A player scratching out a map of the dungeon on graph paper as their DM describes the winding corridors and strange labyrinths their character is exploring is a tradition which predates Dungeons & Dragons itself. It’s become almost habitual; passed down from one generation of gamer to the next: We’re entering the dungeon, so who’s going to be the mapper?

But like a lot of unexamined traditions, there comes a point where you stop and say, “Wait a minute. Why am I doing this?!”

Theater of the mind was supplemented by Chessex battlemaps and Dwarven Forge terrain, and now we live in an era of shiny virtual tabletops with infinite scrolling maps. Player mapping used to be fairly ubiquitous in video games, too, but it’s been almost entirely eliminated there: replaced with mini-maps, quest markers, and fast travel. Why not get rid of it in tabletop gaming, too?

There are can definitely be costs to player-mapping. In some campaigns, in fact, the cost can be quite substantial: The GM repeating room dimensions. The group waiting for the mapper to finish. Confused Q&A sessions between the GM and the mapper as they try to clarify exactly what an odd-shaped room looks like or the precise angle of a hallway. All of this drags down the pace of play and distracts the group from all the other cool stuff — combat, exploration, roleplaying — that’s happening in the dungeon.

So what are we doing here, exactly?

WHY PLAYER MAPPING?

The first thing to understand is that player mapping is only worthwhile if navigational knowledge has value.

In many modern D&D scenarios, it doesn’t: The dungeon isn’t dynamic, it’s overly linear, and/or the goal of the adventure is “kill all the bad guys.” Plus, the adventure is often balanced so that the PCs can wrap up the whole dungeon in a single long rest. So the PCs’ navigational choices don’t actually matter: Even if there are multiple meaningful paths through the dungeon, the choice of path is essentially irrelevant because the PCs ultimately need to kick down every door and clear every room.

Since their navigational choices don’t actually matter, why would the players waste time on making a map?

Maybe there’s some marginal value in “detecting a secret door leading to a bunch of a treasure we otherwise would have missed” (which is why this is so often discussed these days as the reason for player mapping), but it’s an extremely marginal value. Hard to justify all the rigamarole for that one time in twenty that you manage to suss out a secret room you otherwise would have missed.

(And, frankly, a lot of DMs are just going to fudge the Search check to find the secret door anyway. We wouldn’t want the players to miss any of our carefully crafted content, right?)

So when players say that mapping is pointless, that’s not really surprising. It’s quite possible they’ve literally never played a scenario where mapping provided a benefit.

Somewhere towards the other extreme, however, is the Arnesonian megadungeon: The PCs are going to be going down into the dungeon repeatedly and the layout of the dungeon is heavily xandered, so the navigational information from previous expeditions lets you plan your next expedition. The dungeon is also extremely dynamic, with monsters being restocked and aggressive, even punitive random encounter pacing. In that environment, navigational efficiency is of paramount importance: A good map is literally the difference between success and a failure; a big payday and abject failure; life and death.

(This is not to say that you need a megadungeon for mapping to be relevant. It’s just one example of a dungeon scenario in which the PCs will profit from having a good map.)

Furthermore, when mapping is motivated and rewarded, it turns out there are a few other benefits to player mapping.

First, it ensures a clarity of communication. While it’s possible for mapping to bog down play because the player is seeking an unnecessary amount of persnickety detail (more on that later), it’s much more likely in my experience for the map to become problematic because the player fundamentally doesn’t understand the GM’s description of the game world.

The key thing to understand here is that this needs to be fixed whether the player is mapping or not: If they can’t even figure out where the exits from a room are, for example, then there’s a fundamental mismatch between the GM’s understanding of the game world and the players’ understanding of the game world, and that’s going to cause problems no matter what. When this is happening, the player’s map actually provides valuable verification that the GM’s descriptions are being clearly understood and can help quickly clear up misunderstanding when they do arise.

Second, map-making is a form of note-taking, and like all note-taking it aids memory and understanding. It locks in the events of a session and provides a reference that the whole group can look back on in future sessions to remind themselves of what happened.

