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.

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.

A reminder of what the last version of AutoREALM could do. Click on the thumbnail to see it full-sized.

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 Lunar Prospector was one of the science highlights of 1998. Click on the thumbnail for a larger image.

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.

Map of the Belligerents in the Second Congo War by Jaro7788. Click on the thumnail for a larger image.

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 remains of the USK Embassy in Kenya after the bombing, photo courtesy the FBI.

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.

The Omagh Bombing Memorial, photograph by Ardfern

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.

Bucharuddin Jusuf Habibie - official Vice-Presidential Portrait, courtesy the Government of the Republic Of Indonesia

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.

The Jovian moon, Europa, image by NASA. The brown is volcanic material, molten because of tidal pressures, which wells up along the stress fractures in the ice.

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 Logo of the International Criminal Court

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).

Map by Papayoung

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.

Base image by Stelogic, modified by Mike

This is an article that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for a very long time, encouraged in part by the Numb3rs Season 2 episode ‘Double Down’ (and several subsequent episodes), in part by movies such as ‘The Sting’, ‘Oceans 11’, and ‘Oceans 13’, in part by the Babylon-5 Season 1 episode ‘The Quality Of Mercy’ (in which Londo cheats at Poker using an extra (tentacle) limb to reach across under the table), and in part by the first two or three seasons of ‘Las Vegas’. Oh, and some of the Poker games of the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek The Next Generation, as well – just take a look at this list of ‘poker references in Star Trek’ at Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki…

Specifically, I started thinking about how people could or would attempt to cheat in worlds where characters had different abilities to the norm, and what measures casinos – who obviously would want to deter such practices – would have to put in place to stop them.

Cheating in Fantasy

At first glance, there seem to be two ways of cheating in addition to the standards. The first is the use of precognition, and the second uses telekinesis of some sort. But with a little imagination, a few more start suggesting themselves.

Precognition

The problem with precognition is that it always lacks in context or in detail. If a spell is so kind as to show the cheater’s hand (assuming that we’re talking about a card game such as poker), a large bet, and a triumphant win, there is no guarantee that these events happen in sequence, or all relate to the same hand of the game. This makes precognition more a “will-I-won’t-I-play-tonight” coin-toss, cast in advance, but even used in this way there are problems. The player may think they have won, only for someone else at the table to crash the party with a better hand even as the precognitive player celebrates. Or for the player to lose his winnings – and then some – in one or more subsequent hands, for that matter.

Because the GM has full control over the content of the precognition, and will never tell the whole story (he needs to leave room for player input, if nothing else), a player should never be able to rely on it 100%. Scenes should be disjointed, not a seamless narrative.

This is justifiable in a fantasy game situation because the casino would make every effort imaginable to stay on the good side of the God(des) of Luck, God(dess) of Fate, and any other such power that might be able to influence the outcome – or prevent such influences from being helpful.

This notion can be taken further – a casino might employ priests of the God(dess) of Dreams to ensure that everyone who stays at the Casino has dreams of winning, just to encourage them to play!

Telekinesis

The ability to manipulate objects at a distance would seem to be an obvious way to cheat, but in a fantasy milieu, such spells are almost always accompanied by a visual display of some kind – a spectral hand, for example. This makes the approach generally untenable.

Scrying

A more subtle approach is to employ an ability to scry to see other player’s cards. In some game systems, this requires a rather obvious physical object to use as the focus of the magic such as a crystal ball, a mirror, or something similar; this makes Scrying unsuitable as a technique for cheating. Other game systems permit scrying in any reflective surface – a refinement of the obvious approach of simply seeing the reflection of someone’s cards. This suggests an obvious technique – a team, one of whom is a fighter in brightly-polished armor and the other of which who uses that armor to scry on his opponent’s hands!

How would a casino combat scrying? They couldn’t very well ban players from wearing anything that was polished or reflective, though that is an obvious remedy. Carried through to its logical extreme, this would impart a rustic flavor to the most up-market casinos, a touch which could help distinguish the game world from the real one. The problem with such a ban is that it would require casinos to store a large quantity of very valuable magic items belonging to patrons, who would be reluctant to hand them over unless the casino assumed full responsibility for them (and had adequate (expensive) security to boot – a financial risk that could quite literally break the bank.

A better, but more difficult, approach would be to employ illusionists to overlay false ‘readings’ on any reflective surface, ensuring that scrying gave a false ‘read’. It follows that the best and most famous casinos would be found in cities/nations with strong magic schools. Since these are generally the most easily-cast illusions – the casino wouldn’t even have to make them look real, if they publicized the security measure – this would also be a relatively inexpensive solution.

It might even reach the point where the casino paid the costs of apprenticeships in the illusionary art, at least until the apprentice/casino employee had learned enough to carry out this function. Many of the apprentices would not have the skills to progress further, but this is still a win/win/win for the parties involved – the casino gets its illusionists, the trainees get secure employment with the prospects of being taken on as a full apprentice if they are good enough, and the tutor gets additional income, a patron, and assistance in locating suitable apprentices to work on his behalf.

Illusions

Of course, illusions work both ways. A cheat can overlay one of his cards with an illusion of a different card, or do the same with a card in a rival’s hand (though that’s trickier to get away with). What’s more, it would be harder for a casino to combat this without disrupting the illusions that they are using to prevent scrying. The best answer to this is to use a deck of custom-created magic cards that disrupt illusions cast on them – again strengthening the affiliation between schools of magic and successful gambling dens.

This would have an additional benefit – most magic items are far more resilient than their non-magical counterparts. Modern casinos combat card-marking by swapping decks frequently, a practice that relies on having a manufacturing industry able to produce hundreds of virtually-identical decks of cards; the pseudo-medieval nature of most fantasy campaigns does not permit this, but using magic cards achieves the same benefit by making the cards harder to mark in the first place.

Non-magical techniques

Of course, there are always the traditional approaches: high levels of manual dexterity, ‘trick’ shuffles, card-counting, and so on. Some of these might not have been thought of in a fantasy environment, or probability might not work exactly the same ‘in-game’ as it does in real life, but as a general rule, they would still be expected to work. The techniques to combat these would be equally traditional, and most revolve around a dealer provided by the casino.

‘Anything goes’ games

Of course, any private game run outside the scope and protection of a well-heeled casino would not be able to counter these measures so easily – which can be the basis for a fun adventure, in which the PCs sit in on a ‘friendly’ game in which everyone else is cheating by means of a different method!

Cheating in Sci-Fi

As technology and analytic sophistication improve, statistical analysis becomes an increasing element of both cheating (and advantage playing) and of the detection of cheating. It is generally considered cheating for someone to have computer assistance, for example, but this becomes difficult to enforce when mobile telephones which can also run software apps become ubiquitous, and almost impossible if cybernetic enhancements are commonplace.

To combat this, casinos would employ computer-based statistical analysis to detect cheating. The house has the advantage of being able to see everyone’s cards through hidden cameras, so they can always determine the optimum approach, assuming ignorance on the part of the players. A player may legitimately make a mistake and ignore what is apparently the optimum move, once or twice without suspicion, especially if they are clearly not a professional player. A professional may even get away with it occasionally if they can ‘read’ another player well enough – though this becomes more problematic when the other players are also professionals who have eliminated as many ‘tells’ as possible. The more times it occurs that a player wins by virtue of an apparent mistake, the more suspicious that player’s behavior becomes.

Adding to this are other methods of profiling players, both legitimate (facial recognition to identify known and suspected cheats) and illegitimate, and the capabilities of non-human species.

Consider a race with multiple eyes on stalks which weave back-and-forth like cat’s tails by instinct, alert to any potential danger or threat – how hard would it be to prevent such a player from getting a glimpse of his neighbor’s cards? Or a race with a marsupial’s natural pouch in which marked cards or cold decks can be located, but which is normally used to protect the young for whom exposure to the outside world can be dangerous – searching one of those would be the equivalent of a body-cavity search, which would have to be deemed unacceptable as a business practice (if not outright illegal). A race with very accurate thermal senses or very sharp hearing or even canine olfactory abilities might be able to measure the nervousness of another player – hardly definitive, but a definite advantage. Heck, even a race from a low-gravity environment with an extra meter (very roughly 3¼’) of height would find it much easier to see other player’s cards!

There are really very few things that can be done to combat the use of such player advantages. One possibility would be the use of ‘isolation walls’ between players so that they could not see each other, but the ability to ‘read’ an opponent is a huge part of the difference between live play and online play, so this would probably not be especially welcomed. It would also impact the audience’s vicarious attraction to the game, which is a big part of the atmosphere of high-stakes tournaments, so once again, the solution is left wanting.

Ultimately, I expect casinos would simply tell players to learn to live with it – each player has a different mix of abilities and skills that they can use to their advantage as they see fit.

