The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are a pair of depthcrawl mini-campaigns by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen. It would probably be more accurate to describe them as THE depthcrawl mini-campaigns, since the entire depthcrawl concept was invented by Allen for these books.

The Gardens of Ynn came first. A 79-page, PDF-only book with fairly crude productions values, but golden content. The Stygian Library was more or less the sameF, but a 2020 Kickstarter saw this book revamped with gorgeous gothic illustrations and a deluxe printed edition.

INTO THE GARDENS

One day you may find a strange door in a garden. It wasn’t there yesterday. It may not be there tomorrow. But today it looks as if it’s been there for a hundred years, and above it are written the words The Garden of Ynn by way of Whiteoak. Or Hobbiton. Or Waterdeep. Or Bywater-Under-the-Bay.

On the other side of the door is a different garden. A strange and feyish place of glass-roofed mausoleums, singing orchards, and frozen silk-gardens. Haunting these hedgerows are bonsai turtles, giant caterpillars, animated chessmen, and ferocious white apes. And if you choose to go exploring – to go deeper – there are stranger things to be found as the skein of the garden peels back: steam pipes and splicing vats and the vivisection theatre.

LOST IN THE LIBRARY

“Put enough books in one place, and they distort the world.” The Stygian Library is that place between worlds towards which any building stacked high with books (or scrolls or tomes) is bent. Pass between the shelves, explore the chambers of learning, and you may find yourself passing to another realm where the rows of shelves continue without end.

Here there are chained books, silent printing presses, time-locked vaults, and spirit planetariums, all carefully attended by the five Orders of Librarians – Red, Yellow, Black, White, and Grey – who pursue a secret agenda that is somehow related to the spirit tubes and phantom pumps that seem to lace the library’s hidden ways.

Because the Library connects all great stores of knowledge across the multiverse, the answers to almost any question you might ask can be found here… and this is precisely what will lure many into its dusty halls.

WHAT IS A DEPTHCRAWL?

I’ve written up a detailed overview of depthcrawls, but here’s the quickie version: Depthcrawls are a method for procedurally generating an exploration scenario. Each keyed site is created by randomly combining three or four different elements:

• Location
• Detail
• Event
• Encounter

So, for example, in the Stygian Library you might generate:

• Reading Lounge
• Funeral Urns
• Footprints, Litter, Notes, & Other Signs of Passage
• 5 crawling things

These are not, it should be noted, simply enigmatic entries on a random table: Each element is supported by a meaty, play-oriented entry. And so, in this case, I know that the PCs find an assortment of funerary urns arranged around a comfortable room with richly upholstered couches and elegant coffee tables. From several of these urns, there are footprints leading away from them… and as I’ve generated “crawling things” as the encounter, it’s reasonable to intuit that these “foot” prints belong to crawling things which have somehow emerged from the ashes within the urns.

Or perhaps something completely different.

That’s the beautiful alchemy of the depthcrawl: In the process of bringing these disparate elements together (both with each other and with the current circumstances and continuity of the campaign), you – as the GM – will be performing a constant series of creative closures, making every journey into either the Garden of Ynn or the Stygian Library utterly unique. In practice, it very much feels as if you an Allen are engaged in a beautiful dance, your own creative impulses – and those of your players – swirling endlessly with the raw fodder of these setting/adventure books to summon forth something truly magical.

As the PCs journey deeper (into either Garden or Library), their current “depth” serves as a modifier on the random tables, slowly pushing the results towards both greater terrors and terrifying truths.

LIMINAL SPACES

The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are in some ways completely different from each other, but in many others are clearly cut from the same cloth. Indeed, one might say that they are superficially distinct, but unified by a common soul.

What they most essentially share in common is a fey-ish tone that I would describe as “a somber funhouse.”

Funhouse dungeons are designed like carnival rides: Whatever wild whims seize their GM are thrust together, usually with a wacky or comedic result. Ynn and the Library are built to similar effect, but their sense of the absurd is a deliberate invocation of an inhuman and alien environment beyond mortal ken; it hews true to the spirit of Alice in Wonderland, which seeks enlightenment in madness.

“Don’t look too close,” says the funhouse dungeon. “We’re just here to have fun!”

“Look very close,” says Ynn and the Library. “For what could be more fun than the absurdity of truth?”

WHO CAN VISIT THE GARDENS & LIBRARY?

The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are OSR products, designed for that vague smear of pre-1985 D&D and/or the many clones and near-clones of those games which have appeared over the last couple decades.

Personally, I ran The Gardens of Ynn for 5^th Edition without any great deal of difficulty. The most troublesome bit are the monster stat blocks, but you can achieve a great deal with some simple re-skinning. Honestly, the adventures find such a unique vibe that any GM with moderate experience could probably easily use them in a wide variety of systems and settings with little difficulty: Numenera, Savage Worlds, Monsterhearts, etc.

QUIBBLES

The Gardens of Ynn and the original edition The Stygian Library both list their locations, details, and so forth in the order that they appear on the random tables. In my experience, this made it unnecessarily difficult to find the entries for stuff as I generated it. Someone appears to have figured this out, however, and the revised edition of The Stygian Library alphabetizes everything.

