As I was getting ready to play the less than stellar adventure found in the Box, the event’s organiser pulled me aside and told me these magical words:

“Forget about the red box adventure, make something up entirely. Just start with a Roleplaying encounter and play it by ear from there.”

I had just given me the keys to the kingdom… and no one was there to watch me steal the crown jewels.

(Ewww, get your mind out of the gutter!)

You see, while the adventure in the Red Box is quite ordinary and the character generation method is one of the worst I’ve seen since Battlelords of the 23rd Century, the Red Box’s DM’s book is a solid piece of introductory gaming. Thus, armed with the monster chapter and the digest rule-42 on the last page (i.e. the DC table for level 1-3 gameplay), I got ready to inflict my very own brew of D&D on unsuspecting players.

I decided to put all my small press experience to bear on those games and approached the game as such:

Chatty: Okay, so you’re all relatively new adventurers who’ve banded together in the recent past. Can you tell me about your last adventure? More specifically, can you tell me one thing that went really good for your group and what that was really bad…

This post is about one of the best answers I got:

The Zombie Apocalypse, Indie Style

Player #1 (Human Paladin) : The GOOD thing we had is that we’ve so far managed to survive the Zombie Apocalypse.

Chatty (trying to imagine what a fantasy zombie apocalypse would be like… and trying to scale it to a 2 hour game): That’s… interesting. Are we talking regional, continental or global apocalypse?

Player #2: Let’s say “continental”

Chatty (Doing double-time building a setting scaffold in his mind): All right, and if that was the “good” thing, what was the bad one?

Player #2 (Dwarven slayer): Well see… I kinda caused the apocalypse… I kinda was supposed to help my necromancer friend and things got… complicated.

(Oh man, I live for moments like that.)

Chatty: You did? Now THAT is interesting. Does your adventuring colleague know about that?

(Player one was grinning like an idiot at that point.)

Player #2 (Sheepishly): No… I kinda grabbed him real fast and dragged him out of my necromancer pal’s dungeon as the plague was spreading.

(Call it what you want, but in my book, this is true roleplaying.)

Chatty: So basically you guys have survived for some time huh? So this game will kinda be like a 28 Days set in the world of D&D right?

Player #1 (Already passed the point of excitement): Oh YES, this is SO cool!

I had the ingredients needed to fill 2 hours of pure, undiluted D&D gaming.

The Clan of the Dead

I decided to set a classic 6/3 skill challenge where the characters (a 3rd player had joined by that time) were trying to reach one of the few remaining reinforced surface outposts before being overtaken by… (I flipped through the Red Box’s monster chapter) Zombie Wolves!

But Chatty you ask, there are no Zombie wolves in the Red Box.

Yes there are… I’ll show you later, but right now we don’t need stats since the PCs might actually make it alive and outrun the wolves.

(That’s a huge time saving secret just there, don’t refer to stats untill you actually need them… and that’s only if you didn’t make them up in the first place.)

So I ran the challenge very loosy goey, asking the players how they tried to outrun the wolves, slow them and find ways to deal with them. I told them that whatever they managed to win or lose the scene, they would make it into the cave… the challenge was: How hurt and how many wolves would be after you by the time you got there…

Sadly, the players lost the challenge so I decided to make the next encounter into a combat one where the characters had to fight off the zombified versions of 2 wolves and a Dire Wolf… After having inflicted each PC the damage equivalent to a bite…

Things were, pardon the pun, dire indeed.

So how did I zombify the wolves? Real simple. I lowered all thier defenses by 2, bumped thier damage by one category and added the “dies on a crit” feature (which, sadly, never came into play). Had this not been a one-shot game, I would have also added the “Zombies get up the round following getting dropped to 0 HP” power.

The players eventually beat the wolves with very savvy use of fire, chokepoints and the mindlessness of the creatures themselves. I was proud of the players and they were having the time of thier lives. Player #1, who was a 20-something New Zelander who used to play way back when, promised me he was going to start playing again.

There’s no sweeter sound a DM likes to hear in such events.

As I recounted the experience to Dave, we agreed that the concept of a Zombie Apocalypse that wiped out most civilizations from both the surface and underworld would make for a very rich fantasy setting for a mini (5-10 sessions) campaign.

Why don’t we explore this in part 2?

So soon after Gen Con and after having been at Ground Zero for Pax East, I’m not sure how to set my expectations for the Fan Expo.  I have no ideas what the show will be like nor what I’ll be doing except game for most of the day on Saturday.

Regardless of what awaits us over there, I still have a 5 hour car trip to plan so I thought I’d reach out and share/ask how the travelling part of the trip should be prepared!

Shuffle and Repeat!

First up is the music.  I think its safe to say that most geeks have some form of MP3 player, be it a phone of varying degrees of smartness, an electronic player à la iPod or plain old burned CDs.

I’m not much of a music freak but I really need to have some playing whenever I’m doing something repetitive (or when I write).  While I listen to Last.fm a lot when online,  I yet have to develop a standard practice of bringing a player in the car.  But I’m getting there.

My music selection is mostly techno-pop stuff that makes your head nod hypnotically (I heard the term headnotic coined a few years ago)… PM doesn’t seem to find that Belgian 20-something female signers are road trip material.

Pfff, what does he know?

His selection is more geared toward Rock classics from across the Ameri-Euro 70s-00′s spectrum. From southern rock like Sweet Home Alabama to Northern Indie pop-rock like Metric’s Black Sheep. However, being the nerds that we are, we are likely to keep looping the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack and score and Orbital’s Dr. Who theme.

We usually strike a cool balance when together, so I’m not too worried.

What about you? Whats your favorite music mix for Road Trips?

Snacks & Drinks

One thing I like about car trips once I leave my beloved province of Poutine, fruit juice without sugar and Mountain Dew sans caffeine is stopping at gas stations along the way to pick up the kinda drinks and snacks I don’t get at home.  Now I haven’t been in Ontario in a while, but I suspect that the main difference will be that the margarine in any sandwiches we grab will still be near-mustard yellow (ours is near-white yellow, don’t ask) .

But hey, I’m willing to be surprised!

For the event itself, I pack food in advance (to avoid getting ripped off by the concession stands).  I’m going to be game mastering for about 8 hours straight on Saturday afternoon-evening, so I’ll have high energy foods like granola bars and plenty of drinks like Vitamin Water, sports and energy drinks.

What are your favorite trip foods and what do you ALWAYS pick up when you travel in specific places?

Nerd Topics!

Five hours in a car with another guy can erode the range of subject of even the chattiest of geeks.

Actually that’s not true, but work with me here.

PM and I are both Movies, Geek TV and Tropes nutjobs.  Give us a list of movies and we’ll deconstruct them to sub-atomic tropes and rebuild them into pieces of cinematographic perfection that no studio would touch with an uranium pole.

We’re also going to go into armchair (or rather car seat) game designer mode and critique our games of choice (Mouse Guard, Last Night on Earth, Pandemic, Free Market, D&D Essentials) and compare our relative preferences.

Of course, a French nerd discussion is not complete with a little arguing, so I’ll have to work up a few contentious topics to liven the car’s atmosphere a bit.  Like how he thinks Carcassonne was broken by the introduction of the iPhone version, making all players into competitive bastards (I don’t agree, I’ve learn to play Hearts at an English university, being a rat bastard is fun!).

What about you what are your topics of choice?

The Smart Phone is Your Friend

Cell Phone, MP3/Video player, Camera, Social Media Client, Google Map, IMDb, etc, the Smart Phone is my new favorite road trip friend.  From capturing the sights and stories of the trip to fact checking when PM is being a clueless douche, this little gadget is very useful… If the battery on my new Experia X10 can lasts…

Expect to hear from me through that new toy of mine.

But not when I’m driving… I’m not quite that stupid..

See you Next Week!

I leave you in the safe hands of Dave and the rest of the Critical Hits crew.  I’ll be leaving for the Expo tomorrow morning and I’ll be tweeting and taking pics while on site. Follow me here if you want to share in the sights and mini stories.

See you in a few days.

Sound Off!

What started out as a short review ended up being a 1500 word text where I try to summarize what the game is about so I can run it next week.  Feel free to read the Capsule Review and then jump to “So Chatty, what are your thoughts”

The first new RPG I bought at Gen Con 2010 is Apocalypse World by Dogs of the Vineyard designer Vincent Baker. I met him early during the con and he made a great pitch while I was looking for a post-apocalyptic game for my gaming group.  Our mutual interests collided and I left with a beautiful, autographed, pocket-sized paperback.

I’d  likely play it next week with my gaming group so here’s a chatty style review.

Capsule Review

Not for the faint of heart from both a thematic and playing philosophy point of view, Apocalypse World presents a very clever and apparently engrossing game. It’s main focus is not so much on player accomplishment or setting exploration(although the PCs are complete badasses) but rather the relationships that form between PCs and the constantly mutating loyalties and rivalries between them.

If you’ve started enjoying story games that thrive on failures like Mouse Guard and Burning Wheel but want to explore a darker, very adult theme, Apocalypse World is well worth giving a try.

Buying the book+PDF: Click Here

The Core Play Philosophy

As can be expected from a Lumpley Games RPG, Apocalypse World is first and foremost a Story Game focusing not on collecting whacked out technological gear while fighting mutants. Rather it’s very much about the loyalties and rivalries that form when exceptional, kickass beings (the PCs) band together against a merciless, you’ll-get-screwed-no-matter-what world of decay, scarcity and multiple threats coming from everywhere.

Play focuses on players getting into trouble and how they resolve it (usually by getting into more trouble, leaving behind numerous dead NPCs). The PCs follow their own agendas for survival: performing tasks, raiding groups of NPCs (or even those of other PCs) to gain resources and acting on obligations that often crop up.

Play also follows meta-plots, called Fronts, where events and/or major NPC groups move in the already busy schedules of the PCs to make things more interesting and prevent players from establishing too much stability in the world.

For example, a new cult can move in near the PCs holding, bearing a strange viral plague that reprograms people into new fanatical converts before they die horribly of some form of brain cancer 3 months later.

Finally, the game forcefully tells GMs (called Master of Ceremonies or MCs) to refrain from prepping stories and adventures.  Prep focuses on keeping NPCs and organizations created through play straight (there are plenty of tools available online for that) and organizing the game’s fronts.

The Implied Setting and World building

The game’s implied setting  starts unspecified yet remains very specialized:

Here be the post-apocalypse and some serious, undefined shit is brewing in some ethereal entity called the psychic maelstrom.

The world takes shape as the players flesh out their characters while the MC innocently peppers the discussion with questions about the PCs pasts, current location, make of vehicles and names of every NPC around them.

The answers of such questions, with healthy doses of “Just make it up” whenever players falter, create the world as the MC notes relevant details on the very elegantly designed 1st session worksheet.

Character Generation

Characters are presented to players as playbooks: a combination character generation rules, character sheet and character specific rules.  Each playbook represent an established Post-Apocalyptic badass archetype and two players can’t play the same  since each represent a unique exceptional individual.

Some examples:

• The Angel heals people, and has a medical clinic with staff.
• The Battlebabe kills and intimidates everyone with her custom whacked up weapons.
• The Gunlugger is the ultimate killer badass with more guns than shorts.
• The Hocus is a religious leader prophet controlling a cult of NPCs (think Season 4 Gaius Baltar).
• The Brainer screws with people’s brains with her psychic abilities.
• The Hardholder is the leader of an established community of variable size .

And so on.

The playbook outlines all the choices that players make to create the PC, from names, look, equipment, and stat range so it is a clever, self-contained document.

Oh yeah, and thanks to Ron Edwards’ influence (among many other Indie luminaries), the PCs have special powers when they have sex with one another.

Yeah, that kind of game.

The Game Mechanics

Mechanically speaking, the game is an exchange of narrative “moves” where a move describes an action/event/game element with a significant impact in the game’s fiction.

All characters have basic moves like “Going aggro” and “Read a Situation” and character specific ones like the Angel’s “Healing Touch”. Establishing success of such moves (when significant) requires a player to roll 2d6 and add a relevant stat (which usually goes from -2 to +4).  A 7-9 is a soft success (i.e. it works but something goes wrong/different than planned as described by each moves) and a 10+ is a hard success.

While the player will use the terminology of their moves (basic and character-specific) to clearly indicate to the MC what they are attempting, the MC will ask the player to fictionalize said move to make it cooler by saying, over and over again: “Cool, how do you do that?”

The Master of Ceremonies

The MC is guided by a set of formal narrative principles like “Barf forth Apocalyptica” and “always respect the logic of the game”.  He also has very specific moves like”Announce Future Badness”, “Separate them” and “‘take their stuff away”. In essence, the MC announces that something happens whenever he makes a move and asks players to react with moves of their own.  For example:”A bad guy slinks away behind you and loops a steel wire around your neck, what do you do?”