The alternative would be to embrace one alternative solution that comes to mind – but I’m going to save discussion of that alternative for the end of the article.

Telepathy

One particular mode of cheating that needs mentioning at this point is the issue of telepathy. Unlike a fantasy campaign, with it’s special-effects-friendly magic spells, psionics is usually an invisible ability in most sci-fi and superhero games.

There are two primary defenses that could be employed against this method of cheating. The first would be a technological defense – some sort of “jammer” that each patron could wear or carry, which would broadcast mental “static” to any telepath present. The alternative would be taken from the old moral, “to catch a thief” – staff telepaths who would wander around “looking” for people using telepathic means to cheat.

I can see the latter being especially appropriate to a Babylon-5 universe (or any similar game) where there is an aggressive recruitment campaign by the Psi-Corps. For the former to work, there needs to be, One, general acceptance that psionic talents are real, backed by experimental proof, and Two, formal and detailed studies into exactly how it works. The second can’t exist without the first, and the second is required in order to provide a theoretical foundation for developing the gadget in the first place.

Cheating in Superhero Campaigns

A world with Superheroes would have to be a Casino Manager’s worst nightmare. Not only would it bring all the modes of cheating from both sci-fi and fantasy environments – and some of the limiting factors that constrain these would or could be reduced or even obviated completely – but there would be more besides.

Telekinesis

Superhero TK doesn’t have to be visible, and often isn’t. That means that players don’t have to ‘reach’ for cold decks or extra cards, or even to take surreptitious glimpses at the deck.

The one saving grace for Casinos where this ability is concerned is that psionics rarely occur alone – a telekinetic usually has at least some telepathic ability, however poor and untrained it is. So developing and then turning up the Jammers might be sufficient.

Stretching

This brings us back to Londo Mullari and his “extra limb”. When a big toe can stretch and curl around the table to surreptitiously reveal the top card on the deck, casinos have a problem – though a card “shoe” would mitigate this.

Precognition

Superhero precognition is usually more controllable and more reliable than the fantasy variety. If this is a psionic ability, then the measures mentioned under Telekinesis might be effective, but if the character reads the future by sensing the shape of the timeline, the power might be completely non-psionic. However, the latter approach would probably require a greater measure of skill in interpreting the results since there is no direct link between outcome and perception, so this would probably be considered the equivalent of being a professional player, and tolerated.

Teleportation

Can a sufficiently-skillful player teleport cards out of a card shoe at the same time as they teleport in a cold deck? If someone were to propose this to me in a game I was running, I would be extraordinarily skeptical, requiring many long hours of practice. Can it be done with no-one noticing (including security cameras)? That’s even more problematic. Casinos could combat this further by installing simple but highly-accurate pressure sensors under each card shoe – sufficient to detect the difference in weight of a single card. If the reduction is accompanied by the dealer extracting a card from the shoe, it can be ignored; if not, the alarm sounds. The casino might not know who was cheating, but they would know that someone was – and could declare the hand null and void, bring in a fresh show, and so on, just as they would if they detected someone marking the cards without knowing who.

Super-luck & Mind control

There are many other approaches to cheating that can be considered for a superhero campaign, but most of them also exist in either fantasy or sci-fi settings.

One step up from mere precognition is the ability to actually alter the outcome. The simplest method is simply to influence another character’s decision-making process – but that’s generally psionics again, or some form of hypnotism (which in turn requires some form of communication with the victim that would either be obvious or be psionic in nature), so the same measures work.

The more unusual method is to be able to fiddle with probability itself, during the shuffling process for example. Not even automated card-shuffling machines would be able to resist this power, and the only way to counter it is to employ someone to give the patrons bad luck – an unacceptable choice.

In fact, the only solution to this method of cheating is to have the randomizing agent somewhere else completely. And that brings us to the final anti-cheating technique, the one that I alluded to earlier:

Online Gambling

Almost all of these problems go away if you replace the casino with a server farm. If there are no physical cards to manipulate, if players don’t know who they are up against except as a screen name (let alone where they are and who they are), most of the old methods of cheating simply won’t work.

Even unusual methods like reading or manipulating the shape of the future become more difficult, and more easily detected, simple because the game relies on numbers that appear random – but are actually pseudo-random in nature, and hence can be replicated on a backup system in a remote third location. If the two machines agree, there’s no problem – but if they disagree, then one of them has been manipulated.

Is online gambling a complete cure? Not at all – there are some very clever people out there who have devised ways of beating the system (I don’t want to encourage this sort of behavior, so I’m not going to tell you what they are). But if I could find out about them, anyone else who really wants to can do so as well.

Suffice it to say that the proprietors of online casinos know all about them, too, and have watchdog routines in place to curb them – or (in some cases) have decided that it is not worth trying to do so and amended the terms and conditions of their games to permit such behavior.

Know the game

As the long list of media at the start of this article attest, gambling is a common human activity. Being able to simulate it in your games is something that will and should be necessary from time to time.

The environment is a factor that needs to be taken into account if you are to do this with any real success. There have been enough movies and TV shows that this is easy for a bricks-and-mortar casino, but its not so easy when you’re talking about online gaming. You might imagine that you know what it is like, but your imagination – in general – won’t capture the real essence of what a genuine game online is like, any more than a few friendly games will prepare you to participate in a genuine tournament.

Your emotional state, the fact that the stakes are real, the fact that someone else – with a different thought process to your own – has an equal impact on the outcome, these all combine to alter your mindset in the genuine event.

It follows that the best prep for simulating online poker in one of your games is to actually play a few
competitive games at pokersoft sites, and take careful note of how the actual experience differs from your imaginary one.

A few words of warning: to get the psychological impact right, there need to be real stakes, and that means a real game. Expect to lose (unless you make an ongoing hobby of it) and budget accordingly – don’t throw good money after bad in an attempt to recoup a loss. That means considering any money spent on a gambling site to have been spent – if you’re lucky, you might get some or all or even more back from a source that just happens to be the same, but that should be considered a separate transaction.

Secondly, Gambling addiction is real, and can be a real problem. Johnn raised this point a couple of weeks ago in his article, ‘Who Got Poker In My RPG?’ and I would like to second his advice on the subject. You may play online poker with real money to learn how to simulate it in your RPG, but DON’T play for real money in your RPG. In fact, think twice before playing for anything of value, even M&Ms. One GM I know once suggested that RPG gambling should be played for XP – I don’t agree, and even consider the suggestion dangerous.

Above all, have fun! There’s nothing like playing a game with no pressure to win – be it an RPG or online gambling. In fact, thinking of the stakes as “money already spent” should allow you to bring the same detachment to the online game as you do to an RPG session – so enjoy it.

Oh, and if you cheat, on your own head be it – it’s one thing to talk about villains and underhanded types doing so in a game, we neither support no condone doing so in real life.

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 hundred-or-more (!) 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)!

The Adventurer’s Club

The first three adventures in this campaign occurred before I started co-refereeing it. The adventure titles were one of the touches that I brought to the campaign…

