The Lizard of Knowledge

Behind the Times

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 08:46:46 -0400

Life’s been kicking my ass lately. I keep meaning to do things with this, but I never get around to it.

What have I been up to lately? Well, there’s been a big pile of RPG books I’ve been perusing, including Bulldogs, Savage Worlds, Kerberos Club FATEedition, and Shadow, Sword, & Spell,among other things. All of which are interesting for various reasons, all of which I’d like to take some time and go into more detail on when I have a chance.

I’ve been playing various board games, too. Small Worldand its expansions,Thunderstone Advance, Super Dungeon Exploreremains a favorite, and there’s a bunch that I got on sale from the local game store that I haven’t yet had a chance to explore.

I’ve also been meaning to find time to continue leafing through all the old Fighting Fantasy gamebooks so I can post about them, but they take a bit more effort than I can manage to slip into five or ten minute gaps here and there.

So this is more a post about things I want to post about…but it’s a post at all, which is a step in the right direction.

Sick, but not dead

Fri, 11 May 2012 01:35:58 -0400

So things continue in life. I’ve been ill for the past several weeks, sinusitis, according to the doctor. Antibiotics are helping that along its merry way though, thankfully.

There’ve been a few Legend of the Five Rings releases this month, which is exciting (since I love L5R.) I finally got caught up just a few days before the new releases on reading the backlog of L5R 4th Edition books I had bought but not read, so I’m going through a pretty heavy period of L5R love just now. I wish there were more active players in my immediate area for the CCG, but at least I can read the RPG books.

Also picked up, largely as a result of a large set of trade-ins at the used bookstore, most of the run of Trinity that I didn’t already have. A couple of other purchases and a gift of some of the hardest to find ones from a friend, and I’ve now got a complete run of Trinity on my shelf (well, barring the pdf books, which don’t go on a shelf so much. Unless I bring them to a printer or something.)

Between all that and a bunch of FATE system purchases, I’m seeing the Shelf expanding rapidly again in ways it hasn’t done in a few years. I’d largely picked over the used bookstore’s RPG section, and it’s been awhile since I got more than one or two books added at a go. I do so love my collection…

Uh oh

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:10:10 -0400

Uh oh that was vomit that just came out of my mouth.

I definitely didn’t put vomit in my mouth why do I have to have it come out?

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:01:45 -0400

Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Fighting Fantasy #1. The one that started it all.

Warlock’s an interesting book for a couple of reasons, in terms of the Fighting Fantasy series. The rules in this, as the first book in the series, are not quite the same rules the later books followed—you actually get more than one draught of whatever potion you choose at the start, which later books dialed back on.

The book suffers from One True Path—you can beat the dragon and the warlock, the two bosses of the book, in several different ways, but you have to have found three keys in order to gain the warlock’s treasure and “win”. Fortunately it’s relatively easy to do a map of this book’s dungeon, which is not always true. In fact, it’s definitely advisable to do so, because the Maze of Zagor in the second half of the book is pretty confusing if you’re just trying to keep track of it all in your head.

There are a couple of passages in this book that get callbacks in Return to Firetop Mountain, which makes them a bit more memorable than they might otherwise have been. I always remember the little passage with the magical tools that are digging on their own, and the sleeping goblin by the entrance, though.

I went through it without a map, when I was replaying it for this writeup, and I missed one of the keys and got myself horribly lost in the maze section. Frustrating! I remember always having trouble with this one as a kid, too.

There aren’t any fights in this one that are really supremely dangerous that don’t give the player any outs, though, which is good. Ultimately this isn’t one of my favorite FF books, but it’s definitely noteworthy and wasn’t one of the worst, either.

It’s one of the easiest ones to get, too, since it’s been reprinted in every re-release of the series, not to mention having a PSN version and a Kindle version that actually maps it as you play (stupid no Kindle games in Canada…would have bought a Kindle to have that, to be honest.) They even did a special anniversary hardcover edition a bit back.

Anyway, I’m pretty much planning to go through each of the books in the series in turn and post about them when I finish. It’s not going to be on a strict timeline, but it’s a project I’ve wanted to undertake since digging out the box with all of the books in the first place.

Classic Fiction

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:03:40 -0400

Seeing the John Carter movie has brought up an interesting line of research for me, one that I have had an on-again-off-again love affair with over the past couple of decades. Specifically, I’ve begun tracking down classic science fiction and fantasy works once again, beyond the most mainstream, current titles. I’ve done this from time to time in the past, but somehow in spite of the fact that I’ve known relevant names—Howard and Burroughs, Stoker and Dunsany, Verne and Wells—I’ve never really tread farther back than Tolkien, Asimov and Heinlein, perhaps with an exception for a delve into some Lovecraft before Cthulhu got overplayed on the internet.

