Over the years, I’ve run into a number of GMs who are nervous about running a game set in an established setting. Sometimes that’s an established media property (like Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Lucas’ Star Wars), in other cases it’s a published RPG setting. This becomes even more true, of course, when the lore of the setting is particularly dense or particularly expansive. Common examples include Tekumel, Transhuman Space, or even the Forgotten Realms. The perception is that, in order to run such settings, the GM must be possessed of an encyclopedic mastery of their minutia. A similar problem seems to often afflict historical settings.

“I’ve gotta get this right!” is a mental trap that I can understand, but as a GM you need to be comfortable letting it go because it will consistently limit your gaming. Want to run a game set in contemporary Toronto? Well, even if you’ve lived there your entire life, you’re probably going to end up contradicting reality at some point while running it. Ditto if you’re running a World War II scenario or a Victorian London scenario or a Samurai Japan scenario. Running only settings which you’ve created for yourself completely out of whole cloth is a really strict straitjacket that’s going to rob you of a lot of great gaming experiences.

On the flip-side, that doesn’t mean you should get flippant with continuity either. Nobody playing a Star Wars game wants to see the Death Star show up as a giant cube. What you’re looking for is the “grok threshold”: The point where you fundamentally understand how the setting ticks so that you can make up new details about the setting in a way that’s consistent with the setting as a whole. Once you’ve hit that grok threshold, however, you should then feel free to own the setting (which can also mean making significant changes to the established canon).

Often the quickest way to hit that grok threshold is to actually start using the setting. A few tips that I’ve found useful:

(1) If you want to look up a detail, give yourself 30 seconds to find it. If you haven’t found it after 30 seconds, make it up. If it turns out that you’ve contradicted something, sort it out after the session (by either revising the setting or explaining the necessary retcon to your players).

(2) If you’ve got a player at the table with expertise, don’t be afraid to leverage that expertise. (“Hey, Bob, what’s the name of the Archduke of the Red Isles?”) On the other hand, if you’re feeling pressured by the expert to “always get it right”, it can be useful to establish upfront that you’ve customized the setting and that people can expect changes. Don’t be afraid of accepting corrections if it’s not a big deal; but if it would mean that you have to scrap all of the prep for your current session just retcon the setting to match your prep and move forward from there.

(3) Dip your toes into the setting starting with areas which aren’t heavily described. Eclipse Phase, for example, is an incredibly dense and complicated setting, but there are thousands of habitats and settlements which have no description whatsoever. Even official locations within the setting will often have only minimal descriptions. For example, this is the description of the Carpo habitat:

Carpo is one of the few moons of Jupiter that is in its own group. This irregular moonlet is only about 3 kilometers in diameter, yet hosts a population of around 17,000 transhumans; over 98% of that number are infomorphs and the remainder synthmorphs. The Carpo infomorphs reside in a simulspace designed and managed by an infomorph calling himself Da5id. The simulspace itself is an alternate historical America, in which transhuman ethics and morality are being applied to 1800s sensibilities. Admission is very strict and seemingly completely arbitrary.

It’s easy to completely master those details and then build on top of them.

(4) With particularly expansive settings, it can also be effective to limit the “official canon” for your games. For example, when I run Star Wars campaigns I have virtually always limited my canon to the six movies created by George Lucas (unless I’m specifically running a game to explore some other chunk of official lore). I’ll freely reach out and grab other interesting bits of lore (planets, characters, etc.) from novels, comics, and animated series (or even the Holiday Special if I’m feeling perverse) — they become resources I can tap without being restrictions which I feel bound by.

WHY BOTHER?

The primary reasons for using a pre-made campaign setting are the extant expectations/knowledge of the players, the sense of shared community, the reduction in prep time, and the injection of someone else’s creative vision with your own.