4. “Ghost Ship” – Synopsis: A series of ships have mysteriously vanished in Haiti. Others report sighting a ghost ship before narrowly escaping. The PCs are hired to solve the mystery. The insurance investigator who hires them is then killed by “Zombies” (drugged voodoo cultists). PCs romp through haiti having fun with Voodoo priests and Zombies in what appears to be a power struggle between Voodoo cults. The Ghost Ship turns out to be a fake by the Haitian military to enable them to gather the naval forces required to stage a coup, backed by rogue elements in the US Military. Commentary: The title got the PCs thinking along supernatural lines, an impression reinforced by the “Zombies”. What was basically a political thriller with lots of double-crossing and betrayal was given a lot of color and flavor by the supernatural overtones. The scenario ended with a slightly ambiguous note as the PCs hear of another ghost ship sighting after the fake had been exposed and put out of business.
5. “St Michael & St George – Synopsis: The “Order of St George & St Michael” is the British equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition, a darker, quieter, more secretive, and far more insidious organization than its continental counterpart. Most don’t even know of its existence, and they have no direct contact with the church authorities. Membership includes some of the elite of the British Peerage. The existence of the organization comes to light when a former member leaves his memoires to the British Library on his deathbed in a fit of conscience. The Director of MI5 (and secretly a member of the Order) needs to retrieve them before his ‘extracurricular activities’ are discovered, but he can’t use his regular people without revealing his hand. So he calls in Paper (one of the PCs) who in turn involves the rest of the Party. Commentary: Not a title we were completely happy with. It does contrast the sanctity of the two named saints with the villainy of the organization acting in their name, and it again implies a strong supernatural element in what turned out to be a spy-thriller – again full of betrayal and subterfuge.
6. “Teutonic Metaphysics – Synopsis: This was a mission to recover “Teutonic Metaphysics” by J Michelet, London 1928 (1st edition) with marginal notes by Alistair Crowley. There is a Bishop about to be made cardinal, Yugoslav name, and placed in charge of the Vatican Library; the Adventurer’s Club is concerned about his fascist connections and rumors that he is an occultist. Commentary: Once again, a title that hints at the supernatural, but the players – wary from the last two scenarios, when similar hints turned out to be red herrings – immediately discounted that, an opinion reinforced by the revelation that the title refers to a manuscript. As a result, the PCs were considerably surprised when the curse of ill-fortune that comes with the manuscript (which they had dismissed) turned out to be true – everything that could possibly go wrong on the mission, did, starting as soon as they got their hands on the manuscript!
7. “Heisenberg’s Nightmare” – Synopsis: Several Volumes are missing from the Club Library, an investigation is launched and the library assistant (Honeydew, one of the players’ favorite NPCs) is stood down while the librarian (Mrs Hobbs) is re-cataloging the entire library herself. One of the missing volumes contains information on an atomic weapon: “The Hydrogen Bomb”. The FBI is called in to investigate officially. Through contacts, the club learns that someone is offering the manuscript for sale in Denmark. When they get there, the PCs find that the document has been purchased by German Agents and is en route to a castle run by the SS. PCs have to follow it into Nazi Germany and secure it from the castle – then get out of Germany with it. After recovering manuscript PCs return to club FBI has established that Honeydew’s locker has been wiped clean of fingerprints – either someone is trying to interfere with the investigation or the theft was by Honeydew herself. Commentary: The “Hydrogen Bomb” mentioned turned out to be exactly what it sounded like, much to the surprise of the players, who thought we were being clever again – Heisenberg had gathered together a summary of all atomic knowledge then existent, from Szilard to Rutherford, only then realizing that he had spelt out exactly what research, theoretical breakthroughs, and engineering solutions were needed to construct the terrible weapon. This was the first time we had made Nazis the central villains of the plot. A classic “chase the Macguffin” but the players never expected us to lead them through Berlin to a Schloss via SS Headquarters. Getting out of Germany afterwards was even more action-packed than getting in had been.
8. “The Library Crimes” – Synopsis: Honeydew and her best friend (one of the PCs) go on the run against the full might of the police and FBI while the rest of the PCs set a trap to catch the real thief. Commentary: A seemingly straightforward title, it was only when they uncovered the identity of the real thief and learned that he was selling the stolen manuscripts to raise funds to buy more books for the very library he was stealing from that the double-meaning became apparent. At the end of the adventure, the FBI took over the operation of the club on the grounds of national security.
9. “Flash & Richthoffen” – Synopsis: The FBI inform the PCs of intelligence regarding a Nazi super-dirigible missile – a sonic generator in the nose “loosens” the air in front of the dirigible permitting it to travel at 300 mph, and of course it is a huge bag of very flammable hydrogen. The Government can be seen doing anything about it, because the US is technically neutral, but New York is within range of the super-weapon – so they want the PCs to undertake a covert mission into the German R&D facility at Rugen Island. Commentary: This title had so many layers of meaning that some of them almost got lost in the shuffle – it was a little too clever for our own good. One of the featured NPCs was Professor Zarkov (from Flash Gordon). The “Richthoffen” angle obviously referred to the super-dirigible. The whole title was a metaphor for “Shock and Awe”. And finally, the whole thing promised to be a heavily sci-fi / space opera style pulp adventure – so it really surprised the PCs when they discovered Templar Vampires living beneath the Nazi base!
10. “Southern Comfort” – Synopsis: I’ve described this adventure twice before, in ‘There Is A Hold In Your Mind…’: Solving Mental Block and in Bam! Zap! Crunch! World Conventions In Pulp so I won’t repeat it here. Commentary: This is one of the better titles from the Pulp campaign. While it is obviously named after the world-famous bourbon, the title actually refers to the Bond-style villain who invited one of the PCs to a black-tie dinner aboard his riverboat to gloat (some genuine “southern hospitality”) – putting the PC in the perfect position to break his teammates free and completely louse up the villain’s plans. But it also describes the situation of the villain, a mastermind sitting in luxury while plotting the most foul of deeds.
11. “Things Of Stone And Wood” – Synopsis: By far the biggest adventure that we’ve run in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, it took the PCs deep into China up the Yangtze River where they encountered a Chinese Emperor and Sorcerer who returned from the dead and reanimated an army of stone, who could only be defeated by using the Four Elements – but these were the Chinese elements, including wood, not the western ones with which the players (and probably our readers) are more familiar. Commentary: In addition to the obvious references to the Chinese elements and the stone army, there were a number of encounters along the way with other representations of the Chinese elements, all connected by association with the title – everything from corals through to pirates. The entire adventure took close to a year-and-a-half of real time, and greatly expanded the overall scope of the campaign.
12. “Scenes From The Balcony” – Synopsis: A series of miniadventures in which we looked at how each PCs life had been changed by their association with the Adventurer’s Club and their growing fame. Tommy, the aviator, test-flew a radical new type of fighter; Father O’Malley, the priest, had a murder mystery and weird-science swamp monsters; Captain Ferguson, the Sea-Captain and Treasure Hunter, was hired by the Navy to supervise the salvage of an experimental submarine; and Doctor Hawke, the Medic, got involved in a plot to use Native Americans as involuntary subjects of medical experimentation by an immoral pharmaceuticals company, which ended up reuniting the PCs as each of their solo missions came to a conclusion and the Doctor found he needed help to deal with the larger problem he faced. Commentary: The title was determined as soon as we came up with the concept of the adventure, because it described perfectly the situation in which the other players were onlookers (and freely able to kibitz) during each other’s adventures, which were carefully intertwined. Some of the internal timing of the adventures went a bit wonky, but overall it worked fine – as a one-off. For once, the adventure was exactly what it said on the tin.
13. “The Dream Factory” – Synopsis: The team are hired to troubleshoot a string of mysterious accidents on the Hollywood production of a movie about the Adventurer’s Club is being filmed. One of those incidents leads to the discovery of a child-smuggling ring and a madman practicing human sacrifice in the name of the Aztec God, Tezcatlipoca. Commentary: This is the most recently-completed adventure at the time of writing. Originally an idea by Blair entitled “Hollywood Hijinx”, it evolved into a dark and disturbing tale of insanity, evil, and the tragic exploitation of children and their dreams. The title is an obvious reference to Hollywood, but it has a second and darker meaning in the way the villain is exploiting the kidnapped children as slave labor in order to fulfill his deranged dreams.
14. “The Legacy Of Vigo” – Synopsis: One of the PCs inherits a castle, and a noble title – in Transylvania. The estate turns out to be beset with problems – everything from Gypsy squatters to ancient curses to ghosts to crazy weather to… well, that would be telling. Commentary: “Vigo” is Vigo Moldova – the bad guy from Ghostbusters II. The estate in question is that of the legendary Vlad Dracul, aka Vlad The Impaler, the model for the Dracula legends. Since the whole adventure is about what Tommy (the PC in question) inherits from Vigo, whose life he apparently saved in WWI without knowing it, the meaning of the title seems clear. There may or may not be more to that story, but I can’t reveal it here, since the adventure is still ongoing…

Fumanor: The Last Deity

Unfortunately, my adventure notes from this campaign have all been filed away “somewhere safe”. I’m sure they will turn up eventually, but wasn’t able to locate them in time for this article.

Fumanor: Seeds Of Empire

With this campaign, I actually went so far as to provide a list of the adventure titles (at least for the first half of the campaign) to the players, and have kept it more-or-less up to date with short synopses of the adventure contents. The campaign is divided up into six Phases:

• Phase I: The Golden Empire – the Kingdoms of Fumanor face an invasion by the much stronger Golden Empire and select an elite force of unknown youngsters to find a solution.
• Phase II: The Caverns Of Zhin Tarn – a series of extra-dimensional explorations which reveal the solutions to many mysteries.
• Phase III: Imperial Sunset – either the PCs defeat the Golden Empire, or the Golden Empire conquers the Kingdoms of Fumanor. The title is appropriate either way. This is the current phase of the campaign.
• Phase IV: A Minor Matter Of Elves – In the course of their adventures in the Golden Empire, the PCs have learned what they need to know to begin a campaign to overthrow Lolth, who conquered the Elves in the first Fumanor Campaign.
• Phase V: Shadow-plays – In the first campaign, the Drow were liberated from the Worship of Lolth, becoming enlightened citizens of the Kingdoms of Fumanor – it says so on the tin lid. Reality is rarely so clear-cut, and attempts to release the Elves from the domination of Lolth are sabotaged by ambitious Drow, complicating the Elvish Civil War just as victory seemed to be within the grasp of the PCs.
• Phase VI: Divine Vengeance – Either the PCs succeed in overthrowing Lolth in the name of Corellon, or they fail, or something in between. No matter what the outcome, this title is appropriate. Will the party reunify the elvish population? And how will the long-lost Aquatic Elves play into events?

