Gaming in a New City

Image credit: WallpaperUp

 

Reflecting on how far we’ve come together on this site got me thinking about how far I’ve come as a person. It seems like not that long ago, I was 3,000 miles away from home, making it on my own for the very first time. That kind of experience is this avalanche of emotions. You feel fear, doubt, solitude; yet you also feel freedom, like you have the ability to start anew. The opportunity to reinvent the person you are, the person you’re becoming, is right at your fingertips when you leave home like that. Some parts of you come, while some parts stay home. The one thing I knew was coming with me to Arizona was this new thing, at the time, that we know as gaming.

We won’t go too much into the experience, as it doesn’t have much to do with the goal of this post. However, if the curiosity pokes you, reach on out and I can tell you about it. With all the mushy, personal experience stuff out of the way, what is it like to find a gaming group after you move? In short, it’s quite an interesting experience, but it’s a lot easier than you’d think; at least it was for me. We all live in a time where connecting with people is easier than it ever has been before, and using that to your full advantage is the key to gaming wherever you go. My gaming time in the valley was all thanks to a site called Meetup. Many people have heard of it, probably even looked a tiny bit, but never taken the dive into it. It’s easy to see why: you don’t know what to expect, there could be a grandiose number of people on the page but you have no actual gauge of what it will be like, and to make it all worse, you’re in a different place where you may not necessarily know what people are like there.

Intimidating, surely, but sometimes you just have to take that random venture out in to the world to get the good stuff. Phoenix revealed some rather interesting people to me, not all of them that I went through effort to keep in contact with. Not because there were bad people, or ones I didn’t like, but just because sometimes people aren’t designed to be best buds. To turn that on its head, there are a couple of friends that I keep in contact with from my Meetup adventures, and had some very memorable games during my stay. It was really strange to go to a random bar in the desert to play D&D, but it makes for a hell of a story! For gamers in a new city, I do recommend surfing on Meetup to help find some people that can eventually make up your regular home group, but know there is a multitude of other platforms. ENWorld has a forum, Facebook has thousands of groups and pages. Tap your resources, and you’ll probably find out that you can make yourself right at home wherever you go.

 

 

Based off this real life example, this uncomfortable leap of faith that we have to make to assimilate to a new environment, what can we learn? To apply it to a gaming context: when you introduce player characters to a new area, do some stage setting first. If you give the characters some ties to the area they’re moving to, it does a few things. Firstly, it adds a sense of depth. Character backgrounds, player agency to shape the past and future, we talk about it all the time. It’s just another little thing you can to do enhance these pillars of roleplay. More importantly than the personal ties, the characters need a resource to tap. In most fantasy settings, this is located in the common room of some tavern. Tropes are comfortable, safe, and can capture a really nice feeling, but shaking it up creates the memorable plots.

Just like in our own world, there are ways to learn about places before someone travels there. Granted, it’s far easier to use a Google search bar than a library full of books that may or may not have been written for such useful purposes, but it’s something to consider. Some of you are probably thinking that this is an incredibly boring way to solve this issue, and I wholeheartedly agree. We have to acknowledge it’s there, though, because everybody has a different play style. The way I handle this in my group is that I deliver information after a brief assessment of what the character might know based off their age and overall background experience. Collaboration between a player and the GM comes up constantly in things I put out, and this fits that model for me too. The player will come up with a justification as to why their character would know something about the subject, the GM assesses the plausibility of it being truth and adjusts the DC of the roll.

This sounds really basic, but knowing exactly what we’re doing when we do it is key to tuning it to perfection. You can stretch out this interaction with multiple questions that increase the richness of the answer. Recently, when revealing information about Drakkenhall to my wizardly player, I didn’t simply ask him if he would know anything about the city from his studies. I asked him exactly what type of things he studied, what seemingly unrelated subjects were necessary to support the theory of those things. It helps me paint a broader picture of human understanding, not just belittling this poor character’s entire life experience to one roll for a small piece of info. The player learned a great deal about its policing procedures, political structure, known figures of authority, along with a few other quirks the city has. The way we came to this, though, was by mapping the past experience of the character, giving the knowledge a lot more realistic depth.

Now that my really long winded explanation of my thoughts on the subject are over, we can sum it up with a couple of simple rules. When you’re introducing a new part of your setting to the characters, try to think of:

•  All the things you innately know about a city you’d possibly move to, and what research you’d have to do before going there.
• What resources the characters could use to assimilate themselves better.
• How the general populace might receive things that they do that are seemingly normal to them.
• How the methods of the local authorities could interfere with the characters intentions or goals.

 

New places with the same characters are exciting. They allow the players to apply previous knowledge their character has gained, just like they would in real life, without all of the stakes and baggage that normally comes with it. Try to make that experience genuine, fun, and intriguing. What else would you sprinkle into the mix to keep the newness of a location from grinding your campaign to a halt?

 

Stay Metal \m/

Two Year Anniversary!

Image: My hilarious mug and a reader-made, 3D printed, “Heavy Metal GM” D20. Jeff, this is the most amazing thing someone I barely know has ever done for me, thank you so much!

