Here’s an adventure I see from time to time: The PCs are in a city or a space station or the Keep on the Borderlands and Something Weird™ is happening.

• Random people are turning purple.
• Invisible goblins are causing chaos.
• A false hydra is eating people.
• A new bratva is shaking down local business owners, triggering a gang war.
• A druid’s curse or escaped nanotech is causing the local plant life to become mobile.

The idea is that the PCs, while doing their own stuff around the village or space station or keep, will see this background stuff happening and get sucked in.

Here’s the tip: These background adventures are MUCH easier to run if the PCs do, in fact, have their own stuff to do.

This might be as simple as a standard post-adventure shopping trip: You’ve got weird stuff keyed to the general store, the magic item shop, the fletcher’s, the town square (as they pass through it), the inn where they’re staying, etc. and you’re good to go.

But I really recommend running this type of adventure in parallel with a completely unrelated adventure: So while the PCs are investigating the Neverland Murders, they keep encountering random people who have turned purple as a background detail. This lets you pace the purple people in a subtler and, often, more effective way.

(This is why I refer to these as background adventures: They play out – or, at least, start out – in the background of whatever adventure has the group’s primary focus.)

Without that parallel adventure, a background adventure tends to fail in one of two ways.

First, if there are leads the PCs can follow, the adventure will resolve too quickly. With nothing else to do, the players will immediately focus all of their attention on the not-so-background adventure, speed run the path back to whatever’s causing it, and cut short the full timeline of weirdness you had prepped. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but if you want the background adventure to feel like a long-term development (as opposed to a flash-in-the-pan), then you need the players’ focus to be somewhere else.

Second, if there’s nothing else going on AND there are no leads for the PCs to follow (e.g., Annie the Flower Girl turned purple, but there’s no way to figure why that happened from either Annie or her flowers), then the PCs will be left adrift — just kind of awkwardly waiting until the GM arbitrarily triggers the next background event. (And then doing so again until they finally get to an encounter with leads they can pursue.)

As long as the players have something else to actively pursue, though, you can now deliberately eschew keying access leads to the first several events in your background adventure, thereby assuring that the events have a chance to build before the PCs meaningfully engage with them. (Probably. Players can be devilishly clever at finding ways to conjure forth leads from thin air that you never suspected were there. And good on them for doing it!)

I’ve just released the first exclusive video for Alexandrite members of the Alexandrian Youtube channel.

This is an after action report from a session of my Mothership open table. I’m planning to do more of these in the future, offering a sneak peek into what’s going on at my gaming table in (almost) real time.

We’ll be unlocking even more exclusive video content when we hit 30 members!

Alexandrites on Youtube are helping to get my editors and other team members paid, which is what makes all the awesome video content we do over there possible! I’m super grateful to everyone who supports the Alexandrian — whether that’s as a Youtube member, a patron on Patreon, or buying one of my books. And my team also thanks you!

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Human teeth wear out. Even if you avoid the deleterious effects of cavities and gum disease, sheer wear and tear will eventually grind your teeth down. So by the end of a few decades of life, it’s not at all unusual for people to start losing some or all of their teeth.

Elves, on the other hand, live for centuries. Perhaps even longer.

So one of three things must be true.

First, elves have human-like teeth, which means that elder elves must surely be toothless. We would expect elven dentures to be quite common and well-crafted, perhaps even becoming enchanted in various ways. We might also expect elven cuisines to feature a great deal of very soft foods, both to preserve their teeth for as long as possible, and then to support their toothless elder class.

Second, elven teeth are quite different from human teeth, possessed of almost adamantine endurance to resist the grind of centuries. It would follow that this “elven ivory” would be considered quite valuable among the unethical. We might also imagine that whatever material gives elven ivory its unique properties might have some unique appearance. Perhaps elven teeth glow silver in the dark?

Third, elves are not limited to a single set of adult teeth like humans, but instead have multiple sets over the course of their lives. Elves might correlate these to various stages of “post-adult” life that are completely alien to human understanding. Perhaps they might refer to their elders as “ninth-toothed” and, to an elf, the adjective “toothy” means wise.

Alternatively, perhaps they are constantly shedding teeth like a shark. Their ephemeral companions on the road might see them carelessly spitting out loose teeth into the fire. Trackers following the trail of an elven hunting party might find the occasional tooth they’ve shed and left in their wake.

UPDATE

Delightful discussion here, on social media, and on the Alexandrian Discord pointed out a fourth option: Elven teeth continually grow from the root, like a badgers. An ironic oversight because these worldbuilding fancies were tangentially prompted by my new elven Pathfinder character filing his incisors into “Gorum fangs” in honor of his now-dead god.

