One of the things I find notable about roughly the first decade of Dungeons & Dragons is that it was truly a kitchen sink of fantasy tropes. And, most importantly, it was an active kitchen sink: Anybody and everybody could dump stuff into it and it never really felt like it would make anyone blink an eye. Some of this was new and original content, but a lot of it was being drawn from whatever the author’s favorite fantasy novel of the moment was. And the resulting mythic goulash was pretty awesome with a lot of unexpected synergies

Then, at some point along the line, the D&D kitchen sink slowly coagulated into an immutable canon and it became increasingly unacceptable to add new elements to the milieu. Even when new items and the like were created, they often seemed to exist within the existing parameters of the game instead of pushing the boundaries of D&D’s fantasy palette.

One place where this is really obvious is the planar cosmology of the game: If you look at the early years of TSR modules, it’s pretty clear that whenever somebody wanted to include a new plane of existence they would just toss it on the pile and roll with it. Then, at some point, the Great Wheel was codified and that particular kitchen sink was sealed.

4th Edition kind of shook things up with new PC races and an all-new planar cosmology… but it quickly became apparent that they they’d replaced one sealed canon with a different sealed canon.

To make a long story short: Recently I’ve resolved to rip the lid back off the kitchen sink and start pouring stuff into it. I may not be able to shift the core approach of the D&D or Pathfinder supplements, but I can make it so that my personal campaigns aren’t quite so strongly defined by the “official canon” of the core rulebooks. I can infuse my game with all the cool stuff from whatever fantasy novel I’m currently reading. And I can make a point of including cool stuff in my adventure modules without feeling artificially shackled to the “known facts” of what the D&D multiverse is supposed to look like.

I’m going to be starting with some of the nifty keen stuff from Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels, because (a) there’s a lot of awesome stuff that’s easily transplantable in there and (b) it’s what I happened to be reading when I decided that this was a thing that I would be doing.

If you want to do some similar kitchen-sinking featuring your favorite fantasy authors (or films or television shows or heavy metal albums), throw it up on your blog or post it to a messageboard and then throw a link in the comments below.

(I’ll also be adding links to this post as my own kitchen-sinking efforts go live.)

As a general disclaimer, I will note that my goal with kitchen sinking is not necessarily to faithfully replicate the material from which I’m drawing inspiration. (Similarly, rangers in AD&D are gifted in the use of using crystal balls because Aragorn was gifted in the use of a palantir. But AD&D’s crystal balls aren’t palantirs.) I’m also going to frequently take the seed of an idea from the source material and freely riff upon it in order to create entirely new things.

KITCHEN SINKS
Kitchen Sink Brust

Go to Part 1

I’ve previously dismissed the dogmatization of the old delve adventure format due to the limitations of its one-size-fits-all approach. (Both in Part 1 of this series and, at greater length, in Are We Really This Stupid?) But the delve format does have one really good idea:

Everything you need is on the page.

When you’re using the delve format, you don’t have to open your Monster Manual to find a creature’s stat block and then open the Player’s Handbook to figure out how one of their spell-like abilities works: It’s all right there on the page.

This is great from a utility standpoint, and can really smooth out the experience of running things at the table (because the GM can focus on running the encounter instead of flipping pages). It’s also a good rule for layout. (Whenever possible, try to arrange your layout so that information that needs to be referenced at the same time doesn’t require a page turn. For my keys I’ll frequently use page breaks to place the entire description for a room entirely on one page even if it means leaving a ton of unused white space on the previous page.)

When you’re working on a project destined for publication and a general audience, figuring out what needs to be referenced and what doesn’t can be a tricky balancing act. When implementing a similar method of simulating system mastery for the sidebar reference system used in Legends & Labyrinths, I dealt with this issue by defining a very small set of “core concepts” that didn’t need to be referenced because it was assumed that players would be familiar with them, and then including a single page explaining those core concepts that new players could reference when they needed to. You can achieve a similar effect at your game table by using system cheat sheets.

When prepping material for your own use, however, you should be able to very precisely calibrate your personal level of system mastery. For example, I know how the magic missile and fireball spells work in D&D, so I can just jot down their names. But if I’ve plucked an obscure spell I’ve never used before, I’m going to include a reference for it.

I’ve actually spent more than 15 years now prepping material for the 3^rd Edition of D&D, and when I look back over that material I can clearly track my growing mastery of the system. For example, my earliest scenarios feature monster stat blocks with text like this frequently appended to them:

SPRING ATTACK Can move both before and after attacking without AoO. (PHB, pg. 85)

It didn’t take long before I no longer had to remind myself how the Spring Attack feat works. But when I recently ran an adventure with monsters which extensively used new feats from Monte Cook’s Book of Experimental Might, I was still using the same technique:

Elude Blows: Subtract number from melee damage rolls and add it to AC vs. melee attacks (up to BAB). (Book of Experimental Might, pg. 36.)

