson Learned
• 20. The Fastest Gun
• 21. Windows Into Yesterday
• 22. For Sale: One Chassis (slightly used)
• 23. Reflected Glories
• 24. A World Without Behemoth

There’s one more part of this series to go – a look at alien names & languages, at random name generators and how to use them, and at some other tools to help you with your naming of characters, campaigns, and adventures. That’s right, the next part will talk about Name Tools – with, hopefully, a few surprises!

Pieces Of Creation is an occasional recurring column at Campaign Mastery in which Mike offers game reference and other materials that he has created for his own campaigns.

All images used to illustrate this article are public-domain works hosted by Wikipedia Commons, or derivations of such works.

This article is a work of fiction and no endorsement of the content should be attributed to any of the individuals or institutions named, photographed, or credited.

The war on drugs

Total world sales of Crack Cocaine are estimated to have exceeded those of Heroin, signaling the ascendancy of the designer drug.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Continent Of Blood

Massacres and Ethnic Cleansing continue in Algeria throughout the year.

In June, a coup by a former Brigadier-General begins a Civil War in Guinea-Bissau on the African west coast. With the failure of the coup, rebellious uprisings took place independently in two provinces, creating a bloody three-way conflict. Each faction successfully sought allies with a different neighboring African nation; those allied nations then began agitating against each other while attempting to recruit allies further afield. To quell this unrest, the majority of Imperial troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan and redeployed, opening a fourth front. The three allied African nations were declared rogue states by the Imperial Government, increasing the anti-Empire sentiment throughout Africa. It would be a year before the resulting political quagmire yielded a solution to the immediate problem. When the Civil War concludes, thousands will be dead and 350,000 will be displaced, their homes razed.

August saw the commencement of the Second Congo War. It will persist until 2003, by which time 3,900,000 will be dead – making this the bloodiest conflict since the Third Global War.

The Embassy Bombing

August was also the month in which the USK Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed in a cold-blooded and ruthless attack, killing 224 people and injoring over 4500 more. These bombings were later linked to Osama Bin Laden by the FBI.

Irish Developments

In Ireland, there was a concerted effort to set aside the mistakes of the past on both sides and to make a fresh start. On April 10, these efforts are rewarded when the Belfast Agreement is signed by the Imperial Government and by all but one of the dissident groups.

The lone exception is the Democratic Unionist Party, whose religious views are more extreme than the others. As the second-largest dissident group, this demonstrates both overall progress without actually changing anything very much. Many hold-outs from other political and radical groups changed affiliations or formed isolated splinter groups in the wake of the Good Friday agreement, but without the support network, these would be run to ground or persuaded to give up their radical agendas one-by-one. The first such splinter group to receive public recognition was the “Real IRA” when they exploded a car bomb in Omagh on 15 August. The death toll of 29 included both Catholics and Protestants, a Mormon teenager, five other teenagers, two Spanish tourists, a pregnant woman, and six children and was condemned by both Prime Minister Blair and the leadership of the Sinn Fein. 290 more were injured, some severely. The attack did much to cement support for the peace process and led to a backlash of public sentiment against the “Real IRA” which left them persona-non-gratis throughout Ireland. So vehement was the outcry, both nationally and internationally, that three days later the RIRA apologized. However, they stopped short of naming those responsible, leading to an Imperial Man-hunt for the perpetrators. Unfortunately, the investigation was bungled, leading to an ongoing cycle of arrest and acquittal or arrest-and-release over the next decade. The perpetrators were never positively identified, leading some to suggest that they may even have been amongst those killed on the scene – with no real evidence to support the allegation, it must be acknowledged.

India-Pakistan Tensions

Through the course of the year, India and Pakistan would begin a dangerous game of brinkmanship and antagonism toward each other. With India a captured subject of the Mao, and Pakistan a disaffected member of the Empire, the potential existed for these acts of provocation to lead to a new Global War, yet each could justifiably claim that it was doing nothing overtly wrong. Pakistan, still resentful over the Bangladesh conflict of 1970, started the conflict by demonstrating a missile system that could reach India, but which was carefully designed not to have the range to threaten mainland China. India retaliated by demonstrating the ability to create a tower of fire several miles across and 60 miles into the air, which could completely destroy a city centre. Pakistan responded with a series of nuclear test detonations, proving that they had the capability of independent nuclear attack.

