SPOILERS FOR DRAGON HEIST

Anne asks:

I want to run Dragon Heist for my group. Everyone is exited and we’ve already created characters, but I’ve just discovered that two of my players already know the Cassalanters’ secret. It’s not their fault, but I’m really frustrated. Is there anything I can do?

This is a really tough position to be put in, and it’s definitely something you have to think about when running a published campaign. Particularly when it comes to Wizards of the Coast’s official D&D adventures, a lot of this stuff just kind of leaks into the meme-sphere. Your players may not even realize they’ve been spoiled until they’re actually playing the adventure. For example, the secret identity of the big bad guy in Storm King’s Thunder is spoiled in a Magic the Gathering expansion. I’m currently facing similar concerns for running Descent Into Avernus, which are further complicated because (a) the title of the adventure is a spoiler in itself and (b) there are questions about how much Baldur’s Gate 3 spoils things.

Assuming that you don’t want to swap adventures or drop the players who are spoiled, there are, broadly speaking, three approaches to handling this.

First, talk to the spoiled player and ask them to be discrete and not spoil the experience for others. If you’ve got a really good player who’s willing to be responsible about this, particularly if they tend to play from the Author stance (and, therefore, immersion in their character’s POV is of less importance to them), this can work.

In my experience, though, this is still a diminished experience. It’s like working together to solve a crossword puzzle with someone who’s already solved it: At best, they can sit back and not participate in those elements of the campaign. (Which, in some cases, can be a tell in its own right and still ruin the experience for the other players!)

Second, change the spoiled element or give it a twist to surprise the player. For example:

• Change the Cassalanters’ name (and perhaps a few other pertinent details) so the PCs don’t recognize them.
• The Cassalanters are innocent! The story they tell (i.e., diabolists have cursed their children and they’re trying to lift the curse) is true. Take all the Asmodean elements and shift them to a different noble family. (Maybe the Gralhunds?)
• Since the twist won’t work, simply don’t have the Cassalanters approach the PCs as potential allies. They’ll be open villains when they appear, no different than Xanathar and his minions, and therefore the players’ knowing that they’re diabolists won’t be a problem.

(Can you think of other options for working around a Cassalanter spoiler?)

Making these changes will often mean choosing tradeoffs. For example, making the Cassalanters innocent victims means losing the “It was the parents!” twist. Obviously, you should try to choose tradeoffs that you can live with, and you should also look for ways to not only mitigate the damage, but also create cool new opportunities. (If you’d still like a big twist reveal for the cultists’ identity, for example, maybe it’s Renaer who’s the Asmodean cult leader?)

Something to consider here is whether or not the player knows that they’re spoiled. For example, they might know that the Cassalanters are diabolists because they’ve encountered them in a different adventure, but they might simultaneously have no idea that the Cassalanters are part of the Dragon Heist campaign. If that’s the case, then you might be able to get away with just quietly changing the Cassalanters’ names.

If a player knows that they’re spoiled, on the other hand, and you’re completely altering or removing the spoiled element, then it may be a good idea to tell the player what you’re doing (so that they don’t have to walk on eggshells or worry about it). If you’re twisting their expectations, on the other hand, that twist will likely be at least partly based on subverting the players’ meta-knowledge, so you wouldn’t want to double the spoiler by warning them that it’s coming.

Either way, though, you’ll likely want to combine this with Option #1, warning them not to discuss the spoilers with the other players, even if they’re no longer true for the current campaign.

The third option, however, is to turn the spoiled players into co-conspirators. Since the players know the spoilers, frame things so that their CHARACTERS also know the spoiler, but have a reason not to share it with the other PCs. (At least, not immediately.)

In this case, for example, what if the spoiled players’ characters were actually members of the Asmodean cult, sworn to secrecy? When the Cassalanters approach the group and ask for help (still under false pretenses), it’s at least in part because the cult members are part of the group and can vouch for them. (Note that, depending on how much the spoiled players know, you might still be able to keep some surprises – e.g., the true nature of the ritual the Cassalanters are planning – in reserve, or create new twists that are uniquely possible with the new framing.)

The great thing about this approach is that it once again unifies the player and character experiences, so that the player can enjoy the immersive experience of their character’s POV; the puzzle-solving aspects of game play; and the dramatic satisfaction of surprise and payoff.

In this particular case, of course, it’s also creating potential inter-party antagonism between the PCs, which can be problematic. (And some groups may be uncomfortable with any hidden knowledge, even if the knowledge isn’t inimical to the other PCs’ interests.) A full breakdown of how to handle these concerns is a discussion for another time, but a few things I would think about for this specific scenario are:

• Noting that it doesn’t immediately make the PCs antagonistic with each other. Even when the Cassalanters approach the group, the group’s interests can still remained aligned.
• If/when conflict does arise, making sure it remains clear that the diabolist PCs always have the choice to swap their allegiance. (This would be another strong reason to keep the true nature of the ritual hidden from them, in my opinion.)
• Set up replacement characters in the supporting cast that the diabolist players can easily step into if a rift in the party forces the diabolist characters out. (And making sure the players of the diabolist characters are aware that this is a possible outcome.)

Generally speaking, I’ve found that it’s usually possible to set up this sort of dynamic in a way that’s fun and thrilling for everyone. But it’s also useful to remember that there are other ways to set up motivated hidden knowledge that doesn’t create party strife. For example, I ran a campaign where one of the PCs had access to secret lore through their clan… but the clan’s beliefs also meant that they were honor-bound to keep it a secret. When circumstances and trust resulted in them finally entrusting their fellow PCs with the secrets, it was just a cool moment; nobody felt betrayed or at odds.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #19

Go to Part 1

GM: So now, at last, Minas Tirith is besieged, enclosed in a ring of foes. The Rammas has been broken, and all Pelennor abandoned to the Enemy. All night the watchmen on the walls hear rumors of the enemy that roam outside, burning field and tree, and hewing any man they find abroad, living or dead. The numbers that have already passed over the River cannot be guessed in the darkness, but when morning, or its dim shadow, stole over the plain, you can see that the plain is dark with their marching companies, and as far as your eyes can strain in the mirk there sprout, like a foul fungus-growth, all about the beleaguered city great camps of tents, black or somber red.