… that’s it for my quibbles.

CONCLUSION

Either or both of these books get my highest recommendation.

I’ve run The Gardens of Ynn several times, including with the Alexandrian Game Club, and it’s been a smashing success every time. I described it as a “beautiful alchemy” above, and that really is the experience of running it at the table. It’s been such a wonderful experience that I’m looking into the possibility of launching an open table with the campaign.

It’s not just the depthcrawl itself, which is a very nifty structure for procedural content generation. It’s Emmy Allen’s crystal-clear creative vision, which effortlessly flows from the page directly into your campaign with soul-searing pathos, innocent whimsy, and a delightfully surprising pulp steampunk.

If you’d like to see what this looks like in practice, I’ve done a video on Twitch demonstrating a simulated run of what using the book looks like from the GM perspective.

Regardless, these are both books you should pick up as soon as your pocketbook allows!

GARDENS OF YNN

Style: 3
Substance: 5

Authors: Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen
Publisher: Dying Stylishly Games
Cost: $5 (PDF)
Page Count: 79

STYGIAN LIBRARY (Revised)

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Authors: Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen
Publisher: SoulMuppet Publishing
Cost: $30 (Physical) / $9 (PDF)
Page Count: 160

Go to Part 1

Your rumor table should be a living document. The latest gossip, after all, is alluring because it’s topical, and the enigma of the table will degrade as PCs learn its content. Here are a few techniques for keeping it fresh.

SAME RUMOR, NEW CONTEXT

When you give a rumor to the PCs, cross it off the list. If you roll the same rumor again, you may want to roll again (until you get a rumor the PCs haven’t heard yet). Being aware that you’ve given this specific rumor previously, however, you might simply make a point of finding a different spin or variation on the information the PCs already have. (For example, if they’ve previously heard that a wyvern has been attacking travelers along the Southway, they might hear about a different group of travelers being attacked. Or from a group of explorers who saw the wyvern flying over the Red Plateau.)

Tip: In an open table campaign, the fact that one PC has heard a rumor doesn’t necessarily mean that the rumor will have truly “entered” the campaign. That PC might never be played again, and there may be lots of other PCs who never even meet that PC (for all of whom the rumor would still be completely new). It may be slightly less obvious that the same thing can be true in a dedicated campaign, as players may forget or simply lose track of a rumor they’ve previously heard. This is what makes the “same rumor, new context” technique so useful, as it can be used to reintroduce the same information in an organic, rather than repetitive, way.

REMOVE AND REPLACE

Alternatively, once a rumor has been heard, you can cross it off your rumor list and replace it with a new one.

You’ll also likely want to replace rumors that are no longer applicable (e.g., someone has killed the wyvern, so it won’t be attacking people along the Southway any more).

You may also want to periodically replace a random selection of rumors (whether they’ve been heard or not) just to keep the rumor tables fresh.

Tip: You can combine these techniques. For example, you might cross out rumors when they’re heard, but only replace them once per month (finding new contexts if they get repeated before then). Or just keep them until they get randomly cycled out.

EVOLVE SITUATIONS

When you’re updating your rumor tables, it’s an opportunity to both evolve ongoing situations in the campaign world and give the PCs a vector for learning about it.

• A wyvern has been seen flying over the Red Plateau.
• The wyvern is now attacking travelers along the Southway.
• The wyvern has attacked a tax assessor’s wagon and carried off a lockbox containing 7,000 sp.

These situations, of course, don’t need to be limited to stuff that was previously seeded on the rumor table. There’s likely lots of stuff happening in your campaign.

CURRENT EVENTS

On a similar note, a rumor table can be stocked with current events and gossip. When you’re restocking, you may want to drop older events and add new ones to enhance the sense of time passing in the campaign world.

Tip: You can think of the rumor table as having certain “slots.” For example, entries 1-4 on the table might be current events; 5-10 point to random hexes; 11-14 refer to random encounters; and 15-20 being where everything else gets placed. This can help make sure that the table remains varied and “balanced” in its content, while also making it easy to, for example, swap out your current events.

RESPOND TO PC ACTIONS

PCs tend to do lots of big, splashy stuff (like killing wyverns) that are exactly the sort of thing people tend to gossip about. So when they do something notable, add it (or the situation that evolves out of it) to the rumor table.

Players love this. (“Hey! That was us!”) It makes them feel important and it’s a great of showing that their choices are meaningful and their actions have consequences. And the possibilities are almost limitless:

• With the wyvern slain, trade along the Southway has boomed. The caravan activity has outstripped the capacity of the Patrol Guild and they’re looking for freelance guards willing to ride with smaller caravans to Maernoc.
• Lord Erequad has issued a bounty for the adventurers who are believed to have stolen the tax assessor’s lockbox (which was originally taken by the wyvern).
• Four hungry baby wyverns have been seen hunting on the Red Plateau.

In a great hexcrawl campaign, the adventure never ends and the rumor table is constantly driving the world forward.

