5 Tips for the GM Who is Out of Ideas

Fellow GMs, we've all been there: you just got out of work or school, your gaming group is showing up in three hours, and you just realized you have nothing prepared.  Not only do you have nothing prepared, but you don't even know what to prepare - you are completely out of ideas.  Don't call everyone and cancel!  You can still save this.  There are a lot of things you can do to save this gaming session.  Every GM and every gaming group is different, so depending on your particular style some of these options may work better than others for you.

1. Read Random Sections of the Source Books
If you are the type of GM who is always finding little bits of inspiration and jotting them down in a journal or note-taking app, this might be the solution for you.  As GMs, we tend to store the information we use most often from the source books in our heads.  That's great - it lets us run games efficiently without stopping to look things up all the time.  But brains just aren't as good at retaining information as books are.  That's why books exist, after all.  By reading random sections of the source book, not only might you find that you are using some rules incorrectly, you also might discover rules or suggestions for things you don't normally use in your games.  This can create a nice change of pace for you and your gaming group.

The Pathfinder Core Rulebook or the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide (any edition) are generally chock-full of rules about random things an adventuring party might run into.  During one prep session I read the rules for fire and hot environments in the 3.5 DMG and I was inspired to create a house-fire encounter that played like a mini-dungeon, with areas of smoke that blocked sight and caused choking, areas of intense heat that did extra damage to the players, collapsing sections of the house that could act like traps, and a trapped homeowner who asked not only to be rescued, but to have the adventurers retrieve a valuable keepsake from an even more dangerous part of the burning building.

Monster books like the Pathfinder Bestiary or a D&D Monster Manual or Monstrous Compendium are also great sources of inspiration.  The descriptive text for a well-designed monster is full of hooks that hint to a GM how the monster might come into conflict with an adventuring party, making for a more organic encounter than just having a random monster show up out of the blue.  This is especially true of older editions of D&D, which tended to have smaller monster pictures and more paragraphs of text describing their ecology.  You might also discover something interesting about a monster you would have otherwise dismissed.  While flipping through Pathfinder Bestiary 2 looking for some undead monstrosities to populate a low-level haunted house dungeon, I chanced across the akata, a tentacled blue lion-like aberration.  I learned that akatas hibernate in silvery cocoons that degrade into fragments of strange metal in the presence of other lifeforms, their bites infect their prey with larvae, and those they kill rise again as twisted fast-zombies that lash out with their tongues.  Suddenly I had a much more interesting and cosmically creepy haunted house than just a building full of skeletons and ghouls.

2. Steal Your Plot from a TV Show
If you aren't so great at putting together exciting plots and encounters from little points of inspiration, try lifting whole plots and re-purposing them.  This obviously works best if your campaign is pretty freeform and you don't have to worry about messing up a planned story arc.  Get on Netflix of Hulu or Amazon Prime (or I guess the TV if you are into that) and watch and episode of a show.  It could be a show you are in the middle of watching or a show you've never seen before.  As you watch it, imagine your party taking the place of the main characters.  How would they react to the situations and problems the show's plot presents?

It doesn't have to be a fantasy show - in fact it probably shouldn't be.  While your group will definitely figure out what's going on if you run them through an episode of Game of Thrones, they will have a harder time recognizing a fantasy version of MASH or CSI: Miami or Agents of Shield.  If you can, tailor the show you pick to the type of campaign you are running.  If your players are high-level characters managing a kingdom, try The West Wing.  If they are used to investigating creepy goings on in random villages, watch Criminal Minds or Scooby Doo.

It can take a surprising amount of imagination to steal the whole plot of a TV show for a fantasy RPG.  Take the central conflict of the show, re-skin it for your fantasy world, and present it to your players as the next adventure hook.  The killer in that episode of Law and Order might become a devil-worshiping cultist.  The siblings squabbling over some petty thing in [insert Sitcom name here] might become childish noblemen fighting for the ducal seat.  Heck, maybe you'll pit your players against a mage guild leader who is based on Gus from Breaking Bad.  By the time it comes to the table, it might be completely unrecognizable.

For added fun (and to alleviate the guilt of stealing), tell your players what the adventure was based on after they complete it.

3. Create a New Big Bad Guy
If you don't mind throwing a wrench into the gears that are your ongoing campaign, stun your gaming group with the sudden introduction of a(nother) powerful force plotting their destruction.  Start the session by luring your players into a trap, and then spring it with a really tough encounter.  A tough encounter that your players will probably lose.  This new Big Bad should know just how to get to your adventuring party and counter all of their most common tactics.  The party should be left reeling from the blow they are dealt and barely able to escape from this worrying new threat.  With any luck, the tough battle will take up a good part of the session and the party will spend the rest of the session licking their wounds and trying to recover.

Creating this new threat will take some finesse and a good understanding of your party's capabilities and limits.  You don't want to underwhelm them with a quick and easy fight, and you don't want to kill them all off.  Killing your party because you are out of ideas is pretty high up there on the list of Things GMs Should Never Do.  But you should probably err on the side of making the big bad and their minions a little too powerful - you can always fudge things behind the screen to make sure things don't go completely tits-up.  Don't be afraid to let one of the characters die, but don't take it too far.

It is a trope of fantasy RPG plots that the party will occasionally butt heads with the main Big Bad and the Big Bad will barely lose and have some sort of trick up their sleeves to escape to fight another day.  In this scenario, you want to be sure your party knows that they are the ones who need to escape to fight another day.  Give your PCs an escape route and subtly mention it throughout the fight.  Maybe there is a swift-moving river they can jump into, or a portcullis they can slam as they flee.  Or, perhaps, give your new Big Bad motivation to defeat but not kill your party - maybe he wants them alive to witness the destruction of everything they have accomplished.

