When I reviewed Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, I commented that Arveiaturace — the white wyrm with the dead body of her beloved wizard-rider strapped to her back — was one of the coolest things created for the book.

I wasn’t alone. You can find lots of people saying the same thing.

She’s still very cool.

But it turns out she wasn’t created for the book.

I realized my mistake recently when I was reading through Storm King’s Thunder and noticed a reference to Arveiaturace. (Which is a testament to how cool her presentation in Rime of the Frostmaiden is, because it made her stick in my mind so that future references would stick out like that.)

My curiosity piqued, I started digging deeper. And it turns out Arveiaturace is also mentioned in Tyranny of Dragons, where her mate Arauthator is trying to find a new rider for her in the hopes that it will convince her to take the rotting corpse off her back.

(True story.)

Around this time, Arauthator and Arveiaturace were both mentioned in R.A. Salvatore’s Rise of the King, but their origin actually traces back thorugh Dragons of Faerun (a 3^rd Edition supplement that I’m pretty sure is the source text from which they entered 5^th Edition) all the way to Dragon Magazine #230, where Ed Greenwood launched a column called Wyrms of the North. The first column was dedicated to Arauthator. The second column, in #231, was about Arveiaturace, featuring art by Storn Cook:

You can actually find the original article in Wizard’s online archives. (Thanks to Graham Ward for finding that link.)

If you go back and read it, there are some really interesting games of Telephone that you can trace through the later books where it seems fairly clear authors were aware of one of the older references, but didn’t realize (just like me at the beginning of this article!) that it was all based on a larger body of previous lore.

For example, Arveiaturace’s lair is located in Icepeak, where it is part of the lair of the wizard who was/is her rider.

Because Arveiaturace doesn’t actually appear in Tyranny of Dragons, this lair is not mentioned there. But it is mentioned that her mate, Arauthator, has a lair inside a hollowed out iceberg.

For Storm King’s Thunder, whoever wrote the section describing Icepeak (p. 92, where it appears as “Ice Peak”) knew the original source for Arveiaturace or, more likely, Dragons of Faerun and places her lair “correctly” in Icepeak.

But whoever wrote the section on the Sea of Moving Ice (p. 106) was probably sourcing strictly from Tyranny of Dragons and so writes, “Each dragon [Arauthator and Arveiaturace] makes it lair inside a hollowed-out iceberg.”

In Rime of the Frostmaiden, the author of Arveiaturace’s section (p. 105) once again is sourcing strictly from Tyranny of Dragons, is unaware of either reference in Storm King’s Thunder, and decides to place the “unknown” location of her lair atop the Reghed Glacier.

I love this kind of thing because it’s a simple exemplar of something that happens all the time in actual history texts describing the real world. For example, check out CGP Grey’s “The Race to Win Staten Island,” which brilliantly tears apart a historical legend which has perniciously crept its way into historical “fact.”

Another fun fact here is that, in her original appearance, Arveiaturace is a straight-up draconic whore:

Arauthator regards the white dragon Arveiaturace as an acceptable mate when he feels inclined. He employs a sending spell to call her to his lair for dalliance, giving her gems from his hoard after each mating but firmly escorting her out of his domain to rear any hatchlings that may result on her own.

(No shame intended, to be clear. Everyone’s a consenting Adult age category here.)

Where are their kids, by the way? That could be a really interesting thread to pull on in your Tyranny of Dragons, Storm King’s Thunder, or Rime of the Frostmaiden campaigns. Or, if your players have already run through those campaigns, to drop into a future storyline.

My favorite anecdote from Dragon #231, though, is that Laeral Silverhand of Waterdeep heard that Arveiaturace had besieged Candlekeep in response to someone writing a disparaging remark about Melathorand, her dead wizard-rider. So Laeral immediately commissioned The High History of the Mighty Mage Melathorand (he’s the dreamiest!) and hand-delivered a copy to Arveiaturace, cementing a long-term alliance with the tempestuous wyrm (which apparently lasts unto the present day).