And these references can be terribly esoteric and entirely personal in nature. For example, even after 15 years for some reason I constantly forget to take advantage of the Point Blank Shot feat for my NPCs. For some reason my eye skips right past it in a list of feats. So I’ll frequently drop it into the special abilities reference section I include after stat blocks even thought I know what it does.

THE HIERARCHY OF REFERENCE

In general, there’s a hierarchy of reference:

• Include the full text.
• Include a brief summary of the most important factors (and probably a page reference if you end up needing specific clarifications).
• Include just a page reference.
• List the keyword, spell name, feat, etc.

Basically, you move down the hierarchy as you gain more and more mastery over the system you’re running. It’s like the vocab cards you use for learning a new language (except you never need to spend time memorizing them; playing the game does that for you organically) – as you master each concept you cycle them out of rotation.

Including the full text for something has become really easy in an era of copy-and-paste. But having such a large bulk of text is not always the best option for quickly referencing something during play. And if you’re dealing with lots of different abilities or effects, including the full text for every single thing will often bloat your content to the point where it becomes more difficult to use (because, for example, you’re having to flip between multiple pages in order to run an encounter).

UTILITY OF REFERENCE

In addition to streamlining your reference material, you can also manage this bloat by keeping in mind how you’ll actually use your scenario notes (and the references within it) and then organizing it accordingly.

We’ve already broached this subject by talking about using page breaks to keep entire key entries on a single sheet. But you can accomplish a similar effect by “outsourcing” blocks of information onto separate sheets that you can reference simultaneously at the game table.

When I’m GMing, I’ll frequently have my end of the table organized so that I can lay out multiple sheets of paper out in front of me. I’ll also use folding tray tables set up to my left, right, or both sides to hold additional reference material (including rulebooks and the like). I’ll occasionally be asked how I manage to keep the game running so smoothly when I’m juggling all these different pieces of paper, but the reality is that the game is running smoothly because I’m using all of those sheets: My eyes can skip rapidly from one reference to another, making it trivial to (for example) run an encounter featuring a half dozen different complicated stat blocks which would become a massive headache if I was instead trying to flip back and forth between six different pages in a Monster Manual.

Monsters are, in fact, one of the easiest things to outsource onto their own sheets. (Often, of course, you can fit multiple such stat blocks onto a single sheet.) I’ll even include a quick visual reference when I can, which is both useful for describing the creature and also makes it really easy to quickly find the stat block I need to reference. Here’s a typical one:

Outsourcing monsters like this is also an essential component of using the advanced technique of adversary rosters, which is what we’ll be discussing next.

Go to Part 4: Adversary Rosters

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Session 4B: Research and Developments

In which an innocent elf finds herself in the company of ruffians, a multitude of musty tomes are methodically mused upon, and our hearty heroes ennumerate the enigmas which confront them…

As I write this, In the Shadow of the Spire has been running for more than one hundred sessions. The complete campaign journal for this enormous saga, although not currently complete, has just crossed the 500,000 word mark.

Half a million words obviously represents a tremendous amount of labor on my part. So why do it? What’s the function of the campaign journal? Why take the extra effort to create it?

Primarily, it’s because I’ve found that a well-executed campaign journal improves the quality of the game. It can also help sustain the campaign: Having a detailed journal makes it substantially easier for a campaign that’s been placed on sabbatical to come “back from the dead” because players can rapidly get back up to speed on what’s happening by reviewing the journal. For similar reasons, the campaign journal can also make it easier to integrate new players into a long-running campaign.

So, what are the necessary functions of the campaign journal?

First, it’s a record of events. It’s the official canon of the campaign which can be consulted when memories become dim. It, therefore, needs to accurately record a totality of significant events that occur at the gaming table.

This poses a couple of interesting challenges: First, it can often be unclear whether or not something will become important to the campaign until several sessions later. (For example, I don’t find it unusual for a random NPC created off-the-cuff in one session to suddenly be one of the most important characters in the entire campaign ten sessions later.) So you need to adopt a fairly permissive attitude about what does and doesn’t merit inclusion.

As the GM, you also need to watch out for favoring the “true account” when mysteries are present in the campaign. For example, if the PCs are trying to figure out which noble scion is secretly a werewolf it can be a little too easy to only include the clues that point at the true culprit (because you know that those are the only things that are actually “important”) while leaving out all the red herrings the PCs are pursuing.

