Category: Campaign Management

Proceduralism On a Red World Alone

Pixel art of a group of adventurers looking out over mars, towards the city in the dome beneath a starry sky. Adapted from the splash screen at the start of Final Fantasy on the NES.

The current incarnation of On a Red World Alone has been an experiment with a novel procedure of play. The primary aim is to compress the traditional adventurer-to-conqueror campaign structure, so domain play can occur from the first session without ever displacing adventure play.

For those unfamiliar with the (so-called) traditional structure, it is typically presented thus: characters begin as grubby dungeon delvers scrabbling in filth to survive. Through the accumulation of levels, power, wealth, and influence, they become monarchs (or warlords, kingpins, archmages, & popes). In addition to delving dungeons or exploring wilderness, players at this exalted level will engage in ‘domain play.’ How domain play is done has always been vague. Presumably it involves managing large numbers of people and resources rather than only a single character and their personal resources. The idea is compelling, but I’ve never been certain how to approach it. Given how infrequently domain play is discussed, and how incomplete those discussions are, I suspect I am not alone. This post describes my attempt to solve that problem.

Two notes before we dive in:

  • This post will necessarily get deep into the nitty gritty of my game’s setting. I worry that the quirks of the setting may be more distracting in this post than they normally are, so here’s a quick primer for those not familiar with On a Red World Alone. ORWA is set in a densely packed city inside a biodome on Mars. The earth was obliterated shortly after this colony was established, before it had achieved self-sufficiency. The scant few survivors of the human species, traumatized by loss and the struggle for survival, descended into barbarism for centuries. The game is set 500 years after the destruction of Earth. It is the dawning of a new period of enlightenment. Within living memory (Session 1) the Dome was culturally and technologically medieval, but over the past 12 years (176 Sessions) a great deal of cultural progress has been made, and lost knowledge rediscovered.
  • What I describe below remains experimental. Every week I discover new ways to improve on it: develop new tools, discard vestigial mechanics, make key refinements to phrasing. Even the act of articulating my current procedures in this essay has highlighted areas which needed adjustment, so that in places this is now a step ahead of anything my players have seen.

Procedure Outline

Each time we gather to play On a Red World Alone, we start with the Domain Phase. When that’s over we shift to the Adventure Phase until the end of the session.

Domain Phase

  1. Determine Consequences
  2. World Events
  3. Update Progress Bars
  4. Faction Actions
  5. Player Actions

Adventure Phase

  1. Choose a Mission
  2. Preparation
  3. Travel
    • Through the Dome
    • Through the Sewers
    • Into Space
    • Over the Surface of Mars
  4. Exploration
    • Dungeon
    • Neighborhood
  5. Return Home
  6. Haven Turn

Post-Session

  1. Write Recap
  2. Review The Questions
  3. Prepare for next session
Lizard men gather around a wizard, paying great attention to the robed figure as they stare into their orb. Taken from Thundarr the Barbarian.

Domain Phase

The Domain Phase represents one month of game time, and is played through in its entirety each session. With a fair degree of consistency, it takes between 40 and 60 minutes to get through the whole thing. I’m fairly strict about ending sessions 3 hours after start time, so the Domain Phase represents roughly one third of an evening of play.

1 — Determine Consequences

One player is called on to roll a consequence for this session. A riff off Arnold’s “Potential Drama” idea. I maintain a table of consequences that will result from the player’s actions, or from the baggage they rolled randomly during character creation. These can influence any part of the session, which is why I roll them first thing. Some consequences can only occur if a specific player is present, while others apply to the whole party. It’s rare to have a session with everyone in it, so before I announce which die the group needs to roll, I do some quick mental shuffling to figure out which entries on the table are possible today. Everything on the table is specific and prepared in advance. Examples might include:

  • (Only if The Wizard Player is present.) A consequence of the time the Wizard had a spell failure which created a contagious meme about how they smell bad. There’s a bad flare-up today. Everyone the party meets will React at -1 because they think the party are stinky.
  • A consequence of that time the party rescued an artist from a monster that collects artist hands. She has sent the party a gift! A painting that would make an excellent poster, and could serve as a huge boost to a propaganda campaign action. The art may be held in reserve until the party wishes to use it.
  • A consequence of that time the party broke into a mercenary’s apartment, robbed him and then killed him. His crew figured out who did it, and the first encounter that occurs during this session’s Adventure Phase will be an ambush.

2 — World Events

Another player is called on to roll a 2d6 on the table below. Like Consequences, each of these has specific results prepared in advance. I’ve actually got 3 prepped for each, though that’s a bit of excess on my part. Regardless of what is rolled, the prepared results are meant either to create an opportunity for the players to exploit, or a crisis they need to respond to. Whether the opportunity or crisis is better dealt with during the Domain or Adventure phase is often open to interpretation.

  1. Natural Disaster (Example: The Dome’s water systems hit a serious snag. Low areas of the Dome are under 2d12 inches of water. This goes up by 2d12 each week until fixed. Every faction’s Food is reduced by 2 for every foot of water.)
  2. Major Figure Exits Public Life (Usually deaths, but occasionally exile or imprisonment) (Example: Susan Quar, narcotics dealer of note and longtime supplier for all the party’s needs, has been killed. The party will need to make new arrangements.)
  3. Opposed Faction Receives Unexpected Boon (Example: A randomly determined enemy faction discovers an abandoned missile silo in their territory. They keep this very hush-hush, but whispers of excited activity in the area reach the party’s ears. Check upcoming faction actions for that faction. Could any of them be enhanced with a missile?)
  4. Wizard or Dragon Shit (Example: Madam Crucifixion attempted to ambush Dr. Guillotine. She knew just where to go. The battle was brutal. Both survived, and both retreated severely depleted in resources to places where they could hunker down. You could easily identify a few locations to raid while they’re laid up, though if they are able to divine who did it they’d certainly retaliate. Alternatively, you could attempt to destroy one of them in their weakened state. The two are probably the most powerful wizards still living in the Dome (excluding inscrutable Penelope).)
  5. Sub-Faction Action (While the Dome’s major factions all regularly get opportunities to act, this result allows smaller groups to occasionally be at the center of Domewide issues.) (Example: Happy Worm Cultists scavenge food from the players faction. 1 Fewer food this Domain turn. They are well-liked by those who know them, so using force to stop them from eating in order to maintain your taxes would require a roll on the bad reputation table.)
  6. One Additional Faction Action This Session (See Factions Actions below)
  7. Public Need Arises in the Party’s Territory (Example: d4 of the party’s Weorods have been taking undue liberties. Stealing, getting drunk and violent, that sorta thing. Tensions are rising to the point that there are murmurings that large scale violence may break out.)
  8. Public Discovery Made (Example: An archive of “I can haz cheezeburger” memes is discovered online, and spreads rapidly around the Dome. People are quoting it constantly, and it will briefly serve as a sort of universal language of friendliness, allowing the communication of basic ideas outside normal language bounds. After the next Haven Turn everyone will be sick of it and uttering them will probably be regarded as a hostile action.)
  9. Party’s Alliances or Experts are Threatened (Example: The party’s chief engineer recently refused a strange offer to leave your employ and go work for someone else. Now she’s receiving extortionate texts demanding she leak secrets. She won’t reveal what she’s being extorted with, but if you don’t do something about it she’s going to have to give in to the extortion.)
  10. Party’s Tools or Programs are Threatened (Example: Ace Reporter Willie Kypho (formerly of Cult Quarterly) drops the story that the party controls the majority of the Dome’s weather control systems. Why hasn’t this information been shared, or this resource been put to the public good? The party needs to make some response or roll on the bad reputation table.)
  11. Factionogenesis (Example: Duck Folk seize 2d6 blocks of territory in a random location. Call it Duckburg.)

3 — Update Progress Bars

“Progress Bars” being my cheeky re-naming of Clocks. This somewhat tedious-yet-vital activity goes between two more interesting activities in the hopes the players don’t drift too far while I do a bit of bookkeeping. On occasion, clocks will reach a hiccup that I secretly scheduled when the clock was set. It still advances by 1 for this session, but won’t be able to progress any further until some issue is resolved. Thus, if the party are on the ball and get it resolved during this session, they won’t lose any time.

Robed cultists hold a platform on their shoulders, on which rests a large head with a domineering expression. Robots flank the cultists on either side. Taken from Thundarr the Barbarian.

4 — Faction Actions

At present there are 10 major factions in ORWA, aside from the players’ own. Each has their own agenda, and a secret schedule of 3 prepared actions they will take in pursuit of it. When the session reaches this point I call on two players (or three, if a 7 was rolled for the World Event) to roll a d10 to determine which factions advance their agendas this month. Like the World Events these are meant to either create an opportunity for the players to exploit, or a crisis they need to respond to, though sometimes they’re just clues about something big that’s coming in the future that the party may wish to prepare for.

Some examples of recent Faction Actions in ORWA:

  • Pamphlets are distributed to the Akiovashan Faithful, who are set the task of scouring the Dome for a certain room. The pamphlet is very general and mostly pictorial. (Literacy isn’t widespread). For those in-the-know, they’re clearly looking for the Dome’s environmental control systems. Secretly, the party is in possession of several of these. Handing one or more over to the Akiovashans would be massively beneficial to your relationship with that faction. If you don’t want them to find it, you may want to take steps to hinder their search.
  • A large number of “former” soldiers of The Redstone Lords request safe passage through the party’s territory. They’re traveling to the Lords of Light territory to “learn the LoL’s advanced farming techniques, so they can use their strength to feed their people.” Your intelligence reports suggest the Redstone Lords’ disarmament is a ruse, but refusing passage outright would be a very bad move from a public relations perspective.
  • The Hell’s Tenants performed a major raid in Team Gopher’s territory. A hole opened up in the ground, and dozens of mangled horn-headed people emerged, dragging dozens more back down the hole with them. Pursuit was attempted, but failed. The tunnels are too labyrinthine. What are they doing with all of these captives?

5 — Player Actions

Finally, the group takes on the role of their faction’s leadership, with all its resources at their disposal. Between the World Events, the Faction Actions, and any hiccups in the party’s Progress Bars, there ought to be a number of fresh hooks for the party to respond to. I also maintain a list of open hooks left over from previous sessions in case additional prompts are needed, though my aim is that some space is left in most sessions for the group to seize the initiative for themselves.