Back to 5E Hexcrawls

Go to Part 1

With a fully stocked rumor table ready to go, it’s time to deliver your rumors to the PCs. Broadly speaking, there are three approaches to doing this (and you’ll probably want to use all three): proactive, reactive, and opportunistic.

Playtest Tip: No matter how they actually get a rumor, you can have the players roll for their rumor! It’s a fun way for them to feel involved in the process and can increase their sense of “ownership” over the rumor they get.

PROACTIVE

Proactive methods sort of “push” rumors on the PCs without the players taking any specific action to acquire them.

INTERVAL TRIGGER: At some regular interval, the PCs pick up new rumors. This might be once per week, at the end of each adventure, once per downtime, or any such trigger.

ACTION/LOCATION TRIGGERS: You might also trigger rumor delivery based on actions the PCs take which are not, explicitly, looking for rumors. For example, they might get new rumors each time they return to town or visit a new town. Or perhaps taking any non-solitary downtime action triggers rumor acquisition.

In City-State of the Invincible Overlord, individual city buildings would be keyed with specific rumors (which would be delivered when the PCs visited those locations). That feels like low-value prep to me, but it could perhaps be used to good effect as a spice.

CHARACTER CREATION: It’s a very good idea to give any brand new character one or more rumors to kick things off. Before play even begins, these rumors will give them the knowledge to start setting goals and making navigational decisions.

RUMOR CHECK: At any point where you have a proactive rumor trigger, you can make a rumor check instead of automatically granting rumors. You’ll also want to decide if it’s possible to gain multiple rumors at the same time, and whether rumors are gained individually or by the whole group.

For example, in my last open table hexcrawl campaign, every new character would get 1d4 rumors (the stuff they’d heard before the player started playing them) and I would make a 1 in 6 rumor check for each PC at the beginning of each session (representing stuff they’d heard around town since the last time we’d seen them in play).

REACTIVE

As the players learn how useful rumors can be, they’re likely to start actively seeking them out. They may also go looking for other types of information without specifically thinking in terms of “rumors,” but which nevertheless can feed rumors to them.

INVESTIGATIVE ACTION: The investigation action is part of the urbancrawl scenario structure, but this covers any effort by the PCs to deliberately canvass a community for information. This effort might require a Charisma (Investigation) or similar check, with the number of rumors gleaned being determined by the relative success of the check.

TAVERN TALK: Buying a round of drinks and plying others over a cup of grog in the common room of a tavern is another common shorthand for gathering rumors.

BROADSHEETS & BULLETIN BOARDS: Broadsheets (the antecedents of newspapers) and bulletin board notices are formal packaging of “rumors,” allowing the PCs to periodically check in and receive a fresh packet of information. (You can imagine any number of similar packages, ranging from town criers to magic mirrors murmuring cryptic prophecies.) The content of each package (broadsheet headlines, job offers on the bulletin board, etc.) can be bespoke creations, but it’s just as easy to roll them up randomly from your rumor table.

RESEARCH: Delving into the tomes of the local library or digging through the musty scrolls of the official chronicles may not turn up any rumors dealing with purely current events, but there are any number of rumors that can nevertheless be delivered through PC research (e.g., the trade in wyvern eggs a generation back).

ADDING COST: Regardless of the precise method pursued by the PCs, you might consider attaching a cost to it (for buying a round of drinks, well-placed bribes, access fees at the university library, etc.). I’d recommend against making this a particularly large fee, since obviously you don’t want to discourage players from pursuing rumors. Something like 1d6 gp is quite reasonable.

Another option is to make the fee optional, but have it grant a bonus to the PCs’ skill check (making success more likely or improving the quality or number of rumors gained). In this case, since it’s not essential, you can elect to make the cost more substantial.

Once a cost, optional or otherwise, has been attached to rumor-gathering, one cool thing you can do is add this cost to the equipment list for your campaign: Now every new player rolling up a character and every returning player looking to resupply for their next expedition will have an in-their-face reminder that hunting for rumors is something they can do.

OPPORTUNISTIC

Because the whole point of the rumor table is to impart information to the players, you should seize opportunities during play that you can use to leverage your rumor table. For example:

• During any broad social interaction (e.g., the players say “we spend the evening drinking at the tavern”) you might mention one or two interesting things they pick up in the general conversation.
• During specific interactions with NPCs, the rumor table can be used to generate topics of conversation.
• NPCs might be specifically questioned or interrogated about the area.

In practice, the rumor table can be an incredibly versatile tool, and whenever a dollop of information would be useful or provide a bit of spice, you can simply roll or select an appropriate rumor for the situation.

CONTEXTUALIZING RUMORS

When giving a rumor to a player, you can simply drop it in their lap: “You’ve head that a wyvern has been attacking travelers along the Southway.” It works. There’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, it may often be the best way to present a particular rumor. (For example, when I’m handing out rumors to newly created characters at my open table, I don’t feel a need to get fancy about it: Here’s the stuff you know. If you’d like, maybe you could tell me how you know it.)