Of these, I consider the last to be the most valuable: Just as actors perform the role of Hamlet because they want to take Shakespeare’s creative vision and expand it with their own, so your goal in using a pre-made campaign setting should be to take the creative vision and expand it with your own. The actor playing Hamlet will learn things and create things they would never have created if they had simply improvised their own dialogue; similarly you will learn things and create things you would never have created if you had simply created the setting yourself.

(Which is not to disparage the art of creating your own campaign setting or improv acting, obviously.)

My point here is that the degree to which you accept the creative vision and the degree to which you transform the creative vision will vary in both part and scale. You want to take the setting of Eclipse Phase, for example, and consciously make some huge changes to the setting like moving the Jovian Republic to Mercury or having the Factors waging a guerilla war against humanity on Mars? Go for it. After you ran the last session you discovered that you were referring to Carpo’s AI as Mel1ssa instead of Da5id? It’s similarly fine if you simply embrace that change and then move forward to see what happens next.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 10C: Back to the Labyrinths

Opening the box of cherry wood they found a manuscript entitled Observations of Alchemical Reductions and the Deductions Thereof by Master Alchemist Tirnet Kal. The book seemed untouched by age, and Ranthir was immediately enthralled – this had once been a well-known alchemical text, but the last copy of it was thought to have been lost several centuries ago.

Treasure is something I left under-utilized in my games for years: Looting X number of gold pieces and maybe some magic items was simply de rigueur. And, honestly, the psychological pleasure of an escalating numerical value (particularly as it counts its way towards the anticipated acquisition which it makes possible) shouldn’t be undervalued.

But as I mentioned in Getting the Players to Care the Golden Rule of Gaming is that players pay attention when you describe treasure. So if the only thing you’re offering to that undivided attention is generic numbers, you are wasting a golden opportunity.

(I may be gilding the lily here with all these gold puns.)

What you want to do is create treasure which contains meaning; which has specific, creative content. The Observations of the Alchemical Reductions and the Deductions Thereof are one example of that. (Saying that there are “rare books” worth X number of gold pieces is more interesting than simply a sack of gold; specifically listing what these books are is more interesting yet.)

At its most basic level, such treasure increases the player’s immersion and interaction with the game world. But you can use this to additional effect:

• As with the Observations, such treasure can reward character skill (or player insight) by making the treasure more valuable than it first appears. This creates an additional layer of arguably more meaningful reward.
• As described in Getting the Players to Care, treasure can be used to package exposition into an attractive and memorable package for the players.

Simply providing intriguing chaff – little bits of random “cool” that have no purpose or intended greater meaning, like Tolkien’s reference to the cats of Queen Berúthiel – are nonetheless valuable because they provide texture to the improvisational texture of the game world. You can never be entirely sure what uses your players will find for items similar to my 101 Curious Items, or how they’ll combine with other elements of the campaign to create memorable events.

But then Ranthir raised the possibility that they might find a way of transporting the entire orrery to the surface and selling it intact.

The orrery that the PCs also discovered in this section of Ghul’s Labyrinth is an example of this: You’ll see a whole sequence of events spill out over the next few campaign journals which I had no way of anticipating when I created the orrery as a form of nifty and evocative treasure.

The orrery also shows how the context you add to treasure can be used to create obstacles and interesting challenges for the PCs to overcome. One of the most basic ways you can do this – as exemplified by the orrery – is to make the treasure weighty, bulky, or otherwise difficult to transport. Successfully getting the treasure home now becomes part of the challenge. (In the case of the orrery, this took the form of Ranthir’s player eventually coming up with the very clever idea of selling the location of the rarity and letting the buyer of that valuable information deal with the difficulties of transporting it.)

Personalizing this sort of treasure can also be effective. In another D&D campaign, there was a player whose character spent the first ten or so levels stripping dungeons and enemy lairs of interesting pieces of furniture, art, and other accoutrements in order to furnish the fortress-temple he wanted to one day build for his elemental goddess. You can be sure that these features received extra care and attention from me for the duration of that campaign.

