![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/ray_shrewsberry-yeti-5541608_1280.jpg\")
This image is a composite. The base image<\/a> is by Ray_Shrewsberry<\/a>, and parts of the base creature are taken from a second image by Wolfgang Eckert<\/a>. It’s clear that one is derived from the other, I’m not sure which is the parent. Both were obtained from Pixabay<\/a> and have been extensively modified by me. I can’t say I’m completely happy with the results,but they’re good enough.<\/p><\/div>\n I’ve been increasingly frustrated lately by dramatic headlines that offer two choices, neither realistic, only for the whole of the content that follows to knock down one of the two and assert that this proves the other to be true.<\/p>\n I was half-listening to one of these neo-clickbait pieces when they started complaining about the characters launching into technobabble and exposition during the scene sequence under discussion, and I thought to myself, “They?re half-right but they are missing the point”.<\/p>\n The purpose of the ‘offending’ dialogue was to provide context<\/em> and history<\/em> and stakes<\/em> and motivation,<\/em> all leading to subsequent choices.<\/em> Putting the dialogue anywhere else would have broken plausibility completely because the characters didn’t know they would be encountering the species.<\/p>\n “It’s television, I don’t care if it’s believable” is not good enough for what I would consider bad writing. “It might have been better if they discovered things about these creatures at the same time we did” is only valid if it’s completely plausible that the creatures had never been encountered before. Could the writing of the sequence have been better? Yes, of course. But to complain of giving the audience the background necessary to understand the plot? No, the complaint was misdirected and unfair.<\/p>\n Of course, I immediately began considering the RPG ramifications and application of the principle, but the thought of the PCs (or NPCs) interrupting combat to monologue on the backstory or lecture on the history of an encountered species was just as ridiculous as the video comment had suggested.<\/p>\n But then I thought about the content, and what the characters know that the players at the table don’t, and the use of one or more characters who might not<\/em> or do not<\/em> know as player surrogates, and an expanded definition of what an ‘encounter’ could contain, and things started falling into place, guided by a specific hypothetical in-game narrative…<\/p>\n There are six simple rules to follow in Worldbuilding Through Encounters. I’ll look at each in turn, but as a primer, here’s the list:<\/p>\n And then I’ll follow up with some explanatory notes in this format.\n<\/ol>\n Every character present should have a field of expertise or experience that the others lack, by virtue of character class or past experience. The GM should track these fairly carefully. It’s not just what the characters have directly experienced, either; it may be anecdotes and lore from people they have encountered.<\/p>\n These fields of expertise should be mapped out in advance and established, at least broadly, before they are called out in an encounter or situation.<\/p>\n The purpose, as the headline says, is to establish the credibility of the character as a source in advance of anything of real meaning being delivered.<\/p>\n You do it by providing incomplete nuggets of information as it becomes relevant, even tangentially, to the situation at hand.<\/p>\n Setting up a campsite reminds one PC of the time he went camping as a child with his Uncle in the Brewerland Hills. The GM casually drops this fact into his narrative of the scene and just leaves it dangling.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n What this tells the players:<\/strong> There’s a place called the Brewerland Hills where you can go camping as a child, i.e. its relatively safe. Or the character had an irresponsible Uncle, and it wasn’t as safe as it might have been. The distinction is important because it signposts the style of the campaign.\n<\/ol>\n Here’s another example:<\/p>\n Around the campfire at night, the subject of the Great Elvish Kingdom of the 4th Age comes up in the flow of conversation.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n The players have never heard of the “Great Elvish Kingdom of the 4th Age” before. They are likely to have all sorts of questions about the game world’s recent history: 1. Once, in something called the 4th Age, there was a great Elvish Kingdom that was noteworthy. 2. What distinguished the 4th age? 3. What were the preceding Ages? 4. What Age are the characters living in now?<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the GM hasn’t finished building out this element of the campaign lore yet, and even if he could answer all of these questions, he’d rather let anticipation season the delivery a little longer. He knows that answering all those questions now will be anticlimactic and look like clumsy foreshadowing if and when it becomes relevant. And it would put the players to sleep with exposition from on high because right now there are no stakes<\/strong> involved – it’s just random bits of backstory. So he leaves the hook dangling, and diverts their attention.<\/p>\n Doneegal tells you that until he bumped into Ellyssa in the tavern a few weeks ago, he had never seen a real Elf before.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Conversations are like this – one word, in this case “Elf,’ will trigger a shift in topic; as a result, they meander through all sorts of backwaters. By putting this dialogue into the mouth of a PC (see item 3 a little later), the GM is helping the player build out his character’s backstory and imposing limits to his knowledge of the game world. What the player chooses to do with this bit of direction is up to the player.