If possible, tie this into what has happened in the campaign so far.  Find some long-forgotten party that has been wronged by your adventurers (however indirectly) in the past and has had time to plot their revenge.  It could be the thieves' guild they tangled with when they were level three, or the brother of the evil priest they slew in their first dungeon.  If it is grounded in the story so far, it won't feel quite so out of the blue.

Try to set the confrontation somewhere significant to the characters, like their base of operations, a town they saved, or their favorite tavern.  Turning a familiar location with positive associations into a place of conflict and defeat will up the emotional ante and add some great roleplaying hooks into the mix.  As an added bonus, if the bad guy shows up in their home base, defeats them, and forces them out, you've got your next couple sessions covered as your party will inevitably want to re-take their base.

And don't be too worried about derailing your campaign.  Adding this new plot thread might just add a fresh breath of life to it.

4. Give Them a Roleplaying Prompt and Sit Back
This requires a specific kind of roleplaying group - one that knows their characters very well and actually role-plays more than rolling dice.  In fact, even if your group is more of the hack-and-slash type you might want to roll the (metaphorical) dice yourself and try this out with them.  Give your party a non-combat related roleplaying prompt disguised as a story hook.  Something that lets your players take control of the situation as they talk about their characters.  You might not even have to roll any dice!  And the best part - your players will probably love it!  As the story slows down to focus on the characters and their interactions, it will be the players shaping the flow of the session.  As a player, that is really cool.

This roleplaying prompt could be a social situation, a dilemma with no obvious right answer, or an invitation for storytelling.  In a social situation prompt, the party is introduced into a, well, a social situation and allowed to run free.  Maybe a nearby village is having a festival and they invite the adventurers as guests of honor.  Maybe a nobleman wants to gain prestige by associating with the adventurers, so he invites them to his feast-hall.  Maybe the party is trapped in an inn by a blizzard and they have to pass the time hanging out with the colorful locals trapped with them.  The characters can relax and interact with each other and with NPCs to their heart's content.  If you need to, you can fill time with detailed descriptions of sumptuous foods, rustic festival games, and colorful characters.  Create a painting for your players to inhabit.

For a dilemma, the party is presented with a choice or problem with no simple solution.  Maybe it is as simple as whether or not to trust a mysterious stranger.  Maybe they are dragged into resolving a dispute where neither side is clearly right or wrong.  For example, what would your party do in this situation: in a town suffering from a food shortage due to orc raids, a merchant who sold food at five times the market rate is tied up in the square accused of indirect murder, but he claims the added expense was warranted because of the extra security needed to defend against orcs.

An invitation to storytelling prompts the players to recount something about their characters, either about their backstory or about their adventures so far.  This can be easier early in a campaign, when maybe not everyone knows each other's backstories.  Perhaps the party shares a campfire with a  travelling tinker who asks for their stories in exchange for his cooking and mending services.  Maybe an aspiring bard is interviewing them about their adventures so she can immortalize them in verse.  Or a wealthy jarl is offering a great prize to whomever can tell him the greatest story.  The storytelling prompt should make sense in the game world, but appeal to the players' egos in the hopes of provoking some good roleplaying and character building.

Ideally, in any of these situations, the GM will be free to let the players fill the bulk of the time with their own creative energies, stepping in only to guide and enable.  A well-deserved rest for a hard-working GM.  But use this method with caution - if no one wants to tell their story, the session may fall flat.  But hey, if all else fails...

5. Play a Board Game
If you really can't get enough material together for a good roleplaying session, there's no reason to waste a perfectly good gathering of game-hungry friends.  Chances are if you are a GM, you probably have some excellent board games waiting to be played on your shelf as well.  To keep in the spirit of the gaming session, you might try to play a game with similar themes to your campaign.  If you haven't already, you might try:

• Tales of the Arabian Nights, an excellent board game that involves a lot of choose-your-own-adventure style gameplay and character-building elements.  
• Once Upon A Time, a collaborative fairytale storytelling card game.  
• Betrayal at House on the Hill, a horror game that will likely never play the same way twice.  
• Lords of Waterdeep, a game set in the city of Waterdeep in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.
• Munchkin, the competitive card game that famously parodies D&D. I would be shocked if you haven't already played it several hundred times.  

Of course, there are tons of other great tabletop games out there, not all of which share thematic elements with tabletop roleplaying games.  Failing that, you could even just hang out with your gaming group and talk like friends; that can be pretty fun too.  Just roll dice every once in a while to keep up appearances.

-your empty-headed d20 despot

Gods and Religions, Part 3: Domains and Pantheons

If you read my previous article advocating for creating multiple co-existing pantheons in a single campaign setting, you may have thought to yourself, "Wait, you want me to make multiple pantheons?  Won't that get boring?  How many different fricking thunder gods does one setting need?  Damn you, d20 Despot, you ask too much of me!"  Okay, first of all, please let go of my shirt collar.  Secondly, I think you might want to read this very article.  That's right, it's time for another installment of Gods & Religions, and this time we'll be talking about different structures that a pantheon can take, and how to spread domains around creatively so that you don't get stuck with nine nearly identical gods of war.  And, as is so often the case, we can find the inspiration for such diverse domains and pantheons in our own history.

Pantheon Structure
In the first article on the subject, I touched on the idea that there were more options for a religion than your typical eight-to-twenty-member pantheon: many polytheistic religions are centered around a few core deities but include hundreds of gods and god-like beings among their pantheon; others (like Zoroastrianism) acknowledge only two gods, often representing opposing worldviews and locked in eternal struggle with each other.  So when making your pantheons, don't feel obligated to fulfill a certain minimum (or maximum) number of gods.