I knew of the appropriate works, of course—Conan the Barbarian has been a pretty recognizable figure since Arnold portrayed him (poorly?) on screen, and I’d heard enough talk of Barsoom and Burroughs to be at least familiar enough to recognize the name John Carter without the appellation “of Mars” to provide further context. Even within the middle of the last century, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the real classics. Heinlein and Asimov are a good starting point but there’s so much more to be found…

And so I find myself raiding collections of classic e-books. Project Gutenberg has a wide selection available, including most (or all if you check in Australia) of the Barsoom novels, and there are plenty of other resources available as well once the eager reader devours those. I picked up an anthology of Conan stories from the bookstore.

Which is really where the biggest failure is, to my mind…John Carter has zero marketing push behind it. With A Princess of Mars being the basis of the movie, and being in public domain, one would think the minds at Disney could have put into print a tie-in cover edition to promote the movie. When I visited a bookstore to grab the Conan anthology, though, I saw plenty of tie-in Hunger Games and not one mention of the Burroughs piece. Maybe (probably) I’m missing something, but I think it’s equally likely that Disney was missing something when they set out to advertise the movie…

Analog Gaming in the Digital Age

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:52:20 -0400

I’ve always been a pretty big gamer. Video games are up there in my formative influences. At this point in my life, though, I find myself spending more and more of my discretionary income on good old RPGs and tabletop games rather than on video games.

It’s been a shift back for me over the past couple of years. D&D 3rd Edition hit right around when I went off to college, so my gaming group never really adopted the d20 system and kind of dissolved as a result of splitting off to go to university in different towns. Sure, I played, but the SRD meant I didn’t have to buy into the rulebooks as a player. I got my hands on modern consoles, as well, and when my family relocated after my second year of university, I went with them, separating me further from my old cohorts. Video games became the norm, especially if they had multiplayer—my dorm room was a popular hangout for playing Soul Calibur, Smash Bros Melee, and pretty much anything else we could find that would max out the number of controllers.

Then college ended, and I saw those friends less frequently. Sure, we’d still get together and hang out and we’d frequently bust out a multiplayer videogame to play…I bought into D&D 4th edition when it came out, and if we had enough people getting together for a long enough time, I’d run that, but that didn’t happen with any sort of regularity in person. Then someone brought up a simple game he’d picked up one time, and we sat down and played that, and I had an epiphany.

When I throw in a video game and my friends and I play it, we are playing with the video game. When we pull out a board game and my friends and I play it, we are playing with each other, through the board game.

That’s a pretty important thing. Even when seated right next to each other, friends playing video games together are focusing on the TV screen and the controller, not each other. It’s fun, and not a valueless experience, but when face-time with friends becomes scarce—after graduation when everyone has jobs, for example—it’s often more satisfying to play a boardgame or card game, where the interaction with the other players takes a more central role.

It’s also interesting to consider that video games still haven’t reached the freedom that tabletop games provide. At their best, video games are no more restricting than a board game or wargame with heavily codified rules—you can do what the programmers were able to program in responses to, but you’re still restricted by their budget, the capabilities of the hardware, and so on. Tabletop games, however, especially when you get to RPGs, can do pretty much anything without restriction, limited only by what you and your players can imagine.

It’s hard to compete with the shine and gloss on the video games, especially given that tabletop games frequently have equal or higher buy-ins and involve more work to get going than simply popping in the disc…but to me, they’ll always have value.

Nostalgia and Formative Influences

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:35:41 -0500

A little while ago I wrote about how Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were a formative influence on my DMing style. Due to some recent events in my life (the passing of an old friend) I’ve found myself immersed in certain nostalgic elements from my childhood, that were also similarly influential.

Aside from the aforementioned gamebooks, I also had exposure to HeroQuest, a board game about dungeon crawling. I’m really not sure that I’d say it affected my outlook on fantasy roleplaying directly, as such, but it definitely has guided my selection of board games in a very strong degree—Descent, the various D&D dungeon crawl games, and Super Dungeon Explore all share a pedigree with HeroQuest.

I also played heavily two different computer RPG series that were very influential on my life and imagination. Ultima, beginning with 5 but eventually reaching to the entire series, and Quest for Glory (also known as Hero Quest, ironically changed due to the board game copyright of the game mentioned). Both were rather non-linear and had a well developed world to explore and find solutions to problems in. These were the games of my youth, and I think their influence is still felt today.

I wonder, did anyone else play these same games? What other games would get me a similar feel to the above?

Working out the kinks

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:15:46 -0500

I’ve got to sit down and figure out all the ins and outs of tumblr sooner or later…

Thoughts on a Pick-Up D&D Game

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:11:00 -0500

Several months ago now I started running a weekly game at the behest of my FLGS owner, who I’ve been friends with since we worked together some years ago. When he first approached me, he told me there had been some kids coming out to play regularly, but they’d been having a hard time getting a consistent and reliable Dungeon Master out. I enjoy running games, so I agreed to give it a go.

