Engage Players by Having Them Build Your Setting

Posted on October 8, 2024October 11, 2024 by Joel H

Ever feel like your players aren’t as deeply engaged in your game world as you’d like? Collaborate and build the setting together!

In my games I want players to know the background of the setting, have a general idea of what’s going on and how things work. It gives them context to make interesting choices and understand possible impacts. Knowledge is power. It increases their ability to act in the world by understanding its connections, helping them naturally immerse in its logic without constant non-diegetic lore dumps. One of the best ways to do this is to share your tools of world creation for the very first session.

The issue this addresses is that no matter how cool my lore is or how focused it is on encouraging interesting gameplay, players won’t be as into it as I am. The most engaging parts of the game are the parts a player directly interacts with or creates, through the act of playing the game.

In the past, I’ve made a series of detailed and but accessible intro briefing handout packets for multiple groups to try to give folks this information to help give context to the setting and have had at best 1-2 of the players really dig into it each time. It’s just not usually worth the time to invest to try to upload setting background into your players heads ahead of time.

As a player I also don’t usually enjoy reading a lot of lore that I may or may not be able to interact with. I can’t blame them, most of the times a GM has handed me a handout over a few pages to read before a game. I’ve felt at least some of it was extraneous to playing the game and interacting with the world.

Player’s don’t want to do homework for the game. Life is busy. The thing people care about most is their own actions and the results. That’s why all the RPG war stories that are the most memorable and fun stories people tell about games are about what their characters did in it and the impacts their crazy choices had. The longevity and viral spread of anecdotes like Tucker’s Kobolds, The Gazebo story, Sir Bearington, and other game tales isn’t just because they’re funny and digestible anecdotes, it’s because these speak to the promise of the game where players discover something by interacting with the GM’s world and something interesting happens as a consequence of their actions. The emergent and unplanned interactions between the two is where setting and character comes to life as more than dusty description but dynamic elements in an otherworld that can have a semi-magical feeling of existence to it.

When I’ve been cornered by a GM that wants to describe the setting of their world or a player talking about their character’s build and backstory without asking, it drains my life energy a bit. Even when I appreciate the passion they have for what they’re talking about, telling people about purely personal lore is like telling people about dreams or revelations from psychedelics, people generally don’t give a shit because by definition the specific texture and feeling of these experiences are deeply subjective and impossible for others to really relate to. Lore is a dead sterile thing until the person hearing about it gets to make interesting choices about how to interact with it through play.

Story games like Brindlewood Bay, Fiasco, and Microscope get around this by explicitly breaking open the GM’s toy box and giving worldshaping tools to all the players as they create the story of the game collaboratively throughout a session. The joys of creative power to shape the narrative is spread to all the players while encouraging improv and stopping a GM from railroading or burning out by doing days of background prep that may or may not actually be relevant to the game as everyone discovers what the reality of the world is through playing it. I really have a blast with these types of games but it’s not my preferred format.

I also appreciate the joy of secrets and discovery when playing in RPG’s, of getting surprised by something that feels like it was there independently of my or the weird stuff that happens from emergent properties of the world outside of what is narratively satisfying. As a player, if I get to enjoy the GM style thrills of creating the true identity of the murderer or the contents of this treasure chest I don’t get to enjoy the feeling of finding out from an external source and as a GM I can miss watching my players enjoyment as they discover something unexpected. I dig the feeling of being an explorer in an otherworld with its own kind of base reality. When I get to change the base reality too much in the player role, it can take me out of it a bit and remind me that we’re just playing a game and of course it’s all just made up. I like getting into the illusion of being in a realm with some kind of objective reality just like ours does, treating the fantastical situation my character is in as if it was real to them.

So how can we give players both the joys of setting narrative creation and the joys of discovery in a mysterious world? Let them make the game world with you in the first session! They get to enjoy helping create a setting that is personally interesting and engaging to them and then return to the more limited perspective of the player character. There are still secrets to discover, and events that occur throughout the length of the game. The difference from the traditional wholly GM created setting is that from the very first game without any extra reading or homework, your players are familiar, connected, and more deeply engaged with the background lore of the world because they made it. There’s several sweet games and blogs that have fun collaborative worldbuilding procedures and I’ve cobbled together my process from a few of them.

My Collaborative World Building Process:

Sources: Beyond the Wall: Further Afield, Microscope, Dungeon World: The Perilous Wilds, Build Your World- Yochai Gal, Worldbuilding as Team Support- Prismatic Wasteland

Materials:

Blank sheet of paper or other writing surface, bigger is better.
Pencils and erasers (or markers if you’re using a big whiteboard. You can also do this online on a shared whiteboard page through Discord, Microsoft Whiteboard, or your VTT of choice.)

Steps:

Go around the table with introductions and ask for something you enjoy about playing RPG’s. This is more for new groups to each other but it’s fun and useful to hear what your longtime friends specifically dig about gaming. The GM or a nominated player should make sure to take notes of everyones contributions throughout the process so there’s a record of the collabertive setting framework after this is done.
Explain the one sentence concept for the game as the GM. This is a good time to set the scope. Is this on a lost fantasy continent? A star sector around a black hole? An island chain after an apocalypse? An ancient underground megastrucure? Keep this super brief and open, this isn’t the time to have a bespoke premise you’re married to as it limits things too much or might not fit the setting that emerges from the end of the process. Note that you are also a Player and will contribute as well anytime the process has all the players add an element so don’t feel like this is the only place you’ll get creative input.
Using the Palate concept from Microscope by creating a list of elements players can Add or Ban. Each player says anything they want to Add or Ban from the setting. This gives some initial colors for the palate (yeeah!) that we’ll be painting the world with. Do a round of turns for everyone at the table twice. Generally Add things you want but think others wouldn’t expect in the setting and Ban things you don’t want but think others would expect in the setting. Players discuss their picks, everyone should dig the Adds and Bans that are here and have a consensus this is a fun list to play.
Each player adds one Truth of the Known World. These are simple statements of 1-2 sentences from each player that are absolutely true about the world and help define it. The GM asks some followup questions to the player and takes notes to have some inspiration fuel to expand on these later.
Go around the table 1x and each player outlines a Region. They draw a boundary shape around an area on the map and name it, which can be a political region or geographical terrain. Describe it in a few sentences.
Go around the table 2x and every player marks a Major Location on the map and names it each go round. This could be any type of interesting location to have in the world where some kind of adventure could happen. Give a few sentences describing the place. If players are stuck or GM wants to encourage specific varieties of areas they can have the players roll on a table to determine the type of area they’re detailing. For example, Beyond the Wall-Further Afield uses a 1d8 Table with 1. Major City, 2. Ancient Ruins, 3. Human Settlement, 4. Recent Ruins, 5. Inhuman Settlement, 6. Monsters’ Lair, 7. Source of Power, 8. Otherworld which I used this process before but any table of location types that fits the setting premise could work well.
Go around the table 2x and every player adds a detail to someone elses Major Location or embellish upon it each go round.
Go around the table 2x with every player drawing a connector like roads, tunnels, or rivers on the map between Regions or Major Locations.
Pick a Starting Location on the map from the existing Major Locations or decide to place another together.
Make an inset minimap or use another piece of paper for the Starting Location Map. Each player will place a Specific Place within the Starting Location depending on the Starting Location and describe it in a few sentences. A village, starport, bustling port city, slimy goblin cave network, or apocalypse vault will all have different types of Places.
If there’s still time in the session, build characters together. Why are they working together? Where are they from on the setting map? It’s best to do this after you’ve got the world made as it helps make the process easier by providing background for making characters that fit the setting that everyone around the table already knows.

