Teasers Of History and Other Tips

Image by Mick Nolan from Pixabay
A shorter article today (by CM standards), but one with a lot of impact to offer.
The head of the ruined statue lay on its side, half-buried in soil and vegetation. Three meters from crown to chin, the sculpture of which it was originally a part must have been enormous. The left side of the visage had melted like wax; what can do that to fine marble?
For some reason, the scenes at the end of The Fellowship Of The Ring (Movie Version) have repeatedly come to mind over the last few days.
It took me a while to figure out what my subconscious was trying to tell me, but I got there in the end: Monumental structures impacted by History are the best representations of the existence of that History.
Those monumental structures can be architectural, ornamental, geological, or practical.
- “Architectural” is a ruined building of some kind.
- “Ornamental” is usually a statue or sculpture of some kind, like the example with which I opened this article.
- “Geological” is the overt absence of something that should be there, like the back half of a hill, or a hollow which used to contain an organic (wood or clay) structure. Or it might be a structure carved out of the earth – ring-shaped mounds are archaeological indicators of ancient defenses and structures.
- “Practical” is whatever’s left of something with a purpose, often (but not always) a vehicle of some kind.
The gray cylinder rests precariously askew on the snowy ledge, 20-odd meters across and more than 200 long, half hidden by long-frozen palm trees. Ominous black holes are exposed at one end, and a metal wheel with multiple curved blades can vaguely be distinguished at the other, flanked by smooth bulges. In the middle, barely visible under the mass of obscuring ice, is some sort of hump.
The PCs have found a derelict submarine perched on a mountain ledge and covered in snow. This is clearly not an everyday occurrence and very loudly proclaims that something strange has happened quite a long time ago. It’s a scene whose backstory will vary considerably with the genre of the campaign – in some, it’s entirely possible that the PCs won’t recognize what the shape is (and the language used to describe the screw and sail reflect that possibility), but the players should recognize it fairly quickly. This would be an example of positive metagaming, contrasting player knowledge with character knowledge to generate curiosity, interest and excitement – the same curiosity, interest and excitement that the characters would be feeling, but from a different source.
Integration
It’s not enough to simply have such a feature appear in the landscape – that always makes the feature feel tacked on and superficial. To fully integrate it into the location, you need to show the impact of campaign history on it – which also integrates the campaign history into the landscape and the player experience.
In the statue example, it’s the ‘melting’ effect, perhaps the result of a miscast Stoneshape spell, or a target that was partially out of range. In the submarine example, the object’s placement and the growth of the environment around it (snow and ice) serves the purpose. Stones with rents and cracks that clearly result from axe and sword blades tell the story of a past combat of some kind, asking the question who was fighting whom?
This would also provide an opportunity to expand the cultural significance of a chosen character class. While a knowledge check might yield multiple possible answers to the question, or none, examining the depth of the marks, the length of the marks, the curvature of the blade, the strength of the material, and so on, could be enough for a Fighter to recognize the specific type of weapons and when they were manufactured in that particular style. Coupled with the results of the History check, this could be enough to narrow the battle down to a specific conflict.
(A lot of people, GMs included, don’t recognize that the shape and style of common weapons continually evolves, some coming into fashion and some going out of fashion. Always, these marks of distinction become more pronounced and decorative in times of peace and more practical and utilitarian in times of war. Often, there will be little or no practical difference between the variations; it’s just what’s popular.
Sometimes, a General will have a favorite combat maneuver, and will require the men under his command to drill in that maneuver regularly; while it may not confer any advantage on the battlefield of significance, this has a two-fold benefit to the army in question. One, it instills discipline and a level of professional skill; and Two, some bright spark will tweak the design of the weaponry to take advantage of the maneuver or make it more effective. If every army has its own signature style and equipment that is of equal tactical worth, there is no difference in terms of game mechanics, but all the difference in the world in terms of distinctiveness.
For the GM, it’s a crack in the uniform veneer of the rules into which flavor and uniqueness can naturally seep – and that can be worth its weight in gold.
Searching out reference material on the specifics can be arduous, but the GM has a huge advantage over the historian – he can make it up as he sees fit. In one set of strokes of the (possibly metaphoric) pen, the GM infuses depth and detail into his campaign, and welds it to flavor, and – if he does his job well – adds relevance, to boot.