 

Up early on a Sunday, that’s the kind of guy I am. Anyway, hello! Thank you for coming to visit my humble abode! I debated calling this post the “State of the Blog Address,” but I think that’d be taking myself too seriously. Though, let’s be real, it wouldn’t have changed the informality of the content you’re about to read. As February 16th falls on a Friday (and is still some ways away), no time like the present to whip this one up! This one’s for you.

 

Surfing through all of my accounts this morning, Facebook had prompted me to write my story, how all this gaming madness came about. I wrote it, you can see it here, and it left me thinking a little. I started this thing two years ago! Already! That reality came like a slap in the face. Feeling like I haven’t done much, I’m a little disappointed in myself, but a closer look changes that feeling. For two years, I have been putting, what I like to call, “word soup” into the world; and by some divine stroke (probably not), people listen to me. As of the time this is being written, this page has seen 154 blog posts (this being the 155th, I’m weird about patterns of fives and round numbers), over 10,000 visitors, and an amount of experiences whose number and quality cannot even be measured. Because of this site, I’ve been employed for writing, experienced my first conventions (Gen Con 49 and 50, PAX East 2017), became a writer/editor for another website, met some beyond fantastic people, and have been recognized by some of the people I admire most in the industry.

That sounds like I’ve done a lot, though I’d disagree, but everything is owed to those who have supported me. And I don’t mean monetarily, the money that has been brought in by running this thing totals somewhere around like $200 since the start. That’s covered the one year, and the current one, of having my own web domain. It’s not a mound of loot I’ve produced over here, but I don’t need a mound. Never in my life have I been so proud of a little pile of stuff, this pile I liked to call my corner of the internet. People who read my content, people who reach out to talk to me about my posts, people who help me refine my posts by giving me input: you’ve built this site! All I did was provide the content to interact with. Time and time again, I’m humbled by the outright kindness and openness of this community. Of course, there are plenty of people who do the opposite, but every plank has its ugly side. Those interactions don’t matter to me as much, as they only rarely add something to my life.

In the coming years, I truly and honestly hope that this community will continue to be as awesome as it has been. From time to time I disappear, don’t post for a while on here or any of my social media, but know that it’s always on my mind. Fixing cars is no easy gig, and I’m in the actual process of switching into the office side of BMW service. Hopefully, fingers crossed, this will open up oodles of mental energy for me, as the physical wear won’t be so abrasive. Let’s make 2018 a kickass year for gaming. Together.

If you have the time and inspiration, I would love for you to comment, Tweet, or send me a Facebook Message about the first time you read this blog, first time you met me, the first time you played a TTRPG, whatever the hell you want. I just want to hear from you, so I can thank you for all the beauty you’ve helped me bring into my life.

 

Stay Metal \m/

Allegorical Gaming: Weighing Reason

Image: Plato’s Cave Allegory illustration from Mrs. Shepherd’s Classes. 

Before we delve into what the hell I’ll be yapping about abstractly for the rest of the page*, we need to understand what an allegory is. They’re scarily similar to metaphors, especially with the misuse of the word in the modern world. I read a good article that talks about it, though it’s a bit of a slog for someone not used to thinking in this frame. This is the necessary preliminary work that only the individual can do for themselves to make their work successful. Tap as many resources of thought as you can, but come to your own conclusion that’s built on a foundation of facts and reason. If you don’t want to do the work, don’t make your game an allegory. Just have fun, know that’s okay and what games are ultimately designed for. For the record, this one is more about social structure in relation to frame of mind than gaming itself. Shall we?

Using games to confront real things in a controlled and welcoming environment is a pretty good idea, but what are the challenges to this? There’s a myriad of boons and busts to this, but each subject that can be addressed has a different set of them. This makes navigating the waters of a campaign as an allegory quite difficult. Besides the creative hurtles, like choosing what you’d like to explore and how exactly to deeply convey it, you should first look at your group dynamic.

Every group is different, it doesn’t take someone with an extensive back log of experience to acknowledge and understand that fact. However, know that one, singular truth is only a tiny part of the larger one. How is your group different? In what ways do they work together or against each other? These questions are just as important at the table as they are outside of it, and serve as a basis to the final answer as to whether or not your game can be an allegory. When you decide to make your game an allegory, it’s no longer just about the game. To give you some guidance on what to do with that thought: this type of game brings things from outside inward for dissection and reflection. Therefore, you open the gateways for serious, potentially emotional conversation. It sounds good, and it can be, but it can easily blow up in your face if you have players that you don’t deeply know away from the game table. Not only do you have to be a GM in this situation, but you need to be a colleague, and an open minded one at that.

The goal of this art is to make the players turn inward about something on the exterior. If you, or anyone in your group for that matter, can’t walk up to an allegory with a mind to contemplate the entire picture and potentially have a civil discussion about it, then your game should not be an allegory.

Simple as that. When I say that finite statement is “simple,” I don’t mean that the situation itself isn’t complex, but the parameters that allow you to move forward can be boiled down to make them seem that way. When one questions that statement, they can travel down into the infinite depth of the very question itself. Calling it simple gives you a feeling of gratification, an understanding of some degree of depth to where generalization can be useful; but it’s important to be aware of the fact that it’s anything but simple in reality. When you understand a situation fully, it becomes easy to call  it simple, but when explaining it to other people, one must be thorough. The end game of your campaign is to reflect, within yourselves, about the situations presented.