I find I’m particularly liable to do this when including various theories posited by the players: If the players posit a theory that’s true, I’m partial to including that in the journal because they’ve “figured it out” (even if they haven’t actually confirmed that theory yet). So I make a conscious effort to include a wide sampling of the various theories they posit during a session. (The material in the “Research and Development” section of the journal this week is an example of this. In this case, recording all of their unanswered questions also served as a helpful reference for the players.)

Second, it’s a piece of fiction. I believe that reading a campaign journal is a form of entertainment, albeit one which can often only be enjoyed idiosyncratically.

On a few occasions I’ve had players suggest that I should take a campaign journal and publish it as a short story or novel. I take that as a compliment, but it wouldn’t actually work: The journal’s role in faithfully capturing the events that happened at the table preclude its functioning as a proper piece of narrative fiction. But I do attempt to relate those events with effective prose, vivid descriptions, and dramatic moments.

I don’t think that you necessarily need to have played in a campaign in order to enjoy a well-written journal of that campaign. But I think that reading (and enjoying) a campaign journal is a very different experience than reading a novel. In fact, I think it has a lot more in common with reading a piece of non-fiction. I’d suggest that a good campaign journal in many ways blends the skills of a newspaper reporter with those of a fiction writer.

Third, the journal is a memento of the moment. Like yearbooks and diaries and photographs, one can revisit the journals from bygone campaigns and relive the memories of time well spent. When I read through the campaign journal for In the Shadow of the Spire, for example, I have a very different experience from virtually everyone reading this because I am not just recalling the experience of the characters but also the experience of the game table.

Capturing those memories of the table itself in the journal can be somewhat difficult to balance with the desire to create an immersive piece of fiction. In some cases, it’s impossible. (I maintain a small file of memorable, out-of-character quotes, for example, in a separate document.) In other cases, I try to find ways to capture in the fiction a reminder of what was happening beyond it.

For example, in the journal for the first part of Session 4, you may have been wondering why I included things like:

(Ranthir, with his keen vision, quickly found the book he was looking for.)

And:

(Ranthir narrowly avoided dropping a priceless and delicate volume of ancient poetry… thus averting potential disaster.)

These are a rather poor reflection of something that was truly hilarious in the actual session: As described in the journal, Ranthir remained behind at a library while the other players went off to watch Helmut Itlestein’s political rally. When the rally devolved into a riot, I began calling for various group skill checks: Spot checks to notice what Helmut was up to. Reflex saves to stay on their feet in the midst of the mob. And so forth.

Since I was calling for “everyone” to make the check, Ranthir’s player started making the same checks… and then he or I would interpret how the check was relevant to his research back at the library. And since, of course, the checks were radically inappropriate for the sort of activities you’d normally engage in while in a library, there were two layers of humorous contrast at play: The sharp cuts from the riot back to a quiet library and the implication that Ranthir was facing jeopardy to life and limb from musty tomes.

OTHER JOURNALS

Of course, some people will only be interested in a subset of these three goals.

There are also journals written by players. These serve similar functions (keeping notes, etc.), but the difference in perspective often results in a completely different sort of document. Such journals can also serve as extended acts of roleplaying, allowing players a unique avenue for exploring the thoughts and opinions of their character in depth.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 4B: RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENTS

April 7th, 2007
The 18th Day of Amseyl in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

TEE AT THE COCK PIT

Instead of retiring, however, Tee took advantage of the evening hours in order to track down the Cock Pit. She was successful, discovering that the Cock Pit was, in fact, an illegal gambling house run by someone named Naosh (presumably the same Naosh that Toridan Cran had made the 100 gp payment to). It also turned out that, while Naosh ran the Cock Pit, the place was actually controlled by someone named Aggah-Shan.

Tee decided to try going to the Cock Pit by herself (suspecting, perhaps, that the less than subtle methods of some of her compatriots might be less than effective in an underground gambling den). She easily found the place she’d been told to go – a nondescript and unmarked warehouse – and knocked on the door. After a cursory inspection by three guards (“Whaddya want?” “I’m here to gamble.” “Go right in.”) Tee entered a surprisingly lavish gambling hall. Guards were posted conspicuously at several locations, including the main hallway that led out of the area.

Tee asked some questions, tried to flirt unsuccessfully with one of the guards (“Elves not your thing, huh? Your loss.”) in order to see what was further down the hall, and then cashed in 20 gold pieces to play the copper ante tables. Over the next hour she gambled with a fair amount of success (ending up on the night) and continued asking questions, trying to find out whatever she could about Naosh and Aggah-Shan.

