In front of the windows, Rehobath sat behind an enormous desk of godwood – the pale, almost pearlescent wood glowing faintly with a white light in the presence of divine magic.

When describing a game world, I try to make a point of integrating the magical, supernatural, or otherworldly aspects of the setting – the stuff that makes the setting unique and different from the world as we know it – in to the setting as a whole: Magic in D&D, for example, shouldn’t only show up in the loot piles or as the central McGuffin of the current scenario.

This is how you make the fictional world come alive. You can see a great example of this in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, in which the environments are filled to the brim with magical effects, even when that magic isn’t centrally relevant to character or plot. It’s why the Wizarding World is this vibrant, living place which fans find so inviting as a place to imagine living in despite the fact that none of that worldbuilding really “makes sense” if you think about it logically for any amount of time whatsoever.

This isn’t limited to fantasy, either. When I ran Eclipse Phase, for example, I looked at the transhuman technology available and then very specifically think about how that technology would be realized in fashion. So when I’m describing characters they have prehensile hair, color-changing colors, nictating membranes on their eyes, holographic “make-up” projectors that turn their face into a living art project, and so forth. When it came time to write the Infinity core rulebook, I made sure we included a whole section on this type of stuff for the GM to riff around.

A few partially overlapping categories to think about:

• Furniture
• Fashion
• Building materials
• Common conveniences or appliances
• Trinkets

Also think about garbage, trash, and detritus. When we think about the cool things that some speculative conceit would make possible, I think we often default to thinking of those things as being new or shiny. But the thing that will make the future feel fundamentally real to someone from 1895 is not the automobile: It’s the rusted Chevy on cinderblocks in the front yard. It’s the patch of leaked coolant slicking the parking lot asphalt. It’s the busted hubcap laying askew in the gutter.

Numenera is basically a whole game based around this conceit (with the titular numenera being mostly the broken or discarded technological remnants of past civilizations), and also takes it to the ultimate extreme by postulating that the very dirt of the Ninth World is, in fact, made up of particles of plastic and metal and biotechnical growths that have been eroded by incomprehensible aeons.

Similar principles can also apply even without speculative fiction, however: What makes a ‘70s police precinct different from the world that the players are familiar with? (Check out the original Life on Mars television series to see this particular example realized in detail.) Or just life as a police officer in general? Or the environment of a squad of soldiers in Afghanistan? Or just daily life in Paris?

(This assumes, of course, that the players are not currently on tour in Afghanistan or living in the 9^th Arrondissement.)

The past is a foreign country. Foreign countries are also foreign countries.

SESSION 20B: TEE AND THE SILVER FATAR

April 27th, 2008
The 8th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

When they had a moment alone, Dominic asked Tee if she would go on his behalf to see Rehobath, the Silver Fatar of Athor. The note they had found at the Foundry regarding the “Chosen of Vehthyl” had left him deeply concerned about the meeting he had scheduled the next day at the Temple of the Clockwork God. Were they setting him up for something? Were they planning to do something to him?

Dominic felt that he was in desperate need of guidance. But he also didn’t want to walk into the lion’s mouth if it turned out that the Imperial Church was as interested in him as the Reformists.

Tee was more than willing to help. After leaving Dominic at the Ghostly Minstrel, she headed to the Outer Cathedral of Athor.

Athor’s Cross

The cathedral was ancient, its presence in Ptolus a testament to one of the three Merchant Princes who had gone to the Novarch in Seyrun and begun the Great Conversion. It was designed around Athor’s traditional cross and layered with intricate iconography and complex ornamentation. Graven images of saints and figures of pantheistic significance covered almost every surface, including the ornately carved pews in the sanctuary. Holy knights of the Order of the Dawn could be seen guarding every entrance.

Order of the Dawn

Tee had suspected it would be more than a little difficult to get an audience with Rehobath, but she had – if anything – underestimated how impossible it truly was. She was shuffled constantly from one priest to another without ever seeming to get any closer to the fatar, but just as she was about to give up a prelate who happened to be passing by stopped in his tracks.

“Excuse me, would you be Tithenmamiwen?” he asked.

Tee nodded.

“I couldn’t help overhearing that you wished to see the Silver Fatar. He had mentioned meeting you at Castle Shard. If you wouldn’t mind waiting, I’m sure we can find you a few minutes to speak with him.”