Most everything the MC does in the game is make moves that lead up to the “what do you do” question, the MC almost never rolls dice. PCs get hurt (Shot at, drugged, strangled, etc) when they fail rolls. It’s the move players choose reactively that either gets them out of trouble, lands them into different trouble or leaves them lying in a puddle of blood.

The MC must also makes crap up on the spot (NPC moods, appearances, actions) while narrating. When well done, players don’t notice anything other than an apocalyptic tinged fully interactive story that remains internally consistent with both the rules and the apparent onscreen/offscreen logic…

Things become really interesting when PCs either miss a roll or give the MC a golden opportunity to screw with them… thus the MC is invited to go to town and make the most heinous-yet-interesting-for-the-PCs move he can think about. A bit like Mouse Guard’s failure mechanic… only not G-rated and guided by the MC’s list of moves (and any custom ones that fit the game).

The MC also names everything so that all NPCs gain a semblance of substance… but never so much that he gets to hesitate to get them killed, maimed, destroyed at the players whim.

The game’s fuel is the MC’s questions to the characters (not players).  Those questions (and answers) build the world and shape where the action goes.  Many (if not most) of these questions should be embedded in the MC’s moves or in response to players Moves/questions (i.e. turning player questions back to the group).

Chatty: You’re reading this awesome review, What does it remind you of? What does it make you feel like?

Exactly like that.

So Chatty what are your thoughts?

After reading the book and going over the game’s forums, I definitively want to try it for a few sessions.  This is NOT Fallout the RPG.  There is very limited space for armour, explosives and advanced weaponry. What it is about is scarce water, savage gangs of bikers/cultists, warlord raiders, driving through the desert in search of medicines and trying to decipher what the hell is the Psychic Maelstorm before it rots everyone’s brains.

Oh and see if you can get in Marie’s pants before she makes a move on Roark.

I’m completely intrigued by a game with no formal planning and especially by the “you don’t roll stuff, the players do”. It makes me feel the game is hard to master for both players and the MC.  There are a LOT of little bits here in there that can be easily forgotten.

I’ll spend the week thinking of some visuals and sub-themes so I can barf forth the appropriate levels of Apocalyptica.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask… this is a hard game to describe.

Buying the book+PDF: Click Here

I give you the Zombie Apocalypse RPG Trope Post!

Zombies are people, too… Okay, dead people, with poor verbal skills. And the only communication they understand is blowing off their heads.

- USA Network commercial for Night of the Living Dead

Stop being so pathetic! …Humans send robots to Mars. Zombies are baffled by doorknobs.

- How to Survive a Horror Movie by Seth Grahame-Smith

The Real Pandemic

In 2010, humanity scrambled and achieved the near-miraculously vaccination (often at gun point) of 75% of the world’s population.  The virus turned out to be benign.  The conspiracy theorist had a field day… and a lot of science types looked like idiots.

Unfortunately, in mid 2011 the A(H1N1) virus recombined with new mutations of the Swine and Avian flu and a new, very deadly strain arose.  A new pandemic started  but this time no one wanted to get the vaccine and no government had the courage to impose it.

Things changed when the death tolls rose  rapidly. Panic and civil disorder exploded.  Mass Vaccination began again, through riots and armed conflicts.  However, the conventional vaccine could not prevent infection.

Before the new pandemic broke out, the top vaccine manufacturers, grown fat with the profits made from selling the H1N1 vaccine, fell on one another like crazed jackals.  Out of the corporate carnage rose GeneCore now the world’s sole manufacturer of vaccines and gene-therapy.

Faced with the threat of the new Flu virus, GeneCore proposed its experimental, non-FDA approved gene-therapy vaccine.  The idea was to infect the body with a benign genetically-engineered virus that would reprogram all of the body’s DNA to protect it against the Killer Flu.

Mass vaccination, at least in the countries that could still afford GeneCore’s price, was started in late 2011. Protesters and conspiracy theorists were silenced, often violently.

Something was in that Vaccine’s virus… Something primeval, something almost evil.

54% of humanity had been vaccinated when it happened…

(fade to black)

In December 2012, 50% of humanity was dead, 30% had mutated into near-mindless cannibalistic predators and 5% were… something else…

Welcome to Zombie Apocalypse 2012.

The Game’s Setup

This 2012 Zombie Apocalypse idea is good for a short Post Apocalyptic modern campaign where most of the humans have become flesh-eating Zombies.  What’s left of the world’s population hides in pockets all over the planet, trying to survive civilization’s collapse and the new predators.

PCs are not humans or zombies. They are part of the 5% that were mutated in something far better and worse, Vampires!  With intact minds and prodigious powers, they need to feed on human blood…pure, unzombified human blood.

Thus, they must battle the hordes of zombies (and other mutants) and try to find humans to feed upon.

In terms of game system.  I’d suggest using d20 Modern or World of Darkness.  If you use d20 Modern, I propose you use Monte Cook’s World of Darkness for the Vampire PC Class (it works perfectly for that).  You can also generic systems like Gurps or Champions but you may need to build the proper templates for PCs and adversaries.  They all work.

Adventure Seeds

1) PCs “wake up” as starved Vampires in an abandoned hospital ward.  The place is filled with Zombies.  The PCs discover their powers as they fight through the hospital to find the hospital’s Blood Bank (or maybe a few hidden humans”.  Great for a one Shot.

2) The PCs are newly created Vampires that have been enslaved by a Vampiric Coven that discovered how to successfully create new ‘members’.  They must learn to play their captors against one another in order to escape.  Aided by a few heroic human NPCs, they must then evade Zombie guards and Vampire enforcers to reach freedom into the blighted wilderness.  This scenario works great for a more storytelling experience.

3) The PCs are virtuous adventurers seeking the ‘cure’ for their condition and must storm the Headquarters of GeneCore, held by a few Vampire Lords and an army of Mutated monstrosity.  Great for players who want to play the internal struggle of killing humans to survive.

How about you?  What cool ideas would you add to this setting?  Adventure Seeds? Some monster concepts?  Some other idea or cause for the Apocalypse?  You tell me!

This is Post # 600 on Musing of the Chatty DM!  To celebrate this and my Dungeon theme week, I decided to write an article in the style that has made me known as a RPG blogger: a Trope post!  You are new to the blog and don’t yet know about Tropes?  Here’s a handy link to get your started.

In order to celebrate Dungeon Week at Musings of the Chatty DM, and to get your gears going for our little contest, I thought we could explore one of the two foundation Tropes of our favorite Fantasy Roleplaying game:

Dungeon Crawling

Dungeon Crawling is the act of exploring a dungeon (or other dangerous area) while looking for treasure or some other important object. The characters must battle enemies (usually monsters) and use their skills and equipment to negotiate obstacles (usually traps.) Usually, but not always, there is a Boss Battle at some point, and a Mac Guffin or Plot Coupon at the end.

(Snip)… it is actually Older Than Dirt, since even old myths feature it (heroes like Orpheus voyaging into the Underworld, for example). However, it was the Cliff Hanger film serials of the early 20th century that defined the trope, and the Indiana Jones movies that made it popular again later.

Dungeon Crawling.  The word implies slow progress through damp corridors of an underground complex, carefully checking every square inch for potential death traps.  For decades, adventurers have prodded the depths of countless published and home-brewed dungeons, equipped with such classic staples as 10 foot poles (to trigger the traps), Iron Spikes (to stuck doors shut or prevent sliding doors from closing)  and a mule-drawn cart to transport treasures.

Of course, experienced players of old school dungeon crawls have found much more creative uses for such staples and anything else that they could their hands on.

Dungeon Crawling can be defined many ways, as each era of Dungeons and Dragons found new ways of staging adventures around the concept of exploring a (relatively) fixed site where PCs discover various challenges and reap whatever material rewards they can find.  Hot debates are sparked daily in RPG blogs and forums about Old school gaming and how it differs from the game styles encouraged by later editions of D&D.

My goal is not define what dungeon craweling is, nor to add to the debate.  Rather, I’d like to explore dungeon crawling through the lens of game’s history to explore applications of the trope.

The Dungeon as the Campaign Setting

Many early campaigns (and several current ones based on retro-clones of older editions of D&D) were based upon the exploration of large, multi-levels underground structures.  Later renamed Megadungeons, these sites were where most of adventures would occur.  Partys of adventurers, drawn from gaming groups that could sometimes be counted in the dozens, got together and explored the dungeon, clearing large swats of a given levels before exploring deeper.

One of the core assumptions of such campaigns was that the deeper PCs explored, the harder the challenges were and the higher were the potential rewards.  Another assumption was that cleared levels of the dungeon would eventually be repopulated, forcing returning adventurers to deal with new occupants or find alternate, less crowded paths to the deeper parts of the dungeon.

Creating a Dungeon-based campaign

Starting such a campaign is relatively simple, you need to set your dungeon in an area of your favorite game world (or you may create your own world to host it).  You don’t need to flesh out the outside world too much.  You can usually place your dungeon under ruins of some sort.  Popular choices are:

• A ruined monastery, See here for a very recent example.
• Under a Mountain, usually within and under the ruins of some sort of underground city
• Under a City, like Forgotten Realms Undermountain found under Waterdeep or Monte Cook’s Ptolus
• Under a Castle, like the classic Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns from the co-creators of D&D

But you can also break out of the classic approach and build your megadungeon in other ways:

• Inside a crashed Spaceship (like the classic Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module which could be grown bigger by adding more floor decks)
• Inside the cone of a volcano (making your dungeon doughnut shaped) like Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil
• Across worlds/planes of existence (by placing portals that transport PCs from one world to the next)
• Outside! By making the dungeon stand on the various ‘levels’ of a stripped mine or on the side of a mountains with gigantic ‘steps’ carved on its surface.

Its usually a good idea to find a reason for your dungeon to exist.  This will help you define the type of encounters found within it, acting like a baseline theme on which to build upon.  If you build your dungeon in a desert, you might want to borrow from Egyptian myth to give your campaign an exotic flavor.  In a similar manner, if you want to place your dungeon under the ruins of a lost Jungle temple, than you can borrow from Indiana Jones or a plethora of classic pulp era adventure and Sword and Sorcery stories.

Once you have chosen the site of your dungeon you need to chart the closest point of civilization (City, town, village, Frontier Keep, etc) to the dungeon. The further away your dungeon is from civilization, the longer the transit time between forays and resupplying expeditions, allowing more restocking of the dungeon. Large distances may also explain why the dungeon hasn’t been touched by other adventurers before and may play a role in your choices if you are the type of DM that likes to have such questions answered.

Finally, a dungeon far from civilization often makes it more likely to remain the sole focus of the campaign as there is little or no ‘distraction’ to deter PCs from exploring deeper and deeper.

Dungeons that sit closer to civilization are more likely to be plundered faster, with shorter resupplying interludes between forays.  It could also make it more likely to have been partly cleared by prior adventuring parties or being explored by ‘competitors.  Such NPC adventurers may interact with the party, acting as friendly but competitive  support or antagonistic cut-throat jerks.

In my own Primal/Within campaign, I made the City so close, it’s actually inside the dungeon itself!

Once you’ve established your dungeon and the closest point of Civilization, you are free to start mapping your dungeon. The one-page dungeon template is an excellent tool for that!

Such campaigns often don’t have an overarching plot line, the story is the one that the PCs forge through their exploration.  In such cases, story arises from the players actions in and out of the dungeon.  Planning future forays with other PCs, forging alliances with dungeon factions, buying real estate outside of the dungeon and developing lasting relationships with hirelings are all ways that roleplaying occurred and stories progressed in such campaigns.

DM creating such dungeons can therefore focus more on story hooks than developed storylines.  By creating various opposing factions within the dungeon you create opportunities for PCs to discover and exploit the possibilities of such opposition.

Example:

The Orcs of the 4 fingered-Claws have recently invaded the Kobold Warrens of the 1st level of the Great Abyss, a semi-open megadungeon set on a mile-high cliff overlooking the cursed Dagonite Ocean.  Many kobolds are now enslaved to the Orcs, the remaining kobolds have retreated to the cliff side network of ledges and tunnels.  Hating the orcs above all, they will willingly let adventurers safe passage through their new found lair so they can get to the orcs faster.

The Brotherhood of troll-magi, a group of highly intelligent trolls trained in the arcane arts have subdued a Dragon and taken control of its sizable horde, scattering the dragon’s minions to other, less ‘comfortable’ parts of the dungeon.  As the PCs explore the dungeon, looking for the horde, they catch hints that something happened to the dragon and need to prepare to face something mightier what they initially planned.

If you are interesting in capturing the tropes of classic dungeon-based campaigns, here’s an excellent list of assumptions to run an Old School dungeon (mega or otherwise).