12. Done!*

13. Not you GM! You still have to do whatever your preferred style of game prep is and flesh out the part of the setting the players will initially be starting at and directly interacting with. Don’t do the same level of more detailed prep outside of the Starting Location and places they’re likely to go to in the first session or two unless you’re having fun with the process and not feeling burnt out.

Collaborative Setting Creation Overview:
Add or Ban Elements: Go around the table asking everyone for a pick, 2 per player
Truths of The World: 1 per player
Regions: 1 per player
Important Locations: 2 per player
Details to Important Locations: 2 per player on other players Locations
Add Connecters Between Locations: 2 per player
Game Starting Location: Players pick
Specific Places at the Starting Location: 1 per player

Disclaimer: With brand new RPG players, if you have an inconsistent cast of players coming and going in an open table, or if available play time is tight and the game is limited to a few sessions. I would probably skip this as it will take up at least most of a session.

It’s a fun worldbuilding activity but still less fun than actively playing the game for most folks. For people there for a single game I think it’s important to get people actually playing the game within like 30 minutes of sitting down at the table (or screen). I’ve heard too many stories of people turned off from RPGs for years because they spent 4 hours planning a game or flipping through books to create characters together the first time they tried.

Bonus Sci Fi Tweak:

Just make the locations whole planets, defined with a couple sentences. Build it on a hex map if you’re running something like Traveller or Stars Without Number. Mothership works fine on a blank page with connecting jump lines and distances added as part of the process.

Example from Real Players: Land of Yorth

This is messy, partial, and has typos as it’s my actual hasty notes from recording player input and running a basic version of this process live. I’ve made changes to the premise and massive additions but this formed the core framework of a setting I’ve played with six different game groups over years of play and now use as my default home fantasy campaign setting. Thanks Dani, Rayne, and Alex for planting these seeds with me. A loose scribbled setting outline with player input like this can lead to years of fun.

Setting Truths:

We live in the shadow of a great civilization that has fallen, things used to be better.
There’s a great war happening in the distance
Dinosaurs and amphibians/large reptiles
There’s no widespread concrete proof of the specific nature of gods or their existence.
The Ancient’s grasp exceeded their reach and thus weird magic and strange critters.

Regions:

1. Land of Spikes and Pits. Exceptionally hostile, foilage struggles to growth. Ancient warzone, pools of toxic liquid. The Wasters are the only ones who know the ways. Undetonated minefield things. Killer machines that rip flesh off. Rust Red dirt.

2. The Weeping Swamp: Very hot, called weeping because trees leak and sap everywhere. Known for huge amphibians and slugs. Often very foggy.

3. The Drake Marches: It’s separated by a mountain range that scrape the sky and dragon warlords and their cultist followers always in combat. Like Siberia

4. The Fallow Fields. Ancient overgrown and untended vineyards and farms for miles. Agricultural autonoma still trying to do their jobs in the fields and often threatening. Feral overbred livestock. Vegetables that eat humans. A group that claims to be the heir to the Ancient Empire dwells among the fields in ancient buildings turned into fortifcation.

5. The Thorne Woods: Dinosaurs, brambles, ferns

Major Area

1. Lost City of Arkon. It is like a maze inside. The walls and the streets and the streets even move. It’s a former port city of the ancients. An ancient ship and it still guards the port to this day. Ghost ship or magical steam ship?

3. The Port of Spoota. City of glass trade and spices. Everyone walks giant bearded dragons. Walled city with nice oasis, water. Rich as hell, sick gems. Music and food in the streets. It is NICE. More hirarchy. All of their structures is glass, super strong glass in a variety of colors. Weapons made of very sharp hard glass. Independently invented, ubiquitous technology.

Accuracy 20: Right on! Bonus information

5. The Bronze Tower. Big Tower that goes up to the sky, linked to the ground by enormous chains. Dead settlement at the base. All sorts of remains and mutated former residents. Something is in it.

7. The Smoking Basin. Volcanic ruins of an ancient dwarven citadel.

9. The Three Sisters- Major waypoint with trade for Spoota. Goods travel through there, trading stronghold. Culturally made up of folks from distant lands. Anything goes! Seabeasts in the area. Densely populated one seedyish. Rocky crags. C.R.E.A.M. Legendary sea monster sleeps for many years before rising once more. Serpentine monster like an underwater dragon. Hasn’t risen in over a century.

11. The Absence of Wealth: Former enormous pit mine spanning over 10 miles, riddled with sinkholes, industrial machine. Tons of ancient tools, equipment and wierd, and iron. People living along the sides of the pit and inside some of the still former equipment.

12. Rocky Death- Kalodon the Unkillable, an enormous scarred t-rex. In the middle of the forest a huge cave filled with mini ecosystem lairs within.

14. Citadel of the Lizard Regent. Lizard society is genderless, bloodlines important. The clans have been recently unified under the Lizard Regent.

Starting Location

Arro’s Stand: Nobody knows who Arro is. An Arosi is someone from there.

Arro’s Rite: Rite of passage once a year to bring back a successful big hunt to the village.

The Village: Rocky, wastey, rabbits, agave, and edible big lichens. Occasional ambulatory vegetables.

Hell’s Kitchen: Out of an old tower ruin, exiles from another plane. Human attitude, currency, red demon person sized. Grumpy, I hate Mondays. Townsfolk, reacted with fear and now regard with nonchalance. Shazira, goes by Shaz.

Scrapyard and bits and bobs, run by one of the people from land and spikes and pits. Hand cranked macerators, accumulated. You pick through. Zakephron the gobliny, hairy scrapmaster.

Ancient Bathhouse- poorly maintained but still works, based on some hot springs. Quiet Old Lady, nobody knows her old age. Mama Gams.

Town Militia: Big spikey wall with crossbows, on top of steep mesa with windy single wide path going up, used to be a fortress.

Put Your RPG Campaign on a Deadline (It’ll Be Okay.)

Posted on July 10, 2024July 10, 2024 by Joel H

Games don’t last forever. I really want them to but a perpetual game is an impossible goal by definition. So many cool things can emerge from a really long term game that strives towards that longevity but in my experience I haven’t been able to pull it off. Life happens. People move, schedules change. A gap between cancelled sessions goes too long and the game world grows fuzzy and forgotten. Or the players or GM gets bored with the type of campaign and wants to try something new.

I’ve designed a few sprawling sandbox campaigns with intrigue and hidden lore, 80% of which never get the chance to see the light of play. I know that this is impractical and against my own advice to focus on player facing lore, but it’s a guilty pleasure and I get lost in it. I’m also definitely not the only one who struggles with this problem of never satisfactorily finishing a campaign.

https://slyflourish.com/facebook_surveys.html#conclusions

So if I acknowledge I am not going to get the years of play time needed to experience the emergent joys of a persistent forever campaign I can design a campaign that better fits my life as it is, not for an ideal version of it. A campaign where I can already see the end on the horizon when I ritually strangle the game to death on the appointed date. We can get to all the good stuff!