The next week, I went out, met my new players for the first time, and sounded them out. They were a little disappointed to learn that we wouldn’t be jumping right in to run a game sight unseen. I explained to them that I could do that, and it would be okay, or I could take the time to get to know them a bit first, find out what they were looking for in a game, and spend the little bit of extra time designing something that would be tailored a bit more specifically to what they want. I asked them what their favorite stories and video games were, to look for inspiration, and after a few minutes, the consensus was that God of War is awesome and ancient Greek myths are pretty cool. I ended up taking mental notes of what they said they were looking for and coming up with a setting with Ancient Greece as a starting point.

I turned to both Thucydides and Herodotus for inspiration, as well as ancient Greek mythology. The race of dragonborn became the Spartans (well, I gave them a fantasy name but roughly that) and I renamed the Athens of my setting Iounis, after Ioun, goddess of knowledge in the D&D core setting. Inspired by the Points of Light setting, I decided the Iounisians had made a bargain with infernal forces and become Tieflings to win their war with the Dragonborn, but that most of the fighting forces had then sailed off (as the Sicilian expedition detailed by Thucydides) and never returned. I decided that, to supplement that, there was a Minotaur civilization on a nearby island (based off Minoan culture) and a lost city similar to Atlantis that was inhabited by warforged. I’ve since expanded the setting in my mind a little further, though to date the campaign has still retained its focus around Iounis and environs.

Unlike my ongoing Friday night campaign, which has a very strong narrative in mind (themes of fate and fighting it run strong there) I chose to give the players basically free reign in how they wanted to act. I made sure they had a variety of options for who to work for and why in the early campaign and their choices have definitely shaped the way things have come out since then—I’ll go into more detail in a later post, most likely.

The real point of this was how immediately engrossed the kids became in the world I made for them, because they felt they had a say in what it was, and how rewarding it was to me to come up with something thematic based on requests by my players instead of presenting something I made to appeal to myself first and hope that it would also appeal to them. I think it’s a good demonstration of the value of communicating with your players when starting a campaign—a step I know for a fact is overlooked all too often by novice Dungeon Masters.

Reminiscing on Fighting Fantasy

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:11:00 -0500

When I was about eight years old, Mom took me into the Coles at the mall—I’ve always been an avid reader—and a book caught my eye. It had a picture on the cover of a crazy lizardman with a crazy bone crown thing and a scimitar, which was like, the most amazing thing my eight year old mind had ever processed. It was entitled “Island of the Lizard King” and it claimed to be an adventure gamebook in which I would be the hero. I don’t know how anyone ever saw that book and didn’t buy it. Seriously! And that was my first encounter with the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. For those among my readers unfamiliar with the series, Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were similar to Choose Your Own Adventure books, except they had simple rules for fighting monsters, you could die (quite frequently and suddenly in many cases) and they were almost entirely fantasy, many of them taking place in a world called Titan. The reader would create a hero and then proceed to take them on the adventure, finding treasures and fighting monsters along the way, striving to reach the end of the quest (usually at paragraph 400) and achieve victory. When I got into the series there were maybe twenty of the things in print, and I acquired as many as I could as quickly as I could devour them (or in some cases, locate copies.) Eventually they tapered off, with close to sixty gamebooks having seen release, along with associated world guides and two versions of a tabletop RPG based on the gamebook rules, and several novels. I’d managed to get copies of most of them, and to this day I have fond memories of the series as a whole. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were in a sense my first Dungeon Masters, along with the other writers of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and Titan was a world I came to know well. Other gamebook lines existed, as well, of course—Lone Wolf was a big one—but I never felt the same connection and sense of wonder with those stories as I did with the Fighting Fantasy books. Several Fighting Fantasy titles have since been reprinted, in a couple of different editions, and new titles added to the list, as well. At the time of this writing, I’m missing just one book from the gamebook line, Revenge of the Vampire. Someday I’ll have the spare cash on hand to pony up for a copy, but not today. There’s also been a recently released new edition of Dungeoneer that I picked up out of pure nostalgia, though I haven’t talked anyone into sitting down for a session or three of it yet. In a very real sense these gamebooks informed my own dungeon mastering style, as an adult. I was especially fond of a couple of the later books that adopted a very Hammer Horror tone, and on more than one occasion that has influenced my worldbuilding for game settings and adventures I run for my friends. The worldbook, Titan, gave me a mental checklist of “things I need to come up with for my world” that I still compare against today. They’re not the only influence, of course, but they’re a major part of my childhood love of fantasy. This post is probably not the last you’ll hear about them from me, either…

Welcome!

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:09:00 -0500

After hemming and hawing on the subject for several months, I’ve finally taken the plunge and got set up with my very own domain name and so forth. Exciting, no? It’s been some time since I did any regular blogging, on any subject, but I’ve had the itch to get back into it.