Finally, drawing a map can be a very immersive way of interacting with the game world. It’s like how a good horror movie will force the audience to engage in an act of closure by imagining the horrific things which the movie only suggests to them. Because the audience is creatively filling in the gaps for themselves, the result can be more vivid, personal, and emotionally engaging than if you just showed them the monster.

Getting the player to engage in a similar act of closure at the game table — where they, themselves, are ultimately completing the picture of the game world in their own mind — will similarly immerse them into the setting. Player mapping achieves this because it implicitly involves them thinking about what lies beyond the edge of their current map as they try to figure out where they should go next and how the different pieces of the dungeon might link together.

The excitement that generates is one part puzzle-solving, one part reward, and one part being drawn into the fictional reality of the game world. The example of realizing that there must be a secret chamber right here is just one very specific example of what this looks like.

PLAYER BEST PRACTICES

First: Do you need a map?

If you’re a dungeon delver, only make a map if you feel like you’re getting value from it. There are plenty of smaller dungeons and dungeon-like environments where you won’t need a map. (On the other hand, if you’re having fun making the map, then have fun! That’s reason enough.)

Second: Focus on functionality over trying to capture the precise measurements and angles of the dungeon.

In fact, in many cases, you don’t need measurements at all. You can get most or all of the benefits of mapping from a simple network map: Just draw a circle for each room and then draw lines showing how it connects to other rooms.

This doesn’t mean you need to give up on the graph paper entirely, of course. It just means recognizing that most of the time the difference between a hallway that’s twenty-five feet long and a hallway that’s thirty feet long just isn’t important.

Of course, there may be times when you actually need that type of precision. (For example, you might suspect that there’s a secret room hidden somewhere in the haunted house and you want to figure out where it might be.) When that happens, make a point of seeking that precision in character: What is your character actually doing to get the precise measurement that you want?

Third: Map in pencil.

You’re going to make mistakes. As you explore and revisit sections of the dungeon, your knowledge of how everything fits together will grow over time. You’ll want to be able to easily adjust your maps to make all the pieces fit together.

Fourth: Let the GM see your map.

If the GM can easily see your map — e.g., it’s sitting on the table in front of you — it will let them quickly notice errors and give you the necessary corrections.

Don’t expect the GM to fix all of your mistakes, of course. Just the ones that you wouldn’t have made if you were actually standing in the dungeon instead of just listening to a description of it.

Fifth: Make sure to actually USE the map.

This might seem obvious, but your goal is to not to produce an immaculate cartographical masterpiece. Take notes directly on the map, and make sure you’re sharing the map with the rest of the group as a reference and resource for decision-making: Where have we been? Where should we be going? What do we know? What do we want to find out?

Sixth: The map is an artifact that actually exists in the game world.

You’re mapping in the real world just like your character is mapping in the game world. Make sure your character has the supplies they need to actually make the map. Think about where and how the map is being stored.

These are small details, but you’ll find they make a big difference in letting the map literally draw you into your character.

Seventh: Try not to let your mapping disrupt or distract from the rest of the game.

Mapping is important, but you should be able to do most or all of it in the background while play continues to flow normally. If you find that you’re constantly having to interrupt the action to get the information you need to make the map, then something has probably gone wrong.

Most likely, you’re seeking a level of precision greater than you need. Try to figure out how to make your map from the details your DM is normally giving you. If you need more detail than that, as noted above, try to seek it out in character (so that it becomes part of what’s happening in the game world rather than a distraction from it).

Eighth: To wrap things up here are three practical tips.

• Learn and use some simple map key symbols. (These are easy to find online, and there’s also a set in So You Want To Be a Game Master.)
• You’re not making a battlemap. Mapping at a 10-foot scale (as opposed to a 5-foot scale) will let you get a lot more of a dungeon level on a single page, which will make understanding, using, and updating your map a lot easier.
• Be aware of elevation changes. Not every elevation change is a level change, but passages passing above or below other passages are an easy source of confusion that can either ruin or over-complicate your map.

Next: Dungeon Master Best Practices

Mephits & Magmin is the introductory scenario from So You Want To Be a Game Master. It’s designed specifically for first-time GMs, but can provide an evening of eerie, magical fun for any group!