This is also less intimidating for new players. Signing up for a weekly event that has no end that may or may not be fun for them is a lot to commit to fit into a schedule. A campaign limited to just a couple specific months is a lot easier and lower pressure to plan on and fit into a busy life. The two campaigns that I managed to wrap up with a satisfying conclusion had less than 15 sessions and were planned to end by then. The feeling for both me and the players was sweet! Instead of abandoning the otherworld to gather dust frozen midway though we were able to get a fun sense of closure and enjoy the satisfaction you get from the feeling of completion as the game came to a definitive end.

Looking at my past games I’ve usually managed to play an average of like 13 sessions before the game ends. My record is ~23. I like to play weekly.

My current play goal is that my campaigns will be designed to end by 11 sessions. (+ or – 2). When designing a good limited run campaign I think there’s a few principles that are handy to keep in mind.

Nightmare Garden for The Shrike by Jantiff Illustration

1. Define the Campaign’s Dramatic Question

This question is the theme of the campaign, the central pole that everything revolves around. Unlike a more meandering picaresque campaign style, there is a clear question this campaign is about. Most sessions contains some adventure content that impacts the ultimate answer to that question. These are SMART questions (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) that will be definitively answered by the last session of the campaign.

Examples
Will the cult be able to complete its awful ritual?
Who murdered Lenore?
Can the marooned PC’s escape the cursed island?
Will the adventurers be able to survive the dungeon and get enough loot to pay off their debts before they explode?
Can the zombie plague be contained?
Will the Vikings decide to go to war?
Will the stolen Maltese Falcon be found in time?
Will the alien invaders conquer the city?
Can the bounty hunters hunt down John the Skinner?
Who will win the mayoral election?
Are robots sentient and will they get rights?
Will the crew be able to heist the casino?
Which warring party will gain the throne?
Can the Dark Lord be defeated before the Equinox?
Will the ragtag fleet survive long enough to find Earth?

2. The Player’s Actions Decide How the Campaign Question is Answered.

While more focused, this campaign format is not a railroad or a non-interactive movie. How the campaign’s dramactic question is answered is largely up to the actions of the player characters. The PC’s should be characters that have a goal and care about how the campaign question will be answered. I think it is of crucial importance that it is possible that they can fail in their goal of achieving a certain resolution to the campaign question.

This is, I think, one of the most important freedom’s in an RPG- the freedom to fail and see what interesting things happen from there.

An “If the Players Do Nothing” future timeline like the one in Deep Carbon Observatory which inspired the same section in Desert Moon of Karth is a handy way of having a default answer to the campaign question that you can tweak in response to player actions. Factions may also want to answer the questions in a specific way that may align or be opposed to the player’s interests. Using a dynamic faction system is another way to create an answer to the campaign question that surprises the GM too.

3. Start With a Possible Endgame in Mind

To wrap things up neatly there can be an awesome climatic event or location at the end that will hold the answer to the campaign’s main question, all the threads converging here at the final session. This climax or ultimate revelation or location might be soft gated by required information, allies, power, or items that can be acquired in other sessions adventures. I think it’s fun to write a sweet overdesigned set piece for an epic conclusion as long as the GM stays open to tweaking or even possibly throwing it out entirely and improvising if unpredictable player actions and campaign developments require it. Manufacturing the premise for a likely climactic scene where the question is answered can be cool as long as the way the climatic situation is resolved will be decided by what the players do and have done previously instead of having a prescripted outcome.

A crushing and specific defeat is a fine ending to a campaign, just as a resounding triumph. The important thing is that the question was answered in a definite way even if it’s something like “Now, we’ll never know.” or “Everything is doomed.” It’s fine if the players are able to skip a bit faster to the end through clever play. Since the resolution of the dramatic question is the purpose of the campaign the end is whenever the question is resolved by the players actions.

3. Connect Your Adventure Sites

I like to work in region based campaign design where several adventure sites are created in a specific constrained geographic region. In the excellent Silent Legions sandbox horror RPG, Kevin Crawford recommends starting with 9 adventure locations within your region (megadungeon, kingdom, city, wilderness, moon, whatever it is)- which seems like plenty for a limited run campaign. Each of these individual location adventures can be designed on a scale likely to be completed in a single session. This episodic format helps the campaign keep momentum towards and gives every session more variety than being filled with a single section of one location adventure.

The PC’s should always have enough information to keep them moving in an interesting direction. The players should know what the dramatic question of the campaign is by the very first session. Each adventure location has its own dramatic question (even if it’s as simple as a traditional “Can we loot this place and survive?”)

Most of the resolved answers to these questions draw the PC’s closer to answering the campaign’s question. In order to help make sure the PC’s have a lead they want to follow it’s good to offer at least 3 hooks (LINK three clue rule) that point to other adventure locations

That said, I like how there’s tons of X-Files episodes that are unrelated to the show’s central questions. The bendy hibernating guy who eats livers has nothing to do with the overarching alien conspiracy plot. But due to the limited run format of this campaign we need a higher ratio of campaign question related sessions to unrelated ones. Silent Legions recommends that 20% of adventure locations be unrelated to the central campaign premise. This seems like a nice number to give some variety to a focused campaign.

The Conspyramid diagram from Night’s Black Agents RPG is another handy tool that visualizes a campaign tracing the levels of a vampiric conspiracy as a sort of dungeon crawl towards the ultimate answer to the campaign’s dramatic question. I’ve focused some on investigation focused campaigns in this post but dungeon delving or wilderness exploration works with this same framework too. The party pursues their same goal of answering the campaign’s ultimate question “Can the PC’s find the lost Cloud Ship of The Weeping Autarch?” “Can the PC’s get to the inner sanctum of Badkill Dungeon and get the Doom Gem?”

Here’s an example campaign adventure site map I just threw together based on some partial notes from the limited 11 session Delta Green Nevada investigation sandbox game I ran to completion along with a couple campaign question unrelated location sites for variety. The dotted lines represents hooks or clues leading to other sites. The entire map (a 1976 highway map absolutely scribbled with location annotations, spooky sketches, cryptic expressions and stored in a combo locked leather briefcase along with some other weird props.) was made available to players near the start of the campaign to give them more info to make adventure choices.

5. Leave Wiggle Room In The Number of Sessions.

Players are unpredictable and wily creatures and some things will be a lot quicker or take more time than you anticipate. If a particular adventure takes two sessions instead of one. While you are putting some gentle pressure it’s not worth turning into a demanding wagon driver, spurring your players on faster. Sometimes they’ll find things interesting. With a bit of wiggle room for slow sessions, or unexpected left turns that have you scrambling to expand on the campaign world.

Also conversely if they breeze past content you find interesting to move on towards the ultimate question, you don’t need to drag them back to check it out. Just like you shouldn’t force your players to explore every single room of a dungeon, they don’t need to interact with every adventure site in your campaign. The goal of the characters is working towards answering the campaign question to their liking. If they bypass a few adventures on their way that’s just reasonable. If you want to entice them to explore more adventure sites, one way is to include useful contents in them that could help them make sure the resolution to the campaign’s dramatic question is the one they want (Resources, information, power, etc.)