Aside from numbers, another way to differentiate your pantheons is by structuring them differently.  What do I mean by structure?  Well, your typical D&D pantheon (think the gods of Golarion detailed in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook or the Greyhawk deities found in D&D 3.5) is fairly level, with all the gods on relatively equal footing, ruling independently over their own sections of the outer planes.  Other pantheons have more of a hierarchy.  Take the Classical Greek pantheon as a familiar example: Zeus rules over the Olympian gods as king, with his wife Hera.  They, along with the rest of the twelve Olympian gods in turn are superior to the remaining gods and demigods, like Herakles and Asclepius and the Muses.  Hades, meanwhile, reigns over the realm of the dead, and the overthrown Titans are condemned to Tartarus.

The Ancient Egyptian religion provides an example of an alternative structure.  Depending on what time you are looking at in Ancient Egypt's 3000 year history (and who you are asking), the chief god might be the sun god Ra, or the falcon god Horus (who merged with Ra), or the dead god Osiris, or the sun disk Aten (if you ask Akhenaten), or even the dreaded Set (if you ask the Hyksos).  The primacy of the gods depended on the whims of the ruling pharaoh and the power of the various cult centers (like Heliopolis, the House of Ra, or Thebes, where the Theban Triad of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu held sway).  Where the Greek gods were like a kingdom, the Ancient Egyptian gods were more like Hollywood, with different actors rising and falling in popularity over time and being called upon to fulfill different roles depending on the needs of the director.

There are many possible structures a pantheon could take.  Maybe the eight major gods each govern a strictly defined domain, and turn either to the god of balance or the god of treachery when conflicts arise between them.  Or maybe three major gods hold primacy over a cavalcade of lesser gods with more focused domains, like the god of the sea or the god of disease.  Perhaps the pantheon is divided into competing halves, with each god and goddess facing off against their polar opposite on the other side.  Mix things up and throw together a wide variety of ideas to make your pantheon as simple or complex as you want.  As cliché as it may sound, the only limit is your imagination.

Immigration and Absorption
One thing that really shakes up real-world pantheons is the addition of other gods from other religious/mythological traditions.  The Greeks were always receiving popular gods and goddesses from the East and adding them to their theology.  The Romans did their fair share of that (as attested by the popularity of Isis, Sol Invictus, Jesus Christ, and Mithras in the Late Roman Empire), but they also tended to absorb the gods of their conquered subjects into their own gods - a process called syncretism.  The ancient Egyptians, meanwhile, were constantly syncretising their own gods together - combining Ra and Horus into Horus-re, for instance.

If one of the civilizations in your campaign world has close contact with another, through trade, war, or conquest, consider adding one or more gods from one of the pantheons into the other.  Consider what gods fill a 'gap' in the theology of those peoples.  Consider also how the god might change as it is absorbed into a new culture.  For instance, imagine a desert people who are conquered by a seagoing foreign race.  The seagoing race's primary deity is Sha, the god of the sea, storms, and physical might.  As the desert people begin to worship Sha, they focus more on the storms and might than the sea.  Perhaps the desert people already had a minor deity of storms and lightning named Surru.  As Sha takes a leading place in the desert peoples' pantheon, Sha absorbs the less-important Surru and becomes Shasurru, mighty god of storms and floods.

Real history is full of political changes resulting in theological changes.  Gods gain power in the heavens as their supporters gain power on earth - though in a fantasy world, which causes which is a matter up for debate.  Perhaps the earliest example is the Enuma Elish, a piece of Babylonian literature describing how Marduk, the patron god of the city of Babylon, came to overthrow the pre-existing hierarchy and dominate all the other Mesopotamian gods.  Real history is also full of examples of gods being absorbed into other pantheons from outside, adding variety and exotic flavor to an established pantheon.  Incorporating such things into your own world makes the pantheons feel more real.

Leaving Things Out
One great way to make all your pantheons seem very boring and cookie-cutter is to always have every domain represented by a major deity.  Not every religion has to have a god of animals and a god of war and a god of fire and a god of weather and so on ad infinitum.  In fact, not every domain needs to be represented in each pantheon at all.  Some societies might not even have a god of, say, evil.

Think about what sort of gods the civilization would worship.  Take the aforementioned hypothetical desert civilization.  They might have a sun god, since the sun is so omnipresent in the desert, and they might have a water god because water is the source of all life.  They probably would not have a god of the sea (although you might be surprised - Tiamat, who plays such an important role in Mesopotamian mythology, was the goddess of the ocean).

Sometimes domain gaps are filled by the inclusion of foreign gods in the pantheon, as mentioned above.  Other times, other god-like but non-divine forces can fill that role.  It is quite easy to imagine, for instance, a pantheon which has no evil deities; worshipers of evil in such a society might be forced to throw in their lot with demon lords or Old Ones or other such malign forces.

The God of What and What?
This may seem counterintuitive, but don't think too logically about which domains you assign to what gods.  When creating a goddess of the sea, you might give her the water domain of course, plus the weather domain because weather is so closely associated with the sea, the travel domain because ships travel on the sea.  Maybe add in the chaos domain, because the sea is ever-changing, and the destruction domain because of the great destruction the sea can wreak, but also the animal domain because the sea supports so much life.  Sounds pretty good, right?  Okay, now create a sea god for the next pantheon who feels like a completely different god.  If you go about each god logically, you will end up with a bunch of sea gods that seem pretty much the same.  Real deities have so much more variety.  Mesopotamian sea goddess Tiamat is associated with creation and dragons, while the Greek sea god Poseidon is also the god of earthquakes and horses.  The Irish sea god Manannán mac Lir is associated with the afterlife, necromancy, and trickery, the Norse sea god Njörðr is associated with wealth and good cropland, and Ōyamazumi - one of several Japanese sea deities - is also a god of mountains and war.  And those are just sea gods!