Image source: Smith College Museum of Art

I called this article, “weighing reason,” for… well, at the risk of sounding more repetitive than I already do, a reason. People have their own ways of pursuing truth through reason, which in this sense means thinking rather than a cause, though it’s abundantly clear that some methods are better than others. In order to keep peace among a group of people, you need to be aware of other people’s way of reasoning, an individual’s way of reasoning, before you present a question. What does that mean? We know that people don’t like to be challenged. One could ask the question, “Why is the sky blue?” The question is simple, direct, and neutral. You could ask that same question in a different way. Do you know why the sky is blue? See the difference? The former is a neutral inquiry, whereas the second question designated a specific target. That makes it my lack of knowledge against knowledge that I assume you have. It seems silly, as the question is the same, but take tone of voice into consideration. The way you ask that question is in many cases infinitely more important than the words themselves, or at least on an interpersonal level. Pair that awareness with an actually challenging question and it opens the flood gate of deductive reasoning. It seems trivial to be bringing all this up, but zooming in to understand individual parts of the dynamic is what helps you manipulate the damn contraption to work. Unfortunately for us gamers, people are the most complicated contraptions that we have a need to manipulate in the context of RPGs.

In the case of an allegorical RPG campaign, that manipulation is taking the form of making someone pose a question to themselves. This should be done through events in the story, character interactions, the layout of the environment itself, fictional political strife, etc. It’s a hard thing to achieve, and you can fail. Look at what parts of the situation could lead to failure and try to find a way to manipulate that as well. Starting to sound kind of creepy and personally intrusive, isn’t it? Now, I bestow upon you the thought to save yourself from this benign manipulation changing into a way for you to insert your own opinions; which may or may not be objectively wrong due to a lack of understanding of the parts, I might add.

A GM has the power to sneakily interject things that they believe into the experiences of others. It’s their responsibility and duty to not wield that belief like a weapon, but to hand it off like a good book. That way the individual can come to their own conclusion about the stance based on the information within to better themselves and, hopefully, the world around them.

This all seemingly has nothing to do with gaming. However, when we consider the impact of the questions that can rise out of the resolutions within a fictional calamity, we see that there’s more than what’s on the surface. Taking all of what I just proposed and putting it under the most powerful microscope you can find is, by far, the most important part making your allegorical campaign succeed. Is this all? Of course not, I’d be a complete fool to think so. Human beings learn best when presented with information paired with the ability to dismantle it into small parts, helping us make a better judgement of the whole. Virtuous behavior is equally as important, as having more than your own experience it build off makes for a strong foundation. Just remember not to take everything everyone says as truth without question.

* Here’s the disclaimer: I have no formal education in philosophy, social science, political science, or psychology. Or anything, really, besides automotive technology and whatever I retained from my horrendous journey through the American public school system. Everything you have just read is a product of my own deductive reasoning and personal experience, and very well may be wrong. *

I’d like everyone who reads this post to comment with an honest question about this piece. Not because I want to prove you wrong, not because I have some insatiable thirst for argument, but because I want to be better both as a game master and an individual. Hopefully, you’re with me and you do too. I expect to be met with a founded, fact and experience based challenge. The only way to become better is to make mistakes! Learning how to talk about views you disagree with, without letting your emotion override reason, is the most important skill that is the most uncommon. Hone it like the blade you’re going to go kill that troll that represents ignorance with.

Thank you so much for reading and Stay Metal \m/

Campaign Prep: Trial of the Iron Bear Part 2

Image credit: Forgotten Realms Wikia

 

Breaking the entire document up by session, here is part 2 of my Trial of the Iron Bear; an adventure that I created for my ongoing 13th Age campaign. In addition, I updated the part 1 comments, as there were a couple of issues with typos and things having been left out and so forth. These parts of the adventure were written after the players had experienced the Pit of Riches. Parts of it were written beforehand, but tweaked to fit what had come of the situation. The comments will highlight which part is subject to that.

Most of what’s within this piece is the buildup to the final encounter of the dungeon, a face-off with the campaign’s main villain, Ossen. The players didn’t know what was waiting for them, but they handled this dungeon very efficiently despite being ignorant of the stakes. Without further adieu, I bring you part two!

 

Trial of the Iron Bear Commentary Part 2

 

Stay Metal! \m/

Campaign Prep: Trial of the Iron Bear Part 1

Image Source: Eric Belisle

Hey folks! At the bottom of the article is a PDF, a piece of my reference notes for my Saturday 13th Age game. At the time of this adventure, the party was comprised of six 7th level characters, with an incremental or two I believe. My players are pretty tough, so if some of this seems like overkill, that’d be why. This whole thing took a while complete because I had a data loss recently that made me want to cry.