Doing so revealed a large room filed with cages of wrought iron. Tee saw that there were age-yellowed skeletons lying in dusty heaps within several of them.

You can also make the creatures the PCs fight a form of treasure in themselves. Pelts, furs, and other animal products have possessed great value throughout history. In the case of this particular session, the creatures were long dead, but there’s no reason the PCs can’t harvest from their own kills.

In setting this up, however, you want to be careful: If you make a particular animal’s carcass too valuable, you will curtail your ability to use that creature ubiquitously.

This can also become an interesting way of complicating combat: You may not be able to fricassee the golden wombat with a fireball if you want to be able to sell its fur, which will limit the tactics you can effectively use while fighting them. (The old school rules for subduing dragons have a similar dynamic.)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 10C: BACK TO THE LABYRINTHS

November 3rd, 2007
The 30th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

THE BLOODY ORRERY

The next morning, at breakfast, Cardalian came over to their table. She received a rather frosty reception from all of them as she introduced herself to “their new friend”, Tor. She invited them to attend the funeral of Devaral Unissa at the Cathedral of Athor on the 1^st of Kadal and then headed back to her own table.

They shrugged her off and headed back up towards the North Market and Greyson House.

There was still one mystery left in the outer area of the complex: The room with the orrery. Something in that room – or adjacent to that room – was inflicting them with the bloodsheen.

Ranthir had specifically prepared spells to get to the root of this mystery. Working his incantations he carefully circled through the room, trying to ignore the thin sheen of blood springing up across his body. “I am certain,” he said at last, “That one of bloodwights lies within the orrery. I think—“

At that moment, the glistening pink form of a fully regenerated bloodwight smashed its way through the wooden panels around the base of the orrery. Ranthir’s momentary outrage at seeing the ancient orrery damaged was quickly replaced by concern as he realized that the creature had effectively cut him off from the room’s exit… and the blood was pouring ever faster from his pores.

Tor and Agnarr rushed into the room, gladly braving the bloodsheen in order to come to their companion’s aid. Tee kept her distance, but drew her dragon pistol, carefully choosing her shots to blast hunks from the bloodwight’s undead flesh.

It was short and bloody work, but at last it was done. Agnarr grinned. “Well, I think that’s finally the last of them. So…”

Ranthir was lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood.

“Dominic!”

The priest came rushing in from the outer room. Fortunately, Ranthir – although faint from the shocking loss of blood – was not physically harmed. With the strength of Athor flowing into his flesh, the wizard and scholar was soon back on his feet.

His attention turned almost immediately to the orrery, which he had not previously been able to devote proper attention to. After years of neglect it was in very poor condition and utterly inoperable, but after careful study and the taking of many notes, Ranthir was able to reconstruct its basic principles.

He was intrigued to discover that the motions of the heavenly bodies it tracked were not accurate to a modern understanding – there were several minor inconsistencies reflective of a much older cosmological theory. But, even more fascinating, the orrery featured no less than seventeen heavenly bodies which were completely unknown to modern observation. What had the makers of the orrery been thinking? What did those bodies represent? Had they, in fact, existed at some point in the distant past?

Tee, meanwhile, was inspecting the orrery with a more practical eye. She confirmed that the bloodwight had, in fact, been resting within a secret compartment of sorts within the base of the orrery – it had probably once been used for maintenance. But she also discovered that the seventeen spheres representing the unknown heavenly bodies were not made of brass like the other spheres in the orrery, but were instead forged form pure silver and worth a small fortune (at least 425 gp).

Tee began looking for ways to break off these silver spheres, but then Ranthir raised the possibility that they might find a way of transporting the entire orrery to the surface and selling it intact. This seemed a daunting task – the orrery must have weighed at least 14,000 pounds – but Ranthir suspected it could be worth as much as 12,000 gp.

