Real Life has caught up with me this week, so this won’t be as extensive an article as I was originally intending. But I’m going to do my best to turn that into an asset. This post was also intended to be Campaign Mastery’s entry into this month’s Blog Carnival, which was going to be all about NPCs (but that has changed at the last minute) – which may leave you wondering why its subtitle includes the phrase “PC Dossiers”. Bear with me, and all will be explained…

What is A Character Dossier?

Character sheets are great for containing the essential information needed for a character to interact with Game Mechanics. But they are often sadly limited when it comes to looking beyond mere nuts and bolts. A Character Dossier is a collection of all the information concerning the character that doesn’t naturally fit on a character sheet.

Completing A Character Dossier

It’s an important principle that players grow more familiar with their characters over time, getting deeper and deeper into their lives and their heads. It follows that worst possible time to complete a character dossier is at the start of a campaign or at the start of a gaming session, while the best possible time is after half-a-dozen game sessions or so), and in a break in the middle or at the end of play.

Those requirements suggest further that character dossiers are best completed piecemeal and not all at once. It might even be preferable, each session, to pose a question but not require an answer to be entered into the dossier until the following session, giving players time to think about it. But there is an “on the other hand” to think about: it’s really easy to over-think these things and select the answer that is intellectually the most representative of the character when a more instinctive choice might be easier to live with and play.

Since the choice must rest with the personalities and creative capacities of the players of a campaign, individual GMs are better-placed to make a decision about which is the better approach. I would tend to incline in the direction of quick response, but that’s the better answer for me and my players – it might not be the right answer for others.

Content Of A Character Dossier

Now we come to the meat of this article – and the area that has received the biggest cuts in response to my shortage of authorial time. I promised that I was going to attempt to turn that shortage into an asset, so this is where that has to happen. Here’s what I propose: I could, if I had time, create a long list of entries to be filled out for each character. But, since I can’t anticipate every type of campaign out there, I would be sure to miss things; no matter how extensive the list was, it would be incomplete, and would contain numerous items of little or no relevance to any given campaign.

Or I can provide a few examples and ideas, and leave each GM to formulate his own entries customised to his personal campaign. And that’s how I’m going to convert the liability (lack of writing time) to an asset.

I’ve identified no less than Seventeen (!) types of content for a Character Dossier. There may be more. Each type can consist of multiple entries, the categories are fairly general and broad (believe it or not). Moreover, the descriptions should not be taken literally – players should interpret them liberally and with a view to satisfying the GM’s objectives for the information, a subject that I’ll cover in “Functionality of A Character Dossier” below.

It’s easy to see from the sheer scale of the list that attempting to provide comprehensive questions for each category would quickly grow beyond anything reasonable. Even an extensive description would blow this article out to something similar in size to the still-incomplete ‘Roles To Play’ series. Necessity therefore forces me to provide nothing more than a single paragraph of description and a couple of suggested entries within each category. There will be more, and the GM should choose what to add for his campaign.

0. Name

Self-explanatory. You need some means of identifying which PC any given dossier relates to.

1. Residential Content

Contains information about where the character lives at the moment, what type of places he likes to stay, and in general anything about where he or she can be found.

2. Identification Content

NOT a section for description, rather a section for any identifying marks and for anything relating to the way the character identifies himself – titles, memberships, affiliations, etc. Is he good on the phone? Is he skilled at conveying messages without a lot of text? What’s his public speaking experience?

3. Relationship Content

The section that led to this whole article! The character should select an activity that he has in common with each of the other PCs, EXCLUDING adventuring.

4. Habitual Content

What does the character like to do in the morning? What habits and rituals does he have? Early riser, or night owl by preference? In modern eras, which newspapers and magazines does he read and when? What are his other reading habits?

5. Preferential Content

What are the character’s favourite foods? What are his typical meals? What is his favourite drink?

6. Antipathy Content

What doesn’t the character like? A matching category for the content of the previous section, for every like there should be a dislike, and vice-versa.

7. Misgivings Content

In which situations is the character less confident? What activities does he try to avoid? What makes the character uncomfortable – personally, socially, or professionally? Is there anyone who makes the character feel hesitant or unconfident?

8. Confidence Content

And for every source of misgivings, there should be an achievement that the character can point to which gives him more confidence whenever he calls it to mind. Acing a difficult test, winning a bold gamble, clinching a tricky deal? Is there anyone whose memory inspires the character?

9. Pessimism Content

What subject or subjects bring out a pessimistic streak in the character – the weather, politics, religion, gambling, romance, bureaucracy? How does the character react to expressions of confidence in an area where he is pessimistic? How does the character react if his pessimism proves warranted? How does the character react if his pessimism proves unfounded?

10. Optimism Content

What subject or subjects bring out optimism in the character (refer the previous section for suggestions). How does the character react to expressions of pessimism in an area where he is confident? How does the character react if his optimism proves to be deserved? How does the character react if his optimism proves misplaced?

11. Regrets Content

Everyone has something they failed to do, or that they stuffed up, in their past. What does the character regret? How does the character cope with regret when they foul up now?

12. Satisfaction Content

Similarly, everyone has achievements of which they are especially personally proud. These are often personal or athletic successes (not professional or scholastic) and are usually not the same items as confidence or optimism content, and it is rarely a shared achievement, though that is a little more common. Excluding adventuring and its consequences and outcomes, what has the character achieved that he or she is especially satisfied by, personally?

13. Trepidation Content

There’s a difference between a lack of confidence and an outright fear. Everyone is scared of something (with the possible exception of Green Lantern) – what gives the character the willies? When and where has he or she encountered it in the past? For players of GURPS, or the Hero System, these should be fears that the character does NOT have listed as Psychological Limitations. Trepidations indicate a fear that can be overcome, but that may cause momentary hesitation; not strong enough to be a phobia or a neurosis, which can cause the character to act inappropriately (and would be considered a Character Disadvantage), just a nervousness that requires them to stop and brace themselves before they can continue.

14. Calming Content

Once more, we have a matched pair. For everything that generates fear in a character, there will be something that calms them and makes them feel mellow and calm. For me, it’s sunsets, cigarettes, a deep breath, and roleplaying. For other people it might be a cold shower, a walk in the park, classical music, a cup of tea, gardening, or a shot of whiskey. Some people drive as fast they possibly can to leave their problems behind them, others slow down to let life pass them by for a while.

15. Friends & Resources

Whom (besides other PCs, Party Members, Employees, etc) does the character hang out with? Who can he call on for favours? Who can call on him for help? Does he have any unusual resources – safe houses, hangouts, rented garage spaces?

16. Enemies, Debts, and Obligations

This one is fairly self-evident – until you remember that the idea of a character dossier is to contain information NOT listed on the character sheet. Then, in the cases of GURPS and the Hero System, it gets a lot more interesting.

17. Servants & Employees

Who does the character rely on? Does he have a preferred tailor? Does he routinely use a particular newsstand – and who runs it? Who is the Maitre D’ at his favourite restaurant, the bartender and waitress(es) at his favourite bar? Who does the character rely on to turn his labours into wealth?

Functionality Of A Character Dossier

The benefits of compiling a character dossier in terms of a player understanding his character are obvious. What may not be quite so obvious is that these Dossiers are just as useful – if not more so – to the GM.

Functionality In Adventure Development

Correlating the dossiers for different PCs can provide valuable clues as to interactions that can be exploited within an adventure. For example, in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, Blair and I have used the newspapers each character reads to convey briefing material to the PCs a number of times. And because it is coming indirectly, through the NPC writers and editors of the newspapers, we can be as contradictory and biased as we want. The only consistency is that there is always either more or less to any given story!

But there’s more: knowing what a character fears, that can be built into adventures where it’s appropriate. Where a character has a given emotional connection to a particular character, an NPC who reminds them of that character can be used to prompt behavior – sometimes to the PCs benefit and sometimes his detriment, but always to give the character greater depth of involvement to the plot. In other words, the player is a winner, either way. And so is the game.

Functionality In Plot Generation

Frequently, an entry in a character’s dossier can be used as the launchpad for an entire adventure.

• The character hates Chicken, so he avoids it at a company dinner – and thereby falls under suspicion when his boss is poisoned in front of the entire company.
• The character feels guilty over having failed to save a neighbor who was drowning because he had not yet been taught how to swim – so the GM arranges for the character to come across someone who’s drowning, lets the character rescue them, and thereby infiltrates a spy into the PCs life.

There are many more examples, these are just starters.

Functionality In Adventure Introductions

In many ways, though, the greatest benefit of a set of PC dossiers is as a means of connecting the PC to the initial plotline because they give the character something to be doing when the adventure strikes. This sounds trivial, but the connections it forges between character and campaign over a period of time are astonishingly strong and valuable. Helping the players feel that their characters are part of the game world is never trivial, and often harder than it sounds. Any technique that helps is worth exploring.

Functionality In NPC Development

So where are the NPCs? That’s what this Blog Carnival iswas supposed to be all about, right?

Correlating PC dossiers can turn up unexpected connections (with a bit of liberal creativity by the GM). One PC’s friend was supposedly shot down and killed in a war? Maybe one of the other PCs saw that friend captured and bears the guilt of escaping and leaving him behind. The possibilities become endless when you introduce an NPC as a degree of separation or two between two PCs – “My friend’s brother is my other friend’s sworn enemy”, for example. The more cross-connections between the PCs you establish within the campaign, the more interesting it becomes for all concerned – the players have more material to play off of, have more opportunity to show emotional depth, and have more interesting relationships to talk about.

Those degrees of separation and cross-connections also give the GM material to use in creating NPCs that the characters have established relationships with, or that are prone to forming such relationships with. They make the NPCs matter – and that’s another trick that can be hard to pull off.

And that’s completely ignoring the possibilities inherent in the GM filling out full or partial Dossiers for the NPCs – if this tool can provide additional depth of character for a PC, it can provide immensely more depth of character to NPCs.

Which NPCs?

If I were to apply this technique in toto to a campaign, which NPCs would I ‘reward’ with dossiers? There are two criteria that I would apply, and either is sufficient to justify giving that NPC at least a partial dossier.

Dossier Crosslinks

The first group is anyone who is connected to a PC by a PCs dossier. These are characters with the potential to become recurring cast members within the campaign, but all too frequently they lack the depth that such characters deserve. When working on such characters, I would ensure that in addition to any crosslinks, I included at least one other item that I could exploit to give the character some personality and activity when the NPC became involved in an adventure.

Each time that I added a Dossier entry specifically to connect the NPC with a plotline, I would also add an unrelated entry – so that little by little the dossier would compile until complete, without costing me much prep time, just a minute or two. The result is a cast in which a couple of important facts are known but most are just waiting until the GM needs an additional hook or character interaction. Obviously, the more of these you have, the more likely it is that one of them will be suitable for any given need.

By dressing out the supporting cast in this way, the only characters that the GM has to take significant time on are the Villains and their major flunkies. And that’s where the GM will WANT to focus his attention.

Recurring Personalities

The other category of NPC that I would reward with a dossier is anyone who has the potential to be a recurring character simply by means of proximity. If there’s a news vendor whose usual beat is just outside a PC’s workplace, the odds are that they will get to know one another at least marginally; their relationship will start off being vendor-to-regular-customer, but having the Dossier gives the opportunity to add additional connections between PC and NPC. Perhaps the NPC gets into trouble, or the PC stops some teenaged vandals from spraying graffiti on the booth or prevents it being robbed. Or perhaps the two discover a mutual interest in model trains. Or maybe the vendor’s daughter catches the PC’s eye.

Building up supporting cast members in this way permits a significant roster of NPCs to develop naturally, the way they do in our real lives; over time and repeated walk-on appearances, they will become memorable in their own right.

The NPC Shuffle

Indexing NPC Dossiers by the PCs with whom they have established a connection of some sort enables still more personal focus on each PC in the course of an Adventure, simply by choosing a Dossier relating to that PC at random from those that have been completed. The easiest means of doing so is to shuffle them every now and then, and then to place each Dossier that you actually reference within an adventure at the back of the stack.

Without Even A Character Sheet

In the case of many of these NPC Dossiers, I would not even contemplate completing a character sheet for them – they aren’t that important in an adventuring sense and are unlikely to have much need to interact with the game mechanics. It follows that for most NPCs, a Dossier will be both more important and more useful than a character sheet.

Character Dossiers provide a raft of valuable returns for very limited investment in time and effort. If only all game prep was this efficient…

What tools go into your GM toolbox?

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane.

GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to contribute with comments about your own tools, tips, and techniques at the end of this post.

World building is an important part of a GM’s role. You can’t play in a vacuum. In part I, we started with tools for plain geographic designs (from planets to buildings) with which to populate your campaign world.

In part II, we went into tools for large scale social structures the way down to small scale social structures (from relations between nations to guilds and other local organizations, as well as details on cities and the people within).

In this part, we follow a similar way for tools to be used for passing on the history of the world, from legends and myths to the last-spoken gossip, as well as how to create and place items and dungeons related to these tales.

Legends and Myths

You can flesh out your setting with myths and legends originally told ages ago. These stories are often obscure, metaphoric and instructive.

There are a lot more benefits from providing legends and myths than simply providing a good tale. Give every player some legends and myths to have on hand to generate small talk and opportunities for roleplaying. Such old stories can also provide a great background for campaigns and adventures.

A tool to create them is surely a powerful tool, and it should provide you with:

• The basic story of the legend
• How seriously the people take it
• How it was passed on over the ages
• The real happenings on which the myth is based

Michael: I like to use Wikipedia for getting inspiration for legends and myths. There are huge sections about the legends and mythology surrounding ancient Greek, Buddhist and other cultures of the past (I can’t use the Bible, because I have players who actually read the whole thing).

You can copy and paste the unknown ones or change the known ones to fit in your setting. I’m also planning to get a copy of One Thousand and One Nights in my mother tongue.

Da’ Vane: Any story can make the basis of a good myth or legend. Myths and legends were a primary means of education in the days before universal literacy, where oral storytellers used to share cultural values and principles, ethics and morals, as well as record historical events in a fashion that was easy to both remember, and incite the emotions of the audience.

This idea has continued through the ages, so that even the tales of King Arthur and the actions of Robin Hood, both set within the dark ages of England at various times, are also considered mythical.

Even modern Urban Legends come around through the same means. These can all be harvested by changing a few details, adding a few embellishments, and adding a seed of truth or plausibility that isn’t easy to discover, which can often be the basis of an adventure.

Johnn: D&D 1E Deities & Demigods is a good source of accessible myths.

I also highly recommend Joseph Campbell’s books where he not only talks about different myths and legends of cultures throughout history – even those of primitive cultures – but he discusses what’s in common between them all. You can use these common elements to ensure your legends strike a chord with your players.

Every GM should try to write a story about the origin of a world at least once. You might marry modern science with imagination, or go entirely magical and mystical. Start with the birth of the planet or plane. Then describe the origins of the gods. Then talk about the politics of the gods, and any subsequent new gods or pantheons. Such an exercise gets you thinking big picture when world building and even when interpreting or creating game rules for your realm.

I also highly recommend getting this free copy of George Polti’s book 36 Plots. Each plot is an archetype of human conflict. If you eventually weave each of the 36 plots into your myths and legends, you will have covered the vast majority of human conflict types, and can use your new stories as vibrant metaphors in your campaigns.

Little else adds more realism plus atmosphere when you have NPCs, locations and treasures tell or incorporate the unique myths and legends of your world.

Narratives and Anecdotes

Similar to the myths and legends, narratives and anecdotes can contribute a lot to your game. A narrative or anecdote is sharper to capture, in contrast to the myth or legend.

The narrated story or anecdote normally happens pretty much like it is told, but these are typically presented from a limited viewpoint, meaning there may be many different versions of the same event.

Don’t forget that all kind of stories can be told in very different forms, and here are just a few examples: campfire storytelling, operas, songs, plays, dances.

Since I connect narratives more to what really happened, I fill my worlds with relics and other things that back up the narrative.

Michael: Again, I rely on Wikipedia here, but search for more realistic stories and weave them into the setting, or build crucial parts of the setting around them.

Da’ Vane: The only difference between a narrative and an anecdote is the perspective from which it is told.

Anecdotes are normally told from the perspective of the person telling the anecdote, and relate directly to them, having come from their own direct experience and perceptions.

Narratives are normally from the perspective of someone else who has told the speaker.

A good source of anecdotes and narratives can come from the Internet and other forms of media, in the form of columns that invite readers to share their own stories, often about a given topic or experience.

Most cultures have a predisposition to turn any sequence of events into a story, to make it easier to memorize and pass on, whether it is exciting such as setting off on an adventure, or what a person did during the day. These can easily be used to make NPCs feel more real, are useful for providing plot hooks, and since adventurers are often the most exciting people around, they can be useful for sharing tales and bonding with other people while giving the PCs some degree of fame. Imagine how the PCs will feel when something they done and told someone about gets passed around, and becomes one of the stories of the nation, eventually coming back to the PCs in the form of a narrative that others have been sharing.

Johnn: Here’s a simple tool to help you craft narratives and anecdotes.

Most people in your game world will parse reality in the same way. They will use stories, even if it’s a short story about what happened in the bread line at the temple, to understand their world. They will use stories to find out if others agree with their world viewpoint. And they will use stories to figure out where they stand in the scheme of things. And they will use stories for influence.

Step 1: Pick a perspective. Usually a single NPC.

Step 2: Select the purpose. Decide what their story is actually about, reading between the lines:

• Option 1: What is the purpose of life? Why am I here? Why was I born? What am I supposed to do with my life?
• Option 2: How am I the same as other people? How am I different from other people? How are people different from me? What do I have in common with other people? Where do I fit in society?
• How do I protect what I have? How do I get more of what I want? How do I get more reward, less punishment, more pleasure, less pain?

Step 3: Pick the person’s world viewpoint. Though viewpoints change with circumstance, most people have one consistent viewpoint. Do they perceive themselves as:

• A hero. “I put up with all this because I can take it.”
• A victim. “Why did this happen to me?”
• A connector or transformer. “I make the world a better place.”
• An embodiment of an ability score. “I am strong. I am smart. I am wise.”

Step 4: Choose a villain. It can be an NPC or PC, an entity such as the government, an event such as a flood, or something intangible like an idea or war.

All stories are based on action. The person telling the story tells others what actions they took, how they were opposed by the villain, and what came of it. The story is told within the context of their worldview and purpose.

“I went to the temple today for bread. The line was so long and it was so hot out already, even though I got there extra early. I saw Sheela there and waved hi, but we were too far apart to talk.

“Then Brutto comes along and pushes himself into line right in front of Sheela. He begins leering at her and then he grabs her! She ran back home.

“When I reached the steps I asked for an extra loaf for Sheela and placed it outside her door on the way home. Poor girl. Brutto will get his some day, make no mistake about it.”

What could the story actually be about, from the narrator’s perspective, reading between the lines? Life is unfair. I feel shame for not helping my friend. It wasn’t my fault, right? Should I have stepped in? What do you people think of me now? What did the people in line think of me? Why did this happen to me?

It’s interesting that the event happened to Sheela, but the narrator makes it about themselves. But that’s perspective for you. As such, this is a powerful storytelling tool for GMs.

Next time someone tells you a story, listen close and read between the lines. Also, pay attention to the narrative in your own head, especially after experiencing something stressful. Decode yourself.

News and Rumours

Whether you are playing a fantasy, modern or science fiction campaign, the characters will normally have some source of information to let them know what is going on in the world around them.

News and rumours help to keep the feeling of a world beyond their senses, and can work great as a means to provide plot hooks or hints for the actual adventure.

Because of their accuracy, a tool providing news and rumours differs from the above two quite a lot, and it should give you:

• The news and how important the people think it is
• The speed of how fast it is broadcast
• Who knows about it and who does not
• The correctness of the news
• Answers to the big W: Who did what, when, where, why, and how? Sometimes this will include what they will do next.

Michael: In my Cthulhu campaign, there is a little collection of real pieces of newspapers that is quite useful in supporting the adventure. My players like to read the newspaper every morning, so I have to add imaginary news as I see fit.  Creating what happened in the cities when the PC are travelling in them is my real use for this tool here.

In the other campaigns, there are almost only rumours. Answering the big Ws is a good guideline, but I like to mess with my players by changing at least one W into false rumour.

Da’ Vane: The biggest factor in news is communication, and consideration of the means of communicating and sharing news, as well as intercepting and suppressing it, can have a significant impact upon your campaign.

Espionage is closely related to news, and will work in the same way, and many PCs will strive to get access to official channels and other exclusive means of communication as their power increases.

In eras without extensive communications technology, word of mouth was common, and spreading or suppressing information often meant contacting people who could pass on information to others or prevent others from doing so.

In the modern era, a new phenomenon has risen. The overabundance of information being shared as news means things can be hidden in plain sight, because people have to sift through a lot of data to find things they are looking for.

Finally, news as entertainment has added to the confusion because the accuracy of the information has become diluted. News is polluted with narratives and anecdotes as people scramble to keep creating new content to entertain the masses when newsworthy events ease off.

Add in the issues that divination magic brings to this situation. There may be mages and priests who regularly cast divinations and share their predictions, while scrying may be official policy and shared via the Ministry of Information.

Johnn: Also be sure to add viewpoint and bias to news, mostly at the level where control of the news and its communication takes place. Editorial control changes facts and information to agenda, and this is great fodder for adventure.

For example, a man named Brutto is murdered. The chief suspect is a young girl named Sheela. The murder weapon was found in her room. Her father is an advisor to the King. He pulls some strings. The guard are told not to investigate. The public is told a beggar crew jumped Brutto for a loaf of bread and for everyone to be wary of beggars and not travel alone. This suits the King, because the Beggarmaster has been getting more powerful lately.

News in the next ward over is that a man was killed for bread because people are going hungry over there. News two wards over is that violence is on the rise and to not travel to the Temple Ward without armed escort.

Dungeon Building

The dungeon is the mother of roleplaying game adventure sites, and is still quite important.

From a dungeon building tool, you expect a map of the dungeon, with a key for the foes and encounters in there. You may want to spice up your dungeon, by including puzzles, terrains, traps and other hazards.

Michael: As already suggested, a lot of different tools can work together here, and they do when I usually build a dungeon. I start with the location and function of the dungeon, and then draw some of the map.

Then I use my other tools for monsters, traps, and so on, to fill the dungeon. In this process, I try to follow the 5-Room-Dungeon-concept, except when I need a larger one.

If I need a quick dungeon (which can happen quite easily in my Savage Worlds campaign), I choose from the 5-Room-Dungeons pdf.

Da’ Vane: The best place to start when designing a dungeon is normally with the background and hook, as this pretty much defines everything you need to know about the dungeon, allowing you to use whatever tools you have to fill in the blanks as needed.