I’ve reposted some of the early articles I wrote for d20source.com in 2009 and 2010 in the World Building 101 series. I chose what I felt were the most essential of the lot, primarily on structuring campaign documents to keep campaigns organized and setting details clear and accessible for players. There were a lot more articles published over at d20source.com, and I don’t feel a huge need to republish the whole series here when they can be read over there, along with the comments they received at the time.

I may revisit some of the ideas I wrote about in that series, but for now I’m intending to focus on other things rather than revive it—it was reaching a point where I wasn’t sure what I could write about in a meaningful way, towards the end.

My work at d20source was primarily related to D&D, but I don’t intend to limit this blog to one game in particular. I play a lot of different games and a lot of different types of games, so why limit myself to talking about just one? Expect me to be talking about whatever I’ve played recently, which definitely still includes a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, of course!

Above all, I’m creating this to talk about the things I enjoy. I hope others will find it interesting!

World Building 101 - When are Campaign Documents Needed?

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time discussing ways to create and use campaign documents. One topic I haven’t really covered is where to use campaign documents and where not to do so. There are probably as many styles of campaign as there are DMs, and not every game has the same needs in terms of setting details and tracking. Here are a few campaign-styles to consider, along with discussion of the relative need for campaign documents in each.

The One-Shot

Running a one-shot adventure frequently requires little to no cohesive world-building to be enjoyable. The characters are only rarely given deeper backgrounds than required to direct them into the plot of the adventure, and frequently retired after the game finishes. For a single adventure, it is often not necessary to put together a campaign brief.

However, it can still be useful to create guidelines for one-shot adventures, whether to provide some direction for a specific plot hook you want to try, because you want to use the one-shot as a part of a larger campaign setting later, or simply to ensure that everyone makes a coherent group. On the other hand, campaign bibles, unless you’re running every one of your one-shots in the same setting, are probably not required.

The Mini-Campaign

For a short series of three or four adventures it can definitely be worth the effort, for almost all the same reasons you would want to use one for a full campaign. There should be enough room in a mini-campaign to explore character backgrounds to some degree, and the details of the world will therefore matter more than for a typical one-shot. In most cases you won’t need to provide quite as much detail, but otherwise campaign briefs are important. Campaign bibles, while more useful here than in a one-shot, are still largely more trouble than they’re worth. There is little reason to spend a lot of time on in-depth details for a campaign that will likely conclude by the time you’ve had a chance to compile everything, after all.

The Shared World

Some groups enjoy a play style in which DMing duties are passed around between several members. This lets everyone get a chance to play once in awhile. For this kind of game, a campaign brief and campaign bible can take on even more importance than normal, as it’s vital to maintaining an internally consistent setting and keeping track of plot threads from each DM. When beginning a campaign of this sort it’s vital to have everyone who intends to DM sit down together and hash out the details of the campaign setting, ground rules to prevent any one DM from breaking the plots of the others, and so on. This should be included in the campaign brief, which all DMs involved should help create and sign off on. Running a shared world campaign without campaign documents can be a real chore.

The Dungeon Delve

As a delve may represent anything from a single one-shot to a full-blown campaign, the usefulness of campaign documents can vary widely. A short crawl may require nothing more than a capsule description of the environs and a set of guidelines to describe the kinds of hazards the players might expect to face; a full-blown dungeon campaign would require a more in depth document discussing the history and cultures of the complex. While it may seem that PC backgrounds are less likely to come into play in this style of campaign, there are still numerous ways a DM could involve them–a long-lost father or childhood friend were last seen going into the same dungeon, a quest for a lost heirloom, and so on. Should you opt to do so, then a campaign bible would be well worth the effort.

The Published Campaign

Of all the campaign types mentioned here–barring one-shot adventures–this may seem like the style that least requires the types of campaign documents we’ve been discussing. After all, the point of the published campaign is that the heavy lifting of world-building has already been done, and the setting is ready-made. However, campaign briefs are still essential for the published campaign, because they narrow the scope of the campaign to a managable level by specifying what elements you intend to focus on; if your players are less than familiar with the campaign setting then this can be a game-saving effort, as otherwise they will not know how much of the (typically lengthy) published setting details they need to read to understand the game. Campaign bibles, similarly, can still be used to store your campaign-specific locations and NPCs, as usual. The main benefit is that most of the rest of the campaign world details have already been created for you to draw on, but that should never be taken as an invitation to neglect your bookkeeping.

The Homebrew World

More than any other campaign style, maintaining clear documentation is critical to the homebrew world. Most of what I’ve discussed so far has been directly in relation to this kind of campaign. Campaign briefs give your players their first taste of the world, guidelines to the sorts of characters that are appropriate, and campaign bibles give them a sense of the meat of the setting without overwhelming them. It’s also worth noting that it may be worth a third type of document, which we will call a setting bible. A setting bible is related to and builds on the campaign bible, for the purposes of codifying all the information you have as a DM that is either not directly related to your campaign or that is not intended as player knowledge. To date we have focused on campaign briefs and campaign bibles, specifically, since they are the most directly useful documents for running and documenting a game. For now all that needs to be said about the setting bible is that it is typically NOT a player document, and should not include anything that the players need to know; the campaign bible, by contrast, should include only things the players need to know. Between setting and campaign bibles and the campaign brief, this type of campaign is easily the heaviest in terms of bookkeeping but can also be some of the most rewarding games you will ever run.