The prelate shooed the other priest away and led Tee to a luxuriously furnished waiting room – a place of crimson satins and velvet cushions. Tee was still left waiting for more than an hour, but eventually a priest came in and escorted her to Rehobath’s personal office.

The office was at the apex of the cathedral’s tower. A huge, vaulted ceiling left Tee feeling particularly small as she was led down the long length of the hall. A fire burned in a mantle of marble to her left; to her right statues of Athor in each of his aspects flanked the wall to the right. At the far end of the chamber curtains of crimson silk hung before tall windows looking south across the Temple District and across the lower length of the city.

In front of the windows, Rehobath sat behind an enormous desk of godwood – the pale, almost pearlescent wood glowing faintly with a white light in the presence of divine magic.

Rehobath rose at Tee’s approach and smiled broadly. Tee bowed slightly and then sat down.

“Mistress Tithenmamiwen,” Rehobath said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again. Prelate Adlam tells me that you had some matter to discuss with me.”

“Yes,” Tee said. “I have a friend who I think might be in trouble. I recently… umm… found a note that I think is talking about him. I think its very disturbing.”

Tee produced the note and gave it to Rehobath. As he read the note, the look of concern – which seemed like more of a polite façade than anything else – was replaced by one of genuine shock.

“Maeda thinks she’s found the Chosen of Vehthyl?”

“I guess so,” Tee said. “I’m sorry… but what does that mean, exactly?”

“Yes, of course. Let me explain.” Rehobath settled back into his chair. “The Chosen are living saints. The gods themselves have chosen them as direct conduits of their will within the mortal world.”

“You mean the Chosen can talk to the gods?”

“In a way. It would be more accurate to say that they are the living will of the gods made manifest.” Rehobath’s eyes danced over the note again. “Is it true that your friend has the Mark of Vehthyl?”

“I don’t even know what the mark would look like.”

“There are many possible marks, but the Mark of Vehthyl is most often described as eyes which glow with a silver light.”

Tee shifted nervously. “Yes. I’ve seen that.”

Rehobath could barely contain his excitement. “Then your friend has been honored. Would it be possible for me to speak with him?”

“Possibly,” Tee said. “The letter has frightened him. But I’ll talk to him about coming to you.”

“Thank you.” Rehobath paused for a moment and then looked at her significantly. “Your friend Dominic is an itinerant priest, isn’t he?”

Tee quickly denied that Dominic was the friend she had been talking about… and then realized that she’d probably just confirmed Rehobath’s suspicions. Flustered and angry with herself, she made her excuses and farewells.

Rehobath rose and walked her to the door himself, asking her once again – on the way – to have her friend come and talk to him as soon as possible.

NEXT CAMPAIGN JOURNAL

The story has become a legend in the roleplaying industry.

In 1981, TSR was preparing to release module B3 Palace of the Silver Princess. Written by Jean Wells, it would have been the next module in a series that had already produced the classic B1 In Search of the Unknown and B2 Keep on the Borderlands (although both of those had benefited from being included in versions of the D&D Basic Set). The module had, in fact, been printed and was ready to be shipped out to distributors. Comp copies were distributed to all of TSR’s staff.

And that night, the story goes, a senior executive flipped through their copy of the module and then flipped the fuck out when they saw this piece of art:

When I first heard the story in the early ’90s, it was supposedly a fully nude woman, but you can see that’s not the case. Nevertheless, according to the story, the senior executive deemed this art to be Too Risque(TM) for the newly family-oriented Dungeons & Dragons product line. He ordered the product line pulped and even went so far as to go stalking through the staff cubicles that night, yanking the complimentary copies that had been distributed so that they, too, could be destroyed. The only copies which survived were those in the hands of the few staff members who had taken their complimentary copy home with them that afternoon. The offending picture was replaced, the cover was turned from orange to green, and the whole thing reprinted.

It’s a good story. As an urban legend, I suspect it became even more popular once Lorraine Williams took control of the company and they went all-in on making D&D family-friendly (eliminating the words “demon” and “devil,” for example). Around 2003, it even became ensconced as official history when Wizards of the Coast posted a history of the module on their website.

The only problem is that once you can actually look at the original version of B3 Palace of the Silver Princess, the story doesn’t actually make much sense.