The group is allowed to pursue a number of goals equal to the number of players present, with each player acting as caller in turn. They do not control any particular characters at this stage. Their own PCs are currently low-level grunts who aren’t important enough to be consulted on matters of policy.

I’ve adopted this unusual form because the mode of play is unfamiliar. There was a tendency early in the experiment for players to use the Domain Phase to support their characters in the Adventure Phase, whereas my goal is to encourage the exact opposite behavior. I want to foster a group who approaches the game as a domain-level problem, and wields their adventuring PCs as tools in pursuit of domain-level goals. Additionally, positioning each player as a caller has been helpful for supporting players who aren’t able to play consistently and don’t fully grok what’s going on. Each player can cede as much or as little control as they want to the rest of the group during their turn at caller.

The group’s faction has a character sheet listing its resources, and there are mechanics for 8 codified actions:

  • Recruit (Gain Human Resources, so long as the faction has enough food to support them.)
  • Diplomacy (Make requests of another faction. What is possible depends greatly on existing diplomatic relations.)
  • Propagandize (Attempt to influence public opinion.)
  • R&D (Set a team of experts to solving a complicated problem, or developing something new.)
  • Public Works (Set a team of workers to solve a simple problem, or build something standard.)
  • Establish Institution (Create an ongoing program, which will be an ongoing drain on resources)
  • Military (Direct the faction’s armies.)
  • Give Quest (Send spies, assassins, and adventurers to accomplish specific goals.)

The breadth of action allowed by “pursing a goal” is left intentionally vague at the moment. I’m searching for a balance between giving each player a satisfying turn at the helm, without allowing the scope of everyone’s turns to balloon into something unmanageable. Most of the time a single action is sufficient for pursuing a goal. There are cases, though, where one action leads directly into another so smoothly that it would be disruptive to cut off the turn. For example, there was a recent turn in which a player organized a counter-attack to reclaim some seized territory [Military], then used footage of the event to convince several other factions [Diplomacy] to join them in issuing a public condemnation of the original attack [Propaganda].

What I may do in the future is create a mechanic whereby the length of each action can be determined, then allow each player to serve as caller for one month’s worth of actions.

A burning sun dominates the frame, looming over a ruined city. A trio of youths stand together in the foreground, the city far behind them. Cover of the novel "Dhalgren."

Adventure Phase

Unlike the Domain Phase, the Adventure Phase is not played in its entirety each session. On average it takes between two and four sessions to get all the way through the Adventure Phase’s procedure. The action pauses when it’s time for the session to end, then picks up where we left off once the Adventure Phase resumes in the next session. This means the Domain and Adventure Phases are usually a little out of sync with one another, existing on a floating timescale where one advances rigidly 1 month each session, and the other phase can spend half a dozen sessions getting through a single day. This may initially seem confusing, but the solution is simple: just don’t think about it. Strict time records must not be kept.

1 — Choose a Mission

When starting a fresh Adventure Phase, the group needs to decide what they’re going to do. They can personally address any of the issues raised during the Domain Phase, acting as a commando team or diplomatic delegation for their faction. Alternately, they can ignore the hooks and attempt to take the initiative on behalf of their domain, perhaps by raiding a faction they dislike, or doing a favor for one of their allies. They can also ignore domain level concerns entirely, and spend this Adventure Phase selfishly seeking personal wealth and power. Experience points in ORWA can only be earned by donating money into the faction’s coffers (1 donated credit card = 1 experience point / 1 level gained = 1 unit of funds usable in the Domain Phase), so even this purely selfish pursuit has the party acting in their faction’s interests.

Generally I will reiterate the most obvious hooks that are on the table here, and ask the party what they want to do. If there isn’t a clear consensus, I’ll randomly appoint one of the players as Party Leader, and ask them to set the goal. (I then note who has been party leader, and they won’t be in the running again unless everyone else present has been leader an equal number of times.)

2 — Preparation

Before setting out from the safety of the walled citadel of their faction, the party has an opportunity to alter their equipment loadout, recruit hirelings, make arrangements with allies, or pursue information. Because this is a setting in which cell phones are ubiquitous, the party can accomplish quite a bit by calling ahead to some friendly NPCs.

3 — Travel

Regardless of what goal the party is pursuing, part of that pursuit will involve travel. ORWA has four entirely different mechanics for handling this, though each share a single procedure:

  1. The destination is set.
  2. The referee determines how many hours (or days, or weeks) the journey will take, and how many encounter checks will result. (# of encounter checks is rounded up!)
  3. The players are called upon one by one to roll a d6, with results determined according to which mode of travel they’re in.
  4. The players resolve the encounter to their satisfaction.
  5. If this mode of travel depends on resources, check to see if they ought to be depleted.
  6. Return to c, and repeat the process from there until the party reaches their destination.

The various forms of travel available to the party are:

Over the surface of Mars. Encounters are rolled less frequently and occur less often in this sprawling red desert. There are locations to find and creatures to contend with, but the greatest danger is the environment. Within the Dome there’s food vendors on every other street, and a climate automatically controlled for human comfort. Outside, the characters must carry enough food to get wherever they’re going and back again, and be prepared for the extreme heat of the day and extreme cold of the night. Note that before traveling over the surface, the party would need to travel through the Dome to one of its exits.

Into Space. One of the party’s key resources is a fixed portal between their walled citadel inside the Dome, and a space station in geosynchronous orbit above the Dome. There’s a space ship docked at the station which the party can use to travel into space. The thing is a 500 year old freight hauling vessel which moves about as quickly as our own modern space ships do. It also runs on a form of solid fuel which the party currently has no means of acquiring more of, so resource management is critically important. Encounters are quite rare in space, though. It’s even more barren than the surface of mars.

Through the Sewers. A labyrinth accessible from manhole covers in the Dome’s streets. The sewers extend further down into the interior of Mars than any player has yet ventured. This is not a mapped space, but rather a Flux which connects both to mapped spaces and to other Fluxes. (Flux Space is another idea I must revisit soon!) I allow players to use the sewers to travel between any two points on the surface. It requires 1 encounter roll more than if they’d taken the direct path through the Dome’s streets, but by traveling in the sewers the players are able to avoid dense crowds of people and factional authorities. Sewer encounters are a couple notches weirder and more deadly than the ones typically faced on the surface.

Through the Dome. By far the most common mode of getting where the party needs to go, since the Dome is where people live and thus where most things happen. There’s no supply-based resource depletion to worry about when traveling through the Dome, since the party is presumably never far from a vendor that sells any basic material they might need. However the Dome is dense with encounters and impediments of every sort, which will tax the party’s less easily replenished resources, like their hit points and saving throws. Of course they can always find somewhere that’ll rent them a bed for a day or two, but such rest gives their goal time to become more complicated.

4 — Exploration

Depending on the player’s goals, the destination they’re traveling to is probably either a Dungeon, or a Neighborhood.

Two explorers have just walked into an apartment, only to find the floor split, the furniture askew, and a deadly hole in the floor. Taken from the Cowboy Bebop anime.

Dungeon Exploration

My dungeon exploration procedure is pretty standard.

  1. The referee describes the party’s current environment.
  2. The party, acting as a group, uses one Exploration Turn to investigate the space they’re in, or move to a different space. If one member announces their intent to take individual action (i.e., hacking a computer), I check in with everyone else in the group to see how their characters spend that same block of time.
  3. The referee relays new information to the party, such as the results of their investigation, or the success/failure of their actions.
  4. After a-c have cycled 3 times, the referee calls on one player to roll the Encounter Die:
    1. Encounter surprises the party.
    2. Party gets the drop on an encounter.
    3. Impediment (i.e., a minor collapse occurs)
    4. Local Effect (i.e., if the dungeon has a unique function, that function occurs.)
    5. Clue. (Either for the next encounter, or to the location of some treasure, etc.)
    6. NPC Chatter
  5. The party resolves the results of the encounter roll, after which the procedure resets. Repeat until the party escapes the dungeon.
An explorer of the apocalyptic wasteland comes across a medium-sized town. A wall of junked cars blocks easy entrance. A hazy smoke lies low over the town. Taken from Fallout 1, the video game.

Neighborhood Exploration

Neighborhoods are not inherently hostile to being navigated the way dungeons are. By definition they are inhabited by large groups of people who have some reasonable expectation of moving around their neighborhood with relative safety. The party doesn’t need to worry about traps, doesn’t need maps, and can’t solve their problems with violence so easily. Rather, the challenge of adventuring in a neighborhood is social. Can you strike up a conversation with a shopkeep and convince her to tell you about the local tough’s watering hole? Can you impress the toughs enough that they’ll tell you where you can find the mercenary you’re after? (Credit to Ava of Errant & Permanent Cranial Damage for this idea!)

Neighborhoods ARE inherently hostile to outsiders, and so it’s important to determine whether or not the party will be clocked as outsiders. Do they speak the local dialect? Are their clothes within the range of fashions that are normal here? Are their hands as calloused, or as soft, as other folks? Each neighborhood has a few key features common to its residents. If most of the party shares these features, the neighborhood will yield to them. If most of the party looks like they don’t belong here, the neighborhood will resist them. (Credit to Ty of Mindstorm for this idea!)

My neighborhood procedure goes like this:

  1. Does the majority of the party share the key features of this community?
  2. Where do they want to begin their inquiry?
    • Going to a local official opens the party to greater scrutiny, but could provide them with greater resources.
    • Merchants are always willing to talk with outsiders, but you’ve got to spend money to get their attention.
    • Bar patrons are often open to striking up a conversation with someone who buys them a drink.
    • Random people on the street are always an option, but most folk don’t love being approached by randos.
  3. After the conversation is resolved, where does the party go next? (Did they learn something they can act on, or do they need to continue searching for their first clue?)
  4. As they travel to their next neighborhood location, the referee calls on one player to roll the Encounter Die:
Party Obviously OutsidersEncounter RollParty Blends In
Locals watch you face danger.1. Encounter Unusual DangerPeople try to help you.
Party shaken down or threatened.2. Encounter a Local ToughThe toughs nod, and pass by.
Your plight is ignored.3. Physical ImpedimentPeople let you know how to bypass it.
4. Local Effect
5. Clue
Your own hirelings.6. NPC ChatterA helpful local appears.
  1. The party arrives at their destination and may continue their inquiry in a new location. Repeat c, d, & e until the adventure is complete.