She wasn’t very successful. In fact, her questioning brought unwanted attention: A guard dropped a heavy hand on her shoulder and said, “Naosh wants to see you. Now.” (more…)

Go to Part 1

We’ve reached the end of the road: The dice have been rolled. The mechanics have determined success or failure.

Now the GM needs to describe that outcome. (They need to complete the fiction-mechanics cycle by bringing the result back into the fiction.)

If the result is a success, this usually means answering two key questions:

• How does the intention succeed?
• Are there any complications (i.e., unintended side effects)?

If the result is a failure, the questions are:

• How does the action fail?
• What are the consequences of failure?

The process we talked about in Fictional Cleromancy sort of naturally elides into this: As you’re thinking about graduated results, you’re thinking about what the potential outcomes of the action can be. You can usually just carry these thoughts forward through the mechanical resolution.

The actual narration of what’s happening in the game world is, of course, more art than science. But when it comes to describing outcome, there are a few general principles that you can keep in mind.

INTERNAL vs. EXTERNAL FACTORS

First, consider the question of why the outcome happened. What were the determining factors?

Bear in mind that both internal and external factors can influence the outcome of a skill check. (The distinction here is between failing to crack the safe because you’re simply not skilled enough and failing to crack the safe because your lockpick was defective and snapped off.) A lot of GMs default exclusively to the former (the character made a skill check; the check was a failure; therefore it was the character’s fault), but it’s arguably more effective to remember that the randomness of the dice models the entire situation, not just variance in the character’s ability: Sometimes you fail a Steath check because a guard comes around the corner at exactly the wrong time. You fail a Jump check because the ground is unexpectedly slippery. And so forth.

Another way of thinking about this is that, in any given skill check, there are myriad factors that determine its ultimate success and failure. Some of these factors – generally the ones we care about the most – are known. (For example, in D&D we’re always interested in whether a character’s armor will protect them from an attack, so their AC is always factored into the attack roll.) A lot of factors, however, aren’t important enough or consistent enough for us to want to specifically track them, so we use a random number generator to account for all the different factors that could impact the success or failure of any given action (and then trust to the GM to adjudicate the result accordingly).

For example, let’s say that the PC goes to a library and makes a Research test in order to find a particular piece of information. The test fails. The GM decides that it’s because the library doesn’t own a copy of the book that would contain the information.

Some people struggle with this because, if the book wasn’t present in the library, then the PC shouldn’t have had any chance at success on their Research test. This is a fundamental misunderstanding, however: Nobody at the table knows that the book isn’t there until the fictional cleromancy of the random number generator (combined with the GM’s ruling of what that outcome means) gives them that information. The library’s ownership of the necessary book is just one of a multitude of different external factors that could result in failure. (Other external factors might include whether the book has been checked out; if the book has been shelved incorrectly; has the book been damaged; does the book exist at all; and so forth.) The point is that we don’t care about any of these external factors enough to track it or model it mechanically, and so they all get abstractly bundled into the random number generator.

And, because all of these factors are bundled into the random number generator, it’s the GM’s responsibility to creatively unbundle them as they describe the outcomes of action resolution.

But what if we DO care about whether or not the specific book we want is available in this specific library? Well, in that case the GM would specifically determine that – through a listing of all the books in the library; or a list of all the places where that book exists; or maybe through a random percentile check – and then, like the armor bonus to AC, directly factor it into the success or failure of the Research test. (For example, if the GM knows that only one copy of the book survives anywhere in the world and they know that copy isn’t in this library, the Research test would automatically fail.) But when you make an external factor like this explicit, it’s no longer part of the abstract factors being modeled by the random die roll.

(It should be fairly obvious, of course, that no matter how many factors you make explicit there will always be factors you haven’t accounted for when you’re making a skill check. If there weren’t, in fact, you wouldn’t be making the skill check: You’d simply be defaulting to yes or saying no. Saying that the outcome of the action is random is inherently saying that there are factors that may or may not affect the outcome.)

FACTORS INFLUENCING OUTCOME

The ways in which characters can succeed or fail are as varied and limitless as the panoply of actions they can attempt in the first place. With that being said, there are some general principles you can keep in mind when describing outcomes.

SKILL: The most obvious of potential factors. Sometimes you have the best game of your life and sometimes you screw up and fall on your face. A lot of things can impact success or failure, but sometimes you succeed because you’re just that good (or fail because you’re just not good enough).

KNOWLEDGE: Is the character familiar with this particular model of safe? Do they recognize the patterns in a game of chess? Sometimes having just the right piece of information makes the difference between success and failure.