Now it’s easier than ever to run the adventure on a virtual tabletop! Tessa Morecroft of Tessa’s Maps has created an all-new version of the adventure map specifically customized for online play.

In addition to multiple variations of Tessa’s beautiful, full-color rendition of the volcanic caverns, the zip file below also contains a DD2VTT file you can use to import the map with dynamic lighting and line-of-sight to a variety of virtual tabletops, including Roll20 and Foundry.

DOWNLOAD VTT MAPS
(zip file)

Go to Part 1

Sakurai: It was a good campaign, but I was surprised Seffi never showed up.

GM: Who?

Sakurai: Seffi. You know, the guy who betrayed my best friend and commanding officer, killing him right in front of my eyes and sending Kuradao into a fugue state?

GM: Oh. Yeah. I think I remember that. Kinda.

Whether on their own initiative or as part of a group effort to create campaign characters, your players will craft backstories for their characters. These backstories might be only a few sentences long or they might be ten-thousand-word epics, but either way they’re the foundation that the players’ characters will be built on.

And the PCs, of course, are going to be the main characters in your game. The action, the drama, the passion, the hopes, and the dreams of the entire campaign are all going to be focused on these protagonists!

Despite this, it’s shockingly common for GMs to go through all the rigamarole of creating elaborate backstories – often even encouraging the players to do so and collaborating with them! – only to immediately turn around, effectively throw those backstories into a paper shredder, and get down to the business of running the campaign they’ve prepared (and which has nothing to do with who the PCs are or what they want).

I think the influence of published adventures certainly plays a role here: The writers of these campaigns obviously can’t know anything about the specific characters that will be playing it, and so everything from the scenario hooks to the antagonists to the individual scenes must be, to at least some extent, comfortably generic.

So whether a GM is running a published campaign or simply following their example, it’s easy for them to unconsciously erect a firewall: The characters (and their backstories) are over there; the adventure is over here.

What you end up with are campaigns driven primarily, overwhelmingly, and even exclusively by a plot: By the simple sequence of what happens. It’s less than a plot, really, because even a plot in a novel or screenplay is generally understood to be the sequence of events driven forward by the actions of the protagonists. So what we’re left with here is just the shell or simulacrum of a plot; the most simplistic procedural elements of a story.

Note: What we mean by “plot” here is more expansive than simply the prepped plots discussed in Don’t Prep Plots, although prepped plots are probably even more susceptible to the problems we’re discussing here.

The problem, of course, is that our stories are not purely about plot. Arguably, the greatest stories are about the protagonists, and the plot is only a reflection of those characters (or an opportunity for those characters to be revealed and/or to develop and change).

Keeping our focus primarily on the PCs’ backstories for the moment, consider how much less interesting:

• Star Wars would be if Luke wasn’t Anakin Skywalker’s son and Obi-Wan wasn’t his former master.
• Die Hard if John McClane’s wife wasn’t one of the hostages.
• Inception if Cobb wasn’t fighting to return to his kids and if his wife wasn’t haunting his dreams.
• The Hobbit if Thurin was not the rightful heir of the Lonely Mountain.
• The Lord of the Rings if Frodo had not inherited the Ring from Bilbo.

And so forth.

USING THE BACKSTORY

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to use your players’ backstories and incorporate them into the campaign: You can either build the campaign from their backstories or you can adapt the campaign you have planned to include their backstories.

When it comes to adapting a campaign, I’ve previously discussed a technique called the campaign stitch that you can use to link multiple published adventures together into a single, seamless campaign. (The quick version is that you look for elements which can be unified:  Can the village in Adventure A be the same village as the one in Adventure B? Can you replace the dwarf who hires the PCs in Adventure B with the sorceress who hired them in Adventure A?) You can simply extend the campaign stitch, but this time using the characters’ backstories as one of your source texts. For example, instead of either the dwarf or the sorceress, what if the PC is working for their uncle?