5 — Return Home

Ideally this should be handled with exactly the same travel procedure as before. Usually I enforce this. Occasionally, doing so would create an awkward break in the Adventure Phrase. One where the Session needs to end in 10 minutes, and the journey home will take 40 minutes. Too long to extend the session for, but an annoyingly short amount of play to resolve next session. When this happens I often handwave the travel home. I do very much prefer to play through it properly most of the time, though.

A visually-busy scene. Outdoors, with a staircase and structures built entirely out of garbage. A photograph of the Cathedral of Trash in Austin Texas.

6 — Haven Turn

The length of a Haven Turn is “however long is necessary for the Adventure Phase to catch up with the Domain Phase on the calendar.” Most of the stuff I once used Haven Turns for has been subsumed into the Domain Phase, with the exception of character downtime. The procedure is fairly brisk:

  1. Hit Points & Saving Throws return to their baseline values. Magic Users may swap their memorized spells. Characters who sacrificed their armor may replace it.
  2. Players may donate as much of their money as they like into their faction’s coffers, gaining xp equal to that amount. (Characters with debt must pay equal amounts towards their debt)
  3. Each player is asked in turn how their character spends the downtime. A non-exhaustive list of options:
    • Relaxation. The character starts next adventure with 1 Temporary Hit Point per level.
    • Research. The character does a deep dive, and may uncover the answers to 3 questions. (Some information may require them to have a specific source of knowledge to dive into.)
    • Relationship Development. Make a social roll to improve your relationship with a certain NPC.
    • Crafting. Describe an object you’d like to make, and make a skill check to build it.
    • Spell Creation. The player writes the first draft of the spell. The referee writes the final draft.
    • Solo Quest. The character pursues a personal goal which would perhaps be too much of a distraction for them to drag the rest of the party along for. The player sets one specific goal which must be approved by the referee, then rolls 2d6:
      • 2. Failure, begin the next Adventure Phase with half HP and a Saving Throw of 15.
      • 3-5. Failure, begin next Adventure with -1hp per level, and a Saving Throw of 13.
      • 6-8. Success, begin next Adventure with -1hp per level, and a Saving Throw of 13
      • 9-11. Success, begin next adventure with -1hp.
      • 12. Success, no injuries, and you also brought home cash treasure worth 200cc per level!

Post Session

Before each session starts I make a copy of my session report template, which I fill out as we play. After the session (immediately if possible) I flesh out the details into a full session report. My goal with these is not to write compelling reading—I’ve never enjoyed reading session reports, and only started sharing mine by request. The purpose of my play reports is as reference material. It’s handy to be able to type in the name of an NPC and immediately see all their appearances in the game. Frequently I’m able to use it when one of the players can’t find their notes about how one of their magic items works. Just recently it was useful when I started keeping a list of open hooks for Domain Actions. That wasn’t something I had been tracking, but it was simple to look over all the hooks I’d given out and write down the ones that would still be open.

One great failing of my approach is that I over-write my session reports. They don’t need to be anywhere near as long and detailed as they are. This is a failing in my technique that I’ve never quite managed to fix, but I’m sure others could get the same benefits with less effort.

At the bottom of my recap template are a set of questions to consider. I use these to write out a list of everything I want to accomplish before the next session:

  • What needs to be restocked? (At a minimum, one of the world events and two of the Faction Actions. Usually there will be encounters that got used up as well.)
  • Does anyone need to be added to Recurring Characters? (Per my Encounter Table method. Were any NPCs fun enough that I want to see them again?)
  • Who did the characters wrong? (And more importantly: what are they going to do about it? Should they be added to the consequences table, or should a whole adventure be planned around their revenge?)
  • Does anyone owe the party a favor? (Similar to the above: what are they going to do about it?)
  • What Hooks should be added for player actions during the domain phase? (Did anything crop up during this session that players may want to be reminded of?)
  • What tools would help the rough parts of this session work better? (Were the players confused at any point? Was I unable to adjudicate a situation gracefully? Could it be smoothed out with a new procedure, mechanic, or table?)

Over the course of the two weeks between each session I work my way through the list, restocking and revising what is needed.

As of today, those are the procedures I use for running On a Red World Alone. Though, the next session is coming up very shortly now, so by the time you read this it’s very likely something will have changed somewhere.

Photo of my ORWA to-do list. Many items are scratched out, but the ones which haven't yet been crossed off are: Dungeon Impediments, Local Effects, Codify Haven Turn Procedures Generally Better, Weorod How Many Can be used in a battle? Progress bar what does "talk to Needletooth jack" spell mean? What are all 27 of the space hulks in orbit? Reactions to the party's domain actions? Domain level PCs? How do the akiovashans alter their plans? Review domain phases past: what should be different in the world and encounter tables? Are consequences working well? Occurring often enough? World events: review! Neighborhood generator. Movement ought to be reorganized into PROCEDURE! A hammer and a pen laying across the paper obscure the rest of the text.

Additional Reading About Procedures

Proceduralism, by Brendan S.
Doctrines of Proceduralism, by Brendan S.
Proceduralism, by Gus L.
Errant Design Deep Dive #2: Core Procedures, by Ava Islam
The Rhythm of Procedure, by Retired Adventurer
Theoretical & Practical Proceduralism, by Marcia
Loops, by Emmy
What Even Is a “Procedure”? by Prismatic Wasteland
The Basic Procedure of the OSR, by Prismatic Wasteland

Miscellaneous References

Meet the New Boss: Some Thoughts on Domain Level Play, by Joseph Manola. (Also recorded as Episode 108 of Blogs on Tape)
A Fracture in Old School Philosophy: Barbarian or King?, by Dwiz
I’m Getting Too High Level For This Shit, by Nick LS Whelan (A short post which may add some additional useful context to the ideas discussed above).
Running Domain Play as a Carousing Table, by Scrap Princess
AD&D’s Domain Game, by Chris Kutalik

Structuring Encounter Tables, Amended & Restated

A screenshot from Final Fantasy VIII/8. Quistis, Squall, and Rinoa face a mechanized lizard creature in a random battle. The words "SO RANDOM" are printed on top of the image.

This post is an update to my 2017 essay “Structuring Encounter Tables.” It’s intended to replace that earlier version, and thus includes a bit of self-plagiarism.

In order for an environment to feel dangerously alive it must intrude on the player’s desired activities. For any activity in my game, there are increments of fictional time which require the players to roll the Event Die. Each face of the Event Die corresponds to something, but the most complex and important result is an Encounter, which then calls for a roll on my Encounter Table.

All my encounter tables are 2d6 tables1. The bell curve allows me to vary the likelihood of different encounters. The ones that are most likely can be a little mundane, so that even as they intrude on the player’s desires they also serve to establish what is normal in this place. The less frequent encounters can be the zanier stuff that’s fun to write, but would make the game feel disjointed if they were omnipresent.

1 The methods I describe here could easily be adapted for use a 2d4 or a 2d8. I have occasionally used 2d4 myself when I was running smaller campaigns with fewer expected sessions. In general, though, I find that 2d4 doesn’t give me enough room for all the variety I like to pack into a table. Conversely, 2d8 tables are too big. They take too much effort to write, and the odds of uncommon results occurring are too diminishingly remote for my preference.

2 is always a dragon

Because all of our games could use more dragons in them. The game is called “Dungeons & Dragons,” yet in my experience, the appearances of dragons end up being exceedingly rare when contrasted with how often dungeons show up. They don’t need to be these hulking colossal beasts capable of stepping on PCs as though they were ants. They don’t need to be impossible to defeat, so long as they’re scary. A lizard the size of a car with 8 more hit dice than that party’s average, multiple attacks each around, and a big breath weapon is more than enough.

When my players encounter a dragon there’s a 1-in-3 chance that it’s hungry and wants to gobble them up. In this mood a dragon can’t be reasoned with, you’ve got to fight or flee. The other 2/3rds of the time the dragon will simply demand tribute from anyone who crosses its path. Anyone who refuses to pay tribute is gobbled up on principal as a warning to people who think they’re allowed to say ‘no’ to a dragon. Each of my dragons has a preferred form of tribute (perhaps unique books or fancy bottles of booze) but will also accept money of a certain amount per person.

12 is always a wizard

Because all of our games could use more wizards in them. Because wizards are the coolest, fuck you wizard haters. A wizard doesn’t need a complete spell list and inventory of magic items. All they need is the ability to do something really weird and scary, and an escape plan. Wizards know they’ve got a d4 hit die, so they’ve always got an escape plan.

Wizards, being a few steps closer to humanity than dragons, are slightly less likely to want to eat people. Like all my encounters, they’ll be pursuing some specific activity when the party meets them—though because they’re wizards that activity may be completely inscrutable. Capable-looking passers by may find themselves press-ganged into doing something strange, and a lucky party may earn a boon. Though, it’s just as likely that what a wizard wants is something the party would never willingly give up. “The foot of a traveler” is a desirable component for certain spells.

My private rule is that it’s not possible for the party to become friends with a wizard, because wizards do not have friends. Wizards divide people into three categories: people they hate, people who are useful, and people who are beneath their notice. That third group is definitely the safest one to be in.

Wizards and Dragons are each factions of one. They’re individuals with enough personal power that they don’t have to worry about rules or territories. They usually have a few minions, but they control them at their whims rather than by any formalized structure. When encountering either of these creatures the party should be in great personal danger, but clever play could also bring them great advantage. If a wizard or dragon is slain, there are consequences. Allegiances shift, power vacuums appear and are filled, and valuable treasure hoards are left without their most powerful guardians.

7 is usually Recurring Characters.

I maintain a separate list of these, populated with NPCs the party has had some fun dealings with but who would not otherwise have any reason to recur. I rotate people off that list whenever this result causes them to appear, then rotate them back on if the list ever gets too small. In most other circumstances I prefer the purer randomness of a creature that can appear over and over again while some other creatures never do. For recurring characters though, who are mostly friendly to the party, that has often felt tedious to me. It’s fun bumping into an old friend in the grocery store. It’s awkward when you keep bumping into them in every aisle.