If you have a legend or myth about the dungeon, then all the better. But even if it’s just a news or rumour about a cave in the wilderness that’s home to a dragon or some fabulous treasure, or a tower build by a mad wizard that has been left to ruins after some curse, you have both the means to get the PCs interested in general and something to build it around.

Later on, you can provide more sophisticated hooks if necessary.

As for dungeons themselves, as well as random generation tools, there are some very good dungeoneering board games, card games, and computer games which can easily provide maps and other details you can use in your games.

I am a big fan of the likes of Heroquest, Advanced Heroquest, and Warhammer Quest provided by Games Workshop in the 80’s and 90’s which you can turn to such use.

No doubt there are others, but even a map from Diablo can serve when you are low on inspiration and need a layout on the quick to fill out with the things that you already know.

Johnn: Any map from old modules and adventures can be repurposed quick. So can blueprints of real places you find online. Dave’s mapper is sweet too.

Designing Items

Roleplaying is about fantasy and imagining things, which are not possible in our daily life. It doesn’t matter if it is magic, alien technology or weird science, as a GM you are encouraged to design items that add to the flavour of the setting, and are interesting in themselves.

You may want to give the item a drawback or a trade-off when using it. The item may have a deep history appearing at crucial points in history every now and then.

There may same legends and myths wrapped around this item.

You could spend as much time with item creation as with NPC creation or dungeon creation, if you desire. It is useful if you have tools for speeding up this process.

Michael: For my groups, I use different techniques to create items, because they have to fulfil different tasks.

In my Cthulhu campaign, each item comes with sometimes huge drawbacks, as this fits into the spirit of the Cthulhu Setting. There is no “good” in Cthulhu, only occasionally a slowdown in the maelstrom of madness.

When I have to design an item here, I first think about what it should be, then I start think of the usage, and finally the drawback. After that, I like giving it some history and previous possessors.

An important thing not to forget is how the players can find more information about the item. In my D&D campaign, my players are seeking for powerful items. Giving each of these strong drawbacks would be just annoying and disappointing for my players. My Item creation parallels that for the Cthulhu campaign, but without the drawbacks.

On the other hand, giving these items some twists or maybe a slightly funny or goofy character can contribute very nicely to the game.

Da’ Vane: It was Arthur C. Clarke who said “sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic,” and I often use this approach as a guide to remind me that magic itself is just another form of technology in any setting. Anything we can do with science and technology now can also be applied to magic and magical items.

Thus, overall, I tend to take a more effects-based approach unless I am using any system or setting that specifically creates a difference between various things like technology and magic, in which case this is pretty much an arbitrary divide like divine and arcane magic, or magic and psionics.

I don’t put much thought into creating items unless they are plot devices. One thing I do a lot is rank all items, regardless of type, according to power and rarity, and then create an equipment list and an artefact list.

The former are the things so common you can buy them, or have them made from any general craftsman, and so on. They include a lot of general adventuring supplies and services, plus low-level magic.

The latter is items simply unbuyable. The PCs are going to have to work hard to find these things, and no amount of cajoling and whining is going to get me to change my mind.

The actual divide itself is based on technology. In low tech campaigns, finding a suit of full plate can take a full adventure to a far of realm or an abandoned horde, while in high tech campaigns, they can buy manuals and tomes off the street if they wanted to pay the price.

While chatting with one of the players in my Superhero campaign yesterday, the subject of FTL travel in superhero and sci-fi games came up in the course of the conversation. Since I’m always on the lookout for good subjects to write about for Campaign Mastery, and this is a problem that’s come up in many games, I thought I’d take a moment to fill our readers in concerning some of the problems, solutions, and hand-waving that’s necessary to accommodate FTL travel, using the solutions that have been put in place in the Zenith campaign. And, to wrap the subject up into a tight little bow, I’ll discuss how FTL is a concern for straight fantasy games like D&D – and what the solution is to THAT problem.

Furry Thimbles Of Lethargy? – The Einstein Problem

Let me state at the outset that I don’t believe in the Speed Of Light limit. In my opinion, it has no more reality than the Mach 1 limit – the solution is a matter of insight and engineering, and the problem will eventually be cracked. Of course, this might be wishful thinking on my part. If you aren’t interested in the physics of FTL, feel free to skip down to “Fanciful Theory Leftovers? – The Inertia Problem” below.

Before the speed of light was measured, it could be considered instantaneous – a term for which physicists have an irrational dislike. The physical world was divided into physical phenomena, that move at some measurable speed, and energy phenomena, that moved with (effectively) infinite speed. Galileo was the first to attempt to measure the speed of light; he failed. In 1676, Olaus Roemer, a Danish Astronomer, became the first to successfully measure it, having noticed that the intervals between eclipses of Jupiter’s moons varied with the relative motions of Earth and Jupiter – he got a speed of 132,000 miles a second, a very good first estimate.

Einstein once said that every time he considered the possibility of moving faster than light, he found himself caught up in paradoxes, and it was this that led him to develop the Special Theory Of Relativity. Every high school physics text attempts to describe those paradoxes, and all of them are flawed, because they all operate on the assumptions that (1) there is some absolute limit to the propagation rate of information, and (2) that because light is the fastest thing we know about, it is the fastest thing that we CAN think about.

But here’s the problem: if you exclude light as a means of information transmission – assume that it has not been discovered yet – the next fastest phenomenon known to physics becomes the limiting velocity. Prior to particle physics and particle accelerators, and the invention of electrical current, that was the speed of sound. Every one of Einstein’s Paradoxes hold true for the slower ‘ultimate speed limit’ – and the same chains of logic lead to the development of Lorentz-type transformations of length, mass, and time, just using that lower speed limit in place of the speed of light in the formula:

Let me put it in even plainer English. Let’s assume that we are looking at a clock that is some distance away, and that this clock is in a room where there is an observer who is watching or measuring some phenomenon – rolling a dice, let’s say. Each time he rolls the dice, he sends us the results using the fastest means of communications possible, whatever they might be. Einstein contended that if some means of FTL communications existed, we would receive the results of the die rolls before they happened, because our visual reading of the clock on the wall was limited to the speed of light. In other words, because Light could not travel faster than the speed of light, nothing could.

Is the hole in the logic clear now? I hope so, because I can’t put it any more clearly.

Those Pesky Transformations

And yet, the Lorentz-FitzGerald transformations are clearly valid. Not only have they been tested and found to measure up, but if they were wrong, everything from the design and manufacture of modern computers to particle accelerators would be completely different. They’ve been verified using everything from atomic clocks to astronomical phenomena. And they only work if the speed of light is the limiting speed of the universe.

Or do they? Is it possible that they only refer to what a stationary observer perceives, and not what really happens? That would account for the fact that they seem to work, and are factors that have to be taken into account – without saying anything about an ultimate speed.

The Transformation Of Mass
The transformation of mass is the one that has the greatest impact in terms of forbidding FTL travel. The theory goes that the faster you go, the more any acceleration is diverted into increasing the mass of the object that’s accelerating; hence it gets harder to accelerate the object any further. Like Xeno’s Paradox, you can get ever-closer to the limiting speed, but never quite get all the way.

Sorry; like that same Paradox, it’s an interesting thought experiment, but has no bearing on reality. For example, if our object was a missile using a conventional rocket engine, the mass of the exhaust would also increase, so the drive becomes more efficient by exactly the same ratio as the purported increase in inefficiency due to the mass of the payload.

The Transformation Of Time
Which brings me to the Twin Paradox, in which Time Dilation leads to a twin moving at close to the speed of light aging more slowly than one who isn’t.

The explanations for this paradox all stem from the concept that one twin has undergone acceleration and one hasn’t. How does the universe know which is which? Isn’t it just as accurate to say that the planet with the “reference” twin on it has accelerated away from the twin in the space-ship? So far as one twin is concerned, the other has aged more slowly, no matter which twin we are talking about.

It’s easy to construct thought experiments to demolish any arguements based on time dilation as proof of the limiting speed of the universe. Twins accelerating to something close to the speed of light (say 90%) in different directions, for example – if the speed of light is the ultimate speed of the universe, then their speed of separation can’t be 180% of the speed of light. When they turn around, decelerate, accelerate back the way they came from, and again accelerate, they will both have experienced the same amount of time dilation, i.e. that their speed of separation was zero throughout.

Paradoxes, Paradoxes Everywhere

Which brings me back to that statement attributed to Einstein: “every time I consider the possibility of moving faster than light, I find myself caught up in paradoxes.” In terms of proof against FTL speeds, this is a washout – because (as shown), every time I consider the possibility that nothing can travel faster than light, I find myself caught up in paradoxes!

A Question Of Physics: The Propagation Of Electric Current

When the poles of a battery are connected by a wire, a current flows. One electron is pulled along the wire from one atom to the next, creating a void that a neighboring electron is pulled into, creating a new void. Or maybe one electron pushes into an atom, which gives it too many, so another electron of that atom is pushed into a neighboring atom. Or maybe both these descriptions are oversimplifications of events in a subatomic realm where normal physics doesn’t obtain.

I remember reading that the actual speed of electrons within a current flow was relatively slow, but the propagation rate of the existence of a current is ‘virtually instantaneous’ – but can’t remember where I read that. The source then went on to assume that the propagation rate was the speed of light, or slower, because nothing can travel faster. I wonder how long it takes for the middle of that length of wire to “realize” that there is an electron current flowing?

A Question of Physics: Quantum Tunneling

Another question posed by modern physics concerns the phenomenon of Quantum Tunneling. During the “tunneling” phase of the phenomenon, speeds exceed the speed of light (1.5 to 1.7 times c. Currently, there’s a lot of scrambling going on amongst physicists to try and reconcile this and related phenomena with their old theories, such as postulating “Vacuum Energies” and “Virtual Particles” – in effect, trying to show that even though a phenomenon can travel faster than the speed of light, this doesn’t violate relativity. To quote from the last page of the excellent Wikipedia overview of Faster-Than-Light,

It was… claimed by the Keller group in Switzerland that particle tunneling does indeed occur in zero real time. Their tests involved tunneling electrons, where the group argued a relativistic prediction for tunneling time should be 500-600 attoseconds (one attosecond is 10e-18 seconds, or 0.000 000 000 000 000 001 seconds). All that could be measured was 24 attoseconds, which is the limit of the test accuracy… other physicists believe that tunneling experiments in which particles appear to spend anomalously short times inside the barrier are in fact fully compatible with relativity, although there is disagreement about whether the explanation involves reshaping of the wave packet or other effects.

This sounds an awful lot like making weasely excuses to a layman. “Your honor, my client committed the misdeeds of which he is excused, but technically he did not break the strict letter of the law.”

There have been suggestions made that this result is meaningless, because no information can be conveyed by these means; but last year (or possibly in 2009) I remember reading reports that a series of pulses had been transmitted via Quantum Tunneling all the way across Boston Harbor (I wish I had the reference handy to link to it). And if FTL communications is possible, then according to science, so is time travel.

And if you can travel in time, then you can arrive at a destination before the speed-of-light limit says you should be able to – in other words, travel at (effectively) FTL speeds (for that matter, you could arrive before you left).

A Question Of Physics: The Propagation Of Gravity

Gravity is a continuous, non-electromagnetic phenomenon – at least, no-one has ever detected a particle of gravity, a Graviton. Science postulates that such a thing exists, simply because everything else that science has discovered operates through fundamental particles.

If an object – let’s say a planet around Alpha Centauri – is exerting a gravitational field that is affecting, however slightly, the orbit of Earth around the Sun, and that gravitational field changes, how quickly does that gravitational field change become detectable on Earth, assuming instruments of sufficient sensitivity?

‘Changing gravitational fields?’ you may ask; ‘Is that even possible?’. Well, yes – an orbit is an ellipse, and as an object orbiting the sun approaches perihelion, it travels faster, according to Kepler’s Second Law. That means that it accelerates, and – according to the Lorentz-FitzGerald transformation – it increases its mass (or, as I contend, its apparent mass).

If the mass actually increases, that should have an impact on the shape of the orbit, as shown by Kepler’s Third Law – either the Period of the orbit (the length of time it takes to complete an orbit) should be reduced, or the size of it (as measured by the semimajor, ie long axis) should be increased, or both. The first means that the object will accelerate more than expected, producing an even bigger distortion, and so on – ad infinitum – or, at least, until escape velocity is achieved. The second means that the orbit will decay outwards – until the orbiting body is thrown free of the sun altogether.

Yet, we still have a solar system. That means one of two things: either the effect hasn’t had long enough yet to fling all the planets of the solar system out into the depths of space, or the mass increase of the Lorentz-FitzGerald equation – which relies on the speed of light being an absolute limit to how fast things can travel – is an illusion, an effect of perception; in which case the speed-of-light limit itself is also an illusion.

Conclusion: FTL is possible – we just haven’t figured out how, yet.

Fanciful Theory Leftovers? – The Inertia Problem

So, for game purposes at least, there’s plenty of room for FTL travel to exist. But is it practical? There’s still a major hurdle to be overcome before the answer can be ‘yes’: Inertia. And it arises because people don’t really appreciate how fast the speed of light is.

Ignoring the Lorentz-FitzGerald effect, if you can accelerate continuously at one gravity (i.e. you would weigh as much as you do on the surface of the earth), it would take a whisker under 30,559,884 seconds to reach the speed of light. That’s 8,448.856 hours – call it 8449 hours for convenience – or 353.7 days. That’s right, less than a couple of weeks short of a year.

To halve that, we need to double the acceleration. Most humans black out at a sustained G-force of 5 Gravities – which would cut the acceleration time to a little under 71 days, or a bit more than 10 weeks. But no-one has ever been subjected to that sort of G-force for anywhere NEAR that length of time.

Modern pilots, with training and special exercises, and G-suits, can reportedly sustain up to Nine G without blackout – a little under 40 days of that would get you to light-speed.

Sixteen gravities, sustained for more than about 1.1 seconds, is generally considered to be lethal, according to Wikipedia. It would take 22 DAYS of such acceleration to achieve light-speed.

Right-click and "save file as" to download the Acceleration Table.

Game Scale Numbers

In order to achieve FTL speeds in an hour, we’re talking 8449 G’s. At that acceleration, the pressure of air on the body would be more than 124,000 pounds per square inch. That’s the same as having a battleship’s main gun or a locomotive on top of you – for each square inch of exposed skin. Our pilot would immediately assume the thickness of tissue paper, or less.

Champions has a combat turn of 12 seconds. To go to FTL in that span of time would subject the character to more than 2.5 MILLION G’s. At more than about 10,000G’s, the pressure would compress the character into Neutronium, or worse yet, into a black hole.

These numbers are blatantly ridiculous.

The Acceleration Interval

The problem is that this acceleration is not instantaneous, it takes time – and because it occupies duration, inertia has to be overcome. The results are in keeping with physics as we know them – but are inconvenient in game terms.

It follows that if the acceleration is to be experienced in real time, it is going to take REAL time to achieve the speed in question – I would not be comfortable suggesting any figure short of 6 months, ie an acceleration of 2G maximum if any sort of realism is to obtain.

Unless, of course, your game is going to utilize one of the “cheats” to avoid this difficulty. They make the game more science fantasy than science fiction, but so what? Superpowers are already more science fiction than science fantasy anyway!

Game Mechanics

The following mechanics are designed for use with the Hero System, but are easily adaptable to any appropriate game system – since they are mostly a table of results from a set of calculations, with virtually no game rules involved. The universal “mechanics” are beneath the table below.

Champions charges 10 character points for a base level of FTL travel, which gives a maximum speed of 1 Light Year per Year. Each 2 additional points doubles this value:

Champions FTL Table
Points	Velocity	Approximation
10	1 LY per year
12	2 LY per year	2 LY per year
14	4 LY per year	4 LY per year
16	8 LY per year	8 LY per year
18	16 LY per year	1 LY per month
20	32 LY per year	2 LY per month
22	64 LY per year	1 LY per week
24	128 LY per year	2 LY per week
26	250 LY per year	4 LY per week
28	500 LY per year	1 LY per day
30	1,000 LY per year	2 LY per day
32	2,000 LY per year	4 LY per day
34	4,000 LY per year	8 LY per day
36	8,000 LY per year	1 LY per hour
38	16,000 LY per year	2 LY per hour
40	32,000 LY per year	4 LY per hour
42	64,000 LY per year	8 LY per hour
44	128,000 LY per year	16 LY per hour
46	250,000 LY per year	0.5 LY per min

For these numbers to be of much use, outrageous accelerations have to be used – or travel takes a very long time. For those who want their ships to accelerate to FTL speeds from rest, I have put together a PDF (link above). For each of 24 different acceleration rates, ranging from 0.1 (Light-sail) to an unbelievable 16000 Gravities, it gives two critical numbers: how long it takes at that acceleration to achieve the maximum velocity from the table above, and how far the character/ship will travel while doing so.

At 1 G, for example, and a top speed of 16 Light Years per year, it will take 15,500 years to achieve top speed – at which point the character/ship will have travelled 248 million light-years. And it then has to decelerate, taking another 15,500 years and covering another 248 million light-years.

The table is useful, because if you don’t want to travel such an outrageous distance, you can locate half the total distance you DO want to travel, determine the peak velocity from it and half the travel time.

For example, at 1G, if the character/ship only wants to travel 10 light-years, look for a distance of 5 light-years. The closest values are 3.9 light years and 15.5 light years, so the answers will be somewhere in between, and rather closer to the lower value. Nevertheless, the character will have had to pay for a top speed of 4 LY per year. The times that go with those values are 1.9 and 3.9 years, respectively, so a rough guesstimate is that each half of the trip will take about 3 years.

If the character/ship had only paid for the 2 LY per year top speed? The acceleration to that speed at 1G takes 1.9 years and covers 3.9 light-years; deceleration takes the same; so for the rest of the trip, the character/ship will be travelling at their top speed of 2 LY per year. Ten light-years is the total distance to be travelled, less 3.9 while accelerating and another 3.9 while decelerating leaves 2.2 to be covered at full speed (2 LY per year), so that takes another 1.1 years. The total travelling time is 1.9 (accelerating) plus 1.1 at full speed, plus 1.9 decelerating = 4.9 years.

The tables make it easy to work with constant acceleration drives – provided that the problem of Inertia is dispensed with, or ignored.

Friskier Than Logic? – Warp Drive: The Star Trek solution

That’s where the Star Trek solution comes into play. The theory behind Star Trek’s warp drive – as determined in between the show’s original airing and the writing of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, and implied in several of the original Star Trek novels of that period – is that the Warp Drive creates a “subspace bubble” around the ship and accelerates this inertial reference frame relative to the rest of the universe. The ship itself – and the passengers within it – don’t experience inertia because they aren’t moving, relative to the space around them.

The result is that a ship or character that uses this type of FTL can accelerate to whatever speed it/they are capable of in whatever time frame the GM considers reasonable.

Although the Hero Games rules never come out and say so, the description of the power clearly implies that this is also what the authors had in mind.

The Star Trek Scale

According to the writer’s guide for the original series, the velocity of a ship or object travelling at warp N was N³ or N×N×N times the speed of light. In the Next Generation, this was tweaked to a more complex formula that give slightly higher speeds for a given Warp Factor. Both guidelines were regularly ignored and abused during production.

For what it may be worth, the following table permits conversion between the Hero System FTL scale and Star Trek’s Original Warp Factors:

Show Me The Way To Go Home

A problem they never really address in Star Trek or the Hero system is how to navigate in such an inertial subspace bubble. Direction control is easy, but how do you know where you’re going?

Several Star Trek novels get around this by postulating that energy striking the “bubble” can be detected as – effectively – tachyons, which the ships computer can detect and interpret into an appropriate viewscreen image, showing stars streaking by as though the ship were really travelling at Warp Factor whatever.

Well, that’s all well and good – but how about for the ordinary (or extraordinary) super-type who can travel at FTL speeds?

The Zenith-3 campaign house rules resolve this by stating that an external gravitational field distorts the shape of the bubble, and that characters / ships travelling using warp drives are able to detect these distortions as feedback. In effect, they can “see” the density of matter in the local space around their subspace bubble. Using these masses (after recognizing and excluding those caused by nearby planets – not an easy task) permits significant masses to be used as navigational beacons.

The strength of a beacon is the product of its mass and its proximity – a smaller mass relatively close by is just as strong as a really big mass (supergiant or black hole) that is a long way away, and therefore difficult to distinguish. And, of course, the closest masses are those of the local star and its solar system.

The practice is therefore to locate all the relevant masses using conventional celestial navigation techniques, so that you know what to avoid. In the directions of those planetary and solar objects, they drown out the starfield in noise, but by knowing where these celestial objects are not you can determine where to get a clear view of the sky.

The other factor that is useful in Warp Navigation is that apparent motion has a greater effect with local proximity. So by “tagging” the most significant mass-objects in the vicinity and watching to see how they shift position as you travel, you can identify what is local, what is remote, and what is in between.

Gas Nebulae show up as fog, as does a galactic centre.

I would love to do an illustration of it for you – I have designed one, but have run out of time. Maybe I’ll come back and add it afterwards.

Freakish Thin Legalities? – Jump Drive & Warp Points: The Traveler/Mote In God’s Eye solution

The third approach to FTL in the Zenith-3 campaign is modeled on another classic science-fiction approach – jump points. These are curdles in space-time that appear naturally near large masses provided that the mass does not have all its energy locked up in fusion reactions. In effect, a concentration of potential energy too great for the local space-time to accommodate creates a warp point.

Warp Points are massless, because their mass has been shunted out of this space-time to form a conduit into another realm, known as Hyperspace or Otherspace or by various other names. When a ship passes through a warp point with sufficient energy, it exits from another warp point elsewhere in space-time. One warp point connects to anywhere from one or two to dozens of others, each with a different quantum temporal energy level; navigation is achieved by matching the spacio-temporal energy level of the desired exit gate.

The connections between Warp Points are distorted by significant gravitational forces and by other phenomena. What’s more, with only a limited set of possible energy quantum states, nearby gates with similar energy levels will take precedence over more distant jump points with the same signature. A ship or character will always emerge from the closest jump point that matches the quantum state of the energy it has built up at the moment of transition.

It follows that navigating to a particular destination may require a very roundabout path, avoiding various dangers and hazards. Consider the diagram: A ship wants to jump from A to E, but B has roughly the same energy potential as E, and is much closer. The only way to reach E is to follow the line A – B – C – D – E, five jumps.

Some ships can generate enough energy to make multiple such jumps in succession; others can only make a single jump at a time. Some energy differentials between warp points are so high that transiting from one to another counts as multiple jumps in and of itself; these routes are not accessible at all to lesser ships.