In practice, gods tend to accumulate odd associations that we probably wouldn't think of if we set out to create them logically from scratch.  Sometimes this is just due to the unique nature and character of the god - The Norse thunder god Thor is also a war god and a fertility god, because that's just what Thor is.  Sometimes it is because the god absorbed the role of an earlier god who fell out of favor (or a vaguely similar foreign god) picking up strange traits in the process - when Marduk defeated the sea goddess Tiamat, he usurped her role as creator by paradoxically (re-)creating the earth out of her mangled body, and in the process he also seems to have gained an association with the sea.  Sometimes the domain of one god rubs off on their parent, child, or spouse - Apollo, for instance, is associated with healing because of his son Asclepius, god of medicine.  Whatever the reason, gods often come with a plethora of seemingly odd domains which make them unique an interesting.

One easy way to simulate this in your fantasy pantheon is, once you have established your main deities and assigned them a few basic domains, randomly assign the remaining domains to those deities.  Then you can work backwards to create myths that explain why that deity is associated with those domains.  Let's say you have a triad of gods - the god of the sky, the god of death, and the goddess of the sea.  You randomly assign some spare domains to them, and the goddess of the sea gets stuck with love and knowledge.  You decide that her association with love is because the gods of death and the sky are constantly competing for her affection.  Maybe her relation to knowledge comes from the loss of a great library when a once mighty city sank beneath the waves - now all that knowledge lies on the sea floor, where she jealously guards it.

Shake your pantheons up!  Make them feel different from each other.  Above all, make them seem interesting enough that your players will engage with them rather than just ignore them as part of the backdrop.

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Hi all you loyal readers!  You may have noticed that there was no post last week.  I'm sorry about that - this month has been very busy, partly because I am on vacation and partly because when I was not on vacation I was working very hard on non-d20 despot related stuff.  So I have decided that this month I will only be posting every other week.  My $5+ patrons on Patreon can still expect all the promised Monster Mondays, but they will be arriving in a lump at the end of the month rather than weekly (except for the awesome leather golem which I posted in the first week of May).  Check back on Monday the 30th for the next post!

-your syncretic d20 despot

Gods and Religions, Part 2: Death, Undeath, and the Afterlife

Death - it comes for us all, eventually.  Sorry, that's not how I usually start my articles.  Welcome to part II of Gods and Religions!  Usually, an adventurer's main interaction with death is in the dealing thereof, but sometimes - hopefully not too often - the characters get to meet death face-to-face.  If they are lucky enough and rich enough (or know a druid and aren't afraid to come back as a different species) they might even get to come back from the dead.  This can make death seem like just another game mechanic, but it is so much more important than that.

A religion's attitude towards death can have a profound effect on the beliefs and attitudes of the individual and on society as a whole.  And that's just in our world!  Imagine how much more important religious ideas about death become when the afterlife is not just a matter of belief but of verifiable fact (heck, you can just plane shift there!), when there are a number of spells that can bring the dead back to life, and when dead bodies returning as undead monstrosities is a very real danger.

With that in mind, there are some questions you need to ask yourself about death when you are creating the gods and religions of your world.  Questions like:

Can dying in a certain way have consequences for a soul?

Einherjar - brave souls who died in battle - are fêted by Valkyries in Valhalla. Walhall by Emil Doepler, via Wikimedia

Most belief systems have the concept of a 'good death' vs a 'bad death'.  Suicide, for instance, is often considered a bad death, but dying for your faith is a good death (see for example the many hundreds of early Christians who were martyred by pagans and became saints as a result).  For the ancient Greeks, drowning in the sea was a particularly bad death because your body often could not be recovered.  In most cases a good death means a fast track to the nice afterlife, but a bad death means a longer waiting period, or even being condemned to the shitty afterlife that no one wants to go to, even for a quick visit.  In pagan Norse belief, for instance, a brave death in battle might see you whisked by Valkyries up to the halls of Valhalla for an afterlife of feasting and drinking, or to the field of Fólkvangr where Freyja's hall of Sessrúmnir stands (and where women who die a noble death also go), but dying of disease or old age gets you sent to the dark halls of Hel.

Consider having the idea of a 'bad death' manifest mechanically in-game with tougher resurrection costs.  Maybe a character who dies in a way that their god considers 'bad' cannot be raised by the raise dead spell and require the more expensive resurrection or even true resurrection.  

At the very least, having a concept of a 'good death' vs a 'bad death' can affect the risks a believer might be willing to take.  With the promise of divine reward, maybe a character will be more willing to fight to the death in battle.  With the threat of a tougher afterlife, maybe that same character will be a little more cautious fighting at sea, where the risk of drowning and having their soul sucked into a black abyss is very real.  Or maybe a character dying of disease will throw themselves recklessly into battle in hopes of reaching a better afterlife.

Speaking of the afterlife...

Gods and Religions, Part 1: Worldbuilding Options

Some of my players may find it funny that I am starting up a series of articles on gods and religions.  It seems like whenever they roll up new characters for one of my work-in-progress campaign settings, one of them asks, "So what gods do we have to choose from?" and my response is always a sheepish, "I, uh, haven't gotten around to making the gods yet."  In my defense, even if it rarely comes to fruition, I devote a fairly large portion of my thought processes to the gods of a setting.  Gods and religions are important, and if executed properly, their influence on the campaign setting can be profound.  

The fantasy worlds of D&D and Pathfinder have an advantage over our world in that the gods have an empirically verifiable effect on those worlds.  Our world has a variety of competing religions and faiths and an increasing number of people who doubt the veracity of any of them.  If army chaplains could heal the wounds of their companions with a touch of their glowing hand, like D&D clerics and paladins can, our world would likely have a very different outlook on religion.  As it is, we as worldbuilders have to deal with this difference as best we can.  