The Major Half of the table

8, 9, 10, and 11 are for universal threats. Stuff that could appear anywhere and any time without being out of place. The further they get from 7, the more wild they can be. So while 8 might be a rabid dog or a hungry bandit, 11 is going to be something like a void vampire or a spell-starved lich.

The Minor Half of the table

6, 5, 4, and 3 are for threats tied to specific locations. In On a Red World Alone that usually refers to the factional territories the party must travel through in order to get anywhere in the Dome, but it might also mean levels of a dungeon, regional biomes, depth beneath the surface of the sea, etc. Whatever boundaries are important for the players to understand in your setting, you can help emphasize them with this. On one side of a boundary the players fight goblins, on the other they fight flying devil sharks with tornado breath weapons.

Thus my encounter table ends up looking like this:

  1. Roll a Dragon
  2. [Territory]
  3. [Territory]
  4. [Territory]
  5. [Territory]
  6. Roll a Recurring Character
  7. Six giant slugs demanding taxes in the name of the slug king. Who the hell is the slug king?
  8. Starving Dire Bear, recently escaped from an abandoned moleman zoo deep underground.
  9. 21 Gnomes (the ideal number). A numerological cult. They’re insulted by the number of buckles on the party’s clothes.
  10. A talking book that is horny to be read from. It makes things weird right away. (The text is about the history of obelisks).
  11. Roll a Wizard

Kobold Territory

  1. The party spots a pit trap. They’re supposed to spot it. There are 7 kobolds waiting to ambush them as they edge around it.
  2. 17 goblins in full armor, here to raid their kobold foes, and willing to raid anyone else they meet.
  3. A kobold merchant traveling to the lands of the slug king to trade. Has a minotaur bodyguard, and doesn’t trust outsiders.
  4. 4 young Kobold bravos, all drunk, looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness.

Boneboy Territory

  1. A great big rolling skull that can shoot fire out its eyes. Trying to win a marathon race. Would be furious if anyone delayed them even a moment.
  2. A giant serpent. Unseen are 3 boneboy hunters stalking the serpent, who may ambush the party if their encounter with the serpent presents a useful advantage.
  3. A whole company of boneboys (24!) out on marching maneuvers. They’re raw recruits. This is their first day. All but their commander will panic at first sight of the enemy.
  4. 2 boneboy warriors sitting in a small camp, polishing one another’s bones. They will be angry and embarrassed to be discovered.

By breaking the table down this way, generating 11 options becomes a much more manageable task. And adding a new location only requires generating 4 new options, rather than a whole new table. So the only task left is to actually fill the table, and the question becomes: what makes a good encounter table entry? First I ought to specify that for my purposes, an encounter is (almost) always an agent of some sort. An NPC, animal, or monster. I’ve got other tools for managing random locations or environmental hazards. Encounters are things that have their own desires and the ability to pursue them.

The first step is just to come up with something that feels cool to me. It’s easier to turn a weak encounter into a strong encounter than it is to conjure a strong encounter fully formed in my imagination. I pull ideas from anywhere. If I’m on the Minor Half of the table I try to stick to something that represents the factions and situations of the region, but otherwise I let my imagination roam widely and trust that I’ll figure out how to make it fit during play. Sometimes I’m fired by the sort of creative energy that drives me to invent a unique monster, other times I just flip through one of the monster manuals I’ve got on my shelves and pick out the first thing that looks fun. Once I’ve got everything down in a way that interests me, then I can go back over the table to figure out if the entries meet the criteria of being a good encounter. There are two wrinkles that each encounter needs in order for me to be satisfied that I’ll be able to run it quickly at the table.

Wrinkle 1

All of my Encounters are doing something specific. Even if they’re a group of 2d6 generic mooks, they need to be up to something when the party encounter them. For this I wrote a “What is the Encounter Doing” table. My original intent was to roll during play, in conjunction with rolling the encounter. In practice that slowed down play too much, so I’ve taken to using it during session prep, and its been a delight having those details at my fingertips when I run. Roll a d30 for intelligent creatures, and a d12 for animal creatures.

  1. Lost
  2. Hurt
  3. Trapped
  4. Sleeping
  5. Eating
  6. Sick
  7. Tracking Prey
  8. Lying in Ambush
  9. Mating Behavior
  10. Starving
  11. Returning Home
  12. Fleeing
  13. Plotting
  14. Holding Captives
  15. Scavenging
  16. Building a Camp
  17. Demolishing
  18. Doing drugs or drinking
  19. Artistic pursuits
  20. Spying
  21. Committing a crime
  22. Searching
  23. Religious ritual
  24. Setting, putting out, or fleeing a fire
  25. Weeping
  26. Excreting2
  27. Bathing
  28. Socializing
  29. Gloating
  30. Something that isn’t on this table.3

2 “Why is this in the intelligent creatures only part of the table?” I hear you ask. Because excreting NPCs are only interesting if it means they can experience shame.
3 For a table that is meant to be re-used over and over again, it’s nice to have something that forces me to reexamine it from time to time.

Wrinkle 2

At this point an encounter often doesn’t need further tweaking. However, I’ve noticed a bad tendency in myself towards encounters that don’t demand the party’s attention. I construct something that I’d be interested in engaging with for its own sake, but when I describe it to my players they just say “Alright, we keep going.” And that’s…fine. Ignoring an encounter ought to be possible sometimes, but it shouldn’t be quite so simple. Encounters ought to intrude on the players attentions more than that. Ignoring them is possible, but doing so ought to be an interesting choice with interesting consequences.

So in my final pass over an encounter I ensure that the majority of them will make some undesirable demand on the player’s attention. This can mean defending themselves from violence, or slander; figuring out how to soothe an aggrieved person, how to cope with a stolen item, or even just deciding whether or not they want to stand by while those things are happening to a sympathetic victim right in front of them.

One exception to this guideline are the Recurring Characters, because their purpose is different. Most encounters are meant to give the party little problems to solve. Recurring characters are meant to give the world a sense of history and interconnectivity. When you meet someone interesting, you might bump into them again. Usually these are friendly characters, since antagonistic character recur in other ways that will present themselves more forcefully. (i.e. plotting elaborate revenges against the party). That being said, recurring characters still ought to invite the party’s attention in some other way. Maybe they need money, or they have a quest to offer, or they’re running a shop and have something to sell. They may even have a gift for the party.

Restocking

Restocking is an essential and constant process when each entry is as specific as I’ve described. I don’t want to understate how burdensome that can be: it does mean I spend time between every single session going back to these tables and adding to them. I’ve managed to make that practice into a routine which I have not yet fallen behind on. I genuinely find it to be the easiest form of inter-session prep I’ve ever committed myself to, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for preferring somewhat more generic and reusable encounters in order to save themselves that constant effort.

Two things make Restocking easier. The first is that, on occasions when I have more ideas than I need, I make sure to record those ideas under the encounter table, where the extra entry will be ready to sub-in when an old one gets sliced out. Second, and much more important, is that restocking rarely means coming up with a new idea from scratch. If the party encounters “4 young kobold bravos, all drunk, looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness,” then all I need to do to freshen it up is create a variation on that basic theme. This time it’ll be 8 kobolds of various ages. I roll on the table above and discover they’re building a camp. So I mash those ideas together and restock the entry with “7 kobold bravos erecting tents, while an elderly kobold sits on a nearby rock and criticizes their work ethic. None have their weapons immediately to hand.”

The way I run the game, the encounter die is the primary driver of play. It’s how I introduce adventure hooks to the players. It’s how I communicate the details of the world, big and small. It’s how I give weight to the passage of time, which in turn enables me to run a game where the players really can go anywhere and do anything, because rolling encounters gives me a chance to gather my notes and prepare details. It’s a multifaceted tool, and I happily put this much effort and thought into my Encounter Tables because the dividends they pay as play aids makes it worth the effort.

Additional Reading

My original post from 2017
Hazard System v0.3 on Necropraxis (Any post under the Hazard System tag is worth a look!)
Combined Encounter Checks & Tables Using d% on Traverse Fantasy
Encounter Checklist on Prismatic Wasteland
Impact on Goblin Punch
In Search of Better Travel Rules on Rise Up Comus
Monster Design and Necessity on Dungeon of Signs
Sticky Goblins on False Machine

Text Folding Tool for Referee Notes

Organizing campaign notes is frustrating. My preference would be to keep all my hobby material in an analog format, but it’s not practical. A campaign is a constantly evolving mesh of interconnected ideas. A referee can never know which parts of their notes will need to be removed, or expanded wildly beyond their original scope. I’ve tried a bunch of methods: binders, notebooks, recipe boxes full of index cards, stacks of paper with bespoke organizational symbols in the upper corner. In the end, all of them required too much paper shuffling in order to find anything. Digital tools are too useful not to take advantage of here.

But my experience with digital tools has been fraught. In part that’s due to my own general Ludditism: I don’t own a smartphone, and I refuse to even consider relying on web based tools. “Sorry guys, we can’t play today, the website is down.” is an absolutely unacceptable possibility for me. Then there’s all the effort that will be involved to extract my game’s data when the web tool inevitably goes belly up, or gets bought out by some VC firm who makes it unusable. I have a strong preference for software that can be run locally, with a minimum of bloat.

I’ll say it again: organizing campaign notes is frustrating. But I did recently find an option that I’m reasonably happy with, and would like to share.

(Sorry I couldn’t unfold any of the interesting text. My players might be spying on this blog even as we speak >.>)

Libre Office is an open source suite of office software. It replaced the old OpenOffice project, and is currently the primary Free Software alternative to Microsoft Office. It’s a nice piece of software that I recommend in general, but is specifically useful for this hidden feature demonstrated in the video. The ability to to treat header text as a folder for all the body text written beneath, which can then be revealed or hidden with a click of the mouse.

To enable this feature you’ll need a reasonably recent version of LibreOffice. Navigate to Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Advanced. On that tab, under “Optional Features,” check the box next to “Enable experimental features.” This will require restarting the application. Now you can navigate to Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOfficeWriter ▸ View, and check the box next to “Show outline-folding buttons.” Optionally, I also recommend navigating to View ▸ Web for the best effect. Page breaks are an unnecessary complication when your text is going to be expanding and contracting.