If you deemed a piece of art so offensive that you needed to pulp the entire production run and reprint, then you would simply replace the offending piece of art and do the reprint. But that’s not what happened here: Instead lots of different pieces of art were removed or redrawn and Tom Moldvay was brought in to substantially rewrite the entire module.

Over the years, this has led a number of people to go looking for the real piece of art that was at fault. Or to explain why each specific piece of art that was removed had been deemed “problematic” by that anonymous executive all those years ago. For example, I’ve read no less than two essays trying to figure out why this picture of a tinker’s wagon was removed:

And if you were looking to remove all the salacious art in the module, it sure seems weird that the topless centaur on the title page somehow survived the purge:

In 2009, Frank Menzter offered a fresh version of the story in this vein: The real piece of art that had caused the uproar wasn’t “The Illusion of the Decapus,” it was a picture of the three-headed giants called ubues drawn by Erol Otus. Two of the ubue heads looked just like the Blume brothers, and that’s why Brian Blume, TSR’s Vice President, pulped the module.

Frank Menzter was actually there, of course, and so this quickly became widely retold as the real story of what had happened.

Some people noticed, though, that Mentzer didn’t actually know. He was reporting thirty-year-old office gossip, and there was the slight problem that the ubues didn’t actually look like the Blume brothers unless you squinted really, really hard:

Watching the urban legend metastasize at this point is actually kind of fascinating. Mentzer’s identification of the ubue art combined with the older salacious art version of the story, and people now pointed to the three-breasted ubue elsewhere in the image as the real source of the controversy. Others identified the third head on the supposed Blume-ubue as being Lorraine Williams. The legendary appeal of this was obvious, as the Blume brothers and Lorraine Williams were most popularly known in RPG lore as the “villains” who “stole” Gygax’s company from him. It would also make Erol Otus a time traveler, since Lorraine Williams was not even associated with the company yet in 1981.

Shannon Appelcline would later revisit this history and, based on different sources inside TSR, conclude that it was actually Will Niebling and maybe Kevin Blume responsible for the recall.

PASSING OF AN ERA

There may be some kernel of truth to all this: Some piece of art that tweaked some executive’s sensibilities and triggered the recall.

But whether that’s true or not, it’s fairly clear that once a reprint was greenlit somebody (or possibly a whole committee of people) decided that there was substantially more wrong with the module than a single image. As I mentioned, Tom Moldvay was brought in to perform a radical rewrite, and while large chunks of Wells’ original draft remained intact, the entirety of the module was drastically transformed.

And it is, in fact, this transformation that I want to call particular attention to. Because while others point to Dragonlance or Ravenloft or 2nd Edition, I think that if there is one singular moment you can point to and say, “This is when the old school died,” then it was when that nameless TSR executive went crawling through the cubicles, snatching copies of Wells’ module to destroy.

Before diving in here, I also want to discourage people from interpreting this as some sort of full-throated assault on Tom Moldvay’s revisions. The published version of B3 Palace of the Silver Princess was actually a really seminal influence on me as a young DM and probably the single most important module I bought for D&D: I found a used copy of it in Pinnacle Games in Rochester, MN just a few months after buying Mentzer’s red-boxed Basic Set and its expansive dungeon clicked for me as the platonic ideal of D&D in a way that the cramped caves of B2 Keep on the Borderlands did not at the time: I read it cover to cover multiple times. I ran it for my friends over and over and over again. Even the art probably had an out-sized influence on my vision of D&D fantasy for many years.

(Even — or perhaps especially — that now painful-looking centaur side-boob. Seriously. Imagine galloping around without a bra.)

I’m not going to discuss every single change that was made in the module, but I do want to look at a few broad examples that show the radical transition from old school to new school design in the revision of a single product. If you want to do your own side-by-side comparison, you can do so by snagging a copy of the green cover edition from the DM’s Guild and a copy of the orange cover edition from the Internet Archive copy of Wizard’s old D&D pages.

THE END OF THE SANDBOX

The very first substantive change in the module probably captures the fundamental ideological shift in the revision. Jean Wells wrote:

The information given below should be read carefully. Part of it can be given to the players. It will be up to the DM to decide exactly what the players should know about the palace. This information can be altered if desired. The DM is encouraged to add whatever he or she wants to this information to give more color to the palace.