1. “Distant Rumbles” – Synopsis: Tajik (Orc PC) is enlisted to investigate and find a way to counter the threat of potential Invaders from somewhere beyond. Together with Ziorbe (Drow NPC), Eubani (Elf PC), and Arron (Ogre NPC), he forms Tajik’s Misfits…. Commentary: This adventure title dealt with four things: The internal socio-political relationships between elements of Orcish society, the relationship between the Orcish “Nation” and the Kingdoms of Fumanor, disquieting rumors from the world beyond the Orc Tribes’ borders, and early reports of trouble that an “elite force of adventurers” was being assembled to investigate. The adventure title applies with equal validity to each of these subjects.
2. “Devastation Scene” – Synopsis: Discovering that the enemy is mighty in lost arts and undead soldiers, the Party take advantage of an opportunity to (magically) slip behind enemy lines – straight to their capital city. Commentary: Possibly the weakest of the adventure titles from this campaign, it has no depths of meaning and is completely literal in interpretation.
3. “Dead Hands” – Synopsis: The true scale of the problem becomes apparent when it is discovered that the Golden Empire is an empire built on the services of undead menial labor Commentary: This campaign was about getting the PCs in over their heads an foot or so at a time. Every time they thought they had a handle on how serious the situation was, another implication or complication was revealed to them that showed the enemy’s strength to be that much greater than previously suspected. The first scenario reported an invading army; in the second, it was revealed that most of the army are undead, and that the living commanders of the army have access to more powerful magic than anyone has ever heard of; and in this part, the economic implications of having virtually all work done by unsleeping, uneating, undead are revealed – as is the fact that these undead retain the mind and personality of the deceased. I also started acquainting the PCs with the social and religious ramifications. The title was a subtle reference to all these concepts.
4. “Rights & Rites” – Synopsis: Deciding that this reliance on Undead labor is the Empire’s biggest Weakness as well as the source of much of its strength, the team begin to focus their investigation on the specifics. Commentary: The synopsis was obviously written after the fact. The actual plot was simply for the PCs to stir around and come to grips with the society of the enemy, looking for a weak point. In particular, this session focused on the arcane capabilities of the Golden Empire, on their Theology, and on the secondary effects on their society of the presence of so many undead. In particular, they learned that the living possess every luxury and lead lives of sybaritic excess – but that they are expected to pay for this luxury with service to the state as an undead. Again, a fairly literal adventure title, a last minute substitution for “Rites & Wrongs”, the working title of the adventure, which was intended to also go into the criminal code and law-enforcement practices within the Golden Empire – content which was pulled since it would have needed more explanation than simple observation.
5. “Captive Audience” – Synopsis: The party are captured by a Mummified Temple Guard (Chrin, guest PC), which they persuade to join them. Commentary: An adventure that didn’t run entirely according to plan. The PCs plan was to invade the high temple of the capital in search of Holy Books and spiritual writings that would help them understand how the Golden Empire was able to raise undead so easily and effortlessly – and, more importantly, how to cut the puppet strings, since the Golden Empire was completely dependant on their undead workers and armies. Instead, they were captured by a Mummified Temple Guard, a zealot and minor priest, who was intended to give them more answers without lots of exposition. They were then supposed to defeat him and escape. Instead, they used some specious arguement and logic to persuade him to join them – the guest player acting completely out of character for a young idealist and zealot. Fortunately, I was able to solve the characterization inconsistencies later in the campaign. The title of the adventure actually acquired a delicious double-meaning through the PCs actions, because (while the PCs were Chrin’s ‘Captive Audience’, he was also theirs.
6. “Troubled Waters” – Synopsis: Escaping from the Capital, the party trigger a massive pursuit. In dodging the hunters, they find themselves in the custody of the only group ever to fight the Golden Empire to a standstill – Aquatic Elves – and charged with treaty violations. They escape after being found guilty, and find that the pursuit has passed them by – for now. Commentary: This adventure served multiple purposes. It extended the mythology of the campaign, by revealing the survival of the aquatic elves (supposedly wiped out by the Drow long ago), laying the foundation for a reconciliation between the Elf and Drow party members. It gave the PCs an outside perspective on the Golden Empire, a third point of view, and revealed more of the history. It layed the foundations for the fourth phase of the Campaign. And the PCs had to learn to work with their Undead party member, and vice versa, with the latter lamenting his hasty decision to join them. So the “Waters” were both literal and figurative, referring to the relationships within the party and their slow transformation from rugged individualists to a team. With this adventure, Chrin reverted to being an NPC; his brief span as a PC had been an experiment that didn’t work and almost derailed the entire campaign. Chalk up another lesson learned.
7. “Sage Advice” – Synopsis: Chrin leads the Misfits to a cleric he trusts for advice. That cleric points Chrin at the outlands, the only place where Priests sufficiently heretical to listen and sufficiently devout not to be slain out of hand can be found, and gives them a name. The Misfits discover that the Empire are back hot on their trail, because they are able to track Chrin. Commentary: Another fairly straightforward title at first glance, but this adventure was full of people – PCs, Non-PC party members, and other NPCs – all offering each other good advice, or trying to absorb the good advice they had received.
8. “Digging A Hole” – Synopsis: The pursuing warriors of the Golden Empire chase the Misfits into a region with a number of caves. In the largest, the party find a door that can only be detected by Elven sight – and the Golden Empire numbers no elves in its population. The locks are clearly highly magical, giving rise to the hope that this may give the Misfits one or more weapons or allies against the Empire. They resolve to escape their pursuers by exploring the Realms concealed within the Caverns of Zhin Tarn. Commentary: This is the first adventure in phase II of the campaign. The title obviously refers to the idea of “digging a hole and pulling it in after you”, “going to ground”, and all sorts of other metaphors for hiding – but it actually has a triple meaning. The second meaning refers to these Caverns, and their treasures, being hidden under the noses of the Golden Empire simply because they are located in some unattractive real estate that has only ever been seen by Undead – exposing another of the vulnerabilities of the Golden Empire to the PCs. And the final, most deeply hidden, layer of meaning is that of Chrin’s true allegiances as he slowly works his way into the confidence of the team, encouraging them to dig themselves a hole that they can’t get themselves out of. This last won’t be revealed until adventure #14!
9. “Air” – Synopsis: The party Explore a realm based on the Elemental Plane of Air. They ally with a Verdonne from another Plane who has been trapped here for years and recover the first of six keys needed to open the door to the seventh cavern. They discover that time rates are distorted within the Cavern Realms – and that while they were within, their pursuers have caught up and are camped right outside. Commentary: A seemingly straightforward title, but with hidden overtones, as much of the events within the plane can be described using the qualities of air – transparency, wind, fog, cloud, insubstantiality – as metaphors. This was perhaps a little too subtle, I don’t think any of the players picked up on it at the time – but, at the same time, it gave me a focal point for all my thinking, inspiration and design, so it was worthwhile. Verde is a new PC, given life by the player who had temporarily controlled Chrin (and had so much fun doing so that he wanted to join the campaign full-time). The Verdonne are closer to Ents as depicted in the Lord Of The Rings movie trilogy than they are the traditional Ents of D&D or the book, quite literally “the shepherds of trees”.
10. “Earth” – Synopsis: The Misfits sneak across the wastelands between the Cave Realms without alerting the Imperial Undead to their location and enter the Cavern Realm of Earth, finding it far more densely packed than Air was. Thanks to their latest recruit, Verde, they navigate the rivers of dust and find their way to a sentient population – Dwarvlings. After a number of misadventures and a little cultural exploration, the Misfits are joined by Leif, Prince of one of the Dwarvling Clans (New PC). They discover that they are cut off from the Gods while within the Cavern Realms. They eventually find and retrieve the key, rescuing a time-lost Paladin (Julia Sureblade, PC) from a past age in the process. Commentary: This adventure was rewritten into a standalone adventure and published here at campaign mastery a few years back – The Flói Af Loft & The Ryk Bolti, so I’m not going to rehash it too much here. The same seemingly obvious meaning to the title, and the same style of hidden metaphors. This time the players seemed to get them. It wasn’t intended at the time of design that the new PCs would join the campaign, but the opportunity was certainly there and they have certainly made their mark in the campaign. A critical point to note is that the PCs learn that the Pseudo-realms are slowly breaking down, and have the potential for devastating the entire prime material plane when they do.