6. Still Wanting More? Renew for Season 2!

Blades in the Dark RPG recommends treating each campaign like a season of TV that ends after a dozen sessions or so. The main questions get resolved by the end of the season. This chunks a campaign into discrete segments that allow for multiple satisfying end points whenever the campaign draws to a close. To start again, build on the events of the previous season and introduce a new dramatic question for Season 2. Since you’re not beholden to squeezing profits out of a dead horse you don’t need to crank out 33 seasons of The Simpsons- you can quit renewing whenever you find you or the table is satisfied with what they’ve gotten out of the campaign and interested in something fresh.

Fixing Moria: Metro System Megadungeon Design

Posted on May 19, 2024May 19, 2024 by Joel H

The megadungeon has a creative call to it, this grand and imposing space mapped out for adventure, a beckoning otherworld to explore. People dig superlatives, the biggest, the tallest, the most dangerous, the most powerful, the deepest. But the challenge of making something epic in scope can swamp even the most dedicated GM.

It’s very hard to make a truely big space mapped out to a dungeon level of detail, as scope increases the amount of work required to fill the space well increases exponentially. Even some of the largest megadungeons could fit into the footprint of a large mall you could explore in a half day (though a mall with the lights off and filled with monsters and traps would take longer to survey).

To oversimplify this excellent post on the sandbox triangle: High detail, high freedom, or lower effort. Pick two of these qualities for your megadungeon or sandbox design.

For example: If I wanted to make a gameable version of The Forbidden City at high detail, and a high freedom of navigation, I’d be looking at keying ~8000 rooms if I wanted to key the entire thing as a dungeon.

The biggest published megadungeon I know, Ardun Vul, is around 2000 rooms and just 500 yards at its widest. It’s huge, monumental for a dungeon- but compared to realworld spaces, it’s nothing special in scale. I usually don’t try to predict the future but I feel like it’s a safe bet that there will never be an 8,000 room megadungeon that’s better than Arden Vul (which almost buckles under the sheer scale of its contents as a convient GM reference work), though someone is welcome to take a couple decades of their creative life to prove me wrong.

Megadungeons and ruined cities (a sort of open air megadungeon, everything’s a dungeon) can be hard to pull off. My favorite solution is to keep the required effort manageable, player agency and navigational freedom high, and cut detail, reserving the bulk of creative description energy for the specific points of interest inside the megadungeon or lost city. Cut the time at the table spent playing and describing stuff in the middle, between the most interesting node areas of your megadungeon.

For running something like the Mines of Moria, instead of filling half a session with detailed literal miles of mostly vacant corridors, halls, and chambers maybe roll an encounter check or two and describe the miles of interstitial hallways and rooms between your detailed and keyed areas in a quick chunk of evocative description sorta like this:

“The passage twisted round a few turns, and then began to descend. It went steadily down for a long while before it became level once again. The air grew hot and stifling, but it was not foul, and at times they felt currents of cooler air upon their faces, issuing from half-guessed openings in the walls. There were many of these. In the pale ray of the wizard’s staff, Frodo caught glimpses of stairs and arches, and of other passages and tunnels, sloping up, or running steeply down, or opening blankly dark on either side. It was bewildering beyond hope of remembering.”
The Fellowship of The Ring

Having too many navigation decisions in interstitial areas is increasingly counterproductive as adventure site scale increases. RPG adventures can be chunked into different blocks of time and space, maybe a 10 minute exploration turn, a several hour watch in the wilderness or a six mile hex, maybe an entire week of downtime. These discrete chunks are boxes to fill with something interesting enough to note or interact with in the game. If most of these boxes are completely empty I think you either need more content or less boxes to fit the scale of the adventure.

You could break things up into abstract narratively significant scenes like a movie as a number of RPG’s do- but that’s not my preference. I like the feeling of specific time and space. But since we can’t narrate every second, we have to decide where to use the squishy CPU power in our skulls. So we skip and zoom in. A fully detailed and keyed dungeon works well up to a certain scale but in dealing with ruined cities and truely mega dungeons, a pointcrawl style between detailed keyed dungeon nodes offers my favorite balance of detail, freedom, and GM effort, as well as speed at the table.

My thinking on this is most in debt to John Arendnt’s work on The Black City project- which I still hope gets published in a complete form at some point. In one post on node based dungeons he notes:

“This node-based style feels EPIC, and supports vast underground complexes worthy of Moria. It lets you separate your major areas geographically and establish strong themes at each node. The dungeons and lairs are not so expansive that it’s exhausting to stock them. Putting more distance between lairs, factions, and other inhabitants of the dungeon enhances the verisimilitude. It’s much easier to manage dungeon dressing and similar details by starting with a small, strongly themed lair or mini-dungeon complex. And from a preparation perspective, it allows the referee to develop the mythic underworld in much smaller chunks – one mini dungeon at a time – instead of having to generate a sprawling 100-room complex. It combines most of the best aspects of the wilderness hex crawl and the graph-based dungeon into a seamless continuum.”

A great example of these types of node based dungeon map design are metro systems.

Each station on the DC Metro Map, is a point of interest, somewhere to the tunnels in between. Different colored routes offer varying paths with different encounters, routes. In your megadungeon/ruined city, these could be routes like “The Webwrought Path, The Worm Tunnels, The Trail of the Candlelit Pilgrims, or The Imperial Way” with associated perils, scenery, and encounters and inform the environment of the dungeon nodes along their path.

One issue with real metro maps is that they’re designed for practicality in transport and offer heaps of stops right next to each other to be most convenient for their ridership to access a large portion of the city. This isn’t exactly the right metaphor for how to design a sweet node based dungeon.

So in Granada there’s a tourist “train” that looks like this.

It runs in a route around the city in a repeating loop every day. People can buy a one way trip or an all day hop on hop off ticket around the city including a couple stops barred to any other vehicle traffic. On the hottest days in the summer it looks like a ship crammed full of damned souls with no AC.

The ticket price, route, and purposes of the train don’t meet the day to day needs of anyone living there and would be completely impractical for general transportation. It’s designed for managed discovery of neat places for tourists. It’s not trying to present a comprehensive entire city, but an impressionistic representation of the city, a road accessible highlight reel that tries to give a kinda feeling for what makes the place tick.

Video game towns like in Skyrim are similarly impressionistic, trying to give an idea of the city while making a much smaller version then would exist in reality. You could spend your time detailing every street, corner store, and fountain plaza but it wouldn’t be a good return on your time investment. Through the power of tabletop RPG creativity you can have a huge town of thousands or a, you just gloss over the majority of the area, apply a fuzzy lens. This area is abstracted through a pointcrawl.

Fantasy adventuring parties are a kind of tourist, outsiders in the area under time pressure, searching for the highlights. They’re not generally trying to find the routes and places in town that allow them the most convenient day to day mundane life. They’re skipping over 90% of the place to find the palaces, cathedrals, royal gardens, and tombs that hold the treasure they’re looking for in the brief visit available. Many players want to be transported somewhere, to travel and see wondrous vistas when they play in your role playing game world. So give them some cool shit to see and focus your creative energies on these hotspots and let them check out the ones that appeal! Hop on, hop off.