POWER: Sometimes people succeed because they just put more power into the attempt, or fail because they didn’t. A guard raises his sword to parry the barbarian’s blow, but her mighty thews sweep it aside and crush the guard’s skull.

FINESSE: And sometimes actions succeed because of the precision with which they are performed.

ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS: Slippery floors. Frigid weather. Jammed locks. Floors that buckle under foot. Piles of fetid garbage that get in the way of your swinging sword.

TIME REQUIRED: How much time does it take to complete the action? High margins of success might indicate that the action took less time for the character to perform. A failure might result from something taking too long.

LUCK: Sometimes the biggest reason a character succeeds is because they’ve gotten lucky. The giant’s sword was going to take their head off, but it deflected off a falling piece of rubble. They were about to slide off a cliff to certain doom, but they grabbed a piece of scrub brush and miraculously its roots held.

THE TARGET: Whether the target is an object or a person actively opposing the character, they can obviously have an impact on the success or failure of an action. These are the locks that are devilishly difficult or the gullible guard who easily falls for your lie.

BYSTANDERS: In addition to the character directly targeted by an action, it’s possible for other characters to either interfere or assist in the attempt (whether wittingly or unwittingly).

TOOLS: You’re only as good as your tools. Lockpicks break, elven blades slide through seams in armor, inferior IC makes a system vulnerable, and luck charms crafted by your beloved can give the edge in a mystic duel.

These obviously don’t represent the totality of factors that can affect outcome, but hopefully they’ll provide a little inspiration.

(Way back in 1999 I wrote Dice of Destiny for Pyramid Magazine which mechanized this process by assigning qualities similar to these factors to individual dice in a dice pool system. If you find yourself struggling to diversify your outcome descriptions, you might want to check it out.)

MAKING FAILURE INTERESTING

Something else to remember is that the gatekeeper of mechanical resolution is that failure should be interesting, meaningful, or both. In other words, it should have consequences.

This can be one advantage of using external factors in explaining failure: If the character’s research at the library reveals that the book they need only exists in one place, for example, their next action will be to figure out how to get access to it.

What this means, in practice, is that failure generally should NOT cause a return to the status quo. This doesn’t necessarily mean failing forward, but it’s usually best if the outcome of an action – regardless of success or failure – should in some way change the situation. FATE refers to this as “blaming the circumstances”, and the advantage is that the new situation creates new options (which prevent the situation from stagnating or becoming a dead end).

(All of this also applies to success, but as I’ve mentioned previously this generally takes care of itself: Success implies that the character is one step closer to achieving their goals.  A stated intention can almost always be summarized as “I want to change the current situation” and, therefore, the success of that intention automatically carries with it a change in the current situation.)

KEEP IT PITHY

Vivid descriptions are great, but try to get the ball back to your players ASAP.

A necessary corollary of making the outcome of an action interesting by giving it consequences is that you will have created a situation which (ideally) demands a fresh response from the PCs. Once you’ve established that new context, give the players the opportunity to make that response.

PLAYER DESCRIPTION

Instead of narrating the outcome themselves, a GM can instead prompt a player to provide the description. (Often this is the player attempting the action, although it can also be outsourced to other players at the table.)

For example, the GM might say, “You’re spotted as you try to sneak onto the mansion’s grounds. Who spots you?” Or, “You make a loud noise as you climb in through the roof. What’s the noise and how are you responsible?”

(Providing specific improvisation prompts like this – instead of simply asking a generic, “How do you fail?” – is generally more effective because it focuses the player’s response. You’re less likely to get a blank look if you ask a player to finish painting a picture instead of just handing them an empty canvass.)

Using the technique in this form grants the player a limited degree of narrative control. As such, it tends to work great in storytelling games (where it becomes part of a wider tapestry of methods for sharing narrative control). When used in a roleplaying game, on the other hand, I’ve generally found it problematic: It doesn’t really give the players any narrative autonomy (since they can only take narrative control when the GM gives it to them), but periodically forces them into a potentially disruptive and undesired authorial stance.

(In other words, if you want players to have that kind of narrative control, you’re probably better off playing a game that’s designed to do that.)

But that’s not the be-all or end-all of the technique. Instead of having the player get into an authorial stance and describe how the external world affects their character’s intention, you can instead have the mechanical result serve as an improv seed that informs how they play out the scene.

This can be particularly useful for social scenes: Instead of playing out an entire seduction attempt and then rolling to see if it succeeds, for example, you can make a Seduction attempt and then roleplay the scene based on the mechanical result.

This, however, begins to transition us into a discussion of fortune positioning, which is what we’ll covering in the next installment of the Art of Rulings.

Go to Part 10