11. “Water” – Synopsis: Find the third key. The gods find the party.Commentary: Doesn’t sound like much does it? But this was one of the most imaginative settings I’ve ever created, a totally alien environment full of strange and original creatures and a full biology. It was actually created as “an environment” more than a “location” on the theory that water is only bounded by its interfaces with other elements – earth and air, especially. The metaphors for water qualities (especially “slippery”) were just as prevalent, adding the usual additional layer of meaning to the title. More importantly, this scenario established the relationships with the new PCs and the other party members, and started arousing suspicion towards Chrin. Midway through this adventure, Leif became an NPC.
12. “Fire” – Synopsis: The Fire Pseudo-realm is the least terrestrial thus far encountered, being shaped like a vast donut with variable internal gravity and pressure. It is a Stratified realm with 4 layers. Temperature differentials rise far more steeply than normal, and heat does not conduct as well as it should. The party find the fourth key, and the Chaos Powers find the party. Commentary: Once again, a plot synopsis that leaves out more than it includes. Heat, pressure, and energy were both the central properties and the metaphors for the action. Chrin is able to seemingly allay the suspicions and raise prospects for an eventual community of interest between the Kingdoms of Fumanor and the Golden Empire, suggesting a possible diplomatic solution to the main plot, but for the PCs they have become suspicious of Chrin once too often. The Chaos Powers are the central opposing force to the Gods in the Fumanor campaign’s mythology. At the start of this adventure, Verde became an NPC.
13. “Negative” – Synopsis: The PCs Find the fifth key and the mind flayer who created the ecologies and inhabitants of the Caverns. They learn that he killed his research partner, who constructed the “Experimental Pseudo-realms” when the latter was about to carry the experiment to its intended conclusion because he feared that the ecologies he had created would be destroyed in the process. Commentary: Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to write this up as a full adventure, only enough to create some interesting and deadly new opponents (“Mortus Elementals”); for most of it I ran off-the-cuff, directly from my conceptual notes. I did have time to create a “map” of the realm, which I have used to illustrate this article, but most of the details have been lost to posterity. I do recall that much of this setting was about negative emotions, and that the players had been deliberately holding onto Chrin as a team member for this environment (completely forgetting that in this campaign, Mummies had been established as “Positive Energy” undead, and that he was going to be even more vulnerable to the forces and opposition here than the rest of them.
14. “Positive” – Synopsis: The PCs find the final key and make the choice of whether or not to deep-six their undead Guide. Commentary: As the commentary to the previous adventure makes clear, the PCs had gotten their wires crossed really badly. Instead of the Positive Energy demi-plane weakening their undead “ally”, he was made stronger than ever. Fortunately, the figured out their mistake before making any irrevocable missteps – and, much to their surprise, Chrin did not take advantage of his heightened abilities to betray them. Perhaps they had misjudged him – again – after all? Any such deliberations were ended prematurely as the boundaries between the pseudo-planes began catastrophic breakdown, Mortus Elementals tearing a hole into the positive energy demiplane.
15. “The Laboratory Of Tenga Mort” – Synopsis: The PCs use the six keys to create a new world from the cavern realms under the direction of the Gods, who plan to use it as a hidden fortress in their ongoing war with the Chaos Powers. But all the plans go into a cocked hat when Chrin betrays the party and the (PC) Cleric is possessed by the ghost of the dead Mind Flayer whose experiment they are completing, delaying the final act of creation long enough for the Chaos Powers to contaminate the new Material Plane. Verde is trapped in the forming reality, using his powers over fate and luck to protect Leif’s people (and the other inhabitants of the demiplanes, he can’t be selective) during the merging process. Commentary: This adventure could have been subtitled “relationships in a petri dish” and still been consistent with the theme of the main plot. The PCs learn more than anyone in their world has ever known about the origins and formation of the Prime Material Plane, the origins of dungeons and the weirder beasties that inhabit their world, and how the primal forces interplay. They also discover that Chrin has been deliberately leading them away from the help that they need, and that the only thing that they had convinced him of (refer Adventure #5) is that the PCs were potentially dangerous and subversive and should be removed from the inhabited regions of the Empire as quickly as possible. In effect, he has wasted over a month of their time – but, in the process, they have recruited new allies and learned to work together far more effectively. The entire plotline is about the ethics of experimentation, the assumption of responsibility, and a collision of faiths.
16. “Columbus Verde” – Synopsis: The PCs enter the new world in search of their missing teammate. They discover that he was successful in his attempts and that after a period of anarchy, a new ecology is forming. When they discover Leif’s people, they learn that many years have passed since the Merging Of Realities and become embroiled in a murder mystery. Leif realizes that if he leaves again, he will never be able to return without imperiling his people – but honor compels him to remain with the team. Commentary: This adventure changed a lot between initial conception (when Verde was simply going to insist on the team exploring the new world) and what ultimately transpired. The title lost much of its meaning in the process, though its secondary meaning – of “exploring Verde” – remained valid, just cryptic. This was very much a “price of victory” piece, wrapping up loose plot threads so that the campaign could move forward into Phase III, and a title that reflected that would probably have been more appropriate in the end. Heck, even “The Rule Of Lore” would have been an improvement, since the myths and legends surrounding the party were fundamental to the reshaping of the Society within the new world. Oh, well.
17. “Broken Bonds & Lost Worlds” – Synopsis: The misfits resume their travels through the Golden Empire, learning that Chrin was taking the long way round, seemingly intentionally. Meanwhile, Leif is coming to terms with the destruction of the world he knew and his first encounters with the outside world are not quite what he had come to expect. Commentary: The “bonds” are bonds of trust, and the bond of mission objective to plan of action. Everyone needs to figure out where the team goes from here, but they can’t wait around to do it in the Caverns – Imperial Forces have been drawn back to the area around the gates by the massive discharge of magic that created the New World, which leaves them no choice but to plunge right in. They also learn that the Lich template makes Beholders really nasty. In the course of the adventure, Leif reconnects with the party, and the party discover that the plan appears to still be sound, and everything gets itself back on track. This adventure marks the start of Phase III of the campaign.
18. “The Garden of Shimono” – Synopsis: After the trouble they had in town, the Misfits head cross-country. But trouble is never far away when you’re on the run! They make good time until they enter an Estate that is besieged by Demons every night. Commentary: Both the previous adventure and this one feature the everyday life of ordinary citizens of the Golden Empire. I felt it was important to highlight the reality that some problems were universal to both societies. In rescuing the owner of the estate (the sole survivor) from his possessed daughter, the PCs earned a genuine ally in their struggles. The title conveys a slightly Asian flavor, an important element in the Golden Empire that has been occasionally lacking in descriptions so far. In particular, the estates resembled those of an Asian garden, and that association is deliberately reflected in the title of the adventure.
19. “On A Larger Scale” – Synopsis: The Misfits, with the help of their new ally, have to prevent an alliance between the Elves and Golden Empire. The Gods warn them of an instinctive belief that such an alliance must be prevented at any cost. As the negotiations continue, the potential implications and outcomes become more and more dangerous and disturbing, and the party begins to discover the reasons for the Gods misgivings. Commentary: This adventure suffers from the most awkward of circumstances – a title whose significance was forgotten when the time came to write the adventure scenario, and which is therefore irrelevant to the actual adventure that took place. While I have since remembered what that significance was to be, that irrelevance means there is no point in discussing the particulars; instead, I would rather focus on the potential pitfall of being too clever for my own good, in hopes that others can learn from the mistake. For heaven’s sake, if you think of a subtle and especially clever title for an adventure, write down that meaning before you forget what it is!
20. “Specter Of Defeat” – Not yet played, so I have to keep this secret – sorry! That said, the title suggests that things will get even more critical. When the PCs began their investigation, they estimated that they had between one and three months before the invasion began. It’s now been about eight weeks, so it doesn’t take a great deal of insight to guess what this scenario is all about!
21. “The Last Samurai” – Not yet played.
22. “A Summons Of Strife” – Not yet played.
23. “The Hidden” – Not yet played.
24. “Knocking On Heaven’s Door – Not yet played.
25. “Wrack And Ruin” – Not yet played.
26. “Imperium Redux” – Not yet played.
27. “Any Landing You Walk Away From…” – Not yet played. The final adventure in Phase III.