Frequently, however, you’ll find it more effective to contextualize the rumor – to explain exactly how they came by the information and perhaps even give them the opportunity to play through it. This is when you frame up a scene at the local tavern where the PCs have noticed a young man with a freshly bandaged wound on his shoulder. Now they can strike up a conversation with him, learn his name, and hear from his own lips the tale of how the wyvern attacked his caravan and carried away his sister. They can see the haunted look in his eyes as he describes how her screams still echo in his ears.

Now those wyvern attacks have been given a face.

If you want a more detailed breakdown of how to contextualize this sort of thing, check out Rulings in Practice: Gathering Information. But the short version is:

1. Summarize how they’re looking for information.
2. Frame the key moment where they’re actually receiving the information. (This may include playing out a short scene, but it may not.)
3. Contextualize the information, taking cues from the situation, characters, etc. to provide a specific slant or POV on the rumor.

If you’re uncertain how the PCs might have found the information, ask the players what they’re looking for then. See what they throw at you and then play it forward. Or here’s a short list of options:

• Talking in a tavern. (Is it a quiet conversation? Or do they hear someone boisterously boasting at the next table?)
• Saw the information posted somewhere (a wanted poster, a bulletin board, etc.).
• Chatting with a friend. (Which friend? Ask the player if you don’t know.)
• Performing research. (Where?)
• A letter. (From who?)
• A tarot reading, fortune telling, or divine vision.

OPEN TABLE RUMOR POOL

Here’s a fun technique that seems to work best with an open table, but can also be adapted for a dedicated campaign: When a PC gains access to a rumor, it gets added to the open table rumor pool. This list of rumors can be posted in the group’s Discord, put on a wiki, periodically updated by e-mail, or whatever other method of coordination your group is using.

When a rumor is resolved (e.g., the wyvern is slain), reward Inspiration. You can limit this to just the group who resolved the rumor, but it may be even more effective to award it to every single PC in the campaign. This heightens the sense of community in the open table, and can also motivate people to get back to the gaming table ASAP. (Since otherwise their Inspiration will be “wasted” if someone resolves another rumor before they can use it.)

You can also leave the decision of whether to share a rumor with the open table rumor pool up to the individual players: Doing so gives them the opportunity to benefit if someone else can capitalize on the information, but keeping a rumor secret might be desirable if they specifically want to exploit it for their own gain.

MODERATE YOUR RUMORMONGERING

Rumors are good.

Too many rumors, however, will overload your players. They just turn into meaningless noise, and the players will just tune them all out. So, paradoxically, too many rumors can end up being functionally identical to no rumors at all.

In short, to achieve maximum effect with your rumors, you want to limit how many of them you’re handing out.

How many? Well, this depends on the players. I’ve had some players who keep meticulous notes and will have a couple dozen rumors scrupulously listed (and even carefully cross-referenced to their maps!). I’ve had other players who get a third rumor and basically say, “Fuck this noise.” So this is really something you have to play by ear and be willing to adjust on-the-fly.

The key thing to moderate, though, are your proactive rumors: Opportunistic stuff tends to be linked to specific interactions which makes it more significant. And reactive stuff, obviously, is happening at the players’ own request, and so is naturally not overburdening them.

In many ways, though, this is ideal in any case: You really just want a smattering of proactive stuff to (a) help players who would otherwise be lost and (b) remind players that rumors exist, prompting them to do their own legwork to dig up more information on their own recognizance (and to whatever amount they want).

With that being said, you may also want to limit the group’s ability to systematically drain all the available rumors out of the campaign. You might want to, for example, limit them to 1d4 rumors per downtime or per session. Alternatively, perhaps villages are limited to 1 rumor, towns to 1d4 rumors, and metropolises to 2d6 rumors (1d4 of which require special effort). This structure can actually be used to motivate the PCs to explore more: You want more information? You’ll have to go to the big city.

Go to Part 3: Restocking Your Rumor Table

As we’ve previously discussed, exploration can take several forms. The most basic form is simple curiosity, in which you just randomly look around hoping to find something interesting. This is, more or less, the level of exploration provided by the basic hexcrawl structure: You pick a direction and you march forth to see what’s there.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Curiosity is the bedrock of exploration. But for a hexcrawl to truly come to life, the players need to be able to learn information about the region so that they can:

• set specific goals,
• ask specific questions, and
• plan their expeditions.

This is the function of the rumor table, which in its most basic form is simply a random table: Roll a die and tell the players a rumor. Each rumor provides a tangible nugget of information about the region:

d10  Rumor

1       North of Graykeep, there is a ruined arena which is home to minotaur.

2       A merchant has been kidnapped by goblins in the Old Forest.

3       An ogre living along Silkmauk Road has been known to offer aid and enigmatic trinkets to travelers.

4       There are ancient altars of red jadeite scattered throughout the area.

5       The old imperial fort stands on a plateau southwest of town.

6       The lizardmen of Tockmarsh are said to treat all tabaxi as if they were gods.

7       A white wyrm’s lair lies at the headwaters of the Red Rapids river.

8       A nymph of the White Wood will trade magic items for a vial of your tears.

9       In the Old Forest there’s a circle of stone sarsens. Stand amidst them and blow on horn of mistletoe and you can open a fairy gate.