Do you have ideas and concepts for dungeon-based campaigns you’d like to share?

Part 2 will be about… I don’t know yet, but definitively about more dungeon goodness!

Phil’s shoes are quite large, and it will be some time before I am able to adequately fill them. Being a kind and generous former potentate, Phil gave me a practice exercise to run. Here it goes:

I find it best to separate the colors and the whites, because the whites stay much brighter that way. However, you may find yourself out of underwear if you don’t alternate loads. Washing baby clothes is an entirely different story. A person who can keep baby clothes clean probably made a pact with the devil at some point, and I cannot say the payoff would be worth it for me. However, some people are much more into doing their laundry than I, and if for some reason you find yourself at the fabled Crossroads ready to make a deal with Old Scratch, far be it from me to keep you from bargaining away your eternal soul to keep your whites whiter and your brights brighter. I don’t like socks very much. My wife and I threw away all our socks and bought 20 pairs of the same kind that we both wear so that we don’t have to sort. However, the dresser keeps spawning versions of our old socks and sprinkling them randomly into the sea of perfectly uniform socks. I’m not sure if an exorcist would even show up to get rid of this problem but as long as my socks don’t start spinning around and projectile vomiting on me, I think I can make do.

Phil was right, I feel much more competent now. However, he told me that to truly become a Chatty DM, I must discuss tropes at great length. I have just googled that word, and I feel ready. Let us begin.

Tropes are a process of inbred fertilization which employs certain decomposed organic materials– including, but not limited to animal sediment– to blanket an area in which vegetation is desired. The procedure enriches the soil for stimulated plant development while, at the same time, preventing erosion and decreasing the evaporation of moisture from the ground. To properly trope your garden, all you need is some simple household chemicals. I recommend about 1/2 ton of lawn clippings, a can of beer (for the enzymes, which are the catalyst to get all the bacteria going and give your tropes some real kick), 1/8 cup of antifreeze, and a few hefty squirts of Palmolive dishwashing liquid to give those bugs diarrhea. Wrap everything in newspaper over the winter, or your tropes might collapse, taking the foundation of your house along with them. Before you install tropes, you should check your local city or state zoning ordinances involving tectonic shift and/or manslaughter.

Upon further review, it seems that I was talking about something very similar to tropes, but not actually tropes. Please forgive me, I am but a novice Chatty DM. These powers are intoxicating and difficult to control. Please allow me to refocus:

One of the most common tropes in fantasy roleplaying is that every character has underarms. Subverting this trope might seem impossible to the novice, but daily diligent practice will allow you to overcome your limitations. PC’s frequently have heroic (or “good aligned”, as we say in the parlance) underarms, but this certainly does not mean a clever DM can’t speak in private with the PC’s underarms to make them do something unexpected. (Protip: try bribing them with food or diamonds.) Also, the number of underarms on a villain is typically directly proportional to the number of arms he has. (Or she! Don’t forget, girls have underarms too!) If you want to really spice up your campaign, try giving your villain three or four extra underarms. Or just one extra, but it’s a giraffe’s underarm! Now that’s what I call Proper Villainy!

(NOTE: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES give your villain two giraffe underarms. You want your players to feel like they can win at least occasionally. Remember: you’re successful at being a DM when everyone is having fun.)

I think this would be a good place to stop. Phil told me not to lay too much on the audience at once. He said he gave out too many secrets at once this one time, and it killed his entire readership right there on the spot. Rather than undo all the hard work he has done rebuilding his user base and hiding the bodies, I would rather leave you all aching for more. Please don’t cry. I love each and every one of you just as Phil did.

However, I must tempt fate and leave you with one final golden nugget of wisdom: grow a beard, because the evil twin will always beat the good twin at Scrabble.

Good night, Chatty Nation!

I’m one avid reader.  I read novels by the buckets when I have the time to do it.  When my urge to write waned these past months, I made up for it by reading and watching TV more.

Having been around long enough to resist falling into the trap of trying to make a RPG campaign out of everything cool I read or saw on a screen, I had an idea.

Why not try a new series where I share plot elements of books I read with you guys to set the ideas engine off for our collective RPG campaigns.  Not quite reviews nor campaign plans, I just plan to ramble about cool stuff I’ve read and maybe try to churn new ideas for RPGs.

I start the series with my favorite author.

I’ve long been a fan of Neal Stephenson’s work.  To this date, his Snow Crash and Age of Diamonds novels are, by far, my favorite Sci-Fi stories .  I’ve read Snow Crash every two years since it’s first printing as a paperback and I’ve read the Diamond Age 3 times already and I’m starting to feel the pull to read it again.

Do note that Stephenson, much like the early work of William Gibson, assumes his readers are expert in the field he writes about… or are goddamn geniuses! This made me throw a few of his books away in disgust!

FYI: Feel free to skip any long Data Dump you can’t fathom, chances are its not necessary for the story.  I ended up doing it for his 3 book Baroque cycle!

So here’s a quick summary of each story and sample of the key tropes I got from each book:

Zodiac

Summary:

A jerkish ecological militant, bordering on eco-terrorism, is the chemical equivalent of a film noir Detective.  He gets  caught in a conspiracy-level ploy that leads to the discovery of massive amounts of toxic wastes being released in his city’s Boston’s water.

Selected Tropes:

The well meaning jerk: The main character is one monumental asshole and he knows it.

The evil corporation: There’s always one, willing to pitiful things like client safety and future growth for some thing more important like this semeter’s bottomline

The cool boat: Zodiac boats!  Weee! Not as cool now, but still the Eco-Guerrila vehicle of choice!

RPG nuggets:

I think that the well meaning Jerk NPC is a great way of modeling a modern day Magnificent Bastard.  As usual, be careful not to piss your PCs too much (unless you want them to).  This NPC model lives to annoy PC and motivate them through negative reinforcement.

Eco-terrorism is going to be a subject whose popularity will likely rise in the current global polarizing of opinions and stances.  This makes it an interesting approach to explore, especially if you go at it cross genre.

• Fantasy: What if the rising use of Magitek had noticeable, yet still debatable ecological impact on the world?  Final Fantasy VII’s initial plot hook IIRC.
• Horror: What if rising global pollution was a condition for summoning the Great Old Ones as they can’t survive if the Ocean is not polluted enough?  Maybe those crazy cultists that blew up 5 stolen nukes under Bikini Atol are on to something.

Snow Crash

Summary: TV Tropes writes it up better than I ever could.

The tale of a Mafia-backed badass pizza delivery guy who teams up with a badass courier in a Post Cyber Punk disincorporated USA to fight “Snow Crash” – a computer virus for the brain. Oh, and there’s a badass biker with glass knives and a nuclear bomb strapped to his motorbike, too.

This book is pure applied Rule of Cool.

Selected Tropes

Bad Ass characters and villains: This book is bursting at the seems with characters who are scary strong.

Cool Car and Boat (see a theme here?):  The Deliverator is a high tech military grade car for… delivering pizzas. And part of the action of the book takes place on an Aircraft Carrier turned into a floating refugee city.

Big Fraking Gun: “Portable”-nuclear-powered-depleted-uranium-needle-shooting Gatling Gun… ’nuff said!  It’s called “Reason” and you should listen to it.

The Plucky girl: A “I don’t take crap from nobody” 15 year old sketboard courrier girl.  She somehow managed to also show up in a William Gibson novel… fancy that!

Serious Business: Your pizza in 30 minutes, or the delivery boy murdered free!

As I said, if you are a geek, like cyberpunk and haven’t read Snow Crash, go get it now!

RPG Nugget

I really like the concept of brain hacking.  There’s something sinister and powerful behind that idea.  You can easily build a whole campaign, regardless of genres, around an Evil Overlord (corporate or classic) going around and making zombies of the average population without having to invoke complicated rituals that PCs can interrupt by dropping a d20 on it.

Also, having tried it, making your characters Bad Asses in the eyes of ‘the average’ NPC makes for an Epic feeling in your game.  Yes the bad guy waiting for you outside the bar can rip cars in half.  However, while you are in that bar, the waitress is impressed with YOU.

I also really like the concept of the frail looking, Waif-fu mastering, teenaged NPC.  So much so that my players now automatically assume that any underaged NPC I introduce in my games are automatically some sort of Avatar for a god of Battle or a guidance system for an Orbital laser cannon.

Then, there’s something to be said to let PCs handle an experimental, exceedingly deadly weapon and then throw something equally stupid cool at them for the weapon to be used.  I mean, if you are going to be giving them a Wand of Nuking with four charges left, I suggest that you send them a squadron of flying Titanium Elemental Bombers!

Finally, that ‘serious business’ part, makes for such a great tyrannical, Lawful Evil, setting spark.

Anyone else got ideas from these two books?

Why not? It’s been ages since I wrote any of them, and this is Halloween after all.

With a satisfying ‘thunk’ Tragak the barbarian sheared the Orc Shaman’s head, sending it flying in the room’s dank, dark corner. As he was looting the body, he failed to notice the eight spindly spider legs bursting out of the shaman’s brain case and 2 huge mandibles pop out of the head’s eye sockets in a jet of aqueous gunk.  Tragak was in for a surprise.

A lot has been written about Horror RPGs and how to host a scary game.  The word out is that it’s not easy scaring players, even less easy to scare PCs without coercion.

Well I decided to add my voice to the echo chamber by digging in the deepest wells of my depraved soul to come up with some seriously troubling imagery.

And what better way to look for new ways to scare the guts out of your players than looking at one Horror Trope I find intriguing and troubling:

Nightmare Fuel

A catch-all term describing stuff in popular culture that gave us nightmares, whether they meant to or not.

To really be effective Nightmare Fuel, as our examples show, you’ll need something that was meant to either amuse, entertain, or be only slightly scary to the audience. In execution, they’re so trauma-inducing that they may cause even adults to void themselves in terror.

When the effect is 100% intentional, the trope becomes Unleaded.

Take an aspect that defines your favorite Roleplaying game but push it too far and see the result.  Go for out of this world creepiness that will make your players skin crawl.

Fantasy Nightmare Fuel #1

The PCs are asked to recover a legendary suit of plate mail armour renowned to be nearly weightless and make it’s wearer nigh invulnerable.  As the player race to recover the item against a recurring villain, they arrive just too late and see him wearing it.

During the ensuing fight, the villain is hard to hit and the armour lashes out with tentacle-like metal spikes whenever it is hit. However, as soon as the villain becomes bloodied/badly wounded, the tentacle dig in the Villain’s wounds and the armour starts flowing inside the wearer’s body!

Screaming inhumanly, the villain’s organs burst out from all sides as the armour fuses with his wearer’s muscles and Bones, becoming a dread construct of gore and Steel, ready to unleash its true potential.

Fantasy Nightmare Fuel #2

While eating at the Inn and waiting for the next dancing plot point to show up. the PCs hear disgustingly wet popping sounds all around them.  Looking up from their mutton, they notice that all other customers are turning inside out, exposing their insides and rising as freakishly bloodied and chunky zombies… Then have the Innkeeper’s family burst out of the kitchen, fangs-a-showing, telling the PCs that ‘this meal is on the House’

Modern Nightmare fuel #1

A lone, very anxious 6 year old is running scared and crying in the streets of your campaign’s metropolis. Whenever people stop to help her and look her in the eyes, she screams in fear as they turn into grotesquely inflated fanged psychotic clowns!

The circus is in town, and the only way to stop it is to wake the sleepwalking girl, gently…

Modern Nightmare Fuel #2

On a dark night under the shadow of some ancient evil, a gun fight erupts between the PCs and a street Gang.  An inordinate amount of screaming and cries of pain are heard throughout the fight.  Investigating leads to the gruesome discovery that all bullets are alive and doing all the screaming, drowning in blood and suffocating in the bodies of the dead people…

Further investigation leads to the discovery that a twisted priest of chaos has trapped the souls of countless innocents into ammunition and is engineering gang violence to sacrifice all these souls to bring about Chaosocalypse.

Modern Nightmare Fuel #3

One name, The Corinthian

Fear is in your head

Horror roleplaying is about atmosphere, setting, mood and description.  Don’t try to scare PCs, go for the players. Give them the creepiest WTF moments you think they can handle… and the ask them how their characters react.

Therein lies you next drum of nightmare fuel that will leave your players creeped out long after the game.

Happy Halloween.

Credits: Robin Stacey (Ragz), Sandman comics (The Corinthian)

I thought it would be a perfect occasion to do a new Trope post about mixing some Super Heroes in my D&D Kool Aid!

Trope: A narrative shortcut taken in a story that the audience will recognize and have expectations about. See this site if you have never heard about them.