Consistency
Consistency is important. If you find a Roman sword, you would expect any armor or coins or whatever that gets found nearby to also be Roman in character, and of a similar vintage. This should then influence encounters and treasure and decorative styles and anything else that you can think of. Always remember, too, that a battle usually requires two sets of combatants.
I love Gnolls in my campaigns because they tend to use a lot of cast-offs and ‘found’ armor and weapons. A Gnoll is a piece of living history, and if the Gnoll is local, so is that history! You can hide significant clues to puzzles and problems in plain sight, just waiting for someone sharp enough to ask the right question. Be warned, though – do this just once and as soon as the players cotton on, they will expect this to happen every time!
Often, GMs treat the history of their worlds and the history of the objects within it as being all of one piece. Player resources frequently encourage this by simply providing tables of weapons with their game effects. This encourages Roman-style architecture with Egyptian decorations and Greek Urns and all sorts of other hodge-podge mashups; and, because they don’t know any better, and because it’s the GM’s world, players simply accept this and move on.
That might be good enough to get by on, but it’s an opportunity missed – and, once missed, it will never come again.
Editing History
Note that you don’t have to label things “Greek” or “Roman” or whatever – you can simply look up the architecture and armament of a particular group or location, find a picture, and use it as inspiration to describe what the PCs see. Orcs in my Fumanor campaigns had architecture that was a blend of African grass huts and Cumbrian-style longhouses with thatched roofs for meeting halls. Their society owed more to the Vikings than to any other culture – but with their own distinct culture and mythology, assembled piece by piece, and often rooted in the natural advantages that the game rules conferred on them as a race. You can see some of that process unfolding in the Orcs and Elves series, here at Campaign Mastery.
In fact, it’s often better if you don’t use recognizable labels, because that can leave you exposed when you aren’t able to be consistent. The ancient Greeks stole the notion of sliding wooden bolts from the Egyptians via a Near East culture (which one is unknown) somewhere between 1100 and 1000 BC. A small hole permitted a key of the right length and shape to hook onto a metal eye in the bolt and draw it aside through the door. The match had to be reasonably exact in order to get the right leverage to slide open the bolt [Source: https://www.historicallocks.com, plus some imagination based on the sketches provided].
If the architecture that you have led the players to expect is Greek, and labeled as such, then they would reasonably expect the locks to be Greek as well. To make a key that matched, the party Thief would need to find some indication of the original lock (or to proceed by trial and error with educated guesses, starting with a long ‘blank’ key and progressively shortening it until he got the right length). While that might be very interesting, and shine a spotlight on the details of educated lock-picking (and on the Thief/Rogue), if you have in mind a more mechanical contrivance with gears and teeth and tumblers of some exotic nature, the inconsistency can be counter-productive because the lock is clearly more technologically advanced than the architecture leads you to expect. If you strip away the label, on the other hand, mechanical prowess becomes a signature trait of the race that built the place – a trait that then needs to be present consistently throughout it.
There’s more scope for creativity if you leave the labels off. But doing so places a greater premium on consistency – which is not a problem if the GM knows it, and does his prep and creation accordingly.
Makeover Implementations
It’s never to late to start down this path – except perhaps in the last adventure or two of a campaign! But doing so mid-stream is a big ask, simply because of all the baggage created by past adventures and inconsistencies. If you’re lucky enough to have operated with some sort of stylistic theme – “Arabian” or “Persian” or even “Medieval French” for example – then this becomes a lot more manageable, but until now, there’s been no-one holding consistency to account. There will be anomalies.
The big trick to making these anomalies work in a more rigorous regime is to embrace them. Add little touches to your campaign history (or assume that they are there if you don’t see them becoming relevant) to explain these little bubbles of inconsistency and move on – being sure to continue to emplace (quite deliberately) similar bubbles of inconsistency in the future. This takes a lot of the stress and even more of the work out of the project.
By way of example, let’s solve the problem of the Greek-style construction with the out-of-place lock. Unfortunately, the GM let slip the telltale word, “Greek” during his flavor text, and employed Greek terminology like “Amphora” elsewhere in his description at the time, so this is now an inconsistency that he will have to live with and incorporate into his campaign henceforth.