Once that’s done you’re good to go. To set text as a foldable heading, use the dropdown menu in the upper left to make it a heading. A little button should appear beside the text (you may need to hover to see it). If you click this, all the text beneath the heading (down to the next heading) will disappear. Clicking it again will cause the text to reappear. Fill the spaces beneath headings with all the tables, keys, and background information you like! I should point out that I’ve had the best luck using “Default Paragraph Text” here. For whatever reason, selecting “Body Text” has sometimes caused the folding function to stop working properly. I’m not sure why, except that this is an experimental feature and not yet fully developed.

There’s a lot I love about this method. It keeps my notes tidy, no matter how voluminous they get. It’s easy to use at the table since all the headings fit on about two digital pages. The fact that it’s built into a word processor means there’s a minimum of barrier between USING the tool (folding and unfolding it) and MAKING the tool (adding new text, removing old text.) No need to interrupt my writing process to reference special syntax any time I want to add a new header.

No solution is perfect, of course. The way you need to carefully select the way your body text is tagged is irritatingly fiddly. The feature also doesn’t seem to be well optimized. Scrolling through a large document causes the application to chug, and there’s often quite a bit of lag when folding and unfolding text. (Both issues visible in the video above). Some of that’s just down to word processors being kinda bloated pieces of software, which is why I usually write in text editors. None the less, I haven’t found any quicker or easier alternatives yet.

I should note that Microsoft Office does have a similar tool, which presumably works just as well (or better) than LibreOffice’s unfinished feature. My friend Chris H. also swears by a piece of software called Scrivener. From the looks of it, I think Scrivener would be an ideal solution to my campaign note organization needs. I’d happily pay their $50 fee to use the software. Sadly they have no linux compatible version, so I must do without. Thus I can only pass on a second-hand recommendation from Chris H.

BTW, while I’ve got you here: my friend Ava is a SuperCoolLady™ and needs some help funding her transition. If you’ve got a few dollars to spare, that’d be a very SuperCoolLady™ thing for you to spend them on.

Additional Reading

A New Writer Outline Folding Mode on the LibreOffice Dev Blog
Resources For Playing Online on The Retired Adventurer
Hexcrawl Dashboards on Rise Up Comus
Hexcrawls and Computers on Save Vs. Total Party Kill
DM Screen V1 on I Cast Light!

Prep Tools, Not Adventures

The table of poor-quality tools cropped out of Gary Larson's infamous "Cow Tools" comic. Decorated with the 'Wave' art from '90s paper cups in the background, and a bilighting overlay.

Update January 10, 2023: This post has won the Gold Bloggie for best Advice Post! Holy crap I am floored. Thank you everyone who voted for me, or who voted for one of the other posts, or who wrote one of the other posts, and thank you to Prismatic Wasteland for running this event. Being recognized feels nice 😀

I’ve run a lot of D&D over the years, and in that time I’ve cycled through various approaches for how I get ready for a session. Like most folk, I started out with unrealistic ideas about how much and how quickly I could produce good material. Because of this, my early campaigns were basically burnout generators. They quickly morphed into Zombie Campaigns: I continued running them out of a desire to spend time with my friends and to be a good referee, but I’d lost any creative energy for improving them. A lot of promising campaigns wound up ending before they should have because of that. Over many years and many campaigns I’ve developed better strategies for handling prep. The most important of these is to focus on making flexible tools, rather than specific adventure scenarios.

A few weeks ago I began a new ORWA campaign, so let’s take the first session of that as an example. Because it was the first session, and most of the players had no previous experiences in the world to drive their activity, I needed to prepare some specific adventure scenario to get the ball rolling. I put together a little 12 room dungeon which was being contested by two factions, each of which controlled one of the dungeon’s entrances. So my players go out to this location, get invested with one of the factions, and decide the best way to help their new pals out was to do some rabble rousing among the opposing faction’s neighbors. Then there was an impromptu street fair organized around a challenge fight, which the party skillfully manipulated into a riot when their opponents failed to honor the terms of the fight, culminating in the party using the cover of the mob to assault their enemy’s fortified position.

It was a good little adventure, and a great tone-setter for the campaign! It had everything I like to see: I was able to show off the Saturday Morning SciFi weirdness of my setting; the players did some creative problem solving; they punched above their weight class by leveraging a precarious social situation and deploying their skills and spells precisely when and where they would have the most impact. And never once did they set foot in my dungeon, or deal with any of the specific challenges I had prepared.

I’m glad I had that dungeon prepared. If they’d gone into it, I’d have needed those notes. But I’m also glad I didn’t put too much work into it. The whole scenario—setup, map, and key—was scribbled across 3 pages of my notebook. It was a sloppy little thing I threw together during loading screens in video games and boring scenes in movies. If I’d put much more effort into it I might have been annoyed that I never got to use it.

My more serious preparation time was spent making reusable tools to help me quickly generate gameplay no matter what the players decide to do. In the same session I described above, I used the setting map to quickly identify how long the party would need to travel and what sights they’d see along the way. I used encounter tables to give that travel time weight.1 The encounters also presented the players with a series of smaller side-challenges to navigate, many of which provide hooks or foreshadowing for larger campaign events still to come.2 When the party decided to start rabble rousing among the enemy faction’s neighbors I was able to use my NPC generator to quickly give those neighbors some personality and wants of their own. I was also able to reference the territory this was taking place in, and the social norms of that territory informed what challenges the party would face carrying out their plan.3 When the party organized a street fair I could have had a unique street vendor show up with my popup shop generator,4 but at that point we were running short on time so I decided not to.

1 I detailed my general approach for structuring encounter tables in 2017, though I ought to post about its updated form at some point. (Update July 22, 2022) I have now posted about its updated form!
2 One of those challenges, a minor trap the party fell into, resulted in a friendship with the creatures operating the trap. The party has become highly engaged with that friendship, and those creatures have appeared in every session since.
3 In this case, the local population was already prejudiced against the group the PCs wanted to turn them against, so it was easier than normal.
4 Similar to the Goblin Bazaar I described a couple years back.

All this stuff is what I spent time carefully crafting before the game, and almost all of it is reusable. The specific table entries will change a bit: some have been consumed and new entries need to be written. Others are temporarily exhausted and I moved them off the table for a bit. Still others remain on the table with a note that the next time they occur will be the party’s second encounter, with consequent developments. (“Ah, we meet again!” says the creepy sewer vampire.) But now that the tables have been written this restocking is fairly quick and easy to get done. For some tables I’ve even got pre-written replacements ready to go from days when I had too many ideas to fit on a given table.

Other tools I prepared that didn’t come up in that specific session include:

  • A schedule of goals for each of the game’s major factions, so that each time they accomplish something I immediately know what they’re working on next.
  • A table for determining what a random encounter is doing at the moment they’re encountered. I usually roll this outside the session while stocking the encounter tables.
  • Generalized tables for the results of doing something that publicly affects the party’s reputation, good or bad.
  • Specific consequences, good and bad, for some of the party’s more notable actions. I roll one of these at the start of each session. (This is a bastardized adaptation of Arnold’s Potential Drama idea).
  • A table of major events that will occur in the world, irrespective of the player’s actions. Stuff like natural disasters, or the deaths of public figures. (A distant evolution of Brendan’s Haven Complications table).
  • A series of tables and a little stack of blank maps to help me quickly throw together a small adventure site if the party finds one that I haven’t specifically prepared.

And of course, it bears mentioning that even my unused dungeon can now be repurposed as fuel for my tools. The parts the players learned about will need to be discarded: the nexus of varied mutagenic energies, and the Sherman tank in the basement that was being disassembled and smuggled out in pieces. The individual rooms however—none of which the players explored—could be shuffled among encounter tables, or into my adventure site generator.

The great thing about tools is that in addition to saving the referee’s time and energy, they’re able to react to the player’s actions in a way that specifically prepared scenarios just can’t. If the players are walking down the street towards a dungeon, then become randomly fascinated by a bit of graffiti and wander into an alley on a wild goose chase, then if all you’ve got prepared is that one dungeon you’re stuck. But if you’ve got a table of interesting locations that are designed to fit anywhere in your setting, you can keep the game rolling as if you’d planned for this all along. And when the players are able to find interesting adventure no matter where they go your campaign world will feel much more alive.

The reactive potential of tools is also why my most important prep occurs immediately after running a session. While I’m writing out my recap of events (something I’m indulgently excessive about), I have a set of questions to ask myself:

  • Did the players encounter any interesting NPCs that it would be fun to add to my Recurring Characters table?
  • Did the party wrong anyone who might hold a grudge against them? What form might revenge take? (Put this on the consequences table).
  • Does anyone feel that they owe the party a favor? What might they do to settle the debt? (Put this on the consequences table).
  • Review all the table entries used, and restock anything that needs it.
  • What parts of the session were rough, and what tools or techniques would help them work better in future?

That last one is a biggie. For example, as the sessions have gone on, this party has taken out a lot of loans. That’s not something other groups I’ve played with have done. The first couple times it happened I set an arbitrary limit for how big a loan could be, and noted down the amounts without any real idea of how it would be collected. Now I’ve worked out a formalized little procedure for how loans are guaranteed and how debt repayment is enforced.

As of posting this, the renewed ORWA campaign has had 4 sessions. I made sure I had another specific adventure prepped before we started session 2, but once again I’m glad it’s a thing I scribbled casually into my notebook; because 3 sessions later the players still haven’t stopped moving long enough to need me to prompt them towards an adventure. My tools and their own desires have entered a feedback loop that hasn’t left room for me to say “Well, there’s X thing going on over here…”

I’ve also got heaps more creative energy left in me than I used to after the first few sessions of a new campaign.

Additional Reading About Session Prep

That Four Letter Word: Prep on Save vs. Total Party Kill
Planning a Campaign as a Series of Decisions on The Retired Adventurer
The Grand d666 on Being An Asshole To A Goblin

Secret Society Factions in ORWA

In the coming weeks 5 Years Left will be ending. Its been a fun and creatively rejuvenating game, but after nearly two years I’m ready to shift focus. I want to delve back into On a Red World Alone. Play a game with more substantial factions, where players have more opportunity to make world-altering plans. Before I can get things started back on mars, though, I’ve got to develop some tools for myself. Part of the reason I took a break from this game was my fatigue with trying to support a style of play I’d never experienced before. I didn’t know how to referee a satisfying domain game. Worse, I didn’t even know what it was I needed to learn, and never had the time or energy to figure it out. Now I do.