These represent only a smattering of play styles, but hopefully it’s more clear the kinds of considerations that go into choosing what kinds of documents to keep for your game. Next week we’ll begin more closely examining some of the choices that a world-builder faces in regards to what to include or exclude from your campaign world.

World Building 101 - Campaign Bibles and Scope

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

World building is enjoyable and rewarding, but it’s easy to lose sight of the ultimate goal of your campaign bible when you begin scribing the details of the campaign world. A campaign bible should be an almanac and an encyclopedia, but it’s important to keep the focus on the campaign as you are running it, and not on the world itself. The distinction between the two may seem blurry, but it’s a vital difference. Including something in the campaign bible creates expectations in those who read it that the information has been included because it is important to the campaign. If your campaign bible includes a myth about a man who found a legendary spear that was used to slay a god-dragon, then your players will—consciously or otherwise—be on the lookout for that spear to appear in the game at some point. If you only included that to make the world feel deeper, though, then your players will be disappointed when it doesn’t appear.

The second important factor in writing your campaign bible is one that has already been discussed—keeping everything organized. We’ll look at the base categories I discussed last week, examining each in more depth.

People as a category should primarily include key NPCs or important figures in your setting. When you start writing your campaign bible, it’s a good idea to begin with the characters with the most immediate impact on the campaign, followed by important characters with less immediate impact, and so on. Important characters in the history of your campaign might also be included if their actions have had a direct impact on the story or setting that your players are exploring. Try to leave room for your players to provide some NPCs from their characters’ backgrounds, to be used for story hooks or expand on the player character’s history. In this case, it’s important to remember that the same caveat holds true about campaign bible contents—if a player details an NPC, it is most likely because they’re hoping to encounter that character in the game. While you are under no real obligation to include these characters, it’s a good idea to make every effort to do so.

Places is a fairly broad category that includes everywhere the players might go. Again, begin with the areas most immediate to your campaign, then branch out to include more information. You may want to focus in on a specific nation, detailing several cities, towns, and adventure sites within that country but leaving other, more distant countries as sketchy outlines. You may decide to detail everywhere evenly, or describe a major city down to the individual street names and businesses found on each. It’s important to note, though, that detailing every last area of your campaign world reduces or removes opportunities for your players to contribute their own regions or for you to improvise somewhere later on. It’s nice to leave some things open ended so that you can . Subcategories of places might include countries, cities, towns, adventure sites, or specific points of interest within any of the above.

Things, in comparison to people, covers a relatively narrow band of subjects. Generally this will cover important plot items, campaign specific artifacts, or original magic items you’ve designed for your game. It can also include legendary or historical items of power from the campaign world. Here especially it’s worth repeating that if you don’t intend something to appear in your campaign, don’t include it in your campaign bible; the hint of awesome magical power will lead your players to seek out any signs of powerful artifacts you include here, and they may become quite angry to learn that you never had any intention of letting them gain access to the items you’ve described.

History is a very broad area. You can use this to describe the myths and legends surrounding the creation of your world, the wars and ancient empires that once dominated it, or even the history of the little village where your campaign begins. This category can do the most to enhance the depth of your setting, but be careful not to turn things into a series of dates and battles to be memorized, or your players may lose interest. Limit what you include to avoid the sense of slogging through a history textbook. History is the category most likely to include cross-references to other areas of the campaign bible—you may need to ensure that all the links are documented, depending on your format.

Culture is where you will include details on specific races, cultural mores, beliefs, and festivals. Like history, this is an excellent place to add to setting depth, especially with interesting holidays, details on the cultures of specific races, etcetera. If your campaign’s elves behave differently from typical elves, here is where you would note it. You should feel free to be as inventive as you wish—but don’t punish players for not becoming intimately familiar with the details if they don’t want to. For example, if your campaign setting involves intricate rules for how to address strangers based on age and social position, roleplaying through it can be fun, but not if in-character punishments are doled out for the player failing to memorize the specific response called for in a given situation. The character can be expected to know how to behave properly, and should only be penalized for willfully ignoring the societal mores, not for the player having slipped up and leaving off an honorific.

Misc. A catch-all category for anything that you feel the need to include in the campaign bible that doesn’t fit into the above categories. This might be something like the fact that your campaign world revolves around binary suns, or that day and night last for decades each, or anything that is worth mentioning but doesn’t really fall into the other five categories.