This adventure was rather short, spanning three sessions. It’s heavily tailored to the last four years of story that these characters have gone through (though I make little mention of them by name in this one), but I think seeing the notes I bring to the table every time could be useful. All of my campaign notes are written like this, though the order in which I write things may seem jumbled. Just writing the ideas down helps me remember most of the details; for me, the format itself is less important than the content. This definitely isn’t laid out in a way that’d be too useful to someone other than me. The final piece of advice I have to offer when reading this part (or others) is to read the format change post for the Ald Sotha campaign. It’ll make a lot of the names at least somewhat familiar and bring this adventure into context.

Whether or not you care about my campaign as a whole is irrelevant, as I think almost anybody can pull something interesting from the file. Feel free to pick this stuff apart! Feedback, debate about game theory, and questions are more than welcome. Download the file below:

Trial of the Iron Bear Part 1

Stay Metal!

Campaign Building: The Snowball Effect

Image source: Comics I Don’t Understand

This one is a tough subject, as no two GMs are the same. From the ground up, building a campaign is a daunting task, even more so for the more aspiring GMs that want to do this as their first endeavor. Some people like to use an established setting while others have ideas that could only work in a world of their own creation. The question: What the hell do I do to build a campaign? The answer has so many different faces and aspects that it’s rather difficult to nail down, but here’s one way of many to start.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I was lucky. My first campaign sprung up out of me simply saying, “let’s play a game,” to my friends. I came up with the most generic scenario I could possibly think of, plopped it down into 13th Age’s Dragon Empire, miraculously birthing the campaign that I’m still playing today. I started with just an intuition, spending the rest of my time building off of the random details my players had created. By the end of it, I had a titanic cast of GMPCs, villains, events, and locations. I call this method, “the snowball effect.” You simply round up some players, use a setting that’s loosely established, push the “snowball” of your players’ ideas and character actions down the hill, and voila! A collaboratively created game where all the GM came up with was the initial adventure and villain.

So let’s talk terms a little bit. I like to think of the random ideas that you and your players will have floating around all the time as snow. The snow floats around and eventually lands on the ground for you to pick up and force into a shape. Every character creates a tiny snowball, a collection of ideas about their character, a situation, a future plot point, whatever. When they say it, I think of it as them throwing me said snowball. Sometimes I catch all of it, other times it crumbles in my hand and I’m left with just a powdery mess. Regardless, we take that snow and pack it onto the original idea that was my (the GMs), original idea. The snowballs that the players create can sometimes be different from the GMs. Player snowballs tend to be very focused, specific information about something they’re mulling over in their head. GM snowballs tend to be big ideas, usually about theme or campaign direction. Every now and again, if you have an awesome group, you have players that do both. What’s not lucky, is that the GM learns create both kinds of snowballs. Eventually, the GM is packing snowballs or catching player made ones, throwing them at the giant one rolling down the hill, seeing what spatters off and what sticks. Sounds kind of hectic, right?

Details sometimes get lost or forgotten about, only to come up later. The best part is, sometimes when you find that “snow” on the ground, you can pick it up and add it to the snowball. The drawback of doing it this way is that if you have a group that isn’t new to role playing (unlike the majority of my group at the start), then this can feel very unsatisfying. Some experienced players enjoy having fields and fields of lore to navigate, creating a sense of immersion right from the get-go. The snowball campaign doesn’t always work like that, a lot of the time I inject some of the history on the fly, which leads to another problem with it.

Unless you’re comfortable with improv, running this style of campaign can be rather difficult. The snowball campaign forces the GM to keep packing snow onto the story, especially if the characters just throwing the snow around listlessly. You look around at stuff that’s fallen out of the sky (ideas you’ve had or things your players have said), pick it up, and pack it onto the rest. Once you get used to it, it’s incredible fun, however. For me, it gives me the same sense of mystery and excitement that the players get. Since I never know what they’re going to do, or even what their actions could lead to, my instinct and understanding of the campaign as it stands steers the thing. Now, this doesn’t mean that you don’t come up with a loose quest line for the flow of the game.

I call those quest lines “legs” of the campaign; they are the path in which the giant snowball rolls on. Sometimes the snowball is running through halls of a king. Other times, it’s barreling through a dungeon, full steam ahead. The legs are the things that happen outside of the player (and character’s) control. The GM gets to steer the snowball into specific legs. The things that the snowball picks up while traversing the legs are determined collaboratively. Tone is the sound the snowball makes whilst rolling, and theme is what tells everyone what the snowball looks like, but the environment around that snowball is constantly changing. It’s a little nebulous and weird to wrestle with, but the structure becomes a game within a game. This constant rolling that the snowball is doing represents the characters and story picking things up along the way that ultimately changes how it all looks by the end of it. But keep in mind, everything that sticks to it is still snow. It feels the same, although it might sound and look different. Strange, huh? For those of you that are really enjoying picturing the metaphor, you may be asking yourself, “If it’s rolling down a hill, how are you still packing snow onto it?”