No adventure titles have yet been assigned for phases IV to VI. Note that the big finish to this campaign actually takes place in the “Fumanor: One Faith” campaign, listed below.

Fumanor: One Faith

The One Faith campaign – at first glance – has a far more linear structure. But, looking a little closer, and you will find that the Campaign is about to split into two, one character going one way, while the other two have a series of isolated adventures unrelated to the main plot. The following adventures were part of the first phase of the campaign.

1. “Surfaceworld” – Synopsis: The Drow Gallas leaves the tunnels in which he was raised and makes his way to Fort Sharpfang (capital of the Outer Kingdom), where he is recruited by the Inquisition. Commentary: This adventure was all about Gallas experiencing the world above the tunnels for the first time, with all its quirks. He is also surprised to discover that some Elven traits have emerged in his bloodline after his people’s recent experiences in the Underdark when the Matriarchy was overthrown, their deception (that Lolth still ruled) having been exposed in the previous Fumanor campaign.
2. “The Silver Palms” – Synopsis: Gallas receives his first assignment. He joins the Silver Palms (a group of adventurers based on members of the Knights Of The Dinner Table and Black Hands), and gets to know them while the party is en route to retrieve The Red Masque, a legendary artifact of incalculable value. Along the way, they recruit a Bard named Sebastian (PC) and one of the members of the Silver Palms becomes host to a Chaos Power. Commentary: The name of the group is both a play on “The Black Hands” and on “Sweaty Palms”, a condition that the Silver Palms reputedly suffer from when confronted by large sums of gold.
3. “The Grave Of The Prince Of Lies” – Synopsis: Based on the excellent adventure from 0one Games, free from DrivethruRPG. It turns out that the Silver Palms don’t actually know where the Red Masque is, just where to find a clue to where it might be – in the icy tomb of an Undead Dwarven Prince who was seduced, then betrayed, by a Drow Priestess. Commentary: The module’s backstory was incorporated (with some modification) directly into the campaign history because it fitted almost perfectly. That is acknowledged within the campaign by preserving the title of the original module.
4. “Reap The Whirlwind” – Synopsis: While following the trail of breadcrumbs to the next clue to the location of the Red Masque, Kardles (Dwarven Cleric, NPC, one of the Silver Palms) is contacted by the image of Dis The Destroyer, a Chaos Power so evil that even the other Chaos Powers locked him away, who offers him the deal of a lifetime. Kardles is “seduced by the Dark Side”, thinking he can act as a spy against Dis and betray him later – or stick with him, if it looks like Dis will win. The party’s travels take them through a village where the connections between some of the current problems become clearer – the Church’s divisions have been systematically weakening the economy of Fumanor, which has forced some of the current unpopular decisions, which is what is seeding the rebellion. The Golden Empire, in internal terms, is irrelevant; if it weren’t them, it would be the Goblins or the Elves or whatever; some threat would reveal the underlying fragility of the economy. As the team approach the town of Khom, Kardle’s deal with Dis is revealed, though he doesn’t know it, as he seeks salvation; and the power that Dis has over him is also made clear to the rest of the party. Commentary: The title derives from the proverbial phrase that suggests that those responsible for an event will experience the consequences of their actions, a form of natural justice or Karma. In the context of the adventure, the relationship of the title to the events should be fairly obvious, but as it happens there are multiple such events within the adventure, not just the encounter between Dis and Kardles. Each character (both PC and NPC) experienced something that would qualify, as did a couple of NPC priests that were encountered en route – but the encounter with Dis was the one of most significance to the campaign overall.
5. “Khom Back Again” – Synopsis: The party reach the town of Khom only to discover that it is surrounded by a bubble of disrupted time, in which the past and the future collide. They confront Dinosaurs, and Cultists, and past victims of the cultists, and finally an encounter with a 21st century druid and his pack of cybernetic hounds (the ultimate ecoterrorist) before discovering that the entrance to the hiding place of the Red Masque is only accessible from one brief interval of the past. They also learn that the temporal disruptions were part of the imprisonment of Dis, but his attempts to break free had spread the temporal disruption to the surrounding districts. Commentary: This adventure’s title is a misspelling of the name of a hit pop song from the 70s by an Australian band, “Daddy Cool” and it obviously relates to the temporal shifts. These got quite hairy for a while as the PCs would be focused on one threat, only for a new threat to appear from a different era in a different direction and get a new surprise round against them. Dis’ imprisonment was with a twist on Heisenberg’s uncertainty – Dis could localize his awareness in space (but would have no idea what time frame he was in) or he could localize his awareness in a particular time, but only by not knowing where he would find himself in space. All his dealings with Kardles had been from the distant past, reaching into the future in an effort to bootstrap himself to freedom.
6. “The Burning Sage’s Demesne” – Synopsis: Based on another free module from DrivethruRPG, this one by S.T.Cooley Publishing, The Burning Sage’s Demesne required a bit more work to integrate with the campaign history and with the situation at Khom but it was ultimately well worth the effort. The primary change was in making Dis the power ultimately responsible for the background events that led to the creation of the dungeon. At the last possible moment, Kardles saved himself from damnation and rejected Dis. Commentary: The basic story from this module – a tale of love, betrayal, revenge, and grief – was changed almost beyond recognition during the adaption process, but the actual module barely changed at all. Once again, the title pays homage to the source material.
7. “The Red Masque” – Synopsis: The PCs disband the Silver Palms and take the Red Masque through Goblin Territory to the province of Viscount Asher under an assumed identity. They then use its recovery to ingratiate that cover identity with Brother Thaloran, a priest of considerable standing within the region, and who is amongst the most outspoken critics of the harsh taxation. Viscount Asher, with the assistance of the PCs, will then determine who amongst the priesthood are organizing the bandits of the region and gather evidence against them. They then have to Blackmail those church members with the threat of exposure of their activities to the Viscount (a mandatory and immediate Death Sentence) into travelling with Gallas to Ortin, the capital city of the Kingdom Of Fumanor, and there to confess and submit – quietly – to the judgment and punishment of the Archprelate. Commentary: Throughout their journey to Viscount Asher, Dis was attempting to tempt both the PCs and throwing encounters in their way (and even throwing some encounters into their future paths in hopes of persuading them that they needed the power of the Red Masque. (They still haven’t figured that out completely, but it’s now too late for them to do anything about it, so there’s no harm in letting that particular cat out of that particular bag). Somehow, using the Red Masque will set Dis free.
8. “The Brown Heart” – Synopsis: Two of the PCs from the original Fumanor campaign now occupy positions of great authority within the Kingdoms (as NPCs). One suspects that a third has been murdered for possession of a powerful artifact that the team had recovered, so she ‘borrows’ his ace investigator (Gallas) to investigate. Gallas and Sebastian discover that many of the problems besetting the Kingdoms of Fumanor are being caused by the Druids, who are nowhere near as unified in belief as they had assumed in the past (refer Flavors Of Neutral – Focusing On Alignment, Part 4 of 5. The current leader of the Druids was the head of an unstable coalition of forces, barely holding his leadership together. In the course of their mission, they met and befriended an Ambassador heading for the capital of the outer Kingdom (Arazal, a new PC). In return for his assistance, they agreed to escort him. Between them, they were able to establish that BriteOak is actually a non-supporter of the policies of Ceriseth (the ex-PC, and a Moderate) but is doing his best to follow those policies out of loyalty to his mentor. They prove that one of the more radical factions had betrayed and killed Ceriseth and arrange for the leader of the rebel faction to reveal his actions, temporarily preventing a further escalation of trouble from the Druids. Commentary: The title of this adventure has multiple layers of meaning. Not only does it reflect the “eco-credentials” of the Druids, but it refers to the “heart” (moral centre) of BriteOak (who is, essentially, an animated half-tree). Thirdly, it describes the autumnal setting of Briteoak’s Grove, the central site of the action of the Adventure; and, finally, a “brown heart” is somewhere in between a “Good heart” and a “Black heart”, reflective of the Neutrality of the Druids – neither good nor bad, but somewhere (actually, many somewheres) in between.
9. “Monastery” – Synopsis: Arazal’s mission is an offer to negotiate an alliance between the Kingdoms and the Jal-Pur, a nomadic desert people gifted with high magical abilities that are only vaguely understood by the Kingdoms. The demand includes a poetic but vivid description of the person who the Jal-Pur insist on accompanying the diplomat, a description that matches Gallas to a “T”. Eager to accept, the Kingdom gives Gallas and Sebastian some new orders – ensure that the negotiations succeed, at any cost. Their first stop: the Monastery which is the most remote settlement within the Kingdom and closest to the Jal-Pur to collect the diplomat who will rendezvous with them. During the trip, the PCs encounter strange and wondrous events – corridors of wild magic encapsulating zones of dead magic – without understanding the cause. Commentary: There are times when we are all alone with what’s in our heads, and that’s the real meaning of the adventure title: each of the PCs encounters something on the trip that is uniquely personal to their past, present, and future. Each faces a choice of some kind that will define, or redefine, their characters in subtle but long-ranging respects – and has to make that choice alone, with no help from the other PCs. They also meet an Ogre, Arron, who is being sent to join a young Orc Priest named Tajik in a bold attempt to gather direct intelligence on the impending invasion by the Golden Empire.
10. “The Sands Of Blood” – Synopsis: The PCs meet the Ambassador and find him to be a most disagreeable, even blunt and acerbic, character. But as they journey with him, and he interrogates Arazal about the Jal-Pur, they begin to realize that the Jal-Pur prize honesty and forthrightness above all else, and “diplomatic language” was one of the barriers that prevented and strained alliances with them in the past. The Ambassador is probably the perfect representative to the Jal-Pur. At the negotiations, all goes well despite the open opposition of some Jal-Pur tribes; a list of outstanding issues to be resolved is agreed apon that is mutually acceptable. Just as the negotiations are about to begin in earnest, both the Ambassador and the Matriarch of the Jal-Pur are killed under suspicious circumstances. Arazal is appointed the representative in negotiations and first ambassador to the Kingdoms (despite his being the wrong gender) and Gallas is ordered to represent the Kingdoms, leaving Sebastian as the lead investigator into the murders. It turns out ultimately that the killings were carried out by the Golden Empire in an attempt to sabotage the negotiations. A treaty is ultimately agreed between the two and the party set out to return to the Kingdoms.
    Commentary: A straightforward adventure title because the situation carried enough drama without need for subtle overtones.
11. “Goblin, Goblin!” – Not yet played. This will be the final adventure for the unified party.