Some of the critics on D&D 4e revolve around the fact that the PCs are too heroic and too competent, robbing the genre of its historical Zero to Hero vibe.  That’s a perfectly valid critic and is part of the Old School revival we see on the net.

My stance on this is to embrace the new design philosophies and turn the volume to 11.

By default, D&D 4e is be about:

• Exceptional Heroes equipped with powers few mortals share
• A world filled with Evil and Danger
• Combat in dynamic and challenging environments
• Teamwork to surmount difficult odds

I don’t know about you but that really does sound familiar…

Super Hero

A series where the main character has powers and/or abilities that set him aside from other people. Usually (unless he’s Not Wearing Tights) he is a costumed do-gooder with a colorful outfit (which likely sports a Chest Insignia), a Secret Identity and often unusual and useful superpowers or equipment (Snip)

Sometimes the show focuses on a team or other grouping of powered individuals.

So basically, most of the work has been already done to make a D&D 4e campaign into a fusion of Fantasy Super Heroes. Let’s explore this a bit:

Powers and Origins

That one is the easiest.  All D&D classes come packed with powers who are derived from a specific Power Source. You can therefore tweak the fluff behind each source to make it more inline with Super Powers.

Martial Power Source: PCs are Batman-style super normals.  They learned the secrets of killing people with dull spoons and 3 headed flails through secret Monastic Orders and long lost martial lore.  You need to describe moves with silly Anime names like ‘Avalanche of Monkey Thunder’ (Thanks Bobzilla) and ‘Wall of Raging Steel Elephants’.

Divine Power Source: Fearless Leaders, these characters can call both destruction and healing from the Powers of the Planes.  From the Tankish Paladin to the Buffing Cleric you need to play these guys like Avatars of Divine Powers, exuding Glowing Holy Energies like a Leaking Plutonium Reactor Core.

Arcane Power Source: The Blasters of the campaign.  These guys laugh at the rigidity of physical laws.  Need a light? Ding, here’s one!  Need these mooks to be fried?  Boom there it is!.  Oh noes, I’m being cornered by orcs!  Poof!  Suckers, I’m over here now!

If I was to make a Super Arcanist, I’d make him into a Teleporting Warlock and I’d make him as Chatty as Spiderman

In fact, a key point of doing a Super Fantasy game is to encourage players to come up with an origins story to explain, in their own ways, how they got thier powers.  It would also increase the feel of the story to have players come up with reasons why they would learn new powers upon leveling up.  They can visit their old mentors, study old scrolls during adventuring or practice new moves during rest periods.

Costume and Secret Identity

I find it hard to imagine why a Fantasy Hero would want his identity to remain a secret.  It is however one of the key difference between the genres (apart from the whole medieval vs Modern theme of course).

Here’s how I’d envision it:

The world has fallen through dark times, hordes of monsters and marauding barbarians have overtaken the old kingdom and the self-contained Free City is the only standing bastion of safety.  This safety has been brought at the cost of ever increasing power to the civic leaders and severe limitations on freedom.

“We control your life so that others don’t try to take it from you!”

Much like Feudal Japan, all non military citizen are prevented from bearing arms and all must toil in the City’s Gardens, merchant Navies and Services under the watchful eyes of the the City’s Blackcloaks, the Secret Police arm of the government.

Enter the PCs.  They have learned thier (Illegal) powers in secret and are motivated to fight both the encroaching danger of the wilderness but also the choking tyranny of a state that has had power for too long and now clings to it.

Being all citizens of the city, with family and loved ones, they must hide thier identities to perform thier deeds, for fear of reprisal.

Of course, at a certain point they become stronger than all Civic Forces and need to decide how to restore freedom and still protect the city… Fun Times!

Alternative to Secret Identities

Have all PCs be part of an adventuring group, complete with tabards and a name.

Then thier costumed identity makes them more recognizable and more likely to be invited by the leaders of your campaign world for request of help.  It becomes a marketing thing to wear the Blue Cloaks or to proudly wear the Tabard of the Order of The Soup Bowl… don’t laugh, its a very very respected all Halfling adventuring group.

Campaign Models

One thing a Super Heroic Fantasy campaign does not do very well is ‘Kill them and take their stuff’.

Super Heroics is about saving people, facing world-destroying threats and dealing with one’s inner vulnerabilities, making the genre perfect for Psychodrama seeking players.

The campaign should be under the theme of our heroes being asked for help by different organization to face dangers no average mortals can deal with. That model can then be made more complex by having each organization’s agenda become incompatible with other’s and have the PCs find out how they are being used and abused.

So here’s a few campaign ideas:

PCs are Rangers (in the Tolkien sense) protecting a region from encroaching hordes of baddies… and a rift to both the Abyss and Hell opened and things are pouring out… and fighting each other!

There’s a crazy Wizard-Alchemist that developed a serum to “unlock” to true potential.  By a stroke of sheer luck he managed to do one ‘good’ batch. The PCs (all orphans) were exposed to developping their current power.  Since, the mad man has been trying to re-create his early success but has only managed to create and release psychotically savage monsters in the city.  The PCs must trace him back in the depth of the dungeons under the city and put a stop to his activities.

Magic Items as Powers

Since money more or less becomes irrelevant in such a campaign, I suggest that Magic Items (the main reason to keep track of money in 4e) be unavailable for purchase per say.  Instead have Magic items become part of the PCs’s Powers as Super Equipment! Then have this crazy allied gadgeteering Gnome or Dwarf NPC make Magic Items out of whatever pieces of strange doohickeys the PCs find in their quests.

So Magic Items then become the Bat-gadgets of our heroes.

of course, PCs will still find magic items in their quests, but then they players will need to work together to weave them in thier stories.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to don my Flanged Plate mail and Full Face visor for I must foil the latest plans of the Evil Eye, Mastermind Beholder of the Underworld and his Death Gnoll Minions!

What more? Check Out Ninetail’s take on the same subject!

Credit: Nice One Entertainment (Image)

I’ve decided to rename my trope series because the posts feel like I’m writing a new season. I’m also experimenting with slightly different formats of trope posts. It remains to be seen if I’ll be jumping the shark or making the series grow a beard.

Have you ever had the experience, at school, in your families or at work of throwing out a clerverish expression and slowly seeing that expression take root and start being used by others?

While writing my Worldwide D&D Gameday post, I mentioned an unexplained plot element that could lead to a “WTF?” moment if players stopped and though about it.

I referred to this as a Fridge Logic moment.

I’ve since then seen the expression adopted by a few readers and bloggers and I was told that it also crept up on Enworld.

Now I didn’t create the expression, it’s actually part of the TV Tropes Wiki (and an industry term). However, since it seems to be making its way in our collective RPG subconscious, I thought I’d discuss it and ponder how to use it (or ignore it) in your RPG sessions.

Fridge Logic

Half an hour after the show is over, J. Random Viewer is staring into his refrigerator, vaguely bemused by the fact that his six-pack of beer has somehow become a two-pack of beer. Rather than work out how this might have happened, it occurs to him to wonder how in the hell Sydney Bristow (Chatty: from the Alias TV Show) went from Hungary to Melbourne, Australia, then to LA, all within 24 hours.

It hadn’t bothered him during the show. It wasn’t until he discovered he was running short of beer that it became an issue.

So Fridge Logic isn’t a trope per say. It’s more like a safety net on which writers can afford to thin (or ignore) a plot element and not break the viewer’s suspension of disbelief during the show.

Fridge Logic has been the writer’s-room term for these little internal-consistency issues for a good while, as in “Don’t sweat the fridge logic, we’ve got bigger fish to fry. We’ve only got 20 minutes left to work in three costume changes, a foreign language, and a weird wig.” The phrase is often attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, who referred to the delayed recognition of a Plot Hole as “the refrigerator moment.”

Carefully avoiding/subverting Fridge Logic events is what we have started to see in what I like to call ‘cleverly written shows’ like Lost, Heroes and Battlestar Gallactica (well, the good parts thereof).

Thing is, as a Game Masters (GM), we too have way too many fish to fry. We usually can’t afford to prevent such refrigerator moments. While some GM will try to do exactly that, such careful writing comes at a cost of:

• Taking time from prepping more scenes (or more complex/exciting ones)
• Favoring logic/verisimilitude (note my not using the term realism here) over excitement/fun
• Squelching cool ideas because “there’s no way this can fit in the story!”

In my very first trope post on the Rule of Cool, I mentioned that…

…my efforts as a DM should not so much be on far-reaching World Building and tight nitpicking-proof plot lines and such. I should go all out for encounters and role playing that will swamp my players in coolness

I still very much believe that you should not spend too much time trying to unify every single plot hooks and thread in your campaign.

What you don’t want is for your players to have time to ponder fridge logic during the game either because pacing is too slow or because you have been sloppy and left a gaping/railroading plot hole for all to see.

As a Dungeon Master (DM), you want to grip your players in an exciting storyline, amazing action scene or high-flying stunt-ridden combat. You should just go with the flow of where your gut feeling leads you and do whatever you feel like to entertain the players.

If you liberally use the Rule of Cool both in creating your adventure scenes and let your players invoke the same rule when they get creative, any fridge moment you let through won’t be picked up on…

Here’s a little GM secret: Since players are at the frontline of your adventure/story and not a detached audience, they most probably will be too focused on their somewhat selfish perception of the game to tug at any loose threads.

If they liked the game and had fun climbing over that Gargantuan Colossus in the Caves of Woe, chances are they’ll recall the mind-bogglingly crazy stunts they pulled. They probably won’t stop and wonder how the hell a 90′ walking fortress got into the dungeon in the 1st place.

So don’t fight the Fridge Logic, embrace it!

In fact, if a player does mention that there’s something fishy about how that Gelatinous Cube could acquire sentience and ally itself with the Lawful Good Illithid Barbarian, put on your sliest look and wink.

If the player insists, take a note and start planning a follow-up plot arc where you explore how this came to be. If no-one bats an eye, feel free to ignore it for more promising threads.

They say that constraints fosters creativity, I tend to agree.

In fact sometimes you will have to fill a hole discovered during one of your player’s refrigerator moments and discover a series of plot ideas that will lead your campaign to a memorable series of adventures.

Now let’s have a look at another Refrigerator-themed ‘viewer reaction’ that I’ve seen happen a lot online in the last few weeks.

Fridge Brilliance

First impressions are really important. They build relationships and opinions, and you will wish you could do it over again.

Yet, there are times when your opinion of someone or something might change. It could be upon receiving additional information, learning the alternate opinion of someone else, or simply that you have grown up just a little.

Fridge Brilliance is the idea of gaining a new respect for something that you initially hate. One night, as you get up for a midnight snack, you open the refrigerator door and the light dawns on you, “This is the real purpose behind this plot!”

With the advent of D&D 4e, a lot of emotionally charged, often negative posts have been written on it.

Now I’m not going to launch in another “4e is teh Awesomez” post as I’ve done enough of those lately, but suffice it to say that I have been reading a lot of Fridge Brilliance posts about that game lately.

Take about any random RPG blog and look in its archive (including this one). You’ll almost invariably see a neutral to negative series of post prior to the release. Then, from the moment the PDFs got leaked in early June and especially after people got to try it you start seeing a significant shift in opinion.

Most spectacular of those is Robin Stacey’s (aka Greywulf) 170 degrees turn on it (he dislikes the parts of the PHB like I do the DMG).

My take home message? If you can, give the game a try, from either the player’s seat or the DM (they are two different beasts).

What’s that? How could we use Fridge Brilliance in a RPG game? You mean gushing about 4e is not enough anymore? Awwww…

Let’s say you want to sell your group on another RPG (any game). Chances are you’ll have someone (or more that one) opposed and being vocal about it. Take the time to note the players’ concerns and issues with the new game (be they factual or irrational). Also take the time to note what kind of player type that person is.

In the course of discussion, try to get the player to agree, gracefully and in good faith, to giving the game a one session try. (If he/she won’t, don’t bother).

Now check if the proposed system can accommodate your player’s type and choose/create an adventure that will address his concerns/issues.

I believe that resistance to change exists because our perceptions of something are deeply set in our emotional centers. Rational discourse can eventually overcome it, but fighting fire with fire and using emotions is a almost always more efficient.

If you focus on your players’ needs (including the less than enthusiastic ones) and give them an emotionally satisfying session, it’s quite possible that a Fridge Brilliance moment will occur and the new game will be adopted.

It’s a very tall order, but if you really want to GM that new game, seeking a gut-response Fridge Brilliance moment in your change resistant players is the best path to achieving your goal.

Anyone has had positive experiences teaching a new game in the face of active/passive resistance? What were your strategies?

Instead of applying tropes to characters or adventures, why not explore a few tropes that could apply to the actual structure of a campaign?

As I’m pondering about my last campaign, I decided that I would spare you the analysis and discuss the key lesson I learned from it here.