So metaphorical megadungeon metro systems are great. I also think it’s cool to put an actual subway in a dungeon. So many dungeons are the ruins of ancient advanced precursor civilizations why not put a magic or sci-fi podway in there. There’s something fantastical about this to me. As someone who grew up not too far from the middle of nowhere in Nevada, mass transit still feels a bit magical to me, in the same category as castles on peaks or dragons.

Pictured: Average Nevada Commute

Here’s an early draft diagram of the volcano megadungeon, the fallen keep of Cinderstrom I’ve been working on for too long. I used Scapple to make this and dig that program a lot for dungeon planning, but any type of flowchart software would work. There’s also this site which lets you make your own custom metro maps that fit the classic aesthetic and iconography if you’d like to make dungeons that way.

Who knows where the hell the pods go?! Smash some random buttons in a dead language and find out. Maybe one of the pods is sentient and challenges you to riddles and threatens to crash if you don’t come up with good ones. Huge variety of fun options for gameplay with a fantasy podway.

NO MEANINGFUL LORE IF STRICT INTERACTIVITY IS NOT MAINTAINED

Posted on December 23, 2023December 23, 2023 by Joel H

If your players can’t touch, smell, be murdered by, manipulate, blow up, discover, or loot your history it doesn’t matter.. Since it’s my blog I can have opinions and I think that if setting history isn’t designed or revisited with the background thought, “How can this maybe lead to interesting gameplay for my players?” it’s not very good for RPG’s.

Like the lonely fun of world building is awesome but as it exists to serve a sandbox adventure game format it should provide Information to your players that lead to Choices that have Impact. Like if I want to develop an intricate 6 tier caste system for my fallen empire of Different Elves.™ That’s cool but why would the PC’s want to know about it? What choices does the information provide them with? What impact would these choices make?

Maybe the Different Elves restricted access to parts of their labyrinth cities by these castes and had magical doors that read the caste tattoo on the user’s palm before opening. Now understanding the society and knowing for example, the funerary practices prescribed for each of the castes becomes useful if the party wants to find some honey preserved Different Elf corpses to cut off a hand and open some magic doors. What if the Priest Aristocrat caste were cremated in a pit of eternal flame, making it difficult to open the particularly fancy doors with their caste name inscribed on it? Throw a few possible solutions into your world, knowing the PC’s may come up with something entirely different that works. You could have a tome of palm designs and the mystic ink needles that can permanently inscribe the arcane tomb secluded in an archive. You could have rumors of a buried maze villa where the resident Priest Aristocrat might still be frozen intact in ice from a cataclysmic icefall. This was like five minutes of spitballing, you can definitely do better spending a bit more time on it. One can have super weird deep history-but tie it into the gameplay itself for the PC’s to experience first hand and internalize which keeps the multiparagraph lore dumps to a minimum.

(Unless they seek out a sage or some other way they’re explicitly looking for that, some players actually dig hearing the history! Then a strange old rambling guy in the game is doing this long lore dump diagetically, not the booming omniscient voice of the GM some players wanted the dump from or not.)

I’m absolutely not against intricate worldbuilding, it’s great creative fun and provides a sense of an otherworld with its own reality. But I think it should be designed or shaped after the fact to provide information and secrets that lead to cool decisions that have an impact in the characters lives and world.

Lethal Company: My Favorite Dungeoneering Video Game

Posted on December 1, 2023December 1, 2023 by Joel H

Lethal Company seems to be blowing up on Steam currently and it’s the most dungeoneering fun I’ve ever had and I think it’s very accessible to get into. It’s also the best digital approximation of a session of Mothership RPG I’ve found I really, really, like it and think a lot of my enjoyment comes from what I love about OSR dungeoneering.

In Lethal Company, you’re players on a team of up to 4 interns/subcontractors that has a clunky spaceship on lease from The Company. You land your ship on a series of moons and delve into abandoned industrial structures with your friends over in game voice chat looking for scrap. And these moons and structures are filled with a variety of awful creatures that want you dead. Here’s a couple things I enjoy about the game that can be applied to OSR dungeoneering.

1. Debt

In the game you have 3 days to reach your profit quota from the scrap and items you’re able to recover from your expeditions. Each time you land on a moon is 1 day of your time. In the first days if things get too dangerous or a crew member dies it’s easier to call it early and try to get out alive with a minor haul, but as time gets closer to your terminal deadline the pressure of a fatal default leads to riskier decisions in spite of really not wanting to go back in. “I don’t care what you saw in there, get back in- we’ve got to make quota!” This corporate horror framing helps answer the horror RPG question of “Why don’t they just leave this awful place?” and pushes players to constantly have to weigh their greed against their fear on each run in an awesome push your luck effect.

I like this framing even more than the traditional OSR treasure as XP for encouraging adventurous behavior in a survival horror setting. It’s not just how you get better but if you don’t extract the required value in goods, you’re dead or as good as. The pressure of debt on your character is a constant needle to take risks or actions you don’t want to in order to keep your head above water and live to delve another day with an even higher quota to reach. Also relatable to lots of players.

2. Limiting Communication

The best way to play is using the in-game voice chat. Directional audio is excellent so you can hear where your buddy is as they walk around you, voices echo in canyons, and get muffled underwater. If you go out of audible range you need to carry an in game walkie talkie and communicate with a crackling static filter. It’s not uncommon to discover a coworker has died only by not hearing them for a second, turning a corner and seeing their twisted body and still glowing flashlight and having to breathlessly report it to the rest of the team.

A monitor inside the ship offers a radar that can switch cameras to view each player as a blue dot on the map. requires someone to stay back at the ship as overwatch instead of haul scrap if they want to use it and communicate intel about the layout of the facility, green dots representing goodies, and the presence and movement of red dots representing hostile creatures via the walkie.

One of the worst feelings is when you hear a cut short scream over the walkie from ground control person and know you don’t have anyone scanning for dangers around you and you’re going to have to go back there and face whatever killed them to escape the moon

Due to the difference in medium this is hard to pull off in tabletop RPG’s but I think for novelty occasions pulling players into a different Discord channel or room of a building and the GM jumping between them fairly rapidly to reduce deadtime is a fun gimmick to bring out rarely.

Splitting the party and cutting between characters’ viewpoints while the players are at the same table would be the more efficient way of doing this 90% of the time and I’ve used this to good effect in horror games. Foreshadowing dread is spooky and provides some of the joys of knowing dread when you see the thing moving behind a character in a horror film even if it doesn’t provide the actual lack of information. But as both the knowing audience and unknowing participant, tabletop RPG’s are in an interesting space between a horror movie and a horror video game and I think provokes cool feelings and experiences that are distinctive from both.

3. Woeful Underequipment

The Company recommends a rookie starter package that costs more credits then you start with, which sets the tone for the level of employee benefits and support you can expect in the game. This leads to creativity through necessity. Without enough money to get radios for everyone do we have one person stay at the ship? Do we just all run for it without someone watching the radar monitor? Dave died carrying the stop sign we found, but if I pick it up I can club this spider with it. As teams amass more credits they never have enough for everything they might want. Should we buy a teleporter or pay for fuel to get to the moon Titan and it’s more lucrative and dangerous terrain? This vibes with the high focus on equipment and making the best of the tools you have with the environment in OSR type dungeon play.