After much debate, it was decided that they would leave the orrery for now. Tee was skeptical that they could move it (even if they followed Ranthir’s suggestion of hiring workers to perform the necessary excavations) – there was, after all, the pit of chaos in the way. But there was also the possibility that Lord Zavere of Castle Shard would be interested in it – perhaps they could sell the mere knowledge of the orrery and allow the buyer to extract it for themselves.

With these thoughts in mind they moved through the deserted corridors that had been expurgated of the bloodwight plague and passed through the doors of bluesteel… (more…)

(click here for PDF)

Here we have another one of my system cheat sheets, this time for a game that I was Lead Developer for. Like my other cheat sheets, this one summarizes all the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced combat options to the nuanced gear options of the Human Sphere. It’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it also provides a valuable resource at the table for both the GM and the players. (For more information on the procedure I follow when prepping these cheat sheets, click here.)

Infinity is a game of epic science fiction, mixing together transplanetary empires, alien invasions, existential threats, cusping transhumanism, and rich historical allusion into a kitchen sink of thrilling science fiction. The Wilderness of Mirrors scenario meta-structure will create wildly memorable gaming experiences, while the triple battlefield of Warfare, Infowar, and Psywar is implemented using a set of unified core mechanics which strips away the mechanical complexity so often found in cyberpunk-inspired systems.

I’m more than a little biased, but I think you should check it out.

HOW I USE THEM

As I’ve described in the past, I keep a copy of the system cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. Of course, I also keep at least one copy of the rulebook available, too. But my goal with the cheat sheets is to consolidate information and eliminate book look-ups: Finding something in a couple of pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive. The division of pages is mostly arbitrary.

PAGE 1: CORE MECHANICS. As a 2d20 game, the core mechanics of Infinity revolve around skill tests, but (perhaps even more importantly) the concept of Momentum & Heat. Infinity Points are also summarized here for easy reference.

PAGE 2: ACTION SCENES. This page summarizes the core mechanical chassis on which all Action Scenes in Infinity are built.

PAGE 3-6: TRIPLE BATTLEFIELD. These pages detail the rules for Warfare, Infowar, and Psywar.

PAGE 7: ACTION SCENE MOMENTUM & NPC PROGRAM TEMPLATES. These two things don’t really have anything to do with each other, but the Action Scene Momentum page had enough space left over that I could put the NPC Program Templates on it, and those are too useful not to have at your fingertips during play. (They provide a a couple dozen hacking devices that you can give NPCs, allowing you to quickly customize hackers without needing to build a custom deck list every time.)

PAGE 8-9: VEHICLES, STEALTH, BASIC INTERACTIONS. Wrap up of some additional rules that flesh out the core engine of the game.

PAGE 10-14: GEAR. Based on playtesting with these sheets, the gear section was significantly expanded. Like a lot of science fiction games, Infinity has a need to cover a lot of different types of gear. We’ve kept those systems as streamlined as possible, but there are still specialized rules that are pulled out here for easy reference. Of equal importance are the Qualities cheat sheets, which chew up a lot of space but are really useful to keeping things moving in actual play.

PAGE 15: ADVERSARIES. They key info for running NPCs. This wouldn’t take up so much room, but the specialized rules for Fireteams (which make running large engagements much easier) and the full list of common special abilities (included for reasons similar to the gear qualities based on actual playtesting with the sheets).

A SIMPLER SET

These cheat sheets are sufficiently expansive that it would be very time consuming to review them in their entirety. If you’re looking for a quick introduction to the system for new players, here’s what I recommend:

• Page 1: Core Mechanics. (You can skip the specific details of how you, as the GM, can spend Heat. But the players need to understand how to flexibly use Momentum.)
• Page 2-5: The Triple Battlefield. Covering Warfare, Infowar, and Psywar does carry a heavier load than systems that only handle one of them.
• Page 7: Action Scene Momentum. (Emphasize that these are examples. The 2d20 System is nice if you run it as a RAW-above-all bundle of crunch, but Infinity really sings when you embrace the system’s potential for player improvisation.)
• Page 10: Lifestyles & Acquisitions. (It’s not a bad idea to take a look at the Lifestyle descriptions in the core rulebook, starting on p. 388. It’s a fairly short section, but it really encapsulates what it feels like to live in the Human Sphere, and that perspective can be really useful for players trying to create and get into their character’s heads.)
• Page 14: Remotes. (You can skip most of the other gear rules and bring them in as they come up in play, but I think the pervasive domotics and ability to take action at a distance through a variety of remotes is something that players really need to grok about the setting.)