Gandalf: Hmm… can I use my Fireworks skill to whip up a nuclear bomb?

GM: Sure.

Always Say Yes is a bit of GMing advice that gets circulated quite a bit. The example above takes it to a silly extreme, but it illustrates the central problem: There clearly is a point where the GM needs to say no, but the simplistic “Always Say Yes” not only doesn’t help them figure out what that is, it’s more likely to mislead them. Its sole saving grace is that Always Say Yes is at least preferable, in my opinion, to Always Say No, which is where railroading will often take GMs.

Always Say Yes comes from theatrical improv games. And the reason it’s bad advice for an RPG is that improv and RPGs have fundamentally different narrative structures.

In improv, the performers are collaborating to create a world. You always accept new facts about the world because negation doesn’t take you anywhere creatively:

Actor 1: Here we are at Disney World!

Actor 2: No, we’re at the White House.

But even in improv it can mislead performers, because Always Say Yes only applies to the worldbuilding (i.e., stated facts about the world). It doesn’t mean that your character can’t oppose or say no to another character. If the maxim is misapplied in this way, it becomes impossible for improv scenes to have any conflict, draining them of interest.

Note: This is also why Always Say Yes actually can be useful in certain storytelling games based around narrative control mechanics. Many of those games, although not all, feature collaborative world-building.

In RPGs, on the other hand, the GM creates the world and the players take on the roles of characters who live in that world. The players, therefore, are primarily playing a role, not worldbuilding, while the GM’s primary duty is being an arbiter of the fictional reality those characters inhabit. From a game perspective, this is much more like 20 Questions than it is an improv theater game: There’s a “truth” (e.g., the object selected in 20 Questions) that the GM knows to be true and which is being communicated to the players.

Imagine for a moment playing 20 Questions while always saying Yes: It’s technically possible. In fact, just like Gandalf setting off tactical nukes on the Fields of Pelennor, you’re almost guaranteed to “win” every time. And yet you’ve fundamentally broken the game.

So the improv-style Always Say Yes to Worldbuilding doesn’t work in an RPG.

What if we change the target to something like Always Say Yes to Player Plans? This is probably getting us closer to something useful, but it still doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. For a simple example, consider someone saying, “I cast a spell and teleport back to Dweredell!” Okay… but does your character actually have a spell that does that? RPGs have rules that mechanically define characters and what they can (and, importantly, can’t) do.

In addition to a character mechanically lacking the ability to do something, you’ve also got world state (e.g., there’s a teleport interdiction field there) and NPC actions (e.g., someone counterspells the teleport) that can – and at least some of the time should! – negate player intention.

At this point we can easily glide over into another common maxim: Say yes or roll the dice.

This can probably be more accurately understood as “say yes unless the mechanics say no” (since not all mechanics use diced outcomes), but even that’s still misleading because there can, once again, be non-mechanical reasons why a player’s proposed action won’t work (e.g., they want to go the local mage’s guild, but the GM knows there’s no mage’s guild in this village).

DEFAULT TO YES

All of which is why I prefer to use Default to Yes as my maxim of choice here.

Its meaning expands to, “When the players say they want to do something, you should default to letting them do it unless you have a specific and interesting reason not to.” It fulfills the same crucial function of steering the GM away from contrarianism, but also provides a clear standard they can use to figure out when they should be saying No.

Furthermore, if it turns out that there is, in fact, a reason not to Default to Yes, then you can also use the Spectrum of GM Fiat to find the appropriate response:

• Yes, and…
• Yes, but…
• No, but…
• No

And, if those aren’t right, you can always shift to, “Maybe, let’s roll the dice and find out…”

The underlying principle here is the players will generally propose doing things that they would enjoy and outcomes that they desire. So, generally speaking, letting them do and achieve those things will make for happy players.

So why not go back to Always Say Yes, then?

Largely because there’s other stuff that he players also enjoy. That might be challenge (e.g., knowing that they’ve actually earned their victories), simulation (e.g., they want to know that they’re exploring a “real” place), or drama (e.g., struggle is narratively interesting). To generalize, failure is interesting.

GM DON’T #20.1: PREP IS ALL, PREP IS LAW

If we return to our example of the PCs looking for a mage’s guild in a village where the GM knows no mage’s guild exists, however, there’s another pitfall you can stumble into while trying to enforce the fictional reality of the game world.

Imagine that the PCs have come to a large city, perhaps one with half a million people living in it. A player says, “Okay, I want to find a blacksmith who can repair my sword.” You check your description of the city, but it turns out that you didn’t include any smithies in your notes.

This is just like the mage’s guild, right? Your notes for the village didn’t include a mage’s guild, so there was no mage’s guild. Your notes for the city don’t include a blacksmith, so there are no blacksmiths.

… right?

Probably not.

Obviously a large medieval fantasy city is almost certainly going to have at least one smithy. The key insight here is that even if you have hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes detailing your city, you still won’t have recorded every single person, place, and thing. It would be a mistake to believe that the only things that exist in the game world are the things you’ve explicitly written down. Instead, when confronted with a situation like this, the question you should ask yourself is, “Given everything I know about the game world, would it make sense for this to exist? And, if so, what form would it take?”

And, once again, you want to Default to Yes.

If you know that there are no Ivy League schools in Kentucky, then it’s fine to say No if the players want to go looking for one in Paducah. But if they’re just looking for a university with an archaeology department somewhere in the state where they could ask some questions of an expert, then they should be able to find one somewhere in the state!

Once you’ve grokked that principle, the next thing to understand is that this extends beyond cities and states. It scales to almost every level of the game world.