It’s also worth noting that Melathorand’s corpse has been strapped to her back for over a hundred years now. I’m guessing it’s not in great shape.

Or perhaps Arveiaturace periodically seeks out preservation spells to maintain the corpse in good condition. Although if she’s aware of that need, it raises the question of why she has not resurrected the mage. Does the mage not wish to return to life? (Why not?) Or is his soul trapped somewhere? That could be a fascinating adventure seed!

Alternatively, perhaps Arveiaturace is utterly mad and someone (likely Arauthator?) is the one who periodically arranges for the corpse to be magically preserved or restored.

Long story short, if you want to add a lot of lore to your presentation of Arveiaturace, track down Dragon #231 for “Wyrms of the North: Arveiaturace, the White Wyrm” (which, again, you can currently read here). Pretty much everything else is just a cliff’s note version of Greenwood’s original work.

Go to Icewind Dale Index

Go to Part 1 – Click for PDF

Where the encumbrance by stone system really comes alive is the equipment sheet, which basically makes tracking encumbrance as easy as listing what you’re carrying.

Encumbrance Rule: You can write down your character’s encumbrance rule (based on their Strength score) in the spaces provided in the lower right corner.

Armor/Shield/Weapons: The assumption is that your currently equipped armor, shield, and weapons will be listed for reference on the front of your character sheet. You can jot down the current encumbrance value for these items in the spaces provided in the lower right hand corner of the sheet.

Coins/Gems: These are listed in the upper right and their encumbrance is calculated as shown. (To quench the “I have one coin and it apparently weighs a ton” complaints, you can allow PCs carrying 20 or fewer coins to list them as “loose change” in the miscellaneous equipment section.)

Heavy Items: This section is for listing anything that qualifies as a heavy item (i.e., weighs 1 or more stones all by itself).

Miscellaneous Items: This column is the heart of the sheet. Simply list everything you’re carrying in bundles of 20 or less. When you’re done, you can immediately see how many stones of miscellaneous equipment you’re carrying. Bam.

Add Misc. Equipment + Heavy Items + Coins/Gems + Armor/Shield/Weapons to determine your Total Encumbrance. In practice, this is all single digit arithmetic and adjusting your encumbrance on-the-fly during an adventure is practically automatic.

Moving equipment to your horse? Picked up a bunch of treasure? Throwing away your shield in order to run away from the goblin horde at your heels? It can all be done in seconds.

TIPS & TRICKS

Stored Items: This section of the sheet is for anything you own that isn’t currently being carried by your character.

Inventory of Gems: The specific value of gems are tracked separately to make calculating coin/gem encumbrance easier.

Containers: This area is used for listing containers in use (which don’t count against encumbrance). Empty containers should be listed as miscellaneous equipment. There are two easy methods for tracking which items are in which container:

1. List miscellaneous equipment slot numbers next to the container.
2. Put a symbol (star, circle, square, etc.) next to the container, then mark items in the container with the same symbol.

Tracking Supplies: The intention is that you list your supplies in the miscellaneous equipment section, but you can quickly check off supplies used on the trackers. At some point of convenience, you can go through your equipment list, adjust the totals, and then erase the supply checklists to start anew.

The Blank Space: After making the sheet I kept expecting something to crop up that I’d forgotten. (At which point I’d have this convenient blank space to slot it into.) After a several years, nobody has suggested anything. (Let me know if you think of something.)

DESIGN NOTES

The goal of the encumbrance by stone system is to simplify the encumbrance rules to the point where:

1. It is virtually effortless to track encumbrance and, therefore,
2. The rules can be used to meaningful effect on-the-fly during actual gameplay.

All the way back in 1974, this type of gameplay was discussed. In Volume 3: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, for example, we can read:

If the adventurers choose to flee, the monster will continue to pursue in a straight line as long as there is not more than 90 feet between the two. (…) Distance will open or close dependent upon the relative speeds of the two parties, men according to their encumbrance and monsters according to the speed given on the Monster Table in Volume II. In order to move faster characters may elect to discard items such as treasure, weapons, shields, etc. in order to lighten encumbrance.