When ORWA returns, the players will be governing a major faction. Major factions can’t be challenged with pit traps or goblins. They need to be challenged by other factions. Groups with their own idea of how the dome ought to be governed, and the power to manifest that government. These other factions can’t be finite challenges the way a typical dungeon or dragon is. If a faction can be cleared in 2-4 sessions of play, then the game won’t last long. Additionally, I’d really like to introduce some new factions to the game, without abandoning the ones my older players will have gotten to know over ORWA’s previous half-decade-long run. But because this game takes place within the confined space of a city-sized bio-dome on mars, there’s not a lot of room for new factions to exist in.

These are problems that will require a variety of solutions. Some of the less interesting old factions have merged together. Other factions that the old party effectively defeated no longer hold any territory at all, and if they still exist have reorganized into religious institutions, mercenary gangs, merchant corporations, etc. Some factions are able to exist outside the dome, underground, or up in space. The least typical sort of faction, and the one I’d like to work through here, is a secret society. It solves two of my issues right off the bat: secret societies don’t openly hold territory, and so I don’t need any extra space to fit them in. They also defy being a finite challenge, since players can struggle against them without knowing who’s in charge. They don’t have anyone to negotiate with or assassinate.

On a Red World Alone has a long tradition of secret society factions. For the majority of the original campaign the players were agents of a mysterious organization known as “The Internet.” One of the culminating events of that campaign was the players destroying that organization, scattering its resources to the wind, and even hunting down the most powerful remnants of its leadership. They leveraged the tools and secrets they stole from it to build their own faction in the shadows, sharing technology and building alliances until they were powerful enough that I didn’t know how to run the game anymore. It seems fitting that secret societies remain a part of the world. Perhaps, just to give my players an eerie sense of déjà vu, some of their own agents are capable-yet-unorthodox upstarts with secret plans to overthrow their masters.

Let’s imagine a theoretical faction that definitely won’t exist in ORWA: the Cult of the Sleeping God. Their goal is to wake their lazy god up. Every faction needs a goal beyond simply seeking more power. Power-seeking is in the nature of big factions, but each has a certain form or flavor of power they value. This is a religious faction, so they’re seeking power in the form of making their god more powerful.

To awaken their god, the cult needs 3 things: cosmic smelling salts (requiring many rare, expensive, difficult-to-acquire ingredients); access to the dimension in which their god sleeps (they’ll need to learn the secret of how to get there); and to kill the traitor who put their god to sleep in the first place (one of the party’s allies!). Whenever it comes time for this faction to act, they’ll do something in pursuit of one of these things.

For any faction to work as an interesting part of the game the players must, at minimum, know the faction exists. So the Cult of the Sleeping God will have a sigil they paint or carve whenever they take action. Something to bless their efforts, and celebrate their victories. It’s not a very good way to keep a secret, but if the faction were too good at keeping secrets then I’d be the only one who knew about them. I’ve done stuff like that before, and every time it’s just me on my own doing extra work the players never see, and which doesn’t improve the play of the game.

By their very nature, secret societies should show up in places where a normal faction would not. For example, while any faction might place spies to gain information, a secret society could build an entire network within the party’s own faction. So as the party is recruiting specialists—diplomats, scientists, architects, etc.—there’s some chance they may be plants working for the Cult of the Sleeping God. Leeching the player’s resources, building back-doors into everything they do. As another example, players will make rolls occasionally to check the health of their faction. Are the needs of their citizens being met, are their supply lines secure, is there civil unrest? If something is going wrong there’s no reason the Cult of the Sleeping God couldn’t occasionally and obviously be behind it.

I haven’t fully settled on the form domain play will take yet, but part of the procedure of the “Domain Turn” is going to be a phase when a number of other factions get to make ‘moves.’ I won’t have every faction move during every session, since moves are big things that presumably took careful planning. Also it would be tedious. I’d rather players have 2-3 moves to react to during a session. The factions that move are also going to be somewhat randomized. So another way the Cult of the Sleeping God could show up where it’s not supposed to be would be to have them on the the faction table twice. One entry would be the cult acting somewhat obviously on its own behalf. Enough that the player’s information networks can confidently inform them that the cult was responsible. The other entry would call for a re-roll on the faction table, and whatever faction the dice landed on will make a move that has been influenced by members of the Cult that have infiltrated its hierarchy.

This is all very rough. Restarting ORWA is a large project, and like most large projects there’s no clear place to start. Every piece is contingent on some other piece that doesn’t yet exist. The only way to get it done is to start putting things in place, building off them, then coming back around and revising that first stuff once I’ve got a better idea of how the rest of the structure fits together. I don’t yet know exactly what the domain turn looks like, or what elements make up the player’s “domain character sheet,” but the idea of introducing a secret society appealed to me. And now I’ve got an idea about how a secret society might want to attack the party, which has forced me to think about the sorts of resources the party might have, which gives me something to tinker on next, and so on until the game is ready.

Developing a Setting: My Trouble with Dungeon Moon

In my experience the success of a campaign is inversely proportional to how much thought I put into the setting before play begins. When I’m gearing up for session 1 of a new game I have two basic priorities:

  1. To come up with a central conceit which is wild enough to be memorable, and open ended enough to accommodate any sort of adventure I want to run in it.
  2. To do as little work as possible justifying that conceit.

On a Red World Alone is a good example of this approach:

  1. Game is set in a post-apocalyptic biodome city on Mars. There’s mutants and magic and factions squabbling over territory.
  2. The apocalypse was so long ago that nobody understands or has access to technology. That way we can still use the LotFP equipment lists.

It’s a cheap attempt to have my cake and eat it too. I wouldn’t accept that sort of shallow setting design in a published product, but it’s a good way to get a new campaign off the ground. As the game progresses tweaks and retcons can be made here and there to develop the setting into a more well rounded whole. Anyone perusing ORWA’s play reports will see that technology has been a prominent part of the game for awhile.

Which is a very roundabout way of introducing a question that has been floating about in my brain for years now: what do I want to do with Dungeon Moon? 

For the uninitiated: Dungeon Moon is a campaign I ran back in 2013~2014. It was set on an artificial moon built by a wizard who had decided a mere tower was beneath his dignity.  Eventually the wizard disappeared, and the inhabitants of his flagstone moon were left to fend for themselves. The PCs are the great grandchildren of his cooks and gardeners and such. They live in communities surrounded on all sides by horrible monsters and evil experiments. They venture out of the magical barriers that protect them in search of whatever comforts they can bring back to their community.

Dungeon Moon has all the makings of great setting. It’s the first time I really nailed it in making something “wild enough to be memorable.” The plan was always to develop the setting further, and eventually make it into a book. My problem is that Dungeon Moon was (and is) an absolute mess. Every campaign is a mess, but Dungeon Moon was particularly bad. Realistically the only salvageable thing I have from that campaign are the ideas it was based on. Everything I actually developed was trash.

I was in the grip of some really stupid ideas at the time. I had this obsession with creating complex areas described down to the color of the drapes. I had fat stacks of graphing paper that were dense with rooms, cross referenced a dozen different ways, and none of it was done clearly. Remember my old Deadly Dungeons posts? Imagine that, but for every single room. The information was too dense to use at the table, and writing it was too time consuming to keep up with the player’s rate of exploration.

That same obsessive over-documentation prevented me from making all the little tweaks and retcons that have allowed ORWA to develop beyond its early flaws. ORWA has no secret 30,000 word bible that I’ve bled and sweated over; which has allowed it to be agile in a way Dungeon Moon never could be.

I’ve actually made two attempts to fix Dungeon Moon. The first was in 2014, shortly after I stopped running the campaign, and is still burdened with many of the flaws that weighed down the first iteration. The second, in 2016, led to a fun few sessions, but wound up getting pushed aside in favor of other projects. It did result in the development of Flux Space though, which I still think is  the best way to model the idea of a moon-sized dungeon.

I think what I’m going to do is spend the next few P&P posts exploring the individual ideas that made up Dungeon Moon. I want to figure out what the setting needs, how to approach it and make it the fun and playable and shareable setting it always ought to have been.

Some topics to cover:

  • Town generation, management, and development. Dungeon Moon is very much a setting where the party will have a home base they return to and improve over time.
  • What is treasure? One of my biggest regrets is that I stuck with traditional treasure in a setting where pillows and meat should have been valued more highly than gold or silver.
  • Culture and faction development. It’s a longstanding conceit that human life is cheap and cannibalism is commonplace on Dungeon Moon. What other weird habits and communities have developed given the oddity of this particular apocalypse scenario?
  • A lot of ink has already been spilled on the subject of megadungoen design, but I might waste some time retreading old ground just to figure out what exactly it means to effectively expand the endless chambers of Dungeon Moon specifically.
  • History and cosmology needs to be explored in greater depth. Aside from a few details about the wizard who built the place, I never really explored the context in which Dungeon Moon exists. That would help provide some direction to the way the setting is developed. For example: what world does Dungeon Moon orbit?

Advice for Running Long-Term Campaigns Online

The other day, all-around likeable dude Chris Wilson sent me a message:

“I know you’ve been running a successful Google hangouts campaign for awhile now, and I was just wondering if you have any advice for me to get a similar campaign started?”

This isn’t something I’d ever really thought about. After two and a half years, On a Red World Alone definitely qualifies as a long running online campaign, but that’s not something I set out to accomplish. I have no program for keeping it going aside from simply responding to problems as they’ve arisen. None the less, Chris seems to have found the conversation useful. Perhaps the same advice can be helpful to others as well.

The most important thing is to Keep Showing Up. Everything else I have to say could be distilled down to this single point. Campaigns end when the referee gives up on them. If you surrender to your first bout of “setting fatigue,” your campaign will be lucky to last 6 months.

There have been times when ORWA bores me. Days when I just don’t feel like running very much. I push through those times because I enjoy hanging out with my players, and because I know my boredom is temporary.  I know that in a month I’m going to come up with a cool new idea. When I do, I’ll be happy I still have my weekly ORWA session to inject it into.