For example, let’s zoom all the way in on a dungeon room. Here’s one from So You Want to Be a Game Master:

AREA 15: CRYPTIC LIBRARY

The room is of crimson and dark wood beneath a vaulted ceiling. A set of tall double doors, matching the ones you entered through, faces you on the opposite side of the room. A large pentagonal mahogany table stands in the center of the chamber. There are five large bookcases stuffed full of tomes and scrolls along the paneled walls. Sunlight streams in through bay windows with a built-in bench. The windows are leaded stained glass depicting a subtle pattern of golden florets.

Consider those bookcases. In our key, we might even include additional details about the books:

BOOKCASES

The books and other documents here are all of an occult nature. There is a focus on Natharran mythology, particularly an enigmatic figure known as Basp-Attu. A DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check identifies Basp-Attu as a dual-bodied demon said to have been born from the mixed ichor of two dead gods during the War of Falling Stars.

But even with all of this detail, we still haven’t completely detailed the bookcase.

• What if a PC wants to grab the heaviest book off the shelf and use it to bludgeon the cloaker that’s just ambushed them? How big is the biggest book? Is it big enough to do serious damage?
• “Are there are any books with a green cover? Maybe I can fool the goblins into thinking it’s a copy of the Verdigris Bible.”
• “I want to tip the bookcase over on top of the cloaker!” Have the bookcases been fastened to the wall?
• “What’s the single most useful book about Basp-Attu here?”
• “Are there volumes here that would be useful additions to the collection at the libram at my kolledzh?”

To be clear, the point isn’t that you should be prepping answers for all of these questions. The point is to recognize that you can never prep the entire world. The players will always have a question you don’t know the answer to and you will always be performing acts of creative closure at the table.

Unless, of course, you make the mistake of believing that you have prepped everything and that your prep is absolute and immutable law. If you do that, then you’ll have started walking down one of the many paths to pixelbitching — aka, playing a game of Guess What the GM Prepped.

Feng Shui, the roleplaying game of Hong Kong action films, actually pushes this concept of the uncertain game world and creative closure one step further by specifically giving the players unilateral narrative authority to simply declare that a prop they want is present in any fight scene. Want to fight with a ladder like Jackie Chan in First Strike? Bring a rolled up magazine to a knife fight like Jason Bourne? Throw your jacket over a support cable and zipline to the ground? You don’t need to ask the GM if there’s a ladder at the construction site, a magazine on the coffee table, or a cable attached to the building.

This works because when the GM says, “The elevator doors open to reveal a floor full of cubicles,” everyone at the table is, in fact, picturing a different place. There are some details — like the fact there are computer monitors on the desks — that are shared in all of our imagined spaces, but there are other details that aren’t. As we interact with and explore the space together, though, our visions adapt and converge. This mostly happens without friction and often without us ever really consciously thinking about how our mental image of the cubicle farm is morphing and changing.

While in my experience the GM’s vision of the space probably morphs less than the other players (because they are, in fact, the arbiter of the world), it’s important for them to understand that their imperfect vision will, in fact, also be adapting and becoming more fleshed out: I didn’t know there was a smithy in this town, but now I do. I had not specifically pictured staplers on those desks, but once Aaron snagged one I can clearly see them. I had no idea that The Two-Faced Demon by Attansea Millieu was a rare tome, but apparently there’s a copy sitting on this bookshelf.

Discovery is the great joy of collaboration, and if you can truly open yourself to that collaboration, who knows what exciting adventures those discoveries may take you on?

I’m a big believer in open and community licenses that allow third-party creators to publish and sell adventures and supplements for RPGs. Aesthetically, roleplaying games are not just artistic works in their own right; each RPG is a unique medium for creating new works. It’s good for society itself for these mediums not to be encumbered and stifled.

And from a practical standpoint, third-party content is of huge value to the original IP creator. Fears of competition have long since been shown to be irrelevant, as the primacy of the official, first-party content remains supreme among players and GMs. On the other hand, an RPG — much like a computer operating system — gains an immense commercial benefit from having a large and robust library of compatible support material: Each third-party supplement is an opportunity to capture the imagination of a gamer and propel them to the gaming table, which in turn exposes even more players to the game, driving both sales and gaming in a virtuous cycle.

The problem, unfortunately, is that most third-party licenses in the RPG industry have failed. Third-party supplements will generally only sell a small fraction of what first-party supplements will sell; and most first-party supplements only sell to a small fraction of the people who bought the rulebook and/or are playing the game. For third-party publishers to find success, therefore, the RPG they’re supporting needs to already have a very large audience — an audience so large that a fraction of a fraction of that audience is large enough to make a third-party supplement profitable.

And the reality is that the vast majority of RPGs — even those you likely think of as being big success stories — simply don’t have a large enough player base.

As a result, most third-party licenses simply fail. Most of the “success” stories revolve around games with enthusiastic hobbyist designers creating stuff for the love of the game. And good for them! But the games which have managed to create truly professional and thriving third-party markets can almost certainly be counted on the fingers of one hand.

What Mothership, the sci-fi horror roleplaying game from Tuesday Knight Games, has accomplished, therefore, is truly remarkable. First released in 2018, the game quickly invited third-party support not only via a third party license, but by generously and copiously helping to put the spotlight on these supplements. The result is that literally hundreds of third-party supplements have been created, and with the release of the Mothership boxed set this year, the market is, if anything, getting even stronger.

I think another important factor in Mothership’s third-party success is the game’s embrace of the trifold adventure format. I’ve already written a review of the really great first-party trifold adventures, each just two pages long and designed to be folded up into a trifold pamphlet. These are great for a GM because they’re designed to be picked up, read through in just ten to fifteen minutes, and then immediately run. But they’re also great for third-party creators, because they can (a) be quickly produced with a low investment of time and money and (b) given impulse-buy prices that make it easy for GMs to take a risk.

The result is that dozens and dozens of these third-party trifold adventures have been published, and they are an absolute treasure trove for GMs. I’ve launched a Mothership open table, in large part because the library of easy-to-run adventure content makes it easy to always have something ready for the next group of players.