4. Go Back For The Body!

The company docks your pay if you leave a body behind. This often leads to fleeing a beast that’s just slaughtered your coworker only to double back sneakily after being reminded of the cost for leaving them there. This has the same effect of the Funerals for the Fallen house rule of gaining the XP of fallen teammates for the equivalent spent on proper funerals and I think it’s fun and leads to stressful and occasionally silly gameplay benefits.

5. Swings between Terror and Hilarity

I haven’t played any other video game that pivots so strongly and frequently between the two poles. It’s a great time hanging out with your friends or nice internet strangers and joking and shooting the breeze that gets interrupted by moments of sheer terror and long stretches of building tension. The games PS1 era graphics also give it a goofy primativeness that also makes it spookier in a retro analog horror way.

You very, very, rarely can get the feeling of true horror around the table in RPGs. Trying to enforce a single vibe at the table is counter productive. Humor is used to defuse tension and is a natural reaction and also fun.

On the flipside I also think that a GM trying to be consistantly funny can rapidly turn into pure farce. Every game I’ve played at a con that marketed itself as humorous wasn’t as funny or fun to me as the unexpected laughs in other RPG sessions.

Silliness is an emergent property of gaming and throwing too much of the GM’s own from the start often overspices the stew. The gameplay in Lethal Company acts as a GM that plays the horrific straight man to player shenanigans through the setting but with a cheeky sprinkle of dark humor that doesn’t take itself over seriously. It’s nice to have both things.

Stolen graphic from the excellent Mothership Warden’s Operation Manual

6. Easy to Get Into The Game

I’ve played like 12 hours total so far. Multiple times I’ve had a friend or random player join for their first round ever and told them. “You push 1 to dance emote, 2 to point, and we need to go into spooky buildings and grab trash to take it back to the ship and pay off the debt on the monitor or we’re dead in 3 days.” And they were good to go! When you die and get to spectate the rest of the team with the other dead folks in a voice chat, commenting on the livings impending peril and laughing about how you kicked the dust-this downtime is brief because each day is limited to ~10 minutes at which point the ship autopilot takes off at midnight. And the experience of watching mirrors my feelings when I’ve died in Mothership, OSE, or another game I can expect to hop back in lickity split without spending two hours of character creation.

7. Player Skill over Character Skill

There’s no permanent progression between plays, you can buy some better equipment like a shovel, teleporter, boombox, or a romantic table for your ship as you gain credits on each playthrough. Everyone is playing the same noodly armed intern in an oxygen mask. Much like Mothership there’s not really leveling up (though the company gives you XP that leads purely to a fancier job title on your hazard suit) and when your crew inevitably falls short of quota eventually you’re given a High Score. You get better at knowing the behaviors of creatures, natural hazards, and the differences between moons on each subsequent run and can pass this info on to new players.

8. Teamplay

The life of the game is your teammates. Your fates are welded to each other and the team lives in dies on the mistakes,triumphs, banter, and sacrificial monster distractions to allow the other intern with the loot to get away from each other.

More than that, the real person on the other end of the is what makes it fun. Because communication is such an important part of the game you spend a lot of time just chatting with the other folks on the team. There’s enough downtime and goofiness in the game that you get to just talk as well instead of constantly aiming for optimized behavior. On a mechanistic level there’s not that much going on in the game loop and it could seem boring. Get scrap, go to other moons, meet quota, get higher quota, get more scrap. What makes it so replayable and entertaining is the specific humanity of the player behind the player character. I’ve had a blast with friends but also complete strangers who I developed a sense of genuine camaraderie with after 2 hours on a team shooting the shit while dancing and pointing at each other, creeping through dark facilities, stealing alien bee hives, and huffing strange inhalants, and hauling each others corpses. The game has a lot of space for emergent gameplay.

The human element of playing with other people towards a shared goal while being able to communicate and goof off with each other is a lot of what I love about RPG’s. While not able to reach the same highs of experience as GMing a table of good friends in person, Lethal Company offers a bit of that joyous experience- which is quite the achievement for a $10 video game.

Bonus: Steal the Premise for Your Fantasy RPG.

You and the other PC’s have been branded for your crimes with a geas sigil -the Holy Order of Tharn believe all members of society deserve a chance to contribute without being constrained to a prison. If you don’t haul out enough gold pieces worth of treasure from these awful holes in the ground in the pockmarked Valley of the Old Ones and deliver it to your debt holders outpost you’ll be burned to a crisp by your searing geas brand in 3 days. Perhaps you can find a way to break the geas by paying it off or rising against your captors but right now you’ve got a quota of 2000 gold pieces and daylight is waning.

*Debtors brand entirely stolen from a suggested framing for a Hot Springs Island campaign

Game Mastering Like a Park Ranger

Posted on April 13, 2023September 13, 2023 by Joel H

This is going to be one of those posts where someone says how Game Mastering in RPG’s is basically a lot like part of their work experience in another field. I’ll also get into the dangerous arena of providing GM advice. I’d like to tell you I’ll avoid cheesy reaches to fit the framework but make absolutely no guarantees.

“A GM wears many hats… just like a ranger!”

If you’ve been to a national park in the US you’ve probably seen an interpretive park ranger, they’re at the visitor center giving out maps and directions, giving campfire talks and slideshow programs, managing social media, and leading hikes. This was my main job before I started publishing and writing RPG material at Silverarm and the job I’m returning to for the summer season tomorrow again.

If the writing and publishing enterprise ever goes catastrophically belly up, it’s basically the only other career I’m any good at. There’s pros (gorgeous sunsets, strong community, lots of bears and marmots, feeling good about the work you’re doing) and cons (no healthcare for seasonal employees, bureaucratic red tape, increasingly underfunded agency budgets, and isolation), but overall I can definitely say I haven’t regretted my time wearing the funny hat.

Interpretation isn’t really education as there isn’t a desired specific pedagogic outcome. It’s the art of talking about vibes and trying to grapple with a big picture around the facts. A lot of the times when I say I did interpretive park ranger work people misunderstand and ask me what language I was interpreting for visitors. It’s a good question and not unrelated to what the work entails. It’s about the attempt to imperfectly translate environments, history, and broad ideas into a small amount of relatable human language that serve to ideally connect the visitor to an idea of some greater and unemcompassable whole- that of the place itself. This is not unlike what a GM tries to do at the table to translate the vistas of the private worlds inside their skulls into a place that players can comprehend and interact richly with.

It’s less important that someone walks away knowing a specific detail like that Mt. Rainier is 14,411 ft tall or that a kangaroo rat can go their entire life without drinking liquid water and pees solids. It’s the feeling and the broad ideas and overarching concepts communicated by related specific details that stick with them. How will climate change affect this place? What was it like to be alive during the Civil War? What does home mean? How do things adapt to the environment they live in? What are national parks for? How should we talk about difficult history?

Some of the best interpretive themes are big questions with information that attaches to this scaffolding and provides a variety of facts and perspectives, not an authoritative thesis from a lecturing “sage on a stage” bore with all the answers. Much like good game mastering, good interpretation is informed and altered by the interests and lived experiences of the visitor experiencing the program.