A Change In Indonesia

Indonesia continued to be a blight on the human rights record of the Empire. On May 21, President Suharto resigned after 7 consecutive terms in office, a record allegedly made possible only through extensive repression, vote-rigging and electoral fraud; his hand-picked vice-president and natural successor, B. J. Habibie, inherited the position and party machine after Suharto was forced to resign amidst a climate of rioting and civil uprising. Habibie was a compromise that satisfied no-one; the critics perceived him as an extension of the discredited Suharto regime, while the loyalists perceived his attempts at a more progressive agenda as radical. From the outside, Habibie appeared to address the criticisms of the Suharto regime, giving the residents of East Timor a referendum on Independence and reestablishing diplomatic ties with neighboring Kingdoms; but under this veneer, many of his government were holdovers from the Suharto regime who changed neither policy nor attitude, undermining all attempts at genuine reform. The head of an unstable coalition which satisfied neither element, Habibie was repeatedly forced to compromise the ideals he espoused. Despite the diplomatic successes, a semi-successful bid to normalizing the internal race-relations of the country, and successfully stabilizing the economy during his whirlwind 17 months in Office, the progressives broke with the coalition and delivered what was effectively a vote of no-confidence in the Habibie government in the lead-up to the 1999 elections, following which he withdrew his candidacy for President.

Science & Technology

In January, the Empress was presented with a petition signed by 1/4 of the combined population of 19 European kingdoms asking her to forbid human cloning; she agreed in February. This followed the success of New Zealand researchers in cloning Dolly the Sheep in 1996, with attempts underway to clone many other higher organisms, ranging from Rhesus Monkeys to Camels to Cats and Horses. The goal for most researchers at the time was simply to develop the techniques and technology to permit successful cloning, with the end-use of those techniques still open to debate. Medical purposes relating to humans was a medium-range goal that would (it was hoped) eventually lead to more successful organ transplants; for many, the short-term goal was to repopulate endangered species and possibly even restore extinct species. The first successful case of the former would be reported in 2001 with the cloning of a Gaur (Indian Bison). A near-miss attempt at the second took place in 2009 with the cloning of the Pyranean Ibex; the clone lived for seven minutes before dying of lung defects, a recurring problem with the cloning technology of the era. Ironically, the Ibex itself is neither endangered nor extinct, only the Pyranean subspecies. In 2004, and despite the Imperial edict, a researcher attempted to clone a human in clandestine research but the embryo did not take.

The same month, The Lunar Prospector was launched; it eventually found deposits of water ice in perpetually-shadowed Lunar craters. By March, Selenologists reported having found enough water to sustain a permanent settlement on the Moon.

Also in March, the Galileo space probe reported that Jupiter’s moon, Europa, has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice.

On September 4th, Google was founded, with little fanfare or notice paid; there was no indication that it would come to dominate the internet within a decade, becoming synonymous with its primary function. The innovation at the heart of Google was a revolutionary approach to determining the relevance of the websites indexed by the search engine to a particular user enquiry; instead of ranking pages based on the number of times they were opened by those searching for the term in question, or by the number of times the search term appeared on the web-page in question, Google ranked pages based on the number of sites that linked to the page in question, reasoning that the more such links there were, the more likely it was that the page would be useful. Refinements to this basic system occurred regularly thereafter, but the heart of the system is defining relevance to the user enquiry.

In November, a Russian rocket carries the first segment of what is then named the International Space Station into orbit.

The Genocide Solution

The problem of criminal acts against a population as a whole was one that had been on Imperial minds since the Nuremburg Trials following the Third Global War. In the past, such crimes had been handled by ad-hoc proceedings with little in the way of legal authority. One of many problems to be given to an IMAGE committee, no unity on the issue could be found because each Imperial member-nation had its own definitions of what was acceptable and what was not. In July of 1998, a solution was achieved by the IMAGE Committee On Population Crime; they redefined acts of Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and Acts Of Aggression as crimes against the unity of the Empire itself, and established a permanent International Criminal Court in Italy to deal with these cases as necessary. Promulgating a treaty between member nations to bind them to agreement over the jurisdiction of the Court, they achieved the signatures of 87 member nations. Diplomatic negotiations immediately commenced with a view to adding those nations under Mao rule to the list of signatories; these talks would be ongoing for many years.