The sheer number of projects made possible by the trifold format has also helped to create an audience looking for those third-party Mothership projects. The existence of this audience, in turn, encourages creators to pursue even more projects and more daring projects. And the audience is willing to take bigger risks on creators shooting for the moon when those creators have already built a rep through their more accessible projects.

This is a virtuous cycle which has already resulted in the creation of several large and impressive Mothership supplements. I’ll likely be taking a closer look at those in the near future. For today, though, I want to start by putting my own spotlight on some of the great third-party Mothership adventures I’ve been exploring. (And also, for better or worse, some of the less-great ones, too.)

SPOILERS AHEAD!

CIRCLE OF FLAME

Joel Hines’ Circle the Flame is one of those adventures that’s almost effortless to drop into your campaign: The Tinea Weather Station, a circular space station, is in orbit around the water world of Mani. Unfortunately, that orbit is now decaying and its corporate overlords have announced a bounty for any troubleshooters willing to board the station and retrieve the valuable scientific data and IP before everything burns up.

Including the semi-uplifted chimpanzee named Boopsie.

(Who the PCs will quickly discover has gone into a bloodythirsty rage, killing anyone she encounters and generally wrecking the joint.)

The adventure consists of a simple map-and-key of the station, along with a simple countdown mechanic, at the end of which the station plunges into the atmosphere of Mani and burns up.

Tick, tick. Time to roll out!

Whether following the corporate bounty or opportunistically responding to Tinea Station’s SOS, it’s easy to hook PCs into this.

The only thing really holding Circle of Flame back are the curious lacunae in the text. For example, the adventure often refers to Boopsie “retreating to the ducts,” but these are neither included on the mapped nor detailed on the text.

The most significant of these gaps, though, are:

• What happened to Boopsie? At one point we’re told that someone was hired “as a backup operate in case the unthinkable happened to Boopsie.” Is that just a euphemism for death? Or something else? And if something else, is that what caused Boopsie to go bloodthirsty?
• What happened to the station? At first I assumed that Boopsie going nuts was the cause of everything else going wrong, but at the very end of the adventure we’re told that, “Operation logs reveal orbital distance was modified below safety constraints by remote command originating from an encrypted transmission planetside.” But… from who? And why?

My view is that the author of a published adventure should consider themselves a co-conspirator with the GM. That means clearly and concisely explaining what the plan is. It’s strangely common for published adventures to instead try to pull a fast one on the GM.

In this case, I’m not sure if Hines is trying to pull a fast one, or if he just ran out of space. I was initially so convinced that the mysterious transmission from Mani was a teaser for Hines’ Tide World of Mani supplement that I went out and grabbed a copy, but there doesn’t seem to be any follow-up there.

Despite these lacunae being rather frustrating, it’s not terribly difficult to fill them in. (The mystery ducts are probably the most troublesome in terms of actual play.) And you’ll certainly want to fill them in, since Circle the Flame is a tight, well-paced one-shot.

GRADE: B-

CLAWS OUT

Some lacunae are a bit harder to puzzle out.

In Charles Macdonald’s Claws Out, the PCs are onboard the Agamamenon transport ship heading to the Banquo Mining Facility, which is about to be reopened. Most of the passengers are mining personnel getting shipped in. (It’s unclear why the PCs are here, but there are any number of possibilities, including heading somewhere else and Banquo just being one stop along the way.)

The adventure does a nice job of providing tight, effective write-ups for everyone onboard, setting you up for a social-driven mystery scenario rife with paranoia and murder.

Unfortunately, there are three major problems that largely cripple this adventure.

First, there’s something funny going on at Banquo. Apparently alien artifacts have been discovered at the site and the “miners” are actually all undercover scientists sent to investigate them. (There’s also a corporate agent “sent to prevent miners from discovering the true nature of the facility,” but there are no actual miners onboard the Agamemnon and the agent is immediately killed, so that dramatic thread doesn’t really go anywhere.)

The big problem is that everyone onboard has a secret Banquo-related agenda and secret information about what’s happening at Banquo… but “alien artifacts have been discovered” is literally the only thing the GM is told about it.

So as nice as the character write-ups are, they’re mostly a secret homework assignment.

Second, the core plot of the scenario is that there’s an alien shapeshift onboard which starts killing people. (It’s completely unrelated to the alien artifacts on Banquo.)

The most egregious oversight here is that they forgot to provide a stat block for the creature. It’s kinda tricky to run a bug hunt scenario without that.

But the monster is also just kind of vague in general: It’s a brain parasite that lives in your brain, but then also a shapeshifter. It’s “inexplicably afraid of cats” and this is a significant plot point; but its primary modus operandi is turning into a cat (thus the title).

Finally, the lack of blueprints really breaks the adventure. The whole core of the scenario revolves around how the monster is moving around and gaining access to various spaces on the ship. The players are, frankly, going to demand a ship layout, and the GM will be faced with reconstructing one that’s consistent with the adventure’s plot.

In short, Claws Out is an adventure laden with booby traps waiting to sabotage the GM.

I’m not quite willing to write the whole thing off, because there are some cool ideas and characters here. (I particularly like K-RA, the android who has so thoroughly entwined herself with the ship’s computers that they’ve become inseparable.) But the salvage job is so extensive that I really wouldn’t recommend grabbing this one.

GRADE: D-

MOONBASE BLUES

Moonbase Blues by Ian Yusem and Dal Shugars isn’t actually a trifold adventure: It’s a bifold one. (Single sheet, print on both sides, fold down the middle.) Hopefully y’all won’t run me out of town on a rail for taking the liberty of reviewing it here.

Everything was fine on the ironically named Azure Base until a strange, blue comet was pulled into the small moon’s orbit. Each time the moonbase is bathed in the comet’s light, the colonists exposed to it are driven into a frenzied madness.