Wells then discusses several cruxes that the DM will want to make decisions about before running the adventure.

Moldvay, on the other hand, abandons this approach, replacing it with a big slab of boxed text labeled, “Player’s Background (Read to players).”

As you look at the two versions of Palace of the Silver Princess, this is the core of it: Jean Wells is presenting a toolbox full of cool material and, in the classic old school style, challenging the DM to make it their own; to take the toolbox and do awesome things with it. Moldvay’s version of the module is a prepackaged experience.

For example, in Wells’ version of the module, the fall of the Palace of the Silver Princess is an ancient legend. The tragedy happened long ago and its participants — like Princess Argenta, the Dragonrider, and the strange ruby known as My Lady’s Heart — have become legend. What’s left behind is a moldering ruin for the PCs to explore or ignore.

In Moldvay’s version, however, the palace was attacked mere weeks ago and the PCs are given a specific quest by a quest-giver to go and save the day:

Each player character has had the same dream. In the dream, a Protector came to the person and pleaded for help.

“Haven is in dire trouble,” the Protector said. “We do not know what caused the disaster, but we do know that the reason can be found somewhere in the palace. (…) You are Haven’s only hope. We beg you find the source of the evil that has overtaken Haven, and destroy that evil.”

Thus a sandbox is systematically transformed into a potted plot.

THE END OF THE OLD SCHOOL DUNGEON

Wells also embraces a technique that Mike Carr pioneered in B1 In Search of the Unknown by leaving certain rooms unkeyed:

But there are two significant differences to Wells’ use of this technique.

First, Mike Carr’s empty “Monster:” and “Treasure:” fields were paired to a specific list of pregenerated monsters and treasures that the DM was supposed to simply assign to the various rooms. It was a training wheels approach to teaching DM’s how to key rooms and, importantly, demonstrating through practice how stocking rooms in different ways could lead to different play experiences.

Wells gave the beginning DM the same blank canvas, but without the pregenerated content to fill it. They would need to make up the content on their own. If you look at the B series of modules as an instructional course, this was a logical progression to what new DMs had learned and done in the earlier installments.

The other notable thing about Wells’ use of the technique, though, is that she only used it for explicitly empty rooms. While the DM was given the space to fill these areas, there was no expectation that they would or even should fill all of them before using the module. This, first, emphasizes the importance of negative space in old school dungeon design. But it also, and more importantly, emphasizes that dungeon keys are designed to evolve and change over time: These rooms are empty now, but perhaps they will not be the next time the PCs come here.

Whereas Moldvay’s dungeon was a use-once-and-done plot, Wells was designing an old school dungeon with the expectation that it would be visited again and again.

If you want another example of how misinformation can be spread, check out Rateliff’s claim on that old Wizards of the Coast page I linked to above:

More significantly, Moldvay fixes a significant flaw in the original, explaining how the princess got upstairs in her own castle by adding a main staircase (area 22 in the “green cover” edition).

Mentzer repeats this claim in his 2009 account (“like a missing important stairway”). But (a) the stairs in area 22 of Moldvay’s version don’t go upstairs, they go outside; and (b) there is no missing staircase in Wells’ version. The stairs to the Upper Level (UL) are clearly labeled and keyed:

It is actually Moldvay who removes these stairs, leaving the only route to the upper level a trapdoor in the floor of a guard tower (areas 48 and 49 in his version; areas LL-38 and UL-1 in Wells’).

And this change is actually really significant, because the effect is to de-xander the dungeon: Because Moldvay’s dungeon is a plot, he needs a more linear experience with the final fight located at the “end” of the dungeon. Moldvay’s dungeon is, in his own words, designed to be “completely explored” (albeit not in one night). By contrast, in the very first paragraph of the module — basically the very first instruction she gives to the reader — Jean Wells says, “To expand the dungeon, the DM need but open up the blocked passageways and add new and challenging dungeon levels.”