On September 2nd, the ICC heard its first case, finding Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a village in Rwanda, guilty of nine counts of Genocide. Even though anti-genocide laws had been on the books in various Kingdoms since 1948, prosecution had been impossible because no Kingdom was permitted to interfere with the internal workings of another. Only when the crime had been accepted as an Imperial-level matter did the Empire itself take the responsibility for declaring and enforcing laws against such acts. Akayesu was sentenced to Life Imprisonment on each of the nine counts and incarcerated in a prison in Mali, in Western Africa, even though that country was considered a rogue state within the Empire for its role in the Guinea-Bissau civil war. Shortly thereafter, Mali renounced its support of the Senegal faction in that conflict, and was restored to normal Imperial Membership (though downgraded to Class III for its usurping of the Imperial Prerogative).

The Yangtze River floods

It emerged in August that Mao weather control was less perfect than the initial analysis by the Imperial Space Agency had led the Empire to believe when the Yangtze River broke through its main bank prompting mass flooding. Considerable Imperial debate followed, with some advocating a humanitarian responsibility to offer aid, while others argued that the offer would reveal both the capabilities of Imperial Space capabilities and the fact that the Empire was using them to spy on the Mao. After 2 days of wrangling, the Empress made her decision, in favor of the humanitarian arguement – did her advisors really think that the Mao didn’t know the Empire had this technology? This was an opportunity to further establish bonds of trust and respect between the two cultures, and not to be wasted. Besides, she added, Imperial Intelligence might finally learn something worthwhile from the impressions of the troops providing relief on the ground.

Somewhat to Imperial surprise, the offer of assistance was accepted by the Mao. Subsidiary levees had continued to collapse and needed immediate reinforcement, and thousands had been displaced and needed food and emergency shelter. Their forces were delaying and containing the flooding at the moment while evacuations were carried out, but were reaching the limits of their strength, having bought the Mao Empire 48 vital hours of additional time in which to respond.

Immediately the offer was accepted, Cargo flights began ferrying food, blankets, tents, and sandbags into China. A charity appeal was launched to generate funds to obtain further supplies. One hundred Red Cross volunteer medical personnel were airlifted in. Imperial estimates were that with these actions, up to 300,000 lives were saved.

Of course, they were all extensively debriefed apon their return, but hard intelligence proved elusive. The architecture was uniformly beautiful, the land green and fertile. There was a timeless quality to the country, a patience and supple resilience that seemed positively archaic and out-of-place in the modern era. The Chinese citizens were reportedly extremely fatalistic, speaking of “living in natural harmony” and other such phrases. The citizens were uniformly well-fed, uniformly educated no more than necessary for their decreed role in the stratified pseudo-fuedal society, driven by religious belief, and seemed extraordinarily content. Children were tested for aptitude and personality early in life, and the results used to determine their rank and social class within society; a gifted child could elevate the entire family into an entirely different social stratum. In short, Mao society was a highly regulated and regimented feudal caste-based meritocracy. But beyond gaining this appreciation for the internal political structure of the Mao society, the only hard intelligence to be obtained was that even amongst their own subjects, the Mao remained separate and aloof, with their domed helmets and travelling cloaks concealing their appearance.

Iraq: one game too many

Iraq continued to play games with the Imperial investigators searching for WMDs throughout 1998, first agreeing to inspection requests and then restricting the timing or access of those inspections. On one occasion President Hussein restricted the inspection to the car parking spaces of the facility. Unusual rail movements were detected in the hours and days prior to more substantial inspections, suggesting the possibility that the evidence was being moved. Inspectors were repeatedly expelled from the country on trivial charges only for new agreements to be made permitting their return a few hours or days later.