10     Flying carpets have been seen in the skies around Mt. Skarlap, which lies east of town.

You can see how the rumors on this table would instruct the PCs about local regions (Old Forest, the Tockmarsh, White Woods) and interesting adventuring sites (old imperial fort, Graykeep, ruined arena, Mt. Skarlap) that they can now consciously choose to seek out (or use as navigational markers) rather than just stumbling across them randomly.

If this information is so useful, why not just give it all to them in one big infodump? Partly this comes down to effective pacing. In an exploration-based campaign, you really want the players to be slowly learning new things about the area over time. This also avoids information overload: By spreading the information out over time, it becomes easier for the players to process it and use it. (It’s the same reason you don’t read a textbook cover-to-cover, instead processing a section of the textbook and then applying it through practice problems, classroom discussions, etc. before proceeding to the next section.)

Conversely, if you only want to give the PCs a few rumors at a time, why go to the trouble of stocking an entire rumor table? Why not just design the handful of bespoke rumors that you’re going to give them? Well, as we’ll see, a good rumor table is an incredibly useful runtime tool for the GM, useful for responding to any number of actions which might be taken by the PCs.

STOCKING THE RUMOR TABLE

Stocking a rumor table is pretty straightforward: Figure out what size die you want to roll, list that number of rumors, and number them. (Or, vice versa, make a list of rumors until you run out of ideas or feel like you have enough, then count them, and assign whatever die size seems most appropriate.)

But how many active rumors should you aim to have in your hexcrawl?

There’s no one-true-answer here. Personally, I like to have twenty. A d20 is convenient, and it gives you enough rumors to cover the breadth of the hexcrawl without going overboard. (If you own a d30, that can also be a fun way to use that unusual die. But a table of d100 rumors, in my experience, can be a lot of work to prep without really providing a lot of extra value.)

In making each rumor, you’re going to be looking at its source, focus, type, and truth value.

SOURCE

The source of a rumor might be a:

• hex
• random encounter tables
• roads/paths/trails
• factions
• NPCs

Basically, anything you’ve keyed or created for the hexcrawl can (and arguably should!) be fodder for your rumor table.

In fact, if I’ve started struggling to come up with new rumors to stock my rumor table with, a technique I’ve found useful is to just pick a random hex, look at what I’ve keyed there, and then figure out a rumor that could lead the PCs to it. (If you’ve done a 10 x 10 hexmap, for example, you can just roll two d10’s, cross-reference their position, and look at the resulting hex.)

Playtest Tip: You can also use this “pick a random hex, that’s your rumor” technique during actual play to generate rumors even in the absence of a stocked rumor table. Obviously this means you need to be a little more comfortable improvising rumors, but it’s a very flexible technique which, crucially, requires zero prep.

FOCUS

Potential focuses for a rumor can include:

• Location
• Creature
• Object
• Actions/Situations (including threats and upcoming situations)
• Background/Lore

For example, let’s consider one of our example hexes from Hexcrawl Addendum: Designing the Hexcrawl:

C2 – WYVERN SHAFT

60 foot deep shaft that serves as the lair of a wyvern. The wyvern has dug an escape tunnel that emerges from a hill a quarter mile away.

Wyvern: Has a large scar on its left side from a spear wound.

Treasure: 7,000 sp, 5 zircons (50 gp each)

What rumors could we generate from this?

Location: Adventurers exploring the Red Plateau southwest of town report seeing a mysterious 60-foot-deep shaft.

Creature: A wyvern has been seen flying over the Red Plateau.

Object: A wyvern attacked a tax assessor’s wagon along the Southway and carried off a lockbox containing 7,000 sp.  It was last seen flying west.

Situation: A wyvern has been attacking travelers along the Southway.

Lore: A generation ago wyvern eggs were taken from the Red Plateau and sent east so that the hatchlings could imprint on imperial wyvern riders. The practice ended because the plateau became depopulated as a result of the egg-harvesting.

Note that, regardless of the rumor’s focus, each rumor is actionable, in the sense that it gives a clear location for the PCs to go. This is not strictly necessary, but should be much more the rule than the exception: The primary function of the rumor table is to guide and inform the PCs’ explorations, and it can’t do that if the PCs lack the information necessary to do anything with the rumor. (For example, a rumor that just said “there’s a wyvern in the area” is, at best, very limited in its utility, because there’s no way for the PCs to go looking for the wyvern other than just wandering around randomly.)

The actionable specificity of the rumor can vary quite a bit, though. “West of the Southway” is less precise than “check out the Red Plateau,” which is less precise than “the adventurers offer to sell you a map indicating the precise location of the shaft for 10 gold pieces.” But even the vaguest of these nevertheless provides some specific direction.

TYPE

Thinking about a rumor’s type, in my experience, is mostly useful if I’m struggling to come up with a good rumor. But most rumors will fall into one of five types.

Local Color tells you something about an area or the people/monsters who live there (e.g., “The White Woods lies north of Mt. Skarlap” or “the ealdorman is a man named Harlan, who lost his wife in a goblin raid twenty years ago”). Local color may be actionable — if you know the White Wood exists, then you can choose to go there — but lacks a specific motivation for doing so.