Ever-growing teeth, however, require constant wear. This elven cuisine would likely be filled with unusually hard delicacies, perhaps even flavored sands. Other options would also be pursued: While wood elves might just gnaw on any old stick they find in the forest, more civilized elves would have elegant gnaw-tapers filled with aromatic flavors and placed within elegant holders. With ever-renewing teeth, elven cultures would likely also feature decorative and highly elaborate living scrimshaw. There’d be at least some elven cultures where the elven upper class shows off their wealth by letting their teeth grow into twisted (they’d say “fluted”) spires, and others where having ungnawed or irregularly gnawed teeth would make you a slack-jawed yokel. The phrase “raw-toothed fool” would enter the elven lexicon, and likely also be applied as a slur to humans and their weak little mouth-bones.

But, of course, this is not all:

Thanks particularly to Loris, Kyo618, Arno, and, of course, Mr. Stross. Also check the great ideas in the comments below.

If you run a science fiction campaign, buy this book today. If you don’t run a science fiction campaign, then you can wait until tomorrow.

Review Originally Published May 21st, 2001

Points in Space is a generic science fiction supplement designed to provide locations and characters which might be found on your stereotypical space station. It’s written by S. John Ross, who also runs Cumberland Games – the electronic book company which has released it as the first volume in the All-Systems Library.

All right, let’s count the problems with that:

First off, generic supplements don’t work. They lack all the little background details that story-oriented people like, and they don’t have all the little numbers that delight the grognards. Everyone knows this. I know this. You know this. That strange guy in the corner of your game store knows this.

Second off, electronic books don’t work. They’re never, ever worth the money. Everyone knows this. I know this. You know this. That strange guy in the corner of your game store knows this.

So Ross was going to have an uphill battle convincing me with this one.

BUY, BUY, BUY!

And I’ll be damned if he didn’t do it. Points of Space is a fantastic product, and I’m going to tell you why:

First, S. John Ross latches onto the stereotypes of space opera. Because they’re stereotypes they can be dropped into a wide variety of science fiction settings: Anyone playing Traveller, Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, or any of the other usual suspects won’t have any problems finding a place for the material in Points in Space.

The stereotypes are the sugar-coated pill which lets the GM swallow Points in Space, but if that’s all that Ross was providing then this would be like every other generic product I’ve ever seen: Bad.

Of course, Ross doesn’t stop there. Step two is the unique depth which he manages to give to each and every one of his locales, even while he maintains the generic confines of his stereotypes. Everything in Points in Space is given a detailed history, a unique outlook, and a fascinating cast of characters. Or, to put it another way, Ross successfully creates locations which will not only fit into any campaign – they will benefit any campaign.

And if that’s all that Ross did, then Points in Space would be a solid buy. But he doesn’t stop there, either. Not content to simply give you a couple dozen well-developed locations which can be dropped into any space opera campaign, Ross then proceeds to give every location in Points in Space its own unique twist – taking something which was already invaluable and making it unforgettable.

A FEW OF MY FAVORITES

For example, there’s Q’zoon’s – the fast food restaurant of intergalactic starports. The concept, of course, can be fit onto almost any commercial space station from science fiction that you can think of. He then takes the next step of developing it – giving you a memorable cast of characters to work there, a menu of strange alien foods, etc. Then he tweaks it out: Q’zoon’s particular specialty is that they will, upon request, randomize your food request – giving you a chance to blindly sample the wide variety of alien cuisines they have available.

It’s a small thing. But it’s the difference between having your players eat in a cookie cutter restaurant, and remembering “that time we got a job in the place with the random alien food.”

Some of my other favorites:

Laxa’s Holoporn Theater. This place is absolutely hilarious. The description of alien porn left me in paroxysms of laughter, which were only heightened when Ross revealed that that very hilarity is one of the reasons Laxa’s has such a great rep among human customers.

Harcorp Medical Center. “’Franchise medicine’ recently took 7th in Spacer Times reader poll for ‘phrases that strike terror in the hearts of space travelers,’ squeaking in between ‘package tours’ at 6th and ‘explosive decompression’ at 8th.” And you thought HMOs were scary. What can I say? Ross even makes the trip to get your play group healed up after a gunfight a memorable experience.

CONCLUSION

If you run a science fiction campaign, buy this book today. If you don’t run a science fiction campaign, then you can wait until tomorrow.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Grade: A+

Author: S. John Ross
Company: Cumberland Games
Line: All Systems
Price: $12.95
Pages: 143

You can tell this review comes from a different era as I have to go out of my way to explain that e-books are worth it.

I remain skeptical of generic RPG sourcebooks. They always seem like a good idea, but in practice they’re pretty fundamentally flawed: The designer would almost always be better off picking ANY system and including stat blocks for it. First, the book can then be sold to the fans for that game. Second, GMs who are amenable to kitbashing stuff and using it in any system will still be able to do that, too. (But with the added benefit of having stuff mechanically defined so that they can more easily ballpark it into their system of choice.)

As much as I loved this one, it doesn’t appear to have worked out, either. S. John Ross never produced any of the intended sequels.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and Justin Alexander all run their campaigns differently than you do.

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