There are two main approaches that a typical campaign setting takes to religions: universal gods, or local pantheons.  

Universal Gods

In this approach, the same gods hold sway over the entire campaign setting.  This is what most campaign settings (eg. Faerûn, Greyhawk, Golarion) tend to use.  It is the easier approach for the creator of the world, because they only have to think up one batch of gods (usually adding in some new ones in later supplements), and it is easier for the players because they don't need to navigate a treacherous web of home-brewed theology.  

5 Videogame Lessons for the Tabletop

This won't come as a surprise to most of you, but videogames and tabletop roleplaying games are two different things.  As such, they end up doing things rather differently.  But that doesn't mean they can't take lessons from each other.  As roleplaying videogame series like WoW, Fallout, Mass Effect, and The Witcher have grown more popular, RPG-like elements have begun to invade other genres of videogames, to the point where players of popular first-person shooters find themselves spending skill points and leveling up their characters between matches.  Videogame elements can work their way into tabletop RPGs as well, especially as more players enter the tabletop realm through the gateway drug of videogames.  This can have mixed results - some say 4th Edition D&D was an attempt to make D&D more videogamey, and it ended up being the most controversial and shortest-lived edition since the 70s.  But while there are many elements of videogames that would translate poorly to the tabletop, there are lessons from videogames that we can safely bring to the table.

Tutorials

Call of Duty 2

Most videogames have a tutorial level - a soft introduction meant to allow new players to learn the basic rules and gameplay mechanics.  Sometimes this takes the form of a literal training exercise, as in the above screenshot from Call of Duty 2, where Pvt. Vasili Koslov is practicing his grenade potato tossing.  But sometimes it is a short, low-stakes in-game mission that happens to lead the player through many of the common situations they will encounter in the game.

This latter type of tutorial is a great way to introduce new players to the game mechanics.  Send them on a simple mission that exposes them to a simple combat, a skill challenge, and some diplomacy.  For most people, it is a lot easier to learn through gameplay like this than to have the rules explained to them or to read it in a book.

How to Avoid Common Mistakes as a New GM

Crossing over to the other side of the Game Master's screen is exciting, but it can also be intimidating.  Your gaming group is now counting on you to describe the whole world around them, provide them with a story, and adjudicate the rules.  You are basically acting as a human gaming system for a group of gamers.  When the spotlight is on you, the pressure to perform is intense, and it is easy to make mistakes.  

Most of the time these mistakes are small.  They won't break the game or send your group running for the hills.  But everyone wants their first time to go well, and the more mistakes you can avoid the better it will be for everybody.  

1. Read, Read, Read

It happens to every GM.  At some point, you forget a monster rule that totally messes up a fight, or you misunderstand part of the adventure module you are running and cause problems for yourself down the line, or at the very least you forget a rule and have to stop the game and go flipping through a bunch of books trying to find it.  

This may seem obvious, but the hands-down best way you can prepare for your first stint as a GM is to read all the material cover-to-cover beforehand.  Read the main rulebooks for the system you are using.  If you are running a pre-made adventure, read the module all the way through.  Before a fight, read the monster stat blocks to make sure you understand everything it can do.  Even if you've read the rulebooks before, back when you were a player, read them again.  You pick up on different things when you are reading them to learn how to play than when you are reading them to learn how to GM.  You might even find that your regular GM has been misinterpreting a crucial rule!

Not only is this great preparation work, but it is also a good way to come up with new ideas.  You might come across a set of rules that doesn't get used much in your group and decide to build an encounter around it.  When I was reading through the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide while preparing for my first time as a GM, I got really inspired by the section on fire and heat hazards and decided to add a house fire into the scenario.  The result was an exciting non-combat encounter that gave a new player an opportunity to feel like a hero.  

Worldbuilding - How to Steal from History

I've said it before and I'll say it again: a good GM has to know how to steal.  This is never more true than when you are creating your campaign setting.  Even Tolkien, the father of fantasy worldbuilding, stole the language and culture of the Rohirrim from the historical Anglo-Saxons, with the twist that they are horse people of the plains rather than an infantry-heavy insular people.

It may be satisfying to create a whole continent of kingdoms and city-states and emirates from scratch, but it is even more time consuming and difficult.  Plus, you'll have to spend just as much time explaining your world to your players as you did creating it.  Worse still, you run the risk of creating a bland and unengaging world full of shallow, interchangeable kingdoms.  Pilfering ingredients from history makes your world easier to create and more accessible for players.  Once you've decided, for instance, than Kingdom X is going to be based on Charlemagne's empire, you can use pseudo-French and pseudo-German names to lend your kingdom a consistent overall character.

Immersion requires a sense of verisimilitude, which is just a big word that means realism.  Verisimilitude helps players become invested in your world, lose themselves in it, and have great roleplaying experiences.  For that, you need a world that seems real, that makes sense on a human level, and that is readily accessible.  There is no better source for realism than the pages of history itself.  You have ten thousand years of human history at your disposal, displaying a bewildering variety of societies, governments, religions, warriors, and architectural styles.  Steal something from here, something from there, mix and match them, add a twist of your own, and you've got something.  Even the more obscure historical civilizations will add that verisimilitudinous flavor to your campaign setting because they are inherently human, and on some level we understand them.

So go get an entry-level history book from your local library or used book store, read about history on wikipedia, watch some documentaries on Netflix (or the History Channel, if you can find anything that's not about aliens or Templar conspiracies or pawn brokers).  Even just dipping your toes in the waters of history will improve your worldbuilding.

Now, let's take a look at how we can apply what we've stolen to our campaign setting.