You see, my campaigns have almost always crashed before we concluded them (the last one nearly did).

There are always multiple reasons for them but mostly, I think it’s because they run longer than the writer’s capacity to fuel them, and by writer, I meant me, the DM.

Then I started to think of my campaigns as a TV series. I started comparing just how much they tended to resemble long-running American TV series.

Very much like these shows, Seasonal rot often set in our campaigs. (That’s when a series takes a bad turn in terms of plot choices and ends up leading to a bad season, think Battlestar Galactica Season 3)

Then, this year, I discovered the joys of British Brevity with Life on Mars and Spaced. In such shows, seasons last just 6-8 episodes and then we’re done. I also recalled Tommi’s Burning Vikings campaign…

…and I had an epiphany!

I always have been making my campaign based on long plotlines. TV Tropes calls this..

The Story Arc

A story arc (a contraction of “over-arcing storyline”) is a sequence of episodes that puts characters through their paces in response to a single impetus; basically, an ongoing storyline. This can be a few episodes, an entire season, or even the focus of the entire series.

However, while I tend to spring for Myth Arc (i.e. really long story arcs), I find myself stuck with limited time to prep and occasional bouts of the White Page syndrome.

In such cases, I often have to hunt down pre-published adventures with no link to the story arc (or a tenuous one at best). While I sometimes can hack them to fit into the storyline, more often than not it jars with campaign continuity.

I also often end up taking a series of questionable decisions, like adding strange sourcebooks and merging genres and mechanics in the campaign. I do this without thinking about the consequences and I invariably find myself struggling with a campaign so complex and full of loose threads that I become discouraged with it and just feel like abandoning it…

This in turns affects my enthusiasm and makes the game less fun than it could be.

Memo to Self… you also tend to do that with your jobs Phil.

Oh shut up Freud, I’m writing here!

Anyhow, as I sat there watching Life on Mars, I pondered:

Why not make shorter campaigns around a specific Story Arc? Let’s say 5 to 6 four hours game sessions based around a core idea I can describe in 10 words of less. (See my guest post on that at Johnn Four’s Roleplaying Tips).

With such a short span, my core idea will remain to the front and not be derailed by a random adventure or me adding things… I could now afford to wait a few weeks to add new material in the next mini campaign.

Also, if I decide to take a published adventure, I can make the adventure the actual story arc without having to worry about long term plots and such.

So basically this would make my campaigns modeled after British TV series.

At the same time, why not allow players to choose if they want to play a new character or keep the same one in the next campaign?

This would basically make each campaign a “season” of the series.

Characters would progress in their power level from campaign to campiagn, each new character being at the same levels as the others in the party.

Then at the end of our gaming year, we decide if we continue with that model, Keep the structure but start at the bottom of the power tree again or abandon it and purchase/play a classic adventure path.

Yeah… that could work.

What I really like about this approach is that I can let time pass between those mini campaigns and allow players to decide what it is their characters (retired or not) did during that time.

This would allow marriages to be had, children to be born, treaties to be negotiated, businesses to be run. If a player decides that a character should retire, so be it… he will be until he/she decides to call upon him in a later campaign.

Then when we all agree to a timeline to start the action once anew, the characters become heroes again. Others can also rise to the challenge: nephews, sisters, spouses and friends of ex PCs. Alternatively, new heroes could join the returning heroes.

I feel a lot of possibilities.

From a more gamist D&D 4e perspective (how’s that for an oxymoron?) , such a model would allow players to experiment new characters and get to use new sourcebooks as they become available.

This would allow the gaming group to infuse newness in the game without waiting for the end of a long season (or a character’s death) to switch.

I feel that such a campaign model would be ideal for our upcoming D&D 4e games. I’m not too concerned with continuity as those who long for it can keep the same character over a long time.

That being said, nothing prevents the DM from doing a little bit of Arc Welding and tacking on a Myth Arc to the emerging stories that results from these short adventure… Much like reader MAK proposed in my little characterization tips contest (still a few days to participate!).

So am I onto something good or am I missing something… are there disadvantages I fail to see that can bite us with such a model?

Let me know!

So Sorry for the double feed, something happened when I posted this the 1st time and 1/2 the text was eaten!

One of the things I’ve seen GMs struggle with is campaign secrets and big reveals.

Oh, how we GMs like to be full of secrecy about our pet plots and NPC motivations!

Often, we become overprotective of those secrets don’t we? We hoard them and keep them near. Oh yes! Our preciouses!

We tend to think that by handing secrets in X-Files-thin slices, the unfolding multi-dimensional story will grab our players by the throat and the campaign will culminate in a crescendo of coolness followed by an instant Ferris Bueler’s street party where you get to crowd surf and the whole world basks in your awesomeness…

Hum, no. Chances are you’ll get your players confused and/or impatient and they’ll most likely go try to poke into the undefined parts of your neat plot-lines. Worse yet, they may just ignore it altogether and jump the rails.

It happened to me in a spectacular fashion once.

I was playing a Gurps Fantasy campaign game on a world ruled by dragons, made up of the standard fantasy races.

The plot I presented to the players was that they had to bring down a ruthless Dragon prince who was holding the relatively benign Dragon King and Queen of their kingdom in the castle’s dungeons.

Pretty standard fare huh?

What I failed to tell my players was that the dragons came from a Shadowrun-like Earth, had read The Hobbit and found the whole ‘Smaug’ thing to be quite sensible. In order to live that dream, a bunch of filthy rich dragon billionaires built a STL Arkship, stole a huge pile of Human DNA and left for the stars. They later found a planet and terraformed it to lord over a bunch of fantasy races they had tinkered from all that DNA.

Yeah, I used to go for the real simple stories like that all the time.

My campaign’s main plot was to have the players explore/adventure around the world a bit and then get hit in the face with an honest to goodness alien invasion/Sci-fi vs Fantasy mash up!

When I did my Great Reveal® by describing the crash of an alien spaceship near the player’s campsite, my players’ PCs basically blinked, picked up their campaign gear and left the scene to go explore something else.

So yeah, that didn’t work. I humbly came back with a more traditional storyline, leaving the aliens in orbit while the PCs returned to killing Demon Assassins, Senile Undead Dragons and a Wight named Barry.

So what’s the point of all this and what’s the link with tropes?

Well, I think that you can have secrets and big reveals in your campaign world, as long as it doesn’t send the adventure down a path players refuse to walk.

Three related tropes I discovered that are especially well designed for that:

Tomato Surprise

The resolution of a plot by the sudden revelation of some important detail which has been deliberately hidden from the viewer. Had this detail been made known at the beginning of the story, much or all of the dramatic tension would have been missing from the plot. Usually, it hasn’t been hidden from the “viewpoint” character(s). Sometimes, it has been hidden from one character, so the character will be just as surprised as we are.

This is a trope you can use when you wish to have a campaign-level cliffhanger or a game defining plot-twist.

In the RPG version of the trope, the twist is definitively hidden from the PCs and others but possibly not for some key NPCs.

This is especially interesting when you pull this, successfully, mid-campaign and offer the PCs the choice to pursue the story as if nothing happened or take the twist into account and redirect the story (i.e. Take either the Blue or the Red Pill)

Examples:

• The PCs are serving an aging/sick/senile king/old man that turns out to be a God/Dragon/Demon or to be From the Past/From the Future/their father/the BBEG (this is the Classic, almost Cliché version of the Tomato Surprise)
• The Ultimate Evil that threatens the whole universe turns out to be an innocent 5 year old big eyed little girl, complete with cute animé puppy, whose nightmares become reality and devour whole countries.
• The PCs must recover the Seven Whatever from each kingdoms of Gamecubia to stave off a meteor from crashing into the planet. It turns out that the Whatevers were in fact seals that protected each kingdom from a plague and now everyone is dying. Awwww.
• Two words: The Matrix

My Dragons vs Alien game was an example of a failed application of this trope. For it to have been successful, I would have had to come forth and tell player of the game’s Sci-Fi background and to expect it to become significant later in the campaign.

At the very least I should have planned in advance that the characters might decide to take the other pill.

If you want to pull some really weird crap on your PCs, you may want to explore another trope where the Tomatoes are the actual PCs!

Tomato in a Mirror

Our protagonist is going through a perfectly normal day. Only… something’s wrong. The people around him are acting just a bit off. They keep mentioning a string of words, or are trying to herd him to a certain place.

It looks like the town’s been taken over by the pod people, and our hero’s the only one left. He attempts to either escape and warn the outside world, or find where the invaders are coming from and shut it down. But once he gets there, he discovers the horrifying truth: he’s the fake! A robot, a clone, a ghost, or some other duplicate that forgot he wasn’t the real thing, or was programmed to believe that he was. In an ongoing series, it’ll be a duplicate of one of the main characters. In an anthology, it’ll just be someone who thinks they’re human. Either way, it’s an effective inversion of The Puppet Masters.

This is a trope when you want to make one or all PCs to be something else than what they think they are.

This can be dangerous. If played badly it can change a PC’s core reason of being and totally screw a player’s characterization and possibly ruin the game. Thread carefully.

I beleive that the key to successfully pulling a Tomato in the Mirror reveal is to, once again, give the players to chance to ignore the reveal without major impacts or embrace the plot twist fully!

Another important aspect of this trope is that you must drop subtle hints and sprinkle flashes of the TRUTH so the players start piecing what they are slowly. That’s tricky, but just watch a few hours of Lost or the X-Files and you’ll get the hang of it.

A few examples:

• Your characters are Cylons-equivalent, and get the choice of turning traitor or sticking on the side of the race they were imitating.
• One character is in fact a shapeshifter with amnesia sent in the party as a sleeper agent, however, the trigger to recall it’s mission and lift the amnesia partly failed and now the character gets a highly skilled Jason Bourne character!
• Characters are all Angelic/Fiendish Outsiders sent, memoryless, to the material world in humanoid form to learn the realities of terrestrial life. Later in the campaign, a war between the Celestial and Infernal forces break out and all PCs learn of their true heritage… and get to choose either of the 3 sides.

Finally, here’s one last trope that I used quite successfully once.

Truman Show Plot

Usually a variant on the Tomato In The Mirror, where it turns out that the lead character is in fact the main character on a Reality TV show. Exactly how much of his life is controlled varies: in some cases, every little detail of his life is controlled by the network, while others basically let the main character do whatever he wants, so long as they catch it on camera. It can be a twist ending, or it can be established right at the start of the show.

I pulled a successful version of this trope in my Iron Heroes Campaign.

At one point the players investigated a strange portal found at the bottom of a Sunken Tower and that brought them to a fortress that was sitting right beside a huge force bubble sitting over a ring of mile-high mountains. That was the whole Iron Heroes world… and they had been unwitting prisoners for countless generations.

Their warden were fiends and angels trapped with them, posing as normal people or monsters and such.

I had decided this on a whim mid-campaign and when I revealed that, the face of my dumbstruck players was worth billions!

You should try it…

Here’s one last example:

All characters are in fact trapped in Hell in a fake Fantasy world. They are led to believe that they are adventurers exploring dungeons and killing monsters for loot. In fact, the adventurers are part of the eternal punishment of the damned souls there that get reincarnated in new monsters every day and placed deeper and deeper in the dungeons.

The reveal comes when the PCs find a secret exit (perhaps aided by a Damned one) that reveals that the whole thing is the Infernal equivalent of a reality TV show and the Dungeon was this huge divinely morphic stage!

Imagine the Asmodeus, the Lord of the Nine Hells, siting in the director’s chair, clapping slowly, an enigmatic grin on his face.

Yeah!

Can you come up with other examples of these 3 tropes? Have you played any of them?

P.S. Anyone think what the recipe would be to make a Truman Mirror Tomato Surprise?

Good afternoon! I’ve been a long time reader of and commenter on your blog, and I was looking for some brainstorming help. Specifically,
what kind of holds could a magnificent bastard have over a party in
D&D of 10-14th level?

The problem is offense is far easier in D&D than defense, and players
(as I’m sure you know) are often willing to risk a lot to satisfying
revenges or simply kill someone who annoys them. So, with that in
mind, what are some good holds a partially-revealed magnificent
bastard could use to keep the PCs busy and away from himself?

There’s always the kidnapped friend or relative, but parties are
extremely good at breaking into tightly guarded locations, and
resurrection magic means they often do not fear the death of a valued
NPC. There’s information, but once that is imparted the Magnificent
Bastard loses his hold.

What do you think? Any input would be appreciated. Thanks so much!

-PW

My post on the Magnificent Bastard is quite possibly my favorite Trope article so far. That makes me more than happy to try to tackle this.