The answer is why I think running a game this way is incredibly fun. You have to run alongside it. Sometimes you lose control of where the snowball is going, which is when general real life logic rather than creativity makes unexpected things or consequences happen. While you and your players are running down this ever changing hill, looking at your snowball and throwing things at it, you can’t help but look ahead. Steering is collaborative, while the GM is the lookout for snowball breaking obstacles. All you can do is follow it to keep throwing things in an effort to roll it all to a desired end. In this light, it might sound like as the GM, I have no real say in what sticks to the snowball or where it goes. This is a misconception, because the GM always has the ability to stand in front of it, stop the thing from rolling, and say that this particular thing can’t stick to our snowball. Of course, it’s their responsibility to explain to the group why, and if a good reason is presented otherwise, it doesn’t stick. Usually, those are the things that’ll steer it so far off course that it’ll smash into a wall, or a tree (something that would destroy the campaign). At the end, you’re left with a huge snowball, a collection of crap you’ve picked up along the journey, and the memories of how it got from point A to B.

Running a campaign is constantly chaotic on the GM’s side. You have to trust your group, take their ideas into serious consideration, and sometimes even ask why they desire a certain thing to happen. Of course, the dice end up deciding whether they are successful or not, but it’s really fun to see the snow flying around. Am I off-the-wall insane or does this sound like fun to you? I’d love to hear about it!

 

Stay Metal \m/

Dragon Empire: Eld

There is not even one sentence about this place in the book, and it’s made my imagination run wild with what it could be. Eld is this little region at the bottom of the map, sandwiched between the mystery of what’s beyond the Dragon Empire’s southern border and the Wild Wood. The incompleteness of this setting fills me with wonder and never fails to inspire me to create.

So what could Eld be? Let’s start piecing together what we do know. A Koru Behemoth migration route runs right through it, as does a major river called The Grandfather. That alone makes you wonder if the place is inherently magical. The Owl Barrens wall in its western border while people can travel freely into it from the east. We don’t know what the Wild Wood was before the High Druid, but we do know that it has since been altered by her magic. There’s a chance that Eld has been touched by that magic, but judging by the difference of terrain markings on the map, this isn’t likely. It seems as though Eld is naturally protected, and it’s certainly fun to tinker with the idea of this being intentional. But why? Lets do a bit of digging and speculation, shall we?

The first thing that popped into my head with name of the place was the Eladrin from D&D. They’re celestial, elf-like beings front a different plane in the context of D&D, and perhaps this region was named after them for that reason. Could Eld be similar to the Feywild or, to go to the Eladrin’s roots, Arborea? It could explain why it’s linked to the Wild Wood, but the markings on the map are similar to that of the Knee Deep, Hellmarsh, and The Fangs, implying that it’s actually more swampy. This alone sets it apart from the Feywild and Arborea. However, we can still link the name to Eladrin, assuming that it was actually the birthplace of elves before they migrated northward to the Queen’s Wood. It might seem like a stretch but hear me out.

There’s a rumour hiding within the text of the core rules that states that the Elf Queen and High Druid could be half-sisters. It says figurative siblings in the write-up, but let’s interpret it more literally. That alone I could write an entire article on, but putting that supposed truth in this context certainly points to my theory for Eld. It’s never talked about in the book, but perhaps the Elves had found the lands that now make up the Dragon Empire during the start of this age. It’s no secret that elves are an ancient race, from far before the existence of others, but what if they’re simply new to the region? Before the High Druid existed as she does in this age, she could have been living in the shadow of her older sister, the Elf Queen we see today in the 13th Age. The (now) Wild Wood could have been a northward expansion of their peoples when they decided to leave Eld, only to be met with  resistance from its previous inhabitants. Those previous inhabitants could have been the 12th Age’s High Druid and their ilk. Maybe this High Druid in hiding took the Elf Queen’s younger sister under their wing amidst the conflict. You see where I’m going with this; a climactic battle between siblings, ending in the elder being flushed out of the territory for the younger to live in solitude. The High Druid building her own little empire in the wake of her victory and promising to someday stick it to her older sister. In response, the Elf Queen captured The Green, who may have been the black sheep of the dragons that make up The Three, a friend of the previous High Druid.

The theory slightly clashes with some details in the section for the High Druid, but making this tension a focal point for a campaign could be incredibly interesting. This train of thought could also explain why the river running through the Wild Wood into Eld is called The Grandfather. Perhaps the High Druid named it that, in longing memory of her previous home. Even the name Eld itself is reminiscent of the word, elder. No doubt, Eld should be a place of interesting magic that confuses even the most learned wizards, clerics, and druids. Magic that’s somewhere between arcane, divine, and natural. Making Eld the abandoned home of the oldest race in existence also raises some questions.

Why would they have to leave? Obviously, with this being a fantasy system based around conflict, it had to be some sort of natural catastrophe or war. If it’s a war, with who? Did the elves of Eld have a relationship with the Koru Behemoths, and if so, what did it entail? If it’s a catastrophe, what exactly happened? Since we know nothing about the place, the possibilities are endless. Perhaps a magical storm came ripping northward from some far-southern region outside of the Dragon Empire. Maybe that storm dissipated, but could someday reform, moving even further north. On the front of warfare, an elven civil war could be an interesting idea. It could also explain why the Elf Queen has been so successful; she found a way to unite her people and prosper. Furthermore, it could be the reason why there’s no information on it in the book. The warring sub-races of elves were left to destroy one another and they did just that, leaving nobody left to contact the newfound northern lands. Ah, mystery and wonder. My old friends.