By December, the USK had had enough. On the grounds that the potential presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction posed a clear threat to American Citizens, President William Clinton launched a series of airstrikes into Iraq, notifying the Imperial Authorities of the action only once it had commenced.

I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between intelligence and instinct as expressed by different game systems.

Most systems have an INT or IQ score of some kind, but the handling of the other side of the equation varies considerably. D&D and Pathfinder have a WISdom score, the Hero System has an EGO score, my homebrew system has a WILL score, and some have an out-and-out intuition score – usually also abbreviated INT and hence abbreviating intelligence to IQ.

Despite this, they all seem to cover similar ground in their definitions. One handles reactions and responses that occur without thinking, while the other handles the character’s ability to learn and reason.

D&D 3.5

“Intelligence defines how well your character learns and reasons. This ability is important for wizards because it affects how many spells they can cast, how hard their spells are to resist, and how powerful their spells can be. It’s also important for any other character who wants to have a wide assortment of skills.”

Skill acquisition and improvement and initial number of languages are both directly impacted by an INT score. Appraise, Craft, Decipher Script, Disable Device, Forgery, Knowledge skills, Search, and Spellcraft are all based on the INT stat.

“Wisdom describes a character’s willpower, common sense, perception, and intuition. While Intelligence represents one’s ability to analyze information, Wisdom represents being in tune with and aware of one’s surroundings. An “Absentminded professor” has low Wisdom and high Intelligence. A simpleton (low Intelligence) might still have great insight (high Wisdom). Wisdom is the most important ability for clerics and druids, and is also important for paladins and rangers. If you want your character to have acute senses, put a high score in Wisdom. Every creature has a Wisdom score.”

Will saving throws, Heal, Listen, Profession, Sense Motive, Spot and Survival checks, are all based directly off a character’s Wisdom score.

Pathfinder

It’s not particularly surprising that Pathfinder’s description of INT and WIS are virtually identical to the D&D 3.5 definitions. The sequence of some of the sentences is different, but they still say almost exactly the same thing. In fact, the biggest difference is that Pathfinder refers to “Awareness” instead of “Perception” in Wisdom.

Surprise!

That’s a subtle but important distinction – Perception generally implies conscious awareness, while ‘Awareness’ generally encompasses both that and a gestalt impression of things not consciously noted. The latter, I have always thought, forms the basis of much Intuitive action – the character who feels he is being watched even though he can’t see anyone, the character who reacts to the body language of the armed thug even though he didn’t see the weapon drawn, the character who throws himself flat without realizing why he has done so just as the crossbow bolt passes through the space his body was occupying a moment earlier. In D&D, the latter is considered a reflex action, which is based on DEX – or, more accurately, a reflex REaction.

Since characters who are surprised in D&D do not get the benefit of their DEX while they are “flatfooted”, this implies that surprise relates to INT in D&D and to WIS in Pathfinder – that in D&D it’s more about consciously being aware of something going on, while in Pathfinder it is more about instinct. A quick check on the pathfinder rules on Surprise backs up this impression, by defining the condition as “if you are not aware of your opponents and they are aware of you”.

Surprise can also be described as coming to terms with an unexpected development, and that would appear to fit with the D&D definition. D&D specifically talks about Spot and Listen checks to determine surprise, though, and those are Wisdom based.

Reconciling this apparent discrepancy comes down to a definition of Perception – it is not the ability to recognize or understand what you are looking at, but rather the recognition that something is there. This is important to note, because many GMs – myself included – call for a Spot check and then describe what the character sees, or a Listen check, and then describe what the character hears, when there are occasions when we should ask for the check without linking it to the description of surroundings. Instead, we should offer an incomplete description and then ask for the check to determine if anyone can add to the description – or even offer them the chance to react without knowing what they are reacting to.

Hero System (5e)

I’m using the 5e definitions because I don’t have a copy of the 6e rulebook at hand.

“Intelligence represents a character’s ability to take in and process information quickly. It does not necessarily reflect knowledge or lack thereof (a character could be ignorant or a genius, but still have an INT of 10). INT has more to do with processing and reacting to information than with raw learning. INT serves as the basis for Perception Rolls and many important skills.