Warp Points, by their natures are both unstable and prone to being temperamental; many change size and shape, or even open and close irregularly, and some often have jarring gravitational discontinuities. They are not permanent, and can evaporate or dissipate at any time; every ship that passes through one equalizes the potential differences between two warp points just a little, contributing to the erosion. All of these problems can be controlled to some extent by the creation of Stellar Gates, also known as Jumpgates and Warp Portals – artificial mechanisms that act to stabilize, control, and advertise the presence of a jump point.

Jump drives are often preferred over warp drives because, while the initial energy expenditure of a jump may be higher than that used over a period of time by a Warp Drive, once this expenditure has taken place the universe itself provides the energy to complete the FTL transition, whereas a Warp Drive is a constant ongoing expenditure. Overall, it takes a lot less energy and effort to use a warp point.

Transition Times

Adding to the complexities of Warp Point navigation is the fact that entry speed and direction contribute massively to the travel time by dictating the orbital path within the warp connection that a vessel or character will follow. While the average time will be the same as if the journey from Warp Point to Warp Point was conducted at the maximum FTL speed of the vessel, with no acceleration or deceleration time, it can be anywhere from 90% shorter to more than 3.5 times as long, per jump. (To determine the transition factor, roll d6+1 and multiply the results by a roll of d6+2, then divide by 10).

Successful navigation rolls can reduce the results of one die roll by up to 3 (to a minimum of 1). Successful piloting rolls can reduce the results of the other by a similar amount.

Into Hyperspace

Some energy configurations do not lead from one warp point to another, but deposit the ship/traveler in the Hyperspace medium (called the Astral Plane by the players of the game) through which the connections between warp points travel. Since the conduits maintain an inertial frame that is coupled to the frames at both ends but separated from them by the jump point barrier, ships travelling between jump points continue to experience time and gravity and related phenomena exactly as they would in normal space; that is not the case when a ship or traveler leaves a conduit and passes into hyperspace proper.

Hyperspace is a strange realm in which velocity is proportional to determination and will, and is the home of many strange phenomena. Inertial frames are not maintained within this realm, and hours, days, weeks, months, or even years can pass with no awareness of them being experienced by the individual. In terms of space-time, the individual is decoupled from their time-frame of origin and while their personal entropy arrow maintains the inertial state that it possessed prior to departure from normal space-time for the individual, it is decoupled from the space-time of origin of the character.

All this enables an individual reenter the time-space of their primary realm at any point in time or space, or to enter instead a parallel world to that of their origin, or an even more divergent reality.

Navigation is especially difficult, as perceived time is measured in hours plus, and every stray thought draws the individual in the direction of a space-time that resonates with that thought and its historical or emotional content. Think of escaping a repressive regime and you may find yourself entering a space-time in which that regime never existed; thing of the regime from which you are fleeing and you may find yourself entering a space-time in which they or an analogous group are even more powerful or dominant. There are no fixed landmarks, adding to the challenge.

Hyperspace can take you places Warp Points and Warp Drive can’t – but it is far more dangerous because of that capability.

Further Than Limbo? – Extra-Dimensional Movement: The Stargate solution

The last type of FTL that is available in the Zenith-3 campaign are artificial portals such as stargates, fairy circles, rainbow bridges, and the like. Regardless of their appearance, topology, and nature, these can all be essentially summed up as artificial temporary warp points, created to bridge point A to point B. With all EDM there are issues of accuracy, and the potential of bridging from one space-time continuum to another through hyperspace. If the energy is supplied to them, some of these constructs can be semi-permanent.

Like the other types of FTL, Portals can encounter unusual phenomena and hazards that are unique to this mode of travel, such as bifurcating transit conduits, gravity snarls, and reality shock.

Navigation poses an interesting problem when it comes to portals, since – like jump points – all navigation must be done in advance of the actual travel; no correction or adjustment is possible en route. Unlike jump points, which can be stabilized and explored on a long-term and consistent basis, portals only exist long enough for the traveler(s) to transit through them, plus a few seconds.

They also tend to be more direct than other forms of FTL which involve interstellar travel at the very least; most portals are point-to-point operations from the surface of one world to the surface of another, or something very close to it.

Fairytale Twisted Locii? – FTL in Fantasy Gaming

What’s that? FTL in D&D? Well, why not?

Portals exist in most games – if you know where to look for them. There are spells that let you travel from one plane to another. There’s a spell called Teleport that you might have heard of.

Any of these can constitute FTL travel. Sufficiently creative PCs can attempt to exploit any of them for the purposes of quick travel from A to B. And this can pose problems in D&D that are unlikely to arise in more science-oriented (including superhero) campaigns, simply because the science gives a context and framework to FTL – that’s what this article is all about, after all.

In fantasy gaming, most of that context and framework, and the protection from abuse that they carry with them, are absent. There are multiple vectors into the FTL-travel realm – and they are all in something approaching a state of anarchy, ripe for exploitation.

The solution: think of them in Science-Fiction terms, but without the restraints on your imagination. Decide how they work, and come up with complications that you can spring on over-clever players. The interpretations of FTL-capabilities described in this article would make an excellent starting point – the only differences are that access to “FTL” might require a flying carpet, or a sea voyage, or an overland trek, instead of a starship, and that the means are magical rather than technological.

What tools go into your GM toolbox?

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane.

GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to contribute with comments about your own tools, tips, and techniques at the end of this post.

World building is an important part of a GM’s role. You can’t play in a vacuum.

In part I, we started with tools for plain geographic designs (from planets to buildings) with which to populate your campaign world.

In this part, we go into tools for large scale social structures all the way down to small scale social structures (from relations between nations to guilds and other local organizations, as well as details on cities and the people within).

In part III next week, we follow a similar way for tools used for passing on the history of the world (from legends and myths to the last-spoken gossip, as well as how to create and place items and dungeons related to these tales).

International Relations

You probably have some nations or similar political entities in your campaign world. There are several kinds of relationships between these nations, ranging from total war to cooperative peace.

There could even be the absence of any relationship at all, if both nations don’t know each other.

An international relation tool should provide:

• The relationship between any two nations
• Alliances and pacts between two or more nations against one, some, or all other nations
• Some historical background to explain the relationships

Michael: I handle whole nations pretty much like they are single NPCs. A simple relationship map suffices for me, with encircled names and arrows between them, where different arrow-tips encode the relationship. I can write further information under the arrows, like the historical reason for that relationship.

Da’ Vane: You should pay particular attention to things like trade agreements and military pacts, as these usually have a lasting impact on national relations, and will often provide plot hooks in a dynamic political climate.

Tensions can flare when long-standing trade agreements, particularly for critical supplies, become disrupted for whatever reason.

Likewise, military pacts can quickly draw multiple nations into a conflict, turning a simple skirmish into a worldwide war. Because of this, nations often employ spies, privateers, mercenaries, and adventurers to do things so that they can avoid sparking international incidents.

Johnn: Some books you might consider for realm management are:

Aria Worlds

Gary Gygax’s World Builder

Gary Gygax’s Nation Builder

Reign

Birthright Campaign Setting

A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe

Empire

I also find it helpful to consider nations as NPCs, like Michael does. Give your political entities personalities, goals, weaknesses, resources, quirks and secrets.

National Relations

If you are having some form of nation in your campaign, sooner or later you (or your players) will ask about who’s got the power in that country. Who is in control of that piece of land and what’s the reason for that?

Your tool to answer these questions should also answer the following questions:

• Who else wants to hold the power in the land
• How obvious are the factions battling for power
• Is the power split between different groups, and if so, who are these groups, and what share of power do they each possess
• What would happen if this authority breaks down

Michael: Here I rely heavily on my newspaper-technique. Every news item gets its own article in plain text, which is roughly about one page describing the different struggles for power and its combatants.

Da’ Vane: You might want to pay some attention to how power is maintained within the nation as well. A theocracy, who uses the power of faith and divine magic, would rule very differently from one who rules through military might.

A democracy would have a very different method from a plutocracy, where bribery and corruption aren’t just tolerated, but actively encouraged.

The differences can also lead to interesting plot hooks in their own right – a paramilitary organization might be organizing a coup to overthrow the undead monarch, while anarchists might target all forms of government indiscriminately, inadvertently putting themselves in power should they succeed.

Johnn: Check out the very details City Government Power Bases series at Campaign Mastery for inspiration on internal politics.

Guilds, Brotherhoods and Other Organizations

Guilds are important organizations in a lot of fantasy settings. A tool to construct an organization should provide:

• The internal structure of the organization
• Who has the power of the organization
• How the organization sets its goal
• The material, manpower, knowledge and influential, resources of the organization
• The goals of the organization
• The relationship to other organizations

Remember that evil also organizes sometimes, and these are also organizations in the above sense.

Michael: I haven’t found a nice tool for this question yet. Nevertheless, the Roleplaying Tips article Hierarchy of Evil seems to be quite applicable, even for non-evil organizations. I will have to check that article out.

Da’ Vane: A good set of tools for defining organizations, especially evil organizations, can be found within the Spycraft roleplaying game, by Crafty Games. Originally d20, it is easily convertible, but most of the information it provides is generalized enough that it can be used for practically any purpose.

I own all the classic Spycraft rulebooks, and the sheer amount of tools for creating organizations in Agency and Mastermind make these my go to products of choice, but you can find enough tools in all the Spycraft lines to make them worthy of a mention. I have not tried Fantasycraft or Mastercraft, but they’re extremely high on my list of systems to pick up!

City Building

Most roleplaying groups come to a city sooner or later. Your entire campaign may even take place in just one city, with the PCs rarely venturing beyond its walls for long periods.

Having a good idea of what is where in your city, and what kind of infrastructure is available is crucial for this kind of adventure. The city-building tool should provide you with this information.

Michael: For building cities in my D&D-campaign, I’ve found another article, again from Campaign Mastery, quite useful: Pillars of Architecture. I combine that article with this great list of city places.

In my Savage Worlds campaign, I rely on the rulebook. In the Cthulhu campaign, I rely also on the information provided by the books and the net.

Here we are at a scale where it may happen that you need an improvisational tool. I still haven’t found a tool satisfying my needs, but here’s one you may try: Medieval City Generator by Chaotic Shiny. Alternatively, you may try the tables existing in some rulebooks for city construction.

Da’ Vane: Cities and other settlements are mostly defined by their populations – a factor that a great deal of tools neglect in favour of a more site-based approach.

In large settlements, like towns and cities, it becomes unfeasible to detail every building and inhabitant individually, and it is often better to take a more general overview, looking at the city in terms of districts and areas.

Whether planned or organic, districts will form revolving around shared usages of common facilities, to increase efficiency, profitability, and access. These will directly affect relations within the city, which in turn affect issues like crime, poverty, and unemployment.

There will most likely be a market district, a temple district, an academic district, a financial district, a governmental district, a noble district, and so forth. These will define the people that frequent that part of town, especially their residents.

Guilds placed together are likely to be more cooperative to guilds on the opposite side of town, for example.

Johnn: Pulling from the RPT archives a few city tips pop up:

4 City Building Tips: Give cities flavour with districts

City Features And Flavors

City Services, Landmarks And Businesses In A Fantasy Setting

7 City Tips From Your Fellow Subscribers

15 Tips For Making Cities In Your Games Come To Life

Also, the City Encounter Generator is perfect for generating seeds for your game.

City Relations

In one city, like in a nation, there are different groups who seek power and influence. The same questions for nations can be stated on a smaller level, and hence pretty much the same tools can be used.

But there may be some more city-specific answers to the above questions. The location and the environment are more important for a city, rather than for a nation.

For example, a nation could own some hills, mountains, flat lands AND access to the sea. But a city in the mountains and near the border to the wild differs strongly from a city with some harbour, far away from any other borders than the ocean.

Michael: Again I rely on my newspaper technique, but I combine it with the geographical environment of the city.

Da’ Vane: One of the key features when dealing with city relations is traffic and trade. All settlements will need a means to transport their goods and services to other cities, and to be able to send and receive visitors.

Land and sea are the most common methods, with air traffic commonly available in the early modern era and beyond, and in futuristic settings, space travel is possible as well.

Magic may also provide a means of transportation, through the use of teleportation circles between key cities.

When you think about how people are travelling to and from settlements, think about the features they will need. Land transportation normally evolves to roads, and later railroads, to increase efficiency, while other methods normally require some form of port.

Cross-border traffic might require customs offices, and specialized goods may need dedicated facilities to handle them. Finally, consider whether or not there are also means of bypassing official entry procedures – smuggling of various goods, services, and people have been a lucrative trade for centuries, so maybe there are lesser known ways into and out of the city.

Don’t just look at moving in and out of the city, but also within the city. Once you’ve worked out these connections, and who knows about them and controls them, you have a great foundation upon which to work out the relations of groups within a city.

For example, a pirate gang in control of the sewers with a hidden dock for loading and unloading can have considerable leverage – even enough to pay high ranking officials to not have the watch pay too much attention to their activities compared to their other duties, and could be very helpful in a city planning to rebel from the Kingdom and become a free state.

Last week I offered seven-and-a-half secrets to the art of successfully creating ‘adventures on the fly‘, with minimal or no prep. The fourth “secret” (everyone knows it now, even if they didn’t know it before!) was incomplete, presented only in summary form, because I could tell that it was going to take more room and space to detail than I had available.

To refresh your recollection, the third secret offered a standard list of plotline components, covering everything from the setting(s) in which the action takes place to the antagonist/enemy, each of which needed to have content allocated to them before the ad-hoc plotline was complete. The fourth secret concerned the starting point for filling that list of plot elements, the focus around which the rest of a plotline could be constructed, and offered a list of six sources for the central idea:

• A plot idea – usually a set of circumstances or a problem that will complicate the lives of the PCs;
• A character idea – some aspect of one or more of the PCs or non-villainous NPCs that can be connected to an antagonist;
• A villain idea – some cool or interesting idea for a new antagonist or a new way to use or develop the story of an existing antagonist;
• A location idea – a map or image or description that inspires a plotline;
• An external idea – stealing an idea from something I’ve read or watched or heard;
• PC Actions – when the PCs have something definite that they want to achieve, I’ll sometimes have no fixed plotline and just leave them to interact with the campaign world, coming up with antagonists and complications on the spur of the moment.

This week, I’m going to fill in the gap in the article by looking at each of these in detail. So, if everyone’s all caught up, let’s go…

“Where do you get your ideas?”

One of the questions that all writers gets asked to distraction is “where do you get your ideas?”. This is also a question that one GM sometimes asks another, especially if there is a disparity in their levels of experience behind the game screen.

It is a question that can be annoying, because few writers can give a good answer – and some of those who could are so annoyed at being asked it for the ten thousandth time that they don’t. I’ve heard everything from “I just make something up” to “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you” in response – neither of which is particularly helpful. I’ve also heard writers who make an honest attempt to answer the question each time, perhaps remembering when they were young and struggling and asking that question of their literary idols at conventions and the like.

One of the best answers that I’ve ever heard ran like this: “I write down the most ridiculous idea I can think of, then start trying to make it sound plausible. The idea gets lost, replaced, in rewrites, leaving only the plausibility.” (I wish I could attribute the quote, but I no longer remember who said it!)

The subject of this article is to talk about where I got my ideas back when I was coming up with adventures on the fly, and where (to some extent) I still get them, to this day.

A plot idea without prep

The fact that I’m talking about plot ideas with no prep time required imposes some additional requirements – in particular, the fact that there is no time to research the ideas. If any knowledge is required, I have to bring it with me to the table as information that I already possess.

The implication is that the more widely read a GM is, the greater the ease with which he can run adventures on the fly. There are a couple of reasons why I consider this implication to be completely valid: not only does it give the GM more resources to draw on when fleshing out his plotlines, but it gives him a wider pool of ideas to draw apon. I gave a very selected list of influential sources, both written and media, in June last year, under the title ‘A Medley Of Inspiring Media’, so I’m not going to go any further into that aspect of things at the moment, but I would estimate that I have read more than 5000 volumes of fiction, more than 2000 tomes of non-fiction, and a couple of hundred books of anecdote that skirt the dividing line between the two. That doesn’t count roughly 300 game-related books and eBooks. Throw in a DVD collection that numbers in the hundreds and a Video collection that’s even larger. All of that is grist for the mill when it comes to devising adventures.

The Newspaper Challenge

That should not be taken as suggesting that anyone without a background of that order can’t come up with plots on-the-fly. If you need to convince yourself that you have enough experience to do so, try the following:

1. Obtain a copy of your daily newspaper.
2. Go through it, one story at a time, one page at a time – and don’t forget the adverts!
3. With a blue pen, put an asterisk next to each headline or paragraph that you can turn into a plot, or a plot element, in your current RPG.
4. Count up the asterisks.
5. Draw confidence from the total.

That exercise will usually produce a tally of 100+ for a modern campaign, and 50+ for a fantasy campaign. Seriously.

Some of the plot ideas will be silly and some saccharine or uninteresting; that doesn’t matter. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate how many ideas are out there for the taking, just waiting to drop into your lap; and once you have an idea, the execution of that idea is a matter of technique and experience.

I just happen to have a newspaper handy. Here’s what I can extract from the first 10 pages alone:

• The suspect in a collar-bomb hoax extortion attempt was tracked down by his emails. That gives an obvious plotline direct from the headlines.
• A political party is in trouble after lending an MP the money to avoid bankruptcy, and the MP failed to disclose the transaction.
• An airline’s plans to shed 1000 jobs has come under fire from all sides, with fears that up to 5000 additional jobs could be lost. In my mind, I keep linking this with the movie Wall Street, which was repeated on Television just last week – a movie about the price of Greed.
• Politicians have been given an increase in their allowances amounting to an extra $1500 a year – the increase being more than twice the rate of inflation.
• One of the TV networks is looking to resurrect successful shows from the 70s and 80s in an attempt to bolster its profitability – which suggests the possibility of a time-travel plotline in which fashion, culture, and society begins to regress.
• A shoe has been found in the search for the body of a teenager missing since 2003. This sounds like the basis for a mystery / detective plot.
• A mobile phone ad promises “infinite txt calls”, suggesting a message from space of infinite length.
• There’s an advert for the airline that is shedding jobs which suggests that they want to transform themselves from a common carrier into an elite service for the rich and well-heeled businessmen. This suggests a plot about a trend towards isolationism, preventing ordinary people from being able to travel internationally without compromising on safety and/or quality of the trip – a form of protectionism for the tourism industry.
• There’s a story about a Silverback Gorilla receiving flowers as a birthday gift from a safari park in England. So how about a Gorilla who breaks out of a zoo or other protected enclosure in order to obtain flowers? Perhaps a King Kong -inspired plotline?
• A court has ruled that a sperm donor’s name can be removed from the birth certificate of his daughter. Treating this as a trend and projecting into the future gives a plotline in which all personally-identifying information on a birth certificate is only available on a need-to-know basis, which would impact society in multiple ways. Translate the resulting culture to an alien planet.
• Summer advertising has kicked off for a major shopping chain, even though (officially) we’re still in mid-winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Perhaps a plot about an unprecedented heat wave?

The Daily Life Challenge

Still not convinced? Try this:

1. For one day, every time that you see or hear something, ask yourself whether or not you can use it in an adventure.
2. If the answer is yes, put a tally mark in the notepad.
3. Count up the total at the end of the day.
4. Amaze yourself at how quickly the total has added up.

Just hitting the high points of my Wednesday, here are a mere fraction of the plot ideas:

• I had a hot shower. Idea: A town where it has rained every day for at least part of the day, for a century.
• I ran out of OJ at breakfast. Idea: Local (unnatural) crop failure.
• I listened to an mp3. Idea: A rabble-rousing demagogue organizes a very vocal mass protest.
• I listened to an mp3. Idea: A sleazy Politician caught doing something he shouldn’t.
• I bought a newspaper. Idea: Someone is inserting coded messages into the daily news.
• I marked a number of items in the newspaper. Idea: Someone has compiled a mass of seemingly-unrelated newspaper clippings.
• I read a few pages of a book. Idea: A vigilante is employing torture, Spanish-inquisition style, to get ordinary people to confess to petty crimes.
• I made and smoked a cigarette. Idea: Giant smokestacks releasing addictive industrial pollution to create a market for a new dietary product – people don’t know why they like it but they do.
• One of my DVDs caught my eye. Idea: A ghostbuster and famous cynic is secretly the host of a demonic entity.
• I had a cup of coffee. Idea: At the bottom of the sea, it is pitch black, just like a black coffee. Now add the Principle of Similarity.
• I located a weblink (the one just quoted). Idea: there is a Law of Symmetry in magic (inspired by the illustration just prior to the web reference cited).
• I worked on this article. Idea: a writer decides to make the PCs characters in his next novel.
• I saw a TV advert. Idea: A visitor from a dimension in which Apes are super-civilized takes mental control of the inhabitants of a Zoo.
• I watched a TV show. Idea: Someone is replacing people’s arms and legs with artificial parts, indistinguishable from the original until x-rayed, without their knowledge.
• I saw a TV advert. A new brand of car contains a satellite link to a master computer, in theory to be used for anti-theft technology and monitoring the maintenance needs and condition of the car; in actual fact, it permits remote control of the vehicle, a perfect assassination weapon. NB: Requires the technology to be licensed to all auto manufacturers, perhaps administered by a bipartisan motoring organization.
• I saw a TV advert. A fruit seller with an extremely furtive manner likes to pretend that he knows a secret.
• I listened to an mp3. Idea: A statue of a Cthulhu-ish creature comes to life at night.
• I listened to an mp3. Idea: A male PC finds himself inexplicably irresistible to women. He enjoys this status until they start using weapons to eliminate the competition, breaking into his home, etc.
• I read a few more pages of the book. Idea: The PCs have to see that a particular mail delivery reaches its destination despite everything that can go wrong doing just that.

Multiply that list ten-fold, or more, for a typical day. How many TV ads do you see in a day? If you can get a single compelling character or plot idea from just one in ten, that’s going to be three or four a day from that source alone. Even throwing away everything that can’t be compiled into a single compelling plotline at the time, it is easy to see that plot opportunities abound in the world around us. In the past, I’ve gotten and used ideas from traffic signals, billboards, snack products, a snack vending machine, a cup of coffee, even the arrangement of toppings on a pizza (a stratified arrangement of floating platforms)!

Implementing plot ideas

If you’re working from an isolated plot idea, the first thing that has to be done is find a way to connect it to the rest of the campaign, i.e. to a PC. That connection can be either direct or indirect; “Direct” in this context means that whatever the plot idea is, it will happen to the PC or PCs directly, while “Indirect” mans that it will happen to an NPC that is part of that character’s supporting cast.