Other local color may not truly be actionable at all. As such, you might even want to maintain a separate table of Local Color Rumors that you can consciously choose to mix in with more meaningful intelligence.

Opportunities offer a reward, payoff, or some other form of gain. Treasure is always great — caches of magic items or bounties paid for the capture of an outlaw, that sort of thing — but there are many forms of reward: land, favors, a chance to flirt with a handsome centaur. Think about what motivates your PCs and seed that into your rumor tables.

Challenges are like opportunities, but with the addition of some clear threat or obstacle which must be overcome in order to gain the reward. Capturing a bandit to get their bounty is an example of this, as is a mine infested with goblins or a haunted forest where rare alchemical reagents can be found.

One form of reward that may not be immediately apparent is the simple desire to be a Big Damn Hero. If you tell the players that farms in the Fieflands are being attacked by mutant marauders, the desire to save the day may be more than enough to prompt them.

This is aided and abetted by the common D&D conceit that “where there be monsters, there by treasure.” If you tell the PCs about a wyvern attacking travelers along the Southway, you don’t probably don’t need to tell the players that “the wyvern is guarding a cache of treasure” for them to infer it.

Dangers are like challenges, but without reward. The other way to think about this is that a challenge or opportunity is something that the PCs might set as a goal for themselves (find the nymph of the White Wood, slay the wyvern, etc.), but a danger is something for them avoid, most likely while pursuing other goals. It’s the Valley of the Monocs they should go around; or the red gems in Cawthorne Keep that should be eschewed.

The distinction here can be kind of hazy, and will likely even shift as the PCs grow in power and ability. (“There’s a dragon over there!” is a terrifying danger to a group of 1^st level characters, but a rich opportunity that will leave higher level characters salivating at the thought of looting its hoard.)

Mysteries are similar to opportunities, but the “reward” is simply unraveling the unknown and/or learning secret lore: What’s causing those strange lights in the Tockmarsh? Why are there 60-foot-wide shafts drilled into the earth all over this area? Who built the red jadeite altars?

This category of rumor really relies on humanity’s innate curiosity: It may take nothing more than offering the players an enigma to fill them with a burning desire to resolve it.

A final thing to note is that we’re categorizing the content of the rumor, not necessarily reality: For example, a rumor might offer an opportunity of an abandoned silver mine… and it’s only when they arrive that the PCs discover it’s infested with goblins. Something offered simply as a mystery to unravel might nevertheless result in discovering a huge treasure hoard.

TRUTH VALUE

Keeping this distinction between rumor content and reality is also useful as we look at the truth value of the rumor. Rumors can be:

• True
• False
• Partial (there is a hermit in Shamrock Cave, but the rumor didn’t mention he’s a psychotic axe murderer)
• Mixed (the “friendly old hermit in Shamrock Cave” exists, but he’s not friendly)

In structural terms, the key thing to keep in mind is that even a completely false rumor can nevertheless motivate the PCs to go somewhere or do something that will result in adventure.

What you want to avoid, however, is continually offering them rewards and then leaving them with nothing. As long as the players are getting reliably enjoyable experiences following rumors (even when the rumors are false), they’ll continue following them. If that stops being true, however, the players will just ignore rumors as being worse than a waste of time, and all of the wonderful utility of rumors will be lost to you.

Go to Part 2: Hearing Rumors

Matt Mercer, Aabria Iyengar, and Brennan Lee Mulligan — all of whom have run canonical actual plays in the world of Exandria — sat down together for a roundtable discussion of their GMing techniques.

There’s a lot of GMing talent in that room and a lot of great GMing advice in the video. I wanted to kind of dig that advice out and make it accessible, so I rewatched the video and took some notes. Then I thought it might be valuable to polish up those notes and share them here. In practice, that’s turned into a little bit of a ramble as I try to both capture what they were saying, while also sharing my own thoughts on what it means.

Where necessary I’ve used [square brackets] to indicate my original thoughts.

GROKKING A SETTING

I’ve done my own video on coming to grips with a published setting, so I found these thoughts interesting.

Matt: As I learned to GM, I would just create new settings because I was too scared to dive into established settings like Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. So I understand there can be a reticence or anxiety about not wanting to “ruin” the setting or run it incorrectly.

Brennan then talked about how their experience running Exandria was fundamentally different from a GM running it at home, because anything that they say during the actual play becomes official canon.

Aabria: Try it when the guy who made the world is at your table.

Matt: The good news is that for the majority of you, it will not be livestreamed to the internet. So you can fuck it up as much as you want.

Aabria: Nobody 100%’s the lore. (…) Give yourself a little bit of grace.

There are a couple practical tips here:

• Take a break and go look stuff up when you need to.
• Set your campaign in a corner of the setting where you can’t “break” anything.

But the really big idea is:

Matt: Establish in Session 0 that this is your version of the setting. If you really want to be hardcore into the canon you can, but the intent with writing the [setting books] is to make information that you can use. That’s meant to be helpful. That you can take and use as much as you want to the letter, or break it apart and remake it however you want.