On a Red World Alone will end someday, but it won’t end because I’m bored with it. It will end because I’m satisfied with it.

It’s also essential to understand that Your Players Won’t Keep Showing Up. That’s not a judgement on them, it’s just a fact of life. No group of adults will be able to consistently keep the same night of the week available for years at a time. People drop out. Presently, ORWA only has one and a half of its original players. I lost most of my starting group within the first 6 months, and since then there have been multiple “generations” of the party. Some of the later players have become more essential to my idea of what the game is than the people who were there with me at the beginning.

If I have more than a couple sessions of low, or no attendance, I go recruiting. I get out there on g+ and let folks know there’s room for them at my table. Sometimes it takes a couple weeks to find someone, but it’s worth the effort. I’ve had 16 different players in ORWA over the years: some dropped out after a few weeks; some are still new recruits themselves; some played for many years but have moved on to other things; some have returned to the game after long absences. Only one player has been part of the game consistently since its beginning.

To mitigate players dropping off, I do my best to Make The Game Part of Everyone’s Routine. In my experience the most common time to lose players is when the schedule is unpredictable. On a Red World Alone happens every Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm PST. That time has never changed, nor have I ever taken a hiatus away from it.

That isn’t to say we’ve never missed a session. In the 132 weeks since we started playing, we’ve only played 101 times. Sometimes Wednesday is a holiday, and we cancel the game so people can be with their families. Sometimes I can’t avoid needing to work during our normal game time, or I’m too sick to play. Sometimes I show up, but none of my players do.

These things happen, but it’s always handled on a week-to-week basis. The session is always assumed to be on until something disrupts it.

In terms of Organization, my games work pretty much the same way that everyone’s games do. I set lofty goals for myself and constantly fall short of them. Somehow the game hasn’t completely imploded yet, and is still a lot of fun, so I can’t be doing everything wrong.

The first step I take in any new campaign is to create a new community for it on Google+. A place where the players and I can talk about the game without any distractions. It is insanely useful, and is easily my #1 organization tip. Beyond that, I can divide my campaign documentation into three groups: the player’s guide, the public records, and my private notes.

The Player’s Guide is a document I throw together which contains all the house rules we will be using. I don’t have any of the ORWA guides available for easy sharing, but the guide I wrote for Fuck the King of Space is a good representative example. Don’t be intimidated by the 23 pages of writing I did for that game. I use a TON of house rules. The original ORWA player’s guide was much less impressive.

Public Records start with the play reports, where I note down everything important that happened during a session. I acknowledge that my style in this is wildly excessive, and creates a lot of useless documentation that nobody will ever use. Do not emulate the way I write play reports. A good play report can be much simpler than the ones I write.

Out of these play reports I copy some information into various threads. Some are more useful than others. For example: any time a new spell is created, I write it up in the play report, but I also copy it into the Spellbook thread. I do the same thing for any guns that are discovered. I have thread for recording the player’s activities during their Haven Turns, and threads for recording which sessions various NPCs have appeared in.

Finally there are The Referee Notes. Nothing too surprising here: it’s a document with all the tables I use, as well as a few notes about what certain NPCs are plotting, etc. Most of the details about the world just live in my head, same as any other referee. Occasionally I’ll need to stat up a monster or doodle a map. I have a pocket notebook where I write all that stuff.

Some issues are unique to running games online. I use Google Hangouts for a few reasons. Habit is the biggest one, but it’s also easily accessible to people I know through Google+, it’s good at supporting multi-user video chats, and is more-or-less reliable. That being said, Google has definitely been treating the service like an ugly stepchild, gradually making it less and less and less useful over time. I’m hopeful that Discord will be able to replace hangouts, but last time I tried it they still had way too many issues with multi-user video chats.

(Please: no one proselytize to me about Roll20. I do not care.)

In an online chat it’s important to realize that everyone’s voices are being pushed through the same set of speakers. Because of this, everyone gets flattened out to the same volume. It’s not possible for two people to lean over and have a side conversation, or for multiple people to talk at once and remain intelligible. The group needs to be good at giving one another space to speak. They also need to acknowledge that this puts increased pressure on people who are shy. If someone looks like they’re trying to say something, do what you can to give them the space to speak.

Don’t make a big deal about not being able to see people’s dice. Some folks get completely bent outta shape over this, as though it’s impossible to play unless there’s some shared dice roller application. It is pathetic. We’re playing D&D, not craps. There’s no money on the line. Who cares if someone fudges a roll? All they’re doing is damaging their own experience.

If someone showed up at my table saying they rolled an 18 in every stat and a 20 on every attack…so what? It’s not going to save them from making stupid decisions, and the only one who is gonna have any less fun because of it is them.

Audio issues happen. People are going to cause some echo or some static. It can be pretty dang frustrating, but you gotta be understanding. Take some time at the start of the session to let people know they’re causing an issue, and give them a chance to fix it. Often having them put on headphones is all that is required.

If it can’t be fixed and it’s a minor issue, try to live with it. Sometimes people live near the train tracks. It annoys them more than it annoys you, so try to be cool. If someone has a major technical issue which is disrupting play, it’s okay to ask them to leave until they can get their gear working.

People are absolutely going to get distracted. They’ll have you open in one tab while they’re looking at their g+ feed in another tab. It happens, just roll with it.

Finally there’s Mapping. At some point you’re going to need a way to communicate the environment to your players visually.

I’m fortunate to have a 25 square foot white board on my wall which I can easily direct my camera towards. It makes mapping a breeze. By far the simplest method I’ve ever seen in many years of online play. If you can set something like this up, I highly encourage you to do so.

If you can’t, some folks screen share their maps using an image editing program like GIMP. If you add a black layer on top of the map, you can slowly erase it as the players go along, revealing what they see. I’ve always found this method painstakingly difficult, because you can’t see the map any better than your players can. There’s always the risk of revealing something you don’t want.

There’s also Digital Whiteboards, such as RealTimeBoard. It’s a powerful tool. Not only can you draw on it, but you can also upload images & PDFs, place post-it-notes, etc. I’ve played in games that were run entirely through the RTB. John Bell has spent a lot more time with the service than I have, and has a few good posts describing the best ways to leverage it for your game.

The downsides to RTB is that everybody needs to create an account, and will need to be invited via email before they can access the board. Also, the company has been scaling back their free service gradually over the years in favor of a paid subscription. It’s not terribly expensive, but it may not be something you want to do just to play D&D online.

That’s all I can think of. I hope it is helpful.

Questions to Ask Yourself After a Session

The most important preparations I make for my D&D games happen after the session. Making dungeons and monsters is fun and valuable work, but it’s important for the game  to respond to the PC’s actions. Right after a session is when the events of play are fresh in your mind. It’s the best time to think about what consequences might arise in the future.

I think it might be a useful tool (for me, if not for anybody else) to put together a post-session questionnaire. Something to prompt the referee to examine the elements of the session most likely to bear interesting fruit in the future.

Who did the characters wrong during the session?

Do the wronged parties know the characters are responsible? If they don’t know, will they care enough to find out? How will they try to get back at the party? Will they try to hunt them down and take violent revenge? Will they attempt to pressure the party legally or socially? Will they concoct elaborate schemes, or take a more direct approach?

Don’t limit yourself to NPCs who’ve appeared in the game. If someone died, did they have a family who will want vengeance? If the characters won something, does that mean there’s someone else who lost it? Good deeds earn the ire of villains as easily as evil deeds earn the ire of goodly folk.

Did the characters do anything stealthily during the session?

Did they go anywhere they weren’t supposed to be? Did they leave behind any clues that might make someone want to find out what happened, or to improve their security? Just because nobody heard the characters prying open a door doesn’t mean the damaged door won’t be discovered later.

Is there anyone, aside from employers, who benefited from the character’s actions?

Do they regard the party as selfless and heroic, or do they take a more cynical view? Just how far does the party’s good reputation spread? Will they admire the party? Seek to aide them in the future? What is the most interesting way they could show their appreciation? Can they provide the party with information, services, material, or future jobs?  Will the party inspire them to become adventurers in their own right? If so, will they attempt to join the party as hirelings, or will they pop up in some future adventure to aid the party?

If anyone died in the course of the party’s adventure, what sort of hole did they leave behind in their community? What effect did they have on their environment which will be lost now that they’re dead?

Did people depend on the person who was killed? Will they lose their jobs, or become vulnerable to attack, or have their legal system disrupted? Will someone rise to fill the vacuum they left, or will there be a period of chaos followed by a significant change in status quo?

The same questions might apply to any objects the party stole.

What information did the party spread around?

Did they make any new discoveries, or reveal any secrets? Will the people who know this new information keep it to themselves, or will it quickly become public knowledge? How can the information be exploited for personal gain and profit?

Did the characters do anything which the authorities, or the public at large, will have feelings about?

Did the characters engage in any public violence in a normally peaceful space? Did they flout local custom in some particularly egregious way? Did they rile up a mob? Did they make anyone afraid? Did they make shows of wealth in front of the poor, or shows of poverty in front of the rich?

Are the characters known to be the cause? If so, will there be legal consequences? If not, do people want to know who is responsible? In either case, will there be some change to the local laws or attitudes?

Did the players express any desires or interests you might use to engage / hook them in the future?

Did anyone mention a goal that they have? Perhaps an item or territory they wanted; a power or social status they wished to achieve? Did they particularly like an NPC who could reappear as a friendly face / be injured to make the players angry? Did they particularly hate an NPC who could develop into a bigger antagonist just to annoy them?

Central Problems vs. Central Mysteries

A few months back I wrote about how conspiracies fit into my game. Little mysteries sprinkled into the background, obfuscated to the point where they’re really just something I do for myself. Within a week or two of posting that, I found myself in a relevant conversation with John Bell. He argued that it was better to develop campaigns around a central problem, rather than a central mystery.

That dichotomy has been bouncing around in my head ever since. It feels true to me. It’s not necessarily in conflict with the way I run conspiracies, but when I look back over the many campaigns I’ve run in the past, mysteries are consistently more central than problems are. Dungeon Moon is the only exception to this, where the clearly stated central problem was “How do we get off of Dungeon Moon?”

