DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 31E: Kabel’s Tale

Returning to the Ghostly Minstrel they spent the better part of an hour cleaning up the coagulate gore and blood that had been spattered across them in the Banewarrens (and only now pausing to reflect on Brother Heth’s blithe reaction to the same).

We all have weak spots as GMs. Stuff that’s tougher for us. Mistakes that we make more often than we’d like. Things we overlook or fail to take advantage of.

One of these for me is keeping an updated “mental portrait” of the PCs in my head (and, therefore, my descriptions). I generally have a vision of the PCs in mind, but I have a tendency to let it default back to its generic baseline instead of, for example, incorporating all the muck and filth that a bunch of people rummaging around in monster-infested caverns are likely to get coated in.

In this particular case, the players had also forgotten to think about this until later in the session (when they wanted to get cleaned up for a social event), so we were able to play it as ironic comedy beat.

(Although I feel that if I was better about personally tracking this sort of thing and incorporating it into my long-term descriptions, then my players would be less likely to forget about it themselves. So I think the failure still comes back to me.)

A technique I’ve found useful for this is to put a reminder of the group’s “descriptive status” on a swap note on my GM screen. Having it persistently present in my field of vision provides a periodic, unprompted reminder that helps me describe things appropriately and make sure the campaign world is reacting appropriately.

(Now I just need to remember to update the swap notes…)

I’m still running this Ptolus campaign today, and, as you can tell from the dates on the campaign journals, the campaign has progressed quite a bit beyond this point. As a result, I’ve actually discovered a long-term problem related to this one: My mental image of the characters is kind of “stuck” on how the characters looked during these early days of the campaign.

(Sort of like how you often think about how your friends looked in college, even if it’s been years and years since any of you were in college.)

Talking with the players, I discovered that I was not entirely alone in this.

In the actual campaign, though, the PCs are all decked out in awe-inspiring magical gear, one of them has horns now, and a couple have been transformed into albinos. (As you do.)

For this, I discovered that commissioning some fresh character art and then either hanging it in the game room or using it for my GM screen did the trick.

Campaign Journal: Session 32A – Running the Campaign: The Traps That Move You
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Party Planning in Actual Play Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Antecedent Magic Ptolus: Running the Campaign – Dungeon Sequencing