Strand 1: Gallas (plus 2 temporary PCs)

12. “Shoot The Messenger” – Not yet played.
13. ~Adventure is not part of this strand~
14. “Let Not The Left Hand Know” – Not yet played.
15. ~Adventure is not part of this strand~
16. “The Subversion Of Thom Elias” – Not yet played.
17. “What Price, Freedom?” – Not yet played. Temporarily reunites Gallas with Sebastian and Arazal.
18. “Everybody’s Human” – Not yet played.
19. ~Adventure is not part of this strand~
20. “Heretics To The Left Of Me, Heretics To The Right” – Not yet played.
21. “Jailbreak” – Not yet played.
22. ~Adventure is not part of this strand~
23. “It’s Only Politics” – Not yet played.
24. “Death Of An Icon” – Not yet played. Reunites Gallas with Sebastian and Arazal.
25. “Broken Chains” – Not yet played. Begins the buildup to the campaign Climax.
26. “Grand Theft” – Not yet played. The big finish. Teams Gallas, Sebastian, and Arazal with the members of Tajik’s Misfits (refer “Fumanor: The Seeds Of Empire” above) in final battle with Lolth and Dis.

Strand 2: Sebastian & Arazal (plus 1 temporary PC)

12. ~Adventure is not part of this strand~
13. “Meanwhile…” – Not yet played. Teaser: An old friend finds trouble when Sebastian comes to visit.
14. ~Adventure is not part of this strand~
15. “Sebastian’s Groupie” – Not yet played.
16. ~Adventure is not part of this strand~
17. “What Price, Freedom>” – Refer Strand 1 entry, above.
18. ~Adventure is not part of this strand~
19. “The Higher Standard” – Not yet played.
20. ~Adventure is not part of this strand~
21. ~Adventure is not part of this strand~
22. “The Lost Chord” – Not yet played. The final adventure in Strand 2; Sebastian & Arazal will reunite with Gallas for adventure 22.

Out of time and still with several campaigns and about a hundred more adventure titles to analyze. So, I guess there’ll be a part two to come in a couple more weeks. I’ve adjusted the title of this post accordingly..

I’m taking a break from the ongoing Earth-regency Alternate History series this week (mostly because research has been taking more time than I’ve had available. Instead, the following is based on an email exchange between one of my players and myself, raising some serious questions about the population dynamics of longer-lived species and aging in RPGs…

One of my players asked me today about how to determine the age of his new character, an elf who has entered the game in question in an age category of “Venerable”. But the game in question – I won’t name the rules system – has no rules for character aging, and doesn’t even nominate standard lifespans for different races. He proposed, “would it be appropriate to use the 3.5 tables? If so, then my elf would be at least 350 years of age (more probably 450+) with a maximum age of *rolls 4 percentile dice* 606 years, according to 3.5 PHB ageing for elves.”

This was the first time in several years that I’d looked at the assumptions that underlie “standard aging” tables, and I’ve learned quite a lot since the last time. As a result, my thought process led me down some interesting paths, paths which showed how significant a “mere” +50%-or-so lifespan was – never mind the 4-500% suggested by the 3.5 PHB.

Demographics are not a flat line

My first problem is now, and always has been, with the notion of a flat percentage being used to determine where in a race’s lifespan a particular character’s age falls. This makes it just as probable that a character will have a high age as it is that they will have a low age – and it doesn’t take much examination of demographics to realise that the real world simply doesn’t work that way.

Demographics are not a dumbbell curve

The next most-common approach that I’ve seen is the rolling of multiple dice to determine age. This makes a character’s age more likely to be at or around the mathematical mean, offset by any adjustment made to ensure a minimum age that’s suitable for adventuring. This makes character ages too old, on average, and – once again – looks nothing like a real demographic curve.

The problems

Either of these approaches can yield what seem to be reasonable character ages in the case of individuals; it is only when you start looking at larger populations that the answers stop making sense. The population aging approach you choose brings with it implications for knowledge of the past, acquisition of skills, birth and death rates, relative population levels, and the resulting social mechanisms.

Knowledge of the past

If your character is 500 years old, you should expect them to have a fair idea of what was going on 400 years ago, and about events between then and now. This is a cross for the GM to bear that he really doesn’t need; it would, in general, be better to have events of more than a generation ago being lost in the mists of time and the pages of history. Why? Because then the GM can bring out historical events as he needs them for maximum story gain, rather than having to prepare the history in advance.

It doesn’t matter so much in Fantasy novels, where the author can introduce an Elven character only when it suits the plotline; an Elven PC will be pestering the GM for detailed histories every time the past becomes relevant to a plotline. It adds to the Prep Burdon of the GM, sometimes massively, and can totally erase a lot of the atmosphere and mystery of the past.

Acquisition Of Skills

As soon as you have a race living four or five times as long as humans, the GM has to start fudging questions concerning the acquisition of skills – or they will end up with Ubermensch who don’t need the PCs. If it takes 20 years to master a craft or skill, for example, most humans will do so at around the age of 30, and – given probable lifespans – be able to master only one or perhaps two in a lifetime (50-60 years). Your typical elf, if they have 500-year-liefspans, even if youth and childhood are also increased proportionately, will (in comparison) have time to master TEN to TWENTY, even without any advantages from genetic/racial predisposition. And that also ignores any compounding effects – even though, in reality, studying one subject often makes it easier to learn a related subject. That doesn’t matter so much to humans, where there’s only time for the mastery of two (perhaps 3 or 4 in exceptional cases) skills – but when you start talking about 10-20 skills, this effect goes from negligible to seriously important.

To combat it, and prevent elves from coming to dominate society, you have to start making assumptions about how easily long-lived races learn new things, about how ambitious and motivated they are, and generally adding in whole reams of additional racial profile – much of which doesn’t marry up with other source material like official adventure modules.

Heck, consider the number of diplomatic and trade contacts an even-moderately accomplished Elven trader could amass in hundreds of years, the number of secrets and confidences that one could accumulate!

Four hundred years ago, it was 1612 – how much has occurred since then? How many mysteries have arisen because every eyewitness died out before their stories could be documented?

Birth and Death Rates & Relative Population Levels

This is something that I alluded to not long ago in Sugar, Spice, and a touch of Rhubarb: That’s What Little Names Are Made Of, where I was discussing the effects of birth and death rates on population levels and how to stop long-lived races from overwhelming other races from sheer population level, and the implications for character names.

In a nutshell, the more long-lived the race, the lower the population level needs to be simply to maintain population parity with a human society. I’ll return to this subject as the discussion proceeds.

The Human Analogue In A Fantasy Campaign

Consider humans – get their aging right and then it should be possible to simply scale the answers to get elves or any other long-lived race.

Historically, in the historical timeframe on which D&D is based, 40% of children born die before reaching double-digits in age. 30% of those who get to age 10 will be dead before they reach age 20. 50% of those who get to age 20 will be dead before reaching age 30, and 70% of those who get to 30 will be dead before 40. Of those who reach 40, 80% won’t get to fifty, and of those who get to 50, 90% won’t make 60. Of those who make 60, 95% won’t get to age 70. Thereafter it’s 96% dead before 80, 97% dead before 85, 98% dead before 90, and 99% dead every 2 years thereafter – 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, and so on. In theory, if you make your aging save, you can keep going – the record is believed to be about 116 years, though there is a substantial error rate. There are unsubstantiated claims of a South American tribesman reaching 150 years of age, for example.