In the 10-14th level bracket, D&D PCs are now big shots that can afford to bully/ignore pretty much anyone that isn’t an encounter planned by the DM. At that level, players expect to be the only local badasses that stand between

This makes playing a Magnificent Bastard as the campaign’s main villain hard, especially with remorselessness players who use the game’s mechanics to rationalize doing horrible stuff like letting loved ones be killed to raise them later.

If you must play the Bastard as a villain, I’d say that he/she needs to hold the PCs by the proverbial cojones. At level 10-14, that may be difficult but not impossible to pull off. The MB can hit old SchoolPCs/Teflon players in the following areas:

• Prevent the PCs from being raised if the NPC ever wishes so. (i.e.: You kill me, you hurt me, you stay dead!)… maybe the MB has sold the PCs souls to devils or has influence with the divine agents able to raise the PCs.
• Prevent the PCs from selling loot or acquiring new Magic Item (“Did I forget to mention that I am the son of the head of Wizards’ guild?”)
• The MB marries the sister of a PC… who truly loves him and dies of depression if the MB is killed. (She then refuses to get raised, always an option, unless her love returns whole! That’s evil!)
• Pull a Raven…

Pulling a Raven is a reference to Neal Stepheson’s Snow Crash, where one of the ‘bad guys’ called Raven goes around with a Nuke strapped to his motorcycle and has it plugged on his vital signs. You kill Raven, you create a glass Crater.

In that sense, you can make the Magnificent Bastard imbued with an enchantment (or artifact, or diabolic pact) that basically spells doom for a whole kingdom should he be slain. Now PCs need to find a roundabout way of dealing with the MB. Maybe by deactivating the doomsday device or trapping him on another plane…

…But being a Magnificent Bastard, you can be sure someone/something is going to fall under his charms and release him soon enough.

Lastly, if the PCs do end up killing the MB… why not bring him/her back to life all the time? The Bastard probably has allies in high places that can spring for a true resurrect much more easily than the PCs. That should annoy the PCs to no end.

I used exactly that trick with a Chaotic Evil Noblewoman in an old Ptolus adventure (The Banewarrens). Even though she was Evil, she had quite a few political alliance with teh Lawful Good church that guaranteed her a True Resurrection if she died…. and she needed them!

One key point of the Magnificent Bastard is that from the moment the players hate him/her unconditionally he stops being a MB and becomes an Overlord or other type of villain… The Magnificent Bastard depends on having a love/hate relationship with the other characters. If you can salvage a break in trust just once, the NPC has done it’s job… Don’t force it too much passed this point, you’ll be accused of having a Marty Stu.

Anybody else has ideas to share on how a villainous Magnificent Bastard could have a hold against old school/Teflon players?

Keep the letters coming! I might not get to them real fast but I’ll do one per week if I have enough material for it.

As I was losing time on the TV Tropes wiki looking for some more character specific trope I found the Con Man, which lead me to The Con.

This gave me an idea to maybe explore Quest-types tropes to inspire an adventure.

Digging deeper, I found a real classic:

The Impossible Mission

An assignment is received in The Teaser. A planning session is held (Avengers Assemble). Then comes The Caper or The Con, using a Master Of Disguise and an A Team Montage. The resolution is as close to end of The Tag as possible.

At about the 40-minute mark, there is a Pseudo Crisis.

The Impossible Mission trope is a perfect blueprint for a one evening RPG adventure. It basically is a Scene-based 5 room-dungeon. Plus, if well-designed, you can put in key motivators for each type of players you may have, making an enjoyable game for all.

Such adventure is basically set on the premise that the players will be given a mission to infiltrate a stronghold or organization that they aren’t supposed to defeat by brute force alone.

They then get to plan the mission as they see fit. Once there, they must retrieve something (maybe one of the Seven Whatevers) or someone. Alternatively, they may have to eliminate or just break something.

After, the characters get one last scene to high five each other and ponder on the impact of their mission on the overall campaign plot.

Let’s break it down a bit:

The Teaser

This scene can put into action NPCs that are related to the adventure’s main plot but aren’t key players. The players find themselves at the wrong place and/or at the wrong time and witness something happening. The NPCs, setting or props they interact with must have at least a tenuous link to the place/organization the characters will get to infiltrate later.

This is the perfect scene for the butt kickers to flex some muscles or for Psychodramatist/story tellers to explore the setting and interact with minor NPCs.

At the end of the scene, you must hand out the assignment for the PCs through the mouth of a patron/client NPC: infiltrate the organization responsible for the disturbance in the teaser and do whatever must be done.

Examples:

• The Characters stumble unto a slaver’s raid and learn that the Sheik’s favorite daughter was taken by that group. The PCs are implored to join the slavers, recover the daughter and bring back the (insert appropriate part of the anatomy) of the Slave lord.
• The characters are the special guests/guards/bystanders at the inauguration of a temple/museum/spaceship, a bunch of mooks crash in on the party to try to steal the Ankh of Eternity/Skull Jewel/Fluxitron Drive Crystal.

The Planning Session

This is exactly why brilliant tactician players play the game. Give the players some resources (Intelligence, contacts, gadgets, magic item list, money) and let them organize the mission as they see fit.

Make sure you provide the appropriate info in a way that won’t result in an adventure bottleneck (like an obligatory Knowledge check to find the stronghold).

In fact provide about 80% of the info necessary to plan the mission accordingly. The remaining 20% (i.e. 2-3 key info) should necessitate creativity and effort on the part of the players to obtain but should greatly increase chances of success. Missing those 20% doesn’t make the mission a failure, it only makes it harder to pull off.

Examples:

• Players find a map easily but by digging deeper in the archives, find another map that shows a secret door to the inner sanctum where lies the sought after object.
• A contact mentions the guard’s schedule, but an extra bribe makes him add that at every 3rd shift the lieutenant meets with all guards in the barracks for a 5 minute report, leaving the walls unattended.

The Mission

This is basically your average Dungeon/House/Space Station setting except you set up the opposition to be mostly circumvented, not taken by a frontal assault.

Depending on your inspiration, you can make this a one scene infiltration Role Playing encounter (Go in, try to fool everyone, grab/save/kill/break whatever and get out) or you can nest in an actual 5-room dungeon.

Each Players will take a roll that fits their preference best. The stealthy specialists will likely go for scouting or infiltration. The Story Tellers/Psychodramatists may go for the disguise and try to fool the NPCs. The Power Gamers will want to use their powers to make the party’s job easier and the Butt kickers will be itching for the crap to hit the fan.

Your brilliant planners will have a ball seeing their masterful plan come to fruition.

Examples:

• The assassin’s guild received a contract to kill the king. The characters must recover the contract before the guildmaster reviews it.
• Some Eco terrorists put a Radioactive Sludge Bomb in a luxurious Private Space Resort. The Owners refuse to believe the threat is credible and refuse access to the PCs. They must kidnap and replace the Space PunkGrunge Metal band scheduled for a show that very night to be admitted.

The Crisis

You should plan for an unforseen event during the mission to throw a curveball at your smug brilliant planners. He he!

Have something totally unforeseen happen whose impact is inversely proportional to the preparation they put in the planning phase (i.e. poor planning = major Snafu).

Examples:

• Think ‘Raiders of the Lost Arc Rolling Boulder trap’.
• If they are trying to grab something/someone and leave have the ‘dungeon’ rearrange itself to block the planned exit.
• Have a 3rd party, maybe the mooks of the campaign’s Evil Overlord, stage a frontal assault at the exact moment when PCs are caught sneaking in the castle (or when a PC blows that apparently crucial Disguise vs Spot roll).

If you can’t think of anything, have ninjas attack!

(Ninjas always work!)

The Epilogue

After the mission, focus on the party’s story-tellers and Psychodramatist and develop how the mission played into the grander scheme of things. Did the characters make new allies or enemies? Has it change the overall situation of the storyline?

The Power Gamers will be sniffing at any recovered pieces of loot or Mac Guffins. Reward them generously.

If the plan worked well, have the interested NPCs (the quest givers) openly praise the PCs and comment on their brilliance and awesomeness (players NEVER tire of that, I promise you).

Chatty’s Example:

I played a 2 player D&D game one night a few years ago. Most of the group couldn’t show up but I was available and itching for a game.

So I set up an adventure where the 2 players (who were of the Anti Hero type) set up to infiltrate the vault of a Lawful Good God’s cathedral to recover a copy of the Sacred Codex (The players wanted some hidden info about a certain fallen angel they had taken in interest in lately).

So I set up a Lawful Good dungeon, complete with Guardians (Angels, Indentured Half-constructs Paladins and Golems) as well as initially traps. Said traps were initially benevolent (Suggestion enchantment traps that forced intruders to turn themselves in) but became more and more serious ones the deeper you got in the vault (Symbols of Death).

The players used their money to purchase a lot of magical items (Stones of Silence, Invisibility potions, Protection from Good potions, etc).

Then we played the whole dungeon (a 5 room one mostly) in real time (i.e. round per round).

They got their hands on the sacred Codex and made off with it.

It was, quite possibly, the most awesome home-brewed adventure I ever played.

Have you ever played such impossible mission games? How did it turn out?

As I reading through the recent changes on TVtropes.org, I stumbled upon a Trope whose application to RPGs is as simple as it is brilliant:

Crowning Moment Of Awesome

The moment in a show when a character does something for which they will be remembered forever, winning for them the eternal loyalty of fans.

While I was going through the trope’s examples, it dawned on me that one of the things that make a Roleplaying campaign fly is when the PCs start having such moments.

For example, when Yan’s new character activated his Fire Snake Maneuver that burnt through a few Driders and ended in the square of Stef’s Fire Immune Half-Dragon, that pretty much clinched it for Yan’s PC.

Similarly, during a mook fight, Eric’s Crusader rolled a critical hit that dealt so much damage that I described how he managed to kill 2 mooks with one swing of his Bastard Sword. He basically spent the rest of the evening High Fiving every living thing with hands.

We’ve had such moments on several of our campaigns and I think this is one of the strongest thrills that a player seek in playing such games.

I think that you as a DM should strive to achieve such moments on a regular basis. This will give players a sense that they are truly heroes/bad asses in your game world and will help crystallize what each character is about.

So whenever a player goes out of his way to do something cool, ask yourself if you could spice up the description of what he does to truly make the action into an awesome moment. If it does, go wild and, as usual, put aside rules and logic and give the player the spotlight.

The DM can also have his/her Crowning Moment of Awesome too.

When you describe a scene or set up a confrontation filled to the rim with Rule of Cool elements, chances are one of your players will let out a very rewarding ‘this is so cool’ .

My best one was a few years ago, when I managed to give my players a truly epic problem to solve: “The God of food is dead, the whole world is starving because eating doesn’t nourish anymore. You have 48 hours or babies start dying”, one player told me ‘Man I feel like we’re in a David Eddings Novel’

It don’t get much better than this…

What about your players/character/DM crowning moments of awesome?

No no, I’m not ending this series, no worries. As mentioned here, I’m exploring “Endings” as applied to RPG campaigns…

Many long-lasting Role playing campaigns based on power-gaining PCs hinge around a progressively increasing threat that almost invariably escalate to the World Destroying level.

The threat usually takes the form of an impeding Cataclysm that would be caused by some sort of Doomsday Device (Technological, Biological or Magical) or assorted Lovecraftian horrors.

If left unopposed, such threats can lead to…

The End Of The World As We Know It

What will happen if the heroes don’t stop the Big Bad or the Ultimate Evil from doing its nasty work. Can be either supernatural or superscience, depending on the villain, but in either case the bad guy must be beaten down and his toys broken in order to save the planet, or the universe, depending on the focus of the story.

Is usually figurative — expressed as “merely” the death of humankind, the obliteration of Civilization, or its subjugation to aliens, for example — rather than the literal rendering of the planet down to gravel. Common in Speculative Fiction, horror and over-the-top espionage shows, as well as many anime series. May serve as a prequel to an After The End series. May also include Cosy Catastrophe and/or Scavenger World elements. Especially if the heroes are slated to succeed in preventing the End, they (and the audience) may be treated to a detailed preview of what’s coming.

This trope is the bread and butter of schizophrenic overlords and somewhat emotionally unstable cultists. As mentioned above, applying it to a Role playing campaign is often the logical conclusion to the PCs always seeking out the Boss behind the Boss.

Threatening world destruction is often expected to be the ultimate motivator for Player Characters . I mean what’s cooler than saving the world from assured destruction? Right? (it sure is used a lot in published adventures)

The thing is, unless you are an adept of gritty games where heroes are deluded, statistical anomalies (until eaten by Azatoth), chances are that your players may not actually feel all that concerned or ‘scared’. In heroic games where coolness (or power gaming) rules over logic, chances are your players expect to ‘roll a 20′ when shooting at that exhaust port or break the Altar of Endless Sorrows just before Chthulu’s left tentacle enters the realm.