If you give yourself permission to own the setting and make your own version of it, the problem (and anxiety) kind of just goes away: Once it’s yours, any “mistakes” you make are actually just the truth of your setting.

Mercer explicitly rejects the auteur theory of creation, particularly in the context of roleplaying games: Exandria was “born from accident” and developed collectively. Even in his own group, it’s not something that belongs exclusively to him.

[Establishing this attitude in Session 0 also frees the players from this burden. It’s okay to shoot Darth Vader. You won’t have broken anything. You’ll have created something new.]

SESSION 0 & CHARACTER PLANNING

“I have a class. And spells. And magical gear. And literally no desires and no attachments.” Buddy, that’s enlightenment. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re actually done. You beat the game.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Session 0 fulfills several functions:

• It establishes safety tools (lines & veils).
• It’s an amuse-bouche that clears the palette from your previous campaign.
• It sets tone for the campaign.

For an actual play, having an off-camera Session 0 is important because it gives the players space to explore ideas without feeling committed to them.

But the core discussion revolves around character creation. For a long-term campaign, you’re going to be spending dozens, hundreds, or thousands of hours with the characters. So you want to spend the time to get the characters right.

• But also don’t be afraid to sunset characters who aren’t working. Allow players to retool their characters or even retire them and bring in a new character.

Session 0 character creation can be even more important for short campaigns, though, because you won’t have the time to explore and gradually develop the characters (and their relationships) through play.

AT THE TABLE: Do character creation at the table. This allows players to bounce ideas off each other and create pre-existing relationships between their characters. The result is an overt history shared by the group. [You can see an example of this in practice in Dragon Heist: Creating the Characters.]

SUB-GROUPS: You can enhance this by having one-on-one or small group sessions with subsets of the full group. (This can also be done virtually or by e-mail between sessions.) This allows for the creation of secret histories known only to

[This is desirable because (a) enigma drives interest and (b) dramatic revelations are fun. If you’re wondering what’s really going with someone else’s PC, the interest generated will immerse you into that relationship. And it’s fun to be the center of attention for a dramatic reveal; that’s an experience that doesn’t have to be limited to the GM.

This notably, for me, illustrates a central truth: An RPG is an act of narrative creation, and I don’t (necessarily) mean that in the sense of storytelling. I mean that the game is simultaneously the creation of an event AND the spoken narration/description of that event. Furthermore, players in an RPG are simultaneously creators and audience; they are both participants in the creation of the game’s narrative and also the audience for that narrative. (The rise of televised actual play obviously begins to shift this dynamic, but it obviously remains largely true.)

Furthermore, there is a tension between the mantle of Creator and the mantle of Audience. We’ll come back to this.]

KEY ELEMENTS: [I’m creating some jargon from the discussion here.]

• Momentum are attachments. Friends, enemies, debts, etc.
• Trajectory are the character’s initial goals.
• Motivation is the character’s “why.” What is it that they want?

So if you have a player who isn’t providing back story, you need to ask them: Where’s your momentum coming from? What is driving you? What do you want to achieve? [Because the question goes both ways: These things come from back story, but figuring these out will also inform your back story.] Where you are from informs where you’re going.

It’s not about the amount of character backstory. “You don’t need a forty page back story to do this.” You just need enough backstory for these key elements to be in place and for the character to “click” into place.

Nothing wrong with forty pages of back story if that’s what the player wants or needs! Aabria Iyengar has a tip, though: Five minutes before the session, ask everyone, “What’s your back story?” Because no matter the length, in that moment the player will focus in on what’s most essential for them.

Tip: Backstory also tells you where the players’ focus is. As Brennan puts it (paraphrasing), “No clerics? Guess I won’t bother developing the gods, then.”

GAME MASTER AS GREEK CHORUS

Matt Mercer also notes that, “Back story is an invitation to the GM; not an expectation.”

But it’s a potent invitation because the easiest way to prep is to ask, “What do you think you’re going to be doing [as a character]?” And then prep that. (As opposed to saying, “This is what you’re going to do,” and then trying to figure out how to motivate the PCs to do that.)

Brennan characterizes back story as “plot hooks you’ll bite every time.” He contrasts the mysterious necromancer in the corner who the players can freely ignore as opposed to, “Your uncle, who you swore to kill, is here.”

This really sets up the idea of the GM as the chorus of a Greek play: The chorus does not drive the plot forward. It exists to establish the scene, reflect and comment upon the actions of the characters, and also to provoke and inspire their action. In just this way, an RPG campaign is driven by the players and their characters, while the GM creates opportunity and context for them to do so.

Matt: Part of the preparation (…) is getting to know enough about the world and the kind of story that you’re going to tell, so that when you start, you can kinda let all that preparation go and just ride with the player’s actions; their agency. And have that bag at the ready. At that point a lot of your preparation should be modular. You should know which things are important to tell the story, what bits of information you feel would be the most impactful for the players to discover, to uncover, to take to heart and use to drive them towards a goal, to fulfill that heroic fantasy, or that horror narrative, whatever it is that you’re using to tell.

[This is what I refer to as active play. You create these modular bits so that you can play freely with them at the table.]