By focusing on the essential details to your campaign, you ensure that your players and you will not have to shuffle through pages of largely useless data to find what you need; you ensure that the expectations for campaign content are consistent, and you ensure that you will not become overwhelmed by adding details to every little corner of the campaign world unnecessarily. Of course, if you enjoy that level of detail there’s nothing stopping you from maintaining a separate file for supplemental material where you do explore every nook and cranny—who knows, maybe your next campaign will be set in the same world, and you’ll be able to build further on the groundwork you’ve already laid out.

Next week we’ll discuss what types of games do and don’t benefit from campaign documents as explored so far, and why.

World Building 101 - Keeping Organized

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Last week we discussed the pros and cons of various formats for campaign bibles. The one thing that remains true no matter what format you select, though, is the importance of creating and maintaining a system for keeping the information organized and accessible. Fortunately this is fairly simple if you begin with organization in mind and keep it as a consideration throughout the creation of the campaign bible, regardless of format.

It’s worth stating that before you begin writing anything for your campaign bible—excepting perhaps what you included in the campaign brief—the organization of the document should be considered. An organization scheme early on ensures that from the start all your information is accessible and will remain so—trying to impose organization later can be a mess, especially if you have simply tossed all the information together willy nilly.

There are a wide variety of ways to plan organization schemes for your campaign bible.

If you favor a top down approach, you could begin by brainstorming all the categories you want to use, then sorting your notes to fit into those categories. For a bottom up approach, jot down all the bits of information you will include, then sort them into likely categories based on common elements. You may wish to break down certain categories into sub-headings, as well. For my own campaign bible, I chose to use the following general categories as a jumping off point:

People
Places
Things
History
Culture
Misc.

This pretty much covers anything I could reasonably want to take notes about. As I began to work on the campaign bible, though, I realized that I could further divide some of the categories to keep things even more organized:

People
- Player Characters
- Nobles
- Commoners
Places
- Kingdoms
- Points of Interest
Culture
- Races
- Religion
- Organizations
History
- Events
- Battles
- Myths
Things
Misc.

I then broke down some categories even further—Kingdoms includes subheadings for each separate nation in my campaign, with entries for towns, cross-referenced entries for nobles, religion, and culture, and so on. This gave me a very firm starting point for making sure that any information I entered into my campaign bible would be easy to locate at a moment’s notice. It also plays to the areas I am emphasizing in my campaign—I am weaving a political tapestry for my players to take part in, but there is little emphasis so far on specific magic items or artifacts as setting details, and next to none at all on fantastic creatures. Your own breakdown will almost certainly be representative of the areas your game focuses on, and should be unique to each setting you create.

Creating the organizational scheme is only the first step—but having it in place is vital to keeping your campaign bible organized as you add to it.

Depending on the format you have chosen, this may be as simple as updating a central list of links on a wiki or inserting the information into the appropriate section of the text document. If you’re using a binder and looseleaf, it’s a good idea to limit your topics to one per page or pages—this will allow you to simply slip the pages into the appropriate section. You may wish to provide cross-reference information for subjects that may appear in multiple categories—for example, in my breakdown above, I might include a reference to a king under his entry in Nobles and also under the entry for his kingdom. Again, the method you use to cross-reference data is dependent on what format you chose.

Keeping your campaign bible organized will help you to locate your information when you need it, make it easier to update it or add to it, and improve how easy it is to digest the contents. Next week, we’ll spend a bit of time discussing the actual contents of the campaign bible itself!

World Building 101 - Campaign Bible Formats

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Last week we discussed keeping a campaign bible, a collection of notes and documents detailing the world in which your campaign is set. Campaign bibles are important tools for any DM, but especially for those who are building their own campaign setting rather than running your game in a published setting created by someone else. They enable you to create the same familiarity with your world as one might have with a published setting or a setting from popular fiction, such as Star Wars or Forgotten Realms.

One of the first choices you make when setting down your campaign bible is what format you wish to use to create it. Once, the only real choice was to create a series of hand or type-written documents in a notebook or binder, but with the ease of availability of computers and the world wide web, there are now a number of options open to an aspiring world-builder.

Read on for a few of the more common choices, along with some pros and cons for each option:

The Binder

The traditional approach, as has been mentioned previously, is to keep a binder or notebook of notes on the campaign setting. The binder is probably a superior option, as it allows for expansion of specific sections of the document and scalability, as well as reorganization without having to rewrite the entire thing. Keeping it organized is as simple as using dividers for each category you choose–major NPCs, minor NPCs, important places, etc.

Pros:

Does not require access to a computer to use in-game
Great for tactile individuals to have a tome for their world
Relatively simple to expand
Easy for players to contribute to the campaign bible
Relatively simple to reorganize information

Cons:

Difficult to change information to reflect new situations without rewriting or appending
Only one person can access it at a time, barring multiple copies
Multiple copies need to be kept up to date individually
Can be damaged or lost easily

The Electronic Document

Another option is to store the campaign bible in a text file or word processor. This definitely makes updating and sharing it a breeze, since you can just share or print the file as needed, and outdated information can be removed and replaced with the newest version. One problem with this approach, though, is that several different versions may exist, especially if the players have been making notes or adding to it on their own, and it may be difficult to ensure that everyone has the correct file or update everything to reflect everyone’s work.