There are ways to address this. I’ll explore a few of them and then propose my own take on the subversion of this trope.

Storyboarding the Apocalypse

One of the ways to make the threat believable is to have the players get a glimpse of what things will look like after the Cataclysm strikes.

This works well in movies and TV shows by showing a montage of ‘just-how-bad-things-will-get’. However, unless you are a brilliant orator and your players are selfless listeners , chances are you’ll be narrating to a distracted audience if you try to do this the passive way.

The trick is to get the players to interact with these visions of the Apocalypse. For example, it could be done with:

• Traveling, for a short time, to the future ( just like Hiro did in Heroes) to witness how bads things will get.
• Have the heroes live a shared dream-sequence (powered by a Psychic or Seer)
• Play one ‘what if’ session where you go forward in time and present the campaign world as it could become, a post apocalyptic version of your home campaign with future version of the PCs or new PCs that are actually linked to the original ones.

In such cases, you should feature some of the NPCs that the heroes care about. Go fish in your PCs backstories and do the most gruesome stuff to their loved ones, friends and allies. If your players are allergic to back stories and have no relationships with NPC’s, make sure that none of the survivors of the post-Kaboom world remember anything about the Heroes,

Better and more evil yet, make them reviled for not having saved the world in the first place!

Make the world part of the player’s stake.

Another way to get players to care about an End of the World trope is to actually have them come to see the game world as more than a reservoir of Mooks & Loot to get richer.

Make them heir to kingdoms. Give them the leadership of the thieves guild or make them advisor’s of powerful leaders. Make them Earls of luxurious acres of fertile lands. Fill such lands with industrious citizens who are more than happy to toil for the glory of the Hero, in exchange for some protection from the insidious machinations of an Evil DM.

Make sure to have all NPCs they meet make a point on how grateful they are and how cool the PCs are to be the leaders. (Trust me, it works. Your players will be grinning like idiots by the third game)

Then hatch the World End’s plan on them, threatening their beloved holdings and having the NPCs implore them for help or look up to them expectantly.

“Nyogtha” is awakening? Bah, good thing that Bokdar the Bold here is our liege. He’ll kick that thing’s butt back to the Far Realms before the end of the week! Right my lord?’

It’s the whole ‘Give them the Sun and Have them fight for the Moon‘ application of the Rule of Cool.

Another day, another world saved

While getting PCs to care about an End of the World threat can be a challenge, the act of saving the world is usually pretty basic.

Saving the world usually entails killing the Big Bad before the proverbial button is pressed, or by chucking the Ring in the Volcano, or interrupting the last part of the Dawning of Eternal-Nights Ceremony, etc.

In such cases, it’s expected of GMs to apply the laws of Dramatic Timing in one form or another. This means that no sane GameMaster would trigger the Doomsday device while the PCs are getting their armour fixed or that the meteorite never strikes when the heroes are asleep.

In fact, Players may expect that you will apply one or another of the Just in Time trope (and you just may).

But you know what? After having done this for about 20 years, I’m a bit weary of that trope and I am soooo ripe for some honest to goodness subversion.

Nuking it!

Cataclysmic events are often seen as a prelude to a Post-apocalyptic campaign, as ancient history to a rebuilt world or downright averted by the timely intervention of meddling kids Fearless Heroes!

However, is your campaign coming to a close soon? Are you thinking of changing systems, GMs or at the very least, switch editions?

Then why not pull the plug on your campaign and game world with Style?

Go ahead and have the Big Bad press the Button, break the Seal or summon The Ultimate Evil. Do this while the players are actually fighting for their lives against the Horde of Endless minions!

Of course, don’t have the Cataclysm kill the PCs when this happens (unless you really need to get a message across) but everything should be exploited.

This is a perfect way of surprising a group of players who didn’t actually expect you to have the Stones (or Iron Ovaries, I’m totally equal opportunity) to pull it off.

When you start destroying mountains and draining oceans, you have to offer the heroes a new focus (and keep player buy-in) such as:

• Trying to stop the destruction before it kills everyone.
• Brining as many people to safety, as fast as possible.
• Find a new world for the PC’s dependents (from family to entire kingdom depending on your campaign’s scale)

The thing is to shift the campaign from saving the world to salvaging it, or reclaiming it.

Depending on how grim or gritty your group’s playing style is, the PCs may die or fail. You may then end your campaign thus, making the next one about an After the End theme or a fight to Reclaim what was once lost (Excellent post Trask).

This subverted trope is a perfect opportunity to take an established world and make it into a new one. A strange new/old dark world, where danger lurk everywhere and civilization has shrunk to a mere few Points of Lights. (hint hint)

It’s the End of the World as we know it… and I feel fine!

This blog was more or less noticed because of one short text I wrote way back last summer about a Wiki I discovered and a fundamental rule that I believed a successful DM should live by.

There is another one, related to the Rule of Cool, made specifically for games:

The Rule of Fun

Games must be fun to play. Sure, we like pretty graphics and a good plot, but the fun’s the main thing. If they’re fun, a lot of incongruities can be forgiven. Go ahead, try to explain why the yellow circle loves dots and why the ghosts are out to get him, or why the frog needs to get across the road. You can’t. Doesn’t matter.

Just replace ‘pretty graphics’ by ‘cool mechanics’ and the definition applies perfectly to Tabletop RPGs.

Similarly, try to explain why a group of adventurers armed to the teeth would enter a trap-riddled, monster-laden multi-leveled labyrinthine ruin.

You can’t? Who cares!

Gygax has been doing it for decades and he still enjoys it enough to play the game with strangers on his weeding anniversary.

I already covered the DMing version of the Rule of Fun when when I discussed Robin Laws’ Rule 0 of DMing.

However, the Rule of Fun should also be applied to everything else in the game, from choice of game, character generation, the color of dice, the miniature players choose, the adventure you use, etc.

For example, your D&D players don’t want to play a healer? Fine!

Make healing potions cheaper and give everyone Reserve points. Also, give each class a “second wind’ power that allow them to transfer 25% of their HP from their Reserve pool once per encounter by spending a Standard action (inspired from Star Wars Saga, thanks Graham). Voilà, this is fun!

With regards to adventure preparation, I suggest that you apply the Rule of Fun whenever you think of adding a challenge (a fight, a trap, or a Skill roll) by asking yourself this very simple question:

“Will playing this out be fun?”

If the answer is ‘no’ or ‘probably not, but it’s logical’ you need to rethink your design choice.

Rolling a climb check to climb a tree to see the advancing enemy troops 50 miles away is not all that fun. Climbing it to avoid a horde of Berserking Goblins has a better chance of hitting the fun mark.

Last night I was sitting in front of a combat encounter that felt incredibly plain. It was logical to have the fight there, and the chosen foe was appropriate but it was just…. so generic!

I didn’t want to bank on my players eagerness to dish out mindless violence to make the encounter a success, so I chose the best possible thematically-linked battlemap I had. I also added some minor foes with interesting abilities to spice up the tactical challenge of the situation.

These will synergize with my player’s penchant for wanton mayhem and I’m sure the fight will be appreciated.

( To be honest, I think they would enjoy fighting toothless Dire wolves with wet towels, but I still need to make an effort)

Try to apply the Rule of Fun to any instance of travel, investigations, NPC interactions and it will make a game session better. (Hint: random encounters, unless everyone wants them, are not usually fun).

Here’s a last example.

I remember in my old Gurps Fantasy Campaign, I created a mini-game where the PCs had to ski down a very long slope. They could set speed and negotiate various types of obstacles vying for styles points (tradable for Gurps’ equivalent of XPs) by risking higher penalties to their skill rolls and trying to upstage each other.

After about 15 minutes of having fun rolling dice and describing some major whiteouts I had a posse of Dwarves attack the PCs in War Bobsleighs!!!

Was it logical? No freaking way! Was it fun? Hell yeah!

The Rule of Fun and the Rule of Cool… 2 simple rules, great results!

Woot! Game tomorrow and all players have confirmed their presence! Wish me luck!

Davetrollkin stepped up first and requested I tackle Time Travel. Since time travel, much like the Rule of Cool is such a massive trope, I called a few of my fellow bloggers for help. We’ll see who turns to take the challenge…. and you, would you be up to it?

This post is the introduction to the series and my tackling of one subtrope.

According to the TV Tropes Wiki, Time Travel stories usually belong to one of the following categories:

• You Cant Fight Fate : Visit the horrible Future, then come back to try to prevent it!
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Go to the Past to fix the horrible horrible Present!
• Stable Time Loop: Go to the past to fix a problem, come back and realize you created the problem then!
• Temporal Paradox: Go to the past and screw everything up, destroying your future existence. Think Butterfly of Doom.
• Connecticut Yankee: Characters gets stuck in past, adapts or exploit knowledge of future to live the good life or find way ‘home’.

Many of these have great potential for RPG campaign ideas. I know of at least one RPG product that specifically addresses that trope and it’s Gurps Time Travel which focuses on the ‘How’ and various rules and background info to run an Earth-based time traveling campaign.

In a Fantasy RPG setting, time traveling ‘technology’ is usually related to Magic and/or portals. I won’t spend any time on the crunch of it all. However, designing Time Magic and the thinking about the way you plan on dealing with temporal paradoxes are things you need to address.

You can pick any of the time traveling tropes listed above and adapt it to your campaign by either making the campaign about the trope or as an element of the backstory.

Since I don’t actually like thinking about parallel co-timelines and other types of paradox when I design adventures , my favorite Time Travel trope is by far the…

Stable Time Loop

Through Applied Phlebotinum, Functional Magic, or some other means, our heroes travel back to the past. In the past, they wind up being responsible for the very events that underpin their own “present.” This creates a chicken-and-egg scenario, in which the looping sequence of events has no clear beginning.

This is sometimes referred to a “time loop” paradox, particularly when a character, object, or piece of information was never originally created, but exists solely because of its own existence.

Thus, a time travel adventure arc based on this pre-supposes that the characters actions in the various timelines are what actually created the initial problem the arc started with. The Star Trek TNG series finale was based on that sub-trope.

The reason why I like this trope so much is that it gives you all the power of a Time Travel story, complete with characters who’s actions affect the timeline. However, you maintain significant control over what that effect is (its actually pre-determined). If you don’t make Time Travel the campaign’s main focus, when your character realize that their actions caused the initial problem, you’ll get a nice ‘doh’ moment. But don’t make this a recurrent theme…

Here’s my checklist for such an adventure:

• Think of a problem the PCs need to deal with. The presence of some entity released from some Evil Sealed in a can is a good start.
• Create a way to time travel at set times in your adventure (i.e. leave them in past long enough to play out scenes)
• Plan a way that makes the PCs create the problem in the 1st place:
  • Planting false clues, …
  • Giving PCs a disgusting choice like certain irrevocable death or creating the problem.
  • Making coming back the source of the problem!
• Have them find a solution that shows how to deal with the problem in the present (this is a RPG, not Twilight Zone, you don’t want the loop to repeat itself)

Here’s my stab at it:

A huge Demon has been rampaging a kingdom for ages, a hidden survivor of the royal family comes to the PCs and explains that his research in his land’s history reveals that the Demon was released by members of his own family a long time ago. He also found a device that may have been designed by his ancestors to defeat the Demon and he shows them a sort of astrolab-like device.

He asks the PCs to take it and save his kingdom in exchange for a significant amount of the hidden royal treasure. Studying the device shows it to be a Time machine. The PCs uses it (or it trigger accidentally, or the Demon tracks it and the PCs must escape using it to survive).

PC’s arrive in past, in a dungeon, in the middle of a fight between an outmatched a party of young adventurers. Device is broken during fight (or ceases functioning). Dungeon is an ancient ruin found in a savage wilderness (that also happens to be the future kingdom they are trying to save). A female adventurer the PCs just saved happens to be a gadgeteer and can fix the device.

PCs learn that the quest of the young adventurers is to locate a sealed vault rumored to be filled with treasure. Understandably, PCs will try to prevent such a quest to succeed.

BUT! The broken device needs pieces made from a strange metal and gadgeteer shows old journal that says that vault doors and surrounding are made from such a metal. he he he!

Gadgeteer is confident that taking just a little metal won’t affect seal of vault (She’s right). PC’s get gadget fixed and get promise from Gadeteer and rest of party to maintain the seal. They go back home. (Extra Evil DM bonus if you get a male PC to have a fling with gadgeteer).

Once back, demon is still there… uh oh! Talking to royal descendent (if Evil DM plan worked, guess who’s royalty now?) shows that multiple such devices were made by ancestors… (Hoe predictable!). But the exiled king knows that some of that warding metal is left and PCs could inflitrate ruins of castle recuperate the metal and forge weapons of it to kill demon with it.