THE SPIRIT OF ’74

Although Wells goes on to say that “this should be done only after most of the encounter areas have been explored,” what she’s actually describing is exactly in line with what Arneson & Gygax described in the original 1974 edition of the game:

Before it is possible to conduct a campaign of adventures in the mazey dungeons, it is necessary for the referee to sit down with pencil in hand and draw these labyrinths on graph paper. Unquestionably this will require a great deal of time and effort and imagination. The dungeon should look something like the example given below, with numerous levels which sprawl in all directions, not necessarily stack [sic] neatly above each other in a straight line.

In beginning a dungeon it is advisable to construct at least three levels at once, noting where stairs, trap doors (and chimneys) and slanting passages come out on lower levels…

Three levels is, in fact, what Wells provides with a lower level, an upper level, and a tower level. In addition to her instruction to expand the dungeon at the beginning of the module, she includes an appendix with new encounters that can be used to both restock the dungeon and expand it. On her maps she includes almost a dozen collapsed tunnels, and calls out specifically in the key of each of these areas that, for example, “This area may be opened up by the DM.”

(To be fair, the vestigial remnants of all this is preserved in Moldvay’s version in the form of a single blank sheet of graph paper which states, “This graph paper is provided so that the DM may expand the module, if desired. Possible areas of expansion include lower caverns such as areas 11, 17, 20, 45, etc.”)

Arneson & Gygax also wrote in 1974:

The so-called Wilderness really consists of unexplored land, cities and castles, not to mention the area immediately surrounding the castle (ruined or otherwise) which housed the dungeons. The referee must do several things in order to conduct wilderness adventure games. First, he must have a ground level map of his dungeons, a map of the terrain immediately surrounding this, and finally a map of the town or village closest to the dungeons (where adventurers will be most likely to base themselves).

This ideology is why Wells’ version of the module features a region map accompanied by a small gazetteer, rumors, and random encounters: She’s designing the sandbox that the original edition of D&D had instructed you to design. (All of these elements would be removed from Moldvay’s version.)

THE LOST MEGADUNGEON

I would argue that if the original version of B3 Palace of the Silver Princess had actually been released, it would have been the closest TSR ever got to publishing a true Arnesonian megadungeon like the one described in the original edition of D&D. Not because it had a dozen levels all mapped out, but because it was designed to be the essential seed of a megadungeon campaign.

As I mentioned earlier, the published version of B3 was a mainstay of my first couple years of playing D&D. Back when I was running my first OD&D open table, one of my players spontaneously asked to play during a game night. I was pretty drunk, so I decided not to pull out my full kit for the campaign. Instead, I grabbed B3 Palace of the Silver Princess off the shelf and decided to run it as a shout out to my glory days. But I actually had a copy of both versions of the module, and I decided — in a moment of either inspired genius or utter madness — to run both versions of the module at the same time.

As the PCs explored the dungeon, they kept flipping back and forth between the orange-covered version of the module (when the catastrophe had happened long in the past) and the green-covered version of the module (when the catastrophe was fresh and new). The changes to the map and the weird temporal artifacts both confused and excited the players, who later demanded to return and continue their explorations. As a result, I ended up adding the Palace to my open table campaign setting.

It was during this time that I re-read both versions of the module in full… and realized the “lost megadungeon” of Wells’ module. As a result, I decided to open up those blocked passageways and connect them to the upper levels of the Castle of the Mad Archmage, instantly turning the whole thing into the megadungeon it had always been meant to be. I anticipated that the Palace would join the Caverns of Thracia as a second megadungeon tentpole in the campaign.

Sadly, that never happened: The PCs turned their attention from the Palace to hexcrawling, and the campaign eventually ended before anyone found those passages leading down into the depths.

But I suspect this is an idea that I will return to in the future. Perhaps it’s a journey you’ll join me on.

Vagabundork asks, “Why would the PCs accept these missions? Why would a satanist neuroscientist, a self-hatred writer, and a Colombian telenovela actress get involved in a scenario like this? (…) It usually falls to the, ‘we are a paranormal investigation agency’ which (…) removes all that makes cosmic horror awesome.”

There are a few ways to handle this, generally speaking.

First: Get the players on board during the character creation process.

It’s not solely your responsibility, as the Game Master, to explain why all these characters are hanging out together. As they’re creating the group, make sure the players figure out why these characters are operating together.

“We all have a job in the same organization” (i.e., the paranormal investigation agency) is an easy fits-all-scenarios answer to this, but it’s hardly the only one. What do they care about? What common goal do they all share? What secret do they all have in common?