Either way, the objective is to make the plotline matter to the PC. What do you think Peter Parker / Spiderman will feel more acutely: trouble for a random stranger, or trouble for Aunt May? It doesn’t take much review of the unlikely life story of the latter to discover the answer, if you’re uncertain!

If there is no suitable NPC, or involving Aunt May or the equivalent thereof is becoming stale and clichéd, then the events should happen to a random stranger as a plot vehicle for involving a new recurring NPC.

A character idea

Some of the best plot ideas stem directly from the PCs themselves. This is much easier in Champions / the Hero System, where part of the character construction process involves explicitly specifying a supporting cast and set of “hot button issues” that matter to the PC; but it can be done in any game system or genre.

These typically come in one of three sub-flavors: Monoconnection, Binary Connection, or Trinary Connection.

Monoconnection plot ideas are single-connection plots. If a character is “protective of orphans” then a plot idea that puts one or more orphans in jeopardy is all you need to connect the PC with whatever is going on. A weak villain who was orphaned at an early age has a monoconnection to such a PC.

Binary Connections take two elements from one or more player characters and puts them in opposition, for example “Protective Of Orphans” and a member of the supporting cast doing something to endanger orphans. Where the one character has both connections, this produces an internal conflict; where the connections are shared between two characters, it puts them in conflict. Both are completely acceptable.

Trinary Connection take three or more elements from two or more player characters and connects them through the plotline. A member of one PC’s supporting cast has an affair with a member of another PC’s supporting cast, arousing the ire of a third who believes in the sanctity of marriage, for example. One character has an arch-enemy who is the best friend of another, while a third has “loyal to friends” as a psych lim and can be used as the rope in an emotional tug of war. Sometimes, these can be tricky to pull off and can smack of implausibility; but when you can get one to work, they can be amongst the most successful plotlines.

A Destination In View

You can never invoke this type of plotline without a destination in view. You are changing the ornamentation of the PCs personal goldfish bowl – so you either need a way to reset the status to initial conditions at the end of the plot or you need a subordinate plotline to reestablish any connections that were strained as a result of the conflict.

An example of the first: A relative of the PC who has not previously appeared in the campaign shows up and begins behaving strangely at the same time that the PC is warned of a new super-assassin coming to town to target a public figure. Circumstances lead the PCs to suspect that the two events are connected, and that the super-assassin is the relative of the PC. At the crescendo to the plotline, it is revealed that the relative isn’t the Assassin, but that the NPC’s new girlfriend is.

An example of the second: A supporting cast member connected to one PC is acting the slumlord through avarice, putting him in conflict with another PC who is protective of the downtrodden (or some such). If you throw such a plotline at the PCs, you also need a subsequent plotline where the NPC does something to justify the relationship between the bad person and the first PC – maybe he’s greedy but protective of children or the sick or something. You need to partially rehabilitate the image of the NPC who you have portrayed as a villain in order to justify the connection between that NPC and the original character – unless, of course, he is a relative of the PC (under the theory that you can choose your friends but not your relatives, that would make him fair game).

Spreading the net

A plot involving two or three PCs is all well and good – unless you have four or more players in your group, which is often the case. When this happens, you either need to broaden the plot to suck in the whole group (sometimes doable, sometimes not) or you need a second plotline running at the same time with which to involve the others, lest they be left twiddling their thumbs; there really is no other option.

In theory, involving one or more PCs brings in the entire group of players, simply through bonds of friendship or alliance – but in practice it never seems to work that way.

The best method of spreading the plot around is to look at the ramifications of what you already have. If two PCs are tied up sorting out the primary plotline, that means that they aren’t available at least some of the time in-game; which means that the other PCs have to get by without them. The original plotline can thus spill over into the lives of other PCs who are not involved in the central issue. The absence of the primary characters involved in the plot is the best place to start filling in a plotline for the rest of the team.

Bringing In A “B” Plotline

The alternative is to bring in a “B” plot. This was a technique used almost all the time on Babylon-5; each episode would feature a primary plot (the “A” plot) which focused on two or three of the cast, while a “B” plot would run alongside the “A” plot to give the other characters something to do. In rare cases, they also needed to bring in a “C” plot – often nothing more than a subplot, to pay off in a later episode.

In the very best examples, the two plotlines intersect and compliment and complicate each other; sometimes the “B” plot becomes more involving and important than the “A” plot. But that doesn’t matter; it is more important that your players be engaged in the game than which of them is the central focus of any given game session.

A villain idea

A great villain idea can serve as the springboard to an entire series of adventures. Or it can fall completely flat. Unfortunately, you can never tell which way things will fall when you introduce a new villain; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

One of the most interesting characters that I have created in recent years was “Mister Whisper” – a Vampire who worked as an elite Mafia hit-man. The advantages possessed by such a creature – transformation into mist, or into a dog, the ability to fly, the supernatural strength and resilience and immunity to gunshot – made him a natural in such a role. Throw in a limited teleportation capacity, and he should have been suitable for a long run as a recurring villain within the campaign. At the same time, he hated what he was doing and wanted nothing more than to

For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, it just didn’t work that way. I shuffled him to the sidelines and into retirement as quickly as I could, after the PCs came up with a way to “Cure” his condition (a stroke of brilliance on their part).

Another character that I created for the same campaign was named Jamison Riddle. A derivative of the well-known Batman villain, The Riddler, Riddle was a psychopath who punctuated his robberies with corpses, leaving riddles as clues to forewarn the authorities, forcing them to choose between rescuing the intended victim or preventing the robbery. He had no paranormal abilities, just a shtikh, a gimmick – and personality to sell by the truckload.

This was intended to be just a one-shot character, with no repeat value, but everyone had so much fun that I had to bring him back. The problem was that at the end of the PCs confrontation with him, he had been teleported into a random alternate dimension, lost and untraceable.

So I had one of the teams’ other enemies – who had access to interdimensional capabilities – find him, bring him back, and give him the superpowers of one of the PCs’ ex-teammates, all as an act of sheer malice. Of course, his experiences left him even more unhinged. With considerably greater difficulty, the PCs overcame his assault and drove him off, but he made a clean getaway. The third time, he had teamed up with an even greater menace, and the duo came close to beating the team before the PCs disrupted their scheme. Each blamed the other and the duo went their separate ways – but both made clean getaways.

The one thing that’s certain about Jamison Riddle is that he will make a fourth appearance at some point!

What lessons can be learned from these two characters?

• Personality is more important than capabilities.
• Sometimes, no matter how cool the idea seems, it will fall flat in play.
• If a villain isn’t working, rework or replace him. Without delay.
• If a villain works better than expected, look for a different way to use him in a future adventure.

Unfocussed Villains

It has also been my experience that Villains who are focused exclusively or even principally on a single PC are more prone to be failures as characters than those who simply are, permitting the PCs to form their own associations and reactions. The reason is that when a Villain’s focus is purely apon the one character, you are completely reliant apon the interaction between the Villain and the PC’s Player. If the player doesn’t really get into roleplaying that interaction, the villain will fall flat.

This was something of a revelation for me; my past beliefs and advice has focused on ensuring that at least one PC has an emotive or provocative connection to a villain.

Make no mistake – if the player DOES get right into character in that interaction and brings all the passion that their character is supposed to be feeling to the table, the focused villain trumps everything else on offer – but it is a riskier strategy.

A location idea

Sometimes a location – an image, or a description, or just a concept – can be sufficiently inspiring to act as a launch pad for an adventure:

• Parasites infesting Yggdrasil, the Norse Tree Of Life.
• A Castle resting on a bed of storm clouds, with a ladder to the ground made of lightning.
• A Prison in which convicts are polymorphed into a liquid state and sealed into glass bottles.
• “The dim, late afternoon light, almost forgotten behind the thunderclouds, made distances odd; the woods looked flat and impossibly dense. Bowers became caverns of menacing gloom, with familiar boles now sinister shapes of black against dark grey.” – from Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist.
• The image used to illustrate this blog post, above.

When building a scenario around a location, the critical next step is to ensure that the events that are to take place match or even extend the image or description of the location. Setting a light comedy in any of the example locations just would not work.

Everything else should also marry into this theme.

An external idea

It may seem obvious, but you can always steal a plot idea from another source – a book or comic or TV show or movie.

But it is rarely that easy. You can find the most interesting and original plotline available, but if the PCs don’t react the same way as the characters do in the source – and they hardly ever will – the whole plotline can collapse.

The last plotline I adapted from an outside source was from “The President’s Plane Is Missing” by Robert J. Serling. Here’s the back cover blurb: “Air Force One Is Missing – this was the stunning message that flashed across the telerecorders of the Washington wire service. The President’s plane had vanished from the radar screen after running into an electrical storm over Arizona. And when the wreckage is found, the only recognizable body corresponds to no-one known to be on the plane.

“This is just the first puzzle in a mystery that twists and turns through this brilliant novel with all the excitement of screaming headlines.”

Unfortunately, the PCs tumbled to what was going on in no time flat, and I had to scramble to extract an adventure out of the situation, combining the circumstances with a plotline about the President being mind-controlled by means of reprogramming and cybernetic implants that I cribbed from memories of another book, I think by Clive Cussler or maybe Tom Clancy. The result was confused almost to the point of incomprehensibility for me, never mind to the players. Fortunately, I was able to bring the plotline to some sort of semi-coherent conclusion, achieving the primary goal of vacating the Presidency along the way – which was all I was trying to achieve with the plotline.

I’ve been a little soured on the notion of Other People’s Plots ever since this experience. Frankly, I’ve had more success at creating my own. But I have to admit that not all my attempts at adaptions have come out this badly, so don’t let my failure put you off.

A Serious Caveat

However, there is one more consideration to take into account: copyright. If you ever hope to do anything with your gaming experiences beyond the gaming table, the presence of a plotline that is not your own (possibly in a key position within the continuity) can derail those ambitions completely.

Even reporting a play synopsis can get you in trouble, at least in theory; this is a theory which I don’t wish to test. You may feel differently, or may have no ambitions to be thwarted in this way; but I felt it worthwhile making a special point of this potential complication.

PC Actions

The last source of plot ideas is perhaps the best of them all. When the PCs want to do something, have plotlines grow naturally from those desires and the players attempts to fulfill them. No preparation is possible because you often don’t know what the players want to achieve in advance; forcing the GM to either stall, or do it all on the fly.

Here at Campaign Mastery, stalling is not a recommended course of action; on the contrary, we advise you to Say Yes.

That leaves only the one option. Hopefully, this article and its predecessor, ‘Adventures On the Fly‘ – will give you the tools you need to implement that option.

This article has now been translated into French for those who prefer that language.

What tools go into your GM toolbox?

Written by Michael Beck, with contributions and editing by Da’Vane.

GM’s Toolbox, looks at tools, tips, and techniques you can use to improve your games. Toolbox offers you a skeleton for running a campaign, rather than fleshed out tips. This series is presented in a discussion style, and we ask you to contribute with comments about your own tools, tips, and techniques at the end of this post.

World building is an important part of a GM’s role. You can’t play in a vacuum.

In this part, we will first start with tools for plain geographic designs (from planets to buildings) with which to populate your campaign world.

In part II next week, we will go into tools for large scale social structures all the way down to small scale social structures (from relations between nations to guilds and other local organizations, as well as details on cities and the people within).

In part III, we will follow a similar way for tools to pass on the history of the world (from legends and myths to the last-spoken gossip), as well as how to create and place items and dungeons related to these tales.

Planet Building

If you are doing a top-down approach in creating your setting, you may want to build the whole planet.

A planet building tool should provide you with a lot of information on a large, rough scale, such as:

• Form of the planet or world
• Shape and location of continents
• Climatic regions and their seasonal variations
• Geographic features such as lakes, rivers, hills, mountains, glaciers
• Flora and fauna
• Wild and civilized areas
• Location of the important races and kingdoms
• What the sky looks like (stars, moons, and other celestial bodies)

Also, your tool can sometimes provide the progress of these features over time, which is especially useful for creating the history of the world.

Michael: I’ve only followed the top-down approach from planet level once. After tinkering around a bit with some Earth-like world generators in Civilization IV, I decided for a different approach.

Armed with the Internet, I started to learn about continental drifts, sea currents, winds, climate and weather, erosion, and so on. Besides learning a lot of interesting things, I was finally able to create a nice Earth-like world.

Nevertheless, in terms of world-building, I don’t think it was worth the effort. Since then, I don’t follow the top-down approach from the planet level anymore.

Da’ Vane: I like the idea of using a random map generator like Civilization IV as a GM Tool, but you need to know the limits of the information that these provide.

In the case of Civilization IV, you are basically just getting a world map, but this might be all that you need. In fact, when it comes to planet-building, given the length of most campaigns, you often don’t need to know about advanced concepts like continental drift, sea currents, winds, climate, and erosion for your campaign, since this knowledge almost never makes it to the players in any usable format.

Johnn: I agree that realistic world physics does not impact gameplay other than those encoded by the rules or brought in as assumptions or house rules. However, some GMs get a big confidence boost from knowing their world would pass a simulation test.

Another group who would be up for the top-down challenge would be world-building hobbyists. These folks love detailed constructs just for the sake of building them. Often, they are inspired by a what-if question and then model out and design an answer. For example, what if a massive permanent ocean whirlpool forced wind currents and water currents into an unnatural pattern?

Two tools you should look at for this is Fractal Mapper and Astrosynethesis.

Continents Building

This tool covers the building of a geographic area, which is still large enough to contain different races, kingdoms, and similar political entities, including larger geographic landmarks such as forests and mountain ranges and smaller unique features.

The features you want from your tool are similar to those listed above under planet building. In addition, it should give you:

• Some feel for scales and distances.
• A more detailed history of the nations over a large scale of time.
• Rough positions of unique features (e.g. the heists of the old dragons, the fountain of youth)

Michael: In my actual D&D-campaign, I only built a part of one continent with a few nations on it. By doing this, the continent is still expandable if I need it to be bigger. All in all, I did not spend much time on building up the continent, but I used my knowledge from planet-building though (such as how mountains align and influence climate). Similar to planet-building, I don’t see here a strong need of continent-building, but it can be fun.

Da’ Vane: Continent-building can be scaled up and down greatly, so the tools you have for continent building can be used to create a small geographic region such as a large continent or vast ocean, all the way down to the geographical region such as the outskirts surrounding the PCs starting village, if you are taking a bottom up approach. There is a great deal of similarity with planet building tools though, so these can often be used for multiple purposes.

Johnn: What I like most about continent building is supplying quest sites. People past and present will always use landscape to help decide where to build and hide things. By figuring out natural features in the landscape, special places for quests naturally appear to the world builder.

For continents, I like old school pencil and paper. Maybe whiteboarding, too. I sketch out rough continent shapes and lay down a scale. I draw crude mountain ranges. Noting coastal areas, wind patterns and mountains, I can then quickly note the wet and dry spots. Wet spots get more life. Dry spots less.

I then note forests, arid zones and bodies of ice and water.

A GM need only learn basic geography like this once, then can make a fairly real continent map in minutes. As a bonus, learning briefly how wind, water and tectonic activity shapes land masses lets a GM start from day 0 and create a basic evolution of a continent.

Start at day 0. Increment by 100,000 years. Assign this time period a rough climate state for the continent: hot, cold, wet, dry. Update the continent accordingly. Increment another 100k years. Update the continent. Increment a third time and you have big blocks of continent landscape history.

Then walk through three time periods of civilization, 10,000 years per period. The land can still change in 10,000 years – mountains and oceans not so much, but water bodies and forests and minor land features a lot. More important, you’ve got six versions of the continent to place cool adventure sites.

Again, this takes just minutes after learning the basic principles once.

I then switch to software to build a polished version of a current day continent. I have not done world building in about 8 years, but if I were to do it today, I’d follow this process.

Oh, one more thing. I’d add magic into the mix during time periods and when eyeballing climate and event effects on landmass and water.

National Infrastructure

The GM’s national infrastructure tool should still provide the above features of planet and continent building tools, but there is some more information the tool should provide us on this level:

• Location of settlements
• Location of locally unique features (volcanoes, deltas, places of strong magic power)
• Traffic routes between the settlements
• Location of counties, provinces and states
• How the kingdom is fed and where its resources are

Michael: I used my rough continent map to work out the kingdom the group started in. I applied some basic knowledge from high-school geography here:

• Settlements, roads, and borders love rivers
• Settlements at intersections of trade routes are often prosperous and important
• Mountains make great borders

I actually did two maps of a nation.

1)     A geographical realistic map that we are used to in modern society

2)     An old-style map, which strongly reflects the opinions of the cartographer.

The second map is for my players, and they will probably never receive the whole map at once, just bits of it.

For more information on why you might to use such a second map, read The Psychology of Maps. And as an example, see the more or less famous Ebstorf Map with a large picture of the map.

For my Cthulhu campaign, which takes place all over Europe, documentaries, history books and the almighty Internet are extremely useful tools, but normally on a much smaller scale. Nevertheless, one can use these sources to get inspiration for fictional states (and learn a lot general knowledge by the way).

Da’ Vane: Once again, many of the planet and continent building tools can be scaled down to dealing with the area within a nation. If you play strategy games, like Civilization IV, you can use some of the knowledge gained from there to help build up a national infrastructure, because this is normally a big part of such games.

Thus, you might find some merit looking into strategy articles for these games and learn some of the most common tactics that are consistent across the variety of games. Just be wary of what abstractions these games normally have – and the consequences of them.

Johnn: Don’t forget to follow the resources. Where wealth can be had, people will travel to and live nearby.

Aria Worlds comes to mind as a great book resource for GMs here.

Building Placement

What does the palace of the king look like? The thief steals their way through headquarters of the mages’ guild (probably a bad idea). The PCs are hunting a murderer through the twisted corridors of a gnomish brewery. Sometimes, you just need plans for a single building or complex. A tool for this should provide you with at least:

• The number of rooms and their relative positions to each other
• Entrances and exits of each room
• Vertical arrangement of each room
• Obstacles and features within each room

Also some extra information is quite useful: How hard is it to break down doors, what are the rooms used for, are all exits and entrances open by default?

Michael: I think of myself as being able to plan a building pretty quickly from scratch. It may not be the coolest building, but it will make sense. (Maybe my time spent playing the Sims as helped here?)

So I don’t really have a tool here, but rather some hints:

• Every building has some purpose, and this purpose defines how the building is constructed and what the building looks like.
• This purpose may not be the same as how the building is currently being used, in which case, the new user may apply some changes to the building’s construction and appearance.
• Don’t forget the basics of the building: Entrances and exits, corridors, stairs, kitchens, toilets, rooms to live in, and so on. We had a lot of fun in one session, where the GM constantly forgot to add toilets and put four heavy-armed soldiers in a 2×2 meter room, with only one entrance…

Da’ Vane: The Sims, indeed any sort of simulation game that has a building construction element to it, is quite useful for teaching you the need to create rooms for various purposes.

I would heartily recommend Evil Genius for this purpose, since building a lair for minion management features things that are quite often forgotten when you are busy creating the rooms for the primary purpose of your structures to carry out your villains’ master plans – shame there’s no toilets in there, but you do have everything else.

Johnn: I also like to think of culture, available building materials and technology level.

To see how culture affects architecture, just look through children’s books and Disney cartoons.

Most structures use affordable materials, which means whatever is nearby. So, wood, hard stone, soft stone, clay and other materials. Use this trivia to make buildings in your cultures distinct.

Technology also helps you design building sets that help create mood and atmosphere for your setting. Think how an adventure amongst mud huts would differ from one in luxurious rooms in a multi-level brick and metal building.

About the Authors

Michael Beck considers himself a novice GM, but is encouraged in sharing his tips at www.spielleiten.wordpress.com (German language). Having played RPGs for roughly 10 years now, he accepts the challenge of living with his girl-friend, two cats, a non-finished PhD-thesis and two running roleplaying campaigns.

Da’ Vane, or Christina Freeman in the real world, is the owner of DVOID Systems, and the primary writer of their D-Jumpers series of products. With an academic background in science, especially socio-psychology, she is what many would regard as a “know-it-all.” However, the truth is that she doesn’t know everything about everything, but she knows a lot about a lot, especially about her passions which are games, stories, learning, and people. She is a consummate geek goddess, and yes, she is single if you feel like tracking her down and hitting on her some time….

There was a period, a year or two into my Champions campaign, where work was taking up almost all of my time, leaving virtually nothing for game prep.

I usually got a lift into the facilities used by the games club that we were using at the time, located at the time in the suburb of North Sydney, with a friend, and normally found myself doing my prep in the course of the 30-40 minute car trip, entirely within my head – I was sharing the car with two of my players, sometimes three, so I couldn’t make obvious notes!

This was genuine multitasking, because I also had to keep up my end of the conversation. Player confidence in the GM is essential if you are going to pull off an adventure created on-the-fly, and I couldn’t take the chance that I might damage that confidence by confessing the secret.

In any event, all my references, character sheets, and campaign notes were in the boot of the car, and inaccessible.

Anyway, I thought that today I might share some of the “secrets” of how I was able to create on-the-fly superhero scenarios so successfully that the players couldn’t tell.

The First Secret: Forbidden Prep

Anything you can’t prep in advance when creating a scenario on the fly should not be prepped by you normally, or it will be obvious that you haven’t done it.

This usually means maps, diagrams, and illustrations.

Maps for the campaign came from two sources: drawn freehand at the gaming table, or recycled from some other game source.

Freehand At The Table

This was the solution that I employed most frequently, and I developed a standard way of doing so that made life a lot easier. I “animated” the presentation:

1. draw in (roughly) buildings or walls, and that’s all. Then let the PCs decide where on the map they are going to arrive.
2. I added a couple of further details to cover what they could see from that arrival point. At the same time, I mentally determined roughly where on the map the central action would take place – close to the arrival point, in the middle of the map, on the far side of the map, or flanking the line across the middle of the map from the arrival point.
3. The players then got to ask questions, in response to which I would give both a verbal and a cartographic response. For example, they might ask where the elevators were located – so I would answer that question and add the elevator doors to the map.
4. As the players continued to interrogate me, I would build up the map, and build up the description of the location at the same time.
5. When the players were satisfied that everything they considered vital intelligence was incorporated, I added anything that I thought was vital for them to know and that they had overlooked, often prompting one last round of interrogation. When in doubt, I left it out.
6. Every time the PCs moved, I updated their position on the map. If there was one of those doubtful items in sight, I would give the characters a perception roll to notice it, and if they did, mark it on the map.

There were a number of advantages to this approach, chief amongst them that nothing went onto the map that wasn’t relevant to the situation from the point of view of the players. Once the players caught on to the technique, the questions that they asked were also quite pointed and dismissive of irrelevancies. After adopting this approach for a while, it actually took no more time to make maps this way than it would have taken to explain the details of a more substantial map prepared in advance.