Now, factor in the availability of healing magic, and the fact that most of those who die in the 0-20 age bracket die of disease, while most of those who die in the 20-40 age bracket do so in military campaigns of one sort or another.

Then factor in the increased danger of accidental death because there are dangerous monsters and magic and what-have-you around.

You can assume that these two factors cancel each other out, implying that the younger the age, the more likely you are to encounter one of these additional dangers – and that appears to make sense. You increase the rate of accidental death and reduce the rate of death from wounds and disease – but that’s just an assumption that could very well go either way. Make this assumption, though, for the sake of argument, and let’s look at the results:

The Population Breakdown

With our base assumptions and something vaguely approaching a historical foundation in place, we can generate a demographic breakdown:

• 40% die before age 10 (4 in 10). 60% reach 10 years old (6 in 10).
• 30% of this 60% die before 20 = 3/10 of 6 in ten = 18 in 100. The other 70% survive = 7/10 of 6 in ten = 42 in 100.
• 50% of the 42 in 100 die before 30, = 21 in 100. The same amount survive.
• 70% of the surviving 21 in 100 will die before 40 = 147 in 1000. 30% survive = 3/10 x 21/100 = 63 in 1000.
• 80% of the surviving 63 in 1000 will die before 50, so 20% will survive = 1/5 x 63/1000 = 63/5000.
• 90% of the 63 in 5000 die before 60, so 10% will survive = 63/50,000.
• 95% of the 63 in 50,000 die before 70, so 5% will survive = 63/1e6.
• 96% of the 63/1e6 die before age 80, so 4% will survive = 126/5e7.
• 97% of the 126/50 million die before age 85, so 3% survive = 378/5e9.
• 98% of the 378 in 5000 million die before age 90, so 2% survive = 378/25e10.
• 99% of the 378 in 25 thousand million die before age 92, so 1% survive = 378/25e12.

…and so on.

Application to a typical population

Now multiply those by a population base – let’s say, 100,000 people.

• 40,000 will be <10, 60,000 will be 10+.
• The 60,000 are made up of 18,000 aged 10-19 and 42,000 aged 20+.
• The 42,000 are made up of 21,000 aged 20-29 and 21,000 aged 30+.
• The 21,000 are made up of 14,700 aged 30-39 and 6,300 aged 40+.
• The 6,300 are made up of 5,040 aged 40-49 and 1,260 aged 50+.
• The 1,260 are made up of 1,134 aged 50-59 and 126 aged 60+.
• The 126 are made up of 119.7 aged 60-69 and 6.3 aged 70+. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, so round the numbers to 120 and 6 for practical usage.
• The 6.3 people are made up of 6.048 people aged 70-79 and <1 person older than 80 – though we are now well within the 0.3 in 100,000 rounding error. So leave it be at 6 people aged 70+.

The result is a population curve which is noticeably bunched up into the lower end of the scale, rather different to the bell curve or completely flat line that either of the generation methods we have calculated.

The Next Step Not Taken

In my youth, I would have gone on to plot these results on a graph, and then perform a mathematical analysis to derive a complex equation describing the exact percentage of the population for any given age (to fill in the missing points on the graph), then converted the results into a table for generating a randomly rolled age.

Of course, if we simply assume a flat distribution of possible results across the sub-range of ages specified, we can get a simpler answer far more quickly – a d1000 for the age band, and then a d10 for range within that age band. But for the purposes of this article, even that is going further than we have to.

Elves with a 60% longer lifespan

To be honest, with all the social impacts of being long-lived, I can’t really see elves having more than a +60% lifespan over humans without the difficulties becoming insuperable. Doesn’t sound like a lot, does it? But let’s apply it and see what effects it would actually have on the demographic.

Because the dangers faced by the young would be the same for both humans and for elves, I’m not going to apply the full factor to the young. Instead, I’m going to go: Times 1, times 1.2, times 1.4, and times 1.6 thereafter.

So:

• 10+ stays 10+.
• The ten-year gap between 10+ and 20+ becomes a 12-year gap to 22+.
• The ten-year gap between 20+ and 30+ becomes a 14-year gap – but it now starts at 22+ and runs to 36+.
• The ten-year gap between 30+ and 40+ becomes a 16-year gap, but it now starts at 36+ and runs to 52+.
• All the subsequent age brackets are also 16 years of length.

That gives a population breakdown of:

• 40,000 will be under 10, 60,000 will be 10+.
• The 60,000 are made up of 18,000 aged 10-21 and 42,000 aged 22+.
• The 42,000 are made up of 21,000 aged 23-35 and 21,000 aged 36+.
• The 21,000 are made up of 14,700 aged 36-51 and 6,300 aged 52+.
• The 6,300 are made up of 5,040 aged 52-67 and 1,260 aged 68+.
• The 1,260 are made up of 1,134 aged 68-83 and 126 aged 84+.
• The 126 are made up of 120 aged 84-99 and 6 aged 100+.

That’s what a 60% increase in the lifespan looks like. For any given calendar age, you get more elves alive of that age than you do humans. In the bracket containing 75 years of age, for example, you have 6 humans in every hundred thousand and 1260 elves.

To reduce the population levels of both to match – 6 in both – you find that elvish communities are one 210th the size of comparable human communities – so a city of 20,000 people would be the same as a ‘city’ of 95 elves. And a town of 2000 humans would be the equivalent of a group of 9-10 elves.

A correction

Actually, that’s not quite correct. In both cases, we’re aiming for an age range – to get an absolutely correct comparison, we should divide that age range up. So the 6 humans are actually 6 aged 70+ (with, effectively, none older than 80, according to our earlier calculations). So that means 0.6 of them will be exactly 70 years of age.

The elvish age bracket containing age 70 applies to 1134 people out of 100,000, and runs from 68 to 83, a span of 16 years – so 1134 / 16 gives 70.875 people out of 100,000 aged exactly 70. To get that back to 0.6 people, we have to divide the elvish population by a factor of 70.875 / 0.6, or 118.125.

That means that a city of 20,000 humans is as common as a “city” of 20,000/118.125=169 elves. A town or village of 2,000 humans is as common as a “town” of about 17 elves.

400-500 years?

These differentials would be even more extreme if the 400-500 year lifespan model were applied. You would end up with the average Elven city having like 2 people in it. And villages would contain less than 1 person.

Don’t believe me? Well, let’s have a go.

The conversion factor

So, to start with, we want to graduate from x1 to x5 smoothly. The square root of 5 is 2.236, and the square root of that is 1.5, near enough. So, let’s say the factors are:

• times 1;
• times 1.5;
• times 1.5 x 1.5 = times 2.25;
• times 2.25 x 1.5 = times 3.375;
• times 5, thereafter.

Our ten-year population intervals become:

• 10 years;
• 15 years;
• 23 years;
• 34 years;
• 50 years, thereafter.

And that gives, from a standard 100,000 breakdown:

• 40,000 will be under 10, 60,000 will be 10+.
• The 60,000 are made up of 18,000 aged 10-24 and 42,000 aged 25+.
• The 42,000 are made up of 21,000 aged 25-47 and 21,000 aged 48+.
• The 21,000 are made up of 14,700 aged 48-81 and 6,300 aged 82+.
• The 6,300 are made up of 5,040 aged 82-131 and 1,260 aged 132+.
• The 1,260 are made up of 1,134 aged 132-181 and 126 aged 182+.
• The 126 are made up of 120 aged 182-231 and 6 aged 232+.

…and so on.

With 70 years being our standard of comparison, we have 6 humans in 100,000 and 14,700 elves in roughly that time-span. Dividing the 6 humans into the 10-year span gives 0.6 people in 100,000 being exactly 70 years old, while dividing the 14,700 elves into the 34 year age span gives 432-and-a-fraction elves exactly 70 years old out of every 100,000. Reducing elvish populations so that both groups have 0.6 members in 100,000 who are aged exactly 70 years gives a ratio of 720.6.

So an elvish city of “20,000 humans” would contain about 28 elves, and a village of “2000 humans” would be the equivalent of an elvish village of… three. Most of the time. Actually, 20% of the time, it would only be two elves.

Conclusion

Plucking numbers out of the air for lifespan is all well and good, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, the implications can overwhelm your game setting. Or, if they are not taken into account – something few people take the time and trouble to do – they can completely demolish the plausibility of the game setting when someone else hits you between the eyes with some hard questions.

One Caveat: I don’t have any actual population demographics for the calculations shown here, especially for those specified in the section The Human Analogue In A Fantasy Campaign. These are simply numbers that seem about right from the many sources and references that I have read in the past. More accurate data would yield more accurate analysis and projections – but the results ‘feel’ right, as they stand. So you can take them with a grain of salt – but I’ll use them until something more accurate presents itself.