Of course, you’ll also want to do a quick introduction of the setting. This can prove challenging because there’s A LOT of stuff going on in the Human Sphere. Standard advice about focusing only on the stuff that’s immediately relevant to your first 2-3 scenarios still applies here. But take a specific look at the “Human Sphere” sidebar on p. 8 (specifically designed to introduce all the planets) and the “Factions of the Future” sidebar on p. 27 (which introduces all the factions). Between those two, you’ll get a pretty good overview for the setting. The “Life in the Human Sphere” chapter (p. 140-145) is also something you might consider excerpting and giving to the players to read before your first session.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 10B: Retreat to the Surface

Ranthir began marking their path back to the entrance with chalk marks. He also took out pen, ink, and parchment and began drawing an ornate, beautiful, and highly detailed map of their explorations.

Any character, regardless of medium, can be interpreted as a collection of specific traits: They’re brave. Tall. Conflicted. In love. Impatient. Educated. Handsome. Et cetera.

It’s also not particularly revelatory that, in a roleplaying game, the traits of a character will often by mechanically defined: It’s not just that a character is “smart”, that intelligence is given a number and the effects of that intelligence will manifest through the mechanics of the game.

(Of course not all of the traits of an RPG character will be mechanically defined. And even those that are will often – or should often – manifest themselves in non-mechanical ways: Being “smart”, for example, should have impacts on many actions that are not resolved through mechanics.)

It’s perhaps most typical for a character’s mechanical traits to be designed: The player wants Ranthir to be smart, so they assign a high score to Ranthir’s intelligence. They want Ranthir to be trained in the arcane arts, so they assign skill points to his Spellcraft skill.

By contrast, what I often find interesting are the traits which unexpectedly emerge from the mechanics.

For example, Ranthir’s player thought it would be appropriate for the character to be skilled in calligraphy, so he put some points into Craft (calligraphy). When Ranthir began mapping a dungeon during play and the player decided to make a Craft (calligraphy) check to see how attractive the resulting map was, what was unanticipated was the high die roll would cause the other characters to remark on the map. And, more importantly, that high check resulted in Ranthir’s beautiful maps (and his peculiar obsession with the accuracy of those maps) becoming a recurring theme of the campaign and a memorable trait of the character.

Dominic, meanwhile, was wandering the city and trying to get his bearings. (But, for some reason, he kept finding himself back at Delver’s Square…)

Of course, success is not the only way such traits can emerge. Dominic’s poor sense of direction, for example, was not something that was specifically designed. In terms of mechanical definition, in fact, the character wasn’t particularly stupid or anything. But a pattern of poor rolls on very specific types of checks (across multiple skills, actually) caused this element of the character to emerge, at which point the player (and the rest of the group) took it and ran with it.

This would notably lead, at one point, to a skill check where Dominic succeeded and knew which way they needed to go… except none of the other characters believed him, because of his notoriously poor sense of direction.

Obviously any trait can be improvised into existence as one explores their character through play. But I think these emergent traits – aspects of the character which would not exist without the mechanical impulse – are a particularly fascinating part of what happens at the table during a roleplaying game. They’re a great example of the sense of discovery which is one of the primary attractions of the medium for me. They’re also exemplary of the fact that the division that some see between the mechanical component of an RPG and the creative component of an RPG doesn’t really exist: When used correctly, mechanics are an improv seed. They’re the equivalent of an audience member yelling out a random word and pushing you in directions you could never have anticipated or prepared for.