<\/p>\n But this adds to the campaign backstory by implying that Elves have been relatively rare of late – directly contradicting the implications of the earlier hinted backstory, and suggesting that the ‘Great Elvish Kingdom’ came to a bad end.<\/p>\n Alyssa’s player was pre-briefed that Elves had been in relative isolation for the past century or two (who keeps count), when she first decided to play an Elf in this campaign. She had been told just enough to be able to pick up on hooks like this, but not enough to have all the answers. So she takes this opportunity to probe for information from the GM:<\/p>\n Alyssa replies, “It’s true that we’ve not been around as much lately. We’ve had our reasons…”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n … even though the player doesn’t know what those reasons were. The GM can either add a nugget or two of information on the topic or shift the conversation onto yet another line by putting words in someone else’s mouth. Or he could do both at the same time:<\/p>\n Poglan, you think that you saw an Elf once, long ago, passing through your home Village. His horse had thrown a shoe, and he stopped at the Blacksmith’s. Word soon spread, for no-one living had ever seen an Elf before, though all knew of them. So all the children in town headed in that direction hoping to catch a glimpse of the wonder. A few succeeded, but they were disappointed – pointy ears and a nondescript brown cloak with black mud-stained boots. This was so disappointing that most of the children refused to believe the reports; within a year, it was local folklore that a disguised Elven Prince had passed through. Later, you asked your Grandmother about Elves and she told you that in their arrogance, they unlocked a great evil, and were punished for it, but that was all that she knew.”<\/p>\n Macklin, as usual, wears his youthful heart on his sleeve, and comments, “Don’t you hate it when grownups don’t have all the answers?”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n That shifts the conversational topic again, but the GM doesn’t force the players to get into stories of comparative youthful experiences. He thinks he’s tossed out enough hints and teases for the night at this point, so he seizes the moment to build on the credibility of an NPC who is there to serve as his mouthpiece for game lore: the group are being guided on this, their first adventure together, by a 4th level fighter named Hadarn, who lost an arm long ago.<\/p>\n Hadarn says, “People rarely have all the answers, and sometimes that can come back to bite them. You never know when you’ll need to know something. Oh, the stories I could tell, of hunting Willowfolk in the Dimling Marshes, or walking the halls of the Dwarven Realms. But not tonight – we break camp at first light. I’ll take last watch, Macklin the first. Poglan and Donnegal, arrange the mid-watches between yourselves – tonight is Alyssa’s turn at a full night’s rest.”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n This ends the ‘campfire’ scene and shifts the focus onto camp duties and practical measures. It’s taken just one or two minutes of game time, but the campaign is already feeling like it’s set in a real place to the players.\n<\/ol>\n When it comes to an encounter, there are things that the characters will already know about the creatures encountered, and a subset of that knowledge that the players need<\/em> to know in order to play their part in the coming battle.<\/p>\n (I can never think of this scene without hearing Boromir from The Lord Of The Rings, The Fellowship Of The Ring: “They have a Rock Troll”):<\/p>\n An angular humanoid, 12′ tall, shuffles into view, covered in shaggy white fur. “A Wintertroll!” exclaims Hadarn. “I’ve not seen one this far south since the Big Freeze of -oh-twelve!”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The creature is removed from its natural habitat, raising the mystery of how it came to be here. It might have been seen as simply a random result from a random table, but calling that out<\/strong> should tell the players that ecologies and natural terrain have been taken into account by the GM and there is therefore a tale to be told regarding its presence here, even if they never learn what that story is.<\/p>\n Macklin says, “I’ve heard of them! Beware – they gain in power and cunning by digesting those they slay!”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n This tells the players who are paying attention that custom rules are going to be used to ‘enhance’ more familiar creatures from the sourcebooks, and nothing should be taken for granted.<\/p>\n From the white-furred figure come words that you struggle to make out, but which those who know Dwarfish will eventually recognize as a more ancient dialect of that tongue. “Fresh Flesh-food! Yum!”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It’s intelligent enough to speak. And its speech is that of ancient Dwarves, creating a connection between the two.<\/p>\n Alyssa comments, “If it were a Black Troll from the South, we may have been able to bargain our way out of this – but if this creature ever leaves these caverns, it will soon die in the heat outside.”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Environments have also been taken into account by the GM. Another (related) type of creature, and a home range for it, and Alyssa’s knowledge of it, and something of it’s nature, all get called out.<\/p>\n It’s fingers and nails grow to almost 2 feet in length until they almost scrape the floor. Each hand is now a 5-bladed short-sword of unknown capabilities. Again it speaks: “A bargain I offer, I want but two, and the rest may have safe passage – for a seven-day.”