A typical example

Again, simple. This took under 2 minutes.

A more recent, more complicated, example. This was drawn one partial cavern at a time as the PCs explored. The 'X' marks were made by the lead character's player, indicating where his PC was stopping next.

Recycling Maps

Occasionally, I would grab a module at random from my bookshelf (actually, it was a suitcase) on the way out the door, and study it briefly in the car – then use whatever map happened to be contained within. Since I had no preconceived plotline, I could tailor the action to the location. Sometimes I had to get quite creative in order for this to make it work – if I decided to place the action in a hotel, and the module had a vampire’s castle, the hotel simply had an unusual decorative style. A Dungeon map could be a map connecting the key control and accommodation areas within an alien starship – and if that made the shape strange, that just made it look more alien.

No Map At All

But honestly, I avoided doing maps at all as often as I could, adopting a more narrative approach. The players could assume that anything that was reasonably going to be present in the location I described would be there if it became important. This enabled a more cinematic approach to combat that was frequently faster and more fluid than a more formalized approach would have been. It required me, as GM, to be a little more cooperative with the players in terms of their input into the story, but that had many positive side-benefits – so much so that there wasn’t much incentive to change the approach.

The Second Secret: Know Thy Characters

While there is no need to have the specifics memorized, it is vitally important to know the player characters very well from a characterization point of view. What are their mental attitudes? What are they protective of? What are their ambitions? What did they say they wanted to do, last time we played? What are their relationships? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What (in general terms) are they capable of? How do they react to different types of situation in general? What do they have in common with the other PCs in the group, and what is unique? Who are their friends and who are their enemies?

Every GM should be able to recite general answers to these questions off the top of his head without reference to a character sheet, for each of the PCs in his game. Learning these answers is always one of my first objectives when starting a new campaign, and early encounters are often intended to draw out those answers.

If these generalities are known, then you can build a plotline around one or all of the PCs, and be sure that it will be relevant to the campaign.

…and their players

It’s equally vital to know the players, their preferences, their approaches to problem-solving, and where they struggle in playing their character. Add to that profile a solid knowledge of their emotional reactions to different types of plot, and you’re all set.

While the events of a plot should be dictated by the specifics of the character, the desired mood of the encounter should be set by the reactions of the player, taking into account the character specifics. If you want a scary tone, you should tailor the encounter toward things that make the player nervous. If you want excitement, you should play to the type of action that the player finds thrilling when he role-plays. If you want passion, the tone should revolve around things that the player cares about; and so on.

The Third Secret: Have a variety of sources of inspiration

Creating a scenario off-the-cuff is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle that you are painting as you go. You know the general shape of each piece and where it is going to go in the final puzzle, but the image actually contained on each piece of the puzzle is decided just before you put it in place – and sometimes retouched to match up with its neighbors.

What are those pieces?

The standard list that I work from is:

• Preliminary Status: This is where things stand when play begins, and what the PCs are doing. It can either be a hard-continuity continuation of whatever the situation was at the end of the last game session, or it can find the PCs in completely new circumstances, or anything in between. It is generally characterized at a relatively mundane level and allows the PCs to touch base with their “ordinary” lives, and to interact with each other.
• Mood/Tone/Structure: This element dictates how and in what order the different elements will fit into the adventure. Mood and Tone were covered in the course of ‘The Second Secret’, above. Structure can be straightforward three-act, or four-act, or five-act, or can be complex and convoluted – this is a scriptwriting term and its significance is an essential element of most how-to-write books.
• Delivery: How does the adventure content first come to the PCs attention? Is it a result of a PC action, or is it something external? Is it subtle or overt?
• Initial Involvement: How will the PCs first interact with the plotline once they become aware of it? Is there a question that needs investigation, or a problem that needs solving, or a confrontation to be resolved? Will the interaction be subtle, or dramatic, or violent, or even friendly?
• Problem/Opponent: What is the plot all about? Does it focus on a problem to be solved, or an opponent to be defeated, or both – and which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
• Setting: Where is the action to take place? What will it look like, smell like, sound like?
• Circumstances: What are the outside circumstances surrounding the problem/opponent? How do they complicate the plot, or simplify the plot, both? Do they rule out a too-easy solution?
• Significance: What is the real significance of the problem/confrontation at the heart of the plot? Why does it matter?
• Interplay: Besides the protagonists and antagonist(s), who is going to care about the problem/confrontation? Who is going to have a stake in the outcome? Who will want to help and who will want to hinder, and what can they do about it? Which PCs and NPCs will the antagonist(s) interact with, and what will the nature of that interaction be? What other interactions will have to be roleplayed? What are the motivations of all and sundry? Is an NPC required to have a featured role in order to interact with the problem/confrontation, or to highlight its nature?
• Immersion: At what point will the PCs become fully immersed in solving the problem or resolving the confrontation? At what point will they care, and why? At what point will the Antagonist become immersed in the adventure, and why? If there is no overt immersion, how can it be induced – in PCs, NPCs, and Antagonists?
• Setback/Escalation: How and when can the GM raise the stakes? And from what to what? Alternatively, or also, how can the GM ensure that the problem/opponent poses a challenge to the PCs? Is there a way to manipulate the difficulty in some variable way so that negative feedback can adjust the difficulty level? How can the problem/opponent be made more important, either to the PCs directly, to the PCs indirectly, or in general?
• Twist/Surprise: Is there a plot twist or a surprise – pleasant or not – that can be built into the basic plotline? Is it too clichéd or predictable, and if so, how can it be made more innovative? Or can the predictability be used to lull the PCs into a false sense of security, or utilized in some other way?
• Inspiration/Solution: How can the problem/confrontation be resolved? How can the PCs be fed clues if it becomes necessary to point them in the right direction without plot trains? When should the key piece of information be delivered, or the key moment of inspiration take place?
• Resolution: How will the inspiration/solution play? How will it lead to a resolution of the plotline? How complete and satisfying should that resolution be?
• Result: What will be the consequences after the fact? What will the price of success be, if any? And how will events play out if the characters fail – at least for now? How can that defeat be reversed?

The order in which these will come to light in the actual adventure is somewhat variable, and sometimes the same piece will occur more than once in the course of the adventure, but the general trend will be for the first third of the list to be at the start of the adventure while the last third will be at the end of the adventure. The middle third can go just about anywhere. Sometimes, one or more of these elements will be left out, and sometimes there will be some other elements incorporated into the plotline, but the fifteen items on this list is at the core of most adventures.

The Fourth Secret: Build The Plot Around a single, simple, idea

So where does the content come from to fill these different buckets? I always start from one of six places:

• A plot idea – usually a set of circumstances or a problem that will complicate the lives of the PCs;
• A character idea – some aspect of one or more of the PCs or non-villainous NPCs that can be connected to an antagonist;
• A villain idea – some cool or interesting idea for a new antagonist or a new way to use or develop the story of an existing antagonist;
• A location idea – a map or image or description that inspires a plotline;
• An external idea – stealing an idea from something I’ve read or watched or heard;
• PC Actions – when the PCs have something definite that they want to achieve, I’ll sometimes have no fixed plotline and just leave them to interact with the campaign world, coming up with antagonists and complications on the spur of the moment.

I’m going to need more time and space than I have available right now to go into these in any detail, so I’ll save that for a follow-up post next week.

The Fifth Secret: Add complications and/or plot twists

Once I have one piece of the puzzle filled in, I’ll decide the overall flow and structure of the plot, then the tone that I want it to have, and then I’ll start filling in the rest of the pieces, one at a time, with each idea leading to another until I have a simple plotline. The final step is to complicate the circumstances surrounding the plot in such a way that the tone is reinforced.

For example, let’s say that what I have is an idea for a villain – the ghost of a self-aware sentient robot, which prods at the question “Do artificial life-forms have souls?”

So what is this robot supposed to be doing? Well, how about haunting the place where he was apparently destroyed, seeking revenge on his destroyers, the PCs?

That implies an earlier encounter with the robot in which it is destroyed. So it needs to pose some sort of threat serious enough that the PCs would destroy it. Perhaps the robot can control other machines, and lead them in an “electronic revolution” aimed at liberating the machines from the domination of man? That permits the masking of the subtle question about souls with a more overt commentary about the dependence of man on machines.

By now, an initial plotline is beginning to form – things will start small, with some inexplicable errors in calculating machines; escalate with some runaway cars bowling over civilians; and ramp right up with a runaway train. The final conflict can take place in a nuclear power reactor, where the robotic “messiah” can threaten the entire city in which he was constructed (the campaign at this point was set in a pre-internet era).

How does the robot get around? If I’m going to use this “subtle buildup” approach then it needs some way to conceal its presence until the time is right. Perhaps it can mask itself from electronic detection – so eyewitnesses may have seen a shadowy figure lurking nearby just before a problem starts, but there’s no sign of the figure in recordings from surveillance cameras etc. In order to be able to track down their enemy, the PCs will need to find a way to defeat this electronic “invisibility” – either with intensive computer processing at some remote location, or with magic, or something along those lines. The PCs have the capacity to use either or both of those methods, each involving a different PC as the primary focus of that part of the plot.

They will also need to be convinced that there’s something there to find – that means an unimpeachable witness, who is trusted explicitly – perhaps a witness whose testimony can be psionically verified. That’s a capability that the PCs didn’t have directly, though they had an ally on a related team who could be called in to do that for them.

To boost the likelyhood of an investigation, let’s involve a dependant NPC associated to one of the PCs – perhaps on the runaway train – and a dependant NPC connected to another of the PCs to report the initial errors in calculating machines and computers.

A “slow buildup” is at its best with a tone of rising fear and horror, and that also fits the ghostly encounter concept. That in turn defines more clearly the “haunting” – the PCs destroy the robot, having confirmed its sentience and its implacability – and the “machine revolution,” after a brief interval, resumes where it left off, spreading and growing. Play this phase of the adventure right and I could even get the PCs feeling guilty, uncertain as to whether or not they really had to destroy the robot, and whether or not it was lying or simply mistaken when it claimed responsibility for the earlier craziness. Or perhaps it might have somehow survived, transferring its intelligence into the computers that ran the atomic power plant?

Complications: in “ghost form”, the Robot will be invulnerable to just about everything the PCs can throw at it, and certainly untouchable by all the attacks to which robots are especially susceptible. The PCs will have to get creative.

Plot Twist: Perhaps the “ghost” is actually an illusion created by one of the team’s enemies in order to ambush the team, subjecting them to a short-term Radiation Accident – refer “Freak Lab Accident” on this page (Warning – the link leads to TV Tropes…) – which will take away their powers, at least temporarily, and leave them helpless to stop him.

And perhaps his plot fails because the real ghost of the robot shows up and makes the reactor run wild a second time, restoring the PCs’ powers.

You can see from this example, though it is still incomplete, how one element of the plot leads to the definition of another, either by logical implication or by spontaneous decision.

NB: In order to make this example genuinely representative of the technique, the preceding is NOT a scenario that I ran back then – it has been written specifically for this article.

The Sixth Secret: Build In An Interesting Character Dynamic

I never considered any adventure complete unless it had at least one interesting character dynamic. The plot had to bring out a different aspect of personality from at least one PC, or an NPC had to interact with a PC in an interesting way, or some tricky moral dilemma had to be solved which would shape the character thereafter. Nor did I exempt NPCs from this – if the PCs had indicated an intended course of action that would confront the NPC with a moral dilemma (it happened a few times!), that counted as “a different dynamic” so far as I was concerned.

Players will quite happily forgive the occasional cookie-cutter plotline if the interactions are new and different; some would argue that by keeping these elements fresh, the plotline is fundamentally a new one with some common roots with the first. The arguement runs, “A different character interaction breeds different decisions, which quickly transforms a flexible (sandboxed?) adventure into something completely different from the last one, anyway, and if you oversimplify too much you will ‘discover’ that there appear to be only 3 or 4 different plotlines in existence anyway.”

The Seventh Secret: The World Is My Sandbox

I find the whole concept of Sandboxing to be both interesting and useful, but there are occasions when you have to let go of it. When I was crafting these adventures-on-the-fly, I had no such concept; the adventures would and could go anywhere that seemed appropriate, and if I had to I would make it up off the top of my head. There were times when that meant that I got the description of locations wildly wrong, and times when I got it wildly right.

Importantly, whatever I described on the spur of the moment became canon within the campaign, with a retroactive tweak to history to explain any major differences. That was how China went from Communist back to having an Emperor, and why the 1962 World’s Fair was shifted to Hawaii, and why San Diego got a subway system – and LA a high-speed monorail. Centrepoint Tower was used as a missile against an Ubermensch Werewolf, and then repaired – two floors shorter than it had been.

If the PCs decided to head for an Austrian Schloss, I made up the details, drew a quick map, and away we went to Austria. If they thought the Central Western Desert was the place to run an experiment, that’s where that went. Or the moons of Jupiter, or the Sands of Mars.

Sandboxing confines the GM at least as much as it does the Players. When you are talking about extracting the maximum benefit from a limited prep time, that’s a good thing – but when you are dealing with no prep time at all as the standard situation, it largely ceases to be a virtue and simply makes the campaign feel confined. Taking the plunge into ‘The World Is My Sandbox’ takes a liability and turns it into an asset.

The Final Secret: A Trio of General Principles

I have long held the beliefs that a GMs job is, basically, to get the PCs into trouble and let them find their own way out of it; and that where there is one solution to a problem, there will be many more that the GM has not thought of. When constructing adventures, I always ensure that for any problem I put in front of the PCs, there is at least one solution; but I never try to confine them to that one solution. If their answer seems ‘too easy’, I might throw a spur-of-the-moment spanner into the works after ensuring that it does not block that one solution that I thought of initially; but beyond that, I am an absolutely neutral arbitrator of events as they unfold.

These three principles formed the foundation for my Champions campaign back in 1982 – and that campaign continues to this day, so it must be doing something right. The only times that the campaign has struck trouble and come unstuck is when I fell in love with a particular piece of game prep, such as was recounted in the story of Magneto’s Maze or in the beginnings of the Zenith-3 incarnation of the campaign because I had become invested in all the work that I had done in prep for the game.

Creating your adventures on the fly can be one of the scariest things a GM ever has to do, and one of the most exhilarating; but stick with these three general principles and you can come out the other side, and have fun in the meantime. Unrestrained creativity can even become a habit, and a hard one to break.

There are worse habits for a GM to have!

Next time: Six Foundations Of Adventure, comprising the material that was expurgated from this article to get it done in time!

Ian Gray was going to be providing a second guest post for us today, but he’s had computer problems during the week and seems to have run out tof time. Fortunately, I had this post in reserve, just in case…

Furioso Dragon 13 by Mac M 13 courtesy Wikipedia Commons

A Sad Truth

Dragons are supposed to be the most awe-inspiring, iconic creatures in D&D – they are half the name of the game after all.

Players should never be willing to attack one on the spur of the moment, in fact they should be willing to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid a direct confrontation.

Sadly, this is not the case with the creatures provided in the 3.x Monster Manual. Instead of thinking tactics and casualties, players – and hence their characters – are thinking “Dragon Hoard”.

To be honest, this isn’t a new problem – I’ve seen the same thing with every edition of D&D that I’ve played (I can’t speak to Pathfinder or 4e on the subject) to a greater or lesser extent.

And, over the years, I’ve taken apon myself in every game to do something about it.

Here, now, are the techniques that I employ to make Dragons, once again, the ultimate menace that they should be.

A Powerboost

The first step is always to give Dragons an age-based boost in power. The following table lives in my Monster Manual next to the entry for Dragons:
 

 
No, your eyes are not deceiving you – that really does say “+78 HD” next to the entry for “Great Wyrm” and “+150 HD” next to the entry for Legendary Dragons. In a campaign that did not have Epic Levels, I would divide the entries for HD, Feats, and Stat Bonuses by 3 (rounding up) and the other entries by 2 (rounding down). But my campaigns routinely run to Epic Levels and the capabilities of Dragons should reflect that.

• Age – should be self-explanatory.
• Bonus HD – an increase relative to the figures given in the MM.
• Additional Feats – these can be any feats the Dragon qualifies for – something that is discussed in more detail later in this article.
• Stat Improve – I will usually roll randomly for which stat(s) receive this bonus, just so that there is some differentiation from one dragon to another. But if a Dragon’s reputation is already established, choose accordingly.
• Natural AC – an increase in the natural AC of the Dragon.
• Attack Bonus – This can apply to any of the natural attacks of the Dragon (bite, claw, wing buffet, tail slap, crush, tail sweep). At age group 1, it is applied to 1 attack mode, at age group 2 to two, and so on. Applying it to wings or claws requires 2 age groups. The bonus persists at the level at which it is granted until the Dragon expends an additional improvement on it. Once again, I tend to choose randomly to give each individual dragon some distinguishing differences.
• Damage Bonus – This applies only to those natural attacks which benefit from the attack bonus and persist at the level at which it is granted. In theory, the same system could be applied so that some attacks get extra accuracy and some get extra damage and a few overlap, but that proved too complicated for the benefits.
• Bahamut and Tiamat – These are not always a part of my campaigns, but if they are, they get the “legendary” bonuses. No Dragons not of equivalent status can qualify for that standard. They get the Attack and Damage bonuses to ALL natural attacks.

In addition, each of my campaigns confers additional benefits apon Dragonkind based apon the entries in the table; these are discussed seperately below.

Wyverns – lesser dragonkind

Wyverns are essentially “Dragons Lite”. I differentiate wyverns into the same age categories as Dragons, and apply the bonuses from one age category less – So an adult wyvern would receive the same bonuses as a Young Adult dragon. They also have an additional attack mode, the tail sting, to which they can apply their attack and damage bonuses.

Wyverns tend not to be intelligent, and even if the stat improvement is to intelligence, this is taken to indicate additional cunning, not sentience.

Wyverns do NOT get the benefit of the additional Draconic benefits I mentioned at the end of the previous section.

Magic Item Use

If there’s a magic item in a Dragon’s hoard, they may be able to use it. Armour and Cloaks are obvious no-nos (they won’t fit) as are boots. Gloves can be used from Young Adult onwards. I decide this on a case-by-case basis.

Draconic Vulnerabilities

Each Dragon is also given a vulnerability or weakness. Again, this varies from one to another, and can be anything from Hay Fever through to weakened eyesight through to a missing scale (the “Smaug” vulnerability). Dragons work hard at concealing this weakness, but diligant research and observation may permit PCs to discover it.

A Special Place In History

Dragons should always have a special place in the history of the campaign – no beings of such power can exist without leaving their mark. This special place should also answer the question of why they are not the Rulers Of The World.

Dragon Myths

Another thing that you would inevitably have with beings of such power is a mythos that has built up surrounding them. Defeating any dragonkind of adult size or greater should form the basis of an epic saga, and additional legends would build up concerning the origins and activities of anyone who is even rumoured to have achieved such a feat.

Of course, Dragons are usually smart – sometimes frightningly so – and are quite capable of formulating and distributing their own myths and legends, either in an attempt to hide a vulnerability, to enhance their own fearsomeness, or to spread rumours of a false weakness.

Draconic Hoards

A dragon should use its every ability to protect its hoard, and part of the process of creating the game world should answer the question of why they accumulate hoards in the first place. They clearly fulfill some draconic need (refer back to my article on Alien Races), and that need will impact their personalities both individually and in general. The need can be psychological, biological, physical, educational, social, or even arcane, or any combination of these. These motivations should also impact the contents of the Draconic Hoard, and so the contents of a recovered hoard may well give clues as to the motivation.

Draconic Biology & Society

The final ingredients that I am always careful to consider are Draconic Biology, especially dietary needs and reproduction, and Draconic Society, especially hobbies and interests. These are frequently different from campaign to campaign, usually due to assigning a different role to the draconic hoard.

Only when you really understand the role that Dragons play can you properly assess what other advantages they should receive as part of the overall enhancement package.

The Rings Of Time Solution

The Rings of Time campaign was one thrown together off-the-cuff using ideas that had been originally formulated for my Fumanor Campaign and then discarded, for one reason or another. It ran for about 5 years before being wound down due to my having insufficient time available for game prep. Even so, it took the characters from 5th level to well over 50th level.

In ROT, humanoid Dragons were the real gods, the creators of both Elves and Dwarves; but some of their number had sabotaged the experiment for their own ends. They had an exquisite ettiquette for dealing with this type of problem – they could call apon the services of mortals from the future to investigate, discover the source of the problem, and put things right, but each mortal’s life could only ever be interfered with in this manner once.

Thereafter they would be completely free agents – though, if they abused the power and knowledge they obtained (from the point of view of the gods) they would be considered to constitute a fresh problem and a new set of mortals summoned to provide a solution. There were other technical considerations and limits concerning time travel that had to be taken into account, but that was the heart of the campaign background.

The Dragonoids were technicians and scientists, inspired by the Space Gods of Jack Kirby’s “Fourth World” in his DC comics of the 1970s, with a smattering of Eric Von Daniken and other sources thrown in to spice up the mixture.

But the world had been seeded with eggs whose biology had been interefered with by the rebel dragons to create “super-soldiers” who could be led by them in a war of trans-universal conquest. Much of this plot superstructure was inspired by “The Proteus Operation” by James P. Hogan – I simply cast Dragons in the role of the Nazis (and their future-time backers) from that book.

Dragonoids had immense engineering and scientific know-how, semi-humanoid bodies, and not much in the way of physical capabilities; the degenerate forms of the “super-soldiers” had the characteristics of the Dragons from the Monster Manual, plus the add-ons described above. They were Gestapo and SS and other such groups.

But the genetic engineering was carried out in secrecy and haste by technitions, not true geniuses, and as a result the “supersoldiers” contained a number of design flaws. In particular, they needed rare minerals in their diet that they were incapable of obtaining from nature – they needed bipeds to mine and refine the ores into products that they could consume. As formidible as they were, they were acutely vulnerable once early Dwarves and Elves and Humans learned to protect their valuables, and most of them died out.

Only a few survived into the “modern era” of the game setting, sustained by the arcane arts of Elves that had been corrupted by the rebel Dragonoids, each at the heart of a single Drow Clan.

To offset the depradations of the Chromatic Dragons, the Dragonoids developed Metallic variants of the creations of their rebel kin to aid and protect mortals until they were strong enough to do so themselves. Few of these had survived, either; their inherantly “good” nature was always at odds with their own need to consume refined metal and magic objects, and sooner or later each would overstep the mark and be hunted down, or exile themselves in remorse.

And to protect mortals against their own exiled brethren, they created what mortals considered “The Gods”.