Yusem and Shugars use this setup to craft a pretty solid sandbox adventure: A simple map of the base keyed with the mysterious wreckage left in the wake of the comet, juiced up with the cyclical time pressure of the comet’s orbit and supported by a healthy array of GM tools including well-aimed random tables (meteor-mad characteristics, hazards, stuff found on corpses) and stock NPC survivors who can be slotted into any scene.

The only real stumble here, in my opinion, is that the scenario hook is sort of incoherence. Over a quarter of the adventure is dedicated to a “you all wake up and the Computer tells you to do the following tasks” setup which includes stuff like “unclog the toilets” and “go outside and look up at the comet,” but this seems to have no connection to the rest of the scenario as presented and no explanation is given for how the PCs got there or why their task list includes looking up at the comet. The rest of the text seems to also assume completely different framing devices in various places.

If these were more coherently presented as a list of options, there’d be utility here. But instead it all just creates a weird patina of confusion.

The truly unfortunate thing here is that the space wasted on a largely unusable setup could have been used for even more of the really cool adventure tools that make Moonbase Blues so fun and useful!

GRADE: B

Go to Part 2

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.”

– Victor Hugo

Music at the gaming table can be as straightforward as someone clicking their favorite artist on Spotify, doing a Youtube search for “fantasy music,” or slapping their favorite CD into a music player.

But music’s role in your roleplaying adventures can be so much more than that. It can be the shorthand of the soul. It can rock the world and change the course of history. There’s a reason why the biggest celebrity on the planet is always a musician; why fight songs are blasted over stadium loudspeakers; and why you can instantly recognize the theme songs of your favorite films.

One of the things I’ve learned about music at the gaming table, though, is that it’s simultaneously soundtrack and muzak, and I think if you’re going to take full advantage of it in your RPGs, then you need to understand and appreciate both of its roles.

In its role as soundtrack, RPG music fulfills a function similar to the soundtrack of a film: It helps to set the tone and expectation of a scene and can heighten emotional investment. It can also create specific mnemonic touchstones, which can be used to reinforce familiarity, suggest structure, and even foreshadow. (“Bah gawd! That’s Vecna’s music!”)

The truth though — and maybe I’m making a false assumption here — is that I think we all have a general sense of why films and TV shows have soundtracks, how that music affects us as audience members, and, therefore, how we can use music to parallel effect during a roleplaying session.

Muzak, on the other hand, has been oft-disparaged. When I talk about RPG music as muzak, though, I’m not talking about the particular style of generic pablum that we sometimes call “elevator music.” Instead, what I’m drawing a parallel to is the function of the music that’s played in public spaces. Why does your local shop want you listening to music? Why does the customer service line want you listening to hold music while you wait? Why are Disney themeparks filled with the stuff?

The touchstone I use here is the way that music at the gaming table can subconsciously (and almost invisibly) cover the gaping void of abyssal silence whenever I need to spend fifteen seconds looking up a rule or rolling the dice.

Another is the way that you can use music to start a session: You hit play on the music (or switch from general hanging-out music to the game soundtrack) and it’s a signal to the entire table that Play Has Begun.

In this role, our session music is helping to establish a specific atmosphere the fills the room. It’s creating a broader touchstone for the game as a whole; a sense of comfortable familiarity. “We’ve been here before,” it says, reestablishing our common experience and our immersion within the game world in an instant, and then helping to maintain the continuity of that experience by lifting us up and silently supporting us even through the moments when we might otherwise stumble or become distracted.

Note: There’s actually a third function music can serve during a roleplaying game, which is diegetic — i.e., the music the players are hearing is the same music that their PCs are hearing in the game world. Diegetic music can sometimes fulfill the same functions as soundtrack (there are, in fact, diegetic soundtracks in film), but in some cases it might be thought of as something closer to prop or handout. I’m not going to be talking much about diegetic music in this essay, largely because I haven’t experimented with it very much and I think its use in RPGs is pretty rare in any case. But it’s definitely worth thinking about as an option.

MUSIC TIPS

Tip #1 – The Big Pitfall: “Wow, this two-minute track sounds perfect for the fight with the cultists!” Then the fight takes forty minutes and everyone is really, really sick of listening to a two-minute loop.  I’ve learned that the absolute minimum length for an RPG loop is 7-10 minutes, and ideally more than that.

Tip #2 – Mystery Music: Try to avoid well-known and easily recognizable music that your players are familiar with. They’ll associate it with the source instead of the adventure, and that can often become distracting, too. (“Oh! I love this movie! Let’s talk about it out of character for the next ten minutes!”) The exception, of course, is if you specifically want to create and benefit from those associations (e.g., using John Williams’ Star Wars leitmotifs while running a Star Wars game).

Tip #3 – No Lyrics: Don’t use music with lyrics. Lyrics in a language unknown to anyone in the group might be okay (and can be effective at setting at the scene), but even those can be problematic. You’re playing a game entirely based on talking to each other; you don’t want your voices competing with recorded ones.

The combination of Tips #1, #2, and #3 means that what you’ll usually want to source your music from film or video game soundtracks. These are often designed to be emotionally resonant while also fading into the background under a dialogue track. (Video game soundtracks, in particular, are often designed to be seamlessly looped without becoming too repetitive.)

Tip #4 – Speaker Placement: Volume is obviously also important to avoid making it difficult for people to hear each other at the table (err on the side of the music being too quiet!), but speaker placement also plays a big role here. What I’ve learned is that there’s no One True Way here. The right solution will depend both your specific room and your players. With some rooms and groups, for example, I’ve found it works best if the music is coming  from behind me (as the GM), while in others the exact opposite is true.

My current game room is equipped with surround speakers, and I can actually control the direction the audio is coming from. If your speaker placement is less flexible, though, you can achieve the same effect by simply changing where you’re sitting.

In my previous game space, I actually had the music playing from speakers in the next room, audible through an open doorway. This can be surprisingly effective in having the music be part of the experience, while being so spatially distinct that it poses no challenge to hearing.