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n So there’s a non-combat way out of this encounter, but it will require sacrificing either two PCs or their guide and a PC. Depending on how tough it is, that might be a bargain – but it’s not one that any G< would ever expect a PC to make.\n\nAnd the non-standard tweaks to creatures, definitely confirmed. To a GM, that constitutes 'fair warning'. Some players will see it as a challenge, and one is sure at least think<\/em> “it’s got to be worth a lot of XP!”<\/p>\n Hadam adds, it’s claws will be Tainted – healing magics will have little impact on any wounds it inflicts! Protect yourselves!”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Even the slowest player should be catching on to the non-standard monsters idea by now. A normal short-sword might do 1d6 damage; worst case, this thing might do two lots if 5d6 plus strength bonus per round, average maybe 40 points between the two; the warning that Cure Light Wounds and Healing Potions will be of reduced effectiveness could double or triple that. Even if the GM hasn’t been quite so mean, it’s possible that one blow = instant death for half the party, and not even the fighter could go toe-to-toe with it for very long.<\/p>\n Having a 4th-level fighter in the party may have gotten their feet in the door of someplace they weren’t meant to go – but they’re in it now, right up to their necks!\n<\/ol>\n The characters know things about the world that the players don’t. The GM knows what the players don’t, so it’s part of his job to make that information ‘public’.<\/p>\n There are lots of ways to do that – most of them bad, some of them worse. Putting a brief statement into the mouth of a PC simply as an indicator that “your character knows something about this subject” is a promise of more information to come while highlighting the critical information that needs to be known immediately.<\/p>\n “We have three advantages,” says Doneegal’s player, who’s the most tactical of the group. “We’re smaller, faster, and there are more of us.”<\/p>\n “Four,” replies Alyssa’s player. “It can’t stay in the fight for too long without overheating. Alyssa starts chanting the spell, Burning Hands.”<\/p>\n “Four,” acknowledges Doneegal. “Hit-and-run tactics, ranged fire, maybe burning arrows. We might even be able to win this fight.”<\/p>\n The furry creature shuffles forward and swings at Poglan,<\/em><\/strong> (GM rolls dice) …who adeptly dodges the blow only to position himself perfectly for a strike from its other arm.<\/strong><\/em> (rolls dice again) “Poglan goes flying landing with a horrible crunch into the column twenty feet away, taking 15 points…”<\/p>\n “I guess we’re about to find out,” says Macklin’s player. “I’m down to one hit already,” answers Poglan’s player. “Looking for a convenient shadow…”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Characters should rarely have time to complete tactical planning before the fun starts, or combat can really bog down. As soon as there’s a hint of such discussion, it’s time to get the action started.<\/p>\n For all his tactical nous, note that Doneegal’s assessment is fairly basic and stock-standard when dealing with a big, strong creature who has reach on the party. It’s Alyssa’s player who has taken the GM’s hints on board and is actively using them to the PCs advantage, as the GM intended. He knows that the players can<\/em> win the fight – barely – if they manipulate the environment to their advantage and fight smarter, not harder.<\/p>\n And that, right there, adds a second ‘campaign style’ notch to his belt. The paths to victory, he has just silently announced, are not always going to be straightforward. Teamwork and smarts are going to be formidable advantages – ones that the PCs are going to have to exploit.<\/p>\n The implication is that this same attitude will be promulgated throughout all aspects of the campaign. No free lunches and no easy fights – but success will be possible.<\/p>\n Poglan’s player, whose character is hiding and waiting for an opportunity, has the most time to think, and realizes that this encounter is not designed to kill the party, just badly wound them – the real threat will be longer term, while they are suffering from the aftereffects. He suddenly wishes he had taken more time to probe the story of how Hadam lost his hand – there may have been more hints to the general nature of what’s to come buried there, lessons the party are about to learn the hard way.\n<\/ol>\n Readers may have noticed that in all the examples offered, there was very little detail. These were not an excuse for GM exposition, they were placeholders. They do come with the implied promise that detailed questions will be provided at some more opportune moment, but until that time arrives, the information provided is all the players are going to get.<\/p>\n All GMs suffer from the itch to show off how clever we are, to at least some extent. Some control this itch superbly well, some don’t, and some are somewhere in between (about 1\/3 of the way up from the bottom is where you will find me). But this technique doesn’t permit that, and the circumstances help the GM fight off such urges. That can be really<\/em> valuable.<\/p>\n Let’s say a new creature has the ability to channel a shock-wave through earth, stone, or rock until the ground underfoot erupts against the Target.<\/p>\n If it was a creature that the PCs, NPCs present, or anyone that either of them had ever heard from, had ever encountered such a creature, there’s a fair chance this might have been mentioned, because it’s unusual and it’s dramatic and it’s dangerous, and those all make for a great story.<\/p>\n So if anyone’s ever seen anything like this before, one of these pre-combat hints is near-certain to bring it to the fore, as was shown in the Wintertroll example earlier. If it doesn’t get mentioned, then it can be presumed that no-one knows about it.