If you’re using the Alexandrian techniques for collaboratively creating campaign characters, this stitch can go both ways: If there’s not a convenient uncle to serve as the party’s patron, see if there’s a way that you can work with one of the players (or all of the players!) to incorporate the sorceress from Adventure A into their backstories.

Do this for NPCs, locations, McGuffins, and literally anything else you can glean from your PCs’ backstories. It’s virtually impossible for a PC to be too connected to the campaign.

On a similar note, if you’re building your campaign from the PCs’ backstories, you’re basically going to loot anything that’s not bolted down. (And nothing is bolted down.)

Start by identifying the goals of the PCs. Each goal is at least one scenario, and likely more than one: They want a valuable item (a stolen heirloom, the cure for their mother’s disease)? Put it some place secure and you’ve got a raid. They’re trying to discover something (the identity of their brother’s killer, the local of the Lost City of Shandrala)? That’s a mystery, so start building your revelation list. (You can spread the clues around the entire campaign and/or throw it into a 5-node mystery or anything between.)

As part of this, identify the antagonists. It’s not unusual for the PCs’ backstories to be filled with people who have wronged them; people who they hate; people who stand opposed to everything they want to accomplish in life. Grab some or all of them and start setting them up as obstacles the PCs have to overcome to achieve their goals.

Once you’ve got this material lightly sketched in, simply link the scenarios together using whatever campaign structure makes the most sense. (When in doubt, use a 5 x 5 campaign.) Or, alternatively, arrange them into multiple campaign structures, each acting as a separate arc within the greater campaign (running either concurrently or sequentially).

Advanced Tip: These scenarios are easy to hook because the PCs are already motivated to do the thing or find the thing. But mix things up a bit with some surprising scenario hooks, where the PCs think they’re doing one thing only to discover halfway through the adventure that this is actually about the ONE THING THEY’VE ALWAYS WANTED. You can also heighten the dramatic tension by using a dilemma hook as a surprising twist: Someone the PCs’ care about tells them where they can find the McGuffin from their backstory… but only because they want them to do something completely different with the McGuffin than what the PC wanted.

Continue your work by harvesting setting material (locations, factions, etc.) and pulling your supporting cast. Not every single character and location from the PCs’ backstories needs to show up in the campaign, of course, so think about which ones are the most interesting to you. And which ones do the players’ seem most invested in?

While you’re doing this, do some stitching and look for opportunities to link the PCs’ backstories: Could an NPC from Character A’s backstory be marrying Character B’s sister? Can characters be from the same place or belong to the same organizations or work for one another? Can Obi-Wan’s former apprentice and Luke’s father be the same person?

(And, as I already mentioned, you can also collaborate with the players to take two different characters and make them the same person. For example, one of the PCs’ is friends with the druid Allanon and another PC has a very similar wizard named Gandalf who was friends with their adopted father Bilbo. Couldn’t these both be the same guy? If so, it could be a cool link between these PCs that explains why they’re adventuring together at the beginning or the campaign; or an easter egg that they only discover after journeying together for many moons.)

As you’re doing this, regardless of which approach you take to incorporating character backstories, make sure to balance spotlight time. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you should lay the groundwork that will ensure a future balance in spotlight time.) In other words, don’t build a whole campaign around just Frodo’s uncle and his magic ring, include some stuff about the kingdom Aragorn and Boromir have connections to; the lost dwarf kingdom Gimli apparently yearns for; and maybe toss in some elf havens since both Aragorn and Legolas talk about those in their backstories.

Similarly, don’t feel like you shouldn’t create your own stuff while doing this. In fact, you obviously should. Not everything in the campaign needs to be incestuously born from the PCs’ backstories.

Note: There are many RPGs that will help bring backstory elements into play by mechanizing them or incorporating them into core gameplay loops. For example, Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents both use Sources of Stability – major NPCs who the PCs have to interact with in order to regain Stability through a human connection in the face of a horrific universe.

TABULA RASA CHARACTERS

In order to use a backstory, of course, you first need to have a backstory. While some players will give you paragraphs or pages full of information, others might only give you a couple sentences or even nothing at all.

And that’s just fine.