But in actual practice the encumbrance rules were such a pain in the ass — and have remained such a pain in the ass — that either (a) they’re not used at all or (b) the amount of calculation required to adjust your encumbrance is sufficiently onerous that no one is going to try to do it in the middle of a chase scene.

When I started using the encumbrance by stone system, however, I almost immediately saw explicit encumbrance-based play crop up in actual play. And although “encumbrance-based play” may not sound all that exciting at first glance, being forced to throw away your favorite shield or abandon several weeks worth of rations on the pack horse actually creates really cool moments! (Going back for your shield, for example, can be a unique motivator. Running out of food because you had to leave the rations behind can throw your plans completely out of whack and force you to start improvising.)

My experience has been that, once you have a fully functional encumbrance system, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Encumbrance certainly isn’t essential to every adventure, but it is particularly vital for expedition-based play: It is a budget you are spending to prepare for the expedition and it is also frequently the limit on the rewards you can bring back. The desire to manage and expand your encumbrance limits for an expedition (by using mounts, pack animals, and/or hirelings) will frequently unlock unique gameplay and storytelling opportunities.

Running expedition-based play without encumbrance is like running combat without keeping track of hit points. The encumbrance by stone just makes it easy to do what you need to do.

THINKING ABOUT STONES

Roughly speaking, for the purposes of estimating the stone weight of larger items, you can assume that a stone is equal to 15 lbs. in 5^th Edition.

Thinking about the “value” of a stone in such concrete terms, however, is to largely miss the point of the system: The stone is deliberately chosen as an obscure unit of measurement whose definition is intentionally vague. The stone is not defined as a specific weight; it exists in a nebulous range, but probably somewhere between 10 and 20 pounds most of the time.

This is based on historical fact: Although eventually set by British law at 14 pounds, the stone historically varied depending on the commodity being traded and the location in which it was being traded. (For example, the 1772 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica states that a stone of beef was eight pounds in London, twelve pounds in Hertfordshire, and sixteen pounds in Scotland.) This makes it fairly ideal to provide a system which uses crude approximation in an effort to vastly simplify the bookkeeping involved with tracking encumbrance. And the slightly archaic nature of the terminology is also immersive for a fantasy world. (“I’m carrying about eight stone.”)

“But I’m British!”

The British still commonly use stones to measure body weight. And I’ve heard from some, but not all, that this makes it too difficult to slip into the medieval/Renaissance mindset where weights are relative and often imprecise.

If you find that to be the case for yourself, I recommend just swapping out the term “stone” for something else. You can go for something generic like “slots,” although you lose the immersive quality of the system (where both you and your character think of their load in similar terms). Another option would be a purely fictional term. For example, you might reframe the system using dwarven daliks.

SPECIAL THANKS

The design of this system was originally inspired by Delta’s D&D Hotspot and Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

This simplified method for handling encumbrance using an imprecise, medieval-mindset way of thinking about weight was originally designed in 2011 for OD&D and 3^rd Edition. This version of the rules is fully adapted for 5^th Edition.

Encumbrance, measured in stones carried, determines the load a character is currently carrying. A character’s encumbrance can be normal, encumbered, or heavily encumbered. A character has a carrying capacity equal to their Strength in stones (which is the maximum weight they can carry), they are heavily encumbered if they are carrying more than two-thirds of this number (round down), and encumbered if they are carrying more than one-third this number (round down).

Each character has an encumbrance rule to keep track of these thresholds, which are precalculated on the table below. For example, a character with Strength 10 has an encumbrance rule of 10-6-3 (meaning they are encumbered when carrying 3 or more stones, heavily encumbered when carrying 6 or more stones, and cannot carry more than 10 stones).

Encumbered: An encumbered character’s speed drops by 10 feet.

Heavily Encumbered: A heavily encumbered character’s speed drops by 20 feet and they have disadvantage on ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws that use Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution.