Traps 103 with Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.

Paramount Pictures

Welcome back, class! I know it's been a while since our last two sessions, so I hope you took good notes.

Today I'll be talking about how a GM can make detecting and disarming traps more interesting in-game.  I won't be using so many examples from the Indiana Jones movies this time around, because I can only think of one time Indy makes a Disable Device check.  When he is approaching the Breath of God trap in Last Crusade, he ducks, grabs a rope, and hooks it onto a spinning wheel, causing the trap to grind to a halt.

Paramount Pictures

Last time around, I closed by talking about making complex death traps that seem more like puzzles in how the players interact with them.  So why don't we expand that principle to all traps?

I've noticed that in my games, both as a player and as a GM, traps are not always well integrated into the play experience.  A typical trap encounter might go something like this:

Rogue: I open the chest!  Wait, first I should check for traps.

GM: Roll for it. 

Rogue: *rolling* 13... so that's a... 27 all together. 

GM: Alright, you're pretty sure that if you open the chest it will stick you with a poisoned needle. 

Rogue: *rolling* I got a... 31 to disarm. 

GM: Wow.  Okay, you stick your thieves' tools in there and disarm it.  

That's a pretty boring interaction.  Most of it is just calling out numbers, which is not something the in-game character would even be aware of.  This is a failing on my (the GM's) part.  When I include a trap encounter, I need to set it up through description.  To do that, we'll need to delve deeper:

Expect the Unexpected

One of the first things you learn as a GM is that the players will absolutely wreck all of your plans at the first opportunity.  You can never make a plan that takes into account every possible action by your players.  This is part of the beauty of tabletop roleplaying games.  This freedom is simultaneously one of the best things about being a player and one of the most difficult things about being a GM.  As a GM, how are you supposed to deal with it?  How can you expect the unexpected?  Today, we're going to look at just that.

We'll start with an anecdote:

My sister recently prepped and ran the first session of an urban adventure for two players.  The party's mission was to recover a valuable statue from the house of a wealthy merchant on behalf of its rightful owner.  She made it a very open-ended adventure with lots of room for the party to make and enact their own plans.  She expected the party might attempt to pull of a stealthy night-time burglary, try to bribe one of the guards, or simply rough up and intimidate the merchant.  She mapped out the merchant's house and came up with a system for determining where the guard would be at any given time during his nightly rounds, and where the merchant would be in town or in his house at any time throughout the day.  She made a list of DCs for all the different ways they might sneak into the house.  While carrying the statue, the DCs are increased by 5, and failure by 10 or more means the statue gets dropped.  All in all, it was a pretty solid set-up for a heist.

The players, of course, had different plans.  In broad daylight, they bluffed their way into the house to discuss tapestries, then cast a spell that let them search a room without being inside it and immediately found the safe in which the statue was hidden.  They bluffed their way into the study and accidentally disabled the alarm.  The skald summoned a dire rat in the streets as a distraction while the inquisitor disguised himself with magic, and they walked right out of the house with the statue.

I'm pretty sure adventurers would rule the world if they didn't have that nasty habit of getting eaten by dragons.

What can we humble, god-like GMs do in the face of creative PCs and their outside-the-box plans?

Random Minion Motivation Table

"Aim for the big one!" yelled Daltos, hurling a spear at the largest orc.  "If we take out their leader, they'll crumble!"

The rest of the party followed suit.  Grim plunged two bolts from his magic crossbow into the hulking orc chieftain, and Ylvessa charged in and finished the job, hacking off his green head with a swift blow of her scimitar.  

Some of the orcs did as Daltos expected and fled back into the cave.  Some, but not all.  An unassuming orc spearman let out a terrible cry.  "You killed my brother, you elf witch!"  He ran up to the corpse, grabbed the chieftain's warhammer, and brought it down squarely on Ylvessa's surprised head.  

"Rally to me, you cowardly scum!" barked another.  "Unlike that dead idiot Gorflegg, I'LL lead you to victory!"

Then came the shout that Daltos disliked most of all.  Echoing from deep in the caves, an orcish voice called, "C'mon boys! Let's grab the treasure and run!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Any good adventurer knows that discretion is the better part of valor.  But what about the minions that they fight?  Some GMs will drag a battle out until every last mook on the battlefield has dropped below 0 hp, other GMs realize that their goblin horde might rather flee than face the whirlwind of death that is a well-prepared adventuring party.

If you want to go a tiny bit more in-depth, check out this table of random minion motivations:

The idea is simple.  During battle, if a major morale-shattering event happens (such as the death of the enemy leader or an attack that kills more than half of the enemy minions), roll 2d6 for each minion to see what his motivation is here, and judge from that what its action will be.

There is a lot of room for GM interpretation, of course.  This is a GM-ing aid, not a new rule-system.  If the minions in question are soldiers in an evil warlord's army, and you roll that one of them is "Only there to protect a loved one", you might decide that he's there to look out for his kid brother who is fighting alongside him, in which case he might fight hard long after the evil warlord is dead just to keep his brother safe.  On the other hand, a cultist in a death cult who is only there to protect his kid brother might grab his brother and flee at the slightest opportunity.

A fanatical believer might fight to the death for his cause, but a true believer, not blinded by outright fanaticism, might see the value in withdrawing to fight another day.

I chose to make it a 2d6 table because it results in a nice bell-curve, as those of you who have attempted to settle Catan will well know.  I didn't want a flat d6 or d10 table, and I thought a d% table would be too complicated for consulting in the heat of battle.  I think the 2d6 bell-curve makes for a quick and easy table with a lot of potential depth.

Sorry for the short post this week.  Life is busy, and it's so hot in Seattle right now that my rapidly decaying computer is threatening to catch aflame.