You may feel like these players don’t care about the game, but that’s usually not the case. Most of these players just have a preference for sketching in a few broad concepts and then discovering and developing who the character is through actual play.

Such characters aren’t exactly uncommon in other mediums, either. Consider Neo in The Matrix or Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. At the beginning of their stories, both are tabula rasas serving as everymen that the viewer or reader can readily step into as a POV character. In an RPG, the tabula rasa character similarly serves as an easy role for the player to assume and begin exploring your world.

As you’re integrating or building from backstories, however, there are a few things you can do with tabula rasa characters. (After all, just because these characters are being developed during play, you don’t want them to be slighted when it comes to spotlight time.)

First, if you’re using the campaign character creation methods I’ve mentioned before, you can usually add a little flesh to the bones of these characters. Don’t feel like you need to dump a whole bunch of unwanted detail on the player — again, the tabula rasa approach is perfectly legitimate — but you can use this to plant a few seeds.

One particularly useful technique is to link them to some lore. Bilbo Baggins, for example, lives in the Shire. Bilbo’s background details can remain pretty sketchy, while the meatier lore of the Shire (and, for example, Gandalf’s long-standing relationships with the hobbits of the Shire) can do a bunch of heavy lifting.

Another approach is to link them to another PC. For example, consider Merry and Pippin from The Lord of the Rings. We know virtually nothing about them, but they’re friends with Sam and Frodo, which gives them a link to all the stuff in Frodo’s backstory that we’re building our campaign around.

GM DON’T #19.1: UNDERMINING THE BACKSTORY

Another major mistake you can make is undermining a PC’s backstory. The classic example is targeting characters from the PCs’ backstory and killing them off.

Part of the problem here is turning the backstory into an endless liability instead of a boon. It’s also about taking something that the player felt was fundamental to their character’s identity or that they wanted to be something fun to play with during the game and, instead, destroying it.

Players will respond to this by either creating tabula rasa characters (“if I don’t give the GM anything to destroy, then I’m safe”) or character backgrounds filled with endless tragedy (“if my character has already lost everything and everyone they ever cared about before the GM destroys them, then at least it’s on my terms and it’s the core identity of my character”).

The trick, though, is that the line between building on a character’s backstory and undermining it can be razor thin and very dependent on context.

Start by understanding the character’s goals and how those flow from the backstory. If you can understand the core concept of the character and how the player intends to run their character, you can make plans that harmonize with those intentions instead of harming them.

You can help yourself out here by, when the campaign is young, not leaping directly to destructive uses of the PCs’ backstories. Even if a player isn’t entirely happy about how you used their teddy bear, it’ll be a lot easier to course correct if you haven’t ripped off the teddy bear’s head.

I’m not saying that you should never burn down the PC’s hometown. I’m just saying that you’ll probably be more successful if that’s not the FIRST thing you do with their hometown: First, because after spending some time with the character (and possibly their hometown) you’ll have a much better understanding of where the players’ lines are. Second, because if the hometown has been in play for a while, then the player may have done the stuff they dreamed of doing with the hometown when they created their character and won’t feel cheated by the development. Third, because it’s more likely that such events will have grown naturally out of the narrative and the PC may even bear responsibility for what happened. (“I’m sorry your hometown got burned to the ground, but maybe you shouldn’t have told the Bloodtyrant where you lived before pissing her off.”)

Finally, when in doubt, you can just talk to the players and ask them. “What role do you see your hometown playing in the campaign? Are there any lines you don’t want me to cross?” With a little care, these are conversations you can have without spoiling anything. For more details on this, you can also check out RPG Flags: Wants vs. Warnings.

Q: What do you think about prepping and running Swords & Sorcery adventures?

Unlike “science fiction” or “fantasy” or “alternate history,” for which you can make pretty solid definitions, “sword & sorcery” is kind of an ill-defined term. If we go with the original definition  (“fantasy fiction that feels like the stuff Robert E. Howard wrote” — no, seriously, that’s literally how Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber coined it), the first thing on my list would be:

Don’t use Dungeons & Dragons.

Or, if you do, ban all the spellcasting classes. Or maybe only allow PCs to have two or three levels in a spellcasting class.