Push, Drag, or Lift: A character can push, drag, or lift up (without carrying) twice their carrying capacity. While pushing or dragging weight in excess of their carrying capacity, a character’s speed drops to 5 feet.

Adjusting for Size: The encumbrance rule for a creature is doubled for each size category above Medium. The encumbrance rule is halved for Tiny creatures. (It is easiest to consider a Tiny creature as having half its Strength score for the purposes of calculating encumbrance, a Large creature to have double its Strength, and so forth.)

Variant – Quadrupeds: Quadrupeds can carry heavier loads and have an encumbrance rule equal to twice an equivalent biped.

WEIGHT BY STONE

To determine the number of stones carried by a character, simply consult the table below.

Miscellaneous Equipment: Up to twenty items of the same type (scrolls, arrows, potions, rope) can be bundled together for the purposes of encumbrance, with five bundles being equal to 1 stone. Items of different types aren’t bundled when determining encumbrance.

Stowed Weapons: Stowed weapons have been compactly stored in a way which makes them more difficult to draw (but easier to carry). Stowed weapons must be retrieved before they can be used, but they only count as 1 stone per 5 weapons.

Heavy Items: Anything weighing more than roughly 10 pounds can’t be effectively bundled. Estimate a weight in stones (about 10-20 pounds to the stone). When in doubt, call it a stone.

Clothing / Worn Items: Worn items don’t count for encumbrance, unless the individual items would qualify as heavy items.

CONTAINERS

Weapons are assumed to be in sheaths, armor is worn, and you might have a wineskin or two strapped to your belt. But since there’s a limit to how much you can hold in your hands, everything else you’re carrying needs a place to live. As a rule of thumb, containers can carry:

Empty containers count as miscellaneous equipment. Containers being used to carry items don’t count towards encumbrance.

Larger sacks (often referred to as “loot sacks”) are also possible, but these cannot generally be stored on the body. They must be carried in both hands.

VARIANT – CREATURE WEIGHT BY SIZE

Your own weight does not count against your encumbrance, but these figures are important for mounts. (They’ll also come in handy if you need to carry a corpse or prisoner.)

These figures are meant to serve as a useful rule of thumb, being roughly accurate for creatures similar in build and type to humans (i.e. fleshy humanoids). There will, however, be significant variance within each size category. Even typical animals of Huge size, for example, can easily range anywhere from 400 stones to 3,000 stones. Creatures of unusual material can obviously shatter these assumptions entirely (ranging from light-as-air ether cloud fairies to impossibly dense neutronium golems).

ENCUMBRANCE RULES

Part 2: The Sheet

V. writes:

I’m heading into Chapter 2 of Dragon Heist next session. We left off right after Volo “paid” them with a deed for Trollskull Manor, so they want to start with inspecting the tavern in the morning. I’m going to have them re-encounter the urchins there, but then what? I’m not really sure how to keep the session moving after that.

Chapter 2 of Dragon Heist presents a little sandbox-like interlude between the introductory events of Chapter 1 and (in the Remix) the Grand Game literally blowing up on the PCs’ doorstep in the form of the fireball. It includes:

• Fixing up Trollskull Manor so that it can be re-opened (or sold or whatever else the PCs want to do with it).
• Other businesses and NPCs in Trollskull Alley for the PCs to meet and build relationships with.
• A half dozen factions who will be interested in recruiting the PCs, along with short faction missions that the PCs will be asked to do if they join up.
• A hostile businessmen (Emmek Frewn) who will hire a gang of wererats to harass the PCs.

To this toolkit, you can add any loose threads from Chapter 1 that the PCs are interested in pursuing: Relationships with Volo, Renear, Floon, etc. Investigations into the Zhentarim or Xanatharians. And so forth.

That’s a whole bunch of stuff! But how do you actually bring it to the table?

(As a quick aside: One important thing to keep in mind is that you’re not supposed to wrap up everything in Chapter 2 before Chapter 3 begins. The Remix, in particular, decompresses the Grand Game so that you have space to continue incorporating the faction and Trollskull business into the campaign. Doing so will add depth as the PCs’ actions weave together the Grand Game, the factions, and Trollskull into a dynamic interlock. But I digress.)