If you stage a cat burglary into any national park visitor center after hours you’ll find a copy of a 1957 book called Interpreting Our Heritage by Freeman Tilden to heist in the staff library, a landmark book in the interpretive field. In the last 66 years since this dude wrote it there’s been a lot of changes in the world and interpretive field but the work has remained popular. While elements of the book’s contents, uncritical historical perspectives, and its masculine generic pronouns have become dated, it has remained a central work and a powerful reference for environmental and historical interpretive work for years. In it, Tilden lays out some principles for providing interpretive programming that doesn’t suck or bore an audience to tears.

I’ve made the change of swapping the word ‘interpretation’ with ‘game mastering’ and ‘interpreter’ with ‘game master’ in each of the 6 Principles and from other quotes I’ve included from throughout the book as I think they’re just as relevant to running RPGs as they are to interpretation.

“Principle #1: Any Game Mastering that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.

Principle #2: Information, as such, is not game mastering. Game Mastering is revelation based on information.

Principle #3: Game Mastering is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.

Principle #4: The chief aim of Game Mastering is not instruction, but provocation.

Principle #5: Game Mastering should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phrase.

Principle #6: Game Mastering addressed to children should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.“

Here’s some elaboration on using some of Tilden’s principles in your RPG games.

Principle #1: Any game mastering that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile.

I think this is one of the core elements of running a game well. You’re not telling a personal story purely for your own enjoyment but collaborating on a shared experience that every player at the table finds engaging and interesting. This doesn’t mean that you should sacrifice your enjoyment. You have to present a world that’s relevant to your players interest and meet them at the intersection of your interests and experiences.

You need to meet people where their heads are at. Sometimes people just want to know where the bathroom is, sometimes someone wants to have a lengthy conversation on the history of the federal government displacing people from land they were already living on. The difference around the table is that being a Game Master doesn’t require being a public servant on the clock, it’s important for your players to meet you at the intersection of your interests as a participant in the game as well, everyone’s a participant at the table to have a good time.

On Immersion in the Game and Player Agency

“For remember, the visitor ultimately is seeing things through his own eyes, not those of the Game Master, and he is forever and ﬁnally translating your words as best he can into whatever he can refer to his own intimate knowledge and experience. I put the words as best he can in italics, because thus it will emphasize the importance of making this translation as easy as possible. It may not be too much to say that most history may be interpreted effectively (but of course not exclusively) by provoking the thought,‘‘Under like conditions what would you have done?’’
Freeman Tilden

As GM you words are the player’s window into this other world, everything they experience passes through the portal of your description. The situation should be detailed and their understanding of their place in it is clear. You open the door and…

“What do you do?”

To me this is the sound of freedom, I think there are no sweeter four words in a game master’s vocabulary. It’s at this moment where the player is able to walk through the portal of the imagination and use your description to inform their choices to interact with the world and the consequences of that. For my tastes as a player, the more meaningful choices I am provided with along with information to inform these choices and consequences to the actions, the better the game is. I’m preaching to the choir and understand other people have heaps of ways of enjoying RPG’s but to me an RPG session with a preplanned route and end, no matter how artfully concealed behind the GM screen is a withered dead thing, a pinned butterfly on a wall- the pale shadow of the colorful, living, erratically flapping thing it represents.

Principle #2: Information, as such, is not game mastering. Game Mastering is revelation based on information.

“People go to parks because of a keen realization that no picture or printed word, however brilliant, can do more than whet an appetite to experience with one’s own senses the grandeur and wonder nature has formed. No textbook, however instructional, can convey the feeling of reality that comes to us when we stand in the very places, among the identical objects.
Freeman Tilden

This year at GaryCon I got to play in a game with Victor Raymond and chatted afterwards about the best ways of introducing complex settings to players and some of the pitfalls folks can run into. He said something along the lines of who would you say knows more about London? Someone who’s read an intricate and lengthy Fodders travel guide to the city or someone who has actually been to London? You can recite a list of cultural facts and historical dates to your players, but the best way to learn about a setting is to play within it. You need to take them to London, Lankhmar, Sharn, or the Shire not just give them facts and lore about it to read up on.

In exploring the streets, squabbling factions, and sites of an imagined location through actual gameplay their knowledge will be acquired first hand and much more relevant and sticky through navigation of these imagined spaces. Much like there’s value and knowledge to be gained from watching a documentary about national park sites like Yosemite, Yellowstone, or Manzanar- but the sense of place and context gained through the first hand experience and context of occupying the same space and seeing the granite cliffs over the sunlit valley, herds of bison blocking an icy road, or a lone watchtower outside the site of an internment camp is more impactful.

When you describe the interior of a dungeon chamber or spaceship you’re not just telling the players about the facts. They don’t care if it has 11 dented pots and the hinges of the pots are made of copper and the drawers have 27 red forks, there’s a broom in the cover. You want to get the idea of the place across and you only have limited brain space in which to do it. Extraneous non-gameable, interactive, or evocative detail should be excised as players only attention span to take in. I’ve found that the rule of 3 is a good number to stick to for initial description about a place or situation as that seems to stick in the brain easier than a flood of extra detail but still provides enough imagery to be vivid and provoke a strong sense of place. Follow up questions from players can allow for further elaboration that’s directed by their curiosities.

Principle #3: Game Mastering is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.

This is generic enough to be cliche but I guarantee someone reading this needs to hear it. You’re going to suck some when you start because it takes time and effort to improve and that can be frustrating. I know I still suck at a lot of major GM skills after years of running. But there’s so much great resources out there to learn from and the biggest teacher is just time playing with friends and figuring out what you enjoy and don’t enjoy. Anyone can become a great GM, and you don’t need to be try to be the best GM in the world, you just need to have fun at your table. You have the capacity to improve and reach your players regardless of how bad you feel you are. The worst GM’s I’ve had were the ones who firmly believed they had perfected the art and had nothing left to learn. You have the ability within yourself and can improve these abilities through practice and passion as a journey without an end.

“The GM must use art, and at best he will be somewhat of a poet. This sounds frightening, I allow. I can see some of my readers shuddering at the thought and wondering where it leaves them. ‘‘But I never wrote a line of poetry in my life. You cannot expect me to be an artist.’’I reply: You do not know yourself. You have been so frustrated by the curatorship of unimportant details that you have forgotten your inborn talent. We are all, in some degree, poets and artists. If you mean you are not capable of the exquisite ﬂights of a John Keats or the rumbling organ tones of a Thomas Hardy, very well. None of us are. But we can have something of the perception of a poet without having the graphic skill. We can have a sense of joy at sounding a lovely chord, without being a virtuoso.”
Freeman Tilden

Principle #4: The chief aim of Game Mastering is not instruction, but provocation.

This is one of my favorite principles. Show, don’t tell. It is up for the player to meet you in the middle through the feelings you inspire from them.

In recent years someone coined an acronym to help NPS interpreters in training frame how they approach interpretive programming using a similar principle- ORACLE(the Only Right Answer Comes from the Lived Experience). Government loves to torture a turn of phrase into a misshapen acronym.
When I heard the phrase in employee training at a park in 2018 I felt uncomfortable with it and the entirely subjective feel of it. Were basic facts about science and history to be left up to feeling? Luckily that’s not the point.