First of all, we need a mechanically-adept species or race – Elves fit this bill in some campaigns, Dwarves in others, and Gnomes in most of what remains. But all three have appeared in this campaign in the past with no hint of this attribute – which means that either they lost it (unlikely but possible but it would be noteworthy and wasn’t noted), or we need someone else. So let’s say that Halflings are whizzes at creating (and picking) locks – to protect their stores of ale and pantries, of course.
Next, we need a way for the halfling-made lock to get to the place where it was found – that is either a solitary traveler and a singular exchange of some kind, or regular trade between the two at least for a while. If there’s some event in the campaign background to cut the trade links at the right time, the latter is probably the better choice, because it starts integrating the solution into the campaign history; if not, the first is the default way out of the problem. But the fact that there was only one such lock found in the PCs previous explorations argues strongly in favor of the solitary traveler – the experience in-game would be inconsistent with regular trade as an answer.
So, we have a traveler, someone who set out to see the world, making his way from kingdom to kingdom, picking up a knickknack or two as he goes and trading them for passage, accommodation, and food when he needs something more substantial than a day or two’s labor. This is the element that’s been missing from the campaign history, which explains the inconsistency. It didn’t matter before, because you weren’t trying to use cultural content as a tool to enhance the campaign, but now you are.
Fuzziness Is Your Friend (if constrained)
It would probably help to flesh out this rather minimal description a bit, but keep it vague and imperfect – details have been lost – and give him lots of different names that (if translated) all mean roughly the same thing – “Wanderer”, “Vagabond”, “Explorer”, and so on. Too many GMs make their history too perfect – at least in terms of what the PCs know. Yes, the GM needs perfection of reference so that he can build the history into the campaign’s adventures, but the history as the PCs know it will not be as neat. It will contain omissions, errors, historical biases, occasional vagueness, and even outright propaganda. I like to make a copy of my campaign history, deliberately obscure anything that I want the PCs to discover in the course of the campaign, and then “fuzzy-up” the rest, .Overwriting what’s already there.
This is made easier by the fact that Overwrite Mode in the word processing software that I use respects existing paragraph marks – if I get to the end of an existing paragraph and keep typing, the end-of-paragraph marker doesn’t get over-written, the additional text is simply added to the end of the paragraph. NOT ALL SOFTWARE WORKS LIKE THIS, so caution is warranted as you explore the tools available to you. In general, you should abridge the history a fair bit, too, but I like to do that as a separate process, because that gives me three versions of the campaign history:
- A specific and accurate “Reference Version” for the GM;
- An inaccurate-and-abridged summary that represents “Common Knowledge” amongst the PCs;
- An inaccurate but more detailed version that can be split up and given to specific players as it becomes relevant, if they are in a position to know it.
In some campaigns, such as Fumanor, I actually went one step further and provided intermediate versions from the perspectives of singular races and classes where relevant. Sometimes one race got one version of the story and the rest a completely different version, and no hints as to which one was more accurate (if either).
Oh, and in the inaccurate-but-unabridged version, it’s acceptable to have sections where “no-one knows” something – but in the abridged version, that hole should always be filled with wild (and possibly contradictory) speculation. Again, this is a great way to differentiate the races – “The Elves think X, Dwarves are sure of Y, but Mages think they are both wrong and the truth is Z”.
Anyway, getting back to the point: From now on, whenever you create a location in the campaign, you only have to ask yourself “has the Wanderer been here? Has he left his mark? What oddity might he have left behind, and has it survived?” – many times, the answer will be no. You should only say ‘yes’ if/when you have an interesting answer that enhances and embellishes the adventure, encounter, or location.
Again, by leaving things fuzzy, you give yourself room to get creative.
Campaign histories work best when they are teased, not handed out on a silver platter, and uncertainty should be part of the package. This engages curiosity and makes room for plot twists as (some) of the truth gets uncovered in the course of the campaign. These are powerful forces to have at your disposal as the campaign unfolds; once you get used to the degree to which they can enhance your adventures, you’ll never want to go back to life without them.
993… 994…I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. Time is running out!
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