Tip #5 – Remote Control: When the big moment comes, you don’t want to undercut it by pausing the action so that you can fiddle with your music player. You definitely don’t want to have to get up and walk across the room to swap tracks. Figure out a set up that lets you easily and seamlessly control the music. Anticipate upcoming music changes and get them cued up ahead of time, so that when the dramatic moment arrives you can tap the button without the players even realizing what you’re doing. When in doubt, ignore the music and focus on keeping the game moving. You can circle back and get the new track cued up when you have some breathing space.

In prep, this might also mean splicing multiple tracks together so that you can play them all by just pushing one button and don’t need to think about manually swapping between them during a scene.

ADVENTURE SOUNDTRACKS

For my first decade or so of playing and running games, I didn’t use music at the gaming table. Then I played in a Star Wars campaign where the GM used the movie soundtracks. Sometimes they would pick specific tracks that matched specific moments in the game. (I particularly remember them always cuing up the music for the opening credit scroll whenever they would recap the previous session.) At other times they would just let the CD play through. (This would lead to funny moments. A running joke, for example, was for bad guy music to start playing and all of the players to immediately declare, out of character, that the NPC we were talking to obviously must be an Imperial spy.)

One of the things that made this work pretty well, though, is that one of the players owned a portable CD player with a remote control and a big display you could see from across the room: The GM could load the CD up, put the player at a comfortable distance from the group, and then control it from across the room. This was a game changer! (For context: iPods didn’t exist yet.)

This Star Wars group ended up being the same group that I ran my first long-term D&D 3rd Edition campaign for. Having enjoyed the Star Wars music, I began prepping custom soundtracks for each adventure, keying tracks to specific events, characters, locations, and scenes. I would not only burn CDs that I could use with the CD player during the session, but additional copies — including jewel cases and cover art — that I could give to the players as keepsakes.

Creating these soundtracks was, of course, labor intensive. I’d often spend as much time prepping the soundtrack as I would prepping everything else for the session.

I’ve shared a couple of these soundtracks here on the Alexandrian, if you want to take a peek at them:

The Fifth Sepulcher
The Sunless Citadel

SOUNDSCAPES

Over time, I’ve moved away from adventure-specific soundtracks and instead prep broader campaign soundscapes. For D&D, for example, I have playlists for:

• D&D Generic Background
• D&D City
• D&D Combat
• D&D Epic Combat

I’ve been building these playlists for more than a decade, occasionally adding tracks that feel appropriate. Since I’m still the type of person who likes to actually own their music, I’ll also make a point, whenever I add a new album or soundtrack to my collection, of going through it track by track specifically to add songs to appropriate RPG soundscapes.

These playlists started out on an iPod. They now exist on my computer, and I’ve recently transferred them to a Sony Walkman for easier use and transportation between venues. You could obviously achieve similar effects with Spotify, Youtube Music, or similar streaming services, but I do, in fact, like to own and control my media. (For example, I remember a GM who discovered that a bunch of their playlists had broken when transferring from Google Play Music to Youtube Music. No thank you.)

For my long-running D&D campaign set in Ptolus, I’ve also prepped additional soundscapes:

• Ptolus – Day
• Ptolus – Night
• Banewarrens
• Banewarrens – Combat
• Chaos Cults
• Mrathrach Machine
• Banewarrens – Level 10

You can see the two base background soundscapes (Day/Night), while the other soundscapes are associated with the major arcs/villains of the campaign. The exception is the Mrathrach Machine and Banewarrens – Level 10 soundtracks, each of which were designed to accompany big finales.

Similarly, for my Night’s Black Agents campaign, I have:

• NBA Background
• NBA Action
• NBA Vampires

These, again, allow me to broadly set tone for whatever is currently happening across any number of scenarios.

To boil this down to the most basic template:

• Background
• Combat/Action

This duality may seem overly simplistic, but I’ve found it remarkably effective in practice. You can almost think of this in terms of tempo, and switching from the up-tempo action music or back to the more atmospheric background soundscape often gives you everything you need to signal major shifts in the narrative, while the random transitions between tracks don’t need to be individually managed in order to provide a little texture within the broader energy level.

You can then easily add additional soundscapes for anything that you want to punctuate something remarkable and have it really stand out from the rest campaign. (For example, by having a Vampires soundscape for my Night’s Black Agents campaign, it gives me a very clear switch to flip for something-is-different-here that can also morph into oh-crap-the-shit-is-about-to-hit-the-fan.)

Starting from the background/action duality, you may also want to split one of those into multiple soundscapes based on some other significant factor. In a D&D campaign, for example, you might want wilderness, urban, and dungeon environments to all have their own identity. In a Monster of the Week campaign, you might have a small soundscape that only plays when the PCs are gathered in their favorite tavern discussing what their plan of action is.

Going the other direction, you might also find that just having a single playlist for a campaign is more than enough. (For example, I only have a single playlist for my Numenera games.)

Tip: When creating a soundscape, make sure you listen to the entire track before adding it to a playlist! This is a lot more time consuming, but there are plenty of tracks that start out as being absolutely perfect for a background soundscape, but then midway through switch to fast-paced action, jump-scare horror, or the like. Usually you just have to let a track like that go, but I have been known — when I’ve found the perfect track except for the 30 seconds of chase music in the middle of it — to actually edit the MP3 file and create a custom version that I can use.

HIGHLIGHT TRACKS

As a kind of compromise between a meticulously bespoke adventure soundtrack and broad soundscapes, you can instead use carefully selected highlight tracks.

Basically, you key up the perfect two-minute track to set the tone of a scene or launch it with a big, dramatic bang, but then, instead of looping that single track, you transition into one of your campaign’s soundscapes.

The fun part is that you can choose to highlight almost anything.

For example, when running the globe-hopping Eternal Lies campaign, each time the PCs arrived in a new city I would play a specific musical selection handpicked for the location. Although I would then transition into my general Cthulhu-themed soundscape, I could periodically come back to the city’s theme and play it again. Done tastefully, the result gave each city a unique audio profile even though most of the music the players were hearing was just the generic soundscape. This, in turn, meant that I could play the city theme at the beginning of each session and immediately evoke a sense of tone and place.