Players understand how to engage with problems. Problem solving is what the game is built on. It only makes sense that the room-to-room or hex-to-hex problems they encounter while adventuring exist in the shadow of some great looming problem that lends a suggested direction to play.

In particular, what is great about problems compared to mysteries (this was John’s main point), is that they allow for a healthier flow of information. With a mystery, the referee has to be a little anxious about how much they give away. If the players get too much information, the mystery is ruined. Almost by necessity, the referee has to err on the side withholding too much, rather than revealing too much. Much as I enjoy weaving a mystery into the game here and there, this stifled information flow is anathema to my general principles. I’m the guy who got rid of the search roll because I don’t like withholding information from players that I feel they’ve earned.

A central problem allows for the opposite approach. The referee can err on the side of giving the players too much information, because understanding a problem is no guarantee of being able to solve that problem.

In pondering the relative merits of mysteries and problems, my thoughts keep drifting to John’s old Necrocarserous campaign. Playing in that campaign was pivotally educational for me, and directly inspired way more of my blog posts than I’ve ever openly admitted. That campaign had a number of big, ‘central’ problems, but the one that stands out to me the most is the issue of Nepenthe.

Without digressing into a full explanation of the campaign world, I’ll just say that it’s a well known fact that every person in that world has had their memories stolen from them. These stolen memories are distilled into a liquid, called Nepenthe. Finding and reclaiming your own Nepenthe would be a huge boost to any character. We decided this was something we wanted to pursue.

There was some initial mystery in discovering where our Nepenthe was, but we actually solved that pretty quick. We knew what Nepenthe was, and that ours existed somewhere in the world, so we knew what questions to ask. The larger problem was getting to each of our Nepenthes (they weren’t all in the same place), and recovering them from whatever barriers might protect them.

We never accomplished that goal, but the struggle is something I remember fondly, and I’m sincerely proud of the clever solutions we employed along the way. In contrast, I don’t know that any of my players have ever really been aware of the mysteries going on around them in my campaigns. They’re fun for me, certainly, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having them. But I do think that failing to include some central problem has been a major failing of mine, and it’s something I’d like to remedy.

As an exercise, here are 12 potential central problems. Some of them include a bit of initial mystery. But, like Nepenthe, those mysteries can be presented frankly to the player, and solving them does not in itself overcome the problem.

  • A powerful government spy agency is constantly ferreting out everybody’s secrets. Even private conversations in your own home may lead to finding one of their dreaded blue envelopes in your pocket the next day. Public shaming and fines for improper thoughts are common.
  • The undermen–creatures of the deep earth–have reclaimed all metals and ores stolen from their lands by human invaders. Humanity has been forced to fall back on tools of wood and stone. The undermen occasionally burrow up for “surprise inspections.”
  • A titanic beast wanders the campaign world, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Its feet are the size of castles. Fighting it in any conventional sense is an absurd notion. Its body is crawling with otherworldly parasites that are themselves massive and dangerous beasts. The most noble and revered vocation is as the creature’s herald. Brave men and women ride ahead of the creature, evacuating settlements with as much advance warning as they can manage. The world has no great cities, no settlements older than a few decades.
  • An army of conquest is sweeping forward through the land. Wherever they go is changed, permanently. They impost strict laws, and harsh punishments. They gradually transform lighthearted D&D adventure land into a grueling, grimdark police state.
  • A virulent disease passes over the world in waves. Most who contract it are killed, and those who survive are mutated into horrible creatures which ought to be killed. The disease has rampaged for so long that no one now living can remember a time without it. The population of the human race has been dangerously reduced by its ravages. Any NPC the players encounter has a 1-in-6 chance to have contracted it if the players wish to go back and see them again.
  • At birth, every child’s soul is extracted by the Priests of the Only God. These souls are carefully stored and catalogued by the Divine Bureaucracy, held hostage to ensure everyone’s continued faith, and obedience to the traditional interpretations of the Only God’s Law. A select caste of nobility are allowed to retain their souls, which in turn makes those nobles stronger and more capable than their subject peoples.
  • Humanity is dominated by an alien force from another world. They use their advanced technology to keep humanity trapped in a perpetual middle age.
  • The world is wracked by endless conflicts between rival wizards. No community–however remote–lasts long before half their population is drafted into some wizard’s army, or rounded up to serve as test subjects for some vile experiment.
  • The sea god never wanted humans anywhere near her domain. She tolerated swimming, that wasn’t too bad. But she views the invention of ships as an insult. Humans are exploiting an unintended loophole in physics to trespass where they are not wanted, and so she has put a stop to it. As of 1 year ago, nothing is buoyant. Anything of the land placed upon the water sinks instantaneously, as if it were falling through thin air. This has completely cut off the player’s society from the rest of the world.
  • The rapid advance of technology has made many traditional jobs obsolete, forcing people into ever more menial and demeaning professions. They work longer hours, for less pay than their parents did, while a small group of oligarchs profit off the surplus value created by their labor.
  • A drunk god has granted human level intelligence to every creature with a brain. Domestic animals have revolted against their enslavement, game animals have united to form mutual protection pacts, parasites and large predators employ advanced tactics to feed on humans. Society is breaking down from every side, and it seems almost certain that humanity will become extinct within a generation.
  • The orphan nation needs a new roof.

In closing, I’d like to say that I am intensely proud my topbanner choice for this post. Like, you get it, right? Goddamn I am such a clever lil’ boi.

Are You Loyal to the Party?

There are two things about hirelings that I hate.

I hate seeing them treated as props. As things that can be safely ignored until a player wants them to make an attack, or use an ability. I understand that during play, everyone is focused on the events of the game rather than characterizing the background NPCs. This is good and proper. But while I am not interested in forcing my game into cul de sacs of “rich role playing experiences,” it none the less feels lame when hirelings are only ever brought up for their utility. Players should have to do more maintenance to keep them around.*

I also hate determining a hireling’s loyalty when they are first hired, and having that number remain static throughout their tenure with the party. A person’s loyalty to their employer should be a function of their working experiences, not an innate attribute of their character. Loyalty should be a thing that goes up and down constantly, depending on how valued the retainer feels, and how much of a future they see for themselves in this work.

(Loyalty, for any non-OSR folks in the audience, is a number between 2 and 12. Any time the hirelings are presented with a situation that tests their loyalty, the referee rolls 2d6. If the result is greater than the hireling’s loyalty score, then they are not loyal enough to endure whatever the current situation is. They might flee the scene, betray the party, or simply refuse to follow an order they’ve been given. 

In attempting to solve the latter issue, I spent about a year rolling loyalty checks for hirelings after every session. If something traumatic had happened, a failed check caused the hireling’s loyalty to go down by 1. Otherwise, a failed check caused it to go up by 1. The idea was that, over time, the hireling’s loyalty would grow, but that its growth had diminishing returns. It’s easy to go from being an acquaintance to being a friend, it’s more difficult to go from being a friend to being the most important person in someone’s life.

In practice, this wound up just being busywork for me. Loyalty trended upwards over time, until the party had a half dozen hirelings with 11 loyalty. At that point, they basically are a prop, since they’ll almost never go against their employer’s wishes. The only part of the system I think anybody enjoyed were the little notes I wrote into the session reports, explaining why the hireling’s loyalty did whatever it did. “Albert was offended by Don’s joke. His loyalty goes down by 1.” “Sheniqua is proud of having incinerated all those guards. Her loyalty goes up by 1.” Stuff like that.

I quietly stopped bothering to use that system a few months back, and nobody seems to have missed it. I’ve been glumly pondering what I could do to make it work ever since. Then, as I was recording “Romantic Fantasy and OSR D&D” for Blogs on Tape, a good possibility occurred to me:

Periodically, the referee should go down the list of the party’s hirelings. For each one, the the referee decides whether their recent experiences should cause their loyalty to go up by 1, down by 1, or remain the same.

Let me break that down:

“Periodically” could mean at the end of every session, at the end of every adventure, during every haven turn, or even at the end of each in-game year. It depends on how swingy you want the system to be, and how much effort you want to put in. Personally, I think I’ll do it every Haven turn.

When I say “the referee decides,” I mean exactly that. This should be done by fiat, without any dice. Dice are a great way to resolve an infinity of choices, where a referee might unwittingly show their biases. But if a question can be resolved by common sense, dice just muddy the issue. When it comes to hirelings, the referee should already have some sense of who they are as a person, just as they do for all the game’s NPCs. And the referee will certainly know what the hireling’s recent experiences were. It’s not as though NPCs do anything when the referee isn’t around.

It should be easy to infer, given what the referee knows, how each hireling feels about their job right now.

Their loyalty might go down if they suffered serious injury, or if the players made reckless decisions, causing them to lose confidence in the party’s leadership.  It might also go down if the hireling is just annoyed, bored, or feels like they’re not a respected member of the crew.

A lowered loyalty isn’t necessarily a punishment. It’s not always about the Hireling hating or fearing their employer. They’re just fractionally less interested in continuing to adventure, and if their loyalty gets low enough, a failed check might mean they strike out on their own.

On the other hand, their Loyalty might go up if they feel valued. It could be as simple as a good conversation with the PCs, being deferred to on some minor decision, or being celebrated for some success. Making sure your employee had a good day at work will help ensure they don’t betray you to the next goblin who looks at them funny.

Loyalty remaining unchanged should be an uncommon choice. Used only if the referee is really torn between the two other options.

I’m really enamored with this idea, because it seems to elegantly resolve both of the things I hate, with a single mechanic. Hireling morale will be anything but static. It’ll be going up and down all the time, and hopefully it’ll be going down a lot more than it did with my previous method. Moreover, those fluctuations provide a direct incentive for the players to interact with their hirelings to keep up morale. It’s rare, in my experience, to find any opportunity to offload some of the referee’s mental burden onto the players.

This method also seems to have the tertiary benefit of creating a natural cap on the number of hirelings a player can take on. The more people you try to bring with you, the more time and energy you’ll have to spend to keep them happy.

I’m excited to spring this on my players after their next haven turn.

*I realize this problem would be solved if I required hirelings to earn a half-share of treasure. It’s a good method, and one I might use again in the future. But it doesn’t _really_ solve either of the two gripes presented in this post.