The point is that the things that resonate most deeply are those that are arrived at through the filter of a visitors particular perspective and find meaning within their individual lens they view the world with- you shouldn’t lecture people on what to feel about a topic, only provide some fuel and a spark that lights their own consideration of the thing. As a GM it’s not your job to editorialize and tell the players something is scary, awesome, disgusting, or ensure their characters react and take actions in a specific way that you think is best. It’s the unpredictability how a player will perceive and interact with part of your game due to their individual nature that makes GMing different than the lonely fun of writing a fantasy novel. All you need to provide is the tinder of the situation in your world, lit by the spark of your particular style of description that attempts to show this situation to your players. Where and how the conflagration spreads from there is out of your hands.

On Telling Players What To Feel

These Alpine peaks know how to speak for themselves, and they speak a language that the world of people shares. An object, whether a mountain, a lake, a crystal, a Chippendale or an heroic act, is not made more beautiful by being called beautiful.- And the perception of beauty is always in the nature of a surprise. We sometimes humorously call overlooks in the National Park areas‘‘ohs and ahs’’ from the fact that these exclamations are the spontaneous manner in which the visitor expresses his wonder-struck feeling. Thus, in an interpretive sign you are not wise to describe any deﬁnite object as beautiful; besides being impertinent by infringing upon the visitor’s taste, you are interposing between him and the scene.
Freeman Tilden

Principle #5: Game Mastering should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phrase.

I think every bit of information and description provided in running a game should be focused on how it best presents the gameworld as living and complex multidimensional space. Different people also have varied interests and each player at the table will have preferences that will be met differently. Even the individual player and GM’s contain multitudes and variety in gameplay keeps things fresh. Sometimes they want to delve for gold and slaughter goblins. Even if you’re all deeply focused within a narrow subgenre of your game, there’s always room for some variation. Switching things up and providing different types of gameplay helps.

For example, a Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG campaign that has the adrenaline constantly cranked to 11 levels of horrifying can lose its power over time as players grow jaded and used to the non-stop terror train. Being able to breathe and experience the mundane, the suspenseful, the pleasant and the boring, make the moments of horrors much more affecting over a campaign.

In Alien like lots of great horror movies we spend a lot of time getting to know the crew and doing mundane things, arguing about shares, exploring strange structures, even experiencing some hardwon triumph at the end. It would be a much impoverished film if it was nothing but 120 minutes of chest bursting, vent crawling, and head biting. Pacing is often seen as something only prevalent in more narrative railroad styles of play but through introducing opportunities for a player directed wider variety of experiences from dungeon crawling, to intrigue, to seafaring, to goofy social interacts in your campaign the emotional highs and lows will hit harder and be more fully appreciated.

On Limiting Disconnected Background Lore in Favor of Gameable Content

It is far better that the visitor to a preserved area, natural, historic or prehistoric, should leave with one or more whole pictures in his mind, than with a melange of information that leaves him in doubt as to the essence of the place, and even in doubt as to why the area has been preserved at all.
Freeman Tilden

“…you sometimes note an impatience on the part of a specialist that the public does not show sufficient interest in his assemblage of information as such. He is likely to conclude that the average person is somewhat stupid. The opposite is true. It is a sign of native intelligence on the part of any person not to clutter his mind with indigestibles.”
Freeman Tilden

Principle #6: Game Mastering addressed to children should not be a dilution of the presentation to adults but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.

Running games for kids isn’t for everyone as the interests and temperaments of the audience can vary a lot from the adult game. It’s important to differentiate the type of game you’re playing. You’re probably not going to run a Game of Thrones political intrigue sandbox with your 11 year old cousins. There’s also lots of opportunity for really fun game play using the trends of younger groups and it’s worth spending the time tweaking your normal adult style to prepare a game that plays into those particular strengths.

General Ideas for Kids Games: (from my experience and stolen from others)
1. Kids often like to come up with creative solutions.
2. Attention spans can be short, keep things as flowing and simple as possible.
3. Chaotic murder hobo behavior is widespread. Embrace it, don’t fight it.

Ben Milton of Questing Beast and several other notable designers and GM’s are also educators and Milton frequently notes that designing for kids has improved his adult games as well with the principles of clear simplification and openness he’s learned.

On Appealing to Kids With Your RPG Game

“If we cannot interest with our treasures those carefree young persons whose minds are at the height of receptivity, how can we hope to interest those adults who are inevitably fogged and beset by the personal and social worries of an uneasy world?
Freeman Tilden

The Secret Ingredient for Running A Dungeon

I am reminded of a party of visitors I joined to explore a limestone cave. The guide was amiable and personable, but he had made two major mistakes in the work he was pursuing—without catching. In the ﬁrst place,he had committed a recital to memory, and he suffered a lapse of memory before he had gotten very far. This may be a source of embarrassment to the interpreter, but it is worse for his auditors, for they do not merely bleed with him—they bleed for him. After that stoppage, our guide said, ‘‘Well, I’ll begin again. . ..’’ This time he sailed through.

But the second defect was the fatal one. He had undertaken this interpretive work without being in love. If you love the thing you interpret, and love the people who come to enjoy it, you need commit nothing to memory. For, if you love the thing, you not only have taken the pains to understand it to the limit of your capacity, but you also feel its special beauty in the general richness of life’s beauty.

Anything written without enthusiasm will be read without interest. You must be in love with your material.
Freeman Tilden

As GM’s we are guides to unknown caverns within the world, strange and distant stars, and soaring palaces of crumbling obsidian. Memorizing the exact route, planning the excursion to every moment and expecting no deviations whatsoever will not let players have an experience of exploring these fantastical places on their own without respect for their interests and self directed pathfinding. We are never able to reveal the whole fantastical vista that lies in our mind.

Our words and descriptions will never translate the whole of our imaginations to the tabletop. But when I’ve GM’d or played in my favorite games it’s the ones where we had collectively summoned this other world and together were there, sharing that fantastic landscape as a living creation of multiple engaged minds. There’s tons of skills to learn and there’s whole worlds of blogs, books, and advice videos to help you hone those and improve your Game Mastering but it takes that first ingredient to make the journey worthwhile.

Game Mastering at its best- is an act of love. Love for these games and their inspirations. Love for these otherworlds in your head. Love for yourself, your players, and that shared experience at the table. I don’t care if it sounds cheesy. We only have so many moments of real life to spend how we want, we might as well care deeply about what we spend them on.

Bonus Quotes from Tilden Applied to Gaming:

On Fancy Home Gaming Setups and Digital Tabletops:

No institution should install any mechanical devices until it knows that such gadgets can be adequately, continually, and quickly serviced. No matter how good they may be when they are working properly, they are a source of shame when they are allowed to be more than briefly inoperative; Gadgets do not supplant the personal contact.

On Experiences With Difficult People

“In the course of a long career, the GM will meet the pestiferous, the un-manageable, the ineducable, and some whose apparent reason for existence is to provide the hangman with work. These are not the many; they are the few. One who has suffered a number of attacks by poison ivy may get the idea that this malicious plant dominates the scenery. In truth it occupies only a little space in the whole ﬂoral luxuriance.”

Category: Game Mastering