<\/p>\n This is one of those showing-off-their-own-cleverness traps mentioned in the previous section. It’s all too easy for the GM to start bragging about their creation’s abilities.<\/p>\n The best way to fight off that urge is to plan to use it for a nasty surprise attack in the course of the combat.<\/p>\n GM: “The creature touches it’s hand to the floor, palm down. You feel a slight quiver in the solid rock beneath your feet. Suddenly, the rock beneath Alyssa erupts skyward like a meteor shower running in reverse. Make a DEX save for half damage, which will be… (rolls dice)… half of 35 points.”<\/strong><\/em><\/ol>\n A point to carefully note is that the description of events omits almost all specifications. No mention of the range of the power. No mention of how often it can be used. No mention of whether or not it can target multiple locations at once, perhaps dividing any damage between them. No mention of how many dice of damage it did, just the total. No to-hit or attack rolls or any of that.<\/p>\n Those specifications do two things: they distract from the awesome coolness of the encounter itself, and they make the creature’s ability seem mundane. The GM may have to know<\/em> all these things, in order to keep the fight between it and the PCs fair, but that’s where the line should be drawn.<\/p>\n And by keeping the information about the power a secret until it actually gets used in play, the GM actually hardens his will toward not wasting the jaw-drops that he hopes will result. Afterward, if the PCs want to, they can whip out some measuring tape (string with knots at regular intervals) and make some educated guesses as to some of those parameters – otherwise, the attitude should be, “I know about them so you don’t have to”. Because next time they encounter one, it might put it’s hand to the ceiling and rain stalactites down on the entire party. Or put it’s hand on the side wall and unleash the raging underground river that lies beyond. Or the lava tube.<\/p>\n So long as you can keep thinking of nasty surprises, the PCs should have to earn every skerrick of additional detail they obtain – because as soon as the facts are known, the creature loses at least half of it’s capacity to be ‘cool’.<\/p>\n Have you ever noticed how the aftermath of a battle is full of game mechanics and the like? “How much damage have you taken?” “I need some more healing.” “How many XP do we get?” “Does it have a treasure?”…<\/p>\n Those more complete explanations that you’ve been saving up? Now’s the time to deploy them. Interweave that narrative with the more mechanical aspects of post-combat game play, and create the sense of the PCs chattering away with nervous energy now that the fight is over. Draw a line – of narrative – between what the players<\/em> are doing and what their characters<\/em> are doing. Don’t worry about noise-related encounter penalties or anything like that – let them chatter.<\/p>\n Just don’t tell them everything.<\/em> Save some of your ammo for another time, another encounter. Prioritize material of immediate value, material of near-now value, and the occasional cool nugget of never-valuable but really<\/em> interesting. And mix lies and half-truths and vague impressions in, to boot.<\/p>\n Build the world with every encounter, and you won’t have to do half as much outside of it – and that means that the players can focus on the other cool things that you have seeded your world with. Like the waterfalls where precariously-balanced rocks play a random, always unique, tinkling melody – that’s always in the key of C-sharp…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" GMs can take a lot of the strain off by worldbuilding within their encounters. It’s easier than it sounds! Any genre. I’ve been increasingly frustrated lately by dramatic headlines that offer two choices, neither realistic, only for the whole of the content that follows to knock down one of the two and assert that this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[400,370,64,66,67,70,288,74,89,12,91,13,94,95,97,96],"tags":[237,100,163,155,236,319,172,218,282,223,165,232],"series":[],"class_list":["post-55129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adventures","category-all-genres","category-beginners","category-combat","category-dnd","category-gm-ing","category-metagame","category-mike","category-npcs-etc","category-pcs","category-plans-and-prep","category-players","category-ideas-and-inspiration","category-tools","category-world-design","category-write","tag-adventure-creation","tag-adventure-prep","tag-cultures-societies","tag-dd","tag-fantasy","tag-metagaming","tag-npcs","tag-pathfinder","tag-pcs","tag-sci-fi","tag-tools-techniques","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/ray_shrewsberry-yeti-5541608_1280.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1toiD-elb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55129"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55129"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55133,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55129\/revisions\/55133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55129"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=55129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\nThroughout the article, I will be exploring the hypothetical encounter in paragraphs like this one.<\/strong>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n1. Establish Credibility In Advance<\/h3>\n
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2. Expository Hints Pre-Conflict<\/h3>\n
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3. Put Words Into Characters Mouths<\/h3>\n
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4. Tease & Hint, don’t Wallow<\/h3>\n
5. Relevant Content in Combat – Show, then<\/em> explain<\/h3>\n
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6. Expand In The Aftermath<\/h3>\n