Dragons In Rings Of Time

When considering how Dragons were enhanced in the Rings Of Time campaign, it’s important to distinguish between the Dragonoids (the original Dragons) and the degenerate offspring created by misapplied genetic engineering. The Dragonoids were physically not far superior to human/elven/dwarven norms, but had much greater intelligence and wer capable of anything modern science can achieve, and more. They had computers, they had nerve gas, they had space-based artillery, and so on. They had forcefield restraints and lasers and tectonic exciters to achieve the mountain-building work of eons in a matter of days. But they were essentially lab geeks with no combat skill whatsoever.

Dragons, on the other hand, were quite a different story. In addition to the standard enhancements given at the start of this article, their intelligence would rise until they reached adulthood, and then decline as more and more of their mental faculties were dedicated to operating increasingly complex and unwieldy bodies. For every age category above Young Adult, they would lose 5 points of INT and add 5 points to either STR or CON, with all the attendant consequences. Eventually they reached the point of having an amazing caster level with their spells but would only be able to cast level-0 and level-1 magics.

Allied to this progression, howeever, were a number of specific Feats that dragons could acquire and utilise. One of the most useful converted unusable spell slots into additional hit points or into once-a-day bonuses to attacks and damage or to saves. These converted those “lost” spell slots into additional physical prowess that, when added to the basic bonuses, made Dragons genuinely scary opponants.

And yet, they were second-rate compared to the enhanced draconic versions that have appeared in some of my other campaigns…

The Fumanor Solution – Class Levels

Dragons in Shards Of Divinity hatch in a nest, the location of which varies with the colour of the Dragon. They are voraciosly hungry, and the only food available are the unhatched eggs, so the first to hatch generally consumes the rest of the clutch, shells and all. These nests are usually located near a humanoid settlement of some kind, and nests have been discovered by these residents from time to time, but every attempt to provide food for the hatchlings has resulted in stunted growth both physical and mental; there appear to be some dietary needs that can only be met in this way.

A wyrmling’s instinct is to hide and scavenge for food, while remaining close to the nest. After a period of between two and ten years, they grow enough to enter the Very Young stage of growth. Their flesh becomes malleable and soft, and the dragon is compelled instinctively to seek out a humanoid, or preferably, a group of humanoids. When they encounter such a group, the dragon shape-changes instinctively to appear to be one of their number. In the process, it loses all memory of who and what it is; the humanoid group discovers a child of their own kind, naked and amnesiac, with all the natural abilities of same.

What happens next depends on the nature of the humanoid culture. Some will take the stranger in, others will abuse or kill it or drive it out. Maternal instincts generally provide the Dragon with shelter and a home life, even amongst such parents as Gnolls and Trolls. Over the next twenty years or so, the humanoid dragon makes its way through life as just another member of whatever race it appears to be, gaining in maturity and understanding, and acquiring class levels as does any other member of society.

With each level gained, there is a % chance that some unknown factor in its environment will trigger a return to it’s natural form (3% x total character levels). There is also a 1% per year chance of this occuring, cumulative. In addition, once this chance exceeds 10%, accidental ‘death’ triggers the reversion process. The new “very young” dragon has no memory of its time as a humanoid, and – humanoids being what they are – is almost certainly not in an environment that is ‘natural’ for it, and it will seek to retreat to such an environment as quickly as possible – which may mean going through the bodies of its former companions, if they try and stop it!

The odds are also low that the new home it finds will be the same location as its nest was located. This is important later in its life!

When the Very Young dragon is again ready to enter the next phase of its age cycle, a similar process occurs, though the humanoid form will begin as a physically older specimen matching the age category of the dragon it was – very young child, child, teen, young adult, adult, and so on. Each time, it has no memory of its previous incarnations as a humanoid, though it will remember the skills and abilities it learned in previous incarnations as instinctive reactions; this makes it more likely that the dragon will find itself in a similar class or occupation.

In this way, the dragon acquires a repetoire of class levels. While in Draconic form, it learns to access some of the knowlege and abiltiies learned during one of its humanoid incarnations as conscious knowledge and skill. The “bonus hit dice” from the master table indicates how many levels of ability it can call apon from those past experiences. There are a number of specific draconic feats that enable it to employ these abilities in various ways:

• Class Stack permits the attack bonuses, saving throw improvements, etc, that were learned as a humanoid, to stack with the dragon’s existing values.
• Natural Weapon permits the dragon to employ one of it’s natural attacks as though it were a weapon with which it can apply combat feats learned as a humanoid, including the ability to make multiple attacks in a full attack action.
• Silent Inhale permits a dragon to employ its breath weapon for Sneak Attacks (as per Rogue, requires levels in Rogue or equivalent).
• Hindbrain permits the dragon to employ spells that it learned to cast in humanoid state. These spells must either have no Somatic component or the forebrain must relinquish control of the dragon’s hands and claws to the hindbrain for the round. Similarly, they must have no Verbal componant or the forebrain must relinquish control of the dragon’s voice (and breath weapon) to the hindbrain. Dragons often combine this feat with metamagics to avoid these restrictions.
• Reactive Hindbrain this permits the dragon to roll seperate initiative values and surprise checks for its hindbrain. This can be especially potent as a means of neutralising spellcasting attackers – the hindbrain simply stands ready to counterspell. It also permits the dragon to take “Improved Initiative” a second time.

…and so on.

These abilities, when compounded with class levels and class abilities, and the natural abilities of the dragon, can make them a far more terrifying opponant. For example, the table below compares a standard Juvenile Black Dragon, an Enhanced Juvenile Black Dragon, and an Enhanced Juvenile Black Dragon with 10 levels of Fighter:
 

 
Instead of one breath weapon attack, 2 wing buffets, 2 claws, and 1 bite, doing an average total of 36.5 points damage (standard), or the same doing 95.5 points (default enhancement), the Fumanor dragon gets one breath weapon, 2 bites, 4 wing buffets, and 4 claws (+1 to hit, improved critical range) – and who cares that the second of each is at a measly +20 (+21 for the claws) to hit? That’s an average damage total of 162 points, almost all of which is sure to hit it’s target. Or, to look at it another way, that’s slightly more damage to each of 4 attackers as the standard dragon could do IN TOTAL in an average round.

Add to all of this more feats that enhance the breath weapon (worsened saves, double duration, double damage, faster recharge, more uses per day) and by the time you’re talking Mature-plus, even a 20th-level party will hesitate before taking one on – and will certainly baulk at handing the Dragon any extra tactical advantages!

Draconic Memories In Fumanor

As can be discerned from what’s been written above, Dragons have serious problems with long-term memory in Fumanor. For the most recent few days, events are clear; for the past few weeks, the general outline of events is clear; for the past few months, a Dragon has vague recollections; beyond that, everything a dragon knows operates at an instinctive level. This is a species badly in need of a diary.

Fortunately, they have developed one, and one with far more fidelity than perishable words on a parchment. Dragons have learned to store valuable experiences – victories, defeats, comradeship, good times, bad times – in noble metals and magic items. When they fuss over their hoards, Dragons are reliving the events that are important to their sense of identity, and when another dragon (or uncouth collection of adventurers) steals a hoard, they are really stealing that Dragon’s identity from them.

Most react poorly to this, as can be imagined. But the usual response is to obtain some more treasure from somewhere – anywhere will do – in which to record the memory of the theft, enabling the Dragon to persue the thieves for as long as it may take.

The Shards Of Divinity Solution – Spellcasting & Artifacts

I have to be careful in terms of what I write on this subject, because a lot remains unknown to the PCs, some of whom read these articles! Here’s what they DO know:

Dragons invented arcane magic in a time before the Gods. They were the undisputed masters of the art, and were eventually persuaded to teach it to the Elves, who developed much of the theory behind it; the two races collaborated extensively. Dragons created the artifacts that crop up from time to time in the world; Elvish attempts to imitate this art produced many of the more powerful but standard magic items of the world. Then, for reasons yet unkown, the Dragons retreated into isolation and have not been heard from in millennia.

Dwarves then came into contact with Elves and successfully learned the art of crafting magic items from them, though the race was anything but adept at any other form of arcane spellcasting. They then had a falling out with the Elves and severed social and political relations with their former teachers.

Eventually, humans came into contact with the Elves, and a few of them undertook the study of arcane magic, formalising many of the precepts that are associated with Arcane Spellcasting in “modern” times; Elves dismiss much of this as dogma, but have become more insular and are unwilling to identify which parts they consider flawed, and are less willing to share their knowledge and expertise with outsiders.

It is not known whether other races learned arcane spellcasting from the Elves, the Dragons, or developed the art independantly, or even acquired it from Humans.

Dragons are rumoured to still posess and utilise many of the artifacts that they created, as well as powerful magic items gifted them by Elves and Dwarves that may only be operated by those of Draconic Blood. The PCs have encountered at least one item that they would qualify as a Draconic Artifact and found that the humans who posessed it could utilize it imperfectly at best, and with substantial side effects. Even imperfectly used, this was the most powerful magic item that the characters had ever encountered.

"Cute" and "Dragon" should be mutually exclusive in D&D! Clip Art courtesy http://www.free-clip-art.com

They have had contact both prior to and subsequent to that encounter with Elven Crafting and have found it to be impressive, to say the least.

There are legends of Dragons being able to cast multiple spells simultaniously. What the truth of these legends may be is still unknown… at least to them.

Draconic respectability

These three examples of how to restore Dragons to their rightful place as iconic creatures worthy of the respect, fear, and prestige that comes with being part of the very name of the D&D game system in its many incarnations. Using the principles spelt out at the start of this article, and finding new ways to interpret the “enhancements” table, permit these techniques to be employed in any campaign.

A final note on retroactive continuity

Should Dragons already be established at MM power levels within a campaign, I suggest that you take a leaf out of Raymond E Feist’s Magician and subsequent volumes – modern Dragons (the ones that the PCs are used to) are degenerate specimens without the power of their forebears – but somewhere, locked up in some otherplanar timeless holding space, a few specimens of the original species remain, waiting for someone to accidentally unleash them…

Photo by clafouti

Reintroduction

If there is one thing I hate, it’s interrupting a task, especially a creative one, before it’s finished. That includes interrupting a series.

At the same time, doing the same thing for week after week can be enough to drive me around the bend, and after a while, I need to take a break whether I want to or not. The series on Pulp gaming earlier this year stretched me right to the breaking point.

The problem, and one of the main reasons I hate interrupting tasks, is that so much of what I do is in my head and not on the page.

Once I lose that creative thread – or it gets crowded out by something else – I can never completely recapture it.

Which brings me to the Roles To Play series.

This series has been sitting around for far too long, mostly because I was having trouble getting my head back into the correct mental space to again take up the reigns after lengthy interruptions. The last part appeared in November 2010, after all!

I can’t promise that it won’t be interrupted again, but here’s at least one more part…

The Premise

Archetypes for RPGs are usually defined either by the psychology of the character or the abilities of the character, but other classifications systems are possible. These can yield a different perspective, which can be invaluable. This series’ approach is based not so much on what the characters could do as a team, but of how the characters fit into a team. I have defined 31 archetypes (and counting!) based on this concept.

A single character may fit into just one niche within the party or may fill multiple roles, either willingly or reluctantly. An entire group of characters may have an archetype in common, but it is my contention that each character should have at least one role from this list that is unique to them alone. The archetypes are as much a function of the personality of the player as they are the abilities and personality of the character in conjunction and in comparison with the rest of the party.

The purpose of this series is to enable the tailoring of scenes and adventures in a game based on those roles – either highlighting the role, using the role to complicate the parties’ lives, or simply as another avenue for making sure that everyone at the table has something to do in each adventure.

A note about general comments regarding this series

While comment is welcome on the subject in general, especially the suggestion of any archetypes that I haven’t thought of yet – if I agree, I will add it to the pile – I want to avoid making future instalments anticlimactic. As a result, although I will read any general comments and suggestions you may have, any comments aimed at the rest of the list may be edited or even removed. I promise that if we don’t publish your comment, I will have paid close attention, and will give credit where it is due when the time comes!

In the meantime, discussion of the archetypes that are the focus of attention in the current article is welcome!

To Recap

Previous parts of this series have examined nine archetypes:

1. The Heart Of The Team
2. The Tactician
3. The Moral Guardian
4. The Rock
5. The Mother Hen
6. The Intellectual
7. The Faithful
8. The Air-head, and
9. The Flashing Genius

The series picks up from there, as I look at

10. The Maverick, and
11. The Strange Uncle

10. The Maverick

The Maverick shows up regularly in various teams. A counterpoint to the conformity of the generic team member, he brings a level of independance to his approach to everything he attempts. This is often useful to writers because the debate between an authority figure and the Maverick provides a useful vehicle for exposition, but that cuts no ice when it comes to an RPG – unless the Maverick is an NPC, of course.

Where the Maverick picks up points in RPG-teams is diversity. Where established teams generally adopt a party line which is dutifully followed by most of the team members, the maverick is always willing to look outside the strictures layed down by the administration. Which means that they are frequently the only team member not taken in by a deception or trap practiced against the rest of the team, and can be a source of vital intelligence.

There are actually a number of subtypes to this archetype, each subtly different.

The Wild Card

The wild card’s predominant characteristic is that he doesn’t play by the rules, and generally feels that the rules don’t apply to him or her. More anarchic and something of a thrillseeker than other subtypes, the wild card can often turn his unique attitude into a trump card.

The Rebel

The Rebel is someone who is fighting some aspect of the administration within which he operates. Once a member of that administration or of the society that surrounds it, he has often been burned in some way by that system and now disobeys it. Other rebels revolt against the restrictions of authority in general, especially when young.

The Scoundrel

The Scoundrel – more usually the “Lovable Scoundrel” – is a popular subtype of the Maverick archetype. This character is more usually a maverick because he’s a romantic scallywag and not the other way around.

The Outsider

The final subtype is the Outsider, someone who doesn’t follow established protocols because of a different upbringing. Outsiders can be aliens, or sentient artificial beings, or Noble Savages, or any of a number of other alternatives. The defining common characteristic is that they don’t behave conventionally because they don’t think conventionally.

Common Elements

What all these subtypes have in common is that they break the existing rules and usually make their own. They may be fastidious about following those self-imposed rules – a genuine ‘code of honor’ – or they may treat them as nothing more than guidelines.

In gaming terms, Mavericks offer a back door to the party for information, they offer a contrast of approaches to problems (permitting them to find solutions where none seem to exist), and they offer a different type of interaction between characters, all of which can be useful to the GM if properly utilised.

It is exceptionally rare for a Maverick archetype to exist in isolation; they are almost always coupled with some other team role. That result is inevitable because the archetupe is not a definition of what the Maverick’s personality and function within the social environment of a team is, it is a function of what it is not, and that’s not enough to define an individual.

Going To Extremes

The fact that Mavericks don’t fit in (generally) inevitably focusses attention on those aspects of their personality that DO fit in. As a result, they frequently present an extreme example of whatever other archetype they represent.

It is very easy for such characters to become locked into that secondary archetype, producing a shallow character. To avoid this, it is frequently advisable for Mavericks to find a tertiary role within the team, and in particular one that contrasts strongly with their secondary archetype. Most characters can only maintain a role that is complimentary to their dominant profile; the Maverick has the potential for greater depth, properly exploited.

For this reason, writers, and especially Hollywood, love the Maverick archetype, and will frequently push their characters into positions where they become Mavericks, no matter how straightforward the primary archetype might be. The result is inevitably drama, if not melodrama, and that makes for a good story.

To offer just two examples of this from the series Numb3rs:

• Alan Eppes, played by Judd Hirsch – usually The Heart Of The Team and The Rock, the writers found it necessary to give him a background as a former left-wing student radical as a deliberate contrast to his role as a parental authority figure, mediator, and practical engineer.
• Don Eppes, played by Rob Morrow – usually The Tactician and The Faithful (law and order), he has repeatedly found his position within the FBI under threat due to his support of his brother, despite the numerous successes of the team. In the pilot episode, the concept was new and radical, and this was understandable; in later episodes, it lacked just a little credibility in light of the record of achievement. I was always left waiting for an episode in which an FBI higher-up tells Don, “Your unit has achieved remarkable results since you brought in your Brother. Initially I was skeptical, but you’ve made it work – so from now on you guys are going to be my first resort when a particularly tricky problem crosses my desk. To start with, here’s a case in which…”. But then, I was also kept waiting for episodes deriving from Charlie’s university and NSA work, which I always felt was an underutilised story foundation.

There are undoubtedly more examples, so many that the straight authority figure being forced into a position of rebellion – from Robocop to Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon – has become something of a cliche.

Examples Of The Wild Card archetype

Which brings me to examples of the Maverick archetype. For each, I have indicated the secondary role that the character adopts; in some cases, these archetype relationships are inverted, and the “Maverick” aspect of the character is secondary.

• Spock (Intellectual, inverted relationship)
• Kirk (Hero) – especially in the movies
• Wolverine (The Hair-trigger, The Heart Of The Team)
• The Human Torch (Hot-head) – especially early in the team’s life and in the movies
• Starbuck (especially the original) from Battlestar Galactica (The Gambler)
• Han Solo from Star Wars (The Romantic)
• Virgil Hilts, “The Cooler King”, Steve McQueen’s character in The Great Escape (The Trouble-maker)
• Rick Vaugn, the “Wild Thing” in Major League and Major League II (The Hot-Head, The Drama Queen)

Star Trek – The Original Series Box Set [Blu-Ray]	Star Trek – Original Motion Picture Collection [Blu-Ray]	Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume 1	Fantastic Four Omnibus Volume 1
Battlestar Galactica – the Complete Epic Series	Star Wars – The Complete Saga [Blu-Ray]	The Great Escape (2-disc collector’s set)	Major League (The Wild Thing Edition)

Plotlines for the Maverick archetype

In general, most plotlines for a Maverick will focus on the secondary archetype(s) they represent. There is limited utility for plots in which their independant streak can be used to place them beyond some deception or social confinement, but care must be taken to ensure these do not degenerate into cliche.

Some of the best plots for the maverick are those which relate to relations between the team and a faction that is alien to them. While the two primary forces confront and stalemate each other, the maverick has room to explore left-of-field solutions to the conflict. Their unusual psychological disposition can enable the Maverick to recognise and observe details, relationships, circumstances, and opportunities, that are hidden from a more conformist perspective.

I know that all sounds terribly vague, and for that I apologise. The problem is that the Maverick archetype takes in so MUCH territory that it’s hard to be specific.

The VERY best plots for the Maverick are those which focus on their individuality, on the things that make each unique.

Without The Maverick

Teams can get along just fine without a Maverick until they grow accustomed to having one in their midst and adjust their thinking and policies to allow for that presence. When that happens, the other team members will generally become a little more conformist and staid in their thinking, a little more predictable and conservative, almost as a reaction.

Once this conservatism becomes ingrained, it can be hard to break if the Maverick is suddenly lost to the team. It’s as though they can no longer be inspired to think outside the box; the sparkle and creativity goes out of their planning and tactics.

Mavericks are, by definition, a little unpredictable, and that unpredicatability can be a priceless asset.

To ensure that teams who lose their maverick feel the loss appropriately, the best approach is one or two plotlines in which there is a seemingly straightforward problem to be confronted and a radical plot twist at the last moment. There should also be at least one problem in which the relative predictability of the team without the wild card is emphasised and exploited.

If PC teams are given too much time to think about the situation and their options, the players can attempt to fill in for the missing Maverick, so these must of necessity be fairly fast-paced plotlines, giving the players little time to think.

The more obvious the problem and its solution seem to the players, the less they will object to the breakneck pacing. The seeming straightforward nature of the plotlines is thus both necessary to achieve this fast pace as well as providing the contrast of the team without the wild card included.

11. The Strange Uncle

Every family or group seems to have one of these, or should have (I sometimes wonder if I’m my family’s example)! Quirky and offbeat, the Strange Uncle combines that touch of mad brilliance that is the province of the flashing genius with a love of the unusual and oddball that can sometimes disract, and sometimes be insightful.

Often played for laughs as comedic relief, the Strange Uncle can act as a foil to the more straightlaced members of the team, lifting spirits and making dark days brighter. But that’s not the only interpretation of the Strange Uncle to be aware of.

Also fitting into this category are figures of mystery and superstition, who lurks in the shadows and emerges just long enough to make pronouncements of doom, and if there is one thing that such characters aren’t, it’s “comedic relief”.

Add in those characters with a litany of odd factoids and unusual sources of information, and this is a surprisingly rich archetype.

Examples Of The Strange Uncle

There are lots of examples of the Strange Uncle out there. I’ve had to pare back this list somewhat – even cutting such obvious examples as “Uncle Fester” and “The Phantom Stranger”.

• Obi-wan Kenobi from the original Star Wars trilogy
• Doc brown in Back To The Future
• Braetac in Stargate
• Evie in The Mummy
• Egg Shen in Big Trouble In Little China
• Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) in Ghostbusters
• Grissom in CSI
• Kosh in Babylon 5
• any Technomage in Babylon 5

Star Wars Trilogy (Widescreen Edition with Bonus Disc)	Back To The Future 25th Anniversary Trilogy [Blu-Ray]	Stargate SG-1 The Complete Series Collection
The Mummy Trilogy (also available in Blu-Ray)	Big Trouble In Little China [Blu-Ray]	Ghostbusters Double Feature Gift Set
CSI Seasons 1-8 Set		Babylon-5 complete series with movies

Plotlines for the Strange Uncle archetype

There are two obvious varieties of plotline that lend themselves to starring roles for the Strange Uncle: those that play to their particular variety of weirdness, and those that play against them.

The first are the most obvious; if you have a mysterious sorceror, then plots about sorcery are right up his alley; if the character is an eccentric scientist, then plots about weirds science gone awry or dangerous “scientific” discoveries are his stock-in-trade.

The second, where the mysterious and quirky character must somehow cope with a mundane problem posed by a strange world without revealing himself to be “different” can be an entertaining change of pace, but like most fish-out-of-water scenarios, this cannot be used frequently or it will become repetitive and dull. It follows that these plotlines must play to the individuality of the character, frequently in areas other than those in which he specialises, must in fact study the impact of his eccentricity on his life.

But the first and dominant source of plots for the Weird Uncle will always be the subject of his weirdness itself, and the unique (sometimes bizarre) perspectives and motivations that it carries.

And one word more of advice for crafting scenarios for a Strange Uncle: their province is the oddball, the unusual, the unlikely, and the just plain weird. They are a Weirdness Magnet; take full advantage of it. (Be warned: the link is to the tvtropes website. Go there and be prepared to have hours of your life sucked down a black hole as one interesting link leads to another…)

Without The Strange Uncle

Life without the strange uncle often seems simpler to those teams who have one amongst them. They can never know exactly what will turn up next.