What you want do at the top of Chapter 2 is basically a massive dump of options — stuff that needs to get done around the tavern, scenario hooks, etc. You want the players to immediately have to start making choices about what they’re going to spend their time and focus on. This is what will keep things interesting.

To achieve this:

1. Factions will start paying house calls to say, “Hi. Heard you’re awesome. We have a job we’d like you to do.” Renaer is a VIP and saving him in Chapter 1 created a lot of buzz for the PCs.
2. Immediately start having guilds show up to discuss repairs that need to be made and services they can provide. (This is why the Remix breaks down the costs associated with repairs and assigns them to specific guilds. The guild reps humanize the expenses and the individual breakdown also gives the players a chance to think creatively about how they might work around each guild’s remit to save cash… while probably earning the guild’s enmity for scab labor.)
3. Get Frewn, the urchins, and one or two other people from Trollskull Alley involved. Frewn, in particular, will start a whole chain of events, but the ongoing relationships with the other NPCs will develop similarly in an organic fashion. (I recommend giving space to the other alley residents to give the PCs a chance to seek them out and explore the alley for themselves.)

Make sure that the guild costs are significantly (but not impossibly) higher than the group’s cash-on-hand. This will motivate them to figure out a paycheck (i.e., they can’t just focus on remodeling the tavern, they’re going to have to go do interesting things to pay for it).

Put them under a time crunch. They should NOT be able to do everything, at least not without splitting up. Have stuff from two different faction missions happen at the same time; or at the same time as the guild reps show up for some “hard negotiations.” They’re going to have to make choices.

Similarly, don’t wait for one thing to wrap up before triggering the next. Interrupt scenes with other scenes and hooks. For example, they’re negotiating with a guild rep when Frewn shows up or one of the urchins runs in to report that Nat has fallen into a sinkhole. Or both.

MAKE YOUR MENU

If this feels like a lot to juggle… it is!

Across all of these different elements of the campaign, you might have forty or fifty different things you’re trying to keep track of. It’s too much.

The solution?

Make lists.

Specifically, make a sequential list for each category:

• Guilds
• Factions
• Trollskull Drama
• Follow-Ups

Under “Guilds” list all the guild visits in the order you think they should happen (or just randomly if order doesn’t seem significant). Do the same for your faction recruitment/mission assignments, Trollskull-related NPCs, etc.

As you’re running, you can now just glance at your lists and trigger something happening by just grabbing the top item off any list. (This isn’t a binding contract, of course. You can still bounce around if it makes sense in the moment.)

This significantly simplifies what you’re trying to keep track of in your head at any moment: Instead of forty or fifty different items, you only have to think in terms of “guild stuff, faction stuff, and alley stuff.”

I think of it like ordering off a menu: If you dump everything into one big category, ordering is a nightmare. So you organize stuff into appetizers, main course, dessert, and so forth.

Then, during play, you’re like, “Hmm… Getting peckish. Let me take a peek at the menu.”

And because you’ve pre-organized stuff, you largely just need to jump back and forth from one menu to the next.

FOLLOW-UPS

“Follow-Ups,” it should be noted, is a list you can use to follow-up on previous scenes: They piss off a glazier guild rep, so you think, “That guy’s gonna bring some muscle to break their new windows.” Jot that down in your Follow-Ups list.

You could, of course, just add this to the end of the Guilds list, but then you’d have to cycle through establishing everything else on the Guilds list before the PCs would start experiencing the consequences of their choices. Alternatively, you could put it on the top of the Guilds list, but then you’d have to cycle through all your follow-ups before you could introduce new stuff. It’s better to keep a mix of new stuff and old stuff cycling through.

Note that stuff from Chapter 1 – like Renaer or Floon or Volo dropping by for a visit – could also go on the Follow-Ups list. This is a good way to transition stuff from one phase of a campaign to the next and is easy to keep track of on your campaign status document.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #6

Combat is ubiquitous in tabletop roleplaying games. A little bit because the modern RPG evolved out of wargames; a little more because combat is mainstay genre element in the pulp fiction and procedurals that underlie most RPGs; but mostly because simulated combat is fun!