-your in-it-for-the-money d20 despot

How to Run Naval Combat, Part 1

London, British Library, Royal MS 10 E. IV, fol. 19r

The general public's knowledge of Medieval naval combat probably derives from pirate movies and swashbuckling adventures, things centuries removed in setting and technology from the Middle Ages.  So how did people fight at sea in the Middle Ages, and how can we use that knowledge to make naval combat in D&D more interesting?  Well, not to brag, but I've recently written an award-winning Master's thesis on medieval naval warfare, and I'm obviously an expert on D&D because I run this blog, so allow me to drop some knowledge on you.

First, let me say that I know historical accuracy is not what a lot of people are looking for in their D&D game.  I would never recommend sacrificing fun on the altar of scholarly pedantry.  But when you look into it, adding a dash of accuracy can actually make things more interesting - as it turns out, people in the past really knew what they were doing.  Today, I'll talk about how naval combat worked in the Middle Ages, dispelling a few myths and anachronisms.  In a later post, I'll talk about how to mesh that information into a world where magic and monsters are very real things.

4 Rules You Probably Aren't Using Correctly (And Why You Should)

You know the problem with rulebooks?  There's just so many darn rules!  I know how it is - some rules are just too complicated or time consuming to enforce.  Maybe you were a new GM and you jettisoned those minor rules that just slowed things down.  Maybe you were running a game for some new players and you didn't want to scare them away with these extraneous rules.  And then you sort of let them slip away, because the game worked just perfectly without them.

Well... I think it's time to re-evaluate some of those rules.  I've played a fair amount of D&D in my time, and I've read of and heard a lot of other peoples' stories as well.  From the experiences of myself and others, I've identified a few rules that often get ignored (not all the time - very possibly not even in your games - but often).  Now, I totally understand why these rules don't always get used: I've neglected many of them myself.  But they were written for a reason, and I think they might benefit from a little extra love.

"Yes, We're All Individuals!" - Reskinning and Reequipping Monsters So They Don't Get Boring

"Hey, remember that time we fought those skeletons?"
"Yeah, I almost died.  It was bloody ridiculous."
"No, you're thinking of the skeletons we fought back in Derdinn's Keep.  I'm talking about when we fought the skeletons in those crypts back when we were second level."
"You mean third level.  There were three skeletons and two zombies."
"No, second level.  The ones with rusty scimitars."
"They've all had rusty scimitars."

We can't all work our way though the Monster Manual from cover to cover; sometimes in our campaigns we have to throw the same kind of monsters at the party that they have already fought.  But that doesn't mean they have to feel the same.  Too often as GMs we become satisfied with presenting monsters just as they are presented to us in the Monster Manual or Bestiary.  But no matter how good a dish is, eating it over and over is going to get bland.

Take a look at these skeletons.  We've got your typical shambling skeleton in tattered scraps of armour:

Duty-Bound Dead, by Johannes Voss (c) Wizards of the Coast

A saintly skeleton decked out in the finest gilded plate:

St. Pancratius - Dr. Paul Koudounaris, via Cartwheel Art

And glowing-eyed skeletons (okay, probably liches) wielding staves and wearing crowns and mighty robes:

Keith Parkinson

In your game, if you pitted your party against any of these three types of skeletons - even if behind the screen they were all just your basic CR 1/3 skeletons - I guarantee they wouldn't remember it as just "that skeleton fight."

The two simplest and best ways to make your monsters unique are reskinning and reequipping.

Traps 102 with Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.

Paramount Pictures

Last week, in Traps 101, I used Raiders of the Lost Ark to demonstrate a few basic things that traps can do in a dungeon.  I mean, besides maiming and killing.  This week, I'm also bringing in examples from Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, the only other Indiana Jones movies I recognize as canon (not that Crystal Skulls had any traps in it anyways).

Indiana Jones is an adventurer's adventurer, so it really makes sense that the temples and ruins he navigates are dungeons any GM would be happy to have created.  They have a cinematic quality to them (naturally) that boils the elements of a good dungeon down to a few tightly-implemented set-pieces.  For that reason, the Indiana Jones movies ring true as great D&D-style adventures despite the fact that there are no fantastical monsters and Indy himself doesn't wear armour or wield a sword.

"You're strangely dressed for a knight..."                 Paramount Pictures

So what else can we learn about traps from the adventures of Professor Henry Jones, Jr.?

Traps 101 with Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.

Traps are an integral part of nearly every dungeon, but they are very easy to do wrong.  There are some GMs who seem to think that the goal of a trap is to kill your party in as devious and clever a way as possible.  If your goal as a GM is just to kill your players, kindly refrain from GMing.

From Grimtooth's Traps

Others decide to put traps on everything, turning the exploration of a dungeon into a never-ending paranoid sequence of skill checks.  Putting traps in a dungeon is like putting spice in a dish: the right spices in the right amounts can add flavour, but using too much or too overpowering of a spice can render it unpleasant or inedible.

So naturally, to illustrate how to do traps correctly, I am turning to the Indiana Jones film trilogy.  Not just because they are perfect movies, but because they use traps incredibly well.  In a well-put-together movie, every element should contribute to the whole.  If you just throw things in there for the heck of it, your movie will be an incoherent, tone-deaf mess.  But the three Indiana Jones films are well-constructed (the first and third admittedly more-so than the second), and each trap Indy encounters serves to move the plot along or tell us something more about the story or the characters.

When you are designing a dungeon, you are like the director of a movie that your players are about to watch/star in.  If you want it to be a good movie, keep the following tips in mind:

Food and Drink: Never Adventure on an Empty Stomach

"I'm starving.  Let's break out some rations before we rest," Folg suggested, patting his rumbling dwarven stomach.