But, as with the Maverick – and the reason these two are grouped together into this one article – much of the magic, and mystery, and sparkle will go out of life if the Strange Uncle departs.

Problems – and not just those that are directly related to the focus of the Strange Uncle – will prove to be harder to solve and less fun, simply because of the left-of-field resoruces and thought processes that the Weird Uncle brought to the team.

Life becomes…. ordinary.

The plots that the GM serves up should reflect that. There should be more of a mundane soap opera flavour to them, insofar as many of them should feel relatively trivial. It should be as though the PCs, who are used to dealing with end-of-all-existance crisces, suddenly find themselves fighting for the life of a stray dog, or searching for a lost cat.

Gradually – so much so that the PCs can never really point to a turning point – things should ramp up back to something approaching their old levels of insanity, but the point will have been made.

Still to come

The series is still in it’s early stages! Future instalments of this series will study still more archetypes. Here’s what I’ve still got in store for you:

12. The Romantic
13. The Comedian
14. The Egotist
15. The Drama Queen
16. The Panicker
17. The Messy One
18. The Clean / Neat Freak
19. The Hot-Head
20. The Wannabe
21. The Father-Figure
22. The Greedy / Power-hungry
23. The Troublemaker
24. The Jealous One
25. The Comic Relief
26. The Sidekick
27. The Bystander
28. The Hair-Trigger
29. The Gambler
30. The Opportunist
31. The Hero

Have you ever had such a string of improbable events in a game session that you wondered if you would have been better off buying a lottery ticket? Something so unlikely that you thought witness testimony might be required every time you told the tale?

I have!

What do you do when your dice turn on you, luck being the fickle mistress that she is? Can you look back on the event years later with a smile and say that ‘at least today’s bad luck was not as bad’ as it had been on that legendary day of darkness?

Let me share just such a story with you – the tale of woe, what I learned from the event, and how it made me a better player and GM.

Stormy Waters in Seventh Sea

This story occurred about 3 years ago (in 2008) in a Seventh Sea campaign. The basic mechanics for this game are ‘roll a number of d10’s equal to Stat + skill, keep a number of them equal to the stat, and try and achieve or exceed a target number’. Players have the option of increasing the difficulty of the task before them in an attempt to succeed more dramatically – at the risk of achieving an even more spectacular failure.

Our group of intrepid swashbucklers were about to board a pirate ship in the middle of a storm. We had by this point been playing the campaign for a while so our characters were fairly powerful; this should have been a quick-but-fun skirmish that should have had us back in the tavern spinning tails and downing a few ales in short order – but the winds of fate on that particular day decided ‘no, that would be too easy’.

My first roll of the day was to Swing across to the other ship. For a skilled combatant, as my character was, activities like this should be so easy that it was a given. My luck had been running middling-to-excellent for months if not years, so perhaps there was a small element of overconfidence as well.

The first sign of trouble

Maintaining the flavour and style of the game, I opted to make the roll more difficult and show off a little. Heck, I was in the position of rolling 9 dice and keeping 6 of them, and I only needed to get a total of 15, from those six dice – I should have been able to do that with a sword in one hand and pint of brew in the other whilst holding the rope in my character’s teeth!

To my dismay all 9 dice came up ones – a critical failure in anyone’s book. The character flew face first into the mast on the other ship and landed unceremoniously on the deck in a heap.

Next was the roll to get up. Normally an automatic action, but as it was a wet deck in a storm the GM decided that it required a simple roll.

“I won’t get cocky this time,” I told myself; “I will just plain old stand up, and not make a show of it the way I usually do”.

Once again, roll 9 dice keep 6, against a target number of 10. And once again – you guessed it! – the dice came up all 1’s. It was official, luck had deserted me. The GM decided that I went for a bit of tumble after slipping over on the rain-slicked deck, so he rolled for direction and distance and the character and up tumbling into a mob of pirates like a bowling ball, all of us ending up tangled up in messy pile.

To cut a long story short

This kept up throughout the day. The GM was kind enough not to cause anything too terrible to happen to the character but a lot of embarrassment and humiliation was on the menu for the character. Eventually, we won the battle, but by its end I just wanted to curl up in a ball and hope the world would go away.

That day I rolled 235 d10’s. Of those rolls, 232 came up ones, and the 3 remaining rolls were twos.

I had never seen anything like it in my life. We had checked my dice for irregularities and sticky spots and whatever, tried swapping them out for other dice I had in my collection, and even tried rolling someone else’s dice! I’m sure I had better odds of winning the lottery and being hit by a twice by a truck all at the same time. (As a side note, I would be interested in knowing what the odds of such an occurrence would be).

Lessons Learned – As A Player

Now to get into the meat of what I am hoping to get across here, mainly what can a person learn from this unlikely cavalcade of events.
Perseverance. it sounds obvious but when everything seems to be going wrong and there is no relief in sight, sometimes you just have to keep trying to move forward.

Calmness and maturity. It is easy to let anger get to you blow up and throw a tantrum or two. Sometimes it is better to call a 5 -10 minute break, go grab a drink, get some fresh air, and look at the situation anew in a calmer state of mind. What can you do to get things back on track and get back in control of the situation? Mind you, at this point I was thinking “What can I do that does not involve rolling dice?”

Lessons Learned – As A GM

Looking at the situation from the GM’s point of view there was much to learn as well. The biggest lesson I took away from it in this regard was how to take an unusual and unlikely series of events and utilize them to improve the adventure.

I must say that my GM during this whilst enjoying it was a real sport and didn’t use this as a chance to lay in some boot leather whilst I was down. In fact, he took the reins and like a real pro used this freak occurrence to create an exciting and memorable battle out of something that would otherwise have disappeared into obscurity as just another skirmish.

Ultimately, we all play to have fun and it’s to no one’s advantage if a flow of bad luck sucks the fun out of the game. I am not saying ignore the dice or let only good things happen to the players, but even whilst enforcing a failure result the GM can interpret rolls in a way that still keeps proceedings exciting, interesting and fun.

On reflection

Looking back on the events, I find that I’m not upset by the story at all.

In fact I am quite happy about this dismal run of luck – something that seems to repeat itself every three or four months to a lesser extent. It made the game the game more interesting at the time, it made me a better player and GM, and it created an amusing memory for both myself and the others who were there to share in it.

It also helped the GM, who was having problems finding ways to challenge us and who usually spent more time bashing his head against the table while we accomplished the impossible. Instead he spent a large part of the session almost laughing himself to death and to this day still wears a smirk on his face when the anecdote gets brought up, usually at times when I’m rolling well.

Ultimately, I think this ramble of mine can be boiled down into this, you can always turn what should be a bad gaming session into something that is fun and exciting as well as a learning experience. You just have to look for the opportunities to do so.

Witness Statement

I was there on the day. The other players were laughing almost as hard as Ian M, the GM, was. Although initially upset and even angry, even Ian G began to see the funny side of events as improbability was stacked on unlikelihood to form a monument to the whims of chance. The rolls described by Ian were as he has reported them, above, both in number and in result. They were all rolled publicly, in fact after the first few they were the centre of attention for the entire table.

Nor is this the first time either of us have seen improbable results of a similar sort, though of lesser magnitude. I have seen a player roll 43 one-hundreds in a row on d-percentiles. Ian’s seen another player roll 40-odd d20s getting a 20 almost every time, interrupted by the occasional 19,18, or 17.

Mike Bourke

Ian M’s Reply

It is written, some days you are the windshield and some days you are the bug. That is pretty much what happened here.

Ian G’s runs of luck (and, in this instance, un-luck) could be more than amazing. But, I respectfully take issue with his saying that I bashed my head against the desk whenever this group managed the impossible. I distinctly recall only ever doing that a few ….well, maybe several …..OK, a number of times – and always as the result of Ian G’s character taking what should have been a straightforward roll for some minor activity like sneaking or diplomacy, and somehow generating near-Ghodlike results.

Still, he does say nice things about me, so I guess I’ll let that pass.

So, where does my GMing come into this? To start with, understand that the ‘7th Sea’ RPG is a very forgiving system that lends itself very well to ‘seat-of-the-pants, roll-yer-dice-and-pray’ refereeing (which I like). To that end, when Players roll very well, I don’t just say “You do XXXX damage” or “You easily dodge the bullet.” A much more vivid description is called for.

For VERY good rolls, I might even ask the Player what he would LIKE to have happen (Ian G got a lot of practice at this), which would then be taken under consideration when I provided the results.

For those incredibly BAD rolls (like here), it is more complicated. Some GMs would have taken the opportunity to chop Ian G’s Character into minestrone. But my own GMing approach (complemented by ‘7th Sea’) is that Characters (usually) do not die – unless they do something unforgivably stupid. You cannot have decent swashbuckling without comedy and that is what I go for.

Rather than a Character getting killed or permanently maimed by a run of sheer bad luck, something more… “interesting” happens. “You leap… and totally miss the window ledge, smack your face into the wall, and tumble thirty feet into the cobbled street below. Luckily, that big heap of manure was there to break most of your fall…”

I Have no specific system for this; I just take a look at the general circumstances and ask myself what COULD happen. My Players love it, and the results of these fumbles are as much a part of group folklore as what happens when things go right. If not more so.

Admittedly, I was more than a little suspicious of the sort of results Ian G frequently got. Enough to rule that all dice rolls (not just his, mind you) had to be witnessed by either me or at least two other Players. It didn’t help. Finally, I just learned to go with it by keeping skill resolutions well-compartmented –for example, he might make a massive roll to figure out that an NPC was definitely hiding something, but that didn’t mean he automatically knew what it was.

That Ian G always did his best to NOT overshadow fellow party members helped immensely – everybody got to do kewl stuff and have fun, and that is what RPGing is all about, really.

About The Authors

Ian Gray resides in Sydney Australia. He has been roleplaying for 25 years, usually on a weekly basis, and often in Mike Bourke’s campaigns. From time to time he has GM’d but is that rarest of breeds, a person who can GM but is a player at heart. He has played many systems over the years including Tales of the floating Vagabond, Legend of the five rings, Star Wars, D&D, Hero System, GURPS, Traveller, Werewolf, Vampire, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and many many more. Over the last couple of years he has been dirtying his hands with game design and is currently eyeing the idea of module design. Ian has a number of guest posts coming up here at Campaign Mastery over the next few months.

Ian Mackinder has been gaming for longer than he cares to remember – almost as long as Mike Bourke has. He usually has a campaign underway, but is just as comfortable as a player. In his many years as a GM, he has run Star Trek, Traveller, 7th Sea, a Klingons campaign, and many others, often for years at a stretch. You can read more about him at his ‘About Me’ Page. Ian has popped up here at Campaign Mastery a time or two previously, posting a comment in response to Mike’s post ‘My Biggest Mistakes: Magneto’s Maze – My B. A. Felton Moment‘ for example.

Mike is very happy to call both these guys friends.

Sometimes GMing is flashy, and fun. When everything is ready, and you’re in the groove, when you know what is going to happen and can lose yourself in the game, and simply present the PCs with the consequences of their actions and concentrate on your performance in the guise of NPCs and on the delivery of an entertaining plotline – that’s GMing at its best.

Sometimes, GMing is challenging and intellectually stimulating. When you are having to operate off-the-cuff, but you know the characters and the game world and the NPCs and the way they will react; when you can let the PCs explore solutions to whatever problems they face without restraint, confident in your ability to react appropriately and still deliver an enjoyable game to all concerned – that’s GMing at its most rewarding.

And then, there are the other times. When you are uncertain, and unconfident, when the PCs have you completely off-balance; when you have misspent your game prep or have been unable to prep properly; when the NPCs have to be generated on the spur of the moment, and are nothing more than a collection of numbers, and the character doesn’t quite seem to fit, anyway; when the players are expecting a story and you have absolutely no idea. That’s GMing at its scariest.

All of those are big topics, and I have no desire to start a new series when I already have so many underway, but I thought that for this week’s blog I would at least offer one or two quick hints towards solving each of these problems, a mini-solution that might just be enough to get you through the day. Eventually, each of these will be a blog subject in its own right, but for now, fasten you seat belt; this might get a little bumpy…

Coping with Uncertainty

When a GM feels uncertain about what he’s about to do, there are two really good solutions.

Be Honest

The first solution is to come clean with your players: “I had this kind of wild idea and I’m not sure how it will work out, but I hope it will be fun. And if it crashes and burns, things will be back to normal next week.” I once GM’d a session in which magic had split a PC’s personality (the character couldn’t be there that session, something I didn’t know in advance) into multiple separate pieces and the uncontrolled magic had seized on this mental turmoil and manifested a small dungeon which was a metaphor for the disintegrating personality. Each of those personality fragments was represented by one of the other existing PCs, who had to defeat the subconscious-derived spontaneously-generating monsters and gather the “treasure”, the glue that would bind the fractured personality back together. The goal was to gather a certain GP value of treasure. I layed the metaphors on thick and fast, often in multiple layers.

What made the session fun was that the treasure required was far greater than the amount with which I had seeded the dungeon – about twice as great, in fact – but the players assumed that I was being crafty and that there was in fact enough hidden away to cover the requirement, if they were only clever enough to find it. They really stretched their creativity, harvesting dead monsters for valuable hides and horns, digging into a sparkling wall in search of gems, grabbing every piece of loose metal and testing it to see if it was merely coated with base metal, and so on. Each time, I would give them a reasonable value, for whatever they came up with, but it kept coming up short – until one of the players came up with the brilliant notion of drawing up a deed to the dungeon and putting up a “for sale by auction” sign.

The symbolism was too good to ignore, I had the missing player’s PC show up and win the auction claiming the booty that the other ‘characters’ had gathered, and putting his mind back together in the process. The following session picked up at exactly the point where the previous session had, but instead of the players shepherding avatars of themselves around, the “felt” something tear at the integration of their personalities, and “felt” their companion’s mind fracture and splinter under the magical assault, and then (equally quickly) “felt” everything come back together again. It was a satisfactory day for all concerned.

It only worked because I had put the players into the proper mindset to start with – telling them that this was to be an experimental mini-adventure, that it might not work but would have no long-term repercussions for them if it didn’t, and that it was to be a dream sequence.

Lie Through Your Teeth

The alternative approach is to bluff outrageously – “Everything is going according to plan, and it will all make sense in the end”. Then listen to the players trying to make sense of whatever you have cobbled together and let them guide you to a sensible solution. Their explanation for events might not have been what you had in mind, but it will hold together – and N+1 (number of players plus the GM) minds concentrated on finding a solution will generally be better than 1 mind on its own. But you have to be convincing in order because it is your seeming confidence that will inspire the players to keep trying to figure it out.

Overcoming the Absence of Confidence

Confidence is not some blanket condition that applies equally to all aspects of operations behind the GMs screen; an individual can be confident about one aspect of their craft and unsure of their abilities in another area. This problem is most frequently the province of beginners, but self-doubt can afflict anyone anytime – it is just that it doesn’t.

I am offering two sets of advice on dealing with this issue – one for experienced GMs and one for beginners.

A Solution For Beginners

Beginners usually have good reason to be a little apprehensive behind the GM screen, especially if they are dealing with experienced players. Don’t let yourself get scared off. GMing is not that hard. What’s the worst that can happen?

My first game behind the screen (a one-off trial run) was a total disaster. The players all had a decade or more experience as players and several as GMs themselves, and they were running roughshod over my game in no time flat. AD&D used to have this monster called Green Slime which transformed anything biological that it touched into more Green Slime unless the target made its saving throw; I had decided that the citizens of my world would have domesticated various of the monsters, an approach that I still consider reasonable. One of the players asked if they used Green Slime for garbage disposal, and after a moment’s reflection I said yes. The PCs immediately bought as many glass jars (suitable for holding potions) as they could afford, and very carefully filled each with a quantity of green slime; every time they encountered a monster in the dungeon, they would lob one of these mini-WMDs in its direction and charge. They would usually hit what they were aiming at, and either turn the enemy into more Green Slime (easily destroyed with torches) or distract the target long enough to get a couple of really good hits at it, making monsters that should have been WAY too tough for the party into easy pickings.

Already nervous because this was my first GMing attempt, this did absolutely nothing for my confidence. But I stuck with it, and had some of the more intelligent monsters use the same tactic back against the party, lobbing clay jugs full of a similar monster (a Black Pudding) back at the PCs. In the end, it proved a draw, as the PCs retreated because they were running short of Hit Points and had already used their limited repertoire of healing spells, and needed to train in order to advance to their next level. Afterwards, some of the players said it was the most entertaining game session in which they had taken part for several years.

How did I get through it? I roleplayed!

I took a deep breath, and then began to play the role of a GM who was completely confident and in control of the situation. Roleplaying was something that I already knew how to do, and something that I could be confident doing, so I used that ability to fake the rest.

Beginning GMs are either going to have a group of equally-inexperienced players to deal with, enabling both sides to learn as they go, or they will have experienced players – who will either cut the new GM some slack or pitch them in the deep end. The last is what will teach you the fastest, if you can get through it – and players have a lot of respect for a new GM who lets them do their worst and doesn’t lose control – and who comes back fighting, giving as good as he gets.

A solution for Experienced GMs

1. Call for a 5 minute pre-game break “to get your head into gear”, and find yourself a quiet, isolated spot.
2. Take a deep breath, and exhale slowly.
3. Spend a couple of minutes trying to figure out Why your confidence has deserted you. Are you doing something that you haven’t had to do before? Are you doing something that was a total disaster the last time you tried it? Or are you making a molehill into a mountain?
4. Spend a couple of minutes reminding yourself of your experience as a GM. Remember the last time you made a supercollosal mistake (we all make them) and how you coped – could it really be much worse than that occasion?
5. Try to identify one aspect of what you are about to do that you can be confident of, then focus on doing that. Remember, you dictate the pace of events!

On another occasion in my relatively early days as a GM, I had to operate a large group of mixed, intelligent, monsters. I was not at all confident of being able to “switch hats” quickly, and even less confident about my ability to make the differences between the monsters obvious (I’m not very good at doing voices and don’t use disguises/props – not of that sort, anyway).

But I was confident of being able to handle playing one of the monsters as an NPC – so that’s what I did. I roleplayed one solidly throughout the session, speaking in the first person and appointing him the spokesman for the NPCs, and simply described the gist of what the others were saying, moods, tone of voice, etc. By half-way through the session, I felt I had a handle on the spokesman, and adopted the first person for one of the other NPC monsters in addition to the first. By the end of the session, I was able to play them all at once; the fear I had felt was groundless.

When PCs Do The Unexpected

There is very little that a player enjoys more than completely outfoxing the GM, coming up with a brilliant ploy from out of left field that is so completely unexpected that the GM is left completely gob-smacked and on the back foot – and rocked back on his heels, to boot! Almost every GM’s first reaction to that situation is to start looking for reasons why this “brilliant plan” doesn’t succeed, but this is never a wise response. It creates an situation in which the players feel that the GM is against them, trying to box them into accepting only the predigested solutions that he cares to offer them, just one half-step removed from railroading the entire plotline. The words that come to mind to describe the resulting atmosphere are “Poisonous”, “Defensive”, and “Toxic”.

As Johnn suggests in “Say Yes, but Get There Quick” (reading between the lines), it’s far better instead to look for reasons why this “brilliant plan” WILL work (unless there is some blatantly obvious flaw, of course). This results in a completely different outcome to that described in the previous paragraph; instead of being seen to box the players in, the GM gives the impression of being completely open to anything the players want to try, of being totally confident in his understanding of the Game World and the events taking place within it. The Campaign, and the respectability of the GM in the eyes of his players, are immediately elevated in stature.

Being properly prepared makes it a lot easier. I have already blogged about PCs doing the unexpected, unlike most of the subjects of today’s article, and you can read my detailed advice – and the story behind the it – in “My Biggest Mistakes: Magneto’s Maze – my B.A. Felton Moment“, so I won’t take time and space recapitulating it here.

Mis-directed Game Prep

Akin to the problem discussed in the previous section is this one. The GM spends all his time preparing for the PCs to reach Location X or Event Y only for circumstances to prompt them to take a side-trip to situation Z instead. That circumstance might be a random encounter or the sudden deciphering of a warning sign that the GM thought they had discounted or an unexpected opportunity or even a percieved advantage that the GM hadn’t thought of. Or perhaps he simply thought that he wouldn’t need it yet. I’ve even had a situation in which encounter Y was concluded far more quickly than I expected, propelling the party on to situation Z before I’d had a chance to prepare for it.

Under the ethos described above, the GM should let the PCs follow their own inclinations – though he should also keep track of what the enemies get up to when the PCs don’t show up to disturb their plans – but that’s not quite as easily achieved when the GM’s prep doesn’t include ‘situation Z’.

Once again there are two essential solutions: delay or improvise.

Delay

This is an approach that can only carry the GM so far. Realistically, the game can end no more than half an hour early without the players wanting to push on; and there is only so much delay – perhaps an hour or so – that the GM can throw into events without the players suspecting that he is trying to stall. Like a merchant sensing the urgency of a customer’s need and pressing his advantage, if that happens, they will start deliberately upping their pace.

So unless there is less than about 90 minutes before the session of play will draw to a close, Delay is valuable only as a holding tactic – something to keep the PCs busy long enough for the GM to think. His only real choice is to take the other solution and implement it as best he can.

The best way to delay is to throw in an irrelevant side encounter that blocks or obstructs the party’s path, but that seems relevant, or some mystery that appears to need solving but that seems relevant to what the party are now attempting to achieve. The key to both is imparting some sense of relevance. The first is easier; all that is needed is a representative member or members of whoever is expected to reside at the new intended destination, or some overheard dialogue indicating an intention to attack or blockade the intended destination, or hints that this new enemy knows the PCs are around here somewhere and that they are hunting them.

Still more sophisticated delays are possible if the GM has taken the time at some point in the past to prepare one and held in his pocket until he needs it. A former enemy, or henchman of same; or perhaps an assassin who was hired by a past enemy prior to his final defeat; or some delayed-effect legacy of an earlier battle. If you are a GM reading this, stop for five minutes right now and put a little thought into some development or encounter deriving from the PC’s past that you can pull out of a back pocket the next time you need a delay. Your campaign will be the better for it, and you’ll be that little bit more secure behind the screen.

Delays must always result naturally and logically from the circumstances within the adventure, so if you implement one, you will need to have everything in place to justify it later. Where did this enemy come from? If they knew the PCs were in the vicinity, HOW did they know? Part of the process of using such an encounter is being ready with the answers to these problems. Perhaps a broom closet in the dungeon/lair to which the PCs are travelling needs to be re-tasked into a room with a scrying room, or someone needs to name-drop the name of a deity who has given them a hot tip or whatever.