As a GM, therefore, a lot of your time will be spent running and describing combat scenes. To do that successfully, you’ll first need to visualize the battlefield. Only when you can truly see what’s happening will you be able to evoke it for your players.

ON THE BATTLEMAP

Part of this, of course, is keeping your vision of the battle clear and consistent. If the continuity of the game world is constantly morphing without rhyme or reason, it will undermine everything you’re trying to accomplish.

One way to objectively achieve this consistency is through the use of a battlemap, particularly in combination with rules that are designed to take advantage of the battlemap’s precision. When everyone at the table can clearly see the map of the battlefield and where everyone is located on that map, it’s trivial for everyone to stay on the same page.

When using a battlemap, however, it’s also easy to suffer from grid rigidity: Your mental picture of the battle gets locked into the physical, unmoving miniatures on the battlemap. This results in static, boring descriptions of combat in which the goblin is standing in their 5-foot-square and the barbarian is standing in their 5-foot-square and the two of them stand there, swinging swords back and forth.

To escape from grid rigidity in your descriptions, the first thing to realize is that characters are not simply standing in the middle of their square. Part of the abstraction of the grid is that you are SOMEWHERE inside the square, but we don’t know where. There’s even times when you’re “actually” in a neighboring square (because, for example, you’re punching someone in the face who’s “in” that square).

A miniature’s grid position on the battlemap is best understood as an approximation of the character’s location. You can almost think of it as a quantum superposition, where the character’s specific location and action only becomes certain when it is “measured” by description.

Once you’ve internalized this reality that the map is not the territory, you’ll be freed up to describe dynamic, active interactions on the battlefield. For example, let’s consider our goblin and barbarian once again:

If we imagine these characters standing in the middle of their squares and exchanging blows, we might say something like, “Athargeon lifts his two-handled blade high above his head and swings it down! The goblin tries to squirm out of the way, but isn’t quick enough. It’s gutted from shoulder to nave.”

And that’s cool enough. Nothing wrong with it.

But if we can escape grid rigidity, then we’re freed to introduce descriptions like this: “Athargeon dashes forward. His two-handed blade plunges through the goblin’s belly, driving it back into the bookshelf behind it. A shelf shatters and crystal balls fall from the ruin, splintering to pieces on the stone floor. The goblin scrabbles at the blade pinioning it to the wall, knocking more books to the ground, before giving a final bloody gasp.”

The mechanical resolution here is the same in both cases (Athargeon rolls a successful hit and deals enough damage to kill the goblin), but note in the latter description how the characters are now dynamically moving through the space and interacting with the environment.

Athargeon can’t drive the goblin back and the goblin can’t smash into the bookcase if they’re both stuck in the middle of their squares with their feet figuratively glued to the floor.

THEATRE OF THE MIND

If you’re not using a battlemap, of course, then grid rigidity isn’t a problem. But without the reference of the battlemap, you’ll need to keep track of the entire battlefield and everyone on it in your head.

With a little practice, this isn’t too difficult to achieve if you’re only dealing with a handful of combatants. It’s also possible to “cheat” a little by doodling a little sketch for yourself (and/or your players) to help keep things straight.

But as the number of combatants grows, this will become more and more difficult. You’ll start making mistakes, confusing your players and leading to a frustrating and unsatisfying experience. The other problem I have is that the more of my brain is tied up trying to keep the continuity straight, the less focus and creativity I can give to providing vivid descriptions of the fight! Ironically, the more epic a confrontation becomes in terms of scale, the more pedestrian its execution threatens to be as we all get tied up in the logistics of what’s happening.

What I’ve found useful is to think in terms of melees and battle lines.

A conceptual melee basically takes a group of combatants and says, “You’re all fighting with each other.” Anyone in a melee is assumed to be able to attack anyone else in that melee as the chaotic swirl of combat brings characters within reach of each other.