Pros:

Simple to update and share
Can be stored remotely and accessed by several people at once without trouble

Cons:

Requires a computer or a printout to view
Can become complicated to ensure everyone is using the correct, up to date version
Difficult for multiple players to update
File format may be incompatible, depending on format chosen
Reorganizing information can be a tedious exercise

The Web Page

Putting a campaign webpage up with all the details of your setting can ensure that everyone is looking at the most recent data. It also avoids compatibility issues found with text documents. You can also include hyperlinks to allow cross-referencing of pages with other pages easily, or a search function to quickly locate something. A traditional web-page can be difficult to update for players, though if you include the option for players to append information to the page in a comment or message board style posting it comes somewhere between a binder and a wiki for content management.

Pros:

Simple to update and share with everyone
No version tracking required
Possible to permit players to update individual entries
Hyperlinks and searching make finding information simple

Cons:

Requires a computer to access
Difficult for players to create new content entirely
Reorganization is a highly involved process
Formatting and initial setup can become very involved

The Wiki

Technically this could be considered a web page, but the philosophy and concepts behind it are different enough to list wikis separately. The wiki format permits easy updates by multiple users, easy creation of new pages, and a simplified markup compared to HTML. In addition, it’s very simple to set up a wiki initially compared to a more traditional web site; otherwise all the same benefits of a website apply as well. As an additional bonus, reorganizing a wiki is as simple as changing the way you use categories.

Pros:

Simple to set up initially
Very easy to update or create pages for all users
Very easy to reorganize
Very easy to find information

Cons:

Requires a computer to access
Players may be unfamiliar with wiki markup

There is no wrong format for a campaign bible, though some are easier to use or better suited to the purpose than others. The decision depends on your personal tastes and the needs of your group. Whatever you choose, though, it’s important to keep it well organized so you can find what you need.

Next week, we’ll look at some ways to do just that.

World Building 101 - Keeping a Campaign Bible

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Last week, I discussed how to write an effective campaign brief. While this is an important skill for any DM starting a new campaign, there’s more to world-building than the initial introduction of your players into the world you’re creating. A campaign brief is a tool designed as a starting point, but the moment you sit down and start describing the first scene in your first adventure, you’ve given the players more information on the setting than is in the scope of the campaign brief. It’s time to graduate up to a full-fledged campaign bible.

A campaign bible is an impressive enough sounding name, but what it really refers to are the notes and details of everything the players encounter. It’s really up to you how detailed to make it–some DMs work entirely on jotted notes, others spend hours or days detailing large swathes of their world. Either way, as you dole out more information on the campaign, it’s important to keep track of it somewhere for reference; thus, the campaign bible.

If you’re running your game in a setting with which the players are familiar, the campaign bible really only needs to contain a few notes on important NPCs and whatever locations or events you feel are most important. If you’re designing your own world, though, then you may want to use the campaign bible to store history, myths and legends, cultural notes, geography, and anything else besides. Anything and everything you would find in a published campaign setting fits into a campaign bible–up to and including content added in by further campaign supplements.

Read on for some things to consider when writing a campaign bible:

You will probably want to make the campaign bible available to your players in some form, so that they can better familiarize themselves with aspects of the setting they find interesting. You may keep a printed copy or copies in a binder, to be added to and expanded after each session, or host an electronic copy on the web. There are also plenty of sites that allow you to create a free private wiki, which works very well as the basis for a campaign bible for a variety of reasons including scalability, ease of locating information, and the ability for your players to add notes to it themselves.
When writing a campaign bible, it’s less vital to keep things short and to the point than it is with the campaign brief. Your players are already invested in the world of your game, and presumably if they are reading the campaign bible, it is in order to learn more about the world than was contained in the brief.
Keep it focused. While you can feel free to spend much more time and effort detailing the history of your campaign world, don’t go overboard. Inundating your players with too much at once can create information overload, especially if you’re including setting details that have not and will not come up in your campaign. It can be fun to create entries for an entire organization, complete with full biographies of the most influential or important members, but if they will never appear in your campaign, there’s little purpose in including them in the campaign bible and your players may be confused or frustrated if they spend time learning about the group and it never appears.
Include your players in the process. You may have a strong idea for how your campaign world works, but remember that it’s partly your players’ world as well. Give them the ability to write elements of the campaign bible. Perhaps they could write the history of their hometown, or the lineage of their family dating back to ancient heroes. Maybe they want to detail the distant culture from which they originated, or create some tales of clever tricksters stealing fire from the gods at the dawn of history. As long as it isn’t directly contradicting other information in your world or working against the tone or plot you’re creating, let them take some control–you may find inspiration in the material they provide. Letting them contribute themselves also has the added benefit that it may be easier to talk them into keeping some of the records for you–no need to write up a bio page for the innkeeper you improvised if one of your players was taking notes for the bible.
Keep it organized. Nothing is worse than having to shuffle through fifty pages of notes to find that one critical piece of information. By keeping an organized campaign bible you ensure that you (or your players) will be able to find the information you need, when you need it. This can be very difficult if your campaign bible is stored in a hard copy format, but with an electronic format it is extremely simple to maintain organization with a bit of effort.
Plan ahead. If you know you’re going to have an adventure or three focused on finding and exploring a ruined city of the lost empire, put some time into developing the lore surrounding it and let your players see it in the bible some time in advance. That way, you don’t need to spend time during the game relating to them what they know about the ancient empire–and you may actually find that your players will take the opportunity to discuss it in character, and the more knowledgeable characters will inform the rest about the legends of the treasure in the lost city without you needing to become involved at all!
Avoid spoilers. By the same token, however, it’s important to keep a separate set of notes for the DM’s eyes only, containing details on future developments or planned plot events. If the players already know that their employer is going to betray them because you’ve written it in the campaign bible and let them read it, the impact of the reveal will be completely lost. Keep a separate file for your own notes on the characters to avoid giving the players knowledge they shouldn’t have.