Once you know what makes them a group, you can hang your scenario hooks off of it. This works even if their connection seems mundane and unrelated to whatever the scenario is. For example, let’s say they decide that they all work at the same comic book shop. Great, now you can threaten the store. Or have some strange person/creature come into the store. Or maybe the whole structure of the campaign becomes tracking down rare issues of comic books for resale, and the weird places, people, and estate sales they track down to obtain those issues also get them tangled up in whatever the scenario happens to be.

If they all share a dark secret, then a scenario hook just needs to threaten that secret in some way to pull them all in. Or they can all be blackmailed by the same mysterious patron.

Note: Just because the players are all collectively figuring out what binds their characters together, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the characters all know each other when the game begins! For example, they can all want to find the Ruby Eye of Drosnin or figure out the Truth About the Templars and be actively pursuing that without pursuing it together (at least not initially), which can also tie into…

Second: Use separate hooks.

If you design scenarios that are awesome situations instead plots, then you’ll discover that your scenarios aren’t generally limited to a single scenario hook: The cooler and more dynamic the situation, the more places there are to hang your hooks. Vagabundork’s question actually came in response to one such discussion (Scenario Hooks for Over the Edge), and you can also check out Juggling Scenario Hooks in a Sandbox for a different perspective on the same basic concept.

This also means that you don’t have to come up with a single explanation for why all of the PCs are involved in the current scenario. They can all be there for completely different reasons, quite possibly pursuing very different agendas.

It’s not unusual to have an initial scenario that works like this, but then the expectation is that, at the end of the scenario, all of these characters will decide that this was a jolly good time and they should all hang out doing similar stuff from now on. This can work very well in games that have a strong in-fiction conceit for small groups of freelancers coming together like this: D&D adventuring parties or Shadowrun teams, for example.

This is also, however, only the most generic version of this, and you can get a lot of mileage out of the same technique by making it specific. For example, during the first scenario all of the PCs get sprayed by a strange blue goo and now they share a common curse. Even if they don’t decide to all team up to figure it out together, they now all have a common goal… which means we’re back in scenario one and you can easily keep hooking them back into the same blue goo-related scenarios. If you can figure out a way to do this that ties into their specific character arcs and backgrounds, then you’ll get results that are even more specific and, as a result, powerful and meaningful.

This technique can also work well when combined with time skips: If the PCs are all pursuing different agendas, then it would be weird for those agendas to all coincidentally cross paths with each other every couple of days. But if you have a really cool scenario, wrap it up, and then deliberately skip a few months or years (or decades) until the next time these characters all happen to cross paths again, that can be a really cool conceit.

A specific variation of this technique is…

Third: Make them enemies.

Or, more specifically, set them in opposition to each other.

This is a technique I discuss in more detail in Technoir and PvP. The short version is that a good, situation-based scenario doesn’t actually need the PCs to be working together. It can often be even more interesting if they’re working in opposition to each other.

The simplest variation is to have different characters who both want the same thing and are in competition with each other for it. For example, Belloq and Indiana Jones from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film not only contains two completely separate scenarios between these two antagonists, it reveals that they’ve been crossing paths like this over and over and over again for years. If you imagine them both as PCs, that sounds like an incredible campaign.

Another variation is to set things up so that one of the PCs is literally the objective of the other PC. Putting a bounty on the head of one of the PCs is a one-size-fits-all solution to this. The TV show The Fugitive, for example, uses this gimmick. If it was a campaign, the GM only needs to figure out how to hook Richard Kimble into each scenario… and then Lt. Philip Gerard will come following right behind.

This state of antagonism doesn’t have to be entered into with the expectation that it will last in perpetuity, however. When the PCs discover that their antagonism was all a big misunderstanding or, after being forced to work together, realizing that they actually make a really great team, this can collapse into Scenario Two above. (See, for example, basically the entire The Fast & the Furious franchise.)

When using this technique, however, you need to be prepared to actually lose PCs, either because they’re killed or because they just don’t want to work together. That can be OK. (Having one of the PCs leave only to return several sessions later as an antagonist not only for the original PC but for the new PC played by the antagonist’s player can be really cool.)

Fourth: Give them a patron.

When all else fails, patrons make scenario hooks easy: They tell you what your next gig is and then you do it.