RAILS vs. OBSTACLES

What I’m looking for when I’m a player is full immersion. I don’t want the experience of being a storyteller when I’m a PC. And that’s a little bit of a different thing. A lot of indie games want a flat hierarchy at the table where everybody is a storyteller. I don’t want that as a player. When I’m a player, I want to be living in a story, immersed into a character that is not, to their knowledge, living in a story. As Evan Kelmp says, “I am not a character.” I don’t want to play a character that’s thinking about their fucking narrative arc. I want to play a character who wants to save the world as quickly and efficiently as possible. But I, as the player, want the arc. So me and my character exist at odds.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

[Here we return to the tension between player as Creator and player as Audience. This tension is not a bad thing. It drives the central creative act of a roleplaying game in a way almost entirely unique to it as a medium, and when you get the balance right it creates a feedback loop of excitement.

And this type of tension is not, it should be noted, a strictly dramatist concern, although Brennan puts it in these terms. If you think in gamist terms: You, as a player, have a desire for victory. But you simultaneously don’t want that victory to be trivial.]

It’s the GM’s role at the table to resolve this tension; to unify the player’s desire and the character’s desire.

Brennan: So what does it mean if I want to provide that experience to the player? [Characters] are like water. They are going down the hill as fast as they can, seeking the path of least resistance. But the player wants anything other than a straight line. So my job as the “rails” is irrigating a path down that slope that lets the water always have taken the fastest route towards its goal, but at the end of it, the shape is the most convoluted and pleasing. You achieved the shape of a story while you were trying your hardest to avoid it.

The “rails” that Brennan is describing here are not railroading. They are obstacles. It’s the GM’s role to put obstacles between the PCs and what they want. The obstacles that Brennan is talking about are primarily derived from dramatic sensibility, but — as we’ve already discussed — the same equally applies to gamism or simulationism: The level-appropriate opponents who create challenge are placed between the PCs and their goal so that the PCs have to overcome them. Goals are not trivially achievable because the world would not feel real if they were.

Brennan also inverts this metaphor: The “rails” are ultimately designed by the players. They emerge from the character’s backstory. They are the hooks you’ll bite at every time; the uncle you swore to kill showing up to cause problems.

RANDOM TIPS AND INSIGHTS

OTHELLO TOKENS: Use the plastic discs from an Othello game set as generic monster tokens. You can use wet-erase markers on the white side of the token to identify the monster or indicate current hit point totals. [You can also flip the token to the black side to clearly indicate a corpse. It feels like corpses should be difficult terrain, but we so often lose track of them narratively.]

WHERE DO THE RELICS COME FROM? There are specific tropes in D&D. When you’re doing world-building for D&D, you want to identify those tropes and back specific explanations for them into the world, so that those tropes flow organically from the world and are a natural part of it.

[This can apply broadly to almost any setting creation. For example, let’s say you wanted to create a planet-hopping space opera. The essential trope here is that you need to be able to get from one planet to another very quickly: Cheap FTL is going to give you one setting. A solar system with dozens of terraformed planets is going to give you another. Stargates give another. Cross-planar journeys through what our ancestors called the elf-lands gives another.]

NO TIME FOR SESSION 0? If you’re running a one-shot, for example. You can replace some of that work by giving the PCs private moments at the beginning of the scenario. [And also framing scenes with smaller sub-groupings before bringing everyone together.]

Sometimes you can also use e-mail or text messages to ask questions before the session starts.

ACCEPTING OFFERS: The triad here talks about how, “Aabria is a great GM from the player’s chair,” by which they mean that she can see the storytelling beats a GM is setting up and will line herself up to hit the incoming pitch. These players recognize that you’re singing a note because you want to harmonize; and, vice versa, they sing a note because they’re hoping you’ll harmonize.

BATTLEMAPS AS IMPROV SEED. Highly detailed battlemaps can lock players into a particular visualization of the battlefield, but this can be useful if it encourages them to interact with the battlefield in creative ways. The example is given of a player seeing chains on the map and then grabbing them in-character.

…BUT YOU DON’T HAVE A BATTLEMAP: When playing theater of the mind, make it a conscious habit to establish three details of the battlefield. You don’t have to have a plan for how they’re going to be used; just make sure there’s scenery there and you’ll find that circumstance and creativity will make use of it.

And, Feng Shui-style, it can be useful to explicitly give players explicit permission to infer and/or ask about the presence of detail.

AABRIA’S SIGNATURE MOVE: “And here’s what you don’t see.” A cinematic technique in which the GM describes a scene that none of the PCs are present to witness. This can be very powerful.

Brennan: And my head popped off my body, spun around in a circle, and said, “You can do that?!” And then settled back onto my shoulders… Talk about inviting the audience in.

Brennan’s quote here is particularly interesting in light of his earlier discussion regarding the fact that he wants to remain in character. How can this be if he’s so completely blown away by a technique feeding him information that his character has no access to?

Because, once again, the player is both Creator and Audience.

CONCLUSION

If you have time, make sure to check out the full video! There’s a lot of fun stuff — anecdotes, random observations, etc. — that aren’t captured in these notes.