For example, a fight might break down into a “big melee in the middle of the room” between the fighter, the paladin, and a half dozen goblins, while the wizard and cleric are holding back outside the melee. But you might also have a fight with multiple melees: There’s a cluster of characters fighting at the top of the stairs and another cluster of characters fighting at the bottom of the stairs while the rogue, who isn’t in a melee, is swinging on the chandelier.

The point, obviously, is to conceptually simplify how many variables we’re keeping track of. We don’t need to keep track of exactly where the fighter, the paladin, and the half dozen goblins are in relation to each other; we just need to know where they ALL are in relation to the rest of the fight.

A melee should not, however, be used as an excuse for your descriptions of the fight to become muddy or generic. This can be an easy trap to fall into, but just as abstracting the goblin’s position to being “in that 5-foot-square” shouldn’t preclude us from describing him getting slammed into the bookcase, so abstracting the goblin’s position as being “in that melee” shouldn’t preclude vivid, specific description.

In fact, the flexibility of the conceptual melee can actually free both you and your players to greater heights of creativity in the actions you take and how you describe them.

There are limitations to the utility of the melee, however: situations in which the abstraction of the melee is either not useful or confusing. The solution, of course, is to simply not use melees in those situations.

(It feels like it should be more complicated than that, but it isn’t: Just Don’t Do It.)

One common case where melees aren’t useful is the formation of a battle line. In my experience, this most commonly happens in the tight quarters of a dungeon: In order to protect the squishy spellcasters, the melee-types form a line across the dungeon corridor to block the bad guys. If the party is large enough, you may see the formation of a second line with reach weapons.

Meanwhile, on the other side, the bad guys usually outnumber the good guys, so they’ll funnel in, forming an opposing line.

What I generally find useful at this point is to simply write out the line from left to right:

Athargeon           Edvinas                Nazli

Goblin 1               Orc                        Goblin 2

Jotting this down only takes a couple of seconds and can be done as the players declare their intention to form the line. Generally characters can attack anyone directly in front of them, or immediately to their left or right. (So in the above battle lines, for example, Athargeon could attack Goblin 1 or the Orc, while Edvinas could attack anyone in the opposing line.)

What you may realize is that you’ve effectively created a tiny two-by-three grid, just like the one you would see on a battlemap. In order to respect the tactical intention of the characters (to form a defensive line), this shouldn’t be handled as a conceptual melee. The relative positions of these characters should be locked in, just like they would be on a grid.

There will now be a temptation to really lock into the imagery of these two static lines exchanging blows back and forth. And there can be a lot of good material to work with in that.

But you’ll also want to be aware that this can easily loop back once more to grid rigidity: Bring the environment into your description. Let people take dynamic actions within the line. Explore the verticality of the line. Have the line ebb and flow. You can even threaten the integrity of the line, with enemies threatening to overwhelm or break through it.

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

All of this, of course, ultimately boils down to what the characters are actually doing during the battle. It’s easy enough to say that there should be a cool finishing move when a PC kills an NPC or that you should incorporate the environment into your descriptions, but it’s ultimately up to you to look at the barbarian, the sword, the goblin, and the bookcase, and then put those together into something awesome.

And that’s more art than science.

But it IS something that can be practiced.

The most straightforward way to practice, of course, is to simply run more combats: Schedule more sessions and play, play, play, play.

But you can also practice between sessions. One exercise I’ve found useful is to watch a really great fight film — John Wick or 300 or Fellowship of the Ring or Police Story — and simply narrate the action as it happens on the screen, as if you were describing it your gaming group.

This exercise will build your repertoire of fight moves, develop the vocabulary you have for describing a fight, and even teach you a little bit about the effective pacing of fight sequences (although the pacing of an RPG fight will usually be distinctly different from that of a film).

You’ll be able to take those skills and use them to fuel your visualization of the battlefield.

Creative Commons Icons: Goblin by Linector, Barbarian by Delapouite.

Cartography by Dyson Logos.