Because if you look at Howardian fantasy — Conan, Solomon Kane, Kull, and so forth — the sword is the good guy and the sorcery is almost invariably the bad guy: It’s the strange unknown lurking just beyond the eye line of civilization. (Or, alternatively, crushing civilization under a sanity-rending tyranny.)

(Moorcock’s Elric and Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane are both sorcerers, but they’re also deconstructing the genre by making the bad guy the protagonist.)

THE WORLD OF SWORD & SORCERY

But how do you make a story or adventure feel like sword & sorcery, as opposed to epic fantasy or paranormal romance or whatever genre you want to assign a typical D&D campaign to?

Ultimately, my advice — and I think all advice when it comes to sword & sorcery — will be tempered by my own idiosyncratic and imprecise “feel” for what “sword & sorcery” means. But here’s a few thoughts:

• The “civilized” portion of the world is, on some fundamental level, barbaric. There is no glittering, chivalric ideal; no ethics-enforcing Empire (except possibly far, far, away). If city-life seems sophisticated, it’s merely a veil behind which the “sophisticates” indulge heinous pleasures.
• “Civilization” is pressed right up against uncivilized enigmas, which are heightened through the fantastical and the magical. This happens as soon as you walk out of the city gates. It also happens when you journey into the black abyss of the wilderness beyond civilization’s borders. But it can even happen inside the city: “Tower of the Elephant” and “Rogues in the House,” for example, are both Conan stories in which a single building within “civilization” is revealed to contain barbaric horrors.

Civilization is, thus, the dark mirror of barbarity. It attempts to seal that darkness outside its cities, but its cities nonetheless give birth to it.

To perhaps get a clearer sense of this, consider Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Obviously neither of these are sword & sorcery fiction, but they view civilization and high society through a similar lens: As a veneer covering a festering boil of sublime cruelty and murderous amorality.

On the flipside, the things that civilization describes as “barbarian” — Conan’s Cimmerians, Fafhrd’s Snow Clans, Belit’s pirates, Tarzan — are where nobility and chivalry are actually found. The mythic root of these stories is Robin Hood, whose idyllic society of Merry Men living in the barbarism of Sherwood Forest achieves the ideals of chivalry and nobility which are falsely claimed by the corrupt powers of “civilization.”

ADVENTURE & CHARACTER

We now know both the heroes of swords & sorcery and the source of conflict for our stories and adventures, but I think there’s a final component missing that truly gives a good swords & sorcery tale its unique “feel.”

This is sometimes described as sword & sorcery stories having “low stakes,” but I don’t think that’s quite right. A lot of the archetypal S&S heroes — Conan, Elric, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, etc. — all end up in reality-defining conflicts. So it’s not as simple as “Frodo saves the world and Conan doesn’t.”

I think what it boils down to is the primary motivation for a swords & sorcery hero: Survival.

This may be very literal (any number of S&S stories begin with the main character marooned or abandoned or left for dead), but often also manifests at one step removed: The desire for treasure and coin.

(And this, of course, ties into the broader themes of the world: The corruption of civilization strips the common people of wealth and power, creating a permanent lower class desperate just to survive. And the dark enigmas of the world are a constant source of deadly danger.)

Importantly, however, this base need for survival is always displaced by a selfless heroism: When given the choice between securing his treasure and rescuing the maiden, Conan will always rescue the maiden. Robin Hood doesn’t simply steal from the rich, he gives to the poor. (Which is, of course, why both we and Maid Marian love him.)

Where civilization fails to protect the innocent (and is, in fact, often the ones victimizing them), it is the “outsider” that civilization teaches you to fear that will ultimately sacrifice to help those in need.

For similar heroes in other genres, consider Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark or the vampire hunters in John Steakley’s Vampire$.

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 37E: On the Iron Mage’s Business

Tee and Ranthir both rose early the next morning and went shopping for potions. (Without Dominic’s divine aid, they needed more healing resources.) By the time they returned to the Ghostly Minstrel, the others were awake and they breakfasted together.