“Use INT Rolls when a character tries to employ knowledge not specifically represented by a Skill, or when he attempts to remember something or figure something out)…”

Right away, there’s a major difference – INT in the Hero System isn’t about what knowledge a character has, but his ability to use what he has learned. It represents the application of expertise, not having that expertise in the first place. But it also incorporates a character’s conscious awareness of his surroundings – what he knows is there; this is based on an INT roll.

“EGO represents a character’s mental strength and strength of will. EGO helps a character when he undergoes a test of willpower, becomes wounded, resists interrogation or Mental Powers, or tries to overcome his Psychological Limitations.”

‘Ego’ always struck me as an odd name for this statistic. After all, there are two definitions of the term:

• The strength of a character’s opinion of themselves
• A sense of identity or individuality

…and neither of them seem to fit especially well. Instead, the definition offered for the stat describes a character’s determination, how easily deflected they are (or, more precisely, how strongly they resist attempts by others to deflect them from their desired course of action). “Ego”, as a term, has implications for self-confidence and sense of self-worth – both ingredients that contribute to the character’s Charisma score.

My homebrew superhero rules

INT: The character’s ability to comprehend the physical and metaphysical world around them, combined with his deductive ability, scholastic ability, and his ability to remember what he has learned or deduced.

WILL: A measure of the character’s determination and stubbornness, and his ability to concentrate and ignore distractions.

My homebrew rules bear roughly the same relationship to Champions 4th Ed as Pathfinder does to D&D 3.5. So there is no surprise that the characteristic definitions seem to mean the same thing, but use different language.

In an appendix related to unusual societies & races, INT is broken up into five sub-abilities:

• The Ability to think
• Reasoning Ability
• The capacity for education
• The ability to learn
• Memory

You may be thinking that the first and second mean the same thing, but it’s not so. The first relates to the priority given to logical thought over emotional desires and other modes of analyzing a situation, and the value placed on any mode of thought by the character’s society. A society that highly values people who think clearly will equip their citizens with the means to do so, while a society that has other priorities will not. Earth societies in general score in the lower-middle range – we place value on a whole host of different criteria and tend to look down on extreme logic with no ‘humanity’ as being a flawed personality. At best, we’re an indirect meritocracy. ‘Reasoning ability’ describes how well the individual lives up to the social standard defined.

You may also be under the impression that the third and fourth items refer to the same thing, but again you would be mistaken. ‘The Capacity For Education’ refers to how MUCH the character can learn, while ‘The Ability to learn’ describes how Quickly and Effectively the character can learn that knowledge. And Memory, of course, relates to how much if it the character gets to keep.

The major difference between these definitions and those of the other game systems is that there is no mention of any form of intuition or instinct.

Intuition and instinct work differently in any hero-based system and my variant rules are not unusual in this respect. First, you have to make allowance for extra sensory abilities such as Danger Sense; second, you have to taking into account Berserks and Enraged’s; third, you have to take into account psychological limitations; and fourth, you have to take into account the effects of Luck or Unluck. Only once all those have been factored into a situation can you start considering “instinctive” or “intuitive” responses.

Application

Every system has some system for dealing with the rational mind and one for dealing with the intuitive reactions. These can look superficially similar, but when you dig into the fine print, they can be very different. Those differences all relate to where intuition connects with the system – it can be through the intellect, through a wisdom/willpower attribute, or a standalone system.

Each of these three alternatives confers a subtly different flavor to Intuition. Is it a response to noticed but not understood stimuli? Does it connect with Intelligence, with the rational understanding of the world? Or is it related to a more primal awareness of the universe?

The answers to those questions dictate the nuances of how you referee circumstances in which something is taking place of which the PCs are currently unaware. Do you inform them of what they can see? Do you take momentary control of the PC? Do you drop hints, or simply tell the player that there is something wrong without specifying what? Do you deliberately mislead the player by describing what the character thinks he sees – and not mentioning what he doesn’t?

This is a situation that comes up more often than we sometimes realize. Putting some thought into how to approach it in the general case can pay dividends over and over again when considering a specific case, but to do that you need to understand the relationship within your game system of Intelligence, Perception, Wisdom/Ego/Will, and Intuition.