With a good campaign bible, your players will feel much more confident and comfortable with in-character discussion of the world their characters live in. They’ll be able to get a sense of what the world is like to live in beyond what you describe in the play session. If you give them a chance to add to it themselves, they may create plot hooks or adventure sites that you would never have come up with, and they can take some of the load off your shoulders, both for keeping notes for each session and by familiarizing themselves to reduce the amount of time you spend on telling them what they know. The only real downside to keeping a campaign bible is that it takes time–but if you’re having fun writing it, then that’s not a downside at all.

Next week, we’ll discuss some of the ways of organizing and delivering your campaign bible to your players, along with the pros and cons of each.

World Building 101 - Effective Campaign Briefs

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

One of the great joys of being a DM is creating a world for your players to experience through their characters. While there are some very high quality campaign settings available, especially if you’re willing to adapt from older editions, if you’re at all like me then nothing can possibly match the enjoyment of building your own world for your game.

Of course, all that intricate detail is of no use if you can’t communicate it to your players. Handing most players a campaign bible the size of an average university history textbook is a surefire way to ensure they won’t read through any of it.   One obvious reason for this is that the sheer volume of the detail is intimidating, especially if you expect them to become intimately familiar with it before you play, but that’s not the only one. There are several factors to consider for effectively building a campaign world and communicating the details to your players.

The first introduction to your campaign that your players will have is typically a campaign brief. This is usually a document presenting them with the vital information about the setting that they need to understand in order to create suitable characters. Here are some tips to help write an effective campaign brief.

·         Keep it short. Most players are more likely to read a campaign brief of 3 pages than a detailed campaign bible of 30 or more. This is not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t have more details in mind than can be contained in those three pages, but especially for the initial communication, shorter is better. Try to consider 3-5 pages as the absolute maximum length for an introductory campaign brief.
·         Keep it to the point. If your campaign world has a history rich with lost empires and great battles, that’s wonderful, but if your player characters are beginning as adventurers based out of a small town in the hinterlands, none of that is going to be directly affecting them.
·         Keep it clear. Try to avoid using terms specific to your campaign without defining them.   Make an effort to ensure that names are consistent and that your writing style is clear at all times on who is doing what to whom. If your players aren’t able to understand part of the campaign brief, it may as well not have been included at all, and that’s something you do not want.
·         Consider formatting. Use bold or italics to emphasize important details. Keep the formatting consistent throughout the document—the idea is to make it as easy to read and understand as possible.
·         Keep it open-ended. This is a critical point that’s often forgotten or left out by novice world-designers. Always remember that you’re creating a shared world with your players—the lion’s share of the effort in designing a world is the DM’s responsibility, but try to leave room for the creativity of your players. As an example, one game I ran began as a fairly standard fantasy setting in my mind, but one of the players decided to play his tiefling ranger as a cowboy. Rather than telling him that wouldn’t work, I ran with it, and the campaign setting became much richer as a result.
·         Keep it organized. With only three to five pages it may not seem super-important to keep every bit of detail cleanly organized, but it’s actually quite vital to do so. Not only does it improve readability , it makes it that much easier to add to it as your campaign continues to grow.
·         Avoid fiction. There may be some temptation to lay out your campaign setting using an in-character document. This can be an excellent exercise to get into the right mindset for both you and your players, but it’s not always especially clear, concise, or easy to refer back to for specific details. The campaign brief should be presented to the players first, so they have time to digest the information, before you bring them further into the world with in-character writing.

Once you have the basic campaign brief laid out and your players have become familiar with the material you provided initially, expect more details to come out. Check out next week’s article for a more in-depth discussion of keeping up with the details!