 

I’d be really interested to hear what the rest of the community thinks! Don’t be shy, reach out!

 

Stay Metal \m/

Grounded Feet

Photo source: Pigs With Crayons

 

What’s the most common thing you see in an adventurer’s background? Killed parents? Lived off the land until they decided to adventure? Refugee from a fallen city? Players are incredibly good at giving their characters nothing to latch onto. Perhaps that’s something that they do intentionally, leaving an open road for the GM to put sign posts on. Then again, there’s always the possibility of creative shyness or lack of motivation when creating a character. Giving a character stuff to care about can be rather difficult, especially if the player didn’t lay the foundation of who their character is and what they care about. It becomes even more difficult when you try to string together four or five of these characters to create a campaign.

Of course, to circumvent all of these problems, a session zero seems like a no-brainer. Not everybody does those though, and that’s okay. Session zero is a helpful thing, allowing players to collaboratively create characters and organically string things together. It makes the first role play together way less awkward, taking away the need to probe with random in-character questions to learn about one another. For those people who don’t use a session zero, though, have no fear! A fantastic campaign can be born out of your seemingly random characters, you just have to coax them out of their comfort zones. My home game had started in the same way; I had decided that I wanted to GM and I came up with some silly adventure, telling my friends to make characters and play it with me. It exploded into a campaign that we’re still not done with and has had an intense amount of emotional involvement. For more about session zero, Tribality has written a fantastic article, probably better than I could.

For starters, combat usually doesn’t lead to character development. I use combat as a way for a character to blow off some steam, or at least the unimportant ones. If your game is combat laden and your players have a rather groundless backstory, the game quickly becomes a hack-and-slashfest. Some players like this, but if you’re reading this, then chances are you’re a GM who wants more out of a game. With this, you have two options to make the combats potentially draw out some role play from your group. Start by giving the combat consequences. If you can fight anything and anyone with nobody to answer to afterwards, many players tend to get fearless and destructive just for the sake of it. It’s completely acceptable to say to your players, “This NPC scolding you right now appears to be way out of your league,” to convey that fighting this one isn’t the best idea. A lot of the time, this will sound like a challenge to them, so have some insane stats ready just in case. Make sure your characters can run away once they realize their mistake, and more importantly, make that option readily apparent to them. Hinting at it isn’t always enough, be transparent when things start going far south. Squashing characters for feeling out your world can be a downer for a long term game, though there is something to be said for that kind of play style. Letting them describe their getaway could be a fun role playing experience, or turning it into a skill challenge can force characters to collaborate. At the end of it all, don’t forget that this little squabble has consequences!

Photo Source: Pigs With Crayons

The other type of combat as a way to plant characters’ feet in the world is to make the place/time of it important. This one forces combat to occur infrequently, as you have to lay the foundation with an hour or two of role playing and characters interacting with the world to give the bad guy some weight. If you give them problems that they can’t solve with fire and sword, it’ll force them to start thinking together and finding the strengths/weaknesses of each other’s characters. Those problems work best if they’re political or economical, and give the bad guy some armor, so to speak. The bad guy should be difficult to get to without making a huge fuss out of it. It gives that later combat stakes, especially if the characters are in an urban environment and want to live among society. The struggle to coexist with other people helps them realize they need to depend on their friends. It goes without saying that characters in a party will butt heads every now and again, but it adds to the drama. Usually that happens after they realize they need each other, which makes it all the better.

I could write a whole article on urban villains and how to keep them present but not fightable until the final moments of the campaign. To just plant the seeds:

• Make them important to something bigger than the characters can take on by themselves.
• Force the characters to find an avenue in the story to isolate this person from that something. A political faction, an impenetrable fortress, or simply the villain having long reaching fingers where the PCs have to travel to hunt them down.

Meeting that villain or someone who represents them is crucial. Just make sure that they can’t end it all in that moment…

Overland adventures usually remove the political and social struggles that come with their urban counterparts, but that doesn’t mean that the game has to be combat oriented. A GM can use things like weather and difficult terrain to help characters connect with one another. Combining those aspects with a combat encounter can up the ante, making everything much more dangerous. It’ll give the players a degree of caution amongst them, strengthening their codependency. Eventually, things should take them to some kind of township where characters interact with people outside of their adventuring group, and that’s where you can inject more complex conflicts that exist outside the group.

Believe it or not, all of this is the easy part. The most difficult thing to do is taking your players’ inspiration as they go along and making it relevant to the story. Whenever a player wants to discover something important about their character, they usually search for it. They won’t always tell you why they’re looking for whatever that specific thing may be, but it’s your job to eventually give it to them. At that moment, I prefer to ask the player what that thing is and nebulously describe its importance.