There are many things that Genre Savvy players could try to prevent the loop, like creating a Cave-in around vault or even killing the gadgeteer. It’s your choice as a DM to allow time to change (making the adventure based on Set Right What Once Went Wrong) or to have elements in the past reorganize themselves to lead to the stable time loop.

The idea of the trope is that no matter what you did, the problem is still there and you need to deal with it NOW, not THEN.

Extra Evil DM Bonus:

Have players stuck in a 1 day/1 hour Time loop (à la Groundhog Day) either in a time-trapped dungeon or a cursed village. As long as they don’t find the keys to break the curse they have to relive events. If you want to get out of this alive, let players fast forward scenes when they decide not to change a thing in how they played it out in an earlier iteration. I also suggest making the loop as small as possible (4-5 elements tops…) this is a hard stunt to pull off because players will grow bored.

I suggest that, at a certain point, you allow a way out for the PCs but hint that solving the curse/puzzle will bring a reward far greater than anything else found at the PC’s current power level.

Example:

A Chronomancer has warded his treasure vault with a 10 minute time loop. It features interconnected 5 rooms with fiendish puzzles (The Challenge of Champions series in Dungeon Magazines are a great source of puzzles). Leaving from the area resets the trap. Area is not the adventure’s choke point.

Stay tuned in the following weeks for the next post of this series by a fellow DMing blogger. Maybe it will be you?

The Magnificent Bastard (I’m making no reference whatever to any good friend of mine, honest!)

Love him or hate him, there’s a certain type of character that defies being hero or villain, good or evil, friend or enemy. He doesn’t play that game, because he’s too busy making us play his. And at the end of the day when, more often than not, his character succeeds, there’s only one thing we can call him… a Magnificent Bastard.

Sometimes the Magnificent Bastard is consciously and actively pursuing The Game; he is to Machiavelli what the Nietzsche Wannabe is to Nietzsche. At other times, it is merely an expression of his gloriously labyrinthine nature. Either way, he doesn’t just dance to the beat of a different drummer, he bribes our drummer to play all his favourites. Then he has more fun sitting down and watching us stumble over the unfamiliar steps. And deep down in a dark little corner of our hearts, we can’t help but admire that he not only pulled it off, he did it with style.

The ultimate embodiment of selfishness and egocentricity this character type exists in all genres of fiction.

Here’s a few examples from TV and Movies.

• Gaius Baltar & Darth Sidious (Sci-Fi)
• Nathan Petrelli & Mr. (Noah) Bennet (Modern/Super Heroes)
• Jareth (From Labyrinth) & Captain Jack Sparrow (Fantasy/Historical)

We love to hate them while at the same time we are awed at how he/she always manages to get away with such style.

But herein lies the challenges of mining this juicy trope to create cool NPCs. Players don’t usually care enough about a given NPC to appreciate his deviousness and showmanship. Plus they don’t want to share the spotlight, which is quite understandable.

So let’s explore how to tackle this, RPG style!

The Magnificent Ally

While Genre Savvy players expect almost all allied NPCs to turn traitor, this type of NPC was made to do it….and survive! As an effective NPC, it needs to embody the trope without threatening or irritating the players to the point of sparking a spontaneous homicide.

The Magnificent Bastard revolves around being a larger than life jerk that manages to get the girl, the money and the praise, while the true hero does the job and takes consolation that at least the world is a bit safer, if a bit more unfair.

(Hmmm, seen like that, most if not all PCs of kill and loot RPGs would qualify as Magnificent Bastards…)

Here are an example for an allied NPC:

A bard wants to write an epic poem about the PCs that will make her a lyrical legend. While her work greatly increases the PCs’ reputation, whenever they go, she’s already there, be it:

• at the city’s swankiest inn, sleeping in a luxury suite with the innkeepers son (for free and with the innkeeper’s blessing)
• in the barbarian village where she shares the thatch palace of the Chief, being real friendly.
• in the dungeon, discussing the finer points of Troll-Finger race strategies with the troll guards .

The trick here is to give the NPC one key weakness that will prevent it from becoming a Marty Stu. Maybe she is a horrible combatant (as all bards, amiright?) and the PCs need to save her bacon countless times. Maybe she’s the daughter of a truly scary Overlord and she openly opposes him and provides critical tidbits of info to help the PCs spoil his plans.

(Of course in that last case, she’s actually using the PCs in a Xanatos Gambit to depose her father and take his place).

To make this character really over the top, make her mention from the start that a true Epic needs a grand Villain and have her say, many times, she’d be perfect for the job if she wasn’t so busy writing the damn story.

If you can fit in these comments right after she looks the most incompetent, chances are they won’t take her seriously… you’ll leave your players in the dust when she actually pulls it off.

The Magnificent enemy.

As an openly declared antagonist a Magnificent Bastard can be more fun to play than an Overlord.

Always civil, always polite. He’ll make a point of capturing the PCs and then entertain them to a classy evening where he’ll try to make them see that he’s not such a bad guy after all. Of course all this is done in order to work the PCs in a frenzy of hate for him so that they find a way to destroy that Orb he jealously guards at the bottom of his dungeon of Death. Said orb that only Heroes with pure intentions can open.

Then when the trapped Demon gets out and nearly slaughters the PCs, the Bastard arrives shortly after the Demon fled and announces an Heel Face turn. He confesses to his evil manipulative schemes and gives the PCs all the tools needed to destroy the escaped Evil. While they are on the hunt, he gathers up all terrorized kingdoms and creates a ruthless Empire that starts marching on the rest of the world.

When the players return, powerful enough to topple him in 6 seconds, he crumples to the ground, crying for mercy. He explains that he forged this empire to face the arrival of the Mad World-destroying God through the gate that the demon they released, and killed, was guarding.

While the PCs deal with your latest Lovcraftian creation, the Bastard signs a deal with all the Lords of Hell, becomes immortal in exchange for all the souls of the empire and moves to a Condo next to Asmodeus…

And so on…

The trick here is that whenever the players go “that’s it, let’s kill that f….er!”, you need to offer something that the players need more than what killing the NPC is worth. This can be the whereabouts of a lost sibling (kidnapped by the Magnificent Bastard of course), the possible location of a legendary weapon, etc.

This is the perfect occasion to abuse player backstories to the limit. If they start feeling manipulated by that guy from all angles, you’re doing good.

And if you painted him in a corner and he needs to die… have him fall off a cliff. Never let the players have the satisfaction of seeing such a villain die, unless this becomes a defining moment in your campaign (or the players threaten to blow your four tires on the way out).

An effective Magnificent Bastard NPCs is the stuff of legendary evil DMs.

The Bastard Within

Now I’ve tackled the Trope for NPCs. There are also challenges to having a Magnificent Bastard as a PC. Played lazily, it becomes a case of Chaotic Jerk. Played brilliantly by a good story-teller/Psychodramatist, it could be priceless.

Instead of going on for another few pages, I challenge you to come up with tips to play a good, entertaining Magnificent Bastard as a PC… in the comments or your blog.

Yax? Care to take a stab?

Now instead of making this a stats-laden article, I thought I’d write another post from my most popular series so far.

With winter setting itself for the long run in the frigid wastes of Eastern Canada and my reaching the mid-point of the glorious 30′s, I see the specter of my seasonal depression approaching.

While Self-esteem and assurance have reigned supreme these last few months, now self-doubt and brooding moods are reappearing on the horizon.

Historically I used to handle such periods of time by visiting my seldom-used shell more often… and let time do it’s thing.

But now, I have a blog, I can spew all my angst and self-criticism to an established readership…. no?

Wait, don’t leave….

Nah! Don’t worry, that would be self-defeating as no-one wants to hear about the blues of a guy who, when it’s all said and done, has got it going for him in more ways than one.

Clinical aside: While I make light of this, depression is a very serious condition that hits gamers as much as anyone else. I went through a pretty serious one recently and needed a lot of help to get over it. If you are living with a perpetual cloud over your head, fight it and get help, be it clinical, spiritual or friendly. The Seasonal blues is, I believe, just a periodic slowing down that can usually be chased away with some pondering on our situation and fighting it off soon after it’s onset.

So why not try to tackle this darker period differently, and more constructively, with a trope-inspired post on the very subject of the blues, seasonal and otherwise.

First let’s start with a character-focused trope:

The Eeyore

This character exists solely to bring everybody down, but not in the Deadpan Snarker sense; they are defined entirely by their complete inability to be happy for more than a few seconds at a time, an emotional state that usually arises from their only-occasionally-justified suspicion that they are the Butt Monkey of the entire universe. They are the walking Anthropomorphic Personification of clinical depression.

In RPGs, angst and dark, brooding personalities are the meat and potatoes of Method Actor-driven players. Exploring the darker reaches of the Human (or Vampire, or Drow or …) psyche can be a nice exercise in internally-focused character development and can help move a game forward in new, interesting ways.

But, as people don’t usually enjoy seeing Harry or Anakin being all whinny about how unfair everything is, constant in-character depression usually does not interest the other players all that much.

At worse, it can lead to serious intra-party (and intra player) conflict when the brooding character’s player uses this (consciously or not) to stop others from having fun. So here are a few twists on this character concept to play or DM in new ways.

Go ahead and have the character be depressed and generally hard to motivate…

“Ahhh, what’s the point to kill that Dragon? Those peasants will all die of a horrible disease, or if they are lucky, as Orc fodder in the next war”

However, make him/her get really excited, even to the point of making it a monomaniacal obsession, about One Thing.

Maybe it’s Magical Instruments

“Oh, you mean that’s where the Lute of Flarnigan is?…. Well what are we waiting for? Let’s go SLAY THAT FOUL WYRM!’

The possibilities are many:

• Guns (Think a depressed Jayne)
• Gold, gems or treasure (Makes for a great Manic Depressive Halfling Rogue),
• Hate of a certain person (Severus Snape comes to mind)
• Power over others (a great mix for a Gothic Overlord)
• The misery of others (Marvin!!!)

Player motivations aside: I am aware that some players thrive on creating discomfort and more or less try to sabotage the party’s efforts to succeed in tasks. These players are usually Outliers (From Robin Laws DMG II essay, which I’ll address in my next Laws’ post). You must discuss with them on how to meet their need for self-defeat without making the other characters (more) homicidal (than they already are).

Manic depression is also an interesting challenge, if played in stride with the party’s interests. My own character in Franky’s McWod game oscillates widely between shy social ineptitude to rampant psychopathy whenever his unarmed or has a gun in his hands.

The idea is to switch between Apathy and Overconfident Impulsiveness (Gurps players should spot where I get my inspirations for this one) in such a way that will be entertaining to you and all the others.

I believe you can pull this off by having a well defined trigger that creates a switch from one state to the other.

For example:

• Night and Day (including, possibly your distance to light sources)
• Seasons (the inspiration of this post)
• Exposure to drugs/alchool
• Combat
• Discussions with Strangers.
• A certain sound, or smell or taste (any sense works).

Making the trigger clear to the other players. This can allow them to try to influence your character by acting on the trigger themselves. This gives them some form of control on the effects of your character’s personality on the game and at the same time it gratifies you as a Method Actor because you get the others to act on your inner-conflict and you can start exploring how the PC would react to more or less evident manipulation from the others.

Ironic Aside: I would have never guessed that I would one day write tips for method actors/storytelling players…

Of course, if the other players are being jerks about this and shamelessly exploit this trait so that you stop having fun then you can reveal that other trigger (i.e. too many switches) that unlocks that very dark, very unstable mood.

If you can pull this off by having the DM give you a special power linked to that mood, usable only when you both agree that the time is right, you can pull a Hulk on your whole party and have a most memorable session!

This post is already longer than I wanted it to be, but there is one last aspect of this trope I want to tackle…

When Depression hits your game world at large.

As a DM you can also use depression as a theme or as a plot device in your games.

• An enchantment that makes all citizens filled with apathy and unable to break free from the domination of a Spirit of Death.
• A God of Hope and Joy is slain (or corrupted) in the your world(s) and all followers are stricken with a suicidal depression that makes the economy of a large kingdom crash in less than a fortnight.
• Pushing apathy to it’s limit, you can go Guy Gavriel Kay on your players and have the Campaign’s BBEG completely destroy a kingdom and disperse it’s citizens. Then have him cast an enchantment that makes all sentient beings in the whole world unable to acknowledge the existence of that cursed, vanquished place or it’s citizen.
• Make the PCs citizen of that kingdom and breaking the curse the campaign’s goal (if you like that Plot, read Tigana, it’s a slowbut awesome, very story-telling friendly fantasy Novel).

There you have it, making depression and associated mental disorders actually usable in an entertaining way in your favorite RPG.

Now please excuse me, I have some Brooding to catch up with…..

Thanks for being there! Woot 200th post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!