You can also employ highlight tracks to create Wagnerian leitmotifs, which you may also recognize John Williams’ Star Wars scores. Identify the big, important characters in your campaign and assign each of them a unique theme song. When they show up in a scene, play their song. (If you’re running a social event, you could even quickly prep a playlist that includes themes for all of the NPCs who will be there.)

I’ve never actually done this, but it occurs to me you could also do this for the PCs: When someone’s PC is acting as the face for a scene or lands a big, dramatic critical hit or otherwise demands the spotlight, hit their theme song. You could even get the players in on the game (pun intended) by having them pick a theme track for their character.

If you asked me to describe the combat system of Mothership in one word, it would be a toss-up between “strange” and “missing.”

What seems to have happened is that Mothership 0e had a turn-based initiative system. A decision was made at some point to transition Mothership 1e to a more freeform(?) resolution system, but the execution was pretty badly muffed. (It may have also been further complicated by a last minute attempt to revert back to the 0e version of the rules.)

The result is that the rules and examples of play contradict each other, and support material — including stat blocks and adventures — don’t seem to be in sync with the mechanics. To attempt to give a taste of what the confusion in the rulebooks looks like:

• The Violent Encounters chapter in the Player’s Survival Guide suggests a player-facing system, in which PCs make all the checks.
• The example of play is also player-facing, but doesn’t follow the same procedure.
• In the Warden’s Operations Manual, however, player-facing is described as an alternative to the normal combat system. (But, if so, what’s the normal combat system?)
• Meanwhile, all the horrors in Unconfirmed Contact Reports have Combat stats that are designed to be rolled to determine damage… except what function is that supposed to serve if the players are supposed to be making all the checks?

Sean McCoy, the designer, has said that rules-as-written is supposed to be that the monster takes a turn and rolls Combat checks, although he prefers the player-facing option “90% of the time.” And on the Mothership Discord he’s mused about how the Combat stat should be interpreted (“my guideline would be: monsters with 60+ Combat impose [-] on player facing rolls, and monsters with Combat below 20 impose [+] on player facing rolls”).

From what I can tell, the result is that there are three major options for combat in Mothership:

1. Everybody takes a turn, including the monster(s), with the monsters rolling Combat.
2. At the beginning of a round, the GM threatens Harm (to use the parlance of Apocalypse World) and that Harm (e.g., damage) is inflicted if the PCs fail to prevent it with their checks during the round.
3. Monster damage can be inflicted as a consequence for any failed roll by the players. (Possibly resulting in the monster “attacking” multiple times per round.)

This uncertainty has also led to nigh-infinite variation in actual practice, most of which can be characterized as GMs filling the howling vacuum with whatever combat procedures they can nick from other RPGs they’ve played.

(Honestly, you can even see this in my own interpretation of Mothership’s examples of play through the lens of Apocalypse World terminology.)

The most charitable interpretation of all this is that the intention is for the GM to just kind of fluidly move back and forth between these options at their whim. (Or, if you like, in accordance to their sense of “dramatic timing.”) But the difference in outcome is clearly so radically different that it becomes meaningless for the players to even pretend that they have true agency.

Of course, this also affects adventure design. When the combat system is lost in time and space, it’s impossible to actually dial in difficulty. You can arguably see this in Another Bug Hunt, the adventure bundled with the core rules, where the carcinid monsters fluctuate between “one is a nearly unstoppable killing machine” to “actually, y’all can take out a dozen of them with no problem” and than back to “oh no! there’s three of them! y’all gotta run!” (Although, again, it’s possible the intention is for the GM to just enforce whatever “vibe” the current scene has been scripted to have.)

EVERYBODY TAKES A TURN

If you go with Option #1, you’ll likely want to add an initiative system. Mothership 0e used Speed checks:

• Success, you go before the bad guys.
• Failure, you go after the bad guys.
• Critical Success, you get an extra action.
• Critical Failure, you can move OR take an action, but not both.

That works well enough, although you’ll need to decide whether to check each round or just once at the beginning of combat. (And, if so, how long the effects of Critical Success and Critical Failure results last.)

The advantage of this approach is that it likely cuts through all this folderol. It’s clear-cut and it will be very obvious to you which sections of the rulebook you should simply ignore.

Other simple options could include:

• Bad guys always go first.
• PCs always go first (in any order), unless Bad Guys ambush them or seize advantage with an Instinct check.
• Go around the table, with bad guys acting when it’s the Warden’s turn.
• Go around the table to resolve PC actions. The Warden can choose to have a bad guy take their turn before or after any PC’s turn.

MY EXPERIENCE AT THE TABLE

I’m a cuss-headed fellow, though, so I’ve been trying to grapple with the player-facing vision imperfectly presented in the Player’s Survival Guide, which I think can be broadly summed up as:

1. GM threatens Harm. (Again, using an Apocalypse World term of art.)
2. Players declare actions by going around the table.
3. GM makes rulings for how actions are resolved.
4. Players all roll dice (if necessary) simultaneously.

Unfortunately, after running Mothership for a few sessions, the results have not been particularly satisfying. Partly there’s been limited combat and, therefore, limited opportunities for me to experiment, but also:

First, without specificity locking things down, the system is mixing poorly with my default GM stance of letting the PCs set an agenda and then playing to see what happens when they try to make it work. I need to work on setting stronger, clearer Threats and really focus on, “Did the PCs stop the Threat? If not, devastate.”

Second, I’ve still been trying to figure out how to incorporate the Combat/Instinct stats for the critters. Having the creatures make rolls to resolve actions seems to only water down the Threats even more, so it’s not working. It’s just fundamentally problematic that the entire mechanical chassis for horrors in Mothership is incompatible with the combat procedures described in the Player’s Survival Guide.