As an example: Crysx in my Ald Sotha campaign found out that he’s actually an Aasimar. His goal is to basically find the last remnants of his people and the reason they disappeared. They’re incredibly rare in our version of the Dragon Empire. As far as he knows, he’s the only one. Wilton (who hasn’t gotten into the recaps yet, sorry!) is a rich friend of theirs that has a huge library. He has one book on Aasimar. I told Crysx’s player, Ben, that he needed to vaguely describe to me a prophetic picture in the book. Rather than me telling him what his character’s destiny may be, I let him come up with something, giving him a shred of investment. Since then, I’ve been doing nothing but brewing over what it could mean, what I think it should mean to create an interesting story, a satisfying end. As we’ve traveled along, I’ve thrown small bits and pieces at him while we’re resolving the main objective of the campaign.

Now do this for every character. See how it can be difficult? You have to have these little pieces of information be littered throughout the environment, urban or otherwise. At the same time, it should be relevant to the main story arc while individually important to the character. Sometimes put them in seemingly insignificant places to add that sense of wonder and mystery to the setting. The most important part about doing this sort of thing is to throw it back at the players. When they have a question that you feel you don’t have the right to take creative control over, throw it back at them. You can find out what the player is thinking for the character, allowing you to further twist it down the road and make it bittersweet. It’ll greatly help put the feet of your players and characters on the same floor.

For best results, apply these concepts liberally to all of your games.

 

Stay Metal \m/

Ald Sotha: Family Reunion

“There’s no reason for this!” Corbin screamed with fury, his voice echoing in the catacombs. Lisbeth’s mind was ablaze with fear and panic. The others looked on without idea of what to do. Silence returned to the crypt for a minute or two until the eyes of the corpse snapped open once more. It inhaled sharply, the party recoiled in surprise at the sudden movement.

Mia’s father opened his mouth and the sound of six different people came out, “Where am I?” 

“Back to a place that you left by the laws of nature,” Corbin answered angrily. Lisbeth shot him a look at would make a dragon roll over.

“This may be tough to deal with, but you died and I’ve given you life once more,” Lisbeth told him, her voice trembling a bit. Knowledge of resurrection had been reserved for the most elite members of her order. She felt lucky to have figured it out on her own. What if they found out, though…  she thought.

The corpse’s voices were no less shocking a second time, “Back from the dead? I don’t remember what happened…” A look of perplexity adorned his face. The hair on the back of Crysx’s neck stood on end at the sound of this tortured soul. Lisbeth informed him that his memory should return shortly.

Crysx cleared his throat and explained the situation; who they were and why they were in this part of the empire. He explained that they were here to help and that his daughter  was just outside. The man’s expression changes int he blink of an eye. Flailing about in an attempt to stand up, he realized his body was atrophied from the long sleep of death. Lisbeth eased him back down, informing him that he needed to rest for a bit before leaving. She didn’t say it, but there was a lingering fear of using healing magic on the newly resurrected body. There was no way to tell if the cursed mark would interfere with her spells, and she didn’t want to find out. In an awkward silence, they all waited for his body to heal enough to the point where movement was manageable.

“We never got your name, good sir,” Tiberius probed. He informed them that is name was Frederick. Pleased that his memory was returning quickly, Lisbeth started to ask him about what had happened.

“The winter came so fast, and it came angry. We didn’t have enough wood so I was outside splitting some for the stove. I heard someone trudging through the snow and simply thought it was Mia. I didn’t bother to look up, she likes to come outside and talk with me as I work. Sometimes it interferes with the work she has to get done, but I don’t mind. My daughter is my life. What kind of father would I be if I always turned her away?” He started to trail off.

Lisbeth cleared her throat, “The sooner we get through this, the sooner you can see Mia again.” Frederick composed himself and continued.

“I said something to who I thought was Mia, just to start a conversation really. They didn’t answer, but kept coming toward me. Being the soft spoken woman she is, I didn’t think much of it. Before I knew what had happened, someone struck me on the back of the head and, in a flash, I was on my back. Everything was blurry, I couldn’t see who it was but they were large. A sharp pain across my throat followed by a warm, wet feeling and then nothing.” It was hard to tell where Frederick was looking without any pigmentation to his eyes. It made speaking to him uncomfortable.

“At least we know this threat is humanoid and intelligent. It’s more than we had before. Maybe they can be reasoned with,” Tiberius said hopefully.

“If we’ve learned one thing on this journey, it’s that things don’t immediately want to reason,” Crysx mumbled to himself.

The group decided it was time to head out. Frederick was able to pull himself to his feet and walk autonomously. Towards the entrance from which they came, something caught Corbin’s eye. The skeletons in the walls were different from the ones deeper in the catacombs, something that was only apparent when revisiting the more shallow parts. Being towards the back of the group, it was easy for him to slow down and examine the specimen. Broad shoulders, long arms and legs, tusks on the lower jaw. This skeleton is a half-orc. This new piece of the puzzle only made him excited, there had to be a reason for it. He decided to poke around a bit more, only to find that most, if not all, the skeletons in this part of the catacombs were half-orcs. I wonder when things changed. Humans are an invasive species, something tells me this has a lot to do with why we’re here. His friends interrupted his analysis, asking if everything was all right. Nodding quickly, he left the puzzle pieces to join his friends.

When they reached the top of the steps, Crysx told Frederick to stay behind while him and Lisbeth went to go talk to Mia.