"There are no rations," Kyliss shot back. "Daldreth was carrying all our food."  She cast a deadly glare at the cleric, who was dusting himself off in the corner.  

"Hey, if you guys hadn't taken your sweet time getting me out of that gelatinous cube, maybe we'd still have some rations left!" he shot back defensively.  "Or if you guys carried some of the food, for a change..."

"We had a week's worth of rations.  Your saying all of it's gone?  What are we going to eat?"

Kyliss thought for a moment.  "Well, we killed all those dire rats a few rooms back."

Daldreth pulled a face, but Folg lit up.  "Now you're talking," the dwarf said.  "Fresh meat!  Daldreth, go get some of those R.O.U.S.es! I'll break some of this furniture up and get a fire going; this is a vaulted ceiling, there should be enough space for the smoke to go without smothering us all."

Kyliss rubbed her hands together decisively.  "Right, I'll attach a rope to this bucket and draw some water from the well."

Daldreth turned.  "A dungeon well?  Do you want throat-leeches?  Because that's how you get throat-leeches!  No, I'll just cast create water."

"Into what?  That gross-ass old barrel?  It smells like someone stored jellied fish in it."

Kyliss sighed, walked over to the barrel, and cast prestidigitation.  With a flick of her hand, a cloud of dust and unidentifiable ancient muck shot up out of it and splattered against the wall.  "We're good."
~~~~~~~~~~

Food and drink should be important considerations for any adventuring party, because you need that stuff to live.  But, like weight and encumbrance rules, such things are often neglected in favour of gameplay expediency.  A lot of gaming groups feel that keeping track of rations is too 'simulationist' and slows things down or distracts from the fun.  Well I'm here to champion the right of every PC to eat a square meal a day, and not just for the sake of realism.

Making Realistic NPCs

There is one secret to making realistic NPCs: treat them like real people.  That doesn't mean every innkeep, dirt farmer, and bandit thug needs a backstory and daddy issues.  It doesn't mean you need to create motivations and secrets for every character in the village.  Heck, it doesn't even mean every NPC needs a name or a stat block.  It just means that NPCs should feel like real inhabitants of the world, not cardboard cutouts put there to sell magic items, give quests, or fight to the death against the players.

Source

"Stop right there, criminal scum! Nobody breaks the law on my watch!
I'm confiscating your stolen goods. Now pay your fine or it's off to jail."

Let's break it down:

It's My Party: Adventurers Don't Operate in a Vacuum

Bernard grabbed another glass from the bar, dipped his rag into a bucket of beer-colored water, and polished the glass to no obvious effect.  He looked out at his patrons.  It was the usual lot: crusty old farmers, local ruffians, gangly stable boys...  He saw a couple of farmers drain their glasses and push them away.  Bernard was about to draw it to the attention of one of his barmaids when the door burst open.  Sunlight briefly streamed into the bar before being blocked out by the newcomers.  First came an ugly brute of a half-orc with a glowing greatsword strapped to his back, followed shortly by a hooded figure with a black cloak and brandishing a wicked staff topped with a gruesomely realistic human skull.  Next through the door was an anthropomorphic raven in spiked red armour with a mandolin in one hand and a flaming katana in the other.  Last but not least was a black-skinned elf with piercing red eyes, dressed only in woven ivy and riding a monstrous tiger.  

"The conquering heroes return!" Bernard called out from the bar.  "What'll it be, fellas?  The usual?"

~~~~~

Adventuring parties are a strange thing.  Oftentimes, they are actually comprised of many strange things.  It's not much of a problem when you have a group of humans with the occasional elf, dwarf, or halfling.  But there are a huge variety of strange playable races available to your players, some of which are quite literally monsters - in a game where fighting monsters is not an uncommon occurrence.  Some would say it is a defining characteristic.

So if your party includes crow-men, fox people, frog-folk, horned hellspawn, winged monsters, talking monkeys, the bad guys from Lord of the Rings, or magical robots, you should probably give some thought to how they are going to be seen by the people they are trying to save.  This applies equally whether you are GMing a game or writing a fantasy story.

Treasure: 5 Tips and Tricks for Making Your Treasure Hoards More Memorable

The Fishpool Hoard: British Museum.  Photo: d20 Despot

Treasure.  It's a big part of playing D&D.  It is often one of the primary motivations for adventuring.  But how often is it truly memorable?  How often are your players as impressed by their haul as their characters should be?

So often, after a big fight, games of D&D turn into games of accounting.  "You find 2,500 gold pieces, 1,000 silver, and two rubies worth 500 gp each.  Also, everyone gets 1,200 XP."  While treasure and experience are both rewards for a job well done, they should not be treated in the same way.  XP is a numerical abstraction of your character's growth and skill - it is intangible to the character.  Treasure, however, is an in-game reward, and is very tangible to the character.  Yet too often, just as XP becomes a number that players use to invests in better powers, gp becomes just a number that players invest in better equipment.  Finding treasure should be a roleplaying opportunity, not a simple exercise in accounting.

Let's take a look at some tips and tricks to making treasure interesting, exciting, believable, and memorable.

What is D&D?

It's time to step back a bit.  This blog is generally aimed at an audience who plays or GMs table-top RPGs, but I have neglected another facet of my audience: people who are new to D&D entirely.  Since I started the blog, I've had some friends ask me about it.  What is D&D like?  How do I get started?

Now, there are several places I could send you to find out more information, but I figured, why don't I just explain it here, in my own words, for your benefit?  So I'll be doing this in three installments: this week, I will talk about D&D and table-top RPGs in general and how to get started with them; next week, I will post a starting adventure that I created recently, including everything you will need to run that adventure for some friends; and the week after, I will post an account of what happened when I ran that adventure for my girlfriend's parents and some of their family friends.