Third, I’ve been running an open table and my players have rolled random loadouts that include Advanced Battle Dress (AP 10, DR 3) and the 1d100 DMG laser cutter. This isn’t a problem, per se, but in combination with the adventures I’ve been running — which have been slow burning explorations of creepy environments, and then GAH! CREATURE FIGHT! — I’m cognizant that this is likely warping my limited experience with Mothership combat.

Fourth, overall the fights have been thrilling and the players have been immensely enjoying them, but I’m mostly faking it with vibes and panache. This isn’t great for me as a GM because I really, really don’t like killing PCs through acts of capricious fiat. Since the whole combat system feels like a towering edifice of fiat right now, my gut instinct is making me pull my punches when it comes to lethal consequences, and in the long-term that’s really going to hamper a horror game like Mothership.

So my next step at this point is to get a little more specific in how I’m structuring this. That’ll likely give me a bit more clarity when I’m actually running the game, and if I’m at least in the ballpark I should be able to iterate through playtesting. (And, if  not, then at least I’ll know that and be able to toss all this in the burn pit and start over.)

Let’s take a peek at what I’m currently thinking.

THE THREAT SYSTEM

The core combat loop for Mothership is:

• GM makes a Threat.
• PCs declare and resolve actions.
• GM resolves Threat and sets a new Threat.

When making a Threat, the GM should default to devastating consequences.

COUNTERING THREAT: If the PCs’ actions during the round don’t counter or block the Threat, then the Threat is resolved. (You may also have situations where threat is mitigated and only some of the original Threat goes into effect.)

RESOLVING CHECKS: When the PCs fail a check, there should be consequences. Depending on circumstances, those consequences might include the creature automatically dealing damage; making a Combat check to inflict damage; or gaining the Edge (see below).

HORROR THREATS

The Threat from a horror should almost always include one automatic hit for damage. To this, add one (or more) of the following chasers:

• Special Ability: The creature gets to use its special ability (e.g., sucks blood, implants larvae, infects with lycanthropy).
• Ravage: After dealing their automatic damage to a target, the creature can make a Combat check to inflict an additional attack of damage.
• Multiple Targets: Instead of automatically damaging one target, the horror automatically hits multiple targets (e.g., it charges down a hallway smashing through or slicing up anyone within reach; tentacles burst out of the amorphous blob, hitting everyone in Close range; there are multiple creatures and they’re all hitting different targets).
• Trap: One or more PCs become trapped (e.g., the monster is pinning them to the ground; backed them into a corner; etc.).
• Environmental Complication: In addition to the horror, the PCs also need to deal with some other crisis in the environment (e.g., the hull has been punctured and air is rushing out; the blast doors are lowering, threatening to trap them with the creature; the timer on the bomb is ticking down).
• Slaughter the Innocent: The horror takes out one or more screaming bystanders or similar extras in the scene. (This shouldn’t include significant members of the supporting cast, who should be targeted like PCs.)
• Escalate: See below.

Specific creatures or situations may, of course, suggest other chasers. The list above is just a useful set of defaults.

ADVANCED OPTION: EDGE

As an advanced option, consider the tactical position/momentum of the fight. We’ll refer to the side which currently has tactical advantage as having the Edge. By default, you can assume the horror starts with the Edge in the fight unless circumstances suggest otherwise (e.g., the PCs have managed to ambush it). Of course, in addition to blocking the horror’s Threat, the PCs may also be able to take actions that give them the Edge.

If the horror has the Edge, it can make a full Threat as described above (i.e., damage + a chaser of additional nastiness).

If the PCs have the Edge, then the horror’s Threat options, depending on circumstances, will be limited to one of the following:

• Make a Combat check in order to deal damage/use a special ability.
• Regain its Edge in the fight.
• Withdraw. (It will be back later, once again likely defaulting to having the Edge.)

For example, one of the PCs manages to pin a zombie to the floor. They now have the Edge on the zombie. Withdrawal isn’t an option (since it’s pinned to the floor), but the zombie could either try to escape the pin (regaining the Edge so that it can make a full Threat on the next turn) or try to deal damage to the character pinning them.

It may often be useful to think of the tactical Edge as a thing that has to be actively maintained by the PCs (e.g., the PC pinning the zombie to the ground has to keep making Strength checks each round to hold it down). No resting on your laurels!

Note: You don’t have to think of Edge as a super formal thing. It probably isn’t a player-known structure. (Although, for some players, knowing about it may encourage tactical creativity.) But it can be a nice mental model for the GM to have so that combats have a satisfying back-and-forth pacing and the PCs’ actions feel like they have meaningful consequences.

ADVANCED OPTION: ESCALATION

You can expand on the binary concept of Edge by simply extending the concept in both directions.

If the horror has the Edge, it can escalate (e.g. by getting into a better position; charging up its super-weapon; summoning reinforcements; etc.). For each escalation, you can add another chaser to the Threat each round.

If the PCs have the Edge, they’re in a position to potentially

• withdraw;
• isolate the threat;
• force the horror to make its checks with disadvantage;

or otherwise prevent the horror from directly assaulting them.

You may find it useful to think of escalation in terms of vectors. For example:

• The alien can’t attack you right now because the door is blocking it. Can you stop the alien from getting through (or around) the door?
• Okay, it got through the door, so now it’s in the room with you and is threatening harm. Can you escape/kill it first/whatever?

Or:

• It’s trying to take out your tires.
• It’s taken out your tires, can you keep control of the vehicle?
• You’ve crashed and now the alien has jumped on top of the vehicle. It can easily strike anyone who gets out, and its serrated tail starts spiking down through the sheet metal and into the compartment.

A generic progression along these lines is:

• It’s trying to get to a position where it can hurt you.
• It can hurt one of you.
• It can hurt all of you.

You can also think of this in terms of setup and payoff: On the level of a single round you set things up by Threatening an outcome at the beginning of the round; then you pay off that Threat (by either fulfilling it or thwarting it) at the end of the round. Escalation just extends this same concept, with the resolution of this round’s Threat setting up an even bigger payoff (for either the PCs or their opponents) in the next round!