 

“I don’t understand,” she complained. “What do you mean my father is with you?”

Lisbeth inhaled frustratedly, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I tried to put it lightly, but it seems this isn’t working. I resurrected your father. The problem is that he had a cursed mark cut into him, it messed my spell up. He’s alive, he has his memory but he looks a little disturbing. Just try to show you’re happy to see him. Okay?” The girl nodded sheepishly at Lisbeth’s frustration.

When Frederick walked through the threshold and greeted his daughter, she fainted.

“Family reunions can be hard sometimes…” Tiberius said, trying to lighten the mood.

 

 

Stay Metal \m/

 

Themed Battles

image: Cover art of Pelgrane Press’ Battle Scenes: High Magic and Low Cunning

 

Carefully picking monsters for your encounters can do wonders for the theme and feeling of them. Whether it’s a fight with a hundred copies of one enemy, or a mixed bag of targets, it’s important to know what direction you’re taking the image of the combat into. For the most part, the type of monster can heavily affect how the encounter feels. Fighting orcs feels rather different from fighting a rakshasa or two,  as it should be.

Sadly, it can be difficult to find the monsters you need. Sometimes they haven’t been created yet, or all of the orcs are scattered across a multitude of books and supplements. Most people would probably tell you that you need to take your game prepping up a notch, which never hurts, but I say there’s another solution. When building a themed encounter, it almost goes without saying that you have to know what your adventuring party consists of. You wouldn’t throw a group of spell casters at your adventuring party that is solely made up of melee classes. The opposite can also be true if they hit too hard. When in doubt; a group of melee monsters will always work against any adventuring party, just take the squishies into account.

When we think themed encounter, however, we’re mostly talking about one type of monster or a group of monsters that serve a common purpose. In 13th Age, The Blue has somehow created a city of monsters that coexist and even make up her government. Typically, an ogre mage would scoff at the idea of kobold underlings, but in Drakknehall, such is not the case. Using concepts like this opens up a multitude of options when building themed encounters. If you lack a higher power like an Icon, giving them all a commonality of some kind is essentially the base of this point. Much like player races; if given a reason, monsters can band together.

A little different than the “common goal” method, using a bunch of one monster type can prove a little difficult. In another post about encounter building, I talked about monster roles (spoiler, blocker, wrecker, etc.), probably the most important aspect of making an encounter work in 13th Age. For those of us who own most of the books, making themed encounters that uphold this philosophy can be pretty easy… once you find everything. In the core rules, the orcs were pretty limited; all melee fighters save one, which is a shaman that takes the role of leader, a monster that gives buffs to their friends. There was plenty to work with there, and it satiated what we needed to do when learning 13th Age. Now that the game has been out for a while, there’s a multitude of orc options. The 13th Age Bestiary has some good ones, and I hope the Bestiary 2 will keep the tradition. You can never have too many orcs, right? But not every monster has been so fortunate to be given a bunch of friends. Some monsters from the Bestiary, like the Lammasu or Cuoatl can be a little more tough to deal with. Throwing more than one at a party can feel strange, mainly because they’re large and intelligent. A creature of their size is bound to have hubris, having more than one around seems unlikely.

But if the theme demands it, that’s what you should do, right? The answer is, well, kind of. Carrying the Lammasu idea, throwing more than one at a party could be extremely deadly. If that’s the feel you want and it fits your story, go for it. Having a reason for more than one to hang out together is key to making that believable. However, I would argue that having one extremely strong Lammasu (one as written) and a bunch of smaller, weaker ones that are being bullied around would be better. The stats as written don’t have that, so as a GM, you’re faced with two options: 1) Create your own 2). Reskin an existing monster.

Reskinning takes way less time, and is the route I would recommend if you don’t have all the prep time in the world. The key to making that work is finding other monsters that feel similar to the Lammasu (or whatever) that fill different roles. A Lammasu Wizard is a spoiler, and he needs some troops and mooks to back him up. Taking something like an Orc Berserker from the core rules and giving it the Lammasu’s ability Refuge of Stone can really surprise and challenge players. Of course, you’d have to level up the berserker stats appropriately, which is a task in itself, but it saves you from making a completely new monster. On the other hand, instead of something as simple as a troop, you could throw a wrecker with a bunch of mooks. Even a wrecker and a blocker or three, the blocker serving its function as protector of the Lammasu and collector of wrecker fodder. Get creative, it’s what makes it all interesting.

When it comes to making battles themed around specific Icons, I found that the Battle Scenes books are awesome. They have pre-made encounters, sprawling across multiple levels and the books come divided by Icon. If the adventures don’t fit your game, shelf them for later and just rename all the monsters in an encounter. Voila! You have a battle ready to go that has a theme. Don’t let the name of a stat block keep you from incorporating it into a fight. If you don’t have that book, the Bestiary does have a section at the end of every monster block talking about what Icon they’d serve and who they’d hang out with. It gets the creative juices flowing and has proven to be an invaluable resource for me. Shuffle it up, mix and match things that already exist, and most importantly, make sure it’s fun.

 

Stay Metal \m/