The other nice thing about a patron is that you don’t need to figure out why all the PCs know each other or want to work with each other: You just need to figure out (a) why the patron would want to hire each of them individually and (b) why each of them would be willing to take the gig.

The fact that PCs tend to be hyper-competent usually provides the generic answer to the former. Money is a one-size-fits-all answer for the latter.

Nothing wrong with these generic answers, of course. Shadowrun basically builds a whole game around those answers and it does so very successfully.

But, once again, making things more specific instead of generic is generally going to give you better results. Fortunately, it’s generally easier to do this specifically because you don’t need to have the same answers for each PC.

You can also, once again, get the players onboard with this process during character creation. For example, the first time that I ran Eternal Lies, I simply asked the players to make sure that their character backgrounds explained why someone would be interested in hiring them to look into paranormal weirdness. The answers they came up with were all over the map (Chicago cop who got a string of weird cases; girl detective and her brother working amateur paranormal cases in London; combat pilot; author of Fortean nonfiction masquerading as ‘weird fiction’), but also chock full of awesomeness that made it easy to explain why their patron might want to pull them together to investigate her father’s mysterious legacy.

The second time I ran Eternal Lies, however, some of the players ended up with concepts that weren’t as clear-cut in terms of why a patron would seek them out. But we were still able to work together to figure out more personal connections justifying the hire. (For example, one of the characters had been previously involved with a friend of the patron. Another had briefly encountered her father and was, as a result, mentioned in the mysterious notes the group was being hired to investigate.)

Alternatively, maybe the PCs all DO have the same reason for working for the patron: Making that infernal pact so that you could all open a comic book store together sure seemed like a good idea at the time, but…

Another good variation here is to make one of the PCs the patron. See Ocean’s Eleven, for example. This, once again, narrows the focus of the scenario hook down to the desires of a single character, while simplifying everyone else’s involvement down to the question of why someone would want them on the team (which will generally boil down to expertise).

You are Cute. You are Cunning. You are Fierce. You are Magical Kitties, and it’s time to Save the Day!

Magical Kitties Save the Day is the new RPG from Atlas Games. Designed by Matthew J. Hanson, I’ve spent the last few months heavily developing the game and outfitting it with a bunch of new, awesome content.

Every Magical Kitty has a human. Every human has a Problem. In Magical Kitties Save the Day, you need to use your magical powers to solve problems and save the day!

But kitties live in Hometowns that are filled with Troubles like witches, aliens, and hyper-intelligent raccoons. Troubles make Problems worse, so the kitties need to go on adventures to take care of the Troubles before that can happen.

“It’s exciting, fun, cool… It makes me want to do more of it over and over because every time is unique. You can fly. You can do the impossible… nothing is impossible!” – Emma Nephew, Age 9

Magical Kitties Save the Day is designed for all-ages. Older players — whether they’re parents, babysitters, teachers, or older siblings — can be the Game Master for kids as young as six-years-old and everyone else who loves kitties. If you’ve been looking for a way to introduce your friends and family to roleplaying games, Magical Kitties is the perfect game to do it!

You’ve never played a roleplaying game, either? (That seems unlikely here on the Alexandrian, but…) Purr-fect! Magical Kitties includes a lot of tools — including a solo play module so that you can start playing within moments of opening the box! — and guidance for both first-time roleplayers and first-time GMs. Whether you’ve played board games with roleplaying elements like Mice & Mystics or T.I.M.E. Stories, watched actual play videos, or just think roleplaying games sound like a lot of fun and you want to give them a try, Magical Kitties can be your first step into a larger world.

In addition to Matthew and myself, our creative team includes Paul Dean (formerly of Shut Up & Sit Down), Clio Yun-su Davis (winner of the Golden Cobra Challenge award), Jeremy Tuohy, Chris Costello, Anthony Cournoyer, Ekaterina Kazartseva, Garth Graham, Brigette Indelicato, Joseph Siemsen, Colleen Riley, and Thomas Denagh.

Check out Michelle Nephew’s post about running a three-year-long campaign of Magical Kitties for her daughters.

Or sign-up for sneak peeks and an e-mail notification when the campaign launches on July 16th!

Or RSVP for our virtual launch day party, which will include a Q&A with Matthew and I!