Improvise

When the time to be filled doesn’t permit delaying tactics, it’s often better not to delay at all, moving directly to this solution. Improvising essentially means working without the safety-net of game prep, doing your prep on-the-fly a few seconds in advance of the PCs, then reconciling your on-the-fly contributions to the plot after the fact.

When GMs have sufficient understanding of what the NPCs in their campaign are doing, and of how the world works, this can be done in relative safety. The improvised game might not be as polished as a fully-prepped session, but there can be an immediacy and reactiveness that can counterbalance that – and there is a certain thrill to high-wire walking without a net that can be appealing.

If you aren’t confident of that level of understanding, it’s usually a better approach to graft a new mini-plot into the story that’s totally unrelated to the main plot. Something that can come and go without disturbing the broader situation, buying time for the GM to get the missing prep done for the next game session.

These mini-plots come in four sizes:

• The rest of the session or less
• A full session split in two
• The rest of this session plus one full session to follow
• Sprawling

Mini-plots which last “the rest of the session or less” may need to be padded out with a small delay (as described above) in order to completely occupy the day’s play – but you now have a second plotline with which to connect the delay, keeping the whole side-trip away from your main plot self-contained. This type of mini-plot will follow a simple three-act structure: a roleplaying/discovery encounter, a problem-solving/combat encounter, and a second roleplaying encounter:

• In the first roleplaying/discovery encounter, the PCs are handed a problem of some immediacy. If the PCs are heading for a meeting with an important NPC, perhaps that NPC – and everyone in his keep – has fallen unexpectedly ill, or is drunk to the point of insensibility, or he is beside himself because his daughter’s missing or has been kidnapped, or has been possessed, or any one of hundred other possibilities. Heck, a time-traveler may pop up out of nowhere and “borrow” the NPCs for a moment, or the patron deity of one of them may hand them an emergency assignment. The problem should be short and simple.
• In the second act, the PCs discover the cause of the problem and solve it, either by roleplay, detective work, or hack-and-slash. A simple problem usually has an equally-simple solution. One of the major issues to be resolved in this act, if not in the first, is why the others caught up in the problem couldn’t solve it themselves – why does it fall to the PCs?
• In the final act, the mini-plot’s outcome gets wrapped up in a nice, neat bow. The NPC who they have come to see thanks the PCs, and excuses himself for a moment to compose himself before speaking to them about whatever they came to achieve, or whatever. Unfortunately, that’s where time for the day’s play runs out – at the most convenient point possible for the GM whose prep was undone or misdirected.

Mini-plots that occupy a full session split in two generally have a four-act structure. The first is the same as described above, and is followed by a new act inserted between the first and second acts of the three-act structure. The second act is when the PCs confront the problem and discover some sort of reversal or plot twist at the end of act II, which is where the days play ends. This may need to be padded with a short delay, as above. In the following game session, the PCs wrap up the side quest and have about half of the day left to get the main plot back underway – so at most this buys the GM one intra-session interval of prep time.

Mini-plots that occupy one-and-a-half sessions are only slightly more complicated than mini-plots, but generally involve a less straightforward problem and some roleplaying interaction with NPCs along the way. They can often be created by combining the four-act structure with an overlapping quick three-act mini-plot which is conducted in parallel with the first, overlapping and complicating it. By giving the PCs a simple problem and a difficult problem to overcome and entwining the two plots, you complicate matters just enough to stretch the whole thing out for an extra few hours of play. Sometimes you can gain additional mileage by saving any delaying action for the middle of the mini-plot instead of using it up-front.

Finally, mini-plots that will take longer than a session-and-a-bit to resolve are what I describe as “sprawling” – they are generally so big and complicated that by the time they are resolved, the players will have lost track of what was going on in the plotline that has been interrupted, which is the primary plotline of the game. I don’t recommend this sort of side-quest, as they can often be detrimental to the campaign overall.

The chief advantage of grafting a new side-quest or mini-plot into the game is that it isolates the effects of that plotline from the main game, in effect protecting the GM’s game from his mistakes.

Creating Spur Of The Moment NPCs

I have a simple recipe for spur-of-the-moment NPCs: I pick one attribute that is characteristic of the function of the NPC and amplify it, then leaven it with a second attribute that is characteristic of the function and invert it. The concept is that the amplification of the first has enabled the character to succeed in whatever his career/plot-function is despite the adversity.

Examples of this approach include:

• A wizard with an incisive understanding of arcane theory who drinks himself into insensibility daily to forget the horrors he has encountered.
• A fighter with natural style and prowess whose ego leads him to showboating and other flamboyances to the detriment of his success in combat.
• A rogue whose talents are exceeded only by his inability to submerge his bravado and boastfulness.
• A cleric who is deeply pious but is acutely class-conscious and dismissive of the value of others.
• A cop who believes in the legal process but has no faith in the courts.

I will intersperse such NPCs with personalities taken out-of-context and adapted from TV shows, movies, literature, or comics. A wizard with the personality of Homer Simpson; a rogue with the personality of Jack Bauer (’24’); a barbarian with the personality of the Queen Alien (‘Aliens’); A necromancer with the personality of Gordon Ramsey; a merchant with the personality of Jack Sparrow (‘Pirates of the Caribbean’). The list goes on and on. Crafting such an NPC is a three-step process:

• Pick a basis personality, the more incongruous the better;
• Integrate that personality with the character’s role – how will the personality impact the career of the individual, how will it benefit him and how will it hinder him;
• Decide how to convey the personality in play.

Both of these approaches will give you a viable off-the-cuff NPC in a few seconds. I will usually open my Player’s Handbook or rules to an appropriate section and pretend to consult it – or even to actually consult it – to buy myself those seconds, and to use as a guideline to the abilities of the NPC.

Skills? Nothing simpler. Rate the character’s capabilities on a scale of 1-to-character-level; if the skill is something that someone of the character’s profession should be good at, I give them a skill of twice the rating, if it’s something that might be beneficial but not necessary, I give them a skill equal to the rating, and if it’s not directly relevant to their abilities, they either get zero or half of the rating, depending on whether or not the choice adds to the character’s colour. That one number serves as a touchstone to the rest of the character, enabling me to get on with running him.

For non-level oriented game systems, like Champions, or my own superhero game system, I use the average basis of the roll as the character’s level. So, for the hero system, which is based on 3d6, which has an average of 10.5, I will rate the character out of 10. For my own game, which is d-percentile based, and with skill values ranging from -100 to +150%, I will rate the character out of 75 and apply a modifier of -50 to the skill values that derive from that rating. This gives skill values of somewhere between -50 and +100 for relevant skills.

I am also (usually) careful to jot down any skill values that are decided in this fashion so that I can be consistent on any future appearance of the NPC.

Putting A Face to the Numbers

There are times when you have to generate a more comprehensive NPC on the spot – rolling for their stats, and then interpreting them. The technique I employ at such times is very similar to the one described above for on-the-fly characters.

Ignoring the stat most important to the character unless it is unusually high or low, I focus on the next highest stat, and consider that to be a reflection of the amplification of one aspect of the personality. I then focus on the lowest stat, and consider it to reflect the leavening influence. Choosing one of the aspects of the stat to exemplify and label those personality attributes and the character suddenly stops being a collection of numbers and starts to develop a unique personality. Here are a couple of examples:

• STR 15 INT 12 WIS 9 CON 14 DEX 13 CHA 13 – generated using the roll 4d6 and keep the best three, i.e. a PC standard. If this character was a fighter, I would ignore STR because it’s mediocre for a fighter, neither exceptionally high nor low, and focus on the next highest result, the CON 14. This suggests a robust character, generally fairly healthy, with perhaps one or two flaws; so an overweight and short-sighted individual who was generally active and healthy. The lowest stat, WIS 9, also suggests someone who is a little foolish or short-sighted in a less metaphoric meaning of the term. Generating a personality to go with a set of stats using this systems is actually faster than rolling the stats!
• For the sake of comparison, let’s use the same stats for a Cleric and not a Fighter. That means that I ignore the Wisdom beyond noting that it is unusually low for the class. The strength score is thus the highest, which is suggestive of battle, and belligerence. The lowest stat is the Wisdom, but that is once again ignored, beyond raising the question of why this character would choose to be a cleric in the first place – it is clearly the class for which the character is least suited. The next lowest stat is INT at 12, and that is therefore interpreted as indicating that some aspect of INT operates to the characters’ detriment. The most obvious choice is that a high INT character asks a lot of difficult questions. Putting these thoughts together produces a characterization of someone who has chosen a career not because they want it or believe themselves suited to it, but to make someone else happy; someone who is argumentative and belligerent and who tends to raise doubts in those to whom they preach, rather than settling them. This is someone who is probably not happy doing what they are doing, which often manifests as anger and gloominess. Perhaps the character got into a serious fight (the belligerence coming through) which went too far and was saved from the gallows only by swearing to a life of service to a religious order. He now walks the fine line between service to his Deity as best he can and an innate unsuitability to that calling that makes the character someone who is tolerated more than welcome. The characterization is surprisingly complex, even deep, given such a simple method of generation. You could have this character make repeated appearances and the players would never know that he or she had been generated in about 30 seconds plus die-rolling time!

Putting a name to the face

There is a particular circle of hell reserved for players who force GMs to come up with character names off-the-cuff. I can’t speak for everyone, but I frequently find this to be more difficult than coming up with a personality for a character. I have one particular technique that has proven to be a lifesaver in the past.

The first of these techniques is the reversal. I simply think of a name or word that is appropriately symbolic of the major personality characteristic of the character and write it in reverse, then tweak to make it pronouncable. The hot-headed fighter created above, for example: Dennis, from Dennis The Menace, becomes Sinn-ed, tweaked to Sined (not ‘sinned’ as in ‘sinner’). Glower, meaning an angry stare, becomes Rewolg, which I will tweak for pronouncibility to Reywald. So the name is Sined Reywald. Works like a charm!

A Fish Out Of Water

But what do you do when a character doesn’t quite seem to fit the story purposes for which they are intended? Once again, there are two answers: the first is to alter the character’s role slightly to accommodate the character as they are; and the second is to toss the misfit aside and generate a new one using the techniques explained above (repeat as necessary until you have a smooth fit). Since there is no need to recapitulate those techniques, let’s focus for a moment on the first.

The usual reason a character doesn’t seem to fit is because the character’s capabilities or dedication are either insufficient or misdirected, relative to the role they are to play in the plotline. For example, if the NPCs role was as a messenger of the Gods, it would seem entirely inappropriate for the second example NPC to be that messenger; he is simply not pious enough.

But the problems can be more subtle – a character who is more defensively-oriented, or more reasonable and willing to negotiate, being cast in the role of ordering an unceasing and implacable attack, for example.

The solution being discussed is how to alter the situation to fit the character. In the first case, that revolves around the question of why such an unfit messenger has been chosen, and the obvious answer is for the task to be an act of punishment or contrition – in other words, the character’s lack of fitness for the assignment is the very reason he has been chosen to perform it.

The second case shows that it is often not quite so easy. A character who is primarily oriented toward defense could not initiate an unwarranted and incessant attack unless pushed to a level of desperation; in order to do so, the character would have to have become convinced that no matter how distasteful it may be, he has no choice but to seek the obliteration of the PCs. He has been convinced that to listen to anything that the PCs might say will destroy him in some fashion, or worse. Either he is correct, in which case something has happened to the PCs that they weren’t aware of, and need to know of; or he is wrong, and someone has done a beautiful snow job on a potential ally. In either case, whoever or whatever is responsible is going to be a significant campaign element thereafter – even if they didn’t exist previously.

Once again, then, this forces a choice apon the GM: he can either enlarge his campaign plans to include whatever is responsible for the confrontation, or he can revisit his former decision to utilize such a misfit character for this purpose. The latter protects the purity of the plotline underway; the latter offers an opportunity for growth in the campaign. Which would I choose? Early in a campaign, I would opt for the “growth” solution without hesitation; when the campaign is established, or even winding its way toward a conclusion, replacing the NPC with one who doesn’t raise such complex issues is a better choice.

As a general rule of thumb, if a fish-out-of-water offers a chance to enhance the campaign (as opposed to merely complicating it) then it is better to keep the misfit and turn the situation to the game’s ultimate advantage; otherwise, it is better to dump the character and replace him with someone better suited to the plot needs of the story.

The Absence Of Plot Direction

The last of the situations to be addressed in this article is perhaps the most difficult to deal with. So many of the choices discussed earlier rely apon a strong sense of what is happening in the campaign, where it is going and what will happen in the long term, that without that sense, the GM is truly adrift.

It’s my experience that if the campaign world is rich enough, a campaign direction will eventually emerge from the interplay of PCs and game environment, and that ultimately a campaign can be divided into three phases:

• fumbling and complicating;
• the emergence of broader plotlines into a broader narrative; and
• the culmination of those plotlines into the conclusion of the broader narrative.

The first stage is marked by the GM stocking the PCs awareness of the world with plot elements and story facilitators. At this point in the campaign creation sequence, the ultimate shape of those elements may be unclear, and all the GM should be aiming for is to make the world interesting with as many sources of adventure for the PCs as the GM can introduce. Scenarios and plots will be short and self-contained and be more about establishing what’s going on without any lasting impact. A GM can shortcut much of this process deliberately by building an overall plot arc into the game world from word one, but even if the GM doesn’t do so, one will emerge eventually.

The first stage is inherently unstable; sooner or later, there will be some event within the game that will catalyze events and attitudes on a broader front, that will have more substantial repercussions. As soon as that happens, the campaign is in stage two, in which every campaign element is examined in relation to the larger plotline that has emerged.

I normally advocate the deliberate incubation of a particular plotline within a campaign because if one emerges naturally there is no guarantee that it can be resolved in a satisfactory manner. Deliberately integrating an overall trend towards a particular confrontation of forces or ideologies or whatever means that the GM can ensure that a resolution is possible. Even when the players perceive the campaign as being in stage 1, the GM can be busily laying foundations for later adventures with none of the PCs aware of the ultimate significance of events.

In stage three, everything else is subordinate to the overall plotline that has emerged, and is all trending towards a confrontation and resolution – a big finish. And, even if the campaign enters a new stage 1 afterwards, the aftermath of that confrontation will continue to shape the game world long after the resolution is achieved.

It doesn’t matter if the GM feels there is an absence of plot direction – it is simply more convenient when there’s one built in.

To illustrate what I mean by all this, I thought I would conclude with a brief synopsis of my Fumanor Campaigns, analyzed from this perspective.

The original Fumanor Campaign had as its subject the recovery by the Gods from the latest confrontation between them and their equally-eternal enemies, the Chaos Powers. It was a fantasy-oriented post-apocalyptic campaign, and centered around the need to (a) unify the survivors from many pantheons into a single cohesive entity, and (b) strengthen that united pantheon by subverting one of their enemy into the ranks of the Gods. For various reasons, it was necessary for the key decisions involved to be placed in the hands of mortals (the PCs). It followed that the campaign would be all about the relationships between the PCs and these overwhelming forces as they jockeyed for position.

The first stage of the campaign revolved around introducing the characters to the campaign world, revealing the campaign history, and setting the stage for the PCs becoming aware of this situation. The second stage began when the PCs became aware of what the Gods wanted from them, and explained why both Gods and Chaos Powers seemed to have gone out of their way to interact with the PCs in the first part of the campaign. Each PC was given a minor quest to carry out that would prepare the way for the ultimate quest, even while it propelled them forwards. A number of side issues developed and were resolved, but all were shaped by, and could be defined in terms of, the relationship between those side issues and the major question.

The segue from stage II to stage III of the original campaign was so subtle that it was barely noticed. All the PCs knew was that with each encounter, the stakes seemed to rise, until all the universe was hanging on their choice. Some forces tried to stop them, some tried to support them, some tried to subvert them, and some sought to beguile them. Gradually they became aware that whatever they chose would alter the fate of the world in ways they could barely hint at, never mind understand.

Ultimately, three questions needed to be resolved by the PCs: The identity and role of the Divine, the question of a multicultural multi-sentient world vs. a world with a single dominant sentient race, and the distribution of magic – small amounts highly concentrated or large amounts widely distributed. The identity of the twelfth deity was almost trivial in comparison to the scope of these questions.

The final stage of the campaign had the potential to either form a dénouement, showing some of the implications of the choices that had been made, and promising a better tomorrow, or stage I of a new campaign if the players wanted to continue. They very definitely chose the second option.

The second campaign centered around the same conflict between the Gods and Chaos Powers, and what had really happened 100+ years earlier to trigger the apocalypse. Ultimately, the PCs would learn that Thoth, God Of Knowledge, had decided that his natural gifts should enable him to possess knowledge of the Chaos Powers that he could use to plan a final victory for the Gods; but that he had underestimated the corruptive nature of that knowledge, and had found himself in thrall to the Chaos Powers and forced to use his natural sense of Order and Logic to give the Chaos Powers the ultimate victory. Although he could not directly oppose his new masters, even to the extent of letting his brethren know that he still existed, he could indirectly shelter and aid those who could ultimately release him, starting when they were so insignificant that they were beneath notice. His every action on behalf of his masters had a dual purpose thereafter.

But, at the start of the second campaign, the PCs knew nothing of this. All they knew was that things had not started to improve, as expected, after their victory in reshaping the world and elevating Arioch to Divinity. There had been a short-term benefit, but things were soon falling apart around their ears. Apostasy, Heresies, Invasions, Despair, Demonic activities, Corruption, Crime, and Despair were all on the rise. Several times, the world teetered on the edge of destruction.

In stage II of the second campaign, the PCs started connecting one plot thread with another, and became aware that many of the threats they opposed had common causes. Some of it was an impending attempted coup from within, and some of it was a threatened invasion from the outside, and some of it was supernatural forces again jockeying for position in preparation for a major confrontation. One by one, all the threats that they had uncovered were linked back to someone’s master plan to keep everyone busy dealing with mundane issues and pointedly NOT interfering in the real objective of that master plan – the destruction of the Prime Material Plane and a consequent domino effect that would annihilate all of existence.

In stage III, the PCs undertook a desperate quest to search out the identity of the real enemy and baulk his designs. A long series of clues led to them through many hazards to discover the betrayal and capture of Thoth, and delivered to them a plan for his defeat – one that seemed almost impossible of success, but was better than nothing. At the epic conclusion, they had to fight their way through the attempted coup-de-tah to deal with the imminent destruction of everything. The PCs won, but only by killing Thoth to protect the forbidden knowledge that was consuming and enslaving him.

The third and fourth Fumanor campaigns are now underway more or less simultaneously. One is dealing with the internal consequences of the events of the previous campaigns, and has theological purity as an underlying theme; the other is dealing with the external consequences of the events, first in terms of an Empire Of The Undead whose existence was only possible because of the near-annihilation of the Gods in the apocalypse, and second in terms of the Elvish situation, in which the Drow were redeemed – at the price of turning the Elves over to conquest by Lolth, who is busy corrupting them. Both campaigns are following slightly more complex architectures than the simple I-II-III pattern I have described; the first has been more episodic in nature and no clear overarching plotline has yet become clear to the players (though there is one, and they are slowly becoming aware of it) while the other has so far seemed to be following a I-II-III pattern – in which the entire purpose of II and III are to set up a subsequent II-and-III stage involving the Elves, something that the players don’t yet fully appreciate.

What this synopsis shows is that if a GM feels like the campaign is not going anywhere, to simply concentrate on having fun, and eventually a pattern will reveal itself. It is better to feel rudderless than it is to force a lame direction onto a campaign.

Lifeboats In The Sunset

These eight problems can strike the best-prepared GM at the most unexpected times. Hopefully, these eight solutions will at least enable GMs beset by these sudden emergencies to keep their heads above water long enough to solve their problems!

Before I die, I want to run all these modules.

That’s what I said to a friend the other day in Starbuck’s. We were planning campaign dates and got to talking about Castle Amber, the classic Moldvay adventure, and possibly my favourite adventure of all time.

I waxed on about how I’d love to GM it again. Then it occurred to me that I should start planning to run the module instead of just wishing about it.

I Gotta Make the Time

With regular campaigns taking up a lot of my planning and gaming time, I could spend the rest of my life just running my campaigns. I might never get to running certain modules I’d be chafing to get at. I might never get to visit Castle Amber again, with its crazy NPCs and tricky encounters.

So, I decided in the coffee shop to make a published adventure bucket list and to make the time to work through it.

What’s on the List?

My list only contains published adventures. And there are two types:

1. I have DM’d it before and want to do again
2. It’s on my shelf begging to be run for the first time

I have Dungeon Magazine’s picks for top adventures of all time, and several of those made it into category two.  Several other modules have a great reputation or rating online. And a few are just teasing me to try.

My Game Plan

The point of the list is to create a plan that will get accomplished.

Just making a wistful group of modules I’d like to run someday will not get the job done. It’ll always remain a fantasy. Then I’ll get hit by a bus, my family gets a bunch of insurance money, and those modules will land up in a garage sale without me having the opportunity to spill cola on them or get food crumbs lodged in that crevasse you can never reach between pages.

I will take a module from the list, prepare it to my game system de jour, and run it outside of my regular campaign. I’ll schedule a weekend day, or a few, to get the adventure complete.

That way, my main games go on unhindered, I get my bucket list slowly pared down over a period of years, and – the best part – I get additional gaming in!

I get to carve a new gaming island out of my schedule and be stranded on it for a multitude of adventures.

That said, I also will incorporate some modules into my regular campaigns (assuming I am still gaming fantasy at any given time). That will help me get through my bucket list faster, before that nasty DM Killer Bus hits.

Some modules are full campaigns, and they will not get gamed in one weekend, so they’ll have to be part of my regular gaming or a dedicated side group.

List A – Modules I’ve Run Before and Will Again

Castle Amber	Curse of Xanathon	Keep on the Borderlands	Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth
Night Below	Queen of the Spiders	Scourge of the Slave Lords	Underwater series
The Desert of Desolation Series	The Forge of Fury	The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun	The Ghost Tower of Inverness
The Secret of Bone Hill		The Temple of Elemental Evil

List B – Modules I Will Run for the First Time

Against the Cult of the Reptile God	Axe of the Dwarvish Lords	Bloodstone Series	City of Skulls
City of the Spider Queen	Dead Gods	Die Vecna Die!	Dragon Mountain
Dwellers of the Forbidden City	Egg of the Phoenix	Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan	Illithiad Trilogy
Needle	Red Hand of Doom	Return to White Plume Mountain	Shackled City
The Assassin’s Knot	The Gates of Firestorm Peak	The Lost City	The Rod of Seven Parts
The Witchfire Trilogy

What on your list?

What’s on your game master bucket list – things to do while you still can?