The Freeport’s Sword was due to arrive that day, but – as Tee had learned – it was unlikely to arrive until the afternoon. They decided to spend the morning attending to minor chores and the like.

Elestra decided to spend the morning gathering information from around town. But as soon as she walked out the door and bought a newssheet, she turned right around and went back inside.

“Shilukar has escaped.”

There’s a question I’ve been asked a few times about the newssheets that appear throughout the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign journal: Are these props that you’ve prepped? Are the players actually reading through these articles at the table?

Short answer: No.

I’m not averse to ginning up full newspaper articles as props for the players. I created quite a few of them as part of my Eternal Lies remix, for example, even going so far as to purchase actual newsprint paper that could they could be printed on.

Bonus Tip: You can easily find period-appropriate newspaper ads online. To go the extra mile, print the ads on the back of the sheet. Now, when you cut out the article, it will look like an actual clipping.

Bonus Bonus Tip: Take half of your newsprint and store it on a shelf in direct sunlight. Take the other half and make sure it’s hidden away in a dark closet. Newsprint yellows surprisingly quickly, and you’ll shortly have a supply of paper for both aged clippings from the morgue and new ones from today’s paper.

In fact, I’d originally planned to do something similar for this campaign, likely involving full daily broadsheets that I could hand out. There are a couple reasons, though, why this never panned out.

First, I wasn’t happy with the results I was getting. I’m not a fan of producing something that looks like a modern newspaper for a D&D-esque fantasy city like Ptolus; it feels anachronistic and cheap. Even historical analogues don’t quite feel “right” to me, and the aesthetics still weren’t great. There was some room for correction here: In my head canon, the newssheets of Ptolus are produced by enchanted quills, not a Gutenbergian printing press. Unfortunately, I just lacked either the artistic skill or vision to produce something that felt “right” to me.

In short, I just wasn’t getting much value-add from this.

Second, it was obviously very time-consuming: Both the trial-and-error of the graphical design and the work that would have gone into writing up all of the articles in detail.

In the Shadow of the Spire is a big campaign: There’s a lot of adventures. There are lots of factions and NPCs in motion at any given time. There are backdrops and subplots and chaos lorebooks. There’s just a lot of stuff, and I am kept more than busy enough juggling all of it!

The principles of smart prep decree that you should only spend your prep time on stuff that you can’t improvise at the game table, and fully written newssheets would definitely qualify. But smart prep also means prioritizing: Your time is not infinite. Your resources are not infinite. There’s a limit to how much you can achieve, and so you want to prioritize prepping, first, the essential, and then whatever’s most important and/or most rewarding.

For this specific campaign, the limited value of the newssheets bumped them down and then off the priority list.

So I launched the campaign without newssheet props, instead satisfying myself with a short section in my campaign status document:

NEWSSHEETS

• Has a story about another high-profile robbery in the Nobles’ District, which is being attributed to Shilukar. The master thief and mage is said to have broken into Dallaster Manor and assaulted the Dallaster’s daughtetr and heiress, Tillian.
• More reports of ratmen openly prowling the streets of the Warrens after dark. The City Watch still refuses to patrol the streets, although they say that they have increased their patrols along Old Sea Road to keep the problem contained

(This section has since grown to become considerably larger.)

Initially, I believed that I would later find the time to start prepping these newssheets, but I never did.

I also discovered in play that either the pace of the campaign or the inclinations of the players led to a pace where the “news of the day” was actually being split up and parceled out in smaller chunks throughout he day: The PCs were checking the newssheets (or their equivalent) not just once a day, but in the morning, around noon, in the afternoon, and in the evening (or some combination thereof).

So even if I’d started out writing up full newssheets, I might have ended up dropping the idea because it lacked flexibility: The props would be cool, but for this campaign they would be a less useful tool. I need to be able to flexibly figure out how to dole out the headlines to the players depending on when and where they’re trying to snag them, how events have evolved as a result of the PCs’ recent actions, and even the form in which the PCs are trying to find the information.

(And, as noted, some of those forms in actual play aren’t even newssheets.)

Campaign Journal: Session 38A – Running the Campaign: Heists That Just Work
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index